All posts by Abraham Ameh

The Annual Şęnrolu Day in Odoşęnlu

The Annual Şęnrolu Day in Odoşęnlu

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

Upon landing from Addis Ababa on Good Friday, April 19, 2019, I drove from the airport to my roots-Odoşęnlu. In Nigeria, we wrongly place emphasis on place of origin as opposed to residence. Many civic forms demand this information and it used to be the basis for any stake in the larger system. Though the relevance of place of origin is reducing, it is still very much there. So, we tend to have attachment to where our great, great grandfathers or simply put our lineage is. Hence, Odoşęnlu is where I have my country home. It is where I am also a Prince.

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The annual Şęnrolu Day in Odoşęnlu 

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The Corrupt and Elite Animals of Nigeria

The Corrupt and Elite Animals of Nigeria

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

There is an irony about Nigeria. One only needs to shout: “thief, thief, thief”, in an attempt to apprehend an alleged petty thief, and in no time, a mob surfaces capture the individual. The alleged thief, whether male or female, is hounded by the mob and receives instant justice, without a trial. In some cases, irrespective of gender, petty thieves are forcibly undressed with accompanying violent kicks and slaps by a blood hungry mob. If the police delay in showing up and/or there is no voice of authority (whether as a result of age or public office) to restrain such mobs, dis-used motor tyres and petrol are procured to deliver instant death penalty without due process on a petty thief.

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The Corrupt and Elite Animals of Nigeria

 

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The Human Side of Kofi Annan

The Human Side of Kofi Annan

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

I knew Kofi Annan has to die. Somehow, I never thought it would be this early for him. More so, when we were only told that it was after a brief illness. Brief illness for a great African, one of the best human beings, sounds strange for an eighty-year-old with access to the very best medical intervention possible on earth. I had thought he could have gone on for as long as Madiba did.

I would be stupid to want to analyse on the great deeds of Kofi Annan that altered the strategic framework of our world. I will not be exhaustive even in a thousand-page volume on Kofi at the UN and on our planet earth.

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The Human Side of Kofi Annan

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The Politicization of the Request for World Bank’s Prioritization of Boko Haram infested Part of Nigeria

The Politicization of the Request for World Bank’s Prioritization of Boko Haram infested Part of Nigeria

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

I worked for the UN on the conflict in divided Somalia from 1993-2006. The division in that country was palpable in the city of Mogadishu that was, at the beginning of the conflict, divided between General Mohamed Farah Aidid in the South claiming to be President and businessman Mr. Ali Mahdi Mohamed in the North of the same city, also claiming to be President of the country. Both were from the Hawiye clan of the Somali set-up. I worked on both sides of Mogadishu and moved across the green line day-in day-out. Each move, I had many Guards in 3 SUVs with 12 AK-47s (standard UN protocol for such moved), ready to fight to protect the clans’ UN rented SUVs and not myself as I was initially made to believe. However, protecting the vehicles should be seen as protecting the occupants. The reality only comes during any attempt to loot one vehicle. But this is not at issue today as it should be explored elsewhere.

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The Politicization of the Request for World Bank

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Biography of a man of Integrity called Prof. Oyeleye Oyediran

Biography of a man of Integrity called
Prof. Oyeleye Oyediran

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

Breezed into Nigeria to, with my wife, attend the funeral of my worthy mentor and role model. The blood family gave me the honour to read a biography on him to the Baptist Church, Bodija, Ibadan congregation. Below is my intervention.

Our late Pa Oyediran was born at Ogbomosho on January 13, 1934. His parents were late Pa Emmanuel Solademi and late Madam Comfort Oyediran. His father was an itinerant trader who met Comfort, in Gold Coast as it was then known and married her in Ghana. His birth was preceded by four sisters. In effect, he was the first relief that his father sought in having a son. In addition, another son and a sister followed his birth.

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Biography of a man of Integrity called Prof. Oyeleye Oyediran

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Tributes to Prof. Oyelęyę Oyediran

Tributes to Prof. Oyelęyę Oyediran

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

During my years at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 1978-1982, many Nigerian members of the academic community visited as guest lecturers, visiting Profs on sabbatical, etc. With Peter Badejo, Saidu Goje, Segun Oyekunle and others, we always took it upon ourselves to reach out to these compatriots, help them settle down and keep them company so that they will not be home sick. We dragged them to Friday night parties that included Africans from Africa like Joseph Njimbidt Ngu, Tim Ngubeni and Tony Brobbey; Africans from America like Cobie “Kwasi” Harris; Africans from the Carribean like Carlene Edie and many brothers from Haiti whose frechified names I am not able to remember right now. We had formed a formidable group at UCLA on building a pan-African orientation. It was not all parties, we were a strong anti-apartheid pressure group within UCLA and we picketed the Bank of America every Saturday pushing for it to divest from apartheid South Africa.

