The Rise and Fall of the Fulani Empire in Nigeria

By Young Radikum

History teaches us that empires rise and fall. Inevitably. 

Usually they rise on the ashes of an older empire, and in the due course of time, they form the hearthstones of a new era, for the better or for the worse. 

Things would begin to unravel not long after the empire had attained its peak - reached its apogee, as the history teachers liked to say. Next there would be a rebellion in one of the outlying provinces, to which the king would despatch an expeditionary force.

The defeat of that expeditionary force would send shock waves all around, revealing the rot, the drift, in the king's court. Of course, more provinces would rebel. And the king's court, blinded by ineptitude, corruption, nepotism, the old ways of doing things, which produces an inborn, blinkered arrogance, would have no useful answers to the unraveling of the kingdom.

So it is with the Fulani empire in Nigeria. 

We learn through history that Fulani herders began moving eastward from their Futa Jalon homeland in Guinea into the area today called Nigeria from about the 15th century. With the Niger River drawing its source from the Futa highlands, it made sense to follow its banks full of pasture to wherever they led. 

Religion, a Perfect Tool

On arrival in what was Hausaland, the Fulani were outsiders, content to roam the bush with their herd. Until some of them picked up Islam, which had been practiced by the Hausas and the Kanuri for several hundred years before then. 

Religion, always a perfect tool for empire builders, became the pretext for some ambitious Fulani to make their move. The newcomers to the religion decided that the old practitioners, who retained a lot of their ancestral traditions with Islam, weren't practicing the religion well enough, and needed to be purified with a jihad (a religious war). 

That 1804 revolution, which led to the fall of the old Hausa city states, also marked the start of the Fulani empire in Nigeria, wearing the toga of the Sokoto Caliphate we know today. 

As nomads without a settled culture, the best they could do was to drive their new subjects as they drove their cattle, putting them constantly under the whip, and ruthlessly exploited by a ruling class that equated all their iniquities with the will of Allah. The cruelty was so outstanding, as the writer Abubakar Adam Ibrahim noted in a recent essay, that the Hausa masses rejoiced when the British defeated the Fulani in 1903. A key difference, they testified, was that where the British paid labourers for work done, the Fulani rulers didn't. They just took whatever they wanted and paid with cruelty.

Being feudal and resistant to change, the British preferred an alliance with them, reasoning correctly that their conservatism will slow, if not stall, Nigeria's (nay Africa’s) development. They've played this retrogressive role faithfully. The ruling Fulani elite realize that as long as they keep their subjects ignorant of life outside their own interpretation of the Koran, so long would their reign last. How much they wish to export that to the rest of the country can only be imagined.   

Weaponizing Poverty 

What's more, this mass of humanity, thoroughly indoctrinated to think of their oppressors as their heroes, was also weaponized by their tormentors. They turn them into mobs at short notice to deploy against opponents in the competition for national resources. They also provide the rulers with block votes at elections. 

History will note that nurturing this mass of poor and uneducated, unskilled people through the almajiri system of street kids, ultimately proved a double-edged sword that hastened the fall of the Fulani empire.

Nigeria has for the past decade been in the grip of a deadly Islamist insurgency by militants who, like Dan Fodio before them, seek to purify a decadent elite on their way to realizing their power ambitions. It's noteworthy that both the Boko Haram founder  Mohammed Yusuf and his successor and actualizer, Abubakar Shekau, were products of the almajiri system. As long as that pool of street children exist, there'll be no end to the violence sweeping northern Nigeria and infecting the rest of the country.

Buhari has so far in his current reign acted like a man anointed to hasten the end of Nigeria and the Fulani empire. 

He was among a crop of Fulani military and political elite that rightly read the January 1966 coup as the closest anyone came to ending their rule in Nigeria. Buhari and other Fulani elite naturally derived a lot of phobias from that event and its aftermath. The Igbos in particular, with their individuality and entrepreneurship, intensely feel the drag, the incubus of Fulani elite misrule. The Fulani feudalists, in turn, see the Igbo capitalist as the biggest threat to their unearned privileges.

Biafra as Bogeyman

It's not surprising that Buhari frequently recalls his role in the war to keep Nigeria one for the Fulani. And to raise his hackles all you have to say is Biafra! His entire career was built on the model of "we" versus "them" where people not of the same creed and ethnicity are barely acknowledged as human.

