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Our dear President,

My main purpose in writing you at this time is to seek your intervention on the menace of oil theft in Nigeria.

It is a well known
fact that hundreds of thousands of barrels of our crude oil leave our
shores illegally for the international market, daily.

The clandestine nature of the trade has made reliable statistics impossible.

However, estimates
leave the number of stolen barrels to an alarming 400,000 daily. At the
current crude rate of 82USD per barrel, this would amount to a whooping
32.8 million USD (N4.920 billion) daily worth of revenue lost to
criminals. It is believed that Nigeria has lost close to 25 billion USD
in the last ten years (an assertion by one of the major players in the
oil industry in Nigeria).

Indeed the extent of the loss in simply unquantifiable. This national hemorrhage is not only embarrassing but also unacceptable.

As an indigene of
Otueke community from Ogbia extraction, same as Oloibiri where oil was
first discovered in commercial quantities, this sad reality must be
twice worrisome to you, your Excellency.

A few years ago, an
audit conducted by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative (NEITI) revealed that the number of barrels of oil produced
in Nigeria is yet unknown because of the absence of precision meters at
flow stations. Currently what is known is the amount of oil exported as
metering is done only at various export terminals. The report further
reveals that all the losses of crude oil happen between the various
flow stations and these export terminals. This also affects the current
calculations of royalty and Petroleum Profit Tax (PPT) as defined in
our laws. These revelations have been in the public domain since 2006.

A peep into global
best practice reveals that precision meeting can happen at various flow
stations to get accurate hydrocarbon mass balance (actual number of
barrels of oil produced) and that it is both technically and
financially feasible to do same in Nigeria.

All concerned
regulatory agencies are aware but for some reasons no one has dared to
break the status quo and that is why I seek your kind intervention. The
Norwegian government had once offered technical assistance in this
regard to deploy a technology in monitoring oil production in the Niger
Delta. The institutional reforms proposed in the Petroleum Industry
Bill (PIB) (currently awaiting passage) have done nothing to improve
the metering regime. This is an opportunity to make history by stopping
these predatory activities, privileged criminality and economic
sabotage.

It may also please
Mr. President to note that it is widely believed by the public that the
same route through which our barrels of oil leave, serves as the route
of entry for all forms of arms and ammunition that are currently used
to perpetrate mayhem in many parts of our country today. From Jos to
Maidugiri, from Aba to Bauchi the new wave of crime that we are
witnessing today is a direct reflection of reckless inflow and stock
piling of small arms and light weapons mostly received from external
sources.

I respectfully ask
you to take advantage of the goodwill that your government is enjoying
internationally especially among energy partners in the Gulf of Guinea
to ensure that this wicked economic crime is put to a stop. Late
President Umaru Yar’ Adua at the G8 summit in 2008 called on the world
to, “treat stolen crude oil as it treats stolen diamonds as both
generate blood money”

Citizens deserve
the maximum benefits that are possible from our natural resource
endowment. Our oil will not last forever and so we must hurry to ensure
that we use the revenue to diversify our economy. This will require
rapid infrastructural development, industrialisation and job creation.
The beginning of this will be to plug any form of leakage in revenue,
improve our national earnings to be able to finance these capital
intensive long term projects.

There will also be no need for a nation like ours to borrow at this time.

Generations yet
unborn will not forgive us if we fail. No other Nigerian leader is
better positioned than you, your Excellency, to match rhetoric with
action in this regard.

I respectfully
await your usual swift action, which has endeared you to many, as a
listening and responsive leader. May wisdom be stirred up in you to
lead our country especially through free, fair and transparent
elections in 2011?

Yours Sincerely

Uche Igwe

Africa Policy Scholar Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington DC USA

Last week Friday
was a big turning point in Nigeria’s journey towards genuine democracy.
The Appeal Court sitting in Ilorin finally gave a judgement which
returned the mandate of Ekiti people to Kayode Fayemi of the Action
Congress of Nigeria (ACN)). Segun Oni of the Peoples Democratic Party
(PDP), who held the mandate of the people captive for the last three
and a half years, was asked to go home.

Since the
judgement and the swearing in of the legitimate governor, intense joy
and celebration have broken out in the state. Men, women, children, old
and young have burst into a mood that was hitherto unusual for the
state since the return of democracy in 1999.

It was as if the state was just witnessing a new dawn.

