Between Obasanjo's Yesterday and Yar'Adua's Tomorrow

Just like Tchicaya U’tamsi, écrivain engagé and pre-independent Congolese (DR) Poet, “ I have used the excuse of my rotten teeth to keep my mouth shut decently” over the general elections in Nigeria. Considering the hue and cry that heralded the sham called elections as well as the vociferous protestations that greeted its conclusion, I knew I took the right decision in choosing to keep my mouth shut decently and drink from Uncle Bola Ige’s well of wisdom which prescribes that “blessed are those who do not hope for they shall not disappointed.” Of course I did not hope for something better and wasn’t disappointed with the outcome of the elections.

 

But following the proceedings of the Presidential Investiture Dinner for President Yar’Adua and his deputy where eulogies and elegies for were generously composed in cadences of extensive hyperbole by Politicians, ‘stakeholders’, Bankers, Economists and professionals on the many ‘achievements’ of Mr. Obasanjo which included the GSM revolution, debt payment, solid foreign reserves, international recognition, economic reforms of progress, peace and stability, poverty alleviation and democratic institutionalisation,  I almost had a change of mind. Have I been living in the same Nigeria so lavishly painted? Is this Nigeria my country they are talking of or another? Have I been a part of Obasanjo’s Nigeria for the past eight years? Is there something wrong with me? Am I normal at all? How come I always see glasses from half-empty positions?

 

The Nigeria I know is not in anyway close to what these otherwise honourable men and women have said. The Nigeria I know is the Nigeria of Obasanjo’s yesterday. A Nigeria that was for eight solid years, under the clutches of a man who had a self-depreciating sense of humuor before he finally succumbed to the lure of Bonarpatist self-monumentalisation. A Nigeria where liars and thieves are our honourable men and prostitutes are our ladies of honour. A place where we fight corruption but cannonise certain criminals. We pour eulogies on riggers and defamers of our constitution, bestow nonentities with honoris causa, and decorate illiterates with Doctors of letters. A country where lecturers and teachers are perpetually on strike and students only resume school from strike to embark on another strike. A Nigeria where we cannot even organise Hajj operations or conduct a near-accurate population census. A country where darkness reigns supreme with families and industries wiped out by deadly fumes of generators and power plants. A nation where life has become so cheap that the highways and airspace have become veritable icons of mass extermination. A Nigeria where Governors are kidnapped, Ministers are assassinated, federal allocations are hijacked and the brains behind these acts are given national honours and presidential handshakes.

 

A nation with an open sore called Niger Delta that continues to fester into cancerous growth, swallowing innocent citizens, expatriate oil workers, and properties at a pace so dizzying and frighteningly apocalyptic. A Nigeria where poverty walks on all fours in the face of abundance of nearly everything and the only oil-exporting nation on earth that imports fuel. A Nigeria where new refineries cannot be built in eight years but old ones can be sold after eight years of Turn Around Maintenance!

 

All these and many more represent the Nigeria of Obasanjo’s yesterday and with a change in baton from Mr. Obasanjo to President Yar’Adua, Nigerians have been treated to an undesirable rendition of the facile dictum of “I will continue with the programmes and reforms of the Obasanjo administration”, “I will build on the successes and achievements of the last administration”, e.t.c, thus giving us an inkling into how a Nigeria of Yar’Adua’s tomorrow will be. Going by the foregoing, it wont be hasty to anticipate a Nigeria of Yar’Adua’s tomorrow where the fundamental principles and characterization of Obasanjo’s yesterday would hold sway. A Nigeria where elections would be conducted for the purpose of killing and maiming in order to get opportunities to “serve”. A Nigeria where reforms would only matter when they serve the interest of the rulers and are disregarded when they tend to regulate their excesses. A Nigeria where considerable number of presidential hours would be spent in the air, junketing the globe, proving to unconvinced international audiences that we are the heart of Africa. A Nigeria where 5% of the earnings of all public office holders produced by the ruling party goes straight the party coffers.

