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Tobi Amusan’s Tears

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Olaopa Vows To Advertise Civil Service Vacancies

By Tunji Olaopa
By now, almost everyone across Nigeria has heard of Tobi Amusan, the Nigerian superlative athlete who just won a gold medal at the World Athletics Championship Women’s 100m hurdles in Oregon, the United States. That singular feat, the first of its kind for Nigeria, has generated lots of social media attention and traffic. When Tobi climbed the podium to collect her well-deserved medal, the Nigerian national anthem was sung, and she wept profusely. Those tears have not only generated countless emotional fellowship across the world, especially among Nigerians home and abroad. Standing on that podium, and struggling with her tears, Tobi represented the very feature of a hero who had struggled with most herculean predicaments, personal and national, to arrive at that particular point in history. Receiving that deserved medal was not the social media story. What is, is the singing of the Nigerian national anthem, and the evocation of national pride and national revulsion in equal measures among all those who have different understanding of what Nigeria means. Especially for sportsmen and sportswomen. Why would Tobi play the national anthem when the Nigerian state nearly destroyed her ambition? Why would the Nigerian government associate with the success of someone it nearly cast, as is usual, into the rubbish heap of destroyed talents? These two questions have generated serious social media furor.

My point of entry in this piece is Tobi’s tears. In depth and context, it is similar to that of Prof. Tomori who, some months ago, teared up in agony over Nigeria’s protracted predicament. Prof. Tomori lamented the idea of a country that provided all it took for him to become a world-class scholar and virologist; the same country that is failing its own citizens now. On Tobi’s face, one could imagine the many thoughts rushing through her mind as the national anthem played—thoughts of pains and depression at what could have been her lot if she had not got the scholarship to the University of Texas; thoughts of winning at the Nigerian Olympic Trials but the officials did not turn zon the electronic timer; thoughts of the injury that the Nigerian government neglected which could have ruined her aspiration forever; thoughts of all the greatness the Nigerian state encodes.

Tobi Amusan's tears

Tobi Amusan

Like Prof. Tomori, what was Tobi’s tears telling us? Tears tell many stories, and more so tears shed within the crannies of Nigeria’s governance failures. Let me borrow a sense of this from Washington Irving, American historian and essayist. According to him, “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” Of course, anyone who insists that Tobi’s heart is not grieved, even to the extent that she was joyous at her triumph, does not know her story, and does not understand the pain of not being encouraged to shine by one’s country. Her personal trajectory before she arrived at Texas and at that moment of fulfilment. In an interview, she said with tacit grief, “When I was injured, they didn’t care about me. That is how my career ended.” How could her tears not have been motivated by such incidence of not fulfilling her dreams because of an injury the Nigerian state could have intervened in?

READ ALSO: Truth Spoken Before Its Time: Professor Bolaji Akinyemi At 80!

However, the power behind Tobi’s tears lies in her stubborn patriotism. Standing and crying while the anthem washes over hear speaks eloquently about a sacred belief and, indeed, unspeakable love for a country that has the potential to be more. Citizenship in Nigeria is a baffling phenomenon. Outside of the spurious nationalism of the political class and elite, Nigeria has lumped almost all Nigerians into the same space of suffering and lack of fulfilment. There are so many Nigerians who have fled that space in search of greener pastures. Who is to blame anyone who is searching for meaning outside of the limiting confines of national space? Imagine the many professionals whose professional competence has almost been put to shame because of the constraint of practicing in Nigeria. Many medical doctors/professionals recently left for Saudi Arabia where the medical infrastructure not only attend to their search for personal meaning but also enhance their professional skills and capacity to serve humanity.

But you also have those, like Tobi, who have been offered opportunities to become better in terms of career opportunities abroad, but who doggedly still fly the banner of the Nigerian state. This is the category of Nigerian citizenry that Tobi Amusan represented when she stood on that podium and sang the words of the national anthem. It was a moment of contrition; as if she almost made the decision to reject Nigeria and all her woes, but she drew back at the last minute and chose to believe in Nigeria’s possibilities. But there is also a last category of Nigerian citizens; those who do not have the opportunity or simply chose not to travel out and seek greener pasture, but who have equally been worsted by the Nigerian government, but who have counterintuitively latched on to the Nigerian dream in its very absence. In the dark space of the Nigerian streets and several informal spaces, these patriotic Nigerians shed tears of frustration. And yet they have a glow in their heart, watered by the possibility of Nigeria becoming great soon. When the Nigerian youth carried the banner of the #EndSARS recently, it was a demonstration of tough love for a country that must be forced to become better. No wonder many turn to the religious and the spiritual as the anchor to hold the soul in the face of the battering of life and the government misdeeds in the Nigerian existential space.

