Again, Campbell and His Fallacies
nkem360@googlemail.com
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Thursday, June 27, 2013
As
usual, in each of his fallacies, John Campbell, former US Ambassador to Nigeria
and currently the Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York laid claim of being a friend of
Nigeria as he strained himself to propound a one-sided, jaundiced and seemingly
uninformed solution to the problem(s) of Nigeria, while foreclosing any
alternative. First, Campbell should get it; he is not a friend of Nigeria, but
a friend of his interests or the interests of those he represents.
In
a telephone conversation with the Nigerian Guardian in Washington DC, which the
newspaper reported in its June 24, 2013 edition, Campbell talked about the dangers
facing Nigeria in 2015 on account of the socio-political situation in the North
and advised that the “leaders at all levels in Nigeria should pre-occupy
themselves with serious discussion on how to address the exclusion of the North
from economic activities in the country”. Campbell talked about the alienation
of the North. Anyone who reads the report critically will not fail to
understand Campbell’s interest in the far North. He merely tagged along the
Middle Belt and the Niger Delta problems to blur this interest.
Really,
Campbell is not saying anything new. This is a rehash of his pre 2011 election
comments, in which he claimed that Nigerians’ favoured candidate Ret. Maj. Gen.
Mohammadu Buhari, a Northerner, was going to be rigged out by Goodluck
Jonathan; in an election later acknowledged by even the US as the best ever
held in Nigeria, and in which Buhari lost by about 10 million votes. The fact
that certain expectations of the electorates have not been met by the winner
does not obliterate Campbell’s bad call at the time. And it does not make the
former tyrant, Buhari, a better alternative, not then, not now and not in future.
Where
did Ambassador Campbell get this fiction that the far North has been alienated
in Nigeria? Who alienated the core North from the scheme of things in Nigeria? Does
Ambassador Campbell not know who dominated power in Nigeria for nearly four
decades and used it to create more states, local government areas and carried
out delineation exercises that gave them more electoral federal constituencies
for their region? Just who? It’s the North! Does Campbell not know that
Nigeria’s revenue accrual mainly from oil is shared between the federal, states
and the local governments, and those regions that have more states and local
governments receive more revenues than a region like the South East, which has
the least number of states and local governments even when it has three oil
producing states?
Does
Campbell not know that the number of the people joining the military, the
police, the customs, immigration, national security and defence corps, ministries,
departments and agencies (MDAs) etc. is determined on the basis of regions/zones
with more states having more of their people getting into these institutions? Does
Campbell not know that Northerners are major players in the oil industry in
Nigeria? In Nigeria, oil business is the ultimate economic activity that
guarantees one unearned enormous cash and influence. Why have Northerners who
were literally invited by their brothers in power to come and help themselves
with prime oil blocks failed to use their enormous wealth to create economic
opportunities for those around them? Does Campbell think that Southerners who
are involved in “economic activities” were empowered by the government?
When
Campbell talks about “the huge number of illiterates in the North who know only
a few verses in the Quran,” who is he blaming for that sort of situation? Does
he not know that there are all kinds of policy decisions, most of them made by Nigerian
rulers of Northern extraction, which give the Northern youth advantages over
their Southern counterparts, in gaining admission into federal educational institutions
at post primary and tertiary institutions? What the Americans call affirmative
action that just received a big knock from the US Supreme Court on June 24,
2013, is practiced here for core Northerners. And this is done in a very
ridiculous manner.
Recently,
Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Education released the cut-off marks for national
common entrance examination for admission into the so-called unity secondary
schools. Whereas students in the South East zone were required to score as high
as 139 points in order to be admitted, students from the core Northern zones of
North East and North West are to be admitted with scores as low as 12. Now, is
it possible that a child who gets admitted into a school with a score of 12
will be able to compete with a child who gets admitted with a score of 139? How
will the child with a score of 12 cope? Well, this is Nigeria! So, one way or
the order, he/she will go through that level of education. And Nigerians still
wonder about what went wrong with their educational system. That sort of
advantage is also available to Northerners under various guises in admission to
universities and other higher institutions and other federal establishments
like the police force.
Dr.
Campbell is a diplomat and scholar. He has immense access to resources, both
human and financial. Therefore, he has the wherewithal to carry out a
scientific study on any issue he so desires. I believe that the Nigerian
Government will be willing to give him access to the data that he needs for
such a study. So, I challenge Ambassador Campbell to conduct an unbiased
scientific study on how much had been spent on developmental projects by the
Federal Government of Nigeria in each region/zone and the budgetary allocation
to each region/zone derived from an aggregation of what the states and local
governments within each region/zone had received from the national purse over a
given period. It is only when one has done this kind of study and drawn
conclusions from it that one can talk intelligently and justifiably about
exclusion of one section of Nigeria in economic activities. It is only when one
has done this sort of study, generated the relevant data and analysed it that
one can become a confident mouth piece of a section of Nigeria and claim the
right to apportion blame on anyone for the differential development indices
between Northern and Southern Nigeria. But why was this cry of exclusion not
heard during the time the Northerners were in power?
Instructively,
it is also reported that the Nigerian Ambassador to the US, Professor Ade
Adefuye, offered a counterpoise to Campbell’s alienation charge by revealing
the extra mile the Federal Government is going to address the problem of the
North. Professor Adefuye was reported to
have spoken about a collaborative effort between Nigeria’s Embassy in the US and
Corporate Council on Africa, that would translate into a summit on agriculture being
held in the North, as well as another
summit on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that would be held in
the US in which Northerners and other Nigerians would be involved. The summit
on agriculture is exclusively for the benefit of the North. Makes one wonder if
the government of Nigeria and its agencies are now solely devoting all their
efforts to the problems of the North? When will there be collaborative efforts
to address graduate unemployment in Southern Nigeria, especially South East Nigeria
that account for the highest number of unemployed graduates in Nigeria?
In
my opinion, I believe that anyone who is serious about a workable solution to
the Nigerian precarious situation should be looking at the country’s unjust structure
that Nigerian rulers pass off as federalism and exploit to their advantage and
those of their cronies. The truth is that Nigeria should not have been one
country in the first place and indeed, should not be one country. Nigeria is
one country today because it continues to serve the interest of its past and
current rulers and their cronies and, of course, some external interests. In
his book, Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink
published in 2011, just before Nigeria’s general elections, Ambassador Campbell
himself acknowledged that “Nigeria has stayed together for almost fifty years,
despite a bloody civil war, because that is what the ogas wanted.” We all know
that these “ogas on top” don’t care about the volume of blood of innocent
Nigerians that has been used to sustain and continues to sustain this disparate
amalgam. But must Nigeria continue to survive on the blood of its citizens?
For
far too long, people have suggested the treatment of the symptoms instead of
the disease. I think it’s about time those who claim that they are friends of
Nigeria and claim to speak the truth about the Nigerian situation faced the
truth and advised Nigerian rulers that the core issue of treating the disease
can no longer be deferred. That deferment is dangerous.
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