Domestic debt grows

Nigeria's domestic debt is now =N=2.58 trillion ($17.59 billion at the time of the report) and rising.

And the states are rushing to issue bonds. There are still no effective statutory controls on the acquisition of debt, nothing to allow citizens have a say on the extra burden they (and their governments) will have to bear in the future to pay for loans to do .... well to do what exactly? Are the prior projects paid for with loans now earning enough to repay those loans? If they are not, is there anything in place to make sure the new loan-backed projects can repay the loans? Since the (manipulated and rigged) 2007 elections were a travesty, we have not given any governor our permission to govern us, much less to commit us to paying for projects that were not debated during the polls and that we never gave our electoral permission for.

Debt is not what worries me. It is necessary.

What worries me is we have not reformed the method of decision-making that got us into a debt crisis before the rather expensive ($12 billion in lost capital) Okonjo-Iweala deal. If we are still making decisions the same way we did before, what is to say we do not end up back where we were before?

Reform and transformation are of paramount necessity.

Military and Police Reform

A few days ago, I watched a video on youtube. The video has since become the subject of a propaganda war between the Nigerian Army's Joint Task Force and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta. The JTF says the video is fake. MEND says it is real.

In the video, two injured men are lying on the ground, one dead, the other injured. The injured man appears to be comforting the dead man, patting him as if to say "it is okay, it is okay". The two are surrounded by uniformed soldiers. One of the uniformed soldiers asks the injured man to identify himself. The injured man says his name is "Boma" and is in the middle of saying what village he comes from, when he is shot dead by another soldier.

I have no way of ascertaining the veracity of the video, no resources to commit to investigative research and no "contacts" to pump for insider information. I do not think it was "staged", as the JTF suggests, but I could be wrong. Likewise, I do not know what led up to the incident, in other words whether or not these were two civilians murdered in cold blood, or if these were two "militants" who should have been arrested and put on trial but were instead murdered extra-judicially. The army asserts the incident never happened.

There are two things I know for sure. The first has to do with the editor of the video, and the second has to do with the Nigerian Armed Forces.

On The Editor Of The Video

The editor added text asserting that the JTF offensive in the Niger-Delta was a religious war, waged by soldiers from one religion against people from another. Whomever the editor was, they were clearly seeking a reaction and response from Western European and North American governments. This portion, the text added by the editor, is propaganda. The Niger-Delta is a complex problem, but it is not a religious issue, and never has been. I am tired of political individuals and entities who know only one method for mobilizing support -- to use our ethnic, regional and religious divisions to turn citizens against each other. The editor deliberately alienates half of the Nigerian citizenry in his or her effort to appeal to North America and Western Europe, when in fact it is only the Nigerian citizenry (if it ever decided to act together as one) that can influence the outcomes in the Niger-Delta -- and push for reform of the Army. But how can we ever act together as one, when the basic organizing principle of Nigerian politics from the 1950s till today is divide-and-rule, and when politicking revolves around stoking oft-violent socio-political divisions?

I would have embedded that video on this blog, to help spread the word that our Armed Forces need reform, but I cannot be a party to the spread of inter-religious hate. There is more than enough of that in the world today.

On the Nigerian Armed Forces

The Army faces a serious problem when it tries to claim that this video is fake, and that problem is the Army itself, or more properly the history of the Army. Every Nigerian citizen who has seen that video will believe it is real, because the tragic events portrayed in the video are exactly what the people of Nigeria have witnessed the Army (and Police) doing for decades now. Nigerians do not even need video evidence; word that the Army is engaged in operations anywhere is enough for most citizens of the federal republic to conclude incidents such as that portrayed in the video will almost definitely occur. Indeed, no one disputes the authenticity of the videoof the assault on Uzoma Okere by Nigerian Navy ratings. The "shock" and "surprise" expressed by the authorities was not shared by the citizenry at large; for us, the only thing "new" about the Uzoma Okere case is that someone actually videotaped it!

Don't get me wrong. I do NOT hate the Army or the police. Actually, I had a brief argument with a Ghanaian "intellectual" in the dark days of the 1990s. He was one of those people who said the solution to coups in Africa was to disband all African armies. I had to stop talking to him, because what he was advocating was rather stupid. He sounded like one of those people who think the solution to Nigeria's problems is Nigeria's disbandment! If there is a problem in your family, disband the family, abi? Actually, some people do that. I don't.

Believe it or not, the Nigerian Armed Forces and the Nigerian Police provide valuable service to the country, often in difficult circumstances. When communal violence breaks out, citizens often run to the nearest police or army barracks for safety. Our soldiers and officers have served under difficult conditions (and been killed in action) in places like Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia and elsewhere. 700 Nigerian soldiers were killed in one month (January, 1999) on ECOMOG duty according to Professor Ibrahim Gambari (former Minister of External Affairs, and former Permanent Representative to the UN), and the former commander of ECOMOG forces, General Victor Malu revealed that 800 soldiers were secretly brought home and secretly buried in a mass grave for fear of public reaction to the number of casualties. As I type this in June, 2009, the federal government has yet to give an honest, credible, full account of how many soldiers we lost, how many were injured, and how much we spent on ECOMOG.

Our soldiers too-often get the rough end of the stick, treated by our federal republic in the same shabby fashion it treats its civilian citizens, be it the 27 jailed for life for protesting the fact that senior officers were stealing their allowances, or the 25 wounded soldiers dismissed and sentenced to life imprisonment for protesting their shoddy medical treatment.

The majority of our officers, soldiers and policemen are just fellow citizens who are just doing a job in order to earn a salary and support their families. Soldiers and policemen are themselves murdered, by militants, militia, extremists, irredentists, and robbers. Our soldiers are no different from their counterparts elsewhere in the world; the deaths of comrades-in-arms creates resentment in armies all over the world, and no war has ever been fought that did not involve both sides taking out extra-judicial, criminal and murderious revenge on the enemy and on civilians linked in some way to the enemy. Even those European and North American armies that officially profess to be above such things, have been guilty of that much and more in the endless sequence of wars over the decades.

But whatever good the Police and Armed Forces do, and whatever they suffer because of it, is drowned out by the ocean of negative effects accruing from the lack of institutional, systemic and operational reform. Whether this particular video is real or not, the Army and Police are sorely in need of dramatic reform and transformation.

The tactics, methods and rules of engagement of our uniformed services are the same as they were during the colonial days. The British imperialists created the nascent army and police to "pacify" the country; first to impose their rule and later to preserve it. A key principle in this process was "Collective Punishment". If a few youths from a particular village dared fight the colonial order, the colonial authorities imposed punishment on the entire village from which the youths emerged. Collective punishment was not invented by the colonial-era British government; it is as old as humanity. But the British are important in the Nigerian context because they created the proto-army (and proto-police) that would eventually (on Independence) be placed under the command of Nigerians as the Nigerian Armed Forces. And from the very beginning, this colonial army of Nigeria (predecessor of today's Armed Forces) was created to impose and sustain colonial government by force, against the will of the people, and by enforcing collective (and other) punishments on the people until the people's will was broken and colonial rule was secure. Indeed, collective punishment began before the colonial era proper -- I have read an account of three towns (including Asaba) attacked and destroyed by British ships in the pre-colonial period as punishment for not finding and handing over men (allegedly from the area) who had attacked British commercial interests.

The principle of collective punishment should have been banished from Army doctrine after Independence, but it was not. From the 1960s onward, the practice of striking at entire communities, as punshiment for the crimes of particular individuals from those communities, continued. And in the last ten years, there have been incidents in Odi, Choba, in Zaki-Biam , Afahakpo-Enwang, Okene, Abala, and elsewhere -- incidents where police or soldiers took revenge on entire communities after their colleague(s) was(were) killed (or in one case robbed) by unidentified "youths" allegedly from the respective towns.

Alongside this trend of collective punishment is another trend -- excessive force.

Like I said, I do NOT hate the Armed Forces, and as someone who wants to see the Nigerian military transformed into the protective force we the citizens have always wanted (and deserved), I have to say that the training and equipment of our defence forces are both ... inadequate. The inadequacy of training and equipment compel our officers and soldiers to adopt the safest method of attack under the circumstances, which is to obliterate everything in their path, buildings and people alike, with neither precision, nor discrimination nor discretion. The idea is one way or the other, when the dust settles, the enemy will be somewhere under the rubble -- along with anything and anyone else in a given radius around where the army surmises the enemy to be. As far as the doctrine is concerned (and in a context where collective punishment is still practiced), if you were "innocent" you shouldn't have been anywhere in the vicinity of the enemy in the first place, so if you die, you are just another "sympathizer" to them.

