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American officials
used to lecture other countries about their economic failings and tell
them that they needed to emulate the U.S. model. The Asian financial
crisis of the late 1990s, in particular, led to a lot of self-satisfied
moralizing. Thus, in 2000, Lawrence Summers, then the U.S. Treasury
secretary, declared that the keys to voiding financial crisis were
“well-capitalized and supervised banks, effective orporate governance
and bankruptcy codes, and credible means of ontract enforcement.” By
implication, these were things the Asians lacked but we had.

We didn’t. The
accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of
effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks
were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now
the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective
contract enforcement – in fact, the question is whether our economy is
governed by any kind of rule of law.

The story so far:
An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an
epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on
mortgage payments. So servicers – the companies that collect payments
on behalf of mortgage owners – have been foreclosing on many mortgages,
seizing many homes.

But do they actually have the right to seize these homes?

Horror stories
have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home
was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain
players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving
foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce
appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits
asserting that the papers are in order.

And these
affidavits were often produced by “robo-signers,” or low-level
employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.

Now an awful truth
is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist.
In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by
fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible.
These loans were sold off to mortgage “trusts,” which, in turn, sliced
and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally
required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the
borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were
frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now
taking place are, in fact, illegal.

This is very, very
bad. For one thing, it’s a near certainty that significant numbers of
borrowers are being defrauded – charged fees they don’t actually owe,
declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they
aren’t.

Beyond that, if
trusts can’t produce proof that they actually own the mortgages against
which they have been selling claims, the sponsors of these trusts will
face lawsuits from investors who bought these claims – claims that are
now, in many cases, worth only a small fraction of their face value.

And who are these
sponsors? Major financial institutions – the same institutions
supposedly rescued by government programs last year. So the mortgage
mess threatens to produce another financial crisis.

What can be done?
True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose
any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on
foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is
asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act.
That’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from
the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying
low, but conservative commentators like those at the Wall Street
Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper
documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank
says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this
evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted,
knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I
suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

What should be
happening? The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal
morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has
proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it’s
the government’s job to create them. That won’t be easy, but there are
good ideas out there. For example, the Center for American Progress has
proposed giving mortgage counsellors and other public entities the
power to modify troubled loans directly, with their judgment standing
unless appealed by the mortgage servicer. This would do a lot to
clarify matters and help extract us from the morass.

One thing is for sure: What we’re doing now isn’t working. And pretending that things are OK won’t convince anyone.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is difficult to remain unnerved by the
realisation that, in the manner in which restaurants display a “menu of
the day”, Nigeria has grown accustomed to unleashing, with clinical
efficiency, a “crisis of the moment.”

A quick excursion into the recent past would
confirm this. The 2007 elections loom large, arguably the worst in our
recent history, in the words of local and international observers
alike. In the light of Nigeria’s predilection for post-electoral
violence, it is a wonder that the 2007 elections did not replay 1993,
or 1983.

Then there was – and still is – the Niger Delta
crisis, which nearly paralysed the nation’s oil industry, allowing
Angola to temporarily overtake us as Africa’s biggest exporter of crude
oil. The fear, in and out of Nigeria, was that Nigeria’s Delta region
had fallen into the arms of armed militants, and had become another
Somalia.

In the north, intermittent religious violence
raised another set of fears that the country was going to become
another sub-Saharan hub for terrorism. While that was going on
President Yar’Adua’s illness swiftly degenerated into one of the most
potentially explosive – and at the same time farcical – moments ever in
the history of this country.

On the whole it is not a pretty picture. Any
observer would be tempted to assume that Nigeria is a country being run
by brigands – kidnappers in the southeast, militants in the Delta,
religious fundamentalists in the north, and corrupt politicians in
Abuja, and state capitals across the country – and they would not be
totally wrong.

One clear conclusion from the above is that we
have grown accustomed to tottering on the edge of disaster. It appears
there is a perverse pleasure to be derived from (to borrow the title of
a forthcoming book on Nigeria, by a former American diplomat) “dancing
on the brink”.

We seem to regard it as a game: we create the
conditions for national calamity, wallow in it while a watching world
grows queasy, and then take a short break while we cook up the next
calamity. In the background to this ‘game’ is a ‘soundtrack’ that
replays the words “God forbid!” – taking into account what is a
national consciousness that believes that a divine power is always
waiting in the wings to clear up our self-inflicted mess.

The latest crisis-of-the-moment is the set of
bombings that took place in Abuja during the 50th independence
anniversary celebrations two Fridays ago. As before, the loudest voices
amidst the din were the unreasonable ones, leaders and so-called elder
statesmen manufacturing accusations, counter-accusations, and
conspiracy theories. Those who should have been proclaiming the unity
and indivisibility of the Nigerian state quickly split up into
sectional camps, threatening, raging, and sowing confusion, putting
their political ambitions ahead of Nigeria’s wellbeing.

And so, instead of focusing on the most important
questions of all – for example, how do we build a security apparatus
that Nigerians can confidence that it will not only protect them, but
also ensure that perpetrators of crime and violence are brought to
justice – the only preoccupation of the various political camps has
been how to exploit the confusion to smear their opponents and to
advance their own interests.

It is bad enough that we have allowed national
crises to become as much of a fixture on our calendar as public
holidays are. It is even worse when we do not seem to learn any lessons
from previous crises.

President Jonathan it was who said on his Facebook
page during the week: “Nigeria is bigger than any individual or any
collection of individuals. Nobody can hold a country of 150 million
people to ransom any more. The interests of a few conceited,
ill-motivated individuals cannot be bigger than our national
aspirations.”

Already Nigeria stands light-years behind (in
terms of development and standard-of-living indices) countries like
Indonesia and Singapore, with whom she left the starting blocks five
decades ago.

We have also failed to meet any of the many
targets we have set for ourselves in the course of fifty years: the
National Development Plans, the Health and Housing and Education for
All by 2000 plan, and Vision 2010. Time is fast running out regarding
the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, and it appears only a miracle
will make us one of the top 20 economies in the world by 2020. Our
illiteracy, maternal mortality, child mortality and poverty indices
currently look like numbers borrowed from an 18th century statistics
book.

It is a tragedy that at fifty, instead of
consolidating on the successes of the past, and summoning the strength
to march confidently into the next fifty years, we are more preoccupied
with the basic task of trying to ensure that Nigeria does not fall
apart. It is impossible to be trapped in that kind of task and still be
able to find the energy or motivation to forge ahead.

Caught up in blame games, in repeating the excesses of the past, and
in expending our energies on trying to prevent the country from tipping
off the edge, no one seems to remember that the future is what we make
of it today, and that ‘Godspeed’ — not ‘God-forbid!’ — is what ought
to define the national mood, if we are serious about creating a country
that the rest of the world will take, seriously.