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In the village of South Orange New Jersey where I lived for 6 years the celebration of Halloween was taken fairly seriously.

We had chosen South
Orange because it was a stable well-integrated middle class community a
popular location for upwardly mobile professionals just starting a
family and looking for a well-established environment with good public
schools. So with young children at elementary and kindergarten age
participation in Halloween was de rigueur. Even if you as an adult had
no time for it, the pleasure it provided your children made you swallow
hard and pitch in for their sakes, as I did, commending their
willingness to be part of the community they were living in.

The origins of this
festival are mixed and its history checkered combining as it does poly
religious elements that span Paganism, Christianity and Roman
Catholicism. But as far as the festival itself goes today, the
celebration is entirely secular and superficial. The dressing up in
costumes, doling out of sweets, trick or treating and playful
fascination with ghosts and spirits is completely disembodied from the
historical celebrations of the day of the dead, the preparations for
winter or the passing of spirits that formed the origins of All Hallows
Eve. Elementary school children loved the dressing up in costumes and
the parade at the end of the school day where they showed off and had
fun with their teachers while parents watched.

Many families in
the village spread their enthusiasm for this celebration into
decorating their gardens, which they begin to do well before the
October date on which it occurs. One house in particular went all out
one year and turned their lavish home into an eerie grave yard, replete
with greyed tombstones, ghoulish figures hanging from the trees, owls
watching from the branches and dank cobwebs trailing over the bushes.

South Orange was
also a dormitory town, just 35 minutes on the train from Manhattan’s
Penn Station, and a number of parents who worked on Wall Street had
made homes in the village because it provided the perfect bridge
between urban and country.

On the morning of
Tuesday September 11, 2001 when I got that call to collect my children
from school early there were other little ones whose parents did not
get that message. They never returned from work.

The George
Washington Bridge links New Jersey to Manhattan, New York. On a clear
day in SO walking up by the ridge that leads to the park or running on
South Mountain Avenue you can look across the river to the skyline of
Manhattan. For weeks after the 11th you could see the smoke from ground
zero casting a pall on the horizon and you knew you were looking at a
live mausoleum of some 3,000 bodies. Passing that painstakingly
decorated garden on my morning runs made my heart ache. Here was
playmaking at death while across the horizon was an unspeakable horror,
the real thing, not child’s play.

9/11 turned the
world around. There is almost no country or continent that did not lose
nationals or descendents of nationals in that bombing or in subsequent
acts of horror in Spain and in Britain. The victims at ground zero came
from 70 different nations. The lists of those dead include Nigerian
names, known and unknown and people from all religious faiths and this
is why the backlash against Islam as a religion is so patently
irrational. To those lists we also have to add the numbers of dead who
have been victims of outrage against perceived criticism of Islam.

We all live with
the legacy of that destruction, whether it is in the increased security
that trails all aspects of our lives or in mundane everyday activities
like banking, transferring money, receiving money, seeking education
abroad, attending a public event, entering a public arena or the trauma
of obtaining travel visas.

The backlash
against Islam in America has been a long time coming. That site called
ground zero where the towers came down is a raw wound. Those American
right wingers and rednecks who call Barack Obama a Muslim are sending a
calculated message that is sinister and carries a barely veiled racism
that those who plan the kind of destruction that occurred on 9/11 must
relish. But still, there is a lot to be said for the restraint,
maturity and compassion with which the overwhelming majority of
humanity has reacted to 9/11 and similar events. The condemnation that
greeted Mr. Terry Jones’ senseless plan to burn copies of the Koran to
commemorate 9/11 is an example of this. Unfortunately the minority who
really need to understand the message don’t have the ears to hear,
which makes it incumbent on those who do, to keep pushing the call for
calm.

