Nigeria Content Online

Monumental fraud
that could stop the hearts of the faint-hearted has been exposed at the
National Pensions Office. Details of the fraud, which are still
unfolding, are so scandalous that it beggars belief. Initial reports
show that two senior officials of the office have, over the years,
looted more than N12 billion from the government and poor pensioners.
According to the investigations by the Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission, one Suleiman Shaibu, a director, and Phiana Chidi, a deputy
director, have between them cleaned off the vast sum of money from the
national treasury. The two officials who are said to be aided by a
close syndicate made up of ministry officials and bank managers, have
been able to perfect a scheme which before now had been foolproof.

The two connived
with one Abdulai Omeza, who operated nine bank accounts under
fictitious names into which proceeds were paid and later withdrawn and
transferred to Mr. Shaibu and Mrs. Chidi. In doing this, many contracts
were awarded and money paid to fictitious contractors through the
accounts. Last week, the anti-graft agency was able to trace these
accounts and money to the trio who are now under arrest.

What led to this
exposure was that between August and January last year, the office of
the head of service of the federation had invited the anti-graft agency
to help sort out the mess at the Pensions office. The agency found out
that out of over 141,000 names on the list, only 90,000 were genuine.
This means the 51,000 other names on the list were fake but were all
receiving money from the federal government, thus shooting the bill to
well over N3 billion. What a colossal waste! In the bank account of
Mrs. Chidi alone, a whopping N60 million was found, while Mr. Omeza had
N100 million in his. Accomplices such as Mamman Ali Abdallah, Aliyu
Bello and Luke Eloanyi, had various huge sums of money in their
accounts. Other alleged members of this well-coordinated syndicate are
Danjuma Bako-Wasa, Luke Eloanyi, M. A. Abdalla, Aliyu Bello and Grace
Francis. Mr. Bako-Wasa was said to have operated different accounts
with the name Haruna Megida. In one year, he allegedly paid about N21
million into one bank account, while N8 million was discovered in
another account also traced to him. The commission also traced N12
million to Mrs. Francis’ account, while Mr. Eloanyi allegedly had N13
million in his account.

This stupendous
fraud at the Pensions office is perhaps not surprising to many. The
office has become a terrible manhole through which billions of naira
are lost to unscrupulous officials who fleece poor old pensioners of
their hard-earned money, and government of its resources. It is
regrettable that people who are responsible for making light the burden
of this segment of the society are the same ones who add more to their
troubles.

It is unfortunate
that our society has allowed itself to sink so low in morals. It is not
too hard to say that we, as a nation, have lost our souls. All the men
and women involved in this monumental fleecing of the nation’s
resources are probably members of one religious organisation or the
other. They come from families too. These two crucial arms of the
society appear to have lost their moral suasion.

The two arrowheads in this heist — Mr. Shaibu and Mrs. Chidi — must
be made to pay dearly for their sins. It is important to make sure that
this is done, to serve as a clear deterrent to others. This twosome has
demonstrated glaringly the long held belief that civil servants are the
ones who aid and abet politicians to steal our country’s money.

A pastor was
preaching in church one Sunday on how one could bring about a positive
change in one’s life. As in the usual call-response strategy of
audience involvement, he said: “Everybody, say: ‘Change of attitude’.”
Everyone echoed, “Change of attitude.” Continuing, he said: “Change of
focus” and everyone religiously echoed that too. Then he said: “Change
of conduct.” There was a young man who, because he was not
concentrating, responded “Change of condom” while others said, “Change
of conduct.” A slip of tongue? The English language could be a trap in
the resemblances one finds between some words, especially those
referred to as homophones — which sound alike but mean different
things. English words like “conduct” and “condom,” in having some
segmental sounds in common, could also be a source of temptation as
well as a “WikiLeak” for a young man who probably has a lot on his
mind. Anyway, whatever might have been the abundance of his heart, we
still blame the English language for betraying him.

