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I searched for the airtime voucher I had bought the previous day and kept in my bag. I looked everywhere -in my purse, my pocket, in my heart; there was not a trace of it. I gave up and decided to check my e-mail instead.

There was one from my sister-in-law that read: “Hi Funlola, sorry to bring you sad news. Prof Fafunwa died today”. I felt stabbed – in my heart. And so, with my notebook on my lap, I began to search again. I searched for Fafunwa in my heart.

I was sitting amidst other graduands, having just received a Master of Arts degree in linguistics, as I listened to the citation of this teacher of teachers. He was receiving a doctoral degree (honoris causa) from the University of Ife, then, one of the homes of the (now mostly exiled and disillusioned) Nigerian literati. I felt pride, glowing pride, that I was sharing the day with one of the people who made it happen for me. He was part of my story.

So later in the foyer of Oduduwa Hall, in the midst of the handshakes, the hugs and the camera lights, I walked up to him in my red academic gown to ask for a picture with him. He looked at me quizzically as if to say, “what have I to do with you now?” He did not recognise me. I told him I was one of his “6YPP” kids. His expression changed – surprise, disbelief, pure joy!

Like one who just found a treasure, he beckoned to his wife, cameramen and other bystanders to “come and see”. Here was proof of his labour, proof that all that was read in his citation was not fabricated. I felt pride as we stood together smiling for the cameras. I was part of his story.

My notebook remained on my lap as I continued my search in my heart. It was the valedictory ceremony at the end of the 6YPP. I was amidst other “graduands” in a red dress with a white yoke that mother had bought specially for the ceremony. We were smiling for the cameras with Fafunwa sitting at the centre surrounded by his team of researchers and all our teachers. Later in the evening, mother sent me to get some medication from the neighbourhood pharmacy. I still had on my new hair-do, my new red dress and my 6YPP badge as the pharmacy attendant asked me what the occasion was and what 6YPP meant.

I explained that the Six Year Primary Project was set up to determine whether children were better off being taught in their mother tongue or their second language, in this case English. I explained that I was part of the project and we had just graduated that day.

The pharmacy lady was impressed and I felt pride. It was one of my earliest recollections of what it meant to be proud. I was proud of myself and of my favourite teachers, Mrs Ilori and Mr Oyatoye. I was proud of my mother who bought my red dress. I was proud of Prof Fafunwa and his team of researchers. I was proud of my school, St Stephen’s ‘A’ Primary School, the oldest public school in Modakeke.

With my notebook still on my lap, I continued my search. This time I searched for the pride that I felt that December day at Oduduwa Hall. I searched for the hope that was fired in us on that day of our graduation from elementary school. I searched for the pride that I felt that night as I talked to the pharmacy attendant who was proud that I could express myself so clearly at age eleven. Like my airtime voucher, it was all gone! Instead, I felt shame – shame that, forty years after the 6YPP, Nigeria’s public school system was dead!

My heart bled for the Nigerian child who may never experience the hope and the glory we felt that graduation day. My heart bled for the Nigerian public school system that has been run down by shameless folks who make unjust decrees. My heart bled for a nation that has turned from breeding young stars to breeding charlatans, street hawkers, militants and kidnappers.

It is little wonder that Fafunwa’s heart died that October day. Did he resolve that he couldn’t take any more after witnessing the celebration of fifty years of national failure?

I stood up. Yes, Fafunwa is dead. And, oh yes, my pride is gone! But Fafunwa may yet live, if there is one researcher out there who can hear the cry of the Nigerian child, if there is one governor, one lawmaker, one teacher, one minister of education, one mother, one faculty of education that can say ‘yes’ to the Nigerian child.

And on behalf of the Nigerian child and of my 6YPP colleagues, I say to Babs Fafunwa, “Good night”

P.S

As of the time of writing, I was not aware of President Jonathan’s scathing criticism of Prof Fafunwa’s works. With due respect to Mr. President, I’d like to add that we need to cultivate the culture of honouring true statesmen, not tearing down their achievements with words or our own inaction. When a child sits on the shoulder of an elder, he can see far (Akan proverb).

Funlola Olojede writes from Cape Town.

