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TODAY IN THE NATION
‘What the PDP could not achieve in Edo and Imo because of the stiff resistance of the people, it thought it could procure through the tribunal’ MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2012 TRUTH IN DEFENCE OF FREEDOM
EMEKA OMEIHE
VOL 7 NO 2,216
C OMMENT & D EB ATE EBA
W
HY have Nigerians continued to complain over our physical paralysis at the just ended Olympics? It is because, as optimists, we always expect something out of nothing. Expecting something out of nothing has been the Nigerian way in a generation. We like to reap but despise the sower. In politics, we rig. In business, we defraud and laze our way to profits. In culture, we endorse and extol the winners of rigging and commercial fraud as models in praise singing parties and worshipful obeisance. If we get something out of nothing in both, it is natural for the Nigerian to have expected something – a medal - in Britain in the past few weeks. We wanted to foolishly ape the words of the scriptures where Christians should conjure things that are not as though they are. We want to distort the line of the absurdist or existentialist philosophers like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and their German counterparts like Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger who called for a leap of faith. It is a leap of faith that makes an unpopular politician win an election in a flush of applause and throws a party afterwards. That was the reason we expected something out of the Olympics. Some Nigerian-born or parented athletes abounded in blue chip countries like Britain, Canada and the United States and did not want to represent their countries. The point is the Nigerians were shunned by their country because Nigeria did not have the atmosphere or the zeal for them. So many came from outside in the lead-up to the games on their own resources, but a good number of them were treated shabbily. They wanted to be good ambassadors of their countries. They wanted to do something in order to get something. These are more redeeming specimens of the Nigerian soul. They wanted to earn. They were different from the country they met. They saw a country without a stadium of any good quality by world’s standards except, of course, the one in Calabar. What happened to the Stadium in Abuja, and our dear National Stadium in Surulere, Lagos? They are now relics. Relics, by classical definition, should refer to ancient edifices. Ours is barely a generation old. Just as Nigerians die young, so do our dreams. But our monuments are born prematurely. So why are we surprised to see a name like Oluseyi or Osagie in the colours of Canada and Great Britain? It is not that we cannot win gold, with our big population. We have grandiloquent dreams as individuals but no dreams as a people. As Abraham Lincoln noted, the greatness of a country consists not in the number but the quality of its citizens. Do we have what it takes to rival Michael Phelps, the fastest human fish on the planet? Of course. Can we breed Usain Bolts? Why
SAM OMATSEYE
IN TOUCH
intouchsam@yahoo.com 08054501081(sms only) •Winner, Informed Commentary 2009& 2010 (D.A.M.E)
The ambassadors
•London Olympics logo not! My father, Moses, told me stories of his days in the creeks as a lad, and how he and his friends played sport of out-swimming fishes and even staying under water for hours on end. In the heydays of the national sports festival, we saw the potential of Nigerians in swimming. We had talent hunts for athletes on every level. What we have today is a feast of corruption. Who says we cannot have Nigerians excel in shooting or tennis, both the table and lawn varieties? Rather than shoot for glory, we make carrion flesh of fellow nationals in robberies and ethno-religious rampages. Britons took advantage of the Olympics to retail the best of their nation. The opening ceremony was a paean of their history, its march from medieval rut to the majesty of
RIPPLES DEMOCRACY NOT ON COURSE IN NIGERIA– Afenifere chieftain
it’s on SABBATICAL
HERE are two ways Nigeria can react to its failure to win medals in the 2012 Olympic Games: either it shrugs it off fatalistically as one of those necessary but inconvenient setbacks in life, of course after bellyaching for a while, or it lashes out in its typical fashion looking for scapegoats to blame for the woeful performance of its athletes. If precedence is anything to go by, the country is unlikely to conduct a proper postmortem of what went wrong and how to fix it. To do what is necessary to fix the problem and design a realistic and permanent solution would require the kind of discipline economically developed societies often bring to their domestic and international affairs. If we had a modicum of the sort of discipline that produces positive change, we would have applied it to previous Olympics and avoid today’s debacle. Already, many Nigerians are attempting to correlate the $14 million spent on preparing our athletes for the games with the woeful results they got. They suggest it was good money down the drain. But in talking about the ‘huge’ fund, we must not forget that it was released a few weeks to the
T
