poverty

Nigeria’s Fake Anticorruption War

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By Adeola Aderounmu.

Corruption is still the biggest problem with Nigeria. It’s like a curse because despite the pockets of prosecution that we witness every now and then, it seems that things will never change.

I think that the problem will not go away because the fight against corruption is very partial and carries no sincere purpose.

If a man can plead his way out of prosecution then the war itself is absolutely useless. We have seen corrupt politicians arrested today and released tomorrow and case closed!

What kind of anticorruption war is that?

Moreso, some people have never been questioned about their stolen wealth. It gives an impression that some thieves are smarter or more powerful than the others. For example, it is either Babangida is smarter or more powerful than Bode George.

Imagine this, Babangida is alleged to have stolen more than 12 billion dollars. If the allegation is wrong, we’ll never know because he has not given an account (at least not a public one) of how Nigeria’s finances was managed during the gulf war.

The result of this insincerity and fake war on corruption is that we still have more than 90 million Nigerians who don’t know what the next meal would look like. The result also included inability to sustain good and qualitative education. It extends to Nigerian highways listed among the worst in the world. More than 400 people will die on the road today!

The insincerity of governance in Nigeria means that power generation is getting close to zero. Soon, it will be back to the Stone and Dark Ages.

It is not too late to bring corrupt politicians to book. The prosecution should be total, resolute and absolute. Monies should be returned and used to build the country.

But who are am talking to? Who will bell the cat? An illegal president? The entire system is corrupt and it seems that some things will never change.

Are Nigeria and Abuja two great mistakes?

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Are Nigeria and Abuja two great mistakes?

By Adeola Aderounmu.

For a while now, I have been wondering if Nigeria was/is a mistake. Maybe four or more countries would have been viable and prosperous instead of the one nation (Nigeria) populated by more than 90 million extremely poor people.

Indeed in the absence of corruption and very bad governance maybe Nigeria would have become the greatest country on earth. We will never know. What we know is that there are people in Nigeria whose 14th generation from now will not experience poverty because some members of their families have looted and are still looting and preparing for them-the unborn.

In the same set up called Nigeria, for example in the Niger Delta we have people who are living on less than 1 dollar a day. As these people continue to suffer, treasures and wealth are taken away from them daily and part of this wealth was used to build a new city called Abuja.

Instead of building a new capital called Abuja the right thing would have been the building of the Niger Delta. If mumu and idiots like Babangida have built the Niger Delta, we would have no militants today. There will be no MEND. There would not have been any kidnapping in the Delta and Ken Saro Wiwa would not have died.

So the questions remain: Would the people in my area of West Africa have been better off today if the vagabond Briton called Lugard did not establish NIGER AREA (Nigeria)? If the successive evil governments of Nigeria did not introduce poverty as a way of life, would MEND and other criminal militants be waging war against Nigeria today?

Death of Nigerian immigrants in the Mediterranean Sea (The Nigerian Guardian Editorial)

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Culled from the Nigerian Guardian Monday 4th August 2008.

THE shocking news of the death of two Nigerian children travelling with their father aboard a boat ferrying immigrants across the Mediterranean sea en-route Italy once again brings to the fore the harrowing experience of many Nigerians who are desperate to escape the hardship in the country. The depressing economic condition in the country is taking a toll on the population. How to address this problem and check the flight of Nigerians from their own country for largely economic reasons remains a major challenge for the country’s leaders.

The two children reportedly died at sea of starvation and were thrown overboard by their father who was travelling along with 74 other illegal migrants before the Italian coastguard in the Mediterranean Sea picked up their boat. The migrants had set off from Libya. This is happening at a time the Italian authorities have declared a state of emergency on illegal immigration.

A fortnight ago also, 14 Nigerians perished in the same Mediterranean Sea off the Spanish coast. A small open boat, presumably not seaworthy, carrying over 37 Nigerians, capsized in rough seas with waves of up to six metres on July 8. A Spanish maritime rescue ship reportedly managed to rescue 23 of the illegal immigrants while 14 were unaccounted for. The dead included two pregnant women.

This is not the first time that Nigerian illegal immigrants have perished in the Mediterranean waters in a bid to enter Europe. The Organisation for Human Rights in Andalusia (APDH-A), a Spanish human rights group says more than 921 illegal immigrants died at sea trying to reach Spain in 2007. Out of this number, 732 perished close to the western coast of North Africa at the start of their journey while another 189 died near the coast of Spain. The majority of the immigrants were from sub-Saharan Africa of which Nigerians constituted the largest percentage.

These incidents should compel a sober reflection on the worsening state of the nation’s economy that has made the country hostile and uncomfortable for many people thereby forcing thousands of citizens to flee the country even at great risk to their lives. The death of these unfortunate Nigerians in search of better opportunities in Europe, even through illegal routes, is a sad comment on the Nigerian situation. It is sadder still that reports of tragedies such as these do not discourage other would-be illegal immigrants.