But a new dawn it
really is. The journey for Mr. Fayemi and his party has been really
long and tortuous. It is still unclear why it had to take this long-
three and a half years- in a tenure that was supposed to last just
four. Mr. Oni has had full run of the state taken decisions and
appointed people to sensitive posts when in actual fact he was an
impostor and should never have been allowed to preside over the affairs
of a state.

It is these kinds
of anomalies that the Electoral Act 2010 is supposed to quickly address
and make sure that those who do not have the legitimate votes of the
electorate are not allowed to hold public office in future. It is
important that the National Assembly, political parties, Independent
National Electoral Commission and all well meaning Nigerians cooperate
to see to it that this kind of thing is not allowed again.

This is very important because it is gradually becoming a practise.

Between 1999 and
2001 the same scenario was played out in Anambra State when Chris Ngige
was declared as the governor of the state until he was later sacked by
a court to usher in Peter Obi who is now the governor of the state.

This aberration
that is gradually being turned into a norm must be stopped. That is why
we support the need to have elections well ahead of time so that all
grievances pertaining to them would have been solved before a candidate
is sworn in. A situation where a candidate has been sworn in and spent
two to three years in office before being sacked does not augur well
for democracy. In such a situation who pays for the costly mistake in
declaring a wrong candidate the winner? And who pays for the errors? In
our system we have found out that no one in the long run pays for the
mistakes, except, of course, the electorate that has been short changed.

For instance, all
the INEC officials who participated in the heists that foisted both Mr.
Oni and Mr. Ngige on the electorate are still holding to their posts at
the commission or wherever they came from. They have not been arraigned
before any tribunal to face trial for their connivance in the travesty
that brought those men to power. The question then is: how will such
people be dissuaded from committing such electoral crimes in future? Or
how will the failure to punish them serve as deterrent to others?

We salute the determination of Mr. Fayemi to pursue his case to a
logical conclusion and also salute the courage of the judiciary to
restore his mandate. However, the time to begin work is now. The new
governor must realise that he is no longer an activist; the traumatised
people of Ekiti expect a lot from him. He should therefore bend down
and work to restore the confidence of the people and justify their
votes.

I have some respect
for honest criminals. Such criminals do not pose a great danger to
society, especially because they make the job less stressful for crime
investigation officers and law courts. Although they may run, they do
not run far, and when they run, it is to give security agents a little
job to do to justify the salaries they are paid.

The honest criminal
tells the world: “Yes, I am a criminal, full-time. Catch me, if you
can!” And when the honest criminal is caught, arraigned, and the
charges are read, such a criminal nods the head and answers, “guilty as
charged.” Little wonder a presiding judge, full of admiration for the
display of sincerity, immediately commutes a clear 55-year sentence to
five, and, since love covers a multitude of iniquities, goes ahead to
translate the five year jail term to five months. If you ask me, I
would say that nothing stops such a judge from further translating the
five-month jail term to five weeks, or five days, even five minutes.
After all, a conviction is a conviction, whether one is convinced that
the punishment is commensurate to the crime or not.

And why should
Nigerians think so badly about conviction? Is it because their prisons
lack good facilities? With good food served at regular hours, movies to
watch, books to read, and even an arrangement for the prisoner to have
rich sex, who needs the freedom of the outside that comes with a lot of
responsibilities? Ask Clint Eastwood in the Hollywood film “Joe Kidd”
why he opts to go to jail for some days instead of paying a fine of
about five dollars to the court. Boy, in jail, he has access to rich
beer and some rest from action! Much later when a hunt for a criminal
is launched and the Sheriff needs men who are men, he would beg Joe
Kidd to allow someone to pay his fine so he could come out of jail and
join in the manhunt.

Don’t the whining
Nigerians know that imprisonment, for Cecilia, is some rest from
running after kudi and buying of assets? Those could be stressful, you
know.

Imprisonment could
be a vacation, or a retreat, especially if you have a good Bible or
Quran in your cell and an understanding chaplain or Imam to attend to
you every day. Inside your cell, you could be a monk. If you do not
have the right spiritual understanding, then you would be an isolated
monkey in your cell.

Cecilia is a
special Cecilia, the type that a long or short sentence cannot break
her heart. Dear reader, stop humming that Simon and Garfunkel song at
the mention of her name. Cecilia is not breaking your heart by choosing
not to come home and to do her long-short time.

