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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.

Dateline – Balaclava, Mauritius. I spent
a working weekend at the Intercontinental Hotel beach resort in the
beautiful Indian Ocean island country of Mauritius. I was invited to
witness the launching on Friday, 15 October of Global Board of Trade
(GBOT) Ltd, a pan-African futures trading platform that will be based
on the island.

For the
non-initiates, derivatives are financial instruments designed in the
form of an agreement or contract between two counterparties, and having
a value determined by the future price movements of a share or
currency. Derivatives are financial engineering instruments that
facilitate the trading of risk, allowing corporations and investors to
ring-fence the value of their assets against the changing vagaries of
the market.

GBOT Ltd aims to
become an Africa-wide trading platform, leveraging on the enviable
position of Mauritius as a growing financial centre. With a population
of 1.3 million people, the economy has been successfully diversified
from commodity exporting to textiles and manufacturing. With a GDP of
US$16 billion and a per capita income of US$12,500 (compared to
Nigeria’s US$1,142), Mauritius has first-level infrastructures, aided
by policies that are prudent and highly investment friendly. Mauritius
stands at the crossroads of civilisations, linking Africa with Asia and
Europe.

Nigeria was
mentioned in passing, if at all. I kept wondering what’s happening to
our Financial Sector Strategy (FSS2020) which aims to make us the
financial hub of the continent by the next decade.

At the seminar on
Saturday yours sincerely was invited to speak on the theme of
developing a well-regulated pan-African platform for derivatives
trading. The main thrust of my own discourse is that significant
progress has been made in recent years,

although we are
still a baby in global terms, contributing a mere 4.0 and 4.5 percent
to world trade and GDP respectively. If, in the unlikely event that our
continent were sunk by a giant meteorite from outer space, the world
economy would register no more than a few ripples.

But the future is
bright. While the West persist in their backward mindset locked in the
space-time cocoon of incurable ‘Afro-pessimism’, the Chinese and the
Indians see Africa not as a problem but as an opportunity. To fully
realise our incalculable potential I stressed the role of leadership,
the importance of investing in our people and deepening macroeconomic
and institutional reforms, all of which are essential to creating world-class financial centres.

During the evening
we were treated to a gala night of entertainment by a musical dance
troupe from the Mauritian Creole community. Under a canopy overlooking
the stunning Indian Ocean, lullabied by exotic birds and the echoes of
the shimmering waves, our conversation drifted in a totally
serendipitous direction. A white young man imposes himself on our table
with the words, “Niels from Cape Town”. I said, “Oh, is that Niels as
in Niels Bohr?” He laughed and said “yes”. I added that I liked Niels
Bohr very much, having passed his statue everyday at Copenhagen
University, where I once did a summer course in applied econometrics.

One of my passions
is epistemology and the philosophy of science. I said I wished I were
there when Bohr and Albert Einstein first met at Copenhagen train
station. It was said that they got to their homes only late at night,
having spent the whole afternoon absorbed in their eternal debate about
quantum physics and about whether God plays dice with His universe.
William from Uganda gruffly told us that he believes Einstein was the
better of the two, although he would give the ultimate prize to
Feynman. “I met Richard Feynman at Caltech, he said rather
nonchalantly”.

Anil, a Mauritian
commodities trader, found our conversation irresistible. He softly
interjected that Feynman was at heart an artist rather than a
physicist. He went on and on about space, about negative time, black
holes and parallel universes. Having studied Astrophysics at Berkeley,
he told us he found money-making far easier than the abstruse world of
the astronomers. He believes Stephen Hawking, recently retired from the
Savillian Chair of Astronomy once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton at
Cambridge, to be the greatest of them all. He said he once listened to
the old chap at a public lecture. “If you were a non-physicist, you
understood everything he said; but if you were, you would totally be at
sea.” Incomprehensibility, it seems, is the ultimate mark of genius.
The names of Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer also came up.

Niels adds jokingly that perhaps Schrödinger would have understood
Hawking, but only because his real career was his string of mistresses
while mathematics was merely pursued as a hobby! Jane from Kenya
reveals that she is suffering from a profound existential crisis: “How
can they say that Pluto is no longer a planet?” You would think Pluto
was the land of her ancestors. A toast to the African Renaissance!

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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.