Jenni Marsh

Jimmy Lai has been a public target for decades.

It all started after the Hong Kong business tycoon — a refugee from China — reinvented himself in the mid-1990s as the founder of the city's provocative, anti-Beijing tabloid, Apple Daily.

One of the advertisements that introduced the newspaper to the world made Lai's point in the bluntest of ways: By showing Lai sitting in a dark warehouse with a red apple on his scalp, being pelted with incoming arrows fired by a shadowy figure.

Since then, Lai's role as one of Hong Kong's most prominent rabble-rousers has threatened his fortune, subjected him to death threats and made him a symbol of the city's tensions with mainland China.

When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, the city was guaranteed its own legal system and certain democratic freedoms until 2047, when it will likely return in total to Beijing. Over the past three months, millions have flooded Hong Kong's highways in marches against Beijing's perceived encroachment on those treasured freedoms.

Apple Daily has become the city's biggest official champion of that movement. The newspaper of the protesters. Its strident front pages rally citizens to go out and march, it has given away posters to raise at demonstrations, and it regularly taunts the government for its failures.

In a town of tycoons, Lai is the only multi-millionaire who seems prepared to openly jeopardize his fortune for Hong Kong's freedom. The 70-year-old is frequently seen at the marches, in the pouring rain or blazing summer heat.

To his supporters, Lai is a brave democracy fighter. But his detractors say that Lai and his muckraking publication are a black hand for the United States and cause chaos. In recent years, firebombs have been lobbed at his gated home, an obituary claiming he died from AIDS has run in a rival publication and Lai's political donations have subjected him to an anti-corruption case. Lai denied wrongdoing, and the case against him was ultimately dropped.

That Lai has ties with the United States is undeniable. Last month, he flew to Washington to discuss with US Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton how fundamental Hong Kong's freedom is to the US' standoff with China.

"The (new) Cold War is actually a rivalry of competing values," Lai says, framing the current US-China trade war as a standoff of between democracy and authoritarianism. "We in Hong Kong are fighting for the shared values of the US against China. We are fighting their war in the enemy camp."

It's a battle Lai says he's prepared to die for.

Chinese refugee

Lai had already led an extraordinary life by the time he founded Next Digital group, which owns Apple Daily, in the 1980s.

As the Great Chinese Famine gripped mainland China in 1960, Lai smuggled himself out of the southern mainland province of Guangdong and into Hong Kong in the bottom of a fishing boat. He arrived in the city at the age of 12 and dirt poor.

Lai says he became an odd jobs guy at a textile factory, making 60 Hong Kong dollars ($7) a month and living in an apartment with 10 others in the slum neighborhood of Sham Shui Po -- still one of Hong Kong's most impoverished districts.

On his first day, he recalls how coworkers took him for breakfast. Relief from "the anxiety of hunger" was overwhelming, says Lai. "This freedom was the first feeling I had about Hong Kong and it never disappointed me," Lai says. "Never, until now."

After the Communists assumed power of China in 1949, Hong Kong's population swelled by 1,000 people a day during the 1950s as Chinese migrants flooded over the border. Most were "daring and entrepreneurial" survivors willing to take risks, Lai recalls. His twin sister was one of the so-called freedom swimmers, who literally swam from China to the city. She went on to become a major property developer in Canada.

"Hong Kong was a land of opportunity," Lai says of that era.

Within two decades, Lai had learned English, worked his way up the factory floor to the position of salesman and decided to start his own retail line. On one trip to New York during fabric sampling season, he bought a pizza. Written on the napkin was the name Giordano.

That became the name of his wildly successful, casual men's clothing chain, which made Lai his first fortune.

"I was stupid enough to think that if I called it Giordano, people would think that it's an Italian brand name," he says. It worked. By 1992, the group had 191 outlets, made 9 million garments annually and had a turnover of 1.6 billion Hong Kong dollars ($211 million).

"He's kind of a legend in terms of his business success," says Clement So, associate dean in the school of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "Not only for what he did in the news media but in other kinds of industry."

Business was booming, but two things happened in the late 1980s that would derail the course of Lai's life.

First, on June 4, 1989, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Squareto disperse young pro-democracy protesters, changing China forever. Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred to thousands.

Lai says he wasn't political at the time, "but I always had a very strong yearning for freedom because of my experience in China."

Hong Kong was still under British rule but barreling towards reunification with China in 1997. As the city watched the Tiananmen crackdown in horror, Giordano began producing T-shirts with pro-student slogans.

Around the same time, Lai says he got divorced from his first wife. "I thought I was a very eligible guy," he says. "That was something shocking to me."

Shortly afterward, Lai was interviewed by local journalist Theresa Lai. The pair fell in love and married. Next, he became a media baron.

An Apple a day

Today Lai lives in a white, gated house in an upmarket nook of Kowloon. Security staff are stationed outside the property. Paparazzi from rival newspapers photograph all who leave and enter, putting pressure on Lai's personal life and looking for signs that he meets with pro-US figures.

Inside, melodious Chinese hwamei birds chirp in tall white cages, dramatic art works adorn the walls, while giant bromeliads and orchids brighten each corner. "I love flowers," says Lai, with intermittent clips of an upper-class British accent, as he enjoys a breakfast of strawberries and egg sandwiches served on china platters.

The figure he cuts at home, where he regularly hosts politicians, journalists and influential figures to discuss Hong Kong's democratic future -- or lack of it -- is in stark contrast to his reputation as a brash, instinct-driven, ex-factory manager whose formal education ended in primary school.

That public persona began in 1994, when Lai published an incendiary column in a magazine owned by his Next Digital group, describingthen Chinese Premier Li Peng, known as the "butcher of Beijing" for his role in the Tiananmen crackdown, as "the son of a turtle's egg with zero IQ" — a profoundly offensive slur in Chinese.

Beijing responded then as it might do now. It penalized his clothing business.

Lai says Giordano's licenses were revokedacross much of mainland China. In 1994, Lai sold his stake in the company, and the following year he launched Apple Daily, with a 100 million Hong Kong dollar promotionalcampaign, two years before the British handed the city back to China.

"It's my nature to be a rebel -- to be a revolutionary," Lai says. "I express it in business. Whenever I am in business, I create something different from the norm. That's the reason why I have been successful more than other people. I don't believe in incremental improvement."

He applied the mass-market ethos of Giordano to his newspaper: It was low cost, populist and sensational. Modeled visually on USA Today, it "shook the media landscape in Hong Kong in a revolutionary way," says Clement So, the Chinese University of Hong Kong associate dean. The paper didn't care for balanced reporting: This was advocacy journalism, with a strong dose of saucy celebrity gossip.

On news stands, Lai sparked a citywide price war, virtually giving away the sensational title at two Hong Kong dollars (25 cents), the price vendors charged to sell it. "Other papers quickly imitated without much success," says So. "The style of writing, the use of big photos. The pagination. Everything. There was a term called 'Apple-ization.'"

The newspaper became the city's most-talked about outlet -- a reputation it has maintained through its pioneering Apple Extra platform, which controversially animates breaking news events from murders to protests. The publication also found big success in Taiwan, a self-governed Chinese democracy which Beijing claims as its own territory. "Apple Daily was very lucrative in the beginning," says Willy Lam, a professor in history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

By 2008, Lai was worth $1.2 billion, according to the Forbes rich list.

With other media moguls unwilling to risk the commercial fall out of facing off with Beijing post-1997, Apple Daily became the city's sole publication regularly criticizing China. "They were so afraid of the Communists, they left me an independent media market almost to myself," Lai says.

The paper's uncompromising stance, which critics say can lack the editorial balance of including the opposing side's viewpoint, coincided with swathes of Hong Kong's media becoming more pro-Beijing.

"Basically, today people choose their media depending on what is their political affiliation," says Michael Tien, a pro-Beijing lawmaker and fellow textile tycoon whose G2000 clothing chain has more than 700 outlets globally. That echo chamber has, in turn, led Hong Kong society itself to become more polarized, even between "husband and wife, between parents and kids, between friends," says Tien.

"Nobody trusts the media. You don't trust the police. They don't trust the government," Tien says.