A sincere Cecilia
means a new thing in the ranks of big time business of the siphoning of
public funds in Nigeria. With her example, it is hoped that many big
timers in Nigeria would choose the path of cooperating with the Law.
After all, the Law, like its agent the police, is your friend, even
though in its mythical blindfold. The Law is indeed showing that it is
humanistic and cares more about disciplining the subject than
punishing. After all, it is always preferable to have a reserve hand of
consolation for a child whom one has used the other hand to spank.

A sincere Cecilia
is a type that survives, even if she has made history with her skills
in the game of Monopoly, buying here and there, as the spirit moved
her.

A sincere Cecilia tells us that financial corruption has no gender; that what men can do, women can also do and even do better.

A sincere Cecilia is more than oceanic in her internationalisation of reckless wealth from Nigeria.

She is Ibru and her
name travels faster than her deeds. Those who think that she has done
some damage to a hallowed family name are mistaken. For her Ibruness,
she would compensate an empire and still not Helen a Troy.

A sincere Cecilia
accepts having fallen short of the glory of a family and of
self-righteous nation. She has disappointed you and me, not just
because she has stolen, but also because she has not allowed the plot
of the drama to develop complexity and thrill us more. She has cheated
you and me twice, so we are disappointed.

If you are sincerely less Cecilia that she is, cast the first stone.

Ever since former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua fell ill last year, the word “zoning” has been on everyone’s lips. The talk has been of whether the ruling Peoples Democratic Party’s “zoning” arrangement would be applied to permit the emergence of a new President from the south, the north, the east, the south-south etc. Throughout all debate about zoning, no one considered the prospect of zoning the presidency to…women.

Are women excluded from the “gentleman’s agreement”?

Even the vocabulary of zoning is sexist. Zoning is referred to as a “gentleman’s agreement”, implying that it is an exclusive matter for men. Since it is permissible to zone the most important job in the country to a piece of territory, is there anything wrong with zoning it to a gender representing half the population? Zoning by gender is arguably more inclusive than zoning by territory. Since the zoning formula splits Nigeria into six zones, once the presidency is zoned to one of them, over 80% of the population is automatically disqualified from contesting the presidency. Yet only 50% of Nigerians would be ineligible if the presidency is zoned to women.

Women only shortlists are nothing new. The Labour Party in England, and the South African government have both implemented programmes stipulating mandatory minimum female representation in politics or commerce.

RATHER DIE THAN HAVE A FEMALE PRESIDENT?

Previous attempts at making women more prominent in Nigerian politics have failed miserably. President Shagari considered having a female Vice-President/running mate. However his National Party of Nigeria had to drop the idea when one of its male members threatened to commit suicide if the country had a female Vice-President. Before you southerners immediately jump to conclusions and assume that the person who so virulently opposed female candidacy was a “feudal, conservative, Muslim northerner”, think again…the man in question was a southern Christian.

In 1986 the Political Bureau recommended that 5% of legislative seats should be reserved for women. The recommendation never saw the light of day as it was overruled by an eight member advisory committee (of whom only one was female).

UNDERPERFORMING CHAPS

Can the ladies do any worse than the men? Let’s look at what 50 years of uninterrupted rule by men has brought Nigeria: civil war, one million dead bodies in the space of 3 years, systematized corruption, destruction of national morals, ostentatious living, and decadence that would make the ancient Romans blush.

OVERPERFORMING LADIES

Yet ironically, many of the best performing ministers of recent times have been women. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Obiageli Ezekwesili, Dora Akunyili, and Dizeani Allison-Madueke have all performed admirably as ministers. Let us not forget that if not for aunty Dora’s forceful insistence that Jonathan be appointed acting President, we might still be sitting here today with Yar’Adua’s supporters telling us that Umaru is alive and well, and that he will “very shortly” return to Aso Rock and resume his job.

Let us not forget that over $30 billion of national debt was paid off after several decades when a female Finance Minister negotiated an elaborate debt repayment programme with international lending institutions. Thus Nigeria became the first African country to pay off its national debt. Funny, why didn’t the fellas think of that?

Another irony is that women make up a very substantial part of the voting electorate (in rural areas). Old women are known to vote regularly. Yet we refuse to empower a part of the national demographic that votes heavily and which has performed very well in government.

