14042019 - 144 Killed in nine days

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PAGE 32—SUNDAY VANGUARD, APRIL 14, 2019 Nigeria has to tame its political class At the end of the 2007 general elec tions in Nigeria, the Election Observation Delegation of the International Republican Institute (IRI) stated in its report that the conduct did not “measure up to those observed by the members of IRI’s international delegation in other countries whether in Africa, Asia, Europe or the Western Hemisphere.” Painfully, it didn’t bother our politicians that professional election monitors were imputing that the conduct of our election is the worst in the world. To show that they have no remorse concerning the assessment, our political class decided to even worsen the process of selecting their candidates for future elections. Till date, no one has been able to effect any change to Nigeria’s rancorous party primaries. The latest has been to hoard nomination forms for party primaries or to openly exclude some aspirants so that the preferences of the party hierarchy may emerge. The recent rancorous primaries of our political parties particularly that of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) can therefore not be described as new but it is worrisome that a malaise discovered many decades ago is unabatedly being entrenched by our politicians in the polity. Again, as if the parties themselves do not know that democracy can only be anchored on the rule of law, they seek to forcefully illegalize the use of the courts for settling party matters which even the blind can see to be unjust. Fortunately, the threats have never seen the light of day just as the judiciary has never been persuaded to shut out aggrieved litigants. Accordingly, after party primaries the battle shifts to the courts and our politicians would ensure that our judges do nothing else other than their contrived pre-election issues. They would go to different courts for the same subject and then proceed on appeal where the judgments do not favour them, before returning to another high court to obtain conflicting judgment. If they first approached a state high court, they would later go to a federal high court. In some cases, they would return to the same type of court but this time in another town. This continues till after the contest seeking to make different courts at all levels to reverse themselves. To prove that we are a daily electioneering nation, the position now is that at the end of each election, campaigns begin immediately for the next set that would hold four years away. As at today, the heat about who gets what in our national assembly is not necessarily about now but how the alignments for 2023 are to be shaped. Campaign managers are assembled from all sectors of the country including traditional rulers to drum home support for persons who are yet to publicly declare interest for the next contest not-withstanding the law that election campaigns are prohibited until 90days to voting day. Yet, the purpose of the restriction is to avoid distracting office holders from doing their work. We saw how former President Goodluck Jonathan and President Muhammadu Buhari openly chastised in vain, the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria and the Buhari support groups respectively. If the campaigns are in favour of incumbents, those breaching the rule are never apprehended by the police whereas opposition groups are usually chased away even during the period allowed for campaigns for not obtaining police permit. Opposition parties are not alone among those roughly tackled by ruling parties. Individuals and professionals and the media are also targeted. In Oyo state, some months ago, the ruling party demolished a radio station owned by talented Yinka Ayefele having failed severally to coerce him to sing government praises. The demolition Every strategy introduced by INEC to end vote buying is outsmarted by the day hence the decision of INEC to curb vote-buying and vote-selling by prohibiting, cameras and other recording devices in polling booths didn’t work was carried out before dawn on a Sunday morning in breach of a court order to the contrary. This establishes that Nigerian politicians are totalitarians and that anyone not in their support is endangered. Painfully, Ibadan where the first indigenous effort was made well before independence to institutionalize balance and objectivity in media coverage and which all should look up to for professional guidance was the exact place where this infamy of media harassment was done. Politicians in the legislature are often used to impeach persons suspected to be ambitious, especially deputy governors. These happened in states such as Imo, Enugu, Taraba etc. Impeachment being constitutionally guaranteed is a legal option open to legislators but their bizarre approach to it lives much to be desired. It is either they have no quorum for it as stipulated by law or they meet at ungodly hours as if they have an evil intention. Every impeachment recorded in Nigeria since the return to democracy in 1999 has been fake. As for proper electioneering campaigns, incumbents would deny opposition politicians, access to public fora such as stadium and the broadcast media making it hard for the nation to embrace the politics of equality that is premised on a level-playing field. However, many of these anomalies happen only in federal elections. In the case of local government elections, there is usually no contest at all. The electoral bodies for local elections which are often composed of friends of the ruling parties usually operate from government houses, no matter the state. They always ensure that the ruling party ‘wins’ all the seats. In some cases, some of the victors win more votes than the maximum figures in the respective constituencies It is difficult to find something to be happy about with our politicians. Although they always promise to build strong institutions, they only succeed in weakening all public organizations. The latest is that they appoint inexperi- enced party supporters to head several offices. Whereas the public is left to believe that there is an embargo on employment, unqualified people are being recruited daily through the back door. Within our poor economy, political office holders are daily acquiring expensive official cars. These hurt many but the greatest victim of Nigeria’s political class is the nation’s electoral body that is being sabotaged daily. Every strategy introduced by INEC to end vote buying is outsmarted by the day hence the decision of INEC to curb vote-buying and vote-selling by prohibiting, cameras and other recording devices in polling booths didn’t work. Intraparty problems also push INEC to the wall all the time The only institution we can rely upon now to help tame our politicians is the judiciary. In Imo State the other day, judges checkmated political rascals by turning down their contemptuous plan to swear in a new deputy governor for the state. In a historic solidarity, all the judges in the high court in the state resolved not to lend judicial weight to the subversion of the rule of law. The Osun state election tribunal has done well in rejecting altered election result-sheets. The Court of Appeal has told Zamfara politicians to stop shopping for judgments. Only four days ago, the Supreme Court reminded Politicians in Rivers state that there is time for everything. We have to tame our politicians, so our nation can grow. S PhD,Department of Philosophy, University of Lagos 08116759758 The death of democracy in Nigeria: A coroner’s inquest (7) upporters and lackeys of President Muhammadu Buhari who repeat ad nauseam that he is an honest man, a man of integrity, either do not really know the meanings of ‘honest’ or ‘integrity’ or are genuflecting praise-singers benefitting one way or another from the fact that Buhari is the President. In the context of our analysis, ‘integrity’ connotes “uprightness, wholeness and purity,” whereas the word ‘honest’ is inextricably connected to positive attributes like being just, fair, candid, free from fraud, truthful, and so on. Now, from a dispassionate and objective point of view, can President Buhari be truthfully described as an honest leader, a man of integrity, especially given what is in the public domain about his activities and utterances from the time he was military head of state to the present? A few preliminary remarks will serve as our navigator in answering that question. According to media reports, President Buhari’s claim in 2015 that his school certificate was with the Secretary, Military Board, had been debunked by the military authorities. So, despite what some cynics described as an “arrangee” school certificate presented to him at Aso Rock by a top official of West African Examination Council (WAEC), there are still good reasons to suspect that the President may not have the minimum academic qualification for the topmost political office in the country. Again, in spite of denials by the President himself and APC stalwarts with odious antecedents, some Nigerians who do not believe in him consider him one of the most nepotic leaders in Nigerian history, and rightly so, particularly because of his decidedly pro-North and pro- Muslim pattern of appointments in critical areas of our national life and funnelling of funds from both local and foreign sources to address mostly man-made problems in the north while neglecting the south. In addition, by vying for the presidency in 2015 and 2019, Mr. President not only reneged on his much-publicised pledge not to contest again after he lost for the third time in 2011 but also on his promise to be in office for one term only. And given the secrecy surrounding the nature of his sickness and extended medical trips to London, which contradict his tough remarks about working assiduously to eliminate medical tourism by top government officials, some Nigerians no longer trust the President. Buhari claimed that late Gen. Sani Abacha was not corrupt; yet, his government eagerly received the infamous “Abacha loot” repatriated by foreign governments. Sometimes President Buhari rashly defends his loyalists facing credible allegations of corruption, or carries on as if the matter is inconsequential, a mere storm in a teacup. Meanwhile, his startling claim that winning the last presidential election is a reward from Nigerians for his good performance and deliberate silence concerning rampant irregularities in that election portray him as a Machiavellian for whom “the end justifies the means.” More examples can be cited, but the ones presented above are weighty enough to justify the conclusion that any description of President Buhari as a man of integrity and honesty is an exaggeration, a category mistake or an instantiation of what the Austrian analytic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, described as “language on holiday.” Such description can only make sense if one lowers the standards or parameters for measuring honesty and integrity to a vanishing point, rendering both words superfluous as moral concepts. With the anything-goes-aslong-as-I-am-in-power attitude of President Buhari and sanctimonious tiresome blame-game of Prof. Osinbajo, it is very likely that the next four years will not be remarkably different from the last four. In my view, the security situation would probably worsen as Fulani