September 2017

Boko Haram: The Fear, The Conspiracy Theories — Page 20

PATHFINDER International

Lifting up a standard for the Global African Community VOL. 1, NO. 4

FREE

www.thepathfinderinternational.com

ISSN 2573-6523

Colonialism’s new

September 2017

— Page 7

clothes: EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements Federalism in Nigeria: Yorùbá Perspective — Page 10 l late Obafemi Awolowo

Also inside

with Africa Europe is trying to cut the flow of migrants from Africa — Back Page

Out of India: Wave of brutal violence

In depths of Atlantic, a quest for diamond — Page 3 — Page 16

2 | PATHFINDER International, Sept., 2017

NEWS

A surgeon experimented on slave women without anesthesia, now his statues are under attack

By Deneen L. Brown

A

mid demands to r e m o v e Confederate statues across the country, cries have grown louder to dismantle monuments to J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology,” a white 19th-century doctor who performed surgical experiments on enslaved black women without anesthesia.

Over the weekend, a Sims statue in New York City, w here he established the first hospital for women in 1855, was vandalized.

“RACIST” was spraypainted on the Central Park monument, and splotches of red paint were used to deface the statue's eyes and neck.

The city is considering whether to remove the statue, the site of an Aug. 19th protest, as part of a 90-day review of “symbols of hate” on city property, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week.

The memorial was denounced by New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who described Sims’s work as “repugnant and reprehensible” and a

“stain on our nation’s history.” The New York Academy of Medicine reissued its statement calling for the statue's removal.

Sims, who practiced medicine in Alabama from 1835 to 1849 before moving to New York, invented the speculum and other instruments still in use today. He pioneered surgery for fistula, a condition that left women incontinent after giving birth; historians say the treatment revolutionized the field of gynecology.

He also performed the first successful gallbladder surgery and the first successful artificial insemination.

But to make those advances, Sims performed experimental surgeries on enslaved women, raising disturbing ethical questions. His legacy has long been questioned by those who believe he used black women as medical guinea pigs without their consent.

Protesters have demanded removal of a monument to Sims on the capitol grounds in

Columbia, South Carolina, the state where Sims was born.

Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin (D), the city's first African American l e a d e r, t o l d C h r i s Matthews during an interview on MSNBC that he is more offended

by the statue of Sims on the capitol grounds than any Confederate memorial. The state health department building is also named in his honor.

A statue of Sims also stands on the capitol grounds in Montgomery,

Hurricanes and white supremacists A

By Andy Horowitz

s Hurricane Harvey approached southeast Texas, armed white nationalists marched through public squares in the United States. This coincidence echoed history. A century ago, another Texas hurricane provided an opportunity for white vigilantes to perpetrate what may have been one of the worst racial massacres in American h i s t o r y. A n d w h i t e politicians, acting with subtler means, used the storm as a pretext to restrict African American voting rights.

When crises of state and storm collide in an already anxious nation, the thirst for stability can lead too many to the well of white supremacy.

On Sept. 8, 1900, a hurricane pushed a 15foot wall of water onto Galveston Island. The highest point in the city, home to 40,000 residents, was nine feet above sea level. As many as 10,000 people died in the flood. The unnamed storm remains the United States’ deadliest hurricane.

Lurid tales from Galveston captivated a national audience. In “The Complete Story of the Galveston Horror,” for example, John Coulter enthralled readers with an

apocalyptic fantasy: “Incidents of the awful ...

Disaster ... Horrible Looting of Dead Bodies ... Pestilence from so many Decaying Bodies Unburied ... A Second Johnstown Flood, but worse: Hundreds of M e n , Wo m e n a n d Children Drowned.”

There was “No way of Escape,” Coulter yowled, “only Death!

Death! Everywhere!”

Lurking within that dystopian litany of horrors was one Texans actually boasted about: After the storm, white vigilantes executed dozens of AfricanAmericans, whom they

accused of looting.

Pornographic stories of plunder appear t h r o u g h o u t contemporary accounts of the Galveston storm, serving to justify this campaign of terror. “The ghouls were holding an orgie [sic] over the dead,” read one account, and “the majority of these men were negroes.”

“The pockets of some of the looters were fairly bulging out with fingers of the dead, which had been cut off because they were so swollen the rings could not be removed,” another journalist wrote.

“During the robbing of

the dead not only were fingers cut off, but ears were stripped from the head in order to secure jewels of value.”

Did that really happen?

Probably not. The mythical language about “ghouls” suggests that these scenes, like the myths about black men raping white women that suffused the South at the time, were cooked up in the sociological cauldron of white fear.

White people have long dreaded the specter of imagined black predators, and the storm offered an occasion for white readers to revel in their racist fantasies.

Decades of disaster research shows that widespread looting (as opposed to what amounts to foraging for necessities) is rare.

Common sense, too, suggests that people of color lucky enough to survive the Galveston flood — without food or shelter, mourning the loss of family members and neighbors — most likely did not engage in an orgy of dismembering bloated corpses to pilfer some jewelry.

Nonetheless, a coterie of white Galvestonians seemed to believe they did. And that fear gave them license to kill. As the flood receded, Lloyd Fayling, a white former newspaper reporter,

Alabama. In 2005, a painting entitled “Medical Giants of Alabama” that depicted Sims and other white men standing over a partially clothed black patient was removed from the University of A l a b a m a a t Birmingham’s Center for Advanced Medical Studies because of complaints from people offended by it.

According to a 2006 Washington Post article: “ A n a r c h a We s c o t t , Sims’s patient in the painting, endured 30 surgeries as Sims worked to perfect the technique. She was among about a dozen slaves on whom Sims operated repeatedly without anesthesia, which was just being developed and not widely used at the time.

Some scholars have questioned whether the slaves gave or were capable of giving informed consent to the surgery, despite Sims's claim they eagerly sought his cures.”

Sims, who was born in 1813 in Lancaster County, South Carolina, graduated in 1835 from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. Sims opened a medical practice in L a n c a s t e r, b u t h i s practice “failed within the year after two infants under his treatment died.” Sims moved to Alabama and settled in Macon County, where he began working as a doctor treating enslaved people on local plantations.

Read more on www.thepathfinder international.com

He built a hospital, Sims wrote in his autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” “in the corner of my yard for taking care of my negro patients and for negro surgical cases.”

The hospital, he wrote, had 16 beds — four for servants and 12 for patients. He began trying to treat fistula, a catastrophic injury from childbirth that at the time was considered incurable.

According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, “First reports of successful repairs emerged in the literature around the mid-19th century when James Marion Sims described his technique of a transvaginal approach with the use of silver sutures and bladder drainage postoperatively.”

In his autobiography, Sims described surgeries performed on enslaved patients, including Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey.

Sims wrote that he made a “proposition to owners of negroes: If you will give me Anarcha and Betsey for experiment, I agree to perform no experiment or operation on either of them to endanger their lives and will not charge a cent for keeping them, but you must pay their taxes and clothe them. I will keep them at my own expense.”

He wrote that he “was very enthusiastic” and expected to cure them within six months. Anarcha was described as “a mulatto girl” about 14 years old; Lucy was described as about 18 years old and had given birth to a child “two months ago, and that since that time she had Read more on www.thepathfinder international.com

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 3

MAGAZINE

The Kurd’s independence not negotiable By Bernard-Henri Levy, translated from French

by Steven B. Kennedy

T

he timidity of the international community in the face of the Sept. 25 referendum on an independent Kurdistan is a trifecta of shame, absurdity, and historic miscalculation.

We are talking about a people who have been deported, Arabized by force, gassed, and pushed into the mountains where, for a century, they have mounted an exemplary resistance to the tyranny theirBaghdad masters successively imposed on them in defiance of geography and of the Kurds' thousand years of history.

Theirs is a region that finally gained autonomy with the fall of Saddam Hussein — a region that, when the tsunami of the Islamic State crashed over Mesopotamia in 2014 and the Iraqi Army took flight, was the first to organize a counteroffensive. Since then, over a front 600 miles long, the Iraqi Kurds held off the barbarians and thus saved Kurdistan, Iraq, and our shared civilization.

And it is the Kurds again who, in the run-up to the battle of Mosul, went on the offensive on the Plains of Nineveh, opened the gates to the city, and, through their courage, enabled the coalition to strike at the heart of the Islamic State.

But now that the time has come to settle up, the United States remains stubbornly opposed to the referendum, urging the Kurds to put off their aspirations for independence to an indeterminate date in the future. Instead of thanking the Kurds, the world is telling them, with thinly veiled cynicism, “Sorry, Kurdish friends, you were so useful in confronting Islamic terror, but, uh, your timing is not so good. We don't need you anymore, so why don't you just go on home? Thanks, again — see you next time.”

It is said the referendum will distract attention from the common fight against the Islamic State and interfere with the Iraqi elections scheduled for next year. But everyone knows, except when they choose not to admit it, that the military part of the battle ended with the fall of Mosul, thanks largely to the Kurds themselves. Moreover, who can guarantee that the Iraqi national elections will take place as scheduled rather than being adjourned, just as we are asking the Kurds to adjourn theirs?

An independent Kurdistan, the commentators continue, would imperil regional stability. As if Syria, mired in war; Iran, with its revived imperial ambitions; and decomposing Iraq, that artificial creation of the British, are not dangers far greater than little Kurdistan, a secular and democratic friend of the West with an elected parliament and free press!

Independence, the talking heads insist, would threaten the territorial integrity of the four nations — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey — across which the Kurdish nation is spread. It is as if these voices are unaware that the present referendum concerns only the Kurds of Iraq, who have no ambition to form a greater Kurdistan with their “brothers” and “sisters” in Turkey and Syria, whose crypto-Marxist leadership is ideologically incompatible with that of the Iraqi Kurds.

But what about the reaction of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, one asks? What about Turkish President RecepTayyip Erdogan's reported threat to cut the

Kurds are not children: they have earned their independence, and the West must get out of the way. pipelines that connect Iraqi Kurdistan to the rest of the world? I do not believe that it is the role of the West to act as a press agent for two dictatorships that detest us, nor do I see why the blackmailing of one's neighbors should be condemned when practiced by Pyongyang but facilitated when it comes to Tehran orAnkara.

Sadly, however, no argument is too feeble to be used to justify our request to “delay.” It feels like an Orwellian nightmare, or a festival of bad faith, in which all arguments are turned into their opposites.

What of the Kurds' organizing themselves into an autonomous island of democracy and peace, even after the Peshmerga had not been paid by Baghdad for three years? That should be enough for them, claim U.S. State Department experts who cannot seem to grasp why the Kurds should want to take the last step from autonomy to independence. What of the Kurds' controlling oil in the Kirkuk region?

Instead of seeing this as a boon, which should provide immediate assurance of their ability to finance the development of their new country, observers seem to think only of the covetousness that these riches might stimulate.

And when the two major parties scramble for votes — which anywhere else would be seen as a sign of healthy republican civic culture — this is suddenly viewed as the seeds of divisions and disputes to come! We are dealing with the old colonialist drivel that holds some people are never quite ready to govern themselves, not yet grown up, not adult enough.

It is the familiar tragedy that befalls nations that, as Charles de Gaulle used to say (and he knew whereof he spoke), have no friends. Yes, yes, services were rendered, vague promises were made when we needed you and when you alone stood between us and the barbarians, but now that the time has come to keep our word, the evasion begins. “Bad timing,” “not part of the

But now that the time has come to settle up, the United States remains stubbornly opposed to the referendum, urging the Kurds to put off their aspirations for independence to an indeterminate date in the future. Instead of thanking the Kurds, the world is telling them, with thinly veiled cynicism, “Sorry, Kurdish friends, you were so useful in confronting Islamic terror, but, uh, your timing is not so good. We don’t need you anymore, so why don't you just go on home? Thanks, again — see you next time.”

plan,” “the world has an agenda, and we regret to inform you that you are not on that agenda,” and so on.

I witnessed a similar situation at the end of the Bosnian War some 20 years ago.

The 7th Corps of the Army of Sarajevo was on the verge not only of liberating the besieged Bosnian towns but of reunifying the country, forcing the surrender of the Serbian goons loyal to Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic, and bringing peace and justice. But the United States applied the brakes. Under the leadership of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, the United States convened the aggressor (Serbia), the arbiter (Croatia), and the victim (Bosnia). The victim was threatened that if it did not comply, it would be left to its fate — and thus the West's Bosnian friend was partitioned, sacrificed on the altar of a convenient but poorly crafted peace that remains shaky to this day.

May similar sorry machinations not produce, in the case of the Kurds, the same sad effects. May the descendants of the survivors of Saddam's chemical attack on Halabja find the strength to resist the intimidation of all their well-wishers.

May they remember Gen. de Gaulle, who in the summer of 1944 overrode the plans of his American and British allies and, rather than pushing directly into Germany, insisted on liberating his capital first, thereby claiming his share of theAllied victory.

The Kurdish referendum is not an act of force. It is a right. It is a debt. It is a major landmark for a great people who have given immeasurably to the world.

Yesterday, they were among those who saved Jews; in our day, they have given us the Peshmerga, who liberated and now protect the last Christian populations of the Middle East. And, for centuries, they have been one of the wellsprings of the enlightened Islam that, in the secret recesses of the soul no less than in the fury of battle, remains the best response to the curse of radical Islam. It is time for the world to honor the Kurdish people as they have honored us. n

4 | PATHFINDER International, Sept., 2017

NEWS Economic chaos fuels gold rush in war-torn South Sudan

By Okech Francis

A

fter South Sudan's peace deal collapsed, gun battles rocked the capital and soldiers ransacked his clothing store, Ahmed al-Nur faced the economic crisis in a trade that's had an unexpected boost from the new wave of violence: gold.

With inflation soaring and the currency collapsing, the precious metal that's mainly extracted by artisanal miners in Africa's newest nation is more highly prized than ever. At the same time, last year’s spread of armed unrest to Equatoria — a southern region that may be home to sizable deposits — has left authorities with little remit over mining. The result: a virtual free-forall as miners and traders shrug off the risks of the three-year civil war and pile in.

“Many of us are going

to look for gold because we know the profits are big,” al-Nur, who travels to Equatoria to buy from miners, said in an interview. He lost about $20,000 when his store in the capital, Juba, was looted last year and says he now makes as much as $1,000 a month selling gold in the city, a trade that's officially illegal.

South Sudan, mired in conflict that’s killed tens of thousands of people since December 2013, relies on oil production for almost all its revenue and hasn't officially exported any gold. While details on the country's mineral potential are scarce, Jersey-based Equator Gold Holdings Ltd. described it as the “world’s most promising frontier exploration destination” and said its southern Luri project, suspended because of the war, may contain several multi-million ounce gold deposits.

The Mining Ministry

said June 1 that Dove Mining of Thailand and Panamanian company 4MB will begin the first official gold exports in September. They expect initial annual shipments to be worth $500 million, with about 55 percent of profits to be shared with the government in Juba and local administrations.

Home to sub-Saharan

Africa's third-biggest oil reserves, South Sudan has faced economic chaos after the conflict cut crude output and lower oil prices further reduced government income. The economy will probably contract 3.5 percent this year, after shrinking 13.8 p e r c e n t l a s t y e a r, according to the International Monetary

Fund, while inflation was 334 per cent in May. “The country’s economic activity is at a standstill. Oil is not taking off,” said Lual Deng Lual, managing director at the Ebony Center for Strategic Studies, a Juba-based think tank. “Now people have turned to what is there.”

London-based Global

United States gives Ethiopia $91 million in drought aid for food and medicine

By Carol Morello

T

he United States will provide an additional $91 million in humanitarian aid for Ethiopia to cope with a third straight year of drought, the top U.S. official in charge of assistance said onAugust 31.

The extra funding brings U.S. aid for food and medical care in Ethiopia to $454 million this year, said Mark Green, the new administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. Another $210 million in U.S. aid has gone to development projects.

Green announced the new tranche of aid after he met with Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.

In a statement he read to reporters, Green said he also had urged the Ethiopian leader to take "concrete steps to create political space for all voices to be heard and to uphold constitutional and guaranteed rights."

Earlier in August, Ethiopia lifted a 10month state of emergency following deadly clashes between security forces and anti-government protesters alleging right abuses and political cronyism.

"What I said to him is, we look at what countries need around the world to strengthen their ability to deliver for their people," Green told reporters later in the day. "Responsive governance, and a place for people to come together from different points of view, and to share ideas openly and

publicly, history shows is vitally important.

“Our view is the government should continue to do foster that, and do more and more,” he added. “We think it is good for Ethiopia. We think it is the right thing to do.”

According to USAID spokesman Clayton McCleskey, Green told Desalegn he was concerned conditions were deteriorating for people affected by the drought and encouraged the government to “show greater leadership and invest more resources to combat a worsening humanitarian crisis.”

Green, who is on his first trip abroad since starting the job earlier in August, is in Ethiopia to highlight U.S. efforts to help impoverished countries emerge from crises like drought and

famine better prepared to weather future setbacks.

Drought in Ethiopia's lowlands bordering Somalia has sent herders farther afield in their search for land where their animals can graze, and stilted crops in areas where corn stalks grow tall but produce no ears of edible corn.

Green said Ethiopia would be one of 12 countries that will get focused attention from Feed the Future programs, even if Congress approves deep cuts in USAID’s budget. The Trump administra-tion has proposed halving Feed the Future's total budget for agricultural develop-ment programs from over $1 billion this year to $500 million next year. Ethiopia's $78 million share would also be cut in half. Anticipating having less money

to spend, USAID dropped seven countries from the original 19 it had planned to focus its attention on.

The United States has been the principal international donor to Ethiopia as it has struggled through a devastating series of droughts. In recent years, U.S. aid has tried to help herders become farmers, provided seed money to small business entrepreneurs, taught impoverished Ethiopians job skills and provided nutritional education.

While Green assured Desalegn the United States remains committed to helping Ethiopia develop agriculturally and economically, he underscored that U.S. aid is not limitless and Washington expects the

Ethiopian government to contribute more money to humanitarian efforts.