While
President Goodluck Jonathan plays Hamlet, others are not so coy. His
former boss and mentor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, who said, “he calls my
wife mummy and my wife takes him as a son,” warned that if Mr. Jonathan
does not run, “the Ijaw man will be disappointed. This is not a threat;
we shall wait for him to come home. So let him listen to us as his
people.” Anyway, it is almost certain that the president will run.
Aides hint that an announcement will come after Ramadan, and his wife,
Patience, was not too subtle when she visited Delta State recently. “If
you love my husband, then go and register so you can vote.” They say
she is the ‘real’ politician in the family so emissaries from Bayelsa
State, led by the speaker, Werinipre Seibarugu, went to plead with her
to forgive the state governor, Timpreye Sylva, for failing to fall
behind her husband fast enough. According to reports, “though she is
still angry, feelers indicate that she is already reconsidering her
stand against the governor.” So run Mr. Jonathan will, for a rash of
reasons, and pressure so unreasonable he could claim, like Tony Blair,
“I can only go one way. I have not got a reverse gear.” Besides, said
Cairo Ojougboh, his special adviser on National Assembly matters who
first broke the news, “there is no moral justification to ask Jonathan
not to run.” There is no moral justification for him to run either. He
cannot claim that he is the best candidate for the job; that he has the
will and wherewithal to solve our economic and social problems; that he
could superintend free and fair elections while running his first
presidential campaign; that his anti-corruption war is not
circumscribed by the charge that his wife was caught trying to launder
13.5 million dollars. Or even that his candidacy will not deepen the
schism within the polity, making the north feel short-changed, betrayed.

“What that will
create is a serious problem in the future,” said Audu Ogbe who chaired
the 2002 meeting where 47 PDP chieftains (two abstained) voted for
zoning to allow the south complete an eight-year tenure. “Because if it
means ‘when we have it, we keep it, it can’t move’ then a suggestion is
being made to the northerners that ‘you’re a bunch of fools for
agreeing to do it in the first place.’” Besides, since he became
president, Mr. Jonathan has not ruled with any vigour, nor shown the
ability to bring new ideas or people to bear on perennial problems.
Even now, one gets the sense that he is being told to run simply
because he can, because he is there now and it is ‘their’ turn. He is
to be the torchbearer of the Ijaws, one chosen by divine grace to
cancel the injustice done to his people. These are hardly lofty reasons.

There is no sign
that Mr. Jonathan, himself, truly desires the job. He appears to be
running to avoid the consequences of not running. But this country does
not need another reluctant president, one pressured into office by
primordial forces. What other pressures will he succumb to when he gets
there?

Some say he wants the job but it is not in his nature to rush; he prefers to tread softly, feeling his way through the maze.

We are supposed to
believe that the fact that four months to elections a sitting president
is too timid to declare his candidacy, is a strategy. As one of his
aides told Reuters, “The president will not declare until he is sure
that he will win.” He is reportedly frustrated by PDP governors who
have refused to give him that kind of assurance. Governors Rotimi
Amaechi, Bukola Saraki, Babangida Aliyu, Mr. Sylva, Emmanuel Uduaghan,
Gbenga Daniel, and Danjuma Goje continue to hedge their bets and to
allegedly chip away at the support of their colleagues. “They will come
to me to pledge their loyalty and endorsements whereas intelligence
reports from their states indicate they have other agenda,” Mr.
Jonathan was quoted as saying at a recent meeting.

This is not good;
it does not show a mastery of the use of power. Mr. President must also
see how his vacillation allowed people like Ibrahim Babangida and Atiku
Abubakar, consummate players, to exploit his weak grasp of the reigns,
challenging him on the platform of his own party.

“The deal I have
with IBB” said Mr. Abukakar, “is that when this has been resolved, we
will enter into a room and then, one person would emerge.” Still, the
president waits, craving the support of powerful men, sending
emissaries to ‘key traditional rulers’, governors, party chieftains,
senators, and other ‘important people’. One day, perhaps sometimes before the elections,he may yet deign to meet with the rest of us, Nigerian people who, presumably,are the ones to vote him into office.

No, Mr. Jonathan is not the one we have been waiting for. Hamlet
should please take his bow, “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”

Whether the problem
is generation, transmission or distribution, the effect is the same; no
electricity power: Whether the damage is at Egbin, Kainji, Oji River,
Papalanto, Akangba or the local sub-station or transformer, it is all
the same, we receive no light.