I could be wrong, but I believe if you sit down and talk to the officers and men of the Armed Forces, and they were honest (for once), they would admit to their lack of any ability to mount more precise offensive or defensive operations. Nigerian soldiers have died in Darfur (and before then in the Mano River region), because of it. Those soldiers in Darfur came under attack, and we had no way to provide them with air support, no way to supply them through logistics (they basically fought bravely, until they ran out of ammunition), in fact if one were to seriously study our military deployments, one would be angry at a series of governments that continues to deploy the military with abandon, careless of the fact that it is putting them at risk without giving them the things they need to mitigate risk.

But again, this leads to towns in Nigeria getting more destroyed than is strictly necessary in situations that should be mere police operations (armed response task forces, called SWAT in one country), or at worst military intelligence operations backed up by special forces. The police have no systemic or institutional capacity to handle the police operations, and we keep having to call in the army to deal with "communal violence" and the like, which means the violence of rioting youths gets countered by the excessive violence of the army. And the lack of real intelligence gathering, sensible policy-making at the political level, and conflicts of interest between leaders who serve Nigeria by day and destroy Nigeria at night, mean we are constantly faced with anything from Maitatsine to MEND within our borders, meaning the Armed Forces have to defend Nigeria from Nigerians rather than focus on defending Nigeria from outside forces. Add to this the fact that the army and police continue to defend governments Nigerians do not want against Nigeria's people, and you get a conundrum that we have yet to resolve.

You might think I am digressing from the initial point about an extra-judicial murder in the Niger-Delta, but I am not. If you want to stop things like this happening, you have to go to the source. We have to change the input, if we want to change the output. If we were to find the soldiers responsible for this crime, and prosecute them, it would not stop this happening again, and again, and again. And most of the time there is no video, no evidence other than eye witnesses who will be scared and intimidated, and the victim who will be painted as the aggressor by senior officers who always defend their men, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of what the men have done.

The Armed Forces and Police are in need of SERIOUS reform and transformation. We won't get to that point without political reform and transformation, because our political class as currently constituted has a vested interest in keeping law enforcement as weak as possible -- and in ensuring that the army protects them (the political class) rather than protects the people against the political class.

On Nigeria and the Niger-Delta

So much effort is being made in the international media and (sadly) in the Nigerian media as well to cast the issues and problems of the Niger-Delta in a special categorty. They characterize the people of the Niger-Delta as a separate, oppressed minority suffering under the jackboot of the rest of Nigeria. In some cases (particularly in the Nigerian media) they imply or bluntly statee that the jackboot in question is worn by only a section of the country.

In truth the problems of the Niger-Delta, and (more importantly) the solutions to those problems, are linked to the broader problems and solutions of the entire federal republic.

Take environmental degradation.

Nigeria, all of Nigeria, for DECADES paid no attention at all to environmental degradation, not just in the Niger-Delta but EVERYWHERE in the country. Gulley erosion ate some states, the Atlantic ocean ate other states, and desertification ate other states. Industrial and household waste was dumped anywhere, in rivers, drainage channels, fields, anywhere.

The problem of oil pollution in the Niger-Delta did not arise because successive Nigerian government did not care about the Niger-Delta. It arose because these governments did not care about the environment of Nigeria, of any part of Nigeria.

But why blame the government? Environmental protection is one of those things that all we Nigerians agree on in principle, honourable things that nevertheless have so much less impact on our practical politics than senseless things like ethnic and religious fault-lines. It is not for nothing that even the pollution in the Niger-Delta is given a regionalist, divisionist interpretation -- it is "marginalization" and "discrimination", not simple failure in policy-making, policy enforcement, governance and prioritization.

Indeed, this is why we never solve any problem. The moment the problem is raised, it is given divisionist colouration, and instantly large sections of the citizenry disengage themselves, because the agitation is seen as being directly (and belligerently) aimed at them, even when the problem in question is shared by all.

We often discuss the issue of almajiri begging on the streets of northern cities as if it were some sort of ethno-religious issue. The fact that some of these young people turn to robbery (disguised as "religious riot") to feed themselves is also given an ethno-religious interpretation.

I don't understand it. Do we care about our children? Or is that another thing we ostensibly agree on, but do little about?

It isn't an "almajiri" issue to begin with.

Poverty makes parents do strange things.

We have children, all over the country, who are given out as househelps at a very young age, when they should be with their families and in school. A lot of laws in Nigeria are either not enforced, or are enforced so selectively and/or rarely as to be practically unenforced, and these children who work as maids and manservants have little or no protection under the law, not even from sexual abuse by the men (father and sons) of the respective families they work for. In other parts of the world, this sort of work (maid, cook, babysitter, butler, manservant) are paying jobs that adults use to feed their children; in Nigeria it is the children doing these jobs to feed their parents. Other children risk their health digging through rubbish dumps, looking for odds and ends that could be sold to buy their daily bread. Some kids risk their lives on busy expressways selling consumer goods to drivers. Children (and "youths") pour sand into pot-holes on major roads and set up road blocks to collect extra-legal tolls from passing vehicles. And famously in Akwa Ibom, some children were brutalized and abandoned by their families because some pastor claimed they were witches (a convenient excuse for getting rid of an extra mouth if you cannot afford to feed the child anyway).

I don't want to go into the whole laundry list of children's issues that we all think about, we all talk about, we all agree on, but which are not as interesting to us in a active sense as ethno-religious quarelling. What is more important to note is that even though we as a people are religiously, traditionally and culturally inclined to care about our fellow citizens, in practice we allow a lot of things to happen on a daily basis that run contrary to everything we profess to believe. Sometimes (and this is the shocker) we actually argue in defence of these things.

Certain state governments have promulgated Sharia Law. Fine, no problem. Now what would be wrong with these states providing food to Islamic schools, so the children do not have to go out into the streets to beg and/or steal? If the state does not have enough money in the budget to do this, perhaps they should cut some of their many unnecessary expenses, and move to increase tax-generating economic activity in their states. Increasing economic activity would increase employment (a beneficial side-effect), make it easier for parents to afford to feed their children (another beneficial side-effect), and thus lower the governments' bill for feeding children in Islamic (and General Knowledge) schools. But rather than do this, these leaders spend their time explaining to anyone who would listen why it is okay for them to show no concern whatsoever for the welfare of the children of their states.

Which brings me back to my point.

There are a lot of things we profess to care about in Nigeria. But in practical terms nothing is actually done to improve those things.

Much of the "neglect" of the Niger-Delta is the same "neglect" that every part of Nigeria suffers. The children are neglected. All seven ethno-cultural regions of the country have suffered neglect. All major cities, with the exception of Abuja, have suffered neglect.

I have made blog posts in the past about the weaknesses in our system of healthcare. It too is neglected.

I have posted about our weak infrastructure. It too is neglected.

These things are neglected EVERYWHERE in Nigeria.

And then there is the absence of substantive democracy and of a restructured administrative map. These two are the most important missing ingredients, because without them, we the people have no avenue to force OUR priorities on the government, and even if we could, without a more fiscally sensible administrative map (7 states, 84 districts) there would be little effective our federating administrative units could do.

The Niger-Delta (like the rest of Nigeria) has not been able to use its votes to be heard, through elections. They have not been able to create regional/state governments staffed by leaders who have the ability to tackle area problems. They have not been able to make Abuja listen for 50 years. The Fourth Republic is no different, as the rigging done in the Niger-Delta over the last ten years is worse than in the rest of the country (bar Anambra). A party the people of the Niger-Delta hate (the Peoples Democratic Party), somehow manages to win huge majorities come election time. I mean, the people have made it crystal clear they do not think the PDP governments are doing the right thing in the Delta region,, yet the Independent National Electoral Commission would have us believe the people are returning local and national PDP governments by large majorities?

Still, as stated earlier, this is not so much a "Niger-Delta" problem, as it is a national problem. The problem cannot be solved in the Delta alone; if there is cancer in the body and you cut out only a small part of it, the whole body remains at risk. It is simply not humanly possible to create a functioning, responsive-to-the-people democracy in one corner of Nigeria while the rest of country remains undemocratic.

