₦airaland Forum

grandlexuz: Are you talking of the prophets these days who do nothing but PROHELYING instead of PROPHESYING. I have had enough of them.

Professor Wole Soyinka writes on President Jonathan's accusation about #OCCUPYNIGERIA protesters being bribed with pure water and food.

The most generous response that can be given to President Jonathan's recent statement on the people's fuel subsidy protest is that he is suffering from a bad conscience. The worst – which I fear is closer to the truth – is that he is lamentably alienated from the true pulse of the nation, thanks perhaps to the poor, eager-to-please quality of his analysts, those who are supposed to provide him an accurate feel of the public mood. Since I have had the opportunity to contest this perception of the protest with him directly, it is clear what kind of interpretative diet he prefers. The nation needs all the luck it can get.
The president sent in the army and shock Police squads to forcibly seize and occupy grounds from a demonstrating public, a violation of the people's rights as entrenched in the constitution, a right – as it happens – that has been further consolidated by a pronouncement of the courts of law. This should be seen as a grave danger to democracy, and a warning. Both the participants, and those who – myself included – even though unable to be present, lent both vocal and moral support to the demonstration, have been maligned and insulted by such reductionist reasoning. The culture of public protest appears to be alien territory to President Jonathan, which is somewhat surprising, considering the fact that he has not only lived in this nation as a citizen but served in various political offices. He has lived through the terror reign of Sanni Abacha whose ruthless misuse of the military and the secret service did not prevent demonstrations against perceived injustice and truncation of people's rights.

Jonathan's pronouncements truly boggle the mind. What is this obsession with bottled water, comedians and musical artists? Must demonstrators drink water from the gutter? Is protest no longer viable when sympathizers cater to their needs, supply decent water and food rations? And since when have entertainers been deemed a sign of unseriousness in a protest rally. Static or moving, demonstrators boost their morale in any way they can, including dancing and even mini-carnivals. Sit-down occupation and hunger strikes are also legitimate public weaponry against unacceptable state conduct and policies. It may interest the president to know that during the SNG protest march on the legislative houses, a march, not for any individual, but for the sanctity of the constitutional rules of succession, discussions were on for the acquisition of Mobile Toilets for the next stage, in case the protests attained the momentum of continuous encampment. Presumably Jonathan would have preferred to march into office over a field of human waste.

What is especially ominous in Jonathan's distortive re-visit of that campaign is his attitude of self-commendation, from which one deduces a clear intent to repeat the same action if the people choose to exercise their right of assembly in the future. It sounds warning of a state of mind infected by one of his predecessors who was never weaned of his military antecedents, a predisposition to intolerance of dissent that was expressed in mindless muscularity and contempt of judicial decisions. We should not wait for a tragedy to happen before we serve notice that democracy is incompatible with the arbitrary deployment of armed forces against a people gathered or marching peacefully in freedom, articulating their grievances with or without accompaniment of songs, clowns, water sachets or bottled water. The reaction of the public to attempts at military intimidation is always unpredictable – government at the centre should know its limitations, act responsibly, and refrain from incursions that override even the expressed wishes of state governors, and the rights of a people rendered fractious by decades of misgovernment.

Let there be no further attempts at revisionism. The Nigerian people's right to gather and protest remains inviolate. Gani Fawehinmi Park – and any place of choice for a people's assembly – is a people's space. It should never again be invested by menace and attempted coercion.

Wole Soyinka

ifyalways: We can see where the culture of freedom has led the west to. . .

There just should be a balance.

In an ideal African setting,a child might not be able to talk back at,air his or her opinions to the dad but the mom is easily accessible and available.Btw,once a son attains puberty,he becomes a man in the eyes of his dad.his opinions are sought(might not be taken),he is shown the families inheritances and ancient landmark,groomed to be a man/father/defender and dame goes for a girl child that attains puberty albeit with the mom. Now that's our fine African culture. .don't confuse that with what is obtained today.

I want to talk about a matter of national importance. Do read on and you will see what I mean. We have a deep culture of respect in Africa. Every young person is expected to defer to adults. This has been since the caveman days in Africa. It has been drummed into us that we should respect our elders. Unfortunately, this has been our undoing. How, you ask ?

We are expected as Africans, especially Nigerians to defer to our elders, even when they are wrong. And how is this a matter of national importance ? If we continually put out people who continually have to defer to people because they are ‘elders’ ,how do we efficiently lead ? Now there is nothing wrong with respectfully respecting elders; but there is something wrong with not allowing young people to speak up and air their minds, just because they are being respectful. We marvel at how smart kids from the West are, but this is as a result of them being allowed to speak up. Their voices are not being smothered under the guise of a culture of respect.

This Culture of Respect has killed a lot of strong voices in infancy and nipped many leaders in the bud. When an elder is wrong, he should be respectfully told so, so we don’t continue to live in deception. We need a Culture of ‘Disrespect’ . A culture where young people are free to air their minds and iron out issues with adults. After all , adults are human beings and they also make mistakes. Being an adult shouldn’t give you immunity against correction.

