SomberTuesday! Electioneering campaigns are still ongoing. Candidates assure Nigerians that if elected, they will transform Nigeria and help propel it to greatness. However, historical experience casts doubt on their capacity to accomplish these laudable goals. The candidates also must remember that #EndSARS protesters called for an end to bad governance, impunity, violence, and police brutality. However, they were brutally suppressed. This conflicts with the expectations of Nigerians that our government will embrace, respect, and entrench democratic principles. The economy is in the doldrums. Insecurity is prevalent, with kidnappings and abductions normalized. Those whose kinfolk are in captivity are compelled to ransom them. One can only imagine the trauma and gargantuan financial burdens that torment and trouble them. The internally displaced and destitute victims of devastating floods have suffered losses including deaths of friends, family, and acquaintances, injuries, and losses of property, and livelihood. Two years on, #Nigeria must never forget the massacre of peacefully demonstrating youths at #LekkiTollGate and other locations. Given our current reality, we should say: #NigerianWomenArise #EndPoliceBrutalityinNigeriaNOW #EndSars #EndSWAT #EndImpunity

Howard Zinn’s statement is relevant to Nigeria’s situation: “Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while, the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” Let the kleptocrats give back our stolen wealth so that we can fix our infrastructure, schools, hospitals, and also offer worthwhile social protection to our people.

Let the masses enjoy the full benefits of citizenship in Nigeria. Let the leaders and political class repent and build peace with justice. This is no time for politics as usual. The people elected should be those trusted to bring justice, equity, and human security to the entire country, not expedient, unethical, and egocentric individuals determined to dominate for self-aggrandizement or sectional gain. We don’t need oligarchs’ continued domination. We also need a government that puts the interests of majority of citizens first.

Prof. Mojúbàolú Olufúnké Okome is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College in New York.

My point of departure is to suggest that while there is no doubt that alternatives are a necessary, and even an inevitable component, of any living political system, it is important that as scholars and practitioners, we strive also at all times to demystify them from the excessive air of drama and circumstance in which they tend to be wrapped in scholarly discourses. This is for the simple reason that alternatives exist and are mobilised everyday and at all levels as part of our experiences of governance. In other words, alternatives, understood generally as encompassing forward-looking vision and practice that depart from a dominant but problematic and/or contested norm, are an integral part of everyday politics – and, indeed, all spheres of human endeavour.

Although they are fired by an admixture of vision, passion, and necessity, and, in highly repressive political contexts, would require to be pursued with courage and sacrifice, alternatives are also played out simultaneously at multiple levels – micro, meso, and macro. Additionally, they are carried by different actors – big and small, formal and informal, and domestic and external. Alternatives also manifest and are played out in different spaces – local, national, and even global, and at various points in times. They are the underlying drivers of the dialectics of political change.

In their intersection within a polity, they may translate into revolutionary moments of political renewal that arrest our attention. However, in most instances, they are also pursued “silently” with no less significant consequences for overall governance. Whether expressed in macro-national revolutionary terms or carried out “silently” in various localised spaces, alternatives are an embodiment of the agency of the people in all their diversities.

In our highly justified desire for a radical transformation of politics and power in Africa, including Nigeria, we very often set our sights almost exclusively at forms and levels of engagement that capture mostly the dramatic and the revolutionary on a grand national scale. This slanted approach to the mapping of change dynamics has been reinforced in recent years by such dramatic events as the so-called Arab Spring that swept through parts of North Africa and the Middle East, producing gripping moments which were served to us directly in our homes by global television, including the spectacular toppling of long-running political dictatorships and power dynasties. I suggest that even at that, underlying these grand events are an array of ordinarily anonymous or nondescript local forces, such as the neigbourhood committees, professional associations, womens’ groups, and youth networks, that were either already quietly immersed in or became converted to the quest for political alternatives and alternative forms of politics.

If the quest for alternatives is integral to everyday life and everyday politics, rather than only expressing or manifesting itself in dramatic moments of revolutionary change, then it seems to me that the strategic approaches we take to governance and the questions we ask must necessarily be different. This was a key consideration that fired my interest in the 1990s as we Nigerians pondered the issue of how best to overcome the prolonged scourge of military rule that had become a threat to national cohesion and continuity, apart from its many other failings. For me personally, as a civil society/social movement activist, that period was crunch time on how best to carry forward a struggle that had successfully hobbled continued military rule and opened up real prospects for a return to civilian rule and elected government.

