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Nigerian politicians are ‘coming of
age’ as evidenced by the results of the primaries for legislative
chambers at state and federal level. Across all the parties,
politicians are toeing the line of passing the torch to their family
members, very much as you would pass on an inheritance.

In Lagos, the strong man of South West
politics, Ahmed Tinubu is not content with influencing the outcome of
who becomes a governor in what state; he believes members of his family
should also hold political office. So his wife, Oluremi, is now the
Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate for the Lagos Central
Senatorial district. Folashade Tinubu-Ojo, his daughter has won the ACN
ticket to run for the House of Reps seat in Agege, while the former
governor’s son in-law is also a contender for a House of Assembly seat
also under the platform of the party.

Mr. Tinubu is not the only ACN
chieftain who wants plum political positions for his family. Former
governor of Ogun State, Olusegun Osoba who is now the leader of the ACN
in the state endorsed his son, Olumide Osoba’s ambition for a state
assembly seat. Mr. Osoba Jnr has now been imposed as consensus
candidate to the detriment of the ambition of Lekan Abiola, son of the
late politician and business mogul, Moshood Abiola. Mr. Abiola’s
supporters are very unhappy with this outcome.

In Oyo State, Dapo Adesina, son of ACN
leader in Oyo State and former governor, Lam Adesina is the party’s
candidate for a State House of Assembly seat. Also, a son of the ACN
national spokesman, Lai Mohammed has won the party’s ticket for a state
assembly seat.

Ruling party politicians are not left
out of the scramble to ensure their families continue to reap the
benefit of being in public office, long after they may have ‘retired’.
So in Ogun, former president Olusegun Obasanjo has thrown his weight
firmly behind his daughter Iyabo Obasanjo for a return to the senate
seat under the flag of the People’s Democratic Candidate ( PDP).
However, another woman who also has strong political antecedents has
put a dampener on the party. Lola Abiola-Edewor, sibling to Lekan
Abiola, is desirous of becoming a Senator of the Federal Republic of
Nigeria. The result of this has been two conventions run by two
factions. One endorsed Obasanjo, the other Abiola- Edewor.

Kamorudeen Adedibu, son of late strong
man of Oyo politics, Lamidi Adedibu, has won the PDP senatorial ticket
in Oyo. His performance, though, has not reached the pinnacle of
success for the Adedibu family. When the patriarch of the family was
alive, both Kamorudeen and an Adedibu son-in -law and an aide became
senators.

In Katsina, the daughter of late
President Yar’Adua, Mariam, has replaced her husband, Badamasi Kabir,
who is reported ill, as the PDP House of Reps member for Katsina
Federal constituency.

There is also of course the much
reported saga that is unfolding among the Saraki family of Kwara, where
a sister is gunning to succeed her brother as governor of the state.
Although her sibling has refused to support her ambition, her father is
more than willing and has abandoned the ruling party to pitch his tent
with the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN), in the hope it will
provide the winning platform for his daughter.

Every Nigerian, of course, has a right
to aspire to any office; our concern at NEXT however is the sort of
influence those who want to turn political office into family dynasty
can exercise on the political process. The imposition of Osoba Jnr for
example contravenes all principles of fairness and is not good for our
nascent democracy. Neither, frankly, do the shenanigans and goings on
in the Ogun PDP. It cannot be right that our political process is
compromised or circumvented to keep certain families in power.

It is hoped that Nigerians will begin
to pay attention to these sorts of issues and, if necessary, show their
displeasure and opposition by firmly rejecting these sorts of
candidates at the polls.

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This was meant to
be my 2011 inaugural piece, but urgent presidential matters took
precedence last week. I must apologize. But wait before I go on to the
gist of today, I must confess that I am in a state of confusion. And it
is my friend that has thrown me into this conundrum, which if I am not
careful can lead this column to calumny.

You all know I love
writing about Dr. Jonathan Ebele Goodluck, but now I don’t know how to
reference him in the next four months. I can’t really call him
presidential aspirant, he is already my president. And if I keep
calling him Mr. President, other candidates would say it is unfair
because I am creating an unequal playing field. And why is it that it
is only Goodluck that throws me this rope?

