Stopping Jonathan From 2015

 “This New Nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great grandfather, Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities in the North as willing tools, and the South, as conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us, and never allow them to have control over their future” (The Sardauna of Sokoto and the Premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello in The Parrot of October 12, 1960)

G

oodluck Jonathan Is the first Nigerian to emerge president of the Federal Republic by defeating the entrenched Hausa/Fulani oligarchy in an open political contest. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, notwithstanding the fact of his birth and breeding in Zungeru in the north, spoke Hausa fluently and became the symbolic leader of the fight against British colonialism for Independence of Nigeria, could not penetrate the in-breeding Fulani oligarchy for electoral acceptance. Again, Obafemi Awolowo, who earned the plaudits of everyone for his development ideas which he put to practice even before Nigeria’s independence, did not enjoy electoral success in the Fulani dominated north.

President Goodluck Jonathan

But Goodluck Jonathan, the man of providence, portrayed by the Tinubu Press as an effete, provincial academic and politician with a boyish cluelessness, took on the deeply entrenched northern traditional and political establishment, creating a division rooted in public conscience and defeating the entrenched northern politicians Ibrahim Babangida, Adamu Ciroma, Ango Abdullahi,  Abubakar Atiku and Muhammadu Buhari in resounding electoral victories.

It is clear from the lessons to be drawn from this epochal victory that the ongoing effort to browbeat President Jonathan to submit to blackmail and surrender his constitutional right to re-election for a second term particularly from the trenchant Hausa/Fulani north and the mischievous Tinubu Press will amount to asking the victor to deny his historical accomplishment and give away what was earned by the nation through the man of providence. Freedom for Nigeria beckons from what was gained through the electoral victory of Jonathan and this freedom is what is being asked of the man to throw away by requesting him to foreclose his constitutionally guaranteed second presidential tenure. This, my compatriots is tantamount to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Hausa/Fulani north is as things stand today under the benign benevolence of Goodluck Jonathan for regional security and economic progress. Their elite will however not acknowledge this dependence nor will they want to take supportive actions to sustain his regime for their own good. The deeply ingrained sense of entitlement to political supremacy, patronage and economic benefit against the larger interest of all other ethnic groups in the nation has conditioned the Hausa/Fulani to become dependent, arrogant and unthinking of the need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. For nearly forty years of their pillage of the Nigerian economy including the license to allocate other people’s resources to themselves, it never crossed their provincial minds that all era must come to an inevitable end and that the ascendancy of Jonathan signals the end of the age of ethnic supremacy and Hausa/Fulani dominance.

Ahmadu Bello

 

It is paradoxical that the Hausa/Fulani domination of Nigerian politics and economy was not based on any superior indices, either of numbers, skills, enterprise or military conquest but on a single day’s display of bravado and Dutch courage in July 1966 when the northern political establishment recovering from the January 1966 failed putsch, recruited Northern Minority soldiers to decapitate their Commander-in-Chief, General J.T.U Aguiyi Ironsi and complete an ethnic cleansing of Igbo officers in the Nigerian armed Forces. From thence onwards until Goodluck Jonathan in 2010, they sustained a succession plan which guaranteed that a Hausa/Fulani or their crony occupied the presidency of Nigeria.

Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo and Ernest Shonekan are the surrogates they used at different times. They needed the charm of Yakubu Gowon to win over the international community particularly the British, and the southern minorities to accomplish the routing of Biafra in the Civil War. Obasanjo was the lackey they recruited to hold down the rambunctious Yoruba and the south during the times of rebellion to their dominance. Shonekan was the failed lap dog deployed to assuage the Yoruba over the betrayal of Moshood Abiola.

In the period of dominance, the Hausa/Fulani developed a survival strategy that ensured that southern wealth was moved up North to service the gluttony of technocrats, the pageantry of northern aristocracy and for the development of Northern infrastructure. In 1969, the petroleum decree was promulgated to place the control of the burgeoning oil wealth in the hands of Northern Military officers who controlled the federal Military Government and allocated the resources according to their whims. The 1969 petroleum decree changed the economic relationship between regions in Nigeria and helped sustain even for the oil producing states, a subsisting dependence on the federal government for “allocations”, a reverse form of federalism not known anywhere else in the world.