This is what has turned many Nigerian youths into ‘yes yes’ people. The can’t speak up even for themselves, how then will they be able to speak up for Nigeria ? How would this crop argue intelligently and lead effectively ? We truly need a Culture of Disrespect. If you’re a young person reading this, do learn to engage adults intelligently ,without being rude. If you’re an adult reading this,do allow young people to disagree with you. Give them a chance to air their minds, instead of always misconstruing them as rude. They might just be right. And you might just be building a Greater Nigeria in your own way.

Blessings

More to the Culture of Disrespect,

Opemipo Adebanjo

@opesays on Twitter.

Orikinla: Pastors cannot choose your life partners.

It is going to lead to inflation and I srongly believe that the national assembly will not allow it. The national economic team is unknown to us. It is a gathering of friends of the president. They consist of fuel importers, rice merchants and cement importers and so they have nothing to do with the economy. The national economic team cannot be higher than the national assembly. The money for printing the note and the coins would have to be appropriated by the natonal assembly; so if they say no, that is the end of the matter

WhyAWhy: [size=15pt]This a blatant lie! Either you marry the right person or not. Life is not fair, It will ALWAYS throw challenges at you either you like it or not![/size]

hercules07: Waiting for the El-Rufai haters to come out, he is praising both GEJ and Barth Nnaji here. I do not believe the PHCN should be privatised, I think the sector should be deregulated, what worked in the telecomms sector was deregulation not privatization.

On Barth Nnaji's Resignation

I think the issue boils down to poor judgment on the part of Barth. Since the days of TCPC, there exists a Code of Ethics prohibiting members of the Board of TCPC and staff from acquiring assets being privatized.

In 2000, the National Council on Privatization approved stricter Code of Ethics prohibiting staff of BPE and members of NCP from participating in any way in privatization transaction. As DG of BPE between 1999 and 2003, I went further and stopped buying any shares on the NSE to prevent any signalling to the market.

Barth Nnaji ought to be aware of this, and withdrew his firm or its associates from further participation in any consortium participating as consultants or bidders to any privatization transaction, electricity related or not, the moment he was appointed minister of power, and therefore a co-opted member of the NCP. Perhaps he was unaware of this Code which BPE as the secretariat of NCP is obliged to draw attention to for the guidance of all council members.

His resignation is a set-back for the power sector reforms. He is one of the few ministers in GEJ's cabinet that knows what need doing in his area of ministerial responsbility. The whole thing was clearly avoidable.

There are many ministers far less competent than Barth and under whose watch massive fraud, corruption and more serious crimes have been committed. Yet, they continue to sit pretty and not asked to resign.

Perhaps, there is more than this ethical infraction. I do not know, but if what we read is all there is, both the ex-minister and his employer could have handled it better and in a more orderly manner.

Nasir

DO you know of the generation Y concept? Do not feel bad if you do not. I did not myself until recently. Among other things this generation of Nigerians born from between the late 1970s and the 1990s is angry with the generations before them in Nigeria. Maybe they deserve to be. But it had never quite been framed before me as it was recently.

At a recent conference on education, I provided a bit of a summary history of the rise and fall of education in Nigeria, referring generously to Eric Ashby’s work and the Ashby commission’s very kind remarks about the state of higher education in Nigeria at independence. I noted also sir Ashby’s regrets about how the dream had gone sour, in remarks just before his demise.

One of the participants came forward with this stunner of a question. If higher education was as good in those days as she keeps hearing, she queried, how come it produced leaders that have managed to, and continue to make so big a mess of the country. For some amazing reason, I was able to come back on the shotgun, quick on the draw on that very fundamental question. My generation, I said, was not responsible for the mess because it left town but they probably deserve blame as good, if not worse, for not having the character to challenge and stop the rot. So how and when did my generation leave town?

I began with remarks made at the presentation, a few weeks ago, of a book on achievers, by Fola Adeola. Said the founding Chief Executive of GTBank, “Thirty years ago I was referred to as a young man, today they are still referring to me as a young man.” For me, the point Fola was really making was that the men who ran Nigeria 40 years ago as twenty something and thirty something year old without the benefits of the education Ashby felt so proud of, still run Nigeria as seventy something year olds and still call those 10 years younger young men, just as they did 40 years ago. Hold it there. I know you will look at the thirty something year olds who dominate states Houses of Assembly, National Assembly and even one or two Y generation governors and cabinet ministers.

The truth for me is that my generation, which enjoyed that high quality education found there was little space to add the value they could, and in the main, walked. They are the champions of the brain drain. I remember when I returned in 1982 after my PhD. A group of us used to get together around the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs because there was a core of the group that worked as Research Fellows at NIIA. They included Femi Aribisala, Olisa Agbakoba, Babajimi Peters, Mohammed Garba, Henri Yondowei, and Emeka Aniagolu. When Emeka Kalu Ezera, myself and a few others from outside arrived, almost on a daily basis and the big arguments on policy, nation building and serving the common good started, you could almost feel the walls respond to the passion.

