This RE-BRANDING, hmmmm…..”ORIGINAL” OR “IBO-MADE”?

Deji Saanu

Looking are the way Nigeria is governed, one is tempted to wonder “the reality” of those in authority. Is it that they live on a different planet? Drive on roads that pass through somewhere else except those other Nigerians drive on? Is it that they don’t encounter hungry people as they drive their cars along the road? Is it that they don’t wonder why we have so many youths roaming around in broad day light when they should be at work or is that normal? Is it that they don’t see the enveloping darkness that covers the city, if from their aircraft’s seats, as they descend into the country’s airports?

The other day, l observed the cruel contradiction between the Mobalaji Bank Anthony way, and the surrounding houses in a picture of that revamped road, taken at dawn. The road was excellent and could almost be mistaken for New York or the Autobahn in Germany but contrasted sharply with the barely-identifiable houses along the road, on both sides, which where just dark silhouettes since NEPA (Power with-Holding or whatever) as usual, has left everyone in darkness!

What do our leaders ‘feel’ when they read of a whole family being wiped-out by fire from exploding “l better pass my neighbor” power Generators? Do they see these things as ‘reality’ or do they live in a different imaginary world?

What then is Image? What is Reality?

An Image is an imitation, a copy, a pretense, fiction, a likeness, a semblance, imagination, a representation or similitude of any person, thing or act, sculptured, drawn, painted or otherwise made perceptible to sight.

Reality is an actual being or existence of anything in distinction to mere appearance. It is fact, an objective existence.

A few years back, The Nigeria Police was “re-branded” by its newly appointed I.G.P…..”To Protect and To Serve” in other to white-wash its appalling public image but like a Leopard that can not shed its spots, that branding has since been disgraced, not a few times. Even the “express order” to dismantle all “Toll-gates” (sorry, l mean checking-points; lol) by the Chief Cop continues to be disobeyed by all rank and file! That type of re-branding, to put it colloquially, is “Ibo-made”, as we say in those days! No pun intended. Like Taiwan, Ibo-made has actually stepped-up now but that term is a carry-over from the ‘early days’ when “Ibo-made” was an euphemism for “a copy” or an image, of the real thing!.

Granted, one person that has singled-out herself, in performance per excellence is the former Director of NAFDAC, Mrs. Dora Akinyilu. This ‘amazon’ fought drug racketeers to a standstill, she challenged Obasanjo’s father, the Garrison commander, when he would not stop killing his people with expired Indomie Noodles and other fake and expired products. On many occasions, there have been attempts to bribe her and when she would not budge, they tried to kill her but God was on her side. Simply put, she is my heroine, when it comes to honest determination, in Dora we trust,… well until she accepted this “ChukwuMerije” assignment as Information Minister!

I groaned internally; why did they change this woman’s portfolio or didn’t this government hear that you don’t change a “winning team”?

Why not look for one “spin-master” or maybe another lousy propagandist “ Fani K”, for this kind of job?

Well, we have started seeing some of the fall-out, some unscrupulous Nigerians have sent a few babies and youngsters to their early grave, by adulterating “My pikin” baby syrup with ..Wait for this! Automotive solvent! Well, Dora Akinyilu is out and the “Vampires” are back!! When Ribadu left EFCC, compiled dossiers on corrupt Governors suddenly went missing. Maybe it’s just a coincidence!

Well, you might argue that Umaru’s government (or more succinctly, government of the clique ) wanted her to replicate the great job she’s done in NAFDAC, on “ Nigeria”! Plausible but very unlikely.

It’s more likely that the government wanted on one hand, to cash-in on her good reputation, to shore-up its own bad, or rather “no-reputation” and in the same breath, rubbish this woman’s hard earned unblemished reputation. (l refuse to use the phrase “unblemished image”, when it concerns Dora, since “image” is pretense and not real! Hers is “unblemished reality” and one hope it stays so, in the face of the up-coming “image re-branding”.)

