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I have often
wondered why people bother with Nfi, the Nigerian periwinkle; that
insignificant disquietingly green gastropod dressed in black ridged
armor. How can one consider something so easily lost on the palate, or
expend so much energy cleaning or preparing it for an unexceptional
appearance in the meal?

I have on a few
occasions been sent Afang soup or Ekpan ku kwo so disfigured by the
quantity of periwinkles in them that it is like an invasion of the
food; like wading through a swamp full of rocks. And what should be a
texturally soft and comforting meal becomes a challenge, a guilt ridden
meal where one doesn’t want to spend the best part “feeeping” minuscule
periwinkles out of their shells, but doesn’t want to waste the food on
one’s plate either.

On the other hand,
if the periwinkles are removed from their shells and placed in the
soup, they disappear into thin air and add very little personality to
the food. Even when the periwinkles are meticulously cleaned, there
will be at least a few round inedible discs from the periwinkles left
behind in ones teeth that need a whole mile of dental floss to get out.

But I have always
believed that there is a lot about food that is not commonsensical or
comfortable, rather nostalgic, customary, or “I don’t know what but I
like it anyway”.

I once prepared a
meal for a non-Nigerian friend who doesn’t like our country fowl
because according to him, when you break the chicken’s bones, they form
dangerously jagged points that can tear your tongue to shreds.

I don’t know why on
earth a grown man can’t maneuvre his tongue around the bones of a
chicken. Why would anyone despise that delicious meat for such a petty
reason, and choose the tissue paper texture and blandness of Agric
chicken over it? Even if it tore ones tongue to shreds, it is
absolutely worth it. The only possible rationale behind his opinion is
that he has grown up eating his type of chicken and for that reason
prefers it.

I think of soups
made up of Imposing chunks of meat and lethal bones intentionally under
cooked so that the eater must fight with them to eat them. And fighting
is 90% of the enjoyment of the meal: “Swallow” made so resiliently hard
that when you throw it against the wall, it bounces back; soups cooked
with strong smelling condiments like Iru and Ogiri that make the
eater’s mind form all manner of associations that have nothing to do
with food or with anything that one wants to put near ones mouth.

We are not alone in
this predicament. Thai Nam Pla, the condiment commonly known as fish
sauce smells by far worse than Iru. Woe betide you if it pours out in
your car on the way home from the supermarket. Not to talk of Chinese
preserved eggs or even that runny smelly cheese that the French call
Camembert.

In other words,
that wading and bruising of lips is exactly what the seasoned eater of
Nfi wants. Surely, that must be 95% of the experience of eating Nfi! Am
I being too harsh on our beloved Nfi? Aunty Thelma of the famous
Fisherman Stew says that unless a machete is used to scrape the
periwinkle, then it is nowhere near clean especially when one considers
its natural habitat Imagine scraping an Nfi with a machete and at the
end of cooking, all the periwinkle is, is a periwinkle.

I admit to being
the philistine here because I sense that Nfi is also a gastronomic
experience (albeit consisting mostly of sucking). It is the scenic
route; a cultural marker, and even an incidental aphrodisiac. I hear
the sucking sound produced when the Nfi is held to the lips is deeply
suggestive; at least between two people (not five) it is.

Placing the whole
periwinkle in the soup gastronomically works because beads of soup pool
in the small crevices of the periwinkle shell and when that is sucked
out, one gets the essence of the soup plus the flesh of the periwinkle.
But as a reward for such hard work, it is still comparably stingy.

For those
culturally well brought up, there is nothing that animates the appetite
and the enjoyment of one’s meal more than sitting around a table where
the white sound of active Nfi sucking is going on. I have to add that
periwinkles work best for me in soups like Abak (Banga) soup where they
have freedom to move around, and they are not crowding out the soup or
competing with the greens.

Is eating the
periwinkle more a force of habit than quelling hunger or eating
protein, or tasting anything at all? Is the sucking more important for
cultural glue and communal thanksgiving than getting meat out of its
shell?

I suspect the
answer is that I have overanalysed the periwinkle and that for those
who have eaten it all their lives, they know what the periwinkle tastes
like, and will say it tastes like fish or snails or has some unique
taste that can’t really be described.

