TIME TO CRIMINALIZE THE USE OF THE WORD "BEGGARS" IN NIGERIA:
BEHEADING THE MONSTER OF PREJUDICE - by CHIDI ODINKALU - (Chairman, National Human Rights Commission)

Prejudice has become profitable in Nigeria. It’s boom season for ethnic entrepreneurs and, indeed, for sundry purveyors of hate. These traders in prejudice do not inhabit any special corners of Nigeria. They are everywhere and they profit from nearly everything. They cut across generations, class, gender, creed. Nothing escapes their attention and everything is sooner or later an ethnic conspiracy or an excuse for a slur on an identity group.

To be fair, these profiteers in prejudice have received a lot of help recently. Governors in different parts of Nigeria who swore to defend the Constitution of Nigeria have resorted to removing Nigerians from one part of the country to another under various artifices from security to specious humanitarianism. Others have sacked workers in the public service of their states based on claims that the affected workers are supposedly aliens from neighbouring states.

All this takes place notwithstanding that Nigeria’s constitution expressly prohibits discrimination on grounds of place of origin, ethnicity or sex. The same constitution entitles all Nigerians to move freely and live anywhere within the country.

Yet, women have routinely lost access to and preferment within the public service because they married spouses from outside what is supposed to be their state of origin.

It gets worse: prejudice feeds extremism. When a bomb goes off in No-Man’s Land or a security operation somewhere reports mass casualties, the beer-parlour – and even predominant policy – inquiry no less, often turns on the ethnic or sectarian identities of those affected.

Most no longer seem to harbor the capability for pause to mourn the collective injuries to our country, to share in the grief of people like who must mourn the loss of loved ones or to transmit solidarity or compassion to communities living under the weight of victimization.

Transcendentalism is no longer a requirement for leadership. To have a place at the table of leadership, you must corral and bring along a filial collective tied to nativity.

Co-existence has acquired new enemies. Online chat rooms and electronic communities have not helped. There is a frightening electronic traffic in prejudice and vituperation. It is as if some electronic platforms are designed to spike their own traffic metrics by deliberately promoting echo-chambers in prejudice.

All this traffic in prejudice misses one essential and obvious point. In Nigeria, there are only two tribes that matter: the rulers and the others. The former are an overwhelming minority. The rest of us are “the others”. And when you are “the other” in Nigeria, anything can happen to you.

The idea of an “overwhelming minority” sounds inherently self-contradictory but not when you look at it closely. In a democracy, the majority supposedly confers power. In reality, a minority necessarily exercises and profits from it.

In Nigeria a narrow band of interests has always controlled our patrimony. The membership of this narrow band comes from all over the country. When the going is good, they care little about the others. When they encounter the occasional difficulty in carving up our patrimony, they enlist others in manufactured divisions of ethnicity and sect. And they litter the land with red meat for profiteers in prejudice.

All over our laws, being poor is criminalized. The law establishing the Abuja Environmental Protection Board describes hardworking women selling agricultural produce or seeking other legitimate livelihood in day time as “solid waste” and renders them liable to arbitrary arrest.

Unemployed persons are punished for being “idle and disorderly”. Poor people in the wrong place are “vagabonds”. And those who suffer mental disability are “lunatics” or “mad people”.

What is notable in the recent one-way traffic in Nigerians across state borders is not where those affected come from or the race or ethnicity of those who think that the response to our admittedly profound social or political pathologies is the internal banishment of other people. It is rather that the victims are all generally poor people. To underline this point, they are also rendered nameless. As a category, we call them “beggars”.

It is as if being called a beggar is good reason for being put beneath humanity and beneath the protections of our constitution.

When states banish motorbike operators from the roads, the main reason they give is that such “beggars” constitute threats to security.

When banks preclude persons with disability – whose deposits they happily collect - from their transaction and service halls, it is because such “beggars” are unsuitable to be seen in their corporate spaces.

And when we exclude people who do not look like us from our various neighbourhoods, we call them “beggars” too.

