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.”

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.

By Hassan Gimba

For the past four years, I have been insisting that our problem and even need now is not about salary increment but about being a productive nation that produces what it needs and uses what it produces.

This would galvanise our economy and strengthen the naira. With a strong currency, ₦30,000 is more than enough as a basic salary.

Just imagine the naira to be equal to the dollar and there was a time when ₦60 was equal to $100. Here I have reproduced an old writeup on this topic.

There is no Nigerian that will tell you he is not aware of the NLC even if he does not know that it is an acronym for the Nigeria Labour Congress.

What the average Nigerian knows about them is that they always go on strike at the drop of a hat, strikes that have lost their meaning because they always achieve almost nothing.

Well, there’s nothing in it for the average Nigerian; only for the vanguards of the congress. At least, that is what an average citizen will tell you. This suspicion, or rather an assumption, is fueled by the fact that days into a strike, the comrades would be shown on national television laughing and exchanging banters with government officials, and the next you hear is that the strike is suspended while the reasons for the strike in the first place remain unresolved.

Citizens suspect the laughs from the chubby-cheeked people on the ‘telly’ mean each side is happy with what transpired at the closed-door meeting despite the cause of the strike remaining unsolved.

A good example is that of fuel increase or subsidy withdrawal. The labour leaders would shout, give ultimatums and then mobilise workers for a strike. And these strikes affect everyone, not only workers because the public and private sectors are intricately connected. Yet the issue (subsidy) lingers: the palliatives promised, even though mainly targeted to help government workers, are too little or are still being awaited.

We were witnesses to a long strike, getting to almost a year, by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), yet the NLC was nowhere to be found.

But what is getting alarming now is that the labour union, like our governments and their institutions, is becoming a tool for personal causes. There is no reason for the union to call a national strike because its president was assaulted. If he was attacked because he was fighting for fairness and justice, then that should be seen as a sacrifice for his role.

Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Aminu Kano, Gambo Sawaba and many other great freedom and human rights fighters never privatised or personalised their struggles or made people fight the system because they were assaulted.

In any case, how many Nigerians have been attacked, humiliated and dehumanised without the labour union fighting for them? How many have been killed, some by non-state actors and some by security agents? And some victims were public servants. If labour says it is there for the workers, where was it?

And despite this, they are full of cowardice. For instance, the labour union president was manhandled in Owerri, but they came to Abuja Airport to block access roads and, after that, they embarked on a nationwide strike.

We have had many labour leaders, right from Michael Imoudu, popularly known as Pa Imoudu, the father of labour unionism in Nigeria, but none of them personalised the labour struggle till now.

Wahab Goodluck, the first president of the NLC, who served between 1978 and 1984, led the struggle for better wages and working conditions.

He fought against the government’s attempt to deregulate the economy and privatise state-owned enterprises. He organised the NLC and made it a force to be reckoned with, but he never personalised the struggle.

Paschal Bafyau, who took over from Goodluck, made the NLC more politically conscious and active, but he never personalised the union. He successfully negotiated a minimum wage and led the union in the fight to usher in civilian rule in 1999.

One of the greatest presidents the NLC ever had was Ali Ciroma, who served from 1988 to 1994. He fought against General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida’s move to introduce the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).

The union gained strength and influence under his leadership, but one thing he did not do was personalise its activities.

Adams Oshiomhole, who served as its president from 1999 to 2007, gave the labour union more visibility, influence and effectiveness but he never personalised its fight.

One may contend that the quality of the labour union and its search for solutions for the Nigerian worker and, ultimately, the country started nose-diving after Oshiomhole. Many people expected the union to be at the vanguard of solving the country’s problems instead of being self-serving and bringing archaic ways to help the workers and the country.

A good example is the one to do with minimum wage. For how long will labour unions continue mouthing ‘salary increments’ in the face of dwindling national income and the plummeting value of our currency?

Perhaps out of intellectual paucity, they have failed to propose a more intellectually viable option, to both workers and the government, about how to stabilise the naira and make us a nation that produces what it consumes and vice versa.

Every patriot knows that buying things from abroad causes capital flight. A patriotic labour union should be the last to sanction a situation where our government spends hundreds of billions of naira annually to buy cars from foreign manufacturers, thereby keeping afloat other countries’ economies to the detriment of ours.

But Nigerian labour leaders feel comfortable being chauffeur-driven in foreign cars, keeping foreign businesses thriving and foreigners employed while Nigerian youths are jobless and languishing in abject poverty because the country’s industries are dead. How patriotic! This is why they cannot offer a better alternative other than asking for a salary increment. They do not have the intellectual capacity to know that it is not the quantity but the quality of the currency that matters.

Take, for instance, the case of China and Germany, where the minimum wages are $358 (about ₦405,000 as of last week) and 1557 euro (₦1,845,000) respectively, now cast your mind back to when the naira was at par with the dollar and assume our minimum wage of ₦30,000 is $30,000, don’t you think that is more than enough?

Yet still, workers in some of these countries enjoy free housing, healthcare, education, affordable public transport and a constant supply of electricity. This is why salaries have value there.

Our labour union, which should be fighting for better working conditions and stronger currency, is instead fighting for more money, thereby courting inflation and encouraging capital flight through patronising foreign goods and services.

With our bumbling, self-serving and intellectually lazy labour union, it is high time we started scrutinising their motives and their base desires.

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