Monday, December 29, 2014

It Smells Like Christmas But Not in Chibok

“Wow! It smells like Christmas.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that this season reminds me of Christmas.”
“But it is Christmas.”
“Really?”
“Yea man, there’s Christmas in the air, that’s what you are smelling.”
“I see.”
“You are smelling the dry weather and dusty roads. You know what I always say about this season?”
“What’s that?”
“‘O, what fun it is to throw banger on a dusty harmattan night’.”
“Well…”
“Well what? Be merry man, be merry. This is December for crying out loud.”
“Oh, stop that your ‘crying out loud’ nonsense.”
“What’s eating you bro?”
“‘Crying out loud, crying out loud’, some people have been crying out loud for about 260 days now and nobody gives a damn about their cries.”
“Who? For wia be dat?”
“Please, please, please get serious man. Everywhere across the land. And have you never heard of Chibok girls?”
“Oh, that? I never knew you were part of the #BringBackOurGirls…”
“Oh shut up man! That’s usually the problem with some of you in this country.#BringBackOurGirls is not an association or club, it’s a movement. And I don’t have to be from Chibok to identify with the girls.”
“I know, Bro. Just that sometimes, we are too preoccupied with so many different issues in this country that we tend to forget about the Chibok girls.”
“Truly, I don’t know what this country is doing to rescue the girls, assuming they are all still alive and safe at all.”
“I pray they are. God will not let any harm come upon them.”
“So typical…you just mentioned God now, right? God has endowed us with common sense to act.”
“I guess we are trying.”
“‘Trying’? That’s what we ever do and nothing but try.”
“What would you rather we did then?”
“Results…that’s all we want. The world is not interested in excuses but in results.”
“Hmm…”
“Truly, I don’t know how our government officials sleep soundly every night since the girls were abducted. It must be either their conscience is in slumber or outright dead.”
“I think I get your point there.”
“I wonder what Chibok is like this very moment.”
“I can’t imagine it myself.”
“There would be dust in the air no doubt, maybe cold nights too but the setting must be eerie and funereal. For them, the smell in the air would not evoke Christmas or love. It would be the continued reminder of the forced absence of their sources of joy, the very girls who last year sang carols in the town are still unaccounted for. So, how would they know it’s Christmas?”
“Sad, very sad, Bro. It’s a shame!”
“And it’s not only the Chibok community. This Christmas-lessness affects many others who suffered preventable losses during the year. All the people bombed to death across the country through acts of insurgence yet nobody is made to account. And what about the scores of young people killed in the Abba Moro supervised-Nigeria Immigration Service job recruitment scam?”
“I almost forgot that too. And the minister and other officials in that ministry are going to celebrate elaborately this Christmas.”
“I can bet you; hampers, rice, chicken etc have been exchanged several times by all these inept officials to celebrate their year of grand failure. And they do so because they don’t give a damn.”
http://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=166404

http://www.punchng.com/opinion/its-christmas-but-not-in-chibok/

Is the oil party over yet?