 

Amazingly, Nigerians still continue to wallow in their legendary rendezvous with hope and optimism in the face of great challenges. Inspite of the questionable legitimacy of the mandate and the all-depreciating baggage of Obasanjo’s yesterday which Yar’Adua wears like babylonic apparels, the Nigeria of today still expects him to rise above these moral confines and put in place a leadership that will extricate her from the interlocking clutches of corruption and subservience to imperial forces in the name of poisonous prescriptions for economic growth. A leadership that will eradicate, not alleviate, poverty as well as provide incentives for industrial and agricultural revolutions, thereby engaging gainfully, millions of her befuddled youths who presently subsist in desolate waste lands of joblessness, prostitution, armed robbery and struggle, militancy and youth restiveness.

 

Between Obasanjo’s yesterday and Yar’Adua’s tomorrow, lies a Nigeria of today that earnestly craves for a change in all principles of state policy. An early dislodgment and disempowerment of all anti-people reforms, retrogressive presidential posturing, pretensions and proclamations. A leadership that will put education on the front burner of budgetary relevance, resolve with dispatch and conclusively, the lingering feud between the Government and Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), and take people-centred steps in revamping and revitalising education at both primary and post-primary levels. A leadership that will put in place for her people, basic infrastructure and facilities such as housing, roads, Airports, Aviation facilities, water and electricity at all levels. Of equal importance is the provision of standardised health facilities and centres of medical excellence where both the rulers and the ruled can access quality health care delivery. The Niger Delta question must be solved swiftly through the implementation of a complex whole of strategies and steps that are aimed at addressing decades of neglect, exclusion, underdevelopment, infrastructural decay and utter abandonment currently being experience by the region.

 

Of greater importance to the Nigeria of today is the restructuring of our bogus federation and an immediate overhaul of our constitution. The past eight years have not only brought out the naked deficiencies of our constitution but have also revealed in its truest shape, the knock-kneed and distended nature of the Nigerian federalism. The advent of an Obasanjo yesterday, who swept aside all questions of national existence by the simple process of arrogating to himself, his immediate family, small circle of cronies and destructive party, has of course further galvanized the thinking, inserting the possibility that one way to ensure that this aberration never again occurs, is to look into and modify the very structures of the nation being that made such an unthinkable possible, for if the unthinkable could happen once, and the internal arrangements of a nation’s democracy are not drastically overhauled and rendered more equitable and accountable, then of course, the temptation to repeat that phase of our history will ever remain with us and we may wake up tomorrow to discover that a clone of what we now democratic dictatorship has resurrected while we slept or busied ourselves with unbridled scramble for public office.

 

For Yar’Adua, the choice of being a politician who places the nation at his service or a statesman who will place himself at the service of the nation is obviously his to make, not mine, not ours.

Atâyi Babs

May 2007

BAYELSA AND THE CANONISATION OF PROFLIGACY

The nation’s media and even the Internet world were once again, awash recently with essays and commentaries relating to the performance or otherwise of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan’s 9 month-old administration as well as the involvement or otherwise of Mrs. Patience Jonathan in a money laundry act. Of particular interest is Dr. George Allen Fente’s treatise, the Press Secretary to the Governor’s response, a rejoinder from one Mass Movement for Good Governance and a recent pasting on the web by Maxwell James on hysteria, not the solution. Given the expected gamut of published reactions and counter-reactions which subsisted mainly in the conscious misrepresentation and malicious distortion of facts, steeped in a torpid language, truth, cannot but be sacrificed on the altar of personal interests just as the Marxist thought postulates that “in the grip of political psychosis, truth, reason and common reason give way to instinct, passion and emotions”.

According to the Press Secretary and the Mass Movement, Gov. Jonathan has firmly put the State on the “highway of progress” with the introduction of Government taxis to ply the nooks and crannies of Yenagoa and its environs, the piling work on the Ekoli Bridge, on-going construction of the road to Ekeremor through Amassoma, Ekeki and Amarata Housing Estates under construction, payment of salaries, health and educational institutions being face-lifted, the hosting of Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, Mariam Makeba, Richard Grozny, Brain Brown and the Senators of the Federal Republic. The Movement further believes that Gov. Jonathan has moved the State from the “abyss of backwardness and dark alley to the limelight as the State has now become a destination of choice in the South-South”.

