BUA and My Covid Experience

BY AKIN OSUNTOKUN

“In the past 6 years, we have completed 4 plants – two in Obu, Edo State and two in Sokoto (of which this sokoto line 4 is the fourth) with BUA’s total production capacity now standing at 11million tonnes with the completion of this plant.Next year, we intend to complete the construction of two new plants of 3 million metric tonnes each for which construction is ongoing – one in Edo and the other here in Sokoto. We expect these plants to be completed next year which will bring our total production capacity to 17million metric tonnes. From a job creation and economic standpoint, the Sokoto plant continues to be the largest private sector employer of labour in the North-Western part of Nigeria. Also, by adding value to resources mined in Nigeria, Nigeria is being saved billions of US dollars in foreign exchange that would have been spent on importation, whilst also ensuring product availability. In fact, 95% of all the raw materials used in our cement manufacturing process are sourced locally”- Abdulsamad Rabiu

“In March, BUA’s chairperson, AbdulSamad Rabiu, announced N1 billion donation to the private sector basket being coordinated by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in response to the pandemic. A month later, the group announced a fresh donation of N3.3 billion to help the most hit states of Lagos and Kano respond to the rising figures in their states”-Thisdaylive

My flirtation with Covid-19 started, in earnest, at the University of Oxford where I resumed for a year long academic visitor fellowship programme in October 2019. As the pandemic crisis gathered momentum, the University took the universal cue and suspended all academic and official activities indefinitely. I was then prompted by my minder to seize the opportunity and do a tourist destination tour of the city-to those spots that were still open and whose Covid compliant closure was imminent. And so we visited an antique episcopal church built for worship as far back as the 16th century.

We were invited to make a prayer request if either of us so desired. On a hunch I took the offer and made the request that God should shield and heal the world of Covid. The request was significant because at the material time, early on in the visitation of the virus, I did not take the pandemic seriously and used to mock the resident Chinese and other Asian nationals who committed to the mask wearing culture ahead of everyone else (they were the earliest learners of the Covid-19 lesson). As the reality of the crisis took an ominous turn with a global shutdown of social interaction I interpreted my decision to make the prayer request as a divine directive from the higher realms. And rather conveniently I made the further interpretation that it meant neither me nor anyone close to me will be afflicted by the virus.

My friend, Abdulsamad Rabiu is a very good Muslim but obviously did not limit his understanding and intervention to prayers and symbolic spiritual tokenism, he put his money wherein laid his rational convection. He bought millions of dollars worth of airtime on the ubiquitous Cable News Network, CNN, to urge his fellow national and international listeners to follow the science and mask up. By Nigerian and African standards this was quite unique. The erstwhile assumption is that this assumed global social responsibility was limited to the likes of Bill Gates. I promptly and dutifully cited him as self-motivated global ambassador for the fight against the pandemic, COVID-19. After been sequestered at home in Cardiff for several months by the global shutdown, I arrived Nigeria at the year end of 2020 still stuck with the religious belief that I was somehow immuned against the virus. I drove headlong into a hectic and prioritised sub national political schedule with perfunctory regard for the pandemic safety precautions. This was in the heydays of the siege laid to the Yoruba country by criminal Fulani elements and a commensurate militant pushback by Sunday Adeyemo. We could not just sit back and fold our hands in the face of tacit state complicity by the omission of culpable indulgence.

In the Afenifere caucus and rather poetically appropriate, Chief Ayo Adebanjo led the way in the indication that Covid 19 was not a respecter of Yoruba nationalist struggle. But the old war horse stared down the virus and soldiered on with bare physical impairment. In following suit, myself, Gboyega Adejumo and Yinka Odumakin were not so lucky. Indeed, one of us paid the ultimate price. Yet, gratitude is still in order. Afenifere and Pastor Tunde Bakare mobilised Dr Sade Adebanjo as our emergency physician and she worked on us round the clock until the Covid siege on our physical vitality was lifted. On principle, I did not want my Covid patient status publicised at all and most of all I was averse to any sort of fundraising for my care and on this score providence cooperated with me. My condition, even though a little severe, was not beyond the financial medical cost I could personally afford. In the event, those who were inevitably in the know like Afenifere and Bakare assumed the responsibility without reference to me. It was after my safe return that moneybags friends like Abdulsamad knew and his reaction was predictable. What is this Akin? How could you have kept this away from me? Anyway please tell me what to do immediately.

