TODAY IN THE NATION
MONDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2012 TRUTH IN DEFENCE OF FREEDOM
‘An essential element of representative government is the legislature through which elected leaders make laws for the general wellbeing of the people’ EMEKA OMEIHE
VOL 7 NO 2,342
C OMMENT & D EB ATE EBA
A
CITY is a people. More than the village that encases a monolithic world view, a city embraces the world. That is why the village has collapsed as a barometer of a civilisation, especially since the city began its rise on the back of that great idea called capitalism. But the city has also become a cynosure of disgrace, the repository of filth and psychic decay, where the criminal rumbles and the politician cons and the businessman profiteers and the child expires on the cheap. The city of London today is celebrated for its order and even beauty, but it once groveled under Hitler’s bombardments. However, it was that same tragedy that threw up the genius of the great Winston Churchill with his speeches of inspirational growl. Before that, Charles Dickens expended his gifts to depict the squalour of that city, with novels like Oliver Twist and The Great Expectation. The British Prime minister at the time decided to work the city to glory after reading of the terrible want and desperation of the character Oliver Twist. No city in the world, whether it is London, New York, Tokyo or Paris that did not pass through the foul rhythm of grime and crime before surging to a place of envy. All of them were inspired by leaders, just like the case of London. New York is on the rise again after a decade of decline. Lagos fell to such a bad place in the military era. It is a different story today. On this page, I lamented the city of Ibadan where Obafemi Awolowo patented his genius, where the old west preened. It fell, like unfortunate cities do, on the hands of a bumbler. The man, Alao-Akala, preferred the vanity of his sartorial splendour to the environment. Leaders inspire cities. Alao-Akala committed the extraordinary act of narcissism. He loved himself so much that there was not much love left for the city he governed. What I lamented was the filth of Ibadan, where at every turn you saw heaps of refuse intimidating traffic into paralysis. Rather than inspire Ibadan, he inspired filth. So bad was the situation that it was declared in 2008 one of the dirtiest cities on God’s green earth. The man did not understand the meaning of green. In the past year, I have had reasons to visit the city, and it is clear that the city is in the hands of a man who has the wherewithal to inspire it. The evidence abounds of Ibadan as a city on the rebound.
SAM OMATSEYE
IN TOUCH
intouchsam@yahoo.com 08054501081(sms only) •NMMA Columnist of the Year
Redeeming Ibadan
•Ajimobi
All those places where dirt compounded like natural habitats are gone, and they used to swagger in different colours of green, blue, red, brown. But they were not good green, or colourful brown, or bewitching red. They were mock colours. They were the colours of stench rising with impunity to you, even if you were ensconced in an air-conditioned car. There is a strategy to Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s approach to the filth and decay of the city. One of his first preoccupations was to keep the flood at bay. This meant attacking the drainage challenges. Ibadan has been a graveyard as floods after floods pummeled
RIPPLES EFCC DECLARES AUDU WANTED...I’M NOT ON THE RUN, SAYS EX-GOVERNOR
HARDBALL
Traveller’s nightmare
I
ARRIVED Nigeria only to be reminded I was home on Saturday with items missing from my luggage at our international airport in Lagos. The first sign was that the lock was off. I opened the bag, and found it was without some items. I reported to a young man in charge of such matters and he said the locks were removed by United States security. But when they did such things they put the locks back in the bag. Not in my bag. Good news though. The thieves may have loved the glitzy stuff but were too illiterate to know the value of books. They left my books intact. Thank God for small mercies.
•Hardball is not the opinion of the columnist featured above
Why Zuma deserves to lose ANC leadership election
T
...then SHOW your FACE sir
during rainy seasons. Homes caved in as lives drowned. He has built a number of bridges, cleared many a water path so that no stagnant pool accumulates so much dirt that the rains can unleash flood. This is the way to attack the root of the problem. It is still work in progress. They call him the bridge builder. This is accompanied with regular work by refuse disposal units that cart away bags and drums of refuse. I could have gone with the impression that the people of Ibadan loved filth. But that is not the case. I grew up in Ibadan and recall the images of the city, even during the imperial days of the army. I lived in Oke-Ado. Ibadan was not what it became under the bejeweled, half-literate chief executive that steered it into the age of unclean. The third leg of the strategy is the beautification. We cannot appreciate what is clean until we develop what is beautiful inside. To beautify is a painful exercise always, but it is a thing that ought to be done. Entering Ibadan from Lagos invites you to work already going on beautifying the Iwo Road. The work is not done yet, and for it to be appreciated Governor Ajimobi has promised to expand the road. It is still experiencing traffic discomfort, which though has reduced. It will entail massive demolitions, which he plans to do. But the work has to be done. Beauty cannot be enjoyed when traffic snarls. But around Ibadan in such places as Ring Road, Dugbe, Bere, Oje roads, the beauty of
the city is coming to view in picturesque green projects. When a city is clean, the people are creative. That was why novelist Dostoyevsky proclaimed that beauty will save the world. Ajimobi has shown himself equal to the task. We can recall that just a few years ago, Ibadan was a hotbed of violence and insecurity. Partisans of the road workers union terrorised citizens, robbers prowled and the general sense was that of unfathomable devilry. Things have changed and it is taken for granted. Just as it was taken for granted in Lagos State until a spasm of robbery a few months ago reminded us of what good times had fallen on the country’s most populous city. The first task of a government is the security of the people. Oyo State has eased out of the vice grip of inept men, and Governor Ajimobi epitomises that liberation with his clever, methodical touch. With a city vastly more secure and cleaner with better aesthetic outlook, Ibadan and Oyo State can face the larger challenge of attracting more investment. This is an impressive showing in less than two years Ajimobi ascended the throne. He has also done well with roads, rehabilitating and constructing about 250 roads. He has streamlined the finance, raising the internally generated revenue and paying salary even in the 13th month and engaging 20,000 youths in creative jobs. In his play Coriolanus, Shakespeare quips, “what’s a city but the people?” That is the governor’s main task: to set the people away from fear and want. He is on the right track.