From the foregoing, it becomes evident that it is either the Press Secretary/Members of the Movement have become musicians of imagination, erecting a tapestry of fiction and poetry of seduction constructed in cadences of irony or are suffering from a diseased state of thinking hitherto associated with patients of exaggerated self-importance who feed fat on the filthy lucre that emanates from the Creek Havens. A penetrative gaze a the advertised achievements of Gov. Jonathan will bring to the fore, an embarrassing degree of mental aridity, factual inaccuracy, logical inconsistency and linguistic incoherence bordering on serious hypocrisy and falsehood. To say that the procurement and distribution of taxi cabs to ply the nooks and crannies of a Creek town is to say the least, a sad recourse to pedestrianism in the thought process of developing a State that hibernates in aquatic splendour! One does not need a visit to Bayelsa to discover that the alleged piling work on Ekoli Bridge (a project initiated as far back as 1971), Ekeremor to Amassoma road construction and the Ekeki and Amarata Housing Estates are nothing but mere redistribution of forks and knives to pathetic jobbers and entrepreneurial sellers of conscience to cut from the State’s large portion of the national cake with a view to using same to facilitate the Governor’s re-election next year. These projects which have become interminable 419 enterprises, were awarded, not with a view to meeting perceived needs of the generality of the Bayelsans, but with an ominous goal of empowering a new choir of political vultures whose rapaciousness could put all leeches, buccaneers and vampires to shame.

One sad commentary about our democratic experience is the wanton glorification of responsibility and irresponsibility as dividends of democracy. In saner climes, the performance of a Leader’s statutory obligations and constitutional functions such as Staff welfare, Community welfare and Institutional strengthening do not constitute achievements (or giant strides as we say here). It is a Leader’s capacity to craft and fashion out a vision that will manifestly translate into the total liberation of his subjects from the interlocking clutches of poverty, socio-economic exploitation, geo-political domination, ethno-cultural dislocation as well as a neo-fascist enslavement implanted by past years of myopic and tyrannical leadership (the Bayelsa story for the past nine years) that constitute what is known as achievements in office. It is in line with this intellectual wavelength that Plato posited that “our object in the establishment of the State is the greatest happiness of the whole and not that of any class.” But sadly here, a Governor will gladly tell the whole world that some of his numerous achievements are payment of salaries, donation of vehicles to all industrial unions and payment of medical allowances in arrears. It is tragic, indeed lamentably tragic that we are blessed with the Goodluck of a Governor who has turned the Bayelsa Civil Servants into civil slaves and the entire Bayelsans into the Willing who are led by the Unknowing and are doing the impossible for the Ungrateful and have done so much for so long, with so little that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

To us Bayelsans, the talk in some quarters that Gov. Jonathan has turned the State in to a destination of choice in the South-South that Dr. Kaunda, Makeba, Grozny, e.t.c can come to is not only gibberish but a nonsensical baptism of wastage that has become a favourite pastime in the Creek Havens. A concurrent juxtaposition of the over $1.6 billion that accrued to the State in the past 9 months and the Governor’s major achievements vis-à-vis the AMA 2006, The Senators’ Forum, The HIV/AIDS Walk, e.t.c will accentuate nothing but a monumental canonisation of profligacy and acute misapplication of a people’s funds and priorities. Ostensibly whirling in the unfathomable stupor of inferiority complex and corruption stigma occasioned by Alamieyesiegha years of pillage, the Government felt that the only way of gaining relevance once again in the comity of civilised States, was to go cap-in-hand to Organisers of major social events in the country (including the forthcoming NAFEST), begging for hosting rights with full sponsorship and backing from the State Government. Thus in the blind pursuit of this vain glory, billions of naira meant for the infrastructural turnaround of the State, provision of state-of-the-art medical facilities (in view of the prevalence of oil spillage and other concomitant diseases associated with riverine areas), and the erection of socio-economic resorts/tourist beaches (the TINAPA example), have been misdirected into the facilitation of these jamborees. Suffice it to say that these jamborees do not end up achieving the purpose of Government sponsorship in view of the fact that they always leave a sour taste of rueful astonishment at the extent of profligacy in the minds of the Visitors/Participants in these programmes who usually leave the State with memories of Bayelsa as a State where its indigenes are hungry, homeless and hopeless in the midst of plenty, mere attendants at the shrine of canonised profligacy.

