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.

Femi Aribisala on "Bigmanism"

If you haven't already, take a look at this funny essay in yesterday's Vanguard.

The Stories We Should Tell Louder

Back in 2010, a semi-acquaintance of mine attended a panel discussion on Nigeria that was held in London sometime in 2010.  This is an edited excerpt of what he wrote about the event:

The place was full to the brim and the debate was vigorous. The debate was about whether Nigeria was an African superpower and how an area that was able to produce incredible works of art like the Ife sculptures could end up the way it is today.

The panel included Father Kukah, who had interesting stories to tell about the religious conflict in Kaduna. One was about his sister who had a shop and was close to an elderly Muslim neighbour. When Christians were about to be attacked, the old man asked her to hide all her goods in his house. So when her shop got burnt down, she didn't lose much. But then the Muslim's house got burnt down in a revenge attack by "Christians" and she lost everything.   

Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, and indigene of Kaduna State, was subsequently named Bishop of Sokoto in 2012.  Before Jos in Plateau State took over as city most frequently mentioned in the context of "communal violence", Kaduna City, capital of Kaduna State, held that infamous position.

Father Kukah is one of many prominent Nigerian religious and sociocultural leaders who work very hard to end the scourge of communal violence. The story he told of the closeness between regular Muslims and Christians (his sister and her elderly neighbour) is one that deserved wider attention in the Federal Republic. The story he told of the senselessness of ultimately self-defeating nature of the violence should also have found a wider audience in Nigeria.

But nobody knows about it.  The nature of the discourse in Nigeria is to loudly trumpet any and all news (even if unconfirmed) that contributes to sustaining the state of oft-violent distrust, division and dysfunction, and to downplay and minimize anything that would or could create a rallying point for the super-majority of Nigerians who would work to end the dysfunction if only there was an available route towards doing so.

We Nigerians (and Africans) often complain that the foreign media tends to highlight negative news about Africa, and to downplay positive news. We argue that the relentless negativity contributes to the sustenance of the the conditions that create the negative outcomes.

But we ourselves tend to highlight the negative about ourselves, and about each other.

I am not talking about criticism, constructive or otherwise. The only way anything can improve is to realize what about ourselves needs improvement ... but that implicitly acknowledges that we are able to improve. The problem with the negativity is that it is built on the notion that ... the best way to explain it is to revert, once again, to what we easily understand, non-African racism towards Black Africans.  The racist theory that Black people are inferior presupposes that we cannot possibly be as good as anyone else, that we are automatically and irredeemably .... fill in the blank with negatives.

When certain Nigerians tout the division of the country as the "only solution" to our problems, or when people say that the Amalgamation was the source of all of our problems, there is an inherent belief that it is not possible to live in the same country with the other Nigerians, that it is not possible for us to live with them in the same country. Because they are just inherently and irredeemably ... fill in the blank with negatives.

I have had conversations with people where they start out agreeing with me in terms of critiquing the problems, but somewhere along the line, while I am still trying to analyze how we can all come together to solve the problem, the other person(s) branch off toward blaming another ethnic nation, geographical region, "geopolitical zone", or even senatorial zone for the problems. Even within a single town or city, the finger gets pointed at a socioculturally distinct neighbour (Ife and Modakeke, Aguleri and Umuleri, K-dere and B-dere, Zangon and Kataf), who is somehow to blame for the lack of jobs, the scarcity of land, and any other problems.

I know from experience that if you push through and continue arguing your case, those person(s) you are discussing with swing back from the knee-jerk response of blaming some other sociocultural group, and rejoin your analysis of what we could do together to fix the problem. However, the end of the conversation invariably involves both you and them concluding that it is unlikely that the problem will be solved in the real world.

As I've asserted in prior posts, this sort of negative political reaction to each other is the product of a sea of information in which we all swim.

