Nigeria Content Online

President Jonathan
has recently rolled out his ambitious roadmap for the power sector
ahead of the anticipated declaration of his candidacy in the coming
elections. The plan aims to place the private sector as the key driver
of the reforms and to attract an annual investment of US$3.5 billion
while delivering 7,000MW by April next year and 14,000MW by 2013. All
well and good. The devil, as the say, lies in the details.

The whole world
knows that Nigeria has never been short of great ideas. The gaping hole
in our national system is quite simply a lack of effective
implementation.

The failure to
deliver is not only a leadership problem; it has to do with the
systemic failure of bureaucracy, public policy and decision-making
systems. As a country, we have been largely bypassed by the New Public
Management revolution, which started in the United States about two
decades ago with its objective of reinventing government within the
paradigm of efficiency and results-based management.

According to the
Harvard neurologist and educationist Howard Gardner, “all leaders are
limited in what they can accomplish”. In rich as well as poor
democracies, leaderships require support systems that can help them
deliver on their mandates against the backdrop of increasingly critical
electorates. One of my most inspiring teachers has been the
distinguished Israeli policy scientist Yehezkel Dror. Several years ago
Dror called for a ‘new order of leadership’ — a new mindset anchored
on transformational leadership that is rigorous intellectually and
politically savvy and entrepreneurial.

Dror has been the
‘beautiful mind’ behind succeeding leaderships in Tel Aviv who have
managed to build a prosperous and secure democracy in a sea of
turbulence and hostility.

In a seminal 1986
essay, he developed the concept of the ‘central mind of government’ to
help enrich governance and decision-making at the highest levels of
leadership in a manner that promotes the collective interest while
providing overall strategic direction for government.

Britain under
former Prime Minister Tony Blair may have taken those lessons on board
in creating the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU). After his second
election victory in June 2001 in which the Labour Party won by a
landslide, Prime Minister Tony Blair solemnly told the great British
public that he interpreted his victory as “a mandate for reform…an
instruction to deliver.” Blair subsequently invited a noted academic,
Professor Michael Barber, to set up the PMDU which was located within a
few doors of the prime minister’s own office.

Several years
earlier Barber had been recruited to oversee policy implementation
within the treacherous British public school system which had, in some
parts, fallen to Third World levels. He seemed to possess the elixir
stone that changed things with remarkable speed. Exam results improved;
some of the inner city schools that had been largely Dickensian
hell-holes where pupils carried knives and guns were infused with a new
lease of life. Barber has serendipitously invented a new profession
that goes by the name of ‘deliverology’ — defined as a systematic
process through which system leaders can drive progress and deliver
results.

The PMDU’s brief
was to monitor the four core areas of the government’s strategic
priorities, namely health, education, transport and the Home Office.
With a staff of about 40, the PMDU operated as a ‘slim and mean’
outfit, with a proactive no-nonsense approach that held cabinet members
and senior mandarins personally accountable for performance.

While the focus was
on long-term strategic targets, the PMDU carefully cultivated
short-term wins considered crucial to gaining public confidence and
building momentum for greater success. Consideration was given to
setting clear goals design of a delivery map and delivery chain by
which all relevant stakeholders understand what they have to do,
trajectories mapping progress towards implementation, data and leading
indicators with real-time performance information, stocktaking with the
Prime Minister and the Cabinet and commitment to best practice through
continuous improvement of processes and systems to achieve success.

The PMDU has been a
remarkable success. Governments across the world have sought to imitate
its key features. The IMF has described the approach as a ‘frontier’ of
performance management in government.

Given the complex
challenges we face as a country, we need creative decision-making
systems that would enable leaderships deliver on their core mandates.
At the end of the day, Goodluck Jonathan will be judged on whether or
not he has delivered. The British PMDU model is as good a model as any
to consider.

The American
statesman Henry Kissinger famously remarked that political office taxes
intellectual capital. Many of our leaders seem patently ill prepared
for high office. Once in power, there is no time to engage in new
learning. But leadership does not require that one knows everything.
With regard to electricity and other critical sectors, leaderships must
be humble enough to defer to the talents who can cut through the
nonsense and get things done.

