Not Say Goodbye Abba Mahmood — March 20, 2014 If there is any evidence that we are sitting on a time-bomb as far as unemployment is concerned, what happened on Saturday, March 15, must be one such proof. On that day, over two million graduates came out to various centres across the country for interview to gain employment to fill 4,500 vacancies in the Nigeria Immigration Service. It reminds me of that African expression: that when the forest catches fire, grasshoppers do not say goodbye to each other. Many things can be discerned from that Immigration interview last week. First, it clearly shows that graduate unemployment is now at a crisis level. Never mind the lies of the so-called economic coordinators (or rather manipulators) who keep reeling out false statistics about dubious growth of the country’s economy. Secondly, many candidates died in many centres across the country, clearly showing that hunger is real and that many of our youth are simply too ill with various ailments, most especially hunger and malnutrition, to be of any value to the economy. Third, and most important, what that event showed glaringly is the fact that the economic prescription of the Bretton Woods institutions and their agents who are in charge of our economy has failed woefully, and that the few billionaires created by the government through patronage and corruption have not been investing in the local economy. There is no manufacturing and no production with everyone now relying on government for employment and livelihood. After graduating years back and having been in the labour market for many years, many of those candidates are already getting over-aged. There is frustration which is breeding anger, which in turn is breeding bitterness against the whole society. It is a ticking time-bomb indeed. As the unemployment challenge is becoming very glaring for all who care to see, government has gone ahead to inaugurate the Jonathan National Conference (JNC) this week. No one is against a genuine dialogue but the delegates to this conference have the mandate of the government and not the people of Nigeria. The government-appointed delegates consist of mainly rabid anarchists and some pro-establishment people with very few genuine patriots. Clearly, this could be the end of the beginning or it might as well be the beginning of the end. In the first place, this conference is not known to the Nigerian constitution and there was no law enacted by the National Assembly to bring it to being. Secondly, there are two subsisting court cases filed separately to challenge the legality and legitimacy of the JNC. Thirdly, the House of Representatives passed a resolution last week not to appropriate any money for it. Fourthly, JNC was captured in the 2014 Appropriation Bill which is yet to be passed by the National Assembly, so where did they get the money to inaugurate it? If, as some “activists” are claiming, the current Nigerian constitution is fraudulent, then, the government that derived its legitimacy from this “fraudulent” constitution is also fraudulent; and the delegates appointed by this “fraudulent” government are equally fraudulent; and the conference being attended by these fraudulent delegates is therefore fraudulent. In any case, if a conference of this nature is to satisfy the yearnings of the people, it must consist of elected representatives who derive their legitimacy from the people directly and it must have full sovereign powers, not this unelected and partisan one. To compound the problems, the JNC delegates are unrepresentative of the diverse peoples of Nigeria. By what criteria, in all honesty, can delegates of Ebonyi State origin be more than the delegates from either Kano or Lagos State, the two most populous states in Nigeria? About 10 per cent of all the delegates are Ijaw but there is no single Itsekiri or Ogoni delegate in the JNC! With all the current nomad conflicts all over the country, there is no single delegate from the cattle breeders. The Tiv, one of the ethnic groups with spread in more than three states, is having only one delegate. Ngas, one of the most dynamic ethnic groups in Nigeria and the tribe of one of our respected leaders, Gen. Gowon, has not even a single delegate. Women have less than 20 per cent of the JNC delegates. And so on and so forth. The PDP has never put the issue of convening a conference in its manifesto. It has never promised this in its campaigns. It has never articulated it as part of the programme its government would pursue when it came to power. This was arrived at without any thought as to its consequences and implications to the country. It was an impulsive decision and that is why it is ill-conceived, ill-timed and illogical. It did not take into consideration the broad heterogeneity of the country. In short, it has not been fairly balanced and really sensitive to the people. As Peoples Daily newspaper wrote in a recent editorial, “by taking into consideration everything about this conference — its timing, its composition, the delegates’ selection process adopted, the competence and/or calibre of the selected delegates, the orientation and worldview of the selected delegates and the set agenda for the conference — it is impossible not to see the unwholesome purposes the conference is meant to achieve”. “There can be only one sense or purpose of convening a conference of this type in a campaign year, with the elections less than a year away, at a time when the country’s backdrop is becoming bleaker economically, socially and politically — distraction,” concluded the editorial. To further situate the problem more clearly, these unelected delegates who are going to talk about boundary adjustment, resource control, creation of states and structure of government, etc, will practically get no input from the existing elected legislature, because the government is talking about referendum, which is alien to the existing constitution even though this electoral commission can give them any result they want anyway. What is the role of the current legislature in all this then? This, in essence, is effectively a coup against the legislature! From the names of the delegates and the desperation of the government to hold this conference, the agenda to be achieved and the outcome of the conference can be determined. But the integrity of this conference is already diminished from the beginning. It is yet another waste of time and resources. Let us see how those who caused most of the problems of Nigeria in the first place can now be providing the solution. History is on the side of the oppressed.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 10:24:28 +0000
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