Negativity, Violence and Shock Value sell newspapers and keep eyes attached to television sets. But while this is true of the commercial media everywhere, the overall nature of the discourse in most of the world's successful countries is to magnify and trumpet the best part of their national soul, and to sweep the less honourable parts of their national history under the carpet. Even what purports, in this age of political correctness, to be a less patriotic and hagiographic version of their history still rather underplays much of less edifying parts of their past; and much of what is presented as the "progress" of the present could be interpreted rather differently if one took a less rose-tinted view of events.

We do the opposite. We bury the best parts of our Federal Republic's shared soul, and overplay the worst parts of us.  We not only treat the violent fringe as if it were the "normal" Nigeria, but go out of our way from an institutional and governmental point of view to facilitate the actions of the violent fringe as though we are not supposed to be otherwise, or rather cannot be otherwise. That is it right there. The idea that this, the violence, is who we are, and that it is not possible not to be this way.

But I didn't have to hear Father Kukah's story to know that the truth of Nigeria is quite different. In fact, while incidents of mass violence are rightly given wide coverage in the news, at any given point in time, most of Nigeria and Nigerians are not in fact subject to any violence.

Father Kukah's statement about violence and reprisal violence in the City of Kaduna, reminded me of a television report about two men who had previously been leaders of rival gangs of "youths" in Kaduna, gangs that attacked neighbourhoods of people from the sociocultural group of the rival gang (similar to what has been happening in the City of Jos since 1999).  It was one of the few reports I had seen that didn't portray the violence as being one-sided.

These gangs are made up of youths who are unemployed, poor and prone to inducement by political factions. Indeed, a lot of violence in Nigeria is carried out by starving boys and youths who loot the homes and businesses of wealthier "foreigners" (i.e. non-indigenes). One of the more unfortunate aspects of our shared human history repeats itself: when poverty and economic uncertainty rise in any country (even in those so sure of their supposed "enlightenment"), the tendency is for gangs of poor, unemployed youths to see wealthy "foreigners" as having taken opportunities that should have gone to locals.

Of course, if we looked at it this way, we would have been obliged to fix the economic problems of our cities. But now that we just conclude it is ethnic or religious violence, we can throw up our hands and say there is nothing we can do about it.

What really struck me about the story is the two former gang leaders working together to end the violence in the city is how little coverage they received in the Nigerian media. They should be household names, but I only learned of them briefly and only from a foreign media source, not the Nigerian media.

It is time we gave greater prominence to stories of the good people, at least enough so that our people know there is another side to the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Here are links to previous posts I have made about stories that we should tell louder:

THE STORIES WE IGNORE An excellent feature by Tadaferua Ujorha for Daily Trust.

FIGHTING FOR PEACE An excerpt from a Weekly Trust essay by Carmen McCain about an old man who died doing the right thing, but who has been forgotten while we glorify and give national honours to the men and women responsible for creating the situation that killed this good man.

WE STAND TOGETHER Three articles.

GOOD DEEDS IN CENTRAL NIGERIA Self-explanatory (I hope the embedded links are still live).

Perpetuating the Propaganda Ourselves

In these posts (here, here and here), I talked about how other peoples sometimes work to create a negative opinion or prejudice about us among their people.

But we very often do the same thing.

Most countries in the world are able to maintain a public image in the rest of the world that is built on whoever is perceived to be the "best" of their population. Until recently, there was a global image of the British "gentleman" and "lady", even though there were many people in Britain whose conduct was closer to that of a football hooligan. The Japanese are known for being good at technological products, for being good at exporting things, and for the "salary man" in the world of business, even though there are many Japanese who do the most scandalous of things (some of the stuff they show on Japanese television is ... legally and without much fuss ... is downright weird, and that is putting it extremely mildly).  The United States also projects an image to the rest of the world that is not really congruent with reality.

It is true that all of these places are richer than Nigeria. What is not true is the very loudly unspoken idea that they are richer than us because their people are "superior" to us, better than us at an inherent level, or that their culture is "superior" to ours.