Back in the 1970s, in the height of our oil boom, our then Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, was alleged to have boasted that Nigeria’s problem was not how to make money but how to spend it. That was a perfect description of how giddy we strode with swagger as an oil-rich country. Soon, our appetite for consuming what we needed and what we didn’t need became our hallmark. We abandoned agriculture and settled for the new deal in town: oil. Or maybe we should say here that we were intoxicated by the substance.
Truth be told, oil did us well, especially in the famed days of oil boom before the oil doom. We built several infrastructure across the land – roads, railways, schools, hospitals, airports, seaports, stadia etc. We hosted several international events and competitions and established our voice internationally as an authentic African voice. Oh, and we played the big brother to many other countries, even picking up some of their mundane bills like salaries. Who never knew of Nigeria? Well, those who lived in outer space maybe.
Yet it seemed that the oil was also our undoing. Apart from driving up our tastes to a point of inordinacy, it made us lazy about other sources of income generation such as agriculture, tourism and even tax collection. Why bother about any ‘hard work’ when we had the substance which turned to wealth, almost instantaneously. The interesting part was that we didn’t need to know the process of harvesting the substance from the soil. Those who needed it more than us were willing to come and apply their ingenuity to drill it out, tell us how much they had drilled and pay us what we agreed on. Many said the process allowed us to be cheated by the ‘driller-marketer’ which our technologically-advanced partners are. But we never bother because in this romance called ‘joint venture’ we are in; we the rent-collectors are guaranteed our rents, no matter the quantum.
The very rent gave us smart toys, squeaky clean designer clothes and perfumes that attracted friends and foes alike to recognise our place in the firmament of oil-rich countries. But then, it also created our club of local oil sheikhs and our nouveaux riche who became the new overlords over fellow citizens who were banished to a life of poverty, to eat from the hands of the oily men and women. The latter’s only ‘pedigree’ was usually connection to state power. And the state? That became synonymous with waste and ineptitude.
The state played yoyo with the oil. And because we still rely largely on imports of the refined products (petrol etc) of what we sell in raw form (crude oil), the cost of the refined product stayed high whenever the international oil price was high. And when the oil price dips, we still suffer because, being an oil-producer, it means our income flow is reduced, with attendant negative effect on the ordinary citizens. In a sense, therefore, it is, ‘heads they (government) win, tails we (the citizens) lose’. Such hanky-panky by government always brought out the anger in the people with some praying that they wished the country never had the magic substance after all.
Every run comes to an end after all. And so many of us saw this coming, while many pretended it would never happen. Even now that it has happened upon us, many have still not heard or have refused to hear. But as the saying goes, if it feels like it, it probably is. The party is over, or isn’t it? The party of swimming in the ocean of oil money (read ‘oyel money’, for good effect). In the last few weeks, our petrodollars have refused to come tumbling in as we often assume and expect. We need to wake up and smell the coffee, or is it the stench of burnt oil? Whatever it is, we are in trouble and the earlier the country and its citizens realised that, the better.
We need to not only diversify our economy to bring in more money from the abundance of sources, but perhaps, more importantly, we need to curb our penchant for excessive consumption and wastage at the personal and corporate levels. Many of us have campaigned for smaller government in terms of the number of political offices. The time to implement that is now. It is equally important to cut the official and unofficial perks of such offices, including the costs for running illegal offices such as those of first ladies or wives of government officials at any level. We need to tell ourselves the hard truth that the oil party is over!
- See more at: http://www.thenicheng.com/oil-party-yet/#sthash.qYDqy8L5.dpuf

Sunday, December 14, 2014

GEJ v GMB rematch 2015

As you read this, we have just 62 days to the February 14 general election in Nigeria. Once again, the election will square up incumbent President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) against General Muhammadu Buhari (GMB). This much emerged last Wednesday and Thursday at the national conventions of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC). Both men were the top finishers in the 2011 elections, a contest which left in its aftermath, sorrow, death and blood, following days of post-election violence across the land. Should the planned rematch raise worries?
The worries stem from the post-2011 election incidents. This is because both men have been anything but friendly towards each other, post-2011. There have been overt and subtle allegations of either promoting violence or incompetence in handling incidents of violence. Even if both men do not openly deride each other, their followers and supporters tend to exacerbate the gulf between. The effect of this on the political space has been enormous.
Interestingly, the processes that threw both men up as candidates in 2011 seem to have played out again this year, but in a reverse manner. In 2011, President Jonathan fought for a presidential election ticket from his party against formidable oppositions and still got through. Buhari on the other hand got the ticket of his then party, Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), on a platter, even as he ‘owned’ that party.
Today, conversely, Jonathan got the PDP ticket with little stress, even as the party blatantly refused to allow other interested party members a fair chance to give it a shot. The signpost of what a party’s internal democracy should be was on Wednesday and Thursday when the APC held what could be described as the best party primary in recent times. Interestingly, the main legacy parties that formed APC – namely the ANPP, CPC and the ACN, including its progenitor, Alliance for Democracy (AD) – had reputations for non-democratic decision-making. They were in the habit of pressuring aspirants to abandon their ambitions and allow the preferred candidate of the ruling class to prevail. All that became history last week. All the five aspirants in the APC stood election and wooed about 7,000 delegates with Buhari emerging the clear winner.
As both men go into the race, one hopes they would focus on the real issues besetting the country such as corruption, the collapsing economy, insurgency, poor state of roads and other infrastructure and provision of social services such as health and education. Just as the country begins to groan under the effect of austerity, we want to know how the aspirants plan to get us out of this economic mess through sound policies which must necessarily include cutting down frivolous costs associated with governance.
And while they consider the above, we should remind them to cut off the sophistry and tell us their real blueprints for addressing those issues. We should remind both men and their managers not to further divide the country into the fragments of ethno-religious identities. Those identities, after all, do not define honesty, integrity, competence and commitments. They only appeal to our base instincts which are not sustainable. As the Chinese saying goes, ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice’.
It is time for GEJ and GMB to commit to issues-based campaign and rein in their supporters from doing anything that could lead to violence before, during and after the elections. And for the blind supporters out there who see the elections as ‘do-or-die’, we should also remind them that we have a country to protect and defend. After all, if we lose our country after the general elections, it would not matter who won the elections.
http://www.thenicheng.com/gej-v-gmb-rematch-2015/ 