Societal fragmentation has been a theme of the current unrest, as protesters and police have faced off in a series of violent clashes that have been reported from vastly different perspectives across the media.

Some Hong Kongers back Beijing. Many are pro-democracy. Others describe themselves as "blue ribbon," meaning they support the police. Supporters of the movement and more liberal people identify as "yellow ribbon."

Many make a point of defining themselves as Hong Kongers, rather than broadly Chinese, to distinguish their identity from that of those living across the border -- the birthplace of many of their parents or grandparents.

For Lai, a Hong Konger is someone from a small Chinese island who shares the values of the West. "The Hong Kong identity this time ... has really emerged much more into our consciousness," he says. "We identify as Hong Konger like never before."

A black hand for the US

In early 2018, a 19-year-old Hong Kong resident allegedly killed his pregnant girlfriend in Taiwan and returned to the city before being arrested. There was nothing Taiwanese police could do; Hong Kong had no extradition agreement with Taiwan, or any Chinese territory.

In March2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam proposed a solution: an update to the city's fugitive laws that would allow criminals to be extradited to Taiwan -- and mainland China.

Lai was in the United States when the bill was announced and was warned by a US politician over breakfast about the danger it posed. "I really alerted myself," remembers Lai. "I looked at it again and said, 'Shit, this is horrible.' I knew it was going to be a big thing."

He was right. The bill ended up sparking nearly three months of often violent demonstrations in Hong Kong, with more than 800 mostly young people arrested on charges including rioting. Protesters have paralyzed the city's airport on two occasions.

Speaking to Lai it seems that many of his defining moments were sparked by America. The name "Giordano" came from a New York pizza house napkin; when the brand initially struggled to make money, a trip to McDonald's inspired Lai to streamline its offerings, as the US burger chain had done; Apple Daily was modeled on the USA Today.

His top aide in Hong Kong, Mark Simon, is the son of a former CIA employee.

That last detail never fails to tantalize onlookers. For decades, one of the key charges against Lai has been that he is a CIA stooge, and the Apple Daily a tool of the United States.

Earlier this month, China's state-run media branded Lai and three other well-known pro-democracy figures in the city as Hong Kong's "Gang of Four" -- a reference to the group that tried to overthrow Mao Zedong and seize power from the Communist Party in the 1970s.

The People's Daily claimed Lai was part of a quartet of "secretive middlemen and modern traitors," as Beijing tried to blame the unrest in Hong Kong on foreign forces.

The pro-Beijing lawmaker Tien, for one, believes that Washington pumps money into Hong Kong's democracy movement to provide a "continuous force to destabilize China," although he admits he has no evidence to substantiate this claim.

Lai calls the idea of a US-funded color revolution "ridiculous."

"If the US is funding this the evidence would be so self-evident," he says. "You can't find even one person to stand up and say, 'Hey, I got money from the US.'"

But he does view Washington as a key ally for Hong Kong -- as that early warning on the extradition bill proved. When Lai returned from that trip, he began raising the alarm. Journalists at first weren't too ruffled, he says.

"Lam was flying high before this extradition law," says Lai. "Xi Jinping was taking her hand (at public events), she was walkingin front with him, she really wanted to do something great for her boss. She knew this was a great opportunity. And actually it was almost. Because people really didn't pay attention to it at first."

But the business community was more alarmed. "All of them have had to pay something to get the protection of the people that control them in mainland China," says Lai. More than that, they understood the law could be used by Chinese contacts as a tool for blackmail; if a Chinese partner wanted to control their Hong Kong counterpart they could potentially report them to the authorities across the border, where there is a 99% conviction rate.

Opposition to the bill slowly mounted, starting with a march of 12,000 people on March 31, led by Lam Wing-kee, a bookseller who says he was kidnapped from Hong Kong by mainland Chinese agents in 2015, after selling tomes critical of Beijing. China has deniedabducting him.

Lam steamed ahead.

The marches continued: 160,000 people, then 1 million. Still the bill remained set to go through the city's top legislative body, Legco, in early June. Finally an estimated 2 million people took to the streets on June 16. The bill was suspended, but it was too late to quell the anger it had stirred.

Tien concedes it's unlikely that Washington engineered a2-million-man march, but as demonstrators increasingly wave American flags in the protests -- something Lai says is just a publicity play to attract international TV cameras -- the pro-Beijing politician wants an independent inquiry into whether the CIA is funding a color revolution in the city.

A senior US administration official has denied that Washington is sponsoring or inciting the demonstrations, and President Donald Trump also appeared to reject the suggestion last week, when he tweeted that "many are blaming me, and the United States, for the problems going on in Hong Kong. I can't imagine why?"

Freedom over fortune

Founding Apple Daily, and taking on Hong Kong's fight for democracy, gave Lai "a meaning in life that I never had" as a textile tycoon. "The mission," he says, "it has such a wonderful meaning."

The city's other tycoons have avoided wading into the crisis. "If you're a business person in Hong Kong, it is difficult to avoid the China market," says Lam, the history professor. "And once you are in the China market your investment becomes a hostage, which the Chinese government is never shy of using as a means to exert influence."

The closest that Hong Kong's richest man Li Ka-shing, who is worth over $31 billion according to Forbes, has got to commenting on the political crisis was publishing two cryptic messages in the many of the city's newspapers this month (Apple Daily wasn't one of them). The cryptic nature of his advice to exercise caution was unmistakable -- across the city, readers speculated about whether he was addressing the protesters or Beijing, or both.

"No other tycoon is willing to" be so outspoken against China as Lai, says Clement So, the Chinese University of Hong Kong professor. "That's what has made Lai so unique."

That outspokenness doesn't come without dangers.

In 2015, Molotov cocktails were hurled at the headquarters of Next Media and Lai's home in the early hours of the morning. "We're not shocked. Unfortunately, violence has become a regular feature of Hong Kong now in the political discourse. That's just a simple fact," Mark Simon, Lai's assistant, told CNN at the time.

Today, Lai has a personal security detail at his home, but the self-confessed troublemaker says he has never forgotten what it was like to be poor, and he has no intent on abandoning the masses in the crusade they share with him for democracy.

"The young people see no future for themselves -- everything is expensive," says Lai. "Even to live in a small room is too expensive for them." The land of opportunity that entrepreneurs like Lai and Li Ka-shing thrived in when they arrived in Hong Kong has long disappeared.

"With this extradition law people thought, Okay, that's the last straw, we have to fight. We have to fight in front of this last frontier," he says.

That fight might not be good for the finances of Apple Daily.

The extent of Lai's personal wealth today is unknown, but he fell off the Forbes Hong Kong Rich List in 2009. Big corporations with interests in mainland China, such as Cathay Pacific or Li's CK Hutchison Holdings, never advertise in Apple Daily. Hong Kong's previous chief executive, CY Leung, who the publication has long antagonized for his close ties to Beijing, regularly posts pictures on his Facebook pageof companies that advertize in Apple Daily. "Apple Daily is public enemy number 1 for CY Leung," says Lam, the history professor.

Operating in this political landscape,coupled with a general decline in print sales and advertising, has squeezed Apple Daily financially. The newspaper's circulation is now 200,000 a day, two-thirds of what it was a decade ago, with 1.5 million readersonline. Its daily ad revenue has halved over the past three years. Next Digital has posted a net lossfor the past three years.

Earlier this year, the newspaper introduced a pay wall of three Hong Kong dollars for access until September. Next month, the publication is hoping that people will pay 50 Hong Kong dollars a month to subscribe.

"The timing is good for Apple Daily because people want news," says Clement So, the media expert. "Lai would like to get financial support from online readers, if he can do it would throw him a lifeline. But if not successful, it is a real worry whether he cannot sustain his operation in the long run."

Meanwhile, bootstrapping online outlets, such as Stand Newsand HKC News, are growing competitors in the pro-democracy space. By shooting chat shows on smartphones and employing a small staff, they keep overheads low enough to avoid needing Beijing-tied advertisers.