Many of us tend to perpetuate these sorts of ideas. When a Nigerian does something bad, we the Nigerians react as though the person and the person's actions were symptomatic of all Nigeria and all Nigerians. Conversely, when someone does good, it gets dismissed or is not talked about quite as much as the bad person/thing.

It is strange that we label ourselves with negative things, and then talk about foreign countries, even African countries, as though they are completely innocent of those negative things. In reality, if you pick any particular negative act, and assign a Naira or Dollar amount to the absolute magnitude of however much of that act is done by Nigerians, and then do similar analyses of the "perfect" foreign lands, you will find that they do far more of it than we do.

Let me give you and easy example. For a while, the word "Nigerian" and the phrase "potential drug pusher" were used interchangeably by the immigration authorities at airports all over the world. The United States even went so far as to "decertify" Nigeria at some point for supposedly failing to act to control the illegal narcotics trade. Today, you still see the casual equation of "Nigerian" with "drug dealer" in the South African media (and I still regret the $10.00 I spent watching the South African-produced District 9).

But even at the high point of Nigerians being involved in the illegal narcotics business, the total "Nigerian" involvement was microscopic when compared to the United States, the various Western European countries and Japan. There were more of their citizens involved in the business than ours, a higher proportion of their citizenry involved than ours, and the Dollar amount of their involvement made ours look like 50 kobo groundnut money by comparison.

Yet nobody treated their citizens in total as if they were all guilty of drug crime until proven innocent.

This type of negative stereotyping is bad when it comes from foreigners, but we do it to ourselves.

Treating an individual person's crime as though it was a crime committed by his or her entire ethnic group is a recurring theme in our recent political history. And assuming that bad Nigerians epitomize all Nigerians is a standard reaction to any bad news about a random Nigerian in Nigeria or anywhere in the world.

Indeed, there is this mysterious tendency to question everything about ourselves and our society any time we hear that one of our number was caught doing something bad abroad. At best, he or she is said to be giving all of us a bad name. In the meantime, people from abroad have done, are doing, and will do far worse things on the African continent and in the wider world without any fear of being prosecuted for it. And nobody gives their whole country a bad name because of it.

Take all the snide comments about the so-called "Nigerian Scam" (a.k.a 419) on the internet.  If you add up all of the money scammed by every Nigerian scammer that has ever existed, it would add up to less than what a single American (Bernie Madoff) scammed off of the people duped into investing in his Ponzi Scheme. Should we call such schemes the "American Scam"? Or should that term be reserved for the various exotic financial instruments and derivatives that nearly wrecked the entire global economy?

Look, before anyone start shouting insults at me, I am not trying to get people to place negative labels on foreign countries. Just pointing out that we Nigerians should stop accepting the negative labels other people place on us and should stop creating/propagating negative labels of our own.

Believe it or not, the super-majority of Nigerians are kind, decent, good people. If this weren't the case, the Federal Republic would have collapsed into anarchy a long time ago. Most of the things that are supposed to enforce the political "order" are dysfunctional or nonexistent, likewise the things that are supposed to support the economy (for example our banks lend only to "safe" borrowers like the government, import-exporters and Big Business), yet there is an "order" to life in Nigeria that is built on we the people effectively governing and "policing" ourselves.

Life in Nigeria often involves interacting with the institutions of state only insofar as there are certain things you have to give them (e.g. an extorted sum of money at a police checkpoint). Beyond that, it is often as though we don't have a government (or a "formal" private sector), yet we still manage to get things done. We generate our own electricity, provide ourselves with water, construct our own "roads" and generally get things done in an economic system built substantially on trust because nobody has the time or resources to enforce contracts through the court system. It is all on trust, something that doesn't exist if you believe the negative stereotype.

