Kukah: Boko Haram, Symptom of Failed State
11 Sep 2011
By Mohammed Aminu
Bishop of the Catholic Church, Sokoto Diocese, Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, Saturday, said the wanton violence being perpetrated by Boko Haram in the country is a manifestation of a failed state.
He also stated that the level of insecurity in the country was a consequence of the inability of the Federal Government to manage the post-election violence in some parts of the country.
Speaking to THISDAY in Sokoto Saturday, Kukah maintained that Boko Haram had gone beyond its late leader, Mohammed Yusuf and ordinary people that were associated with the North East group.
According to him, it is unthinkable that poor people in Maiduguri, who are angry with the police, would have contemplated going to bomb the United Nations building in Abuja.
Kukah pointed out that Boko Haram was a manifestation of corruption, saying the violence is about the corruption that has entered into the bloodstream of the Nigerian society.
He declared that the violence being witnessed in the country at the moment was a manifestation of state failure and poverty and added that from the point of view of major indices, Nigeria is literally at best a failed state, since the signs are there for all to see.
"Tell me which other country in the world can live with enormous resources and yet poverty is sitting side by side. We don't need the United Nations to tell us about the failure of the country, the indices are there for all to see,” he said.
"Scientifically and from the point of view of social science and politics of transition, if a country is going through transition, there are minimum economic indices.”
Monday 21 November 2011
Father Kukah and the Pentecostals
By Festus Eriye
Published 23/05/2010
Opinion
Unrated
says Catholic cleric, Mathew Kukah should not engage in mud-slinging against other christians
Catholic cleric, Monsignor Matthew Kukah, would ordinarily be described as a perceptive contributor to our on-going national discourse. Some would even go a step further to say he is controversial based on a couple of curious positions he has taken over the years. But certain statements attributed to him this week suggest that while he may be brilliant, he is far from infallible.
In a lecture titled: "Nigeria at 50: Challenges and Prospects" delivered at the sixth Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Institute of Strategic Management Nigeria (ISMN) held in Calabar mid week, Kukah drew the following conclusions about our national journey.
In its 50 years, he said Nigeria has been bedevilled with "politics without principles, pleasure without conscience, wealth without work, knowledge without character, business without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice".
It is hard to quarrel with that. But after taking pot-shots at everyone in sight he rounded on the religious – Pentecostals in particular - whom he accused of preying on the fears of the people. "One of the greatest problems facing the country is criminality masquerading as religion. Pentecostalists are preying on the peoples fear. A man sees ‘vision’ and promises you the ‘cure’. No wonder today we have so many ‘prayer warriors’.
It is not difficult to see why someone like Kukah who is a notable representative of religious orthodoxy in Nigeria would have a problem with people whose choose a path of worship that deviates from the canons of Rome or Canterbury. Over the years people like him from the Christian religious establishment have sought to deride and dismiss the Pentecostal movement as nothing more than an exotic fad that would soon disappear.
But rather than succumb to the vain hopes of the orthodoxy, the movement has gone from strength to strength – to the extent that today – were Nigerian Christians to be polled, a majority are likely to describe themselves as Evangelicals or Pentecostals.
Kukah has diagnosed "criminality masquerading as religion" as a major threat to Nigeria today; what he has not done is point the finger in the right direction. What are the criminal dimensions to the practice of Pentecostalism in Nigeria that he has discovered? They are not going about slaughtering people in the thousands in other to convert them. All they offer is a belief template which people are free to accept without compulsion whatsoever.
Among notable issues that the Catholic hierarchy has had with Pentecostals is their dynamic interpretation of The Scripture. But when you examine their core beliefs in the light of what is written in The Bible, it is impossible to reproach them. Teachings about healings and prosperity are all there in the word of God for all who would approach them with an open mind.
But whether the likes of Kukah believe it or not, miracles are still happening in today’s world. No genuine teacher of God’s principles for prosperity would offer you some pie-in-the-sky doctrine. They would always emphasise holiness as well as the hard work ethic.
Unfortunately, some of the harshest critics of Pentecostalism in Nigeria have never really taken trouble to examine the doctrine. Where you base your conclusions on the excesses of one or two televangelists; or a couple of false prophets, it is hard not to come away prejudiced.
The truth of the matter is that a man with an argument can never win against one who has an experience. I would suggest that respected priests and commentators like Kukah should sheath their swords and take time to study this move of God in Nigeria. It is not wise to denounce Pentecostals as ‘criminals’ just because they think differently.
One would have expected someone of Kukah’s standing in the Catholic establishment to keep his head under the parapet rather than engage in wild generalisations and mud-slinging against other Christians – knowing the trials that his own church is passing through at this period.
All over Europe and America Catholic clergy are under attack because of the child abuse scandals. But we all know that these are the actions of just a few deviants. There are thousands of hardworking priests and nuns who live a holy life and are in no way involved in the mess. Do we now denounce the Catholic hierarchy – ignoring the good the church has done over the years – just because a handful missed it?
Rather than sneering at the efforts of Nigeria’s many ‘prayer warriors’, Kukah should be thanking God for them. It may seem like the rapid spread of Pentecostal churches has not changed their adherents much. But let’s not forget that ours is to pray: it is God that can change a man. We might also add that without the prayers it could have been worse.
The trouble with Nigeria is not flamboyant Pentecostals. The triple demons of ethnicity, religious intolerance and corruption existed long before Pentecostalism became fashionable. Let’s focus on those evils rather than take on scapegoats who don’t deserve the tag.
Two-party by force
Nigerians tend to rally along two broad-based political tendencies. It is that thinking that informed President Ibrahim Babangida’s experiment when he unilaterally set up the National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP).
His political factory even manufactured manifestoes, logos and slogans for the two artificial parties. In the end, shocked at the progress his illegitimate children were making, IBB strangled them with his own hands.
On Thursday, members of Nigeria’s House of Representatives – in a throw back to the military days - discussed a proposal to institutionalise a two-party system by legislative fiat. Thankfully, the motion was defeated after a rancorous debate.
Nigerians love short cuts and in our bid to catch up with the rest of the world we embark on the most ludicrous of endeavours. I cannot recall anywhere in the democratic world where the number of political parties was fixed by parliament.
In the US and UK where until now there have been two dominant parties, there is room for others to co-exist and compete. It is that provision of a democratic alternative that allowed the British Liberal Democrats to break up the Labour-Tory power rotation arrangement that had existed for decades.
Choice is at the heart of democratic culture. If Nigerians are inclined to a two-party system then let it evolve. Throwing in independent candidacy is not enough. We should not be hemmed into any fake arrangement simply because we have too much choice. I do agree, though, that the state must withdraw from funding parties. When it does the real number of parties Nigeria can support would emerge magically.
The trouble with the Electoral Act is not the fact that we have 54 political parties on the books. At issue is the determination of politicians to subvert even the most cleverly crafted anti-rigging legislation ever known to man.
If our office seekers would renounce violence and fraud there would be no need for all the superfluous reviews of existing laws. What we have on the books are enough deterrent. Unfortunately, no one ever gets prosecuted and punished for electoral offences and no one is deterred. That is why we keep going round and round in circles.
By Festus Eriye
Published 23/05/2010
Opinion
Unrated
says Catholic cleric, Mathew Kukah should not engage in mud-slinging against other christians
Catholic cleric, Monsignor Matthew Kukah, would ordinarily be described as a perceptive contributor to our on-going national discourse. Some would even go a step further to say he is controversial based on a couple of curious positions he has taken over the years. But certain statements attributed to him this week suggest that while he may be brilliant, he is far from infallible.
In a lecture titled: "Nigeria at 50: Challenges and Prospects" delivered at the sixth Annual General Meeting and Conference of the Institute of Strategic Management Nigeria (ISMN) held in Calabar mid week, Kukah drew the following conclusions about our national journey.
In its 50 years, he said Nigeria has been bedevilled with "politics without principles, pleasure without conscience, wealth without work, knowledge without character, business without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice".
It is hard to quarrel with that. But after taking pot-shots at everyone in sight he rounded on the religious – Pentecostals in particular - whom he accused of preying on the fears of the people. "One of the greatest problems facing the country is criminality masquerading as religion. Pentecostalists are preying on the peoples fear. A man sees ‘vision’ and promises you the ‘cure’. No wonder today we have so many ‘prayer warriors’.