And please don't give me any bull about secession. Gabon is a small, oil-rich country of about a million and a half people, and it is as undemocratic and corrupt as Nigeria. Oil-rich Congo-Brazzaville is even worse, and Equatorial Guinea (land of the bloody purges, monarchic/dynastic family rule and mega-corruption) makes Nigeria seem like a textbook democracy by comparison. Somalia, a country made up of people from one ethnic group and one religion, makes Equatorial Guinea look like a textbook republic. Yes, Botswana is doing well, but with all due respect, the politicians of the Niger-Delta are no different from their rest-of-Nigeria counterparts (or of their counterparts in the other Gulf of Guinea oil states).

We have to tackle this problem directly, rather than deceiving ourselves with divisionist rhetoric. We Nigerians have to tackle this problem together, because if we are apart, the politicians, militicians and plutocrats will continue to win. You can crush a small group of people agitating for something, provided everyone else stands off and looks the other way. What you cannot do is crush EVERYBODY. It just isn't possible.

The people whose decisions have a disproportionately large impact on the rest of us in Nigeria, are in fact a tiny micro-minority. They appear to be powerful because they act without opposition. We the people are too busy quarreling with each other, and at times lining up behind the decision-makers like sheep while they claim to be shepherds protecting us from each other.

Casting the Niger-Delta issue as if it was a unique situation, or as if they were an oppressed minority suffering abuse from the rest of the country, plays into the hands of the very political system that ignored the Delta region for so long in the first place.

No heroes in politics

I am interested in foreign countries' politics only insofar as it affects their political and economic policies towards Nigeria and Africa. The truth is their basic policies do not change. There is a lot of change in the wrapping paper, but the "gift" remains the same. The funny thing is they tend to criticize each others' policies towards Africa, which is amusing because all of their policies are the same.

This works for them. It serves their interests.

My abiding focus is on figuring out how Nigeria and its African neighbours can start to achieve our own interests.

In most countries in Africa, the opposition complain that the government suppresses democratic freedoms. Funnily enough, when the government and opposition switch places, the erstwhile opposition do exactly the same things the former government did, and the former government (now opposition) starts to whine about democracy and demanding all the things they refused to do when they were in government.

Africa is not alone in this.

All over the world, the different factions in the political world are more similar to each other than they are different. Whether the SPD or CSU wins in Germany, the country will be as it was, and as it will be. Whether the Democrats or Republicans win in the USA, life continues for most Americans as it did before and as it will. The truly important things are usually out of the reach of the politicians anyway. Or more accurately, politicians tend to do nothing about the important things until some sort of crisis forces them to act. And when they do act, they do the same things.

This works for them, but it does not work for us.

Nigeria (and Africa) need a radical paradigm shift in the political, economic and social spheres. And business-as-usual tennis matches, where different factions of the same system pass power back and forth between themselves is not going to get us there.

Most Nigerians have a political hero or two, or even several.

Most Nigerians have a person or persons they believe were great leaders, or the greatest leader that ever lived.

Many of these heroes, dare I say most (or all) of them, appeal to specific sections of the country, and are either (at best) respected abstractly in other sections, or (at worst) distrusted, feared, disliked or hated in other sections (at worst). The reaction of most of the country to the annulment of the 1993 elections is a case in point; even people who ostensibly voted for the late Moshood Abiola could not be bothered to fight for his mandate. Ultimately they gave him their vote because the only other option allowed them was Bashir Tofa; truth be told, these voters probably wanted (and trusted) neither one of them particularly much.

I have always been politically neutral. There is no point supporting the opposition when they would be no different from the sitting government.

Still, I have felt the need to act. I have felt that need since the Second Republic. I was a child then, but even then I knew that it did not make any sense.

Igbos were supposed to vote for NPP because it was the Igbo Party. Yorubas were supposed to vote for UPN because it was the Yoruba Party. Hausas, Fulanis and sections of the Middle Belt were supposed to vote for NPN because it was the NPC reborn (actually, it was the precursor of the NRC, the SDP, the UNCP and the PDP, but that is another story). Other sections of the Middle Belt (the ones that supported the UMBC in the First Republic) were supposed to vote NPP, in a sort of resurrection of the First Republic's All Progressive Grand Alliance, while the people of Kano (who backed NEPU the first time around) were supposed to back the PRP this time around. And the people of the Niger-Delta were supposed to vote NPN as a bulwark against the NPP, for reasons that also dated back to the First Republic. The new kids on the block were the GNPP, whom you were supposed to back if you were from Borno or certain parts of Gongola.

Notice how nothing above had anything to do with policies, ideologies or even a sense of what the federal social contract should be. There was nobody offering a definition of what the federal republic was, what it should be, with an explanation of how we were meant to get there.

Just a bunch of ethno-regional rubbish, masked under pleasant-sounding words and phrases.

I have wanted to be active in politics ever since then, not for any personal ambition, but because I felt (even as a child) that SOMEBODY had to offer something else, something different, something that gave our people a choice.

Too much of our politics does not make sense. From as far back as the 1950s, we have been fighting each other over the wrong things, and neglecting the important things.

I do not support any of the existing political factions. If you read through this blog from the first post to the last post, you will see that I do not discriminate in my critiques on ethnic, regional or religious bases.

Nevertheless, writing critical essays does not really achieve anything. If you want change to happen, you have to create change. You must work for it, sweat blood for it, and if necessary suffer for it.

I came very, very, very close to joining the Nigeria Rally Movement. I might still join in the next few months. I have to think about it. Sometimes things sound like they are what you are looking for, but until you really get to know the things in question you can never tell. I did exchange emails with one of their leaders. It sounds good, but we will see.

What I am trying to say is, if you see me criticizing your own particular political hero, please do not think I am doing it in support of your hero's rival. Odds are I have the same opinion of your hero's rival as I do of your hero.

Oh, and check out the NRM website. If you like what you see, join them.

I might.

I might not.

FIFA changes the rules

Across the world, more and more people are eligible at birth for the citizenships of more than one country. It used to be if a player featured at any level for a national team of one of the countries he was eligible for, he was locked into playing for that country at the international level forever. Well, not forever, but you get the drift.

The rule was changed, to allow players eligible for more than one citizenship at the time they first donned a junior international jersey to switch, but only once, only if they had never featured for the full senior national team, and only before their 21st birthday. You could play for the Under-17s or Under-21s and still be eligible to switch, provided you did so before your 21st birthday. After you hit 21, you could not change your international allegiance.

This week comes news that FIFA has changed the rule again, taking off the age-limit. Now, provided you have not played for the full senior team, and were eligible for the alternate choice from the start, you can switch your allegiance (only once) at any age (I have seen one source that said the new limit is your 28th birthday, but most sources say there is no limit.

I want Nigeria to develop a programme for developing players in Nigeria. I also want us to start thinking of making our domestic league financially competitive with the biggest leagues in the world (admittedly this is impossible without our broader economy, GDP and GDP/per capita, growing to rival the biggest in size, but then rapid economic growth is a national priority in and of itself).

I am a traditionalist. I believe a Nigerian is a Nigerian regardless of where he is born, and I want the children born in the Diaspora to grow up proud of their Nigerian heritage and identity; and whatever other citizenship documents they may hold, I want them to seek the Nigerian passport as well.

In this vein, I would like our embassies to have an official (no more than one) who's job is to keep in touch with potential sporting stars among the young Diaspora. I don't mean waiting until they are stars, and then trying to claim somebody when we contributed nothing to their development. No, I mean being there from the start. The embassies should look after our citizens, and the parents of every Nigerian child outside our borders (even those who will not become sportsmen) should feel the protective umbrella of the nearest embassy. Indeed, the embassy should be at the heart of the socio-cultural life of our citizen communities abroad.

But specific to sports, we need to have the best Nigerian athletes, born anywhere, proudly representing the federal republic at the highest level. I want us to run successful sports programmes that any athlete would want to be a part of. I want to see sporting teams of Nigerians of various ethnic, regional, religious and "birth place" backgrounds working together as a unit to achieve sportiing success.

Is this not what Nigeria is? A union of differing peoples, united for common advancement and achievement?

We have not really done any of this.

Still, there are young sportsmen and sportswomen of the Diaspora, who could be very important to Nigeria as we seek to climb to the zenith of world sports. As many of them as can be persuaded to don our colours, should be welcomed "home".

The FIFA rule change opens the doors for us to talk to, perhaps even persuade a handful of footballers who have only recently crossed the old age-limit threshold. We do not have to try too hard. If they say no, we can let it go.

