THE NATION THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 2013
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COMMENTS
S
ENATOR Chris Anyanwu, beautiful and charming is at all times an embodiment of grace. Brilliant, resourceful and imbued with supreme self-confidence, she is not the one to easily cave in to pressure or intimidation by men. Long before the latest assault by Owele Rochas Okorocha, she had dazzled and dazed powerful men in power who had attempted to pull her down. For instance, despite wielding nothing more than her pen, Abacha who just couldn’t stand her guts, roped her in to an attempted coup, slammed her with a life sentence. From her Gombe prison she became a recipient of many international awards including the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism, the CPJ International Press Freedom Award and the UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. And like a cat with nine lives, Anyanwu outlived Abacha to emerge a senator on the platform of PDP representing of Owerri Zone of Imo state. “I felt I could do more than observe and moan the things that were not going right ... I felt I could be more useful in helping find solutions to the problems”, she had said to justify her decision to join partisan politics. She decamped to APGA and was again elected senator in the April 2011 election. No less intimidating are the credentials of Okorocha, the governor of Imo State and Senator Anyanwu’s opponent in this epic ‘battle of convoys’. His Excellency is a former member of National Constitutional Conference, former chairman, Board of Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, former Special Adviser to President Obasanjo on Inter-Party Relations and former PDP chairman aspirant. Like Anyanwu, Okorocha is a tough fighter,
‘The opposition must also take note of the current culture of overpaid opposition legislators’ disingenuous deployment of parts of their disproportionate earnings that run into millions, to build schools, recreation centres, buy cars and motorcycles ostensibly to alleviate poverty of members of their constituencies’
I
N 2070, Nigeria will be the world’s leading economy, overtaking the United States and China. This projection is made possible by extrapolating from present trends and through a critical assessment of the country’s potentials and resources. Our nationalists had a vision of a great nation, with a commanding presence in world affairs. This is what has been termed the mega-vision and it will be realized about 60 years from now based on the following parameters – tourism, the arts, fashion, entertainment, mining, agriculture and sports. Tourism: By 2070, tourism will replace oil and gas as the country’s chief revenue earner. At high gear or focus will be the carnivals – Abuja carnival, Lagos carnival, Calabar Xmas carnival, CARNIRIV, etc; the festivals – OsunOsogbo, Igue, Ofala, etc; the game reserves – the Yankari National Park, the Gashaka/ Gumti Game Reserve etc; the waterfalls – Gurara, Ofejiji, Owu, Ijesha Erin etc; the palmfringed waterfronts and beaches; the splendid peaks of Somorika, Idanre, Olumo, etc; the Naija 7 Wonders including the Obudu Ranch Resort, Sukur Landscapes, Benin Moat, Kano Walls, etc; the UNESCO slave-routes, especially the Badagry and Calabar sites and the larger-than-life creative personalities such as Fela Anikulapo Kuti. We need only a policy of Re-Africanization to be the world’s next cultural and creative wonder. The Arts: Nigeria is custodian of sub-Saharan Africa’s artistic wealth, so stated British ethnographer Bernard Fagg. Even modern Nigeria has not been devoid of artistic vitality. Our poets are legion and the country has been described as a singing nest of poets. Our writers scripted Nigeria into history, so said poet Odia Ofeimun. Nigeria has black Africa’s only Noble Prize Winner in Literature, Wole Soyinka, whose forte is drama. Our visual artists are among the best in the continent and several art movements are in existence, such as uli, ona,etc. Our artists have painted or sculpted the Nigerian Paradise – the expressiveness of music and dance, the warm and vivid colours shown even in dress, the radi-
Imo’s battle of convoys who through hawking of groceries in Jos bought his first bus before he was 14. He also sold fairly used cars via Cotonou. Okorocha like Anyanwu also started as a PDP member. When he lost a bid to become PDP governorship candidate, he decamped to ANPP. He decamped back to PDP and was promptly made special assistant to President Obasanjo. He left PDP to form his Action Alliance (AA) from where he decamped back to PDP hoping to grab the plum job of PDP chairman. Fortune smiled on him when he decamped back to APGA in 2010, and fought a brutal battle, allegedly by storming the Imo State Secretariat of APGA with dozens of thugs, who beat up several top officers of the party who were trying to frustrate his efforts. The serial cross carpeting ended on a good note as he was declared winner of the 2011 Imo State governorship election. These then are the duo of PDP turned APGA warlords that fought the ferocious ‘battle of convoys’ in Azaraegbelu, Owerri North of Imo State last Wednesday. Senator Anyanwu, by her own account, had visited Okorocha earlier in the day ‘to felicitate with him on the up-coming wedding of his daughter,’ with a convoy of cars probably bought, fueled and driven by public officials at the expense of the tax payers. With the convoy she proceeded to Mbaise for a function. It was on her way back that her own convoy was confronted by Okorochas’s “intimidating convoy bearing down on her convoy with full compliments of security operatives, conventional and non-conventional”. Even after directing her convoy to veer off the road and stop for the governor’s convoy to pass, the governor’s security men stopped and blocked her convoy, dragged out the driver of her pilot vehicle and beat him to pulp, before dragging him to the bush with the aim of shooting him but for the shouting and wailing of our delec-
table senator. The senator also claimed she was miffed and ‘in utter shock’ to see that “Okorocha was watching the entire episode complacently and had even shouted orders to his men saying “disarm her security’.” Not exactly so, said Ebere Uzoukwa, the governor’s Special Assistant on Media. The governor, he claimed, narrowly escaped death when the senator’s convoy rammed into his convoy. Thereafter, the senator, in his words, ‘alighted from her vehicle, ‘went berserk by descending on the security men slapping both the governor’s Aide-de-Camp and Chief Detail’, and also ordered her Naval security personnel to open fire. The senator denied, saying the governor who she called a ‘psychopath and a threat to decent society,” has ‘pathological fixation on lying”. The governor hit back, through APGA chairman Okafor, who should ordinarily be an arbiter, at the senator describing her as having a “penchant for fighting in public”, and with “a history of impulsive violence and disrespect to elders”. This disgraceful acts and hilarious tales might have taken place in Imo, but it is symptomatic of the rule of warlords, cliques and gangs that go on in the name of political parties in our nation today. The absence of real political parties with vision, and programs aimed at improving the welfare of the governed, is responsible for the gross indiscipline, corruption, and abuse of office or what President Jonathan recently described as unacceptable attitudes of our political office holders. PDP that fraudulently ascribed to itself the title of the biggest political party in Africa, APGA and some of the opposition parties are nothing but instruments of warlords to settle political scores and for sharing spoils of war after periodically rigged elections. We have since learnt that the seed of Boko
Nigeria in AD 2070 By Isi Omoifo ant light and dynamism of forms, the curvaceous women as well as the abundance of flora and fauna. The African century will witness the explosion of creative expression that will dazzle the world. Fashion: African fabrics are among the most colourful and vibrant in the world. Lagos is the fashion capital of Africa and the current rave are Ankara-based designs. It is available as gowns, skirts, tops, camisoles, trousers, hand-bags, slippers, shoes, belts, throw pillow-cases, curtains, etc. With appropriate government support, Ankara and other local fabrics can take over as the preferred choice of Nigerians, when they have been persuaded to strip off their slavish western suits and other wears. Our fashion houses can take advantage of opportunities in the rest of the continent, among diasporan blacks and in the global community. The global market has already been prepared by some western fashion houses which specialize in ethnic wears. A rich sea-change in dress aesthetics is in the making. We shall be the generation that makes the cultural turnaround to an African modernity. Entertainment: In the 18th century, Olaudah Equiano from Igboland told his English audience – ‘we are almost a nation of poets, musicians and dancers’. By 2070, Nigeria will be an exporter of rhythm, particularly music and dance, to the rest of the world. The hip hop phenomenon will be sidelined, to be displaced by more rootsy and folksy music. The Rhythm and Blues (R &B) category has come to stay and it will be incorporated in the musical inventory. The opera will be domesticated as pioneered by Hubert Ogunde, Nigeria’s Nollywood will overtake America’s Hollywood as the world’s largest centre for film production. Due to the nature of our film
delivery, movie stars will inevitably become music stars with a wide fan base as in India and will be reference points in fashion, taste and manners. Mining: The Nigerian soil is inlaid with precious and priceless metals and minerals. The Niger-Delta abounds with oil and gas, though off-shore production has become important and prospects exist in parts of the North. Bitumen is buried in Ondo State, iron ore in Kogi and gold deposits in Zamfara. Edo North is crammed with minerals such as limestone, gypsum, granite, mica, calcite, etc. Some other states especially in the North, are sitting atop fantastic mineral wealth. The crippling centralization in the country has made it impossible for states, in partnership with the private sector, to proactively exploit and benefit from their mineral