After he toppled a democratic regime in 1983 because its trajectory appeared against his ethnic and religious interests, he had to be relieved of leadership lest he ran the country aground. Repackaged as a saint by desperate politicians doubting his staying power and hoping he would stumble and drop the reins for them to pick up, he has shocked them by staying on to much deleterious effect.

One of the first things Buhari did on taking power in 2015 was to hold a lecture at the Lugard Hall in Kaduna where he announced that the "north is back." Back to what? Back to power, the power to share the spoils of power. Not back to lead Nigeria to economic productivity and development, but to sit at the head of the table and share out the product of the sweat of others like all feudal lords love to do.

By then oil had flowed for more than 50 years, and more was expected to flow. There had been an interregnum of Olusegun Obasanjo's rule that was to end in 2007 but was extended to 2015 after Umaru Yar'Adua's brief stay in office. So the north was back in 2015 to doing what it knew best - sharing and taking the lion share to fritter away.

Then the unexpected factor immediately doomed the regime: the collapse of crude oil prices. It was never planned for, never anticipated, yet it was the reality that faced the regime and immediately spooked it. The Buhari regime has tried to borrow itself out of the mire but is sinking more into the quagmire.

Fated to Be a Destroyer 

Yet he remains oblivious of his fate as the destroyer. Not minding, he's gone ahead to unfurl his narrow-minded agenda: barefaced Fulani/ Muslim supremacy. He has run the most nepotistic government in the history of the country, appointed only northern Muslims to the helm of all key security commands.  They have in turn overseen a national proliferation of a Fulani militia that has unleashed violence across the land without any official censor, in the name of grazing their cattle. He elevates his Fulani people and other northern Muslims as supreme, with others as mere vassals to be subjugated by force. He has zero faith in the constitution he swore to uphold and undermines it with a cynical, gap-toothed relish. 

The consequence is that most non-Muslim northerners and the rest of the country have lost confidence in the Buhari regime. Conspiracy theories, made credible by the government's disposition, have spread of a Fulani, Muslim plot to takeover Nigeria. The emergence of Amotekun militia in the southwest and a copycat in the southeast, represent open repudiation of the sectional leanings of the Buhari government. 

Even more serious is the emboldening of separatist groups and the sprouting of mini-insurgencies across the length and breadth of Nigeria, stretching the security forces thin. In the military, a corruption industry, discrimination and incompetence have ensured that the trillions spent on defence and security build private estates rather than buy weapons and feed troops. 

And the national debt keeps piling up, to the extent that 83 percent of revenue, at the last count, was being spent on debt servicing alone. With a sluggish economy, a predominantly youthful and restive population, managed by an anachronistic regime, it's not hard to see the troubles that lie ahead for the Fulani/Muslim rulers. And as each day unfolds, it's getting more obvious that time is not on their side.  

In high places confusion reigns.

Buhari’s administration,  like the man, is so stiff-necked that it can't even look up to see a falling roof over their head. That's what happens when empires are about to fall, like the accursed dog, they can't even smell the damned shit. 

 

 

 

Nigeria: What kind of restructuring?

Nigeria: What kind of restructuring?

By Chuks Isiugo

That is one question that has popped up now and then amid the current noisy, and sometimes rancorous debate about the future of Nigeria. It is a question that is at once pertinent and crucial, if a country that lost its way can get back on the track.

Perhaps, that question should be preceded by yet another question: Why restructure? You restructure when a construct has become weak and rickety. When a structure has outlived its usefulness, is no longer sustainable or delivering the service it was designed for. When the structure has become misshapen.

The fact is that the structure of Nigeria today isn't what it was designed to be. It was designed as a regional structure, where the three, and later four constituent parts were semi-autonomous, controlled 50 percent of their resources and were able to shape their destiny. As the tragedy of Nigeria's post-colonial era unfolded, and the state was captured by a faction of the elite in the ensuing one-upmanship, the distortion began.

With the oil reserves found in the country's southeast as the big spoil, all subsequent administrative creativity exhibited by members of the famous Class of July ‘66 was aimed at taking more than their fair share of the oil wealth, through the creation of states and local government areas and the award of oil acreages to selves and cronies. In other words, all those administrative units created by a succession of military regimes, from Gowon to Abacha, were all effected with an eye on sharing the oil wealth. None was designed as a genuine administrative units to improve the management of production and the economy, but rather as conduits for siphoning the oil wealth produced in the Niger Delta.