It is not difficult to see why someone like Kukah who is a notable representative of religious orthodoxy in Nigeria would have a problem with people whose choose a path of worship that deviates from the canons of Rome or Canterbury. Over the years people like him from the Christian religious establishment have sought to deride and dismiss the Pentecostal movement as nothing more than an exotic fad that would soon disappear.
But rather than succumb to the vain hopes of the orthodoxy, the movement has gone from strength to strength – to the extent that today – were Nigerian Christians to be polled, a majority are likely to describe themselves as Evangelicals or Pentecostals.
Kukah has diagnosed "criminality masquerading as religion" as a major threat to Nigeria today; what he has not done is point the finger in the right direction. What are the criminal dimensions to the practice of Pentecostalism in Nigeria that he has discovered? They are not going about slaughtering people in the thousands in other to convert them. All they offer is a belief template which people are free to accept without compulsion whatsoever.
Among notable issues that the Catholic hierarchy has had with Pentecostals is their dynamic interpretation of The Scripture. But when you examine their core beliefs in the light of what is written in The Bible, it is impossible to reproach them. Teachings about healings and prosperity are all there in the word of God for all who would approach them with an open mind.
But whether the likes of Kukah believe it or not, miracles are still happening in today’s world. No genuine teacher of God’s principles for prosperity would offer you some pie-in-the-sky doctrine. They would always emphasise holiness as well as the hard work ethic.
Unfortunately, some of the harshest critics of Pentecostalism in Nigeria have never really taken trouble to examine the doctrine. Where you base your conclusions on the excesses of one or two televangelists; or a couple of false prophets, it is hard not to come away prejudiced.
The truth of the matter is that a man with an argument can never win against one who has an experience. I would suggest that respected priests and commentators like Kukah should sheath their swords and take time to study this move of God in Nigeria. It is not wise to denounce Pentecostals as ‘criminals’ just because they think differently.
One would have expected someone of Kukah’s standing in the Catholic establishment to keep his head under the parapet rather than engage in wild generalisations and mud-slinging against other Christians – knowing the trials that his own church is passing through at this period.
All over Europe and America Catholic clergy are under attack because of the child abuse scandals. But we all know that these are the actions of just a few deviants. There are thousands of hardworking priests and nuns who live a holy life and are in no way involved in the mess. Do we now denounce the Catholic hierarchy – ignoring the good the church has done over the years – just because a handful missed it?
Rather than sneering at the efforts of Nigeria’s many ‘prayer warriors’, Kukah should be thanking God for them. It may seem like the rapid spread of Pentecostal churches has not changed their adherents much. But let’s not forget that ours is to pray: it is God that can change a man. We might also add that without the prayers it could have been worse.
The trouble with Nigeria is not flamboyant Pentecostals. The triple demons of ethnicity, religious intolerance and corruption existed long before Pentecostalism became fashionable. Let’s focus on those evils rather than take on scapegoats who don’t deserve the tag.
Two-party by force
Nigerians tend to rally along two broad-based political tendencies. It is that thinking that informed President Ibrahim Babangida’s experiment when he unilaterally set up the National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP).
His political factory even manufactured manifestoes, logos and slogans for the two artificial parties. In the end, shocked at the progress his illegitimate children were making, IBB strangled them with his own hands.
On Thursday, members of Nigeria’s House of Representatives – in a throw back to the military days - discussed a proposal to institutionalise a two-party system by legislative fiat. Thankfully, the motion was defeated after a rancorous debate.
Nigerians love short cuts and in our bid to catch up with the rest of the world we embark on the most ludicrous of endeavours. I cannot recall anywhere in the democratic world where the number of political parties was fixed by parliament.
In the US and UK where until now there have been two dominant parties, there is room for others to co-exist and compete. It is that provision of a democratic alternative that allowed the British Liberal Democrats to break up the Labour-Tory power rotation arrangement that had existed for decades.
Choice is at the heart of democratic culture. If Nigerians are inclined to a two-party system then let it evolve. Throwing in independent candidacy is not enough. We should not be hemmed into any fake arrangement simply because we have too much choice. I do agree, though, that the state must withdraw from funding parties. When it does the real number of parties Nigeria can support would emerge magically.
The trouble with the Electoral Act is not the fact that we have 54 political parties on the books. At issue is the determination of politicians to subvert even the most cleverly crafted anti-rigging legislation ever known to man.
If our office seekers would renounce violence and fraud there would be no need for all the superfluous reviews of existing laws. What we have on the books are enough deterrent. Unfortunately, no one ever gets prosecuted and punished for electoral offences and no one is deterred. That is why we keep going round and round in circles.
Nigeria: How Far, So Far? By Matthew Hassan Kukah
Posted: June 4, 2011 - 00:32
By Dr Matthew Hassan Kukah is
The key to good decision-making is not knowledge. It is understanding….…Malcolm Gladwell
In my essay marking Nigeria’s 50th anniversary last year, I tried to make some projections as to what Nigeria might look like in the next 50 years. I played around with the theme of what I called, Nigeria’s coming power elite, that is, the millions of our children who are in the Diaspora. I was rather enthused by the reactions I got from that piece. Only last week, I had the honour of speaking at the Nigerian Governors Forum in Abuja. In that short presentation, my concern was with posing the question: How did we get here? For a good part of that day, I received several text messages from people. What I sense is that by some inadvertent collusion, we have ended up with no intellectual content to our politics.
When I posed a similar question at one of our monthly Roundtables which I organize in Kaduna, my good friend, Dr Hakeem Baba Ahmed asked what I thought then was a strange question. Its import only hit me later on. He had asked me rather poignantly, Father, where is here? It is doubtful that Dr Ahmed understood how deep that question was. For, it forced me to think about my own assumptions. Yes, indeed, where is here, or to put it differently, what is here? In other words, like travelers lost, or tired from travel, or at sea, where indeed, is here? The question as to where is here, can be answered by the sheer ubiquity of our chaos, failure and decay.
My interest in this essay is to highlight some of the issues that I raised very briefly in my presentation at the Governors’ Forum. I believe that we are at a momentous period now in our national history. I believe that more than ever before, we now require a robust intellectual input to steer our democracy on a path that can best reposition Nigeria to face the future with hope and confidence. To do this, I will address ten key issues.
First, Nigeria has to come to terms with why our journey has been so very slow. The corrosive impact of military rule, with its tradition of unaccountability and the corrupt influence of money have left a legacy that the political class has continued to exploit, seeing power as merely an opportunity for theft and self enrichment. Someone wrote of the Congo that given the predatory foundation laid by King Leopold and his Belgian exploiters, it was natural that the only one who qualified to succeed him had to be a Mobutu. Mobutu’s historic despoliation and ruination was a natural progression of the dungeon that Belgian colonialism left behind.
In the absence of a clear cut negotiated settlement to end its rule such as in South Africa, or outright defeat of an older order, such as in Afghanistan, Nigeria’s so called transition to democracy in 1999 was at most a muted fraudulent strategic repositioning by a ruling class that had run out of moral options. The late General Abacha’s denouement had turned out to be an exposition of the last dregs of a stale wine of military rule which had been exposed to hostile elements of corruption. Leaving no tradition of accountability or a blue print for organizing for the Common Good, Nigerian politicians have simply come to see their role as merely the continuation of the same exploitation of their people in a semi legal environment protected by the architecture of a weak state. Beyond planning for its own survival, the Nigerian political class has simply no serious blueprint for a national project. The late Professor Claude Ake in a 1996 essay titled,
Is Africa Democratising, drew attention to this sharp distinction when he argued that: Military rule is not so much the aberration we often call it as the negation of what is uniquely human in the way we relate. The military can never engender Democracy because it is the antithesis of democracy as regards norms, values, purposes and structure. The military addresses the extreme and the extraordinary, while Democracy addresses the routine, the Military values discipline and hierarchy, Democracy values freedom and equality, the method of the Military is violent aggression that of Democracy, persuasion, negotiation and consensus building. After many years of discrediting politics, aggressing and humiliating politicians, virtually everyone is discouraged from politics except those with a neurotic attachment to power, no other means of livelihood or self esteem
The principal challenge that the nation faces therefore is how to open up the political space to allow the energy of ordinary Nigerians to become the creative force for growth and genuine development. Politics and political processes were slowed down because the transition to democracy in Nigeria was already concluded before it started. Whereas the Afrikaners had decided that they would give power to Mr. Nelson Mandela, the black South Africans were lucky that they had a disciplined organization, the African National Congress, founded way back in 1917. The ANC had institutionalized ideology and discipline which to which the great Nelson Mandela had to submit to in totality. In our case here in Nigeria, although a cabal made up of retired and serving military officers, retired technocrats and politicians of northern extraction had struck a deal to give power to General Obasanjo while he was still in prison, there was no party platform on which he would
land. Factions, fractions and cliques of different and divergent ideological leanings or none at all, responded to this emergency return to civilian rule.