In all these instances, we deploy these usages to excuse our inability to care or show compassion. Yet, the only thing that is beggared by all this sniffing at people who are not like us is the possibility of mutual co-existence in a viable country.

The use of the word “beggar” to describe fellow human beings and citizens says everything about the pervasiveness of status as the defining influence in how Nigeria is presently organised. This is not chosen by nature nor ordered by any ethnic or faith group.

As a policy tendency, the idea of civic entitlement, that citizens are entitled as a matter of right to certain minimum guarantees of well being and due process is now under threat in our country. This must be resisted by all who wish Nigeria well.

Difficult as it may seem, there are many ways to fight back. Leadership is important. We must offer support and incentives for aspiring leaders who are genuinely committed to promoting transcendental and non-discriminatory values and find ways to exact political penalty for those that fail to do so.

The law has a role to play. We must review our laws and remove from them provisions that penalize poverty or being different.

It also time to think about criminalizing hate speech and related crimes of purveying hate.

Related to this, proprietors and promoters of electronic communities must begin to assume greater responsibility for traffic on their platforms. Agreeing a voluntary code of good practice could be a good beginning. The National Human Rights Commission can mediate this.

Pejoratives, like “beggars”, must be discouraged in our public communications. Every person has a name and group pejoratives of this sort are themselves violations of dignity and the inherent worth of every person.

As a menu of options, this is only a beginning. There are lots more that we could do. We can at least resolve around one goal: It is time to end the open season on those who look different from us.

ODINKALU, an expert in human rights and migration law, is the Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission

RE: LAGOS, THE IGBO AND THE SERVANTS OF TRUTH (BY FEMI FANI KAYODE)

By Sam-Ireke Eleanya

I have read Femi Fani-Kayode’s slew of articles in the past one week and Love and well, embarrassment – on his behalf, propels, compels and impales me to respond to, at least, one of them.

Because, it is important.

You see, I am now a father of many including a beautiful one year old girl whose grandfather recently retired at the highest level attainable under Lagos State government – level 17 - after raising so many young persons as a classroom teacher. A remarkable feat considering he had before then served as a captain in the defunct Biafran army. It would be nice if my daughter ever comes across that Fani-Kayode’s article, in my lifetime or thereafter, – that she should find something else from her dad – to salt back reality into her worldview as to the intrinsic worth of the quiet contribution of her grandfather to Africa’s most populous city: Lagos.

Yes, I do have an eye on posterity. It matters. That Fani-kayode do not steal that from my daughter. Small ambition – but still very important. I owe it to her. My father did the same for me - for as long as his life lasted. 

First, the insignificant issues raised by that article (since the insignificant here are usually the things that sets us against each other once they are repackaged in ethnic or religious get-ups).

The claim that people with ties to the Igbo socio-cultural heritage helped to develop Lagos” is not “hogwash”. To say or even think otherwise is what is: that is, hogwash.

Lagos, warts and all, is one of the greatest cities of Africa. And like all great cities, its arms have always been open to creative energies from any place in and outside of Nigeria. 

Many dead and living persons of Igbo descent have provided that energy. Some of them are notable. No, don’t ask me about names. I won’t give you. The reason is good for your health. For, it is the contribution of the anonymous city-builders that truly really matter – in quantity and quality. Their feats, good or bad, shorn of the shadows of their names, allow contemporary and future beholders the privilege of reveling in the most earthy rhetorical question on earth: who could have done this?

Great cities – like the Great Pyramids of Egypt and other so-called physical wonders of the world - have always been built on the back and brain of anonymous people. The only wahala is that they do not get to - or care to - tell their story which is then hijacked, garnished and called history by story tellers. And as Chinua Achebe pointed out so poignantly in Ant-Hill of the Savannah, the story-teller is the King. And, kings like to play the hero. 

Yes. Anonymous persons, dead and alive, with direct or convoluted ties to the Igbo cultural heritage helped, significantly, in the development of Lagos. As have Itsekiris, Hausas, Fulanis, Ijaws, Efiks, Idomas Tivs…so-called inter-ethnic half-castes…Chinese, Lebanese, Koreans, Americans, British nationals and of course so-called international half-castes. The list of sovereign or ethnic nations and other groups that have invested in and continue to invest in the development of Lagos is beyond the capacity of Fani-Kayode – or Albert Einstein - to understand. And it is nothing to be ashamed of. It is an honour due to God which He would not share with anybody.