Last year when I
called him Acting President, Yar’Adua’s boys kept referring to him as
Vice President until God came to his rescue. By the way, where are
those cabal guys? Those that thought they had the knife and the yam and
could just wake up and call a gentle man vice president when he was
already declared acting president? Anyway, soja go soja come.

Actually one of my
New Year resolutions is to be very apolitical this year. Since I am
politically challenged and I can never catch up with what our
politicians are up to. Just as you think you have a grasp of what is
happening in Abuja, things get muddled up if not blown up and you can’t
even tell when the earth under your feet was shifted.

The rate at which
some of the old senators failed in their primaries reminds one of
recent WAEC and JAMB results. What they did not know was that failure
can be infectious; when they did not do anything to make sure that our
secondary school students pass their exams, they should not expect to
pass their primaries too. There is a saying in my village, ‘who say I
nor go pass my secondary, im too nor go pass im primary’. That is a
warning to in-coming politicians, who managed to pass the very
expensive and difficult primaries.

Ok, I need to
actually respect and stick to my new resolution to stay out of
politics. Let’s move to other more important things in Nigeria. Before
I left for my village for Christmas, the current administration
launched what it called Bring Back The Book. I was very excited about
the whole programme, and with exuberance I decided to do everything
within my power to help make it a success. So when I got to the
village, where most of my primary, secondary and university books are
kept, I went to work.

I opened all the
old boxes that contained my books and started dusting them. It was a
pleasure to reconnect with my books again and each one of them held
special memories for me: my Queen Primer, Brighter Grammar all the way
to Lexis and Structure. I reconnected with authors like SMO Aka, Olu
Tomori, Senanu and Vincent. The books written by Stone and Cozen were
as new as the day my father bought them at Uromi because I never liked
those guys.

I moved on to the
ones that made me sniff a little bit in my class one, like Eze Goes To
School, Chike and the River, An African Night Entertainment, The
Passport of Mallam Ilia and The Drummer Boy. I set those aside and
leafed through more advanced ones like Mission to Kala, Poor Christ of
Bomba, Burning Grass, Zambia Shall Be Free, Jagua Nana, Arrow of God,
No Longer at Ease, A Man of the People and got to the almighty iroko of
them all, Things Fall Apart in its orange glory and the beautiful
illustrations I used to copy in my drawing book.

I moved on to Weep
Not Child, The River Between and remembered how The Beautiful Ones are
Not Yet Born portrayed the politicians of the 60s and started wracking
my brain to see if African politicians have changed in our day and age.
When things started getting heavy, I moved to light weights like
Veronica My Daughter, Evbu My Love and these also brought too much
misty memories.

I opened another
box and it was filled with James Hadley Chase and Robert Ludlum, I
closed that because those are not the books the president wants to
bring back for now. After going through all the boxes and realizing how
much reading I did in the village, I began to wonder where things
started falling apart. I shook my head and said truly, the president
must bring back the books and I must help him.

So I loaded all the boxes of books into my boot and zoomed off
happily to Lagos. My intention was to donate them to primary schools
and secondary schools around Lagos (where else will I get press
coverage for such political mileage), only to be told that schools have
been closed because of politicians. What does one have to do in this
country to help? Sigh. My people I brought back the books o, but where
do I take them, I have no storage o!

No, today’s piece is not about who won
or lost various party primaries across Nigeria. That hurricane will not
settle anytime soon. Our focus today is on a different kind of breeze
blowing across Europe and leaving once mighty powers in the throes of
destitution. The aftermath has been a fundamental shift of power that
has reduced former empires and colonial masters to new economic
colonies.

Great Britain once ruled seventy
percent of the world’s oceans and dominated military, economic and
political power across the world. It colonised America and large parts
of Canada. It owned Australia, New Zealand and parts of China,
including Hong Kong. The entire continent of Africa was a playground
for British colonial masters and a source of slaves and commodities.
Today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe were essentially the property of one
Englishman – Cecil Rhodes who naturally named them for himself. The
entire Indian Subcontinent and South East Asia – Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Myanmar, Thailand and the Malay Archipelago were British dominions.

That was then. Today, Nigerians own
some of the most valuable and sought after properties in the UK. It is
difficult not to smile at the sight of Britons working as chauffeurs,
domestic assistants and chefs (drivers, house helps and cooks) for
Nigerian families in the UK. It is hard not to applaud Indian and
Chinese businesses buying British icons such as Jaguar Land Rover and
MG to save them from bankruptcy. Africa used to be the abode of debt,
but today, public sector debt today in the UK is over £800 billion.

