Nigeria Content Online

There’s
a fight currently going on in Kogi State. It has to do with a refinery
that is to be built near Lokoja, the state capital, by Chinese
investors. Apparently the governor, Ibrahim Idris, desirous of bringing
the famed ‘dividends of democracy’ to his kinsmen, decided to relocate
the proposed refinery to his village.

For the moment we will ignore the patent
illogicality of scheming to host such an environmental hazard, and
focus solely on the governor’s disingenuous move. It has become the
pattern amongst Nigerian governors and politicians to play politics
with construction projects funded by the government.

The most recent high-profile example is the
disgraceful drama that played out in Sango Ota recently, between Ogun
State governor, Gbenga Daniel, and the Speaker of the House of
Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, over who should take credit for – and
commission – an overhead bridge.

Ekiti presents another good example of the folly
of our politicians. In 2008 the National Universities Commission (NUC)
licensed a new University of Education set up by the Ekiti State
government, in Ikere-Ekiti. The new university was sited on the grounds
of a College of Education, which had been in existence in Ikere-Ekiti
since 1978. The government’s plan was to eventually relocate the
college to another part of the state. Ikere-Ekiti, uncomfortable with
the prospects of giving up a thirty-year-old College of Education, with
established structures and a sizeable student population, in exchange
for a fledgling university, protested vehemently. The controversy
spurred the governor to relocate the university. His choice of
location: Ifaki-Ekiti, his hometown. That decision immediately
aggravated the controversy.

The crisis between Oyo and Osun States over the
Ladoke Akintola University of Technology is also a good example.
LAUTECH is jointly owned by both states. The university campus is
located in Ogbomoso, Oyo State, while the Teaching Hospital is in
Osogbo, the Osun State capital. And then in 2009 Governor Alao-Akala
started the construction of a new teaching hospital – in Ogbomoso,
which also happens to be his hometown. The Osun State government
promptly raised an alarm.

Things have degenerated since then, with Oyo State
ordering all its indigenes at the Osogbo Teaching Hospital to
immediately relocate to the new site at Ogbomoso. Both states have also
separately appointed vice chancellors for the institution.

At a recent meeting with state governors in
Abuja, Vice President Namadi Sambo acknowledged that before now the
Federal Government sometimes deliberately sited projects in unviable
locations in states whose governors did not belong to the ruling party.
Assuring the governors that would no longer happen, he said: “I think
we have passed that stage. Today, we cooperate with all governments
belonging to all parties as one nation and this is part of the
achievements of democracy.” This shows the extent of the pettiness that
guides the conduct of our leaders.

Vital construction projects are not decided, or
sited, based on the principle of maximum benefit, but on parochial
considerations. During the Sango-Ota drama, Mr. Daniel was quoted as
saying that Mr. Bankole should find another project to “claim”.

The Obasanjo years were characterised by violent
clashes between Lagos State officials and officers of the Federal Roads
Maintenance Agency (FERMA), over who ought to handle traffic control on
Lagos roads that belonged to the Federal Government. As Vice President
Sambo acknowledged, communities are often deprived of projects because
they ‘belong’ to the opposition. Not satisfied with zoning political
positions, we mindlessly zone projects as well.

In the Kogi instance, the protesters are saying
that the governor’s decision to move the refinery to his hometown is in
disregard of a technical report specifying a location for the project.

The bad blood and controversy generated by these
controversial decisions ensure that whatever benefits the projects were
intended to provide in the first place are diminished. All of these
politicians ought to be called to order, and reminded that the monies
being spent are not personal funds.

When will the genuine needs of the electorate start taking preeminence in public spending decisions?

Let us zone poverty. Let us build it a tent and fasten it to the loose earth of the North West. Let us make the rest of the country poverty free and confine poverty to the North West alone. Have they not produced the most of our leaders since independence? They have enjoyed enough; it’s their turn to be poor. Poverty to the North West.

Let us buy hunger a new cloak and zone it to the South West. All those pot bellied men and women with oversized torsos need to slim down. It’s not even good for their health you know and liposuction is damn expensive. So let us do them a huge favour and slim them down for free. No more owambe parties and endless aso-ebi. It’s poverty to the South West for keeps.

Aha, these South East people, they are too wealthy, talking containers and consignments all the time. They don’t need all that money you know. Let us zone armed robbery to the South East. Let us get arms for the youth to help us reclaim some of the excess money. Perhaps we could add kidnapping to it. Yes, armed robbery and kidnapping go down well like beer and pepper soup. They will find a good home in the South East for sure. And yes, we must disarm the police and keep them underpaid.

The North Central, who are they sef? Sometimes they prefer to be called “Middle Belt” as if the word “North” is a curse. Well, we are not bothered by that. We will zone power outage to them. Let us declare darkness in their land. Let us import candles for them and banish Mikano and John Holt from Abuja. The toy “i-big-pass” generators must go as well. We shall establish a bush lamp factory to augment the candles. Black is beautiful they say. Black out is even more beautiful.

South South – the oil people; let us zone unemployment to them. What do they need jobs for? They already have oil. Let their youths lie about idle. Let them drink raw crude from the plentiful wells until they are drunk.