Import licensing, a diabolical practice introduced by the Shehu Shagari Government in 1981 was enacted to subdue the business class and put the lucrative import business under the control of President Shehu Shagari and his kinsmen. Mahmoud Tukur, erstwhile Vice Chancellor of Bayero University Kano and later Minister of Trade and Commerce became the point man. He was the star of the Shagari administration, courted by the mighty and the lowly alike, not for creating value to the economy but for issuing permits to import goods of any kind into Nigeria. It is this process of pre-bended import licensing and benefits allocations that created the Hausa/Fulani champions of business and enterprise of today.

Fulani

It is public knowledge how the Hausa/Fulani also used ethnic control of federal power to leverage the commanding heights of the economy and allocate resources and benefits to their kinsmen. The allocation of 87% of all oil blocks - the underpinning reason for the dog-fight for the presidency in 2013 - in the South-South oilfields to Hausa/Fulani and Kanuri is a vexatious case in point. So also is allotment of certain federal posts to only their kinsmen, another irksome issue open for ethnic contention, particularly the headship of Customs and Excise and certain Federal Ministries and Agencies.

Boko Haram is not an unprecedented phenomenon in Northern Nigeria but a replication of the same Islamic fundamentalist revolutions and ferment that swept through the Western Sudan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One of these Islamic Champions was a Fulani cleric named Usuman dan Fodio who led the conquest of the Hausa Habe dynasties and the violent takeover of their empires across what was once Hausa land. It is this historical conquest of Hausaland and Oyo that make the Fulani believe that Nigeria is their conquered territory and their ethnic inheritance.

Boko Haram in Procession

Boko Haram’s present day practices are a reproduction of the overwhelming brutality that attended that conquest. Contributing least of all Ethnic Nationalities North and South of Nigeria to the national Purse, the Hausa/Fulani maintained a political and economic control far beyond their productive or military capabilities. They took covert control of the Armed Forces and maintained a glass ceiling preventing non-Hausa/Fulani officers, particularly the Igbo and southern minorities from rising to significant command positions.

For instance in August 1982,fearing the coming together of the Progressives and foreseeing the clear possibility of Shehu Shagari losing in the pending presidential election of 1983, the Hausa/Fulani establishment met in Kaduna and recommended to  Shehu Shagari the retirement of the General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the strategic 1^st Division, Kaduna and the promotion of five named Hausa/Fulani officers to Generals to forestall power falling into the hands of “infidels” in the eventuality of a coup de etat and the toppling of Shagari’s Government.

Thus Alani Akinrinade was forcefully retired and Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, Muhammadu Jega and Garba Wushishi were promoted to Generals. A coup did happen to remove the deeply unpopular Shehu Shagari and the NPN government in December 1983 but it was a palace coup dominated by the strategically promoted officers which as planned, did not change the ethnic hold on power by the Hausa/Fulani.

An obverse side of the choices available to Goodluck Jonathan in the fight over 2015 presidential election has not been properly considered by anybody particularly the people determined to pull the entire nation down to secure the Aso Villa. What if Jonathan decides not to run for re-election and refuse to deploy the massive goodwill and resources of the presidency to support PDP, the ruling party? Can the denizens of the ruling party hope to sustain their present slippery hold on power after the 2015 elections? PDP will explode and the resulting fragments will be minority parties or junior partners in existing parties with no commanding presence or capacity to contest a presidential election.

This is the major reason the seven rebel Governors in PDP cannot move in to their pre-registered political party PDM. If the All Peoples Congress (APC) wins the Presidency by any chance, can a Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, Ango Abdullahi,  or even Adamu Ciroma live with an intemperate and bigoted Muhammadu Buhari for four years? Will the Yoruba continue to allow Yorubaland to be used by Tinubu and his Afenifere deserters to pursue an Islamisation agenda? To every right thinking Nigerian, Goodluck Jonathan holds the vital aces required to hold Nigeria together post 2015.

