Month: October 2021

By Muhammad Sabiu

By Aisar Fagge

A Kano-based civil society, Kano Advocacy Organization (“Kungiyar Matasan Kano“) wrote a petition to the Public Complaint and Anti-Corruption Commission (PCACC), Kano State against the telecommunication companies operating in the state for abandoning their corporate social responsibility functions which they execute in the Southern part of the country.

The chairman of the organization, Comrade Alhassan Haruna Dambatta led the executive members of the organization from various local governments to the Anti-Corruption Commission where they dropped their six-page letter signed by their national legal adviser, Barrister Murtala Bala Abubakar Esq.

The reason for taking this action according to Barrister Murtala is “to ensure the telecommunication companies abide by laws on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as provided by various subsisting Acts passed by both the National Assembly and the Kano state House of Assembly.

They cited the Federal Government’s Local Content Act 2010 sponsored by Hon. Dr Abubarkar Amuda-Kannike and “An Act to establish the Corporate Social Responsibility Act and for other matters connected herewith’ sponsored by Hon. Ossai Nicholas Ossai, which states that Corporate Social Responsibility means action taken by a company to address key social, economic and environmental problems of a particular area in which the company operates.

The Corporate Social Responsibility Act, in section 21, has identified the activities expected of these companies to engage in and not limited to;

(i) Contribution towards educational development of the people in the area, (ii) Provisions of infrastructural facilities, contribution towards rural electrification projects and road construction,

(iii) Collaboration in partnership projects with local governments,

(iv) Environmental stewardship and protection mechanism,

(v) Construction and improvement of healthcare delivery system.

(vi) Provisions of pipe-borne water, improvement of existing waterworks and construction of boreholes and public convenience.

Furthermore, the Kano State CSR law on Corporate Social Responsibility of 2011 has repeatedly exposed the need for multinationals and other companies operating in Kano state to uphold the provisions of the law as defined by both Acts of the National Assembly and the Kano state House of Assembly on Corporate Social Responsibilities.

According to Kano Advocacy Organization, “Many if not all of these companies [MTN, Airtel, 9Mobile] operating in the Southern and Western part of this country do provides these services to the people of that area, but the case is entirely in contrast to what is available and obtainable here in our state. Last year, the Ijaw Youths Council as reported in the mainstream media, among other campaigns, violently went and demobilized Ten (10) of the telecom’s mast in Bayelsa state and their reason as stated is that the contract for the supply of diesel was awarded to a non-Ijaw contractor, hence, the reason for their anger.”

“Because of the fear of threat of violence from these Southern and Western Youths, These companies operating there ensured that the Youths of the South-south, Southeast, and Southwest are assisted through Youths Empowerment programs, start-ups, vocational trainings, Hub creation, ICT Training, Digital marketing training, App development training, Computer trainings and many other concepts that are designed to empower and promotes the Youths and people of those states so that they can become productive and self-reliant. However, the case in the Northern part is entirely in contrast to what is obtainable in the Western or Southern part of this country and most especially and specifically in Kano state with the highest population of phone users where these telecommunication companies are making billions of naira without commitments to the provisions of the various laws that protected the right of the people and communities where they conduct their businesses.”

In view of the above, Kano Advocacy Organization calls for Kano State PCACC to investigate the following among others:

1. What are the records of MTN NIGERIA, AIRTEL, GLOBACOM, 9MOBILE in the provisions of social Amenities, like, building and refurbishing of schools, recreational centres, health care facilitates, Youths Empowerment programs among others in Kano state?
2. Record of Youths Empowerment programs conducted by these Telecoms in Kano state.
3. How much profit they made in our state and what part of it has been utilized on the people as provided by both CSR laws?
4. How many schools and health care facilities were refurbished or built from scratch by these Telecoms in Kano state?
5. How many youths in Kano state benefited from these Telecom’s scholarship programs widely celebrated in the Southern and Western parts of this country?
6. Record of permanent and pensionable employment of Kano indigenes by these Telecoms.
7. When and how did these TELECOMS partner with the Kano state government in the provisions of social Amenities in our state?
8. Find out what are the future plans and programs of these telecommunication companies operating in our state on community development, provisions of social Amenities, scholarship, etc.?
9. Provide evidence of the established and constituted Corporate Social Responsibility ‘policy committee’ referred in the act as ‘CSR Policy committee’.
10. A copy of their CSR performance report of the last five years as made under sections (3) and (9) of the Act.
11. Record of the unspent amount deducted for CSR in the last five years.

