Fuel Subsidy Desktop Study Report, by the Centre for Public Policy Alternatives (CPPA), Lagos

For Us, who missed the party that set forth at Dawn…

“We are refugees fleeing from the excesses of our parents.” – Dambudzo Marechera

I
Shall we envy them who set forth at dawn?
Dawn, when cohabitation
was the biggest crime
good and evil could jointly muster.

They went to bed with yesterday’s sun
that they might rise, well before today’s,
and set forth, as the tip of day
light’s tongue licked the sky awake.

But as for me and my house
we shall set forth as midnight’s babies,
sleepwalkers burdened
by the ill-packed bags of emergency.

Midnight, when Crime and Innocence beat
with the single heart of siamese twins.

II
They sing to us
of the need to appease Somnus early;
they, barbers to whom wisdom
has entrusted her grey Afro,
patrons with whom dawn
perfected the strip-tease.

Pity – our gift to them,
our peace offering to all who will never realize
just how many cubes of courage have gone
into these cups of childly wisdom
that steam in our hands.

III
Early, at the feast of dawn, they gathered
up the kitchen, and set forth
on their illustrious journey
forgetting the fate that tomorrow awaits
manna smuggled in bags of pilgrimage.
and the manna died.

IV
And we, who could not set forth at dawn
have joyously settled for midnight
having little to lose, and everything to gain
from time and chance, masked deities
of this hour of anomy.

According to him early modern (i.e. 16th to 18th century) England was a “solidly hierarchical society”, defined by acts of landowning, hunting and hospitality (i.e. the hosting of receptions and dinner parties). In a bid to set themselves apart from the ranks of the undistinguished many Englishmen resorted to tracing their ancestries as far back as they could. Some went as far as the Norman Conquest. In at least one case a gentleman traced his genealogy to Noah’s Ark. Cust highlighted the obsession of many English families of that era with “Coats of Arms” – as markers of “collective honour”, or for the purposes of “mask[ing] ancestral and social origins.”

All of these were of course the beginnings of the famous –  and still intact – British class system.

Fortunately for us in Nigeria, however, the ‘Snob’ industry is nowhere near as complicated as the English version. Trust Nigerians to simplify their imports, even whilst managing to maintain their size and importance. Where you stand in the Nigerian society is determined primarily by how much money you have today, not by how much you had last year, or how much your father had forty years ago. It really doesn’t matter where you are coming from, as long as you have done well for yourself. It also doesn’t matter by what route you arrived at your current financial success – politics, business, the civil service, Internet fraud, religion – everyone is welcome at the table of abundance.

As the Yoruba saying goes, money earned from carrying shit does not smell of shit. Unlike the English system, designed to run on a certain, ruthless form of exclusivity, the sky seems big enough for all birds to fly in Nigeria. We are pragmatic people, the edges of our practicality having been honed by years of wildly volatile economic conditions.

I once watched a documentary, about an Englishwoman whose family owned thousands of acres of land, upon which sat a mansion in which generations of the family had lived. The woman, finding it difficult to maintain the property, then decided to give guided tours to visitors, as a means of raising money. In line with traditional British obsession with the past, she was sure that people would visit, awed by the mix of grandeur and ancient history that she had inherited. England is laden with the ghosts and shadows of aristocratic backgrounds like these, sustained on the leftovers of proud pasts.

If that woman lived in Nigeria, a sad fate would await her. Lacking money today, her noble past would be unable to deliver her. Nigerians do not reckon much with the past. Which is what I think explains the gross disrespect we extend to our museums. No one is permitted to live on past wealth, or forgiven for attempting to do so.

On the other hand forgiveness for past poverty is readily dispensed. The man who today struggles to pay his children’s school fees, will have the chance to start afresh when tomorrow he becomes a local government chairman rich enough to export all his children to private school in England. By the time the children return speaking like native English people, the man’s place in the Nigerian social pecking order is all but assured.

I doubt that money would buy “class” in England. In Nigeria, the case is different. Even though there are occasional hints of a ‘taxonomy’ – “Old Money” and “New Money” and “Money-Miss-Road” – in the final analysis, all monies are one and the same thing. Chieftaincy titles, honorary doctorates and praise singers do not discriminate between one form of money and another. Money indeed matters, and God help you if you think that a mouth fluent in English will make up for a pocket that is not fluent in money. You will be told point-blank that you are only “blowing grammar!”