My students have
perfected their skills in outsmarting me whenever I attempt to use them
in demonstrating the consequences of inattentiveness in class. Not
wanting to be subjected to ridicule, they would, in response to my
question “What did I say last?” tell me: “You asked, ‘What did I say
last?’” Some of them, especially the back-benchers, would be busy
discussing some other issues, or playing with their mobile phones,
while a lecture is going on. When I discover this and try to expose
them, they choose to become tricksters. Does it matter if I tell them:
“Try to be here when you are here”? Sometimes the classroom interaction
as an event located in a world of distractions turns out to be a
hide-and-seek, but we enjoy it and use the humour to bring back
wandering hearts. Not that such interruption is desired in a lecture
that is strictly tied to time, but what can one do but use the exposed
weakness of inattention to try to rebuild the lecture as a collective
engagement with knowledge?

We live in a world
where the mind is under serious siege, with many people creating more
and more distractions for themselves and others, and becoming
increasingly absent-minded in their performance of daily activities. A
tsunami of the mind surges forth and sweeps them away from a
coordinated life. Just think about the number of patients who, in some
societies, have perished in the hands of some doctors and nurses
because of wrong medication. Imagine some surgical materials — pins,
threads, even scissors — forgotten inside a patient’s body in a
surgical operation and the patient later opened up again after
suffering terribly for weeks or even months with the strange luggage!
And what does the sticker on the door of the doctor’s consulting room
say? Perhaps this: “We Cure; God Heals.” Wonderful!

OK, imagine drivers
— including riders of commercial motorcycles — typing messages on their
mobile phones or searching for phone numbers to dial while driving on
busy roads. Look closely on the windshields of the vehicles and you
would find a sticker that reads: “Angels on Guard” or “Back to Sender;
I’m Covered by the Blood of Jesus.” The blood of Jesus must be juju
that wards off road accidents, even when the driver’s actions invite
such accidents. Indeed, many vehicles on our roads drive themselves, or
are driven by supernatural forces, and passengers only get to their
destinations by a stroke of luck.

Sometime ago I bought some ‘special’ loaves of bread from a
five-star hotel, hoping to make my family’s breakfast table a bit
different. Indeed it turned out to be tragically different for, as we
were eating the bread, we found staple pins inside it. In fact, it was
my tongue and teeth that first made the shocking discovery! I wasn’t
quite sure that my children hadn’t swallowed some in their hurry to get
done with the breakfast and be off to school. When I phoned the hotel
and complained in the bitterest terms, what else did I get but
apologies and excuses on how a packet of staple pins fell inside the
flour and the baker thought they were all eventually removed! The
noises in our heads which are sometimes installed by the kind of
culture in which we find ourselves or by our own inability to make the
right choices, inevitably prevent us from concentrating and doing
things appropriately. A serious tsunami of the mind is silently
devastating some societies and does require the same kind of urgent
attention that we give the physical tsunamis in the world today.

Here’s a statistic
you may not be aware of: about 50 percent of the world’s uncultivated,
arable land is in Africa. This abundance of potential farmland offers
Africa the opportunity to feed itself and to help feed the rest of the
globe. But consider another statistic: Because of poor roads and a lack
of storage, African farmers can lose up to 50 percent of their crop
just trying to get it to market. In other words, Africa needs not only
greater investment in agriculture, but also in roads, ports and other
facilities that are vital to moving the land’s products to consumers.
Fortunately, part of the solution could lie with the almost 23 million
African migrants around the globe, who together have an annual savings
of more than $30 billion. Tapping into this money with so-called
diaspora bonds could help provide Africa with the equipment and
services it needs for long-term growth and poverty reduction. These
diaspora bonds would be in essence structured like any bonds on the
market, but would be sold by governments, private companies and
public-private partnerships to Africans living abroad. The bonds would
be sold in small denominations, from $100 to $10,000, to individual
investors or, in larger denominations, to institutional and foreign
investors.