Destiny rarely provides such opportunities for statesmen to make a
difference. It would be tragic for our country if Mr. Jonathan ends up
just as another ‘cash and carry’ political prisoner to reptilian party
hacks and an increasingly imperious and rapacious governorate.

The Broom has done it again.

This time it is the
Okada that ended up at its wrong end. In one clean swoop, the broom
flogged them off our roads and into the bin. Away with the nuisance,
they chant. The Okada don’t fit into the plan for the Mega City, which
the Broom peddles. The Okada must go. Now they are gone.

The Broom has swept
the Okada away yet the traffic is still there, as alive as ever. Even
with the Okada, reporting to work on time was a challenge. Now everyone
is wondering but the Broom has provided us no alternatives. They will
adjust with time they say.

It doesn’t matter how. We are just meant to adjust.

The Broom has done
it again and someone says the worst hit are the policemen. Their take
home pay has just been reduced by many portions. No more rojaring at
the bus stop. The bus drivers cheer. Now we will go home richer, they
rejoice. Soon they will increase the fares and we will have no options.

The Broom will look the other way, for even their own BRT buses already hiked theirs.

The bourgeoisie in
their air-conditioned cars are happy. The sight of poverty, which the
Okada represent, nauseates them. The Broom is really working, they
hail. Being a car owner has suddenly got a whole new meaning. Now their
car bumpers will be safer from scratches. And yes, there is a little
more entertainment for them as they inch along in the traffic. What
better satisfaction could there be for them but the sight of people
trekking in the sun and the rain because the Okada are gone.

The Broom refuses
to see that it has just swept many men into joblessness and many a
family deeper into poverty. It doesn’t want to notice that the able
bodied men who ride the Okada aren’t doing it by choice. It pretends it
doesn’t know the relationship between unemployment and crime. It boasts
of having bought a helicopter for the police. Shoot those nuisances on
sight they order. We don’t need them in our Mega City.

The rest of us are
divided into two camps. Some cheer the Broom, citing the many ills of
the Okada. Others boo the Broom and say it is insensitive. Some point
to Abuja where the Okada system worked, as example to follow. Others
remind them that Abuja is quite different from Lagos in many ways.
Another lot however is just looking, they don’t have an opinion.
They’ve been awed by the other impressive work of the Broom that now
they don’t know how to approach this new development.

In all this no one
cares to talk about the issues that led to the emergence of the Okada
in the first place, or the conditions that led to the birth of graduate
Okada riders. We brush the main issue under the carpet and argue about
trivialities. The real issue of rapid urban expansion without
proportional expansion of utilities and a poorly developed transport
system; the real issues of grave economic imbalance and extreme poverty
in the land, remains un addressed.

The Broom has done it again, but this time I think it has swept a
little too much. It has thrown away the bin along with the dirt. It has
acted like those before it who forgot the welfare of those that gave
them the mandate as soon as they got comfortable in the chairs of
Government House. It has shown us that indeed the difference between
the Broom and the Umbrella is only in the physical structure. In
thought, they are one and the same and the rest of us are just on the
other side.

WASHINGTON – Even in the thick of a historical tragedy, Tony Blair never seemed like a Shakespearean character.

He’s too rabbity
brisk, too doggedly modern. The most proficient spinner since
Rumpelstiltskin lacks introspection. The self-described “manipulator”
is still in denial about being manipulated.

The Economist’s
review of “A Journey,” the new autobiography of the former British
prime minister, says it sounds less like Disraeli and Churchill and
more like “the memoirs of a transatlantic business tycoon.”

Yet in the section
on Iraq, Blair loses his CEO fluency and engages in tortured arguments,
including one on how many people really died in the war, and does a
Shylock lament.

He says he does not
regret serving as the voice for W’s gut when the inexperienced American
princeling galloped into war with Iraq. As for “the nightmare that
unfolded” – giving the lie to all their faux rationales and glib
promises – Tony wants everyone to know he has feelings.