For their sakes, I stand waiting to be corrected.

Female football
in Nigeria has a relatively short history, dating back to the late 90s,
but in that short period the female national teams have done a great
deal to enhance Nigeria’s image.

The recent
victory of the Super Falcons in South Africa, who defeated defending
champions Equatorial Guinea to win the African Women championship is
only the latest in a string of successes recorded by the team. In a
competition that has only been played seven times, the Falcons are
six-time winners, and they have qualified and participated in all World
Cups till date. They will be making their sixth consecutive appearance
in the Women Mundial in Germany next year.

Unfortunately,
these sterling records have not earned respect for the women who have
brought so much honour and prestige to the country. When the team
arrived in Lagos after their victorious outing in South Africa, they
were paraded aboard a ramshackle trailer that even cows would have
sniffed at. Despite this, the footballers were happy to have been
received at all; In 2008, no arrangement was made to received the team.
It was so bad that on arrival in Nigeria, the players each had to use
their own money to charter cabs from the airport.

The truth is that
our ladies have not been accorded the respect they deserve for their
achievements over the years. Will it be too much to ask that they be
remunerated accordingly? Yes, the men’s game still has more prestige,
more money, but that should not take anything away from what the
Falcons, Falconets and the Flamingoes have done to re brand Nigeria in
the eyes of the world.

While the Super
Eagles (and one wonders if they still deserve that appellation) collect
on the average $10,000 (N1.5million) as match allowances in
international tournaments, the female team gets a paltry $1,000 and
$500 for the junior teams. The disparity in these allowances is too
wide to permit rational discourse.

When the Eagles
won the 1980 Nations Cup for the first time, they was a deluge of gifts
for the players ranging from cars to houses and national honours. Yet
our women have now won the female version for a sixth time and the best
we could do for them was parade them in a trailer used to transport
cows to the abattoir. Such actions reveal a clear disregard, even
disenfranchisement of our women. This has to be remedied quickly as it
could easily kill the motivation and the morale of the players and also
that of youngsters that may want to follow in their footsteps.

It is true that
by the time the team reached Abuja, the Nigeria Football Federation
quickly moved to remedy the shoddy handling of the Falconet’s reception
by conveying them in a Marco Polo bus to the Presidency, but the
football house still needs to do more to encourage and motivate the
players.

First, there have
always been allegations – unproven as of now – that some male officials
of the team try to use their positions to harass female players
sexually. These have to be taken seriously and investigated. And if any
male official is found to be guilty, he should be prosecuted. This will
reassure aspiring female footballers, they will know that they will be
protected when and if they get to play for the national team.

Also, there had
been subtle threats that Eucharia Uche, the coach, will be replaced
before the World Cup in Germany next year. This is a woman who chieved
what a male coach could not do in 2008, beating the superb female team
of Equatorial Guinea. She also showed in all the matches that she was
not afraid to ring the changes as the case of Loveth Ayila plainly
showed. Ayila started the first match against Mali but she did not get
her act right. The coach made her sit out the rest of the tournament
with her replacement doing the business. That showed a coach who did
not allow sentiments to cloud her judgment and who was also thinking on
her feet, ready to make corrections on earlier devised tactical
formation when they are not succeeding.

The coach has now
been assured by the federation that her job is safe but they could do
more by assisting her in getting quality club attachments where she
will improve her skills.

The Federation
should also intensify efforts to get sponsors for the female local
league, where development has been hampered by a lack of direction and
finance. If this is done the reservoir of players will increase and we
will see an improvement in the quality of football played by the female
players.

In preparing for
Germany 2011, there is a need for incentives that are clearly spelt out
so the players know what they have to gain by performing well. The
match allowances need to be improved and more friendly matches should
be organised to keep them in match form. The women are important and
must be made to feel important.

They have won six
African crowns and have appeared in all World Cups, that should be more
than enough to get them the respect and plaudits they deserve.

It is a long, long,
time since I visited London last so this may sound old hat to many, but
bless me if the first poster I saw as I exited the train wasn’t ‘Good
people Great nation’, courtesy of GTB. Just the kind of welcome message
you need when ‘escaping’ Nigeria! The wonders and signs did not end
there. I spent the next 13 hours waiting to board a plane to Brussels.
This was due to something called fog that goes with Britannia, only
when you have been away for a decade you tend to forget. So there was
I, practically reliving those old days at Ikeja airport when departure
time was a closely guarded secret, just as it was open knowledge that
if you left Lagos by road at the crack of dawn you could make it to
Enugu before the first flight landed.

