Category: Monday

When the news of Nigeria’s new laurel broke as the GDP icon of Africa, I was interested in the celebrity status for a different reason. I looked for indices. I thought about oil. But they said our status came not because of oil but because we had added other players to the repertoire of our economic drama.

Without oil, all the other indices will pass for little. Oil money provided the capital for the other investments, including agriculture. We live and die by oil as a state, in spite of the greater roles of agriculture, technology and, of course, Nollywood. In oil, we live and move and have our beings. Is it not because of dwindling oil revenue that we cannot pay states their allocation? Yet, if we read the news well, we will worry over what is going on with oil giant Shell. It has decided to sell off its wells in Nigeria. Few people are asking: to whom? If we don’t handle that sale transparently, we shall fall into a bad place. So what oil has given us in GDP, oil may take away in revenue, jobs and other areas of an already tottering economy.

However, everyone likes a little praise here and there. We want to take credit when we do well, just as some persons in government are happy that Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa. But no one wants to be mentioned if we describe that economy as big for nothing. As we select language, so also we select figures. The beauties of words and figures are in the eyes of the beholder.

You can find the words that can make a thing great and the same thing a devil. For instance, an imperiled man can look at a gun and describe it as a weapon of liberation. In another breath, an opponent can condemn it as a murder weapon. The South African athlete, Pistorius, has said he shot his girl friend, Reeva, accidentally. Others say he committed murder. The bottom line is Reeva died. The Bible says money is the root of all evil. The same book says money answers all things.

When the United States fought with Iraq in the era of President George Bush, Sr., missiles were unleashed to Saddam Hussein’s territory. The United States media called them Patriot missiles. When Iraq shot similar weapons, the U.S. media called them scud missiles. Both killed and destroyed. But from the U.S. angle, patriot missiles fulfilled a noble mission of death, while the scud missiles pursued an ignoble mission of death.

So we do with figures. A football team manager once said he could turn a billion dollar profit into a billion dollar loss and vice versa. As Einstein said, it is not the figures that matter but those who count them. And I may add, how they count them. So while GDP made us one of the best in the world, the World Bank says we are at the bottom three of the poorest in the world. So, what statistic do you want? I do not however belong to the ambience of those who say the GDP status is a bad thing. But it is not a good thing until we turn it into prosperity. Until then, it is only numbers. Numbers don’t lie. But numbers don’t put food on the table.

We have seen here how banks turned red accounts into black and the chief executive officers of the banks basked in glamour. They became role models, philanthropists and pastors. Until the ousted CBN chief, Lamido Sanusi, exposed them, we did not know that they were fraudsters and famous debtors in suit and agbada and immaculate syntax and the snob culture of the polished. Of course, they were frontbenchers in Christian crusades against iniquity and they donned our national awards and chieftaincy titles. Our leaders anointed them and our marquee pastors solemnised their paths.

So let no one rejoice at the size of an economy that hoists the same size of suffering. What is the size of our healthcare, or education, or middles class? How many people live on less than one dollar a day? Most Nigerians. Some countries with smaller GDP have power and many of them have better educational systems and health care guarantees.

We cannot have real growth without power and today we pretend in that category. Just after we spent billions of dollars to get DISCOs and GENCOs, we are told things have fallen apart and darkness is still here to stay. That leaves us with oil, the free gift of nature. But it seems that also is in danger. We cannot get good refineries. All we do now is rely on swapping our crude oil for dollar and other products on arrangements known only to the NNPC and the presidency.

To complicate that, we have the story of Shell, the oil giant. Just as we saw due process doomed, I fear that if care is let loose, oil wells managed by Shell for decades will fall into incompetent hands. This is because the oil giant is throwing in the towel and is about to sell off our patrimony. The oil wells belong to Nigerians. If Shell is pressured to sell it without transparency, we shall have what Fela described as “dead body get accident”.

According to reports, some of the bidders include Vertex and LetterOne, Aiteo and Taleveras, MidWestern Oil and Gas with Mart and Notore, Lekoil, Seplat, Transcorp, Sahara Consoritum, etc. Licences known as OMLs are now choice cake and the pedigrees of the owners of the bidding companies must be scrutinised. Who are they? What are their links with government? We must know whether they have strong competences. That is one of the critical agonies with our DISCOs and GENCOs.

