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By Tunde Olusunle

Nigeria’s South East geopolitical zone has courted global notoriety for the multipronged crimes and criminality which has festered over the years. In several public engagements, I’ve had reason to comment on this lingering malaise which never seems to abate. First I wrote “Gunsmoke from the East,” published in The Guardian of August 9, 2021. I equally engaged the subject in “Unknown Gunmen, November 6 and the Epidemic of Bloodletting,” which appeared in The Cable of October 6, 2021. The needless hemorrhaging of precious, oftentimes innocent, definitively irreplaceable lives in the mould of day-to-day Nigerians, technocrats, businessmen, security personnel, cannot be more discomforting. “Travel advisories” emanating from the diplomatic outposts of several countries with nationals in Nigeria, typically classify the South East as a “no-go zone.” Reports from a few friends who spent the last yuletide in their eastern homeland, however, allude to a measure of sanity in the region within the season. Kidnappings were scantily recorded, killings barely reported. Let’s see how the minimisation of blood flow within the season, is sustained for our collective good.

As tribute to the innovations they were bringing to bear on governance and administration in their respective addresses, I had reason to salute governors Alex Otti of Abia, Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra and Mohammed Bago of Niger State in an overview I did last year. The piece was titled “Plaudits for Otti, Soludo and Bago,” and published in Thisday of May 24, 2024. I acknowledged Otti’s frugality and clear-headed focus on multisectoral development, as against the dour, colourless stint of Okezie Ikpeazu his predecessor. Soludo won me over for his determination to encourage and further deepen the development of homegrown competencies and products, while prosecuting an infrastructural makeover of Anambra State. Bago’s recourse to the conscientious development of agriculture in his infinitely blessed state, for local sufficiency and the economic sustenance of his constituents, remains remarkable.

Soludo and Otti are in the news again playing the roles of pan-Nigerian statesmen and helping to paper up the cracks of the edifice of our togetherness as a nation. The percentage parochialism which Nigeria witnessed during the ruinous eight years of Muhammadu Buhari at the helm of national politics and governance, was only comparable to the divisive rhetoric of Nigeria’s pre-civil war era. Buhari exhumed the fossils of our latent ethno-religious fault lines, intentionally imposing a Fulani hegemony on Nigeria to the consternation of the mass of his Nigerian constituents. He said in the early days of his administration, that sections of the country which gave him five percent of their votes, would reap similar measures in political appointments and project appropriation. Buhari made good his threat to a large extent. He punitively appointed Igbos to marginal ministries like Labour and Employment, as well as Science and Technology!

Early last year, Soludo appointed Joachim Achor and Adebayo Ojeyinka as Permanent Secretaries in the Civil Service of Anambra State. Achor is from Abia State, while Ojeyinka hails from Osun State. Ojeyinka by the way was engaged in the Anambra bureaucracy by the third republic governor of the state, Chukwuemeka Ezeife. Okwadike as Ezeife was famously adulated, led the state between January 1992 and November 1993. Ojeyinka grew through the ranks in the Anambra system, logging over three decades before his elevation last year. The process which produced him was merit-based. It included a computer-based examination, an engaging search process including security verification, and a one-on-one interaction with the governor.

Southwards from Awka, the Anambra State capital, Alex Otti of Abia State last week appointed Benson Ojeikere as the new Head of Service of the Abia State Civil Service. A little over 30 years ago, Ojeikere underwent the National Youth Service Corps, (NYSC) in Abia State. He emerged the best participant in the mandatory one-year exercise and was granted automatic employment by the incumbent regime at the time. It is a measure of his qualities and the implicit confidence reposed in him by successive administrations in Abia State, that Ojeikere’s brief before his recent elevation was that of Permanent Secretary in Government House, Umuahia. At Ojeikere’s inauguration, governor Otti re-echoed the sentiments of Soludo, his counterpart in Anambra State. He spoke of the imperative to “build a system where meritocracy triumphs over mediocrity, where the best and brightest can rise to the top, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds.”