After the departure
time for the 12.50 flight to Brussels had been changed for the fourth
time and the gate for the second, the sign was removed completely and
we found ourselves seated next to a growing queue of people bound for…
Munich! The native gentleman sitting next to me explained it all very
carefully. “This means they have no idea where the plane is, not to
talk of telling us when it will land so we will have some sense of when
it might take off for Brussels. This is England!” he declared laughing
and skipped away to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Driving down
Kingsway Road, Ikoyi a couple of days ago, I had another memorable
encounter with a political campaign poster, this one displaying the
arresting features of our former vice president Abubakar Atiku, clad
surprisingly, in a suit and promising Lagosians ‘better dey come’.

The thing with
these posters is that the message, in order to be memorable, has to be
short, so one has no space to seek clarification from Mr. Atiku as to
when that ‘bettah’ comes at whose door will it land? But since
Nigerians have experienced his leadership before, albeit as a number
two man, the question might be moot.

But there is also
another possible explanation for the happy choice of phrase. Mr. Atiku
has long years of service in the Customs and Excise Department. His
Wikipedia entry reads: “Atiku joined the Customs and Excise department
in 1969, serving in Seme, Kano, Maiduguri, Kaduna, Ibadan and Lagos. He
rose to the rank of Deputy Director (second in command nationwide),
with a notably impeccable service record…” so, the meaning of the
slogan might just be literal.

It was Yemisi Ogbe
who last week reminded one of that Nigerian gem, ‘idea is need’, so one
must, in light of this, laud the honesty and accuracy of Mr. Atiku’s
campaign crew. They are not trying to feed us some new line, some
brazenly false election gimmick.

In fact there is a
rich vein of realism that runs through Nigerian sloganeering. You Chop
I Chop or I Chop You Chop has to take the baba nla award for most
imaginative Nigerian political party name ever. The party founders
called it the way they saw it. Coming a close second, if not calling
for a category of its own is Charles Taylor’s, “He killed my Ma, He
killed my Pa, but I will vote for him”. Chilling, yes, I mean you
better vote for him. It is not evidence his lawyer is likely to use in
marshalling a defence for the former president of Liberia currently
standing trial at The Hague for war crimes.

You might think
that since Nigerians do have the franchise, a campaign for one man one
vote might be redundant, but that would mean you were MIA when the
verdict in the case of against erstwhile Delta State governor Emmanuel
Uduaghan was handed down stripping him of the post of chief executive
because as the judge ruled, no election actually took place.

In the city of
Chicago in the US where political corruption has legendary proportions,
there is an old joke about citizens being urged to wake up in good time
so they could vote early and often. In contemporary Nigeria, the
imperative of enforcing the one-man one vote system is even more
important than fooling around trying to implement a one-man one-wife
policy. Mind you, not that anyone is trying; the comparison is used
simply to make a point that some things do matter.

Sometimes a popular
song has the line that just fits the times. The Gamble and Huff chart
topper of the 80s, Ain’t no stopping us now, fitted the mood of the
gravy train days of the NPN, just before that locomotive came crashing
to a stop, militarily instituted by Mohammed Buhari’s New Year’s eve
intervention in December 1983.

History has an
awful repetitive habit. November 2009 was a chilling month for Nigeria
and set in motion the events that led to Mr. Goodluck Jonathan stepping
into the breach. There were no slogans then, just hopes and prayers
that Nigeria was on a different road at last.

We do not seem to have travelled very far.

We have had cause, in a previous editorial, to
call it the “stuck” exchange. Now we have the dubious honour of
contributing another description: the “candy floss” exchange.

All the while we assumed it was a place for
creating, trading and multiplying wealth, and generally advancing the
frontiers of the free market.

While the party lasted, the doors seemed open to
all and sundry. Nigerians fell over themselves to be a part of it,
pumping funds into the market. Wealth, as well as local and
international awards for profitable capitalism multiplied, as expected,
and there was much joy in the land. Wasn’t this, after all, the
exchange that put two Nigerians on the Forbes List?

