By Cudjoe Kpor
President Muhammadu Buhari has flown to several countries since he came to power on May 29, 2015. The rationale, naturally, is to market Nigeria so as not to become a pariah state in the comity of nations. The benefits of his marketing efforts, however, are hardly visible to his compatriots. Mordant critics say that Buhari must minimise the country’s Invisibles expenses with his estacode-hunting entourage. Worse still, for a country going through its current dire straits, Buhari’s priorities must first be to stay in Nigeria and provide the leadership compass which his compatriots will follow to fix its mess.
The government, however, takes more pride in pointing at the support it has garnered around the world to fix the Boko Haram insurgency and the anti-corruption war’s increasing benefits, the two hideous societal stereotypes which make the country forbidden territory for foreign visitors who like to keep their lives and limbs intact.
Foreign jamborees, as critics call his travels abroad, or serious business, as the government likes to explain, what is really lacking to make the visits have more serious impact and relevance for citizens are reciprocal visits for summits in Nigeria. Apart from regular consultation summits by Lake Chad basin nations which team up with Nigeria to fight Boko Haram insurgents, in partnership with Benin Republic, bilateral relations are conducted by accredited envoys and special delegations – or more commonly, multilateral summits and conferences held outside Nigeria.
The first of the world’s most advanced and industrialised nations in the G7 to brave the avalanche of bad news about Nigeria is German President Joachim Gauck who visited for four days penultimate week. President Buhari, his host, was away for a six-day holiday but flew back after his two days in Lagos. And the insurgents did not disappoint either. Though 500 kilometers away, they unleashed two huge blasts with female suicide bombers in an Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp at Dikwa, some 86km from the state capital, Maiduguri, Borno State which killed 58 and wounded 78 others. But cut-off of communications made the news about the blast delay for one day before the media got wind of it.
Still in his first two days, President Gauck and his partner Daniela Schadt moved around everywhere of interest in Lagos. He met the corporate leaders including executives of about 100 German subsidiaries established in Lagos in fields as diverse as banking, construction, communications, oil and gas, as well as ICT corporations. Apart from the desire to acquire German science and technology, in addition to German acumen for running successful businesses, his hosts in Lagos, including Governor Akinwumi Ambode would be too glad to establish twinning relationship with Frankfurt, in Germany, the financial hub of Europe.
Of course Lagos displays best the dire straits into which Nigeria is strapped by the precipitous fall in crude oil prices for a highly-dependent economy on imported inputs for production. The precipitous drop in crude oil price hit the country badly. First, the 95 percent external revenue is depleted to one-third. Then the foreign exchange required to import manufacturing inputs such as raw materials, machinery and spare parts are also gone.
Consequently, a crude assessment of the unemployment and its concomitant crime-prone youth revealed that for every 10 able-bodied youth one meets in Lagos, only two are gainfully employed in viable companies. Five others are unemployed; three are engaged by so-called employers who cannot pay their salaries regularly at the end of any month; the remaining two are itinerant employees, who move on to the next employer once they see signs the current one cannot be trusted to pay salaries regularly. Of course defaulting employers include state governments and media houses.
Hence the plethora of crimes in the city, reflective of the Criminals Generation of the youth. Every imaginable crime which aggravates insecurity is committed with maximum atrocity. Their rampant crimes vary from predictable pick-pockets and hand-bag snatchers, car and traffic stick-ups; ritual killings for money are common currency, kidnapping for ransom, murder, robberies, advanced fee swindles, Internet banking frauds and other cybercrimes now ravage the ICT sector, among others. Elsewhere in the country, cattle rustling, armed attacks by unidentified gunmen are common mass killings. Worst of all, is the Boko Haram insurgency which, over the past seven years, led to the death of up to 20,000 persons, more injuries aggravated by displacement of 2.6 million in IDP camps in the three epicentre Northeast states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe.
However, these did not feature on the radar of President Gauck’s visit aimed at reinforcing bilateral ties with Nigeria, its investment, business and trade communities. High quality German products, especially industrial chemicals and other raw materials, technology, automobiles and other services are in high demand globally. They are worth marketing to needy, backward societies for accelerated advancement. The visiting President subsequently met the cultural purveyors in Lagos, the most outstanding being the 1986 Nobel Prize-winning writer and dramatist, Professor Wole Soyinka, as well as the younger generation of writers, musicians and artistes. One writer was so excited in Abuja, he told Gauck, he has never met even one of his own country’s presidents. That makes meeting the German president very special indeed.