But let us at least try, if for no other reason than to convey to them (and to the broader Diaspora) that we recognize them as our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters.

That we do not think of them as "foreigners".

Football and the Olympics

So, Jacques Rogge, the head of the International Olympic Committee has warned that if FIFA changes the eligibility rules for the Olympic Football tournament, the IOC might cut the size of the tournament (i.e. reduce the number of teams) or drop the tournament altogether because "the value of the event" (in Rogge's words) would be diminished.

The Olympics is too large and too expensive for most countries to host. Even those countries that can afford it are essentially wasting money; according to everything I have read over the years, the United States is the only country that makes a profit when it hosts the Olympics. Every other host loses money, though the IOC makes money. Frankly it is a bloated event, that should be hosted across an entire country (maybe more than one) rather than force single cities to build more (white elephant) sporting facilities than they could ever find use for in the decades after the Olympics have moved on.

You can probably guess that I am only interested in a small fraction of the sports at the Olympics. The rest of the events, the majority of the events, do not interest me at all. And I am not alone.

There are two kinds of sports.

The first group, the majority, are sports that use the brand of the Olympics to generate interest in what is essentially their most important global championship. During the Olympics, the "world" pays attention to their sport; after the Olympics, the world loses interest.

The second group are sports that are so popular they do not need the Olympic brand to validate their world championships or world champions. The three biggest sports have self-standing world championships, the FIFA World Cup, the Rugby World Cup and the Cricket World Cup. Association Football is the world's most popular sport, and I suspect most fans would give up any number of Olympic medals in any number of sports if meant their football team would win the World Cup.

In tennis, it is more important to win the Davis Cup, Fed Cup or one of the tennis majors (US Open, Aussie Open, Roland Garros and Wimbledon); the Olympic gold medal in tennis is nowhere near the top of the agenda. I don't know much about golf, but I have never heard of a golf Olympic champion, nor have I noticed any golf fans excited about such a person if he or she exists.

Basketball is different. It is a popular sport worldwide, but the Olympics might just edge the Basketball equivalent of a World Cup in significance. This is probably due to the United States, the home of basketball. Americans love the Olympics; for the average American, "world champion" at something and "Olympic champion" of the same thing are synonymous. But then the broader American public have traditionally had little interest in Football, Rugby and Cricket, the sports that prove that a single-event World Championship can be more prestigious than an Olympic medal -- and this is also the country that describes its national champions as world champions.

For those of us who follow the major world sports, the Olympics congests the calendar while providing little in the way of an explanation for the congestion.

No really, what does the Olympic medal decide in football?

We have a world champion, decided at the World Cup. We have a junior champion, decided at the World Youth Cup. And we have a school-boy or cadet world champion, decided at the Under-17 World Championships. Each of these world championships has an equivalent continental championship that decides the continental champions at each level.

So what does the Olympics decide? The Under-23 champion? Of what use is that?

I am a citizen of a country (Nigeria) that has won the Olympic gold in football (in 1996), and if given the choice, I would trade it in for an extra Nations Cup title or a World Cup title. I don't know what the Olympic gold signifies. We were not the African champion, and we were not the World Champion. It was just another age-restricted trophy.

We endanger the health of football players, and the commercial viability of football (scarcity is value) by forcing our star players to play far too many matches every year, without rest. They don't rest. In the off-season, they are playing friendlies, qualifiers, continental championships and the World Cup.

There is fault on the club end too. The biggest example of unnecessary fixture congestion is the UEFA Champions League. It is bloated, featuring way too many unnecessary (boring) matches in the earlier phases. What used to be rare and fantastic encounters between European giants are now routine, mundane repeats of encounters we have seen several times before (particularly this year when there were nearly four English teams in the semi-finals).

In Africa, the uneccesary Championship of African Nations (CHAN) has been created. We already have the wonderful African Nations Cup, which not only crowns the undisputed champion of Africa, but also is (in my opinion anyway, as an African fan) the second-most important football tournament behind the World Cup. What is the CHAN for? We should not dilute the Nations Cup's value by crowning some sort of co-champion at the CHAN, nor do we need a new tournament restricted to players based in African domestic leagues; we already have the sub-continental championships (the CECAFA Cup, the COSAFA Cup, the Amilcar Cabral Cup, the CEMAC Cup and the Arab Nations Cup) that are contested exclusively by players based in African domestic leagues.

There is a similar story to tell elsewhere. Brazil for one could do with a simpler system of domestic football championships. All in all, football needs to be streamlined so we get quality over quantity, and to give our players time to rest between seasons.

As it stands today, FIFA does not even include the Olympics on its unified calendar, so clubs are not required to release their players for it (something Rogge complained about in the article).

If football was dropped from the Olympics, who would notice? Who would miss it?

There are too many international agencies that continue to operate in the 21st Century in ways that were outdated even in the 20th, and the administrative organs of world sport are no different. The IOC and FIFA could both do with some reform, but in a practical sense the Olympics should be downsized, made less expensive and more focussed by restricting it to those sports that need the Olympic brand. Everything else should have stand-alone World Championships, that are small enough for most countries to dream of hosting.

Still on Dredging the Niger

I want to clarify my post on dredging the Niger.

It is not the absolute cost of the project that worries me. I suppose my beef has more to do with the opportunity cost of every Naira spent on the project.

Public services like healthcare and education are obviously important, and I do not mean to neglect them, but our economic growth has long been stymied by our inadequate infrastructure. And it is economic growth (and growth in the disposable income of our citizens) that will pay for public services, and for individual and family access to private health insurance. We cannot get this growth without infrastructure that supports rapid economic development.

In this context, revamping the railway system is a MASSIVE priority. The only things I would rate higher on the infrastructure priority scale would be:

(a) Raising our electricity generation from below 6,000 megawatts to at least 200,000 megawatts if not more. I don't know what a Nigeria operating at maximum potential would require, since it has never happened, but it bothers me that we have been talking for years, decades, about rasing our generation to 10,000 megawatts, when it is clear that 40,000 is insufficient for South Africa (with 33% of our population, and 500% of our per capita income) and they are not operating on maximum potential either! For the record, this counts only electricity generated by entities like PHCN and Eskom, and not the electricity produced by private generators and in-house production by large and small corporations in both countries, but it is enough to surmise that 150,000 megawatts would be barely sufficient to support a Nigeria operating at South African levels of output.

(b) Water. Having individual citizens, firms and corporations randomly sinking boreholes into the ground all over the country does not strike me as a sensible way to manage scarce water resources. I have heard of no concrete plans advanced by any of the major political parties in 1999, 2003 and 2007 for the management, collection, processing and distribution of water on a federal-scale for our urban and rural communities. There are assorted World Bank-backed projects here and there, but our federal republic needs a coordinated approach to an already serious problem that will become even more important going forward.

The above two priorities will require a LOT of investment, public and private, and we do not currently have access to the requisite funding. Added to these two, we must also prioritize the rail system (and the federal inter-city expressways) and we don't necessarily have access to the funds to do that properly either.

We have a couple of state plans (light rail in Cross River and Lagos State), and a federal plan that seems to consist of a Lagos-Kano line that passes through Abuja (or a separate Lagos-Abuja line, hard to tell) and a Port Harcourt-Maiduguri line as mentioned by Presiden Yar'Adua in his 25-page Guardian inteview.

Now if you are the British colonialists, seeking only to export resources to the coast, the federal plan would work for you; and if you have a simplistic view of Nigeria's economic future, the federal plan would work for you too. But if you have an ambitious understanding of the internal economic inter-dependence of the federal republic, and how this inter-dependence can be used to create internal chains of production, and how these chains could create an entirely different type of international trade for the federal republic -- well, then the federal plan is not good enough. The rail system we need desperately is a lot more complex (and hence more expensive) than that. We need it not only to support autochthonous economic development, but to take some of the pressure (and congestion and risk of accidents) of off our inter-city expressways. And if we are serious about protecting vital national resources like the vast Gashaka-Gumpti Reserve, we would have to invest in elevated lines across sensitive areas.

The state plans are interesting in and of themselves, but we risk duplicating costs if the state plans ultimately are incongruent with the eventually improved (I hope) federal plan. Indeed, there is something strange about deciding on the placement of municipal airports, inter-city bus depots, putative inland ports, export promotion zones, and major industrial development projects without first answering the question of where we can and cannot feasibly build, renovate or add a spur or main line of a pan-federal railway system.