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Tributes to Prof Oyelęyę Oyediran

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UNILAG ASUU Honours Prof Akingbade

UNILAG ASUU Honours Prof Akingbade

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

November 26, 2019 was an important day for me. The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) Unilag Branch organized a day to appreciate the services of mainly past chairmen and others of the branch.

Mrs. Folashade Sikirat Akingbade, surviving wife of my late comrade in the struggle against military dictatorships (Major-General Muhammadu Buhari and his usurping successor, the Maradona of Nigerian politics: General a.k.a President Ibrahim Babangida),  Prof. J. Funsho Akingbade had invited me and Professors Akere, Kukoyi and Okusanya (Akingbade’s friends till the end), to join her in receiving a posthumous award in his name.

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UNILAG ASUU Honours Prof Akingbade

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Visit to Bristol

Visit to Bristol

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

My first time of visiting Bristol, England was on May 14, 2019. It was a dinner visit with my bosom friend Tayo Eboda to meet with our former Mathematics teacher at Ijebu-Ode Grammar School, Mr. Tony Finch. A multi-talented teacher who taught Mathematics, Add Maths, French as part of being a polyglot. I remember that he was comfortable in too many languages that included Polish, German etc. By the time he was leaving Ijebu-Ode in June 1970 to travel for 6 months before proceeding to Saudi Arabia, he had taught himself Arabic. Subsequently settling in Malaysia, he added Malay yo his many European languages. The last time I met younger Tony Finch with a lot of beard was in 1975 in England when I got to meet his parents, sister and friends. For Tayo, it was 1970.

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Visit to Bristol

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Xenophobic Attacks on Nigerians in South Africa

Xenophobic Attacks on Nigerians in South Africa

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

The developments in South Africa and subsequent reactions in Nigeria are extremely sad and reflect the failure of leadership in both countries and more so in South Africa.

The intermittent hate exhibited by South African mobs on other Africans has happened a number of times before the recent spate. There has been enough time for the South African government to address the problem radically including through to its root causes. Disbanding, detention and/or repatriation of criminal gangs operated by other Africans should have been a regular occurrence.

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Xenophobic Attacks on Nigerians in South Africa

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Throwback to My Experience Challenging Ethnic Quota System in Nigeria

Throwback to My Experience Challenging Ethnic Quota System in Nigeria

Babafemi A. Badejo, Ph.D

Just stumbled on The New York Times account on the 1988 struggle of my family against constitutionalized ethnic discrimination in Nigeria. The problem of Federal Character remains a major challenge to development in Nigeria. The Constituent Assembly that foisted this injustice was chaired by late Chief Rotimi Williams and promulgated by General Olusegun Obasanjo as Head of State. It has been upheld as the grundnorm since 1979. However, it seems former President Obasanjo is now surprised that President Muhammadu Buhari is ignoring Federal Character as it pleases him as reflected in the former’s letters to the current president. I wonder what Chief Rotimi Williams would say today if he were alive. We fought this case through to the Court of Appeal with late Chief G.O.K. Ajayi (thanks to late Pa Alfred Rewane who provided consideration for the services of the SAN) and Solomon A. Olugbemi Esq., whose consideration was only conviction and friendship.  We had technical win but lost the constitutional substance. We went on to the Supreme Court with Olugbemi alone. The Supreme Court was divided along lines that appeared to me as probably north and south with superb arguments that upheld our right to fight but rejected the suggestion that correcting a constitutional wrong of this magnitude cannot be overtaken by events. Reactions would be much welcomed.

See below as reported by New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/06/world/ethnic-quota-for-nigerians-is-challenged.html

Ethnic Quota For Nigerians Is Challenged

By James Brooke, Special To the New York Times Nov. 6, 1988

At the age of 11, Adeyinka Badejo is learning the hard way about affirmative action, Nigerian style. The daughter of an eminent political science professor here, Miss Badejo hoped last month to win admission to a Nigerian Unity School – a Government-financed prep school for top universities here and abroad.