“Do they really
suppose I don’t care, don’t feel, don’t regret with every fibre of my
being the loss of those who died?” he asks of his critics.

In Iraq, marking
the transition to the “post-combat mission” for American troops,
Defence Secretary Robert Gates was eloquent with an economy of words.

Asked by a reporter
if Iraq would have to be a democratic state for the war to benefit U.S.
national security, Gates cut to core: “The problem with this war for, I
think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified going
to war proved not to be valid – that is, Saddam having weapons of mass
destruction.” He added, candidly: “It will always be clouded by how it
began.”

Iraq will be “a
work in progress for a long time,” Gates said, and, “how it all weighs
in the balance over time, I think remains to be seen.”

Blair writes that
he thought he was right and that he and W rid the world of a tyrant.
But he winds up with a bitter anecdote: “I still keep in my desk a
letter from an Iraqi woman who came to see me before the war began. She
told me of the appalling torture and death her family had experienced
having fallen foul of Saddam’s son. She begged me to act. After the
fall of Saddam she returned to Iraq. She was murdered by sectarians a
few months later. What would she say to me now?”

There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.

He concedes that
the invasion of Iraq was more about symbols than immediate security,
about sending “a message of total clarity to the world,” after 9/11,
that defying the will of the international community would no longer be
tolerated.

In other words,
Osama bin Laden had emasculated America, and America had to hit back,
and did so against a country that had nothing to do with him or 9/11.

Blair did not want
to be W’s peripheral poodle. He wanted to “stand tall internationally”
with Britain’s main ally and not “wet our knickers,” to use a Blair
phrase, when the going got tough (or delusional).

Blair fantasized
that Saddam might someday give WMD to terrorists. This, even though the
dictator didn’t like terrorists because they were impossible to
control, and even though, as Blair admits, (the secular) Saddam and
(the fundamentalist) Osama were on opposite sides. (When Saudi Arabia
felt threatened by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Osama offered to fight
the Iraqi dictator.)

It is criminally
naive, given the billions spent on intelligence, that Blair and W
muffed the post war planning because they never perceived what Blair
now acknowledges as “the true threat”: Outside interference by al-Qaida
and Iran. So the reasoning of the man known in England as Phony Tony or
Bliar amounts to this: They had to invade Iraq because Saddam could
hypothetically hook up with al-Qaida. But they didn’t properly prepare
for the insurgency because they knew that Saddam had no link to
al-Qaida.

He knew Dick Cheney had a grandiose plan to remake the world and no patience for “namby-pamby peacenikery.”

“He would have
worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran,” as well as
“Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair writes of Cheney, adding: “He was for
hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We’re coming after you,
so change or be changed.”

The religious Blair
fancied himself a conviction politician who had intervened for good in
Kosovo and Sierra Leone and would do so again in Iraq. So he did not,
as he said others did, “reach for the garlic and crucifixes” when Dick
hatched his sulfurous schemes.

If he had
challenged W and Cheney instead of enabling them, Blair might have
stopped the farcical rush to war. Instead, he became the midwife for a
weaker Iraq that is no longer a counterweight to Iran – which actually
is a nuclear threat – and that seems doomed to be run one day by
another brutal strongman.

Maybe Blair should
have realized the destructive Oedipal path W was on. At their first
meeting at Camp David, W screened “Meet the Parents.”

© 2010 New York Times News Service

Yesterday marked
one year since the death of human rights activist and lawyer, Gani
Fawehinmi, at the age of 71, after a protracted battle with lung cancer.

While alive Gani
was without doubt the conscience of Nigeria – thorn in the flesh of
dictators and dictatorial governments, a voice for the voiceless, and
arguably the country’s most prolific public commentator

Over the course of
three decades Gani was jailed several times for what he believed in:
justice, fairness and equity for all citizens of Nigeria, irrespective
of religion, ethnic group or social class. For Gani law was far more
than a way to ensure a comfortable existence for himself.

His life was spent
demonstrating Wole Soyinka’s assertion that “justice is the first
condition of humanity.” He never shied away from taking governments to
court for irresponsible actions and decisions.