My criticism of the spending on dredging the Naira is tied to the fact that I would rather we consolidated what funds (public and private) we have to attack the problem of the pan-federal railway system first. I don't care so much what the absolute cost of the dredging is -- whatever it is, I would rather those funds were first committed to the railways. My point is further buttressed by the fact that once the railways are where they need to be, there will actually be no need to dredge the Niger as intra-Nigerian transportation would be on a solid footing (six inland ports simply do not achieve anywhere near as much in internal and external transport as an effective pan-federal rail system). With proper planning, we could have rail access to the ports of Douala, Porto Novo, Cotonou and perhaps even Accra and Abidjan.

By the way, could someone direct me to the environmental impact study vis-a-vis the Niger Delta? The construction of the Kainji Dam denied the many islands of the Delta their natural source of silt, the earth of which they are made and with which they are sustained. Combined with the rising oceans, many islands were reported to have lost territory to the sea. The loss of territory in Lagos gets more media coverage, but the issue exists in the Niger Delta too.

Sometime soon, we have to ask ourselves questions about how to protect Lagos and the Niger Delta from ocean erosion, how to protect the states created from the defunct "East-Central State" from gulley erosion, and how to protect Niger Republic (which is a climate buffer between our northern frontier and the Sahara Desert) from the southward march of the arid and semi-arid climate zones. These goals will require better understanding of the region of the natural world in which we find ourselves, as well as the political will and access to funding necessary to do whatever is necessary.

It just seems strange to me that everything important is on hold, while we commit scarce funds to dredging the River Niger.

Reflections on June 12

The 1993 elections were contested by two government-manufactured parties. We the people did not create or choose these parties. They were imposed on us by the Babangida diarchy. These were the parties they wanted.

After the diarchy disqualified all of the presidential candidates they did not want, the two prefabricated parties presented Nigerians with a choice between two men. We the people did not choose these candidates. More importantly, we did not have the option of selecting other options, other possibilities that we perhaps would have considered to be superior choices.

We the people were force-fed a choice between two men, in an election that resembled a professional wrestling promotion.

For those of you who have never watched professional wrestling, there are two types of matches. The best-known type of matches are marquee events between two stars. But the most numerous type of matches are "enhancement" matches, which usually feature a star or future star against a nobody; the promoter (i.e. the owner of the company) books the nobody in the match for the specific purpose of having him lose to the star in a way that makes the star look magnificent. Often, the nobody is someone you have never heard of before and will never hear of afterward.

Bashir Tofa was nobody. Not literally, of course, but politically he was a void, a vacuum. He was not even a power in his own home state (it would not surprise me if indigenes of his state had never heard of him before -- I certainly hadn't). Tofa's elevation to the role of presidential candidate, in the context of the heavily government-managed 1993 polls, must raise suspicions that he was a Barry Horowitz or Brooklyn Brawler booked to lose to an Andre the Giant (RIP) or Ric Flair.

The late Moshood Abiola was a man of the system, a dear friend of erstwhile regime head Ibrahim Babangida. There are allegations that Abiola helped fund the 1983 and 1985 coups, and that his newspapers provided propaganda and public relations support for both actions. He definitely garnered great wealth was a key figure in the diarchies of the 1970s, in the Second Republic, and in the diarchies of the 1980s and early 1990s. He was a man of the system. It would not surprise me if his dear friend had manipulated the system to ensure a particular outcome; most of the big names of Nigerian (wuruwuru) politics got the message and did not run, but Babangida certainly disqualified anyone who wanted to run that could have posed a challenge to the desired outcome.

On occasion, the men and women of the system do fight each other for control of the system's levers. Sometimes (too frequently in Nigeria) they even kill each other.

But whomever wins, the system continues.

It is the same everywhere in the world. There may be cosmetic changes here and there when an opposition party replaces a governing party, but the underlying dynamics of the country's social, political and economic life do not change. This is okay in wealthier climes, but it is unfortunate for African countries because we rather strongly need tranformative change and reform. Unfortunately, what we get in Africa is "opposition" politicians complaining about the government, and then doing the same thing themselves after they replace the governing party.

Indeed, "opposition" leaders want to capture the undemocratic, unbound, unchecked and unbalanced powers of the government for themselves, rather than reform and change the system. And to be honest, the leaders of the fight against colonialism ultimately held onto to the colonial government's supreme, unaccountable, de facto dictatorial powers. Colonial governments did not permit such niceties as democratic elections influence their decision-making or their exercise of power; post-colonial regimes were just as disinterested in the democratic voices of the people. The colonial governors perceived themselves as knowing better than the black people they governed; post-colonial leaders, many of whom were in politics strictly because they were part of the well-educated minority in their countries, felt the same way about the people they led.

But I digress.

The fight between the late Sani Abacha and the late Moshood Abiola over which one of them was supposed to succeed their mutual friend Ibrahim Babangida, was real. Power was at stake, and Babangida probably made promises to both of them; they were both influential in bringing Babangida to power in the first place, and had both profited from their friendship with him.

It was a real fight

But it was not a fight about changing the basic nature, structure and function of the Nigerian Federal Republic. Like every fake election and every military coup, it was a fight of "man of the system" against "man of the system".

At some level I think Nigerians know this. There is a reason for the public apathy towards coups and fake elections. Regular Nigerian citizens do not want to die on behalf of any of the putative winners or losers of the coups and rigged polls. None of them is who we really want anyway, none of them would even have been candidates if we had had our way, and none of them offer us anything in the way of policies or possibilities that are worth fighting for or dying for.

As for the politicians (and militicians), well they know the score, don't they? Tom Ikimi and Baba Gana Kingibe were the leaders of the two 1993 political parties, and they jumped ship to become ministers in the Abacha government. Except they didn't really "jump ship" did they? Both parties were part of the same system as the Babangida and Abacha regimes, as was the election itself and the abortive Third Republic. Ikimi and Kingibe simply moved from one functionality within the diarchy to another.

Loyalists do exist, people who fight on for particular Big Men. These loyalists are either Big Men themselves (with a stake in the results) or are the sort of "youths" who, since the before the First Republic, have been ever-willing to fight (literally) for an ethnic kinsman, a co-religionist or a moneybag.

It is never really about the principles of transformation and structural reform.

Many of the men who fought the longest for the late Moshood Abiola's mandate turned around to give their support in 2003 to then-President Olusegun Obasanjo, a man who supported the annulment of the 1993 elections. And after years of supposedly campaigning for democracy, they support a man who was the face of a Peoples Democratic Party machine that revels in subverting and thwarting democracy.

And it is not just an Abiola thing. Supporters of retired General Mohammedu Buhari have also abandoned him, after years of allegedly advocating "democracy" in the face of Obasanjo's often unconstitutional behaviour.

Let us be honest.

Obasanjo satisfied something that the erstwhile pro-Abiola group wanted, and Yar'Adua satisfied something the erstwhile pro-Buhari faction wanted. And we all know what that something is, and we know it has nothing to do with transformation and structural reform, or to do with any policies or ideologies or principles. It is ethnic in nature, isn't it?

And if we are going to keep the spirit of honesty alive, let us admit that part of the apathy (and outright hostility) towards Abiola's mandate in the third leg of the old tripod was just as ethnic-driven. The tripod still works the same way it always has; when two legs gang up on the third, the third loses.

But that is what happens in a country where politicians stand for nothing and offer nothing. Almost the only thing that differentiates them from each other is their ethnicity, their religion, and whether they are ex-army officers or life-long civilians. Other than that, they are mostly the same and would do the same things if placed in office.

The politicians themselves recognize this. Initially, they used their ethnic, regional and religious differences as the basis of mobilizing support. After the Civil War showed the dangers of doing that, we moved into a different era. One of these days, an intelligent researcher needs to write a series of books detailing how Nigerian politics moved from the disaster of the Civil War to the hegemony (for now) of the Peoples Democratic Party. The irony is the late Moshood Abiola was part of that process, though he was consumed by it, as were so many others.

But it isn't just the Big Men. We the people are the same.

Any number of intellectuals, commentators, etc, from any and every corner of the country, have the fascinating ability to massively criticize a regime, demanding accountability, transparency and democracy, only to turn around and become cheerleaders for the regime (or another regime exactly like the one they criticized) because of some perceived advantage for themselves (appointment to a cushy job) or for their socio-cultural groups. We the people cannot criticize our leaders because we do the same thing; in my own ancestral village, the people acquiesced in a game of deception by the former governor of the state, to allow him to claim to have built schools in the area (in his list of accomplishments) even though the schools in question were standing in the colonial days -- my townspeople did this because the governor appointed one of "our sons" to high office.