What emerged as the Peoples’ Democratic Party was at best a menu hurriedly designed well after the meal had been served! A motley crowd of men and women brought together with the mission to perpetuate the ravaging and exploitation of the resources of state, saw President Obasanjo’s earlier commitment to transformation suffer severe strain as the old order sought to claim back what it had not really surrendered. The contortions and distortions of 2003 elections bear no repetition but they showed the strain. Bloodied from that fight, President Obasanjo soon began a process that would reverse some of the gains he had already made. He decided to shed his moral claims, took off the gloves and bang, the rofo rofo fight started. The third term agenda sowed the seeds of the national humiliation that was the 2007 elections. These failures were not evidence of a diseased political elite. They were merely symptoms of a cancer that had not been properly
diagnosed not to talk of recommending a regime of chemotherapy.
Second, what we have as here, is really the evidence of our failure to have a real transition to democracy. We had missed the basic theoretical philosophy of transitions and forgotten that not all transitions from authoritarianism lead necessarily to transitions to democracy unless the old order has suffered defeat or surrendered to a superior moral high ground gained through negotiation as in South Africa. The squalor, the impact of the pervasive and invidious culture of corruption, the collapse and rut of all physical and social infrastructure, the culture of violence are all before us of evidence that the old order was still stalking us.
In a way, we have all become victims of a weak, gasping and collapsing state, preying on its citizens. In a rather strange kind of way, governance has been about the dog returning to its vomit. Fancy the contradiction expressed in the fact that the failure of policy has become the cure. Let me explain. Does it make sense that all those areas where we have the greatest failures are the areas into which huge resources are being sunk? Think of the billions of dollars sunk into generating power which we cannot see. Yet, rather than face this failure, we are told constantly that billions are going to be sunk on railways, power and so on. The lack of roads has become the justification for the perpetuation of the myth that road construction is the excuse for sinking billions of dollars into nonexistent roads. Ditto Education, Health and range illusory options created to justify the persistence of theft as an article of faith. National extortion has become a
tool of governance. The politicians along with their Ministers constantly dip their fingers into the coffers while recycling the proceeds of theft into their pockets and fuelling the Party machinery. It is the cumulative impact of this frustration that found expression in the violence that followed the elections. This is why holding public office is the prelude to political ambitions (Councilor wants to become the Chairman, Chairman of the Council wants to become the Governor, the Governor wants to become the next President and the President decides he does not want to go!) Why should public office not be the prelude to stealing of state resources?
Third, is it likely that we have reached a defining moment, one of the quality of which Malcolm Gladwell, the writer and New Yorker columnist calls, the Tipping point? In the little book by the same title, he says: The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
Clearly, we can attempt this luxury against the backdrop of two rather superficially plausible propositions. First, we might convince ourselves that we have put military rule behind us. This illusion can be sustained against the backdrop of other realities. One was the decisive and incisive decision in 1999 by Generals Obasanjo and Danjuma to cut off from the ranks of the military, an elite segment whose appetite for power had been wetted by public office. That singular decision many would argue, has severely constrained the military’s ability to threaten the polity.
Evidence of the fact that we have crossed the Rubicon might be gleaned from the fact that since in many respects, the military has historically been the fighting wing of the northern ruling classes, under normal circumstances, the clouds and fumes around Yar’adua’s health in the last days of his regime would have offered a perfect excuse for a coup. Happily, Nigeria survived.
Again, even the violence that attended the last elections would also have provided a perfect excuse for the military to argue that the civilian government had lost its capacity to contain the violence. But, happily, the circumstances were different. Of course, at a theoretical level, we can argue that the nature of the beneficiaries of a coup or no coup would have also had a say in determining the behaviour of the military and their civilian sponsors, many of who might probably have drowned in the process.
Can we argue that our ability to successfully organize four elections back to back is also indicative of the fact that we have indeed reached a decisive point in which the military now appreciates that its interests are now subordinate to those of the political establishment? If this argument is found to be sufficiently plausible, then it does appear that Nigeria is on the threshold of a new dawn. But, of course, that depends on other factors. The key concern here is the quality of the political actors on the ground and whether indeed, we have a crop of politicians who can turn away from the predatory politics of the last eleven or so years.
In another biting critique of the Nigerian political ruling class, the late Professor Claude Ake, in a 1993 lecture, summed up the characteristics of the political classes by concluding that: The Nigerian ruling elite survives against all odds. There is no legitimacy to draw on. It has run out of ideas, even bad ones. We are always looking up to someone else, forever searching for good leaders to see us through. The Nigerian state is a negative unity of takers in which collective enterprise is all but impossible. The challenge is for a new crop of well-informed, modern and patriotic politicians to commence a process of severing this ugly, opportunistic, parasitic virus which encourages a visionless gang who see politics or military rule as business by other names.
Fifth, what are the building blocks that Nigeria needs? The real challenge is how the President and the political class decide on team selection. Here, I do not mean just political office holders and the ruling Party. Clearly, there are two institutions whose roles the President needs to think more clearly. These are traditional rulers and religious bodies. These institutions have become very visible in the political process. As we can see from the persistence of violence, there is need for clarification of the roles that these two key institutions have to play in a democracy. Indeed, the so-called eruption of post elections violence was indicative of the need for a clearer role for the two institutions who should be less visible in a democracy.
There is of course a slight conceptual difficulty. Whereas Muslim traditional rulers collapse the two identities of traditional and religious rulers into one, the same cannot be said of the Christian religious leaders. Within Christianity itself, whereas the Catholic Church maintains a legal and critical distance from partisan party political processes, many Protestant bodies have a slightly different disposition. Some within the ranks of the Pentecostals, especially the one-man Churches, believe that the altar can be transformed or co-opted into a partisan political soapbox. The result is the increasing high profile roles that we have seen recently shown either in direct participation by some Pastors or the enthusiastic and direct embrace of Caesar by which some pastors want to become official Chaplains while their Churches become the Political Party at prayer!
The need to extricate these threads of confusion is important. We saw very clearly in the last elections some worrying trends which, if not properly handled could pose problems for both the government and the religious bodies. Seduced by material benefits, many religious leaders seem ready to play roles that show outright partisanship. Government patronage has the tendency to create further problems especially given that adherents to different faiths hold different political views or no views at all. To be sure, unlike traditional rulers, religious leaders do not get their staff of office from the state. Therefore, they have every opportunity to play a more critical and prophetic role of speaking truth to power and standing up for the weak in society. It is understandable that in our convoluted environment, this role is complex. However, if traditional and religious leaders must play their roles and protect their people from the excesses and temptations
of political manipulation, they must try hard to steer clear of partisanship. The politicians have everything to gain and nothing to lose but the religious or traditional rulers have almost everything to lose and nothing (except the material) to gain. The reader might wonder, since yours sincerely is often accused of being a politician. Well, I consider myself a public intellectual with a duty to interrogate politics and political behaviour as part of the process of nation building. I am political because I am human, but not a politician because I am a Catholic priest!
Sixth, what are the present obstacles to Nigeria’s democratization agenda? I think the first is the Constitution. Clearly, the Constitution as we have it runs the risk of becoming an incubus to national development and integration. It is unfortunate that too many factors have combined to make its necessary amendments so difficult. First and foremost, the members of the National Assembly have shown such a gargantuan appetite for self-interest that most commentators would argue that their primary entry into those hollowed chambers was to become major partners in accessing the loot. From the first set of legislators in 1999 right through to the last session, corruption more than anything else trailed this otherwise august body. The legislators did not fool anyone when they tried to brag their way through the stunning revelations of their bad ways by Mallam Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank Governor. Indeed, no less a newspaper than Business Day reported
last week that on balance, it has cost the Nigerian people over one billion naira to get a single bill passed in the National Assembly.