That is why we need to restructure because the oil age has ended. If you want to be hopeful, you can say it's about to end, and a give it a few more years, even a decade more. But for all practical purposes, the foundation on which the current Nigerian system is built has been undermined irredeemably. In societies where the ruling elites are forward thinking, they would have acted before the economic imperative. Now the imperative is upon us and people are asking, why restructure? They don't get it that if they don't restructure the force of circumstance will do it for them.

Abubakar Atiku seems to get it. And he's been warning the feudal elite of the north to move in time before the tsunami comes. Ibrahim Babangida, of all people, now gets it too, and has joined the chorus.

For years, especially following the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections, groups such as the National Democratic Coalition, the Movement for National Reform (led by Anthony Enahoro), the Afenifere Group of the Yoruba southwest and the Eastern Mandate Union led by Arthur Nwankwo, have consistently called for restructuring the country, to return to the independence mandate. These were political agitations not backed by the economic imperative. They were mostly ignored without consequence.

Now it can no longer be ignored without grievous consequences. Despite President Muhammadu Buhari's military bravura and feudal arrogance, it took faceless, non-state actors called the Niger Delta Avengers to teach him that the region's oil could no longer be taken without their consent, even in this twilight of the oil age. It was a lesson he should've learned beforehand, and Nigeria could've avoided recession.

Technological advances in oil production will ensure the abundance of the fuel, and Nigeria would be hard-pressed to find buyers should it overproduce as it did in the past. With advances being made in alternative energy, including electric cars, wind and solar energy, it is estimated that the equivalent of all of OPEC’s production today (about 32 million barrels a day) won't be needed by the 2030s.

So this is Nigeria’s conundrum. Why won't you restructure faced with such a daunting future? Isn't it better we rejig the structure, and create units that are economically sustainable, release the feudal brakes holding back Nigeria, free pent up energies now bursting its sides and allow the wheel of progress to take us to the future?

The Genius of Okonjo-Iweala's Economics

By Chuks Isiugo

What is the purpose of governance in Nigeria? That is one question, simple as it seems, that is key to diagnosing Nigeria's worsening ailments. Perhaps it's not being addressed because everyone knows what the answer is: plunder! By some suppressive mechanism, this truth is never allowed to rise to the surface of our national consciousness. And we've had successions of governments going around peddling the bare-faced lie that government is about development.

 Yes, indeed, governance once was about development. When the first human communities were built it wasn't difficult for them to see that individuals needed to cede some of their personal interests, freedoms, to a collective, a sovereign that became the common interest, that worked for the interest of all, with equity and fairness, to avoid a life that was brutish and short. They could see that then, it's now that they don't. 

Well, of course, megalomaniacs always tried to seize that collective power for their personal aggrandizement. History is replete with the many revolutions fought to tame such huge egos and humble them. But when they assumed the nationalist garb, they became justifications for imperialist plunder and fascist atrocities. 

 Thus was Nigeria born: a contraption designed to plunder and rape more than 250 ethnic and language groups, making up a fifth of the population of Africa. At least its creators had a purpose and brought their efficiency to bear. Roads and rails were built to wherever they needed to evacuate resources. Schools were built where they needed to train manpower. Courts were established where they needed to impose order right after the gunboats had passed through. They had a purpose. 

But when they handed over the contraption they had built to the newly trained Nigerian operators, there was a problem. The contraption needed to be re-purposed so that it was no longer a tool for plunder but one for development. That never happened for the leaders could find no better use for the machinery they inherited and couldn't turn swords into ploughshares. 

So, to ask the question again: what is the purpose of governance in Nigeria? Answer: plunder! That explains why a census is not a headcount in aid of management planning but the deliberate inflation of numbers in order to lay claim to a bigger share of the commonweal; that is why people agitate for more states and local governments, not as cohesive units of administration and social organization but as sharing centers for the national cake; that is why David Mark as Minister of Communication confidently declared that the telephone is not for the poor man at the same time the technology to democratize it was far advanced; that is why politics is a do or die affair because you get a chance to be a sharer, dishing out pieces of the national cake however caught one's fancy; that is why more money is spent on defense and national security than education and health, because those who have made it to the round table at the very top need to be protected - and we don't need surplus humanity, so why give them health and education?

 Things have gone so bad with perhaps the most self-destructive political elite in the world that the more revenue that accrues to the government, the worse things have become for their people. Since 1999 Nigeria has earned more money from crude oil exports than all previous years put together, with states such as Delta and Akwa Ibom earning more than accrued to the national coffers at the time General Yakubu Gowon declared that he didn't know what to do with money in 1975. Yet there was no visible impact on basic services and public works.

