Monday Column by Emmanuel Yawe
royawe@yahoo.com | 08024565402
I dreaded meeting my mother in the last days of her life. Often, she would ask me why the government had jettisoned the Better Life for Rural Women program introduced by Maryam Babangida, to which I had no answer. She kept asking me that question until she died about two years ago.
Given out in marriage to my father at the tender age of thirteen, she never had the luxury of western education, let alone urban dwelling. She lived all her life after marriage with my father in our rather remote village. In her 82 years on earth, she witnessed different systems of government: colonial rule, independent democratic Nigeria, military dictatorship; back to democracy and then back to military dictatorship yet again. At the time of her death in 2016, Nigeria was again under democratic rule.
For all these forms of government, none ever came up with a program that touched her life and that of the rural community in which she lived like the Better Life for Rural Women. She lived in a community that had no electricity, no pipe borne water, no tarred road, no medical facility to complement the services of the quack native doctor, no telephone services – nothing.
The only visible government presence in her environment was the tax collector – often cruel and inhuman in the exercise of his duties. When community taxation was abolished all over the north in 1979, even this lone symbol of government – the tax man – also evaporated. That meant a complete absence of government in her environment even as her community felt relieved to see an end to the powers of the tax man with his highhandedness and cruelty.
The Better Life program changed everything. Before the program was introduced, my old man died and my mother used her initiative to arrange an Association of Widows in her immediate community. They elected her as their leader. It was nothing big. Often when I went home, I found them sitting tamely under the mango tree in our compound, holding meetings after Sunday service. I was not a member, I couldn’t have been. I do not know what were the issues that were up for discussion at these meetings. I could only guess that as women, they gossiped and bemoaned the hard, melancholic life they were living without husbands.
Then came the Better Life for Rural Women – with a bang.
Her Association of Widows was identified as the most visible women non- governmental body in the Ward. She was delegated to represent the Ward at the meeting of the Better Life at the Local government. She must have made some impact at the Local Government because she was subsequently made a delegate of the Local Government when meetings were held at the state headquarters. Overnight, she became a super star.
Her Association was the better off for her stardom. They metamorphosed into a registered Cooperative Society. With their new status, they met every Sunday not only to gossip and bemoan their fate this time, but to distribute fertilizers, improved seedlings and even credit facilities which they now enjoyed from the Peoples Bank of Nigeria. The impact of the program on her life and that of her fellow widows was very positive. That explains why she was so puzzled until her death that a program like that could be jettisoned by succeeding governments – just like that.
Sadly, I could not lay bare to her the reality of our national life which is the lack of continuity in governance. Every government that comes to power tries to first of all demolish or kill the previous government. Then they engage their energies in building on the carcass of the dead government. But how was I going to explain this complex situation to my old, illiterate mother? It was hard.
Look at the toll gates erected under the Babangida administration to raise funds for the maintenance of our high ways. They did not only raise funds but were some form of security checks. A succeeding government woke up one day, contracted bulldozers and got them all demolished. In return for what? Now there is no money to maintain our highways which have been taken over by armed robbers and kidnappers.
Thank God for little mercies. Twenty-five years after Babangida stepped aside, there are some legacies he left, solid legacies that have defied even the vagaries of some of the demolishing squads that succeeded him. I have often asked myself; Why can’t they for instance go and demolish the Third Mainland Bridge which his government built in Lagos? Since some people believe IBB is all evil, let them go and do it and face the people of Lagos.
Are they scared of the volatile and restless Lagos crowd? Then let them come to Abuja. Here people are somehow docile and restrained. Let them demolish the Aso Rock Presidential Villa, International Conference Center, ECOWAS Secretariat, the fly overs and the major highways that have given Abuja its beauty. Or better still since it was IBB that had the spleen to physically move the office of the President from Lagos to Abuja, let them just take the office back to Lagos.
It is not only the physical innovations that are evidence of the farsightedness of the IBB presidency. It was IBB who assembled a galaxy of brains, arcane, deep intellectuals and high achievers to set up a cabinet – the type this country had not seen before and has never seen since then. These exemplary patriots conceived and implemented the policies that have outlived his government for twenty-five years.
It was IBB who liberalized the economy from the medieval chocking grip of governmental control. The NNPC was restructured to give indigenous entrepreneurs an opportunity to participate in oil prospecting and production. For the first time, the oil producing communities got a sympathetic ear with 13% derivation; the banking sector got liberalized and agriculture too. Farmers got a better deal for their products now that the corruption besotted commodity boards were disbanded. Import licensing, another hub of corruption and racketeering was abolished.
Beyond Nigeria he conceived and invented ECOMOG, a multinational force for conflict resolution in the West African sub region. President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had harangued Africa on the need for an African High Command in the 50’s and 60’s. For the first time, a Nigerian president delivered something close to the visionary dream of Nkrumah. The United Nation has adopted ECOMOG as a model.
If my mother, an accomplished rural woman celebrated IBB’s wife because she brought Better Life to the rural folk, I as a journalist should celebrate the man himself because he freed the media in Nigeria. Could you imagine a Nigeria today where all the Television and Radio stations and even most of the newspapers are owned by state and federal governments? And then NITEL, with her monopoly on telecommunications, making sure only the rich have telephone lines? Was IBB not the first person to liberalize media ownership in Nigeria and create the national communications policy that paved the way for GSM?
It is twenty- five years – a quarter of a century – since the man stepped aside. If he was as bad as some people would want us to believe, why have his legacies survived for this long?