This is part of the reason why the broader public, 140-million-strong, do not stand up to fight the political battles of any politician. We know that he or she is as likely to turn around and cut a deal with the person who was supposedly the mortal enemy just two seconds ago. We will die, and die, and die, and then (like Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga) the people we were fighting for will shake hands and continue to enjoy their positions atop society.

June 12, 1993 is one of the important in our shared history. But we tend to draw the wrong lessions from our important days, and ascribe to them the wrong reasons for significance.

These are days when one faction of the system gained the upper hand over other factions of the system. Advantage, no matter how long it lasts, is always temporary.

And advantage, no matter which faction holds it, does nothing to break the federal republic free from the constraints that keep us from achieving our full potential.

I do not think we will see real change until a date in the future -- when we choose a new system to replace the one we have now.

Dredging the Niger?

The federal government is proceeding with a long-mooted plan to dredge the River Niger.

Dredging the Niger has been talked about for years, usually by people who argue that creating a port at Onitsha would spare businessmen based there the delays of waiting for goods to first clear the ports at Lagos and Port Harcourt (Delay One), and then be transported on our roads that will never be confused for autobahns (Delay Two). The ethno-regional question was also brought up directly or alluded to indirectly, with certain individuals alleging both the delays, the lack of an Onitsha Port, and the placement of Port Harcourt in Rivers State were all part of some nefarious plan to punish a particular ethnic group.

More recently (relatively speaking), there have been new voices calling for the Niger to be dredged all the way up to Abuja, and for the creation of an Abuja Port. Similar arguments are made for the Abuja Port as are made for the Onitsha Port. Similar ethnic innuendo is indirectly alluded to (by proponents and opponents, who feel this will be a port that belongs to a certain ethnic nationality, who will no longer be dependent on ports where they are allegedly discriminated against). And to top it off, those who believe that the national political capital must also be the national commercial/economic capital feel Abuja must have a port (and a stock exchange, and etc).

In this 25-page interview with The Guardian, President Yar'Adua reveals that the plan (presumably devised after years of discussion and debate that preceded his administration) is to create SEVEN inland ports. He did not mention specific cities, but if seven new ports are to be created, it is highly likely both Abuja and Onitsha are on the list (and if Onitsha isn't, there will be another avoidable political crisis).

Before I talk about the dredging, let me talk about the cities in question.

I love Abuja. The decision to move the political capital to Abuja is one of the few decisions made since 1960 that I wholeheartedly agree with. With that said, we have done a poor job of handling the transition. I do not think the planners have a clear idea of what Abuja is and what Abuja should be. For one thing, it should not (and will not) replace Lagos as the commercial/economic capital (I love Lagos too), but I don't want to digress too far off the subject of this post (except to add that the much-praised Nasir El-Rufai's robotic attachment to an outdated city plan should perhaps not be as praised as it is -- it is long past time for us to rethink Abuja, before events move beyond our control).

I love Onitsha. The city went through a period where it was basically abandoned, and became possibly the dirtiest place I had ever seen. Its been a while since I last passed through, and I really hope things have changed for the better. In a way, cities like Onitsha, Ibadan and Enugu have been affected in the post-1960 era by the rise to prominence of other cities that do the sort of things that these cities used to be the hubs for. Still, Onitsha sits at the heart of a productive industrial region (on both sides of the Niger) that has not yet begun to scratch the surface of its full potential. Infrastructure improvements would definitely help unleash some of that potential.

Now, having honestly expressed my affection for these cities, I have to say: Dredging the River Niger is a bad idea.

While Nigerian public opinion continues to see the federal republic as a rich country that spends its money poorly, the truth is the Federal Republic of Nigeria is not a rich country. Our resources and productive capacity have been insufficient to meet our needs and requirements. This has always been true, and we have always needed to be judicious with our spending (unfortunately, we never were), but it is even more important to note this truth in the current economic climate.

President Yar'Adua acknowledges this. In the 25-page intervies, he spoke of having to cut back on grandiose schemes started by the Obasanjo administration because the federal government did not have enough money to pay for all of the schemes. He proposed cutting the pay of (faux) elected and appointed political officials. Yar'Adua also (sensibly in my opinion) asked the National Assembly to revise the 2009 Federal Budget downward, because the revenue projections on which it was based are unrealistic in the light of changes to the world economy (read: the price of crude oil). Last I checked, the President was still wrestling with the Assembly on the budget revision; it seems some legislators are concerned that the President will cut unnecessary spending on constituency projects with which they buy cheap, temporary popularity, so they have challenged him to implement the budget they passed (and he signed) or take them to court to force the revision.

Where we are right now fiscally (and where we have been since BEFORE regaining self-government in 1960) is a place where you have to prioritize and make choices, because you cannot do everything. YES, it is important to unleash the potential power of Onitsha, and YES it is important to link Abuja to the Atlantic. And the other five potential ports are probably also places that could benefit from arterial linkages to the sea.

But we already have a plan for this -- the plan to expand the railway lines.

President Yar'Adua mentioned these plans as well in the interview. I am not sure I agree with the plan (as he described it), and perhaps in that disagreement lies the root of my disagreement with the dredging of the Niger.

If we properly design our new railroad system, it would connect Onitsha and Abuja to the coastal ports. It would also connect both cities to every other major citiy in Nigeria. This second set of connections is important, particularly for Onitsha. With a port, they can bring in their goods. With pan-Nigerian rail-line, they can bring in their goods, and efficiently send those goods to buyers across Nigeria; indeed, Onitsha could actually come to buy more of its merchandise from producers in the rest of Nigeria instead of bringing in imports, because transportation and electricity/power are two infrastructure areas that could dramatically decrease the cost of manufacturing in Nigeria (indeed, it is rather weird that we are proposing to spend so much money on dredging, mainly to facilitate imports of consumer goods for the Onitsha market and the Abuja power elite).

But here is the thing, why should we, a country that does not really have enough money to fix all its problems, spend money on BOTH? The rail line basically fixes the problem that the inland ports are supposed to fix, and has the benefit of doing so much more than that as well. So why not focus all of our scarce funds on expanding and renovating the rail lines, which kills multiple birds with one stone, instead of expending some of it dredging the Niger? However much it is we save, would it not be better to add that many more kilometres of track rather than have to wait that much longer to expand the lines? For those who think "constituency projects" are important, bear in mind EVERY CONSTITUENCY in Nigeria stands to benefit from the economic efficiencies that could be introduced with a real railway network that is appropriate to the Federal Republic's needs (as opposed to being appropriate to the needs of the British colonial government in a time long since passed).

We have to prioritize the rail network -- and electricity -- which should mean that these get frontline consideration for spending our scarce public funds.

You might say the existing ports have only limited capacity, even with as much drastic expansion as is geographically possible, but even then it would be cheaper to encourage outside (as in NOT the Nigerian government) investment in expanding the facilities at Douala, Cotonou-Porto Novo, and even as far afield as Takoradi-Sekondi, and then creating road or rail links between those ports and the Nigerian rail grid. Remember this links go both ways, allowing us to export to these countries, even as their ports ease the congestion in ours. And we do not have to pay for the expansion; I am sure they would be keen to exploit our market, and would either do it themselves or open it up to private investors, some of whom could be Nigerian entrepreneurs or consolidated Nigerian banks. I daresay the competitive and comparative advantages of the seven proposed inland ports lie elsewhere, in economic territory that would more easily be unleashed by rail-links that could bind them (and other cities in Nigeria) into integrated production networks.

Why pay twice for something we could pay for once, while achieving a more efficient and effective outcome?

I don't really blame the government, because they are being pushed by influential segments of the citizenry, who have embraced dredging the Niger almost like a new religion. The odd thing about it is these so-called inland ports cannot possibly achieve their touted objectives without an improved national rail and road network, yet we would not even be thinking about the inland ports if we had the rail and road network we needed.

Presidency says "No" to narrowed focus

The Guardian published this report on the Presidency's reaction to new CBN Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi's call to focus on two or three things that can be delivered in four years rather than trying to complete President Yar'Adua's entire Seven Point Agenda.

To make a long story short, the federal executive has no intention of "pruning" the agenda. All seven points will be accomplished, they insist. The President's spokesman pointed out (correctly in my view) that all seven points are important, so important that it would be wrong to drop any one of them.