 It's all too clear now what James Ibori did with Delta's money and Diepreye Alamieyeseigha with Bayelsa's: they stole them. More than 300 billion naira was budgeted to build a major highway linking important economic regions, it remained a death trap for the duration of a regime that made the award - even a successor minister wept over it - and yet no work was done. The man who presided over this got even bigger roles in successive governments. Even the very road to the seaport in Lagos through which they import their luxury goods decayed without eliciting any urgency in them to mend it.

 By the time of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala's second coming as finance minister, now serving Goodluck Jonathan, 75-77 percent of the national budget was going to recurrent expenditure, - to pay salaries, allowances, run the office - with the rest invested on capital projects, such as new roads, railways, schools, hospitals. That is, 7.7 naira out of every 10 naira the government spent went to cater for public servants that are not up to two million people, less than 2 percent of Nigeria's 170 million people. Then 2.3 out of every 10 naira went for the rest of the say 168 million people. Can you beat such insanity! In recent years government officials took caprice even further by refusing to dispense capital budgets and sharing the money among themselves at the end of the financial year rather than return it to the treasury. It's been established that our lawmakers are the best paid in the world, our president's kitchen among the best stocked and his aircraft fleet of the most wide ranging brands.

 Okonjo-Iweala was quick to seize on the disparity between capital and recurrent spending, how it was outrageous and needed to be reversed if we should aspire to development, when she took office. She was amply supported by the Central Bank Governor Lamido Lanusi, who questioned why we needed so many states, so many lawmakers, so many ministers (for plunder of course). It was as if he had forgotten the purpose of the Nigerian state; he promptly got chided by the lawmakers, who also initiated a law to whittle down the powers of the central bank governor. (For an example of why the size of the capital budget matters, Lagos state under Babatunde Fashola has consistently spent an average of 65 percent of its budget on capital projects and the impact is clear for allto see; translate the scale to Nigeria and you'll get the big picture).

Negotiations with stakeholders in the three arms of government for a medium-term economic plan initiated under Okonjo-Iweala could only secure a concession to reduce recurrent from 75 percent to 68 percent over three years from 2012 to 2015. Anything more would have rocked the machinery of plunder badly, putting its passengers at great risk. It was best to proceed delicately. At that point it seemed to me that Okonjo-Iweala had failed in her bid to transform a reprobate.

What has since emerged instead is indeed evidence of her genius. Loans, loans, loans of various kinds have been arranged from mostly the Chinese and other multilateral lenders to finance infrastructure projects without tampering with the recurrent funds available to public officials. In fact they may even get more. Chinese funds will now build us four brand new airport terminals, build us new railway lines and power stations, help us develop our economy without the rigour of financial discipline. Hopefully we will emerge from it a diversified, flourishing modern economy, one of the top 20 globally by 2020. A win-win situation, as they say. A looter continua! And there lies the genius of Okonjo-Iweala!

The Significance of Achebe as an African Writer

(A tribute to Chinua Achebe who passed on at the age of 82 last week.)

By Chuks Isiugo

In the early 1980s along thecorridors of the English Department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka on one certain day, an argument ensued between Esiaba Irobi and Maxwell Ihedioha on whether Achebe had won the Nobel Prize or not. I can't quite recollect who was canvassing what position, but I remember clearly how it ended.

     "Let's ask him!" I quipped to the two combatants as we watched Achebe step out of his office about to go out."Let's ask him!" they chorused.

     So we all strayed a bit uncertainly towards him.

     "Good morning, Prof" It was Esiaba who spoke up on our behalf."

    "Good morning. How are you?" He turned to us with his soft voice and the faint smile of a writer imagining a funny scene that he seemed to wear always.

      "We've been having an argument that you have won the Nobel Prize. Then we thought we should ask you as we saw you coming out of your office."

     Achebe's smile widened and became ironical as he detected humor. "Not yet. I haven't won that. But thank you for wishing it for me," he said as we went off in laughter, the matter finally resolved.

     Achebe’s one great trait was his simplicity, showing that a writer can be a normal human being. He can raise a family and stick with his wife without being moralistic about it and still abound with a liberal dose of naughty humor. A writer doesn't have to be full of himself and unapproachable. At the same time a writer can drive a nice car if he wants to (he drove a Mercury Monarch in those days) as he was to tell Esiaba in a subsequent interview. In short, that a writer is a man, a member of his community.