We did not do due diligence. Unlike the telecoms companies, the power deals were handed over to the friends of the powers that be. They thought it was all gold in the power sector. They got the DISCOS and GENCOs and they were disappointed to see dross instead of gold. They felt like a bridegroom who did not know his bride well and choked on body odour at night. The DISCOS and GENCOs complain every week. The victims are the common Nigerians who sweat it out with their I better pass my neighbour power generating sets when they can afford it. The Frankenstein wonder has become their Frankenstein monster.

The NNPC owns 55 percent of the OMLs while Shell owns the balance with AGIP and ENI. I know the presidency and the oil minister must have voices in this matter.

The National Assembly has to intervene and probe the financial profiles of the bidders. We don’t want government loan guarantees for them or those who woke overnight into money whose sources we cannot verify.

If the selloffs are not transparent, the consequences will be dire. If they lack strong and resilient financial bases and lack competences, we shall wake up one morning and discover that our oil wells cannot yield oil because those in charge are still working on the technicalities of drilling and shopping for those who can do the job. Today, the federal government has complained that it does not have enough money to pay states even though oil revenue is soaring higher than the budget benchmark. Imagine the scenario when we don’t even have the oil to sell.

Shell is selling off because of pipeline vandalisation, oil theft, oil spills and restive host communities. The next complaint might be just like the story of Nigeria with great GDP side by side with great hunger. It will be a parody of poet Samuel Coleridge’s line: oil, oil everywhere but not a drop to drill.

If it is one thing to be without power, have we imagined Nigeria without both power and oil! Our oil will be big for nothing, just like the big-for-nothing billions of dollars spent on big equipment that has given us darkness for electricity.

It has no objection to due process unless it suspends Justice Agumagu before issuing a query. ‘Obey before complain’ is as true with soldiers as with the NJC

Then T.S. Eliot wrote his play, Murder in the Cathedral, quite a few literary neophytes did not grasp his idea. They thought he was writing about murder in the house of God. He was.

But the sort of murder he targeted was not the superficial blood fest of a human killing another in the holy of holies. I have encountered instances of such shallow zeal in Nigerian newspapers. Eliot, like all great artists, was more enthralled with metaphor.

If Eliot were to locate his play in today’s Nigeria, he would have crafted murders in many temples. One of them is the National Judicial Council.

He would have recast how that august body murdered justice in its hallowed place: judiciary. It is a cathedral of justice without safety nets. If it is a safe place, why should justice die in its sanctum? Why should the righteous run into its tower and not be safe?

That happened in the story of retired Justice Ayo Salami, where the chicanery between that body and the presidency tossed a man of such heft and legal carriage into a cesspool of judicial miscarriage.

It is one of the sour regions of Nigeria’s contemporary legal history. We inflict a wound in the image of justice and allow the comely visage to contort into a cadaverous face. It is ugly like Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, a satiric swipe at elite lack of grace.

Now in Rivers State, where a measure of calm has returned after the inanity of a presidential busybody and blabbermouth, the NJC has insisted on wielding the power of a king in a democracy.

The matter began last year in an apparently routine way, like one of those irritations one expects to peter out with time. But when Peter Agumagu’s nomination met roadblocks, it became the case of the NJC denying justice in the same way Peter the apostle denied Christ.

The issue is simple. A quartet of the governor, state judicial service commission, the NJC and the house of assembly decide who becomes the chief judge of a state. All three decided in favour of Agumagu except the NJC. The law calls for the most senior member of the bench for the post. By all accounts, Agumagu, who had served as chief judge before becoming president of the state customary court, is the methuselah of the court.

The NJC said no. The governor took the matter to court and the court ruled that the wisdom of Solomon picked methuselah in the person of Justice Agumagu.

But it seems the NJC does not understand the path of justice in this matter. It is not interested in age. It is only interested in “under-age”. Hence it chose D.W. Okocha, a junior, to topple Agumagu. It does not subscribe to coups except when the oga at the top is not their man. It believes in the court system but it must be the court it chooses. It will accept any verdict except that of the federal high court.

It has no objection to due process unless it suspends Justice Agumagu before issuing a query. ‘Obey before complain’ is as true with soldiers as with the NJC.