Today, Arabs, Russians, Indians and
other nationals own some of the major teams in English football. A
decade ago, great sporting franchises like Manchester United,
Manchester City, Chelsea and others represented the best of British
sporting traditions. Of great import also in sports, is the way the
stars of English and international cricket are being auctioned in the
Indian Cricket League which is now the richest in the world.

The wind of change is not limited to
Britain alone. Spain was once a global leader and it fleet dominated
the seas and the known world. Spain colonised practically all of
Central and South America. The devastation wreaked by its
conquistador’s left permanent damage on the populations of its
colonies. Entire populations were wiped out through conscription to
work in the gold and silver mines of central and South America.
Hundreds of ships laden with gold, silver and other looted treasure
sailed to Spain, making it the richest country in the world at one
time. Today, Spain has an unemployment rate of about 20 percent and is
begging China to buy Spanish government bonds – to enable it raise
money.

Similarly, Portugal was a major naval
and merchandising country with colonies all over the world. It once
owned Brazil; a country that is several times its size. Today, a
Portuguese youth with ambition is better headed for Brazil where he has
better prospects than in Portugal itself. A great deal of choice
property in Portugal today belongs to foreigners (including former
colonial subjects from Brazil and Angola) who only use them for
holidays, while many Portuguese live in poverty. The same thing can be
said of Belgium’s king Leopold II who once owned the entire Congo –
several times the size of Belgium. The brutality of the king in
exploiting this vast country is unsurpassed. Today, in addition to
economic problems, Belgium itself is divided along ethnic lines with
the Flemish and Walloons seemingly unable to live together. Tribalism
is not an African invention.

In addition to Britain, Spain, Portugal
and Belgium, other former colonial and economic powers like France,
Italy and Netherlands are being supplanted by the economic miracles of
China and India. Poverty and economic failure are no longer synonymous
with Africa and Latin America. Today, there are many workers in Europe
who do not earn what their Nigerian counterparts earn. The streets of
Africa are no more dominated by British and French automobiles but by
Toyotas, Nissans and increasingly, TATAs and Geelys. Global finance is
shifting from London to Shanghai, Dubai and Mumbai. It is comical,
watching government and business leaders of Europe kowtowing to minor
visiting officials from China.

As we move ahead towards general
elections, we must reflect on the fact that had we voted right and
protected our votes over time, it would not have been inconceivable
that representatives of Her Majesty, the Queen’s government would be
combing Lagos and Abuja, trying to convince Nigerian businesses and
government to invest in British government bonds and to reschedule
British debts to Nigeria….

There is something about Ogbono soup
that requires both technique and light handedness. The best Ogbono soup
that I have ever eaten is from twenty years ago. Although my mother had
taught me not to ask for seconds when eating outside our home, I asked
for thirds and was abruptly put in my place with that sort of bruising
facial expression that said that I must be very badly brought up
indeed.

Whatever! The soup was that good; well
worth the rebuff. In my mind’s eye, I can bring up the soup in vivid
palm oil colour; not moody dark brown, but beautiful turmeric, lightly
viscose, velvety and embellished with juicy fresh giant prawns.

I have to say that I wish it were not
called “Ogbono” soup. The name is just so inelegant, so heavy, so
frumpy, so mouth contortingly ugly. Even the Yoruba’s “Apon” sounds
equally malignant. It is like naming a beautiful girl without
considering how the letters that make up the name flow through the
lips… I beg your pardon, no matter how time honoured the name is, if
it doesn’t glide around the lips, it somewhat takes away from the
girl’s beauty doesn’t it?

It is a simple soup only in so far as
one considers it from the point of beginning to cook, but I think that
in order to give it its due, one needs to think back to the point of
harvesting bush mango seeds, the ridiculous incommensurate effort in
cracking open thousands and thousands of bush mangoes and saving only
little white seeds that are then dried and sold to market traders.

Ogbono seeds are a major source of
income for many communities in Cross River State. They also arrive in
Calabar from as far away as three days journey from Bamenda in
Cameroun, travelling in large old rice sacks stacked on boats. When I
buy them in N50 heaps from the market, I wonder how anyone can make a
decent living from selling these undervalued imperfect seeds. Another
N50 and I have my roughly ground Ogbono flakes courtesy of a wiry man
who works his arm vigorously at some machine that looks like it belongs
in an archeological museum. The sweetish earthy smell quickens my steps
towards home.