     I was to see this significance in his conduct and interventions during those years we as students were able to mingle in his company, whether in the classroom, at social events or at home. I remember one occasion he held a lecture at the Margaret Ekpo Refectory in those days. His had been preceded by visit by Wole Soyinka, the eventual winner of the Nobel Literature Prize a few years later. We had all thronged to Soyinka’s lecture and were not disappointed. There was Soyinka standing at the lectern, filling the hall with his presence: his uniquely cut, dark jumper top, his hirsute Afro then devoid of grey, his booming voice and very impressive diction. He did fit the bill and we were all excited to see him, even though we couldn't make much sense of what he said, we were all satisfied with the performance.

     Then came the Achebe lecture and we expected something similar. But we were disappointed. His was rather a self-effacing presence. He wore a printed Ankara top over grey trousers, his voice rather high pitched (with none of the boom of Soyinka’s), his gestures rather reserved. All his efforts were geared toward focusing us on the subject of his discussion. We were disappointed as it wasn't as colourful a show as Soyinka’s. It took me years of added maturity to appreciate how important it was that Achebe remained himself and didn't try to be anyone else. I also began to reflect on how lucky my generation was to be mentored by the likes of Achebe, Soyinka and J.P. Clark, all strong, unique examples of what it meant to be an artiste.

     In April 1990, I was in the swirl of activities to mark Achebe’s  60 years and had managed to door-step him for an interview. Days later I had gone to his Nsukka home near the campus stadium in the company of the painter Greg Odo, who was well-known to the family.  It was four days before the road accident that was to cripple him for the rest of his days, I remember very clearly. And after we sat down and made introductions, Achebe asked me if I found the interview he gave me useful. I was surprised he still remembered me. I said I did, though I was still struggling to get any publisher interested in the story I had written.

     While most of the conversation went on between his wife, Christie, Greg and I, Achebe sat quietly listening. His only intervention was to ask Greg, who had been describing the plot of a novel he planned to write, to get on with it and talk less about it.

     "If you keep talking about it, you may feel you have done enough and end up not writing it," Achebe said.

     The writer should always be aware that he is engaged in a solemn, serious business, was a message Achebe always harped.As he said in an interview, his advice to aspiring writers is that they should know it’s a very difficult business:
     “They have to know that before hand. Because if they're going into it, they should know that what it takes is not just the fanciful notions, you know, especially how writers look, what they wear or something. They should really have the energy plus the stuff. You know the story of a young  man who became mad? He just became mad, and he was just stamping up and down the market. And the older mad man who was just watching him after a time called him and said: ‘This thing you entering, do you think you can do it?’ He told him this thing is for life and you're already wasting so much energy on the first day.”

Obituary: Ashikiwe Adione-Egom, the motor-park economist, 1942-2003

By Chuks Isiugo





     Long before I met Ashikiwe Adione-Egom in 1987,  his name had preceded him. I  first encountered him through the numerous articles he wrote in The Guardian newspaper of Lagos in the mid-1980s challenging the military-backed, IMF- and World Bank inspired economic orthodoxies of the time, which later became encapsulated as the Structural Adjustment Pogramme (SAP). What they essentially said was that the market was supreme, and the ultimate regulator. So everything - health, education, infrastructure, the entire development process - had to be left to the market to determine. And whatever the market decided was God's will. Q.E.D.

     It was a convenient argument for someone with a fat wallet. Even more so when he was armed and had filled his pocket from the public coffers, as was the case with the soldiers then seized power under the leadership of Ibrahim Babangida. The argument was never won with logic but with the power of the gun and the weight of the Western powers who wanted SAP to impoverish Africa and continue the 500-year-long rape of the continent. Adione-Egom was one of those (along with Adebayo Adedeji of the UN Economic Commision for Africa) that railed against the callous argument. Thus he styled himself the motor park economist, who thought about the full ramifications of the harsh measures on the disadvantaged, even the touts in the motor parks.