Preliminary
estimates suggest that sub-Saharan African countries (excluding South
Africa, which doesn’t have significant emigration) could raise $5
billion to $10 billion a year through diaspora bonds. Countries like
Ghana, Kenya and Zambia, which have fairly large numbers of migrants
living abroad in high-income countries, would particularly profit from
issuing diaspora bonds. There are precedents for such moves. Greece
announced this week that it was preparing to issue $3 billion worth of
diaspora bonds in the United States. India and Israel have issued
diaspora bonds in the past, raising over $35 billion, often in times of
financial crises.

Why would diaspora
bonds work so well? For one thing, the idea taps into emigrants’
continuing patriotism and desire to give back to their home countries.
And because diaspora populations often build strong webs of churches,
community groups and newspapers, bond issuers would be able to tap into
a ready-made marketing network.

Another advantage
of diaspora bonds for African countries is that migrants make more
stable investors in their home countries than people without local
knowledge. They’re less likely to pull out at the first sign of
trouble. And they wouldn’t demand the same high rate of interest as a
foreign investor, who wants to compensate for the risk of investing in
what would seem to them like a relatively unknown developing country.
Diaspora bonds could also be issued in the local currency, as migrants
are likely to be less averse to the risk of currency devaluation.
That’s because members of the diaspora have more use for local currency
than foreign investors; migrants can always use it when they go back
home or for family-related expenses. Take, for example, an African
living in the United States who now earns an annual interest rate of
less than 1 percent on small deposits; a diaspora bond with an interest
rate of about 5 percent certainly might seem attractive. To make the
bond even more appealing, the countries the migrants reside in could
provide tax breaks on interest income. Donor or multilateral aid
agencies could also offer credit enhancements in the form of partial
guarantees, to mitigate default risks.

Even more money
could flow into Africa if countries tapped into the billions of dollars
that members of the diaspora send home each year by using those
remittances as collateral to raise financing from international
markets. This approach has allowed banks in several developing
countries — including Brazil, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala,
Kazakhstan, Mexico and Turkey — to raise more than $15 billion since
2000.

Here’s how this
works: when a migrant transfers foreign currency to a relative’s
creditworthy bank in his home country, the bank pays out the remittance
from its holding of local currency. That transaction creates a foreign
currency asset equivalent to the size of the remittance, which can be
used as collateral for borrowing cheaply and over the long term in
overseas capital markets. Such borrowing has no effect on the flow of
money from migrants to their beneficiaries. Yet development banks,
national banks in developing countries and donor agencies can partner
to harness enough remittances and create enough collateral to raise
significant sums of money to invest in agriculture, roads, housing and
other vital projects. The people of Africa are scattered around the
globe, but many still feel a powerful sense of belonging to the
continent. Through diaspora bonds and remittances, they could create a
better future for their homeland.

(Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala is the managing director of the World Bank. Dilip Ratha
is the manager of its Migration and Remittances Unit.)

A man preaches the
gospel to some atheists. They listen to him attentively and finally
agree that Jesus is the Messiah. Then he preaches the same gospel to
some Christians. But by the time he finishes, they want to lynch him.
Why would Christians want to kill him when atheists accept him? That is
kingdom dynamics.

Jesus preached to
unbelievers in a Samaritan city and many immediately believed he is the
Messiah (Jn 4:39-42). But when he preached to some Jews who “believed
in him,” they wanted to kill him (Jn 8:31/59). What truth of God might
provoke a more violent reaction from ostensible believers than from
unbelievers?

Adulterous Christians

Let me deal with
one here. Tell some Christians they are not sons of God and you would
get a distinctly un-Christ-like reaction. Tell them they are enemies of
the cross and they might decide to crucify you in retaliation.

When Jesus
encountered this kind of reaction during a discourse with some Jews
“who believed in him,” he said to them: “Why do you not understand my
speech? Because you are not able to listen to my word. You are of your
father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was
a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because
there is no truth in him” (Jn 8:43-44).