Until we discovered, far too late, that what we
had on our hands all along was a candy floss party, full of fluff,
totally lacking in value. It wasn’t a stock exchange, it was a puppet
theatre, a gathering of magicians, who conjured figures out of thin air
with the same aplomb with which they made them vanish.

Presiding over this depraved organisation, which
showed no capacity for restraint and was voracious in its appetite for
stealing, was Ndidi Okereke-Onyiuke, The ‘crooked’ madam of Kakawa
Street, along with her senior officials, spared no effort in the raping
and pillaging of the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

We are in possession of a copy of a forensic audit
(available to be downloaded from our website, 234NEXT.com) into the
affairs of the exchange under Mrs. Okereke-Onyiuke. The audit was
commissioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and produced by
the law firm of Aluko Oyebode in conjunction with KPMG.

It is a sickening report. The recklessness with
which executives of the exchange paid out huge sums of money from its
administrative funds is matched only by the absurdity of what the funds
were spent on. It is, amongst other things, a tale of luxury tastes
that can only be acquired outside of a honest day’s job: lavish events,
expensive cars, Rolex watches, a yacht, even. The report also is a
treatise on the Manual of Creative Accounting.

One example, taken at random from several: N342
million paid to a front company owned in fact by the head of the
Corporate Affairs department of the exchange, to organise a Long
Service Award in 2008.

The name of the company (you will not find a more apt name): “Candy Floss Limited.”

Another example: N186 million spent buying 165
Rolex watches ostensibly for presentation to long-serving staff. At
least half of this money went to Candy Floss, and 92 of those watches
remain unaccounted for, as there is no evidence they were actually
purchased, to say nothing of giving them to anyone. Another N100
million paid to Candy Floss for the supply of cars, some of which have
never been seen by anyone.

The sum of N450 million was “reported” as overseas
travel expenditure in 2007, well in excess of the N60 million budgeted.
In 2008, the reported figure leaped to N615 million. The forensic audit
reveals that the actual amount expended – according to the books – was
N1.9 billion: that’s not a typo — the amount spent on foreign trips by
Mrs. Okereke-Onyiuke’s gang, in the year of our Lord 2008, was
N1,900,000,000.00. By an act of creative accounting, N1.3 billion of
this “was reclassified under different expense description/classes.”
Indeed the report is a fascinating compendium of accounting tricks.

These are only a fraction of the report’s
findings. It also says that Mrs. Okereke-Onyiuke paid herself more than
half a billion naira in productivity bonuses in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It
appears that, in between supervising public offers and raising funds
for Messrs Obasanjo and Obama (whether solicited or not,) she found
time to supervise a transformation of personal fortunes on several
fronts.

Laden with instances of over-invoicing, multiple
payments, gross breaches of financial guidelines, unaccounted-for
purchases, falsification of accounts, illegal sharing of funds,
flagrant disregard for budgets and expenditure limits – the report’s
contents are nightmarish.

But then again we have to acknowledge that they
are only nightmarish if you discount the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA)
report that nailed Bode George, or the several EFCC reports indicting
political office holders, now sadly gathering dust in unknown places.
After all, none of our law enforcement agencies, least of all the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, has seen fit to haul in Mrs.
Okereke-Onyiuke and her cabal.

Acts of monumental corruption have ceased to be a
surprising phenomenon in our country. But that doesn’t make them any
less deserving of censure. Mrs. Okereke-Onyiuke has a lot of questions
to answer. Before now she had been accused by Mr. Aliko Dangote, a
former president of the exchange, of mismanaging it to the point of
bankruptcy. Mr. Dangote, like many others associated with the exchange,
also has questions to answer.

In addition to Mr. Dangote, the Exchange council
was led by a long line of captains of industry, including Oba Otudeko.
They all need to tell us what they know, and when they knew it. This is
not the time to start screaming about ‘victimisation’ and ‘the antics
of enemies’.

This is not the time to start running around in
search of absurd court injunctions (which, admittedly, and with enough
cash on or under the table, are not all that hard to obtain.)