Perhaps our real problem is the quality and caliber of men and women who found their way into that Chamber. Or, it might also have to do with the fact that the Party to which they belonged and which was the Party in power had become notoriously blind to charges of corruption in the polity. In responding to the charges contained in the report of the Presidential Advisory Council over the issues of the size of the Cabinet, the President was reported as claiming that his hands were tied by the Constitution. The point here is that the Constitution requires some really surgical operation in areas that can free it to serve our country effectively. It is hoped that the next Assembly will have the courage to place national interests above those of the members of the Chambers.
Seventh and as a corollary, key issues like the question of Land ownership and citizenship rights require immediate attention. Clearly, the Governors seem to have continued with the bad ways they inherited from the military since the promulgation of the Land Use Decree in 1976. The allocation of choice lands to cronies, friends and associates continues to remain a major ingredient of political patronage. In the peripheries of urban cities, Local Chiefs have climbed into this bandwagon of corruption and, in collusion with government officials, are busy selling lands that do not belong to them. In the process, land speculators and racketeers are constantly swindling innocent citizens. There is need for a radical review and harmonization of Land laws across the country if we are to avoid the dangers of most of our cities becoming glorified ghettos in the future. Again, the crisis over land is closely related to citizenship rights and the rights of Nigerians
to move around in their own country. The problems of the Plateau should have offered us a good opportunity to address these issues, but clearly, the politicians are prepared to continue to play with human lives. These two issues should occupy the attention of both the national and state the Legislatures. But, sadly, since the politicians are the major beneficiaries, it is difficult to see who enough enthusiasm can be injected into this issue. Another area of concern is the overwhelming dependence on the sharing of loot from Abuja especially given that there are no mechanisms for control or transparency in how these resources are used. To facilitate their control, some Governors simply hand pick Speakers and Local Government Chairmen who simply continue to grovel for morsels. The result is a lack of debate or application of resources to the needs of ordinary citizens since the Chairmen are replicating the same tyrannical tendencies.
Eight, there is the issue of national security. Since violence and the insecurity it induced was often the greatest threat to the state, it is not unexpected that political violence became the major excuse for soldiers, the manufacturers and exporters of violence to step in and take over its deployment when it discovered civilians were toying with it. Under the military, security of the Head of State and his government was the major preoccupation and indeed the basis for legitimation. This is why, those within the military who were suspected of threatening the government were often lined up and violently shot as coup plotters. Gradually, the cost of protecting the Head of state became a license for unlimited access to resources. This is what led to the emergence of various security outfits and Operations which have now become an industry. The culture of security vote emerged and it is now part of our political culture. Today, in our so called democracy,
no citizens are allowed to question or know how much of their budgets go into this security vote. If this is not licensed stealing, I do not know what it is.
But, perhaps what is even worse is that although the culture of security vote has been democratized across the levels of government, we see that while more and more Nigerians are dying by the day from violence, the state Nigerian state is losing its capacity to ensure security of its citizens. Armed bandits, armed youths, and so on are constantly intimidating the Nigerian security agencies. More Nigerians have died in our democracy than at any period in our history outside the civil war. Tragically, both citizens and government have shown an unbelievable degree of apathy with the loss of lives. The circles continue and the state and federal governments simply set up Committees, an exercise in mutual hypocrisy since both the members of the Committee and the government know that nothing will become of their report. If this were not a matter of life and death, perhaps one might be less angry. But, the fact that Nigeria remains one of the most unsecured
parts of the world while billions or naira and millions of dollars are being stolen in the name of security is totally unacceptable. Governments should feel free to vote money for security, but there is no reason why this should be a secret.
Ninth, there is the challenge of values in our society. The failure of our electoral processes is a symptom of the moral rut that has taken over our country and the entire fabric of our national life. What can one get now in this country that can be called a right as a citizen? Is it Justice, Jobs, personal safety, access to social services covering health and education among others? The fact is that today, the inability of the state to offer services is tied to the deep corruption that has eaten into the Bureaucracy where, over time, bureaucrats decided to abandon their sacred duty to serve and simply decided that the politicians and the soldiers should not be allowed to chop alone. Of course, it is hard to blame individual citizens in an environment where the failure of government has meant that every citizen now has to bloom where they are planted. Those in power have lost the moral right to impose the will of the state since they are the first fault
lines.
Nigerians complain daily that money is being turned into a god. This may be the case, but we need a context for it. For, really, what else is there to do when you do not have a state that can look after you and your family? This is not an excuse but simply to state that the failure of the state has severe implications for everything in the life of our nation. This is why, restoring a moral balance in our society is a matter of great urgency.
In his seminal essay titled, The Talented Tenth, the great Marcus Garvey presented a masterly argument to the effect that like, Abraham and the debate over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, only the Talented Tenth could reverse the ugly and sad black condition in the United States of America. Among other things, Dr. Garvey argued: If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the
object of life. Today, genuine religion, teaching values and morals has lost grounds to preachers who have fashioned religion to fit the moulds of blind materialism of the moment.
Tenth and finally, we must return to where we started, namely, what is the future for Nigeria? In his little book, The Education of a British Protected Child, Chinua Achebe restates the Igbo proverb which says: If you do not know where the rain began to beat you, you will not know where you began to dry. How apt.
To be sure, we have and we must make much out of the successful elections especially as the world has commended. However, it will be deceitful for anyone to claim that these elections did not have problem nor can the result be indicative of the fact that we have seen the end of the bad ways of the political class. Their imprimatur is commendable, but in the final analysis, it is what Nigerians feel and how they perceive changes in their lives that is most important. If for the sake of argument, we accept the congratulations for the conduct of the elections, will the political class rise up to the challenge of rebuilding a severely fractured nation like Nigeria?
Dr Jonathan has great challenges ahead, but they are also opportunities for statesmanship and patriotism. He has to simply have a sense of history and what greed has done to his predecessors. Like the Brazilian monkey, many a statesman has held on to the nut of power until the forces of darkness caught up with him. This was what happened to General Abacha. Some of his predecessors had a chance to make history but allowed blind ambition, poor reading of the direction of the moral wind vane. The result is a tattered legacy (as in President Obasanjo). For a man who has come from nowhere, President Jonathan must decide whether, as I mentioned in my lecture at the Governors’ Forum, he wants to be an orphan or take his place as a prince.
If he wears the toga of an orphan, then, he can reverse the ruination that has made Nigerians vulnerable orphans and set in motion a machinery for creating an inclusive society based on justice and fairness to all. This will help us make up lost time. If on the other hand, he prefers to function as a prince, then, the footsteps of those who presided over the political funeral of his predecessor will not be far away. You have a four-year mandate. Live by it in case tomorrow does not come.
The President has a chance, but there are too few good men and women left, men and women with enough courage and moral fibre who are willing to sacrifice everything including their political ambitions to do the right thing for Nigeria. There are men and women within and outside the PDP who have destroyed this country and those who have tried to build this country. The President must rein in some of the bad eggs in his Party. The mad violence was merely a channel for pent up anger and frustration against a system that has remained blatantly unfair especially to the weakest.
There is no doubt that in its present shape and form, the Nigerian state is an anti thesis to development and progress. Held down by ethnic entrepreneurs, there are no winners, only losers. If the President does not free himself from their clutches, they will sink him. They have manipulated the levers of this corrupt contraption called Nigeria and that is why we have come to grief and are living in the shame that is characterized by darkness, squalor and death in the twenty first century. Whether they come wearing the agbada of regionalism, the cap of ethnicity or the beads of religion, the President must look back and see if he can find anything that these shameless chauvinists have done for anyone outside their immediate family and fixers while posing as praetorian guards. If we can build on these elections, we can inspire confidence in the system among our people.
In doing so, we shall end the tragic culture of voting without choosing. Congratulations, Nigeria.
Dr Matthew Hassan Kukah is Monsignor,Parish Priest, St Andrews and Vicar General of Catholic Archdiocese of Kaduna
Posted: June 4, 2011 - 00:32
By Dr Matthew Hassan Kukah is
The key to good decision-making is not knowledge. It is understanding….…Malcolm Gladwell
In my essay marking Nigeria’s 50th anniversary last year, I tried to make some projections as to what Nigeria might look like in the next 50 years. I played around with the theme of what I called, Nigeria’s coming power elite, that is, the millions of our children who are in the Diaspora. I was rather enthused by the reactions I got from that piece. Only last week, I had the honour of speaking at the Nigerian Governors Forum in Abuja. In that short presentation, my concern was with posing the question: How did we get here? For a good part of that day, I received several text messages from people. What I sense is that by some inadvertent collusion, we have ended up with no intellectual content to our politics.