Perhaps they might decide to go fishing. That would be good. Time we freed our waters of sharks and whales. They don’t even have enough land for schools so we shouldn’t be bothered. The South South
must remain unemployed. Jobs shouldn’t be for everybody after all.

The North East would look good with bad roads, don’t you agree? Let us zone crater infested roads to the North East. Let us break the bridges and turn the expressways into single lanes. Let us remove the drainage canals, so that the roads will spoil faster. While doing that we must ensure we build across rail lines and make sure the airports are death traps. The North East will enjoy this I imagine. It would be good to see people staying at home more.

Perhaps when we are done with attempting to zone these conditions that plague us as a nation and find that they can not be zoned, we will end all this noise on zoning or not zoning the presidency. Our problems have no ethnic, tribal or religious identity; neither are they confined to one particular part of the country. The man in Maiduguri suffers bad roads as much as the man in Umuahia. There is kidnapping in Kano just as there is in Port Harcourt.

Unemployed youth are a legion in Lagos just as they also walk the streets of Abuja. And who in this country does not experience power outage? And yes, the hunger is nationwide and poverty is like a national identity.

When we go abroad do they ask what zone of Nigeria we come from before asking us to step aside as they poke fingers into our private areas just to be sure we are not smuggling drugs? After the Abdulmutallab incident, did they not put the whole of Nigeria on the terrorist list? When our name tops the chart of corrupt nations, is there a zoning of the ranking?

Since our problems cannot be zoned, there is no way zoning shall solve them. We waste time and energy bickering over the ethnic identity of our leaders as if when our ‘brother’ is in power any thing changes for us.

It irks even more when I listen to persons who suffer most from bad leadership we have had to endure all these years, stand around newspaper stands and in the public buses arguing about zoning. It doesn’t matter who is in the saddle. The language he speaks isn’t worth a thing.

What matters is, is he speaking the language of development? That should be our concern at this time.

The
decision last week to remove both the Chairman and the Director-General
of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) was long overdue. I salute the
courage and decisiveness of my good friend Arunma Oteh, the boss of the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In all truth, the situation
had become intolerable.

During the
previous week former NSE chairman, Aliko Dangote had accused his
director-general, Ndi Okereke-Onyuike of financial misappropriation to
the tune of N11 billion. Apparently, the duo had been in a long-running
battle of power and control.

Since the spring of
2008, our economy has been crippled by gross insider abuses in the NSE.
Before then, our capital markets were unarguably the most attractive in
the world.

Returns on
investment of 100% were not uncommon, with bank stocks averaging 120%
before the bubble burst. The IPOs for the Dangote Group of Companies
were among the most successful. If you had invested in Dangote Cement
at the time they went to market, you could easily have made an
incredible 800% on your principal in less than a year. Dangote Sugar
was also the toast of the investment industry. We were all drunk with
the heady wine of a bullish bubble that we believed would always defy
the laws of gravity. People made loads and loads of dosh just by making
one or two phone calls to their stockbrokers.

And then the
chickens came home to roost. It started with a few whispering campaigns
and dirty little gossips in the gilded pavilions of Mammon. People
smelt blood when one prominent stockbroker declared that only an idiot
would invest in the Nigerian capital market. Foreign investors got the
cue and made for the border.

Within weeks, some US$16 billion of portfolio investments had left our shores.

Add to this a
ruinous banking crisis which predates Lamido Sanusi, and then you get a
fatal cocktail from which our capital markets have yet to recover.

The non-initiates
on these matters would be inclined to think the whole thing was
triggered by the global financial meltdown. Truth is, our capital
market crisis was largely home-made, in fact, occurring a good six
months prior to the sub-prime crisis that imploded at Wall Street in
September 2008.

Ndi Okereke-Onyuike
should have left the headship of the NSE as far back as 2007. Nobody
disputes her qualifications or professional standing in the industry.
It was her politics and greed that had compromised her.

As one of the
champions of so-called Corporate Nigeria, a gaggle of moneybags based
largely in Lagos, she had used her position in the dominant political
party to mobilise funds. It was unprofessional and illegal to compel
investors to cough out funds for politicians against their better
judgement or long-term interests.

Okereke-Onyiuke was
also Chairman of the Transcorp Group, a chaebol whose promotion by the
powers of the land would have made Russian oligarchs green with envy.
It was a blatant conflict of interest for her to double as Chairman of
the NSE while heading Transcorp. But she was the last to see the
absurdity of it all.

And then there was
the Obama campaign fund faux pas, which the Obama people were quick to
dismiss as 419. If Ms. Okereke-Onyuike had not been as blind as a bat
she would at least have seen the handwriting on the wall and made a
dignified exit before the curtain closed in on her.

I have met the Indlovukazi (Swazi for ‘she-elephant’).

In private she is
coquettish and shy — almost girlish. She once narrated the
serendipitous path that hauled her from obscurity to the summits of the
corporate world. Tears cascaded freely down her cheeks. I wish her a
restful retirement from the tumult that was largely of her own making.

