By Femi Kusa
johnolufemikusa@gmail.com
olufemikusa@omail.ai
We stand again for the umpteenth time before a picture of a hopefully better Nigeria glittering in the horizon and beckoning on us. It will not come to us. We must go to it.
This picture is of the Nigeria of our dreams, of Nigeria as it could be. Because they all thought they were all-wise, military president Ibrahim Gbadamosi Babangida (IBB), like his civilian successors, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan and, lately, Muhammadu Buhari, failed to lead this nation to the promised land. They all ran their shows with small kitchen cabinets which soon overpowered them and consumed whatever energy and vision they thought they had.
Like Pilate’s wife, Aisha Buhari warned her husband of the do-gooders. But he silenced her and threw her into “the kitchen and the other room”. I hope that President elect Bola Ahmed TINUBU, as president, will learn from the mistakes of his predecessors. If he does not, Nigerian nightmares, such as poverty, mass unemployment, psychosomatic diseases and untimely deaths will continue to flourish.
MISTAKES
One of the mistakes of Tinubu’s predecessors was that they failed to have 360 degrees handle on each of Nigeria’s major menacing problems and possible solutions to them. Thus, government was conducted on “fire brigade basis”, always plodding in the dark and never really emerging fully from a dark tunnel.
In my view, obtaining 360 degrees handle on national questions is best done, through Presidential commissions. This column advised President Buhari of this. But he may be forgiven if he paid not much attention to it because his health got the better part of him in the early days of his administration. Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo would have helped him. But, as first lady Aisha Buhari said, before she took her bow from the state house and hibernated in Dubai, a powerful “mafia” had hijacked the president. Even Bola Ahmed TInubu, who helped the president to power, was locked out. It must have taken “village intelligence” and political sagacity for Tinubu to have refrained from voicing public opposition to some failings of the Buhari administration at that time and during the political campaigns on which, vicariously, he was caught in the Buhari cobwebs.
COMMISSIONS
The incoming President may design a totally new road map for Nigeria with a Presidential commission for each national question, and a presidential review commission which will help him to review the performances of his Ministers every quarter.
Presidential commissions will examine over a time frame problems facing Nigeria in their respective sectors and provide solutions to them. The president can formulate the solutions into an agenda which the Ministers will be obliged to implement. A Presidential review commission will monitor implementation of the agenda. Ministers who fall below par over two consecutive quarters will be shown the door. Gone would be the days Ministers bungled and bungled but still kept their jobs. This project will cost money, no doubt. The critics will even wonder if it will not side-line the national assembly. The critics can be told handsome handshakes between Ministers and law makers crippled oversight functions of the assembly. If they didn’t, how come the armed forces couldn’t fight terrorist, bandits, and insurgents until recently when they were re-armed and motivated? How come huge investments in electricity generation and supply haven’t yielded commensurate dividends? How come crude oil is stolen in the oil fields and foreigners are illegally mining and exporting gold?
Fortunately for him, Tinubu is never afraid of spending money. He spends money to make more money than he spends. That is the story of Lagos State for eight years and of the legacy which he left behind and has continued to make Lagos State the Leader State in Nigeria. If, for example, he throws money at a presidential commission on energy, poverty, and through that Nigeria can produce more energy than it needs and export the rest, would that not be better than stockpiling money for the purpose of befooling the electorate four years after with savings and savings and savings which added no value to Nigeria’s family, social, commercial, and industrial wellbeing? The experts would meet, dust the problems up and suggest solutions. We are informed that perfection comes in the union of ideas. When every national question is on the table, face up, and addressed as such, there is transparency. Do we not remember that darkness has no hiding place in the light?
SHONEKAN
On 27 November 1996, military despot General Sani Abacha made former UAC NIGERIA chairman Ernest SHONEKAN chairman of a 250-member vision 2010 committee to tell him how Nigeria can become a world power in 14 years (2010). The committee sub divided itself into 13 work groups, each group charting a route out of a huge, dark tunnel. But many of them were neither original thinkers and players in the sectors they tried to design road maps for. Twenty-seven years after the committee’s inauguration and 13 years after 2010, Nigeria still wallows and grows in the dark. The vision 2020 was rowdy and dabbled into subjects in which many of its members had neither intuitive nor intellectual competence. What he ought to have done was to make the experts tell the nation what they need to bring Nigeria at par with expert sectors in countries which had the mastery of expertise in various sectors. This time around, there could be Presidential commissions for security, agriculture, education, energy, transportation, forestry, health, telecommunications, manufacturing, youth, social welfare, policing, drug abuse, solid minerals. etc.
CIVIL SERVANTS
Proceeding with these templates, the civil service will be purely civil or public service. Nigeria will have a goal in every sector and a vision, always, of such a grand develop skills and objectives to achieve that goal. Chief AWOLOWO did it in the Western region. That is why the Southwest region today is the most developed of Nigeria’s six geopolitical regions. Never mind that Olusegun Obasanjo, as both military and civilian president, came from the Southwest. This region does not accept him as its leader and did not back him up. He did not believe in Chief Awolowo and other Southwest leaders, and he has continued to work against them.