Yes, there are scammers who take advantage of the situation, but if the scammers were in the majority, everything in Nigeria would have long since ground to a halt. Life is able to proceed in Nigeria because we Nigerians mostly do the "right" thing without compulsion or coercion, and where we fall short it is usually because of the reality that condition bends the crayfish.  There are situations in which doing the "right" thing is either difficult, impossible or metaphorically masochistic -- for example, a certain element of nepotism, kinsman-ism, clique-ism and ethnicism comes into play in an economic and political system built on knowing someone enough to trust them, rather than relying on impartial and effective judicial enforcement of contracts.

But we are not fundamentally bad people.

And don't let them get away with convincing people otherwise.

I often say that "communal violence" in Nigeria is predictable and avoidable, but for various reasons the powers that be refuse to do what is necessary to avoid it. Under normal circumstances, we the people should have reacted with anger to their failure to do the necessary, but we have allowed the discourse to be dominated by those who work to convince us that the entire sociocultural group to which one side or the other in these incidents belong are "bad people" who attack the other side because of the sheer "badness" of their entire sociocultural group. This is how "they" behave, is the basic response, and since there is nothing you can do to change "their" behaviour, we just have to live with the fact that "they" will keep doing this.

Do you realize that Nigeria would be an entirely different type of country if it was true that every member of every ethnic group hated every member of one or all of the other ethnic groups?

What we have now, in terms of violence, is what happens when the violent few are allowed to plague the peaceful majority from every sociocultural background.

We are also dealing, separately, with the fact that the most desperate economic groups in the country don't have anything other than violence to defend what few economic rights they have. Most "communal violence" in Nigeria revolves around land disputes between communities, about ownership of land, about who is or is not an indigene (i.e. has or doesn't have right to a portion of the land), and about the competing land-linked interests of farmers and pastoralists.

We are good people. And it is time we start believing that about ourselves.

On the Inherent Risks of Political Protests

A Camerounian posted something on a popular Nigerian discussion forum. He was commenting on recent events in Egypt. For the record, I have not expressed an opinion on Egypt on this blog, and I am not going to do so on this blog. I will address something else about the Camerounian's comments.

Here is what he said:

Many people go out every year protesting for political reasons.

Many die in the cause.

In Egypt hundreds of people  have died because they wanted one person, who might turn his back on them, to be placed back to power. I have been in protests before  and I remember the dangers and  group effect that make you do things you won't do if alone.

I have come to see the world today different from the average person at least politically.

Some people really die protesting for what will not even help them or will not change their status.

Is it better to just ask for your bread and tea from the ruling elite and a house above your head and live peaceful till death takes us naturally? I love this life and won't go and die because i want to make it better for others because it doesn't get better at all and many people don't even get what they asked when they succeed in their protest.

Nowadays I actually feel sorry for people going out and dying in protests. I will say do protest but if i sense it is getting out of hand, go back home. Dying is not worth it, what is your take?

It is a much more complicated issue than that, though, isn't it?

On the one hand, George Orwell's "Animal Farm" is a fairly accurate description of what happens following "coups", "revolutions" and other changes of government. One way or another, what comes after tends to bear a striking resemblance to what came before. All of the things that were supposedly fought against continue on, albeit under new management. And the ideologues and intellectuals that purportedly to argue in favour of changing things metamorphose into defenders of everything they previously criticized, insofar as their political faction is advantaged.

Indeed, one could argue that one of the many problems with post-colonial African countries is the "heroes of liberation" inherited all of the (undemocratic, unaccountable, unchecked) powers of the imperialists, as well as all of the coercive institutions created to impose that power on the citizenry (as well as political techniques like ethnic divide-and-rule), and have since proceeded to use that power in exactly the same manner without reform. The fact that our governments continue to take instruction from colonial-type world powers, whether directly (bilaterally) or indirectly (via institutions like the Bretton Woods agencies), only adds to the feeling that we have Black African Governor-Generals masquerading as Presidents.