EVEN IDI AMIN LIKED NIGERIAN WOMEN

I recall watching a TV documentary that featured video footage from a cabinet meeting chaired by Uganda’s former leader “His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE” (for the sake of simplicity let’s just call him “Amin”). During the cabinet meeting, Amin poured scorn on Ugandan women whom he accused of being lazy. He asked why they could not be more like those marvelous “hard working” Nigerian women who put Ugandan women to shame, and who get up at the crack of dawn to open their stores before taking their kids to school, then getting home in time to cook their husband’s favourite dish. This was in the 1970s people. I wonder what Amin would say if he saw today’s Nigerian women at the World Bank, in the military, as world renowned Professors, entertainers, economists, and authors.

We have had a lot of firsts. President Goodluck Jonathan recently appointed Professor Precious Kassey Garba, as Nigeria’s first ever female Chief Economic Adviser. We have had female finance ministers, transport ministers, and until recently the head of the traditionally male and macho world of the stock exchange was a woman. We are happy to give women influential positions, but not the ULTIMATE powerful position.

ARE YOU AFRAID OF WOMEN?

So what are we afraid of? I anticipate that many of you reading this will say that conservative “African culture” militates against having a female President. Really? Consider the following countries that have had female leaders:

India – Indira Gandhi
Israel – Golda Meir
Pakistan – Benazir Bhutto
Philippines – Corazon “Cory” Aquino and Gloria Arroyo
Sri Lanka – Chandrika Kumaratunga

Are these countries any more conservative than Nigeria? Most of them are just as religious and even more conservative than Nigeria is. There is nothing “un-African” about female leaders either. Doesn’t local legend speak of a powerful Queen building a mighty empire in the Ijebu area several hundred years ago? Heck, even Liberia has a female President – and blood did not descend from the sky, nor did wild beasts emerge from the seas when she was sworn in.

So for next year’s election, let us not zone the presidency to the south, north, east, west, north-central, south-east, north-west, south-south, north-east, south-west, or any other place that a GPS device can find.

Let us zone it to Nigerian women. It won’t hurt.

Until next time.

Sixty nine days after 33 miners were trapped in a
Chilean mine, the world watched spellbound as all 33 of them were
rescued. That these men endured more than two months trapped hundreds
of feet below the ground is a testament to the amazing power of the
human spirit to overcome challenges. There are, of course, the obvious
lessons to learn from the Chilean story.

Anyone who has spent time on the internet in
recent days cannot miss the many jokes in which Nigerians have
attempted to imagine what would have happened had the events in Chile
taken place in Nigeria. Those jokes reveal one thing – the lack of
confidence that many Nigerians have in the ability of their government
to respond with concern, urgency and efficiency to disaster. We have
seen too many examples in the recent past – the many images of rescuers
attempting to dig victims out of collapsed buildings with bare hands
and shovels, the cholera epidemics that go on unchallenged by the
authorities for weeks on end.

In 2005, the nation watched a plane-full of
persons, most of them young children, consumed by fire at the Port
Harcourt International Airport. There was also the plane crash that
sent emergency services to a site in Oyo State, hundreds of kilometres
from the actual crash site in Ifo, Ogun State. Events like the Chile
rescue always find a way of bringing the Nigerian question into sharp
relief. There’s the temptation to favourably compare Nigeria and Chile
by lumping them together as developing countries. But such a comparison
begins to sound hollow when you realise that Chile’s per-capita income
is $15,000, way above Nigeria’s. Our concern is not so much on the many
ways in which Nigeria has failed her citizens in the past, but instead
in the uplifting aspects of the Chilean story.

We are very much interested in the way in which
such a triumph of the human spirit can serve to inspire the world.
Chile took advantage of a crisis and impressed the world with its
display of national unity. We salute the Chilean miners, for the
indomitable spirit they displayed. We salute the Chilean people for the
display of love and affection they showed for their trapped countrymen.
We salute the Chilean mining minister for the great calm he displayed
in front of TV cameras, and the entire world. There is no doubt that
his calm handling of the crisis significantly inspired many across the
world, the trapped miners included. We salute the Chilean Navy, which
manufactured the rescue capsule that has earned a place in the history
books. We believe that Nigeria can pleasantly surprise the world; that
we can offer a lot more than news of corruption and violence and
electoral malpractice and advance fee fraud. Every day Nigerians
demonstrate this innate capacity to achieve great things. Our
performance at the recently concluded Commonwealth Games is a testament
to this. One can draw parallels between that mine and the Nigerian
situation; the way that life for many Nigerians often seems to be lived
in a trap, swinging between heights and depths of despair, awaiting a
rescue that may never show up. But we also see hope in the way what
might have been a tragedy played out. Quick as we are to point out
Nigeria’s many failings, and excoriate our leaders in the public and
private sectors, we are also eager to use this opportunity to remind
Nigerians that it is important to draw hope from the story of Chile’s
33 miners. Against the odds, against all hope, they held on; kept one
another’s spirits up, and displayed an sense of organisation that
seemed incongruous with the desperate circumstances in which they found
themselves.