Paradoxically, his
opponents confirmed the veracity of this assertion that their father is
the devil by wanting to kill Jesus there and then.

Faith without works

Can a Christian
really be satanic? Yes indeed. Today, we often define a Christian
according to Paul’s standard which says: “If you confess with your
mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him
from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto
righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation”
(Rm 10:9-10). But what many Christians fail to appreciate is that
Paul’s salvation yardstick is satanic precisely because it is
deceptively based on faith alone.

James is quick to
point out that if faith is the sole yardstick for salvation, then the
devil becomes a “Christian:” “You believe that there is one God. You do
well. Even the demons believe- and tremble! But do you want to know, O
foolish man, that faith without works is dead?” (Jam 2:19-20).

When Jesus asked
his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter declared that Jesus is
“the Christ, the son of the living God” (Mt 16:15-16). Jesus
immediately acknowledged that Peter’s response was inspired. He said to
him: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not
revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 16:17). In
effect, Peter was the first person in the bible to fulfil Paul’s
requirement of making a “confession unto salvation.”

A demonic faith

But a few verses
after Jesus’ acknowledgement of Peter’s inspiration, he tells his
disciples he is going to Jerusalem where he would be killed. When Peter
protests against this divine agenda, Jesus says to him: “Get behind me,
Satan! You are an offense to me, for you are not mindful of the things
of God, but the things of men” (Mt 16:23). This reveals that, in spite
of Peter’s Pauline confession, he remained on the side of Satan and men
and not on the side of Christ and God.

This is the dilemma
of many of us who call ourselves Christians. We think we belong to
Christ because we answered an altar call and confessed Jesus as our
Lord and Saviour. But everything about us shows we are really of the
devil. The life we love is the one the devil gives. Our prayers are all
about getting the bread and fish that evil fathers of this world give.
The churches we attend are those of motivational preachers who provide
us with “five keys” and “seven strategies” for gaining this world.

This makes us mad
and furious at anyone who dares to preach the true gospel to us. We
abuse and persecute anyone who pricks our conscience and calls our
attention to the need to lay down our lives in order to gain the
kingdom of God.

Thus, day-in day
out, we betray Christ with a kiss. We call him our Lord and Saviour,
but our values, aspirations and lifestyles testify against us. They
speak eloquently that we are of the world and not of the kingdom. They
reveal that we are on Satan’s side.

Jesus says:
“Whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be my disciple”
(Lk 14:33). But many satanic Christians insist Jesus does not really
mean what he says.

articleoffaith@234next.com

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Some scholars
credit the spread of fax machines as a factor in the downfall of the
Soviet Union. Good for the fax. But that’s pretty much been the lone
high point for the venerable device in the last 25 years. Since the
fall of the Iron Curtain, faxing has been a joke. It’s one of the most
expensive, least flexible, and most annoying ways to send documents in
the digital age. Everyone knows this-even, I’ll bet, the people who
make fax machines. Faxing requires special equipment (the machine, a
phone line), it’s stationary (I’m guessing you’ve never sent a fax from
a plane), it wastes paper, and it’s a hassle. Yet for all its
well-known limitations, faxing persists. How often are you asked by
someone-your bank, your insurance company, your lawyer-to “please sign
this and fax it back”? If it’s less than once a month, consider
yourself blessed.

The main reason
faxing lives on, of course, is because of another ancient and
mystifying custom: signing a piece of paper to make it official. God
only knows why this fetish persists. Many countries have laws allowing
for electronic signatures on documents, but it’s the rare institution
that will accept your click as proof of agreement. So it seems we’re
stuck. As long as people want to see your scribble on a piece of paper,
you need to have a fax machine, or at least a way to approximate one.