What then can our Information Minister do, to “re-brand our Reality” so as to achieve our “desired Image”?

We all know the problems with Nigeria and top of the list is CORRUPTION.

Corruption has in-turn, like a hydra-headed Octopus, bred a lot of offsprings and the most dangerous among them is “Insecurity of life and property” in Nigeria.

Other “children” of corruption are bad infrastructures, like bad or collapsed road network. Minister-after-Minister for Works, like their counterparts in Power & Steel, have concluded that the Ministry is where you steal money to campaign for election to become the next state governor. A cursory look at the recent Ministers for Works/Power & Steel, whose responsibility it is to build and repair roads, ensure stable and sustainable energy supply, would show a trend: vacating that position and then vying for a political office which, with enough embezzled funds and our dear Prof. ‘Iwuruwuru’ presiding , they end-up winning! And the looting continues!!

Corruption is also responsible for massive unemployment among our youths and the social malaise that it spurned, the 419-syndrome. In the first place, money that was meant to fund, develop and equip our educational institutions get embezzled and the end results are “half-baked” graduates, ill-prepared to step-up and into the demands of being employable. No organization wants to employ a graduate that you have to start to re-train like a school-cert holder! A graduate should be a graduate in thinking and knowledge and should be ready to fit-in at the slightest prompting, in form of entry-level training and only in stable, well-funded academic institutions can you produce such.

Thus, we have available vacancies that can not be filled by our graduates and due to the lack of “Social Security Buffer” ( since the money that could have been set aside for this has also been stolen!), our unemployed graduates become so “desperate to survive” and are easily drawn to such ills as E-mail scams and ‘419’. While this should not be construed as a “legitimizing excuse”, one can safely conclude that if electricity had been stable, probably one or two of these “unemployable graduates” would have taught about engaging in self-employment but with the cost of petrol and generator to contend with, starting such business is daunting for a young man.

Had it not been for corruption, probably, the Textile Mills, one of the largest employers of semi/unskilled labor, would have provided a living for some of the thousands of young men turned “sophisticated, graduate armed robbers” in our midst but where is the electricity to power such companies as, one after the other, they close shop while our Governors and Ministers (Works, Energy, Power and Steel, FCT, )  build mansions, buy Jets, operate secret forex accounts in safe-havens like Belize and Switzerland, using money meant for refurbishing and building new power plants and new roads. In the last dispensation under President Obasanjo, it was alleged to have  spent 16Billion dollars to “build darkness” for Nigerians! Now, that’s something that needs re-branding!!

With so much flood in Nigeria, especially in the West/Southern part of the country, one still wonders why a country like Libya, a virtual desert can boast of portable water for all household while tap water penetration in Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Oyo or any of the states in these region is less than 10%. A case of “the fool” being thirsty in the abundance of water! The funds allocated year-in year-out for such rural water projects simply disappear into one D.G or Ministers account in a foreign land! What right has Ghana, to celebrate a whole year of uninterrupted power supply while the “giant of Africa”, with all its resources, is budgeting two billion naira for the maintenance of Generators at the government palace called Aso-Rock? This is corruption, this is Nigeria’s reality.

The same corruption is what is killing our health sector and our people. Shamelessly, our leaders loot money meant for building and refurbishing hospitals and when they fall sick, they use the same money to jet abroad to treat their ailments! Has it never occurred to them that if the German officials/Ministers have looted money meant for building hospitals in Germany or Britain or United States or Saudi Arabia, our President might probably not be alive today! But hey, what about the ordinary Nigerian that can not jet abroad to enjoy the “honesty and prudence” of these foreign nations and their leaders? They just don’t count, right? The last Minister for Health “shared booty” with fellow Senators, people that are supposed to make laws to prevent such crimes in the first place, money meant to provide health facilities…like all health needs have been met? …and what happened? NOTHING GO HAPPEN. Sure, nothing go happen, abi na today?