I have had reasons to shed tears for what I have come to call the missing pieces in Nigeria’s development—the obstacles, misgovernance, lost opportunities and all sorts that keep putting Nigeria backward, and delaying her possible greatness. In 1992, I was on my own quest for meaning. I had started a family, and the responsibility to make ends meet had become quite daunting. I had started working at the Speech Writing Unit of the Presidency when I then got a job at the UN. But then, the late Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade had compelled me to stay on in the Nigerian civil service rather than pursue the more prestigious UN appointment. We had both shed some tears in my office at the Aso Villa that day. It was as if I was watching the promise of a better future flying away out of my reach. Aboyade was my mentor; and I had to believe his dream about Nigeria. He regaled me with the story of how, as a student at Cambridge University in the late 50s, he was a part of a core of dreamers who were determined to redefine Nigeria’s greatness in the comity of nations. Those dreamers later reconstituted into different levels of multidisciplinary teams that began mapping Nigeria’s developmental path. Aboyade himself played a huge role in Nigeria’s development planning. Unfortunately, by the 80s, Wole Soyinka had dismissed that generation as a wasted one.

READ ALSO: Olaopa Meets With Top Lagos Civil Servants, Speaks On How To Reposition State Public Service

With the Tobi Amusan story, we are forced to ask: how many more generations will the Nigerian state waste? How many more heroic acts would the state reject from those who believed in her? I think it is most providential that the Tobi story is unfolding in the build-up to the 2023 elections. The electoral promises have started piling up without any significant nudge yet towards an ideological and issue-based itemization and discussions about what matters in taking Nigeria seriously. How, for instance, could the heroism, energies and patriotism of the many Tobi Amusans all across Nigeria and around the world be harnessed to facilitate progress for Nigeria? Nigeria, like the continent itself, is a youthful nation that embeds enormous human capital development that could drive national progress. This makes education, across all spheres, a significant matter for electoral engagement by aspirants for the highest offices in the land.

How do we make education the bedrock for national development? If any of the aspirants does not have the blueprint for a genuine and realistic engagement with education, then such an aspirant does not deserve our votes. Any aspirant that does not have a plan for youth engagement is just a player who wants four years to squander Nigeria’s chances at national greatness. We have got to a stage in Nigeria’s national trajectory where political rhetoric should not sway us again.

A final message to Nigerians: Tobi Amusan demonstrated the dogged will to survive despite Nigeria’s crippling limitations. With her success, no one has any excuse to keep blaming Nigeria. The dreams we hold should become the touchstone of our successes. My dreams withstood the terrible dysfunction of the Nigerian administrative system and even an untimely retirement at my prime. Tobi’s dreams withstood the terrible mess of sporting organization in Nigeria. Our collective aspirations can become the foundation for greatness; not only personal ones, but also our collective greatness as a nation.

Olaopa is a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, and Professor, National Institute For Policy and Strategic Studies
(NIPSS), Kuru, Jos.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com

 

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Opinion

Kemi Badenoch’s Bad Knocks  On Nigeria 

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By  Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha

One of the interesting proverbs I picked up in our General African Studies (GAS 201) course with the late Professor Jabez Olowo Ojoade in the University of Jos in 1979 was ‘it is a bastard child that points at his homestead with his left hand! The Akan people of Ghana put it this way: a bastard child points to his father’s house with his left hand’. The Yoruba say that ‘a person who points to their homestead with the left hand is not a good person’, while the Luhya of Kenya say that ‘when pointing to your village, use your right hand’. It is in the Swahili language that a sort of generalised use of the left hand is concretised when it says ‘the left hand is for personal hygiene, not for pointing!

Bastard child! Homestead! Pointing with the left hand! These three constituents and functional parts of the proverb tickled my teenage imagination to no end. What is it about the left had that it should not be used to refer to one’s family? Why is this metaphor common across the continent? Indeed, there must be something about the family, about the homestead, about one’s origins that deserves respect no matter the circumstances.