THE PRESIDENT
A president should not be afraid of brainstorming for ideas through presidential commissions. Working through the commissions makes him humble himself before the nation as running an open and inclusive administration, as a person who acknowledges thereby that he is not Mr Know all. He does not have to fear that the government will be highjacked from him. Power is not his. It derives from the people he is a servant of as a gift from their Creator to Whom all Powers belong. It is recognised, though, that being the one entrusted with power for four years, he cannot abdicate Power as he cannot also misuse it. Chief Obafemi Awolowo was on top of this game. He was knowledgeable and visionary. He once told us he was not better than any of us, irrespective of the accolades we all showered on him. He said the difference between him and us was that, when we were under the blue and red light of club houses at night, he was contemplating the problems of the land and finding solutions to them.
So, working through a commission, Chief Awolowo was not like a lamb in the slaughterhouse, naive or uninformed or prone to being misled.
He always knew where he was heading, and only wanted the bare bones or the skeleton fleshed up for him. This was what the likes of Prof Oluwasanmi and Professor Sam Aluko did for him with the pounds, shillings, and pennies from cocoa sales.
Bola Tinubu appears like Chief Awolowo to be tough going. Politically, he has crossed a forest of hinderances Chief Awolowo did not cross. He has given a hint that he would name his ministers within one month. It took Buhari six months to do this in 2015 and two months in 2019. If Tinubu accepts the idea of Presidential commissions, they may have long life spans, advising the government about any divergence from goal, reconciling differences as exigencies may dictate and develop new agendas for the future.
IGBO, KANU
What I am not certain of is if Bola Tinubu would like to tackle the IGBO and NNAMDI KANU questions through third parties such as a presidential commission or personally, and if he would like to do this within one month. I believe it is better for him to do this personally and within one month while the 10th national Assembly is settling down and before the ministers take their seats. The political sea and ocean are calmer currently. He may presage a visit to Igboland with a visit to Catholic Archbishop Kukah, a leading critic of his Muslim-Muslim ticket.
A visit by a President Tinubu to Archbishop Kukah reminds me of a visit by Lagos Governor Tinubu to Chief Gani Fawehinmi who traumatised him with several lawsuits. In the process, Fawehinmi was diagnosed with a rare terminal lung disease, and he was dying. Like a dog paying a visit to a hungry and angry lion in its den, Governor Tinubu visited Fawehinmi at home. Fawehinmi was overwhelmed that a man he viciously attacked would feel so concerned that he was ill and would pay him a home visit. They became friends in the end. From a visit to Archbishop Kukah, a President Tinubu May head for Igboland, to the state of Nnamdi KANU, Anambra. Should he go with KANU? Oh yes. But under cover. Security people know what that means. He would return with Kanu to Aso rock or to Lagos the next day. And, while speculations are at their peak, he would discreetly send KANU back to Kenya and, from there, back to England. This should help to open the South-East for a resolution of the Igbo question. Fences will have to be mended with anti-Igbo forces who want KANU and the Igbos to carry the cans of End SARS youth revolt which almost entombed Nigeria.
THE POLICE
This is where I am headed. I do not like Soldiers always called in to resolve civil disturbances such as kidnapping, terrorism and banditry. The police force can resolve them if it is well trained, armed, and motivated. The military should be hidden from the view of other nations, so they are not easily sized up. My father was a colonial policeman (1945-1979), so I should know what I am talking about as someone who grew up in police barracks for 28 years. Police training nowadays is too short and there are fewer refresher courses. Police barracks are dirty. I doubt if there are weekly barracks inspection anymore. Discipline has sagged. Some smoke Indian hemp in their uniforms amidst hoodlums in street joints. In my days as a barracks resident, police wives were not permitted to sell items such as toiletries, milk or sugar and tea at home. They ran rented shops outside the barracks. Their husbands were investigated for how the investment came about. The mess or the canteens, one for officers the other for other ranks, were the official business houses. But what do you find in police barracks nowadays? Pepper soup joints frequented by the big boys of society the police should keep under watch!
TINUBU’S PROMISE
During the campaigns, Bola Tinubu said Nigeria needed about two million policemen. But some people quickly shut him up while others apologised for a slip of tongue, saying that he meant a smaller number. In my view, we should be looking at about five million policemen. We need not worry about financing. The system will be self-financing.
I proceed from the lessons we should learn from mother nature. The average adult human body has about 100 trillion cells. Cells of the immune system are comparable in cell mass to those of the liver and of the brain. Immune deficiency implies disease or death. Nigeria is “diseased” because of policing deficiency. It is doubtful if we have more than 500,000 policemen to police 200 million citizens. That is about one policeman to about 400 citizens. That was why the police force was literally liquidated by the End SARS youth revolt, irrespective of their arms. Given Nigeria’s insecurity experiences today, we need young men and women for policing in the following areas.
1) REGULAR POLICE
2) FOREST POLICE
3). HIGHWAY POLICE
4). NEIGHBOURHOOD POLICE
5). AIRPORT POLICE
6). SEA POLICE
7). TRAFFIC POLICE.