I repeat, it was correct to say that all seven points are important to the federal republic.

However, as I pointed out in this long and rambling post, the President cannot possibly hope to achieve all seven points in one term in the current political context. Even if he were to win a second term (manipulated polls or not), his are likely to be the umpteenth set of undelivered promises from a federal leader. It is too much to do, in a political context that makes doing anything good more difficult than strictly necessary.

But there is hope. The President can make headway on all seven points (and more) but only if he prioritizes one particular thing: Geographic reform of the federal republic's our three-tier administrative structure.

We should have 7 states and 84 districts, instead of 36 states and 774 LGAs. The combined total of state assemblymen and local councillors should be 66% lower than it is today. There should be 25% fewer federal legislators in a single chamber. The “Federal Capital Territory” should be coterminous with today's Abuja Municipal Area Council, with the rest of the current FCT transferred to one of the 7 proposed states; this reduced FCT would be one of 4 "federal territories" unaffiliated to any of the 7 states.

The effect of creating bigger and stronger second-tier and third-tier federating units would be to relieve the federal government of the responsibility of doing EVERYTHING.

You see, Presiden Yar'Adua's spokesman is right. All seven points (and more) must be done and must be done now. But the federal government does not have to be responsible for doing all seven. Some of the burden can be shifted to new, stronger second- and third-tier federating units. Even things as expensive and far-reaching as heavy infrastucture can be shared more efficiently and effectively across the pyramid.

Right now, most of the LGA governments are run like the personal property of the respective State Governors, and even the few bright spots of governance at the second-tier level are held back by the fact that there are few linkages between their economic development efforts, and the broader regional and federal markets those development efforst will ultimately rely on.

Not to mention the Presidency and the broader federal government will no longer have to worry about how to fix every single problem. It would be so much easier to focus on the big ticket issues when the smaller issues have been devolved, but we need stronger platforms on which to base such devolution.

Nigeria versus Kenya - 2010 World Cup & Nations Cup Qualifier

The Eagles take on the Harrambee Stars tomorrow, Matchday Two of the final phase of the joint qualifiers for the 2010 World Cup and Nations Cup. After our morale-boosting away friendly win over Les Bleus of France, I am expecting (and hoping) for a victory that relaunches our campaign for a place in South Africa next year.

We MUST win. Matchdays Three (Tunisia vs. Nigeria) and Four (Nigeria vs. Tunisia) will probably decide the group. Regardless of what happens in the other Matchday Two encounter (between Tunisia and Mozambique) it is vital that we go into Matchday Three with the maximum four points available to us after the draw in Maputo.

As a staunch fan of the Eagles, my tension is high. Not for this match per se, but for the entire qualifier series. You can't blame me, after all we didn't qualify for the 2006 World Cup despite finishing even on points with Angola and ahead on goal difference. I actually like the head-to-head rule, but that did not relieve me of the disappointment (under-statement) I felt when we missed out on the German party.

I hope Mozambique proves strong enough to get a draw away in Tunisia, because even if the Nigeria wins Matchdays Two, Three and Four (my dream results of course), we would be on ten points, only four points ahead of the Tunisians if they beat Mozambique at home to earn six. Better to be six ahead, but that will only happen if the Mozambicans can win a hard-fought draw this weekend.

Yes, I know it seems unrealistic to hope for the Eagles to win away in Tunisia, but it is because I respect the Tunisians that I hope we strive to open as big a lead as we can as early as we can. If this thing stays close (or if we stay behind, as we are right now, on one point to their three), it will get REALLY tense before it is all over.

Good luck Eagles!

The 25-page Interview

Five weeks ago, The Guardian published a lengthy interview with the President of the Federal Republic, Umaru Yar'Adua. And when I say lengthy, I mean lengthy -- it was twenty-five pages long in Microsoft Word.

In a country where innuendo and rumour often masquerade as fact, it was refreshing to hear the President's thoughts in his own words. I do think the editorial staff (who incidentally conducted the interview) could have done a better job of organizing the material, they are professionals after all, not mere bloggers such as I. Still, it was highly informative.

There were a few things I agreed with, and many things I didn't, but even where I did not agree, it was "politics" not "morality" that drove the disagreement. In a functioning democracy, citizens are allowed to disagree on policy points. In fact, such disagreement is not only natural, it is the very spice of politics. Of course we are also supposed to have the right to use our votes to make decisions on these disagreements, a right that has yet to be established in Nigeria.

I do not blame Yar'Adua for the democratic deficit. I actually find it rather insane that so many commentators seem to blame him for EVERYTHING wrong in Nigeria. The man has only been in office two years; if these problems still exist, it is because nothing was done about them in the 47 years before he took office.

Oddly enough, many of Yar'Adua's fiercest critics are people who pliantly acquiesced or outrightly supported the eight-year Obasanjo regime that preceded his. To say it is a hypocritical position for them to take on MANY levels is under-statement, but I do not want to digress too much from talking about the 25-page interview.

President Yar'Adua put a lot of things into context, and made a good argument for his government in a number of areas. Again, the editorial team could have done a better job of structuring it, but his arguments are straightforward. Again, I agree with some things, and disagree with many things, but that is life.

Rather than talk about what I agreed with and what I didn't, I decided to focus on two things.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, the new Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, was asked about the federal government's "Seven Point Agenda". He advised the government to focus on two or three points they can realistically finish in four years, rather than attempt to complete all seven.
His advice makes sense. But it is not just "seven points", is it?

Reading through the 25-page interview, there is SO MUCH President Yar'Adua wants to do.

Too much.

It is not bad that he wants to do these things. In fact, when you get a sense of what he wants to do, you start to realize how little the prior regime did in eight years. It appears Yar'Adua has spent the first two years cleaning up behind his predecessor (and erstwhile godfather). There are things he said off-hand in the 25-page interview that got me thinking, a good example being his comments on a $2.5 billion loan the prior government negotiated with the Peoples Republic of China. Again, I don't want to digress.

The point (and the problem) is there is no way Yar'Adua is going to be able to complete his to-do list in the two years left to his administration's first term. And even if he gets a second term, the six years will be just about enough to finish work or two or three things.

He has got to narrow it down!

I know that two or three deliverables are insufficient to reform and transform the federal republic. And I know that transformation requires a multi-faceted, multi-issue, multi-front assault on ALL of the institutional and systemic weaknesses and deficiencies of our federal republic. The "problems" feed on each other, and even if you weaken one "problem", the other "problems" will re-energize it nothing has been done about them.

But let us be honest. Our political system is not capable of the sort of sweeping, transformative reform we need. There is no way Yar'Adua (or anyone else) could get the full agenda effectuated under the current political circumstances.

And even if the software of our politics were to improve dramatically overnight, the hardware is still too unwieldy, inefficient and ineffective. I am sorry, but this 36-state, 774-LGA structure is a hindrance to effective governance under any political circumstances. Nigerians complain about "corruption" and "theft" but the bigger problem is "waste"; even when spending is technically "legal" and "constitutional", too much of it is wasted one way or another.

There was recently a dramatic example of this in Bauchi State, where Governor Isa Yuguda sacked over Nine hundred (900) gubernatorial aides! The list of sacked aides included 23 Special Advisers, 41 Senior Special Assistants, 265 Special Assistants, and 582 Personal Assistants! What the heck?

The articles (here and here) suggest the Bauchi governor decided the state could no longer afford all these aides, due to the effects of global economic downturn. The articles do not mention the fact that the federal and state governments are facing a combined total fiscal deficit of about $11 billion in 2009.

The reporters should have mentioned Bauchi State cannot afford such wasteful spending even in times of plenty! Even if the federal republic entered another Oil Boom, there are far better things to spend that money on; give me the money and give me Bauchi State and let me get to work! Not to mention the fact that each of those gubernatorial aides had a network of patrons and clients to "legally" support through the use of their influence (and of what budgets their offices controlled).

And speaking of patrons and clients, the "innuendo" mills are of the opinion these 900+ were appointed to these meaningless, ceremonial posts as a reward for work they did to propel the governor into office. Presumably now that he is the President's son-in-law, and a returnee member of the PDP, his position is secure enough that he can drop them. Such is Nigerian politics.

While the inherent tendency toward waste and inefficiency is clear, the atomized administrative structure itself makes systemic, transformative change unnecessarily difficult, almost impossible.