Many of the Nigerians and students of Nigeria here will know that our country has a rich history of social movements with an impressive record of resistance against oppressive policies and rulership. However, there was always an historic challenge that faced the movement: How to convert resistance into power with which to push the alternatives around which militants were mobilised. 

That same challenge was posed in the lead-up to the birth of the Fourth Republic: A social movement that was strong and organised enough to make a change in national governance impossible to avoid but not powerful enough to impose its alternative as the viable path for the country to follow. In part, this problem was reflective of the conception of change in the ranks of the movement as a totalising process that needed to happen on a macro-national and pan-Nigerian scale at the same time and all at once.

Let me quickly forestall a misunderstanding: Collective pan-Nigerian territorial change of the kind that will overturn a history of socio-economic underdevelopment and governance underperformance remains the historic duty of all those who seek the rebirth of our country and continent in unity, justice, peace, progress, and security. However, achieving this goal did not require an indefinite wait for the day when like-minded actors across the Niger would be able to create the national movement and momentum to translate opposition and resistance into national power. While the search for such a national change process was going on, it made eminent sense to seek to promote alternatives in various other sites where we could effectively already begin to make a difference. And this is exactly what some like-minded people like me and others decided to do in making the transition from civil society to political society.

As a frontline political party actor since 2005, a two-term governor, a two-term Chair of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, and a Minister in the federal cabinet, I am able to state without equivocation that at different levels, in various domains, and through many mechanisms, it was possible – and valiant efforts were made – to promote localised alternatives in the political process and governance system. That these were localised did not make them any less necessary or significant; they impacted many and also set a new tone and tenor for politics, governance, and the interpretation of citizenship. Examples of such changes are many – and will be fully documented in due course – but I note here, for now, that in Ekiti State, to use that specific example, we were successful on several fronts in shifting the overall template of governance and resetting aspects of public administration. 

Some of the changes we effected include: a) The restoration of a merit-based system of recruitment into the civil serve as we sought to rebuild state capacity and public administration; b) A raft of interventions to empower women, blunt gender discrimination, protect the girl child, and stem gender-based violence; c) the introduction of core social policies as a first step towards a new state-society compact – including a social security benefit system for the elderly; the institutionalisation of a state development plan, a system of public sector performance evaluation, and the curation of global good practices in the administration of public affairs; major investments in the restoration of values and ethics in everyday governance; efforts at restoring the civic culture in political competition; the adoption of a transition law aimed at strengthening continuity in governance and development despite administrative turnovers; the fostering of inter-generational engagements with a view to cementing a system of orderly succession, leadership recruitment, and mentorship, etc.

The initiatives taken were numerous and spanned various spheres of policy and governance. Inevitably, some required experimentation, adaptation, and innovation. Others were simply commonsensical or required us to learn from established good practices. In some cases, we registered immediate results. In others, expected results were slower in coming on account of ossified cultures that needed to be dissolved. Yet others are still work in progress. In all cases, they allowed us, within specific domains, sectors, and areas, as part of an overall strategy of change and progress, to demonstrate the feasibility of political alternatives and to practice alternative politics. Both endeavours were not without their challenges. Doing things, anything, differently ruffles feathers, high and low.

Many a stakeholder may be more invested in instant results as opposed to medium-to-long-term outcomes – remember the metaphor of “stomach infrastructure” as against physical infrastructure development. After years of failed promises, a cross section of the populace is steeped in cynicism about intentions. Assembling a team of loyal fellow travellers ready for the long haul has its own challenges. The import of all of the foregoing is that alternatives also have their own politics which must be played right for the changes in form and substance that are envisaged to have a chance of succeeding and making a difference. This fact immediately broaches upon the question of the strategy for change management that is adopted in a context in which the harvest is plentiful but the labourers are not only few, but even the ones available are poorly equipped and motivated. The would-be change maker is, therefore, also immediately confronted with critical issues of timing, phasing, and sequencing in the quest to drive an agenda of alternatives in policy, politics, and praxis.