Polite conversation was also something that the English paid attention to. The higher your class the more adept you were in the ‘Art of Polite Conversation’. Coarse and rough and vulgar talk was for the bottom of the social heap. In contrast, rich Nigerians have no qualms about overlooking all laws of conversational decency. They are allowed to be shamelessly coarse, to throw, “Bullshit! Do you know who I am?” at everyone who seems to be getting in their way.

Nigeria certainly has its laws, which anyone aspiring to ‘stand-out’ would do well to learn. One example: The First Law of “shining”, as follows: “The more the darkness you surround yourself with, the brighter you will shine”. It is this law that explains why there are streets that have only one house with its lights on, while the rest remain at the mercy of PHCN, mournful in the glow of the powerful lamps from the Big Man’s house. Welcome, all ye intending snobs, to Nigeria.

OGUNLESI_New media and the 2011 Nigerian elections

OGUNLESI_Africa_China

OGUNLESI_NOTES FROM A JOURNEY WITH BARACK OBAMA

tolu-ogunlesi_what-the-truck_wings-magazine-2008

OGUNLESI_For the young, mobile phones mean much

OGUNLESI_Passing the baton

OGUNLESI_marketplace-of-media-ideas

OGUNLESI_The idea of the Nigerian University

(CNN) — On Friday a car bomb exploded at the United Nations compound, in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, killing at least 18 people and injuring several others. It is the latest, and most ambitious in a series of bomb explosions that have hit the city in the last year.

The last one, in June, targeted the police headquarters in Abuja, killing two people.

Boko Haram, an Islamic extremist group (sometimes referred to as “the Nigerian Taliban”) has been claiming responsibility for these bombings. “Boko Haram” translates loosely as “Western education is forbidden/sinful.”

The group holds all government authority in contempt and wants to establish a Sharia state in Northern Nigeria. Boko Haram has been in existence for several years, proselytising, and running a mosque and religious school, but did not rise to national prominence until it attacked police stations and prisons in parts of Northern Nigeria in July, 2009.

In retaliation, Nigerian security forces launched a ruthless crackdown. Hundreds of people were killed; the Boko Haram camp destroyed, and its leader, Mohammed Yusuf, arrested. He would later die in police custody, and a number of officers are currently facing trial. (Some of the group’s anger is traceable to what it claims is the highhandedness of the Nigerian police and military).

U.N. Secy.-Gen. condemns Nigeria attack

The shortlisted and winning stories (winning stories selected by Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee) were published in the anthology NEW WRITING FROM AFRICA 2009, Johnson & King James Books (South Africa).

2011 Caine Prize shortlisted author, Beatrice Lamwaka, and the winner, NoViolet Bulawayo, are also included in the anthology, as are the Nigerians Maik Nwosu and Omolola Ogunyemi.

Excerpt:

Last year the British Council released a report on Nigeria’s youth. One of its observations: “In the worst case, Nigeria will see: growing numbers of restless young people frustrated by lack of opportunity; [...] and a political system discredited by its failure to improve lives…”

Talk about irony. Now, one imagines, is the time to commission a similar one on Britain’s youth – if the British Council still has enough funds, post-cuts, for such a venture. Mounting evidence points to the fact that today’s Britain is home to a generation of children and youth cast adrift on a sea of radicalising disenfranchisement. Not long ago the Evening Standard found that “1 in 4 children in London leaves primary school at 11 unable to read or write properly” and “1 in 5 leaves secondary school without being able to read or write with confidence.”

“Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future,” criminologist John Pitts told the Guardian. “Much of this was opportunism but in the middle of it there is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose.”

Read the full piece, here

Being text of a piece written for April Fools Day 2011, previously unpublished, until now.

Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) presidential aspirant, Nuhu Ribadu this morning pulled out of the April 9 presidential race, citing the “urgent need for the opposition to unite against a ruling party that has done more ruining than ruling in the last 12 years.”

Mr. Ribadu made the announcement in a terse statement sent to media organisations.