What manner of democracy can
this be, when every opportunity Nigerians have to select leaders they want is
scuttled by so much intrigue, complicated by processes contrived to ensure that
only certain people emerge as party candidates?
One can’t readily recall in
what order the famous ‘of/for/by-the-people’ definition of democracy went; but
one knows that it was always/has always been/will always be about the right of
the people to FREELY choose their leaders. This
means REAL CHOICE, from political party level.
Can this be how democracy ought to be
practised? Can true democrats be so averse or allergic to the simple democratic
process of putting themselves up for the race, canvassing for votes and hoping
to win on the strength of their conviction, not because the party has in a
cult-like manner ‘decreed’ that everyone must vote one way, irrespective? Is
that democracy, truly?
Why can’t people be allowed
to slug it out the old-fashioned way, through superior argument? Suddenly, we
want to tinker with the Electoral Act beyond what INEC brought us back there
for? One thought we were repairing time-lines, but No! Trust us; it’s time to
exploit loopholes to make sure answers match questions.
What, pray tell, is our
business with ‘party-caucus-to-choose-candidates’ and
‘right-of-first-refusal-clause’? Are these democratic tenets? We complicate
simple matters because we need/have to confuse the people to get specific
results, since the people ‘don’t know’ what’s good for them. What is wrong with
a more simple process, unless they suspect they are not worthy of our votes?

This is a sad interpretation of democratic practice indeed!
People hope candidates who emerge from the
primaries would have fought for the right to represent the party based on known
standard democratic principles: robust debate, sound logic, superior reasoning,
respect for all opinion, allowing unfettered choice without express or implied
intimidation and most importantly, accepting that one’s choice may not be
popular. This, I’m afraid, isn’t what they’re going to get!

REAL CHOICE means not restricting us to candidates the political party
leadership [in all their wisdom?] deem fit to have supposedly short-listed for
us! That’s the problem with the proposed amendments. We wanted a process that
would allow us to select whom we wanted.
What we will be getting instead, is a process so contrived, wherein
every current political office holder shall definitely come back, if the
Constitution allows it.
We have lost the right to
boot out politicians who do not perform well.
How can someone who was redundant in his political office have the right
to ‘first-refuse’ to come back before we can field someone against him? Who
should be refusing whom here? So performance becomes immaterial because once
the Electoral Act is tinkered with, that simple age-long process of letting
candidates vie for and get your vote after convincing you, dies? If party
primaries don’t throw up the right people, will we get vibrant leadership or
will we be stuck with this current cult-like system?

At the end of the day, we
are going back to the Electoral Act because amendments were not primarily done
for our benefit. We were not given those reforms we demanded through the UWAIS
panel, were we?
Months ago, everyone thought
that finally, amended laws would supposedly give us the FFC [free, fair,
credible] elections we badly needed. Are we now changing our minds about the
quality and capacity of those amendments, after slapping ourselves gleefully on
the back about a job-well-done? Were we pretending in the spirit of patriotism?
Am I the only one who remembers some poignant reforms demanded and denied?
Take the clause about
leaving at least six months between the date of election and the date
governance commences, for example; did we ask for governorship election
disputes to go to the Supreme Court? Blame it on all the politicians who, in
defiance of specific laws, insist on going to the Supreme Court to seek one
clarification and/or interpretation on matters, which a court with competent
jurisdiction will have ruled on. Is this ego? Where will it end, the feeling
that only the Supreme Court is big enough to pronounce on one’s matter?
Is this desire to have the
highest court in the land adjudicate on one’s matter, evidence that one is indeed
important? Will the Supreme Court satisfy them? Did a politician not approach
the ECOWAS Court, knowing that it was a fruitless venture but ‘deepening our
democracy’ nevertheless?

Are you surprised that
things are now unravelling because our political office holders only want to
further their own cause with amendments that would be of benefit to their
personal ambitions alone?

I have always told
myself and anyone who cares to listen that I do not think that God is a
democrat. If He was, Satan would have succeeded with his coup. We were
really talking about crowd action and reaction, juxtaposed with
democratic actions and reactions. People should carefully observe
before climbing on any band wagon. It is easy to hear “but their course
was hijacked by hoodlums and touts”. We also know that good news is no
news and that bad news is what makes news. That is why CNN and
Aljazeera are hot.

Nigerians are very
quick to point to Ghana example. How Rawlings came on board and
annihilated all the criminals in power and opened a new page that
changed the sad story of Ghana to glory. Unfortunately we have had
Generals in Nigeria who came on board and changed the stories of their
private pockets to hilltop glories and left the masses in perpetual
servitude. They are still around and are shamelessly taunting the
populace with their loot. Well, the time of Generals has passed. They
had their opportunity.

My intention this
week is to advise Nigerians about the dangerous mistake of joining in
any kind of mass action without digging deep into what that crowd is
really intent on doing.

Some of us have
noticed how our children follow bad fashion and imbibe decadent
cultures; how a great majority of our girls and women now expose body
parts that should be hidden and our boys are now ‘saggin’, wear
ear-rings and are quick to adorn their hairs crazily?

We have seen how
good and progressive bills are tucked under, or killed even, in the
national assembly because they do not serve the selfish interest of
some sitting members, their past colleagues and their godfathers. I am
very convinced you now understand the drift of my story this week. But
if you do not, know that the road to heaven is very narrow and the one
that leads to hell is very wide.

I was actually
inspired to write on crowd reaction and I thought wise and good people
should be wary, so they are not misled. A few weeks ago, myself and
about three others were called to be judges in a ‘talent hunt event’ in
one of our university campuses. A dance competition was introduced as a
side attraction and the last eight contenders were asked to slug it
out. Then we noticed that one of the dancers, a very pretty young girl
who was declared the winner, was putting on a “low-waist jeans trouser”
and, as she danced, all her buttocks were outside in the full glare of
the cameras.

Crowd has decided
At first, I thought I was the only one seeing her. But when the other
two judges leaned over and said, this girl would have won but for what
she had on, I quickly agreed. Surprisingly, the MCs of the occasion, in
choosing the final three, cut us judges out of the decision, with the
help of the crowd of students who filled the one thousand capacity hall
to the brim. Each time the particular girl bent down to achieve a
particular erotic move, with her full buttocks staring us in the face,
the crowd screamed.

If you have seen Beyonce or Rihanna dancing, you would know what I
mean. Finally, the last three finalists were chosen and the indecently
dressed girl was among them. And before we could protest, the MCs
decided to use the famous national assembly style. “If this girl is
number three say yes;” “if this boy is second, say yes” and “if this
girl is the winner, say yes”. The crowd was actually ecstatic. I mean,
the girl’s dance was mainly erotic, what I will call ‘waist and yansh
dance.’ Get this straight, they had the preliminaries the week before,
where the final eight that made the finals were chosen from. So she
came prepared. To rub insult upon injury, the sponsor of that event,
right there, immediately increased the prize money after the girl has
been declared the winner by the crowd and he brought out the cash and
gave the girl. The crowd had decided and they say it’s the beauty of
democracy. Please, follow the crowd only when the course is right.

This is not looking good. The Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) has been revealed to have huge gaps in its
processes, and through those cracks have fallen N21 billion worth of
‘excess’ polling booths.

The chairman of the commission had asked for and
received N87.7 billion to conduct these elections, based on a claim
that there are 120, 000 polling sites in the country, and that data
capture machines at each of these polling locations would cost N308,
000. In between the commission chairman’s loud cry that the elections
were at risk if these funds were not released timeously, there was a
hurry to approve the monies – and processes were skipped. Nigerians,
wary of any excuse to slow down the electoral process, seemed to look
away.

At the basis of this was a collective desire to
give INEC all the support it needed and when the commission asked that
elections be moved forward to give it time to fulfil its mandate the
request was readily granted. But an analysis of the data published by
INEC on its website, conducted for NEXT by citizens advocacy group
WangoNet, shows that INEC has 28,000 fewer polling stations than it
claimed – nearly 8000 polling booths were counted up to thrice.

Chairman Attahiru Jega’s spokesman has denied any
attempt to defraud the nation, saying the numbers were not verified
because the commission was pressed for time. “The number of machines
that have been projected for procurement will be fully procured,” said
the spokesman, Kayode Idowu, in a telephone interview.

This excuse is not only unacceptable but is
precisely the root of the problem. As many Nigerians have pointed out,
an issue that has been the bugbear with the conduct of elections, even
intertwined as it is with straight up vote rigging, is systemic
failure. By relying on numbers and data that local and international
bodies had discredited under Maurice Iwu, his predecessor, and seeming
to consistently ignore informed critics on his way to organizing new
elections, Mr. Jega was clearly refusing to heed the warnings of
history.

It is alarming: the INEC website for instance has
plenty of data that is incorrect. There are 774 local governments in
the country, but it claims 930; there are 9, 572 wards, but it
identifies 11,118. The number of polling booths was not spared in this
misrepresentation. INEC had publicly advertised that 120,000 polling
booths will be available during the next elections, but its database
suggests that this estimate may have been grossly inflated.

The danger of electoral abuse with inaccurate data is obvious.

More worryingly, all evidence points to officials
who inflated the numbers through a mixture of duplication and
falsification. This paper’s analysis reveals for instance that each of
the skewed data has a unique serial identification number, indicating
that the errors might have been inserted on purpose.

