July 20, 2010
Bolade my cerebral lawyer friend; pulled a call through to me the other day. He wanted to talk about the just concluded FIFA mundial. For obvious reasons you could also tell he was not in the mood to discuss about the dismal performance of the Super Eagles. I really had not been looking forward to squabble on why the giant of Africa had wobbled and fumbled until it was shown the way out of the tournament.
Bolade my cerebral lawyer friend; pulled a call through to me the other day. He wanted to talk about the just concluded FIFA mundial. For obvious reasons you could also tell he was not in the mood to discuss about the dismal performance of the Super Eagles. I really had not been looking forward to squabble on why the giant of Africa had wobbled and fumbled until it was shown the way out of the tournament.
I was already reeling out the familiar course of arguments in my mind; on our infantile claim to unmerited greatness, our rights to be served before any other in Africa and the usual culture of hoping for the best in spite of hard, bald facts. I was also thinking of how to respond to Bolade’s ubiquitous quips on whether our perpetual talent for fumbling and bungling is located in our stars or in our genes. But he beat my imagination when instead he requested for my take on George Boateng, the jet-black mid-fielder wearing a Ghanaian name in the German squad. My friend wanted to know what Adolf Hitler would have thought of a black man playing in the German squad; which should have been made of only blue eye honks; a prized biological trait of an Aryan, the race for which the Fuehrer had lived, killed and died.
Of course, my friend Bolade knew the answers; he is aware that if the Fuehrer happened to have resurrected from the carton box, where his remains are supposedly held in the Kremlin by the Russians, he would have begged to go back to his anonymous space than ruminating on what had become of Teutonic Germany that was to rule the world for at least a thousand years. Hitler would just as much have been disappointed with the British squad at the just concluded World Cup but not probably at the French, for whom he had little regard. It would not have been surprising to him that the land of De Gaulle has even dipped further into parading a team of assorted players from Arabia and the fringes of Africa. For the malicious Fuehrer, the spectacle of a German defeat from the hands of some dark-hair Uruguayan Indians would have been a sweet and welcomed revenge.
Strangely, Bolade’s insistence on unearthing the sceptre of Nazism in the aftermath of the recently concluded football tournament also unearthed introspection on the irony of contemporary Africa. Played forward, Africa’s contemporary events would have evoked a sense of dé jàvu at the Wolf’s Lair in 1940. Josef Goebbels, Herman Goring, and the rest of the Nazi echelon would not be surprised that South Africa, the most enduring space of white rule in the continent, is the only country qualified to host the 2010 World Cup in the continent; ahead of Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana that have been self-ruling for the better part of one century.
In the circumstance, you could envision Herr von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign Minister and a guiding light of Nazism peering above his monocle as he cheekily advised Africa to take a good look at the trophy as it may never come back to the old continent, except South Africa by some miracle avoids the ruinous path of Zimbabwe and Old Robert by grasping the obvious tenets on power, politics and developmental economics as oxymoron for Black Africa.
Truth be told, that preposition on black African leaders as bad economic managers is already a credible thesis even in presidential palaces across the continent, and has been so apparently since the 1980s, about the time the toothy Minna General zapped the economy and decreed SAP on Nigeria. The preposition on keeping political power and outsourcing the economy may have since mutated into various strains in Nigeria, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Ghana or Senegal; essentially it is no longer unpatriotic to see African rulers espousing the return of the erstwhile colonial masters to the commanding heights of the economies. The preposition is now cruising on its own dialectics like harmattan fire in plain Savannah.
If the West can be asked to run the commanding heights of the economy, why should we shy from offering it the commanding heights of our polities? What really would the ordinary Okada man in Ikot Ekpene lose if Nigeria invites Germans to run the country on Build Operate and Transfer (BOT) and from inside the Aso Rock, to save cost? Wouldn’t we be been better served if the ministries are also handed over to American, German or Dutch experts and if the overpaid legislatures could somehow be relieved of their unmerited perquisites and the proceeds used to provide better education for our children? You can only imagine what profits could have accrued to the restive Delta if the BOT programme had started since 1999, the wasted years of Ibori and Odili the region would have been averted if the states had been run by Norwegians on BOT. If the Israelis are handed the reins at the police headquarters in Louis Edet House and not just occasionally invited to recover kidnapped journalists by a clueless IG, the spate of crime would have abated across the land, leaving honest Nigerians to go about unmolested even on the streets of Jos. PHCN would cease to be a bastion of corruption as we would more likely emerge from the bouts of darkness under the watch of Canadians.
You can expand the preposition on outsourcing to cover every aspect of Nigerian society, including the universities, the rails, the airport and the sea ports. Just envision the prospects of disciplined and efficient Swiss personnel at our entry ports or the British in a judiciary where you could trust that the wigged lordships would truly live up to their appellation.
The point is that Africa’s, especially Nigeria’s independence have not delivered on the promises and the colonial era largely remains a nostalgic reference point. Sure, there are African leaders like Mandela that could be credited with exceptional performance; even here in Nigeria some are breaking the mould in Lagos, River and Ondo States under exceptional encumbrances. But the skewed leadership recruitment process continues to lock out the chance for a real change, as the system seems tailored for political jobbers and knaves with no talent for governance. Even while we have yet made BOT an official policy, Lebanese, Indians and Palestinians run the virtually all the super marts in Lagos while the crude oil taps that feed the profligacy of our rulers are kept flowing by the big Western oil companies.