The embassies are besieged daily by thousands of Nigerians who are seeking visas and hoping to remain abroad illegally. The presumption is that the streets of Western countries are paved with gold and that life outside Nigeria would necessarily be better. Many have lost their lives and hopes in the process.

The harsh economic situation in the country is to blame. There is mass unemployment, social infrastructure is decaying, there is insecurity in the land, poverty stalks the land as virtually every sector of the economy is depressed. The list of woes is unending and nothing could be more scary. Since the 1980s when the economy took a plunge for the worse, large numbers of Nigerians have sought refuge abroad to escape the hardship at home. Many believe that doing odd jobs abroad is better than languishing at home. This is the driving force.

Consequently, thousands of Nigerians queue up daily, at the gates of foreign embassies in the country seeking visas. The embassies have devised stringent conditions to prevent many from obtaining visas. As a result, only a handful of visa applicants succeed. In utter desperation, therefore, those denied visas seek alternative means to accomplish their desire. To worsen the matter, a syndicate of unscrupulous Nigerians has capitalised on the ugly situation to defraud unsuspecting would-be immigrants with promises of visas and jobs abroad on payment of fees running into thousands of dollars.

It is these crooks that organise such hazardous and illegal trips across the Mediterranean Sea after the victims have paid the agreed fees and have, in most cases, been issued fake visas. In the case of immigrants whose destination is Europe, the syndicate would first transport them to any of the North African countries from where they are ferried by rickety boats across the sea. It is in the course of such ill-conceived trips that accidents occur.

This has smeared the image of Nigerians across the globe. Consequently, on arrival at foreign entry points, security operatives subject our citizens to untold harassment and inhuman treatment. Unfortunately, Nigerian government officials at home and in foreign missions have not helped matters. In a way, the maltreatment of Nigerians abroad is a reflection of how Nigerians are treated by their own government.

To discourage more Nigerians from fleeing abroad as illegal immigrants, governments across the federation would have to improve conditions at home, and make the governance process more citizen-friendly

Northern governors and the politics of oil BY REUBEN ABATI

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Culled from the Guardian Newspaper Friday August 1 2008.

THE big news of the week in my estimation is the declaration by the chairman of the Forum of Northern Governors, the Chief Servant of Niger State, Dr Mua’zu Babangida Aliyu at a programme tagged First Northern Agricultural Summit on Monday, July 28, to the effect that Northern Governors have resolved to turn their back on oil revenue and develop the agricultural resources of the North. Dr Aliyu was speaking on behalf of the 19 Governors of the Northern states of Nigeria, and at the same forum, his views were further echoed by the Adamawa state Governor, Admiral Murtala Nyako. Dr Aliyu declared: “The future of the north lies in our hands. We should today begin to shape our destiny. As a Nigerian of Northern extraction, I feel very unhappy when somebody describes me as a parasite because of oil, when I know that I have the capacity to solve my problems and probably do even better through agriculture and education.” And so the North wants to go back to agriculture, with the hope that the financial sector of the economy will provide necessary support.

The politics of this declaration is important: the Northern Governors are responding directly to widespread insinuations in the Southern part of the country that the North is rather parasitic, contributing little to the commonwealth and yet getting more than a lion share of the national cake. Over the years, this distrust of the North has been expressed ever so loudly by Southern leaders and interest groups; thus turning geography into one of the more delicate sub-texts of Nigerian politics. Issues of contention include the population of the north, the political delineation of the North, resource allocation, the relatively low contribution of the North to national GDP, and the unusually large presence of the north in positions of power and authority. At the centre of this is the politics of oil, the allocation of federal revenue accruing mainly from the sale of crude oil.

The ThisDay newspaper in reporting the Northern Governors quoted them as saying: “North can survive without oil”. The Champion gave the story an even more provocative edge in its headline: “To hell with your oil: North tells South”. This is perhaps the most radical response coming from the north so far on the question of oil and its control since 1958. Before now, the Northern intelligentsia had tried to argue that the crude oil in the Niger Delta belongs to all Nigerians and not to the owners of the land from which it is extracted. The late Dr Bala Usman on many occasions even pushed a curious argument based on geology to wit: the oil deposits in the Delta flowed, over the years from the Northern parts of the country, and so the real owners of the oil in the Delta are the people of the North. A second notable response was the attempt by the then North-dominated Federal Military Government to find oil by all means in the North. So much money was spent on a search for oil in the Chad Basin, until the explorers got tired of searching. And now in 2008, the Northern Governors, for the first time have declared that “the Niger Delta can go to hell” with its oil and that without oil, the North can and will survive.