I suggest that one of the difficulties that would-be change makers have had to deal with in the period since the birth of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic centres, inter alia, on the problem of timing, phasing, and sequencing.

I argue also that the politics of alternatives at any and every level requires alliance and coalition-building to undergird change processes. Furthermore, it will be foolhardy to assume that a ready-made and willing constituency for alternatives is in place in spite of the impression often created on social media; when crunch time arrives and the demands of change begun to be felt, the herd very often disperses amidst a crisis of expectations. Political and civic education must, therefore, go hand-in-hand with policies and leadership so that alternatives can find enduring anchorage in an organic constituency. For, even under the best of circumstances, active citizenship will need to be mobilised on an ongoing basis in order to sustain alternatives that negate established practices rooted in cronyism, maladministration, and various abuses.

In contextualising alternatives, it would be remiss of me not to make a few remarks  on what is now being described as “alternative politics” or a “third force” in Nigeria’s contemporary electoral politics. The present context of electoral politics in Nigeria is dominated by citizens who are, for many reasons, disillusioned with mainstream political parties which they blame squarely for not delivering democracy dividends.

However, if alternative politics must be taken as a wholesale reform of our political system, and we are interested in the codification of a system of alternative  politics that is consensual and developmental, then perhaps the argument to put forward, as a first step, is that our electoral system may need to be re-engineered away from the current majoritarian “winner takes all” model. Indeed, whichever political party wins the 2023 general elections, one can readily predict its going to be a close race. Imagining a race in which the eventual winner scales through with a 50.5 percent of the vote just as we recently witnessed in Kenya, it does not require a seer to predict that such an outcome is unlikely to enhance stability of the polity, let alone allow the militants of alternatives to thrive in our search for a national rebirth.

My sojourn in politics so far convinces me that any strategy for building sustainable democracy in a plural and divided society such as Nigeria must place a premium on electoral systems that will promote accommodation and inclusivity as a way of ensuring that the fractures and frictions that obstruct national change-making are blunted and dislodged. In the age of populism, elections help shape broader norms of political behaviour and we are already witnessing centrifugal, inter-ethnic and inter religious tensions as we move towards the 2023 elections. That is why as a first step, since we are unlikely to see any change in electoral reform before the election, my own view is that regardless of the outcome of the election, it would help if a national unity government is the eventual product, one that is consensus-driven with a clearly agreed agenda for broad-ranging reformation and transformation. This is especially so if the outcome of the election is not overwhelmingly definitive.

This is why I see the debate about political alternatives and alternative politics a superfluous one. Important as they are, the institutions of direct state power and electoralism are just the tip of the iceberg in the democratisation complex. Indeed, genuine democracy ought to rest on a much richer ecology of associational and organisational life and should be nourished and reproduced through every-day struggles of the citizens. But when we broadly define the everyday struggles as simply the handiwork of ‘civil society’ as in the EndSARS or Occupy Nigeria movements, we strip them bare of their spontaneity and deeper meaning and romanticise  ‘civil society’ as the rationally ordered, codified and all-knowing alternative to government and overplay our abilities as activists to counter the inherent inequities of class and markets. Even worse, we are presented or we present ourselves as antidotes to the ills of democratisation, which is why single issue causes like EndSARS have been hugely successful in form but exaggerated in their expectations and eventual outcomes. The reason for this crisis of exaggerated expectation that activists suffer is not far-fetched. The truth is that as long as we live in the post-Westphalian world of sovereign states, we exaggerate the ability of the civil society to stand up to the power of the nation-state or the mega corporations on its own steam.

This is why I am not sure that the solution to the current deficit that our democracy is experiencing can be solved with posing activism as a counterpunch to politics. For autonomous institutions to play a different role in mediating citizens’ democratic choices, their organic development must be combined in a more nuanced manner and a more systematic way with the use of public and state power.

The choice is therefore simple: one can continue to snipe on the fringe and complain that government is not listening to the yearnings of the people. Alternatively, one can stop agonising about missed opportunities and organise in a manner that places citizens as drivers of change in our quest to restore communitarian values and a future of hope and possibilities for our people.