Afterall, as long as an air-ambulance and a state of the art mobile ambulance can be part of Umaru’s entourage to Jos (to mourn the dead! What a joke!!), the indigene inhabitants of Jos can die in their thousands, ….we dey kampe!

Now, every man and mostly, every thief wants to remain immune and safe from the “insecurity” they created in the land. No wonder they build very fine but mostly, non-functional houses (what do you expect from some “money-miss-road” looter?) and then ring-it in with so high a perimeter fence such that Abu Graib or any other maximum prison will be jealous! Even at that, we have witnessed the murder of very high profile individuals, if not from armed robbers then from hired assassins thus, we conclude that the highest fence in the world can not solve ‘their insecurity’ problem! right? They are prisoners in their own house, due to their own corrupt nature. More fittingly, “Prisoners of Corruption”.

We can go on and on to enumerate how corruption is the father of all the ills plaguing our dear country and saying this does not make one a genius. Any ordinary folk along the street knows this…except those in authority in Nigeria!!

This is where l sympathize with the new information Minister, Mrs. Dora Akinyilu. 

In her dogged determination to “re-brand” Nigeria, she is missing the point and missing the “Reality of Nigeria”.

She has said that “" Nigeria cannot wait until it’s solved all its problems before addressing its image”. I say Nigeria’s ‘image’ is actually not Nigeria’s problem and Nigeria’s image is not the cause of Nigeria’s problem, it is Nigeria’s “Reality” that is Nigeria’s problem!

She even went on to say “A better “image” would improve tourism and encourage businesses to invest in Nigeria”.

Again, l wonder, this can be the same suave Dora Akinyilu that we all know?

Any day, between “Image” and “Reality”, any investor will base his ‘investment decisions’ on Reality. Our bad image is not as a result of “poor branding, wrong branding or under-branding”, our bad image is a culmination and summary of our Reality, an unenviable reality. Wake-up Madam and smell the coffee!

Once upon a time, we still remember a particular Minister for information under the military regime who has this habit of coming on NTA to tell us the “exact opposite” of what we saw with our naked eyes, in the name of propaganda and information (mis)management. After a while, once he comes on air, people simply changed the channel to DBN, Channels or another “private” news station where we could here “authentic news”, it’s as simple as that. Decision making is rational, moreso when people have competing options.

If the last regime of Obasanjo squandered over 4million pounds on “foreign consultants”, trying to “re-brand” Nigeria and he himself spent close to half of his eight years as President, in the “air” junketing from one foreign capital to another, trying to promote tourism and ‘lure’ foreign investors to Nigeria and till date, we are yet to see the foreign investors flooding to Nigeria rather, they flood to neighboring Ghana! Shouldn’t Mrs. Akinyilu have taken a cue from that or why must we always repeat the same mistakes over and over again?

The world is a global village and the preponderance of Information technology, computer systems and the internet highway means that there is virtually no information, on any subject that you sought, from the serious to the mundane, that you can not get on the web, if you know the “keywords” to Google!…and l can bet that “investors”, foreign or even local, know the keywords to Google!, before investing in any country..: Security ( of life and property), Stability(political, monetary and policy), Infrastructure (electricity, transport, communications/Telephony, health), Discipline (fiscal, financial and in everyday life).

On these yardsticks, no investor will choose Nigeria, even over its poorer neighbors except those who, like the “Siemens,the KBR” men, the phantom IPP (Independent Power Project) ‘divestors’ who want to be bed-fellows with our corrupt and sabotaging officials. Notice that “corruption” was not listed as one of those “keywords”

That anyone does not know that Nigeria’s image is synonymous with, and caused by its “corruption-induced” problems, is beyond me. To think you can leap-frog Nigeria’s image while those problems mentioned above still persist is to try another eight wonder of the world, and to dwell in Utopia.

