Job openings at GIZ Jos office

Job openings at GIZ Jos office.

The duty station for all positions will be in Plateau State. Please find attached the job descriptions. Applications should be submitted via e-mail to hr@giz.de latest by Monday July 22, 2013; and the subject should follow this format “Job title (SEDIN)” for example “Project Coordinator (SEDIN)”.

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The butchers of Nigeria JANUARY 23, 2012 BY WOLE SOYINKA

Over the past year, Nigeria’s home-grown terror group, Boko Haram, has escalated its deadly attacks against Christian and government targets, with the aim of establishing a Sharia state in the country’s north.

Nearly 30 years ago, in the largely Christian heartland of a multi-religious Nigerian nation, and at that nation’s pioneer institution—the University of Ibadan—a minister of education summoned the vice-chancellor and ordered him to remove a cross from a site dedicated to religious worship. Some Muslims had complained, he claimed, that the cross offended their sight when they turned east to pray.

The don’s response was: “Mr. Minister, it would be much easier to remove me as vice-chancellor than to have me remove that cross.” Christians mobilised. A religious war was barely averted on campus. Today, the Christian cross occupies that same spot, with the Islamic star and crescent raised only a few metres away. As I observed at a lecture several years later, there has been no earthquake beneath, no convulsions of the firmament above that space, no blight traceable to the cohabitation of that spot by Christian and Muslim symbols.

I evoked that occurrence when the latest torch bearers of fanaticism—a group called Boko Haram—emerged. I did so to draw attention to the fact that religious zealotry is not new in the nation, nor is it limited to the “unwashed masses” who have been programmed into killing, at the slightest provocation or none, in the name of faith. Unfortunately, far too many have succumbed to the belligerent face of fanaticism, believing that any form of excess is divinely sanctioned and nationally privileged.

Sectarian killings—numbered in the thousands—preceded Boko Haram, much organised butchery, sometimes announced in advance, always tacitly endorsed by silence and inaction, escalating in intensity and impunity. It was consciousness of the geographical expansion and the increasingly organised nature of the fanatic surge and its international linkages that compelled me to warn on three public occasions since 2009 that “the agencies of Boko Haram, its promulgators both in evangelical and violent forms, are everywhere.

“Even here, right here in this throbbing commercial city of Lagos, there are, in all probability, what are known as ‘sleepers’ waiting for the word to be given. If that word were given this moment, those sleepers would swarm over the walls of this college compound and inundate us.”

Much play is given, and rightly so, to economic factors—unemployment, misgovernment, wasted resources, social marginalisation, massive corruption—in the nurturing of the current season of violent discontent. To limit oneself to these factors alone is, however, an evasion, no less than intellectual and moral cowardice, a fear of offending the ruthless caucuses that have unleashed terror on society, a refusal to stare the irrational in the face and give it its proper name—and response.

That minister was not one of the “unwashed masses.” He was, quite simply, the polished face of fanaticism. His prolonged career as Secretary of the Nigerian Universities Commission and Minister of Education inflicted on the nation a number of other policies of educational separatism that left a huge swath of Nigeria open to fanatic indoctrination.

Yes, indeed, economic factors have facilitated the mass production of these foot soldiers, but they have been deliberately bred, nurtured, sheltered, rendered pliant, obedient to only one line of command, ready to be unleashed at the rest of society. They were bred in madrasas and are generally known as the almajiris. From knives and machetes, bows and poisoned arrows, they have graduated to AK-47s, home-made bombs, and explosive-packed vehicles. Only the mechanism of inflicting death has changed, nothing else.

This horde has remained available to political opportunists and criminal leaders desperate to stave off the day of reckoning. Most are highly placed, highly disgruntled, and thus highly motivated individuals who, having lost out in the power stakes, resort to the manipulation of these products of warped fervour. Their aim is to bring society to its knees, to create a situation of total anarchy that will either break up the nation or bring back the military, which ruled Nigeria in a succession of coups between the mid 1960s and the late ’90s.

Again and again, they have declared their blunt manifesto—not merely to Islamise the nation but to bring it under a specific kind of fundamentalist strain. Rather than act in defence of Nigeria’s Constitution, past rulers have cosseted the aggressors for short-term political gains.

