News: RMRDC Gives Farmers seeds for New Tomato variety. - IS SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH NOW JOB FOR THE BOYS?

I wonder whatever happened to The Nigerian Institute for Horticultural Research, NIHORT, that The Raw Materials Research and Development Council, RMRDC should now be handing out tomato seeds to farmers. At this rate the Nigerian Road Research Institute may soon organise the introduction of new yam and potato cultivars while the National Root Crop Research Institute slumbers. I imagine that all readers have now gotten my drift.

Right from the days of late Mrs Maria Sokenu at RMRDC, at a time the current Minister of Science and Technology Dr Ogbonnaya Onu was a prolific writer on scientific and developmental issues, it was not known to have a mandate that overlapped with those of the other Federal government research institutes. Why now? Nigeria has so much work begging to be done that we cannot afford any duplication of efforts often attended by intra and inter ministerial squabbles. I will spare the readers battle stories on this score.

I recall that in my days as a fledgling (and ultimately failed) manufacturer, I could not get any help, not even information, from the relevant agencies. Even my group’s effort to collaborate with PRODA was a disastrous failure because the agency simply did not have in place a template for such collaboration. We were  forced to repeat research work already done by PRODA. The silver lining was that my company overtook PRODA and in the years to come had the pleasure to offer PRODA technical advice on their demand! For readers still wondering what the encounter was all about, let me save you from your misery. It was Engineering Ceramics,  an arcane discipline most educated people are not even aware of. However all that is now history. Our effort ultimately collapsed because my team was about a quarter century ahead of the thinkers (?) in governments of those days. With NEPA/PHCN, the government was our number one but very lousy customer. I doubt that much has changed since then, the Buy Nigeria mantra notwithstanding.

The above storyline however did not prevent the Federal Government from opening a brand-new front on Ceramics Development Research at FIIRO, Oshodi, in Lagos. We would have laughed over the matter, but this development was not in the least funny. The "researchers" at Oshodi were well known to us and knew full well that they were wasting their time and ours. And the people's money too.

It was in our interest then to be aware of the engineering capabilities available in our immediate  and often wider neighbourhood. Many fabricators could not believe the things that we literally forced  and taught them to make for us.

I personally cultivated many large enterprises that had better foothold in the supply chain of many raw materials, clays, quartz, feldspars, talc, diatomite, etc which we needed in rather small quantities, which made it unprofitable for the original suppliers to do business with us. We developed in house processing, an activity that we would not have had to engage in if we were in more advanced climes.

We knew and kept abreast with whoever had spare ballmill and furnace capacities. We made our own glazes for the high performance products that we made for the electrical power industry. Meanwhile we had access to the WAHUM Group which, with a line of several ballmills, makes vast quantities of glaze for its enamelware production lines. One can then imagine my alarm when the current Director General of FIIRO in a recent public presentation announced to the world at large that nobody makes glazes in Nigeria! Who or what will prevent this individual from becoming a Permanent Secretary tomorrow, to be better able to infest the whole ministry with ignorance. Only in Nigeria!

Of Ethiopian Airlines, Cut Off Marks and Patriotism - WHEN WILL NIGERIA FIELD ITS FIRST ELEVEN TO MEET ITS DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES?

Cut off mark? Who has not experienced the torture of explaining to an otherwise brilliant child that he/she cannot get into a school because he/she is from the wrong state. I do not need to bother my compatriots with my battle stories getting my kids into Fed Govt Unity schools for high school. The most enervating was when and how my daughter sought admission into Unilag, my only child to attend my alma mater.

Fast forward. . I have lately been commenting on the status of the electrical power industry. Has anyone noticed the way the membership of the governing board of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, was "equitably" zoned out? To what end I ask. I once took the trouble to check out the intellectual and professional backgrounds of some of them and I came out gravely dissappointed. Many of the members have no business being in that Commission.

As an an angry consumer, I do not particularly care if the right technocrats are sourced from say Kwarra or Edo State, if only they know what they are doing. I hold great respect for Dr Sam Amadi, but that has not stopped me from being brutally frank with him. The work at NERC is not another job for the boys/girls. I have drawn attention to the utter confusion among the ranks of the new power moguls, and made dire predictions on the future of the spun off Discos and Gencos. I doubt if anyone had taken me seriously. Meanwhile I stand by my predictions. In a lighter mood, I once picked on the management of Benin Disco. How I wish that they have seen the light. Perhaps they will share their new and improved insight with us all.