During a drought in 2015 and 2016, Ethiopia spent some $700 million on food for food for people affected. This year, it has pledged only $110 million, and so far spent far less than that.

“The United States will continue providing assistance for vulnerable people, but we all agree host-country partners must be willing to step up during crises, and the prime minister indicated that he was looking to do so,” he said.

No Country for Civilians: The sudden exodus from war-torn South Sudan is the largest Africa has seen since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This is what a nation without civilians looks like.By Jason Patinki. n

Witness said it has received reports of increased South Sudanese gold trading. A June report on Uganda's gold trade by the advocacy group said that “minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan -- that might be funding conflict and human-rights abuses — pass through Uganda on their way to international markets.”

A central bank study in March noted about 200 unofficial gold traders are working in Equatoria, dealing in a combined 1,411 to 1,764 ounces (40 to 50 kilograms) per month, according to AnduEzbonAdde, undersecretary at the Mining Ministry. When the bank sent staff to study the trade and offer to buy at $24.25 (3,000 South Sudanese pounds) per gram, blackmarket traders began purchasing for as much as 50 percent more, he said.

Rebels in Equatoria, a region of nine states that initially escaped the worst of the broader conflict and extends south from Juba to the borders with Congo, Uganda and Kenya, took up arms against President SalvaKiir’s government about a year ago.

A counterinsurgency followed and there's been a wave of alleged atrocities, mainly against civilians, with government forces and rebels both using hunger as a weapon of war, Amnesty International said this week. While many people fled their homes, others “mad after gold” are “taking advantage of security loopholes to move in to buy gold illegally,” Adde, the ministry official, said in an interview.

Traders pay armed groups for access to the mines, he said.

The governor of Kapoeta, a state that has at least 12 gold sites and whose capital is 186 miles (300 kilometers) southeast of Juba, said “foreigners” had seized control of some mines in the area in the past year. Speaking by phone, Louis Lobong Lojore alleged the entire gold business was run by nonSouth Sudanese and said the government is working on policies to empower local citizens to benefit from the resources. n

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 5

Nigeria is living a lie T

he story of Nigeria, just like the rest of Africa, was and still is based on the corruption of the social and cultural paradigms of the various Nationalities that make up the country, expressed in the architecture of State, not the least because the creation of the country had no input of these Nationalities who were nevertheless forced into complying with its dictates mainly by negating their existential paradigms. This substitute was not an improvement on an existing paradigm but its neutralization and substitution leading to the cycle of continuous underdevelopment.

Nigeria thus became a Nation-State anchored on colonial prerogatives without integrating the Nationalities who operated within the ambit of conflict against each other once the colonial rulers withdrew. This is one major reason why any and all references to any form of economic development was always restricted to what obtained pre-independence. Independence and its aftermath brought the interNationality conflict into the open where the quest for hegemony by the North and the East enabled an alliance between the two for the singular purpose of neutralizing the West; which alliance dominated the affairs of State such that the neutralization of the Western leadership became an urgent matter of State.

The British further formalized the lie of the Nigerian State by

EDITORIAL BOARD Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Femi Odedeyi Managing Editor Gbenga Gbesan Production Editor Soji Amosu Graphics / Design Mikaiil Akinlawon Published by Pathfinder Media LLC P. O. Box 1256, Greenbelt, MD20768, USA Tel: 240-838-4466 1-240-602-3802 Website:

www.thepathfinderinter national.com www.ooduapathfinder.com E-mail: editor@ooduapathfinder.com advertising@ ooduapathfinder.com

acceding to the demands of the North to ensure its political dominance through a false census that gave majority parliamentary seats to the North and which became the political foundation for Independence. Since then, no credible census had taken place, whether under a civilian or military administration and which once again not only points to the corruption embedded in the formation of the State, but also in the living lie that it is.

Nigeria became a house built on a sandy foundation; the mantra about “unity” notwithstanding.

“Unity” cannot be assumed to mean a c o m mo n p u rp o s e o r destiny of a people since the various peoples inhabiting Nigeria's geopolitical space had been exhibiting such purposes before colonial amalgamation, that is, outside the context of Nigeria as a State, whose “unity” became an end in itself. To affirm the non-negotiability of such a State demands an interrogation of the positives it brought to the lives of the peoples fundamentally different from those they experienced before being forced into it.

The British colonial forces must be credited for being truthful about the characterization of their “Nigerian” territory as a “Protectorate”, with no pretenses for the various Peoples inhabiting that geo-political space, unlike now, at the present time, where, in spite of achieving formal Independence, Nigeria, as a State, is not true to itself,

Editor’s Note hence cannot be true to the Peoples.

It says it is a “Federal” Republic when it exists against every known definition and characteristic of Federalism; there are no “Federating” Entities, those that existed prior to 1966, that is, those Regions negotiated as a consequence of anticolonial agitations were simply decreed out of existence by the Nigerian Army and replaced by what that Army decrees as “Federating Units”.

This Army was a creation of the British colonial overlords, having established what it called the “Royal Hausa Constabulary”, in Lagos, right inside Yorubaland, as a forerunner of the projected role for the North as the eventual custodian of the colony, where every step in the transformation of this Army reflected the projection of its Northern Mandate. Furthermore, this terminology employed by the British was an endorsement of Hausa domination by the Fulani, who, having no territory of their own inside Nigeria’s geo-political space, had nevertheless imposed their hegemony on the Hausa by various means of subterfuge.

Thus, a “Hausa Constabu-

lary” was in reality a Fulani-controlled military force.

This Constabulary metamorphosed into the West African Frontier Force and eventually into what we now know as the “Nigerian Army”. The mindset of this military was not different from that of the colonizer. It functioned as a colonial force, trained to subjugate the “natives” and suppress the people; to see the people and relate with them as a conquered specie. This was why the “Nigerian Army” sees no contradiction when it is deployed as an internal political and security force as the very many examples in Nigeria show.

That it would be initially created as a “Hausa” Constabulary force gave fillip to the Hausa-Fulani who rightly saw this development as a vindication, if not outright support for its own imperialist designs on the rest of the country, particularly Yorubaland.

Pursuit of this colonial mandate became this army’s own imperative; for this type of army cannot possibly be transformed into its opposite, an anti-colonial entity, unless its original intent was abolished such that it becomes a creation borne

out of the “soul”, the essence of the new society which can only come from “within” the ethos of the Nation/People/ Nationality and reflected in a new architecture of State.

This was why no Nigerian administration (military or civilian) since the end of the civil war had been able to reach the level of social and cultural development or consciousness attained in the Regions before and immediately after Independence, a political atmosphere created by an understanding and an accommodation of Nigeria’s socio-cultural plurality where the Regions were still able to determine their internal projections and expectations thus creating opportunities for the development of their localities.

It was through this Nigerian Army that all of the anti-colonial efforts which eventually made Britain cede political power via a Federalist Structure was neutralized, starting from the Nzeogwu-led coup of January 15 1966 and formalized by General I r o n s i ’s U n i f i c a t i o n Decree, which eventually led to the 1967-1970 Nigeria-Biafra War; and which, as historical records now show, was a war of dominance between competing Northern and Eastern hegemons. It was through this Army that Nigeria’s underdevelopment took on a more sinister dimension, where every military Administration touts corruption as the

most visible cause of underdevelopment, with a purported vow to fight it but with the opposite being the result, where corruption took on more visible and vicious forms.

It could not but be so; the country being run on a lie.

This is partly due to the violence unleashed on the anti-corruption quest where militarist language, namely, “fighting”, “combating” as forms of engagement enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with corruption itself, both existing side by side and feeding off each other’s excesses without making a dent in the depth of corruption of and in the society.

This “fight” is thus presented as a pitched battle within a military confrontation demanding a set-piece victory when it is actually a political, economic and cultural issue. Moreover, the sustenance of the economy and the credibility of the State itself will necessarily mandate a struggle against any form of corruption as not doing so increases retrogression and underdevelopment of the society.

For Africa's sake, the lie of the architecture of the postcolonial State must be neutralized and replaced with the truth, a historical truth, where Africa’s peoples had been in one form of interrelationship or the other; any fights or wars between them being consequences of such relationships, unlike now, where wars and conflicts within and between African countries are essentially proxy wars of colonial forces directly or indirectly controlling African countries thus reinforcing Africa’s underdevelopment. n

6 | PATHFINDER International, Sept., 2017

CARTOONS

Page 7

Magazine Vol. 1, No. 4, Sept., 2017

International Lifting up a standard for the Global African Community

Since 2002, African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries have negotiated a reciprocal free trade agreement known as the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union (EU). While it was marketed as the magic bullet towards the ACP countries' industrialization and development, it is in fact an unfair agreement that is anchored in a colonial framework.

Colonialism’s new clothes: EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements with Africa

T

hough not highly publicized, the EPA has faced continued opposition from across the ACP countries, not least because of its devastating effect on small scale farmers. The case of some African countries presented here is illustrative of the way communities are fighting to regain control over their resources and protect their markets from the flooding of cheap EU processed foods, along with pesticides and genetically modified organisms.

“A tonne of cocoa is roughly US $1,300, while one 4x4 vehicle is now about US $120,000. So you need about 92 tonnes of cocoa to exchange for one 4x4. But to get one tonne, you will need not less than 20 acres of land. The average cocoa farmer in Ghana has only around 2-3 acres, meaning it would take him or her well over 500 years to produce enough cocoa to buy a 4x4.”— John Opoku, human rights lawyer and activist, Ghana.

This statement highlights the dire terms of trade that Africans and other peoples of the global South deal with on a daily basis. Since time immemorial, nations in the global South have entered into unfair trade agreements with the rest of the world — keeping them in perpetual poverty! The nature of trade that follows these agreements and the benefits are always one-sided. Of specific interest, are the so-called Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) that keep popping up. One such FTA is the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).

Since September 2002, African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries have been negotiating EPAs as reciprocal trade arrangements with the European Union (EU) under the Cotonou agreement. These EPAs are aimed at further liberalizing the economies of former European colonies, a move that would have farreaching implications for farmers, fisherfolk, miners, workers and consumers across the concerned regions.

Before EPAs, the ACP countries had preferential trade arrangements with the EU. One of these arrangements was the Everything But Arms (EBA) initiative which offered unilateral non-reciprocal

market access for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to the EU, thereby granting LDCs duty-free and quota-free market access to the EU. Despite this opening, ACP countries rarely ever managed to fill the allowable export quotas to the EU under the EBA. Uganda, for instance, has a 5,000 metric tonne quota for sugar but its exports to the EU never attained this amount, partly because of the EU's stringent rules of origin and supply side capacity constraints.

The premise used by the EU to switch from the EBA to the EPA with the ACP countries was the argument that preferential trade was not in compliance with World Trade Organization (WTO)

“

Instead of pursuing bilateral FTAs with all 79 ACP countries, Europe divided the ACP countries into 7 blocs – West Africa, Central Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA), East African Community (EAC), Southern African Development Community (SADC), Caribbean and the Pacific. The process was touted as a way to promote regional integration.

However, since it started in September 2002, much division and acrimony has been created, deadlines have gone unmet and the current situation, as illustrated, is quite messy, especially in the African continent.

”

rules. This was a ruse, as exceptions to WTO rules are always possible. The idea really was to push liberalization further into the three regions for the benefit of European capital (exporters first, investors over the longer term), by creating a global market with the same rules everywhere.

The ACP countries would supposedly reap more growth, jobs and technology transfer as a result.

In fact, the promises in the EPA are not any different from the ones that we saw and heard during the much-heralded great things to come that were housed in the now failed Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) – effects of which are still being felt today! Both are rooted within a colonial framework which allows transnational corporations of the EU and the global North to extract raw materials from these countries under their own terms. As with all FTAs, the EPAs need to be analyzed and understood as a series of interlinked events that are negotiated one after another with the sole purpose of crippling emerging economies.

Instead of pursuing bilateral FTAs with all 79 ACP countries, Europe divided the ACP countries into 7 blocs – West Africa, Central Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA), East African Community (EAC), Southern African Development Community (SADC), Caribbean and the Pacific. The process was touted as a way to promote regional integration. However, since it started in September 2002, much division and acrimony has been created, deadlines have gone unmet and the current situation, as illustrated, is quite messy, Turn to page 8

8 | PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017

MAGAZINE

Colonialism’s new clothes: EU’s Economic Partnership Contd. from page 7

especially in theAfrican continent.

How the EPA affects food and farmers inAfrica Since inception, the EPA has been mired in controversy. This stems from certain clauses that have been included in the agreement which pose serious threats to human rights and force the privatization of critical sectors in national economies. This is particularly true in most African countries. Along with undermining national sovereignty, EPAs have destabilized regional integration processes, strangled local industries and withdrawn policy space from the civil society. Of specific interest are the effects of the EPA on Africa’s agriculture, especially smallholder farming, which is the backbone of mostAfrican economies.

Smallholder farmers on the African continent account for 90 per cent of all farms but have access to only 15 per cent of the continent's agricultural lands; also, smallholder farmers supply 90 per cent of the seed used on the African continent. Smallholders provide 80 per cent of the food supply in these regions, while close to 43 per cent of agricultural labor in Sub-Saharan Africa is comprised of women.

Also, it is estimated that the fisheries and aquaculture sector employs close to 13 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Pastoralism is a livelihood for 50 million people, 12-22 million of whom are in the Horn of Africa. Alongside this backbone, a plantation sector dominated by big capital produces export crops such as bananas, sugar cane, cacao, pineapple, tea and coffee.

African small holders produce to feed their local communities and markets, and do not have the capacity nor a real interest in producing for Europe. Under the lopsided free trade rules, the EU has a lucrative access to African markets through the export of processed food products. Conversely, African countries are bound to the less lucrative and less sustainable business of exporting raw agricultural products such as coffee and cotton to EU markets.

Liberalizing the EAC market means that cheap and subsidized products from the EU can freely flow into the region, and ultimately cripple the industrial sector. Therefore, they have a lot to lose from an FTA with Europe that would see European foods displacing their own and that would open the door to European companies establishing more plantations, fish farms and other agricultural export operations that affect their access to land, water, seeds and markets.

Experience already shows that agreements with Europe are not there to benefit Africans but to open up their borders for European companies to come in and produce for their own market.

Take the case of East Africa where this arrangement is already affecting the food security of many and destroying the natural environment. East Africa is home to Lake Victoria, the second largest fresh water lake in the world. The lake has a variety of fish which are a source of livelihood for many across the region.

Yet, ordinary East Africans can no longer afford fish. As a result, they can only afford to buy the pocket-friendly mgongowazi (fish skeletons).

Mgongowazi are remnants from fish firms that process Nile perch for export.

This, coupled with the production of flowers, cocoa, cotton, string beans and coffee, ensures that African production is essentially export-oriented towards the EU. The EPA negotiations were meant to promote liberalization of African economies as well as increase access for

Fish skeletons set out to dry on wooden poles in a market in Kisumu, Kenya. The fish skeletons, referred to as “mgongowazi”, are sun-dried and deep-fried before being sold as affordable food. (Photo: REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya) entry of GMO foods, especially in times of food shortage. For this reason, in 2017, Kenya's National Biosafety Authority (NBA) publicly warned traders on the continued importation of corn-based products like cereals, certain cornflakes brands and popcorns. Kenya has the strongest economy in East Africa and can set a precedent vis-a-vis other countries in the continent, particularly Nigeria and Ghana which are taking steps to improve national provision for biotechnology and biosafety.

Under the EPA, countries are expected to cut tariffs heavily. The EAC, for example, has committed to liberalize 80 per cent of its market for European Union imports over a 15-year period. This includes raw materials and capital goods which already enjoy duty-free status. Such a move would expose the agricultural sector to unfair competition from the EU, which would undoubtedly shake the very core of America, Europe and Japan. They are European companies to African regional trade, and displace local farmers therefore increasingly pressuring Africa markets. As such, African countries, like due to competition from cheap products to open up its markets for their products. many ACP countries, were obliged to from the EU. For that reason, sensitive For example, Syngenta’s chairman Ren progressively open their markets to products will be excluded from tariff Jianxin aspires to double the size of European products as illustrated in the elimination and remain protected for now.

Syngenta in the next 5 to 10 years.

EAC liberalization schedule above.

Dairy is one of the most sensitive Jianxin has already indicated that his On the face of it, the schedule caters products, as Africa is well supplied by expansion will happen mostly in India for the protection of infant industries small producers who cannot compete with and inAfrican countries. and sensitive products. On careful subsidized European agribusiness. On a This context makes African countries examination, however, glaring contrapositive note, some regions have opted to more vulnerable to many unwanted dictions on the schedules cannot be protect their dairy sectors. In East Africa, products, including the infiltration of missed. all dairy products will be excluded from Genetically Modified Organisms For instance, on one hand, the EAC liberalization if the EPA is signed. For (GMOs). Once corporations and their has protected maize flour (HS Code, 6 example, once the Kenyan government lobbies succeed in getting some digits 110220) at a duty rate of 50%. Yet, realized that the livelihoods of close to countries to accept them, it will be on the other hand, maize starch (HS 600,000 dairy farmers would be difficult for other African countries to Code, 6 digits 110812), which is a binegatively affected by the importation of say no. In many countries, GM foods are product of maize flour, has been milk powder and dairy products from the promoted as the panacea to food liberalized. These contradictions EU, it opted to list dairy products as a security. Anne Maina, from the Kenya equally apply to other products like sensitive product. In West Africa, dairy is Biodiversity Coalition (KBioC), is potatoes. With such a liberalization excluded except for powdered milk, of concerned with the escalating schedule, value addition through agrowhich Nigeria is the biggest importer. In infiltration of GMOs into Kenya. processing will be constrained and will the case of South Africa, some meat and Despite an existing ban on the also compromise food security given the dairy have been excluded, but not all. importation of GMOs into Kenya, the supportive linkages between agriculture Fisheries are another sector threatened country has had little control over the and manufacturing.