In 1992 he
challenged the Babangida administration in court for devaluing the
naira. He defended Ken Saro Wiwa during his trial by the Abacha
government. In 1999 he sought the judicial nullification of the
Nigerian Constitution on the grounds that it was the product of an
unconstitutional military government.

In 2008, seeking a
declaration that Farida Waziri’s appointment as Chairman of the EFCC
was illegal he took President Umaru Yar’Adua, the Senate, the Economic
and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Attorney General of the
Federation to court. With Gani, no one was above the law.

The last two
decades of his life were spent trying to bring the killers of
journalist Dele Giwa to justice. Regarding the Dele Giwa assassination,
he testified before the Oputa Panel with the same energy and
determination he demonstrated fourteen years earlier.

Not content with
simply fighting an oppressive system, Gani channelled substantial
portions of his wealth into philanthropy. He was a generous dispenser
of scholarships to indigent students.

It can be said
that Gani was in a class of his own. There was none like him. At his
death one of the most widespread sentiments that floated around was
that Nigerians had been orphaned. Who would speak truth to power in the
matchless Gani style? Who would take presidents to court? Who would
write frank letters to the authorities, protesting their
thoughtlessness? Who would defend the Constitution with as much vigour?
Who would make Nigerians resist the temptation to give in to total
helplessness?

One prevailing
sentiment since the death of Gani has been “What would Gani have done?”
It would not be incorrect to say that Nigerians felt Gani’s absence
during the six-month constitutional crisis that accompanied the
disappearance of late President Yar’Adua. Amidst the clamour of voices
Gani’s would have rang out loud and clear, backed with figures and
statistics and generous quotations from the Constitution.

He was after all
the man who in 2005 compiled a comprehensive record of former President
Olusegun Obasanjo’s many foreign trips, and issued a public statement,
as follows: “Even when Mr. President is in the country, he hops from
one state to another paying social visits. He returns to the country
from his tours at times to start such internal state visits and when
such internal state visits end he jets out of the country. In all, our
president has slept out of Nigeria 512 days in the last 6 (six) years.
The foremost house keeper of the affairs of Nigeria is many times
absent from the house.”

Gani would have
had a lot to say on the profligate decision of President Jonathan to
purchase three new jets in a country hard hit by poverty and failed
infrastructure.

As Nigerians mark the first anniversary of Gani’s demise, we must
not forget that much of what Gani suffered for still remains a mirage.
True justice remains a luxury, and the average citizen struggles to
survive in spite of the government. Commemorating the death of Gani
should serve as a wake-up call to Nigerians across all economic and
religious divides: the battle for the soul of this country continues,
and every sensible citizen should seek to be a Gani in their own sphere
of influence.

If you want me I’ll let you film me on your
videophone, sings Beyonce and the message is at once public and
intimate. Make a cameo she goes on, “I can handle you” she croons; “if
you want me you can watch me… its gonna be you and me.” Fast rewind
to 1997 when the PalmPilot was first launched, its 4.7 x 3.1 x .7
dimensions measured in inches makes it a dinosaur compared to today’s
sleeker models that give you the whole world in your palm and a hundred
different ways to interact with it too, including conducting a virtual
relationship with any version of a Beyonce that tickles your fancy.

Twenty years ago the idea that you could be multi
tasking, including performing bodily functions and speaking on the
phone at the same time seemed positively infra dig; now I am not sure
anybody gives it a second thought especially with the difficulty these
days of “getting through”! Come to think of it that old joke about the
man who will instinctively dobale even when speaking to his Kabiyesi on
the phone is not redundant. He can actually film himself performing the
obeisance with his smart mobile device and “instant message” it to Baba
as he speaks. Sometimes you don’t know which world is catching up to
the other.

The phone has had an up and down history in
Nigeria. In the early sixties it was taken for granted in the
relatively few homes that did have one. It was a status symbol all
right because of its exclusivity, but it did work. Then came the late
seventies, early eighties when virtually only ‘big’ men and women had
them.