The secret of my Ogbono soup is that
every single ingredient is considered and reconsidered lovingly,
meticulously. Apart from my Ogbono flakes, there is my palm oil.

At Christmas, I received a present of
an eight litre keg of first grade palm oil produced by Real Plantation.
The smell of it is like that of those gorgeous cardiac arrest Ofada
stews. The palm oil is blood red not bright red, and the bottom thick
dark orange coloured sediment is no more than an inch in depth.

My fish is dry-smoked catfish, skin
removed, rehydrated in simmering boiled water. I have often written
about how much I hate the heavy fishy smell of crayfish, made much
worse by grinding it to fine powder and adding it to soups, as
fundamental as crayfish addition is to cooking in Cross River. Yet I
have to recommend some large smoked prawns (crayfish) that I was given
in Calabar.

In the first instance, they are nothing
like the dark red smoked prawns that are called crayfish in the market.
These were carefully smoked to a coral almost pink colour, and have a
delicious aroma. And instead of grinding them to fine powder, I
rehydrate them along with my catfish, thereby drowning away some of
that overwhelming fishiness.

I am not of the school of thought that
onions and Ogbono don’t go together. I in fact use one whole white
onion; expensive but well worth it for giving my Ogbono a subtler onion
flavour than the cheaper purple onion.

For heat, I use both dried and fresh
Cameroonian peppers. There is a logic to this: the fresh pepper is
added to my simmering fish and prawns to flavour and animate them. I
can risk this, since I’m, going to discard of the water and not use it
in my soup. The dry pepper, more mellowed goes into the soup proper.

For anyone wondering why I have to use
Cameroonian peppers, the answer is that they are grown in soil fertile
and dark as chocolate in Santa Mbei, and Akum and Pinyin and in
Bamenda… these peppers are special, and I have not yet found any
peppers that compare in flavour and travelling heat. Last but not least
is a bunch of organically grown Ugwu washed and shredded thinly.

My finely chopped onion, a little
garlic, ginger and a bay leaf are added to heated palm oil. Everything
is sautéed until my onions are translucent. My rehydrated fish and
crayfish are added. Some dry Cameroonian pepper is added, and water,
enough to give the impression of a watery stew. My Ogbono flakes are
mixed with a little palm oil, and then constituted with boiling water
then added to my onion fish water mixture. More and more water is added
until my desired viscosity is reached. A little salt is enough. My Ugwu
goes in at the very end, just before the soup is taken off the fire.

There is nothing left to do but to make some Garri the size of my fist… as usual, and sit and devour!

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One
of 2010’s landmark events was Julian Paul Assange’s publication of
secret diplomatic US government cables on WikiLeaks, his whistle
blowing website-company. Nahu bis dis man sef?

Julian Paul
Assange, born 3 July 1971, is an Australian publisher, journalist,
software developer and Internet activist. Assange has worked as a
computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth. He has lived in
several countries, and has made public appearances in many parts of the
world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and
investigative journalism.

Assange founded the
WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has
published material about extra judicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste
dumping in Africa, Church of Scientology manuals, and Guantanamo Bay
procedures.

In 2010, he
published classified details about American involvement in the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media
partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables. The White House
has called Assange’s release of the diplomatic cables “reckless and
dangerous”.

Assange is
currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual
offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010. He is
currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an
extradition hearing. Assange has denied the allegations and claimed
that they are politically motivated.

Assange has
received awards and nominations for his work including the Economist
Freedom Expression Award (2008), and the Amnesty International Media
Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya. He
was most recently named Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year”. (From
Wikipedia, free Encyclopedia).

In local parlance,
what Assange has done is called tatafo or tatafo witaut waya. One who
commits such an act is also addressed as a Tatafo or Tatafo witaut
waya. The information leaked may be in favourable to one party but the
reverse for another. Julian Assange’s release of the many secrets of a
big power like America and other countries like Nigeria is definitely
not in their interest.

However, there are
individuals, non-governmental organisations and nations that are happy
about this development for reasons best known to them.

At the level of the
private individual, with particular reference to large residential
compounds or the popular fes mi a fes yu eria dem, tatafowit aut waya
is synonymous with rumour mongering. As an unsolicited act, it is
presumed as something that usually happens through the back door.

This is underscored
by the fact that in those days of the NITEL brand of analogue telephone
(called waya in Naija), any information sent through this medium was
generally presumed to be official and genuine. Information passed
outside of this medium, was perceived or described as wit aut waya (not
via the telephone) and therefore fake and capable of creating unhealthy
situations. The Americans dubbed Mr. Assange’s actions as “reckless and
dangerous”.

If you have ever
lived in big compounds wie pipul plenti, there’s no way you would have
missed seeing wetin tatafo witaut waya don du to relationships and
marital homes.

Most Tatafo witaut
waya derive pleasure in leaking secret information but not without the
following caveat: “no tok se na mi tel yu o”.

Tatafo has its bad
and good sides, but the case of Julian Assange is a different ball game
because he operates with a duly registered website branded as
“dangerous” by those opposed to his views.

Despite the fact
that the government of Goodluck Jonathan was not pleased with Julian
Assange’s leaks about Nigeria, The Guardian, one of Nigeria’s respected
newspapers has named him as the paper’s Man of the Year.

Whether for good or
bad, we have people that are averse to keeping secrets and Julian
Assange happens to be one. Another name for a Tatafo is Amebo. Julian
Assange is a komfam Amebo who could be described as Tatafo wit waya we
pas waya. Na Tatafo wit intanet. Weda pesin de du tatafo wit waya oo
not, tatafo na tatafo an na wahala fo evribodi. Nobodi send am. Kpakam!

Mr. Oribhabor is a promoter of Naija (Nigerian Pidgin), and writes from Abuja

Twenty-seven.
That’s the number of bullets a police guard fired into my father before
surrendering himself with a sinister smile to the policemen around him.
Salmaan Taseer, governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province,
was assassinated on Tuesday – my brother Shehryar’s 25th birthday –
outside a market near our family home in Islamabad.

The guard accused
of the killing, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, was assigned that morning to
protect my father while he was in the federal capital. According to
officials, around 4:15 p.m., as my father was about to step into his
car after lunch, Qadri opened fire.

Qadri and his
supporters may have felled a great oak that day, but they are sadly
mistaken if they think they have succeeded in silencing my father’s
voice or the voices of millions like him who believe in the secular
vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

My father’s life
was one of struggle. He was a self-made man, who made and lost and
remade his fortune. He was among the first members of the ruling
Pakistan Peoples Party when it was founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in
the late 1960s. He was an intellectual, a newspaper publisher and a
writer; he was jailed and tortured for his belief in democracy and
freedom. The vile dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq did not take
kindly to his pamphleteering for the restoration of democracy.

One particularly
brutal imprisonment was in a dungeon at Lahore Fort, this city’s
Mughal-era citadel. My father was held in solitary confinement for
months and was slipped a single meal of half a plate of stewed lentils
each day. They told my mother, in her early 20s at the time, that he
was dead. She never believed that.

Determined, she
made friends with the kind man who used to sweep my father’s cell and
asked him to pass a note to her husband. My father later told me he
swallowed the note, fearing for the sweeper’s life. He scribbled back a
reassuring message to my mother: “I’m not made from a wood that burns
easily.” That is the kind of man my father was. He could not be broken.

He often quoted
verse by his uncle Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of Urdu’s greatest poets. “Even
if you’ve got shackles on your feet, go. Be fearless and walk. Stand
for your cause even if you are martyred,” wrote Faiz. Especially as
governor, my father was the first to speak up and stand beside those
who had suffered, from the thousands of people displaced by the Kashmir
earthquake in 2005 to the family of two teenage brothers who were
lynched by a mob in August in Sialkot after a dispute at a cricket
match.

After 86 members of
the Ahmadi sect, considered blasphemous by fundamentalists, were
murdered in attacks on two of their mosques in Lahore in May, to the
great displeasure of the religious right my father visited the
survivors in the hospital. When the floods devastated Pakistan last
summer, he was on the go, rallying businessmen for aid, consoling the
homeless and building shelters.