It does not matter when there is a conflict of interest, as some persons have wondered whether a member of the council is a relative of its nominee. The NJC believes in exception as rule, rather than the rule with exception. Is that why it has particularised the case of Rivers State when similar cases have been glossed over in other states? The cathedral body defies persons who have started to perceive the NJC as a presidential poodle. Who does not ape the virtue of loyalty? So, like Ruth in the Bible, we can hear them bellow, “Wherever the presidency goes, there you will find us.”

Is the NJC not an advocate of federalism, and is that not why it has allowed some other states to have their judges? It only treats Rivers State differently because it has to follow the canon. The canon allows for exception to the rule. Goodwill is important to the NJC, but not like strong will. After all, did Shakespeare not say “lawless are they that make wills their law?”

It believes in institutional integrity, hence the law must serve it rather than the people. They are cannibals of law, and what is wrong with that? We must build strong institutions. Did the president not say so?

In spite of uproar about the partiality of the grand body, the NJC kept a venerable silence. I wonder what happened to the venerable silence of old? It is not fighting shy in a public spat with a governor.

The august body decides that it will not follow its own precedent. In the case of Ayo Salami, it recommended suspension to the president, who signed off with a cynical glad hand. Again, if the NJC recommended suspension to a president in the case of a federal judge, why did the NJC not do the same to a governor with regards to a state judge? It could have written its own recommendation to the hard-charging Governor Rotimi Amaechi.

It could be so grandly worded. A sampler: “The National Judicial Council hereby recommends that Your Excellency should suspend Justice Peter Agumagu for allowing himself to be sworn in and even allowing you to recommend him as the chief judge of Rivers State. We also reiterate that the right person for the post is the one you rejected, the honourable D. W. Okocha. Signed.”

The NJC could still pen the letter, and I am sure, Governor Amaechi would lustily enjoy such a love letter and reply with the clinical effusion of a tiger. He might reply, with laconic words such as, “I cannot be expected to go back to my vomit. It is against my fate as a Catholic.” The public may even hear from Governor Amaechi before the NJC thinks of any response.

The NJC lords may not know it. In their lofty gowns and solemn halls and exalted chairs, they already think of themselves as monarchs of the law. Like the law of the Medes and Persia, what they say cannot be changed. “So let it be written, so let it be done,” was their refrain in the ungainly glory of that era.

We often hear of the court of kings. Here we have kings of the court, a misnomer that suits the ego of some judiciary bigwigs enmeshed in the travesty of law and society. Of course, the NJC knows it is above the law; hence it would not respect the decision of a federal court.

The story began in an obscure room in England. The ignominious fall of the Abacha junta foreshadowed a new era in Nigeria. Like bivouacking armies, the habitués of that room had shifted their tents from home to a stranger’s land. There and elsewhere in the western world, they pitched battles for democracy against an era of the butchery and finality of a tyrant’s order. IBB first represented it and preceded Abacha of the Gestapo, goggle frame and the fame of excited whores.

The unraveled Abacha era meant it was time to go home for this man. Others did not trust the so-called promise. They doubted democracy would return. To them, it was a false dawn, shadowy with booby traps. Isolation and battle from a distance had imparted them with an awful comfort. Better to grieve and throw lobs of bombs from outside than risk the fates of the then lamented dead. Kudirat Abiola, Alfred Rewane, Bagauda Kaltho, Shehu Yar Adua, et al.

It was not fear; it was realism. They had love for country. But as Chinua Achebe noted in his Things Fall Apart, it is from the house of the coward that fingers are pointed to the ruins of a brave man’s house. They were not cowards, but they had had enough ruins to lead them to the path of caution.

But this man was not for the popular caution of his fellow fighters for democracy. After a futile drama of cajoling, persuading and jostling for ideas, he surrendered any effort to sway them along his path of bravado.

“I want to go and see my mother,” was the clincher for Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu. No one could argue against that sentimental salvo. They surrendered to mama’s boy. He left them in London, back to the land of his birth for a rebirth of politics of the progressives. He did not want to stay back like a fighting romantic. Not like the Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda, who would not return home 29 years after the Second World War was fought and won.

