The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Hello homo

    FOR those who insist on the exaggerated idea that the recent pro-homosexuality decision by the United States Supreme Court possibly marks the beginning of the end for mankind, it must be said that the development may just be the beginning of another beginning. The evolutionary clock is still ticking and not about to stop.

    It is a wonder that over 20 countries have embraced same-sex marriage rights, and in this strange category are developed countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Sweden. It is predictable that the passion will spread because homophobic arguments based mainly on religion, culture and nature are inadequate.

    With the sound and fury of anti-gay voices in the background, my mind went to a thought-provoking moment during the 10th Orisa World Congress held in July 2013 at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Osun State. In the course of stimulating discussions on issues of interest in the context of Yoruba religion and culture, the subject of homosexuality came up. Many were curious about the position of the religion on this controversial question. It was a reflection of the times. After a lively debate, it was Prof. Wande Abimbola who had the last word. He said: “We cannot say exactly how Ifa views this. There is no need for us to get involved in this controversy.” In a global village of multiple faiths and definite religious positions on homosexuality, his indefinite comments were confounding.

    It was a fascinating intervention particularly because Abimbola, a retired academic who will be 82 this month, is a Yoruba culture exponent and a distinguished Ifa priest. “Ifa is the heart and soul of the culture and philosophy of the Yoruba people. It is not dead, but parts of it are going into oblivion.” Abimbola said while making a contribution to a discussion during the five-day programme.

    The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2005 listed the IfaDivination system among “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” Multitudinous gods or orisa make up the Yoruba pantheon, with Ifa as the oracular mouthpiece of Olodumare, the Almighty in Yoruba religion. The religion is also known as the Orisa tradition.

    The variegated gathering at Ile- Ife, which included participants from the United States of America (USA), Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela and Mexico, demonstrated the appeal of the religion beyond its local provenance and brought instructive international perspectives. An all-male family of four from Cuba, a Chinese couple who live in Venezuela and a densely bearded white American were among the alluring sights.

    It is a point to ponder that many religious people in Nigeria base their hostility to homosexuality on faith morality, which is why Abimbola’s ambiguity is complicating from a religious point of view. Interestingly, also in July 2013 Pope Francis, head of the world’s largest Christian church with an estimated 1.2 billion Catholics, at least 19 million of them Nigerians, expressed a non-judgemental position on homosexuals. The Catholic Herald reported: “Speaking to members of the press during a flight back to Rome from Rio de Janeiro after World Youth Day celebrations, Pope Francis responded to questions about the Vatican’s alleged gay lobby, by saying: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?” Also relevant: The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, representing the Church of England, in a joint letter addressed to then President Goodluck  Jonathan on Nigeria’s anti-gay stance, made it clear that “The victimisation or diminishment of human beings, whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex, is anathema to us.” They emphasised that homosexual people “are children of God, loved and valued by Him and deserving the best we can give – pastoral care and friendship.”

    The complexity of the religious argument against homosexuality can be better appreciated in the context of the information that there are an estimated 4, 200 religions in the world. It would be enlightening to know how many of them have a problem with homosexuality or same-sex relationships. In other words, how many religions regard homosexuals as ungodly perverts? Is it a contradiction in terms to speak of godly or god-fearing homosexuals?

    When homosexuality bashers don’t play religion or don’t play God, they reach for the weapon of culture. When they do so, they conveniently forget that human culture is expandable and always a work in progress. What has been culturally unacceptable may become acceptable and what has been culturally conceded may become inconceivable.

    It should be appreciated that today’s triumph of gay rights in the United States, which is the fundamental implication of the majority opinion of the Supreme Court legitimising same-sex marriage anywhere in the country, is not an overnight achievement and resulted from a campaign that dates back to the 1970s. Important milestones leading to the destination include: May 17, 2004, when Massachusetts became “the first U.S. state and the sixth jurisdiction in the world to legalise same-sex marriage”; May 9, 2012, when Barack Obama became “the first sitting U.S.  president to publicly declare support for the legalisation of same-sex marriage”.  Also, on   November 6, 2012, “Maine, Maryland, and Washington became the first states to legalise same-sex marriage through popular vote.”

    Before the June 26, 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision that revolutionised the gay narrative in the country and made it “the twenty-first and most populous country to legalise same-sex marriage”, a CNN poll on February 19, 2015 “found that  63% of Americans believe gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, up from 49% in August 2010.” It is revealing that CNN polling also found that 59% of Americans felt the U.S Supreme Court’s endorsement of same-sex marriage was “correct”.

    It is especially significant that the reportedly popular court ruling “overturned a precedent”, meaning there was a time when a contrary idea prevailed. The court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that “the denial of marriage licenses and recognition to same-sex couples violates the Due Process and the Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” This information is similarly important: “Gay and lesbian couples already can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia. The court’s ruling means the remaining 14 states, in the South and Midwest, will have to stop enforcing their bans on same-sex marriage.”

    With religious and socio-cultural interpretations of human homosexuality reimagined, the question of naturality may have been subtly answered. Central to the controversy is the nature of homosexual desire in human beings, whether it is biologically driven or socially influenced. It is interesting that there is evidence of homosexual behaviour in certain mammals, birds and fish. So, it is not an exclusively human phenomenon.

    In a world of expanding freedoms, the homosexual orientation is likely to enjoy increasing accommodation as one of the possibilities of human sexual expression. Of course, there will be consequences.

  • No longer a pariah

    No longer a pariah

    President Muhammadu Buhari’s rise to power is a parable of tenacity and the happy pendulum of fate. No one counted on him at one time. His big and mighty foes feared his appeal. They waited for his venom to expire. Before the expiration date, however, he struck.

    Then those who pooh-poohed him, who sneered that he was no more than a grand and populist irritation, began to see him as the wisdom of the hour.

    They no longer flaunted their superior airs and credentials. Rather, they flocked to him.  They morphed into cheerleaders and wiggled their waists in the same band. But they rehearsed a different genre of music.

    When it was time to sing, their incongruous tunes collapsed under the throaty sonority of the majority.

    Now the majority’s symphony fell silent, we started to hear the dissonance of toads and crocodiles.