Turn to page 9 The colonization of agricultural markets inAfrica Under the EPA, countries are expected to cut tariffs heavily.

Some of the EU countries are also part of the G7’s New Alliance for Food The EAC, for example, has committed to liberalize 80 per cent Security and Nutrition (NAFSN), which of its market for European Union imports over a 15-year is directly supporting the expansion into period. This includes raw materials and capital goods which Africa of major agribusiness companies like Bayer and Unilever. By extension, already enjoy duty-free status. Such a move would expose the these countries are part of the agenda of agricultural sector to unfair competition from the EU, which increasing EU access to African markets so that they can sell their pesticides, would undoubtedly shake the very core of regional trade, and transgenic seeds and cheap processed displace local farmers due to competition from cheap foods. products from the EU. Further to this, seed companies are facing saturated markets in North

Yet, ordinary East Africans can no longer afford fish. As a result, they can only afford to buy the pocket-friendly mgongowazi (fish skeletons). Mgongowazi are remnants from fish firms that process Nile perch for export. This, coupled with the production of flowers, cocoa, cotton, string beans and coffee, ensures that African production is essentially export-oriented towards the EU.

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 9

MAGAZINE Contd. from page

by the EPA in African countries. Tariffs for trade in fish products are clearly designed to protect EU-based fish processors and provide them with as much flexibility as possible for sourcing fish products at the lowest price in African markets. As a result of the enormous differential between the tariffs for processed and unprocessed fish products to enter EU markets, African fisheries are forced to export unprocessed fish at cheap prices, while tinned fish products from the EU flood local markets.

Liberalizing the fisheries sector does not have any benefits at all for smallscale fisherfolk, rather what is being witnessed are increased cases of locals who cannot afford fish, illegal fish trawling around the coastal areas and decline in fish stocks due to over-fishing.

Flowers and seeds expediting trade agreements between Kenya and EU Kenya has recently signed and ratified her instruments to be part of the EUEAC economic partnership agreements (EPAs). The pressure to sign on the dotted line comes from the lucrative flower export industry which is controlled by a few rich foreign farmers and corporations.

The benefit of flower exports hardly trickles down to the common citizen given that these multinational corporations are involved in tax evasion schemes. In 2011, Christian Aid reported that Kenya may have been losing US$ 500 million every year as capital flight from flower exports to the EU. The same horticulture industry was instrumental in pushing Kenya to adopt the Seeds and Plant Varieties Act. This has since been upgraded to be compliant with the more draconian protocol of the International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) of 1991.

Kenya's rush to be the first to sign into EPA and UPOV 1991 laws spells doom to smallholder farming and the right to food. It is immoral for Kenya to expect other EAC member states to sign and ratify this EPA. By rushing to sign the Market Access Regulation with the EU, the Kenyan government skirted around a Kenyan court ruling that there be adequate consultations with Kenyan smallholder farmers and that they be involved as important stakeholders.

Just like for the EPA, much of the burden for Kenya to join UPOV and drag the rest of the EAC countries along, came from the floriculture and seed industries, who wanted to ensure a regionally seamless and expedited trade for their own benefit.

Daniel Maingi, Director of Growth Partners Africa and National Coordinator of the Kenya Food RightsAlliance (KeFRA).

Agreement to negotiate rights for the seed industry As mentioned, the EU-African EPAs only concern trade in goods for now. But they do contain a clause which says that in 5 years’time, the parties will negotiate further chapters under the Rendezvous Clause. The Clause stipulates that parties should undertake to conclude negotiations in other issues within five years, once the agreement comes into force. This includes negotiations in areas of services, investment, government procurement, trade and sustainable development, intellectual property rights and competition policy.

On intellectual property, if the Caribbean EPA is any model, African states can expect that the EU will present new rules that go beyond current international standards as established under the WTO. They will be asked to adopt the rules of the UPOV which provide patent-like rights for plant b r ee d er s , t o b o o s t p r o f i ts f o r multinational seed companies, and possibly join the Union.

Agreement to give more rights to foreign investors It is unclear how far the EU will go in demanding the liberalization of investment rules that EU companies enjoy under similar deals in other regions, including the powerful Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) scheme. ISDS is a procedural mechanism that is provided for in international agreements on investment.

It allows foreign investors to bring a case directly against a State where they have invested in before an arbitration tribunal, if they feel that the State has breached the rules set out in their agreement. If the latest negotiations are to be taken as models, the EU may push for the widest liberalization possible along with a modified version of ISDS that the EU secured in its recent trade agreement with Canada.

One major concern will be land. FTAs tend to promote the concept of “national treatment”, which means that foreign investors should receive the same treatment as national ones. Unless African states take a stand on this, the EPAs could make it illegal to restrict access to farmland by foreigners.

Beyond land, liberalizing rules on investment will ensure that European agribusiness companies and major retail chains – from Nestle and Danone, to Carrefour – get ample benefits from building their presence in Africa. The devastating effects on the agricultural sector extend to the other sectors, the reality of which is mind-blowing! Due to the unfair trade deals, the local food processing industry is in decay or struggles to grow in most African countries. In parallel, the farmers' capacity to produce food for their own communities and local markets is compromised and, with it, food sovereignty. The predominance of export-oriented cash crops in Africa is one of the signs that colonial exploitation is alive and well, 50-60 years after the independence of many African countries.

Production and Processing “If somebody is trying to plan with you based on where you are today when you are planning to move somewhere else, it will be wise to look ahead and make sure that the agreement anticipates where you are going. The problem with the EPA is that it does not anticipate where we want to be as an industrial e c o n o m y. ” — D r. O k e c h u k w u Enelamah, Nigerian Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment Africa’s manufacturing share is, without a doubt, so small that it has led the African Union (AU) to launch an

initiative titled Action Plan for Accelerated Industrial Development in Africa (AIDA). AIDA was adopted in 2007. If manufacturing is already struggling, an EPA will not be the magic potion that Africa needs to grow its manufacturing sector.

When it comes to manufacturing, signing an EPA means that industry and products have to strictly adhere to European standards before they can be accepted for export to the EU. As John Opoku puts it, adhering to standards really means prioritizing Europe's manufacturing sector at the expense of Africa's. He argues that “even ordinary palm oil standards have to be met before they allow you to export. Fish has to meet certain standards, otherwise we cannot export fish. So you find that it became a means of restricting our production matrix and allow them to still bring their goods.”

This is true for almost all African economies which are still exporting unprocessed products that eventually make it back to the same country processed and more expensive. For example, Kenya is one of the biggest producers of coffee but an ordinary Kenyan cannot afford instant coffee. It is precisely for these reasons that Tanzania and Nigeria have advanced for not signing the EPA. Grassroots protests against the EPA in Kenya The Kenya Small Scale Farmers Forum (KSSFF) and many others are working for the opinions of smallholder farmers to be heard or taken into consideration when it comes to trade agreements. For this reason, together with six other petitioners, KSSFF took the Kenyan government to court in 2007.

The group were “[…] suing lack of public participation in the EPA negotiations because one condition is that there should be intensive public participation, facilitated by the government of the countries. So the court ruled that Kenya has to ensure that there is public participation and government just ignored and went ahead and negotiated the way they wanted to,” stated Justus Lavi, one of the petitioners and member of the KSSFF. The farmers argued that the draft EPA would lead to food insecurity and undermine Kenya's food sovereignty.

They denounced the possible detrimental effects to the Kenyan economy due to “cheap and heavily subsidized products from the EU, leading to unfair competition which may lead to the closure of the Kenyan manufacturing industries.” The farmers

did win the case in 2013 but never followed up on the judgment. In 2016, the Kenyan government signed and ratified the EPA. What’s next Another critical concern for the EPA is Brexit and its apparent impact on the EPA. It is no secret that Britain is the biggest consumer of most products from most of these countries. For the EAC alone, Britain accounted for 35.5% of total EAC exports to the EU in 2015. Brexit calls for an immediate halt in the negotiations because the negotiating parties have changed.

Africa Kiiza, from SEATINI, argues that “We need to first assess the implication of the Brexit. […] Because we might not benefit, but the EU [minus Britain] stands to benefit in every way.”

Despite the obvious disarray that exists, the EU continues to push hard for the most recalcitrant blocs like East and West Africa to sign the EPA. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the imminent negotiation of a successor to the Cotonou Agreement, which expires in 2020. The ACP states have already announced that they want to shift their trade and investment relations with the EU from a free trade to a preferential basis under the new agreement.

Further to this is the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) that was established by theAfrican Union Summit in an attempt to fast-track the continent-wide trade integration element of the 1991 Abuja Treaty. The CFTA is an attempt by the African Union to create an African Economic Community. Among other aspects, it will negotiate issues around tariff elimination, rules of origin, nontariff barriers, sanitary and phytosanitary standards, trade facilitation and trade in services. It is expected to be completed at the end of 2017.

The EPA is running into all kinds of hurdles like Brexit, a growing rise of nationalistic tendencies and xenophobia as well as other national processes that are overshadowing regional and international agreements. There is increasing opposition towards FTAs in Africa and beyond. Even within the EU, there is mass mobilization by people who oppose them.

As a result, governments are barely able to pass these agreements.

These setbacks present a perfect opportunity to renew the opposition against the EPA and other upcoming FTAs like the post-Cotonou arrangement that is currently being developed. This is the moment when the whole FTA agenda in Africa needs to be challenged and groups need to come together to push for a new deal. The time is now for African countries to prioritize their citizens and put their needs first, before FTAs are negotiated and signed. n

10 | PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017

FEATURE

l late Obafemi Awolowo

Federalism in Nigeria: Yorùbá Perspective The Awo Legacy and the Challenges of Political Leadership and Governance in Present-Day Nigeria, Akin Mabogunje writes

L

et me start by joining in welcoming you all to this special celebration of the Atayese Association to mark the 58th anniversary of the self-government of Western Nigeria in 1957.

In many ways, Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the twilight of the colonial period between 1952 and 1959 provided something of a template against which to evaluate what is happening in the country today. Both in his role as leader of a political party, that is the Action Group and the leader of government in the then Western Region of Nigeria, he exemplified what we expect of a political leader and a statesman.

Of course, even before assuming either of these roles, Chief Awolowo had made his position abundantly clear that the only path to Nigeria’s freedom and development is through the adoption and serious commitment to a federal system of government. Today, there are many who will argue that the seeming failure of Nigeria to make significant progress in its socio-economic development is the departure from this system of

government occasioned largely by the imposition of military rule on the nation for the greater part of the last five decades.

I have, therefore, divided this paper into six parts. First, I revisit the issue of Federalism and how critical it remains as a system of government for a country like Nigeria with such diverse ethnic groups and differing levels of socioeconomic development. Secondly, I evaluate the role of Chief Awolowo in ensuring the installation of a federal system of government in Nigeria and what this tells us about the nature of the struggle for this cause within a national polity like ours.

Third and fourthly, I examine the impact of the adoption of this system of government on both the nature of political leadership and governance of a region under him. Fifthly, I comment on the incompatibility of such a system with a military system of organization and the fact that the nation’s socio-economic development continues to be hampered because of a deliberate disregard of the various distortions and misapplication

that this incompatibility has inflicted on the polity. My sixth section then presents the various challenges that political leadership and governance that Nigeria continues to face in post-military Nigeria, especially the fact that neither the political leadership nor the informed segment of the populace seems to care about returning to the path of true federalism.

I conclude by offering some propositions as to the way forward for Nigeria, bearing in mind that much has changed in the country and the world at large since Chief Awolowo’s time but that there are still concrete lessons to be learnt from his legacy not only in the area of political leadership but also of effective governance.

Federalism as imperative to Nigeria’s development and greatness It took a number of meetings of the pre-independence London Conference for the proponents of a unitary system of government for Nigeria, exemplified by the advocacy of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and the National Council of Nigeria and the

Cameroons (NCNC), to accept that, given the ethnic diversity and different levels of socioeconomic development of its peoples, federalism was imperative for the unity and progress of Nigeria.

Federalism, however, must not been seen as simply a matter of dividing a country into subnational entities or aggregating these entities into one national system.

Its significance depends first, on the relative size of the federating units and second, on the powers that inhere in those entities vis-a vis the central or federal authority.

The issue of relative size is important in a federation like Nigeria since, for equity, it is argued that no one unit should be so large as to be able to subvert the will of the other units combined. This was the initial Achilles heel of the Nigerian federation with the Northern Region being so much bigger than the two other two regions put together. This, was, of course, what the British liked and until the Northern Region was broken up into six states on the eve of the Civil War in 1967, the asymmetry of size was a factor in the collapse of the first Republic.

The issue of the powers that inhere in those sub-national entities vis-à-vis the central or federal authority, relates to whether we have a strong or weak federation. Theoretically, for a strong federation, the powers of the federal government are spelt out in an exclusive list whilst the sub-national entities have some concurrent powers to regulate their affairs, promote and enhance the development of all their naturegiven resources both above and below the soil, and foster the socio-economic development of their citizens as well as residual powers to deal with issues not specifically stated. The federal government is usually assigned such exclusive powers as those to determine foreign policy, make treaties, declare war and control imports and exports whilst the states have powers to ratify the constitution. Most governmental responsibilities are thus shared by state and federal governments with both levels of governments being involved in such policy areas as taxation, business regulations, environmental protection and civil rights. Experience, however, indicates that the balance of power between the federal government and the states is often a matter of political bargaining over time.

In Nigeria, for instance, one of the most defining features of the pre-military constitution was the flexibility that allowed the exploration, exploitation and development of mineral resources in the hands of both the Federal and the Regional Government. It was this flexibility and constitutional mutuality of interest that allowed the Federal Government to continue to exploit the colonial tin mines in Jos and the coal mines in Enugu and establish the first cement factory in Nkalagu, Eastern Region whilst the Western and Northern Regional governments could also go on to establish their own cement works in Ewekoro and Sokoto respectively. It was the under-

standing, up to the 1963 Constitution, that 50 per cent of royalties from such mineral exploitation belongs to the Region whilst 30 per cent goes to the distributable pool to even out development in the country and 20 per cent goes direct to the Federal Government.

The enormous royalty from petroleum exploration, coming during the unified command of a military regime when the country was virtually operating a unitary constitution, was to force the country to deviate from this equitable relationship and plunge the country into its first series of militant insurgency.

Awolowo’s Action Group and the Struggle for the Installation of a Federal System of Government Within the framework of a colonial government, a unitary administration was, of course, inevitable. To install and implement a federal system of government in such circumstances can be seen as the product of a well calculated step-by-step struggle by the Action Group Government under the leadership of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

Although the Richards’ Constitution of 1948 had regionalized the country and had resulted in the McPherson Constitution of 1951 which formally instituted a federal-type system of government in Nigeria and called for elections through electoral colleges to the regional Houses of Assembly, the intention was to see these Houses not much different from the former Legislative Council in Lagos which was no more than a talk shop, allowing Nigerians to ventilate their views on various policies provided by the Colonial government. As such, the Assembly Chamber was arranged like a debating platform with no distinction as to the government and opposition benches for the majority and minority parties respectively as in a proper parliamentary system of government. When the Western House of Assembly, was inaugurated in 1952, the Action Group, being the majority party, refused to participate in the inauguration unless the seating arrangement in the House was rearranged to give recognition to the existence of a government and an opposition party. This was the beginning of the real struggle for installing a truly federal system of government in the country but there was still a long way to go.

Chief Awolowo described the federal system proposed under the McPherson Constitution of 1951 as a very light one because it was unbearably restrictive and obstructive in operation with some of its provisions patently contradictory to the principles and norms of federalism. As such, it generated a constitutional crisis which led to a series of constitutional conferences in London and Lagos under the chairmanship of Oliver Lyttleton, the Secretary of States for the colonies starting in 1953. It was at these conferences that the struggle for a truly federal system of government were eventually fought and won. Indeed, it was at the 1953 Conference that it was decided that there should be power sharing between the central and the regional Turn to page .......

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 11

FEATURE

Federalism in Nigeria: Yorùbá Perspective Contd. from page ...... governments; that the regions should be truly autonomous from the central government in respect of subjects under the residual powers; that the official designation of LieutenantGovernor should be substituted for Governors in the regions whilst the Governor of Nigeria should be designated GovernorGeneral; that Lagos should be excised from the Western Region to become a Federal territory; and that selfgovernment should be granted

by Her Majesty to regions that desired it.

The London Conference was followed by a Lagos Conference to finish the unfinished business of the 1953 Conference and consider the report of Sir Louis Chick, the Fiscal Commissioner appointed at the London Conference. The Conference agreed in principle with his recommendations on the allocation of resources between the Federal and regional governments based largely on the derivation principle whereby half of the proceeds from export duties and revenues from mineral resources were to be retained by the regions. The Conference also regionalized both the public service and the judiciary and established a Federal Supreme Court to replace the West African Court ofAppeal.

All of these provisions and a number of others formed the c r u x o f t h e Ly t t l e t o n Constitution of 1954.

T h e s t r u g g l e , h o w e v e r, continued as there were still a number of unresolved issues.

Another conference in London in 1957 under the chairmanship of Mr. Allan Lennox Boyd, the Colonial Secretary finally conceded self-government and universal adult suffrage instead of the unified electoral system to the Western and Eastern region with Northern Nigeria claiming not to be ready for this until 1959. Still another Conference in 1958 and in 1960 finally laid the strong foundation for a federal system of government with the regions having their own regionalized judiciary and a confirmed derivation principle for revenue generation and sharing arrangement. The point to stress in all of these was the continuous struggle that necessitated this series of conferences towards the emergence of a truly based federal system of government in Nigeria.