herdsmen and Boko Haram terrorists take advantage of having people of the same Islamist mindset running the security apparatchik of the country. Our economic situation will remain in the doldrums because unquestioning loyalty to the President and the ruling party, ethnicity and cronyism will trump merit in the selection of those to manage critical sectors of the economy. The fight against corruption has largely become a caricature, an empty slogan used either for harassing opposition members and their supporters or for compelling corrupt politicians to join the APC. There is nothing in the horizon to suggest that the APC government will sincerely revisit the issue of restructuring with a view to formulating a new constitution that would The fight against corruption has largely become a caricature, an empty slogan used either for harassing opposition members and their supporters or for compelling corrupt politicians to join the APC address the fiscal and geopolitical anomalies in the present document. Politicians and other prominent Nigerians who create the impression that it would be extraordinarily arduous to generate a better constitution are intellectually lazy and dishonest. For example, it is very possible to re-examine the 1963 constitution and Aburi Accord and distil provisions that will improve the practice of democracy in Nigeria. The biggest obstacles to the project of reconstructing the country on the foundation of efficient federalism are members of the ruling power blocks. Their mindset is archaic, retrogressive, and clannish. All of them, from prominent politicians to powerful traditional rulers and those in charge of relevant institutions are hampered by poverty of imagination, myopic egoism, dishonesty and absence of genuine patriotic feeling and will to do what is appropriate for the good of the country as a whole. Despite sycophantic avowals that President Buhari is a “converted democrat,” one should be sceptical about such claims given his age (which virtually rules out any fundamental attitudinal change), military background and, most crucially, his purist Islamic orientation. On the other hand, since Prof. Osinbajo hero-worships his boss and is unwilling to stop blaming previous PDP administrations and humbly acknowledge the egregious failures of the APC government, there will be very little genuine introspection and critical thinking in the corridors of power in the next four years. Those hoping that Buhari and his cohorts have learnt from their mistakes and would use the second term to correct them are living in cloud cuckoo land. There is nothing to show that the next four years will not be “more of the same.” Consequently, from the arguments presented in this series, the coroner’s verdict is that democracy in Nigeria is not totally dead yet: it is in deep coma, hanging precariously onto life inside a ventilator. It was born in 1960 with genetic defects whose manifestations have grown worse with time largely because of the polluted political ecology dominated by carpetbaggers, that is, men (and few women) of very low “mental and moral magnitude.” But all hope is not lost. Just as contemporary medical advances have made it possible for welltrained medical personnel to revive patients almost at the point of death, Nigeria’s democracy can be resuscitated if certain urgent steps are taken by well-meaning members of the ruling elite and civil society groups. The most important step is radical reconstruction of the present geopolitical architectonic and the political economy to trigger massive social transformation. What I am talking about has been adumbrated earlier, namely, restructuring. It is heart-wrenching that the dominant faction of the northern military cum civilian establishment and their southern collaborators have not realised that the 1999 constitution is the biggest stumbling block militating against the development of our country presently. By stipulating a grotesque admixture of federalism and unitary system, that constitution makes northern Nigeria to be so dependent on oil, gas and other sources of revenue from the south, to the extent that what is playing out now is a surreptitious form of internal colonisation. Tony Nnadi of the Lower Niger Congress and others have articulated reasons why Nigeria must be reconstituted to allow the federating units (I suggest the six geopolitical zones) freedom to exploit their human and natural resources for development without being appendages of an overbearing central government. Unfortunately, myopic selfishness, bulimic greed, pernicious ethnic and religious loyalties and plain stupidity prevent supposedly intelligent and educated members of the ruling class from recognising that the country as currently constituted and governed can never progress in a sustainable manner, and doing what is required to correct the situation. The history of the United States, to take just one example, demonstrates that the most suitable geopolitical structure for a multiply plural country like Nigeria is a form of political arrangement that permits economically viable units bonded together by historical and cultural ties a reasonable degree of independence in exploiting natural resources and human capital in their areas within the context of a central government whose powers are determined by the federating units through consensus or agreement. We are really wasting valuable time and resources tinkering with the gravely flawed 1999 constitution, in the futile hope that doing the same thing repeatedly will lead to new and better result. That cannot work, for, as Albert Einstein wisely remarked, you cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it in the first place. Concluded.