My father believed
that the strict blasphemy laws instituted by Zia have been frequently
misused and ought to be changed. His views were widely misrepresented
to give the false impression that he had spoken against Prophet
Mohammad. This was untrue, and a criminal abdication of responsibility
by his critics, who must now think about what they have caused to
happen. According to the authorities, my father’s stand on the
blasphemy law was what drove Qadri to kill him.

There are those who
say my father’s death was the final nail in the coffin for a tolerant
Pakistan. That Pakistan’s liberal voices will now be silenced. But we
buried a heroic man, not the courage he inspired in others. This week
two leading conservative politicians – former Prime Minister Chaudhry
Shujaat Hussain and the cricket-star-turned-politician Imran Khan –
have taken the same position my father held on the blasphemy laws: they
want amendments to prevent misuse.

To say that there
was a security lapse on Tuesday is an understatement. My father was
brutally gunned down by a man hired to protect him. Juvenal once asked,
“Who will guard the guards themselves?” It is a question all Pakistanis
should ask themselves today: If the extremists could get to the
governor of the largest province, is anyone safe?

It may sound odd,
but I can’t imagine my father dying in any other way. Everything he
had, he invested in Pakistan, giving livelihoods to tens of thousands,
improving the economy. My father believed in our country’s potential.
He lived and died for Pakistan. To honour his memory, those who share
that belief in Pakistan’s future must not stay silent about injustice.
We must never be afraid of our enemies. We must never let them win.

Shehrbano Taseer is a reporter with Newsweek Pakistan

© 2011 The New York Times

It is the nightmare
of every security planner. But the low intensity, tit-for-tat killings
and despoliation that has been going on in Plateau State for months now
is exactly the kind of situation that unmakes even the best laid
security plan.

Locked in a vicious circle of violence and
insecurity, all that patrolling security officers are likely to see are
smiling (or scowling) faces of the people seemingly going about their
business, and after the patrol is gone, these same people launch
attacks on their neighbours in a fit of misapplied rage.

It is opportunistic. It could be unplanned. But it
is no less effective in sending terror and despair into the ranks of
perceived opponents. With the deployment of more troops to Jos and
outlying districts, this appears the only form of action that is safe
for the aggressors in the conflict.

Early last Tuesday, a horrific example of this
form of attack was carried out on a community in the state. A murderous
gang creeps on a community already asleep by 1am, rouses the people by
unleashing guns and arrows on them and creeps back under cover of
night. At the end of the killing frenzy, about 18 people – men, women
and children – lay dead.

It has also been going for far too long and the
inability of security agencies to have fashioned out a response to it
is a pointer to the fact that the crisis cannot be resolved by military
means alone. A people intent on killing one another need higher
incentives than the threat of a Spartan whiplash to make them desist
from their self destruction.

You can dispatch the entire contingent of the
Nigerian Army into the state and the killings would not stop unless the
political leaders summon the needed courage and sincerity to tackle the
underlying issues. Sadly, this political leadership has been missing at
both the local and national levels.

It is not as if the unfolding tragedy was
overlooked by government officials. President Goodluck Jonathan visited
the area about two times last year; several senior military and
civilian leaders have also been there.

Following the last major outbreak of violence in
the area in 2009, the government, both at the state and at the federal
level, constituted two panels of enquiry. Even though the last two
panels were a reflection of the sectarian trouble on the ground – the
state government expressed a lack of trust in the federal
administration then led by the late Umaru Yar’Adua – the panels managed
to collate a large body of evidence on the perceived injustices by the
two major sides in the conflict and what they expect government to do
to resolve the crisis.

It is a tragedy of leadership that no action was
taken on this until the latest outbreak, which started last year. It is
trite to mention that the longer this continues, the harder it will get
to resolve the crisis. Unfortunately, our political leaders are
distracted now. Some watchers of the cycle of outbursts say it is no
surprise that this is happening at this time, when politicians are
focused on reelection and governance has taken a back seat in their
minds.

By this weekend, some of the madness of the
campaign frenzy will have subsided with the completion of the party
primaries. The Plateau State governor has won the ticket of his party,
the Peoples Democratic Party. His estranged deputy, Pauline Tallen, and
her supporters have ensconced themselves in the Labour party. They
appear set to face off at the general election in April.

Neither would command any respect – or the right
to ask their people to vote for them – if they refuse to show
leadership in seeking a resolution to the crisis destroying their
homeland. The two politicians and the constellation of interest groups
and politicians swirling around them need to shed partisanship on this
matter for the sake of the people they seek to govern.