I don’t have a fax
machine in my home office. I don’t own a scanner, either. (I don’t want
to give manufacturers of either cursed device the satisfaction.) For a
long time, I would just ask my wife-who has a job in a real office,
surrounded by squealing faxes-to do my faxing for me. Over the last
year or so, though, I’ve increasingly relied on JotNot, an app that
turns my iPhone into a scanner. JotNot is terrific at what it aims to
do. To scan a page, you snap a picture of it and crop and scale it with
a few on-screen swipes; JotNot then processes it into a PDF. But this
is still somewhat tedious, especially if you’ve got lots of pages to
scan.

Last week, I
finally found what I’ve been looking for: a way to sign and fax-or
e-mail-a document using just my computer. It doesn’t require you to
print out your forms or sign them with a pen. You will need a camera,
but only once; after that, it’s painless. The system is called
HelloFax. And it’s terrific.

Here’s how
HelloFax works. First, you sign a blank piece of paper. Then you take a
picture of your signature and send it to the site. Now you’re free to
sign and send documents that you’ve got stored digitally. (In other
words, HelloFax is only for e-mailing and faxing files that you can
find online or that people have e-mailed you; you can’t use it to fax a
physical document.) To begin, you upload your form to HelloFax. The
system understands a wide range of file types, including PDFs, Word
documents, and several more esoteric ones. HelloFax transforms the
document into an image, and then it lets you add text to that image;
this allows you to fill out your name, age, SSN, and other information
on virtually any kind of form. Because HelloFax treats your document as
an image, you do have to manually position the cursor in each box-in
other words, you can’t hit tab to go from field to field-but I still
found it pretty easy to do.

When you’re done
filling in your form, click “Add Signature” and HelloFax will pop in
the scribble that you photographed earlier. (It has controls to let you
move and scale your John Hancock to look just right.) Finally, enter
the fax number or e-mail address of your recipient, and boom! You’ve
just faxed something, and you didn’t even have to leave your chair.

There have been
other services that purport to let you fax from computers. But none of
these is as straightforward as HelloFax; either they don’t allow you to
fill out documents on your computer (which means you’ve got to print
out and scan, at which point you might as well get a fax machine) or
they require you to download software. HelloFax, by contrast, is a Web
site, so you don’t need to download anything and it works everywhere.
(It doesn’t work very well on smartphone browsers, though.) For now,
HelloFax is free, but it will send faxes only to U.S. numbers and it
imposes a 20-fax limit, after which you’ve got to ask the site to let
you fax some more. (The company’s FAQ says: “If you [exceed the limit],
email us at support@hellofax.com with some feedback and, if you’re
nice, we’ll give you some more free pages.”) It also doesn’t yet
receive faxes. The company is working on a paid service that lifts the
limit and allows you to get faxes, but it hasn’t announced a price.

How much should
you pay for such a service? Fax machines sell for as little as $40,
which is just $3 a month for a year. If HelloFax charges any more than
that, then it might not seem worth it. But that’s the wrong way to
calculate things: Compared with printing out, filling in, and feeding
sheets of paper by hand, HelloFax is a dream. I’d pay $5 a month-or
even $2 per fax-just for the ease of use. And unlike a fax machine,
HelloFax can also e-mail documents. It’s almost worth it just as a tool
for filling out and sending tax and insurance forms.

HelloFax is a
small startup, and though I’m hoping everyone begins to use it, it’s a
bit early to predict that it can kill the fax machine. The idea of
digitizing your signature could be catching on far beyond HelloFax,
though. Last week, Apple unveiled a developer release of Mac OS
10.7-known as Lion-which includes a slick Signature Capture app that
works just like the one in HelloFax. You autograph a piece of paper and
hold it up to your Mac’s camera; the system captures and processes your
signature, which is then available to all your programs. I’m hoping
Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies adopt the convention, allowing
you to insert your signature into Word, Acrobat, and every other office
program. That’s probably a few years off (Lion is scheduled to be
released only this summer). Still, it’s clear that the fax machine’s
death warrant has been signed. I can’t wait to dance on its grave.