However, those who have tweaked the religious chord are discovering that they have conjured up a Frankenstein. Arrogance has given way to fear. The former governors of the northern states of Gombe and Borno wasted no time in issuing full-page advertorials in the media, apologising to Boko Haram when the latter issued threats against them for their alleged role in the deaths of the group’s members at the hands of security forces in 2009.

They had precedent. It was in Nigeria, after all, that a deputy governor, later backed by his superior, pronounced a fatwa on a Nigerian citizen in 2002: “Like Salman Rushdie, (her blood) can be shed. It is binding on all Muslims, wherever they are, to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty.”

That was the fallout from a beauty contest in Abuja that drew the ire of some Islamic extremists. Reacting to the mayhem, a female journalist had speculated that, were the Prophet Muhammad alive, he might have selected one of the contestants for wife. For that alleged blasphemy, hundreds, guilty only of innocently pursuing a living, were massacred by hordes of fanatics, who were mostly bussed into the capital for organised violence. The president went grovelling before the presumably offended elite.

It was the same governor of an impoverished state called Zamfara who unilaterally commenced the separatist agenda that turned parts of Nigeria into theocracies under a supposed secular Constitution. His whim was indulged, his political support was courted by the then-sitting president, obsessed with prolonging his tenure. The governor, now turned senator, was also caught as a serial pedophile.

Challenged in the media, he boasted that the Quran was above the Constitution, and thus he was not subject to laws that criminalised copulation with underage children or, indeed, cross-border sex trafficking, of which he was equally accused. He was neither censured by his fellow senators nor placed on trial. His followers have taken their cue from his declaration, convinced that the greater the crime, the greater its deserving of immunity.

How many of the hundreds of cases of impunity need one cite, with their corresponding gestures of appeasement? Where does one begin? Can the Nigerian police or judicial records reveal how many were prosecuted when a man called Gideon Akaluka was beheaded, his head paraded on a stake through the streets of Kano in northern Nigeria, for allegedly desecrating the Quran? It turned out no such offence had been committed.

Nor has there been a single arrest in the secondary school where an invigilating teacher, a Mrs. Oluwasesin, was stripped naked, beaten, and then “necklaced”—set on fire by students for allegedly “treating the Quran with disrespect.” Her real crime? She had confiscated a Quran—and, incidentally, a Bible as well—from cheating students during a paper on religious studies. How does one convey scenes where killers perform ritual recitations before or after the meticulous throat-slitting of school children, in the conviction that this carries the same potency of immunity as papal indulgences once did in the decadent era of Christianity?

For decades, leaders of those communities remained mute or uttered pietisms. Now the foot soldiers have matured on the taste of blood. They understand the essence of power. Some have come to realise they have been programmed, used, abused, and discarded. Now they seek to exercise power and have turned on all, mentors and appeasers alike.

Nigeria is at war. The Somalia scenario nibbles at her cohesion. When we insisted that the nation had become a prime target of al Qaeda, the reply was that Boko Haram was a home-grown phenomenon—as if this were ever the question!

The reality is that it has, inevitably, developed ties with al Qaeda and its borderless company of religious insurgency. Only a few have sown the wind, but that wind was fanned by the breath of appeasement. Only one choice remains: to ride, or else reap, the whirlwind.

- This article was first published in the NEWSWEEK Magazine, January 16, 2012 edition.

HOW WE ALL FOOLED JEGA

From Ephraim Akpata to Abel Guobadia and then Maurice Iwu, elections in Nigeria have come under serious criticism from local and international observers. From problems of poor organisations, rigging, thuggery, violence, intimidation to blatant announcement of results where elections never took place among many anomalies, elections since 1999 have been found short of being credible, free and fair. Many expected a turning point for elections in 2007 when the then President Musa Yar’Adua admitted publicly in his inauguration speech that the election which brought him into office was flawed. In fulfilling his noble promise to reform our electoral processes, President Yar’Adua set up the Uwais-led Electoral Reform Committee heralding the much talked about electoral reform in Nigeria. Far into the reform, Prof. Maurice Iwu largely considered as the man that gave Nigeria the worst set of elections got kicked out and Prof. Attahiru Jega was appointed INEC chairman.