HE African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s ruling party for the past 18 years, began its five-day elective conference yesterday. The conference, attended this year by about 4,000 delegates, holds every five years. Top on the agenda is the election of the party’s leader, with the winner expected to lead the party into the country’s general election in 2014. Whoever wins the party’s leadership contest will automatically become the next president. Vying for the coveted position are President Jacob Zuma, 70, and his vice president, Kgalema Motlanthe, 63. The contest comes at a time when South Africa (Pop. 50m) has been described as one of the most unequal societies in the world, with more than half of its people living in poverty, and its bond rating downgraded by at least two international rating agencies, including Moody’s, and Standard and Poor’s. There are also widespread allegations of corruption. Mr Zuma, who has no formal education, and is self-taught, is expected to garner enough support from the party’s delegates to win the leadership election at the conference taking place in Bloemfontein (Mangaung). He is still charismatic and clever, compared with his challenger who is described as ‘quiet and unassuming.’ A Zulu from KwaZulu-Natal, he is very popular among the Zulu, the country’s largest ethnic
group. But even though Zuma is expected to win, he deserves to lose. The reasons are legion and compelling. Apart from lacking the intellectual depth to innovatively tackle the mounting social and economic problems facing Africa’s largest economy, Zuma is also embarrassingly frivolous and unable to summon the gravitas required to replicate a fraction of the nobility Nelson Mandela, and to a lesser extent, Thabo Mbeki, imbued South Africa. Even though he makes strenuous efforts to separate his public life from his private life, it is disturbingly remarkable that Zuma has been married six times, currently has four wives, and has some 21 children. The business of presiding over South Africa is too serious to be left in the hands of a serial polygamist permanently distracted by the opposite sex. In 2006, he barely escaped a rape conviction, in spite of making very ludicrous statements about sex and HIV infection. Even if we ignore his 2009 acquittal on corruption charges, though his financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, was jailed for soliciting bribes in a $5bn arms contract scandal, Zuma has really never shaken off the image of someone who cannot be trusted to properly manage the finances of his country. But much more importantly, Zuma deserves to lose because of his poor handling of the mineworkers’ strike which convulsed the country in August. Some
34 miners were shot dead while protesting low wages and poor working conditions at the Lonmin plant near Marikana. It was the most violent repression perpetrated by the police since the collapse of apartheid, indicating that little has changed in that country’s law enforcement operations. Other unions have since embarked on their own protests to press for better working conditions and higher wages, and Zuma has equally displayed appalling inability to tackle the growing discontent. If Zuma wins the top party post, he will probably lead the ANC and preside over the affairs of his country up to the 2019 elections, by which time he will be 77. It is not his advanced age that is the problem. What may constitute a tragedy for South Africa is that Zuma is unlikely to display sterling leadership qualities or exhibit more restraint than he has shown so far. He will not be more innovative, he will not be more intellectual, he will not be less frivolous, and he will not be less distracted. The leadership position his country hopes to secure in Africa will of course be threatened the more, as will its chances of social and economic turnaround. With South Africa undermined by leadership insufficiency, and Zimbabwe racing downhill on account of President Robert Mugabe’s insensitivity and poor judgement, and Nigeria wracked by egregious leadership incompetence, the outlook for Africa grows dimmer by the day, if not by the hour.
Published and printed by Vintage Press Limited. Corporate Office: 27B Fatai Atere Way, Matori, Lagos. P.M.B. 1025,Oshodi, Lagos. Telephone: Switch Board: 01-8168361. Editor Daily:01-8962807, Marketing: 01-8155547 . Abuja Office: Plot 5, Nanka Close AMAC Commercial Complex, Wuse Zone 3, Abuja. Tel: 07028105302. Port Harcourt Office: 12/14, Njemanze Street, Mile 1, Diobu, PH. 08023595790. WEBSITE: www.thenationonlineng.net E-mail: info@thenationonlineng.net ISSN: 115-5302 Editor: GBENGA OMOTOSO