The current investigations by EFCC in to the money laundering act committed by Nancy, Mrs. Jonathan’s sister really makes one to wonder if the State is jinxed or under a spell of some sorts, or have we now become a State of the unfortunate, governed by the unwarranted for the benefit of the undeserving? Inspite of the litany of shamefaced denials emitting from the Government and its paid agents, Bayelsans are yet to be told in clear terms who Nancy really is, what the nature of her million dollar business is, the extent of her sister’s (the First Lady) influence in her business, and the role of the Government in encouraging other businesswomen like her in the State. However, one thing that remains constant as the northern star in all these calculated attempts at window dressing a malignant cancer is the fact that Mrs. Jonathan and by extension, the State’s First Family, cannot be extricated completely this web of economic crime committed by their confidante. Moreover, for a Governor’s wife whose recalcitrance to her husband’s directives led to the untimely death of a young and promising Commissioner of information in car crash, and whose stock in trade of late is hopping from one State Ministry to the other, placing outright demands for contracts for her fronts and cronies cannot but require the services of a Nancy!

Maxwell James and the Mass Movement also informed Nigerians that “Gov. Jonathan has re-branded and stabilised well and brought it to the level where everybody in Nigeria now wants to associate with Bayelsa, and its time for everybody to get involved in moving the State forward.” The above assertion is symptomatic of the typical Nigerian political speech, which is merely a conflation of meanings, encoding a universe of sly, slippery and cynical significations that manages the magic of appearing to say something while essentially obscuring issues. In what way has the State been re-branded? Re-branded into what or as what? Is everybody in Nigeria associating with the State now because it has become a tourist delight, a hub of socio-economic activities in the Niger Delta or a place renowned for less than frugal expenditure where hostage taking (and probably suicide bombing) has become a way of life?

The age-long aphorism of “moving the State forward” should be denounced for what it is, an empty, stultifying clause that oozes deception. Owing precisely to the beguiling attractiveness of the spoils of office, our Leaders usually fixate on the metaphor of propulsion, mistaking the image of motion with the idea of progress. Moving the State forward into what? Crises, chaos or crass corruption? Of course, a State can be moved forward into crises, chaos and crass corruption when a Government elects to sponsor factionalisation amongst its many unregistered youth bodies. Our recent history is replete with Leaders that have moved us forward into ineptitude, misery and unimaginable self-enrichment.

It is understandable that it is far too early to expect “giant strides” from an administration that is just 9 months old, but the truth still remains that solid steps and actions imbued with the innate capacity to engender qualitative development of the people and infrastructural resuscitation can be made in 9 months. A baby that cannot crawl, cry or be cuddled in 9 months is only fit for a paediatric reclusion, and not the Creeks. Oil rich Bayelsa, the glory of all lands, has gone through a most excruciating journey for the past 9 years in the hands of renegade-leaders who have only succeeded in perpetrating infrastructural decay and backwardness, thus presenting her as a standing example of an institutional irony, and can ill-afford, the speeding antics of a snail, in its destined march to greatness.

Bayelsa deserves a better deal – a clean break from the past!

Atâyi Babs

Kpansia Epie

2006

AWONIYI: Completing Kogi's Break from the past?