As for the former
Chairman, Aliko Dangote, it was always odd that the richest man on our
continent should also double as Chief Rabbi of our synagogue of
capitalism. Lest I am misunderstood, I do not envy him his stupendous
wealth. And this is patently not a job application, in case the vacca
foeda who attacked me on this column is reading this.

Aliko Dangote had
no business chairing an institution in which he is the biggest single
investor. Italy has fallen below the league of civilised nations
because the country was hijacked by her richest mogul, Silvio
Berlusconi.

It would be
inappropriate to comment on Dangote’s dispute with Femi Otedola of
African Petroleum because the matter is still sub-judice.

Aliko is
surprisingly very smart. He has this astonishing capacity to rattle out
dizzying figures about profit margins, ROI and financial ratios. In
private, he is charming and humble — almost school-boyish. He has the
winsome face of Denzel Washington with the frightening eyes of
Caligula. Behind his back, his rivals refer to him as ‘Chemical Ali’.

Three lessons for
the future: first, never appoint anyone to manage the stock exchange
who is either avaricious or deliberately seeks to mix business with
politics; second,

the wealthiest
investors should be barred from managing the NSE; thirdly, we need an
anti-monopolies and anti-trust regulatory body to break the back of the
dangerous cartels that plague our economy. The market economy is indeed
the material foundation of a free society. But capitalism without laws
is like playing Hamlet without the Prince.

When
the idea of the Internet was conceived, its founding fathers intended
for it to be a medium of communication through which ideas and
information on important researches that would benefit the human race
can be shared effortlessly.

But as with the dynamite invented by Alfred Nobel
(based on intentions similar to his last name), the Internet created on
ideas of friendship and human progress has turned around to become a
weapon of willful human destructiveness and a tool for personal
vendettas.

About a month ago, naked pictures alleged to be
those of the young, talented and popular singer Wande Coal were put up
on the social networking site Twitter where it became a “trend”, a hot
topic, the first for a Nigerian subject. It is unclear whether
blackmail or extortion was involved in this case. In fact, the reasons
behind the showing of these pictures are still couched in mystery.

The representatives of the award-winning artist
first denied that the images were of him and then in the next breath,
referred to them as photo shopped.

While still in the aftermath of the Wande Coal
nude pictures controversy, another exposé hit the Nigerian webosphere.
This time it was the turn of a certain “Otubu” as the girl in the video
called him, a lecturer at the Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma. Unlike
in the Wande Coal affair, this was a clear case of extortion. That most
commentators on the Otubu scandal chose to ignore the criminal offences
committed in the course of shooting the video to focus instead on the
misconduct that led to them, speaks of the high public irritation at
the state of moral decadence on our university campuses.

But it was certainly not altogether out of the
altruistic motive of setting an example for randy lecturers that Judith
and her cohorts shot a humiliating show portraying the downfall of Mr.
P. O. Otubu a lecturer in Engineering at Ambrose Alli University. The
clamour for the lecturer “to sign the cheque” and “still drop
something” rang louder than recriminations at his unscholarly attempt
to exchange pass marks for sex.

To show the extent to which human beings would go
to carry out their revenge, no thought was given by the moviemakers of
the possibility of the screening of the video leading to their arrest
on the grounds of blackmail, extortion, kidnap, false imprisonment,
assault and a host of other crimes.

The carelessness and misplaced sense of moral
justification of these people who foolishly misuse the Internet says a
lot about a general lack of knowledge on the legal implications of
certain acts, the ineptitude of the Nigeria Police Force and the
non-existence of a working judicial system.

Those who celebrate people like Judith and company and the Wande Coal photographer,

should pray one day that they are never placed in a situation where they come under the receiving end of such notoriety.

This does not go to say, however, that Mr.

Otubu if indeed he did try to victimise his
student did not deserve to be exposed. (Video or not, that this is a
case of a victim of sexual harassment who got the better of her
harasser and not that of two lovers in situation of love-gone-sour is
debatable.) Be that as it may, it is most certainly a sign of good
citizenship to expose any form of crime and in the most public way
possible, especially the ones that might have been covered up by the
police. But to commit a crime while doing this just speaks of sheer
stupidity and totally torpedoes whatever noble intentions “the
activist” was inspired by to begin with.

It also encourages further stupidity and the perpetration of crimes in the name of justice.

The latest of these Internet vendetta videos shows
a couple having sex at knifepoint. From the voice screaming at them
from behind the camera, it could be discerned that they were
clandestine lovers caught in the act by the woman’s jealous and rather
murderous partner. As punishment, the unfortunate couple was now being
forced to continue their amorous act in the plain view of a camera, the
whole point being to expose their adultery on the Internet where it
would be viewed and condemned by the whole world. And to keep them in
position(s), the aggrieved partner kept slashing a knife in their
faces, at one point almost cutting the woman, even as he kicked and
spat out expletives at them- and all this while the camera rolled! The
video can be viewed freely on, of all places, Facebook.

Call me whatever but methinks that aggrieved or
not, the partner just provided indisputable evidence in his own
attempted-murder and assault with a deadly weapon.

Now, if only Nigeria were that kind of country.