Thus, Germany has stood out as the first among the seven most advanced countries in the world to visit Nigeria. And the visit is most significant because Nigeria is currently passing through dire straits. And much as nobody derides its tragedy in diplomatic circles, Nigeria is one of the hardest hit by the tumbling crude oil prices on the international market which bring in 95% and up to 65% of foreign currency and total revenue respectively. No wonder the services sector best shows some signs of life. The manufacturing sector and the capital market are limping, though a presbyopic Dangote Cement Plc has led the sub-sector to remain significantly afloat in cement production. The same way, its President Alhaji Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, has signed agreement with a German consultancy to train 300 artisans by the demanding German standards to lead the expansion of the small and medium scale sector transformation in his Kano State.
Noting that the country has over two million IDPs that need support and reintegration, Gauck told PresidentBuhari said that ending the insurgency should not be by military might alone. Complementary to the military rout, good governance and the rebuilding of infrastructure, including schools and healthcare facilities in the affected areas would give the citizens hope for a better future and thus contribute to ending the insurgency.
The Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki said the visit by the German president underscores “the excellent relationship” between Germany and Nigeria but asked Germany and EU to help to eliminate the insurgency and fully reintegrate the IDPs. Saraki added: “This Assembly… shall earnestly support the Executive in its fight against corruption, terrorism and insecurity… We have a lot to learn from Germany and to gain from stronger Nigeria-Germany relation in this regard.”
It is Gauck’s first visit to Nigeria, West Africa and Africa and he bonded well for the “excellent bilateral relationship with Nigeria” which is in dire straits. It took uncommon courage to make the trip into a country passing through corruption-infested dire straits Nigeria is currently going through. But more important, to convince the German government to let their President make such a trip to a country which seems at high risk of teetering over the brink of collapse with consequent chaos.
For, hardly would anyone underestimate the enormous challenges confronting the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, which appears to have ended its honeymoon with an increasingly impatient electorate. That the problems are enormous is bad enough. But the perception of a proxy war on the sidelines of finding the solutions and applying them diligently for speedy resuscitation implies an irrelevant confrontation with past failed leaders who want their successor to fail like themselves, merely exacerbates the problems intractably. A budget 2016 alteration mess in the legislature without the police and the security agencies arresting the culprits to date, makes the perceptions extra-problematic.
Still, President Gauck and his partner Daniela Schadt paid their first official four-day visit to Africa’s most populous country. If he had expected to see a booming country with cheery citizens as the one-time giant of Africa, he would have been disappointed. But surprisingly, he seemed happy throughout his stay and said so on a number of occasions.
Needless as a reminder, the concatenation of calamities made the continent’s self-acclaimed giant shrink into a midget since the turn of the year: In its North-east, is the worst of all the crises confronting it: the insurgency by Boko Haram militants. To date, some 2.6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) are ekeing out a miserable existence in camps. The deaths have not ended yet, despite the recent successes by the armed forces in collaboration with their counterparts from Chad, Niger and Cameroon. A Senator from the state, Baba Kaka Garbai, February 7, made the “mistake” of blurting out the truth that Boko Haram insurgents still have significant strength in 50 percent of Borno State. He was almost chewed up for blurting out haram. Even the Governor of the state Kashim Shettima joined the blasts. Incidentally, when Kashim himself raised alarm two years ago on February 18, 2014, telling Villa correspondents in Abuja, “Honestly, Boko Haram are better armed and are better motivated than our own troops. And believe me — given the present state of affairs, it is absolutely impossible for us to defeat Boko Haram,” the same number of years went past before the scandal of arms money shared out by then president Goodluck Jonathan for his political re-election campaigns became public scandal.
Then on the economy front, the country’s high vulnerability to external shocks came to the fore when its mono-crop dependency on crude oil exports took 95 percent of its external revenue down. The education system has collapsed, aggravating the propensity to crime and spawning criminality anywhere, overwhelming its law-enforcement agencies.
But as a testimony to the “excellent relationship underscored by the Senate President Saraki,” there was no single picket line or protests group anywhere throughout Gauck’s unlimited degrees of freedom of movement and interactions with his audience anywhere. Comparatively, I bet US President Barack Obama visiting Nigeria would have got insults from the anti-gay protesters for attempting to impose the perverted sexual aberration on the government and country. Demands were few. Perhaps because of the general awareness that Germany had to host 1.1 million refugees last year alone. And more are making the trip, sometimes in the most perilous rickety boats. But as he told West Africa (ECOWAS) parliamentarians in Abuja, Germany remains an “open country” for refugees, but “cannot take in all who want to come to us,” though fleeing and displacement have become a challenge to both continents.