As Nigeria enters its fifty-first year as an independent nation,
those inspiring images from Chile should be allowed to seep into our
national consciousness. It is possible for us to be a country that
takes positive advantage of crises — one that makes the headlines for
our sense of unity and efficiency, just like Chile.

I don’t know if irony is the right word, but it
does give me pause when I reflect on the fact that the male equivalent
of the pill that freed women from the fear of conception is a little
blue diamond shaped pill that prolongs men’s ability to seek
satisfaction in the act of conception. But just the other day, one half
of the duo that made it possible for couples to meet in the middle and
achieve that ultimate joy of union for most- the birth of a child – was
awarded the Nobel prize in medicine.

Robert G. Edwards, an Englishman with his compatriot, the late Patrick Steptoe, developed the procedure for helping infertile couples to
fulfill their hopes. Edwards is a physiologist now aged 85, who spent
years working on getting eggs and sperm to grow and unite outside the
body. The late Steptoe, who died in 1988, ten years after the first
successful test tube baby, was a gynaecologist who pioneered the
concept of laparoscopic surgery, the method by which eggs are extracted
from a womb.

The duo were a dogged and determined pair who
withstood ostracism, hostility, and denial of funds from the medical,
scientific, and religious establishment.

According to the UK Guardian, they were spurred
on, Edwards said in 2008, by their patients. “Nothing is more special
than a child. Steptoe and I were deeply affected by the desperation
felt by couples who so wanted to have children. We had a lot of
critics, but we fought like hell for our patients.”

Louise Brown, the daughter of Lesley and John
Brown, that lucky first couple was understandably excited and happy at
the news of the prize, but many of Edwards and Steptoe’s supporters
felt the Nobel Committee had been very tardy indeed in recognising this
achievement.

Steptoe is no more, and Edwards is too old to
grasp what has just happened to him. To date, 4 million people around
the world have been born through IVF and the procedure has led to the
development of new ways to treat forms of male infertility, a condition
that, to some Nigerians, does not exist.

Which brings us to the strongly held beliefs that
can make the pursuit of happiness so hard for some. The idea that a
person is incomplete without this or that can create a real blight on a
life that could, left alone, find other paths to fulfillment. You must
marry, you must have children, then you must have sons, because
daughters don’t mean as much…It is unending and sometimes it is
nonsensical.

Happily, even in Nigeria, some of that is giving
way to the recognition that there are alternatives, one of which is
providing a loving home to children in need through adoption, an act
that is a two fold gift of giving and receiving that keeps on growing.

Looking back though, there were days when almost every aspect of the act of conception was fraught with fear. Lack of the kind of medical
knowledge and the tools we have today meant that giving birth was a
risky process that could take you to the brink and beyond. If something
went wrong, there was little to choose from between the act of trying
to extract the child with the crude and rudimentary tools available and
saving the mother. Both usually died so that when child was
successfully delivered and the mother lived to share the joy, it was a
triumph of grace and providence.

“I have been and back’ is the chorus of one of the traditional songs announcing the birth of a child.

There was surviving childbirth and there was the
fear of conception, the strain of a child each year, the pressure of
more mouths to feed, the drudgery of a life of constant physical work
farming, childbirth, housework or in between some petty trading, just
to keep something coming.

For schoolgirls, it was a rocky terrain. Teenage
pregnancy meant the end of a chance at education and a career. And
then, with a working life, babies meant no career or one where
advancement was limited, especially if the babies kept coming. Those
were dark days of back street abortions of lives wasted in hidden fear
and misery.

The advent of the contraceptive pill changed all
that. One tiny little tablet freed women up to make choices and plan
their lives, to pursue pleasure without fear, to plan for the
responsibilities young men did not spare a thought about as they went
about sowing the wild oats society entitled them to.