I have taken the pain of working us through the fact that the politics of alternatives occur at various levels in part because it allows for a more precise assessment of prospects for innovation and transformation in 2023 based on the lessons of experience. Here, the two final points I would like to emphasise are as follows: First, our primary challenge at this time is not so much that alternatives are absent. Far from it. Since 1999, various alternatives have been tried out and continue to be experimented. Even now, leading consociationalists see the current Nigerian presidentialism as a good case study in electoral reform in managing conflict in divided societies. The policies and politics of alternatives are, however, unevenly spread over time and space. This fact partly explains the variegated geometry of change which we are witnessing in the country.

The second point I would like to make is that for far too long, our political culture has perpetuated the myth that strong and charismatic leaders can bring about change single-handedly – rather than convert the formal authority derived from their electoral mandate into a process of democratic renewal. Based on my own direct involvement and practical experience, on the field, innovative social change can only occur with a leadership dedicated to motivating people to solve problems within their own communities, rather than reinforcing the over-lordship of the state over its citizens. The main challenge of political leadership  in this context therefore is to reconnect democratic choices with people’s day-to-day experience and to extend democratic principles to everyday situations in citizens’ communities and constituencies.

Considering where we are today in Nigeria, it is my proposition that the next big challenge which history beckons on us all to respond to is how dispersed sites and actors of the alternatives can be meaningfully united and forged into a national movement of enduring change in which Nigerians across different geographies can recognise themselves.

What my colleagues and I did in Ekiti under my overall stewardship had its place and will continue to remain relevant. Similar efforts as we deployed in Ekiti have been played out and are still ongoing in various states of the federation. These efforts would need to be united as part of a broad leadership consensus for national rebirth. Doing so will require its own politics and a visionary type of leadership that is able to rise above faction and fraction to project a new national imagination.

I thank you all for your kind attention.

Dr. Kayode Fayemi, former governor of Ekiti State and Chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum delivered this keynote address at the Conference on Redesigning Democracy held at the University of Oxford on Thursday 20 October, 2022.

By Sonnie Ekwowusi

Last week, a group of pro-choice NGOs staged a protest against the Hon. Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu for directing the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) to expunge the current immoral sex education taught in Nigerian schools from the school curriculum. Worried about the immoral content of sex education curriculum in Nigeria and the wrong method deployed in using it to corrupt impressionable secondary school and primary school pupils most of whom are in the age bracket of 5-14 years, the Hon. Minister had directed last week that the immoral sex education should be removed from the school curriculum and that the teaching of sex education should be left in the hands of parents who are the primary educators of their children and religious institutions which are the custodians of morals of young people.  Rather than sexualize and damaging the character of our school pupils with a pernicious sex education, the Hon. Minister prefers that parents and religious institutions should teach sex education in order to safeguard the morals of our school pupils.

But the Hon. Minister’s directive has not gone down well with some pro-choice NGOs. Last week they issued a statement stating, among other things, that the Minister’s directive is a hindrance to progress in providing school pupils and teenagers with factual information and skills on teen safe-sex and reproductive health (otherwise known as abortion) that are necessary for young people to make rational decisions about their bodies. Also faulting the Hon. Minister on the said directive, a wife of a former State Governor, who over the years has gained notoriety as child safe-sex radical activist, has written a letter to the Hon. Minister stating, inter alia, that the Nigerian government should embrace the Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) of  the notorious pro-abortion foreign NGO called the United Nations Population Funds (UNFPA).

The government should just ignore the protesting pro-choice NGOs and the wife of the former State Governor. Under the so-called CSE which the wife of the ex-State Governor is prescribing to the government (I have a copy of it right in front me as I scribble this), school pupils in open classrooms are required to touch each other’s genital saying:  “I like you”. The pupils are also expected to touch each other’s private parts and find out the differences in their respective private parts. For years now I have been following the corruption and sexualization of the Nigerian kids by the UNFPA. Under the youth peer sexuality education Training Guide/Toolkit, funded by the UNFPA and used in many public secondary schools in Nigeria, (which I also have in front of me at the moment), the students are told to share with other students with whom they feel more comfortable things like: “Your sexual fantasies (fantasies), “Your feelings about oral sex (oral)”, “Whether you enjoy erotic material (X), “Whether you have fantasized about a homosexual relationship (gay-fan),” “Whether you have had a homosexual relationship (gay-exp)”. On page 75 of the Guide, there is a condom relay race activity involving boys and girls. It instructs the peer leader to “Ask two volunteers (participants or co-facilitators) to hold the two penis models” and then to invite two teams to race to put the condoms on the models.