     And when eventually I met him, the circumstances were somewhat dramatic and less than edifying. I had gone to The Guardian with an old friend to visit a common friend who was working then in the now defunct African Guardian magazine. At the reception we had  found no one, and while we waited a staff member came along. While we were asking from him the whereabouts of the object of our visit, along came another man dressed in khaki shorts pulled up to his belly, into which his shirt was tucked in. He wore socks that stopped just before his knees and a pair of shoes. The only thing missing was a helmet to complete to look of an old British colonial officer.
     It was Ashikiwe Adione-Egom. He glared at us while we made our inquiry and interrupted.
     "You guys should stop disturbing him, you didn't keep any receptionist here," he said.
     "But I'm not talking to you!" I shot back at him.
     "Then go! Then go!" He said, flailing his arms as he walked away, not waiting for my next response.
     My friend and I looked at each other and the man we had been talking to and we all burst into laughter.
      "Don't mind Ashikiwe," the fellow we had been talking to said to us. "He's a trouble maker."
     That was my first encounter with his eccentricity. Years later, when he had become familiar with my writing and sought me out, we became great friends. I never reminded him of that first encounter. It was not necessary and had been overtaken by events. I was always amazed by how much I learned from every conversation I had with him, no matter how short.
     Adione-Egom's main preoccupation was how the global financial system was rigged ab initio by being founded on the gold standard, a derivative of the global trading system created from the proceeds of the Atlantic slave trade. His argument was always that Africa and the global south would never find economic freedom unless they freed themselves from this system and founded an alternative financial system.
He spoke with a deep knowledge, having studied economics at Cambridge University and the best institutions of the the West and excelled. But he was like a prophet not reckoned with in his own country. He had the misfortune of being in Nigeria at a time of the most brutish anti-intellectualism, during the reign of military rulers from Muhammadu Buhari, Babangida and Sani Abacha, who decided that those with the requisite knowledge to move Nigeria (and Africa) forward were not needed since they were bent on putting the country in reverse gear (apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti).
     So any intellectual who was worth the name had to brain-drain to other countries (often in the West), where their knowledge was appreciated and eagerly deployed. The rest put their knowledge to the service of the military in exchange for filthy lucre. Those who did neither became sidelined. And that became the lot of Adione-Egom. It was a difficult fate, devoid of material rewards. But Adione-Egom bore that fate with dignity and never for once stopped telling truth to power.
     In the last decade or so, his writing took a decidedly Christian, religious tone. His preferred name became Peter Alexander Egom. But the substance remained the same. It became a variant of the liberation theology pushed by Catholic priests in Latin America in the 1970s. Unlike the prosperity preaching of the Nigerian pentecostals that provides succour to the hearts of thieves and looters of public property in government since the 1980s, which justifies wealth and luxury irrespective of the manner of acquisition, Adione-Egom's economic theology was bottom-up. He argued against the economic philosophy of might-is-right and insisted that God's plan is that none of his children shall sit in the sidewalk and beg bread (to borrow from Bob Marley). It is a simple truth, so simple to be derided by those in power, but equally an enduring truth that would survive their reign, even though Adione-Egom is no more.
   

Abuja: The Quintessential Apartheid City

Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, is the quintessential apartheid city! It is the biggest achievement of the country's ruling elite and the biggest illustration of its folly. Eager to recreate the look of their favorite cities in Europe and America, they decided to build something of their own to mimic their masters. So they built Abuja, the apartheid city, from where the poor will be banished and the thieving oppressor won't be tormented by the sight of of the effect he wrought  - the hordes of the hungry thronging after their sleek cars, or shanties standing next to their mansions and detracting from their concrete beauty. That was the mistake of Lagos that won't be repeated in Abuja.

A view of Maitama, a favorite perch of Abuja's rich

So in Abuja, workers pour in every morning from the various satellite towns that ring the city, do their bit and troop out at dusk.  As they leave every evening, the wide, tree-lined streets of the central district look even more empty, lined by huge, silent buildings. It is estimated by an official, who seems to know, that more than 60 percent of the buildings in the city are vacant. The workers who take leave of the beautiful city at the end of everyday, make their way towards Mararaba, Nyanya, Keffi, Kubwa, Zuba, Suleja, Mpape, in crowded, rickety buses, taxis, motorbikes, covered in a cloud of exhaust fumes, all potential candidates for the daily carnage of accidents on the city roads.

Where the minority government in apartheid South Africa took the trouble to build relatively decent houses in the satellite towns, with covered drains, regular power supply and reliable transportation (often trains) to the cities where they worked, the Nigerian rulers have gone a step further. They've saved the money that should've gone into all that and put it into the cost of governance. That's money spent maintaining officials, their advisers, special assistants, assistants to special assistants, assistants to advisers, their secretaries, office assistants, and providing all these officials with officials cars, official housing, foreign travel  and other privileges of office. The result is that currently, 75 percent of the national budget (more than 80 percent of which comes from crude oil exports) is spent on maintaining the government and bureaucracy.
This has been the steady trend of these past several years of civilian-guided plunder of national resources.