New York Times

I have not met a more finicky soup or met the owner of a
Nigerian recipe so scrupulous about which ingredients are used. Fish is just
one of the details. By the time I had combed Calabar’s Marian market looking
for what the recipe owner described as smoked Songu or smoked local sardine,
toppled some shellfish onto my leather shoes, sweated two and a half buckets,
mistakenly carried off some other woman’s ‘sackamoto’ with a month’s purchase
of crayfish in it; for the very first time, gone to a part of the market called
‘The War Front’ and back, and found neither of the fish described, a line of
Sunny Ade’s Easy ‘Motion Tourist’ began to play in my besieged head: “…Shawa
ni, agodo ni, sarapore o, Omo’ Eja!”. I hear this song isn’t about fish, but
really about some arcane sexual message. This particular line literally
translates as shawa, agodo and sarapore are all babyfish!

Songu is also a species of baby fish smaller in size to the
shawa and agodo. I wonder how people can tell any of them apart. Even though I
was determined to follow the recipe to the letter, I found neither songu (a
Rivers State word, by the way) nor local sardine. The secret of the recipe is
supposedly a combination of three different fish in the soup, one of them being
smoked baby fish. The next day, I called up Mama Deola, the recipe owner. “What
on earth did you say this songu is again?” “You probably won’t get the real
songu, so just settle for some other baby fish,” she said.

O, for goodness sake, I should have just listened to Sunny Ade!

Mama Deola does not use crayfish in this egusi soup, rather, her
songu or agodo or shawa; her smoked catfish, and some stockfish or shinenose.
The absence of crayfish is one of the reasons why I particularly like this
version of egusi.

The smoked babyfish skin is removed and ground up in the dry
mill of a blender, bones and all until it is almost a fine powder. The smoked
catfish is cleaned with salt and hot water in preparation for stewing.

The stew which forms the base of the egusi is made from bawa and
not tatase or sombo. The difference between the three peppers is in size and
sweetness and heat. The bawa is largest of the three, not a sweet pepper, but
not a particularly hot one either, certainly not as hot or as sour as the other
two. The stew is made from a combination of the bawa, one onion or less, and
one or two scotch bonnets. Mama Deola insists that the hot peppers are as few
as possible so that heat is not a distraction from the savouriness of the soup.

The egusi, the ground melon seeds are mixed with salt, water and
onions and mashed together to form irregular dumplings. These dumplings are a
textural and aesthetic characteristic of the soup.

The mixture of peppers is fried in palm oil. The prepared smoked
catfish, rehydrated stockfish or shinenose are added to the stew and fried
along with it. When the stew has developed the mellowness of cooked peppers,
the fish has softened in the stew, and the stew has taken on the flavour of
smoked fish, the egusi dumplings are added with a little water and the stew is
simmered without stirring, until the egusi becomes firm and doesn’t come apart
under the pressure of the cooking spoon. The stew must not become dehydrated. I
find this process of cooking lumpy egusi frustratingly long. When they are
eventually cooked, shredded ugwu and the blended babyfish are added, stirred in
quickly and the soup is taken off the hob so that the ugwu stays fresh.
Stopping the cooking at this point also keeps the taste of the ground fish on
the surface of the soup, like a tantalizing prelude to the main event.

The degree of flavour added by the babyfish cannot be
overemphasised. I was once given a piece of freshly smoked agodo by a friend
from Abeokuta who leisurely snacked on one. The smell of smoke on fresh fish in
my nostrils made my stomach instantly groan with hunger. It is one of the most
incredible things I remember eating. The addition of that wonderful punch of
flavour from the fish is the perfect finishing touch to the soup. Pass the
gari, please!

The season of the
soapbox is here again. Part comedy and part Greek tragedy, the game of
politics appears to attract all sorts: saints and sinners; madmen and
specialists; villains, demagogues, charlatans and knaves. The love of
power is capable of driving men into anything. A Kenyan friend once
remarked that you should never go into politics unless you are prepared
to kill anyone who stands between you and the prize.