With the media hype finally settling down after the burial of the ACF Chairman, Chief Sunday Bolorunduro Awoniyi and the attendant harvest of condolences carved in cadences of dirge, splashed here and there by Nigerians in their legendary adulation of the dead, comes a more poignant push to question the relevance of the ACF chairmanship to the people of Okun land and Kogi state, when there is no single federal high institution in Okun land (except the pitiable Federal Govt Girls College in Kabba), and no referral health institution of note (save the recent effort of Prof. Lambo’s recent intervention). The situation becomes even more pathetic for Awoniyi’s old Kabba province (which is the present day Kogi) when compared with other lesser provinces in the old northern Nigeria.

Kabba province, which was second, only to Kano province in terms of revenue, human resources and size, cannot today boast of a Federal University nor an appreciable federal presence in structures and facilities. How come after several years of faithful service to Sir Ahmadu Bello and other northern overlords, Awoniyi’s Kogi remains the 3^rd poorest state in Nigeria (CBN statistics)? Of what tangible significance are the long years of service in the northern establishment and the ACF machinery to the thousands of Okun, nay Kogi youths who are wasting away in the desolate island of unemployment with educational paralysis rusticating their ideals? 

To many keen followers of the political historicity of the fertile land that is safely tucked around the only confluence in Nigeria, Kogi represents a miniature Nigeria where three major ethnic groups (Igala, Ebira & Okun) hold the other minority groups in the state to the jugular in the Machiavellian shove of determining who gets what, when and how. One other similarity the state shared with Nigeria was that of the existence of a miniature trio of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Sir Ahmadu Bello and Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the persons Dr. Steven Achema, Senator A.T Ahmed and Chief SB Awoniyi who all bestrode Kogi’s political firmament like inscrutable colossus of effervescent hue. These icons played prominent roles the creation of the state as well as its socio-political and economic development through their diverse interventions and active participation in governance issues.

Dr. Achema, just like the late sage, Chief Awolowo, was and still is the issue in Igala politics and with the Igalas constituting over 54% of the state, Achema has continued to regulate the political temperature of the confluence state even six years after he was sent to the great beyond in a largely suspicious auto crash. Senator A.T Ahmed on the other hand, epitomised (and still does) the totality of all ‘Ebiraness’. He was a mobile no-holds-barred encapsulation of all Ebira aspirations and up till now, the truest expression of the Ebira question remains contextualised within the formidable and impregnable A.T Ahmed machinery. Just like Achema, he too perished in a very controversial auto crash along the same Lokoja-Abuja road where Achema met his waterloo.

Chief Awoniyi on his own part, assumed naturally the political leadership of his people after an untainted stint in the public service of Northern Nigeria and then Nigeria. For his glorified relationship with Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Kogi west senatorial slot became his for the asking under the umbrella of the defunct National Republican Convention (NRC) in 1991. From this position, there was no looking back for the Aro of Mopa as he went on to form the PDP alongside Dr Achema in G34 and other and then went on to contest its national chairmanship and lost before becoming the Arewa Consultative Forum’s Chairman. Just like his two other peers, he too went the way of all mortals recently as a result of injuries sustained in an autocrash along Abuja-Kaduna road.

Having interacted closely with these three gladiators in their days of active political engagement, I cannot but point out the obvious fact that this threesome had an overflowing love for their kith and kin who in turn venerated them to high heavens as political demi-gods in Kogi state. Suffice it to add this nexus with their people contributed in small way to the conflictual nature of the relationship between these three men. Several indefatigable efforts made by Achema and A.T Ahmed to govern Kogi were met with frustration through the influence of Awonyi who honestly felt that it was his Okun people’s turn to govern the state since the Igalas had governed the state previously and the Ebiras had produced a Governor in the person Adamu Attah in the old Kwara state. This singular belief held by Awoniyi that power must be rotated among the ethnic groups in the state not minding their minority status propelled him to rally all the firepower in his arsenal to ensure the emergence of Dr. Steven Olorunfemi, a minority candidate from Okun land as the PDP Gubernatorial flagbearer in 1999 as against the hugely popular Achema in a primaries that reeked of intense manipulations.

