Abroad by Any Means is Edo culture

The front page news of Vanguard Newspaper of today, May 12th refers to a story of Gaius Obaseki, Edo State Governor, talking about how he is educating Edo youths to understand, on the whole, the idea of abroad. According to Abaseki, there were 30, 000 Edo youths in Libya alone, when he became the Governor of Edo State. 

I wasn’t surprised there were this much of Edo youths in Libya alone. The love of travelling abroad is a culture around that region of Nigeria and goes more than fifty years back. As far back as then, a lot of other people have not taken notice because it hasn’t become an issue to the foreign destinations of desperate travellers. 

As a member of the National Youth Service Corps, I served in Edo State, staying in the St. Saviour area of Benin City. That was as far back as 1993. It was a time when commercial buses carried huge iron drums in the back, rather than passengers’ baggage. The drums housed huge speakers from where the sounds of Shaka Demus/Pliers, Mad Cobra and Shaba Ranks rose. It was a time when women wore long skirts with slashes that began from the helm right up to the thigh; you would think they were sabotaged with Gillette razor blades. That crazy skirt was referred to as “Shaba,” after Shaba Ranks who happened to be the king of Dancehall at the time. Certainly, the girls who wore those skirts are now grandmothers and are now looking back at what time has done to their pride. 

The Liberian war was ongoing at the time. Liberians were accepted as refugees in many parts of the Western world. All that was required of them was to present a Liberian passport. I was at a barbing saloon at the last bus stop in Inhiwhinwhi area when a guy approached me with a fake Liberian passport, pitching to get me to buy it. He requested an amount with a five as the starting digit. I can’t recall if it was five or fifty thousand. But I came from Jos and we don’t have that huge adventurous culture on the Plateau. In my typical Plateau mindset, I just looked forward to getting a job with Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, where I served or getting back to Jos and seeing what Heaven brings.  

Four years later, I found myself in Port Harcourt, Rivers, hustling. I run into a guy from Agbo, Delta State –they are all related, you know.  He studied Mechanical Engineering and had two options in life: either he find a job with an oil company or conserve enough money from the petty jobs and find his way abroad. He was always talking about the adventurous journeys, saying, “Where I come from, they don’t care about your graduate shit. What they want to see is how much you have.” He eventually left to travel abroad and I never heard from him anymore, despite searching all social media. I dread the idea of my friend ending up in a Moroccan pit of hell.

While still in Port Harcourt, there was this lady from Edo. She was an English teacher in one of the schools in Port Harcourt. Her ambition was to travel to the Netherlands. I had feelings for the dark slim and brilliant Edo woman. She knew it but I didn’t have what she wanted.  One day, I heard the shocking news that she was in Holland, already.  She was civil enough to avoid the idea of travelling through the desert with all manner of companions –desert storms, aridity, the ignorant, the young and old, the clean and the clumsy, uncertainty... She just worked to save enough money to travel via a safe, legitimate option. Her case is one of a known, documented success. 

Travelling by any means necessary has moved from what it is to trafficking kids that are, at times, willingly offered by their parents. The reasoning is that “Well since I am not young enough to go through the hassle, my kids can go, get the money and send it back.” 

Obviously, economics is at the root of the epidemic. It is the reason why it will spread and it has, indeed, spread. The Edos were just the first to see and understand it from a distance.

While the war in Libya got so messy everything became chaotic, warranting some Libyans to begin taking black Africans as slaves, I watched footage on YouTube, beholding the ignorance some victims played out and I wondered how someone with such profound ignorance would navigate the complex societies of the west, their ultimate destination. The depth of ignorance was such that you can’t help but ask yourself the question: what is she going there to do?

The profundity of ignorance can best be addressed through education and, hence, Gaius Obaseki hits the nail on the head. But education will do little to someone whose psychology is hardcore and rooted, since it is going to rest largely on reorientation –poverty and hardship have already given their orientation. It is the reason why basic education of the right quality is what is needed, not only in Edo state but across the length and breadth of the Nigerian space. 

Stanley Meyer, Nigeria and Fuel Scarcity

Fuel Queues in Nigeria. Credit: businessday.ng.

As of today, May 5th, it is getting to a couple of weeks since Nigerians commenced another episode of petrol fuel scarcity. Considering that Nigeria is an oil-producing nation, the situation triggers heartbreak, gloom, distrust and despondency.

It is a bizarre situation; people as high as university dons and directors in all tiers of the Nigerian Civil Service have resorted to commuting via commercial tricycles since they can't afford to power their private vehicles at the current fuel cost of about N1000/litre of fuel. We have suddenly found ourselves in a situation where the country belongs to a handful of politicians and highly successful businessmen and women.