In our own country,
things seem to be getting murkier by the day. We had the alarming
allegation of a conspiracy by some high-powered political operatives to
poison Goodluck Jonathan. The sudden apparition of animals on the
runway of Bauchi Airport last week, when the plane conveying Nuhu
Ribadu’s running mate Fola Adeola was about to land, was unsettling.
Someone somewhere might have had a mind to make a sacrificial lamb of
the winsome Adeola and his entourage. Then we had the Suleja massacres.
In Benue South, the attempted assassination of Lawrence Onoja, a
senatorial aspirant, in the hometown of Senate President David Mark,
was most unfortunate. However you look at it, these episodes put our
democracy in very dim light indeed.

We seem to be
forgetful of the things that really matter for most Nigerians: food,
health, housing and a future for their children. Sadly, our current
discourse is bereft of all reference to economic policy; on such issues
as power and infrastructure, education, unemployment and poverty.

During his
re-election campaign for the White House, Bill Clinton had a banner
that declared: “It’s the economy, stupid”. With no insult intended to
our political classes, I lament the benumbing inanities that reign in
high places.

It takes no genius
to know that the great challenge of our era is how to reposition the
Nigerian economy. Poverty imposes a harrowing burden on our people that
must trouble all men and women of conscience. An estimated 70 per cent
of Nigerians live in absolute poverty.

When a young woman
has to sell her body to fund her university studies, that is poverty;
when an expectant mother dies at childbirth because she could not have
access to maternal healthcare, that is poverty; when an old man goes
blind with cataracts that could have been removed through minor
surgery, that is poverty; when the old and infirm have to beg on the
streets, that is poverty; poverty reigns where babies die of
malnutrition and disease borne of bad drinking water. These are the
fundamental determinants of life-chances for millions of our
long-suffering people. We have created a monstrous system that offers
our youth no hope and no sense of the future.

There is simply no
magic wand that can make poverty disappear overnight. It requires hard
work, vision and committed leadership. The journey of a thousand miles,
say the Chinese, must begin with a single step. We can learn from the
example of Brazil that, in less than a decade, has lifted more than 20
million people out of absolute poverty. They were able to achieve this
miracle through sensible economic policies and such socially
progressive initiatives as the bolsa familias.

The abiding
challenge for democracies everywhere is how to promote the greatest
good for the greatest number while preserving the constitutional spirit
of liberty. There is a whole body of literature on the relationship
between economic growth and democracy. Indeed, political economy fully
acknowledges the role of a prosperous middle class as one of the
ramparts of a free and stable republic.

Having disappeared
for decades, the Nigerian middle class is reappearing at last. But we
are not experiencing growth and expanding opportunities in the right
mix of magnitude and velocity that would establish a flourishing middle
rung that serves as a bulwark against mass revolt while safeguarding
harmony and stability.

These challenges
raise profound questions for the statesman: what kind of Nigeria do we
want? Do we want a society based on law, justice and compassion or do
we prefer the lawless cesspool of backwardness that has made us the
laughing stock of the world?

An equally important question is how to curb the cost of government
and make our federalism work with greater efficiency than the ghastly
Leviathan that currently saps our energies and resources at federal,
state and local government levels. I was privileged to listen to a talk
by Ernest Bai Koroma, President of Sierra Leone, a few days whilst on a
state visit to Brussels. He spoke passionately about the need to run
government as a business concern, paying careful attention to costs and
accountability for results. The leadership of this small war-torn,
desperately poor country appears to have more focus than the leaders of
the so-called ‘Giant of Africa’. We certainly could do better than that.