Even where money is voted for capital projects, such as roads, or even investments in health, education and other basic social services, the bureaucracy has in recent years found a way to subvert them. Such projects are simply not implemented, and monies voted for them are simply shared among officials in the concerned ministries, agencies or departments. Or where it can't be shared, the money is returned to the treasury, or rather a show is made of returning the funds to the treasury, from where it is put back in the pipeline for the next budget process, until it's flow is diverted to irrigate private pockets, estates and libidos. Awash with cash, government officials have created Abuja's artificial economy, where prices have no bearing to the legitimate income of the participants in that market, but is propelled by its abundance in the pocket of government officials (their wives or concubines) who have lost their heads at the sheer amount of money within their reach.

Mpape, a satellite of Maitama.

So while Abuja's streets are among the cleanest, widest and most beautiful in the world,  while its hotels and nightclubs are brimming with revelers and prostitutes, there's no decent road connecting the city to any other part of Nigeria. Any visitor to Abuja will no doubt be impressed by the eight-lane highway running from the airport into the city. But it will take only a few kilometers drive beyond the airport on the way out, to realize that the main road linking the administrative capital to the country's entire south, including the economic capital of Lagos, is a snaky  two-lane highway, dotted  liberally with craters and potholes, bumps of warped tarmac and sandy portions where the tar was washed away by rain. Indeed there's no road built to link Nigeria's economic capital with its political capital. But why should the ruling elite care, when the very road that evacuates their massive imports of luxury goods from the ports of Lagos have failed completely in the past decade and have been abandoned in perverse neglect?

Franz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth that every generation must, out of relative obscurity, realize its mission, fulfill it or betray it. The Nigerian ruling elite, out of relative clarity, chose obscurantism, enthroned greed as a guiding principle and betrayed its mission to advance the liberation of the African continent from a 500-year-old grip of invaders and plunderers.  While the Afrikaners in South Africa, having seized political power and the commanding heights of the economy felt a dire need to justify it ,and invented apartheid, the ruling elite in Nigeria doesn't feel obliged to to think, except when applying cunning to thievery. They just show power,  and are keen to make it brutal to make the point.

In Nigeria, the ruling elite, bereft of any ideas, has been content to play the role of warrant chiefs, doing the bidding of their masters in London and Washington, hoping it would be enough to give them free rein to ride roughshod over their people. While Nigeria was under colonial rule, the British built  a railway and road network designed to aid the colonial enterprise. Two rail lines, one running from the northeast to the southeast, and another running from the northwest to the southeast, ensured that all goods meant for export got to their intended destination. Similarly, goods imported by the colonists used these  same transport arteries to reach their intended markets. However, under self-rule, little or no improvements have been made more than 50 years on.

What's more, a succession of military rulers starting from the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida in 1985, sabotaged the country's skeletal rail system in order to create road haulage contracts for friends and cronies. Sheer creativity, that is! Within a few years, all the goods and passengers that previously relied on the railways, now had to be transported by the roads. Trunk roads built around the country in the first oil boom years of the 1970s, rapidly failed, as everything including fuel, goods arriving the ports, farm produce moving from the countryside into the cities, now had to be hauled by road. At the same time the regimes in  power didn't care about investing in either maintaining the very roads now carrying the burden of the country's transportation or about building news ones.

The same fate befell the countries refineries. Four refineries with a capacity to process 445,000 barrels of crude oil daily had been completed during the first rush of oil money in the '70s and '80s. For many years they provided enough fuel for domestic use until the mid-80s under Babangida, when balance of payment difficulties (essentially importing more than you had foreign currency to pay for) resulted in the enforced devaluation of the naira under World Bank and International Monetary Fund economic prescriptions, essentially designed to retard Africa's development and reduce value of its people's labor value. Of course, being the top warrant chief of the time, Babangida heartily fed the nation the ugly, ineffective medicine. Then began the logic of petroleum subsidy, whereby fuel prices were raised periodically either to bring them in line with international prices or to discourage smuggling to neighboring countries where the prices were higher. By the time Sani Abacha took over  the plundering contraption called government in Nigeria, in the late '90s, all refineries in the country had stopped working, interminable amounts were being spent fixing the refineries without success, while fuel was being imported from refineries owned by top officials of the same government, including Abacha himself and his national security adviser, Ismaila Gwarzo, from neighboring West African countries including Sierra Leone.