I remember that in 2014 the same UNFPA organized what it dubbed the third Family Planning Pre-Conference which was held at the Reiz Continental Hotel, Abuja. At that Conference, the UNFPA launched a condom-safe-sex campaign entitled, “No Hoodie No Honey”. This campaign was widely reported in the Nigerian media. The campaign was also posted on Twitter, Facebook, and on other social media.  The campaign was targeted at young Nigerian girls in the age bracket of 14-18. The campaign was aimed at supplying condoms and contraceptives to these young Nigerian girls and convincing them that “safe-sex” is their right and therefore they shouldn’t be ashamed to practice “safe sex” even if the different Nigerian cultures and religions teach otherwise. For example, one of the inscriptions on the No Hoodie No Honey roll-up stand posted on Twitter read: “Let’s push for easy access to the female condom and that a woman may buy condoms without being shamed” First: the campaign was tainted by fraud and deception. While scientific evidence consistently shows that the condoms, which contain naturally-occurring holes, do not protect its user against infections and against HIV and rarely protect against unwanted pregnancy, the UNFPA fraudulently masquerades about the cities of Nigeria and giving the Nigerian youths the false hope that condoms protect from any misdeed.

It beats the imagination that the UNFPA and others are corrupting Nigerian children with immoral CSE under the watch of the government. The American College of Pediatricians has said that CSE is one of the greatest assaults on the health and innocence of children because, unlike traditional sexuality education, CSE highly and explicitly promotes sexual promiscuity and high-risk sexual behaviors among children and teenagers. CSE programs have an almost obsessive focus on teaching children how to obtain sexual pleasure in various ways. (Please visit this site https://youtu.be/6yTvdCHgEHQ)   and view the 11-minute video to see evidence of the harmful elements of CSE.  The video provides just 15 harmful elements typically found in CSE curricula. Since each of these 15 harmful elements has the potential of causing long-term negative effects on the health and well-being of children, having even one of these elements should be reason enough to disqualify a CSE program from being taught to children in our schools. CSE harms children in the following ways and therefore should be banned in our schools. Sexualizes children; teaches children to consent to sex; normalizes anal and oral sex: promotes homosexual/bisexual behavior; promotes sexual pleasure; promotes solo and/or mutual masturbation; promotes condom use in inappropriate ways; promotes early sexual autonomy; fails to establish abstinence as the expected standard; promotes transgender ideology; promotes contraception and abortion to children; promotes peer-to-peer sex education or sexual rights advocacy; undermines traditional values and beliefs; undermines parents or parental rights; refers children to harmful resources. These are not invented by me. Please visit: www.waronchildren.org and www.investigateippf.org)

Aside from the CSE, many textbooks used in Nigerian schools have been corrupted too with lewd matters. You may be well aware that in the last twenty years or so,  classical English literature books and novels such as Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Weep Not Child, Things Fall Apart, Zambia Shall be Free, The Man Died, African Child, Akin the Drummer Boy, Mine Boy, The gods are not to blame and so forth have been removed from our school curricula and replaced with sex-related local English literature books containing lewd subject-matters to give the unsuspecting young school pupils the wrong impression that self-control is unnecessary and that casual sex makes them feel good; that they should engage in casual sex before marriage; that ‘safe sex’ is what to aim for in life provided that they don’t get pregnant. And if they do get pregnant they should procure an abortion as soon as possible. It is unfortunate that we now live in a highly-sexualized society. And one of the negative consequences of this is the sexualisation of primary and secondary school pupils. At every turn — TV, music, movies, sex education in schools — pre-teens, teens, school pupils, and teenagers are daily bombarded with the tragically misguided message borrowed from abroad that safe sex in all deviant forms, LGBT1+, gay marriage, transgenderism, and bestiality are good for them and that the resultant outcome holds no dangers for them.