    Nothing tells this story more than the ambitions and cynicisms of three men. The first is the Owu chief, Olusegun Obasanjo, the peripatetic harlot of Nigerian politics, Atiku Abubakar, and the Kwara renegade, Bukola Saraki.

    As for the rise of Buhari, it calls back the lives of  Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. All three were outsiders of the vortex of power. In the case of Lincoln, he was too tall, ungainly and ill bred. Churchill was a loud mouth, boor and subversive. In fact, former United States president, Richard Nixon, noted in his memoirs that he drew inspiration from Churchill. His obituary was written off late in his life in the House of Commons. He turned out to be the greatest prime minister in memory.

    As for de Gaulle, he was an outcast in an age of national treachery when Petain and other French leaders sold the pride and birthright of France to the butchery of Nazi Germany. His contemporaries regarded de Gaulle as rebellious, foolish and puerile. Churchill plotted to fly him out of Paris in the turbulent flush of the blitzkrieg. Churchill remarked that de Gaulle’s soul encased the French pride in that flight of escape.

    Once these men became their nations’ leaders, they waxed from pariahs to messiahs. All who looked down on them later bowed. Those who did not bow wheeled into subterranean intrigues and acts of subversion. They wanted to torpedo the popular will.

    The APC crisis is still called crisis in spite of what some of its leaders call reconciliation. It is the act of papering over the cracks. The men who do not wish the party well only wish for the party their ambition. They do not love Buhari. They only sat in the train or rode in the same carriage because he was the only one in whose company they could clutch their selfish dreams.

    Their schemes are coming home to roast, not roost.

    Their plan was simple. Let us win in the Senate, make it a fate accompli. Later, we can con the president onboard. They took the president for a simpleton. Atiku formed the dubious coalition with Saraki and Obj because of the ambitions of 2019. The man who won 2015 has not settled down to office, their 2019 ambitions want to unsettle his administration.

    Yet we know that Obj, Atiku and Saraki are strange bedfellows. They are too ambitious for their own good. An Obj will not endorse an Atiku ambition. Atiku knows this. Saraki, for whatever egoistic delusion, thinks he can be Nigeria’s president.

    But in all these, they want to throw cats in the pigeons of the president. After causing confusion, they want to present themselves as angels of peace. That is the so-called reconciliation move. It is capital self-delusion and hypocrisy. They want reconciliation without truth.

    They say the Lawan and Gbajabiamila groups should accept the fait accompli of Dogarra and Saraki leaderships in the National Assembly. Now, how do they want to explain two irrationalities. One, the party arrived at one candidate. Saraki defied it, plotted with the enemy, waylaid the party and disgraced the majority vote. They forget that Lawan was Buhari’s candidate. After the fact, the governors of the party tried to save face. How do you live with the fact that a party decides something, some members flout it, and no penalties are imposed. Does that not turn the party into an impunity machine? Was that not one of the capital reasons the PDP was flushed out on March 28? Is the APC not going back to its vomit by starting off embracing the enemy’s mistake?

    All those behind Atiku, Saraki and Obj want to wield their influence to let the matter slide. Well, they won but it does not feel like victory. That is why they keep calling for peace. In spite of that, they show their true colours. Saraki said recently that inability of some state governments to pay salaries could be traced to corruption. Saraki has no right to talk on corruption until the charges hanging over his head are cleared. He cannot vault himself into sainthood overnight. He became Senate president on a corrupt lie, overthrowing the party convention. His is a victory without honour. That is why he remains the Kwara renegade.

    That leads to the second point. If they wanted reconciliation, why did Saraki and Dogarra spurn the party letter? The argument that the law is more important than the party is a self-serving line. The law towers above all, but law is itself based on honour. When we manipulate the law and defrock it of honour, we work against the very spirit of law. That was what the Saraki group did. It is haunting them, and it will haunt them forever. Reconciliation without truth is going to the future without memory. It is like pursuing an end without a beginning. If we reach where we are going without knowledge of where we are coming from, we will not know why we started the journey.

    Last weekend featured the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. The speakers, including former President Clinton, stressed the need for reconciliation but it must be based on truth. We cannot wish truth over unresolved issues. It is like prospering on a lie. In South Africa, truth was sought before reconciliation. Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace tapped into the theme of truth and reconciliation by looking into the story of a professor who takes advantage of a female student and thinks he can get away with it by merely leaving his job. He spends the rest of his life grappling with the consequences. Booker Prize novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, The Buried Giant, looks at the unresolved crisis of the birth of Britain to show how a past of division cannot be glossed over by mere prosperity. The author referred to Bosnia, Kosovo, the second World War, etc, as some of the inspiration for the work, a fantasy of gnomes, elves, dragons, etc.

    Part of Nigeria’s problem is that we have not resolved many issues and we move on. But we never move on, and unresolved issues haunt us always, so woes pile on woes in our national life.

    Obj, Saraki and Atiku have a choice. They have to decide whether they belong to APC or they want to form an alliance to form another party. Atiku has PDM that never wins anything, and he cannot stand on his own. He has to play whore with others to get something. In his present style and content, he has not, and he never will, be Nigeria’s president.

    The choice still dangles before this group and their men. It will determine whether they want to work with Buhari or stalemate him.

  • Bail-out and sundry issues

    The measures unfolded last week by the Buhari administration to offset backlog of salaries and allowances owed workers in the country call for serious introspection. Those showering encomiums or indulging in chest-beating for the credit to the new administration which the package represents may miss the salient lessons the development has placed in the vortex of public opinion. Good as the measures are especially given the dire economic situation in many of the states, the message may be lost if the raging euphoria blurs our vision to the monumental dangers in states depending on federal handouts for survival. That should be the real issue.

    Under the measures, $2.1billion dividend paid into the Federation Account by the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas company Limited (LNLG) is to be shared among the three tiers of government. Between N250 and N300 billion special intervention funds from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) are also available as soft loans to the states while a N600 billion relief package from the Debt Management Office (DMO) to help states restructure their debts with the commercial banks is also on offer.

    Much of the reactions from the larger public have come as commendation for the federal government for saving the states from the deleterious economic situation they have found themselves. At the last count, many of the states owe workers between four and 10 month’s salaries. Even with the cheering prospects which the incentives offer, there is a wide gamut of feeling that the new package may be misused by some states, unless firm measures are put in place to monitor strict application.