As far as Nigerians are concerned, those who viewed Nigeria's oil as a curse are getting vindicated. Looking at the situation broadly, the global oil industry has given us a huge reason to view oil as coming with some level of course, albeit a minuscule. Some people will argue that the global curse is huge. Fossil fuel has brought staggering progress to humanity, but when the potentially apocalyptic dimension of its downside is viewed, it is a curse of sorts. For a myriad of reasons, people in different places are desperately praying for an option for fossil-driven engines.

This brings us to the story of Stanley Meyer, a guy from the US state of Ohio, who is said to have invented a hydrogen-driven car. Meyer's technology involved the process of electrolysis that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is combusted to power the engine, while the oxygen and other residues are propelled through the exhaust, enriching the atmosphere with more oxygen. The invention was meant to power a dune buggy capable of driving for 180km on four litres of water. Many folks must have said, "Who cares about the quantity of water? If it meant driving that far with 100 litres of water, all it would have required was to find the nearest river, well or water pump and just refill."

Meyer was said to have died in 1998, at a restaurant where a waiter served a purportedly poisoned drink. In the conversation that ensued, there were accusing fingers in the direction of the oil industry, the only institution that would have suffered if his invention were to fully come to reality.

There is that saying that "the triumph of evil over good is only fleeting." The doom the oil industry was trying to avoid if Meyer's invention were to come to full application is sure to come. The whole issue is something bigger than Meyer; it is about the whole of mankind. For the love of money and power, we cannot let humanity perish. Fossil fuel is getting closer and closer towards actualizing its target extinguishing the whole of mankind. Every day, we see events pointing in that direction. Recently, we saw it in the United Arab Emirates and Kenya, through floods of the magnitude that convinces the strongest sceptics of the veracity of the global environmental crisis.

In Nigeria, millions are praying frantically for the coming of the electric car. In the ignorance of many, their prayers aren't motivated by the day of doom that the use of fossil fuel would bring, should we lose the fight, but by the excruciating hardship, the exorbitant cost of petroleum products has brought.

We understand that Stephen, Stanley's brother, has moved his late brother's invention to Canada for safekeeping. Eventually, even the killers of his brother would beg this invention to be revisited. 

The Sad Power Verdict of Adelabu

Adebayo Adelabu. Source: Theindependent.ng

Recently, the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu warned that if the recent increases in electric power tariff are not accepted by Nigerians, there will be a total blackout within the next three months in Nigeria. We thought that Adelabu would be advocating for the ordinary Nigerian, considering that he is talking on an issue that pitches ordinary Nigerians against a profit-driven institution. 

If one has been watching events in the power sector, one would have no option but to doubt if that warning is hinged on any sincerity. The history of electric power reforms in Nigeria is replete with tariff increases and lies since there aren’t corresponding improvements in the power supply. This, largely, has been the narrative. 

Let us look at cases of insincerity that we have witnessed along the way since the power reform got underway. There is the issue of metering. It was pronounced, from the onset, that meters would be free. The issue continued lingering such that those who eventually got the meters had to make one form of payment or the other. 

But there is also the preposterous issue of estimated metering. The estimations kept rising steadily and it reached a situation where some consumers were paying as much as N17, 000 month. So, if a country pays a minimum wage of N17,000.00 –as it was then – you know that something was awry. While some consumers were waiting for their meters, the story changed –you have to pay as much as N80,000 to get a meter currently. What happened to consumers who had their connections on condition that their meters would come free? It means that they have been robbed. 

There is the question of whether the distribution companies were sold to third parties. The tradition in an atmosphere that is rife with greed and graft is that people in power skim such that everything ends with them. People in Nigeria feel that when you are in power, ensure you make the “most” of it. So, the issue of transparency was questionable. If you look at other corporations that were sold at the time, most ended up in the hands of people who were in power at the time of the privatizations. An example is NICON HILTON in Abuja which ended in the hands of the government officials of the Obasanjo’s Presidency.  

Recently, there has been the issue of Band “A” consumer communities that would be charged over N200 per unit of electricity because they get not less than 20 hours of electricity per day. It was a deal struck with the distribution companies. It failed disgracefully as the companies could not keep their side of the bargain and is, thus, an indication that the companies are never sincere, never corporate in their dealings and shouldn’t be trusted to guarantee any improvement in power supply regardless of how much they charge. 

Now, the combined distribution companies made a profit of over eight hundred billion naira in 2022. In 2023, it rose to over a trillion naira. So, when the Minister of Power gave that warning, it seemed like the companies had not been making profits. The question is: why is it that despite these profits, the supply has only declined? At least, we don’t see any electricity.