2047 on the horizon

To many, the year2047, when Hong Kong will likely return to full Chinese rule,once felt like a futuristic date. But nowthat it isjust 28 years away, it's something Hong Kongers can imagine in their lifetime. The fight for democracy has become more urgent, more controversial -- but potentially less achievable, as China's economic rise gives Beijing more political power to resist democracy.

"I don't know where (the protests are) going to end," Lai says, "but one thing I know, with the world watching over us ... I think Trump, the US, cannot back off (from supporting Hong Kong) now. They can only go further and further. Not financially, but politically and morally."

Earlier this month, Pence said that chances of a trade deal with China would diminish if Hong Kong's laws were violated by Beijing, and criticized the country's human rights violations as antithetical to American ideals. Trumpalso tweetedthat Chinese President Xi Jingping should meet with protesters.

If mounting international pressure coincides with an economic slowdown and job losses, China could change, speculates Lai. "That doesn't mean that the Communist Party will collapse," he adds. "But it might mean that Xi would have to step down and a more liberal government will take over and slowly we will be on the right way." But there is no sign of this happening anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong's economy is taking a hit across the tourism, aviation and retail sectors from the disruption. Michael Tien, the pro-Beijing lawmaker, says that sales for his retail business were down 40% in August. "Nobody feels good anymore to come out and consume," he says. The Hong Kong government has announced a$2.4 billionstimulus package to help the economy grow amid the unrest.

For Lai, if the financial hub's economy has to suffer for freedom, so be it: The prospect of a struggle doesn't give people "an excuse not to fight."

"If we fight, we might have a miracle happen," he says. "If we don't fight, we have to submit to the tyranny. I just think that if we have been able to eliminate slavery we have the ability to eliminate tyranny, too. That's hopeful."

CNN

Someone told a circle of his friends recently that his nephew had a ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ case. He said the boy appeared sober in detention but he was shocked by how his mother saw the son's perfidy as 'business'. The woman reportedly said: “Is it not owo oyinbo?” Her listeners were shocked. She is a Yoruba. That a Yoruba person – and a woman – took that dangerous bend in thoughts and belched it out in public told them clearly that the house had, indeed, fallen. 

I remembered that case when I read what chairman of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr Ibrahim Magu, told the press on Friday. He lamented that “we have a situation where we have Mothers of Yahoo Yahoo Association. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of that. Whenever we arrest their children, they’ll gather around our offices pleading for the release of their children.” To be called a thieving brigand is enough shame; but my people will say there is something even more shameful than being caught a thief. That thing is shamelessness.

The biggest news in our country last week wasn't the sharing of Nigeria's ministries among principals, principalities and minions. It wasn't also whether a Chief Imam was sent by our knowledgeable president to go minister at the Basilica. The long, very embarrassing list of 77 indicted Nigerians released by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) was the biggest news globally. With a worried friend at the weekend, I had a long, extensive chat on that case. We discussed the depth of the scandal, the lack of a coherent response and reaction from the highest level of our government. We discussed the whys and hows of the ethnic hue of that FBI list. The names are preponderantly male and Igbo in spelling and pronunciation. I reminded him of an old relevant story we were told twenty-something years ago. Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa shared with Mr Omololu Olunloyo his frustration trying to fight graft in his government: “Mr Olunloyo, I just caught a thief, but they are saying I cannot prosecute him unless I catch a Hausa thief and a Yoruba thief.” We agreed that were Balewa to be alive today, it would not be difficult at all to balance that equation.

I lamented that while we agonise over banditry, cattle rustling and kidnapping from the North, Yahoo Yahoo has become a big embarrassing business, down south –including in Yorubaland. I told him it was a shame that the nation acts helpless as the buffeting sea of crime washes away Nigeria's future. An average Yoruba person would ordinarily have a sense of shame if another Yoruba was caught committing a crime. Is that generally still so today? Not exactly, but we agreed that there was still a measure of sanity here even as we spoke. The woman who rationalised her son's scams as reparation did not escape the reprimand of relations who heard her “Sebi owo Oyinbo ni.” No one there agreed that it was ‘a business’. Such rebuke should be heard everywhere else –North, South, East – for all not to be culpable and complicit in Nigeria's emergent culture of heist.

My friend agreed and waxed very intellectual. He held that Nigeria is an amalgam of very different peoples with different attitudes, moulded by a combination of historical, cultural and national contexts. He spoke on the reality of clashing modes of socialisation. He agreed that “shame is a cultural institution in Yorubaland.” He said “that is why some ignorant people say we are 'cowards.'” He said the Yoruba “calculate a high chance of winning before getting into a battle. (Mo’ja mo’sa la n m’akinkanju l’ogun...). This is principally because of the institution of shame. This is the reason our warriors of old must 's’igba' (that is, die) if they failed at war.”

 It is also the reason wealthy criminals and moral deserters don't last among the Yoruba. We agreed, looking at the last civil war and the June 12 crisis, that even in contemporary Nigeria, no leader would ever return to Yorubaland a hero after fleeing from battle. The institution of shame won't let anyone do that. But this Yahoo Yahoo rain appears set on submerging the moral high ground anyone has been standing on. And in addition to that, the Saudi Arabian government released a long list of Nigerians on death row there for drug trafficking. They are mostly Yoruba. 

We will be deceiving ourselves if we deny the unfortunate collapse of our country. We have (mis)educated youths unleashing themselves on the world. We have millions burdened by and with good education but without jobs and without hope. An army of violent, uneducated, uneducable, unhinged youths has virtually taken over the North. The South has a special youthful breed of lost, forlorn millions with axes to grind with the state. The boys among them know that they must become men and take on responsibilities. They see that the state has no plan for them beyond denying them hope and asking them to be hopeful. They will get out of hand – and they have got out of hand – to the collective shame of Nigeria. Deputy Publicity Secretary of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Chuks Ibegbu, alluded to this in an interview last Saturday. He said: “Blame our politicians for the desperation and criminality of our people in foreign lands. If our economy is good and our leaders are doing well, I do not see any reason for our youths to go to foreign lands to commit fraud.” I agree even as I see no reason for anyone to take to crime at all. We should be worried by the crimes  being committed daily by thousands in search of hope.

Aberrant, deviant Nigerian youths are committing heinous crimes home and abroad and a troubled world is reacting so decisively. There were reports that a financial outlet in the United States has suspended legitimate money transfers to Nigeria. The reports said this may go global. What impacts will this have on personal finances and on the national economy? A Lagos-based editor wailed online last week that he was profiled and specially frisked at an airport abroad. He wrote: “when I was heading out to Atlanta from London, I was flagged for a second search at the boarding lounge of Virgin Atlantic. After they were done searching me, I decided to ask why I was singled out and the fellows called on the head of the team since they had no answers. When he came and I demanded to know why I was singled out for a second search, ...he claimed he had no idea but that my name was just flagged and he showed me in his papers, where I was flagged. Just like that.” We read his experience because he had the confidence to write. Thousands have suffered this and will suffer more in silence in vicarious liability for others' crimes. It is the price people pay when they share a nation with criminals in power and on the streets. 

A failed state is a state that has comprehensively failed its youths, its present and its future. Somalia is the reigning metaphor for a failed country. Everyone is a warlord in that collapsed nation of big and small wars. The tragic reality of state failure appears to have walked in here in Nigeria. In the absence of a government of knowledge and values, everyone with guns now rules his space in our jungle. It is either soldiers are killing policemen or policemen are killing unarmed suspects or mobs are killing cops while the government hosts criminal feasts and distributes toothpicks after great meals. Fish eating fish to live and grow is pleasant only in games. In the depths, it is an unsafe world for creatures unfortunate to be weak. 

A national newspaper this past weekend reported some policemen arresting a driver for using Google Map to locate his destination: “I was sandwiched between the two (policemen), who were not in uniform. Inside the car, they saw my phone; I was using Google map to get the best route to work and one of them kept saying that it was an offence to use Google map while driving....” The driver knew his rights. He knew the policemen were wrong but he was in a hurry to get to work. The policemen saw that urgency in his restlessness and pressed harder. They wanted N120,000. No, their catch said. The bill started climbing down like traffic light. “At the end of the negotiation,” the victim said, “they took me back to Maryland (Lagos) and parked by the roadside for me to go and withdraw money at the Wema Bank ATM (they had asked for the money to be withdrawn at the ATM). While one of them went with me, the other three stayed back in the car.” The hapless Nigerian lost N45,000 to the cops. He is still asking why his country's policemen did that to him. He won't get the answers. Now, how do we want the world to see this? What other meaning has system collapse if not this? I am not sure things were this bad when Alan Paton wrote his 'Cry, My Beloved Country.'