Impact on Political Leadership The constitutional struggle for installing a federal system of government in Nigeria helped to highlight the nature and character of political leadership in the country especially as exemplified by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. The first and most important element in his leadership was the promotion of a clear vision of where the country should be heading. This vision was not one to be held just by the political leadership of the party alone but also to be shared with the Civil Service as well as by the supporters of the party at all levels of government.

l Prof. Akin Mabogunje

Ensuring that this vision is held also by the Civil Service was crucial for any government interested in making serious impact on the socio-economic conditions of the populace and will be discussed in a little more detail in a later section. As for the supporters of the party at the grassroot level, sensitization as to vision of the party is paramount. This requires a high degree of political mobilization whereby most intelligent members of the public not only understood but also appreciated the basis for the struggle and the frequent crises. Sensitization thus began with the widespread promotion of the party slogan of “Freedom for all, life more abundant”. It was deepened by frequent meetings in Ikenne of ward captains, local government leaders, legislators and others at which various issues germane to the understanding of the operations of a federal system of government were discussed. This was always with a view that the leadership at this highest level of the political organization would get back to their constituencies and similarly inform and sensitize the next level of leadership who in turn will enlighten and educate their followers on these issues and so on down the chain of leadership.

This system of mobilization and sensitization was further enhanced because of the strong emphasis on party discipline.

Being a member of the party especially at the level of winning an election to represent your people in the House of Assembly entailed not only accountability but also subscription to a set of ethical principles both formal and informal. This was clearly spelt out or tacitly understood particularly in respect of financial claims on government.

To this end, therefore, political parties in the House usually appoint a Chief Whip, sometimes with a Deputy, to ensure that all members comply with party directives especially in matters of attending the House or voting for particular legislation. The effectiveness of the role of the Whip in the Legislature is largely a function of the fact that in the British-type

Parliamentary system being operated at the time politicians can have careers that go beyond just being an assembly man. He can become an Under-Secretary, a Junior Minister or even a Minister all on the basis of his performance as a party man.

Discipline within the parliamentary party was thus a matter of carrot and stick, the motivation to toe the party line being also based on the possibility of advancement in rank and importance within the party.

It was thus relatively easy for the party to formulate a set of ethical principles and to expect party members to follow. The legislative process which often poses voting as members of the governing party as against those of the opposition gives vibrancy to the disciplinary capacity of the parties. It needs to be stressed that government within this federal set-up was still based on the British-type parliamentary system. This does not subscribe to a division of powers between the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary.

The Executive was also part of the Legislature and, at least in Britain, the House of Lords also acts as the final court of appeal.

C o n s eq u en t ly, th e P ri me Minister and his Ministers are members of the House of Commons and are subject to the oversight functions and enquiries by other members of the House. They bring their bills to the Commons to be passed into law although bills can also be generated from within the two Houses. The fact that passing a bill into law is a continuous process of testing how far a government enjoys the confidence of a majority of members in both Houses puts political parties constantly on their toes. Of course, it is not the passage of all the bills that call for a vote of confidence on the party in power. On special bills, the defeat of government sends signal of a failure to enforce needed discipline on members of the parliamentary party or to correctly assess the feelings of the public on the particular issue, hence the importance of the feedback element in the continuous mobilization and sensitization of party members

especially those in parliament.

Consequently, although there was nothing like a constituency budgetary vote for projects, parliamentarians were expected to spend time in their constituencies discussing forthcoming legislations with local party leaders and getting the feed-back from them as to the public acceptability or otherwise of various acts of government. In this way, the mobilization of all the communities in the region was assured. This, of course, did not mean that there was no opposition to the government at the local level but their members too were briefed about the basis of opposition to particular legislations of government. The type of indiscipline that was witnessed at the inauguration of the 8th National Assembly earlier this year would have been impossible in the parliamentary federal system operated in Chief Awolowo’s time.

Impact on Governance The impact of the federal system of government was also very much felt in the effectiveness of governance at the regional level. This was in the sense that the Federal Constitution gave the regional government powers especially over their resources. The evergreen legacy of Chief Obafemi Awolowo has been based on how he harnessed this residual power to dramatically enhance the welfare and well-being of the people of the region in such areas as education and healthcare and to systematically transform the socio-economic conditions under which they have to live. In order to appreciate the enormity of the powers of regional government in a truly federal system, I will limit consideration of its impact on three areas for which Awolowo’s regional government has remained the icon of what sub-national government can do within a truly federal constitution. The three areas are in education, mineral exploitation and agricultural development.

The Awolowo legacy in the area of free primary education is now almost like a legend. In

1951, when this idea was first mooted by Chief Ajasin at the Owo meeting of the Action Group, it sounded so impractical and impracticable. There were so many stumbling blocks in the way. How many children would be involved? Where are the schools? Where are the teachers, the teaching materials, the books, the paper, the pencils and so on.

And, more importantly, where would the financial resources to fully implement the idea come from? It is important to stress that at this point in time, the colonial government was little involved in providing primary education to its subjects. Except for the three or four secondary schools, primary schools and most of the secondary schools in the region were the creation of missionary bodies and community effort with the colonial government providing only what was called “grants-in-aid” to them. Thus, to the colonial administration and even to many citizens at the time, making free primary education a major plank in the manifesto of the Action Group sounded almost foolhardy. And yet, with orderly step-by-step, systematic execution and focused determination, the period 1952-55 saw the government recording successes in this area one after the other.

The 1952-53 Census had just been completed but it was not too clear what it says about how many children would have attained the age of 6 years by January 1955 when the scheme was expected to be launched.

This was a job for a demographer.

No such person was available in the country at the time. But through various enquiries, it was discovered that a Western Nigeria demographer was working for the United Nations at the time.

Successful effort was thus undertaken to attract him back to the country to help resolve this challenge of providing the requisite data on the number of expected pupils and their distribution within the region.

On the basis of these preliminary demographic estimates, the number of classrooms to be built and of teachers to be trained as well as the number of books, writing materials, uniforms and other paraphernalia of schooling had to be made available for the parents to purchase on the open market.

The issue of funding became the litmus test of the determination of government to achieve this major element of its electoral promise. It must be remembered that there was no petroleum or gas at this point in the nation’s history. All the government had to depend on was taxation and its ability to persuade the majority of the populace of the critical importance of this program for the development of the region and their children. Capitation tax was raised from sixpence to ten shillings and six pence for all adult males and in some local government areas adult females.

Part of the sensitization and mobilization was to explain to the citizens that the scheme was to be funded by all tax-paying adults, whether they had children of Turn to page .......

12 | PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017

FEATURE

Federalism in Nigeria: Yorùbá Perspective Contd. from page ...... school going age or not. Sales tax on salt and entertainment tax on any consumption in public places were introduced. It became necessary to press for the regionalization of Commodity Marketing Boards so that export tax could also be levied on cocoa and other agricultural exports from the Western Region. These and other creative fiscal strategies had to be employed to finance this revolutionary program of the government.

In spite of this, when the time came in August 1954 to register the children, Chief Awolowo noted in his Speech on the Supplementary Appropriation Bill at the House of Assembly on March 2, 1955 that, instead of the 170,000 originally anticipated on the basis of the 1952 Census figure, they now had to provide for over 400,000 children (Voice of Reason: Selected Speeches of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Fagbamigbe Publishers, Akure, Nigeria 1981, p.99). Undaunted, they had to call on the communities to assist with building additional classrooms with government providing corrugated iron sheets as roofing materials, appeal to all citizens who had had any teaching experience to come to the aid of government to make up the shortfall in the number of teachers and, as noted above, seek for a supplementary budget to cover the additional expenses.

For the region, the success of the scheme became a patriotic challenge to unprecedented dimension. It raised the primary school population from 430,000 in 1953 to over 1 million in 1959 and introduced a new culture of education as the birth-right of every child in the region.

In anticipation of the transition of students from these primary schools to secondary institution, communities were encouraged to start their own secondary schools. To deal with the excess that was bound to occur after taking account of those who would not go beyond the p r i m a r y, t h e g o v e r n m e n t introduced an intermediate institution which it called “secondary modern”. Again, according to Chief Awolowo (op. cit., p.127), the number of secondary schools rose from 46 in 1953 to 139 in 1959 whilst the number of the secondary modern schools went from 0 in 1953 to 363 by 1959, providing places for over 50 per cent of the primary school leavers. In short, by 1959, the number of secondary school population in the region had risen to 84,374 compared to only about 9,000 in 1954. All of these dramatic developments were possible not only because the Western Region was a federating unit within a truly federal constitution but also because it was in total control of all its resources — agricultural, mineral, financial and fiscal.

The control of its mineral resources was evident in the manner in which it developed its cement industry. Although the Colonial Government still retained exclusive control over minerals and mines, a control

still reflected in putting these two issues in the exclusive federal list up to the present constitution, the derivation fiscal principle of the initial federal constitutions of 1960 and 1963 conceded that any region where minerals were being exploited would be paid 50 per cent of the royalty received by the Federation on this account.

This provided the necessary incentive for regional governments to want to promote the development of the mineral resources within their territory.

Thus, in 1957, whilst the Federal Government developed a cement industry at Nkalagu in Eastern Nigeria and had plans for another for the Northern Region, it had no plans to develop same in the Western Region because the Nigerian Geological Survey indicated that there was no limestone deposits in that part of the country. The Western Regional Government, however, did not believe or accept this statement.

It hired its own consultants to investigate the situation.

Through consultations with colleagues in Benin Republic, it was discovered that a limestone bed located in that country was getting wider and thicker as it proceeded eastward into Nigeria. On the basis of this, the Western Regional Government initiated the development of its own cement industry at Ewekoro, which was commissioned in 1960, well ahead of the federally sponsored Northern Nigerian Cement industry.

From this limestone belt were to follow two other cement industries at Sagamu and the more recent development by Dangote at Ibeshe.

This situation was in sharp contrast to what happened when later the Western State under the governorship of Chief Bola Ige was to try to develop the Igbetti marbles.

The Federal Government had become more assertive of minerals and mining being on the Exclusive List as a result of the boom in petroleum exploitation that it insisted that all licenses to prospect for minerals now reside only at the federal level even though land matters remained under the control of state governments.

The confusion that arose as prospective developers try to negotiate between these two contending authorities has been partly responsible for the slow pace of solid mineral development in the country.

Even today, the Igbetti marble is still awaiting development in spite of all the talk about efforts to promote solid mineral development. The same can be said for the bitumen deposits in Ondo State and phosphate deposits in Ogun State, among many others whose development could dramatically transform the socio-economic circumstances of these states.

In respect of agricultural development, the Western Regional Government concentrated on organizing the farmers through promoting the cooperative movement amongst them. The movement, of course, covered other activities such as producer, marketing, consumer, thrift, credit and craft co-

L-R: Ooni of Ife, Oba Ogunwusi and Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi operatives but the cocoa farmers Such constant monitoring was into a centrally controlled marketing cooperative was its the basis for going out to the distributable pool that would be linchpin. Under the Action field periodically to confirm the used to even up development in Group Government, a major performance information to the all parts of the country. This effort was launched to organize presented to the political would have made some of the oilthe farmers into co-operatives leadership. From all this, it must producing states vastly richer especially to be able to train be obvious that a well-trained than the federal government them on how to produce their and committed Civil Service is a itself, a situation which would cocoa to Grade 1 standard. The sine qua non for a political have undermined the hierarchical Regional Ministry of Agricul- leadership that seeks to deliver discipline of the military ture and Natural Resources services of various kind to organization. In consequence, worked hard to mobilize most promote the welfare and well- instead of the derivation fiscal principle of the Federation in the farmers in the region into co- being of its citizens.

The Incompatibility with a Awolowo era, all royalties from operatives under such mineral exploitation as well as outstanding leadership as Chief Military System of Organization It must, however, be stressed other sources of revenue such as Obisesan and Chief Ayorinde s u c h t h a t b y 1 9 5 3 , t h e that this Awolowo legacy both in sales tax were now to be Movement could open its own p o l i t i c a l l e a d e r s h i p a n d deposited in what is now called a Co-operative Bank with an governance was spawned Federation Account from which initial capital of GBP 1 million. largely under the colonial some basis or formula for The Movement went on by 1957 regime. As soon as political distribution between the three to develop the Co-operative independence was attained in tiers of government would be put Buildings in Ibadan with its ten- October 1960, the struggle for worked out.

The result of this incompatistorey block of offices, an hegemonic control of the new Assembly Hall and a shop (op. Nigerian State saw the weakness bility of the unified military cit., p.126), all of which of the “flawed constitutional command and a truly federal constituted a novel and striking contraption” which the British system of government was to architectural landmark in Ibadan was bequeathing to the people, a make states no longer pro-active at that time and even up till contraption in which one region in seeking new sources of was large enough to bend the revenue to enable them initiate today. programs of importance to their All of these remarkable will of the Federation to itself.

As Harold Smith, an Oxford- c i t i z e n s b u t t o b e c o m e developments in governance would not have been possible trained but defiant British Civil increasingly dependent on the without the political leadership Servant who refused to play the Federation Account for their paying serious attention to the game at the time and suffered operations. For the Federal quality of its civil service. It is great personal deprivation for Government, the more states that on record that it was Chief this, noted in his publication exist or are created in the country, Awolowo who went to Lagos to Libertas Homepage, “The the more their dependent status persuade Chief Simeon Adebo British did not plan the military grew. This situation played into to come over to help build an coups of 1966. They simply the hands of military government The which could create states and efficient, effective and result- made it inevitable”. oriented Civil Service in the mismanagement of the first coup local governments by fiat. Thus, region. The importance of this of January 1966 led to a second the military government of crucial relationship between coup in July 1966 which General Yakubu Gowon in 1967 political leadership and the Civil virtually returned the country to created a 12-state Federation to S e r v i c e h a s b e e n w e l l the status quo ante even with the check the secessionist attempt of documented in many of the subsequent attempts to create the Eastern Region and move publications of Professor Ladipo more states which turned out to towards a more equitable Adamolekun. A major outcome be a necessary but not sufficient federation by breaking up the Northern Region. His effort gave of this relationship was the bases for a true federation.

More serious, however, was rise to a Federation with six states manner in which the Civil Service saw to the effective the negative impact of the in the former Northern Region implementation of the various imposition of the unified and six states in the Western, policies of the government of the command structure of the Eastern and Mid-West Regions in day. In this regard, I am military on a supposedly the south. This situation was soon reminded of the story told me by federally articulated governance upturned by the Generals late Chief A.A.K. Degun, one of system. The position got further Muritala Mohammed/Olusegun the product of the Adebo School, distorted with the remarkable Obasanjo regime which in 1976 that when he was the Secretary rise of the returns from increased the number of states to to the Military Government of petroleum resources gradually 19 and created 301 local Ogun State, he was already used accounting for over 70 per cent governments based on an to keeping a small note book in of the annual budget of the arbitrary criterion that no local which he recorded on a weekly federation. This development g o v e r n m e n t m u s t h a v e a basis the level of performance of greatly challenged the earlier population of fewer than 160,000 different Ministries in the fiscal arrangement whereby and more than 800,000 people. execution of various programs regional governments kept fifty T h e c o u n t r y w a s f u r t h e r or projects of the State percent of royalties from mineral fragmented under General Government as provided by development in their area whilst Ibrahim Babangida first in 1987 their Permanent Secretaries. the remaining 50 per cent went Turn to page .......

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 13

FEATURE

Federalism in Nigeria: Yorùbá Perspective Contd. from page ...... into 21 states and 459 local governments, and again in 1991 into 30 states and 569 local government, both times based on no criteria. Finally, under General Abacha, the country was in 1994 again sub-divided into 36 States and 774 local governments.

What was notable about this last sub-division of the country was that it made no pretense to being objective at all. It was at the whim and caprice of the military government and created great inequities in the overall governance system in the country. Perhaps the most obvious was what happened between Lagos and Kano State in this last process of creating new states and local governments. Up to that date, it was assumed that Lagos State and Kano State had roughly the same population and usually had the same number of local governments. This was initially 15 but was later increased to 20 for both states. However, General Abacha decided to carve out a new state out of Kano State which was named Jigawa State.

To this new state, it allocated 26 local governments whilst he, at the same time, increased the number of local governments in Kano State to 44, making the number of local governments in the erstwhile Kano State 70 whilst Lagos State was left with its 20 local governments.

This palpable inequity has made it very difficult to attempt any reform of the local government system especially as this might mean reducing the revenue accruing to those states which have been allocated more local governments than they are entitled to on the basis of their population. Indeed, General Olusegun Obasanjo, on his second coming as a civilian President, set up a Committee on Local Government Reform which was seen in certain quarters as an attempt to correct this inequity and was therefore opposed. He himself, however, for party political reason stood against the attempt of the Lagos State Government to try to force the hands of the Federal Government to correct these anomalies.

It is, of course, self evident that state and local governments are easy to create under military than democratic rule where terms and conditions for such creation are spelt out in the Constitution more difficult to fulfill. The motivation for the agitation for the creation of more states and local governments und er military rule was the increasing financial resources from the export of oil and gas and the urge of communities to get as much share of this national cake as possible. Today, as the prospect of continuing windfall from this source of revenue is dimming by the day, the country will, sooner or later, be forced to re-examine the sustainability of the present federal arrangement and be more disposed to consider drastic review for a more sustainable federal structure.

The operation of an apparently federal system of states and local governments based on monthly

l Main Gate of the University of Ibadan — First university in Yorùbá land and Nigeria

financial allocation from a federation account has done a lot to wean the population from their civic responsibility of paying personal income tax to provide resources for the services they crave for. By the same token, trade unions insist on workers being paid at the same rate across the country irrespective of the differing financial capacity of their State government. All of this disempowers them as citizens to be able to insist on good governance from their political leaders. With state and local government no longer dependent on tax resources they can mobilize from their citizens, the insistence on their accountability to their citizens thus seems very hollow. The citizens too, on their part, not having to pay tax, feel no strong compunction to demand effective and efficient service delivery from those elected or selected to govern them at both state and local government levels. It is thus no wonder that corruption became the order of the day at every level of government in the country. It was a case of don't bother me and I won't bother you.

More fundamentally especially at the local government level, the so-called Local Government Reform of 1976 further compounded the problem of accountability. By deciding to ignore the age-long system of local governance on the basis of settlements both urban and rural and choosing instead arbitrary figures of demographic number, the reform under-estimated the importance of social identity in human response to governance.