On the other hand, I will admit to being tempted to tell the Camerounians that his attitude is the reason Paul Biya has been President of Cameroun for 31 years (and why Ahmadou Ahidjo was President for 22 years before Biya chased him out of the country. If he opens his mouth and says the wrong thing, Yaounde has only to threaten violent reprisal, and he will quieten down.

So, what is the answer?

I don't know. I don't think there are easy answers. I am not going to pretend to be an action hero myself.

As I said in the first paragraph, this blog post is not about Egypt.

Speaking about Nigeria, I do think that we the citizens are collectively to blame. We allow ourselves to be divided against each other so easily that we don't seem to realize that we collectively outnumber the totality of the squabbling political/economic factions that govern us. We not only outnumber them in the society at large, but we outnumber them in the Army and the Police as well.

Our overwhelming advantage was not brought to bear during the colonial period, and has not been brought to bear in the post-colonial period either. Even the soldiers and polices, who are drawn from us, from our families, have been shooting at us on behalf of governments, colonial and post-colonial alike, for more than 150 years (dating back to before the foundation of the Lagos Colony).

I am not sure any of us Nigerians would have to die to change Nigeria. We just have to collectively want it and collectively make it happen.

On so-called "Experts" and the Nigerian narrative

In some respect, this is a follow-up of this post, and in some respects it follows-up on my posts on "propaganda" and how the way we talk about things influences peoples perceptions of those things in a problematic way.

You may have been following the controversies kicked off when Governor Fashola of Lagos "deported" citizens of Nigeria from Lagos State to Onitsha in Anambra State. Apparently these deportations have been going on for a while, with deportees getting "shipped" out to the northernmost states. The arrival of deportees in Onitsha kicked off a firestorm of debate, which almost immediately took ethnic and regional shape. Especially on the internet, where insults were traded based on nasty stereotypes.

The discussion wasn't so much about the constitutionality of the action, nor have we begun the long overdue conversation about what Nigerian citizenship actually means. Instead we had people like Femi Fani-Kayode publishing ethnic slurs against Igbos.

I have never liked or respected Femi Fani-Kayode. He used to criticize President Obasanjo in the most vociferous of terms, but when Obasanjo gave him a cushy job as a pro-government spin-doctor, he became a dogged and rather sycophantic defender of the man he was only recently pillorying. A man who will sell himself to the highest bidder, and who forms his opinions based on whomever is willing to pay him the most, is not a man to be taken seriously.

People like Fani-Kayode should be ignored, and not given a wider platform from which to spread their bile. Unfortunately, Fani-Kayode's remarks attracted a firestorm of responses. And even more unfortunately, the responses took an ethnic and regional shape, provoking similarly ethnic and regional responses.

I want to focus on what such response to Fani-Kayode, because it highlights something I have talked about in prior posts. The full text of the response is here.

I am not interested in the response per se, just in the introduction of the author, and in the author's first two paragraphs.

This is the author's name:

Dr. N. Tony Nwaezeigwe

Senior Research Fellow

Institute of African Studies,

University of Nigeria,

Nsukka.

He is a PhD, a senior research fellow, an "expert" on African Studies. You are probably expecting something that will put an end to the pointless ethnic stereotyping and insults, something that will move us towards a discussion of the core issues and how to resolve them .... but ... then ...

Nigeria’s nationality question is neither the creation of the Igbo nor the Yoruba. It is the consequence of Hausa-Fulani’s megalomaniac quest for political power in the nation. Yet the Hausa-Fulani accept the fact that both the Igbo and Yoruba hold the key to their attainment of this divine-right objective only if both groups agree to remain suspicious of the other. It therefore becomes obvious that the solution to this national question can only be attained if both the Igbo and Yoruba realize that their mutual understanding and respect of the other’s perception of Nigeria’s progress would save the nation millions in loss of human and material resources.