Guest feature: They Fly, We Die By Okey Ndibe

Let’s start with the more recent. Last Saturday, I made a routine phone call to a relative who lives in Anambra State, Nigeria. As the conversation drew to a close, I asked after her mother.
“Well, her condition is getting slightly better,” came the response.
I was taken aback, for I wasn’t aware at all that her mother was sick. I immediately confessed my ignorance by asking, “Has she been sick?”
“Oh, I thought you knew she was hit by a car,” the relative said. Then she told the story.
On Monday, February 8, her mother had gone to the local government headquarters to pick up a bag of rice that the state governor had offered to all pensioners. Her mother met an old friend, also a pensioner. The two women stood by the roadside, discussing. Quite suddenly, a driver who was trying to pass another car lost his grip, and his car nearly plowed into the women. The two friends were extremely fortunate that the car merely brushed them as it careened into an open roadside gutter. Even so, my relative’s mother fell from the car’s glancing impact.
A day later, the elderly woman’s arms began to swell, indicating a fracture. She was taken to the state-run teaching hospital in Awka, the state capital. There, the woman—who was in fairly serious pain from her injury—was told that she must return in a week (today, in fact). The reason: the hospital’s orthopedic surgeon sees patients at the teaching hospital only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
For me, the story was hard to fathom. In a country where orthopedic cases are rather rife—what with automobile and other kinds of accidents—it simply defies logic that any health facility, much less a state-owned hospital, would not have several doctors with expertise in treating bone fractures.
Bones broken in an accident bring excruciating pain. Believe me, I know. In 1992, a friend was driving me to Murtala Muhammed International Airport when—with the airport in sight—we had an accident. His car somersaulted three times, and then came to rest upside down. Luckily, none of the three of us died. The friend driving me was a banker, and we were all taken to a clinic in Surulere, Lagos that was retained by his employer. Despite my complaints of monstrous pain on my left arm, the doctor on duty did not bother to send me for any x-ray. He just looked at my arm, and assured me I was fine, just a bit bruised.

Two days later, I returned to the US, my arm terribly swollen, and the pain at a hideous level. I called my doctor who asked me to come in immediately. She (sensibly) ordered an x-ray, which revealed I had sustained one fracture at the elbow and had broken my left thumb in two places.
That experience gave me a deep first-hand experience of how hapless Nigerians’ suffer at the hands of doctors who practice what I call juju medicine, or mis-medicine.
Knowing how painful it can be to break any bones, I think it’s inexcusable—to say the least—to ask an elderly woman, a grandmother, to go a week before she would be seen by a doctor.
A few months ago, I had an even more disheartening conversation with a US-based Nigerian friend. His uncle’s wife was standing at a country road waiting for a bus when she crumpled to the ground. Passersby gathered, loaded her in a vehicle, and raced to a local hospital.
The patient was still alive when they arrived at the hospital. There was a doctor on duty, which should have been good news. But this doctor had less faith in medicine than in spiritual intervention. The doctor did not check the patient’s pulse. He did not gauge her blood pressure. He didn’t bother to listen to her heart. Instead, he asked his nurses and the Good Samaritans who brought in the woman to form a circle around the patient. Then, extending a hand over the woman’s supine body, (and inviting his nurses and others to do the same) the doctor began to utter a torrent of prayers. He reminded the Devil (ever-present in Nigeria) that the Devil was a liar. He ordered the affliction that had felled the woman to release the woman and “return to sender.” He importuned God to demonstrate His majesty and power by raising the woman back to her feet.
The doctor kept up the racket for about an hour, as sweat poured from his body. Then he calmed down, his energy spent. It dawned on him that the woman had passed away while he, the supposed man of medicine, played a televangelist, the good doctor solemnly announced that God had decided not to heal the patient.
Of course, Nigeria has many fine, dedicated doctors. Chances are, however, that the “prayer-warrior” doctor had received wretched medical training, if any. In many other jurisdictions in the world, the so-called doctor would have been stripped of his license, assessed a steep fine, and likely sent to jail.
But in Nigeria? Perish the thought! The physician’s criminal dereliction invited no consequences. Another poor person had died; that was all. I won’t be surprised if the doctor’s prestige soared in the estimation of those who saw him resort to spiritual theatrics rather than the practice of basic medicine. Nigeria has evolved into a space where many people routinely demand that God do for them what they can and ought to do for themselves.
The two poor women here—the one with a broken arm and the other who breathed her last while a negligent doctor wasted time flinging a storm of alleluias at her—are among millions of victims of a brand of inhumanity and irresponsibility that have marked the behavior of Nigerian public officials. I’m confident there are many orthopedic doctors willing to take up employment in a major hospital in Anambra State. Why must patients with fractures wait for several days to receive treatment?
Closing in on fifty-six years of its existence as an “Independent” country, Nigeria has no healthcare policy to speak of. Nigerians ravaged by diabetes, cancer, heart diseases and a slew of other grave ailments are left at the mercy of ill-equipped hospitals or, worse, in the hands of unscrupulous, money-obsessed pastors, imams and dibias whose stock, magic and make-belief, are dressed up as sure-fire miracles.
Nigeria’s political and business elite—in other words, those who have shaped their country into the near hell-on-earth it is—feel no compunction hurrying off to the UK, the US, Asia, Europe or even other African countries to receive medical treatment.
In the end, it’s up to Nigerians to demand that their public officials participate fully in Nigerian life. Officials’ school-age children should attend the same schools as other Nigerians. And when these public officials fall sick, they should submit themselves for treatment at the same hospitals that other Nigerians go to. I mean, why not?