This much is self-evident, at least, until Guinness Book of Records comes in with a contrary verdict: the development tapestry and trajectory of the ever evolving city of Lagos is not the 8th wonder of the world started and finished, exclusively, by the first ethnic group to be connected to its swathe of lagoons, creeks, islands and marshes. 

Lagos is not even built yet. Lagos is - (as Governors in Nigeria like to say during the first two years of their term in office when they have messed up their state capital with various unseemly construction projects that may never ever be finished so as to recoup election expenses) a perennial construction site. Which also explains why there are many characters on “site” who may not be to the liking or approval of the principal or lead contractors like Governor Babatunde Fashola.

To think otherwise dignifies nobody: the thinker, the very set of people the thinker set out to benefit or the very people he set out to slight.

Yet, it is possible to forgive FFK, “the beloved of the Lord” and privileged scion of a notable family originally from Ile-Ife. It’s possible that he could actually have a genuine basis to hold such an opinion of Lagos’ development. In these days of creative thinkers who can think outside of the box to the point that thinking-outside-of-the-box becomes a box, it is possible. Or, it may just be that in spite of his very distinguished education in Britain right from childhood till he graduated as a lawyer from the same law school his grandfather and father attended that FFK is genuinely hampered by the trendy-ignorance of the ivy-leaguer.

And that is also forgivable.

Lagos, like the elephant, is not a lore to be told by visually or experientially challenged folks who have been groomed and sealed for the head section of the elephant. The sky-scrappers, bridges, roads, toll-gates, mansions, shopping malls, stadiums, galleria, Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Banana Island, Victoria Garden City or Alausa do not make Lagos Lagos. What does are well, too marvelous to be told: they can only be lived. And most of it are Lagos’ underbelly which can only be experienced. 

It is also easy for privileges to make one blind to Lagos: to hate the real face of Lagos; to refuse to engage and help to grow Lagos; to become frustrated by real Lagos and ultimately to inspire a destructive urge to bleed Lagos of whatever does not to conform to a phantom and test-tube image of Lagos – starting from the dislocation and afterwards, relocation of the very weakest: the so-called destitute, homeless, vagrants, and mentally unwell. But make no mistake, it is only the start. A bully would always up the stake - if nobody squares up to him or her.

I know. Go into any little library with any material in it of historical worth and you would see the same pattern everywhere, all over the world: it is a kobo, a dozen.

Blindness by virtue of privilege and the bubble of living within the corridors of powers (I know, I have been there) is not unlike real blindness. I rephrase, it is more dangerous than physical blindness. For it puts the direction and tenured destiny of a whole city, state or even a country in the hand and mind of persons who are habitually blind to the estate they lead. Persons who do not know the stakeholders of the city they lead or who even if they know – have decreed their own version of test-tube stakeholders – whatever the realities on the ground are– and have committed to realizing that phantom stakeholdership at whatever cost.

If all the view that Fani-Kayode has of Lagos is the one he got when on holidays from Britain, as a very privileged young man slush with Nigeria's funds moving in privileged circles loitering around once-upon-a-time Lagos' fun spots, then he is Lagos-blind. If all the view he has is the one he gets from his window seats on his many frequent plane flights, then he is still Lagos-blind. If all the view he has of Lagos was his frenzied look-see through the tinted glasses of heavy jeeps in presidential convoys moving with feather-light speed during his time as a Presidential aide or Minister; or from the tales of his father and grandfather by moon or bulb lights; or even from well-researched books and travelogues on Lagos in the Libraries of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, well, he does not know Lagos. He is still Lagos blind.

