The building where "Nigeria" was "born"

I am not sure how to feel about the picture below.

On the one hand, it is the place where violent foreign invaders finalized the process of their conquest and domination of our peoples.

On the other hand, it is also the place where the "Federal Republic of Nigeria" more or less came into existence.

But whether you look at the place as a negative memory, or as a piece of the foundational story of "Nigeria", surely the place shouldn't look the way it looks? Shouldn't it be a place we visit to either remind ourselves of a bad thing we must strive to avoid (i.e. foreign dominance), or to remind ourselves of a good thing like Nigerian unity (it is a good thing, isn't it?).

Maybe the way the building looks is best understood as a metaphor for "Nigeria".

Whatever their propaganda might say, the British/European intervention in "Nigeria" was intended purely to benefit the British/Europeans at our expense. Nevertheless, they accidentally created a political platform from which we the people, peoples and nations of "Nigeria" could defend ourselves and our interests in a world designed to be hostile to our interests.

Except, that "Nigeria" has not, is not, and (if nothing changes) will not do for its citizens the things that it is supposed to do for its citizens. Take for example the issues involving "African" migrants facing danger and death in order to make it to supposedly better lives outside the continent. Notice that once the foreign news organizations started to give saturation coverage to the deaths of more than 20 Nigerians and the "slave market" in Libya, our federal government started making noises about doing things they would already have done years ago if they actually gave a damn about our citizens. Note I say "federal government" and not the name of any specific Fourth Republic president, as the "migrant" problem has existed for many years -- as has governmental disinterest in the fate of the "migrants".

Yeah, the state of the building where Nigeria was "born" is a metaphor for the Federal Republic that was "born" there. If "Nigeria" functioned the way it is supposed to function, the building where it was "born" would look a lot different.

This is the building Premium Times identified as being the place in Zungeru, Niger State where Mr. Frederick Lugard signed the documents that created "Nigeria" by Amalgamation.

Subtracting 90 from 310 International Organizations

A month ago, Kemi Adeosun, the Minister of Finance, announced Nigeria would withdraw from 90 of the 310 "international organizations" we are presently part of. We apparently owe payments of one kind or another, payments we cannot afford, to a number of these organizations. Unsurprisingly, there is uncertainty as to how much we are owing; a "committee" said the arrears were $120 million, but the Ministry of Finance (and other ministries) believe we owe a lot more than that.

The Minister gave no indication as to which organizations we would be withdrawing from. Its been a month, and there is still no guidance .... not just as to which specific organizations, but also as to what particular types of organizations they consider to be superfluous.

The number "90" is very specific. Did they already identify the 90, or did they just randomly decided to fix our number of memberships at 220 and withdrawals at 90 just to have specific numbers to report?

If it is the former, they could at least give us some sense as to what sorts of organizations are on the list; it is a very significant thing the government is planning to do, and they did not mention any of this in their 2015 campaign, so it would be nice if they didn't act like we gave them a mandate to do such things secretly without telling anyone what they are doing.

On the other hand, if it is the latter, and they just randomly fixed the two numbers at 220 and 90 without actually first deciding on a criteria for withdrawals, then they may find that when they do develop a criteria, the organizations that meet or fail to meet the criteria will not fit neatly into the nice round numbers of 220 and 90.

Don't misunderstand me. I support the reduction in the number of international organizations Nigeria is a part of; I just want to know what it is they are doing.

If it was up to me, frankly, the magnitude of the reduction would be greater. However, I wouldn't make a move without first discussing it with the public. Or rather starting a public discourse on what Nigeria's strategic interests are, how the rest of the continent/planet impacts upon these interests, what would be the best path towards protecting our interests .... and then we would have to talk about whether or not any international organization that currently exists helps, hinders or is irrelevant to the protection of our citizens' interests.

Because to be honest, it really shouldn't be about the money. We shouldn't join or leave organizations based on whether we are owing, or whether we can afford to pay. Even if we can afford to pay to be in 220 organizations, we shouldn't be in any of them that is irrelevant or harmful to Nigeria, and if we cannot afford to pay to be in 310, but there is something about the 310 that is practically useful to Nigeria, then we should find the money somehow (perhaps by selling Governor Okorocha's Zuma statue to wealthy foreign collectors of curios and oddities).

I've got to be honest with you. I don't really think any of the international organizations do anything that is useful to Nigerian or African progress. The hype surrounding these organizations is that they step in to fund insufficient "aid" programmes for refugees of a politically-created disasters. What we need to be doing is dealing with the issues that make these politically-create disasters predictably incessant, and as to whether international organizations help, hinder or are irrelevant to that ... well, we can argue about that in another blog post.