resources. Agriculture: By 2050, Nigeria will become a major food exporter, with enough surpluses to cater for the needs of drought-stricken African countries. Nigeria has vast arable lands and diverse ecological zones propitious for the production of a variety of food crops. Agribusiness, Agro-industry and Agro-forestry will be properly integrated into the production systems. The country will recover its former capacity in the production and export of cash crops such as cocoa, cashew, palm produce, rubber, groundnuts, kolanuts, etc. Farm mechanization will concentrate on the local manufacture of tractors, threshers, harvesters, etc. Rain-fed agriculture will largely give way to irrigation. Crop residues and indigenous grasses will be used for production of biofuel such as ethanol. The rural poor will become the new brides in the programmatic utilization of the ecological wealth of the rural areas for transformational development. Sports: Nigeria will be among the world’s leading sporting nations in 2070. It will win the World Cup before 2040, as much local
Haram that has rendered the north eastern Borno and Yobe states ungovernable for over two years was planted by cliques and gangs that employed its services for balance of terror to win election in 1999 and 2003. It has also emerged that South-south disgraced ex-governors like Alamieseigha and James Ibori, behaved like warlords sponsoring the various militant groups for balance of terror while sharing their people’s common patrimony. It has also been established that PDP government at the centre equally armed its own preferred militant group. In the South-east, the fact that kidnapping for ransom has become an industry, in an area controlled by a small regional party with capacity to mobilize more effectively clearly shows that APGA is just an instrument in the hands of cliques of former PDP members. Political parties, even when they end in the dictatorship of a small oligarchy, endure only when they treat discipline as a badge of honour among its members. Sadly we cannot say the same of many of our current political parties. PDP is an unruly clique that treat every scandal from the fuel subsidy scam, pensions scheme fraud, the privatization and commercialization scam, as ‘family affairs’. The governors like our overpaid legislators are wasting public resources because that is the only political culture they inherited from the self-serving military that suddenly cut off our age long political culture that predates the emergence of modern political party in 1926 which emphasized our various cultures, traditions, ‘passion and collective reasoning,’ and group priorities . Anyanwu and Okorocha, like our over paid lawmakers and undisciplined governors who behave like warlords are part of thousands of ‘newbreeds’ that breed only corruption unleashed on our nation after the so-called training by our equally fraudulent state house political scientists. We have to start afresh. And this is the challenge before the opposition as they haggle over their differences in order to create a strong opposition party that can confront PDP, an instrument used by gangs to protect interest of their gang members. The opposition must also take note of the current culture of overpaid opposition legislators’ disingenuous deployment of parts of their disproportionate earnings that run into millions, to build schools, recreation centres, buy cars and motorcycles ostensibly to alleviate poverty of members of their constituencies. It is not only self-serving, but also a fraudulent way of using illegal earnings to embark on gubernatorial race instead of focusing on law making.
enthusiasm and local talents are generated in the game of football. Football will be run as a business and football academics will groom stars. Sprints, table tennis, volleyball and basketball will also be priority areas. There will be planned sports development from the grass-roots and coaches from far and wide will be engaged. Apart from crippling centralization, the cost of governance, cost of doing business and operation of fiscal federalism are challenges. Anyone advocating the creation of more states has an intent to collapse the republic. We should indeed insert a constitutional provision for state contraction rather that state creation. The present bicameral legislature at the centre is unnecessary burden on a struggling nation. Nigeria is ranked 131 out of 185 countries in the global competitiveness index, blameable on corruption and infrastructural deficits. It was a constitutional oversight to have adopted America’s structural arrangements, without the complementary fiscal regime, under which each tier has its taxable areas in line with its responsibilities. Currently our states and local governments are sinking holes into which the national wealth disappears through personnel costs and corruption. Without a new constitution, Nigeria cannot meet its challenges. • Omoifo is a poet and essayist writes from Benin City.
‘The Niger-Delta abounds with oil and gas, though off-shore production has become important and prospects exist in parts of the North. Bitumen is buried in Ondo State, iron ore in Kogi and gold deposits in Zamfara’