    The lesson in this seeming vote of no confidence on some of the governors can only be lost on us at a great cost. And that is the key issue that has been brought to the fore by the foregoing. In it also is the indubitable fact that despite the challenges arising from the fall in oil prices in the international market, the governors are largely to blame for running the economies of their states virtually aground. So the issue goes beyond non- availability of funds. It has little to do with the drop in revenue accruals from the federation account. That is why even oil bearing states that receive more from the federal till are in many months’ salary arrears while some others that do not enjoy that advantage are faring better. The secret of this can only be located in how effective and efficient they have been in the management of the funds that accrued to them overtime. That is the real issue here. And the way it is handled will chart the direction for the financial prudence, self sufficiency and ultimate survival of the states.

    It also brings to question the efforts of state governors to save for the rainy day; efforts to rely more on internally generated revenue given our dependence on a mono cultural economy. It largely hinges on priority-setting and cost-cutting. The governors needed to be measured against these indices for us to determine whether the new intervention funds will not go the way of previous accruals that were misused. So when we avail state governors with more funds without them appreciating what the new direction entails, we stand the risk of coming back to the same situation.

    As of now, there is nothing to indicate from the life styles of the governors that it will not be business as usual. The number of their former colleagues currently facing trials for sundry financial misdemeanour do not give comfort of mind that we are about to exit from the mess so soon after. It is also curious why the current debilitating finances of the states were kept under seal in the days following the last electioneering campaigns. Or what role the last elections played in bringing these states to their knees shortly after.

    The public may need to know whether the inability of states to pay salaries and allowances has a direct bearing with the huge spending of the political parties during the last elections. If the issue bears positive correlation with the cost of running elections, a more effective and more pragmatic approach would entail fundamental constitutional review to cut down the cost of running elections in this clime. There is also the challenge of the defective federal system of government we currently run. We ought to be certain whether we really need a federation in the strict sense of it or the aberrant form in which it currently operates. There is the need to resolve once and for all whether the component units will exercise a large measure of financial autonomy or continue as an appendage of the central authority. These are the kind of lasting interventions we should be concerned with at this point and not the unnecessary altercations between rival political parties as to who should take credit for the funding of the bail-out package. The PDP had sought to take some credit for the funds the government intends to disburse contending that savings from the Jonathan regime formed a major chunk of that money. It further reasoned that the availability of such huge funds puts a lie to the impression which President Buhari gave to the world that the treasury was virtually empty.  The party would therefore want the president to correct his earlier statement given the huge amount that is now readily available for sharing.

    But the presidency in an apparent move to extricate itself from the accusation, swiftly explained that the money meant for sharing, represented dividends from the NLNG which had just been remitted into the federation account while others came in the form of loans and rescheduling of previous exposure of some states to the commercial banks. It was also very unequivocal in denying that any money was drawn from the Excess Crude Account (ECA) that is now a subject of disputation.

    Though the presidency did not clearly say so, implicit in that clarification was a veiled attempt to reaffirm its earlier position on the state of finances of the federal government. That was the purport of the argument that the dividends from the NLNG had just been paid in and that the president’s attention to it was drawn during a courtesy visit by the company. Whatever the case, the money still belonged to the federal government. It is immaterial at what point the attention of the authorities were drawn to its existence. And as has been rightly argued in some quarters, government is a continuum.

    Perhaps, the president could be excused since he had promised to give the nation full details of the financial standing of the country in due course. Thus, we may not have to be in a hurry to take him to task on how empty the treasury was when he assumed office. By the time he has had a comprehensive picture of the situation; perhaps there will be the need for the kind of demands the opposition is making of him regarding how empty the treasury really was.

    The lesson in all this is in the need for caution and moderation in our criticisms and utterances. It is important that we are constructive and factual in all our presentations otherwise we will be inadvertently creating monsters that will turn round to haunt us. In the wake of the last elections, foul and intemperate language was freely deployed. Facts were also twisted to gain advantage. If these could be excused given the exigencies of winning elections, there should be very little room for them now.

    Part of the disenchantment with Buhari’s pace is on account of the type of campaign promises the opposition mounted to gain power. The end may have justified the means. But the general impatience with his speed and subsequent pleas for more time would have been absolutely unnecessary if the enormity of the problems facing the nation were really factored in while making campaign promises. Our nationalists faced the same situation immediately after sending the white man packing. So, we need to reappraise our language of political discourse.

  • A good man

    He lived for 106 years, but his claim to immortality happened for only six months. Even those six months he tucked away in the silence of a selfless memory. It is a lesson in humanity for the Nigerian elite.

    It happened in 1939 when Adolf Hitler loomed with his Nazi nightmare. With its death showers, starvation, rapes, torture, etc, the concentration camp beckoned all Jews. The world was numb with ignorance. The camps – in Auschwitz, Sobribor, etc – were not before then and had not since then ever installed human butchery and barbarism of that scale. Jews, whether father, mother or child, were rolled rudely into chambers and incinerated or burned to ashes through what was known as showers of death.

    Nicholas Winton, who just died at 106, did not then know about the concentration camps the way we know it today or the way the world came to understand it towards the end of the Second World War in 1945.

    He acted swiftly when he heard that Hitler’s army under the cover of its deafly air force known as Luftwaffe, would soon mow down Czechoslovakia. He called off his luxury pastime of skiing, and moved to the east European country for a mission of charity. He planned to save as many as 900 children by shipping them away from the underbelly of horror in Czechoslovakia. But he succeeded only with 669.

    Although of Jewish origin, all his family lived in Britain. He had no family ties in that country. He just knew children were in danger of falling into the jaws of tyranny. He did not have time. Hitler could plunge into the country any time, and so he materialised in the refugee camps in the country, and took down names and photos of the children.

    So, he made several trips in early 1939 between London and Prague. Aided by his mother, he set up the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, raised money, called for volunteers who could host the children. He raised some money but not enough. He made the difference from his own purse.