Mr. Ribadu’s action, coming barely 48 hours after another contender, Pat Utomi, stepped down, is being seen by analysts as a definite game-changer in the forthcoming elections.

“Now there’s no way Mr. Jonathan is going to win in the first round,” said Ian Kiddin, Eastern Africa expert at the George Bush Center for Global Policy and Peace Studies in Texas. “With Mr. Ribadu stepping down for Mr. Buhari, the chances of a major Jonathan-favouring split in Northern votes are significantly reduced. The best the president can get on April 9 is a run-off.”

Many Ribadu supporters were taken by surprise, and social networking sites were abuzz with debate about the announcement. Members of Team Ribadu, the campaign’s youth wing, were sighted gathering outside the campaign office, wearing black armbands. “This is a paradise for disappointment,” one of them said, parodying the title of Mr. Ribadu’s bestselling memoir, ‘A Paradise for Maggots’, which tells the story of his quest to rid Nigeria of corruption as head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

But not everyone was taken by surprise. “Ribadu has been pulling a lot of strange moves lately,” someone tweeted. Mohammed A, 26, one of a crowd of young people who gathered to chant “Sai Buhari” outside the Buhari campaign office in Lagos quipped: “Let’s face it, this should have happened long time ago. Ribadu is simply a less-experienced version of Buhari; he should wait for his time.”

Expectedly, the Buhari camp has hailed Mr. Ribadu’s decision. “We are delighted by the move, and it is now no longer a question of ‘if’ Mohammadu Buhari will become President, but ‘when.’ And we now know the answer to that question: May 29, 2011.”

Pastor Tunde Bakare, Mr. Buhari’s running mate who had, a few weeks ago, described the PDP’s campaign rallies as a “farewell party”, told journalists that he had a dream in which he saw President Jonathan and his wife “packing their belongings into Ghana-must-go bags, and boarding a canoe for the creeks of Bayelsa.”

Reactions have also come in from unexpected quarters. Spokesperson for the Lagos State chapter of the Broom-Sellers Association of Nigeria, Rukayat Olanshile, said the executive council was in an emergency meeting and would be addressing the press later today.

The PDP presidential campaign organisation declined to comment on this development, but reports have emerged of a sudden flurry of activities at the organisation’s headquarters, and at the presidential villa. Inside sources say that the President has cancelled a planned appearance at a pre-wedding party being hosted by the Nigerian High Commission in London, for Prince William and Kate Middleton, and originally scheduled for tomorrow. Rumours of a meeting between the First Lady and popular hip-hop musician D’Banj could not be confirmed as at press time. 

(first published in TELL Magazine, in 2008)

I know. That’s not what Professor Femi Osofisan said. “Birthdays Are Not For Dying”  is what the famed playwright titled his play. And of course I agree with him. Birthdays are for wining, for dining, and for miming happy songs. Not for dying, and certainly not for denying!

Why would anyone want to disclaim their birthday, you might want to ask?  When news filters out that the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of one of Africa’s richest countries is caught publicly putting out a disclaimer relating to his date of birth, should there be cause for alarm? What does that tell us about the state of his country’s treasury, considering that it is not out of place to regard a Presidential Birthday as a State Event, worthy of being bankrolled by the Federal Treasury. Has the country fallen upon hard times?

On Tuesday the 15th of July 2008, The Daily Punch carried a certain strange-sounding headline: Confusion reigns over Yar’Adua’s birthday. The story’s opening line – Was President Umaru Yar’Adua born on July 9, 1951? – can be chilling or downright comical, depending on how you look at it.

The Big Question is this: for what other reason, if not journalistic mischief, would a newspaper confer on itself the right to question the Presidential Birthday? But of course The Punch is not being mischievous. It is actually asking the question expecting an honest answer; expecting anyone who knows the truth to come out and solve a riddle-that-should-never-have-been-a-riddle in the first place.