He is still a Jambite who has not been matriculated into the earthy and ever changing smell and face of Lagos. Does he know Dustbin Estate in Ajegunle where kids and goats play, eat and sleep on rubbish in a well-ordered community where survival has demystified tribe and ethnic group completely? Or does he know waterfronts of Bariga where naked children play perilously by deep canals overgrown by water-hyacinths whose survival depend solely on the speed or reaction of other children no matter their ethnic group? What does he know about Apapa where young men from every part of Nigeria straggle in daily to lend their shoulders and back to uphold Nigeria’s maritime industry that defines Lagos? Or about hundreds of thousands of women selling boli and groundnut, frying akara, "chin-chin" and big oily doughnuts that sell more combined units, daily, than many established industries do in a month?

Does he know Nollywood built by talented people from every part of this country that has and continue to put Lagos on the global culture and entertainment map? How about Lagos’ many tertiary institutions that sloughs through strikes and strikes and yet somehow manage to keep supporting the industrial complex of Lagos? Does he know the roll-call of staff and students? Does FFK know the markets of Lagos – large and small where the living (and some whisper, ghost) of every tribe congregate to provide the consumption that gives Lagos the highest slice of Value Added tax in the country? Does he know the bukkas, cafeterias and hotels of Lagos which cuisine have such established Lagos “delicacies” which origin are traceable from as far away as Owerri, Calabar and Rivers state? Or does he know the premiership viewing centers that have - without any deliberate policy support - become a cottage industry on their own servicing hundreds of thousands of Lagos youth, united by football and adrenaline but divided by marvelously ludicrous allegiances to football clubs based in countries they may never visit till they die?

Has he ever galloped through Lagos on the equine back of a molue or its modern BRT version? And seen Lagos people? Or has ever gone to any of the Marriage registry and seen Amaka happily wedding Oyebode without any relation except Akpan as best man and Aishat as maid of honour? When fifty okadas stop to support a colleague -right or wrong - who is involved in an accident, does he know their ethnic make up? Keke Marwa and NAPEP has become another massive feature of Lagos employing hundred of thousands of young men and providing food for almost as much agberos free-riding on their industry: does FFK know the real names and birth place of driver and agbero? 

Has he ever felt the adrenaline of hope of the million of young and old that come out every morning in many parts of Lagos with various implements of trade hoping to be hired for just enough to feed their families and bodily frame? Does he know the source of the onions and sweet potatoes and the men who sell them – except on Fridays? Or does he know the landlord tenants dynamics of Lagos – in face-me-i-face-you or even in the luxury condos of Lekki phase one? 

Has he ever taken the roll-call of the multitudes who throng the Lagos-Ibadan expressway every Friday seeking to connect to the God of RCCG, MFM, and other christian denominations which have cornered endless acres of space in that God-hounded segment of Africa? Or has he entered any of the big houses in Ikoyi after the master has gone with the big car leaving the big house for the plenty small people of different ethnic stocks? 

Does he know the professional circuit of Lagos that continues to make Lagos the leading voice in Africa on various issues. Or does he know the famed Lagos media and civil society network stands which continue to stand as a bulwark against tyranny in Nigeria? That stood as a buffer for Lagos State government alone when the tornado or is it the hurricane of the PDP led federal government came leveling every state in Nigeria's south west axis? When those Lagos organisations mobilized "one million marches" to protest against Abacha or defend June 12, does FFK, pray, know that most of those who make up the faceless throngs each time a call is made for the right cause- some of whom pay with their lives for their audacity - ever did so in defence of ethnic allegiance? That the preservation of the soul and dignity of Lagos -as a microcosm of Nigeria, was their opium which gave them heady courage?

Does he know the intricate make-up of Lagos's nonprofit organisation that continues to lead the rest of Africa on several topical and unique initiatives? The nonprofit segment which segment has been viciously harmed before international funders by the implicit vote of confidence on them by the Lagos State government as evidenced by the immoral trashing of those indigent Lagosians by the State government that was set up primarily to uphold their security and welfare. Does he know squat?

