Over the last few months, our nation has had to reopen a fresh chapter in the conversation on internal security, peace and unity in the wake of renewed violence in the North Central and North East of our country. These sad episodes have not only led to questions by Nigerians (and Nigerians as a whole) around the effectiveness of our security structure, but also questions about the integrity of Nigeria’s unity.

Unity is not something we just have because we are Nigerians, or because someone like me or any other weighs in asking Nigerians to be united. Unity is something we must deliberately work for. In order to unite Nigeria, me must consciously define the fundamentals of our nationhood, to ensure everyone feels safe, secure and carried along.

To build a truly united nation, we must address the issues which lead to insecurity at their roots. We must pay more than lip service to “poverty alleviation”, and truly get Nigerians working again. A person who has a job has less time for ethnic bickering.

Let truth be told, the people in the upper classes of our country rarely engage with each other with ethnicity in mind. When people have food to eat, they are less suspicious of each other and begin to focus on creating value. People who have food to eat and good homes to live in do not worry about the ethnicity of their business partners or co-workers. They are more worried about what value their business partners bring, rather than where those partners come from.

There is this joke which I get to hear often – when a small car hits another small car, the drivers come out to shout, because they don’t know which of them has money to fix the damage, but when two big cars hit themselves, the big men come out, shake hands and exchange cards. As people get better quality of life, they begin to place more value on life and wellbeing of others. This obviously means that if our people have better lives all-round, there will be fewer suspicion and confrontations between groups of people.

Now let me share a bit of experience with building unity. I come from Adamawa State, made up of almost an equal number of Christians and Muslims, Fulani and disparate people’s collectively called Chamba. In many ways, Adamawa is like Nigeria. I grew up as a Fulani boy. My grandmother and uncle were tradespeople, so it was not uncommon to have a lot of Christians and people of different ethnicities and religions in our home. Our neighbours were Christian and Muslim, so I grew up really not exposed to tribalism until I went to secondary school. There were two sociopolitical organizations then, one for Chamba people and the other for Fulani. I was a popular student, so was promptly invited to join the Fulani organization.

But privately I had been speaking with both my Fulani and Chamba friends about unifying both organizations before the invitation came, so it was difficult for me to go and join the Fulani organization. I publicly refused to join the organization, and instead worked with both sides to create the Adamawa Students Union, an umbrella union which collapsed both the Chamba and Fulani organizations into one.

This was the inspiration which would later lead to the creation of the Adamawa Peace Initiative, a non-governmental organization which brings together all the stakeholders in our state to work for peaceful coexistence. The API brings together scholars, clerics, youth, market women, businesspeople (many of whom are of Igbo extraction), representatives of security organizations, and co-chaired by Muslim and Christian leaders. This organization helps defuse conflicts in Adamawa communities, organizes entrepreneurship classes and sports events for young people, as well as coordinates relief projects whenever and wherever the need arises in Adamawa. API was the first organization to coordinate the absorption of internal displaced people from around the North East into Yola and surrounding towns.

A few years ago, the API heard rumours that certain groups were spreading fake news that another group was planning attacks on the other from out of state. The organization quickly got together, assembled both Christian and Muslim leaders to address the issue. That Friday, the imams around the state had been briefed to speak about the issue to reduce tension, while the Christian churches did same on Sunday. Crisis was averted. This has been the template with which API has addressed issues since then.

The experience here shows that building peace and unity goes beyond goodwill messages. We should not be in denial about the weaknesses in our communities. We must actively pursue peace and unity by coordinating grassroots organizations. Fake news did not begin on the internet – rumours have led to unfortunate incidents of bloodshed in our communities around Nigeria. Inter-group grassroots organizations can provide a trustworthy partner in keeping everyone assured of their safety.

But the tasks of NGOs like API are only secondary. The primary needs of Nigerian communities are jobs and opportunities to build sustainable ventures. Our economy needs to grow to accommodate the population which has been growing faster than our GDP.

I was having a conversation about Nigeria’s population growth rate, and a friend of mine joked that I am probably not the right person to have this conversation with, seeing as I have a really large family. This is true in many ways. Many people in my generation grew up in large families, it was all we knew, but must we continue in what we knew, in the face of new information and reality? It is also often the case that the elite families can afford to train their children, so large families become a resource, but the reverse is the case with poorer families. It is easy to see how income inequality will grow even wider as our population grows further, especially in rural communities.