When I posed a similar question at one of our monthly Roundtables which I organize in Kaduna, my good friend, Dr Hakeem Baba Ahmed asked what I thought then was a strange question. Its import only hit me later on. He had asked me rather poignantly, Father, where is here? It is doubtful that Dr Ahmed understood how deep that question was. For, it forced me to think about my own assumptions. Yes, indeed, where is here, or to put it differently, what is here? In other words, like travelers lost, or tired from travel, or at sea, where indeed, is here? The question as to where is here, can be answered by the sheer ubiquity of our chaos, failure and decay.
My interest in this essay is to highlight some of the issues that I raised very briefly in my presentation at the Governors’ Forum. I believe that we are at a momentous period now in our national history. I believe that more than ever before, we now require a robust intellectual input to steer our democracy on a path that can best reposition Nigeria to face the future with hope and confidence. To do this, I will address ten key issues.
First, Nigeria has to come to terms with why our journey has been so very slow. The corrosive impact of military rule, with its tradition of unaccountability and the corrupt influence of money have left a legacy that the political class has continued to exploit, seeing power as merely an opportunity for theft and self enrichment. Someone wrote of the Congo that given the predatory foundation laid by King Leopold and his Belgian exploiters, it was natural that the only one who qualified to succeed him had to be a Mobutu. Mobutu’s historic despoliation and ruination was a natural progression of the dungeon that Belgian colonialism left behind.
In the absence of a clear cut negotiated settlement to end its rule such as in South Africa, or outright defeat of an older order, such as in Afghanistan, Nigeria’s so called transition to democracy in 1999 was at most a muted fraudulent strategic repositioning by a ruling class that had run out of moral options. The late General Abacha’s denouement had turned out to be an exposition of the last dregs of a stale wine of military rule which had been exposed to hostile elements of corruption. Leaving no tradition of accountability or a blue print for organizing for the Common Good, Nigerian politicians have simply come to see their role as merely the continuation of the same exploitation of their people in a semi legal environment protected by the architecture of a weak state. Beyond planning for its own survival, the Nigerian political class has simply no serious blueprint for a national project. The late Professor Claude Ake in a 1996 essay titled,
Is Africa Democratising, drew attention to this sharp distinction when he argued that: Military rule is not so much the aberration we often call it as the negation of what is uniquely human in the way we relate. The military can never engender Democracy because it is the antithesis of democracy as regards norms, values, purposes and structure. The military addresses the extreme and the extraordinary, while Democracy addresses the routine, the Military values discipline and hierarchy, Democracy values freedom and equality, the method of the Military is violent aggression that of Democracy, persuasion, negotiation and consensus building. After many years of discrediting politics, aggressing and humiliating politicians, virtually everyone is discouraged from politics except those with a neurotic attachment to power, no other means of livelihood or self esteem
The principal challenge that the nation faces therefore is how to open up the political space to allow the energy of ordinary Nigerians to become the creative force for growth and genuine development. Politics and political processes were slowed down because the transition to democracy in Nigeria was already concluded before it started. Whereas the Afrikaners had decided that they would give power to Mr. Nelson Mandela, the black South Africans were lucky that they had a disciplined organization, the African National Congress, founded way back in 1917. The ANC had institutionalized ideology and discipline which to which the great Nelson Mandela had to submit to in totality. In our case here in Nigeria, although a cabal made up of retired and serving military officers, retired technocrats and politicians of northern extraction had struck a deal to give power to General Obasanjo while he was still in prison, there was no party platform on which he would
land. Factions, fractions and cliques of different and divergent ideological leanings or none at all, responded to this emergency return to civilian rule.
What emerged as the Peoples’ Democratic Party was at best a menu hurriedly designed well after the meal had been served! A motley crowd of men and women brought together with the mission to perpetuate the ravaging and exploitation of the resources of state, saw President Obasanjo’s earlier commitment to transformation suffer severe strain as the old order sought to claim back what it had not really surrendered. The contortions and distortions of 2003 elections bear no repetition but they showed the strain. Bloodied from that fight, President Obasanjo soon began a process that would reverse some of the gains he had already made. He decided to shed his moral claims, took off the gloves and bang, the rofo rofo fight started. The third term agenda sowed the seeds of the national humiliation that was the 2007 elections. These failures were not evidence of a diseased political elite. They were merely symptoms of a cancer that had not been properly
diagnosed not to talk of recommending a regime of chemotherapy.
Second, what we have as here, is really the evidence of our failure to have a real transition to democracy. We had missed the basic theoretical philosophy of transitions and forgotten that not all transitions from authoritarianism lead necessarily to transitions to democracy unless the old order has suffered defeat or surrendered to a superior moral high ground gained through negotiation as in South Africa. The squalor, the impact of the pervasive and invidious culture of corruption, the collapse and rut of all physical and social infrastructure, the culture of violence are all before us of evidence that the old order was still stalking us.
In a way, we have all become victims of a weak, gasping and collapsing state, preying on its citizens. In a rather strange kind of way, governance has been about the dog returning to its vomit. Fancy the contradiction expressed in the fact that the failure of policy has become the cure. Let me explain. Does it make sense that all those areas where we have the greatest failures are the areas into which huge resources are being sunk? Think of the billions of dollars sunk into generating power which we cannot see. Yet, rather than face this failure, we are told constantly that billions are going to be sunk on railways, power and so on. The lack of roads has become the justification for the perpetuation of the myth that road construction is the excuse for sinking billions of dollars into nonexistent roads. Ditto Education, Health and range illusory options created to justify the persistence of theft as an article of faith. National extortion has become a
tool of governance. The politicians along with their Ministers constantly dip their fingers into the coffers while recycling the proceeds of theft into their pockets and fuelling the Party machinery. It is the cumulative impact of this frustration that found expression in the violence that followed the elections. This is why holding public office is the prelude to political ambitions (Councilor wants to become the Chairman, Chairman of the Council wants to become the Governor, the Governor wants to become the next President and the President decides he does not want to go!) Why should public office not be the prelude to stealing of state resources?
Third, is it likely that we have reached a defining moment, one of the quality of which Malcolm Gladwell, the writer and New Yorker columnist calls, the Tipping point? In the little book by the same title, he says: The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
Clearly, we can attempt this luxury against the backdrop of two rather superficially plausible propositions. First, we might convince ourselves that we have put military rule behind us. This illusion can be sustained against the backdrop of other realities. One was the decisive and incisive decision in 1999 by Generals Obasanjo and Danjuma to cut off from the ranks of the military, an elite segment whose appetite for power had been wetted by public office. That singular decision many would argue, has severely constrained the military’s ability to threaten the polity.
Evidence of the fact that we have crossed the Rubicon might be gleaned from the fact that since in many respects, the military has historically been the fighting wing of the northern ruling classes, under normal circumstances, the clouds and fumes around Yar’adua’s health in the last days of his regime would have offered a perfect excuse for a coup. Happily, Nigeria survived.
Again, even the violence that attended the last elections would also have provided a perfect excuse for the military to argue that the civilian government had lost its capacity to contain the violence. But, happily, the circumstances were different. Of course, at a theoretical level, we can argue that the nature of the beneficiaries of a coup or no coup would have also had a say in determining the behaviour of the military and their civilian sponsors, many of who might probably have drowned in the process.
Can we argue that our ability to successfully organize four elections back to back is also indicative of the fact that we have indeed reached a decisive point in which the military now appreciates that its interests are now subordinate to those of the political establishment? If this argument is found to be sufficiently plausible, then it does appear that Nigeria is on the threshold of a new dawn. But, of course, that depends on other factors. The key concern here is the quality of the political actors on the ground and whether indeed, we have a crop of politicians who can turn away from the predatory politics of the last eleven or so years.
In another biting critique of the Nigerian political ruling class, the late Professor Claude Ake, in a 1993 lecture, summed up the characteristics of the political classes by concluding that: The Nigerian ruling elite survives against all odds. There is no legitimacy to draw on. It has run out of ideas, even bad ones. We are always looking up to someone else, forever searching for good leaders to see us through. The Nigerian state is a negative unity of takers in which collective enterprise is all but impossible. The challenge is for a new crop of well-informed, modern and patriotic politicians to commence a process of severing this ugly, opportunistic, parasitic virus which encourages a visionless gang who see politics or military rule as business by other names.