Has ever held a summit for beggars, street hawkers, homeless under-bridge dwellers, and other fringe citizens who eke out a living outside of tax-net of Lagos State - and collated their vital statistics? And learnt that none of them know him by name, has toiled to build the wealth he now takes for granted - or once shared the proud heritage or background that he thinks entitles him to talk down to millions of Lagos' citizens.  he swaggers about with as if he has a corner on God? Does he even know how of many them are just weeks, months removed from their date with destiny? Does he know the angels among them - whose entertainment holds the key to the blessedness of so many Lagosians and may be his very own? 

Or does he know which of them could be his bunk mates should he be convicted in his ongoing criminal prosecution?

Has he taken stock of the names of streets and highways in Lagos and seen the real Lagos? The mini-Nigeria? The most advanced testament to the latent changes happening across every corner of Nigeria while the FFKs of this world continue to re-calibrate their political reinvention on a diabolical evil which vestigial outgrowth, unfortunately, continue to draw worshipers. Or does he know the make-up of the ubiquitous and hardy Lagos hawkers clan which has and could survive everything thrown at them - except perhaps, if somehow traffic jam disappears from every corner of Lagos. Or a more hawkers friendly Lagos is given its day in the sun through legitimate and reasonable engagement of its dynamics.

Reading Femi Fani-Kayode’s smug article and the trophies of “shares” and “comments” he is getting, it is very easy to forgive him happily. The joke is on him. He does not know Lagos: especially this Lagos of 2013. It is not a no-man’s-land. It is a State of over 15 million persons each of who owns a piece of this place in their heart of heart. And not a billion Femi Fani-Kayode can take it away from them no matter what diabolical sentiments he appeals to. 

He stands on the wrong side of history in this very ludicrous and vacuous venture of his. Not even the equally vacuous and ignorant statement by one of the greatest mis-adventurist on Nigeria's leadership plane - Orji Uzor Kalu - whose governance of Abia State for eight years gifted Africa it's worst kidnapping nightmare in recorded history and even a worse successor - who also happened to have served as Orji Uzor Kalu's Chief of Staff. Orji Uzor Kalu has no ability or commitment to sponsor the research and statistical development that put the contribution of Igbos in Lagos at 51%. It was another hogwash. Everybody knows that Orji Kalu no go school. FFK has no such excuse: he graduated from the university of London. 

Except, if both of them sat down over 29 beer bottles to plan all of this. To reinvent themselves through any means necessary. Even the misery of the very poor.

One thing is certain though. FFK will fail. In this venture. To divide another generation of Nigerians the same way his generation was divided – and so has become a liability to their nation. Just like others before him with even greater convictions and motivations – did. Fail.

Fail very well FFK. 

Today, 30th July, 2013, the FolksLAW blog debuts.

FolksLAW is a young father's engagement of his nation: the standards - legal, ethical, industrial, customary -behind the stories that are reshaping its native folklore.

I write as a self imposed service to my generation. I write also as a trust, for my very young children - if ever they ask, twenty years hence: "what did our father say to all this, in his time?."

This column would dwell on stories that most of us can relate to. Stories already in the public space and the stories that need to be in the public space.

This blog would try to speak for people who think like I do, at a time when there are many dubious voices and platforms stridently declaring their speakership on our corporate behalf on key issues: people who by their antecedents, exposures, convictions, commitments and knowledge, are capable of little except well-intentioned misrepresentation.

And so, I speak - to help those with good intentions, contend with those with mischievous intentions and strengthen the voice of those driven by so much more than  mere intentions.

My writings would bespeak me: my faith, my training and my conviction. My commentaries would draw from my privileged exposure to the educational, legal, development, public and private sectors of Nigeria. Years on the farm, in the markets of Aba, in classrooms across several states of this country would not be disdained in my commentaries.

I hope to keep my writings true: that they would portray my deep love for my nation, its People and God - as revealed through Jesus.

This blog would also make space for efforts by other people committed to non-mercenary writings. Even if they disagree with me.

There are too many sour gripes and wordy-swords across this land already. And that is why I write. I believe (and Heaven help me to prove true) that my writing would be for  this corner of the earth - salt and light. That's the standard this blog must be judged me by. At all times.


Sam Eleanya