This same pan-Nigerian vision, has successively informed the broad-arms embrace of Nigerians from all over into the scheme of governance in Lagos State, for example, over the years. Lai Mohammed, (Information Minister under the Buhari regime) from Kwara, and Rauf Aregbesola, (former Governor of Osun State and immediate past Minister for Interior), from Osun, savoured national political limelight under the Bola Tinubu governorship in Lagos, between 1999 and 2007. Dele Alake, (incumbent Minister for Solid Minerals); Opeyemi Bamidele, (Leader of the Senate), both from Ekiti, and Biodun Faleke, (a ranking member of the House of Representatives) who is primarily from Kogi State, are all alumni of the Tinubu “Lagos School.” Indeed, between Tinubu’s addresses as Governor of Lagos State and National Leader of the All Progressives Congress, (APC), his media advisers, Segun Ayobolu, Sunday Dare and Tunde Rahman, hail from Kogi, Oyo and Osun states.

If the sociocultural backgrounds of the above listed is unanimously Yoruba, if they bear etymological consangiunity with Lagos State, how about Ben Akabueze, who was commissioner for budget and economic planning under Tinubu in 2007 and thereafter Director-General of the Budget Office under Buhari? How about Joe Igbokwe, a serving Special Adviser to Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos? As Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole took along with him from the labour movement, Olaitan Oyerinde who served as his Principal Secretary. Sadl, Oyerinde was assassinated in May 2012, a matter which remains unresolved like most other murder cases in our country. All through his years as Governor of Bayelsa State, Henry Seriake Dickson had with him Francis Otah Agbo from Idomaland in Benue State, as one of his closest aides and confidants. Dickson indeed supported Agbo to vie for a seat in the House of Representatives which he won.

Between 1999 and 2007, Sheddy Ozoene from Enugu State was Chief Press Secretary to the Governor of Delta State, James Ibori. Back in 2003, Festus Adebayo from Ondo State, was Special Assistant, (Public Policy Analysis) to the Enugu State Governor at the time, Chimaroke Nnamani. As governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El Rufai had Adebisi Lawal, from Ogun State and Muyiwa Adekeye, from Kwara State as his advisers on Investment, and Media, respectively. Fausat Adebola Ibikunle, also from the Yoruba country was his Commissioner for Housing and Urban Development. Veteran journalist Bala Dan-Abu from Kogi State was spokesperson for the immediate past governor of Taraba State, Darius Ishaku. The foregoing discourse is apposite because it attests to the feasibility and sustainability of authentic integration in our socioculturally divergent polity, if intentionally prosecuted.

Except deployed for political mischief, except triggered by hard-line extremists, ethnicity and religion are barely divisive elements in our coexistence as a people. This reminds of a section of the lyrics of the song Me and You No Be Enemy, with the refrain “We Suppose to Be Family,” by Lagbaja, a post-Fela Anikulapo-Kuti Afrobeats legend. The song was released over two decades ago. Lagbaja’s treatise contends that if the colour of our tongues is the sole measure of our individual origins and backgrounds, humans from all over the world could all have evolved from the same biological roots! All tongues are red, Lagbaja reaffirms, while asking rhetorically what the distinguishing features would be, between a Nigerian and a Ghanaian; an Indian and a Pakistani; an English man and an American, if they stood in a file line.

By acknowledging and rewarding competence and merit as against sectionalism and parochialism in statecraft, Soludo and Otti have proven to us that we can together build a genuinely egalitarian country. We can draw from the diverse pool of human resource abundance available to us as a country to propel this country to greater heights at every level. Six Nigerians: Azeez Butali, Ijeoma Opara, Oluwatomi Akindele, Eno Ebong, Oluwasanmi Koyejo and Abidemi Ajiboye, medics, engineers and professors, were recently honoured by outgoing American President, Joe Biden. They received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, (PECASE). Their country of primary origin was not a parameter for measuring their intellectual and professional competencies, even as Biden’s successor, Donald Trump, once caustically categorised Nigeria as a shit hole country.

The colours of the skins and eyes of the Nigerians so acknowledged by Biden didn’t matter. The quality and value with they continue to avail to humanity was uppermost. Food for thought for leaders intent on imprinting landmarks on the aisles of time.

Tunde Olusunle, PhD, Fellow of the Association of Nigerian Authors, (FANA), teaches Creative Writing at the University of Abuja