Of course, Mr. Jonathan also needs to be more
hands on in this case. Jos is like a tinderbox that should not be left
to smoulder for too long else it will explode and suck in other parts
of the country. He should put politics aside and tackle the crisis in
Plateau with the decisiveness it deserves. The national shame and
tragedy must be stopped.

Recently, the Lagos State Government was accused of being an
elitist government that is insensitive to the needs of the masses. It has
become imperative for the government to set the records straight.

As a government that is passionate about the people, the state
government’s empowerment and poverty alleviation programme has provided
opportunities for all classes of people to learn various vocations, after which
they are provided with needed capital to start off on their own. Through these
initiatives, over 55,000 Lagosians have been trained across the 20 Local
Governments and 37 Local Council Development Areas.

In the area of education, the state government has transformed
public education in the state through its systematic school rehabilitation
programme. Aside its rehabilitation exercise, it has equipped public schools
with necessary facilities. This is in addition to the continuous payment of
NECO fees of SSS3 students, provision of toilets in 339 schools, fencing of
over 91 schools, completion of 6 multi-lingual laboratories -one each in the
six Education Districts, rehabilitation of the 5 Government Technical Colleges,
upgrading of 30 model schools, provision of completely new laboratories for 105
schools, provision of brand new furniture for students and teachers in over 88
public schools, acquisition of a new 2-colour printing machine for the
Education Resource Centre, to mention just a few of the numerous efforts of the
state government in public education

With regard to job creation, the Fashola Administration, in
2009, created about 156,779 jobs across various sectors in the state. A
breakdown shows 6,114 people being employed directly into the medical and
education sectors at the lower levels in the public sector, 52, 685 jobs
outside the public sector, in such areas as micro credit finance, business
support and field training. Over 98, 000 others are involved in various
construction sites as sub contractors, employees of major contractors, in such
projects as school construction and rehabilitation, drainage clearance and
construction, construction of roads and bridges, hospitals and city cleaning.

A total number of 2,500 graduate teachers were also offered
appointments into the State Public Service. This is in addition to the over 3,
000 NCE graduates that had previously been absorbed.

Road Construction and rehabilitation is another area where the
state government has touched the lives of Lagosians from all walks of life. All
the on-going and completed road projects met the highest specification
including provision of streetlights, pedestrian walkways, service duck drainage
channels, grassing and beautification of the median.

To make the rural areas attractive for reversing rural-urban
drift, the state government embarked on the construction of access roads to
link up these villages

One other vital area where the government has transformed rural
Lagos is in terms of rural electrification. Presently, it has completed a total
number of 165 rural electrification projects under its rural intervention
scheme. In terms of rural water supply, the state government has provided over
116 communities across the state with potable water. Out of these, 65 were
provided with small scale water schemes of various options.

Just recently Fashola commissioned the N45 million Isawo micro
water works, which has the capacity to produce 60,000 gallons of water daily,
in the Ikorodu axis of the state.

Only God knows how many children of the elites were involved in
all these exercises!

Space will not permit me to talk about the efforts of the state
government in improving the health sector, ensuring public security, enhancing
internal revenue generation, transforming the environment, boosting grassroots
sports development, developing modern markets among others. All these efforts
have been to the advantage of Lagosians across all divides. It is no longer
secret that the state government has raised the bar of governance in the
country and from every indication its best is yet to come.

Every democratically elected government is accountable to the
people, to whom it owes its existence. This is why it has become traditional
for the Fashola administration to render periodic accounts of its stewardship
to the people every 100 days. It has consistently thrown its doors open to
divergent opinions and views from various sources, the opposition inclusive.
Here, the administration has convened stakeholder meetings on various issues
ranging from the Coroners Law, to the Inland Waterways Law, to the GIS project.
In addition, the state legislature is organizing public hearings and Town Hall
meetings. In fact, the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of public
functionaries have become public property in order to make them more accessible
to members of the public.

In as much as it does not expect everyone to applaud its developmental
efforts, it is, however, desirable that criticisms are constructive and issue
based. This is the only way to build a viable democratic culture. This is the
only way forward!

Ogunbiyi works at the
Ministry of Information & Strategy, Ikeja.