SUNDAY Vanguard, APRIL 14, 2019, PAGE 33 Between the moribund Nigeria Airways and the dominering Ethiopian Airlines •Extinct By Folu Olamiti, FNGE TO say Nigeria-the supposed Giant of Africa-is without a national airline, befuddles right thinking Nigerians. Once buoyant Nigeria Airways came to into limelight in 1958 after the dissolution of West African Corporation, WAAC. It began operation on October 1, 1958; and in 1971, it was rebranded to the name it had until it ceased operations in 2003. At the peak of its life span, the airline had 44 aircraft on its fleet, and strongly showcased and flew Nigeria’s flag around the world. Through the sheer magnificence and efficiency of the airline, Nigeria became the toast of many airlines and attracted their managements to Nigeria to learn the rope on how to run a viable and profitable airline. Nigeria boasted of the best and latest airplanes in the industry, ranging from Airbus A310 to Boeing 737 to Douglas DC 10. Not only that,the airline was booming with a workforce of 2,191. But then, some easily predictable and some unforeseen variables set in and ailed the popular airline; then began its slow and sure death. The ugly variables include: complacency, lack of foresight, inability to analyse current trends and predict the future. Others are; mismanagement, corruption and over staffing, to mention a few. The airline in its history accumulated a huge debt totalling $528m. Finally, the airline ceased operations in 2003 and was liquidated a year later. More than 3000 jobs went with it. I went this far, giving the history of the behemoth to show how poor management, indiscipline and lack of foresight can kill a dream, no matter how big. While Nigeria’s neighbours like Chad, Togo, Cameroon and Ghana, to mention but a few, that had next to nothing in terms of the size of their economies, still boast of viable and profitable airlines, Nigeria is lost from the pack. Of course, among this pack of nations, Ethiopia stands out. Until the recent disaster, the Ethiopian Airline is proudly the market leader in aviation in Africa. Sadly, and ostensibly due to no apparent fault of its own, disaster befell the airline on March 10 2019 this year when its Boeing 737 Max crashed six minutes after take-off. Many families, •Still flying including those of two eminent Nigerians that perished in the crash, are still in deep mourning. But will the tragedy mark the beginning of the end of Ethiopian Airlines? The answer is a big NO. By the grace of God Almighty the airline is set to continue its seamless operations with the same resolute resolve its management has been investing in achieving excellence as to its corporate goals. I flew in an Ethiopian aircraft, last December, to Johannesburg and I was spoiled a little during the journey. I was amazed at the high level of efficiency in every aspect of its operations. From check-in to boarding and take-off, everything was seamless. Ethiopian Airlines started operation in 1946 having been founded by the late leader, Emperor Haile Sellasie. It all began as a state-owned carrier operating in a joint venture with the defunct Trans World Airlines, TWA. It underwent radical upheaval in the following decades - including the fall of Ethiopia’s monarchy, the reign of a brutal Marxist regime, and a famine that killed over one million people. The irony here is the magical way the Ethiopian Airlines weathered the storms and bounced back in a market where several flag carriers from bigger African economies, such as South African Airways and Kenya Airways, fell into bankruptcy or financial difficulty. Nigeria Airway went into permanent death. The success story of Ethiopian Airlines lies in its managerial ability. Tewolde GebreMariam, the current Chief Operation Officer, began his career with the airline in 1985. Though Ethiopia’s weak economy might have been a blessing, the airline’s management has always been acutely aware that "if they made losses, the government was not in a position to bail them out", using the words of Elijah Chingosho, a former Secretary General of the African Airlines Association and managing director of Ultimate Solutions Consulting, an aviation