Who gains from this
no light matter and who loses? All of us lose except a very few;
manufacturers, industrialists, students, patients, video-centre
operators, artisans, battery chargers, tailors, hairdressers,
cosmetologists; All of us Nigerians and Nigeria lose. Industries and
manufacturing concerns abandon the large Nigerian market and move to
tiny Ghana where they manufacture their products at greatly reduced
cost and from there feed the Nigerian market. Jobs are lost, government
revenue diminishes. We just can’t compete with Asia in terms of
production because whereas labour is cheap, electricity power is
impossibly expensive, as we all individually have to generate it
ourselves.

In the first
category of “winners” are: diesel sellers, generator manufacturers,
vendors and repairers, and transformer sellers. In the second category
is the staff of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

The diesel sellers
range from the smaller time dealers that make it impossible to navigate
through the streets of Marine Beach in the Apapa and Ajegunle areas of
Lagos to Tin-Can Island to the major importers of the product and
owners of the Tank-Farms, up to those who have been able to buy over
whole corporations. This latter group is peopled by several Big Boys
led by one white-apparel wearing no-value-added Forbes 500 billionaire
friend to the president who gives the impression that he knows what
others don’t know.

They all are
wonderful specie of human beings tremendously rich on the misery of a
nation. They have created a nationwide monumental demand for a product
that if not for PHCN and their demonic antics would be largely
unattractive and irrelevant to our existence. But then, what kind of
dark power have these people contacted that has enabled them to
successfully feed fat on the misery and backwardness of entire
generations of a nation, nay a race?

Several long-term
Nigerian based foreigners, including Indians, Lebanese, Greek and some
Nigerians, lead the generator manufacturers and sellers group. Their
names and products include Marapco, Jubaili, Leventis and P.Z. They
largely manufacture their cheaper and poorer genre Rolls Royce and
Perkins generators in Asia under license of European manufacturers.

The ubiquitous Igbo
trader who is at the lower end of the generator seller market supplies
incredibly poor quality Chinese manufactured very cheap generators that
promise much but deliver little. They are in the business of cutting
corners. A 5K.V.A generator is really 3K.V.A and a 10K.V.A is really
6K.V.A. No standards whatsoever are maintained and the Nigerian
Standards Organization watches. Nearly every urban Nigerian family has
one. In some compounds there are up to 20 generators going at the same
time. Some families that can hardly pay their children school fees are
the proud owners of at least two of these dead-on-arrival generators.
Finally, we have the repairers who include Mufu, Baba Kamoru and the
host of small time repairers who litter the streets of Ebute-Metta and
Ladipo, the headquarters of scrap.

As for their
accomplices and co-conspirators PHCN, the organisation that still
enjoys a monopoly on the provision of power but unashamedly neglects to
do so, it is essentially a cursed organisation whose staff benefit from
not providing any services. A couple of weeks ago they actually had the
effrontery to withdraw their services and go on strike. This was a
wonderful opportunity to invoke the toughest of sanctions on them for
an offence analogous to treason because ordinarily electricity is
essential to the life of a nation. This wasn’t done and the PHCN
Workers’ Union now realises that they can hold the nation to ransom and
cripple the privatisation exercise. They need to be watched! Have you
noticed that we have been struggling for the last twenty odd years to
increase generation beyond 3000 mega-watts? Anytime we go beyond 3000,
major damage occurs. In many parts of the Lagos Mainland, there has
been total power outage for an unprecedented period of nearly four
weeks. This time the problem is not low levels of water at Kainji or
gas supply at Oturugo or Papalanto but simply sabotage at Akangba. They
claim that the two transformers that feed the station have broken down.
For four weeks? The truth is that the network has simply been sabotaged
to maintain the demand for diesel.

Experts say that if
the outage continues for a week or two cumulative demand of diesel will
move our white apparel wearing yacht loving friend of the president
into the Forbes top 100 richest men in the world.