For the avoidance of doubt, there’s nothing wrong with huge population. It can indeed be an asset if properly harnessed, especially in situations where the citizens are exposed to good education and skills, ensuring that they get a head start in life, like it is the case with China. The challenge however is where population growth far outstrips GDP growth as is currently the case with our country. In this instance population becomes a liability by default.

It is important that we grow our economy at a rate to cope with our population growth. Our current population growth of 3 per cent when compared with our GDP growth of 1 per cent in 2017 and the expected 2.5 per cent in 2018, will see us ending up with a lower per capita income and becoming even poorer at the end of 2018. Our GDP growth needs to outpace our population growth to make the latter an asset and not a liability.

As a father (and one with a large family) on one hand and a promoter of education on the other, I will counsel that on a scale of balance that parents have children that they can train to acquire good education and skills that will give them a head start in life and make them productive members of society.

An alumnus of American University of Nigeria, Mr. Muhammed Zanna is a daily reminder of the nexus between education and job creation. The young man could not wait to graduate before venturing into the entrepreneurial world. He bought over a business that had served as a practical for their business management class. Today, the young man runs a personal business, a testimony that education can indeed be a tool for creating small businesses. The Zanna experience, incubated at AUN in Yola, is an apt reminder that when our young people are taught how to create small businesses, their creative energies are unleashed to the betterment of the individual, our economy and society.

Atiku Abubakar is a former Vice President of Nigeria and PDP chieftain. [myad]

The Yoruba have a way of describing social deviance and allied deviant behaviours. While growing up in the ancient town of Owo in Ondo state in the late 60s, one or two cases of missing children upped the ante of parental guidance and protection.  As children, we were warned not to lurk around the idyllic and isolated bush paths at the back of the homesteads because of the evil of gbomogbomo (transliterated as stealer of children).

I cannot remember if any child I knew then was a victim. I cannot also remember that anybody was arrested by the police in connection with child theft.  Perhaps, those in the nefarious trade did so with some tinge of mystique. Yet, the mantra: “beware of gbomogbomo”  became a compulsive cautionary refrain in security alertness that compelled parents and wards to resort to obligatory self-help.

Indeed, the societal concerns then were neither corruption nor badly-managed economy. Parents and wards were concerned about the damage gbomogbomo could cause to the home. Today, due to degeneration of values in government, the concerns have morphed from child theft to mind-boggling corruption that has become endemic in our body-politic, breeding large-scale abject poverty among the vast majority of Nigerians.

The resultant dysfunctional socio-economic and political system has continued to produce some dialectics that put our polity on perpetual edge.  Samplers: our rigged federal system with its concomitant foibles and the Boko Haram insurgency with its associated vagaries are veritable instances. Even, the idea of restructuring which is a proposed panacea for curing the mischief of our rigged federalism is an indicted intellectual capital in the rash of polemics for recalibration and redefinition of the wheel.  Yet, arguments largely point to restructuring as the best way to go in the quest for a new political order.

Nigeria’s current political system, which unremittingly promotes cries of marginalisation by some sections of the country and feeds ethno-religious conflicts in addition to nepotistic considerations by leadership in appointments to strategic national offices, location of financially-viable infrastructure projects and distribution of our commonwealth in mute disdain for fairness, is nothing but a mockery of true federalism.

For a new Nigeria to emerge from the old order, it is about time we gravitated in the popular trajectory of power devolution. Over-concentrated powers in the national government must be devolved to the state for deliberate achievement of precise and target-specific projects in order to promote fast-paced development at that level and thus put an end to the monster of wastefulness that Nigeria’s federal government has become.

The powers vested in the president are almost absolute. Little wonder that the presidential race has become an emotive issue. The prehistoric mindset – that Nigeria’s presidency is the beginning and the end of the quest for political identity and power – continues to reinforce itself. This explains the characteristic politicking that has always defined the contestation for the presidential niche.