    It was a dark time, and he could not transport the children without bribing the Nazi officials. Never a moral purist, he bribed the Nazi police chief known as criminal rat because of his rank known in Germany as Kriminalrat. He cooperated and the bribes reached down to the train operators and officials in Customs and Immigration. The bribes greased the trains through barriers.

    He planned and paid for eight trains to take the kids from the country through Cologne, Nuremburg and other ramparts of Nazism through Holland. They were ferried to Essex, from there they took a train to London where British families received them, who took them on as children. It started in March and ended in August. Seven trains had eluded the Nazi monster. The last and eighth train had 250 children, but before it left, September 1 had dawned savagely when Hitler ordered every border shut down. The children the last train bore were never seen again, and it was assumed that they descended into the oblivion of the concentration camps.

    Within six months, he had written himself into the annals of charity and into the front rank of human love. For the rest of his 106 years on earth, nothing so spectacularly was associated with him. “One crowded hour in a glorious life,” penned the poet Thomas Mordaunt, “is worth an age without a name.”

    Yet everyone, in Britain and everywhere else, forgot Winton’s act. Not even the beneficiary children sought the man. He hid the scrapbook containing entries of the names of the kids and letters, etc of those months in his attic. He never even told his wife of his heroics. He was a disinterested hero. His wife saw them and probed him for answers. Even at that, he did not think it was any significant what he did. She thought differently, and made the information available to the media, and that was how the world woke up to a good interred in Winton’s bones.

    Most of the beneficiaries did not see their parents after the war. Hitler’s Nazi bears had lapped them up. Some of the parents tearfully parted with their children on train platforms and some of the children yowled not to part with their parents. Today, they call themselves “Winton’s children.” Some of them have soared to do good to their world. One of them, Renata Laxova, discovered a congenital abnormality named after her. Hugo Marom was a founder of the Israeli Air Force. Joe Schlesinger is a well-known Canadian broadcast correspondent. Karel Riesz is a filmmaker and director, among others, of “The French lieutenant’s Woman.”

    Winton operated in a time so perilous that the poet W.H. Auden described it as when “the clever hopes expire/ of a low dishonest decade,” when “the unmentionable odour of death offends the September night.”

    What has happened to our elite? How many of us have done so much good and cut ourselves out of our comfort zone for the weak and vulnerable among us? The irony is that we pride ourselves as weaned on the communal ethos. This column has called for the rich to adopt wards in hospital, students in indigent schools, chaperon the wild and wayward orphan, etc. It is taken for granted in the West where the individual is king. Yet here the rich stash their loot, their mansions and skyscrapers defy heaven, while their posh cars splash rainwater on the lolling poor.  Too many are poor, but where is the balm from the well-heeled? Boko Haram victims teem everyday among us, but we moan in the retreats of our cosy homes and wait only for the government. The rich make money mainly from the government, perhaps that explains why they do not think they owe anybody, after they grease back the palm that first oiled them.

    We should imitate Winton. It is good men like him that make a good society.

  •   Ambode and the Uche household

      Ambode and the Uche household

    Hers seems to be a failure of fertility. Ruth Uche stalked Lagos Government House for help. She has six children and all of them are twins. In a Yoruba household, it means you would have three Taiwos and three Kehindes, a glorious confusion. But Ruth is not celebrating. Her maternal joys often multiply in toils and tears. The father of the kids, one Benjamin Uche, has fled the home to dubious shelter in Ikorodu. In the United States, he will be called a deadbeat dad.

    She cannot fend for the children. A native of Abia State, the woman says her husband delights in the glories of copulation and not the rigours of fatherhood. He loves the biological rush of fathering, but lacks the impulse of fatherhood. Ruth even confessed to abortion. Dazzled by abundance, Ruth has too little. Abundance – of children – took away her pride, gave her pain, hunger and she pines for help. Even her in-laws have not afforded warmth of food or nearness.

    An angel of mercy came in the form of Nigeria’s alpha governor, Akinwunmi Ambode. He swiftly issued a directive to his erudite deputy, Dr. Oluranti Adebule, to give her welfare. It’s a bower of love such as this that chimes in with the spirit of Nicholas Winton.

    But it is a story of a failure of men in the Nigerian society. It is cowardly to leave your kids, no matter how poor you are.  Even if you have nothing, it does not excuse delinquency. In the United States, the husband would be forced to answer to the law.

  • Supremacy is supreme

    DOES superiority necessarily mean the same thing as supremacy? This is the thought-provoking question prompted by President Muhammadu Buhari’s word choice when he addressed members of the National Executive Committee of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on July 3. Buhari was quoted as saying: “Let APC work; let the system work and let us have a government that will earn the respect of our constituencies. Please accept the superiority of the party.”

    On reflection, there is a sense in which superiority does not denote dominance, control and unchallengeability. There is a sense in which supremacy means these things. This is why Buhari’s word choice is problematic. A functional interpretation of party supremacy must be informed by the logic of supremacy. Supremacy is supreme. Such subtleties of meaning suggested by Buhari’s preferred word will only help to fuel the party’s crisis of individualism.

    Certainly, supremacy cannot mean infallibility. So the party can err. It does not guarantee fairness. So the party can be unfair. The essence of party supremacy is its conclusive collective voice.

    From this perspective, the self-serving arguments being circulated on behalf of anti-party manoeuvres by Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker of the House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara of the APC betray a fundamental trivialisation of party supremacy. Only a distressingly dysfunctional decoding of the concept could have created the circumstances that brought the two men to power in the National Assembly, in defiance of their party’s desire and decision. It is revealing that the same warped twist has resulted in the queer cohabitation at the helm of the Senate with Saraki and Deputy Senate President Ike Enweremadu of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) belonging to opposing parties.

    However, it is not only Buhari who has complicated party supremacy by his initial liberalism to the detriment of the collective expression, and subsequently by his indistinct word usage. Although it is open to speculation whether a timely intervention by Buhari could have foiled the rebellion that enthroned Saraki and Dogara, it is possible that the president’s non-involvement undermined party supremacy; just as it is possible that the president’s word choice downplayed party supremacy.