Why do we hold that the Far North owe a world of gratitude to Goodluck Jonathan? Because we believe to be true that If President Jonathan for mischief, want of resources or any other reason scales down the deeply sabotaged military operations against the Boko Haram in the North, the forces of darkness as represented by the Terrorists will be unleashed on the entire Far North and the Northern political, traditional and religious establishment will be overrun and replaced by persons and institutions that hold allegiance to Boko Haram under a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. Can whatever will be left of the northern establishment live with that?

Boko Haram is a Frankenstein’s Monster created by a Northern elite implacably infuriated by the loss of power to a minority politician, never mind that Jonathans people have been supportive of the political interests of the north and are the owners of the bread basket which sustains the entire Northern Region. Now the Boko Haram monster has grown beyond the capacity of the Northern irredentists to manage and are now poised to eat up its creators and replace the establishment with its own implacable and irascible kind.

 

 

 

Goodluck Jonathan in the Presidency embodies and holds the hopes and aspirations of all previously denied and sidelined ethnic peoples in Nigeria and they watch keenly the macabre dance that is going on to seize the Aso Villa and make it a permanent abode of the Hausa/Fulani. It will be foolhardy for any group in Nigeria to make little of the determination of the Peoples of the South-South to hold on to their chance at the exercise of presidential power for the public good and the rebirth of the Nigerian nation.

Basil Okoh

 

NIGERIA: HOW WILL AGRICULTURE FARE UNDER A NORTHERN PRESIDENT?

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Minister of Agriculture

Minister of Agriculture Dr. Akinwumi Adesina is laying foundations and bringing new and exciting thinking into re-building Nigerian agriculture, but what happens to us when he and his principal Goodluck Jonathan leave?

Nigerian officials have historically maintained a dubious attitude to agricultural development and farmer welfare. What is said at public places do not usually reflect what is practiced as policy. Nigerian bureaucrats choose always to splash huge sums on grandiose projects with high decibels in publicity but with little or no impact on actual production and development in the sector. Farmer welfare comes last in government considerations.

Huge sums are lost, always, on overpriced contracts, the importation of useless equipment or payouts to Multilateral Agencies and Western Consultancy groups who mean no good to the development of Nigerian agriculture. We bear witness to the cesspools that the River Basin Development Authorities (RBDA) and the Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) championed by the Federal Agricultural Coordinating Unit (FACU), Ibadan, then headed by the zealous Professor Francis Idachaba and sponsored by the World Bank turned out to be, legacies of the “Integrated Development” model of Dr. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank in the Seventies and Eighties.

Abandoned Rice Processing Plant, Omor, Anambra State.

Agricultural development was to be built around farmers in clusters surrounding the major rivers of Nigeria, the rivers themselves offering irrigation water and drainage all year round.

Fine policy that appeared to be. Trouble was that the billions of dollars offered by the World Bank in credit never got to Nigeria. A full sixty percent of the money was expended on the purchase of overpriced equipment and materials that were unsuitable for Nigerian agricultural practices and farming systems. The requirement to purchase Euro- American equipment was written into the fine prints of the contracts with the World Bank which was the first warning for failure. The balance 40% was mostly purloined by Nigerian officials.

The farm extension services personnel recruited for the projects were ill trained, unsupervised and preferred to gallivant around town with the motorbikes bought for the purpose rather than moving into farming communities as trainers of the farmers in the so-called modern practices.

Something shameful will be remembered of President of Nigeria at the time, Alhaji Shehu Shagari (1979-83) and his political Party National Party of Nigeria (NPN). They clutched at the World Bank projects like life rafts to save a failed agricultural policy. The prop slogan “Green Revolution” ended up creating a huge food deficit and a food import monopoly for party big wigs who brawled over import licenses.

The combined result of the World Bank sponsored projects and the food import license bonanza for the NPN mandarins was to effectively destroy the burgeoning growth in the agricultural sector particularly rice cultivation in Nigeria. Rice, sugar, wheat, corn, etc were labeled “scarce commodities” and put on the special import license list granted only to the NPN party moguls who went on to import these products with graft money from pre-bended contracts. A tidy monopoly was thus created for the few and the cost foisted on the rest of the Nation and its farmers. Thereafter, a dire import dependent food policy and a growing debt burden defined the national economy for the next three decades.

It must be remembered that Shehu Shagari and his NPN nurtured Nigeria’s imported rice dependency syndrome which will be near impossible for the Nigerian population to kick.