About 16 years ago, an NGO called the Concerned Mothers Association, Lagos, ace broadcaster Adesuwa Onyenokwe and others brought a lawsuit against the Lagos State government at the Federal High Court, Lagos over the sexualization of the Integrated Science curriculum to include the techniques of kissing, masturbation, breast enlargement, how to do abortion, how girls can sterilize themselves and be having sex without becoming pregnant and so forth I was one of the counsel for the plaintiffs in that suit. The lead counsel in the suit was Mrs. Sylvia Sinaba SAN (of blessed memory). I remember that when the matter was called in court, the judge, who happened to be a female, was completely stunned by the sexualized issues pleaded by the plaintiffs in their Statement of Claim. In her shock, she first took up the Statement of Claim, held it up momentarily in her right hand, and queried, “What is this?”. “My Lord, these are what they are now teaching them in schools”, responded Mrs. Sylvia Sinaba SAN. Silence enveloped the courtroom.  The judge was dumbfounded. Anyway, to cut the long story short, the matter was amicably resolved out of court. In the spirit of amicable settlement, the Lagos State government at that time yanked off the offensive portion of the Integrated Science curriculum although I suspect that by now it has been brought back into the curriculum.

Between from March 27 to 29 2017, I attended a Conference which took place at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Victoria Island, Lagos. One of the Speakers at that Conference was Ahmed Akanbi, a Muslim parent and a Lagos-based legal practitioner. Midway in his presentation, Ahmed did something which shocked most of the Conference attendees. He carefully dipped his hands into his handbag and brought out two English literature books containing some lewd subject matters and showed them to the audience. He told us that the two books were recommended books for primary six pupils in the primary school attended by his daughter. The title of the first book authored by Oyekunle Oyedeji is: Tears of a bride, while the second book written by Queen O. Okweshine bears the title: Precious Child.  According to Ahmed, his 9-year-old daughter in Primary 6 came back home from school one day and engaged him in a conversation that bothered on some sex experiences. At first, Ahmed was utterly stunned that his 9-year-old daughter was conversant with sex matters. But after he had regained his composure he asked his daughter where she learned about those sex experiences. It was then that his daughter opened her mouth and narrated to him how their school teacher has been using the aforesaid two books to teach them how to practice “safe sex” and how to gain sexual pleasure. Ahmed read to the hearing of the participants some sexy portions of the two books. The participants rose to their feet in utter shock.

Seven years ago, some Lagos-based NGOs also filed a law suit at the Federal High Court, Lagos against the Federal Ministry of Education and others over the smearing of the following textbooks used in many secondary schools in Nigeria- New School Chemistry for Senior Secondary Schools    By:  Osei Yaw Ababio; Revised by: L. E.S Akpanisi Herbert Igwe ; Modern Biology for Senior Secondary School By:  Sarojini T. Ramalingam, revised by  Lucy I Akunwa and J.BC Obidiwe and the New School Physics for Senior Secondary By M. W Anyakoha PhD-with the following watermark inscriptions: “I know that My Mother is a harlot and that my Father is a Kidnapper”, “I am a son/daughter of a  Harlot and kidnapper”, “I confess that my Family is bad, Evil, and a Disgrace to the Nation”, “My Parents Taught me how to love and smoke Indian Hemp, to kill and practice illegal things”. I was the leading counsel for the plaintiffs in the suit. Guess what happened thereafter? The publishers of the lewd textbooks came all the way from Onitsha to our law firm in Lagos to beg for amicable settlement of the matter out of court.