For Tinubu, the war was won, that war against the soldiers. If Heraclitus knew that the story of life is battle, he knew another theatre was about to brew at home. He wanted his rifle loaded.

He craved the solitude, or what Alan Sillitoe called the loneliness of a long distance runner. He had to win but he had to trust his gifts and conscience. That capacity to trust his judgments and instincts and win in unlikely circumstances has come to typify his public life.

We have seen this in the past decade. We saw it in his decision to defy Obasanjo while other Southwest bigwigs of the AD followed the president’s coattail. They were caught napping seeking the oxygen of survival while the Owu chief swept all the states for PDP. Lagos State with Asiwaju Tinubu became an island of the progressives. We saw it when he hit on the bright idea that independent power projects would simplify power. He was ignored, but it is the wisdom of the day.

When his years as governor were in their last flames, he placed his cards on one Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN. He weathered a bitter and divisive storm from within his inner sanctum and outside interlopers. But that choice of the governor of example has remained the best decision to date of his public life.

With the captain came a whirlwind of progressive onslaught in governance in the country. The Adam of change in Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, has stunned the state of red dust and doughty warriors with his forays of spectacular achievements in education, roads and the environment. Then came the other states in the Southwest. Ekiti State under Kayode Fayemi signposted a welfare programme for the elderly and unleashed infrastructural renewal. The State of Osun under Rauf Aregbesola is turning a supposedly backwoods state into a city on the hill, with his audacious blend of educational innovations, infrastructural breadth and policies of compassion. Later came the duo of Abiola Ajimobi in Oyo State and Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State. All over Ogun State are testimonials of roads and bridges constructed in such breakneck speed that states with fabled riches have not matched in eight years of performance. You just have to visit Ibadan to see how one man’s tenacity and devotion can change a society. Ibadan has been liberated from the squalor and timid vision of all the governors in that state since 1999.

All these men stand for the opposition in national politics. They have governed with a greed for change. I wonder what their predecessors think now when they see what these men have done.

How different would the nation have been if Asiwaju Tinubu did not act alone in that sultry room in London, or if he had tagged along with his fellows with Obasanjo? We would be a nation of one party, with the opposition clawing and snarling impotently from the sidelines. The same is said of France today about Charles de Gaulle, whom historians have described as “always alone”. He is the most remarkable Frenchman since the small general from Corsica.

It was in that spirit that he embarked, about a year ago, upon a mission to build an opposition party. That has given the nation the All Progressives Congress. This is, as it stands, a titillating proposition. He has with his accustomed brio, empathy and fiery dexterity brought together the most formidable opposition in the nation’s history. As it is, this is a stellar achievement. All the other coalitions in our history, from UPGA to PPA, were soap bubbles because the partisans could go back to their default homes. APC presents a fait accompli. It has weathered the disorienting logic of its critics that it is a pigsty, accommodating the scum of prostitutes. Those who say that lack historical judgment. All great political acts were no moments of purity. Ask Churchill who coalesced enemies into his war cabinet, including those who would have sold out to Hitler. Or Lincoln, who ran a government of rivals as documented in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team Of Rivals. They forgot that even Awolowo’s Action Group was a whirlpool of strange ideological bedfellows as historian Sklar and even Duddley tell us. Charles de Gaulle, the statesman of rigidity, accommodated communists when he set up his government.

The party is a winnowing machine and it ultimately yields to the organising genius of its leaders. This is the task that Tinubu faces and the jury is still out on that. If he succeeds, then it would be his greatest decision. So far, except his critics don’t want to admit it, he is the most influential citizen of this era. He is a picture of endurance and wise daring. As his foes come at him, he soars and fattens like John Webster’s black birds in a dark and stormy cloud.

As he marked his 62nd birthday, he focused on the common man. Yet he is not a common man. But few leaders combine his contradiction of a “patrician” breeding with the common touch like him. He can speak the language of the CEO with the same assiduity that he chants the rhythm of the Mushin meat seller. Street wise, elite savvy, he is a double threat who can descend from the sky and erupt from the earth at once, to paraphrase American journalist Roger Rosenblatt. He has the skill to speak anyone’s language and rally others together. We need that kind of temperament and talent in an age of religious schisms and tribal loyalties. If that is his gift today to Nigeria, it is also his challenge. Happy birthday.