That out of the 80 names released by the FBI, 77 are Nigerians should make the country weep. That out of the 77 Nigerians, not less than 74 are Igbos should take tears from every Igbo person. That almost all the names of condemned drug traffickers recently released by the Saudi Arabian government are of Yoruba Muslims should be enough to call a conference of that ethnic nationality for soul-searching and to cry and ask why. Whenever a country has failed in its core mandate of guaranteeing people's security and welfare, a key manifestation is what we see today. Survival by all means becomes the norm; all mores and values become worthless. When a man grows to feel his own value-lessness, his vulnerability and disempowerment as a man, he becomes desperate. We've been seeing it in Somalia since the early 1990s; we are grappling with it right now in Nigeria. Somalia, as a state, collapsed in 1991. The Rift Valley Institute, in a February 2016 report, noted Somalia's ignominy of being ranked as “one of the worst places in the world to be a woman,” “the worst place on earth to be a mother,” and, “one of the worst places in the world to be a child.” Similar judgments have been passed on Nigeria in recent years. Check.

If your gluttonous neighbour eats strange, poisonous insects and you look away, when the consequences of his bad eating habit comes, you will lose more than your sleep. Nigeria is a diseased pretty, premium harlot. All its prized clients, home and abroad, must feel its pangs. The international community must take its blame here. It is potentially risky (and suicidal) to see only money and resources each time Africa and its misgoverned territories come into focus. In a globalised world, what and who make a nation's governing class must be of interest to all. Decades of abetment of evil in Nigeria by successive western regimes cooked this deadly brew being piped all over the world today. Nigeria is too violated, too destroyed and too allowed to rot and stink for too long for the world to feel safe and be safe. The country in its present poisoned form can only breed more dangers for itself and the universe.

It is, however, not too late, even this midnight, to recalibrate Nigeria's engine; reset and realign its wheels. The world cannot afford a further 'Somalised' Nigeria beyond what it presently is. The world needs to pay greater attention to the health of Nigeria and the perverse ways of its ruling caste beyond the reactive measures of arrests, indictments, naming and shaming of its felons. There is the urgency of state retrieval, readjustment and revival. The needed desperate stitches and sutures cannot continue to be entrusted to the rapists who caused the tears. 

Communist Party of China would like the mainland Chinese population and the rest of the world to believe that the ongoing, sometimes violent protests in Hong Kong pose a threat of "terrorism." But the truth is that China has only itself to blame for pushing the city's idealistic youth into the streets once again.

Whether it happens now or in 28 years, when the “one country, two systems” framework is set to expire, millions of people in Hong Kong want to stave off the inevitable: the city’s forced integration into mainland China. And yet there are deep divisions within Hong Kong about how to prevent that outcome. On one side are those, like Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed leader, Carrie Lam, who would prefer to reach some kind of settlement with the Chinese government; on the other are those who have taken to the streets this summer. Each side believes it has grounds to tar the other as traitors.

For her part, Lam is a known quantity: the model imperial governor who wants to do right by the people, but who ultimately must do as she is told by those who appointed her. The young protesters, however, represent something unique. Earlier this month, I was among them during two of the most intense episodes thus far – on August 11, when the police wounded a young woman in the eye, and more recently, when masked protesters occupied Hong Kong’s airport for two days in the face of police brutality.

At first blush, the demonstrators seem to be in a situation similar to that of Ukraine’s Maidan protesters five years ago. Both episodes involve a “province in revolt” and a larger neighbor with the power to overwhelm the demonstrations by force. And in both cases, the government of the larger power hired the local lumpenproletariatand various criminal elements to attack the protesters.

But in more important ways, the Hong Kong protests are nothing like the Euromaidan. Ukraine’s protesters had recognized leaders, an organizational structure, and a clear agenda, which is why they were able to negotiate with the authorities when the time came. The Hong Kong protests, by contrast, are largely leaderless, and have coalesced around an innovative form of civil disobedience bordering on hybrid warfare. Oscillating between non-violence and violence, the protests have taken on a liquid form, and still do not even have a name.

The protesters are known simply as the people in black. Because they wear masks, they are faceless. And because they themselves do not know what they will do next, they are completely unpredictable. They can materialize in multiple places at once, rapidly assembling and then dispersing. The police cannot catch them, let alone count them or detain any identifiable leaders. The authorities can neither negotiate with them nor attempt to divide them, because they are already divided. They are anonymous even to one another. They communicate through the encrypted messaging app Telegram, and make decisions spontaneously on a majoritarian basis.

Still, the Hong Kong protesters have plenty in common. They are mostly twenty-somethings who speak Cantonese and grew up in the free world (precisely because undercover policemen do not speak Cantonese, they have been easily unmasked). And they adopted their hybrid-war tactics not as a first choice, but because the peaceful, centrally led “Umbrella Movement” in the city in 2014 yielded no results. Its leaders were arrested, and the movement quickly dissipated.

This time, without leaders to target, the authorities retreated as soon as they saw the rocks in protesters’ hands. But although Lam has suspended the controversial bill that triggered the demonstrations – which would have allowed criminal suspects in Hong Kong to be extradited to mainland China – she has not withdrawn it. Nor can the Chinese government afford to be perceived as having given in, as that would merely invite more “terrorism” from other potentially insubordinate provinces.

Instead, the Chinese propaganda machine, after mostly ignoring the Hong Kong protests, has begun to depict them as a threat, in order to rile up the Chinese people. And on August 17, pro-China activists held a demonstration in Hong Kong that they claim drew nearly 500,000 people(according to the police, the turnout was closer to 100,000). These propaganda efforts have been so outrageous that Facebook and Twitter have closed down some 1,000 mainland Chinese accountsthat were generating false reports.

These efforts to foment Chinese nationalism are clearly intended to prepare the ground for an intervention and the use of force. Chinese media have circulatedvideos of Chinese paramilitary forces mobilizing in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. “The chances of [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] deciding to send in the People’s Liberation Army to quell the unrest are rising by the day,” writesJamil Anderlini of the Financial Times, “and I suspect are already higher than 50%.”

But even if the Hong Kong protests were to subside, they would soon pick up again. As one protester toldthe Hong Kong Free Press, “We will continue to cause disturbances and start non-cooperation movements until the government responds.” No one in Hong Kong can even imagine their semi-autonomous region becoming just like any other Chinese city, prosperous but subject to censorship. For the city’s young people in particular, the idea that anyone who wants to get ahead professionally must join the Communist Party of China is absurd.

But the CPC cannot simply give in. Hong Kong may serve China’s business interests and attract foreign investors, but as long as the city is free, it will be an unacceptable temptation to mainlanders. Hence, the Chinese government has tried to smear the protesters as “terrorists.” Yet anyone who has observed the demonstrations firsthand knows that this is cheap propaganda. The overwhelming majority are young idealists who would rather be doing something else, but have been forced into the streets by the Chinese government’s increasing authoritarianism.

In 2014, Hong Kong’s youth demonstrated peacefully and were ignored. Now, they sometimes reach for stones. If the Chinese government continues to give them no other choice, its false claims about them might just become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is what happened with the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland and the Basque separatist group ETA in Spain. If something similar happens in Hong Kong, the CPC will have only itself to blame.

Project Syndicate

“In the deserted harbor there is water that moves endlessly against the stone walls. In the dark and silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished paneling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools” – Alan Paton.

It is all no longer news. No, not any more is it any news that thousand are dying silently of hunger and malnutrition, of preventable diseases and minor ailments. Everyday, more people are losing their means of livelihood because retrendment is now a daily exercise; it is no longer part of the unusuals that constitute the stuff of news. The word “Poverty” has gone out of fashions; if people are poor, so what? And “so what”, too, for all the immorality that goes on these days. What is it that still shocks you? If departed military governors are accused of stealing the treasuries dry, so what? If N10 Million was spent buying cars for soldiers, what’s your own? What is your concern, dear brother and sister?

