allAfrica.com: Nigeria: June 12 - Forget Lawyers, Try Professors First (Page 1 of 2)

Mountains will be in labour, and the birth will be a ridiculous little mouse -Horace, 65-8 B.C., (Vanguard Book of Quotations p. 166), The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers -William Shakespeare, 1564-1616.

MOST lawyers will roast in hell anyway (except my daughter of course), whether we slaughter them or not. God knows they have been responsible for drafting the obnoxious decrees by which the military has enslaved Nigeria and the current constitution which has granted criminal licence to office holders thereby inviting the unprecedented kleptomania we have experienced since 1999.

Right about now, unlike Shakespeare the people we should be most wary of are professors and not just because of the latest abortion called book launch by Professor Nwosu on the June 12,1993 elections but because, by and large, professors in government in Nigeria have and are proving to be great disappointments. Even those who have registered some good performance in one area quite often muck it up in another area.

We recollect Obasanjo's minister of aviation who was stubbornly foisted on the nation by OBJ until aircraft started dropping from Nigerian skies like ripe mangoes in March. Professor Iwu was booed in absentia by people attending the book launch even when the M.C announced that he was only "ably represented" by an errand fellow. Professor Ojowu, erstwhile chief economic adviser would be remembered for two things while in the service of Obasanjo.

He went to deliver a report in which he asserted that 70 per cent of Nigerians were living in poverty. Obasanjo would have none of it because it meant that the government was failing in one of its two major objectives (the other was fighting corruption to a standstill - please don't laugh). Chastised Ojowu, a professional economist son produced a new set of documents claiming that poverty in Nigeria had declined to 54 per cent; meaning that 22.4 million Nigerians have crossed the poverty line in less than five years - a world record.

When I challenged Professor Ojowu to prove his claim he wrote a rejoinder that is only fit for the marines. It is instructive that among Ojowu's colleagues in government at the time, who fell in line with the fallacious 54 per cent poverty level were Dr. Okonjo-Iweala and Oby Ezekwesili - both now at the World Bank where the poverty level in Nigeria is still listed at 70 per cent.

Then there are the promoters of Vision 2020, mostly professors, who know better that no country even with sound infrastructure and uninterrupted power supply has ever grown its GDP by 15 per cent annually for eleven years. Yet these men want Nigerians to place their hopes in a pipe dream. Finally, although, I could furnish more examples of professors professing falsehood in Nigeria today, there is the "professor" at the helm at the Nigerian Stock Exchange, NSE.

She has managed to achieve what no one else has done since the history of exchanges started in the world. By the time you read this article, the NSE would have operated for three weeks during which no shares registered a loss; it has been gains!!! The reason she and her colleagues have given is the most laughable I have ever heard. They don't want shares to undergo a free fall and undermine the NSE.

That sounds to me like the "professor" is trying to stop a dam break with her fingers because the NSE "dam" is set to break whether or not she likes it and I will give her two reasons among several because this column is not about the NSE. That will come later.

The public offers for subscription by banks which boosted the shareholders capital were successful (in fact too successful) mainly because the banks mostly supplied deliberately over optimistic future estimates about dividends and share price appreciation and then followed this up by getting complaisant stock brokers to help manipulate the share prices beyond levels justified by real performance. Second, several investors were lured into acquiring shares with bank loans generously offered by the banks.

Unfortunately, most such investors expected the share certificates to be delivered to them speedily to enable them sell and make quick profit while repaying back the loans. This has not happened; so there are billions of bank shares still locked up which if released will flood the market; the dam break "Madam NSE" is trying to prevent will occur and will be more damaging than if she had allowed market forces to prevail. She will, at least, lose her finger and possibly more. I don't wish it for her but it will happen anyway.

Additionally, there are more scandals coming about how share prices were manipulated by a cabal among stock brokers. The cases of companies whose shares appreciated despite liquidation by a court or those which have closed down for years represent the tip of the iceberg. And Cadbury was not the only company inflating results. All those examples are designed to set the stage for the comments on Professor Nwosu's new book.

Like most academicians, he gave the book such a long title, like those papers they deliver at the faculty's seminars, one would need about five minutes just to read the title. Why he could not have titled it: June 12, My Story is a mystery to me. But then I am not a professor. Two, for all the hype that preceded it, the book was a complete let down. Since Professor Nwosu has spent a great deal of his adult life grading other people's paper, I hope he does not mind being told that this is one book that fails in every respect.

web allafrica.com	Enter your search terms	Submit search form
OR subscribers use AllAfrica's premium search engine


Use our pull-down menus to find more stories

Today's Most Active Stories