By Muhammad Sabiu

Nigerian soldiers working under the platform of Sector 5 of Exercise GOLDEN DAWN in Enugu have successfully neutralised three unknown gunmen who raided a police checkpoint on October 7.

This was announced today by Brigadier-General Onyema Nwachukwu, the Director of Army Public Relations, via the Nigeria Army’s official Facebook page.

The soldiers engaged the gunmen in a shootout which forced the latter to flee the duel scene, and the soldiers recovered one vehicle and two motorcycles.

However, Mr Onyema regrettably stated that one soldier lost his life.

The southeastern region has been seeing a series of tensions and rampant attacks on government facilities by suspected IPOB members, which could not be unconnected with their secession agenda.

By Tahir Ibrahim Tahir (Talban Bauchi)

By Ahmadu Shehu, PhD.

My previous article titled If there was Biafra generated debates around Biafra’s disadvantages (and advantages) to the Igbo people. Many of these comments were very insightful, and in line with the thoughts I presented. While I cannot respond to all the commentators, I will briefly address the most salient rejoinders. But, once again, let me quickly state that this conversation does not target the Igbo as an ethnic group. Instead, I aim to provide an outsider view to these pressing issues of national unity on which all Nigerians share equal rights and responsibilities to tell ourselves the home truth.

Some commentators say that the article was biased as I only focused on the disadvantages and neglected the “obvious” advantages the Igbo will gain from Biafra. However, I do not see a single demographic, economic, geographical or even political advantage the Igbo will gain by simply seceding from Nigeria. That is the thesis of the previous article. In fact, the post-exile writings of Odumegwu Ojukwu, the architect of Biafra himself, buttress this point.

The most critical observations from many prominent Igbo elites and friends claim that as much as the Igbo people enjoy Nigeria’s unity from both economic and political perspectives, we should equally be thankful to the southeasterners for the jobs they create for other Nigerians. In other words, the Nigerian market saturated by Igbo traders is also lucky to have the Igbo money as capital for the employment of other Nigerians.

Well, this claim might seem valid at face value. Still, it may not be entirely accurate when Igbonomics – a term I use here to refer to the economic strategy of the Igbo people – is subjected to a critical view. In the said article, I noted that one of the weaknesses of the southeastern economic model is that it is closed to other Nigerians. The resentment the Igbo folks have against the majority of Nigerians do not allow “strangers” from any region of the country to freely establish or run businesses in Igboland. That is why most Igbo billionaires today were made one hundred per cent in and by other regions of this country, but not the other way round. There is hardly a non-Igbo billionaire made by or in the southeast.

This xenophobia is not only applied against the Hausa-Fulani northerners or the Yoruba south-westerns but also their closest cousins, the Niger-Deltans. This approach is based on three exclusionist strategies of Igbonomics: First, the market and product, and indeed the value-chain must strictly remain an Igbo affair. Second, other regions’ markets, their products and value-chains must be proportionately shared with the Igbos. Third, to drift public attention from this ongoing reality, maintain the victim card by crying louder than the bereaved – the real victims of marginalization. While the first two tenets are lawful but greedy, the third is a clear case of hypocrisy. Here is a simple example to foreground this scenario.

The Igbo form the largest group of Nigerians in the diaspora. Since Nigeria is an import economy, the Igbo people in diaspora serve as business agents for their brethren in Nigeria. Therefore, the import business is basically an Igbo – Igbo transaction. Here in Nigeria, these goods are transported mainly to the southeastern markets, such as Abba and Onitsha. Instead of Lagos or Port Harcourt, most Igbo traders, who are widely dispersed across the nooks and crannies of this country, buy their goods mostly from Igbo distributors in the southeast. Another Igbo – Igbo transaction.