Small and medium-sized towns which had operated on the basis of the willingness of their citizens to tax or levy themselves to provide particular services were lumped together in a local government which had no capacity to motivate individuals for community recognition or provide sanction for infractions against the interest of the community. To make matters worse, services which were best provided at the level of local communities were hi-jacked by state governments following on the federal government which also hi-jacked state functions

with the coming of the oil boom.

This failure to appreciate the importance of the principle of subsidiarity in governance has now come to plague the country.

Everywhere there is evidence of the increasing inability of federal and state governments to effectively perform tasks they had inappropriately saddled themselves with such as waste management, local road maintenance, storm water drainage and so on. Different television channels on a daily basis present us numerous evidence of this failure of governance all over the country.

The other major program of the military government which runs counter to the federal and democratic governance system was their virtual nationalization of land. The Land Use Decree of 1978 which attempted to unify the administration of land throughout the country gave state governors almost absolute right to dispose of land within their state. This must be seen as one of the factor in the prevailing surge of poverty in the country.

The so-called reform in land administration instead of giving economic exchange value to the land of citizens especially in rural areas simply reduced the citizens to the status of tenants on their own land. Except for urban residents who can claim right to their land on the basis of conveyance document or family occupation, rural dwellers were provided no basis for their possessory right to their land. It was thus not possible for them to use their land as collateral for raising credit to improve on their economic status. Indeed, more often than not they found themselves dispossessed because the State governor had allocated their land to some companies or individual and they had to resort to threat of violence to secure compensation. Such virtual nationalization of land was certainly not in keeping with a democratic dispensation that guarantees rights of citizens to their property. Attempts to rectify the situation has been made very difficult because the Decree was embedded in the Constitution and could therefore not be amended in any form except initially through expunging it

from the Constitution.

Challenges of Political Leadership & Governance in post-Military Nigeria By the time of the return to democratic rule in 1999, so much had changed in the architecture of governance in Nigeria as to make the Awolowo years in government look like the golden and glorious years of development especially in what was formerly the Western Region of Nigeria. Specifically, the country had become awash with funds from one single source, namely petroleum exploration, that dwarfed into insignificance the financial resources available to all the governments of the Federation from all other sources. The three regional governments had become 36 States, the different local government system in the regions have been streamlined to 774 local governments. The Parliamentary System of government has been replaced by the Presidential System of government, a system which was being extended to the local government. The practice that allows public servants such as teachers and university lecturers to contest in politics and seek for leave of absence when elected into office has been replaced by one which required them to first resign from their position before they can contest for any elective position. Also, instead of elected political officers especially at the local government level being paid sitting allowance, they are now treated as if they are fulltime officers.

The effect of the surfeit of revenue from the oil boom of the 1970s was also to affect the relationships among within the three tiers of government. As the royalties from oil exploration accrued to a single account under the aegis of the Federal Government, that Government became more and more powerful whilst the creation of more and more states left state governments in an infinitely weaker position. Also for this reason, the principle of subsidiarity was jettisoned whereby a function was assigned to that level of an organization where it is likely to b e m o s t e ff e c t i v e l y a n d efficiently performed. Conse-

quently, the federal government took on many services which states were best placed, and indeed, used to perform whilst states, on their part, also took on functions which local governments were best placed and used to perform.

Two examples of this jettisoning of the principle of subsidiarity will suffice. The Federal Government decided to take over the maintenance of a number of roads which used to be State Government roads. More than this, it decided to set up a parallel organization known as Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA) to look after all these roads in the States.

Before then, Federal or Trunk A roads within States were usually maintained by the Ministry of Works in the States which send their bill for repayment to the Federal Government. With the setting up of FERMA, the maintenance and repair of these roads now depended on decisions and provision of resources from Abuja which often leads to delay and further deterioration in the condition of the roads. In frustration, states have been known to go ahead and repair damaged parts of these roads within their states but now have great difficulty in getting reimbursement for their effort from the Federal Government.

By the same token, States took over roads which used to be under the control of local governments.

The result is that everywhere in the country the situation of road maintenance is greatly deplorable since the authority which is in the best position to notice when a breakdown in the road begins is not enabled to immediately see to its repair. All of which prompted a foreign visitor to one of our major cities to wonder whether there is any government in our cities.

The same thing can be said for waste management. In other countries, this is the most local of local activities. Whilst local governments can effectively see to the collection of their solid wastes, the role of State and even Federal Government would be to provide and develop well sanitized landfill sites for the safe and hygienic disposal of all types of waste. Such centrally developed landfill sites could make special arrangement for treating medical, metallic and radio-active wastes. Instead, what we have are state-based waste management boards and a situation in which waste collection is reduced to an endof-the-month one-day affair. No wonder Nigerian cities are said to be some of the dirtiest in the world. We, ourselves, can see this especially the mounds of refuse that are left to adorn the median of most of our dual carriage ways. There is also hardly a single, well-developed land-fill site in the country and solid wastes are simply dumped in gulleys, river beds and wetlands within and around urban areas.

The changes that the military introduced into the governance of the country dramatically increased the cost of governance and made public service at all Turn to page .......

14 | PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017

FEATURE

Federalism in Nigeria: Yorùbá Perspective Contd. from page ...... levels of government a lot more lucrative than it has ever been.

Although it was assumed that the bonanza from oil will always continue, it was clear even in the 1980s that this was also subject to great uncertainty. Indeed, it is worth remarking that General Buhari in his first emergence as a Nigerian Head of State came at a time when the economic fortune of the country had taken a sharp nose dive because of the profligacy and corruption of the civilian administration of Alhaji Shagari. Although General Buhari’s tenure then was shortlived, the country had to go through many years of the Structural Adjustment Program which consigned many families into absolute poverty. And although the vagaries of a major dependence on a single source of national revenue has been patent for some time, the structural reforms that could reduce the cost of governance and make for a more economically stable and vibrant country are still hardly seriously contemplated although a lot of empty statements about diversifying the economy continued to be made.

Side by side with these developments at the level of government has gone the increasing alienation of citizens from their political leadership and from serious concern with democratic governance. The political relationships has become increasingly mercenary, volatile and unstable. Citizens are willing to sell their votes for a pittance. This is because they do not see how they can effectively influence the manner in which they are governed especially as governance at the local level where they should depend for the services that truly touch their lives has been disempowered and hardly relates to them.

Although they are expected to vote for candidates at this level, elections to the position are at the whims and caprices of State governors who can sack a local council anytime and replace them by a care-taker council of henchmen. It can thus be clearly appreciated that the loyalty of such councils will be to the State governors rather than the citizens who elected them.

Political leaders no longer present their followers with any vision of what they want for them in a way to catch their imagination and make them feel part of governance for selfactualization.

Citizens’ alienation thus constitutes one of the greatest challenges to political leadership and governance in present day Nigeria. The alienation is manifest in various ways. First, it has kept away from the political arena, especially at the local government level, a good number of patriotic citizens who cannot subscribe to a cynical approach to political leadership.

Such an approach expects political leaders to go with the tide of making all sorts of highminded promises at their election but, once in office, to resort to a prebendal avocation of enriching themselves through all forms of corrupt practices.

Secondly, the alienation shows

even among the elected officers by a certain feeling of helplessness in shaping the course of development in their area. The Presidential system of government assigns a lot of powers to the President and his unelected Ministers. The separation of powers on which this is based means that as an elected member you are not directly involved in promoting your party program.

Instead, you are given some resources to undertake your own constituency project to be able to claim some legitimacy among your constituents. Once elected, the President and his Ministers can fashion out their programs and there is not much the Party can do to make the President take its manifesto as the road map for his own program. Thus, elected members do not see themselves as agents for sensitizing and mobilizing the citizens behind government programs set out to implement and practicalize the vision of the party. Indeed, in the Presidential system of government the legislature could become more or less the opposition to the government, irrespective of the party affiliation of their members.

Thirdly, alienation also shows in the tenuous level of party discipline among elected members of our national and state assemblies. The disturbing exhibition of indiscipline by members of the governing APC party at the inauguration of the th 8 National Assembly indicate quite glaringly that at least some members are not in tune with the democratic order within their party. Their action casts a long shadow on the cohesiveness of the legislature and the effectiveness of its role in moving the governance of the country to a higher level.

Conclusion — The Way Forward Let me conclude then by posing the fundamental question of this lecture. This is as follows: How does the Awolowo legacy speak to our present challenges of political leadership and governance in Nigeria? To my mind, the answer to the question comprises five elements. These are: l the vision of political leadership, l the mission of translating the

vision to reality, counting the cost and planning to meet the challenges of that translation, l mobilizing the populace behind the vision, and l instituting a regime of discipline to sustain the vision.

All these five elements can be deduced from the narrative of explicating the Awolowo legacy.

The Action Group government which he led came to office with well prepared policy documents of its vision for different areas of governance. The party in government, working with the Civil Service, was seen as the major instrument for translating this vision to reality. But, for every sector especially the revolutionary one of free primary education serious attempts were made to count the cost and to devise various revenue-yielding strategies to meet the challenges of the novel program. All of this required that the masses of the population was mobilized behind the vision and the institution of a regime of creative struggle, of discipline and accountability at the personal, party and public levels made it easy to carry the day and leave us with the impression of a glorious age of remarkable achievements.

Yet, it will be unconscionable not to realize that both the external and the internal environments have changed since the period of the Action Group government under the leadership of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

The external environment, for instance, had seen the end of colonialism and promoted a new world order of globalization, with its preeminent capitalist mode of production, the increasingly transforming role of the information technology, the emergent dominance of private sector organizations in national economic development and the fostering of democratic dispensation in most countries.

The internal environment had seen the rule and misrule of military governments, the pseudo-creation of what appears to be a more equitable federal structure but under a debilitating unified framework of operation, the remarkable growth in the size of the population and the gross domestic product, the l

social undermining role of oil glut and the desultory engagement of the population in the struggle for good governance and higher productivity, all of which create new challenges for political leadership and governance in the country.

None of this, however, obviates the fact that with a clear and well-articulated vision of what our present political leadership wants the nation to become in the 21st century beyond just being at least the twentieth largest economy in the world we can begin to see a new path of development for the country. The present political arrangements of an overcentralizing federal government cannot, however, take us to the realization of this vision. The struggle must continue as in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s day to secure a more truly federal constitution which allows the states greater control over their resources and opportunities to compete with one another for the overall growth and development of the nation.

Central to such a struggle is the importance of ending the monthly trooping of States to Abuja like beggars to receive the hand-outs of what the Federal Government regards as their share of the Federation Account.

To strive towards a truly Federal Constitution, the least that can be done is to end the fiscal distortion of the military era and move to a position that the 1963 Constitution conceded that its sub-national units or regions are entitled to 50% of the proceeds of royalty in respect of any minerals including mineral oil and mining rents. Twenty percent is then credited to the Federal Government and the remaining 30 per cent to a distributable pool to be shared among the regions in some determined ratio to help even out development everywhere in the country. It will be interesting to calculate how much states would be worse off by this arrangement which gives them the freedom to develop their resources on their own steam that the present system which consigns them to the status of suppliants at the Federal Government's table.

The point to stress is that even in the United States from where we borrowed our Constitution, the present fiscal arrangement

l L-R: South-West Governors in Nigeria: Mr. Ayodele Fayose (Ekiti State), Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode

(Lagos State), Sen. Ibikunle Amosun (Ogun State), Barr. Rotimi Akeredolu (Ondo) State), Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola (Osun State) and Mr. Abiola Ajimobi (Oyo State) recently came up with a development agenda for the region.

would be something of an anathema to their federal spirit.

Indeed, it would seem to the American as the surest way to stifle development and kill the enterprising spirit of innovation and healthy fiscal competition among the States. The situation between the States of Texas and Nevada helps to drive this point home. These two states are almost polar opposites in terms of resource endowment. Texas has abundant petroleum resources, a variety of solid minerals as well as good agricultural land for crops and large-scale animal husbandry. Nevada is virtually desert. Yet, the situation was not resolved by Nevada insisting on sharing the returns from the resources of Texas by putting them all in a Federation Account.

Instead, the leaders of Nevada engaged themselves in intelligent planning on how to raise the resources needed for effective governance of their State. They came up with two ingenious and unusual propositions to raise the much needed revenue. One was to make gambling a major economic activity from which the state can derive ample taxation benefits; the other was to make divorce easy for citizens on the payment of a fee. I was visiting Nevada some time in 1999 and was amazed at the level of development based largely on these two sources of revenue mobilization.

More significantly, I learnt that the level of electricity production and consumption in Las Vegas and Reno, the two gambling cities in the State was by far higher than the total electricity generating capacity of Nigeria. All of this is to emphasize that the continued struggle for a true federation could also be seen as part of our struggle to enhance the rapid economic development of the country.

For Nigeria itself, it would be necessary to revisit the costly Presidential system of government with which we are presently saddled. The issue of ensuring that a Presidential candidate is voted for by the whole nation and not just one constituency in the country as in the Parliamentary system of government is incontestable. But many other countries such as France have adopted a system of government which combines both the Presidential and the Parliamentary systems in what is called a SemiPresidential system. This reduces the cost of governance, provides for a Prime Minister and Ministers chosen from among members of the legislature, enhances party discipline and ensures that the party in power properly projects and strives to actualize its vision for the growth and development of the country.

Our political leaders are best advised to re-examine this issue of the cost of governance in an era of reduced prospect of the bonanza from oil production into which we are moving.

The issue of mobilizing the population and making them feel truly involved in their own governance requires re-visiting our system of governance at the truly local level. No one can deny that the present system of local government fails to make the Turn to page .......

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 15

FEATURE

Federalism in Nigeria: YorĂšbĂĄ Perspective Contd. from page ...... populace feel they are truly participating in their own governance. A system which does not recognize the sharp difference in the needs of urban and rural communities and treats both with equal disinterest cannot mobilize or motivate the citizen to feel a sense of responsibility for their own welfare and well-being.

Urban centres, however, small, have needs different from those of rural areas. They need tarred roads, electricity, sanitary waste disposal facilities, water supply, storm water drainage and many other services for which they must pay to enjoy. It would be relatively easy to make them pay either tenement or property tax if they can see that there is a clear relationship between their payment and the effective delivery of these services and that

they have the ability to change those called upon to provide these services if they prove inefficient.

Maybe if because of the perceived advantage of gratuitous additional revenue, States in some parts of the country are not willing to accept any fundamental change to the present local government system, one can suggest that the present local governments be treated as and called counties whilst the small and medium-size towns within them be granted municipal status so that they can more effectively look after their own affairs. In the case of large cities which have been broken up into more than one local government, a metropolitan planning and transport authority be instituted to provide some overarching coordinating body for the orderly development of the whole urban area.

Election to councillorship could also then be open to all citizens including public but not civil servants and m e m b e r s h i p remunerated by sitting allowance to concern more funds for the capital development of their jurisdiction.

But more fundamental for effective political leadership is the need to cultivate and promote a high level of discipline and accountability at the individual and party level. It is such discipline that is transmitted to the larger public and gives the needed respect and legitimacy to political leadership. Discipline is not just a matter of adhering to a strict personal code of behavior. It relates also to how the leader is regarded in his interaction with the public. A leader who cannot be punctual at events cannot be regarded as discip-

lined or considered as one that accords great importance to his public.

And no party can acquire true legitimacy to leadership in the sight of the public if its members don't exhibit a high level of discipline in regard to the supremacy of the party in the execution of their governance responsibility.

A major plank in the legacy of Chief Obafemi Awolowo is his commitment to continuous constitutional struggle for ensuring that a truly federal arrangement was established in this country. That struggle is certainly not yet rested and one can expect our political leaders to devise various ways of working towards the desired outcome. I do not, for instance, see why State governments cannot take the leadership in promoting mining activities in their states.

Oyo State still has the

Igbetti marbles to exploit and Ondo State has its bitumen. Their State Universities can be funded to do the feasibility studies of the extent of these and other minerals resources.

Once these studies indicate their economic viability, the State could proceed to seek partners for their exploitation.

The issue of what percentage of royalties accrues to the State can then become a matter of negotiation with the Federal Government.

At any rate, such issues as well as others to fur ther deep en th e federal orientation of the country can become a matter for serious deliberations at the Governors’ Forum, leading hopefully to a major amendment to the Constitution.

I believe I have said enough to emphasize that, irrespective of the effluxion of time, the

legacy of Chief Obafemi Awolowo still resonates in our present circums-tance.

His struggle to see that a truly federal State is established in Nigeria was derailed by thirty years of military rule. The hope, therefore, is that our present crop of political leaders will show the same commit-ment and determination to the continuing strug-gle to lead us to a golden future through their vision, their d e t e r m i n e d e ff o r t t o actualize this vision, their prudent concern with costs of governance, and their strenuous effort to truly mobilize the citizens behind this vision, and, more importantly, their personal discipline and accountability to serve as icon to motivate us their followers. Only through such dedicated leadership towards a truly Federal Nigeria, can this nation hope to attain to its manifest destiny of leadership in Africa and the world at large. n

16 | PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017

MAGAZINE Many Indians may be unaware that Africans have long lived among them — their descendants, known as the Siddis, inhabit India's west coast and parts of its south. Their ancestors are believed to have been cavalrymen and slaves who came with Muslim invaders in the medieval era.

Some of them ascended to powerful military positions and even became provincial rulers in western India. The Siddis have retained elements of their musical and artistic heritage even as they have assimilated into Indian society. A smaller wave of Africans also came to India as slaves with the European colonizers, and some 60,000 people of African origin live in India today, scholars estimate.

In modern times, a natural affinity has existed among the once colonized lands of the global south. India took to international forums to champion Africa's liberation from imperialism and sought an end to apartheid in South Africa.

Mohandas K. Gandhi once said, “India's freedom will remain incomplete so long as Africa remains in bondage.” That moral solidarity underpinned India’s decision to extend diplomatic, financial, and material assistance to African nations from the time it formed its first independent government under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.