The revolution in
information and communication technology continues to propel organised
crime, armed banditry and sectarian violence, all of which pose grave
threats to national security. Criminals and subversives based at
different and far-flung geographical locations can now network, plan,
coordinate and execute attacks by phone or the Internet, beyond the
reach of law enforcement agents. Also, the Internet has turned out an
open-source for know-how on any subject, crime and criminality
inclusive. The December 2009 botched bombing of Superscreen TV station
in Lagos, the 2001 twin tower bombing in the United States, sectarian
violence in some parts of this country and pervasive armed banditry,
all owe their sophistication and devastation to unrestrained negative
deployment of both the cell phone and Internet. And because of the
sheer enormity of the devastating outcomes, it is now wiser to pre-empt
or disrupt crimes through proactive action, rather than embark on
reactive and palliative measures, which regrettably, the N6.1b SIM card
registration venture is all about. That is why the usage of both
technologies (cell phone and the Internet) has come under the security
scrutiny of governments in other lands for both strategic and proactive
law and order maintenance. The obvious truism being that if a people
can keep tabs on the communications that go on in the land, their
security would be highly enhanced.

Proof abounds that
many countries are already mitigating the risks posed to national
security by the revolution in the information and communications
technology industry. While it is true that failure in intelligence was
fingered for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and similar ones on
some European countries, we all can testify that those nations have
remained almost impregnable to such crimes ever since. They deployed
technology to keep tabs on all phone and Internet traffic in and out of
their territories.

There is no email
or phone call, whether national or international, that escapes the
security scrutiny of America – the acclaimed land of liberty. The same
thing goes on in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and even in some African
countries. Terrorists can no longer replicate 9/11 kind of attacks.
Therefore, our own security apparatus should rise to the challenges of
the times, with intelligence gathering and surveillance activities
becoming technology driven. Technology driven intelligence gathering
should pre-empt crimes, bust those that are ongoing and facilitate
investigation into those that happen to take place.

One more
justification for technology driven intelligence gathering and
surveillance is that besides their speed and capacity for mass
destruction, the magnitude of present day crimes transcends emphasis on
the numerical strength of security personnel to curtail or defeat. This
is because criminals are already seizing the initiative by employing
technology and, expectedly, nullifying the numerical superiority of our
law enforcement agents. After all, that is what technology is all about
– achieving much more than is humanly possible.

Therefore, with the
present scenario, raising national security budgets appears to be
attracting no proportional security or reduction in crime. Incidents of
armed robbery, kidnapping, assassination, religious fanaticism, ethnic
war and political thuggery appear rather to be on the rise. The crime
rate is overwhelming our security apparatus in terms of men, materials
and machinery. The ever-widening gap between national security budgets
and the rising tide of crime demands judicious deployment of scarce
resources in the war against crime. There should be more rational
responses to crime problems by using security intelligence data to
proactively target people, locations or activities thought to pose
future threats, rather than simply reacting to reported offences. That
is sure to result in some budgetary savings alongside the main benefits
of proactive law and order maintenance.

But while the
telecommunications service providers in some other countries are now
the arrowheads in the deployment of technology to supply leads for
preempting attacks, busting ongoing crimes or apprehending criminals,
the contrary is at present the case in this country. It is on record
that operators in our own telecommunications industry have been citing
cost as their excuse for not incorporating security intelligence
gathering technology into their networks. That appears the only
dignified way of insisting that it is the government’s responsibility.
As the tier of government constitutionally mandated to secure lives and
property, the federal government is being expected to shoulder the
financial burden of procuring the technology. And that is actually how
the technology was introduced in some other countries.

The revolution in
information and communication technology (ICT) has opened communication
gateways to both the good and the bad. Law abiding citizens and
anarchists alike, now enjoy greater freedom of association and speech,
made possible by ICT. And if their disadvantages must not cancel out
their advantages, Nigeria must monitor her telecommunication gateways
as a necessary restraint on criminal and destructive usage. The longer
we delay taking that decisive step, the more we lay bare our underbelly
at the mercy of criminals and anarchists to whom ICT has become
indispensable in the coordination and execution of their destructive
activities.

John Uwaya lives in Lagos, Nigeria