pioneer. For decades, Ethiopian Airlines survived-but it wasn't until the mid- 2000s that it started to thrive. In 2005, that the airline started making global headlines when it announced that it would be the first in Africa to launch Boeing787 Dreamliner, placing a $1.3 billion order for 15 of the fuel-efficient, long- range aircraft. Soon after, the airline began expanding its international network with a focus on emerging economies. One major target, China, is now one of the Ethiopian government economic partners. The airline grew by leaps and bounds. One Negatu, born in Ethiopia, said: "Everyone belittling its strategy" has been taking unawares as the airline now flies 40-plus per week to China, 20 to India and 14 to Nigeria. As part of its expansionist programme, Ethiopia Airlines would soon sign an agreement with Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines and Asian Airlines. The airline also operates Africa's largest aviation academy, where pilots, ground staff, maintenance technicians and cabin crew from across the continent come to train. But its biggest innovation is still to come as it plans to open Africa's skies. Africa skies remain largely unconnected. Only five countries have direct flights to more than 20 other nations according to the African Union. Ethiopia tops that list. From the inflight magazine, Selamta, I read how Ethiopian Airlines has pursued its own strategy: a 15- year plan to dominate Africa's skies by acquiring minority stakes in other carriers. In 2010, it became a founding partner in Togo-based airline ASKY. Two years later, it helped establish Malawian Airlines. It replicated the strategy last year with airlines in Guinea, Chad and Mozambique. It goes further by helping its partners with expertise and credit lines for new aircraft. James Asquith, one of the frequent fliers on the airline, also the official Guinness World Record Holder as the Youngest Person to Travel to every country in the world, has this to say as he concludes his impression after a trip to Addis Ababa: "My flight flew with Cloud Nine business class with great food, an It was not only the family of those that perished in the crash that mourned or are mourning. Many people, across the world, wept as if they had their loved ones in the tragic flight extensive drinks selection and a very comfortable and semi-private seat that turned into a flat-lie in bed. The experience was fantastic. As I stepped off my return flight into the U.S., I smiled remembering the last thing I did: attend the welcome ceremony for the 100 aircraft. When I say goodbye, I congratulated everyone on their achievements and the Ethiopian Airlines CEO said he hope to see me when they receive their 200th plane. This was met with shouts of 'no, 300', '400'. This is an airline that is unstoppable growth path-driven by its people. One way or another, hopefully I'll be back for aircraft number 200 soon". Ethiopian airlines is arguably the biggest Aviation brand in Africa. It is a successful billion-dollar company that competes globally every single day. The crash of the airline's Boeing 737 Max last month was felt deeply. It was not only the family of those that perished in the crash that mourned or are mourning. Many people, across the world, wept as if they had their loved ones in the tragic flight. However, despite the deluge of tears, many saw the crash as a wake-up call for the airline. The management has resolved that the airlines focus to dominate the aviation world must remain on course. With the opening of the first phase of Bole International Airport's new terminal to handle 22 million travellers each year, the airport, according to the CEO,Tawolde, will exceed Johannesburg's OR Tambo International Airport as the largest capacity airport in Africa. The big question is ; why has Nigeria refused to pick up from where she failed many years ago, rather she prefers to donate her airspace to foreign airlines who are now making millions of dollars out of the country daily. Ethiopia is bruised but she is not allowing one disaster to kill her dream. •Folu Olamiti Media Consultant writes from Abuja.
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