It was in South Africa that a young Gandhi developed satyagraha, the philosophy of nonviolent resistance that served as an important tool in India's fight against the British. That ideology deeply influenced the anti-colonial struggles of South Africa's Nelson Mandela, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, and Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, among others.

The intercontinental ties, strengthened during the Cold War, brought scholars from Africa: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has noted that many African heads of state, past and present, have received some form of education or training in India.

In 1971, the foundation of the prestigious Symbiosis International University was laid in the western city of Pune with the aim to accommodate international students — which it did with not a fraction of the violence that has become all too common. Today, the school enrolls 3,000 foreign students, primarily fromAfrica. “The tears of a foreign student was the turning point in my life,” says S.B. Mujumdar, the university's octogenarian founder. The plight of a homesick Mauritian with jaundice led to Mujumdar's zealous efforts to promote dialogue between the local and foreign students.

Even today, reports of assaults on Africans living there are rare, perhaps due to early, deliberate efforts to sensitize Indians.

Indian government agencies provide little useful data on the African student population currently in the country as a whole. But the Association of African Students in India estimates that some 25,000 Africans are currently studying in India, a substantial portion of them in Greater Noida. The area is one of the newest developments on the outskirts of the Indian capital, representing a slice of

Photo: Takudzwa Averlon Kapfunde (left), who goes by Averlon, and Kudzai Petra Phiri, who goes by Petra, were classmates back in Zimbabwe. Both from Harare, they influenced each other to study dentistry in Jaipur, where they have a busy academic schedule six days a week. Both women are Christian, and on Sundays they catch a bus to the city center from their campus and spend the day in church. Sometimes they are invited to a Christian Indian's home for lunch. When Averlon needed an operation, an Indian church family helped her through recovery at no cost. The church community is the only semblance of family life for them so far from home. But, living on campus, the women have experienced little of the kind of racism faced by those who live off grounds.

Out of India: A wave of brutal violence against visiting college students is forcing the country to examine its racism problem.

By Pamposh Raina, a New Delhi-based journalist

T

hick white curtains with a colorful zigzag pattern only partially block the scorching sun from the living room of Sandra Adaora Okoyeegbe’s rented apartment on the outskirts of New Delhi. An episode of BKChat LDN streaming on YouTube flashes on a modest flat-screen TV mounted on a wall. The 21-year-old African student calls the recently launched British web series a “chat show,” each episode featuring a group of mostly black, young participants who exchange their views on issues including the racism they contend with in the U.K. Okoyeegbe has faced it in India, too.

A Nigerian from the southern state of Anambra, she left her home to pursue an undergraduate degree in pharmacy at one of the private universities that have mushroomed in recent years in Greater Noida, a suburb about 25 miles south of New Delhi's center. “Indians have racism in them, even the educated ones,” she says, with a trace of sarcasm. “They think because of the color of our skin, we are lesser than them. We face racism here every day.”

In March, not far from her neighborhood, a roving mob beat up a number of African students in multiple attacks. Some of the violence was captured on a widely circulated video of Indian men storming into a local shopping mall, kicking and punching a black man, and thrashing him with metal trashcans and stools. The severely injured victim, a young Nigerian, survived, but Okoyeegbe and many other Africans in the area feared enough for their safety to remain indoors for several days, in some cases weeks. Even now, Okoyeegbe says, “I cry seeing that video.”

The rampage followed the death of an Indian teenager. A few days earlier, when the young man was reported missing, rumors buzzed that Nigerian men had kidnapped him, and lurid tales of cannibalism ensued — until he came back home in a dazed state. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died. Soon unsubstantiated reports surfaced that he'd overdosed on drugs provided by some Nigerian men living in the area. After the teenager's parents filed a complaint, the police detained the alleged culprits, but there wasn't sufficient evidence to hold them, and the men were released. The African link to the episode refused to die, and anger toward the community boiled over.

That tension is connected, in part, to a widespread belief about Nigerians in Indian society — that they all sell drugs or are a social menace. Respected Indian publications have indeed reported on Nigerians’ disproportionate involvement in drug trafficking in some Indian cities, and many Africans, irrespective of their nationalities, have been subjected to a presumption of criminality. And there is minimal social exchange between the Indian and African communities to help dispel these stereotypes.

The past few years have seen several clashes between the locals and an expatriate African population of about 40,000 by some estimates, many of them students. In 2013, a minister in the state government of Goa was criticized for referring to Nigerians as a “cancer.” The following year, a mob assaulted a group of young men from Gabon and Burkina Faso in New Delhi — an attack posted on YouTube. In January 2016, Indians and Africans alike were appalled again when a Tanzanian student was pulled out of a car, beaten, and partially stripped in the southern Indian city of Bangalore.

She was allegedly targeted by an irate mob after an intoxicated Sudanese student ran his car over a couple, killing the woman and injuring the man. The Tanzanian student didn't even know the Sudanese driver. She and her friends had only driven through the accident site and inquired about the earlier incident. The police confirmed that she was presumed to have been involved with the crime, simply because she was African. (Five men were arrested for their assault on her.) The recent violence in Greater Noida has only driven a deeper wedge betweenAfricans and their host country.

Whether there has been an actual escalation in attacks on Africans or simply more news coverage of such events is debatable. But the conflict suggests that street-level Indo-African relations are dangerously unmoored from diplomatic policy and the historic camaraderie that has long existed between India andAfrica.

“

Turn to page 10

Many Indians may be unaware that Africans have long lived among them — their descendants, known as the Siddis, inhabit India's west coast and parts of its south.

Their ancestors are believed to have been cavalrymen and slaves who came with Muslim invaders in the medieval era. Some of them ascended to powerful military positions and even became provincial rulers in western India. The Siddis have retained elements of their musical and artistic heritage even as they have assimilated into Indian society.

A smaller wave of Africans also came to India as slaves with the European colonizers, and some 60,000 people of African origin live in India today, scholars estimate.

”

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 17

MAGAZINE

Out of India: A wave of brutal violence Contd. from page 9 the new, aspirational India on the cusp of urbanization. Most of the original inhabitants are rural Indians; even those newly enriched by the real estate boom have had limited exposure to foreign cultures. They jostle against a young, upwardly mobile population, including African students of engineering, nursing, and finance, among other specializations.

Private universities have proliferated in India over the past decade. While catering to local demand, their promoters hard sell their instruction and facilities to international markets. “The world is here @ Sharda University,” promises a television ad for a privately funded school in Greater Noida. Many of these campuses are located in areas where rural insularity lingers. As foreigners, African students have become a source of revenue, often paying more in tuition than their Indian counterparts. Others are drawn by scholarships to Indian governmentfunded educational institutions — part of a diplomatic platform to promote regional trade and cooperation. Yet this show of amity has failed to bridge the cultural chasm.

“When there is a diplomatic connection between India and Africa, why is there no connection between the people?” TochukwuAlagba asks. On his campus in Greater Noida, the lanky, mild-mannered young man with closely cropped hair, a pencil-thin moustache, and a goatee narrates his experiences in India with a measure of amusement and disbelief. The 25-year-old Nigerian student came to India from the state of Ebonyi in 2013. Since arriving, he has been mocked, stared at, and called racial slurs like kalu, a Hindi word that translates to “blacky,” and habshi, a derogatory term for people of African origin, which has its roots inArabic.

Alagba attributes all of this to a deep cultural misunderstanding — the assumption that all African men are drug peddlers and all the women prostitutes.

“In Africa, women wear skirts. In India, women wear pants. Is wearing a skirt wrong?” he asks. “Does wearing a skirt make my sister a prostitute?” Then there are the dietary taboos. “Many Hindus don't eat meat. In Africa, eating meat is considered normal. But here if you eat meat, they portray that Africans eat human flesh,” Alagba says. “We are not cannibals,” he adds, alluding to a racist myth that, incredibly, persists among some Indians.

He has run through eight houses in the last four years. “I pay my bills and rent on time. I keep my house clean.” When he asked the owner of an apartment why he suddenly had to vacate, Alagba says the landlord told him that “tenants complained that their culture forbade them from living with blacks.”

African students and residents in India “have always been victims of gawking and staring,” says Siddharth Varadaraxxjan, a founding editor of the Wire news website in New Delhi.

“Landlords have always overcharged them. What is new, and especially disturbing, is, first, the level of police harassment, of which there is anecdotal evidence, on the pretext of combating drug peddling and prostitution and, second, the increasing tendency for some Indians to resort to violence.” Failures of civil society account for part of the problem, he believes. “Our public spaces have become more brittle, though I am not sure there is data to suggest India is more prone to mob violence,” he says.

A veteran newspaper editor and author, Varadarajan notes that the Indian government does not statistically track race-based crimes, even as they are increasingly being covered by the

“

In modern times, a natural affinity has existed among the once colonized lands of the global south. India took to international forums to champion Africa's liberation from imperialism and sought an end to apartheid in South Africa. Mohandas K. Gandhi once said, “India's freedom will remain incomplete so long as Africa remains in bondage.” That moral solidarity underpinned India's decision to extend diplomatic, financial, and material assistance to African nations from the time it formed its first independent government under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru. domestic and international press. He believes that the presence of African students stirs “the usual resentment that we see in host societies around the world to migrants and foreigners.”

Even on college grounds, that resentment is sometimes expressed in the basest terms.

Okoyeegbe, the Nigerian pharmacy student, was confronted by an Indian student in a common restroom on campus. “Monkey! Monkey!” shouted the Indian freshman, expressing horror at the very sight of an African. Not too long after that, the two bumped into each other in an elevator. The same words greeted Okoyeegbe, who reported the incident to the university's disciplinary committee. In a written apology, the Indian student stated that she was sorry for her behavior. Okoyeegbe says they've both put the incident behind them and are friends now. But still she often feels belittled off campus. One evening, she was mistaken for a prostitute while standing outside her residential complex. “I am not a sex slave. I am here for an education,” she says, with visible exasperation.

Other African students who arrived in India full of hope are subjected to curious stares bordering on suspicion.

JoselineUmurerwa, 22, arrived from the Rwandan capital of Kigali in 2016 to study physiotherapy in Greater Noida.

Outside her campus library, where she has been preparing for an upcoming exam, she carefully monitors the time on her black sports watch. Of the outright violence in the news, she believes that “the people behind it are illiterates who

”

don't know that there are people of different colors in the world.” She adds that “there are good and bad people in every country.”

T.K. Oommen, a prominent Indian sociologist, says light skin has always been associated with superiority and beauty in India. The caste system that has traditionally dictated social hierarchies in the Hindu-majority country has tried to establish that uppercaste people are lighter-skinned than the lower castes. Notably, varna, the archaic Sanskrit term for the Indian caste system, is synonymous with “shade” or “color.” It is no coincidence that India's “fairness cream” industry is estimated to be worth some $467 million and that Fair & Lovely is perhaps its oldest and most popular product. If racism is deeprooted among Indians, there is denial and defensiveness surrounding it — which isn't surprising given India's triumphant political narrative of darkerskinned people liberating themselves from fairer-skinned oppressors and founding the world's most populous democracy. Still, in northern parts of the country, “wheatish” skin color is considered more desirable than the darker tones predominant in the southern regions. Facial features are similarly rated: Populations from India's northeastern states, despite being lightskinned, are commonly referred to with slurs such as “chinky” because of their distinct features, akin to those of people from farther east. Africans, it seems, are not the spurs for Indian racism, but they certainly cannot avoid it. They have stepped into a long and complicated

history of prejudices that run deep and don't distinguish among nationalities or individuals. “What we are showing to Africans in India is very much an extension of what we show to our own people in India,” Oommen says.

Hartman de Souza, 67, is a writer and third-generation Kenyan of Indian origin.

In the 1960s, he returned with his family to his ancestral home in the western state of Goa. As far back as the 1980s, when racist incidents were less well covered in the Indian press, he was reporting on discrimination against Africans in India.

He recalls a young man from Sierra Leone telling him that he had the option to study in Europe but chose India because it was the land of Mahatma Gandhi. However, the student's experiences with the local population led him to remark on their cruelty: Some Indians asked him to scrub the dark color off his hands. Yet despite such insults, de Souza says, violence toward Africans of the kind seen today was virtually unheard of.

In recent years, intolerance and lawlessness have been on the upswing in India, with spasms of brutality erupting over dietary politics and other cultural flash points. The rise of the right wing globally — not just in India — has eroded restraint and civility and made minority populations vulnerable. In many countries, the idea of the nation-state is being reassessed, part of a growing backlash against globalization. In India, the fault lines of caste and religion are becoming more pronounced under a Hindu nationalist government that fosters a culture of intolerance. n

18 | PATHFINDER International, Sept., 2017

FAITH

Pastor ties U.S. political discord I to ‘theological malpractice’ n the 1960s the African American church was at the center of the civil rights struggle, but today, in the wake of the Charlottesville saga, black pastors do not appear to be as vocal and organized as they once were.

The Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, spoke about the role of the church in this time with Hamil R. Harris, an adjunct professor at Morgan State University and a former Washington Post staff writer.

Q: On Aug. 12, an apparent white supremacist in Charlottesville allegedly ran over counter-protesters who came out to stand up against neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups gathered for a unity rally against the removal of the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. What should be the faith community's response?

A: The faith community, particularly the Christian community, must see the events of Charlottesville as symptomatic of our failure. By and large, Christian faith in America is a sentimentalized expression of personal piety. Jesus has become a doorman who opens the portals of eternity.

The movement of Jesus was violently persecuted by Rome and religious leaders who served as chaplains to the empire. Today, many who claim Christian faith are fully aligned with the American empire and are fully supportive of the racialized violence and oppression that has funded and still funds this empire. They helped to elect this president who morally equates white supremacists [with] those whom they oppress. They are satisfied with vague notions of personal salvation while not giving a damn about the sociopolitical and economic hell which assails many around the world. Jesus preached that the reign of God is now, not tomorrow.

What has happened and what will happen is as much the result of theological malpractice as it is the result of political malpractice.

The faith community must be about the work of sociopolitical transformation in the here and now. We must be faithful to this vision as was Jesus.

In the 1960s the African American church was at the center of the civil rights struggle, but today, in the wake of the Charlottesville saga, black pastors do not appear to be as vocal and organized as they once were.

The Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, spoke about the role of the church in this time with Hamil R. Harris, an adjunct professor at Morgan State University and a former Washington Post staff writer.

Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington Q: When former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in the White House, there was an Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

Has there been any o u t re a ch f r o m th is president in terms of bringing diverse faith leaders together, and is that important?

A: I have not been contacted by President Tr u m p . B u t t h e s e programs at their worst can lull the church into a prophetic slumber. Often these are bones.

And a church busy chewing on bones discarded by the state will refuse to bark. And when we refuse to bark, the weakest among us become food for the predators that surround us.

Q: I interviewed a professor from Howard University who attends Metropolitan. She said that while she attends your church, she doesn't come there for politics but for faith. This professor's views reflect a growing attitude among millennials. How does the church recapture this generation?

A: Every justice is costly. But the history of

America and the world proves that injustice is costlier.

Churches and preachers who claim to be apolitical are usually firmly aligned with the politics of American empire. The African Methodist Episcopal Church in general and Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in particular are clear about our politics.

Ours are the politics of Jesus, and when this nation's politics are at odds with our politics, we speak and act boldly and without fear.

In his letter from the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King appealed to white religious leaders to join blacks and others to deal with racism, and yet, 11 a.m. on Sunday is still very segregated and evangelicals have been silent. Is there any talk of coming together?

This cannot be solved by another kum-by-yah annual prayer breakfast or King Day service.

This will only be solved when America and her churches are willing to confess to their ultimate loyalty to whiteness and to empire.

I cannot countenance another political leader

saying that what we are seeing is notAmerican.

What we see is fundamentally American. It is the America my ancestors knew. It is the America future generations will know

unlessAmerica is willing to atone for her sins, redistribute power, and pursue a peace that is not the absence of conflict but the presence of economic, racial, gender and political justice.

Q: You have been arrested for protesting President Trump's position on immigration and other things, but we are not generally seeing the thousands of protesters like we witnessed in the 1960s.

A: Too many persons have been lulled to sleep by the trinkets of middleclass life in America. Too many believe that they and their children will know safety and prosperity. A rising stock market doesn't ensure progress. People fighting for their freedom and the freedom of others makes progress a possibility.

This nation has never granted freedom to anyone. Freedom has had to be demanded and fought for. And the fight continues. We cannot and do not bequeath rest to our progeny. We bequeath awareness and the willingness and responsibility to fight for justice.

Q: Is there a plan to challenge the “alt-right” [a far-right white supremacist movement]?

Are some church leaders afraid to get involved?

A: Those who are afraid are confused. Clarity will build courage. We work on behalf of the God of the universe and the God of all people. Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church and all who know our Lord will continue to do what we have always done. We will worship. We will liberate.

We will serve. n

Letter to the Editor RE: “How Benjamin Franklin, a deist, became the founding father of a unique kind of American faith,” by Wayne Dawkins, Associate Professor at Morgan State University, writes from Suffolk, Virginia.

A c t u a l l y, t h e “unique faith” existed in America at least 150 years before the U.S. Constitution, and Franklin, who was a non credal child of God. When I serve as a delegate at annual Unitarian Universalist general assemblies, I look for the banner of a Massachusetts congregation that was established in 1636.

I’m lifelong UU, a Judeo Christian who exists in a Virginia fellowship with humanists,

agnostics and some atheists. We’re in a continuing search for truth and meaning a n d s h a r e a commitment to social justice.

Indeed Franklin, along with Unitarians John and John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson were men of The Enlightenment and believed science and reason did not have to oppose faith.

African-American Unitarians and Universalists include Edison genius Louis Latimer, National Urban League President W h i t n e y Yo u n g ,

“Eyes on the Prize” filmmaker Henry Hampton and National Association of Black Journalists co-founder Alex Poinsett.

Suffragette Mary E.W. Harper, who lived for a time in Baltimore, was claimed by two denominations, including Unitarians.

After nearly four centuries in America, there's hope that unaffiliated people of faith will find our noncredal movement in the 21st century.