Entrenched interests have consistently fanned regional, religious and ethnic embers in desperate bids to appropriate the position. The grand conspiratorial alliance against Goodluck Jonathan in the 2015 presidential election thrived on such primordial considerations. He did not survive the contrivance of national insecurity as well as the created perception of incapacity of his administration to deal with it. Boko Haram, our modern day gbomogbomo, having previously made episodic incursions into Abuja and its environs, had put the greater part of the northeast zone to rout.

The crown capping of the insurgents’ casus belli was the abduction of 276 Chibok schoolgirls on April 14, 2014. The Chibok debacle happened about a year to the March 28, 2015 presidential election.  The Dapchi shame, involving the stealing of 110 schoolgirls, happened on February 19, 2018 about a year to the scheduled February 16, 2019 presidential poll.  Our Chibok and Dapchi schoolgirls have become objects for political bargain in the hands of our modern day real or prearranged gbomogbomo.

The Chibok incident shattered the Jonathan administration. The Dapchi farce has ridiculed Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency.  In my first article on the abductions of our schoolgirls in Chibok and Dapchi, in which I sardonically described the existential incidents as the whoredom of karma, some inevitably cruel fates, I had hinted of my second article with which I would explicate my suggestion that the Dapchi schoolgirls’ abduction, in particular, might after all be contrived.

Some fifth columnists in the administration may be involved in the farce for self-serving agenda.  It may also be a contrived schema to launder the administration’s image that has ebbed due to the president’s cold response to and shambolic handling of the genocide unleashed on farmers by Fulani herdsmen in Benue, Plateau and Taraba. Nevertheless, it is a chimera to think the reign of Boko Haram is going to end anytime soon. It will outlive the Buhari administration. Jonathan had heavily funded military operations against it, but unfortunately, some former military chiefs had turned the war into money-making bazaar. The Buhari administration has been recouping the billions of naira for hardware that went into private pockets.  That was how insensitive some former military chiefs acted to over-maximise the opportunity presented by the war for pecuniary gains. We now have, in addition to sophisticated gbomogbomo, a band of crude gbewiri (thieves in Yoruba).

The fact that Buhari, a military general, is in the saddle, has not completely changed the narrative. The Boko Haram war has become a big government business. Despite the claim by the administration that the sect had been technically degraded and defeated, it is still intermittently attacking soft targets.  And, this is the point in issue.  How come the sect still had the capacity to move to Dapchi where it seamlessly hauled away 110 schoolgirls?

It is metaphoric that the military would allow the underbellies of their commanders-in-chief to be exposed in the comparative contexts of the Chibok and Dapchi schoolgirls’ abductions. The ease with which the girls were evacuated in both instances has taken conspiracy beyond the realm of mere theory. In Chibok, it was easy for the gbomogbomo to purportedly move the girls into Sambisa forest in Borno state.  But in Dapchi, those who know the Yobe state terrain very well say there is no forest to move the girls into.  They claim that it is a wide expanse of desert land with thick layers of sand that make vehicular movements impossible.

A prompt pursuit of the insurgents by military troops would have, therefore, mediated spatial distance that the insurgents had gained for about two days after the incident before the information was released to the media for reportage. This aspect needs to be investigated by the 12-man committee set up to find out the circumstances surrounding the Dapchi schoolgirls’ abduction.

Contrary to the original assurance, there is an increasing loss of confidence in the ability and commitment of the Buhari administration to completely obliterate the Boko Haram insurgents.  The insurgency now plays a “political bargaining role” in our presidential politics. Besides, fifth columnists may continue to deploy it to force successive administrations to appropriate humongous sums for the battle.  This means big arms supply contracts from which pecuniary interests would be serviced.

Some elements in government, whose responsibility it is to negotiate the release of abducted girls anytime the need arises, would wish that the multi-billion-naira-cash-for-captors’-exchange racket continues. This is the irony of our nation, which craves citizens’ patriotism in the face of contrived national insecurity.

Postscript: The Buhari administration may announce at some point in the future that it has secured the release of the Dapchi 110. That will be good news. But I hope it does not turn out as a deliberate gambit to gain critical mileage in the 2019 presidential poll. That will be extreme political brinkmanship.

• Ojeifo contributed this piece via ojwonderngr@yahoo.com [myad]