While l have unending respect for the Minister for information, l will be sad if she allows herself to be used for mis-information and of course, dumped afterwards. Curiously, it has been for sometime, the trend to rubbish our brilliant Igbo brothers and sisters, deliberately or not, by saddling them with this “mis-information” portfolio and thereby truncating an otherwise unblemished reputation that would have catapulted them to higher national reckoning.

It is the ills of the Nigerian society that are responsible for the ‘Bad Reality’ others notice and propagate about Nigeria, which in-turn, gives us a bad “Image”. Foreigners read about the happenings in Nigeria from independent sources, major news outfits like the CNN, BBC, AP, e.t.c. have correspondents in Nigeria (not to mention the various ‘in-country reports’ from diplomatic staff) and among Nigerians and as such, no matter the amount of “positive noise” this re-branding will generate, the outer world can and will sieve the ‘real news’ from the “branded-news” and form their own opinion, image and position about Nigeria, from such independent sources.

Shall we then continue to waste our precious time and resources, by continually “putting the Cart before the Horse”? Who do we set-out to fool? When the whole world demands an objective description and existence of Nigeria, we seek to “re-brand” by giving them an image, a copy, a fake Nigeria, a pretense and fiction of our own imagination.

Just for a minute, let us assume we could build one or two power plants (be it a Nuclear power plant without the likes of “Siemens” playing underhand tactics and making it a grave danger to our people) and repair our roads like the Lagos State government is doing.

Let us combine this two with discipline in the Police force, with modern equipments and technical support like CCTV (of course, CCTV would not work without stable power and would under-perform in the face of unreliable broadband service; not to mention the basically corrupt nature of our law enforcement agents) and proper re-education and training.

The above in itself, is the re-branding that we seek, the likes of which “campaigns, adverts, paid consultancy or an Obasanjo-like global junketing can not achieve!

The message we will be sending out to foreigners and investors alike is that we are ready to host them in a secure environment or one that takes security seriously. We are telling them that we are ready to support their legitimate business and ensure they succeed. Before we know it, they would start to trickle and then flood to Nigeria, since business will flourish wherever there is (legitimate) money to be made.

A Good Product Needs no Hard-Sell!…..not even by an enigma like Dora!!

Like it or not, the only businesses still ready to stay (or invest) in Nigeria today are those that are rooted in corruption and palm-greasing. It is “collusion and corruption” that makes it worth their time otherwise, what is the economic sense and argument of any business executive who decides to operate in an environment where he has to run on expensive diesel fuel ( Nigeria) rather than operate in another clime where public electricity is stable?

Even the health cost of breathing-in the obnoxious fumes from the Power Generators is enough deterrence after all, life is most precious.

I know Dora is a good and upright woman, l know she’s always meant well for her fatherland, ….your past effort speaks for you but please remember that adage that says

“Bloodied must be the finger-nails of anyone whose head is infested with lies”.

Image is nothing, Reality is everything (sounds like Seven-Up! But its not!!)

What needs to re-branded is not Nigeria’s image,

but Nigeria’s REALITY……Corruption.

 Mr. "Deji Saanu is an I.T. Specialist and Digital Security Consultant.

Robot  # 1 | 24.03.2009 07:47

This RE-BRANDING, hmmmm…..”ORIGINAL” OR “IBO-MADE”? Deji Saanu Looking are the way Nigeria is governed, one is tempted to wonder “the reality” of those in authority. Is it that they live on a different planet? Drive on roads that pass through somewhere else except those other Nigerians drive on? Is it that they don’t encounter hungry people as they drive their cars along the road? Is it that they don’t wonder why we have so many youths roaming around in broad day light when they should be at work or is that normal? Is it that they don’t see the enveloping darkness that covers the city, if from their aircraft’s seats, as they descend into the country’s airports? The other day, l observed the cruel contradiction between the Mobalaji Bank Anthony way, and the surrounding houses in a picture of that revamped road, taken at dawn. The road was excellent and could almost be mi...Read the full article.