With the battle line firmly drawn between Awoniyi and Achema and the latter subtly extending support to the opposition party, Awoniyi’s protégé lost the election to Achema’s ethnic brother, Prince Abubakar Audu. Not ready to swallow the defeat with equanimity, Awoniyi took the battle to Abuja where he rooted vigorously for the expulsion of Achema for anti-party activities and also ensured the exclusion of Achema’s name from the ministerial list and almost succeeded in deleting Achema’s name from the list of Special Assistants to the President before Obasanjo intervened by insisting that he needed stubborn people like Achema (who could ensure the defeat of an ‘almighty’ Awoniyi’s candidate) around him. With this insistence, another battle line was drawn, this time between Awoniyi and Obasanjo and Achema became handy in ensuring that Obasanjo’s candidate, Engr, Barnabas Gemade, gives Awoniyi a handsome beating in the race for national chairmanship of the party.

The first major casualty to be recorded in the power play for the soul of Kogi PDP was Dr. Achema who later died on his way to Lokoja for the State’s PDP congress. His absence notwithstanding, Achema’s camp eventually triumphed over Awoniyi’s camp by producing majority of the state EXCO and this victory eventually sealed Awoniyi’s political invincibility in the state as he was even at a point summoned to the party headquarters in the state to answer charges of anti-party activities. Coinciding with this string of events was the death of the then ACF Chairman, Alh. Abdulraham Okene, a Kogite of Ebira extraction, and with the then tidal rise in the clamour for total separation of the Middle Belt from the North and the need for an Obasanjo-hater to counteract Obasanjo/Danjuma’s preference for middle belt officers in the military’s high command, the northern oligarchy found in Awoniyi, a willing tool for the emasculation of all middle belt activism as well as total onslaught on Obasanjo.

Awoniyi’s performance was no doubt brilliant as he gave teeth to the hitherto rudderless ACF, rallying it against every obnoxious move of Obasanjo and this he did until he died on his way to a meeting in Kaduna bringing to a completion, Kogi’s break from the immediate past era where these three titans held sway as A.T Ahmed also died last year in an autocrash. Signs of an imminent end was initially sounded early this year when Awoniyi’s direct scion, Abayomi was roundly defeated by Smart Adeyemi in the Kogi west PDP senatorial primaries, thus signalling the emergence of a brand new era in Kogi politics that will hopefully be devoid of autocrashes! Rest on, our Bolorunduro!

AN EVENING WITH ANGRY OSUNDARE AT 60

AN EVENING WITH ANGRY OSUNDARE AT 60

atayibabs@yahoo.com

 

 

With invitations sent all across the world, the literary world abuzz with frenzied expectations, the atmosphere conspiratorial, embellished with the rough caress of Lagos island breeze, the stage was set for a fiesta of words, all in honour of Prof. Niyi Osundare who clocked 60 years recently. Surrounded and submerged in an island of books and books, the precincts of Jazz Hole Ikoyi, Lagos further gave an inkling into what the evening would be: an evening for the lettered mind as well as a celebration of Prof. Osundare’s sixty year-old sojourn in this part of the world that is not beyond our ken.

 

The roll call was nonetheless heart-thumping and spirit-soaring as it ranged from the genial and sacred Wole Soyinka to passionate Odia Ofeimun, the amiable Ogunbiyis to brotherly Kunle Ajibade and many others renowned for the lethal firepower that juts out from the barrels of their pen.  As we settled down to listen to the melody of knowledge, immersed in accentless articulacy, and dance to the rhythms of wisdom vibrating from the talking drum of priceless experience, the shocker came: Our celebrant is angry!

 

 Of course the celebrant is not angry that the organizers dragged him all the way from his teaching assignment in New Orleans to Lagos, rather he is profoundly thankful for the gesture as it afforded an opportunity to regale his friends with his unsavoury experience when Katrina paid him an unwelcome visit in his home in New Orleans. He remains thankful to all those who proved to him that whatever Katrina went away with, friendship could restore even ten times better. He is not angry that he has clocked 60. On the contrary, he considers himself extremely blessed to attain that age and to grace to mark with his folks as he has had two major close shaves with death, an accident in Nigeria and the hurricane Katrina that almost swallowed him and his wife and went away forever, with his prized possessions: books and manuscripts in soft and hard copies.