Shagari’s successors, Buhari, Babangida and Abacha all military despots and lacking imagination and patriotism and owing no obligation to Nigerians having come to Government through coups d’état, sustained Shagari’s practice of licensed food importation, creating a few billionaires in the midst of an increasingly impoverished farming population, a dangerous dependence on foreign, particularly Asian rice and now a devastated agricultural sector, lacking investment, infrastructure and a disorganized market overrun by imports from Asia.

Typical Rice Mill in Nigeria 2013.

Babangida did worse. He fashioned and implemented an ethnic economic agenda banning wheat importation (a crop not cultivated in Nigeria) to effectively put the

Flour Milling and brewing companies out of business, leading to the loss of nearly a million jobs in the milling, brewing, bakery, pastry and ancillary businesses. He then sold the entire country down the river with a dubious harmattan wheat cultivation project in Northern Nigeria paying out unbelievable sums to Hausa/Fulani contractors who after three years could not have a single bushel of wheat to show for all the tonnes of money.

Determined to crush the thriving poultry industry in Southern Nigeria, Babangida placed an absolute ban on corn and Feed imports into Nigeria, again destroying the Feed Milling industry and sending the entire poultry stock based mostly in Southern Nigeria to forced fire sales and closure.

Accusations of an ethnic agenda to destroy southern agricultural investments and force a dependency on Northern food products were mostly ignored by the Babangida Government. Neither could Babangida deny that Southern dominated poultry meat production was being forced to closure in order to open up a monopoly for Northern cow beef business.

What then will happen to southern agriculture under another northern president? Wait please for the next instalment…………….

'DO ME I DO YOU', ANOTHER KIND OF 'WAR' IN NORTH-EASTERN NIGERIA

LOCUST RITUAL

In Nigeria's far North eastern Borno State, another kind of war is on, man is biting back against the desert locust. Swarms of migrating locusts seasonally strip the semi-arid region of its scanty vegetation and crops. But Gambo Ibrahim, 27, a locust hunter, says the people of Borno have found a way of converting the desert locust's assault into an annual banquet. They eat the locusts which they call "desert shrimps".

ONE BAD TURN

"In Pidgin English, we say 'na do me i do you'," says Mr. Ibrahim, who has been hunting locusts for 8 years. I mean, yes, the locusts are eating up our crops, but we are also eating them up and making money to boot.

"So both man and locusts are losers, but i think they are worse off because we are eating them. I guess you could say one bad turn deserves another," he says with a chuckle.

HUNTING

"Since the locusts fly and man cannot fly, then if man must catch them, he has to figure out a way to engage the locusts on familiar territory - ground. "The locusts tend to fly at night because it is really cold (temperatures drop to 9 degrees Celsius) and dark. That's when we go after them.

"You need safety boots like these ones I have on, which are actually my dad's cast-off military issue and they serve the purpose well" Mr Ibrahim says.

LIGHT TRAP

"in addition to the safety boots and a minimum of three layers of clothes - jeans is the best - you also need a very powerful torch" Mr Ibrahim explains. You use it to see your way in the sahara at night. The torch is actually also a trap. "The locusts are attracted to it and they literally just come flying into your face and all you really have to do is just pick them off.

MONEY SPINNER

"We then put them in bags and head for the market. A bag of live locusts fetches between $26 and $30. Locusts are simply money spinners", Mr Ibrahim says. Most of our buyers are women who in turn dress the locusts, fry them and sell them to members of the public.

SNACK

"We buy the locusts from the boys,"says Esther Daniel who sells fried locusts in Maiduguri town. After that we remove their wings so they can't fly", she says.

Agribusiness-Nigeria: INVESTING IN SHRIMP AND PRAWN PRODUCTION

Agribusiness-Nigeria: INVESTING IN SHRIMP AND PRAWN PRODUCTION: Blonde Prawn No 4 It is time now for the Nigerian Authorities to wake up to frightening realities in the marine fishing i...