The service was erratic. It was easier to get onto
a Nitel operator to book an international call than it was to get your
neighbour on the phone. It often took many hands to get through to a
number. When the fingers were tired of redialing (there was no instant
button technology then) someone else would be asked to take over. If
you lived in a place like Festac in Lagos and needed to make an
international call you made the long drive down to the Island office of
Nitel or if you had friends who were senior civil servants and had
phones at home you could invite yourself by to book a call. The Nitel
operator would call back when the number was ‘through’.

Outside Lagos, it just did not happen.

The handset became a decorative item, there to be
seen but rarely heard. Then Nigeria skipped a whole process when mobile
phones came into being, Olusegun Obasanjo added to his many-coloured
legacy, and the rest is history.

No self-respecting roadside vulcanizer can be seen
without a cell phone. The access to conversation with loved ones near
and far is ubiquitous, the only currency you need is airtime and that
too has become a new device with which to lure Beyonce wannabes. ‘Baby
come ride my Volkswagen’ has given way to, ‘let me give you some
airtime’, to go by a recent South African public awareness message
warning against multiple sex partners.

So yes, there is a lot of communicating going on
but is there really much being said? The Nigerian factor has made many
of those conversations a fractured and irritating exercise. Relying on
one network has proved inadequate so many people sign on to three or
four. Text messaging has become far less stressful than straining to
hear a voice over a crackly line or in noisy surroundings, so what used
to be seen as poor syntax and bad grammar passes fr gd txt wen de lyn
is bd.

But there are unmistakable advantages. It is a
boon to be able to speak to old parents on a regular basis and have
them communicate with grandchildren; to keep track of recalcitrant
teenagers whether they want you to or not, and otherwise make sure out
of sight is not out of mind; or even to ensure that unavailable is
virtually enjoyable as Beyonce promises.” So take my picture on your
video phone, you can pick your own song you can be the only one.” The
course of business has been made smoother and faster. Access to
information has made planning and forecasting easier. It has widened
our horizons and opened people’s eyes up to possibilities they never
dreamed about.

News alerts such as the one this media
organization is starting up will keep you up to date with what is going
on in your world; the GPS will take you where you need to go; you can
get your email, keep up with your friends and run your office from the
palm of your hand. Good bye to the fly by night ‘armpitcos’ of yester
years, but welcome too to the sinister stalkers on the look out for
easy ransom money.

That is the rub: we can match them feature for
feature when it comes to keeping up with the latest gadgets but the
basic underpinnings that will enable us reach those heights
collectively as a society are still mired in the seventies.

Water, light, mass transit, roads, health care, security, education…

Are the politicians listening?

If one has be
selective when considering the advice of Theodore Roosevelt (US
President 1901-1909) to ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’, it’s
probably better to go with the ‘big stick’ part. Naturally, one is free
to speak harshly and carry a big stick – countries which have them
often do. But what one wants to avoid – especially in international
affairs – is speaking harshly when one has only a small stick.

This does not
appear to have been the policy of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in
its recent dealings with the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,
whose ‘Brotherly Leader’, Muammar Ghadaffi, it will be recalled,
suggested in March that Nigeria should be divided into a ‘Muslim North’
and a ‘Christian South’.

Our response was
bold and forthright. Although Senate President David Mark felt that
there was no point discussing anything said by a “madman”, the House of
Representatives called on the government to sever ties with Libya,
report Ghadaffi to the United Nations Security Council and ask the
African Union to investigate whether he was funding sectarian crises in
Nigeria. On its part, the federal government expressed “strong
reservations and disappointment” and recalled our ambassador for
‘consultations’.

The national mood
was of anger and rejection, as well it might be. According to Ghadaffi,
his suggestion was modelled on the 1947 Partition by which British
India was divided into secular India and Muslim Pakistan. That caused
not only the displacement of over twelve million people, but sectarian
violence during which up to 500,000 were killed.

Even when it was
pointed out that there were many Muslims in southern Nigeria and many
Christians in northern Nigeria, the great advocate of African unity did
not sheath the knives with which he proposed to dismember Nigeria.
Instead, he recommended our division into several “ethnic” states. This
time the ‘Guide of the Revolution’s model was Yugoslavia, whose break
up gave rise to the odious practice of “ethnic cleansing” and scenes of
violence, rape and abuse of human rights on a scale unprecedented in
Europe since the end of World War II.