Please follow me on twitter @okeyndibe or email at okeyndibe@gmail.com

Letter to Olusegun Adeniyi of Thisday RE: BUHARI AND THE OLD WOMAN IN KATSINA

RE: BUHARI AND THE OLD WOMAN IN KATSINA - Olusegun Adeniyi, Thisday

Dear Segun,

As usual you covered so much ground in your recent article. Please allow me to dwell only on the issue of fuel subsidy.

How do I get the impression that the people in President Buhari's inner circle are leaking their reasoning for delaying the removal of fuel subsidy through you because they believe that you will do a better job of selling it to the rapidly growing band of critics, which now includes you? Kind of Explainer-in-Chief. For goodness sake, you have done your own bit. Let this regime carry its own burden.

In my opinion piece titled "Gas-to-Power Conundrum" (Sept 2014), I boldly staked a position for the immediate removal of natural gas, fuel (as in petrol) and electricity subsidies. I knew that this was a very unpopular position, but I have never engaged in a popularity contest with the ever posturing Nigerian public figure and pseudo-analyst. For sure, I am not one of them. I actually directly blamed the elite who against their better judgement joined the largely uninformed masses at Gani Fawehinmi Park to torpedo the then planned removal of fuel subsidy. I regret to inform you that I have to date not seen a proper analytical response to my original thesis. Talk of being roundly ignored. Over the course of several interventions, (none of which was published by Thisday), I have also asked for the price of kerosene, indistinguishable from aviation fuel, to be freed from government control. None of the intended benefits ever trickled down to the masses. Meanwhile the market became grossly distorted as a result. The unresolved issue of the continuing abuse of the fuel subsidy scheme is a different kettle of fish. Today Friday, December 4, 2015, I purchased 30litres of petrol from a filling station in Oshodi, Lagos. You should have seen the relief on my face as I most gladly paid N120 per litre. How desperate I was.

I have therefore become quite frustrated when, with the predictable but ignored collapse of government finances, the same activists who graced the rally at Ojota (I don't have to name them) started falling over each other to have their names in print, and on radio/television with the new message, "Yes, it is now the right policy to eliminate fuel subsidy." They say and/or write this viewpoint with a straight face, and without offering any new facts to buttress the change of position. Probably they are counting on the short memory of most Nigerians.

You also wrote, "Nigerians want to know, and indeed deserve to know, what Buhari is doing about the economy and they want to hear it from him." Why then are you allowing President Buhari's handlers to offer us snippets through your column? Is it a matter of plausible deniability? The Buhari presidency should man up and talk directly to us citizens. If we don't like or don't make sense of what we hear or see, we will roundly criticise the government. That's their lot. The team asked for the job. We gave it to them.

I can easily deduce that you wish this new administration well. So do I, without any reservations. It must learn and fast too that all the carry over problems from the Jonathan presidency plus any new ones now belong to President Muhamadu Buhari. His team should please, please get on with the job.