    What about the visit to Saraki by the State Chairmen of the APC from the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory on the same day Buhari spoke about “the superiority of the party”?  This was definitely not a reflection of party supremacy because it reflected the accommodation of a figure that emerged outside party supremacy.  It is incongruous and ironic  that  Saraki reportedly said to the visitors: “I want to assure you that all of us APC Senators, we are committed to ensure that the APC is successful so that we can win elections years and years and years and years after because of the foundation we are laying.”

    If Saraki’s words show an appreciation of the party platform for the purpose of political pursuits, his role in the humiliation of party supremacy is not worthy of appreciation. Does he think that the party is a ladder to reach political heights, but not a voice that must be obeyed?

    It is clarifying to note what Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole told the media after 16 APC governors held a meeting with Buhari on June 24 in an effort to emphasise the supremacy of the party, and get Saraki and Dogara to accept its choices for specific leadership positions in the National Assembly. Oshiomhole said: “Basically, what we are saying is that the senators should adopt the position of the party. We were all elected on the platform of the party. We are not just a collection of individuals. We are a political party and when a political party has spoken, we must listen.”

    The question is: How can the party reassert itself and its supremacy in the circumstances? It is clear that Saraki wants his controversial election to be treated as a fait accompli, and he is not prepared to stop at that, which is why he subsequently rubbished the party’s list for leadership posts. Dogara is staging a similar play in the House of Representatives. Beyond these early signs of disruptive behaviour, there is a dangerous probability that these characters will be encouraged to perform even more daring stunts to disgrace party supremacy if they are allowed to get away with the initial misbehaviour. Furthermore, others may be inspired and emboldened by their example.

    APC supremos must save party supremacy, and they must find their own way of doing so.  The rebels must have built various scenarios in trying to anticipate the consequences of their rebellion, and the party must be prepared to explore multiple possibilities to checkmate them.

    In particular, the defensive claim that the rebellious lawmakers are motivated by a perceived democratic duty to restrain alleged domineering tendencies by certain powerful interests in the party flies in the face of the internal logic of party supremacy. The point is that internal politicking in a political party may give an advantage to certain interests such that they enjoy leadership influence, but this is no reason for the disadvantaged to bellyache to the point of belligerence and centrifugal conduct.

    The conflict over party supremacy in APC is nothing short of a domestic war of sorts. It is not for the faint-hearted. On both sides, it will require a capacity to endure a war of attrition. The ultimate casualty will likely be the people because the hostilities will constitute an unproductive distraction from the serious business of good governance.

    The mess amounts to a colossal shame for a party that attracted impressive public support and won convincingly at the history-making polls only a few months ago especially because it wore a badge of decency. That badge seems to have been torn to shreds by the party members themselves. What this means for the party and the polity will unfold as time progresses. The path to follow is to restore party supremacy erected on party discipline, party cohesion and party integrity; and that path must be followed wherever it may lead.

     

  • Boko Haram protests

    When residents in major cities of Anambra State protested against alleged plans to relocate some Boko Haram detainees to prisons there, many were tempted to dismiss the protests with a wave of the hand. This was more so when prison authorities rose to vehemently deny such a plan was in the offing.

    They hinged their denial on the grounds that most of the Boko Haram detainees were still awaiting trial and it would be inconceivable to relocate them to areas far flung from their trial venues. Since Anambra State is hundreds of kilometres away from the North-east, the epicentre of the insurgency, many were led to believe the rationalization of the prison authorities. The shrouding of the trials, conviction and issues relating to the insurgency in utmost secrecy, left one with little choice than to buy the argument of the prison authorities.

    This was followed in quick succession by a statement from the Anambra State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) accusing the state government of masterminding the demonstrations for political reasons. The party was so emphatic that it described the rumours as baseless even as it had no basis dabbling into the controversy.

    But things took a different turn a few days later when another round of demonstrations erupted in the sleepy city of Ekwulobia in the Aguata Local Government Area. This time, the demonstrators were very certain that about 49 Boko Haram convicts had been relocated to the Ekwulobia prisons. They had as evidence, the arrival of truck loads of soldiers with mattresses and mats. As if these were not enough, the sight of soldiers who cordoned off the prison fenced with wire gauze, stopping and searching people including villagers left no one in doubt that Boko Haram prisoners were indeed at the facility. Even then, the leadership of the traders’ association which has been anchoring the demonstrations, quoting prison sources, said Boko Haram prisoners numbering 49 were actually brought to the facility on Sunday, June 28 under very tight security. It would seem from the above that the protests were after all not a fluke as we were made to believe. The protesters appeared to have gotten their facts right before kicking against the relocation. And what is their grouse? Their fears can be gleaned from some of the placards which among others read “please save our state from Boko Haram insurgents” “Why Ekwulobia of all the towns. Why Anambra State”. Their worry is that housing the insurgents in the area would attract all manner of visitors especially sympathizers of the convicts with the frightening prospects for unleashing attacks on the people. There is also the possibility of jail break with serious security implications for the people.

    Ordinarily, the prison authorities should be within their call of duty to deploy prison inmates to any facility of their choice in any state they consider safe enough for that purpose. So they may not have contravened any law of the land in the instant case. By relocating those 49 insurgents to the Ekwulobia prisons, it should be expected that the facilities there are well protected, well equipped and adequately safeguarded against the volatility and dangerous machinations of such high risk inmates. If that was the rationale, there may be no serious ground for the seeming paranoia against the housing of the insurgents in such facilities.

    But this optimism pales into insignificance in the face of the decrepit state of our prisons. Not only are our prisons not well kept and maintained, their security has left much to be desired. Overcrowding has left in its wake, recurring incidents of jail break. When this is juxtaposed against the recurring attempts by Boko Haram detainees and their accomplices to free their detained members through very violent means, the fears of the Anambra people can be better understood. Those who may be inclined to dismiss these fears have the cases of Kogi and Ekiti states where gunmen believed to be linked to the insurgents bombed two prisons and aided the escape of inmates. If these instances are still not enough, the jail break at the SSS Headquarters in Abuja during which the insurgents disarmed the SSS agents guarding them resulting in heavy shooting that sent the seat of the federal government shaking, drives home the mortal danger in hosting the insurgents. There were similar instances of Boko Haram attempts to free their colleagues in military facilities even in Maiduguri. So when traders and residents in Anambra State especially Ekwulobia fear that mortal harm may come their way through the presence of the insurgent religious extremists in the decrepit and poorly protected prisons, they are standing on very solid grounds. And as has been noted, the prisons where the insurgents are now being housed have only wire gauze as fence. That is why those passing there come into contact with soldiers guarding the facility. It is for the same reason that the arrival of high profile inmates cannot be hidden from the prying eyes of the public. Thus, the prison cannot be considered safe for the keeping of very dangerous and potentially explosive criminals for whom life means nothing. One had thought that the standard practice is to keep such dangerous criminals in maximum security prisons.