 

Prof. Niyi Osundare is angry that he is clocking 60 at a time the health of his beloved Nigeria and that of his fellow countrymen and women keeps migrating from bad to worse, as if on a legendary pilgrimage. He is angry that the plight of his fellow citizens is appallingly worse than it was when he marked his 50^th birthday in 1997. He laments the fact that all around the country, sudden deaths have become usual and welcomed occurrences and that it is no longer news that life has become so cheap in Nigeria that even rats now tend to compete with humans in life expectancy. He finds it difficult to comprehend the fact that with exceedingly high-income statistics from oil flaunted by the Government at the centre, hunger still lays its tenacious siege on Nigerians’ bellies, reducing them to the level of scrounging animals with Pensioners hanging on the streets of Abuja, queuing endlessly, and dying in the process of begging for what is their due.

 

Osundare’s vexation stems from the barefaced reality of human and natural resources that limitlessly abound in the land, the country should have no rendezvous with poverty, needless to mention topping the list of every international index of misery and social underdevelopment. He painfully rues the omniscient complex of our rulers who strut around the country in triumphalist back-slapping and the most insensitive kind of conqueror mentality while he and most Nigerians continually find it difficult and stressful to travel internationally as they are quarantined from other nationals and aggressively interrogated almost to the point of missing connecting flights, all because of their possession of a Nigerian passport!

 

Coming from an Osundare who spent a substantial part of his life in Ibadan both as a Student and Teacher, his anger is perceptibly justified as the gubernatorial lunacy in Oyo State climbs to a macabre level. Who wouldn’t be angry when the cherished ideals of one’s homeland are being thrown to the dogs with reckless flourish by political urchins nurtured and bankrolled by the State? A more cogent rationale for his anger can be situated in the state of the country’s education sector, a sector he had committed all his working life to. It is with an embarrassing degree of shame that one notes that even with the inputs of Osundare and his ilk, education in Nigeria has become an expensive charade, an empty stultifying ritual for raw or half-baked graduates, inflicted on the Nigerian society for the dissemination of crass ignorance and the perpetuation of gloom. The ‘finished products’ of our educational system cannot serve themselves well, needless to mention the country, they cannot even justify the country’s below 26% investment in their education.

 

In one of Prof. Osundare’s open letters to President Obasanjo, which as usual, remained largely unreplied, he opined that “ Teachers are being mandated to make bricks without straw and compelled to watch helplessly as cherished academic standards run utterly to seed and the country takes its ‘quantum leap’ into illiteracy and darkness. They are disabled by poverty, low morale; inadequate teaching tools, and they find no joy and satisfaction in the job they do.” These and many other myriad of problems threatening our destined march to greatness dominated the birthday celebration which later metamorphosed into an ideas house for the restoration of Nigeria from the brinks of self-motivated collapse. Just as Odia Ofeimun who compèred the event added, the fact that Osundare still has the nerves to be angry about Nigeria validates his unrepentant patriotic zeal and optimism in the Project Nigeria as most Nigerians have since lost the capacity to be angry about Nigeria. They have simply resigned themselves to fate, awaiting the worst or the best to happen.

 

This confirms the axiom that Nigerians are the only people on the face of the earth that will find a way of escape through a wall when pushed to the wall. Some jocularly refer to this escapist and defeatist mentality as resilience. But all through world history, resignation to fate and escapist mentality are not recognised as seeds that germinated into free, prosperous and civilised societies. Rather, it is indignation with the present and a capacity to match words with action that guarantees a glorious future. Dissatisfaction with the status quo remains a major key to any process aimed at reforming the present for future security and prosperity.

 

The beautiful evening ended on a convivial note amidst effusions of nationalistic enthusiasms and an inexplicable yet inextinguishable glimmer of hope that after the darkness of the darkest night which may be today in our country’s history, comes a glorious dawn of prosperity, respect for the sanctity of human lives, responsible leadership, international recognition and total observance of the rule of law and due process.

Bon anniversaire, dear Prof. Osundare!