Fifth, what are the building blocks that Nigeria needs? The real challenge is how the President and the political class decide on team selection. Here, I do not mean just political office holders and the ruling Party. Clearly, there are two institutions whose roles the President needs to think more clearly. These are traditional rulers and religious bodies. These institutions have become very visible in the political process. As we can see from the persistence of violence, there is need for clarification of the roles that these two key institutions have to play in a democracy. Indeed, the so-called eruption of post elections violence was indicative of the need for a clearer role for the two institutions who should be less visible in a democracy.
There is of course a slight conceptual difficulty. Whereas Muslim traditional rulers collapse the two identities of traditional and religious rulers into one, the same cannot be said of the Christian religious leaders. Within Christianity itself, whereas the Catholic Church maintains a legal and critical distance from partisan party political processes, many Protestant bodies have a slightly different disposition. Some within the ranks of the Pentecostals, especially the one-man Churches, believe that the altar can be transformed or co-opted into a partisan political soapbox. The result is the increasing high profile roles that we have seen recently shown either in direct participation by some Pastors or the enthusiastic and direct embrace of Caesar by which some pastors want to become official Chaplains while their Churches become the Political Party at prayer!
The need to extricate these threads of confusion is important. We saw very clearly in the last elections some worrying trends which, if not properly handled could pose problems for both the government and the religious bodies. Seduced by material benefits, many religious leaders seem ready to play roles that show outright partisanship. Government patronage has the tendency to create further problems especially given that adherents to different faiths hold different political views or no views at all. To be sure, unlike traditional rulers, religious leaders do not get their staff of office from the state. Therefore, they have every opportunity to play a more critical and prophetic role of speaking truth to power and standing up for the weak in society. It is understandable that in our convoluted environment, this role is complex. However, if traditional and religious leaders must play their roles and protect their people from the excesses and temptations
of political manipulation, they must try hard to steer clear of partisanship. The politicians have everything to gain and nothing to lose but the religious or traditional rulers have almost everything to lose and nothing (except the material) to gain. The reader might wonder, since yours sincerely is often accused of being a politician. Well, I consider myself a public intellectual with a duty to interrogate politics and political behaviour as part of the process of nation building. I am political because I am human, but not a politician because I am a Catholic priest!
Sixth, what are the present obstacles to Nigeria’s democratization agenda? I think the first is the Constitution. Clearly, the Constitution as we have it runs the risk of becoming an incubus to national development and integration. It is unfortunate that too many factors have combined to make its necessary amendments so difficult. First and foremost, the members of the National Assembly have shown such a gargantuan appetite for self-interest that most commentators would argue that their primary entry into those hollowed chambers was to become major partners in accessing the loot. From the first set of legislators in 1999 right through to the last session, corruption more than anything else trailed this otherwise august body. The legislators did not fool anyone when they tried to brag their way through the stunning revelations of their bad ways by Mallam Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank Governor. Indeed, no less a newspaper than Business Day reported
last week that on balance, it has cost the Nigerian people over one billion naira to get a single bill passed in the National Assembly.
Perhaps our real problem is the quality and caliber of men and women who found their way into that Chamber. Or, it might also have to do with the fact that the Party to which they belonged and which was the Party in power had become notoriously blind to charges of corruption in the polity. In responding to the charges contained in the report of the Presidential Advisory Council over the issues of the size of the Cabinet, the President was reported as claiming that his hands were tied by the Constitution. The point here is that the Constitution requires some really surgical operation in areas that can free it to serve our country effectively. It is hoped that the next Assembly will have the courage to place national interests above those of the members of the Chambers.
Seventh and as a corollary, key issues like the question of Land ownership and citizenship rights require immediate attention. Clearly, the Governors seem to have continued with the bad ways they inherited from the military since the promulgation of the Land Use Decree in 1976. The allocation of choice lands to cronies, friends and associates continues to remain a major ingredient of political patronage. In the peripheries of urban cities, Local Chiefs have climbed into this bandwagon of corruption and, in collusion with government officials, are busy selling lands that do not belong to them. In the process, land speculators and racketeers are constantly swindling innocent citizens. There is need for a radical review and harmonization of Land laws across the country if we are to avoid the dangers of most of our cities becoming glorified ghettos in the future. Again, the crisis over land is closely related to citizenship rights and the rights of Nigerians
to move around in their own country. The problems of the Plateau should have offered us a good opportunity to address these issues, but clearly, the politicians are prepared to continue to play with human lives. These two issues should occupy the attention of both the national and state the Legislatures. But, sadly, since the politicians are the major beneficiaries, it is difficult to see who enough enthusiasm can be injected into this issue. Another area of concern is the overwhelming dependence on the sharing of loot from Abuja especially given that there are no mechanisms for control or transparency in how these resources are used. To facilitate their control, some Governors simply hand pick Speakers and Local Government Chairmen who simply continue to grovel for morsels. The result is a lack of debate or application of resources to the needs of ordinary citizens since the Chairmen are replicating the same tyrannical tendencies.
Eight, there is the issue of national security. Since violence and the insecurity it induced was often the greatest threat to the state, it is not unexpected that political violence became the major excuse for soldiers, the manufacturers and exporters of violence to step in and take over its deployment when it discovered civilians were toying with it. Under the military, security of the Head of State and his government was the major preoccupation and indeed the basis for legitimation. This is why, those within the military who were suspected of threatening the government were often lined up and violently shot as coup plotters. Gradually, the cost of protecting the Head of state became a license for unlimited access to resources. This is what led to the emergence of various security outfits and Operations which have now become an industry. The culture of security vote emerged and it is now part of our political culture. Today, in our so called democracy,
no citizens are allowed to question or know how much of their budgets go into this security vote. If this is not licensed stealing, I do not know what it is.
But, perhaps what is even worse is that although the culture of security vote has been democratized across the levels of government, we see that while more and more Nigerians are dying by the day from violence, the state Nigerian state is losing its capacity to ensure security of its citizens. Armed bandits, armed youths, and so on are constantly intimidating the Nigerian security agencies. More Nigerians have died in our democracy than at any period in our history outside the civil war. Tragically, both citizens and government have shown an unbelievable degree of apathy with the loss of lives. The circles continue and the state and federal governments simply set up Committees, an exercise in mutual hypocrisy since both the members of the Committee and the government know that nothing will become of their report. If this were not a matter of life and death, perhaps one might be less angry. But, the fact that Nigeria remains one of the most unsecured
parts of the world while billions or naira and millions of dollars are being stolen in the name of security is totally unacceptable. Governments should feel free to vote money for security, but there is no reason why this should be a secret.
Ninth, there is the challenge of values in our society. The failure of our electoral processes is a symptom of the moral rut that has taken over our country and the entire fabric of our national life. What can one get now in this country that can be called a right as a citizen? Is it Justice, Jobs, personal safety, access to social services covering health and education among others? The fact is that today, the inability of the state to offer services is tied to the deep corruption that has eaten into the Bureaucracy where, over time, bureaucrats decided to abandon their sacred duty to serve and simply decided that the politicians and the soldiers should not be allowed to chop alone. Of course, it is hard to blame individual citizens in an environment where the failure of government has meant that every citizen now has to bloom where they are planted. Those in power have lost the moral right to impose the will of the state since they are the first fault
lines.
Nigerians complain daily that money is being turned into a god. This may be the case, but we need a context for it. For, really, what else is there to do when you do not have a state that can look after you and your family? This is not an excuse but simply to state that the failure of the state has severe implications for everything in the life of our nation. This is why, restoring a moral balance in our society is a matter of great urgency.
In his seminal essay titled, The Talented Tenth, the great Marcus Garvey presented a masterly argument to the effect that like, Abraham and the debate over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, only the Talented Tenth could reverse the ugly and sad black condition in the United States of America. Among other things, Dr. Garvey argued: If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the
object of life. Today, genuine religion, teaching values and morals has lost grounds to preachers who have fashioned religion to fit the moulds of blind materialism of the moment.
Tenth and finally, we must return to where we started, namely, what is the future for Nigeria? In his little book, The Education of a British Protected Child, Chinua Achebe restates the Igbo proverb which says: If you do not know where the rain began to beat you, you will not know where you began to dry. How apt.