    Those who know Ekwulobia well would be amazed at the logic for the transfer of the insurgents there. Despite its status as a local government headquarters, Ekwulobia is still largely a rural community located at the very heart of Igbo land. A Boko Haram attack there is very unlikely to go down well with the people of that geo-political zone. It is likely to be viewed as a deliberate act of exporting Boko Haram to a zone that is battling with a surfeit of its own challenges. Perhaps, the inability to come to terms with what the situation would portend should Boko Haram insurgency be added to their litany of challenges is at the root of these protests.

    More fundamentally, a lot of people from that region suffered serious casualties in lives and property in the hands of the insurgents. Many of them have had to flee the northern parts of the country in the wake of incessant attacks and threats from the murderous group ordering them to leave or face annihilation. Before Boko Haram changed strategy, much of their targets were Christian places of worship even as their hatred for other religions has never been in doubt. So if the people of the zone grow paranoid on the mention of Boko Haram on their soil, they have genuine cause to complain. They are within their rights to draw copious attention to the unmitigated danger which the arrival of the dreaded criminals on their soil portends. That right can neither be abridged nor circumscribed especially in the democratic dispensation we now find ourselves.

    It is one thing for the government to reserve the rights to deploy prisoners anywhere and a different ball game for such rights to invade the sensibilities of the people without whom governments have no meaning. The protests may not be enough to compel the government to reverse its decision to relocate the detainees there. But they have drawn serious attention to the fragile peace in the area as a result of the presence of those detainees. They have sensitized the authorities to the dangers in keeping such violent groups in rural prisons lacking in serious security architecture. They have called attention to the new challenges in that community consequent upon of the arrival of the insurgents. These are the points that have most poignantly been driven home.

    The federal government has the option to shut its eyes to the genuine concerns of the people of the community. It is also at liberty to ignore the issues raised about the inappropriateness in hosting sophisticated criminals in ill-maintained and ill-equipped prisons. But it stands to take liability for acts of omission or commission should the simulated scenarios eventually play themselves out.

  • Legislators’ pay and other matters

    Renewed public interest in the salaries and allowances of lawmakers and political office holders should not be surprising. With the grim state of the nation’s economy; mounting arrears of salaries by governments and high cost of governance, it is difficult for the seemingly huge pay of legislators and other political office holders to continue to evade the prying eyes of the public.

    This interest is not entirely new. It was a subject of heated debate around 2013. Then, there arose public outcry against the wide gulf between what was seen as the jumbo pay of federal legislators, vis-à-vis extant wage regime in the country.  The actual pay of the lawmakers generated so much speculation that the Revenue Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) had to come out with the schedule of salaries and allowances of members. Even with that, their actual salaries and allowances have since remained a highly misunderstood issue, often leading to opaque interpretations.

    According to that schedule, the annual salaries and allowances of a senator amounted to N12.9 million. This is in addition to N24 million paid once in their tenure of four years. In this category fall such items as car loan, housing loan, terminal benefits etc.

    For a member of the House of Representatives, his annual salaries and allowances amounted to N9.5 million in addition to N23.8 million paid once in four years for other loans and benefits.

    With the change of government and dwindling national revenue resulting in backlog of salaries; it did not take time before the matter resurfaced. It has resurged with such momentum and frenzy that the impression now gaining ground is that the cut is a major step towards plugging the drain in our national revenue chain.

    Not unexpectedly, governments, persons and institutions have bought into the idea as given fillip by emerging reactions to it. Central to all these, is the impression that by slashing these salaries and allowances, more money would be freed for national development. Kano State Governor Abdullahi Gunduje took the lead by slashing the salaries and allowances of political appointees by 50 per cent ostensibly to enable the state get enough funds for development. Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia State placed himself on half salary and cut his travelling allowances by 50 per cent until salaries and allowance owed workers are paid.

    This is as the RMAFC has set up a committee to begin a downward review of salaries and allowances for political, public and judicial office holders. The bug seems to have caught up with everybody with the outlawed Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta MEND threatening to resume hostilities should members of the National Assembly refuse to reduce the huge salaries and allowances that accrue to them. As if responding to this threat, the Senate has also floated a committee to arrive at the same purpose.

    All these concerns can be understood given their convergence on the common ground that we need to make some sacrifice for the country to come out of the woods. If these stem from genuine concerns for attitudinal change in the way our citizens hitherto conceived affairs of the public realm, this would amount to significant progress.

    Before now, the tendency was to fleece and impoverish the government for the benefit of the individual and his primordial unit. That has been the basis for the unmitigated corruption that virtually brought this nation to its knees. Political offices are seen as avenues for self-enrichment rather than service to the humanity.

    If emerging concerns for behavioural shift represent real commitment to prudence, selfless services and patriotism, then we have every reason to hope there will be light at the end of the tunnel. There is a glimmer of hope that we are beginning to enthrone a common bound of selfless services.

    That should be something to cheer.

    No doubt, a reduction in salaries and allowances in the proportion that has been proposed, will free some fund for the development of the states and the nation as the case may be. But it remains to be imagined the positive difference it will make in our overall national development matrix given the figures above.

    It is not certain what constitutes the salaries and allowances of political office holders in the states. But if my little stint in that capacity some years back is any thing to go by, not much savings would be made out of such salary cuts. It will even result in the negative by impoverishing the appointees thereby laying them vulnerable to thievery in the most daring manner. The effect will turn out counterproductive. It would appear the entire idea is propelled more by political expediency rather than sound economic calculations. They promise very little in their overall contributions to the economic health of governments both state and federal.