But nobody is fooled, one day, monkey go go market …… Agu Imo is based in Lagos.

As we gear up for
the countdown to elections, time is clearly going to be the biggest
dictator in our next attempt at democratic elections.

There were two
problems with the 60-30 day straitjacket into which the 1999
Constitution put Nigeria’s electoral timetable: one, that elections
were held too close to the handover date; and two, that the 30 day
period within which elections had to be held was too narrow.

To nobody’s great
surprise, in amending the Constitution the National Assembly failed to
read the instructions properly, so while it moved the election
timetable back to allow more time between election and handover, it
didn’t widen the 30-day window. That may not matter much for the
immediate future, but it will be interesting to see what will happen if
and when the 30 days coincide with Ramadan. It would have made more
sense to allow a 60 or even 75-day period within which the Independent
National Electoral Commission could exercise its discretion about
fixing election dates.

By holding
elections earlier, the amended Constitution has at least taken
elections out of the running for a clash with Easter. But the
often-stated objective of concluding any election petitions before the
time for handing over falls due was always a non-starter. Practically
the only 2007 election petitions that were concluded within three
months were those that turned on elementary matters such as the
omission of a candidate from the ballot.

It is surely
reasonable to hope that Attahiru Jega’s INEC will be better organised
to avoid this blunder into which Iwu’s Commission fell (either by
design or by reason of a chronic inability to follow basic rules about
closure of nominations). But in 2007 most litigation arose, and is
likely to arise in 2011 from the long list of other things that go
wrong with Nigerian elections: fake or missing voters’ registers, fake
or missing voters, stuffed or seized ballot boxes and fake collation of
figures, to name just a few.

However much
confidence we may have in Jega’s integrity, the pressure of time means
that the scrutiny of both INEC permanent employees and its ad hoc staff
is likely to be less than thorough, opening the door to all manner of
electoral misbehaviour. No, I’m not one of those who imagine that Youth
Corpers (who won’t even have to stick around to see the results of
their misdeeds) constitute a silver bullet for election rigging.

If there had been
any faint hope that election petitions could be finished in three
months, it would have made more sense to put the presidential and
gubernatorial elections – which have the largest constituencies, i.e. a
bigger arena for election-rigging, and consequently a lot more
witnesses to call to prove it – first.

Several political
parties, fearing the ‘bandwagon’ effect, have complained that Jega’s
timetable favours the ruling Peoples Democratic Party. This concern is
not groundless, given the issue- and ideology-free nature of Nigerian
politics. But that is as much the fault of non-PDP parties as it is of
the ruling party. For example, in the past few days electricity workers
have challenged President Goodluck Jonathan’s roadmap for electricity,
while the Nigeria Labour Congress has threatened a general strike if
fuel prices are raised, but nobody need expect these issues to feature
much in the coming campaigns.

There have also
been complaints that the electoral timetable gives the PDP an ‘unfair
advantage’ because other parties now have to rush their candidate
selection processes and campaigns. But nothing stopped any party from
getting its act, coalition or mega-merger together long ago if they
felt that Nigeria was entering a peculiar space warp where time would
run more slowly for the PDP than it would for other parties.

The truth is that
the just-released timetable could be just as bad for the PDP against an
organised and committed opposition. But that would need an opposition
that does more than mimic meaningless campaigns of ‘mass’ rallies at
which empty slogans – We Go Win! – are shouted at party supporters.

Like Iwu before
him, Jega doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the views of
ordinary voters. We just have to comply with his agenda. And even if
you registered to vote in 2007, you will be disenfranchised if you
don’t present yourself for registration in Nigeria within a narrow
period of 14 days.

Jega’s INEC no
doubt consulted itself when settling the electoral timetable. But just
like its predecessor, there has been little indication of readiness to
accept contributions from ordinary voters, such as: “That fourteen-day
period will clash with haj …”. Once again it was: “We have decided
what’s best. We’re not interested in what you have to say. Just be
quiet, listen and obey.” Given how little time there is, one must try
to be charitable about this type of attitude. Still, it is to be hoped
that the dictates of time won’t turn our electoral process into one in
which we, the voters, feature only as a tiresome inconvenience.