PATHFINDER International, Sept., 2017 | 19

NEWS

South Sudan three year civil war, K no one seems winning AJO KEJI, South Sudan — Brig. Gen. Moses Lokujo stood in the ruins of Loopo, a strategic hilltop village in South Sudan’s lush southern Equatoria region. Less than two miles to the east, telephone poles poked over a green ridge, marking the outskirts of KajoKeji, the seat of the county of the same name, where rebels under Lokujo’s command stared down government forces across a deserted marketplace, one of dozens of front lines in a grinding, three-year civil war that no one was winning.

It was late April, about two weeks after the South Sudanese army had attacked Loopo from the southwest, blasting through two lines of rebel defenses and wreaking havoc through the village. When the government forces eventually retreated to their base along the Ugandan border, the rebels moved back in to find the place destroyed.

The homes were torched, the shops looted. A rocket-propelled grenade had cratered the wall of a primary school building, leaving behind sheaves of white ash that used to be books.

The army had attacked again, flanking the rebel positions around KajoKeji just days before I arrived, but L o k u j o ’s m e n h a d repulsed them under heavy fire. “This is my location,” said Lokujo, a tall, well-built ethnic Kuku armed with a quick laugh and a black 9 mm pistol strapped to his hip.

“The enemies will not come out and kill our civilians.”

The reality is that in KajoKeji, as in much of war-torn South Sudan, there aren’t many civilians left to protect.

Loopo was a ghost town except for Lokujo’s troops. The rest of KajoKejicounty, once home to perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, has emptied amid a civil war that has become one of the world's worst, with government and rebel soldiers murdering and raping civilians for their ethnicity or suspected political affiliations.

Since 2013, tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people have been killed across South Sudan, though no one is really counting. Untold more have died of starvation and disease.

Around a third of the population — estimated to be up to 12 million

before the war — have fled their homes. In the last year alone, 1 million South Sudanese have flooded into Uganda, including three-quarters of KajoKeji’s population, amid what the U.N. has described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing. It is the largest sudden exodus in Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

So Kajo Keji is now a land of soldiers. The army, largely consisting of a notorious ethnic Dinka militia called the M a t h i a n g A n y o o r, controls key border posts and towns along the road to the national capital of Juba, while the rebels roam the hilly countryside. In between are empty villages, burned huts, and silence.

Dense bush overtakes abandoned fields. For three days, I traveled across the county from west to east and didn't see another car. With a few exceptions, the only people I met were rebels.

Bush is for guerrillas,” said Victor Moses, a rebel who joined Lokujo in February. And the guerrillas, Moses said, aren’t going anywhere.

“We are ready to fight even for more than five years or 10 years or 20 years.”

Moses and the rest of Lokujo’s soldiers are part of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-In Opposition, the country’s main rebel force. The IO, as it is called, was born in 2013 when the national army, called the SPLA, split following a massacre of ethnic Nuer citizens in Juba by Dinka troops loyal to President SalvaKiir. In subsequent days, Nuer army units defected across the c o u n t r y ’s s w a m p y northeast and, along with Nuer youth militia, sought to avenge the deaths of their brethren in Juba. Banding

together under the leadership of former Vice President Riek Machar, himself a Nuer, they massacred Dinka civilians and others, plunging the country into a cycle of violence that continues today.

Machar remains at the helm of the IO, but he has been in South Africa since December 2016, after a brief unity government fell apart and he was chased into exile. Meanwhile, mechanized government troops have routed the Nuer rebel units in the northeast, where most of the fighting occurred from 2013 to 2016. As a result, the war has shifted south to the region that snakes along the porous borders with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, making Equatorian troops a dominant group within the IO. Victor Moses is one of those troops. Born in KajoKeji in the 1960s, he joined the SPLA in 1987, back when it was a rebel group fighting the Arab-dominated government of thenunited Sudan. That war ended in 2005, setting the stage for South Sudan's independence in 2011. Peace was good, he said, but the abuses by Kiir's government and his allies in the army became too great. So this year, he deserted his post in Juba, came home to Kajo Keji, and went back to war. “If the government reforms, then well and good. If it doesn't reform, then the government will reform through fire,” he said.

The first night I stayed with them, the rebels camped in a cluster of primary school buildings that once accommodated some 400 students. In one classroom, guns and combat boots lined the wall beneath a blackboard that still listed instructions for

some long-canceled social studies paper. The next day, during the visit to Loopo, I saw a ransacked classroom with the same instructions on the blackboard, suggesting that people fled simultaneously across the county. It was not a slow exodus but an immediate, sudden emptying. “It’s really painful,” said Scopas Peter, a local chief who stayed well behind the front lines. “If there is no education, that means you have lost the future of this place.”

In the mornings, the rebels brushed their teeth, drank tea, and gave each other haircuts.

Younger soldiers played with a pet monkey that had the honorary rank of lance corporal. When they patrolled in their pickups, piled in the back with weapons bristling, the rebels sang and teased. Near a displacement camp in the west of the county, where the few remaining civilians have taken refuge, the men whistled as they passed a group of young women walking toward the Ugandan border. The women giggled and waved back.

“Beyoncé,” one rebel whispered as the women disappeared out of sight, provoking much laughter from his colleagues. Another soldier, a tall ethnic Mundari with a pointed goatee, shook his head, declaring that he didn't want a South Sudanese wife. “My first wife is Arab. The next one must be Australian or American,” he said. “It is important to mix.”

Besides Mundaris, Lokujo's troops count ethnic Kuku, Kakwa, Bari, and a handful of Nuer soldiers who shifted south to fight in Equatoria. With the allegiance of fighters from around the country,

such diversity should be the IO's chief strength as they fight the Dinkadominated government.

But Machar has been unable to manage the mix. Non-Nuer soldiers have defected from Machar to join other rebel leaders not affiliated with the IO, accusing him of favoring his Nuer tribes people. In l a t e J u l y, w e s t o f KajoKeji, fighting broke out between Nuer and Equatorian rebels within the IO after one of Machar’s most powerful Equatorian generals defected and joined a rival insurgency. But Lokujo’s forces have remained under Machar, launching attacks on government positions even as Equatorian and Nuer rebels battle each other just hours away.

The diversity of the rebels in Kajo Keji mirrored their ragtag appearance. One officer wore a shining green police helmet, another a tiger-striped cowboy hat. Foot soldiers donned berets, baseball caps, floppy fisher's hats, faux fur bucket hats, and Elmer Fudd hunting caps. They wore camouflage army fatigues, blue police uniforms, jeans, T-shirts, wind breakers, and winter jackets. On their feet were rubber rain boots, worn-out sneakers, and flip-flops.

Some sported black leather combat boots, shined each morning by a soldier who doubled as L o k u j o ’s p e r s o n a l photographer.

Their armory was just as eclectic. They carried AK-47 and M16 assault rifles, PKM light machine guns, homemade shotguns, and Bulgarian rocketpropelled grenades. One soldier had a battered Czech submachine gun.

Another wielded a flare gun built by a company in Florida. A young

insurgent, looking barely 18, cradled an ancientlooking grenade with a wooden handle. Another packed a wooden bow with jagged, steel-tipped arrows in a fur-lined quiver.

Unlike the government, which has purchased weapons through Uganda, the rebels have no major arms supplier. Nearly all of their kit has been stolen from the government in battle, including Lokujo’s pistol, which the general slapped on a plastic table before each meal at the abandoned primary school.

“I took it from an NSS officer I killed,” Lokujo said of his side arm, referring to the National Security Service, a government paramilitary force. Sure enough, engraved on the gun’s side were the letters NSS, right above a stamp reading, “Made in Israel.”

At night, the rebels feasted on boiled pork, taken from abandoned farms. Goats and cows were off limits unless purchased because the rebels considered them the property of the people, but pigs were plentiful and destroyed crops, so local chiefs declared them fair game for the IO. With ample food, the men boasted that conditions were better in the bush than in the government barracks, where soldiers often sit for months without pay. “They tell us that we are thieves,” a radio operator nicknamed Lima Ta n g o s a i d o f t h e government forces. “And we tell them we are living better than them.”

Lima Tango had been a secondary school student in Uganda but dropped out this year after government soldiers razed his father's fields back home in South Sudan. Without money from the farm, he couldn't afford the school fees, so he joined the IO. Many others in Lokujo’s unit were also new to war. There were child soldiers who looked no older than 15 and criminals, too. One man had been locked up in Kajo Keji for having sex with 13-year-old girl but joined the rebels after they broke into the jail and released all the prisoners. There was one woman among the fighters, Jane, who had her own room in the school building. In the mornings, she brewed the tea before picking up her M16.

Samuel Lokujo, who is not related to the commander, was a taxi driver when the war broke out. In December 2015, he was taking passengers to Juba when gunmen ambushed his vehicle. He ran and hid in the forest.

When the gunshots stopped, he ventured back Turn to page 20

20 | PATHFINDER International, Sept., 2017

FEATURE

Boko Haram: the Fear, the Conspiracy Theories

By Idiat Hassan

S

ince January, there have been at least 83 suicide bombings by children — a figure four times higher than last year.

Of the four roads leading out of Maiduguri, the main city in the northeast, only the Maiduguri-DamaturuKano road is adjudged safe.

In rural areas, people are not able to venture more than four kilometers out of the main towns in each local government area because of insecurity.

I n M a i d u g u r i ’s Mosques, people now pray in relay. As one group prays, another keeps watch to guard against suicide bombers.

The death tolls are startling. In the last two months, high-profile Boko Haram raids have included: An attack on oil workers and soldiers prospecting in the Lake Chad Basin in which more than 50 reportedly died.

The shooting and hacking to death of 31 fishermen on two islands in the Lake Chad Basin.

In response to the rising tempo of attacks, acting President Yemi Osinbajo ordered the deployment of all his military chiefs to Maiduguri in July. It h a s n ’t s t o p p e d t h e violence.

The insecurity has undermined farming in the northeast, resulting in serious food shortages in pockets of the region.

Boko Haram has taken to seizing food and goods from communities in Damboa, Azir, Mungale, ForFor, Multe, Gumsiri – to mention just a few.

The military are also accused of threatening communities that do not vacate their villages and move to the poorly serviced internally displaced persons (IDP) camps.

Those that stay behind risk not only being plundered by Boko Haram, but also the confiscation of their goods and produce by the army, on the grounds that they are in league with the insurgents.

In the Lake Chad Basin in particular, Boko Haram is moving into the traditional fish and bell pepper trade. It not only helps finance their insurgency, but muddies the identification of who is a combatant.

Nowhere seems safe – even Maiduguri. In recent months there have been bomb blasts at the Dalori IDP camp, Maiduguri University, a general hospital, and a

The fear is palpable in northeast Nigeria as Boko Haram intensifies its war on civilians. The military’s regular claim that the jihadists are on the run is patently false, and provides no comfort to anyone. Instead, this is the reality: major coordinated gun attack on the city itself.

Know your enemy The military not only appears powerless, but lacks the operational intelligence to thwart the attacks. That lack of awareness — over both the nature of the threat and how to deal with it – led the army’s head of public relations, Brigadier General Sani Usman, to accuse parents of “donating” their children to Boko haram as suicide bombers.

The raid by the military on the UN’s headquarters in Maiduguri in August was another example of woeful intelligence. The army said it was conducting a cordon and search operation for high-value Boko Haram suspects, and did not know it was entering a UN building because there was no insignia.

But the incident does point to the level of distrust over the work of humanitarian agencies.

The word on the street in Maiduguri the morning of the raid was that the leader of one Boko Haram faction, Abubakar Shekau, was in UN House — along with a secret store of ammunition.

Conspiracy theories abound and aid workers are implicated. A common allegation is that they provide food, fuel, and drugs to Boko Haram under the guise of delivering humanitarian aid.

An additional gripe is that what aid is being delivered to the needy is not enough. The World Food Program suspen-

ded food handouts in Borno this week after IDPs in Gubio camp rioted, destroying five vehicles belonging to International Medical Corps. They were protesting, they said, that they had not received rations in two months.

And then there are the grievances over aid agencies not employing enough locals, and that foreign aid workers do not respect local norms and traditions in what is a conservative society.

It’s an unhappy relationship. The overriding perception here is that the surge in aid agencies to the northeast is not what is required – people want security first, and then they can take care of their own needs.

Guarding the Guards B u t a rg u a b l y t h e biggest problem is that the military are far from uniformly trusted to provide that security.

The most enduring conspiracy theory is that behind the eight-year war are conflict entrepreneurs in the military high command and the political class. They are accused of perpetuating the violence to feather their own nests, at the expense of the lives of Nigerian citizens.

Although there has been a series of major weapons purchases, from attack helicopters to an extremely expensive deal for ground-attack planes from the United States, it doesn't seem to have added to the fighting capability of the military.

The confusion over who’s who is also exemplified by the

tension between the army and the vigilante Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF). It is the CJTF that has been the military's eyes and ears, the first responders manning the roadblocks in towns and villages.

Armed with little more than traditional weapons, 680 of them have been killed so far in the conflict.

Ye t t h e m i l i t a r y distrusts them, believing that within their ranks are Boko Haram Fifth Columnists (which is probably true, along with criminals and other miscreants). But the CJTF see themselves as

community defenders.

They receive little or no remuneration for their work, and no insurance cover.

The atmosphere of sus picion over th e enemy within extends to the tension between IDPs and those who remained in their communities when Boko Haram arrived. As IDPs return to those areas adjudged safe, it's easy to label those that stayed behind as collaborators, brainwashed by the insurgents’ideology.

As the counterinsurgency campaign stumbles on, Boko

Haram clearly believe it now has the momentum, after being on the ropes last year – driven from all the towns they controlled.

The propaganda war certainly seems to be going their way.

Since the beginning of the year, Shekau has released 11 videos. The more low-key Boko Haram faction led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi (who publicly shuns indiscriminate attacks on civilians) has now stirred and published two videos in the space of a month. There was once talk of ceasefires and negotiations — that seems very distant right now. n

South Sudan three year civil war, no one seems winning Contd. from page 19 to find his passengers, two women and two men, dead with their belongings looted. The men who attacked Lokujo’s car wore plain clothes, but he believes they were government troops. So later that night, he waited outside a bar in KajoKeji where a group of Dinka soldiers were drinking. When one of them stumbled out, he shot him with a bow and arrow, took his AK-47, and fled to the bush to join the IO. He was still carrying the same rifle inApril.

“They have been shooting me with this one. Now I have this one,” he said, showing off the weapon in the morning sunlight as Jane brewed tea over a nearby campfire.

“They are a man. I am also now a man.”

The rebels took a

mystical view of their fight. The former taxi driver Lokujo wore charms around his neck with bits of supposedly magic tree bark meant to protect him from grenades. The rebels credit forest spirits for a key victory at a place called Jokat, where they blocked the govern-ment’s advance. According to their legend, a tree fell across the road, trapping an army convoy and allowing them to kill the army soldiers and capture two vehicles and many weapons. After the battle, they claimed, the tree righted itself. They believed history was on their side, too. “Definitely we are going to win,” Brig.

Gen. Lokujo said, pointing to a mountain that once served as a base for the Anyanya, a southern Sudanese rebel group that fought in the area in the 1960s. “We are following the footsteps of our forefathers.”

One person they didn't assign mystical qualities was Machar, who has portrayed himself as the rightful leader of South Sudan according to a Nuer prophecy. Though the rebels in KajoKeji recognized Machar as their leader, none venerated him p e r s o n a l l y, a n d t h e y dismissed the idea that the IO was Machar's personal force. They also scoffed at his sidelining in South Africa. “Even if he is no longer with us, still the war will go ahead,” Moses said.

“The movement is not belonging to him. The movement is a movement of the people, and people are the ones who fought.”

But the people are also the ones bearing the brunt of the war. Dozens of civilians have been killed in KajoKeji alone, mostly by government forces.

Read more on www.thepathfinder international.com

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 21

REPORT In 2012, the governor of Osun State, Ogbeni Rauf Adesoji Aregbesola set up a committee to affirm the position of Osun State in the restructuring agenda.

Its report has been established as the State Government’s position on Restructuring. The Governor, a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress, is also a member of the Party's Committee on Restructuring recently set up to address the issue.

Below is the kernel Osun Committee’s Report Governor of the State of Osun, Ogbeni Rauf AdesojiAregbesola

From State of Osun on Restructuring of Nigeria

“

The Military — There is need for a fundamental restructuring of the Military.

There should be a regional based army but with a central control just like in India. “ DEVOLUTION OF POWER—Constitution al recognition should be given to geo-political zones/regions. That the geo-political zones or regions should be the Federating units.That the g e o - p o l i t i c a l zones/regions should be created using such parameters as culture, land, nationality and political expediency.

More powers should be taken away from the center to the federating units. That only matters bordering on the collective interest of the generality of Nigerians like foreign affairs, d e f e n s e , c u r r e n c y, among others, should be left with the Federal Government. Amendment of the Constitution should include a clause for self-determination.

The National Assembly should be bi-camera but election to the House of Representatives should reflect extant Electoral Act incorporating Justice Uwais Panel reports in its entirety. Senators should be on part-time basis and receive sitting allowances only which should be determined by t h e R e v e n u e Mobilization and Fiscal C o m m i s s i o n (RAFMAC), while the salary and emoluments of members of the House of Representatives should not be higher than that of the most senior public servant in the employment of the Federal Government.

“That each region, when

constitutionally recognized, should be allowed to make and h a v e i t s o w n constitution. In view of the above, Chapter 1 of the 1999 constitution should be amended to make the constitution supreme in areas allocated to the Federal Government. However, if our proposal on devolution of power is accepted, then it will affect all other provisions of the 1999 Constitution which is essentially unitary in nature, orientation and philosophy to take care of the heterogeneous nature of Nigerian society. In the event of any inconsistency or conflict between the laws of the geo-political zones or regions and that of Federal Government, it should be resolved by the Supreme Court of Nigeria. The right of selfdetermination should be guaranteed by the Constitution. In place of Section 3 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which provides for the 36 states of the Federation, only the Geo-political Zone/Region should be listed which political zones/regions have been informally recognized by the people of Nigeria.

