24022020

18 — Vanguard, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2020
THE wealthiest man in the world
today is a stingy man. Jeff Bezos, the
amazing owner of Amazon, tops the
list of world’s richest persons with a
net worth of over $130bn.
Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, the
most charitable billionaire, has given
away a total of $45.5bn of his wealth
since 1994 (a lot of which was
dedicated to the eradication of malaria
in Africa) and created the Giving
Pledge project along with Warren
Buffet which encourages billionaires
to give away at least half of their
fortunes while alive.
Bezos, on the other hand, had sat
on his pile of cash in spite of many
walk-outs by staff of the company over
his reluctance to give to charity. But
the sleeping giant is finally awake.
He has committed to the fight to
save Mother Earth by pledging a
whopping $10 bn “to work alongside
others both to amplify known ways
and to explore new ways of fighting
Bezos’ $10bn for Mother Earth
the devastating impact of climate
change”.
The fight to limit climate change is
a universal one which involves
individuals, groups and countries of
the world working in concert to
ensure the Green House Gases, GHG,
do not exceed 1.55 per cent of preindustrial
levels.
In 2018, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, IPCC,
identified the dangers that face all
living dwellers of Mother Earth.
It outlined measures that must be
collectively pursued to ensure that
dramatic rises in ocean levels do not
lead to disappearance of coastal lands
and the death and homelessness of
hundreds of millions of people, along
with precious flora and fauna.
Most countries have signed up to
the Paris Accord on Climate Change
initiated in 2016, and millions of
youths, in the wave of Greta
Thunberg’s international campaigns,
annually stage protests to persuade
their governments to do more to avert
the disaster which the Secretary
General of the United Nations,
Antonio Guterres, warns is now
“within sight”.
The fight to prevent the temperature
of the earth from tipping over requires
huge sums of money to research
into. It is a means by which
the objective can be met even in the
face of recalcitrance by some powerful
leaders.
We welcome Bezos’ gesture, but we
believe that those who have benefited
much more from the bounties of
Mother Earth have an obligation to
commit more of their financial
resources to this fight.
Nigeria’s biggest climate change
headaches is the project to recharge
the almost depleted Lake Chad which
is responsible for mass poverty,
suffering and insurgency there. It will
cost over $23bn to transfer water from
the Ubangi River in the Congo Basin
to refill Lake Chad.
More financial commitment is
required to save the earth, and those
who have it must remember that if the
crisis tips over their wealth would lose
all value.
OPINION
When a president’s silence isn’t golden
By BANJI OJEWALE
SILENCE isn’t golden when your house is
in flames and you’re alone at home. You
need to shout for help from the army of
neighbours within reach. You need to raise your
lone voice above the crackles of the inferno
gaining new grounds. Silence isn’t golden
when your spotless reputation is vociferously
impugned or threatened and you have an
opportunity to stop the campaign. Silence isn’t
golden when there is a cacophony of opinions
and reports, false or accurate, reaching the
public about your candour. Your silence here
isn’t golden; it is grotesque, grisly and grimy.
This is what Nigerians have been fed with
these past few days after the disclosures on the
‘feud’ between two key men in the
Muhammadu Buhari Presidency: the
grotesque, the grisly and the gross. The nation
can’t afford to function under the weight of the
creeping official silence that we are witnessing
in the face of a leaked memo on our security
profile. Weighty issues have emerged in the
document that need to be addressed this critical
time when the aggression of insecurity has risen
to a crescendo in the land. The memo has not
come from an outsider shielded from the
activities of government. Nor is it from any of
those classified as ‘wailers’, those perpetually
said to be opposed to Buhari’s government,
those compatriots who see nothing good in
the sitting government.
The damning missive has come from the
National Security Adviser, NSA, Babagana
Monguno. He is angry that Buhari’s Chief of
Staff, Abba Kyari has strayed into territory not
allowed him under the Constitution. He
accuses Kyari of “undue and dangerous
interference on matters bordering on national
security”. So upset is Monguno that, according
to the Premium Times online newspaper which
sighted the letter, he “fired a warning memo to
all service chiefs to desist from taking further
directives from Mr. Kyari”.
Monguno, a retired major-general, is
reported to have said: “Chief of Staff to the
president is not a presiding head of security,
neither is he sworn to an oath of defending the
country…As such, professional practices such
as presiding over meetings with service chiefs
and heads of security organisations as well as
ambassadors and high commissioners to the
exclusion of the NSA and/or supervising
ministers are a violation of the Constitution
and directly undermine the authority of Mr.