To be sure, we have and we must make much out of the successful elections especially as the world has commended. However, it will be deceitful for anyone to claim that these elections did not have problem nor can the result be indicative of the fact that we have seen the end of the bad ways of the political class. Their imprimatur is commendable, but in the final analysis, it is what Nigerians feel and how they perceive changes in their lives that is most important. If for the sake of argument, we accept the congratulations for the conduct of the elections, will the political class rise up to the challenge of rebuilding a severely fractured nation like Nigeria?
Dr Jonathan has great challenges ahead, but they are also opportunities for statesmanship and patriotism. He has to simply have a sense of history and what greed has done to his predecessors. Like the Brazilian monkey, many a statesman has held on to the nut of power until the forces of darkness caught up with him. This was what happened to General Abacha. Some of his predecessors had a chance to make history but allowed blind ambition, poor reading of the direction of the moral wind vane. The result is a tattered legacy (as in President Obasanjo). For a man who has come from nowhere, President Jonathan must decide whether, as I mentioned in my lecture at the Governors’ Forum, he wants to be an orphan or take his place as a prince.
If he wears the toga of an orphan, then, he can reverse the ruination that has made Nigerians vulnerable orphans and set in motion a machinery for creating an inclusive society based on justice and fairness to all. This will help us make up lost time. If on the other hand, he prefers to function as a prince, then, the footsteps of those who presided over the political funeral of his predecessor will not be far away. You have a four-year mandate. Live by it in case tomorrow does not come.
The President has a chance, but there are too few good men and women left, men and women with enough courage and moral fibre who are willing to sacrifice everything including their political ambitions to do the right thing for Nigeria. There are men and women within and outside the PDP who have destroyed this country and those who have tried to build this country. The President must rein in some of the bad eggs in his Party. The mad violence was merely a channel for pent up anger and frustration against a system that has remained blatantly unfair especially to the weakest.
There is no doubt that in its present shape and form, the Nigerian state is an anti thesis to development and progress. Held down by ethnic entrepreneurs, there are no winners, only losers. If the President does not free himself from their clutches, they will sink him. They have manipulated the levers of this corrupt contraption called Nigeria and that is why we have come to grief and are living in the shame that is characterized by darkness, squalor and death in the twenty first century. Whether they come wearing the agbada of regionalism, the cap of ethnicity or the beads of religion, the President must look back and see if he can find anything that these shameless chauvinists have done for anyone outside their immediate family and fixers while posing as praetorian guards. If we can build on these elections, we can inspire confidence in the system among our people.
In doing so, we shall end the tragic culture of voting without choosing. Congratulations, Nigeria.
Dr Matthew Hassan Kukah is Monsignor,Parish Priest, St Andrews and Vicar General of Catholic Archdiocese of Kaduna
"All Our Presidents Are Accidental Tourists," Says Matthew Kukah
Lecture: Priest highlights the problem of the nation Nigeria, urging everyone to take the responsibility for its present state.Lamenting the fact that Nigerian Leaders would have to strengthen their level of preparation before ascending political offices, so that the country could be driven on a platform of visions and not mistakes, Matthew Kukah, a Catholic Priest has declared that it is unfortunate to have all Nigeria Presidents ascending office via one mistake or the other and not with a prepared mind to govern rightly.
"As we can see in the issue of this country, all our President have come by accidents. We have had long history of accidental access to leadership. Who is that person in this country that have been preparing somewhere with a mind that in another five years I want to be the President. All of them are purely coming in through accidental causes. "He said.
According to the motivational speaker and a member of the constitution reform committee set up by the Presidential era of Olusegun Obasanjo, Mr. Kukah x-rayed the list of all the past Presidents both military and political, stating that all of them were virtually unprepared for the task ahead of them.
Speaking at Ado-Ekiti at the Public Lecture organized by the Ekiti State Government to mark the present administration's a year in office, titled, ‘Long walk to a new dawn,' Mr. Kukah described the state governor, Kayode Fayemi as a veteran of struggles as the political thread that took him to the office was humanly unbelievable and challenging, but described his final ascension as the will of God.
Also, Mr. Kukah advised all Nigerians to see themselves as partners in the struggles to reform and rebirth Nigeria, urging them to stop seeing only the politicians as the corrupt individuals affecting the politics, but should look inward to correct wherever there might be needs for every individuals to make changes.
"Many of us belief that the only people that are corrupt in this country are the governors, Presidents and co, the rest of us are innocent, so it is only those who are in power. Those of us who are ere are not the guilty, we have to make it clear that government truly owes us a duty, but has given the opportunity to many of us to make them accountable and we have failed, because most of us are like them." he said.
He however said that through so many means, especially in the name of contracts, those in government and outside government are all guilty and are conspirators in whatever level of development a state has found itself.
The speaker also said that why Nigeria have not been able to overcome religious crisis is due to its way of applying the wrong prescription to solve its problems and cause of the crises, he however charged President Jonathan to ensure having adequate laws in place to check the criminal attitude of the militants and their cohorts in government.
US Ambassador: Social Woes Fuelling Boko Haram in Nigeria
Boko Haram have attacked the Police Force Headquarters in Abuja
REUTERS
The U.S. ambassador to Nigeria has urged it to address "appalling" social problems in its restive north and ease off on heavy-handed security crackdowns if Africa's most populous nation is to overcome a growing Islamist militant threat.
Boko Haram, an Islamist sect whose name translates from the northern Hausa language as "Western education is forbidden", has been behind dozens of deadly bombings and assassinations in northern parts of the country this year.
The sect's home is at the base of the arid Sahel in the northeast, one of the West African nation's poorest regions and bordering Chad, Niger and Cameroon.
President Goodluck Jonathan has said Boko Haram needs to be dealt with like other militant groups around the world but many diplomats and aid groups have called for the government to look at some of the home grown issues that feed the violence.
Jonathan is deploying a growing military force to counter the sect's attacks but many residents say troops do more harm than good, while rights groups accuse soldiers of brutalisation and unlawful arrests that backfire into sympathy for Boko Haram.
"I think it's important for political and military leadership to impress upon soldiers on the ground that they need to do their duty but they need to do their duty in a way that doesn't violate the rights of the civilian population," U.S. Ambassador, Terence McCulley said in an interview with Reuters.
"At the same time I think it's important the government look at how to redress these social-economic indicators in the north. Pick any one you want, whether it be health, literacy or access to clean water, the situation is really appalling."
Boko Haram's ambitions are growing and its attacks are becoming more sophisticated. A car bomb exploded in the car park of police headquarters in the capital Abuja in June, narrowly missing the chief of police.
In August, the sect hit its first international target. A suicide bomber smashed a car full of explosives into the side of the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria's capital, ripping off the side of the building and killing 24 people.
Intelligence agencies and security experts believe Boko Haram has expanding ties with jihadist groups outside the country, including al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which operates in North African countries that border Nigeria.
"We've heard stories for years of individual members of so called Boko Haram or Nigerian Taliban travelling to northern Mali to train with GSPC (Group for Call and Combat), subsequently AQIM," McCulley said.
"Clearly extremists here are learning techniques and are adapting their methods based upon what they've learned, what they've seen outside Nigeria."
Jonathan won an election in April that international observers and many Nigerians said were the fairest since the end of military rule more than a decade ago.
He has since put in place an economic team, led by former World Bank Managing Director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, that has been tasked with forging ahead with a reform programme, which is moving more slowly than international investors would like.
McCulley said Jonathan had made some "truly impressive appointments" and the U.S. was encouraged by the commitment he has shown to reforms, which include a sovereign wealth fund, removal of fuel subsidies and a plan to privatise the power sector, now a major drag on Africa's second-largest economy.
Despite being Africa's largest crude oil exporter and holding the world's seventh largest gas reserves, Nigeria only produces as much electricity as a medium-sized European city.
International investors have said Nigeria's population of more than 140 million offers huge potential gains but a common complaint is that corruption often stunts economic growth.
"It's a clearly a problem. Corruption not only saps the confidence in people in government, it also discourages both national and foreign investment and I think it's a problem Nigeria needs to tackle more aggressively," McCulley said.
He said a big step in Nigeria's development would be to put someone in charge of the country's anti-corruption agency with the integrity shown by Attahiru Jega, the man behind the successful elections in April.