Up here in the north and other parts of the country, the Igbo employ strictly Igbo artisans, mostly from their own villages or communities in the east, and in some cases, the so-called northern Igbos. From sales girls and boys to messengers, marketers and suppliers, the Igbos domiciled in the north only trust their own ethnic brothers regardless of the opportunities employing locals might portend to their businesses.

For instance, you find a single Igbo shop owner in a village. By the following year, s/he has brought two, three or four Igbo artisans, thereby growing in population, manipulating the resources and seizing the business opportunities further away from the local people.

In most cases, the deal is that a separate business in the same line is established for the younger artisan, expanding further the grip of the Igbos in that line of business in the communities they are domiciled. Thus, the profits, gains and resources of the business in any of these communities become an Igbo affair entirely. Therefore, in this arrangement, the Igbo create jobs primarily for themselves while other sections of Nigeria serve as their consumers.

While the Igbos living in the north own properties and investments in the region, they return their proceeds to their homelands. Thus, I can bet my last penny that Igboland has more properties and investments built from profits and wealth acquired outside the Igboland than those made from the businesses run within the Igboland. Moreover, I had said earlier that businesses domiciled in the southeast largely depend on the larger Nigerian market to thrive.

Therefore, it should be clear from the foregoing that Igbonomics in the north is an Igbo economic affair that largely – if not only – benefits the Igbos. The brutal truth is that the Igbo are NOT marginalized in Nigeria. Instead, they are playing a victim card to maintain the economic status quo. While the various sections of this great country have a lot to thank one another for, none of these sections should claim any superiority. Neither should any of these play a gimmick of marginalization. We are equals in the hands of God and our country.

Dr Ahmadu Shehu is a nomad cum herdsman, an Assistant Professor at the American University of Nigeria, Yola, and is passionate about the Nigerian project. You can reach him via ahmadsheehu@yahoo.com.

By Muhammad Sabiu

David Hundeyin, a self-styled investigative journalist who has in recent months become popular on social media, has come under fire over his about-a-year-old tweet condemning “Arewa” and its culture.

According to Mr. Hundeyin, the world would be a better place to live in without the “uncivilised” Arewa culture because he has“[n]ever seen a culture that hates outsiders and somehow detests its own women worse than it hates [the] said outsiders.”

“The world will be a significantly better place when Arewa culture completely dies off and is replaced with something fit for human civilisation,” he added.

The digging up of the tweet could not be unconnected with a recent, viral, controversial article he wrote titled “Cornflakes for Jihad: The Boko Haram Origin Story”, in which he tried to give the history of Boko Haram in Nigeria and presented what many described as “conspiracy theories” and “hasty conclusions.”

Airing their grievances against Mr. Hundeyin’s derogatory tweet, many Facebook users from the North took the issue to their timelines.

For instance, Dr. Ahmad Shehu suggested that legal action should be taken against people making such negative stereotyping.

“The north should make an example of these idiots. I hate it when we seem passive against these kinds of bigots. I enjoin our legal activists to take these kinds of people to court for stereotyping,”Dr. Shehu wrote.

Similarly, another user, who goes by the name Abubakar Sulaiman, sees him as somebody with a dangerous mindset. “The question that crosses my mind is simply why do they hate us? This is the dangerous kind of mindset David Hundeyin and his ilks use to delve into archives.

“So what was made to look like an investigative journalistic endeavour by the likes of David Hundeyin was simply a pre-conceived idea supported by witty though foolish biased selection of data while ignoring a significant portion of related data that may contradict that pre-conceived idea. A clear case of cherry picking,” he said.

Also, according to Adam Baba Yamani, Hundeyin is nothing but a bigot and hater of anything that has to do with the North and Muslims.