Elections Without Purpose

There are certain people who keep saying we all must vote, and who keep insisting that anyone who doesn't vote will by definition lose the right to criticize the governments (all three tiers) after the vote.

But what are you supposed to do when the political system is designed to present you with different versions of the same thing you do NOT want as a citizen?  Different versions of the same future disappointment? Are you supposed to keep wasting your time "voting"? By padding the turnout numbers, are you not merely granting the toga of credibility to the very thing you do not want? By picking one of the bad options presented, are you not empowering the bad option to claim that the things he does are done with your permission and approval?

In fact, why do we complain about "rigging" (and even about coups) when we are still going to be forced to stomach a type of government we do not want, even if there is a "free and fair" vote? It is not just that the same type of person will occupy political, bureaucratic and technocratic positions, but very often is is literally the same people.

Please, don't do that thing we sometimes do in Nigeria of looking at the name of the person speaking, and then interpreting everything he or she subsequently says from an ethnic or regional prism. Yes, I am Igbo, but the structure and fundamental nature of Nigerian politics has never made sense to me.

The first political thought I recall having was as a child during the Second Republic. The election was coming up, and I was excited by the pageantry of it all. But then I realized that underneath the facade, the election boiled down to little more Igbos vote NPP, Yorubas vote UPN, and Hausas/Fulanis vote NPN. The regional/ethnic chess game did not stop with the three legs of the so-called "tripod", but as a little child, and as an Igbo, it didn't make sense to me that I was expected to support a party (and the politicians within it) simply because I was Igbo. I wouldn't have been able to properly articulate it at the time, it just seemed to me that it was a stupid way to choose leaders of the country. I would later learn about the 1950s, the First Republic, the Civil War .... and all I could think of was how different it all could have, and should have been. All I could see were the errors and mistakes of people who were, and still are, surprisingly popular considering their decisions set us on a path to the kind of politics we still practices .... and the kind of violence our federal republic is still plagued by.

If we are honest with ourselves, we would admit our method of choosing leaders has not progressed much since the Second Republic, and political figures are wildly popular in specific regions for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they actually understand what our problems are, first of all, before we even ask if they understand the solutions. Actually, and more depressingly, not a lot has changed in our politics since the 1950s. In fact, if there is a so-called "national question" then it is comprised of several dozen questions (plural) that should have been answered in the 1950s, but have not been answered up till now, and do not look like they will be answered any time soon.

It is interesting that we are still being treated to the sights and sounds of people trying to break up the federal republic. There are those who advocate this openly, those who hide their real intent behind euphemisms, and those who aim to create enclaves within the country where the laws of the country do not apply. The biggest problem in Nigerian politics since the 1950s has been the absence of a basic understanding of the strategic interests of the various ethnic nations within the Nigerian federal republic. We would have interacted with ourselves differently, approached our continent differently, and (especially) approached the rest of the planet ... much differently. As it stands, it is 2017, and people are still talking about destroying the best platform from which we can protect ourselves and advance ourselves on this planet that has been designed to function with hostility to our interests.


Anyway, all of this is just rhetoric. Let me say something practical.


The All Progressives Congress (APC) goes on and on about how the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ruined Nigeria over the first 16 years of the Fourth Republic. But have you noticed something about the APC? The APC is comprised almost entirely of the people who ruled Nigeria in the first 16 years of the Fourth Republic. Some of them were PDP, some were AD/AC/ACN, some were ANPP/CPC, and some were APGA/PPA, but all of them, in one way or another, held significant power at the federal and state levels between 1999 and 2015. When they describe the first 16 years of the Fourth Republic as a time of failure, they are indicting themselves as well as their rivals who are still in the PDP for the time being (pending their eventual decamping to the APC. If they couldn't fix Nigeria's problems of Nigeria under their previous incarnations, why are we supposed to believe they will do so as old wine in a new bottle? In fact, is anyone surprised that they are not doing so?

By the way, President Buhari himself may not have held power in the Fourth Republic prior to 2015, but he has served at the highest levels of the Nigerian federal government since the early 1970s, in a variety of powerful portfolios, including that of military Head of State. There are a lot of things his supporters say he can and will do, but he has had more than 47 years in "politics" to do these things, and not only did he not do these things, but realistically he never showed the signs that he could.