This is where it starts. On the 9th of July, 2008, and in the days following, top Government functionaries (the upper echelon of the “Big Men Class of 2007”) tumbled over themselves to put up “Happy Birthday” messages to their Boss, President Umaru Yar’Adua, in the dailies – as is the custom all over the length and breadth of Nigeria. The top shots who successfully got their messages across (according to The Punch) included the President of the Senate, Mr. David Mark, the Minister of Information and Communications, Mr. John Odey, and the following Governors:  Mu‘azu Babangida (Niger), Timipre Sylva (Bayelsa), Ikedi Ohakim (Imo), Rotimi Amaechi (Rivers), Jonah Jang (Plateau), Godswill Akpabio (Akwa Ibom), and Aliyu Wamakko (Sokoto).

In the days that followed, it emerged that the “congratulators” were miles off mark (no pun intended!). Not only did they get the date wrong, even the month was wrong. The President they rejoiced with “at 57”, was alas still only 56 years and (approximately) 11 months old. Information gathered from the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Communications (apparently there’s no info on the Presidential Birthday anywhere else, not even on the internet) made it clear that the actual date is August 16, and not July 9.

The big men have since started to “explain”, one by one, how they managed to make President Yar’Adua perhaps the only President in the world with two birthdays. The Minister of Communications, according to The Punch, attributed the gaffe to “an error committed by a staff of the ministry…”

Of course we believe him. The unnamed staff (underpaid; perhaps even chronically under-promoted) must have, in the course of confirming the President’s birthday, mistakenly looked up the O.J Simpson (also born July 9) entry in some dog-eared copy of a “Who is Who” compendium. And that same staff must have then been transferred to the Office of the Senate President, from where he made the same mistake, before going on to repeat the error in various Governor’s Offices around the country.

That seems to be the most likely explanation, especially as we all know that one of the terms of employment in the civil service is the possibility of being transferred to any part of the country, at any point in time, without prior notice.

So much noise has been made, so many people are ranting. What the many “wetin-be-ya-business” social commentators across Nigeria have failed to realize is that, taking former President Obasanjo’s own birth details into consideration, we can actually congratulate ourselves on our “progress” in matters relating to the accuracy of Presidential Date of Birth.

In Obasanjo’s case, even though it was generally acknowledged that March 5, 1937 was his date of birth, the actual year of birth remained (and still remains) in the realms of conjecture. And this was not helped by the admission of Gbenga, his eldest son, who in a now-classic January 2006 interview, declared: “I personally think [my father] is older than 70 years. He just said he is about 70 years because nobody recorded his age when he was born… [h]e is not as young as people think…”

There is therefore cause for rejoicing, seeing that, with the progress of democracy, we have improved by reducing our Presidential Birthday Margin of Error from years – or even decades – in OBJ’s case, to months in the case of Yar’Adua (and only one month, I must add).

Well, mistakes have been admitted, and we can now move on. The newspapers of course have smiled all the way to their banks (pardon the cliché) with birthday advert largesse. The people I pity are the parents and historians and biography-writers of tomorrow, who will have to explain to the youngsters of tomorrow why a once-upon-a-time President of Nigeria had two birthdays.

And, of course, to be pitied the most is the man or woman who will, someday in the future, discover that the one question separating him/her from the grand prize of ten million naira (on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”), is this: “When is President Umaru Yar’Adua’s birthday?”

Even 50-50 might not save the poor guest – not if the options are automatically narrowed down to (1) “July 9” and (2) “August 16”.

By Tolu Ogunlesi

(originally appeared in my column, ONGOING CONCERNS, in NEXT)

*

The State Security Service (SSS) needs to be on Facebook and Twitter. There is an ongoing proliferation of subversive tendencies on social networking platforms, and something needs to be done urgently to check the trend.

Since we’re in the middle of the National ‘Propose-a-Controversial-Bill’ Month, I’m proposing that Mr President send a bill to the National Assembly making it an offence for social networkers to make the president the butt of their jokes.

In one of the gags currently making the rounds, the phrase ‘tenure elongation’ (I know the ‘presidency’ has protested that it’s mischievous to refer to it as ‘tenure-elongation’, and that it should instead be referred to as ‘single-tenure’; on my part I’ve settled for the alliterative ‘tenure-tinkering’) has been replaced with the unprintable ‘penile elongation’.

Apparently, there are rumours that before the presidency settled for this whole tenure-elongation business, the shortlist of recommendations included a ‘penile elongation’ bill, seeking to make it mandatory for all male Nigerians above the age of 18 to undergo, erm, surgical intervention, to help spur the country’s economic growth.