By the way, some Nigerians in the diaspora also point to Nigeria with their left hand. ‘That country’, is often used to describe the place where some spent eighteen or thirty of their lives as they tried to find their feet. So, in a sense, Kemi is simply doing what some full-blooded Nigerians do in reaction to the anomie which currently rules the land. Kemi stands out because of her delicate and prominent position in the world. We all took offence when Bully Donald Trump referred to ours as ‘shithole countries! At that level, who said what becomes very important, that is, the message is given prominence because of the stature and calibre of the messenger.

            The proverb, according to Wikipedia, is ‘often used to convey that someone who is not respectful or grateful to their roots or heritage will eventually be rejected or ostracised by their community! The left hand, we are told, is for personal hygiene. We don’t use it to give or receive gifts; we don’t use it to serve drinks or for traditionally important functions.

             In the African context, a bastard child is not one who was born out of wedlock or whose father is not known to the family. Bastard child represents a person who is disconnected from their family. Pointing to the family house with the left hand is indicative of disrespect.

            These thoughts flooded my mind when I read recently elected leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, gave some hard and bad knocks to Nigeria, the Nigeria Police, and governance in her Nigeria, her ancestral home. To be sure, nobody who has encountered some men of the Nigeria Police in action can fault Kemi. Her chemistry of being brutally frank is what has taken Kemi to the heights in Conservative Party politics. Whether she can indeed lead the Party to victory in an election is a different kettle of fish. As the potential leader of the British government, all cards will count when push gets to shove. Which is why Kemi should remember that no well-trained child points to the family house with the left hand.

            Nigeria is in process. It is a building site. And we started this project of disparate and different cultures fused together when the British pounced on our ancestors to create Nigeria. We look back to the years when a British monarch, King Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), who ate two of his six wives for breakfast and dinner. Wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were executed by beheading. Jane Seymour died under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps if Diana had emerged in the 15th century as wife to a British monarch, the reigning king would have sent her to the guillotine instead of the tunnel in Paris! Some British monarchs actively participated, supported, and profited from the transatlantic slave trade. British monarchs oversaw the colonisation of indigenous lands in Africa, North America, and Australia sometimes through genocide! No where in Africa, our dear left-handed and grandly insolent Kemi, would a Prime Minister allow his wife to remain in an adulterous relationship for decades as Harold Macmillan did with wife Lady Dorothy Macmillan did with the bisexual Bob Boothby in the 20th Britain!

            We may need to remind Kemi that racism still dominated policing in Britain as it does in much of the Western world. Yet, we have not painted the entire police system as being racist. Indeed, Kemi, without officialdom around her can still be profiled by a police officer if she were found driving alone in some areas of London! Her skin colour, is not typically British, I dare say. Yet, we have not said that Britain is racist. The ‘how dark’ racist discussions which precipitated Harry and Meghan fleeing the British monarchy is still very fresh and raw in our consciousness; yet, Nigeria’s Vice President has not called the British monarchy a racist institution.

            Time will fail me to discuss the Damilola Taylor case in year 2000 when the Metropolitan Police handling of Taylor’s murder was seen as slow and inadequate due to racial bias. By the way, Damilola was both British and Yoruba like our illustrious and petulant Kemi who believes in giving hard knocks! What about the Stephen Lawrence 1993 murder case which the Metropolitan Police badly handled owing to racial bias? In 1999, Roger Sylvester, a Black man, died in police custody and an inquest showed that the police used excessive force. In 2009, newspaper vendor Ian Tom died after being struck by a police officer during the G20 protests in London. The 1999 Macpherson Report, which investigated the Stephen Lawrence case, concluded that ‘the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist! As late as 2017, the Lammy Review which was led David Lammy (MP) concluded that “black and minority ethnic individuals were more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and imprisoned than their white counterparts! Need I say more?

So, our dear daughter and bright star Kemi in the British firmament, we shall not point to you with our left hand, because in spite of you, you are our daughter. We can only say that the Nigeria Police is in good company of the Empire of the Police system which was created in 1820 by your progenitors from the other side! Colonial vestiges are not easy to shake off!

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Afe Babalola And Dele Farotimi: On Justice, A Just Society And The Nigerian State

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Prof. Tunji Olaopa

By Tunji Olaopa

The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society. And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.