President. Such acts
and…meddlesomeness…have not only
ruptured our security and defence efforts, but
have also slowed down any meaningful gain
that Mr. President has sought to achieve.”
The memo is dated December 9, 2019 and
sent to the president and to the foreign affairs
minister and his counterparts in defence,
interior and Police affairs. The president’s chief
of staff was copied. He titled it: ‘Disruption of
the National Security Framework by
Unwarranted Meddlesomeness.’
Only a few Nigerians would be surprised
that nearly three months after Monguno wrote
the letter, there is little to suggest his concerns
have been taken care of. We all know our
beloved president’s introvert culture. He
possesses a famous niggardly attitude when it
comes to reacting to kitchen cabinet uproar.
The man at the centre of it all, Abba Kyari, is as
reclusive. Both are agoraphobics who do not
seem to notice what’s going on outside where
they are, those groaning under the feet of the
fighting elephants.
There would be less shock that since Premium
Times unveiled the seething power tussle
among the president’s men, there’s been no
word from the president himself or any of the
horde of spokespersons. All is calm. The
government believes in the old adage: speech
is silver, silence is golden. There is, however,
more rumble in this unholy silence which
trashes a glittering appearance. Not all that
glitters is gold. The grass is suffering under the
giant weight of feuding mammoths.
We’re used to fiddling Neros calling for more
revelry when Rome is burning. We’ve been
brought to a point where, like Afghanistan,
Syria and Iraq, the night’s flagship news
broadcast would not be complete or over if
there is no report of carnage in Nigeria. Years
ago, a news editor in one of Nigeria’s leading
TV stations developed a fetish about one of
these violence-prone areas. Long before he cast
his headlines, he kept a permanent spot for a
major story on multiple deaths from violence
and suicide bombing in those areas. His
Insecurity is still the order
of the day because those our
president has mandated to
tackle insecurity are too busy
attending to petty squabbles
morbid anticipation never failed; it was always
fulfilled. And he would end up with a sardonic
smile.
Aren’t we at that pass? Aren’t we sometimes
reluctant to turn on the radio and TV? Are we
always comfortable with buying grief when
we buy the newspapers, knowing we shall be
herded sheepishly into a world filled with the
news and pictures of a ‘technically defeated’
Boko Haram inflicting more pain and anguish
as they operate freely? Knowing violence has
become a daily affair here, isn’t it easy for a
news editor sitting somewhere in
Johannesburg or Doha or London or Atlanta
to predict in the morning a headline of mass
killings in Nigeria and have his adumbration
manifest one hundred percent hours later in
the evening?
Send Opinions & Letters to:
opinions1234@yahoo.com
As I was composing this piece, news came
that Boko Haram terrorists have so far killed
547 teachers in the North-East of Nigeria
alone. The president of the teachers’ union,
Nasir Idris, said insecurity in the region had
thus led to more challenges: increase in outof-school
kids who are potential recruits for
the insurgent Boko Haram and politicians who
rely less on the vote to get to power. They are
also ready candidates for cult and armed
robbery gangs.
We know why insecurity is still the order of
the day despite the countless billions of naira
we have deployed into battling it. Those our
president has mandated to tackle insecurity
are too busy attending to petty squabbles.
Infighting is their preoccupation, more
important than the constitutional duty of
terminating the scourge threatening to
terminate the nation. They ought to be
removed without delay, for fresh hands and
fresh ideas to come in. But, according to the
government, even though the service chiefs
have overstayed their tenure, they won’t be
removed soon as Nigerians and the National
Assembly members demand from the
president. Boss Mustapha, Secretary to the
Federal Government, says replacing them now
would be harmful to national security. “You
don’t just wake up and say sack people, it doesn’t
happen like that,” Mustapha says.
How does that comfort Nigerians? It doesn’t.
It only says we haven’t arrived in the land
promised us by our leaders when they traversed
land and sea seeking our votes. The central
government’s argument crushes our hopes as
we mark the second anniversary of the captivity
of Leah Sharibu, the young citizen Boko
Haram gunmen have refused to free since they
seized her in February 2018. Both the leaders
and the led are now helpless as murderous
men and women straddle the land like the
Colossus of Rhodes.
•Ojewale, a social commentator, wrote
from Lagos