If I were an adviser to President Yar'Adua, I would tell him to focus on ONE thing, pushing through constitutional change to cut down the number of states from 36 to 7, to reduce the number of third-tier bodies from 774 LGAs to 84 districts, to cut down the size of the FCT, and to create 4 "federal territories" that are not affiliated to any state.

It would probably take the rest of his first term and all of his second term to complete, given the fact that the entire political system will fight him every step of the way. But he would win a second term in a free and fair vote if he campaigned on this very issue.

Not that there will be a free and fair vote.

In fact, President Yar'Adua will not push this. He couldn't even if he wanted to. He is in office because of the system, has no power outside of it, and could not operate outside of it or without it.

And sadly, he is not the only one. All of the major leaders, regardless of ethnic, religious, regional or political affiliation are all Men Of The System. They will all talk a big game, and then shy away from doing anything substantial for fear it will cause the end of a system they are ultimately comfortable with -- replacing it with a system in which they would never rise quite so high.

I read that whole 25-page interview. I really think Umaru Yar'Adua is at heart a decent, good man. But someone needs to tell him to prioritize constitutional reform to our administrative structure. We start there.

Federalism and Africa

A quick note on politics elsewhere in Africa.

We Nigerians have been "federalists" since before regaining our freedom from British imperialism. Indeed we were federalists even before the British yoke; the geographically expansive Sokoto Caliphate was not a unitary kingdom, nor was it an "empire" in the classic sense. You could call it a confederation, but it might have been more accurate to call it an association. Many of the "emirates" that were part of this confederal association bear a striking resemblance to some of the "states" that currently make up the Nigerian federal republic.

In any case we have been the (imperfect) torch-bearers for federalism in Africa. And inasmuch as our federalist-republican system has been very imperfect, the constitutional and practical autonomy enjoyed by second-tier units in Nigeria (regions and later states) has always exceeded the constitutional (but not necessarily practical) autonomy of second-tier units elsewhere in Africa. I say not necessarily practical, because in some countries (those at war and/or those where the national government in particularly weak) administrators of the second-tier entities enjoy a freedom of (often despotic) action that belies the constitutional limitations imposed in their unitary systems.

Add to this the tendency for African countries in the last half-century to have one-party states, military-led governments, civilianj-led dictatorships, and de facto single-party-dominant states (masquerading as multi-party states) and the tendency toward centralism is magnified by the lack of a serious opposition and the citizens' lack of ability to change their government at the polls.

In the 1990s, Ethiopia ostensibly adopted federalism as a constitutional principle, but in practice a repressive national government (borderline civilian dictatorship) and a ruling political alliance that brooks no opposition (borderline one-party state) creates a situation where true federalism is an impossiblitiy.

Sudan is also ostensibly federal, but this is legalese, fine words designed to mask what is in effect a ceasefire line with two "national" governments on either side looking at each other with suspicion. I worry about Sudan for MANY reasons, not the least of which is my fear for this "referendum" they are supposed to hold on contiuned national unity.

Ironically, Sudan is the proof of the point I want to make in this post.

Most countries in Africa (Sudan inclusive) should have adopted true, real, substantive federalism the very moment they freed themselves from the colonial jackboot. The biggest should have been federations from the start, and the bigger-than-average should have been federal republics. The mid-sized countries should have devolved substantial autonomy to the provinces or districts (whatever they called them), giving them self-government just short of federalism. And the smallest African countries should have had self-governing municipalities.

The excuse for centralization was always that the countries were so diverse, they would fall apart without it, but centralization proved to be the divisive factor in early post-colonial Africa -- most spectacularly so in Sudan.

Nigeria is proof that adopting federal principles is not in and of itself sufficient, but centralization was never the solution for the absence of these factors. This false dichotomy is one of those things I criticized in my immediately prior post to this one, in this case the idea bandied about Africa in those days that federalism and devolution (and multi-party democracy) equalled break-up while centralization (and one-party state of civilian-military dictatorship) equalled unity.

What Nigeria needed to do then (and sadly still need to do now) is create the absent factors; not to mention recognize that the three-region structure was as inappropriate as the 36-state structure is now. The Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers provinces should not have been in the Eastern Region (and for the record, I believe we would not have lost Bamenda and Buea to Cameroun if the voters in that referendum had believed they would have been part of a C-O-R-B-B region). The Middle-Belt, the old Gongola State and the old Borno State should not have been in the Northern Region. And obviously the Mid-West should not have been in the West.

Now this may seem like simplistic statements affirming things that we all believe, but we need to recognize that the fact that these changes did not happen on the surface says a lot about the political and socio-cultural climate of Nigeria beneath the surface in the 1950s and 1960s before the Civil War. Indeed, the reason (and method) for the creation of the Mid-West had nothing to do with these underlying currents finally moving in a positive direction. One of these days I will have to write a book (or something) about how the build-up to violence and Civil War actually began in the 1950s and not in the mid-1960s, but I digress.

In any case, Nigeria's experience does not take away from the fact that Africa's countries need a lot more federalism and devolution than is present today. Indeed, it is important to note that federalism in and of itself does not fix the governance problem, but it is the ideal place to start.

Tanzania's national government policy toward Zanzibar (and the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi's approach to the Civic United Front) is driven mostly by its fear that Zanzibari autonomy will lead to Zanzibari independence. On the flip-side, Zanzibari opposition politicians are well aware that the CCM and national government prefer a centralized unitary state with a one-party or single-party-dominant system, and are inclined to pull away from central control if only to maintain what autonomy they currently have. Tanzania is geographically larger than Nigeria, if only one-third as populous, and life would be a lot easier on both sides if the mainland regions enjoyed the same kind of autonomy as Zanzibar. For one thing the Zanzibaris would feel more secure about their status. For another thing, the national government would not be so worried about what would then be a normal relationship with all of its second-tier entities (as opposed to the anomaly of its current relationship with Zanzibar versus the rest of the country). And it would improve governance, as the currently under-developed regions of the mainland can move forward to pursue development plans of their own rather than waiting for the slow-slow-slow of Dar Es Salaam to plan for all of them.

The same thing goes for Kenya. The ethnic violence that followed their last election is just the most destructive manifestation of currents that have been running through their society for decades. In any case, there is too much to gain and to lose from controling the national government treasury, which does tend to promote dictatorships (Kenyatta, Moi), and electoral manipulation. Kenya needs first consolidation (of districts and provinces) and then responsible devolution to the new, more sensible second- and third-tier entities.

The same logic could be applied to so many other countries (including West Africans like Liberia and Sierra Leone, where discrepancies in development between coastal capitals and interior provinces are part of sad national stories), but it is particularly apt for the East African countries because they are the best examples of one of the more problematic traits in Africa.

Kenya has not reformed itself or devolved power. Uganda has not reformed itself or devolved power. Tanzania has not reformed itself or devolved power. Rwanda and Burundi are still coming to terms with "ethnic diversity" that extends only to TWO groups, both of whom speak THE SAME LANGUAGE.

Yet all these countries are busily trying to construct a new layer of government on top of the existing layers.

This is the funny thing with most countries in Africa. All of the biggest obstacles to our growth are downward and domestic, yet all of the activity is upwards and international. And they are not even "fixing" anything, just using the fancy new bodies as a sort of

I mean, exactly how are people going to guarantee democracy and constitutionalism in a giant East Africa, when they can not figure out how to get it to work in a small Burundi? If they think more complexity would make it easier, they need only look at Nigeria; I daresay their three big EAC members are already acting the way our three big regions did in the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, simplicity does not make it easier either, as Somalia proves.


An Africa comprised of properly governed/administered countries operating under a pared-down, narrow-focused, built-for-specific-purpose African Union is sensible. Creating behemoth structures for the AU, ECOWAS, EAC, etc, and giving them all grandiose aims and goals is pointless when it all comes down to an alliance between a large number of internally-fractious, poorly governed countries.

But I am getting more than a little off point.

I look at South Africa and I do not understand why they don't just go all the way and adopt a federal system. There too, like elsewhere in Africa, the dominant politicians are far too interested in being in control of everything, and far too suspicious of allowing even a modicum of breathing room to ostensibly autonomous entities.

I don't get it. What is with this addiction to excess centralization? It is not a socio-cultural thing, as most of our precolonial states (including the kingdoms and empires) were decentralized, albeit to varying degress. Yes, some degree of consolidation is a help, but there is a happy medium between too much decentralization and too much centralization.

We need to find that happy medium. This equilibrium point will differ for different countries and different sub-regions, but we must all find that point. And we should not just write it into our constitutions, while continuing to practice despotism.