Even many English, Mathematics and Social Science textbooks used in many Nigerian secondary schools have been corrupted to include lewd matters in order to sexualize the young students. For instance, in Mathematics, a typical Maths question for primary school pupils is: “20 condoms + 5 condoms-2 condoms equals…”. At the moment in my little office, I have the latest lewd textbooks or sexualized textbooks used in corrupting our secondary school pupils in Nigeria. They include: Basic science  Junior  Secondary School Razat Publishers, 2018 edition, (for JSS3). Open pages 78 – 83 to see the harmful contents of the book- lesson on teenage pregnancy, types of abortions students can do, myths & facts about pregnancy, indoctrination of the pupils on the terminology of unsafe & safe abortion, six ways to prevent pregnancy with contraceptives, how to enjoy ‘safe sex’ without pregnancy: false information on four types of abstinence of which none is the actual definition of abstinence to be promoted among adolescents. Active Basic Science, 2014 edition By Tola Anjorin, Okechukwu Okolo, Philias Yara, Bamidele Mutiu, Fatima Koki, Lydia Gbagu: See Pages 31- 34. Cry for Justice By Ademola Adefila; See Pages 60-61, 64-65, read the description of having sex and sexual experience. Stigma By Samson O Shobayo, See the pages. The book encourages sexual relationship with HIV patients; kissing. Basic Science & Technology for Junior Secondary School 1, 2 and 3: By W.K Hamzat, S. Bakare: See Pages 29- 47 Pages 48-52 Page 64 Pages 67- 73 and Pages 86 of the three books which promote abortion, LGTB, masturbation and safe-sex with condoms. New Concept English for Senior Secondary Schools for SSS2, Revised edition (2018 edition)  By J Eyisi, A Adekunle, T Adepolu, F Ademola Adeoye, Q Adams and, J Eto, See Pages 103- 104 that contain obscene and vulgar expressions such as: “small men always thinking small and acting small ”and these vulgar words:. “He swore by the grey hairs of his head and his penis…even by the cunt of his own mother”.

It is high time Nigerian parents woke up to their parental responsibilities. Parents are the primary educators of their children. They cannot shirk this responsibility under the excuse that they are working hard to eke out a living. Most social vices in Nigeria today are caused by failed parenting. We are in trouble in Nigeria. Failed parenting engenders failed political leadership. This is regrettable. The family institution, unarguably, is indeed the fundamental unit of society. The family is the natural context in which children imbibe those cherished values which form the superstructures for the building of our national ethos. Therefore parents should rediscover themselves and reinvigorate their respective families to enable them to parent their own children to be responsible citizens. Our civilization is imperiled when families are imperiled.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Over the past fortnight, this column has addressed the multiple dimensions of the crises of attrition, retention, and replacement in Nigeria’s Supreme Court as well as the pathologies that make these resilient. Given the significance of the Court in the country, it is only proper to dwell a little on how these problems can be fixed. Three issues are immediately in focus.

One is occupational health and wellbeing for Supreme Court Justices. The tendency to reduce the triple crises of attrition, retention, and replacement in the Nigeria’s Supreme Court to an issue of appointment of brilliant academics or supposedly proven practitioners avoids the real problem. Indeed, the records suggest that premature mortality on the court has been most unkind to its brightest and best.

For instance, Chukwunweike Idigbe was reputed to be arguably the sharpest and most rigorous mind on the court at his death in 1983. Augustine Nnamani, was only the fourth holder of a doctorate degree in law to be appointed to the court, after Taslim Elias, George Baptist Ayodola Coker, and Egbert Udo Udoma; and Okay Achike was only the second law professor and the third legal academic to sit on the Supreme Court after Taslim Elias. Adolphus Godwin Karibi-Whyte, another academic who preceded him to the Supreme Court and who, like Achike, retired in 2002, was an Associate Professor at the University of Lagos before the onset of his judicial career. Niki Tobi, former Dean of Law at University of Maiduguri, followed later.

The Supreme Court does not appear to have been the kindest of working environments its most brilliant minds and there is nothing to say that it will be kinder to any bright minds who agree to go there now. If anything, the court has been somewhat of a cemetery in a quite literal manner to the brightest legal minds.

The complaint of the BOSAN about its members being denied elevation to the Supreme Court deserves to be treated with suspicion. Regrettably, it is also members of the BOSAN who saddle the court quite often with applications of the most disreputable kind, needlessly clogging up the dockets of the court and making the work of the Justices unbearable. The BOSAN can hardly complain when Justices of the same Supreme Court look upon many of these same practitioners of dubious professional ethics with determined suspicion when they look prey with intent on high judicial office.