Things are bad, very bad! Things are getting drastically worse. Nobody however seems ready to do anything about it.

You know, the worse things get, the more privileges they enjoy – our rulers. That is why you won't willingly give up on privilege and opulence, even if your people are roasting to death.

But what of those at the receiving end, the people who work and walk with hunger, those who are daily insulted, who are politically marginalized, who are socially abused – the people, our people, whose psyche is daily being assaulted? What have they done? What are they doing? What can they, in fact, do?

Some have talked about the legendary complacency and adjustment capability of Nigerians. The Nigerian, the opinion goes, is tough, enduring and resilient; resilient, mind you, not in fighting exploitation, oppression and insults, but in very well adapting to them. The Nigerian of this imagery is very creative, too. Just as one avenue of livelihood closes or one opportunity is taken away from him, he invents another, and so life goes on. If he cannot make it legitimately, countless illegitimate means and methods are ingeniously created. When things get so tough that he can no longer cope, the Nigerian under reference takes it all in his stride, becomes escapist via religion and fatalism.

The foregoing represents the popular imagery of the Nigerian, one with which I refused to be persuaded for a very long time. My standpoint was that the lessons of history teach that people subject to extreme privation and insults by a cabal of people invariably revolted and upstaged their oppressors. The frequency of the reality depicted in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, two classics by George Orwell in which an upstaged class of oppressors was replaced by another class of oppressors  never deterred me in the belief. The idea was that the natural revulsion of exploitation and oppression by people subject to them and the resilient spirit of human beings always ensure that no unjust regime lasts forever.

This belief found a basis in the history of the Russian Workers and Kulags under the czars, of the Cubans under the Baptistas, of the Aba Women in Colonial Nigeria, of the Algerian fellas under French colonial rule, of the Iranian mullahs and Almajiris under the Shar, of the Fillipinos under Marcus, of the Romanians under Ceausescu, of … The list is endless.

Of late, however, the seeming appearance that Nigerians have lost their sense of moral outrage slowly but gradually inched me to the position of those who believe that Nigerians are an acquiescent and passive lot. I observed how well the civil society itself reproduces the immorality of the state and those who run it and how it encourages political leaders to be amoral in their actions. I saw the immorality of the society on its own; the tyranny of the people against each other, the cheating of a poor fellow by his kind and kindred, the brutality of the husband against the wife, of parents against their children, pervasive illegitimate sexual dealings and wheeling; I saw them all.

I saw the civil society itself through and through and I recalled the saying, long ago of Socrates, that those who intended to fight for justice must themselves be just. Which then is the society that would fight the tyranny of the state and its operators that is itself pervaded by tyranny and immorality? Inexorably, I began to question the credentials of the people that are themselves victims of oppression but who think that things should continue as they are. Skepticism first, then cynicism. Faith was being lost in the society itself, and with that, faith in the ability of the country to get out of the doldrums.

Then came the “Water show down” in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State. I witnessed how a people who I believed best typify the Nigeria situation rose up in unison and determinedly to fight the entrenched privileges of shylock water tanker operators who had made sure water did not run for the last 15 years in the town in order for them to continue to reap obscene profits from their trade. The tanker operators started by selling a drum of water for 30k, then 50k, later 70k, N1.00, N1.50, N2.00. The people could afford the gradual price adjustments, and they continued to adjust. When the tanker operator realized that the people had got almost totally reliant on them for water supply, they moved the price to N3.00 and later to N4.00. The people grumbled at each turn, but they continued to buy nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the story was rife that the tanker operators organized to bribe workers in the Ijebu Ode Department of Waterworks so that water would always be in extreme short supply. It was said, in addition, that the operators organized for clandestine destruction of laid water pipes to the same effect that water never ran adequately. In all of these, the people pretended they did not know what was going on.

The patience and tolerance of the people were tasked to the limit when the tanker operators increased a drum to N5.00. No, the people would have none of it. No, the people would have none of it. No more tanker operators  in Ijebu Ode. The people were ready for the hardship until the government repaired the water network in the town. The government had no choice than to back the people. The regime, anyway is civilian – not the military which rules in spite of the people as if the people do not matter.

Such is the determination of the people that even now that the tanker operators are begging to be allowed back in business and sell a drum of water for N2.00, the people are saying an emphatic NO! Not a few of the tankers have been destroyed, not a few of their operators have been stoned in their houses and on the streets. The anger of the people in this instance knows no bounds.

The incident induced a rethink. If that could happen among a people that are famous for their affluence, felicity, hedonism and complacency, then all is not lost for the country. Hope was rekindled, faith was re-awoken. Why should one be cynical about the capability of the people? Why was it not realized that the inadequacies of the people may really be no more than a reaction to the exploitation and oppression of the powers-that-be who are in control of their collective structures and institutions? Must the people even be totally moral and upright, individually and collectively, before they are able to fight the injustice that dogs their existence? If leaders are in positions of power partly because they think they are more capable than the masses in terms of positive human values, would the people not be justified to demand of them more uprightness and responsibility than the people themselves are capable of? Questions, questions – these are questions that lead me back to the Nigerian condition.

I pity those who continue to rule as if the people are the tissue papers they use and flush off in their toilets. I fear for those who are taking our people for granted and making them progressively desperate.

The point is being reached when people have little to show for their rugged existence and when the point comes that people genuinely know that they have little or nothing to lose, their reaction to perceived injustice is most likely going to be explosive. The people will be extremist in their reaction because the privations and insults they suffer are extreme. Oh, by what means is the coming explosion to be prevented?

Published by Sunday Tribune, 29 March, 1992

Just in case you missed this frightening and scary story. It was one that set the airs on every patriot’s skin on the edge during the upper week. It provoked eerie goose pimples that instantly colonized the pores of their skins. The celebratory mood of the country during the Sallahfestivity notwithstanding, that event would have polluted national joy. The First Family was also prepared to join in the celebration. Pronto, words had gone to the Protocol department of the Villa to make ready necessary logistics as President Muhammadu Buhari would be celebrating the Islamic festival with his kith and kin in the ancient city of Daura, Katsina State.

The President promptly emerged from his office to the entrance of the Aso Rock Villa. Fawners of power slipped over one another to raise the traditional clenched fist and arm-propelled-into-a-circumference greetings to the Shugaba. Pronto, as the Americans say, the presidential convoy began the journey to the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, amid the usual blaring of sirens. The convoy was as long as the foolish inclination of a dimwit. Senior government officials, security chiefs and a few of the president’s family members, were on his entourage. The Commander in Chief ofZa Oza Room,the Nigerian First Lady, also sat like a dowager beside her husband, relishing the aura of power and presidential majesty that enveloped her. The family looked forward to a splendid Sallahcelebration in the sleepy ancient city of Daura.

As soon as they got to the airport, the president was escorted to the Presidential plane whose engine had been set running on the tarmac. Before boarding, he observed the ancient governmental ritual of shaking hands with top government officials who had lined the route to the entrance of the plane as if they were envoys about to sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty again. Having dispensed with the ritual, the president sat relaxed inside the plane, his wife beside him, as well as one of his daughters who wore this oriental attire that reeked of wealth and splendor. Then the plane took off. Shaky and rather not in possession of the grips of its takeoff, it however managed to stabilize in the sky. And just as President Buhari’s favourite kunu, his usual on trips of this hue, was being wheeled to him, one of the air hostesses, alarm festooning her face, apparently panicky, rushed to him.