Littleman Muhammadu Buhari By E. C. Ejiogu
Muhammadu Buhari
By EC Ejiogu
The only problem that I see with SO is that he is roundly dedicated to the Nigeria project. Elsewhere, he will be called the quintessential patriot. But when it comes to the Nigeria project, nothing can be more demeaning than calling someone like SO a patriot. This is in the sense that for reasons that derive from the foundational maladies that afflict it, Nigeria is only fit for what it has represented ever since it was cobbled together by the British, i.e. a den and roost for evil men and women, autocrats, dictators, and the clueless who misrepresent themselves as leaders.
But if I must excuse SO’s on-and-on advocacy for the Littleman as a potential savior of the Nigeria project, the latter’s inclined fixation on returning to power cannot be excused. His track record is clear indication that he is an evil, sinister, and treacherous character whose sole desire is to perpetuate an obnoxious contraption and use it to hold the Igbo and any other nationality especially from the lower Niger from charting the path of self determination.
By the way, with all respect due a friend, I must add that SO’s devotion to the Nigeria project as it is presently structured and his conviction that therein lies the redemption of every distinct nationality, which was forced to constitute it could qualify as pathological altruism—“the idea that when ostensibly generous “how can I help you?” behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive”.
Which brings me to two core queries that advocates of the Nigeria project have refused to attend to: Where is that voluntary covenant, which binds the distinct nationalities that inhabit the Niger basin in the Nigeria project? Why then must anyone insist that the nationalities must continue to allow themselves to be entrapped in the Nigeria project even as it is evident that it hinders their progress? I hope SO doesn’t retort with: For unity’s sake!
SO’s more recent outing was his call on the Littleman to come out of hiding and mount what he believes would amount to much needed opposition to Goodluck Jonathan’s make-believe government. Well, well-said. But only if the Nigeria project were a functional state and political economy to boot, and also, if the Littleman himself were a democrat. Does anyone still remember the ancient philosopher’s mantra that says, ‘a good man lives in a good state’?. The Littleman man is neither a good man, nor is the Nigeria project a good state. How then would he be capable of providing an opposition therein? Who made a gift of a coat to Mr. Toad? In and by itself, it will be an aberration for an autocrat to provide an opposition. Even more so, in a contraption like Nigeria that was conceived and brought into existence as a den for the practice of autocratic authority. Just one more: Since the modern era, has anyone seen where a backward group or clique has mid-wived development or progress in society? If you’re in doubt, take a look back, and you will see the roadway of history littered with the pathetic sight of decades of dominance in the project by a backward group, and even some cliques.
Littleman Buhari’s antecedents have shown that he hasn’t deviated from his ancestral pedigree. His ancestors were autocrats who lived and thrived on the hegemony they erected in the greater upper Niger and relied on to dominate and exploit others. He was born and socialized in the same autocratic social milieu, which nourished him and he still thrives in it. It reflects on his public life. Samplers: Did you know that Buhari was one of the senior army officers who sustained a running complaint to Olusegun Obasanjo in 1980, only a few months after he shooed the former’s kinsman, Shehu Shagari into power in 1979 to the effect that he was funding the Police Force better than the Army? That same lack of respect and aversion for the tenets and norms of democracy manifested in 1981 when as a division commander he disobeyed legitimate order from his commander in chief and violated an age-old tenet of healthy civil-military relations in society, which stipulates the subordination of the military at all times to civilian control, by launching “a hot pursuit operation into Chad on his own responsibility” in 1983. He recounted that with pride in a 1993 interview to a newsmagazine. He later capped his subordination with the overthrow of that hapless cabal headed by Shagari on New Year’s Eve 1983. Many wouldn’t forget his often-mouthed arrogant slogan throughout his dictatorship that epitomized his disdain for popular will and concern: “I’m not running for re-election”.
Someone like the Littleman who claims that he is averse to the patronage-clientage system—that, is exactly the other name for what is being called corruption, which afflicts the Nigeria project—that nourished him all his life is yet to account for where he derives the funding that goes into his serial quest to assume state power again. If he is the democrat that he is being made to resemble, why not join up the on-going popular clamor for a sovereign conference to realize a legitimate state through the restructure of the Nigeria project?
Buhari’s messianic-tinged support for the perpetual existence of the flawed Nigeria project is his own indictment as evil in perpetuity. His new-found democratic and anti-corruption claims don’t add up. They are at best, dubious and fictional.
Let no one misinterpret my serious misgivings about the Littleman as an endorsement of Goodluck Jonathan. If at all, the two of them are on different sides of the same coin—a counterfeit.
The only thing I see in and about Buhari whenever I look is his unbridled desperation to reclaim state power in the project and use it for what his ancestors did in the upper Niger more than two centuries ago, which he tried his hands at in the period 1983-1985, i.e. to cow and repress with a characteristic recklessness all in the bid to buy additional lease on time and life for the Nigeria project.
Who would argue reasonably that a Republic of Biafra, which showed exceptional promise in the overall during its short existence, could not have been producing Nobel Prize winners in the requisite realms today, if it had been allowed to survive? It is heart-breaking therefore that on the Eve of the Nobel awards, someone still thought that a Muhammadu Buhari has any positive role to play in the Nigeria project. Tukiakwa!
●E. C. Ejiogu, PhD; is a political sociologist. He is the author of The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria, published in March by Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Is Goodluck Jonathan Plain Stupid? By E. C. Ejiogu
Goodluck Jonathan
By E. C. Ejiogu, PhD
He remained there all the same—shuttling regularly to Germany for what was called medical attention as his handlers indulged themselves looting and stealing public funds. It got to the point when the Germans refused to admit him any longer in their hospital. But the bizarre absurdity continued as the Saudis took over. Even when the Saudis washed their hands off him, and he was parceled back on life support and left outside the seat of power in Abuja in an ambulance where he decomposed away, he was kept on as president.
As all that went on, there was Goodluck Jonathan, rolling over silently in the full view of the world, contented with being the vice president to a president who was as far as anyone knew, dead! When they eventually knocked something together for him and called it acting presidency, he concurred, literally flashing his signature sheepish grins.
One of Jonathan’s first acts after Yar’Adua’s decomposing corpse was finally wheeled out of the seat of power, and way was paved for him to assume de facto control, of state power in the project, was to bother the autocrats in Saudi Arabia to let him come over and thank them for ‘taking care of’ Yar’Adua. Again, he simply grinned some more after they turned him down.
In the last several months, every reasonable person watching as things continued to unfold spiral down in Nigeria has been rankled by the ease with which the Boko Haram Islamist terrorists sustain their blood-letting all the way from Abuja to several parts of the Sokoto Caliphate areas. They have done that in a manner that fits what obtains in climes that are devoid of governance. It got to the point where the US intelligence establishment stepped in to furnish what became the only credible security warning over the menace. Directed at American citizens who were cautioned to stay away from two luxury hotels in Abuja, the alert came handy also for everyone else, including Jonathan and elements of his hapless make-believe government, who free-loaded on the alert that their own outfit is incapable of generating credibly, and deserted the two locations fingered in the alert.
All of these canalize into a sad reality: Goodluck Jonathan, his sterile-brained butterfly of a wife, their unfortunate exploits in public life, indeed, everything about them constitute yet additional indicators that the Nigeria project is, in Graham Green’s description, a burnt out, in fact, a basket case.
I don’t know about you, regardless of the façade of being president—to that I say, president gbakwaa oku!—as much as I have seen of this Jonathan, there is simply nothing extra that I need to see in or hear from him to sufficiently de-convince me that the man is not plain stupid, I mean silly! It’s only a stupid person that will buy into the absurdity, which is being whispered into his ears by the likes of the flotsam-jetsam character like Ruben Abati who presume that paid cheap public relations blitzes in esoteric magazines—some are currently running in the November issue of South Africa Airways in-flight magazine, Sawubona—constitutes their so-called transformation, which clearly translates to deceit.
Worrisome as this reality is, it is not a surprise though. A social ecology in which—as the late Obafemi Awolowo once said during his lifetime—dogs devour lions, is an aberration. It is only a plain stupid man like Jonathan who would delude himself daily that he is waxing successful as president even when it is plain clear that the land is falling into pieces literally.
•E. C. Ejiogu, PhD, is a political sociologist, and the author of The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria published in March by Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
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