One of the earliest reactions to this came from the Arewa Consultative Forum, the social and political forum for Northern leaders, with the ACF saying that Northerners are indeed “lazy and parasites who rely on other regions for survival. There is no reason to run away from the truth.” But in s strange balancing act in the same statement, the ACF blames the Niger Delta for the economic woes of the North because according to it, people of the Niger Delta raided the Middle Belt for slaves during the slave trade era. All of these seemingly entangled issues can be taken apart.

The intervention of the ACF is at best a form of damage control, for if prompt effect were to be given to the wishes of the Northern Governors, the development process in the north which is essentially dependent on oil revenue will grind to a complete and final halt. But Dr Aliyu and his colleagues could not have been calling for a sudden stoppage of the sweet and free funds coming for the Federation Account. Their statement was clearly politically inspired and aspirational in terms of their development projections for the North. But talk is cheap. However, it is not only the North that is dependent on oil, it is not only the Northern states that are parasitic, nor is it only the people of the north that have become lazy. The curse of oil affects every part of Nigeria and all the people. Nigeria’s national productivity index is one of the lowest in the developing world.

The black gold is at the root of most of the ills in the Nigerian society: the laziness of the leadership elite, the bowl in hand, beggarly conduct of the states and the imposition of unitarist modes on the governance process in spite of the federalist principles in the Constitution. It is the entire country that is lazy and parasitic therefore: and it is one of the reasons why the people and the militants of the Niger Delta have had to continue to remind the rest of the country to become productive and make a contribution to the national pool instead of stealing Niger Delta resources in a greedy and unfair manner which leaves nearly nothing for the real owners of the resources. This wake up call had been long in coming but it is now more strident with the insistence of the people of the Delta on federalism, the militancy in the creeks and calls for resource control.

It is perhaps not difficult to see why the North is specially targeted and labelled an unproductive part of the Nigerian Union. The ACF accuses the people of the Niger Delta of raiding the Middle Belt for slaves during the slave trade era. The slave trade ended over 200 years ago. Where is the connection with the development crisis in the North? The ACF’s statement in this regard is meaningless, and this is unfortunate coming from the same ACF that is humble enough to admit that the South is saving the North. The problem with the North is its elite. Nearly every politician who becomes a big man in the North wears a big babaringa and refuses to work. More than any other group in Nigeria, the northern elite have had more access to state resources and more control over the same resources, but this has not been used to bring development to the people.

The same oil resources that Southerners claim Northern leaders have taken have largely been used to oppress the poor in the North and sustain feudalism. In this regard, the average Northerner is just as aggrieved as the average Southerner, for in the end, the patterns of dispossession imposed on this society by successive governments at all levels have produced uniform grief. The underdevelopment of the North has nothing to do with the slave trade; it has a lot to do with the attitude and lifestyle of the Northern man of power. Northern Governors trace the de-industrialisation crisis in the North to “international conspiracy against the North”, If there is any conspiracy at all, it is internal and it is the conspiracy of the northern elite against their own people.

One example: Governor Danjuma Goje of Gombe state has approved for himself and his predecessor in office a sum of N200 million as “executive pension”. The North, like the South, is in need of new leaders, not rent-collectors. If Northern Governors want development, they must begin with changes at the level of attitude and lifestyle. Nothing in Northern agriculture as proposed can sustain their present lifestyle. Vice Admiral Murtala Nyako, the Adamawa Governor, was right when he lamented as follows: “No nation has ever enjoyed lasting peace and stability or could ever survive when only a few of its citizens wallow in wealth and affluence at par with the rich of other nations, while the rest of its citizens are entrapped in poverty.. the simple truth is that the above reality obtains more in the North than other parts of the country”.

Northern Governors have been holding meetings since 1961, and at every meeting, they talk about the same issues – agriculture, education and development. But nearly 50 years later, there are more poor people in the north than other parts of Nigeria. The streets are full of distracted kids, with bowls in hand begging for alms during school hours. When UNICEF reports that more than ten million Nigerian children of school age are out of school, they can be found mostly in the North.

Northern Governors want to focus on agriculture, but to use agriculture as a launch pad for growth and development, the states must invest first in education. Who will work on the farms that the North will set up? In a few years, the growing population of almajiris on Northern streets will be old enough to be mobilised for riots not for any productive activity. It is a shame that many years after independence, the North continues to enjoy an affirmative action privilege in education and politics, which easily annoys Southerners who feel that they face much stiffer competition in seeking and gaining access to opportunities. Who will manage the agricultural renaissance of the North? This same set of fertilizer-stealing, rent-collecting elite? And where is their blue-print?