Officially bringing the system under a BOT arrangement would therefore only formalize and broaden an existing working process and stem the haemorrhage. It would also give our new owners the needed legitimacy to build a working system while we get our acts together. It may appear simple and even self-deprecating especially when you consider it could make Adolf Hitler and Pier Botha wince in their graves, but BOT is not a bad idea in the face of our peculiar circumstances and drab prognoses.
Dr. Goldsmith, a medical practitioner, lives in Lagos
I was already reeling out the familiar course of arguments in my mind; on our infantile claim to unmerited greatness, our rights to be served before any other in Africa and the usual culture of hoping for the best in spite of hard, bald facts. I was also thinking of how to respond to Bolade’s ubiquitous quips on whether our perpetual talent for fumbling and bungling is located in our stars or in our genes. But he beat my imagination when instead he requested for my take on George Boateng, the jet-black mid-fielder wearing a Ghanaian name in the German squad. My friend wanted to know what Adolf Hitler would have thought of a black man playing in the German squad; which should have been made of only blue eye honks; a prized biological trait of an Aryan, the race for which the Fuehrer had lived, killed and died.
Of course, my friend Bolade knew the answers; he is aware that if the Fuehrer happened to have resurrected from the carton box, where his remains are supposedly held in the Kremlin by the Russians, he would have begged to go back to his anonymous space than ruminating on what had become of Teutonic Germany that was to rule the world for at least a thousand years. Hitler would just as much have been disappointed with the British squad at the just concluded World Cup but not probably at the French, for whom he had little regard. It would not have been surprising to him that the land of De Gaulle has even dipped further into parading a team of assorted players from Arabia and the fringes of Africa. For the malicious Fuehrer, the spectacle of a German defeat from the hands of some dark-hair Uruguayan Indians would have been a sweet and welcomed revenge.
Strangely, Bolade’s insistence on unearthing the sceptre of Nazism in the aftermath of the recently concluded football tournament also unearthed introspection on the irony of contemporary Africa. Played forward, Africa’s contemporary events would have evoked a sense of dé jàvu at the Wolf’s Lair in 1940. Josef Goebbels, Herman Goring, and the rest of the Nazi echelon would not be surprised that South Africa, the most enduring space of white rule in the continent, is the only country qualified to host the 2010 World Cup in the continent; ahead of Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana that have been self-ruling for the better part of one century.
In the circumstance, you could envision Herr von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign Minister and a guiding light of Nazism peering above his monocle as he cheekily advised Africa to take a good look at the trophy as it may never come back to the old continent, except South Africa by some miracle avoids the ruinous path of Zimbabwe and Old Robert by grasping the obvious tenets on power, politics and developmental economics as oxymoron for Black Africa.
Truth be told, that preposition on black African leaders as bad economic managers is already a credible thesis even in presidential palaces across the continent, and has been so apparently since the 1980s, about the time the toothy Minna General zapped the economy and decreed SAP on Nigeria. The preposition on keeping political power and outsourcing the economy may have since mutated into various strains in Nigeria, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Ghana or Senegal; essentially it is no longer unpatriotic to see African rulers espousing the return of the erstwhile colonial masters to the commanding heights of the economies. The preposition is now cruising on its own dialectics like harmattan fire in plain Savannah.
If the West can be asked to run the commanding heights of the economy, why should we shy from offering it the commanding heights of our polities? What really would the ordinary Okada man in Ikot Ekpene lose if Nigeria invites Germans to run the country on Build Operate and Transfer (BOT) and from inside the Aso Rock, to save cost? Wouldn’t we be been better served if the ministries are also handed over to American, German or Dutch experts and if the overpaid legislatures could somehow be relieved of their unmerited perquisites and the proceeds used to provide better education for our children? You can only imagine what profits could have accrued to the restive Delta if the BOT programme had started since 1999, the wasted years of Ibori and Odili the region would have been averted if the states had been run by Norwegians on BOT. If the Israelis are handed the reins at the police headquarters in Louis Edet House and not just occasionally invited to recover kidnapped journalists by a clueless IG, the spate of crime would have abated across the land, leaving honest Nigerians to go about unmolested even on the streets of Jos. PHCN would cease to be a bastion of corruption as we would more likely emerge from the bouts of darkness under the watch of Canadians.
You can expand the preposition on outsourcing to cover every aspect of Nigerian society, including the universities, the rails, the airport and the sea ports. Just envision the prospects of disciplined and efficient Swiss personnel at our entry ports or the British in a judiciary where you could trust that the wigged lordships would truly live up to their appellation.
The point is that Africa’s, especially Nigeria’s independence have not delivered on the promises and the colonial era largely remains a nostalgic reference point. Sure, there are African leaders like Mandela that could be credited with exceptional performance; even here in Nigeria some are breaking the mould in Lagos, River and Ondo States under exceptional encumbrances. But the skewed leadership recruitment process continues to lock out the chance for a real change, as the system seems tailored for political jobbers and knaves with no talent for governance. Even while we have yet made BOT an official policy, Lebanese, Indians and Palestinians run the virtually all the super marts in Lagos while the crude oil taps that feed the profligacy of our rulers are kept flowing by the big Western oil companies.
Officially bringing the system under a BOT arrangement would therefore only formalize and broaden an existing working process and stem the haemorrhage. It would also give our new owners the needed legitimacy to build a working system while we get our acts together. It may appear simple and even self-deprecating especially when you consider it could make Adolf Hitler and Pier Botha wince in their graves, but BOT is not a bad idea in the face of our peculiar circumstances and drab prognoses.
Dr. Goldsmith, a medical practitioner, lives in Lagos
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