If the best
Ghadaffi could suggest for a major nation in the continent that he has
always dreamed of leading was displacement, death and destruction,
Nigerians might be forgiven for imagining that humble words and abject
apology ought to precede any return to the status quo ante. We might
expect confirmation that Libyan funds and assistance (which, in the
post-Lockerbie settlement era, are no longer free to make trouble in
the Western world) have not been re-directed towards stirring things up
in Nigeria.

Apparently not.
Well, it is Nigeria whose citizens are on death row in Libyan jails. It
is Nigeria whose impoverished political opposition could be such a
tempting target for Libyan campaign contributions. And it is Nigeria
that has the sectarian crises.

Perhaps our
government ought to have considered all this before going out on a limb
to make a lot of indignant noise about Ghadaffi’s suggestions while
leaving him in possession of the saw. Small wonder that President Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia felt bold enough to try to ease it out of
his hands, a strange intercessor between Nigeria and Libya. Despite our
pulling Liberia’s chestnuts out of the fire both by sending our
soldiers to fight and die in that country’s civil war and by granting
their ex-president, Charles Taylor shelter in order to pave the way for
peace there, Johnson-Sirleaf only seems to remember our contribution
when she is actually on Nigerian soil. In other parts of the world, she
only improves on her usual silence when Nigeria is being disparaged
with some cutting remark of her own.

For example, during
her 2006 visit to Libya she remained silent while Ghadaffi berated
Nigeria for handing Taylor over for trial by the Special Court for
Sierra Leone. No doubt it would have been awkward to interrupt
Gadaffi’s rant to admit that it was actually her own government that
had handed Taylor over to the UN-run court, and that all Nigeria had
done was return him to Liberia – and to her custody. Perhaps she
resented our failure to accede to her earlier suggestion that we should
send Taylor direct to Sierra Leone.

With such a
mediator, it’s hardly surprising that the traffic has been pretty much
one-way. Libya sends an envoy who is received in Abuja by our
president. Said envoy comes not to withdraw or apologise for Ghadaffi’s
offensive suggestions but to protest about David Mark’s. We send a
whole minister of foreign affairs who is received in Tripoli by Libya’s
prime minister. Our minister signs an agreement by which we agree to
normalise relations, exchange ambassadors and generally make nice. We
rush our ambassador back to Libya. Libya, which had not bothered to
decorate Abuja with an ambassador before the crisis, ignores the
agreement to designate one as part of the settlement now.

Perhaps Nigeria
ought to have followed David Mark’s advice to ignore the ‘Brotherly
Leader’ after all. As one observer, quoting Shakespeare, put it: our
initial reaction turns out to have been “full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing”.

No apology. No assurance of non-interference. No Libya cowering at our big stick. Indeed, no big stick. Nothing.

Rotimi Amaechi, the Governor of Rivers state,
should thank his stars that he did not look Mrs. Patience Jonathan –
they say she’s a Dame – directly in the eyes during her recent trip to
Rivers state. He would have turned to stone for such are the mortifying
powers of this latest nightmarish entrant into Nigeria’s gory pantheon
of lawless, uncontrollable, and overbearing first ladies. Perhaps her
handlers in Abuja told her that she was going on a lecture tour of her
home state to teach the Governor how to govern a state?

Mrs. Jonathan had gone to Rivers state to launch
her pet project and do other ego-massaging stuff that first ladies are
wont to do on such occasions. The issue of Governor Amaechi’s
demolition exercise in her home town of Okrika came up and this is when
Mrs. Jonathan assumed the role of Mater Dolorosa of her people. She
disagreed openly with the Governor’s explanations, upbraided him
angrily, lectured him on the virtue of dialogue, and taught him some
grammar to boot! Mrs. Jonathan’s misbehaviour in Rivers state last week
is a blessing in disguise for it has once again placed the insufferable
illegality of the contraption called first ladyship at the centre of
our national conversation. Just two weeks ago, I had written about the
brigandage of another lawless first lady, Funke Daniel, of Ogun state
who went to terrorize an Ogun citizen with instruments of state and
appurtenances of power that would still have been illegal were her
husband to have deployed them with such galling disregard for due
process and the law.