Confused? In case you didn’t know, there is a scientific theory linking male organ size to economic growth. Only two weeks ago, Finnish economist, Tatu Westling, of the University of Helsinki, published a paper: ‘Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?’ which “explores the link between economic development and penile length between 1960 and 1985” and finds that there is “an inverse U-shaped relationship” between weiner size and 1985 GDP levels. “The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres,” the paper states.

It beats me why the presidency settled for a divisive tenure restructuring bid, when it could have introduced the much less complicated, more easily sellable penile tinkering alternative. Think of it, in the event of failure, it’d have been easy for the president to say: “It wasn’t my idea, it was Gmail-spammers who originally proposed the idea” – and we would have believed him.

The decision to settle for the more complicated constitution-altering project was an all-out bad one, if you ask me. Speaking of bad presidential decisions, I decided to compile a ‘Top 10’ list, from Nigeria’s post-independence history. Here’s what I came up with (in chronological order):

Aguiyi Ironsi’s ‘Decree No. 34 of 1966’, which declared Nigeria a unitary state; The imposition, by the Yakubu Gowon government, of a £20 compensation limit on Igbos after the civil war ended; The knee-jerk decision of the Shagari government to expel hundreds of thousands of West African immigrants – mostly Ghanaians – in January 1983 (Buhari repeated this move a little over a year later); The Buhari-Idiagbon regime’s cancellation of the Lagos Metro-line project; Babangida’s decision to take Nigeria into the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC); The introduction, and subsequent mismanagement, of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), by the Babangida government; The annulment, by Babangida-and-cabal, of the June 12, 1993 elections; The Sani Abacha transmutation-into-civilian-president project; The Obasanjo 3rd term bid; and the unilateral handpicking, when it failed, of Umar Yar’Adua as his successor; the Goodluck Jonathan surprise-surprise tenure-tinkering agenda.

Somehow, when Mr Jonathan traversed the length and breath of Nigeria, campaigning, seeking votes, rousing Nigerians with moving speeches of how he was not born rich and how, once, he had no shoes, (and consequently promising transformational leadership), he forgot to notify us that ‘tenure-tinkering’ was not only on his manifesto, but that it was Number 1 in priority terms.

The ‘presidency’ has made eloquent arguments about how longer intervals between elections will help reduce the amount of money our expensive democracy consumes. We have been reminded that the government released a whopping N87 billion to INEC for the 2011 elections, and that that is a helluva lot of money.

Which is true, especially for a country in which more than half of the population has to survive on less than $2 a day. But when you consider the fact that Hassan Lawal is currently standing trial for presiding over the stealing, sorry, misappropriation, of N75 billion – almost as much as the 2011 INEC expenditure – during his years as Minister of Works and Housing (an unelected government position), doesn’t it occur to you that Mr Jonathan’s money-saving priority should actually be ensuring that not only is every single kobo of that money (and other stolen ones) recovered, but also that the system is restructured in such a way that looting of that magnitude is rendered impossible henceforth?

How much sense does it make to complain that (inevitable) elections are costing us so much when unelected government officials continue to steal the nation blind, unchallenged? Elections are supposed to cost money, damn it! The alternative is to abolish elections completely and invite the military back to power.

One sad fallout of this tenure-tinkering bid is this: the president has managed to awaken and unite his many enemies. In recent days, I’ve seen mentions of the Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPLF) in the news. Just when we thought that annoying cabal was dead and gone to its grave, Jonathan rouses them. He has now fully convinced me that his uncanny ability to make Messrs. Babangida and Atiku and Ciroma sound like statesmen, is no fluke.

I insist that Jonathan’s decision to take time off governing Nigeria, to push tenure-tinkering, was a miscalculation of the highest order. He ought to pay attention to the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ that have seized the airwaves in the last week. Justifiable negativism from Nigerians, if you ask me. Jonathan should ‘jejely’ jettison the jejune ‘genda’, for the good of the country.

Let him revisit that penile-length debate instead, and let all Nigerians, male and female, young and old, come together to see how we can use Tatu Westling’s theory to improve our chances of attaining the 2020 Vision.