A major problem with the court is not merely that its dockets are unmanageable, it is also that, secondly, its working methods appear inhumane and unsuited to its primary workers, who are by design senior citizens. In June 2022, it emerged that the Justices of the Supreme Court had written to the then CJN complaining of debilitating failures of health and wellbeing, including non-provision of housing and research assistants. In particular, their letter lamented that there had been no meeting of the Justices over the entire duration of the COVID-19 crisis, pointing out that the standard of healthcare in the court had deteriorated to the point where “there is a general lack of concern for Justices who require immediate or emergency medical intervention.” These complaints naturally raise the possibility that the rate of mortality as a form of attrition at the Supreme Court is preventable.

This naturally leads to a third issue of leadership of the Court. Historical mortality may be relatively high among appointees to Nigeria’s Supreme Court but it has never affected any CJN. This is surprising because many will think that the CJN, with the multiple portfolios and offices that s/he holds, would be very stressed. Over the years, the office has evolved from being a first among equals to a bit of a constitutional potentate, with infinite capacity to dispense patronage or penury in equal measure at their whim around the legal profession. Any reform of the court that does not address the urgent need to un-bundle the office of the Chief Justice is fated to failure.

It is no surprise, therefore, that recent occupants of the office appear to have been undone by allegations on the borders of judicial integrity. In three years since 2019, Nigeria has had three Chief Justices. Of these three, two left office prematurely in circumstances connected with negative imputations on judicial independence and integrity. Indeed, it has been said that the penultimate CJN left the judiciary and the Supreme Court “in a mess”. About the sack of his predecessor, The Economist wrote that it was “not merely unusual; it was also unlawful.” In that case, it appeared the judiciary was wilfully complicit in its own defenestration, itself also evidence of deeper integrity problems with that branch of government.

When legitimate questions of judicial integrity can be raised at this level, it becomes rather idle to focus on access to appointments as a panacea because even the appointment process would be corruptible and probably corrupted. In the public perception, this is largely what the current situation is with judicial appointments in Nigeria. Many believe – and there seems to be evidence to support the claim – that appointments have become a joint enterprise of politicians and judicial insiders. When BOSAN complains that its members deserve a look in, citizens sneer that BOSAN’s members desire to muscle in on this duopoly with hardly any altruistic goals in view.

These are by far the biggest causes of the attrition, retention and replacement crises in the Supreme Court. As is evident from this breakdown, appointment or replacement does not necessarily rank among them. Indeed, in the face of these, the problem that Chief Justice Ariwoola complains of cannot be altered even if we were to triple the establishment size of the court from 21 to 63 or, even worse, implement the entirely unfortunate and unworkable idea of decentralizing the Supreme Court to each geo-political zone of the country as some have advocated. In these circumstances also, legislating for Justices to serve until the day after eternity, as Afe Babalola SAN has suggested, would be a very bad idea indeed.

It is nevertheless important not to totally ignore the advocacy by BOSAN to look to the ranks of its members for appointments to the Supreme Court. Former CJN, Mohammed Lawal Uwais, has explained that he instituted the policy of confining Supreme Court preferments to serving Justices of Appeal because “there is the issue of integrity. If you have been a judge at the High Court or Court of Appeal before coming to the Supreme Court, you would have done cases where whether you are a corrupt person would have been discovered.”

It should be recalled that the Chief Justice governs preferment to the privilege of SAN. If he says that he is unable to trust the integrity of the persons whom they choose to prefer to the rank, then it is hardly a response to the crisis of appointment in the Supreme Court to suggest that the answer lies in choosing from the ranks of persons whose integrity can’t be guaranteed. What is required in the face of this claim is not to insist on preferring people to the Supreme Court from these ranks but to first reform the system of preferment in order to guarantee the rank of SAN as a quality mark of unquestionable integrity and excellence, which it can hardly be said to be presently.

In the end, it is necessary to admit that there is no magic bullet to address or resolve the crises that the new CJN has called attention to. Rather it requires a multi-dimensional approach beginning with an internal reform of the operations and management of the Supreme Court itself to improve wellbeing among its personnel both judicial and non-judicial. Caseloads in the court will need to be governed much better through appropriate filtration devices. This will require a combination of both legislation and reform of the rules and doctrines of the court. Standards of judicial ethics at all levels will need improving. If these are done, then attention to appointments could be part of the package. Absent these reforms as a package, a focus only on appointments will not be part of the solution. Rather, it will only deepen the problem.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]