Two inventions have made the pursuit of happiness possible in such fundamental ways

and yet, we still continue to perpetuate the same
problems. Teenage pregnancy is till an issue in many countries, despite
the availability of sex education, and free contraception. Ordinarily
it should be an anathema that HIV AIDS should still continue to spread
when the message of how it can be prevented is so basic and simple:
protect yourself always or abstain and you can live free of the virus.

It is a big puzzle how the human condition simply refuses to change.
Or maybe it is just that freedom without education, and that in its
truest sense, is as bad as no freedom at all.

The huge Nigerian,
and indeed African community in the United States engages in intense
and constant debate on a list serve run by Professor Toyin Falola –
SAAFRICADIALOGUE. In the run up to the 50th anniversary celebration of
Nigeria’s independence, the key issue of concern to the community was
fraud and the Emeagwali narratives. Anyone that has googled

Nigerian achievers
on the Internet would have come across the “great achievements” of one
Philip Emeagwali. The question posed was whether he is the greatest
Nigerian achiever in the contemporary world or a monumental fraudster?

In the numerous
citations about his so-called achievements, we read that he has a PhD
in scientific computing from the University of Michigan, that he is the
father of the Internet and the inventor of super computers.

He claims to have
invented 41 patented devices including a timing device, non-capsizable
container, sweepstake programmer, random unit generator amusement
device, and bidirectional monitoring and control system and so on. In
an interview by Susan Henderson for the book African-American
Inventors, Philip Emeagwali presented his achievements in the following
manner: “…Invented methods and procedures for making computers faster
and more powerful. These methods enabled me to perform the world’s
fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989 and
solve the largest weather forecasting equations with 128 million points
in 1990. Programmed a computer with 65,000 processors to outperform the
fastest supercomputer and thereby proving that it is best to use many
processors in designing supercomputers. Successfully implemented the
first petroleum reservoir model on a massively parallel computer in
1989. As a result, one in 10 parallel supercomputers is used to find
and recover additional oil and gas. Solved one of America’s 20 Grand
Challenges – accurately computing how oil flows underground and thereby
alerting the petroleum industry that massively parallel computers can
be used to recover more oil. Only 30 percent of the oil in a reservoir
can be recovered and this discovery will enable oil companies to
recover more oil. Invented a new approach of designing supercomputers
by observing and emulating patterns in nature. Formulated new
mathematical (partial differential) equations for slowly moving liquids
and gases such as the flow within the Earth’s interior.”

Under Olusegun
Obasanjo, the Nigerian Government invited and celebrated Philip
Emeagwali as one of our shining stars in the Diaspora. This was at a
time in which there were claims that the best Nigerian brains are
abroad and we should bring them back to develop our country. Those of
us in the country were considered failures that could not get positions
abroad.

The problem with
Philip is that the university has now revealed that he never completed
his doctorate degree and checks at the United States Patent and
Trademark office did not show up patents with the name Philip
Emeagwali. He has not published in any reputable peer reviewed journal.
The conclusion is that narratives about his achievements are a fraud.

The claims about
his achievements have however been cleverly spread in numerous web
sites, and today many curricula on African and Black achievements have
him as a star example. Black youth in Europe go around with his
photographs in their school bags determined to be as “great” as
Emeagwali when they grow up.

One of the most
poignant aspects of the saga is the manner in which Gloria Thomas
Emeagwali was dragged into the debate. Gloria is a top ranked professor
of history in the United States. She is a good friend of mine from our
days as junior lecturers in Ahmadu Bello University in the early 1980s.
At that time, she was recovering from a bitter divorce with a different
Emeagwali who had studied with her in Trinidad and Tobago, married her
and brought her to Nigeria where she suffered a lot of abuse. To her
shock, she found her photograph cut and pasted on Philip Emeagwali’s
web site with the fraudulent claim that she is his wife. She put a
disclaimer on her own web page and has sued him in court.

When she drew
attention to this in the on-going debate, many questioned her
sincerity. As one commentator put it “”Emeagwali” is not a common name,
like Okeke, Okafor or Ojo. We know not whether Gloria bears ANY past or
present relationship with Philip beyond a common last name.” The
suspicion was that she might be his estranged wife trying to get at
him, which is extremely unfair allegation for the Gloria I know. At
that point, the debate got dirty between so called Igbo bashers and
Igbo defenders derailing the core issue about fraudulent claims of this
man. The most painful issue of the debate is that Nigeria bashers in
the United States are now singing narratives about how most Nigerian
academics in the country are 419 scholars.