First, both the Igbo and Yoruba, seen respectively as mentors to other minority ethnic groups in the South and Middle Belt should see their assumed characteristic rivalry, if at all there is something like that, as healthy to the overall development of the Nigerian nation and, not the vice versa. Second, both groups should be aware that this question of Nigeria’s nationality will always persist so long as the Hausa-Fulani feel that without any one of their own being at the helms of authority in this country, there will be no peace. And one fundamental means of achieving this Arabian power mentality is to ensure there is perpetual state of political belligerency between the Igbo and Yoruba.

And there you have it. Right from the very start, he plunges into the same ethnic stereotyping, the same insults. His response to Femi Fani-Kayode's unwarranted attacks on the Igbos as an ethnic group ... is to launch an unwarranted attack of his on on the Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups. Actually, there is a sly insult aimed at the so-called "minority" ethnic groups, who tend to react negatively to the suggestion that they are the political subordinates of Tripod ethnic groups to which they were yoked during the Independence Era and the First Republic.

This type of "discourse" has been the bane of Nigerian politics since the 1950s, and while people tend to point at violent incidents in our past as "proof" of their negative views of other ethnic groups, it is more correct to say that the violence was a result and a consequence of all of us having negative views about each other.  To many things are instantly misinterpreted as being pan-ethnic in nature, and too many times entire ethnic groups have been assigned the blame for actions carried out by small groups of people who happen to be from that ethnic group.

The people doing the misinterpretation are not "uneducated"; if anything, the public perception that "experts" know what they are talking about has tended to lend credence to problematic theories that do little to explain why our problems came to be, and why they exist. And it is not just our academics and intellectuals that do this -- the foreign experts are just as bad.  I am at a point where I almost want to call on the entire planet to consider anything and everything ever written or said about "Africa" by a foreign "experts" at any point in the past or present to be by definition false.

Indeed, among the many problems of African academia is the tendency to repeat-back or echo the conclusions foreign "researchers" make about our continent and to treat these as being established fact. This then leads to the tendency to adopt grand plans that are bound to fail, because they have nothing to do with the actual issues. Once the plan fails, we start to hear explanations for the failure that do not take into account the fact that the plan, and the "facts" upon which it was based, was bound to fail from the start.

There is a video posted on the internet, in which the late Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello made certain comments about "Igbos", accusing them in effect of intending to take over and dominate the Northern Region.  A lot of present-day Nigerians would criticize the Sardauna's comments, entirely unaware that they approach the "issues" in exactly the same way he did. Some people are forthright about their views on other ethnic groups (like the Fani-Kayode and Dr. Nwaezeigwe) while other people make a point of sounding politically correct until you scratch them a little or subject them to just a little stress and their true feeling about other ethnic groups and regions emerge.

Back in the 1950s, somehow and for some reason, everyone in the political and academic circles, and consequently a lot of people in the wider society, became apprehensive that they were going to be "dominated" by other sociocultural groups. The late Sardauna may have been blunt in his comments, but everyone showed by their actions that they had the same feelings about other ethnic groups as he did. Indeed, the nascent Federation of Nigeria lost the Bamenda and Buea areas to Cameroun largely because the "minority" groups in those areas took their chance to escape "domination" by the Eastern Region's "majority" ethnic group. Western Region politics also changed in the 1950s to accommodate these suspicions, which had effects on national politics.

Our politics have neither resolved nor recovered from the problems and questions that arose in the 1950s. We are still stuck in the same arguments we've been having since the 1950s, and are still subject to the same consequent violence that has plagued us in greater or lesser intensity since then.

It is time to change the conversation.

Plans and Masterplans

Mallam Nasir El-Rufai became rather famous (or infamous) as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory during the Fourth Republic's Obasanjo Administration. His claim to fame (or infamy) lay in his project of demolishing buildings within the FCT that did not conform to the Abuja Masterplan.

El Rufai was praised by many in the media and commentariat, and much was said about people not obeying rules and how important orderly planning was ....