INVESTING IN SHRIMP AND PRAWN PRODUCTION

Blonde Prawn No 4

It is time now for the Nigerian Authorities to wake up to frightening realities in the marine fishing industry and begin to enforce regulations governing fishing and trawling activities in the Nigerian waters. The fact that hitherto abundant tropical fish like Croakers, tuna, snappers, shrimps and prawns are now imported into Nigeria by the same Asian companies that over-fished our waters to the death should be sign enough that a serious crisis is on the Nigerian plate in the marine fish industry.

Investments and attention should now begin to move towards evolving a homegrown cultivated shrimp industry while placing and enforcing a five-year ban on fishing and shrimping in Nigerian waters to allow the re-population of seriously depleted marine life. A cultivated shrimp industry located along the large network of estuaries and creeks of the nine coastal states will open up a new frontier for business engagement and mass employment for shrimps and prawns, internationally tradeable products of insatiable demand.

Tiger Prawn No 4

Figures emerging from worldwide trade on cultivated prawns is enough to cause the nation to salivate. Since the 1990's the total production of cultivated prawns have grown at a faster rate than any other agricultural product in the world. 

Shrimp

Since then global shrimp and prawns production has increased by 75% from 2.4 million Metric Tonnes to over 4.2 in 2004 with an annual average growth of 8% since then. Aquaculture i.e cultivated or farmed shrimp currently account for approximately 25% of total world production, a worldwide market valued at USD6 billion at the farmgate and over $20 billion in retail.

REVIVING FISH AND SHRIMP TRAWLING IN NIGERIA 1

Before the new millennium  Nigeria was a significant exporter of seafood particularly prawns and shrimps to Europe and North America from the catches made by fish trawlers on the Nigerian coastal waters.This is not so anymore. Nigeria actually imports shrimps and prawns now to meet its domestic demand.

The depletion of the crustaceans from the Nigerian ocean floor did not happen without warning to the Nigerian authorities. About three decades back, Indian and other Asian businessmen invaded the Nigerian waters with trawlers equipped with gadgetry to comb banned juvenile fish and shrimps from the sea bed with absolutely no control or enforcement of regulations from Nigerian Maritime Authority. The companies deployed illegal nets and other equipment to plunder the coastal floor hauling up juvenile fish, sea horses, turtles and tonnes of other marine life along with the shrimps and prawns they craved.

Fish Trawler

The biggest culprit in this immensely lucrative racket was without a doubt Ocean Fisheries Limited, then the backbone of the Churchgate Business Group. In its heydays Ocean Fisheries cavorted with the high and mighty in Government, owned 52 trawlers prowling Nigerian waters and was permitted to be the sole occupant of the Ikorodu Light Terminal Port in Lagos. Ocean Fisheries also operated the largest seafood processing facility at Odogunyan, 20 kilometres Northeast of Ikorodu.
Here Ocean Fisheries employed more than 5000 women and girls to process fish and shrimps for export to France and the United States. These workers were paid less than a dollar a day. Not only was the fish and shrimps caught free in the Nigerian waters without obeying international regulations, Ocean Fisheries would not pay tax to the Nigerian Government even on the seafood exports. Mr. Mike Hartley, an American and then Managing Director of Ocean Fisheries did say that "Nigeria offers the best free lunches". 

NIGERIA YET TO INVEST IN THE $20 BILLION WORLD PRAWNS TRADE

 The Gulf of Guinea lapping nine (9) states of the Nigerian Federation offers best-in-the-world spawning and breeding waters for shrimp and prawns. Lying so close to the equator in the middle of humid Africa and abutting the largest tropical mangrove swampland, temperatures average 30 degrees Centigrade. The warm tropical water and its vast creeks and ravines habour rich and wild undergrowth's that offer natural  spawning ground for crustaceans and these can be easily adapted for both small and industrial scale cultivation.

 

Despite shrimps and prawns literally popping out of the Nigerian coastal waters even up to the middle seventies, the Nigerian coastal communities never developed the culture of shrimp farming inspite of the worldwide booming trade in the product and inspite of the fact that shrimp and prawns cultivation remain one of the most lucrative farming enterprises in a modern world that has become insatiable for its consumption.

 

 A reason for this cultural and investment failure may be the disruptions and pollution of the waters that oil exploration and production caused in the Niger Delta and the fact that there was no encouragement from the Federal Authorities that had become so unhinged and covetous of Petro-dollars from Crude oil.