Nigeria's Solution to the Problem of Electric Cars By Pius Adesanmi.

Scandinavia, Britain, France, Netherlands, India, China, the US - everyone is in a scramble to announce the end of fuel-powered cars by 2040 and so on. Everyone is announcing that every car on their roads will be green by 2040. Only electric cars. No more petrol and diesel cars.

Many of my friends, who still are yet to come to terms with just how terrible the psychology of Nigeria's political elite is, have been agonizing. They are worried about what happens to an oil-dependent, monocultural economy like Nigeria when all the buyers of her oil go green and her oil pretty much becomes useless.

Well, I can tell you for sure that from Aso Rock to the National Assembly, to Governors, down the ladder to the most inconsequential member of the political class - you can add the socioeconomic elite too - they are already thinking and planning ahead for the advent of electric cars in 2040.

They are just not thinking the way you are thinking.

If you do a laundry list of the solutions they have found as a class to the challenges of modern living in the 21st century, you will gain an insight into how they are going to handle the transition to electric cars.

Problems of space in their built environments in Ikoyi, VI, and Maitama? They destroyed master plans, built on green areas and public parks, built commercial ventures in residential areas, commandeered communal rail track areas for parking lots of private schools, etc. Other elite in tight spaces in Hong Kong, Singapore, etc, will experiment with innovative mastery of space by applying engineering and architectural genius to achieve vertical derring-do in building design. The Nigerian elite will visit violence and aesthetic chaos on her own built space because she has too much money and too little culture.

Bad roads and death traps? They are buying more and more helicopters; their jeeps are getting bigger and sturdier. The other day, I saw Senator Ben Murray-Bruce and a group of other pregnant male Senators inspecting Federal roads in worse condition than the farm paths used by Askia the Great in the Songhai Empire in the 15th century.

The Senators say they are members of one of these useless Senate committees and they had come to do a firsthand assessment of the roads. This was some expressway linking Edo state to the deep south. As the Senators granted TV interviews, talking rubbish, you could see their jeeps in the background. I shook my head in anger. Useless people. They have now seen that the roads have gotten worse. They will return to Abuja to suggest bigger and sturdier jeeps capable of coping with the roads for all Senators in the 2018 appropriation.

Poor health facilities? Well, you have been witnesses to their nakedness and utter shamelessness on display in London this week as a political class. Foreign hospitals will remain their only answer to Nigeria's health issues.

So, how do you think an elite that has handled its own lived environment, roads, and health in this manner will handle the question of electric cars and the imminent end of the fuel economy?

Well, by now, I can bet that some of them are already making inquiries from the innovation sectors of Scandinavia, Britain, France, the US, China, and India. When can we start to place individual orders for these cars of the future? When can we start to queue up for customized versions of these cars? How many can you deliver to me in Lagos or Abuja on January 1, 2040?

How can they be attempting to place orders for cars in 2040 when they cannot guarantee that they will be alive even tomorrow? Never mind. Members of Nigeria's political elite are not intelligent enough to think like that. Their singular focus will be to be the first elite in the world to use cars they cannot manufacture.

And by the time the electric cars are being delivered over their dead bodies to their children in 2040, their own goal of being able to manufacture pencils in Nigeria sometime in this 21st century may still not have been realized.

If the owner of morning says it shall be well with the leaders of Nigeria, the owner of evening will disagree.

Pius Adesanmi

IPOB, MAZI KANU AND MYSELF By JOHN DANFULANI ,Ph.D

On Sunday the 23rd of July 2017 I paid a courtesy call to the supreme leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra(IPOB) Mazi Nnamdi Kanu in Umahia, Abia state. The thick mushroom cloud that my visitation engineered is still permeating the political skies of Northern Nigeria. The empire dogs are jeering while lovers of freedom and liberty are cheering. It's hard to predict when the rumbling cheers and jeers of my solidarity visit to one of the most courageous and foresighted Nigerian and leader of IPOB will cease.

The ultra-conservative elements and oligarchic beneficiaries of a skewed cum dysfunctional unitary system baptized and labeled a federal system are hysterically yet unsuccessfully trying to throw the kitchen on me and divert attention to most mundane issues. Their bait is too pedestrian for me to swallow like brainless turkeys happy for Christmas.