Again, I am not an ethnicist and this is not about President Buhari's region of origin. I began this essay by asking whether there was any point to "voting" when there is never anyone on the ballot worth voting for. My critique of Buhari is applicable to all of his predecessors, to all of his would-be predecessors, and to his would-be successors. I started this blog during the Obasanjo Administration, and if you read my posts from the beginning, through the Goodluck Jonathan Administration, up till today, you will find my views are consistent, and are consistently applied to everyone. There may not have been an Igbo president during the Fourth Republic, but figures like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Charles Soludo (among others) have had strong influence on the direction of Fourth Republic (and on its predictable economic woes), and I have never hesitated in objectively critiquing anyone.

Okay, now that I am done with the unfortunately necessary disclaimers ....

Our politics have always been disconnected from our practical problems. Our politics follow an internally consistent logic that produces recurrent outcomes to "elections" and "coups". The thing is, the internal logic of our politics was never about ascertaining the source of the country's problems, deducing solutions to the country's problems, or vetting potential candidates according to how well they fit into the framework of problem-definition and problem-solution. If anything, your success in Nigerian politics is dependent on convincing "stakeholders" that you have no intention (perhaps no ability) to fundamentally change anything in a way that will put Nigeria on the path to having an economy like that of Germany or Japan.

But in 2019, we will be told we have to vote.

Why? For who? For what?

I'd like to say that before we hold another pointless "vote", our federal republic first needs to have a conversation about .... our federal republic. But in the real world, there would be no point to such a conversation, as it would be dominated by the same personages and voices that we would need to do away with if we are going to have any chance of having a meaningful discourse.

Something has to change.

An Investigative Report on Exam Malpractice

In places where law enforcement and judicial system are perceived (rightly or wrongly) to have some degree of effectiveness, people do break the law in blunt and undisguised ways ... but a much larger number of people (and corporations) contrive of ways to break the spirit and intent of the law, while positioning themselves to be able to argue that their actions could reasonably be construed as falling within the "letter" of the law. The wealthier you are, as an individual or corporation, the more capable you are of organizing your "law-breaking" and eventual legal defence in such a way as to avoid a conviction, or at the very least to ensure that you are convicted of a lesser or even minor offence (often following a plea deal). The poorer you are, the less access you have to these particular tools of "law-breaking".

In Nigeria, the police do arrest people, and the courts do convict people, but Nigeria's people, polity, economy and society operate in a context where the quality of law enforcement and the judiciary is presumed to alternate between involuntarily ineffectual, deliberately dysfunctional and consensually corrupt.

I do not think we Nigerians as a people are "worse" than anyone else when it comes to crime, however, there are certain kinds of crime that are committed bluntly and openly in Nigeria, whereas in other places anyone who wanted to commit the crime (and trust me, many do) would have to be more "sophisticated" in their criminality, or would have to dream wistfully of what they would have done if the risks of getting caught didn't outweigh the possible gain.

There is also the issue of compensation. In certain countries, officialdom are frankly overpaid. Yes, they are paid far more than would be economically feasible if the world's economy was normal. In this context, it is easier to uphold certain standards that are perceived to be beneficial to the society at large.

In Nigeria, where civil servants and pensioners can be owed more than a year's arrears of salary, it can be .... difficult for people with rent due at the end of the month to listen to their conscience. I am not making excuses for their behaviour, but it has long depressed me that Nigerian policy-making does not take into account basic economics. Our governments, at all three tiers, keep coming up with macro-level policies that they claim will lead to particular outcomes, while leaving in place all of the economic realities that effectively force people at the micro level to make decisions that in aggregate will negate whatever it is the macro so-called policy claims it is going to achieve.

Anyway, all this is a set up to get you to read this investigative article from The Punch newspaper. The stats at the bottom of the page indicate only about 450 or so people have read the electronic version of the article, which I think is unfortunate. This is exactly the sort of investigative reporting we all want (or say we want). Yes, I know most Nigerians still get their newspaper news from actual "paper" newspapers, but those get replaced each day and anyone who didn't read it on the day (a year ago) it was published on paper will have missed the news anyway.

A reporter went undercover to expose blatant, unashamed, criminal examination malpractices. I am not one of those people who assumed "everyone" in Nigeria is a criminal (I am a Nigerian, and I am not a criminal), but the exam malpractice problem clearly extends far beyond the single centre the reporter exposed.

And yes, it is a long article in a time when the internet has shortened people's attentions spans, and yes, I know "data" costs in Nigeria. Still, isn't it better to read the facts of a thing that we all know is happening, rather than basing our "knowledge" about it on the usual rumours that are never actually true, even if they are based on (and hint at) things that are true?

 PS: Is it the proper etiquette to say I was directed toward the article by the journalist Kadaria Ahmed? She posted a link.