(Un)fortunately, my intellectual maturation, my political science education and my professional endeavor in institutional reform advocacy have prepared me to intervene in this critical matter. I have always been involved with Nigeria, and with reflective thoughts about how to reconstitute her greatness. Three learning encounters with three world-historic icons configured my passion for wanting to see that Nigeria becomes a state we all can be proud of. The first came from my reading of Plato’s Republic. There is a reason that the entire treatise commenced with the question, what is justice? Justice was a fundamental issue in the decline of the ancient Athenian democracy that allowed Socrates to be judicially murdered. The second learning derived from Wole Soyinka’s dense prison memoir, The Man Died. And like most who have read it, Soyinka was troubled by the idea of justice: “For me, justice is the first condition of humanity.” By the time I would be coming to Thomas More’s Utopia, I was already apprised of the connections between my political science education, my professional endeavor as a public servant, and the key elements of institutional reform as a cogent framework for transforming Nigeria.

From Plato to Soyinka, we have a trajectory of political reflection that takes justice seriously as the basis for organizing a just society. This is part of the intellectual frameworks for my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. In one of those explosive seminar classes that played some fundamental role in my intellectual maturation in the graduate school, I had proposed an argument through a seminar paper titled: “Is a revolution an option to fix Nigeria?” The topic was meant to titillate the collective yearning for revolution that would serve as the ultimate mechanism for social change that would flush off all traces of corruption and degeneration in postcolonial Nigeria. Revolutions seem to possess some allure for the masses because they constitute a framework of justice that the constitutional justice mechanism might not be able to handle.

However, as Wole Soyinka, Thomas More, Martin Luther and even Galileo Galilei would realize, the need for radicalism is balanced by the force of establishment orthodoxy. The Nigerian predicament has, as a fundamental foundation, a lot to do with the connection between governance failure and injustice in terms of the persistent and protracted class strife between the haves and the have-nots, between the rich and the poor, indeed, in the final analysis between the government and the governed. And in the case between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi, the issues boil down to the administration of justice and the entire edifices and institutions of social justice and the rule of law in Nigeria. And so, in outlining the key issues involved in the matter, we must be careful enough to read between the lines and the noises of analysts who are eager to queue behind their favored protagonists.

First things first. Let us remove the surface debris. Indeed, and in this case, the debris points us in the direction to look for the rot within the matter. First, there is the matter of civil defamation and its legal ramifications. And second, there is the issue of the legal and moral protocols involved in dealing with the pursuit of redress by someone who knows and understands the law. Barrister Farotimi has a legal right to seek redress in court. Chief Babalola has a legal right to defend his reputation in court. In raising the specter of legal prosecution against defamation, I see Chief Babalola as being at the forefront of gatekeeping the legal establishment in terms of what is and is not permissible or possible under the law and its conservative tenets. If you are hurt or an injustice has been done to your person, then the best place to seek redress is not the court of public opinion but the constitutional legal establishment.

Unfortunately for him, Barrister Farotimi’s book, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, impugns the entire legal and judicial establishment up to its apex institution, the Nigerian Supreme Court. However, does radicalism preclude moral decency? A book could be written and allegations made without the complement of atrocious language. Or maybe the rot in the judicial system, and the need for a revolution preclude any niceties, especially with those who are allegedly at the forefront of perpetuating and protecting the rot. But then, how to prove what we all consider to be the norm in terms of legal prosecution of judicial corruption remains a hanging question.

No matter how we look at what we are calling the surface debris, we are redirected deeper and deeper into what lies beneath the surface. The ultimate question is that between Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi, what we are asked to contend with is the state of the Nigerian judiciary and the corrupt impediment of social justice, especially for an average Nigerian. What Barrister Dele Farotimi said about the Nigerian judicial system is not new. We are all familiar with the rot within the system. Indeed, this is not the first time an alarm would be raised about what we are all familiar with. Indeed, as far back as 1999, The News magazine carried a most unsalutary headline, “Crooks on the Bench: An Expose on the Rot in the Judiciary.” The magazine headlined the names of 47 judges indicted for judicial corruption. What is new is that Dele Farotimi dared to go so far as to mention specific names, and to confront the big players in the legal establishment. And he did this in a most scurrilous manner targeted at getting maximum traction and attention. It is as if Mr Farotimi, through the public sphere, is throwing the gauntlet to every Nigerian and challenging us on our collective responsibility to clean the Augean stable.

If Barrister Farotimi cannot prove his allegations in court, it would not mean that his charges are false. It might only imply that the system which is supposed to guarantee justice has become too corruptly dense to achieve its mandate. But there is also the chance that since the entire judicial system cannot be tarred so broadly with the same brush, Farotimi’s allegation might receive a dispassionate hearing that might deliver justice as we expect it. This might be a tall expectation. Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament has inevitable consequences on the capacity of the judicial system to facilitate the delivery of justice. And this failure also complicates the capacity of the Nigerian state to deliver on its social contract to Nigerians. This is what makes the Babalola-Farotimi case too complex to be decided either in the constitutional court or the court of public opinion. The burdens of postcolonial disruptions that the Nigerian judiciary system carries are enormous: judicial corruption, miscarriage of judgments, executive lawlessness, delayed trial due to insufficient infrastructure, financial dependence on the executive arm of government.