“Shugaba, there is a problem!” she stammered. As she spoke, the plane began to make an unusual meandering in the sky. The hostess’ voice also meandered dangerously, just as she managed to waffle out the words: “We just found out that the pilot isn’t Captain Ali Baba-Kura, head of the Presidential fleet… indeed, Shugaba, it was only now that we discovered the pilot now on the cockpit is one Joshua Nas, a man who was sent out of the air school just after two weeks of training… we are in trouble, Your Excellency…”

If you are beginning to think that the above scenario is improbable, unreal and impracticable, belonging only in the amateurish plots of Nigerian Nollywood script writers, just place the list of Nigerian ministers just sworn in last week by same Mr Buhari, side by side their credentials and their portfolios. You will realize that the scenario, in the world of Buhari and surrogates who run the country on his behalf, or with whom he runs this country, is as real as the pain faced by one whose tooth had just been extracted, who wants to laugh at the same time. Or, at best, a sudden realization that the medic who had just opened one’s tummy up, was a mere head of the nearby butchers’ association. It is the only explanation for the socio-economic self-immolation which the Buhari government had just committed regarding the fates of a Nigerian population said to be in the neighbourhood of 200 million persons.

After a lumbering, interminable spell, Buhari produced a 43-member ministerial list comprising seven women and thirty-six men. Out of the 14 ministers in his first cabinet appointed now, 12 were retained in their previous posts. One of them is Chris Ngige, whose rating in the job had been thoroughly despised by stakeholders. Same for key ministers in the so-called development agenda of the government, education, Adamu Adamu, who has been severally criticized for making passable impact in the ministry in his first appearance, became Buhari's choice. For instance, the out-of-school children figure, which has been a key index of development, has remained jaundiced under Adamu’s handling. So also the Justice Ministry under the hands of Abubakar Malami. Controversies have dogged the concept of justice under him, provoking the unpleasant epithet of Minister of Injustice. The corruption fight under the supervision of his ministry has remained the comatose patient he inherited, save for the hype of a justice-beholden administration in the media, a pack of which is heading for its canvass.

Buhari’s reappointment of Zainab Ahmed as Minister of Finance has helped situate the kind of government he wants to run in the next four years. Aftermath the cyclone that swept off erstwhile Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, Ahmed was deployed from her Ministry of State for Budget and National planning to oversee the Finance Ministry. Immediate past Executive Secretary and National Coordinator of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) and an accountant by profession, her dismal fare since Adeosun’s exit is the subject of wagging tongues of stakeholders. She was said to be laid-back in attending to files, unlike the swiftness with which Adeosun treated same. She is also said to be very lax in pursuing an against-method economic/financial policies for the government. All in all, the prevailing hunger, hardship and hopelessness that have supervened the national landscape should be a mirror of how the Buhari government itself has performed and how far the ministers have lent their understanding to him.

Looking at the list, your mind will immediately chisel out a scenario equivalent to Captain Baba-Kura’s. Nigeria looks like a “company” that had just entrusted her administration, with a humongous budget and staff and multifarious products and services which are expected to jumpstart and impact the life of every Nigerian, into the hands of an amateurish cast of barely well-meaning political loyalists. They possess sparse understanding of what their new offices needed but are ostensibly smart and committed to All Progressives Congress (APC). They may be workaholics at political campaigns that got the President the ticket to the Villa but ultimately, they can be compared to the incongruence and the misnomer of a barely qualified pilot driving the presidential plane – apology to the Chief Justice of Nigeria.

Though a cacophony of disappointing reactions had circulated round the airspace immediately the ministerial list came out, one of the ministers put the incongruity in very sharp perspective. He is Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, former governor of Osun State and ex-Commissioner for Works in Lagos State. Never known to have short supply of whimsical riposte to situations as this, he had shot out: “I don’t really know much about the operations or policies of the ministry apart from stories about (it) on the pages of newspapers. My relationship with the ministry is distant. What I know about (it) is what I read in the newspapers,” he had said.

As if there is a dearth of quality personnel who can man the ministries, aside one or two persons, Buhari, in the two cabinets he has had, has shown a morbid fascination with those who have very high political relevance, rather than those imbued with performance pedigree, ability and professionalism. There is also a fixation he has for recompense. He was quoted to have told the people of Kaduna and Kano states that he gave them two ministerial portfolios to compensate them for stacking heavy votes in his favour. This is at best very self-serving and absurd in a democracy. A combination of all these, no doubt, has had very damming and deleterious effect on the so-called #NextLevel mantra of the government. Goodluck Jonathan, Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Yar’Adua had quality professionals as ministers who gave form and content to their governments. You had persons like Olusegun Aganga, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Akinwunmi Adesina, who after leaving ministerial offices, soared higher in international estimation. The bulk of Buhari’s ministers have been those whose political credentials are obese but are very lean in prosecuting any development agenda.

Why appoint as ministers those who are coming into contact with the concept of their ministries for the first time, who will spend the next four years as crèche pupils of their ministerial portfolios? With Aregbesola’s stint in the Ministry of Works and governorship of Osun State, why not affix him in, say the Ministry of Works? With the globally touted retarded growth of Nigeria in the power sector, why not appoint a capable technocrat as minister? I learnt that the man Buhari appointed Minister of Power, Saleh Mamman, was an Assistant Director (Technical) in the Taraba State Government. I pray this is not true. What that mean is that the minister would spend the next four years trying to understand the ministry. Oh, my God, a Technician in the ministry? This must be a lie! What calamity can befall a people that is more than that this?

It was bad enough that the fixation of governments in time past was on credentials but Buhari’s is on the politics of their credentials. He is fixated on political pedigree as passport to membership of his cabinet. Which is very retrogressive. When he said he would appoint those he knew personally, those who are apprised with his lumbering, hermitic knowledge of the other person reckoned that the cabinet would be made up of characters locatable only in his restricted circle of influence. There are several technocrats who possess the midas-touch to rescue Nigeria from her stasis. Aside his mouthing it, Buhari has no economic agenda to lift Nigeria out of the economic woods and open up the economy. If he had, it is buried deep down in an abomasum created only for him. The Nigerian economy had contracted under him by 43 per cent last year and there is very sparse Foreign Direct Investment into the economy due to the upsurge in violence and insecurity in the land. The oil sector, still the driving force of the economy, is in turn driven by the sharks and whales of corruption.

A serious government desirous of pulling its country from an economic morass like ours cannot sustain these Acheulian ministerial characters on parade. An ideal one would have its bureaucracies policed by ministers who possess a combination of sterling qualities, talents and skills. Other qualities should be technical expertise, organizational know-how and decades of unimpeachable on-the-job experience. We will also need ones with unassailable pedigree of management and skills, maturity steeped in wisdom, forthrightness and willingness to subjugate an innate tendency for subordinating private ambitions for societal greater good. Juxtapose all I have said against the personality of Rotimi Amaechi for instance, and others in Buhari’s archival cabinet in general, and a sense of where we are and where we will likely be in the next four years will hit you like a tornado.

Nationalism comes in many flavors — the ethnic and the civic, the religious and the secular, the right and the left. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalismcalled for inheritance taxes, a ban on corporate money in politics, workers’ compensation and a living wage. By contrast, the recent National Conservative Conferenceoutlined a “new American and British nationalism” that featured balanced budgets, strong national borders and a return to Anglo-American national traditions: “constitutionalism, the common law, the English language, and Christian scripture.”

There are so many varieties of nationalism that it may be time to pause and ask: What is a nation? A provocative and useful answeronce came from the 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan: “The essence of a nation is that all of its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.”

What must citizens forget before a nation becomes a nation? Ethnic differences, for one thing: “No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth,” Renan said. Ancient differences as to sect or creed must be left in the past. “Every French citizen has forgotten,” Renan claims, that in the 13th century the pope’s armies nearly wiped out the Cathars, a rival Christian sect, and that on St. Bartholomew’s Day in the 16th century, Catholic mobs slaughtered thousands of Calvinist Protestants.

Happily, by Renan’s day, such old conflicts had fallen into time immemorial, and in so doing freed France to become France.

What can happen to a nation whose citizens do not forget? Renan would not have been surprised by the fate of the former Yugoslavia. For many years, Muslim Bosniaks, Roman Catholic Croats and Eastern Orthodox Serbs lived in relative harmony. With the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s, however, it seemed likely that the country would splinter into its constituent parts, and the Serbs, fearing they would become a second-class minority, began to massacre their Muslim neighbors.