The facts are clear, unambiguous; and if anyone has contrary
information, we’ll be the first to provide them with a platform to
demonstrate it.

At the Beijing
Forum, which I attended last weekend, one of the participants from
England told me that he had been invited to give a talk on what lessons
Africa can learn from China, and wondered what my views were.

What could one say
that hasn’t been said before? The truth is that most of the lessons we
need to learn from China are the same lessons we should have learned
from Malaysia, from Singapore, from South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia or
Lao. They are the same lessons that the Nigerian Economic Summit,
Vision 2010, Vision 2020, Vision 2020:20 and any number of other
development plans produced right here in Nigeria have absorbed; plans
that we beg our governments to implement.

Beg, to little discernible effect. Most of our people, and too many across Africa, remain poor in a richly endowed continent.

I haven’t yet laid
hands on Greg Mills’ book, “Why Africa is Poor: and what Africans can
do about it”, but according to the review, Mills asks why Africa is
poor despite the fact that its people work hard and the continent is
blessed with abundant natural resources. Mills concludes that Africa is
not poor because of bad infrastructure or lack of trade access,
development or technical expertise – or even corruption – but because
our leaders have made the choice that we should be poor.

That is not the
choice made by China’s leaders. Whether it was Mao Zedong who actually
said it, there is no doubt that it was Deng Xiaoping, China’s de facto
leader throughout the 1980s, who set in motion the reforms inspired by
the phrase “To be rich is glorious”.

I’d been thinking
about this decision by our own leaders – that we should be poor – when
I found myself spending 50 minutes waiting to turn left under the
infamous flyover at Ota in Ogun State. The surrounding roads are in
such a terrible condition that the newly-opened flyover has – if
anything, worsened traffic. I thought about it again on my way back,
taking the ‘shake, rattle and roll’ alternative route on state roads.

It baffled me that
anybody in government would dream of making a fuss over the
long-delayed completion and opening of that wretched flyover, let alone
subject the nation to an unseemly struggle to claim credit for it! The
Obasanjo administration had refused to complete it for reasons best
known to itself. Accusations of improving the road to President
Obasanjo’s own front door (Obasanjo Farms lies on the Idiroko road
which starts beneath the flyover) may have been avoided, but perhaps
the ex-president should take a ride in the buses plying those routes,
and hear the salty language in which he is described.

The resulting pain
to countless other road users is surely concrete evidence of the
propensity of our ‘big men’ to measure their height – not by how close
they are to the sky – but by how large the gap is between them and
those below. Unable to achieve healthy growth themselves, they must
hinder others so that they can continue to ‘walk tall’.

The state
government refused to repair the alternative roads, perhaps because
heavy lorries might use and destroy them. But this beggar-my-neighbour
attitude was completely indifferent to the fact that it was the people
in Ogun State who suffered.

The contrast
between that glaring example of a decision that the people should be
poor, and the decision of China’s leaders that their people should be
rich (and didn’t consider provision of a decent road network a special
favour) struck me as the main lesson that Nigeria could learn from
China.

And then to return
home to an even better example: the three-day strike! Labour’s demand
that the agreement on the national minimum wage should be implemented
not only came against the background of the grossly inflated
remuneration of legislators (as well as presidents and governors), but
also coincided with the decision to heap Scylla on Charibdis by piling
obscene presidential pensions onto the riches already enjoyed by former
heads of state.

President Goodluck
Jonathan is reported to have said that a difference of a mere N1,000
(between the N17,000 being paid and the N18,000 being demanded) ought
not to lead to any industrial action “for good people that have been
friendly”. I don’t blame him. Although N1,000 is over 5% of N18,000, it
probably wouldn’t appear as even a fraction of a percentage point on
the presidential take-home pay calculator.

That statement –
which, for sheer inability to understand the lives of ordinary people,
is right up there with Marie-Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” advice to
18th century France’s starving bread-less poor – can hardly be what
labour leaders were referring to when they praised Jonathan for his
‘humility’ after his five-minutes-to-midnight rush to hold talks about
the strike. But if he cannot understand the meaning of N1,000 to a
worker in today’s Nigeria, how is he going to get his head round the
idea that the people of this country might – for their labour and
effort – also want to be rich? Or at least, to climb out of unnecessary
poverty?