Nigerians are sufficiently familiar with ritual
enactments of lawlessness by these so-called first ladies. There is no
need to do a laundry list of their transgressions here. One must
mention in passing their effeminate husbands who are never able to rein
in their wives and make them obey the law once they rig themselves into
office or once some benevolent spirits crack their palm kernels for
them and they find themselves in office (apologies to Achebe). Imagine
Goodluck Jonathan instructing the Inspector General of police to
instruct the Rivers state police commissioner to instruct the SSS to
investigate what happened between his wife and Governor Amaechi and
report back to him! We are lucky that Mr. Jonathan did not propose a
supplementary budget appropriation to fund a high-powered commission of
inquiry to look into the remote, immediate, and intermediate causes of
his wife’s misbehaviour in Rivers state. Whatever happened to that part
where a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do? Whatever happened to that
part where you tell madam in plain and simple language in the bedroom
that state governors are not pupils to be supervised by the
non-existent office of the first lady? Whatever happened to that part
where oga tells madam that what she did in Rivers state was way beyond
her remit?

And just what exactly are the police officers that
he has sent on this risible investigation errand supposed to tell Mr.
President? “Em, oga presido come o. Yawa dey o. E be like say madam
Patience dey lie when she deny say she no harass the governor o?” In
Nigeria? I’m afraid Mr. Jonathan is wasting our time. He knows that
those police officers will tell him what he wants to hear.

Reuben Abati has blamed Rotimi Amaechi for
abandoning the running of his state to attend to Mrs. Jonathan in the
first place. After all, the overbearing visitor is not recognised in
the Constitution and a governor has no business going to do “yes ma yes
ma” all over the place. He should have sent Mrs. Amaechi to do small
talk with the visitor. Abati is only partly right though. The greater
blame lies with the followership, starting with Mr. Abati’s
constituency, the media.

Abnormality does not exist or operate ex nihilo.
Its actuation depends entirely on the discourses of legitimation it
garners among the followership. That is what accords it hegemony. The
irritating characters in our rulership are not the ones who have
legitimized the aberration of first ladyship in our polity. We, the
people, are the complicit legitimizers of this open sore of a country.
The irrationalities and the imbecilities of the rulership are
stabilized and normalized in our subconscious when we sheepishly
describe and talk about such acts in the language of normality.

I once described such subterranean legitimation of
the irrational acts of the rulership in the speech acts of the
followership as making concessions to the oppressor in the field of
meaning. If you doubt me, do a review of media descriptions and online
discussions of Patience Jonathan’s misbehaviour in Rivers state.
Virtually every newspaper called it a “state visit” or an “official
visit”. That is nonsense. The same applies to media descriptions of the
frequent ego trips of the wives of state governors. You hear that the
first lady of a given state is on a “state visit” or an “official
visit” to local government areas of the state to commission projects.

Mrs. Jonathan and her juniors in the state capitals do not qualify
to be on “state visits” to anywhere. They are not recognized by the
Constitution. The generalized practice of describing the money-guzzling
jamborees of these overbearing first ladies as “state visits” or
“official visits” is a tragic role that we, the people, play in
legitimizing elite stupidity. If Mrs Jonathan’s fawning aides and
handlers treat us like fools by packaging her trips as “state visits”,
must we concede meaning to them by accepting that illegal description?
As the Yoruba saying goes: blessed is he who tries to make a fool of
you and woe unto him who accepts to be treated like a fool.

Question 1a. Define Nigeria. Answer: A land where
the elders do nothing but sing of a glorious past and the youth are
leaders of a tomorrow that will never come.