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THE WORRISOME STATE OF INSECURITY IN PLATEAU STATE AND NIGERIA

Plateau state, the ‘Home of Peace and Tourism’ has known little peace for almost a decade now owing to violent crises and bloodshed that have threatened the very existence of the state. Casualties have continued to rise as people of different interests engage in violent attacks and reprisal attacks often on innocent and vulnerable citizens especially women and children. The gruesome attacks on Dogon Na Hawa and other villages around Jos where victims were mostly women and children are still all fresh in our memory. Amidst these war-like attacks on villages around Jos, a new dimension was introduced on Christmas eve when bombs were detonated in Angwan Rukuba and Gada Biu claiming many innocent lives. Ever since, Jos has degenerated into a secret war zone of sort with open as well as secret killings and maiming of lives and wanton destruction of property.  

While the federal government that controls the security apparatus in the country has shown gross lack of capacity to safeguard lives and property across Nigeria and more importantly in Plateau State, recent activities of men and officers of its security agencies has become an issue of concern to many Nigerian especially those living in Plateau State.

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CHILD'S RIGHTS ACT/LAW IN NIGERIA: REALITY OR FARCE?

Following her ratification of regional and UN Conventions on the protection of the rights of a child, Nigeria in 2003 successfully domesticated the provisions of those international instruments in form of the Child’s Rights Act 2003. Shortly after that, advocacy shifted to state governments for the domestication of the provisions of the Act in their various states since the issue of protection of the rights of a child falls within the residual list of Nigerian constitution where the states have exclusive powers to legislate. Up to date, about two-third of the 36 states of the Federation has passed the law legally committing themselves to the protection of the rights of the child in their states. This is the reality. The passage of the Child’s Rights Act/Laws notwithstanding, the Nigerian child is still very far from enjoying the rights guaranteed under both international and domestic instruments. Children all over the country still suffer child trafficking, child labour, rape, torture, inhuman and degrading treatments, early marriage to mention but a few. This is the farce of the Child’s Rights Act/Laws in Nigeria. This paper attempts a critical look at the position of the Nigerian child against the background of the enactment of the Child’s Rights Act/Laws, whether the enactment has translated into better life for the Nigerian child or if the efforts were mere cosmetics? The paper concludes that though the legal framework for the protection of the Nigerian child had improved tremendously since 2003, this has not translated into any significant improvement in the condition of the Nigerian child.

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DISCRIMINATORY PRACTICES AND THEIR EFFECTS ON WOMEN'S RIGHTS TO SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

It has become generally accepted as a truism that women are discriminated against and therefore generally disadvantaged worldwide. Though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international instruments like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) entrenched, affirm and reaffirmed the principle of equality of all as a foundation for freedom, justice and peace in the world, women have continued to suffer discriminations starting from the period predating birth through girlhood to adulthood. Efforts at creating equal opportunities for women at political, economic and social planes have not achieved desired result due to deep-rooted cultural and religious abuses. This paper will attempt a quick look at socio-economic rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), other international and domestic instruments with a view to establishing what constitute socio-economic rights. The paper will also discuss briefly the vexed issue of justiciability of socio-economic rights with a view to establishing that such rights are enforceable in Nigeria to the extent to which there are Acts or Law of the legislature promoting them. Finally, the paper will take a critical look at various discriminatory practices against women at all levels and how they constitute blockages to the realisation of rights to social and economic development with a conclusion that there are sufficient legal instruments to challenge such discriminatory practices in Nigerian courts.

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Oyinlola Sacked, Aregbesola Declared Governor in Osun State

Finally, the Court of Appeal sitting in Ibadan has nullified the lies cooked by INEC and declared Rauf Aregbesola the duly elected governor of Osun State. While this brings joy to my heart as a Nigerian with sympathy for ACN and the 'progressives', I have continued to ponder on the kind of country we have created for ourselves either by virtue of our actions and inactions. A country where someone could occupy a governorship seat for almost a term without winning an election and then walk away when he is removed by the court after a long battle of deceit and fraud.

If we are genuinely interested in reforming our electoral system then we must ask and answer the following questions;

1. Why does it take three and half years to dispose of with an election petition?

2. What happens to persons (like Osunbor, Agagu, Oni, Oyinlola etc) who rigged the people's will and spent state resources when they never won any election?

3. What about electoral officers who pronounced these impostors winners (officers like madam Ayoka)?

4. What about the party that has produced this widespread rigging?

5. What about the fat salary and allowances the impostors illegally collected while holding on illegally to the stolen position?

The questions are many but the answers are not. If we are serious about free and fair election, then people like Oyinlola, Oni, Agagu, Madam Ayoka etc must surely be prosecuted for electoral offences and made to pay.