Out of all that came a current affairs journal called Spectrum, engagement with the intelligentsia of the generation before and policy thinkers like Izoma Philip Asiodu and his peers. Then many lost heart. One by one, even that group, which came to define my generation, headed North and West. They left the country to positions in Europe and North America. I still recall an opinion essay by someone who wondered why I was still in Nigeria. And the person was not being nasty. He was actually very kind to me but concluded Nigeria had no room for people of talent. He was more or less reflecting the view of what was considered the appropriate thing to do by those who could in my generation, leave town.

Of our group all that is left in Nigeria besides me, are Femi Aribisala and Olisa Agbakoba. Dr Aribisala, one of the finest political economists of his time, educated at Europe and American’s finest universities, long became a pastor, a wonderful thing to serve God, but a huge loss nonetheless to a discipline in which he was one of the very best.

Emblematic of how my generation left town was a story told by an expatriate CEO of a pharmaceutical firm about their frustration in testing the efficacy of new drugs in the 1990s. They would start with a group of professors of medicine at UCH, and six months later all would have left for Saudi Arabia, then they would turn to another group only for exit to happen three months later.

So who was left to lead and how did Nigeria lose the benefit of the quality education of the 1960s, ‘70s and early 1980s. I think the thirty something year olds who took power in the 1960s have generally stayed in power. In many cases they have cloned themselves in the new young men in power who had to worship at their altar and sometimes sacrifice their souls to be let in. They also incorporated a few that got that education the questioner was wondering about. To deal with why those with quality education they have brought in is to understand two phenomena. One is the corporatist state in post-colonial Africa and the other is the idea of being in office but not in power.

The corporatist state sought to suck in certain elements that seemed able to threaten the system. So the Bar Association president was appointed Attorney-General and put in a position to thwart the rule of law to show loyalty to the incorporators, and the medical association president became minister of health etc. In a variant of this process the incorporated is initiated into a new paganism, money worship. The new idolatry makes all human relative in value to what they own or how much can be squeezed out of them.

So people forget how to speak truth to power and say to the ruler who is clueless: You are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sycophancy becomes a high art until the beneficiary falls from power and becomes object of the scorn of these sycophants as they move on to the new men in power. The other crippler of the educated that is brought into office is lack of real influence. At a CVL yearly lecture a few years ago, the guest speaker, Prof. Ibrahim Gambari of the United Nations, when he was challenged about performance of people like himself when they are in government, Gambari’s retort was that there is a difference between being in office and being in power. Many incorporated ministers are in office but not in power. Their real influence, if we were to be honest was marginal.

My generation, left town or was ignored, except for those who turned to people, power with mortgaged consciences and money worship, a faith that somehow sucks the finishing of good education from human consciousness such that all that is seen is how “my Mercedes is bigger than yours”. It also sets adherences on a path of reckless abuse of the commonwealth to get money not earned so as to buy things not needed in other to impress people they do not really like.

Professor Wole Soyinka may see his generation as “a wasted generation”; mine simply left town and became useful to other societies. The trouble is that many of us got the education we are taking elsewhere at little or no cost, thanks to the taxpayers of Nigeria. This is why I get into trouble with my many Nigerian physician friends who now live in the U.S., when I tell them that while their American colleagues were borrowing a fortune to pay their way through medical school they were taking freely received training to the U.S. from where they harass me about how come we cannot fix Nigeria.

The guilt of my generation is a big one. It is not the misleading of Nigeria. They were not around to do that. The guilt of my generation is that education did not give us enough character to stay and fight those who did not realise that the duty of every generation is to make its shoulders available so the generation next can better see tomorrow to make it better than yesterday. Instead of fighting off those who took power in the 1960s at age 30 so we can make ready a better place for the generation Y to build on with their ICT know-how and technology savvy disposition, we simply said these guys don’t take prisoners and left town

tigerleggs: Yoruba na wicked tribe.

“Power can remain in hands of an infidel if he is just and fair but cannot remain in the hand of those who profess to be Christians or Muslims if they are unfair and unjust” - Sam Nda Isaiah quoting Danmasanin Kano, Yusuf Maitama Sule on the guiding principle of holding power in the Old North.....deriving from Sheikh Usman Danfodio's saying that "A society can thrive in unblief, but not in injustice." This is something that many of our leaders have forgotten with dire consequences on peace, security and progress in our country.

Wallie: Short answer is no. The danger posed by rays depends on the ray's wavelength and frequency. The higher a ray's frequency and the shorter its wavelength, the more dangerous it is. Essentially, a ray will be dangerous to humans if it can penetrate a human’s living tissue and interact with molecules therein.