    But like ever Nigerian thing, every body has bought into the frenzy and wants to make political capital of it. The key thing is that all manner of groups want these salaries and allowances reduced. Once that has been achieved, its teleological purpose has been served. And nothing more!

    More fundamentally, all the noise about pay cut is premised on the flawed thinking they constitute the real avenues for fleecing the nation. One is afraid this view is a highly misplaced one. It cannot stand the weight of evidence in the face of the stupendous wealth lawmakers and political office-holders are known be flaunting around town. They cannot account for the scandalous display of opulence by legislators and political office holders in and out of office.

    They count for little in terms of the funds to run elections in many parts of the country. Worries have been expressed on why people still seek legislative offices in the face of the prohibitive cost of running elections. In some states, it runs into billions to run for a senatorial seat. What is the fraction of the salaries and allowances of a senator to N1billion for instance, to expect it is the main source of recouping his electoral investments?

    It amounts to chasing shadows to nurse the feeling that these salaries and allowances are the real avenues for fleecing the government. They only constitute legitimate and known sources. Nothing has been said of the illegitimate and unknown sources. These are the areas the prying eyes of a government of change should focus. There is so much corruption in the exercise of legislators’ oversight functions. President Buhari captured it succinctly when he spoke of financial recklessness and lack of accountability due to the official abandonment of all financial and administrative instructions in parastatals and agencies. All these avenues must be plugged for real progress to be made.

    But then, the larger public must queue into this change mantra for it to be meaningful. Much of those making noise about jumbo pay, are the same people that at every level of the electoral process, ask for money before discharging their civic duties. You cannot take money in lieu of your votes or support and expect sanity from the system. The sacrifice expected of lawmakers can only endure if there is positive and permanent change of attitude on electoral matters from the larger society.

     

  • To love and to hate

    To love and to hate

    President Muhammadu Buhari is caught in between love. Everyone wants to show they love him.

    It is happening everywhere like an epidemic. The EFCC tries to show him love. The NNPC is keeling over with that delicate emotion. The NTA is transmitting it in pictures and words.

    Of course in politics, we see it in droves. Bukola Saraki says he loves Buhari. The Owu chief, too, who clobbered him electorally and in snide comments would show only love now.

    Atiku, the peripatetic harlot of Nigerian politics, who battled him with war chest after war venom is awash with PMB love.

    The first show of love was the staff of Aso Rock who reported early to work in the spirit of the gangling hero of the day. Soldiers in their high and peacock perches are saluting him in lusts of deference.

    Let us not forget the walks, the advertorials, the politicians who now know that they only can swear by PMB. The ethnic titans, the religious zealots, the men cocooned in conspiracies against the man whom they thought had no chance to topple the simpering hero who now clucks in Otuoke.

    We forget that not long ago, these same persons had the venoms of rhetoric against this man. This is the man who did not have the qualification in the Army. He was the man who was too old, too groggy, too northern, too Muslim, too austere for the times.

    Now, we see the love of Buhari. But the love comes in different incarnations. There are those who love in order to keep their jobs. See EFCC has suddenly woken as the moral avatar, dusting up all sorts of revanchist cases. If Buhari is the man who can change our moral tone, so let us go after the so-called bad guys. It does not matter that under Jonathan we only pretended except when we went after his enemies, like Timipre Sylva.

    The NNPC felt the shadow of love. The pot of gold is the vault of lies. Many stories of fraud tenanted that institution. Buhari is aware. Fear flew in the halls, screamed in the files, boiled in our crude oil, scarred our ears. They wanted to show love, but how? This was one place that the phrase tough love had a new meaning. It was tough to lie about what was clear thieving of the national treasury. Buhari knew about it and he took a first step and dissolved the board. The list of the board members told us what sort of men presided over the kleptomaniac bazaar of our resources.

    Like the denizens of the DSS. No resources of wit to tap in order to show love. Now the president does not want them near him, at least for now. But he will have to use them. In a democracy, the secret service is the fulcrum of security. He knows that. But he is confronting an irony. The bastion of love is the secret service for a leader. But it’s like what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet, love has become the hate. The bard called it “fiend angelical.”

    The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, now says he loves the President. He says he will work with the President. But he is at odds with the President’s directive and his party. He loves the President but humiliates his party. He benefited from a moral sewer of a process that installed him as president. He won a battle, and when his party with the President’s nod said he should conceded offices, he defied. Wasn’t that love, Saraki style?

    He loves the President and he is lying that he gave up his ambition for Buhari as though we were not in this country when he bowed out of the race. He knew better than Atiku that he did not want the humiliation and disaster of primary defeat. He bowed away from public disgrace, not for Buhari’s ambition. How does the PMB, whom he loves, implement his programmes when he, Saraki, cohabits with men who confess antipathy to the landlord of Aso Rock?

    He worked with Atiku, the man who now wants to play bee to Buhari’s honey. He spearheads mutiny so he can be the power Trojan of the APC. How does he explain his actions to his latest hero of today? That he undermines him in order to love him? If he loves him, he should tell his co-conspirator Saraki to yield to the party rule. Both are fair-weather men. They have always been. Within the PDP, or outside. As for Atiku, he never saw an opportunity of self-aggrandisement he did not embrace, even if it meant kissing Lucifer.

    As for the Owu chief, we saw him make a colourful act of tearing his PDP card in public. I hope we do not see, in the near future, another enactment of return. He would brandish a new card as the prodigal come home in a flourish. He did not tear PDP in his heart. He worked, in underhand shadows, with PDP men and Atiku to undermine Buhari. They plotted to make PMB’s early days a tempest. Is that not love, the Ota way? We know how he showed love in the past. Dance with the man’s wife today, oust him tomorrow. Dine pounded yam today, his office dies tomorrow. Remember Okadigbo, Ogbeh, etc.

    PMB will be taking a class in love these days with Judas’ silhouette in the background. He must feel special now that all those who knew him as enemy now bedeck him as the emblem of affection.