To outline the fundamental challenges of the judicial system in Nigeria this way is not to give in to cynicism and a deterministic mindset that we might be caught in a vice that is inescapable. It is simply to say that the ongoing uproar between the two dramatis personae demonstrates that the court has been given a chance to reflect on the role that (in)justice plays in the fundamental understanding of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament and the capacity of a democratic system to correct itself. When Chief Afe Babalola and Barrister Dele Farotimi are given their day in court, we will have no choice but to trust that same judicial system to deliver unbiased judgment no matter our misgivings about how objective and untainted that judgment could be. This is just a way of saying that though our judicial system is not perfect; it is still the best that we have.

The last words on this reflection on the connection between the ongoing feud between Babalola and Farotimi and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament must be given to Haile Sellasie, former emperor of Ethiopia: “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”

Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission,Abuja, and Professor of Public Administration.
tolaopa2003@gmail.com

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Opinion

Fear Of Witchcraft And Politics In Zambia

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Witch Burning, Impunity And Abuses Linked to Witchcraft Beliefs In Benue State
Dr Leo Igwe

By Leo Igwe

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) is concerned over the reported arrest of two men accused of being ‘witchdoctors’ in Zambia. The arrest underscores the potency of witchcraft fears and the connection between occult anxieties and the country’s politics. These individuals were accused of trying to bewitch the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema. The police claimed that they had charms. They planned to use the charms to harm the president. The report says the two persons have been charged under Zambia’s Witchcraft Act. The Act criminalizes “possession of charms”, “professing knowledge of witchcraft”, and “cruelty to wild animals”. The police found the two with assorted charms, including a live chameleon.

This development is utterly embarrassing and shows that the Zambian government is slowly losing its focus and bearing.The country has many socio-economic challenges. Suspicion of bewitchment or possession of charms should be the least of its worries at this time. There should be no place for witchcraft and possession of charms in modern politics because there is no evidence for these beliefs and practices. Zambian authorities should not weaponize the Witchcraft Act or use it to justify this incident. Zambian law does not recognize witchcraft. Zambia’s Witchcraft Act criminalizes naming or imputing witchcraft. It prohibits accusing or threatening to accuse any person of being a witch or a wizard. In this case, it is the police who are breaking the law.

Otherwise, how did they know the two individuals were ‘witchdoctors’? Did these persons identify as witch doctors? If not, the police are liable because they named and imputed witchcraft and have to prove that these individuals have witch-doctoring powers. The police claimed to have charged these individuals for possessing “assorted charms”, including a chameleon. Really?

The police in Zambia have questions to answer: What are charms? How did they know that what was in their possession were charms, not pets? Is a chameleon a form of charm? What makes possession of a chameleon possession of a charm? When and how does a chameleon become a charm? The police need to answer these questions and more before one takes them seriously.

Again, did the individuals describe what was in possession as ‘charms’? If they did, does confessing or designating something as a charm make it a charm? And if they did not, the police are liable because they need to prove how those possessions translated into charms.

In addition, the police claimed that the duo wanted to bewitch the president. What does that mean? How did they know? Are the police not contravening a provision under the Witchcraft Act by professing knowledge of witchcraft? Can one harm another person using a chameleon? They claimed that the two persons wanted to use the charms in their possession, including the chameleon to harm the president. How did they know that? What is the evidence for that?

The Advocacy for Alleged Witches calls for an end to this state-sponsored witch hunt. There is no evidence of harm through witchcraft or charms. The Zambian government should desist from witchcraft- related infractions and violations including arbitrary arrest, and detention of innocent citizens. These allegations are baseless and absurd. The arrest was politically motivated. This development demonstrates that Zambian authorities are out of sync with their duty and obligation to uphold the rule of law and protect accused persons.

Zambian authorities need to act in compliance with the 2021 UN resolution, which urged states to take measures to combat abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs and ritual attacks. End witchcraft allegations in Zambia. End witch hunts in Africa now!

Dr Igwe directs the Advocacy for Alleged Witches.

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