Sunday, December 7, 2014

The big man and his entourage

After my initial fits and starts attempt at reading Michaela Wrong’s book, It’s Our Time to Eat, I have recently got into the groove of it. The book tells the story of John Kithongo, a principled activist who was hired by the Kenyan government to head its anti-corruption agency, the Kenyan Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC).
Kithongo’s story reflects much of what we see across Africa. It tells the story of the multi-facetted nature of corruption in seeping through the building blocks of society. There are several lessons to learn from the book. One is that the fight against corruption is herculean and the commitment of governments often suspect. Page after page, I keep seeing Nigeria’s local context in Wrong’s book. Just take a look at the following quote, for instance:
“Reporting Africa, I’ve always been puzzled by the readiness otherwise intelligent diplomats, businessmen and technocrats show in embracing the ‘Blame the Entourage’ line of argument. The Old Man himself is OK’ runs this refrain echoed at various times from Guinea to Cote d’Ivoire, Zaire to Gabon, Tanzania to Zambia. 
“Deeply principled, a devout Muslim/Protestant/Catholic, he observes, in his own life, a strict moral code. It’s his aides/wife/sons who are the problem. They’re like leeches. If only he’d realise what they are doing in his name and put a stop to it. But of course he adores them. It’s his one weakness. Such a shame.”
The argument has always struck me as a form of naivety so extreme it verges on intellectual dishonesty. In countries where presidents have done their best to centralise power, altering constitutions, winning over the army and emasculating the judiciary, the notion that key decisions can be taken without their approval is laughable. If a leader is surrounded by shifty, money-grabbing aides and family members, it’s because he likes it that way. These are the people he feels at ease with, whose working methods he respects. Far from being an aberration, the entourage is a faithful expression of the autocrat’s own proclivities.”
How convenient it is for people to avoid talking truth to power but flip-flop to blame the excesses and, yes, corruption of such leaders on their entourage. We hear that a lot in Nigeria at different levels. The apologists of the incumbents ascribe every achievement recorded on such officials, yet for every failure, they find a way of blaming it on their aides. And truth is, our government officials are often very smart and smooth enough in their corruption as to claim ignorance of what is going on under them. That explains why every leader is often described as having ‘tried his/her best’.
That also explains why, whenever someone is ever jailed for corruption and abuse, it is never the top dog but at best, many of the numerous aides. The exception to this was the conviction of former Delta State governor, James Ibori. But then, such conviction was only achieved outside Nigeria after years of legal rigmarole at home.
For those who try to extricate the chief executives from the actions of their subordinates, they forget that the chief executive, in a winner-takes-all political system as ours, hires and fires his aides, not the other way. As such, the buck, as they say, stops at the big man’s table because he made the choices. They should take full responsibilities for the team’s excesses, just as they do with the successes.
So, where the police boss goofs, the president should take the can if he fails to call him to order. When a minister misappropriates funds, the president should not claim ignorance. And when a commissioner is found out to be living under the shadows of a forged certificate or fraudulent academic claims and still retains his exalted office two years after, it stops being just his problem, but a big question mark on the integrity of his boss, the governor.
Perhaps our problem flows from the workings of our traditional societies where the king can do no wrong or is at best excused of his excesses. But then, we operate a different political system in the name of presidential democracy where the standards are different. So, let our big men take responsibility for themselves and the actions of their entourage.
See more at: http://www.thenicheng.com/big-man-entourage/#sthash.lfXpMP9k.dpuf