    He reminds me of a character in the most ambitious of all novels, War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy’s character was mocked all the time. No one laughed at his joke. He did not belong to the royal class. He was adopted by one of the mainstays of the upper class. He was renounced in love and society. But suddenly he came into a big inheritance. Suddenly Pierre was the most sought after in Russian society, anything he did made men cringe and any joke made them laugh. They craved the largesse of his purse if they sneered secretly at the large heart it came from. His new power became a lesson in understanding people. He eventually knew who loved him and who did not, but he learned later that the world was full of love, if in counterfeit expressions. United States President Harry Truman once said that if you wanted a friend in Washington, “buy a dog.”

    Graham Greene, in a short novel, titled the Third Man, shows how a man can be two at the same time. A man is buried supposedly and all mourn him as this great guy. But he is killed eventually after his lover knew him to be a fraud, the police know him to be a liar and his best friend know him to be a traitor. He dies once but mourned twice. The first fake burial calls him hero. The second knows him as villain.

    So, Buhari will worry who is real or fake among those brandishing love. But the real lovers are those who voted and who fought for him when he was mocked as a gangling zealot of tribe and faith.

  • ‘Collective madness’

    Ironically, Nigeria’s luminary of letters, Nobelist Wole Soyinka, lost the election for the prestigious poetry chair at the University of Oxford for non-poetry reasons. His defeat by British poet Simon Armitage ranks as a stunning literary upset, considering that 80-year-old Soyinka was a clear and comfortable front runner with an impressive number of 149 nominations. Armitage had 54 nominations. The election demonstrated that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” Armitage, 52, polled 1221 votes, while Soyinka got 920 votes, followed by EA Stallings with 918 votes, Haldane Sean (206) and Gregson Ian (75). The Professor of Poetry is, among other things, expected to give a minimum of three lectures a year, for a stipend of £12,000, and the tenure is five years.

    Perhaps the most thought-provoking reaction to the election result and Soyinka’s loss came from Andrew Franklin, who has published the laureate’s work. He reportedly described the outcome as   ”collective madness,” and was quoted as saying, “Why couldn’t Oxford have voted for its first ever black professor of poetry?” Franklin added: “Simon Armitage is good but this is a collective failure of imagination. It just would have been nice to see Oxford do something different. Maybe Oxford is just full of dull old farts who only vote for the obvious. I don’t think they have anything to be proud of here.” The question is: Was Soyinka’s colour a disadvantage?

    The barely disguised hint at possible racism may not be an over-reaction. While the publicised anti-Soyinka factors were his advanced age, his allegedly suspect commitment, and his failure to provide a tenure agenda, the deciding consideration may have been unstated and unspeakable.  As his backers pointed out, the age argument is unsupported by the history of the over 300-year-old position, and it was not obligatory to supply a plan.  On the question of his commitment, Soyinka himself said in self- defence:  ”How curious that anyone would even speculate that I would allow busy and committed people – friends, colleagues and total strangers – to waste their time nominating and campaigning on my behalf for such a prestigious position if I were not serious about contesting.”

    The path of reasoning by elimination leads to that dark possibility of discrimination on the basis of colour. Indeed, it would require a transparent demographic delineation of the electors to disprove or prove the suggestion of racial bias. According to the University, “Voting is by members of Convocation… Convocation consists of all former student members of the University who have been admitted to a degree (other than an honorary degree) of the University, and all members of Congregation (the ‘dons’ parliament’ of the University).” Were there racists among the voters? Or, put differently, how many of the voters were slaves of racism?

    To be fair, the world has progressed to more benign forms of racial prejudice, even to the point of delusion built on the cloudy concept of post-racism. However, the reality of colour-related discrimination is still too real to be unreal.  If Soyinka’s towering literary stature was rubbished by racist dwarfs, it underlines the distance between humanity and a non-racist world. And for a writer known for his passion for the promotion of human rights, it may be an eye-opener for Soyinka that the world of letters is not colour-blind, meaning that the right to skin colour has not become unchallengeable in that supposedly sublime  sphere.

    Was it payback time for Soyinka, the protester who registered his anti-racist punch in his marvellously and magically nuanced famous poem “Telephone Conversation”, first published in 1963? It is understandable that his supporters are puzzled. For a literator who in 1986 became the first black and African winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the world’s ultimate literary recognition and decoration, it is too bad to be true that he failed at Oxford.

    It is worth recalling that the Nobel Committee painted Soyinka as a master of form and content “who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.” There is no question that the accomplishment had the quality of a redeeming feature for the black man in a world corrupted by racism.

    From a romantic perspective, a five-year period as poetry professor at Oxford, which is regarded as perhaps just short of the Nobel, would have been a befitting climax to Soyinka’s writing life. The only qualification is “that candidates be of sufficient distinction to be able to fulfil the duties of the post”. The anti-climatic development raises the question whether Soyinka has suffered a decline in distinction which the Oxford voters validated.

    It is interesting that Soyinka’s rapier wit and broad imagination, as well as his capacity for thoughtful parallelism, were brilliantly communicated in his post-election statement in which he admitted to having been “truly caught up in the excitement generated by this historic union of the poetic and democratic Muses.”  His punch line was delivered with practiced subtlety: “Mind you, if only they’d allowed me to import a small team of our seasoned electoral jugglers from the home front….”

    The reference to Nigeria’s crisis of democratic integrity was unmistakable.  It was Soyinka the poet and playwright, but also Soyinka the political activist. Undeniably, in Soyinka, there is a rare conflation of the artist and the activist at a superlative level; and it is to his credit that in the almost 30 years since he won the Nobel at age 52, he has not gone artistically cold and remains politically warm. It is noteworthy that Soyinka was Armitage’s age when he was crowned.

    It remains to be seen how Armitage will champion the cause of poetry, but his statement submitted ahead of the contest indicated a useful direction. He wrote that he would take advantage of the position “to discuss the situation of poetry and poets in the 21st century, to address the obstacles and opportunities brought about by changes in education, changes in reading habits, the internet, poetry’s decreasing ‘market share’, poetry’s relationship with the civilian world and the (alleged) long, lingering death of the book”.

    Armitage’s anxiety about the future of poetry in what Harold Bloom called “an age of visual overstimulation” is certainly appreciated, but Soyinka’s magnetism and lateral thinking are probably more appropriate for rescuing the genre at this juncture. It looks like the real losers are Oxford University and the art of poetry.