What was true for the railways, roads and refineries, was also true for power supply. The country's last power stations were built in the early '80s. No new additions were made and the people lost hope when they saw that the government itself now depended on generators to run. Then everybody went for generators, thanks to Chinese manufacturers who built cheaper alternatives that became available to a wider number of people. Now the country is not only the greatest importer of power generators worldwide, but also own the highest number per capita, spurning its riches of natural gas, coal, biomass, wind and solar powering the rest of the world.

Unfazed by its monumental failings, the ruling elite, like an unrepentant prodigal, is ever seeking new ways to create the money to feed its rapacious greed, usually with the advice of their masters in London and Washington. The latest top warrant chief, Goodluck Jonathan, is now touting the failures of several administrations, including his own, as a basis to increase fuel prices. Having spent hundreds of billions every year to pay the difference between the international price of crude oil and the local cost of fuel, the government now wants to stop the payment in order to use the difference to build the country's infrastructure, officials say.

No mention is made of any plan to cut the bloated bureaucracy and government, with legislators that earn the highest pay among their peers in the world. There is no talk of rebuilding the refineries to ensure domestic processing of fuel and tackling the cartel the government admitted was controlling fuel importation and taking most of the fees paid as subsidy. There is no plan to rebuild the railways, to shift the burden of transportation from the roads and guarantee cheaper movement of goods and people, before thinking of increasing fuel prices. Even the government's plan to revive the power sector is now dependent on foreign investors, as if foreign investors built the functioning power infrastructure of the rest of the world. Roads and railways are now to be built through public-private partnerships, which means that the contract will be sold to companies in which they have interests. The only thing they won't seed the private sector and foreign investors are the armed forces and the police. They need armed protection to maintain their plunder. That's the game plan of the apartheid regime in Abuja.

The jealous God is an imperialist

One of the concepts that have come in handy for the imperial subjugators of African and black people is the concept of a jealous God. It has been applied to devastating effect on Africans by Arab and European predators that for long coveted Africa and its riches, using Islam and Christianity. Incidentally both are Abrahamic religions, which along with its third leg, Judaism have been deployed for violent purposes over time. Their pretention has often been that their aim was to enthrone monotheism, but in reality nothing was further from the truth. The true aim was to conquer and and enslave African people and take the riches found in their land.



The African people they claimed they were teaching about one God, had always known about the Creator. I am yet to find an indigenous African language that doesn't have a word for the Supreme Being, and proceeding on simple logic, it's not possible to name what you don't know. The name you give reflects the way you apprehend what you name, and while the African may pay obeisance to some natural objects or animals or other natural phenomena, he was aware that the Supreme Being manifested in everything in creation and appreciated the Creator in like manner. Indeed, Africa, as the home of mankind and civilization had given the concept of one God to humanity. From Ancient Egypt, Greeece learned and handed over to Rome,; and till date we remain captive to the Greco-Roman epoch..



Yet, the descendants of Rome and Mecca come running to Africa to teach the original source of the knowledge - one of the great ironies of life! But indeed the true aim was to conquer and dominate the African, dominate his mind and dominate his resourcesand keep him in perpetual servitude. Therefore, the Chrisitians say, the African must have no other God except the Christian God, as if there was any other God but God. In turn the Muslim insists that Allah is the only way, when he means cultural imperialism, a sharia that denudes the individual of all that makes him original and turns his gaze perpetually to the east.

And Africa is thorn, warped, twisted and befuddled by this so-called war between two civilizations, which is actually a war over who should control the booty that they saw Africa to be. A war with origins going back to some 500 years ago when Europe found a sea route down to West Africa and undermined the erstwhile middleman position which the Arabs occupied for centuries as traders of the treasures of Africa to Europe and the Far East. Most recently China has joined the scramble, but as with the longer-standing predators, the aim is also the same: to take what Africa has, and inevitably in the process, find a way to denigrate Africans as people who lack humanity and for that reason don't deserve the riches of the continent.

So what should be the best response from Africans in the face of the hypocritical but nonetheless grievious onslaught by the socalled Arab and European civilizations on their African forbear? Stand firm, don't doubt yourself because the life of God is already in you through creation. The fact of being alive justifies all existence and one owes the Creator a duty to live life fully. Don't be lazy, don't flee from work and most of all seek knowledge of that which is true. That will lead you to the knowledge that there is only one humanity and that Africa was the route humans walked as they came out of creation. With that knowledge at the back of your mind, please forge ahead to the promised land.