The only issue to resolve i s p o w e r a n d responsibility to be allotted to each zone.

Section 4 of the Constitution should be preserved with a caveat that Chapter V of the constitution which contains section 47 to 89 should reflect the position of the people of the state of Osun that the g e o - p o l i t i c a l zone/region should

nominate Senators to Senate of the Federal Government.

“SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT —A t r u e F e d e r a l administration based on parliamentary system of government should be entrenched rather than the existing presidential system because parliamentary system allows for collaboration and will greatly assist in reducing the cost of governance. Executive powers at the federal level should be exercised by a Presidium of six elected Presidents from each of the six regions for a single term of six years with each president heading the government for one year on a rotational basis while each of them will have m i n i s t e r i a l responsibilities on the federal matters for the term. With this arrangement, no region w i l l c l a i m marginalization. “ F I S C A L FEDERALISM — Vi e w s o n F i s c a l Federation are based on power devolution agenda. The general opinion is that each geopolitical zone should control its resources with certain percentage as may be determined by the zone to Federal Government. That all manners of taxes, including VAT, shall be the exclusive preserve of the geo-political zone/region except those dealing directly with matters relating to federal Government.

“NIGERIA POLICE — The issues agitating the minds of individual are whether the policing system in Nigeria should

be under the control of the Federal Government o r R e g i o n a l Government? The agitation for a State Police is borne out of the present ineffectiveness of the Federal Police to provide security and other malfeasance perpetrated by the police in their discharge of their constitutional duties.

HIND SIGHT: The establishment or the provision of a Federal Government is borne out of the fact that in the previous years during the Nigeria constitutional evolution, there existed then: (i) Local Government Police in the South and (ii) Native Authority in the North.

R O L E O F TRADITIONAL RULERS “In view of the fact that traditional institutions must be respected as the custodian of custom and culture of the people and because of the historical and cultural values bestowed on the traditional institutions which must at all time be protected, the call for constitutional role for traditional rulers is unnecessary and uncalled for. This is because the jurisdiction of each traditional ruler is restricted to his Local Government Area or a part thereof. However, Nigeria being a multi ethnic, multi-cultural country precludes it from having a unified traditional system. It is therefore, submitted that the Federal Constitution s h o u l d N O T accord/include any role for the traditional institution. At best, each Regional Assembly should, in pursuance of

its residual power, make such laws as it may deem fit to accord honor and specific responsibility to its traditional institutions.

RECOGNITION OF S I X G E O POLITICAL ZONES I N T H E CONSTITUTION “Nigeria is at present a strange federal arrangement of 36 federating units that are largely unviable. Power is over-concentrated in the center and radiates from there to the States, at the pleasure of the Federal Government.

Resources allocation formula tilts unjustifiably in favor of the center, breeding wastes, corruption, ineptitude and underdeveloped of the constituent states. The cause of true federalism would be well and truly served if we return to the pre-1966 evolutionary path. That is, a balanced federal structure which recognizes fully the legitimate claims of all these groups for selfdetermination, and where no single entity among the federating units will be strong or powerful enough to hold the others to ransom, but where each of the federating units is large enough both in terms of size and population as well as of resources, to be viable, self-reliant and dynamic. Arising from various different positions and strong argument canvassed for each position in the memoranda to juxtapose this positions with other views in materials available, we recommend that the new amendment to the

constitutions makes provisions to recognise the following zones as Constituents units of the Nigerian Federation.

“NORTH WEST ZONE—Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina, Jigawa, Kano and Kaduna States.NORTH C E N T R A L ZONE—Plateau, Nasarawa, Kwara, Kogi, Niger and Benue States. “ N O RT H E A S T ZONE—Yobe, Bornu, Adamawa, Gombe, Taraba and Bauchi States.SOUTH WEST ZONE—Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Ekiti and Lagos States.SOUTH EAST ZONE—Imo, Enugu, Anambra, Abia and Ebonyi States.SOUTH SOUTH ZONE—Cros Rivers, Rivers, AkwaIbom, Edo, Delta and Bayelsa States.

“We are of the strong conviction that the present 36 states cannot, properly speaking, be the constituent units of the Nigerian Union as they were not arrived at on the basis of any rational, cultural, linguistic, political or economic parameters but were largely products of whims, caprices and hegemonic designs of privileged past Heads of State or Presidents (as the case may be) who used their position to the advantage of their people. We therefore hold the position and recommend the adoption of regional or zonal structure.

These regional or zonal structures should be accorded constitutional recognition. Each Region/Zone should have its own constitution or be constitutionally empowered to enter into such agreements on administrative, economic and other activities, as may be approved by the regional legislatures.” n

22 | PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017

FEATURE Diagnosing the Nigerian malady options for the Southwest

“

By Segun Gbadegesin

My intention here is not to moan or brood over the failures of a quasi-unitary system. Rather my worry is about the state of the southwest as a cohesive group, a people with a history of achievement that was and is still the envy of others. Assume the worst, that the progressive government at the center, while willing, finds itself in a situation that it cannot deliver on political restructuring. What ought the southwest to do? And since “ought” logically implies “can”, what can the southwest do?

P

hysicians have been hard at work in the business of diagnosing the Nigerian malady. Thus far, three theories have been propounded: supernaturalistic, humanistic (leadership), and structural. In recent columns in The Nation, I have dissected these and rejected the first two.

The problem with the supernaturalistic theory in its two forms is that it assumes humans are not the architect of their fortune, thus giving them an excuse to fail. The second — humanistic — puts the blame on poor leadership, but it also fails to address the context in which leadership operates. I illustrated with the submission of Ojukwu who, while acknowledging the leadership qualities of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, identified him only as “the leader of his people.” The implication is grave. It led me to suggest that we don't have a leadership crisis, we have an identity crisis.

That means we need to attend to the structure of a federation that condemns us to alien-relationship in the same land.

If we acknowledge the obvious, that Nigerian contains within its territorial boundary many nationalities, the way to progress and development is to find a consensus around the structure that is adequate for a multi-national entity. As General Akinrinade observed recently, “while a proper political structure does not automatically amount to good leadership, it is clear that appropriate structure can facilitate the job of an average leader who believes in the rule of law.” Until that is achieved, the path of Nigeria to progress and development is marked with landmines of discontent and unhealthy rivalry. Meanwhile there are options for the southwest.

Options for the Southwest In the last dispensation, marginalization was the battle cry of an integral segment of a political tendency in the southwest. It reflected its perception of a center and its periphery, a core with a favored occupant and a margin with its forsaken elements. The tendency was unwavering in its complaint and, though too little and too late, the presidency was forced to respond in some form.

Evidence: The over-publicized reconstruction of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway which it still was not able to get off the ground until the present administration revived it with a demonstrated dedication.

However, as aggressive as it was, that political tendency was neither dominant

“

The object of the rallying cry for restructuring is to enable the components of the federation to develop efficiently and effectively. For this object to be realized in the southwest in lieu of restructuring, there is a more viable and perfectly constitutional and legal option than secession. It does not even require any out-of-the-box imagining. It only requires us to address ourselves to the questions: what worked for us in the past as a people? How is the present different from the past? In the light of the difference between the past and the present, what adjustments do we need to make to our past approach so that we can have a good outcome in the present.

”

The problem with the super-naturalistic theory in its two forms is that it assumes humans are not the architect of their fortune, thus giving them an excuse to fail. The second — humanistic — puts the blame on poor leadership, but it also fails to address the context in which leadership operates. I illustrated with the submission of Ojukwu who, while acknowledging the leadership qualities of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, identified him only as “the leader of his people.” The implication is grave.

It led me to suggest that we don’t have a leadership crisis, we have an identity crisis. nor self-serving. It was not dominant because there was a greater number in the zone that preferred confronting the administration on the vital question of restructuring to asking for crumbs from the federal table. As it turned out, because the former group was not selfserving, and because its complaint was altruistic rather than egoistic, there was a meeting of minds with the other political tendency.

The Southwest complaint about marginalization was less about the distribution of position among political elite and more about the overall development of its infrastructure and the possibility of regional advancement which had been hamstrung in the politics of the overbearing center.

The question for the Southwest has always revolved around the prospect of putting to work, for the advancement of the region in particular, but also the country in general, the mass of largely untapped human and material resources at its disposal. To the extent that it feels helpless in the centralized architecture of a quasi-unitary system that we run in the name of a federal polity, the complaint of marginalization as arrested development makes sense. Having the memory of what the region accomplished in the golden era of Nigerian federalism in the late fifties and early sixties cannot but be frustrating in the present circumstance of retarded growth and unfulfilled expectations. Without the unfortunate brutal interruption of its forward march in the 60s, there is little doubt about where the old West might be now. But here we are with generations of youths condemned to a present mired in confusion, celebrating ignorance and greed, and a hopeless future. It hurts.

Many of our compatriots who were forced into the trenches in the fight against military dictatorship in pursuit

of true democracy truly believed that the successful outcome of the struggle was capable of entrenching freedom and genuinely participatory democracy. In addition, however, they also genuinely believed that the struggle would correct the mistakes of the military regarding the fundamental issue of the structure of governance. But the midwives that delivered the fourth republic and its early pediatricians had also been the loudest cheer leaders for the ruinous policies and practices of the military era.

And in and out of office, they have not relented in their defense of the failed ideas and ideals.

The new administration, which was propelled into office by a coalition of forces that included some of the most strident advocates of political restructuring from the southwest, appears to still be finding its way.

Meanwhile, many of its loyal supporters are expressing the hope that it does the right thing in the matter that could make or mar the success of the progressive brand in four years. While it is still too early to be despondent, there must be a serious effort in the desired direction to calm worried nerves.

Of course, no one denies that there are too many irons in the political hearth and it takes wisdom and focused attention to get them all in shape. The inauguration of an Electoral Reform Committee is a case in point. Surely, elections are integral to an efficient and effective democracy, and the administration is right to prioritize the reform of the laws that govern our electoral practice.

But it is also important to recognize that, as important as elections are, the structure of governance within which elections occur is equally, if not more, important. If the structure is wobbly, elections will not successfully fix it. The demand for the revision of the structure of the polity in the last thirty years has

”

been so unrelenting, even in the face of several successes in the matter of electoral reform.

So much for crying over spilled milk.

My intention here is not to moan or brood over the failures of a quasi-unitary system. Rather my worry is about the state of the southwest as a cohesive group, a people with a history of achievement that was and is still the envy of others. Assume the worst, that the progressive government at the center, while willing, finds itself in a situation that it cannot deliver on political restructuring. What ought the southwest to do? And since “ought” logically implies “can”, what can the southwest do?

We are cognizant of the fact that, in view of the constitutional provisions under which we operate, the southwest cannot secede. There is no self-determination clause that can constitutionally or legally back such a drastic move, IPOB aspirations notwithstanding. A bloodless divorce must have to be the result of a consensual decision of all the parties. In any case, given the differing and sometimes contradictory tendencies within, it is unlikely that such a consensus is reachable, even within the southwest.

The lesson from the recent struggle for democracy is still too fresh to be forgotten.

But the drastic option of secession is just that.

The object of the rallying cry for restructuring is to enable the components of the federation to develop efficiently and effectively. For this object to be realized in the southwest in lieu of restructuring, there is a more viable and perfectly constitutional and legal option than secession. It does not even require any outof-the-box imagining. It only requires us to address ourselves to the questions: what worked for us in the past as a people? How is the present different from the past? In the light of the difference between the past and the present, what adjustments do we need to make to our past approach so that we can have a good outcome in the present.

To the first question there is a simple answer. We had a fortunate combination of selfless leadership with the skill sets for economic and social development, a people with the inculcated values of hard work and the urge to self-improvement, and a large expanse of land and territory that was a boost to the fundamental requirement of the economy of scale.

Consider this last factor for a minute.

From Okeho in the north to Ikeja in the south, from Ado-Odo in the west to Ado Ekiti in the east, the products of the land complemented one another. Production was enhanced by friendly governmental policies such that there was enough for domestic consumption and export. We saw the beginning of an agro-industrial complex with Lafia Canning Industry, Ado-Ekiti Textile Factory, and a host of others. There is a need, therefore, to understand what is different from the past in the present.

To be contd. in the next edition.

PATHFINDER International, Sept. 2017 | 23

FAITH

ADVERT SPACES Available

Call:

Will Rogers for rates on 1-708-268-5518 or e-mail: advertising@thepathfinderinternational.com

PATHFINDER International Lifting up a standard for the Global African Community

VOL. 1, NO. 4

www.thepathfinderinternational.com

FREE

SEPTEMBER 2017

Europe is trying to cut NEWS flow of African migrants

By Kevin Sieff and Isaac Stanley-Becker (Berlin)

N

AIROBI, Kenya — Just as the European Union appeared to stem the flood of Syrian refugees last year, it recognized that it had another, even more complicated problem on its hands: Migration from Africa was continuing to surge.

That realization prompted frantic European efforts to deal with another front in the migrant crisis, culminating in a meeting between the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Niger and Chad, along with a senior Libyan official - and a round of proposals that many migration experts consider to be flawed or incomplete.

Since the collapse of Moammar Gadhafi's regime in Libya, the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean has soared, as people have taken advantage of a vacuum of authority to set sail from the country's northern coast. A network of human smugglers who facilitate the traffic has expanded from the tip of North Africa down to countries such as Niger and Sudan.

Contacts for smugglers circulate on Facebook and WhatsApp in major cities across Africa. Since 2014, more than 400,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy.

“In many ways, the height of the Syrian migration exodus is behind us, but when you look at the youth bulge and demographic vitality of Africa, you say, 'Oh damn,’” said Demetrios Papademetriou, a senior fellow at the

Migration Policy Institute, a Wa s h i n g t o n - b a s e d r e s e a r c h organization.

Europe was able to reduce the flow of Syrian refugees by making a deal with Turkey, a major jumping-off point for many of those fleeing the war in the Middle East. The agreement allowed Greece to return migrants to Turkey,

while the Europeans increased financial support for Turkey's refugee population and provide greater visa liberalization for Turks. No such solution has emerged to handle the African influx. That has launched European nations on a complicated mission to curb the flow of migrants and refugees.

Much of that quest involves money.

Liberia trapped in pernicious cycle of reliance in which aid begets more aids

By Benoni Urey

V

isit Monrovia, the capital of my country Liberia, on a Thursday night and in one of its many lively bars you will witness both what is good and bad about the international development community. You'll find aid workers at the karaoke, blasting out the lyrics to "We Are the World" - and reminding the locals "We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving."

What they are giving - at that precise moment - is money toward the salaries of hundreds of Liberian bar staff: a good job to hold in a country where as much as 85 percent of the young population are unemployed. Indeed, despite the attention international agencies have lavished on Liberia since the end of our civil war in 2003, there's not much to show for the effort.

Of course, aid is appreciated. Over the past 14 years, donor generosity has promoted peace and confronted and defeated the Ebola epidemic. Yet there comes a point when charity can become a barrier to treating and respecting people and a nation as partners.

Whether Liberia has reached such a point is for others to decide. However, there are certain facts concerning

Liberia that are beyond dispute: Fourteen years after our civil war, meaningful economic development is still not within reach for most Liberians; Liberia still ranks amongst the 10 poorest countries in the world; even among those who are employed, 78 percent are considered to be in vulnerable employment (which means that they are own-account workers or contributing family workers); and 56 percent of Liberian females between the ages of 15 and 24 cannot read a sentence in English.

It is clear the current model isn't working. Donor support is supposed to be a transitional arrangement: enhancing resilience, generating

opportunities for trade and fostering the growth of a vibrant private sector to draw investment. This has not been Liberia's experience. Instead we have become trapped in a pernicious cycle of reliance in which aid begets more aid.

This means a rethink in the balance between aid and trade is overdue.

This must begin with the government looking beyond aid to deliver Liberia's future and taking the lead in setting the priorities and framework for delivering services such as health care and education.

This is not to argue that it should be the role of the Liberian government to directly deliver such services itself; rather that international nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental agencies have taken, in some cases, complete control of the traditional functions of the democratically-elected government to set policy and deliver services. Without sovereign, democratic control and accountability, Liberia is not in fact sovereign or democratic at all: Its people are not free to chart their own course.

Aid can never fulfill the full swath of a country's needs; it cannot be a substitute Read more on www.thepathfinderinternational.com

The E.U. is rolling out a $1.9 billion plan to "address the root causes of migration" what many see a quid pro quo for African nations to improve border security and accept deportees.

Mali, for example, was offered $150 million in a deal that would "enable the return from Europe of Malian migrants," according to an E.U. statement. But when the agreement became public in Bamako, the capital, there was a public uproar, prompting a motion of censure from parliament. The Malian government eventually pulled out of the deal in December.

"The Malian leadership miscalculated the outcry," Papademetriou said.

Like many African countries, Mali receives millions of dollars in remittances from workers abroad, a lifeline for many families.

During previous surges in migration, European leaders have discussed the need for a "Marshall Plan for Africa" - a development package so big that it would lead to jobs at home for would-be migrants, preventing them from leaving.

Such a project never happened. This time around, African leaders are skeptical of such ideas.

“The needs of the continent are enormous, and unfortunately 1 or 2 billion euros will not change the situation,” HisseinBrahimTaha, Chad’s foreign minister, said in an interview with Jeune Afrique, a French-language magazine, published this week.

Many cities along Africa's main migrant routes also have benefited financially from the flow of people to Europe. In countries such as Niger, the organizations theoretically responsible for policing migration have grown accustomed to accepting bribes from smugglers.

Read more on www.thepathfinderinternational.com

Printed and published by: Pathfinder Media LLC, P.O. Box 1256, Greenbelt, MD20768, USA. Tel: 240-838-4466. E-mail: advertising@ooduapathfinder.com Managing Director: Femi Odedeyi. Websites: www.thepathfinderinternational.com, www.ooduapathfinder.com