Slobodan Milosevic, a skilled apologist for the memory of difference, helped plant the seeds of that exercise in ethnic cleansing when he celebrated the anniversary of an ancient battle. For Serbs, it had become a so-called chosen trauma, an ancestral calamity whose memory mixes actual history with present-day grievance and hope. In the summer of 1389 at the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo, an army of Muslim Turks defeated Christian Serbs led by the feudal lord Lazar Hrebeljanovic. The Ottoman Empire thereafter ruled over Kosovo for 400 years.

To mark the 600th anniversary of that battle, Mr. Milosevic gathered a crowd on the original Field of Blackbirds. He himself descended on the site in a helicopter as if sainted Prince Lazar were returning from on high. Standing before the prominently displayed dates 1389 and 1989, he then delivered a speech whose constant references to dignity and humiliation, motherland and treason, bravery and suffering, pride and shame were clearly designed to provoke a time-collapsed modern re-enactment of the ancient animosity between Christians and Muslims.

In subsequent years, a genocidal campaign followed. In the town of Srebrenica, Serbian fighters massacred about 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

Henry Adams once called politics “the systematic organization of hatreds,” certainly the case in the former Yugoslavia. Not that American politicians have ever lacked such skills. One need only think of Ronald Reagan going to Neshoba County, Miss. — notorious site of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers — to kick off his 1980 presidential campaign by telling a cheering crowd at the county fair, “I believe in states’ rights.” Or of Donald Trump Jr., who traveled to the same county fair in July 2016 to assure the crowd, “I believe in tradition,” a simple prompt in both cases for voters whose motivating “chosen trauma” is the Civil War and its legacy of racial animosity.

In sketching a model of nationhood, Renan adds to the forgetting of difference a kind of negative definition of national identity, carefully enumerating all the things that people might take to be a nation’s essence and dismissing each in turn: It isn’t to be found in religious belief, language, race, “ethnographic politics,” economics or even geography (“it is no more soil than it is race which makes a nation”). Once he has pared all that away, Renan leaves us with little but the first part of his “essence of a nation,” that its citizens have many things “in common,” meaning, to my mind, the kind of nondivisive secular ideals found in the United States Constitution such as universal suffrage, due process of law and a guarantee that the government will pass no legislation “respecting an establishment of religion.”

Can there be a new nationalism that squares with such ideals? Maybe, but the National Conservatism Conference, organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation, showed how difficult it can be.

The organizers of that meeting set out to “reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought,” at the same time insisting that their project stood “in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race,” an opposition articulated in part by appealing to a supposedly more benign political theory grounded in “culture.”

When they got into details, however, it was hard to separate that ground from race and religion. “Culture,” one speaker declared, always emerges from a specific time and place, his example being the famous sermon imaging the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city on a hill,” an inspirational text rooted in “a particular soil” and “a particular way of thinking.” The home soil would be England, of course, and the way of thinking the Puritan strain of the radically anti-Catholic Church of England — a culture, in short, markedly European, white and Protestant.

Other examples offered at the conferencecould never quite escape the disconnect between ideals and their details, the most egregious and off-script example coming from a speaker calling for an immigration policy that would take “cultural compatibility” into account, shamelessly adding that this would effectively mean “taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.”

The new nationalism seems to be driven by a hunger for identity, for a solid sense of one’s presence in the world, joined to a style of self-knowing that operates by opposition: I’m British, not French; I’m American, not Mexican; I’m Christian, not Muslim; I’m white, not black. Given that point of departure, nationalism becomes a shorthand for the memory of all such oppositions.

It is always a valuable exercise to freshly imagine what our country means to us, but in doing so we would do well to remember that when it comes to divisions of race, ethnicity and religious belief, the unforgotten is the destroyer of nations.

New York Times

Former Commissioner for Energy and Mineral Resources in Lagos State, Mr. Olawale Oluwo, has stated categorically that government in Lagos State starts and ends in the house of the leader of All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Oluwo, who spoke at Afang Summit, organised by a Lagos-based investment banker, Mr. Joseph Edgar, also gave insight into the power play that denied former Lagos State Akinwumi Ambode his second term bid.

In his words, “Part of the things we were doing before they stopped our government was building terminals and bus depots all over the state. If completed, the project will take out completely those garages that have been there for decades. It’s those garages that are producing touts. There is no need for National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW).

“The NURTW makes N82 billion every year from Lagos, which is almost 10 per cent of our budget. So, these things would have eliminated the commercial danfo, the molue, tricycle, and okada and the same guys will be the ones running the new transport system. We never used to ride okada. So, why would okada be normal? this is one of the things we were trying to eliminate. The okada and agbero we see today were not in that future.

“I think the Lagos of three to four years may not be the Lagos of the last three to four years. Lagos will change; the change will be tough, rough, and I believe it will be bloody. It will be delusional to think you want to go and do a struggle and you are thinking of coming back. Until you are able to make coming back home a probability, you are not qualified to lead the struggle. You might be qualified to be a supporter or sympathizer of a struggle but you can’t be at the forefront, because nothing good comes easy. Do you think they will leave power and move on?”

On why the powers that-be moved against Ambode, Oluwo said, “Don’t judge a man you don’t know and you have never met before. People manipulate people to destroy people and they succeeded in doing that to Ambode.

“Ambode deliberately decided not to talk. So, it’s not balanced. One side was busy feeding the public with a negative story. I was not only a government official, I was also close to him and I was a member of his kitchen cabinet. I know the time he will talk will come. Ambode has made his own determination not to talk for now.”

On how Ambode became Lagos State governor, Oluwo recounted his meeting with Delta State-born businessman, Mr. Albert Okumagba who “told me that Ambode would be governor of Lagos in 2012 and I laughed. I told him then that even if I don’t know who would be governor of Lagos, I know those who would not be governor, that if they were sharing it for free Ambode was one of those who cannot rule Lagos. And I did not work for Ambode during the primary. I worked for the former Speaker Lagos Assembly, Mr. Adeyemi Ikuforiji, because he is my maternal cousin and I gave him my commitment in 2007 that I would support him in anything.

“I never knew Ambode until Okumagba introduced me to him in 2011 when I took a proposal to his house, and I think at that period, Mr Bola Tinubu had told Ambode that he would be governor of the state. So, Ambode is not the kind of guy they woke up from sleep to be the state governor. I didn’t believe it when I was told. I didn’t work for him during the primary because I did not believe Tinubu was behind him.”

Oluwo also spoke about the battle Mr. Babatunde Fashola fought before securing his second term.

According to him, “I don’t want to believe that Tinubu has the intention of making anybody a governor and then give him a second term. Fashola was not meant to go for the second term. There was a plan to stop Fashola; I was in Ikuforiji’s camp at that time and Asiwaju told him to start preparing. Whatever that meant, I don’t know, and Ikuforiji was the only one that came to contest against Fashola during the primary. So, people say probably it was because of Fashola’s popularity that earned him a second term. The answer is, ‘no!’ It had nothing to do with that. It’s just that that thing (federal might), Asiwaju did not have it in 2011. That was what made him succumb to Fashola going for the second term; he had it (federal might) in 2015. If the party had been in power in 2011, Fashola would never have gone back, because these guys (Fashola and Ambode) are technocrats. They don’t have any party of their own; they don’t have structure. PDP was ready to give Fashola the ticket before Asiwaju ran back.”

Oluwo also spoke on the Afang Summit’s theme, ‘The Economy: What Hope?’, saying, “Anybody can build a structure but a man that has access to state’s money to build a structure is different. If Ambode had known a year earlier that he won’t come back, it would have been a different thing, because they sold a dummy to him and to all of us but I didn’t believe them and I told my people that they were being deceived. Ambode did not fight because of Buhari. One, Ambode didn’t know that Buhari would be aloof and would not get himself involved. Two, he had too much respect for Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

“They sold Ambode a dummy, that the ticket would be given to him, but they just wanted to shake him and they were sending people to tell him, ‘don’t worry, you are too popular to be stopped.’”

Oluwo also spoke about the relationship between Ambode and Lagosians, noting, “There are things Lagosians didn’t like. Refuse became a disaster; they didn’t like the Land Use Charge, but that doesn’t affect the ticket of a political party. The refuse problem is not as serious as killings under Buhari. As long as you are on the right platform of a political party and they have money they can share, some Nigerians will sell their votes and look the other way and let you write the result. That is the level of our development at this time.