the industrial revolution as well as the pomp of royalty. We saw a country celebrate its history as the pageant of world history, and it succeeded. The London Times, which writes some of the best editorials in the English language, serenaded the country’s display as “a festival of Britishness.” The Chinese, affirming their ascent in the world, basked in a sweep of medals. The Americans showed their hubris as still the nation to beat. They dominated the medal haul. If anything, the blue-chip countries have shown us that there is no short-cut to glory. We could not rig our way to success as we do in elections, court verdicts and business deals. There is no fakery in the Olympics. It is all about rules, and if you cannot abide, you lose. No godfather here, no moneybag heaven, but the consummation of talent. The Olympics celebrated the best of the world, and our country was absent, a tragic no-show in the carnival of honours. Our ambassadors represented us well from the rear where we belonged. Rich countries like China and the U.S. worked hard with vision and industry before they excelled. It is the same spirit they invested in the Olympics. Nigerians can learn from that. President Goodluck Jonathan can learn a lesson or two about being an ambassador. It is not about travelling to Trinidad and Tobago when his country founders in a show of electoral strength in the African Union, or flying to Brazil for an earth summit while Boko Haram burns the Nigerian earth. It is not about going to retail our sovereign funds to foreign investors in Europe while our own investors are famished for funds. It is about telling the best of our efforts and regenerating our pride as a people. If he knew that, the President could have shown a sense of concern about the games. Sport today is the modern translation of war among nations. If he had a good vision, he should have done something about our pre-
paredness. All he did was dole out money. We have not heard Jonathan intervene in the sports in a fruitful way in the past year. He could have done what Britain did: hunt all over the world for Nigerian talent and furnish them to don our uniforms. We may not have hunted for non-nationals as England and other Western countries did. We would have had enough Nigerians on the team as a start in generating interest in Nigerianness. He should have quickly changed the face of our stadiums all over the country, especially Lagos and Abuja. He should also have set in motion, as others do, the necessary talent hunt for the next Olympics. Nothing of the sort is going on. The President is adept at the sort of dominance his party has, which is through rigging. When Jonathan visits other countries, he is like the Nigerian athletes at the Olympics. They go there to give a good impression of our country. They end up having a good impression of others. It is like the novel, The Ambassadors, by Henry James about an American who travels to England with superior airs but the English high society overawes him. Who, then, is the superior ambassador? That is the story of our Olympics. The cultural evangelist becomes converted. We become, like a character in The Ambassador describes himself: “the perfectly equipped failure.”
Cursing the darkness
P
OWER is one of the drawbacks, or shall we say the absence of it of our lives. But for labour to exploit it in the guise of activism is not only perilous for us as a country, it is a new look to opportunism. The NLC has decided to go on strike if the PHCN does not remove security forces already guarding the PHCN stations around the country. So, what good can come out of such show of shame? It is also stated that the PHCN junior workers are fighting over pensions. That is a more reasonable ground to go on strike as many retirees in this country have been left in the lurch. But even at that, I understand that they claim 25 percent of their salaries have been deducted over the years. But it turned out that there was an agreement in 2004 to deduct 15 percent, which the PHCN, in bad faith, did not do. So the PHCN relied on IGR for the few who retired until the snag came when mass retirements happened. Now, labour wants 25 percent of the money they never paid for retirement or we shall have darkness that we already are used to in our misery. I am sure an agreement can be reached on workers’ money. But to threaten strike because of those guarding the stations is like asking for a curse. What this means is that labour wants to curse the darkness rather than light candles. All we want is regular electricity, and labour is not helping matters.
HARDBALL
•Hardball is not the opinion of the columnist featured above
Olympics humiliation
30 and 56 percent, depending on whose figures you rely. We have been unable to maintain the country’s major arterial roads, we ran aground our shipping line, destroyed the national air carrier, and are struggling to resuscitate an antiquated railway network. We must be careful not to isolate the Olympics failure, as if it was possible to make a success of it in spite of operating a huge and comprehensive template of policy and infrastructural inadequacies. Countries that harvested scores of medals at the 2012 Olympic Games prepared hard and long for success. It is a miracle we achieved modest success in basketball before the US humiliated us in the games. If we are able, if we would stop being our usual selves, let us urgently design a comprehensive programme of action and budget for the next Olympics, subject it to thorough vetting by local and foreign experts, and begin to implement immediately, not with the cavalier and contentious manner we implement budgets, but with the seriousness of a focused nation. The alternative is to go to sleep and pray for miracles in the 2016 games.
games, and that it does not even compare favourably with what other countries spent on their athletes. A country like Great Britain, which has supplied statistics of its preparation for the games, disclosed it spent over 260 million pounds to prepare its team, and the fund was released over many years, not a few months to the game. China and the United States are likely to have spent much more. So, too, did Jamaica, though its success was virtually limited to the more showy sprints, thanks to Usain Bolt. It will be unwise to blame either the athletes alone for displaying poor athleticism, or sports administrators for incompetence, or even the government for slow response. The Olympics failure is a reflection of a much deep-seated national malaise. Consider, for instance, the controversy over budget implementation, especially the slow release of fund that has reduced execution to between
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