Four weeks of siddon look

To be on leave from work for one month while one’s salary is still flowing is one of the brightest ideas that the Whiteman ever brought to this country. In the last four weeks when I was on leave, I regarded reading newspapers, watching television or surfing the internet as an invasion of privacy, since I did not have to write a column. However, from my siddon look patch I took agitated notice of six episodes on the Nigerian and international scenes.

During the first week of my leave, I took note of copious stories and opinion articles in the newspapers saying that Lagos State was deliberately short-changed by the military regime during the local government creation exercise of 1991. I am surprised that General Ibrahim Babangida decided to remain silent on this issue. In August 1991 when IBB created nine new states followed by two rounds of creation of new local governments, I wrote all the lead stories on the exercise in Citizen magazine.

There was one episode that no one has yet mentioned. Forty prominent Lagos elders, including Oba Adeyinka Oyekan, petitioned IBB and said Lagos did not need any more local governments. In particular, they were alarmed that Lagos Island was going to be split and the Oba of Lagos would find himself in another local government. They made a statement that I never forgot: “If local governments are created because of development, Lagos is overdeveloped.” The Guardian copiously reported their protest in late 1991 and anyone with a complete file of Guardian editions from that era should kindly cross check it. It is not gentlemanly, to say the least, for people to turn around 26 years later and say Lagos was short changed without recalling that episode.

The second, related issue I took agitated notice of was the attempt to blame military rule for all of our developmental problems. Nigeria’s failure to achieve rapid industrialisation was in spite of military rule, not because of it. Some people are promoting the idea that significant national development is achievable only under liberal democratic conditions and that it was the lack of it in Nigeria for 29 years after independence that prevented us from making rapid socio-economic progress. Well, that is not true. Most of the Third World countries that industrialised, built impressive infrastructure and leapt close to the First World during the second half of the Twentieth Century did so under authoritarian political conditions.

South Korea, for example, made huge industrial progress under Park Chung-hee, one of the world’s most brutal dictators. Taiwan made great progress under the Kuomintang, as Nigerian businessmen know too well. Indonesia rapidly developed under Suharto, despite his countrymen’s later view of him as a vile dictator. Malaysia made rapid progress in the 1980s and 1990s even though Mahathir Muhammed was not a charming democrat. In the 1970s, Iran’s economy under the Shah grew at a dizzying 15% per annum, the highest in the world. China’s phenomenal growth since the 1980s was not achieved under democratic conditions. There was this old saying that “Stalin made the Soviet Union an industrial power; Khrushchev made it a nuclear power and Brezhnev made it a super power.” None of the three was a jovial liberal democrat. In fact, Hong Kong became a first rate financial power under colonial rule. Where is the correlation between democracy and rapid national progress?

During my leave, I took agitated notice of the increased tempo of the campaign for restructuring. I wondered: what is it that happened in Nigeria recently that made restructuring more imperative now than at any other time in the last five decades? I think the best explanation I heard was offered by Prof Femi Odekunle, that some people are trying to change the national attention from the anticorruption war. Some people have launched a determined campaign to snatch national attention, disorient the Buhari regime, usurp its popular mandate and impose on it an agenda that was not a part of its mandate at the polls, as far as I can tell.

I think the democratic option for the restructuring campaign is to campaign on and win election on an agenda of restructuring, not insist on a referendum when the constitution makes no provision for it. In any case, if there is a referendum today and they lose it, they will say that it was rigged. If, as some people now allege, APC promised restructuring in 2015 and if indeed that was why Nigerians voted for it, then that should become an issue in the next election and proponents should work to defeat APC on the promise of a more serious commitment to restructuring.

During my leave, I also took political notice of Women Affairs Minister Mrs. Aisha Alhassan’s pledge to support Atiku Abubakar in 2019 even if President Buhari runs for a second term. The episode reminded me of a story I once read about Walter J. Hickel, Interior Secretary in US President Richard Nixon’s administration in the early 1970s. Hickel was a rough, uncouth former boxing champion and former Governor of Alaska who used strongarm tactics in his construction business.

Nixon liked Hickel for his conservative political views but once he became Interior Secretary, it turned out that Hickel harboured liberal views on some issues. At one point he publicly criticised Nixon’s handling of student protests over the invasion of Cambodia. Nixon then summoned him to a meeting. According to Hickel, “He repeatedly referred to me as an adversary. Initially I took this as a complement, because to me an adversary within an organisation is a valuable asset. It was only after the president used the term many times and with a disapproving inflection that I realised he considered an adversary to be an enemy.” We do not yet know if Buhari summoned Mama Taraba to a meeting and if he described her as an adversary.

My siddon look period was jolted by Operation Egwu Eke. Two days after I arrived at Nnobi Girls in Anambra State for my NYSC, I was on my way to the Afor market when I nearly stepped on a huge python. A young girl nearby shouted, “eke!” If that python was dancing, I did not notice it because I was in pell-mell retreat. The Nigerian Army, which once spilled blood over every inch of this same land in order to put down a costly secession, was not about to sit on its hands until IPOB overruns the South Eastern states, silences all its elite, overthrows federal authority and disrupts democratic elections. The rule of preemptive strike applies not only in military matters but in politics as well. It reminded me of what the late Kano preacher Kalarawi said he told Malam Aminu Kano at the beginning of the PRP crisis in 1981. He said, “If you see rimi [silk cotton tree] growing on your farm, cut it down when it is still small! If you allow it to grow to full size, there is nothing you can do about it!”

I am not fond of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sartorial trousers, hairstyle, his duck-like shuffle or his penchant for inspecting goose-step military parades and missile launch sites. I don’t think it is a good idea to fire missiles over the heads of Japanese, even if it is partial revenge for Japan’s occupation of Korea in 1905-45. Ten years ago during a similar missile crisis, I wrote that the Western powers have no moral right to assail Kim’s nuclear ambitions when they themselves harbour the world’s largest and deadliest nuclear arsenals. Kim Jong Un should discard his nukes but so should Americans, Brits, French, Russians, Chinese, Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis.