By DESMOND UTOMWEN

My first face-to-face meeting with Mr Bayo Onanuga was in 2005 in Lagos.

He asked, “Who are you, how may I help you?”

“I am Desmond, sir.”

“Oh, the man from Abuja, you’re so young?”

“Thank you, sir,” I responded as he waved me to a seat.

I told him that I was asked to come to Lagos and he said yes, he was aware.

“Information got to us that you were about to kill a story…”

My eyes were as wide as saucers. I did not know what killing a story meant. From his explanation, I was stunned that such a thing could happen. In any case, was a story that was already on the streets “killable”? It was rather strange to me that somebody could level such an allegation against me!

Trouble started for me after we came out with a cover, The Greedy Police Boss, in 2005 in TheNEWS Magazine. I was still young then and in my formative years in journalism.

I went to Police Force Headquarters in Abuja to continue with my normal work as one of the correspondents. I wouldn’t know who knew me there and called my boss in Lagos that I was in Force Headquarters. The next thing I got was a call from one of my Senior Editors, he asked me where I was and I said I was at work.

He then said that I should take the next available flight to Lagos. I didn’t know what was happening, so, I took a flight to Lagos. On getting to Lagos, I met Mr. Onanuga. I think he understood better, he saw the innocence in me. He then asked what I was doing at the Force Headquarters and I told him that was my beat and I was there on my normal routine.

“Ha! You should not have gone there,” he advised.

He then gave some lectures, he said I should not have gone there because we had just done “a very hot story” on the Police Inspector General, Tafa Balogun and with that, what I should have done was to hibernate for a while because those guys would have been so angry and in anger, they could be looking for a scapegoat.

He, however, said that he would not blame me because I was still very young and new. He said people that did gorilla journalism would understand better. (Of course, I wasn’t part of the gorilla journalism that was the practice during the Military Rule for which the likes of Mr. Onanuga were heroes and legends).

He said I should have hibernated because those guys could be angered and at that moment they could have been looking for a fall guy.

Finally, he said, “I believe you”.

He then started advising me. After the advice, he started chatting with me, that he’s been seeing my stories, he liked my doggedness, the way I went after stories.

He said there was a particular interview I did that he so much liked, that was the interview I did with Kema Chikwe, who was the Minister of Aviation then.

Mr. Onanuga then went further to assign me to cover the National Assembly for him. Right there, I made a request that I would need a letter requesting accreditation to the National Assembly and he gave me one. That kind of increased my confidence in doing the job.

Mr. Onanuga would come down to your level to relate with you. He is a very calm person and a great teacher with so much patience. He knows how to impact knowledge, and bring out the best in you. The first impression you may have of him from the outside is that of a very tough person. I had that. The very first time I saw him, I wondered what kind of tough person he is.

There was a time Mr. Onanuga and I travelled to Kaduna and we lodged at NAF Hotel. He advised me a lot about the profession. He advised me not to blackmail anybody to make money. He also told me how difficult it is for a journalist to have too many friends, that it would become a liability for the journalist.

He counselled. “When you have too many friends; particularly those with baggage, they will expect so much from you, it will influence your story judgment and what you do as a journalist. That is when people will start mounting pressure on you to kill or to do certain reports. You must be very firm in doing your job and must not maliciously write against anybody because the job is not to maliciously attack anybody, but to speak the fact, even if people do not agree with you at that moment, they will agree in years to come. This is because the truth will always overcome lies, they will realize that you were truthful with your report.

Yes, Mr. Onanuga is a stickler to professional ethics and he combines compassion and efficiency and I’m glad he mentored me. Of course, I cut my teeth under Mr. Onanuga, I learnt so much from him; I came into the profession as a greenhorn. He is an editor’s editor and can turn the most egregious piece of writing into mellifluous prose.

As one of his editors, Ademola Adegbamigbe wrote, “Then, he would call you to his office (he would never dress a member of his staff down in the presence of others), tell you what you did not get right, and then let you know how you could improve. He possesses a clear professional vision, sees ahead of his contemporaries, and, thus, takes proactive steps to avert disaster.”

Hassan Gimba

NGO is the acronym for Non-Governmental Organisation and as the name suggests, they are non-profit bodies formed to carry out non-governmental functions and thereby fill gaps that governments and even the private sectors could not affect or where their impacts are minimal while the needs are necessary.

They are meant to be agents of development, more especially at the grassroots level, while engaging the citizenry with a deliberate agenda to awaken their awareness and desire for positive social changes that would enhance their quality of life while driving them to make their world a better place.

Non-governmental organisations are supposed to be interventionist bodies that are formed to improve the quality of life for people through various means, some of which are one or more out of the provision of necessities such as food, clothing, improvement of educational and healthcare infrastructure and provision of materials, training and many more that would improve the quality of life and enhance employment opportunities.

Aware of these herculean but noble tasks, when the United Nations was formed in 1945, Chapter 10, Article 71 in its Charter recognized them as such provided they remain nonprofit entities and independent of governmental influence, even if they receive certain funding from the government. That was probably inspired by The Anti-Slavery Society, arguably the first NGO in the world.

In Nigeria, the earliest NGO formally recognised was that to do with the work of Mary Selessor against the killing of twins considered evil in Calabar.

However, there are so many now in Nigeria that it may be impossible for even the government to know some, considering our poor database system. Even though according to AllAfrica, a multi-media content provider, systems technology developer and the source-of-record for African news and information worldwide, there are over 46,000 NGOs in Nigeria, lack of proper monitoring has given some a window to engage in activities detrimental to our well-being as a nation. The nefarious activities associated with some of them have made some states tag some of them with the toga of ‘persona non grata’, booting them out of their states.

Some prominent NGOs in Nigeria, some bearing names of individuals and some reflecting their works include the TY Danjuma Foundation, the Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), Amnesty International, the North East Regional Initiative, and the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP).

There are many others such as the Solutions for Internally Displaced (SOLID) People Project, Saving One Million Lives Programme, Africa Hope Alive Initiative, Mental Aware Nigeria Initiative, CLEEN Foundation, Federation of International Female Lawyers, Global Peace Foundation, etc.

However, apart from states that halted the activities of some NGOs, the federal government has had occasions to altercate with some of them because they deliberately incite the public or their beneficiaries against constituted authorities. Some of them prefer beneficiaries that will always be at loggerheads with the government; to them, such are friends deserving of more and more patronage.

Apart from all these, most of them are not corrupt free or super accountable as they want the world to believe. For those bearing respected people’s names, is it in collusion with the individuals or are they being blindsided?

When beneficiaries’ grants are in foreign currency, for instance, some of the NGOs “help” the beneficiaries by converting the funds into naira for them. However, in a show of corruption bordering on fraud, they do not do the conversions based on any known parameter: not official rate and not parallel market rates. While what they give is always lower than official or black-market rates, beneficiaries never get to see the excess, which invariably affects their activities.

Yet these are organisations purposely established to fight corruption and mismanagement in governance as well as fight for accountability and transparency among public officers.

The NGOs mostly get their funding from abroad as conduits to beneficiary bodies here. Do their funders abroad know of this misappropriation? Will they condone it if they knew? Is the government aware of such vices that can be deemed as sabotaging the nation’s economy?

The federal government needs to set up an inquiry into how many of these NGOs run their activities, including giving more encouragement to subversive elements and those calling on the depredation of national assets and how they utilize their funding, including how they disburse them to beneficiaries.

While we intend to subsequently present three-year evidence of such malfeasance to aid any action the government intends to pursue, we believe the Nigerian government must come out with a new policy that would guide the activities of all NGOs.

Many of them can be rightly said to be tools of neo-colonialism and outright agents of foreign intelligence services in the way they go about their activities. The amount of information they have at their disposal, using local organisations is far more than the Nigerian state has.

However, others are genuinely concerned with the well-being of Nigerians and are actively impacting positively on the lives of people in both rural and urban areas. They do not short-change beneficiaries because they are aware that they are not a profit-making body and therefore they do not collect funding from A, meant for B, but end up not giving to Caesar what belongs to him because Caesar has no way of asking A what was due to him.

They also do not, under the carpet, encourage and empower elements that see the governments of the day as enemies, fighting them, weakening them in such a way that the future becomes uncertain.

Hence we will look at basically two such NGOs, the Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) and the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP).

The WSCIJ is a “non-profit, non-governmental organization with social justice programmes aimed at exposing corruption, regulatory failures, and human rights abuses with investigative journalism.” SERAP desires to “advance transparency, accountability and respect for economic and social rights through other means such as media advocacy, public impact and strategic litigation, capacity building, institutional building, and education and awareness.”

To be continued ….

Hassan Gimba is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Neptune Prime

By Hassan Gimba

In the past few months, there has been some incessant din over the plight of education across the country, how deplorable it has become and concerns over how to bring it out of the shambles it has been shovelled into as a result of long-term negligence by those who should nurse it after benefitting from it.

Many of us who were in this part of the world before 1980 knew what schools were and how governments went the whole hog to make them qualitative while making the academic environment so conducive.

The managers of education  did not compromise quality and standards for they were aware that any pupil with the right foundation in primary and secondary education, can venture into the world and be a huge success. And funds for that were adequately utilised.

We had our primary and secondary education almost free. Uniforms, books and meals were provided. Mattresses, blankets, mosquito nets, detergents, soaps, pocket money and even transport fares were provided for secondary students. No student bought his chair, desk, or bench.

There was adequate power supply, and pipe-borne water was taken for granted. Nobody knew of boreholes because the central water supply was functioning. There were generators in case of power failure and the maintenance culture was commendable as well. School children were encouraged to engage in wholesome extracurricular activities.

Up to the mid-80s our primary and secondary schools were bastions of excellence while our tertiary institutions were citadels of learning. We were prouder to gain admission into a Nigerian university than to go abroad to study, then.

I recall that going to the School of Basic Studies (SBS) of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (ABU) was more prestigious than even going to study in America. Any student you saw in ABU Zaria then had passed his General Certificate of Education (GCE) with flying colours while only those who failed the West African Examination ran abroad, where in most cases admission criteria were lower than obtainable here. And so we took the entrance examination to SBS and left our mates who failed their GCE to japa out on a scholarship to study abroad.

But since then, the reverse has become the norm; now studying abroad confers on one a status that studying at home does not. And all this is no thanks to those in charge of our education who deliberately allowed it to get rotten while profiteering from it.

What do you make of a situation where a person superintending education would take his child to a private school or abroad? What do you make of a situation where a student here may score nine credits but fall short by a few marks in JAMB to secure admission to study medicine while his classmate with three credits and zero points in JAMB can go abroad to study medicine and return to Nigeria as a medical doctor?

Perhaps, alarmed by the negative trajectory education has taken in this country, a lot of stakeholders who know what education should be like have started declaring, or calling for the declaration of, emergency in the education subsector.

For instance, six months after he was sworn in as governor of Zamfara State, Dauda Lawal declared a state of emergency on education, because, according to him “the neglected education sector in Zamfara affected all levels, from primary to tertiary, with poor learning environment and personnel.”

Similarly, the governor of Kano State, Alhaji Abba Kabir Yusuf, on Friday, 14 July, about two months after being sworn in, also declared a state of emergency in the education sector. The declaration was intended to “hasten actions in delivering services to guarantee access to quality education for all in Kano”.

Likewise, lending a voice to the forum of the wives of state governors who, among others, called on the federal government to declare a state of emergency on education, the International Ford Fellowship Programme Alumni Nigeria (IFFPAN) recently urged President Bola Tinubu to immediately declare a state of emergency on compulsory basic education programmes across the country.

The IFFPAN, an independent, nonsectarian, nonpartisan, private, nonprofit, social justice organisation for Nigerian Alumni (Fellows) of the International Fellowship Programme of Ford Foundation, United States, urged the president to spare no effort in ensuring that young Nigerians have a solid footing for the realisation of their dreams.

However, long before all of them, Mai Mala Buni, the governor of Yobe State had declared a state of emergency on education in his state. He said that the decision was to consolidate the solid foundation put in place by his predecessor, Alhaji Ibrahim Gaidam.

Unlike others who waited months into their tenure before declaring what is in the interest of their people, he made his declaration in his first inauguration speech as governor on 29 May 2019.

And perhaps they, especially the northern governors, may have some takeaways from his vision. This is because all the states have witnessed a fall in their standard of education. But, significantly, almost all the states, in one way or the other, have witnessed either insurgency or banditry.

Having known what education used to be and realising its fall in the state, aided by the onslaught of insurgents, Governor Buni wasted no time in establishing new schools, renovating and building new hostels and classrooms in existing schools, building and equipping laboratories and ICT Centres.

His vision led to the recruitment of over 4,000 education staff and the retraining of almost 30,000 others, rather than sacking them and compounding the problem of unemployment and insecurity in the state and nation.

There has also been a significant increase in the number of Yobe undergraduates studying at home and abroad due to improved scholarship programmes. The governor’s policies led to a drop in the number of out-of-school children by over 75 per cent, according to Dr Mohammed Sani, his former commissioner of education, who oversaw the transformation of almajiri schools into modern tsangaya, as a result of which he is now heading the National Almajiri Commission.

Hassan Gimba is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Neptune Prime.