IPOB's takes are:Nigeria is an unhappy matrimonial home full of ruckus;colonial masters that engineered the political wedlock called amalgamation in 1914 did so for economic and political reasons; and that, Ndigbos be allowed to conduct a United Nation Monitored referendum to decide whether to stay in the marriage or divorce.

IPOB's mission, strategy and tactics has local,regional,and global protocols and laws backing them under the broad "principle of self-determination".In post Cold War era,many climes withdrew from the bank of this collective rights without hindrance from the state. It was the spirit of this principle that nationalists in the colonial world(including Nigeria) triggered in sinking colonial rule. Through the magnanimity and global acceptability of this philosophy Nigeria lowered the Union Jack on 1st October 1960.

The political geography called Nigeria was created for heinous reasons by the colonial masters. It is an established realism that economic and administrative reasons guided their decision to amalgamate extreme strange bedfellows in 1914. And refused to demolish the political babel they mischievously constructed before their departure in 1960 despite the knowledge that the amalgams never solicited for it nor showed any interest of staying together. The country's many constitutional conferences in Nigeria and in United Kingdom, and threats of secession by regional leaders before 1960,was a clear indication of Nigerians unwillingness to glue as an indivisible and indissoluble entity.

In 1967 South East region declared a Biafra Republic.It sparked a 30 months civil war. Fifty years down the lane,we are still getting colliding versions of the quantum of human and material lost. Because history is written by victors, war crimes and other inhuman treatment of the Biafrans have been refused a ventilating space in the narrations of the war.

The 1967-1970 war only suppressed the Biafra mission- a fact the federalists are blatantly refusing to accept for a very protracted moment. The rise of IPOB and its complete acceptance by day-to-day Biafrans is a pointer to that. Solomonic wisdom and sagacity are not required to know that it will take God's direct intervention to neutralize IPOB's advocacy of a referendum for Ndigbos.

The state, through its official information channels and sundry propaganda outfits are equating IPOB's call for a referendum to a call for war. Hell no. We saw how similar calls peaked with peaceful referendums in Eritrea, Kosovo, East Timor, South Sudan,Scotland, and Crimea. All those referendums came to force under the globally acceptable principle of self-determination. Is Nigeria not aware that self-determination cardinal principle of international law? Sheer mischief,right ?

Truth be told,this 1914 Lord Lugard's political contraption and Apartheid-like state has outlived its usefulness. Its existence is only serving the interest of ethno-religious supremacists whose anachronistic and barbaric ways of life is not in tandem of contemporary socio-cultural cum political order.

This European created upper caste placed their spiritual books above our 1999 constitution- hence their constant chopping-off of peoples heads under the pretext that some basic tenets of their religion had been violated.Or launching of some terrorist groups whose aim is to shove their beliefs down our throats. Or a cattle rearing Militia that keeps destroying peoples villages and running down their farmlands with impunity.

It's clear that most ethnic nationalities are comfortable with this slave and master political setting,except Ndigbos. As a lover of freedom and liberty,and a hater of dictatorship and other form of discriminations- I support IPOB's struggle against the evil system and its actors. I support their attempt to pull down the pillars of this satanic political order through a referendum.

This brings me to the question of the geography of the struggle. Yes IPOB is a South East based organization struggling for the emancipation of their people from the yoke of a backward system and actors. But their freedom will also set-free other ethnic nationalities in Nigeria. Ndigbos going will make-way for others to peal-off from the remaining entity. And stand as independent entities or form a commonwealth of independent states or a confederation.Sequel to that,my support for struggle stems from the positive "unintended consequences" I/we will benefit from it.

Aside what might be our collective decision to also end our existence as a single entity, individuals can migrate to the new nation of Biafra and acquire citizenship. The new nation(like most nations) will permit citizenship by naturalization. It is better to live in a nation where your name and religion is not placing a limit to what you can aspire and potentials.

My prediction:Biafra shall be a shining city on a hill. And a place where the black race shall be proud of.
ISEE!
ISEE!!
ISEE!!!