Question 1b. Explain your answer in 1a. Answer: In
typical Nigerian fashion I will begin my answer with another question –
or series of questions:

“Why is our Society so afflicted with the virus of
corruption? Why does it appear that the average Nigerian is
congenitally corrupt? Why should people who do not want to exert
themselves enjoy the good things of life? Why should the indolent and
the mediocre prosper at the expense of the hardworking members of the
Community? Why do we place so much premium on wealth even when it is
known that such wealth is a product of unjust and corrupt enrichment?”
Who said this, and when?

Those words were spoken by a certain Mr. Ayo
Fasanmi in a speech delivered at the annual conference of the
Association of History Teachers in Nigeria in, wait for this, 1972.

Troubled by the questions above, Mr. Fasanmi and a
handful of young Nigerian men and women on May 29, 1971 formed an
“Anti-Bribery and Corruption Committee.” 1971. Good ol’ days indeed. I
could have sworn that those words above were uttered by Nuhu Ribadu
yesterday afternoon.

One keeps hearing all this talk about “when
Nigeria was good” – when angels roamed the streets and questionable
wealth was kept hidden far from public view, and one naira could buy
you a shipload of rice (apologies to Mr. B of Basi & Company fame).

Isn’t this one of the great myths of this age?

I insist that the starting point for the
transformation of Nigeria is the realisation that there’s no point
lamenting that Nigeria is “getting worse.” From all available evidence,
Nigeria has always been “worse”. Our problems in Nigeria have never
changed. At best, what they do is change name:

the “Problem Has Changed Name (PHCN)” phenomenon,
seen in the transformation of NEPA to PHCN, OMPADEC to NDDC, FEDECO to
NEC to INEC; “go-slow” to “bumper-to-bumper”; police-routing Anini to
EFCC-routing Ibori.

It is sad that Nigerians above a certain age spend
so much time living in the past, lamenting how things used to work,
such that there is no energy left to find any solutions.

Acknowledging once and for all that things have
never been good frees us up to focus on a more pressing task: that
much-needed debate on why we are the way we are, and how we can break
free from the insanity of doing things the same way and expecting
different results.

“Very poor leadership appears to me as the black
man’s greatest problem,” Areoye Oyebola wrote in his 1970s classic
‘Black Man’s Dilemma.’ “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely
a failure of leadership,” Chinua Achebe pronounced a few years later,
in ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’.

Thinking about Nigeria’s leadership challenges I
am reminded of the words of W.B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” That, in my opinion,
is the most fitting punch line to the joke called Nigeria.

Might Achebe and Oyebola be right?

Arise Magazine recently published a special
supplement on Nigeria’s 50th independence anniversary. It’s a slim but
well put together document, with fascinating photos and an informative
time-line of Nigerian history.

But the most interesting part of it is a piece
titled: “GENERATION NEXT”, with the intro: “As Nigeria celebrates its
golden jubilee, the torch is passed to a new generation; the Goodluck
Jonathan Generation. Here are 50 of the rising stars.” Those rising
stars included such distinguished young and promising Nigerians as
David Mark (“a bridge between the old and new generations”), Femi
Otedola, Aliko Dangote, Vice President Namadi Sambo, Bukola Saraki,
Bola Tinubu, Diezani Allison-Madueke, Donald Duke and Godswill Akpabio.

Awesome stuff. Those are the “rising stars” of
Nigeria, the future of this great country of good people. One wonders
what my generation is doing still hanging around. Clearly we arrived
far too early. We are the Premature Generation. We should blame God for
sending us well ahead of our time.

All of us should go and find stuff to do – sing
and dance and tweet and fall in love and pop champagne, until, say,
2040, when, hopefully,

the aforementioned “rising stars” would have
fulfilled their missions and stepped aside to give us, “the new youth”,
a chance to help ourselves to our own share of whatever’s left of
Nigeria by then.

In 2040, I will be a 58-year-old, well past the
life expectancy allotted to me by my country, my grey hairs nicely
suppressed by the finest of dyes. I will be ready to take my place as
the future of Nigeria.

And of course I will remember to tell my children, the leaders of a
tomorrow I know will never come, of the “good ol’ days” of my youth;
that innocent age long before Nigeria ‘spoilt finish’!