Now, Abdulsamad is one of the most generous friends and citizen, anyone or any country can have. As philanthropy in contemporary Nigeria goes, (as another friend puts it), Samad is the new kid on the block. I may be wrong but I doubt if there is any Nigerian who has expended more resources in addressing the challenge of the pandemic in Nigeria. Nearly the same can be said of his general commitment to the cause of corporate social responsibility in Nigeria. He and Aliko Dangote are quite high up in the ladder of my favourite Nigerians. The duo are a standing rebuke to Northern political jobbers and pandering opportunists who canvass preordained poverty and self-destructive obsession with political power as the ideological manifesto of the North-a North that can live with poverty but not with hard work and productivity. Recall the idiom of a foremost proponent. “We can live with our poverty, but we cannot live with a sense of disrespect and anybody who toys with our respect. We will fight them to the end. We inherited the North that determined where Nigeria went”.
Not long ago, a documentary ran on the cable tv titled “the makers of America”.

The cast comprised five historical figures including JP Morgan and Rockefeller; I cannot now remember the other three but they were all entrepreneurs and high stake investors. As distinguished as many American politicians were, no mention was made of any. This remarkable documentary was only being consistent with what we were taught in political economy that the economy is the substructure, the inner logic upon which the political superstructure is anchored. There would be protestations that in growing their business empire, Rabiu and Dangote have enjoyed concessions and other official preferments but so do others who did not commit to a tough similar call of a boots on the ground industrialisation drive.

My exhortation is founded on a principled and intellectual premise. Both Karl Marx and Max Webber, founders of the theoretically divergent Marxists and Capitalists school of thought are agreed as to the precursor and causation of capitalist development; the former negatively so and the latter positively. The Marxists assert that progression to capitalist development is necessarily preceded by the utilisation of the proceeds of ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ to birth and grow industrialisation. In the cultural origins of capitalism, Max Weber argues that capitalist economic development is rooted in the cultural mentality that deems wealth creation as a vocation, a calling.

In general terms and in my understanding, the human agent of capitalism is (in the language of post-modernism) the professional investor-who, beyond the material gratification of business returns, finds ultimate satisfaction in creating wealth as an end in itself. The positive Nigeria that is struggling to be born is that in which the many contemporaries of Dangote and Rabiu (who likewise acquire considerable resources from the primitive accumulation stage of Nigeria’s capitalist development) should equally embark on profitably ploughing back the accumulated capital into Nigeria’s economy. Both are in this respect and in regard of their massive industrialisation of Nigeria and Africa, black Africa’s textbook capitalists. So therefore when my principal, Kabiyesi, the Ooni of Ife invited me to come along with him to Sokoto for the commissioning of the latest BUA cement plant I had no hesitation in accepting the invitation, my phobia for flying regardless.

Arriving at Sokoto, the first inescapable observation was a substantial lack of commercial activity and social mobility. At the best of times, far Northern cities were never a conurbation of industrial and commercial activities. The current unprecedented and pervasive security breakdown has made a bad situation considerably worse and fostered a vicious cycle of poverty. The crisis has had the multiplier effect of deindustrialisation and socioeconomic immobility which in turn fosters a massive army of hungry and seething economic destitutes with vested interest in anarchy rather than the peaceful stability of society. Needless to say this is the inexhaustible pool feeding the neo terrorist seige laid on the Northern society. As the inimitable late Professor Sam Aluko surmised, the rich cannot sleep because the poor are hungry.

The proximate perfect storm scenario is then actualised by the inability of the government to meaningfully grapple with the rampant anarchy. This is the multiple jeopardy situation from which investors, large and small, flee and never look back. Who will break this vicious cycle? To put the dilemma in the horse’s mouth, President Mohammadu Buhari confessed his helplessness “Every day, we are worried about what is happening in the North-west..What is happening now in the north-west is what has honestly overwhelmed me.. the same people, the same culture, killing each other, stealing each other’s property”. Which makes the valiant response of organisations like BUA all the more heroic.