“Yes, mistakes were made on Visionscape, but in every reform, you are displacing vested interests. They would fight back and take you down or destroy the programme. Visionscape has its own problem, but they escalated it. But one thing is sure, Lagos will go back to Vissionscape reform; they may repackage it, do the naming ceremony for it but they will surely go back because that is the only way to manage waste and the transportation programme we put together.”

On what Ambode would have done differently if he had realised early that he would not get the ticket of the party, Oluwo said, “Forget about the party leaders; they don’t count. That thing they call Governor’s Advisory Council (GAC) is a toothless bulldog; they don’t have one per cent relevance in the scale of hundred. Ambode was too popular for them. So, what Ambode should have done was to have gone to his principal to say, oga, anything you do, we are going into this second term together, give me my second term and I will give you everything you want’. The truth is that Ambode never had any issue with Tinubu; it was people that came in between them.

“Nobody has power in Lagos outside Bourdillon. If Ambode had given the impression that he was ready to fight, they would sit him down. It is about power and resources; power does not belong to these people. The lesson learned is that you can be given something on a platter of gold, but you may not sustain it on a platter of gold.”

The Guardian

Corinne Purtill

In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.

Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.

Let’s take a look at Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:

Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. They aren’t. Which takes us to:

Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

Cipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. Every category one can imagine—gender, race, nationality, education level, income—possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. There are stupid college professors. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. How numerous are the stupid amongst us? It’s impossible to say. And any guess would almost certainly violate the first law, anyway.

Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself.

The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account? Stupid.

This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity. First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others’ expense. And lastly there is the helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense.

The non-stupid are a flawed and inconsistent bunch. Sometimes we act intelligently, sometimes we are selfish bandits, sometimes we act helplessly and are taken advantage of by others, and sometimes we’re a bit of both. The stupid, in comparison, are paragons of consistency, acting at all times with unyielding idiocy.

However, consistent stupidity is the only consistent thing about the stupid. This is what makes stupid people so dangerous. Cipolla explains:

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

All of which leads us to:

Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. This brings us to the fifth and final law:

Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

And its corollary:

A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

We can do nothing about the stupid. The difference between societies that collapse under the weight of their stupid citizens and those who transcend them are the makeup of the non-stupid. Those progressing in spite of their stupidity possess a high proportion of people acting intelligently, those who counterbalance the stupid’s losses by bringing about gains for themselves and their fellows.

Declining societies have the same percentage of stupid people as successful ones. But they also have high percentages of helpless people and, Cipolla writes, “an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity.”

“Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the [stupid] fraction and makes decline a certainty,” Cipolla concludes. “And the country goes to Hell.”

Compiled by Olalekan Adeleye

Quartz

Banks market capitalisation drops by N657bn —August 12, 2019.

Investors lose N157.7bn as 43 stocks decline —August 13, 2019.

When in 2016 the forecast of a continuous decline in stock prices was made, a friend asked me when it will end and a recovery get underway. The answers provided were simple. The bad news for investors, whether in the capital market or elsewhere, will continue as long as Nigeria has a Federal Government whose leaders don’t understand how modern economies work.

The unceasing competition among nations of the world for advantage will always work in favour of countries blessed with leaders with a great deal of know-how. Nigeria, unfortunately, is stuck with economic illiterates managing our fortunes for us. Furthermore every quarter that produces poor results will see us fall farther behind other nations and also make it more difficult to catch up.

A deregulated capital market such as ours presents government and the governed an objective report card of what global investors think of our performance. No senior special adviser on media or minister of mis-information can claim that we are doing very well on the economy when the trend remains downwards for almost 27 months. The reasons are not too difficult to understand for those not wedded to government propaganda.

Capital is a coward; it takes flight at the first serious sign of trouble. The first serious sign of trouble came in 2016 when the economy went into a recession for the first time in 38 years. The results were made available in the first quarter, Q1, of 2017. Investors expected a vigorous response from the Federal Government towards strong and quick recovery. What followed was not reassuring and induced pessimism about Federal Government’s ability to understand and manage a complex economy.

To begin with the president had prolonged health challenges – which led to a lot of ugly speculations about the captain of the Nigerian ship of state. The vice president stepped in and filled some of the political vacuum created; but he failed to take any significant measures to accelerate economic growth.

Meanwhile, 2017 budget was hostage to divisive politics. The leaders of the executive and legislative branches of government forgot (or never realised) that bad politics will drive out good money from any economy any time. Collectively, they behaved as if Nigeria was isolated from the globalisation of all markets.

A friend in need is no friend of mine —American comedian.

The budget was eventually passed in late May and signed in early June. By then, the more jittery foreign portfolio investors had started to check out. They knew from experience about the verdict of history on such matters.

A budget passed so late in the year and, with no growth stimulus of any sort, invariably results in low Gross Domestic Product, GDP, growth. They were absolutely correct. The year 2017 ended with 0.8 per cent growth – barely noticeable. With -1.4 recorded in the previous year, the cumulative for 2016 and 2017 was still negative.

Given the depressing results for the first two years, many presidents invariably dissolve the cabinet and attempt to bring more experienced people into government to accelerate development. Nothing like that happened. Individuals appointed on account of loyalty or to pay political debts were retained until the end. The ministers of the most important ministries from the standpoint of the economy – power, works, transportation, finance, internal affairs – became national embarrassments to everybody who could objectively assess their performance. They embarrassed everybody except the team manager who either did not know what a performance appraisal is all about or did not seem to care. But, foreign investors with their funds locked up in the largest country in the dark continent were not so forgiving.

They noticed that the Lagos-Ibadan double-guage rail line which was promised before the end of 2017 was not anywhere near 20 per cent completion when the year ended. This is August 2019 and the line is still far from being opened for business. The Chinese, who provided the loan for the rail line know that there is a time component to any loan deal. With delay, interest payments mount. That was how we got into the debt trap in the 1980s. We are back on familiar road to our detriment.

They also noticed that we allowed the re-construction of the busiest road in Nigeria – Lagos-Sagamu-Ibadan – to drag on for ever. It has taken us all the years from Yar’Adua’s government in 2007 to repair and expand a road which Gowon’s administration delivered from virgin land in less than three years. It will still remain uncompleted by December this year.

The paralysis of the nation’s biggest ports for almost five years could only occur in a country which does not want foreign direct investment in large amounts.

The Apapa gridlock, which has not been duplicated anywhere in the world, is a classic case study in How Not To Run A Government. The situation not only slows down evacuation of imported materials from the ports, it actively discourages exports.

The impunity of the drivers of trucks and trailers is simply astonishing. Osinbajo, as acting President issued them an order to vacate in 72 hours. He was ignored; and the situation got worse.

Two months ago, the President issued the same “Quit Notice”. They are still there till today. No official of government has received a query for this slap in the face of the nation’s highest constituted authority. Yet, Nigeria loses billions each day the trucks stay there.

Foreign investors take note of all these signs of a nation in almost total disarray and they have rightly decided to withdraw to safer economies. Obviously, the government of any country which can tolerate the atrocities we mentioned above, as well as others left untouched, cannot possibly expect its economy to grow at six, seven or eight per cent as China, India and Indonesia – the countries mentioned on June 12 – had done for several years. Can anyone imagine China allowing truckers to block a major road for two weeks – not to talk of five years?

Those still involved in the Nigerian Stock Exchange must be there now for other reasons other than return on investment. Nigerian economy is heading for another low growth year. Firms listed on NSE are struggling. Now, Food and Beverage sector will experience a tough time starting with those importing milk products as component of their manufacturing process.

The collateral damage which the change of government policy will have on non-food manufacturers (packaging materials, etc.) will be more profound than anybody can imagine at this time.

Decline in total capitalisation since January would have been alarming if not for new major listings like MTN. But, even with them, the future is bleak for investors. The Nigerian economy under current management cannot deliver the sort of robust growth which will halt the continuous slide in share prices.

Vanguard