To Miss Badejo’s dismay, she discovered that several of her sixth-grade classmates scored lower than she did on a national test, but that they won admission to the prestigious boarding school system. In this West African nation where virtually, everyone is of the same race, the difference is ”state of origin” – often a code phrase in Nigeria for tribe.

Miss Badejo scored 293 on a 400-point test – three points below the cutoff for girls from Ogun state, a southern state largely populated by members of the Yoruba tribe. If she had been born to parents from Kano state, the northern heartland of the Hausa and Fulani tribes, she would have sailed into a Unity School with a score as low as 151. ‘Federal Character’ Policy.

Miss Badejo’s rejection was a result of Nigeria’s policy of ”reflecting the federal character.” Through nationally mandated quotas, this policy is intended to ensure that Nigeria’s disadvantaged tribal groups have equal access to higher education and to Government employment.

Femi Badejo, Adeyinka’s father and a professor at the University of Lagos, decided to sue Nigeria’s Minister of Education on the grounds that the Unity School’s admission policy constitutes discrimination.

In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and one of its most diverse, the case has attracted attention comparable to lawsuits challenging affirmative action programs in the United States.

Late last month, Nigerian reporters packed the three wooden press benches in Court 19 of Lagos High Court as opposing lawyers in black robes and white wigs argued their positions.

During a recess, Mr. Badejo, clad in a yellow dashiki-style shirt favored by the Yoruba people, limited his comments to saying: ”There is no comparison between affirmative action in the United States and ‘federal character’ in Nigeria.”

For Nigeria’s southerners, Mr. Badejo’s case has become a minor cause celebre, and several southern educators and politicians have sharply attacked the 10-year-old quota system. ‘Unjust Discrimination’

”I think it’s unjust discrimination,” Lateef Kayode Jakande, a former governor of Lagos State, told a Nigerian reporter. ”The way out is to encourage the underdeveloped ones to catch up, rather than to bring down the developed ones.”

In Ibadan, the nation’s largest city and one that is largely Yoruba, Dapo Ajayi, a high school principal, said the national quota system discourages southern students who see it as reverse discrimination.

Support for the federal character policy comes from Nigeria’s north. The northerners, most of them Muslim, long resisted Western-style education first introduced by Britain, the colonial power here until 1960. Nigerians on the Atlantic coast -Yoruba in the west and members of the Ibo tribe in the east – sent their children in large numbers to British colonial schools.

Today, almost 30 years after independence, a new generation of Nigerians bears the stamp of this colonial inheritance. In the test Miss Badejo took last September, the cutoff point was set by the score attained by the 500th-ranking boy or girl in each state.

Cutoff scores for students from states largely populated by the Ibo or the Yoruba ranged from 280 to 303. Cutoff scores for students from northern states with high Hausa and Fulani populations ranged from 151 to 252.

”The South has had longer access to Western education than the north -you can’t run away from that fact,” Rotimi Williams, a Lagos lawyer, said in an interview.

In 1978, Mr. Williams served as chairman of the committee that drafted Nigeria’s 1979 Constitution. Today, he defends the quota policy as ”a necessary evil.” ‘A Stake in This Country’

”What some might call discrimination is actually making everyone feel they have a stake in this country,” he said in his law offices. ”Otherwise, an outsider might say the universities are dominated by southerners, that the civil service is dominated by southerners.”

Nigerians are debating a new constitution and the concept of federal character will probably be preserved untouched, said one of Mr. Williams’ sons, Ladi, a lawyer who is a delegate to the Assembly. Under law, 5 percent of certain grade-level jobs in the civil service and in Government-owned corporations are reserved for applicants from each of Nigeria’s 21 states.

In a separate interview in October, Nigeria’s President, Gen. Ibrahim B. Babangida, said that federal policy should require ”very good representation of the different regions of the country at points of entry.”

”From then on, very much depends on performance,” the President said. Ladi Williams argued that the ethnic quota policy should not apply to some areas, such as Olympic teams, university presidents and the Nigerian delegation to the United Nations.

But, he said, Nigerians often look at life through an ethnic lens. A few years ago, he recalled, many Nigerians were disgruntled when the national junior soccer team, the Eaglets, traveled to Beijing and won the junior world cup. Commentators noted acidly that the coach and 9 of the 11 starting players were from Bendel state.

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Throwback to My Experience Challenging Ethnic Quota System in Nigeria

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