Mr. Jega’s house needs some cleaning up, and the buck stops at his table.

As the president of the Nigeria Bar Association,
Oluwarotimi Akeredolu, said in August, Mr. Jega’s reputed integrity is
not enough. It is the integrity of the system and it processes that
must be seen to be believed.

This point has now to be made most emphatically.

Accountability, first and foremost is at the
heart of this issue. Since the finance minister has confirmed that the
funds were released to INEC only last Thursday, the more urgent
question now is what happens to the excess N21 billion?

More than that, Mr. Jega needs to respect the enormity of the task
before him and the short time he has to complete it, even with the
change of date. The knee jerk defensive stance taken by his lieutenants
will not do. Mr. Jega has taken the first step by asking for more time.
Now he has to heed the advice members of the National Assembly gave him
last week: he needs to speak less, and begin to search for and get the
help that he needs to do his job. As it is now, the commission is
clearly in over its head.

It
was during this month some 24 years ago, that cowardice took a whole
new meaning. Precisely, on October 19th 2010, it will be twenty four
years since the blast from a letter bomb packaged by yet to be
identified person(s) sent one of the greatest icons of journalism in
this country-Dele Giwa- to an early grave at a little short of forty
years of age.

In 1986, I was far
too young to have understood the item in the news or the shock every
one must have been in. So I can’t boast of having had a personal
knowledge of this great man, a privilege I wished I had. But a pile of
old magazines and newspapers which my Dad happens to have kept afforded
me the opportunity of meeting this rare gem one-on-one through his many
issue oriented writings and critical columns. I feel an overwhelming
urge to share what I know with the world as we count down to the twenty
fourth anniversary of his death.

Dele Giwa, founding
editor of NewsWatch magazine was a unique Nigerian in many respects the
most remarkable of which was his belief in journalism as a tool for
ensuring good governance. So strong was his conviction that he lived
and died for it. With a blunt, firm and forthright resolve, he told the
truth and damned the consequences.

With guts and
extreme confidence in himself, Dele Giwa acknowledged that he was in
the business of making enemies but was ready to make them in the
overriding interest of a great Nigerian state. He saw this interest as
the responsibility of the press to protect and he blazed the trail in
that regard.

“D G” as he was
fondly called believed so much in Nigeria and was said to have once
boasted that Nigerians were unshakable. Alas,

his death shook the
nation a great deal especially the fashion with which it came, but we
carried on. He was known for his unyielding opposition to bad
leadership at all levels and uncompromising zeal to expose the misdeeds
of public office holders and their collaborators.

Above all, DG was
very dedicated to his job. In simple terms, he was said to be a
workaholic and would not undermine excellence for any reason.

He abhorred sloppy
work and was quick to rebuke even his top colleagues at NewsWatch when
found wanting. He hated cheats and liars, was firm and decisive, yet
humble and friendly. His bravery and strong personality combined to
single him out among his contemporaries.

While the search
for his killers might have remained inconclusive all these years, I
wish to note that in our society today, we can identify many kinds of
Dele Giwa killers. We see his killers in all those who are against the
passage of the Freedom of Information bill. All those who claim to
represent us but who look us in the face and lie to us. We identify the
killers in those people who are quick to lock up television stations
and arrest their staff for doing their job in some weird name of
‘national security’.

We see his killers
in those who steal election victories and manipulate both the judiciary
and the masses such that they some how they continue to soil our public
space. We identify the killers in all those public office holders who
mistake the public vault for their trouser pockets, looting so much
that one begins to question their sanity.

All those
government contractors who have perfected the art of the more you look
the less you see- those who will do the job at half the quality, those
who will collect the mobilization fee and disappear:

All those who
oppose free speech at any level and engage in acts that negatively
affect the lives of over 140 million Nigerians both as public officers
and as private individuals are the killers we’ve been searching for and
it is time we fished them out and brought them to book.

If those cowards
who hatched and executed the letter bomb murder of DG thought that they
would succeed in silencing him forever, it is a pity that his death
only gave rise to many more biting journalists and journalistic forums,
including social media where our people have continued to say it
pointblank like Dele Giwa did.

So, 24 years on, we
are not mourning but celebrating the life and times of this icon, true
patriot and a national hero of the first degree. We might not all be
journalists or possess the talent of writing well, but we can still
pursue excellence and the great ideals he exemplified by aspiring to be
the best we can be in our chosen fields. Above all, we must stop his
killers in whatever form we identify them from having a go at us again
for as Roosevelt once said:

“No man is worth his salt Who is not ready at all times To risk his
well being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great course.”