It has been a
winter of strikes in South Africa in 2010. The World Cup opened under
the darkening clouds of strike threats from Eskom’s workers. Eskom is
South Africa’s equivalent of NEPA. I appreciate that many Nigerians
will comment that NEPA workers have no need to go on strike since,
judging by the daily interruptions in the supply of Nigerian
electricity, they seem to be on perpetual strike.

Those cumulus
clouds dissipated so that the world’s soccer fans could enjoy a
memorable African world cup. But, they returned in a darker form, laced
with thunder and lightning, culminating in the storm of a three week
public worker strike. Black and white teachers of government-owned
schools, nurses of government-owned hospitals and sundry other
officials united to down their tools in support of an 8.6% increase in
their wages and a 1,000 Rands (N21,069 ) monthly housing allowance.

Consumer price
inflation in South Africa is less than 4% and is expected to remain
below 6% until 2012. Mr. Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary general of the
Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), justified those
demands by contrasting the huge gap between the wages of his union
members and the heads of South Africa’s government departments,
parliamentarians, and ministers. My impression is that a public school
teacher earns at least 120,000 Rands (N2.53 million ) per annum while
the director-general in the Ministry of Education earns close to 1
million Rands.

The strike has been suspended because the government has offered a wage increase of 7.5% and an 800 Rand housing allowance.

Violence and a
display of indifference to human suffering has marked this strike. Some
teachers who wanted to assist their students acquire their daily dose
of education were beaten. Babies died. They were simply “collateral
damage” in the quest of 1.3 million workers for decent wages in one
African country.

I was far from
impressed by this whole episode. Yet, I have to assume that the
unionized workers could do with the pay increase. Still, we in Africa
have to ask ourselves some questions? Can workers strike their way to
prosperity?

The South African
government or any other African government granting real wage increases
has to pay for those wage increases. Perpetual real wage increases,
therefore, lead to higher taxes or less investment by the government in
infrastructure necessary for South Africa’s future or cuts in social
grants for the unemployed and the poor. No doubt, many yearning for the
fabled communal equality of poor African villages, as well as Marxists
and communists, will hail the prospect of higher taxes on Africa’s
minute class of privileged souls. The smaller the number of Africans
able to afford brandy, books, and Benzs, the happier we shall be! Keep
on dreaming!! Government workers in rich countries are comfortable
because their tax payers are employed by successful businesses, big and
small, which themselves pay lots of company tax. Taxes rise in a
sustainable manner if, and only if, the tax-collector’s herd of
tax-payers gets fatter. Vampires do not like corpses. So, ironically
and unwittingly, Cosatu’s quest for decent wages is a search to
increase the size and profitability of Africa’s capitalists.

Trust South
Africa’s Chinese textile factory owners to expose this irony. The town
of Newcastle in Kwa-Zulu Natal, burdened with a 60% unemployment rate,
mines coal and has a Chinese Chamber of Commerce comprising small
garment factory owners. They pay their workers anywhere between 250
Rands (N5,267 ) per week and 500 Rands (N10,534 ) per week to produce
clothes that compete against imports of Chinese made clothes. The
garment workers unions demanded that all workers be paid the legal
minimum weekly wage of 324 Rands and sought to close 85 factories
employing 9000 workers that did not comply with the law.

The South African
Chinese capitalists pointed out that they could not earn a profit if
they applied the legal minimum wage in their factories because of the
low prices offered by the communist China capitalists. The workers
insisted on their legal rights and the Newcastle Chinese capitalists
went on strike. They closed all their factories at once. Talks have
resumed now that the workers understand that the capitalist has no duty
to employ a worker simply to lose money.

Africa needs more capitalists like the Zulu Chinese factory owners
or Nigeria’s tycoons. South Africa’s condition of hyper unemployment
signifies an acute dearth of capitalist employers. African unions need
more capitalists; not more strikes.