THE GENERAL POLICE will remain in charge offices in police stations, more of which require upgrading, and will attend to general police duties.
HIGHWAY POLICE fascinate me. It is because we do not have them that kidnappers abduct travellers into the forests. This special police force will govern all highways in the country. They will be different from the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), a traffic police on the highways at best. I imagine about 200,000 vehicles travel every day on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and about the same number on the Lagos-Badagry expressway. Lately, we have been hearing of kidnappings on these roads, as we do hear on the Shagamu-Ijebu-Ode-Benin Road. If every vehicle on the Lagos- Ibadan expressway pays about N200 for highway policing, it will provide 200,000 x 200 which equals N40 million every day or N1.2 billion every month. Of this conservative toll, N200 million may be reserved for road maintenance, while N800 million goes to the highway police and N200 million is kept in reserve. We were promised police patrol and security on this road when it was commissioned by the Obasanjo military administration in August 1978. Today, N200 per vehicle is incomparable with the lives of the occupants of that vehicle. We can replicate what we do on Lagos-Ibadan expressway nationwide, especially for Abuja Kaduna expressway.
FOREST POLICING is as important as policing towns and cities. It is because the forests were ignored that the hoodlums, kidnappers, terrorists, and bandits took them over. Why can huge farms not grow out of them as this column has been canvassing? States that wish to resettle Nigerian (not foreign) nomadic cattle rearers in ranches can do this. Big businesses will spring up in the forest towns. Canning companies will be there. So will be sellers of feed for the cows. Schools and hospitals and restaurants as well as recreational centres will come. The forest police will be there. Residents and companies will pay policing taxes. As I suggested in 2015 and 2019, Nigeria can produce billions of rabbits from the forests every month. I witnessed such a forest activity in Senegal in 2006. There were no jobs for young persons. Women were prostituting. Vivian Wade, French wife of President Abdoulaye Wade, took idle women to forests hostels. They grew cucumbers, cabbage, tubers, fruits, vegetables consumed in Senegal and France, earning fabulous incomes and periodically holidaying in town. We neglected our own forests. As nature abhors a vacuum, ignoble persons took them over and are menacing us. Aren’t we at fault?
NEIGHBOURHOOD POLICE is a big deal. Regular police are overstretched and under equipped and sluggishly respond to emergencies. The neighbourhood police will have good records about many residents. Today, the street junctions and corners are dens of drug sellers and users because policing is not effective there. China fought two opium wars, the first from 1839 to 1842 with Great Britain and from 1856-1860 against Britain, France, and the United States. The Europeans were dumping opium, a narcotic drug, on China for money, and China was trying to shut its ports.
Today, we rely only on the NDLEA to fight drug trafficking in Nigeria. The NDLEA is doing a good job under Brig Buba Marwa (rtd). But it will appear largely limited to airports and seaports. Codeine and tramadol and other narcotics from India and other countries still find their ways to Nigerian neighbourhoods. What about the street corners and road junctions where telephone recharge card businesses are camouflage businesses for selling drugs of all kinds, including those binding in biscuits, sweets, body sprays, drinks, chewing gums, laundry soaps? The neighbourhood police can mark out the drug dens for the NDLEA which can then carry out location sweeps. But is the NDLEA well-staffed for this policing task? Prison expansion, like the setting up of the rehabilitation centres, may be in the forests, will have to go hand in hand with this drive. The inmates of rehab centres may be trained in all sorts of skills in the food chain, to help Nigeria expand farm yield and banish food poverty.
PORT POLICING must be stepped up. Guns and other contraband are flooding in. Seaports are growing in number. Lekki has come up. Badagry is coming up. Bola Tinubu promised Akwa Ibom a seaport. Port Harcourt would want its own. Calabar and Warri are beckoning. So has been Ilaje in Bariga, Lagos, since the 1962 political crisis in Western region upset Chief Awolowo’s plan to make it a seaport. Every state is struggling to have its own airport. Will there be no need to police them?
TRAFFIC POLICING grows with population growth and population movements. Rail transportation is growing. We have witnessed assaults on trains. Abroad, there is police presence at boarding stations and on the trains while Artificial Intelligence monitors the tracks.
CONCLUSION
For want of space, I would like to conclude here this interesting subject. For me, the son of a policeman (Samuel Adebayo Kusa NO 7053), employing five million persons into the various police forces will drastically reduce unemployment, address youth restiveness, make the population more secure, reduce food poverty and prevent the involvement of the military in menial security matters which may distract them from their expert preoccupation, which is war against external aggressors.
FEMI KUSA was at various times Editor; Director of Publication/ Editor-in-Chief of THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER; Editorial Director/ Editor-in-Chief of THE COMET NEWSPAPER. Currently, he keeps a Thursday Column on Alternative Medicine in the NATION NEWSPAPER.
Some of his health columns may be found on www.olufemikusa.com and in MIDIUM a digital platform for writers. He is active also on Facebook @ John OLUFEMI KUSA.
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