Point One

Labour and Employment Minister Chris Ngige elevated the street tack of bluffing into a governance art last week. He said Nigeria had a surplus resource of medical doctors and, as such, those among them desiring to relocate abroad in search of greener pastures were encouraged to so do. Speaking on a Channels Television programme on Wednesday, the minister of labour, who happens to be a trained medical doctor, said he had no fear that massive recruitment of Nigerian doctors by some foreign embassies could hazard this country’s health sector. The Saudi Arabia mission had only lately undertaken such recruitment. Responding to a question on implications of the brain drain for Nigeria, Ngige said he was not worried: “We have a surplus. When you have surplus, you export.” The minister likened the situation to the experience of India, saying: “It happened some years ago here. I was taught chemistry and biology by Indian teachers in my secondary school days (because) ther...

Recent events beyond our borders in Nigeria strongly illustrated the fundamental transience of the potency of power, especially when it is misapplied. Although those happenings were offshore, it is worth our focus here because the morals therefrom have universal application. One universal moral that showed up, for instance, is that power has legitimacy only when it genuinely issues from the people. In other words, a power broker is only as secure as the voluntary mandate conferred on him by the ordinary folk he purports to represent, not by designing and implanting structures of coercion for self-preservation. Also, when power slips away, an erstwhile broker could become a victim of his own weaponisation of that essentially fleeting privilege. Ask former President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, and he would perhaps wish now that he had used power in connecting with his people’s struggles and aspirations. The fact of history is, he did not, and he is now out in the cold a...