He wrote,“Hello my people of the North (Arewa), if you think David Hundeyin is not a bigot and a hater of anything North and Muslims, take your time and glance at what he wrote on his Twitter handle, don’t be deceived by the cloak of journalism he is wearing, his intent is to replace you, your culture and Way of life with the one of his choice, for those among us that are applauding David Hundeyin for his “Conflakes..”, please read, research and cogitate.”

Colleagues and former students of Abdulrazak Gurnah, from the Department of English and Literary Studies, Bayero University, Kano, congratulate him, as he emerged this year’s winner of the prestigious Nobel prize in Literature.

According to one of his former students, Ibrahim Garba, “we already foresaw than in him, since the 1980s when he taught us in the department, here in Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. He deserves it. Gurnah has always been enthusiastic about Literature and today he attained the highest and most popular status. Congratulation sir”, he said. He added that “Bayero University, Kano would be equally happy and part of this achievement, as a place where Gurnah worked and served diligently.

According to the Guardian Newspaper, UK, the “Tanzanian novelist is named laureate for ‘uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism’

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”.

Gurnah, who grew up on one of the islands of Zanzibar and arrived in England as a refugee in the 1960s, has published 10 novels as well as a number of short stories. Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel committee, said that the Tanzanian writer’s novels, from his debut Memory of Departure, about a failed uprising, to his most recent, the “magnificent”, Afterlives, “recoil from stereotypical descriptions and open our gaze to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world”.

No black African writer has won the prize since Wole Soyinka in 1986. Gurnah is the first Tanzanian writer to win.

Gurnah’s fourth novel, Paradise, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. Olsson said that it “has obvious reference to Joseph Conrad in its portrayal of the innocent young hero Yusuf’s journey to the heart of darkness”, but is also a coming of age tale, and a sad love story.

As a writer, Gurnah “has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa, and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals”, Olsson told gathered journalists in Stockholm.

Gurnah was in the kitchen when he was informed of his win, said Olsson, and the committee had “a long and very positive” conversation with him.

Gurnah’s most recent novel Afterlives tells of Ilyas, who was stolen from his parents by German colonial troops as a boy and returns to his village after years fighting in a war against his own people. It was described in the Guardian as “a compelling novel, one that gathers close all those who were meant to be forgotten, and refuses their erasure”.

“In Gurnah’s literary universe, everything is shifting – memories, names, identities. This is probably because his project cannot reach completion in any definitive sense,” said Olsson. “An unending exploration driven by intellectual passion is present in all his books, and equally prominent now, in Afterlives, as when he began writing as a 21-year-old refugee.”

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah review – living through colonialism

Worth 10m Swedish krona (£840,000), the Nobel prize for literature goes to the writer deemed to be, in the words of Alfred Nobel’s will, “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Winners have ranged from Bob Dylan, cited for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, to Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.According to Ellen Mattson, who sits on the Swedish Academy and the Nobel committee: “Literary merit. That’s the only thing that counts.”

The Nobel winner is chosen by the 18 members of the Swedish Academy – an august and mysterious organisation that has made efforts to become more transparent after it was hit by a sexual abuse and financial misconduct scandal in 2017. Last year’s prize went to the American poet Louise Glück – an uncontroversial choice after the uproar provoked by the Austrian writer Peter Handke’s win in 2019. Handke had denied the Srebrenica genocide and attended the funeral of war criminal Slobodan Milošević.

The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded 118 times. Just 16 of the awards have gone to women, seven of those in the 21st century. In 2019, the Swedish academy promised the award would become less “male-oriented” and “Eurocentric”, but proceeded to give its next two prizes to two Europeans, Handke and Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk.”

By Sumayyah Auwal Ishaq

Former Vice President, Arch. Namadi Sambo, Khalifa Muhammadu Sanusi II, the Deputy Governor of Kaduna State, Dr Hadiza Sabuwa, representing Governor Nasir El-Rufai among other dignitaries, are attending a public lecture in celebration of the one-year anniversary in office of HRH Ambassador Ahmed Nuhu Bamalli, the 19th Emir of Zazzau at Yaradua Hall, Murtala Square, Kaduna.