.... but does it ever occur to anyone that our constitutions, statutes, edicts and "masterplans" never take the reality of Nigeria into consideration?

Sometimes, the people who put these documents together seem to be thinking and talking about an alternate place in a different universe and not Nigeria. Sometimes they seem to be trying to superimpose whatever they saw when they were schooling abroad on top of the realities of Nigeria, without understanding why those places they saw abroad came to look like that, and why whatever they saw there is not applicable to Nigeria.

Sometimes they seem to be copy-and-pasting from a textbook, or adopt standard-issue, one-size-fits-all plans drawn up by foreign consultants and institutions. Sometimes, they don't seem to be aware that the advice they receive from abroad is heavy on the strategic interests of whoever is giving them the advice and light on anything of relevance to us.

Fundamentally, we have not really discussed what our strategic interests are, besides saying things like "An Africa-Focused Foreign Policy", "Non-Aligned", "Pan-Africanism", "Africa Must Unite", "African Solutions for African Problems" and other political slogans which sound like they are saying a lot when they in fact say very little or nothing of substance. At the end of the day, we seem to drift along without any particular plan, inasmuch as we have libraries full of voluminous plans we have drafted and re-drafted over the last 52 years.

The Abuja Masterplan was not, and is not a realistic document. Governor Babatunde Fashola's plan to rid Lagos of the destitute by deporting them to their states of origin is laughable; if he really thinks this plan will work, then he is not who his many fans say he is.

There are poor people in Nigeria.

There are unemployed and underemployed people in Nigeria.

I don't know what the real statistics are. Most of the statistics they use in their $1-a-day and $2-a-day talk sound fabricated, but there are a lot of people in Nigeria who are economically disadvantaged.

It is a reality.

And it is a reality that these people are going to migrate to cities, and are going to find a ways to live and places to live where they don't have to pay a lot in transportation costs to get to wherever they hustle daily. The daily hustle brings in only so much money, and you don't want transportation to eat up most of it.

Telling them to go back to their villages doesn't make sense. If there was anything waiting for them in their villages, they would not have left in the first place. If you had done something to develop their villages' economic potential, you wouldn't now be wringing your hands as to what to do with them in the cities.

Even in the cities, urban redevelopment is always sold as a plan to build "affordable housing", but in practice usually means housing that is not affordable to most Nigerians. Indeed, the Abuja Masterplan is an odd document that effectively moved federal civil servants to a city where federal civil servants could not afford the rent.

Look, we all know that our local, state and federal governments do not have the resources to create a European-style welfare state. Actually, the Europeans don't have enough resources for that either, and no one ever honestly talks about why they are able to keep their welfare states in spite of their resource deficiency ... but this blog is not about Europe.

If you are the government and you cannot provide welfare to the teeming poor, why would you make it government policy to block the poor from making money for themselves? Okay, you think street traders make the streets look unattractive, what do you want them to do? Sit at home and starve? Or maybe go into crime?

There are economic reasons why the "Keke Napep" and "Okada/Achaba" industries exist; the fact that you don't like them does not mean that there is no place for them in the Nigerian market. If there were an economic basis for everyone in Nigeria to be driving a private limousine, that would have happened long ago without government intervention.

I get that commercial motorcyclists are notorious for flouting the laws; but if you are going to ban an industry notorious for flouting the law, start with politicians. Our problems with enforcing our laws constitute an entirely separate issue that should be resolved in and of itself. If you effectively banned all "okada", there would still be lawlessness in the land. We can become a society that enforces its laws, or we can remain a society that doesn't, while banning "okada" as though it makes a difference.

In fact, what is wrong with our policy-makers anyway? They think people's adaptation to economic difficulty makes the city look less beautiful, but rather than ease the economic difficulties, they try to sweep the poor people under the carpet so they don't have to see them

It doesn't work, but they keep doing it.