North-South relations in Nigeria are often constructed in form of rivalry and competition, and this is discernible in the tone of the statements by the Northern Governors and also the ACF. But it is an unhealthy competition that promotes further divisions. Rather than dismiss the Niger Delta and its oil, the Northern Governors should show humility and gratitude. If they are serious, they should be more interested in raising constitutional questions and seeking reviews which would free the North and other parts of Nigeria from the tag of “parasitism”, and which in the long run will ensure a return to federalism under which every state in Nigeria will be required to become productive. Under that new arrangement, the Niger Delta people will be glad to go to “hell” as advised

MAY 29 2007-MAY 29 2008:Another Year Wasted!

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Adeola Aderounmu.

It’s been one full year since an illegitimate government was installed or enthroned in Nigeria. One can easily be deceived that Nigeria is ungovernable because of the divergence of people, opinions, cultures, attitudes and size of the country. But Nigeria is not the only country that is diverse in such many ways.

What is missing and what has eluded Nigeria is sincerity of purpose on the parts of the political class and the useless military that have plunged the country since 1960. To this day, a typical Nigerian politician is a looter and an opportunist. All he or she is aspiring towards is self-betterment and personal enrichment. The other aspects of him/ her are deceit and pure hypocrisy.

Corruption remains the main thing in Nigeria-our biggest ailment. Politicians continue to loot and milk-away the country to dryness. They are never prosecuted and when they are prosecuted, they walk away with total freedom after a deceitful trial and bail session. Who is fooling who? All the ex and serving politicians who have stolen monies from the national treasury are still enjoying their loots while the rest of us suffer, just like that!

Millions of dollars continue to disappear from the treasury daily under shady and covered deals. Nothing is done to improve the standard of living in the country. What is the essence of the few flashes of magnificent buildings in Abuja when it is made only for a negligible part of the population? Those things in Abuja mean nothing and they serve no purpose to more than 90m people living below poverty line and surviving on less than 2 dollars a day.

Nigeria needs 100 000 MW of power but she is generating less than 1 000 MW. How can a sane mind explain this? One year after the illegitimate coming of Umaru Yar Adua, power supply has gone worse. Those who stole and mismanaged billions of dollars that were earmarked for electricity development in the past 8 years are living as freemen. What a country? Those kinds of people belong in life-time jail because their negligence has sent thousands to the grave beyond. Their ineptitudes have destroyed lives and homes. They have spread sadness in the land, and the sadness and darkness persist to this day-May 29 2008 and beyond.

In other aspects of our lives as Nigerians, we are on our own while the government continues to operate at a frequency that does not tally with the expectations of the masses. The governments in Nigeria do not care about the Nigerian people. The politicians are thieves in disguise. They lie to the people and they rigged their way into power. Imagine this very wicked gang led by Yar Adua asking the people to pay more for electricity which is not even available in the first place. Absolute nonsense and senselessness!

In Nigeria, nobody cares if you have water to drink or if you “hunger to death”. Nothing is plan and nothing is in focus. The hospitals are not functioning to optimum level. Even the illegitimate president goes to Germany for treatment of his own ailment. What a shameless man? Why didn’t he build any hospital in Katsina State when he was a governor FOR 8 WHOLE YEARS? Has anyone thought about that?

Housing is an issue that is not tabled in the Nigerian government agenda. I don’t remember the last time estates or residential areas were designed and executed in that country. It is up to you as an individual to loot somewhere and build your own house. Only very few people can work legitimately to achieve such noble dreams. Majority do it at the expense of other people who must suffer. Rare and Scanty Mortgage houses are up for the rich and mighty. Where is the hope of the common man?

This country Nigeria is known worldwide as a producer of oil. Yet in a very shameful way, Nigerians continues to import petroleum products for use in Nigeria. The refineries are not working at all or they are working inefficiently. All these years of talking and talking, these civilian and military idiots in power cannot do something to build new refineries or make the available ones work maximally/ optimally. How many shameful things and mad acts can one see in governance by these gangsters?

Really, hopelessness persists. Look at the network of roads. Highways are in terrible conditions and all tiers of governance are looking the other way. Nigerian roads are terribly, terribly bad and annoying. Expressways have become snail-ways. Rather than settle down to work, these senseless politicians go about jumping from one country to another. They move from one hotel to another and from one useless function to another. They don’t even know what they are doing. Absolute scalar quantities!

The Nigerian people too do not even know their rights at all. They are just doing follow-follow. Many political thieves are still waiting for their own opportunities to steal and loot directly and indirectly. In general, the lack of purposeful leadership and the presence of a powerless followership are rubbing this country of her greatness. What is left of Nigeria is individual’s will to succeed at any cost. If you take away self-will, there is no country left to call Nigeria.

How long shall we complain about all these ills before we begin to see remarkable changes that will touch the lives of more than the 140m people? How long before corrupt politicians are sentenced to prisons? When will thieves in political offices be shown the way out? When will violence stop and when will the votes be counted? How many more fuel pipeline explosions are we going to have this year?

Who will save our souls?