We have great Nigerian scholars at home and abroad. We also have
great fraudsters at home and abroad. Not all that is abroad is good.

It’s not surprising
that Chilean President Sebastían Piñera made sure that he was on hand
to welcome the first of the 33 miners who had been trapped at the San
Jose mine since the 5th of August, back to the world, or that he stayed
at the mine in the remote town of Copiapo which is over 700 km from his
working base in the capital, Santiago, throughout the entire day and a
half that the rescue operation took. The entire episode has been
tremendously positive for the image of Chile and the Chilean people.

Comparisons, though
perhaps odious, are inevitable, nor is it only in Nigeria that the
results are unflattering to the home team.

In Mexico they are
cracking sour jokes along the ‘if-the-miners-had-been-Mexicans’ line
(the tunnel would have come out in the United States of America).

In the United
States of America Barack Obama, with his frequent visits to Louisiana
and tough talk during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill never played a
fraction as well as his Chilean counterpart. Obama’s government was
content to leave the matter for BP to sort out until public opinion
forced a more proactive response. By contrast, even though it sought
and received advice and assistance from all over the world, Piñera’s
government was clearly in charge of the rescue effort from the outset.

Disasters, whether
natural or man-made, are an inevitable fact of our human lives on
mother earth, but government reactions vary. In Hungary for example,
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is fully alive to the toxic effect of
environmental disaster on political careers, is threatening “the
toughest possible consequences” for those responsible for the tide of
toxic red sludge that burst out of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant on the
7th of this month.

Here at home, the
disaster of the day has been floods from Sokoto in the north to Ogun
and Lagos in the south. President Goodluck Jonathan has made a point of
turning up in Sokoto along with relief materials for flood victims.
There has been none of that “I don’t need to be here” arrogance with
which former President Olusegun Obasanjo rebuffed displaced Lagosians
during his visit to the site of the Ikeja Cantonment explosions in
January 2002: Jonathan is running for election as President and needs
not only to counter the ‘Ijaw mafia’ tone that keeps leaking out from
those around him, but also to highlight the contrast between himself as
the father of the entire nation and the parochial and sectional
presentation of the ‘Gang of Four’ northern Peoples Democratic Party
candidates: Atiku Abubakar, Ibrahim Babangida, Aliyu Gusau and Bukola
Saraki.

But although it’s
not only in Chile that mining activity carries risks, or in Hungary
that industrial processes have deadly side effects, apparently it’s not
all disasters that a presidential candidate wants to be associated
with. That might explain why it has been left to the United Nations to
raise the alarm about the lead poisoning deaths of over 400 children in
Zamfara State, where alluvial gold mining is taking place in lead
contaminated areas. In that tragedy there is nothing to ‘fly in to’ –
just another mark of the failure of the Nigerian state at the basic,
boring, regulation of potentially dangerous industries.

When ‘rich alhajis’
are reaping while ‘poor mallams’ risk their health to mine the gold,
perhaps making too much noise would risk stepping on political toes in
an area where those running for office need local friends and
supporters. The thread of lax government oversight runs through many of
the recent man-made disasters: the oil industry in the US was obviously
getting away with the sort of grossly negligent attitude towards
compliance with safety standards for which it is famous (and
unsanctioned) in Nigeria, and the same might be said of Chilean mine
owners and Hungarian aluminium producers. But in those countries
governments have been loud in their promises of future stringent
regulation. Here, it may not be clear to informal miners in Zamfara
State that their governments even care that there is a problem!

Like the people of
Nigeria, Chileans have had their time under the military jackboot,
ushered in on their own “9/11” when the democratically elected
government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in by Augusto Pinochet in
a 1973 coup supported by the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency. But
while for us, military dictatorship only set the country back and
hindered our progress in every way, Chile has at least emerged with
something to show for the years of human rights abuse and harsh
measures advocated by Pinochet’s “Chicago Boys”. Despite the resulting
slump in wages and high unemployment, Chile achieved such sustained
economic growth that today it is considered a ‘middle income’ country.
The miners and people of Chile deserve their accolades. It used to be a
standard joke in media circles that the dullest newspaper headline ever
written was: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.”

Times change. The 2010 version is: “Mine roof collapse in Chile.
None dead.” It’s a headline that brought the whole world to a halt with
tears of joy.