The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Are the masses 419?

    Are the masses 419?

    The news seems impossible. It is against the grain. The masses stole from the elite as we witnessed in two banks. It is what sociologists and philosophers would describe as counterintuitive. Is it the masses who corrupt the state or the state that corrupt the people? Can the masses steal? Is it not, from time, the province of the elite to put their fingers in the people’s cooky jar? We call them the masses, but we don’t imagine them amassing wealth. Amassing is a filthy word, sentenced to the big man who picks the people’s pocket. But for the scenario to be reversed? That is something unusual.

    When the masses steal, they do it against public trust? The public outwitting the public. It is not only suicide; it is also incest in the open square. It is the underbelly undermining itself.

    Lotus Bank is one of the new generation banks. It may not have the capitalization of the marque brands of finance. It is not UBA, Zenith, GTB, or even the oldies known as First Bank or Union. But they have come to play. Or, shall we say, come to be played?

    But it did not happen to Lotus alone. It is not an epidemic, or else one would have said Lotus, unlike the flower, gave off a foul scent. It happened to another new generation bank, the Taj Bank.

    Taj faltered in July this year. Lotus’ was in 2024. For Taj, it was no consolation that its loss was less terrifying at N900 million. The Taj story was too embarrassing for any public tears.

     After all, money can bleed, but it does not cry. Taj kept the noise down, the coins jingling sober within its vaults.

    There is no public record on how many customers stole, and whether there was any pursuit of such public perverts. But the Lotus story smells like poisoned scent, like a fart in a flower shop.

    What enabled this ignoble hour? A glitch upset the banking system into a breakdown. The banking falcon could not hear the falconer. Payments fell apart. Anyone could withdraw how much they wanted and transfer how much they wanted. Mere anarchy was loosed. Innocence was lost in this ceremony of pillage.

    So, in the words of Poet W.B. Yeats, “The best (customers may have lacked) all conviction/ while the worst are full of passionate intensity (to steal).”

    For Lotus Bank, the sum was N1.13 billion. A nifty penny, even for a bank. The number of thieves? 718 customers. In this era of sanctifying averages, how much did one person steal? N6.3 million. A nifty penny for any civilian not named Dangote or politician. It is astounding because we know that the average Nigerian does not have up to N50k in their accounts. It means some have gone home with as much as N20 million. What a pay day, or what a steal day. Or shall we say, what a people’s day?

    What might the people have had in mind when they made a run at their bank. They probably were fantasising about that shirt, that shoe, even that moment in a plush hotel in Ikoyi. Not a plate of pounded yam and egusi soup. By this act, these people failed the poor test.

    The poor would steal to eat, to pay rent, for transportation. Not a N10 million pay day. Even if it is rent, the poor does not rent a N6 million flat. So, how are the people different from the elite they gripe about?

    That is not the only part. Lotus Bank has sued 45 banks in order to retrieve their money. Is it funny? The elite are fighting the elite to resolve the crime of the people. Usually, when the elite fight, it is to steal from the people. Like when politicians fight, they claim it is on the people’s behalf. They fight for spoils. The people rejoice over crumbs while the dueling elites fatten. Here, the people’s cheeks are aglow at the expense of the elite who fight over who made away with the loot.

    It is an inversion of a morality tale. The good guys are now the bad guys. But who is the good or bad guy? It is what Martha Nussbaum, an American philosopher, calls the “fragility of goodness.” Are we good because it is innate, or because the power of circumstances lionise us, make us saints or heroes or even warriors? Is it the law that tames us into good husbands, good secretaries, good accountants.

     Left to ourselves, we might be monsters. These issues obsessed Greek plays like Aeschylus’ Agammenmon and Sophocles’ Antigone. Nussbaum muses often in that book on Aristotelian ethics. “If there is no God, everything is permitted,” asserted Russian writer Dostoyevsky.

    So, in the blindness of a glitch, the people could show their true colour. They could steal and get away with it. Maybe not so fast. What technology takes away, technology can also give back. Maybe that is why the Lotus Bank is suing its competitors. If the people are knocking the heads of the elites against each other, we wait to see when the giants collide. Will the people, as grass, suffer? Lee Kwan Yu said when two giants make love, the grass also suffers. It is true of banks. Routinely, they romance in interbank transactions that happen every second. It is endless coming and going. The people interrupted at Lotus.

    Does it mean there is 419 in the people? A few years ago, a protest was a disguise for open robbery. During EndSars, they raided food warehouses, destroyed BRT buses in Lagos, decimated a mall. Those who took bags of rice stepped over those who got nothing. They did not say, ‘let’s share, we are all poor together.’ Even the poor eat alone.

    The most intriguing paradox is that the money at the bank is not, technically, the bank’s. It is other people’s money. It is a sacred trust. The people put the money there. The people stole it. They stole from themselves. Blessed be the people.

    It only speaks to a trait: the foolish majority. Hence, philosopher John Stuart Mill laments “a few wise and many foolish individuals, called the public.”

    Yet, it is the same majority that cries foul at official corruption, at stolen and unaccounted billions. They hide. But if Lotus finds them out after the lawsuit, will they be named? If they run an advert of 718 thieves, who will shame them? No one knows them. If it is a senator, a governor, a minister, it makes screaming headlines. The streets also scream. One prominent politician’s error is a disgrace; the people’s collective folly bears no name or face. This is not a shame society anymore. Since we left the village state, we lost shame.

    The public space is mainly urban and, as Claude Ake asserted, it has been privatized by the elite. Positions and offices are prebends, places held in trust for some higher power. If they are held in trust or on trust, they are not for trust. The public do not own the public space and they cannot be held responsible for whatever goes wrong there.

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    Glitches are no new to modern commerce. We saw them at Heathrow Airport. PayPal was no customer’s pal when a glitch put 10 billion euros in jeopardy a few years ago. An American customer woke up to become a $92 quadrillion man. The zeroes behind 92 dazed him. He then playfully fantasised about clearing the United States National debt and buying his favorite baseball team. Before the glitch joy, the man had had few transactions over a thousand bucks. The bank returned him to his humble dollars.

    It is this humility of low estate that the Lotus customers did not have. They became instant megalomaniacs. They always were but the opportunity just opened their eyes to who they always were. Maybe they did not rise up to that self-knowledge, a fatal flaw of tragic heroes.

    Some may assert that the poor stole because the elite made them. As novelist Samuel Butler is quoted as saying, “the society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.” We can expand it to mean, the elite prepares the crime, the people commit it. It is a collaboration. This makes either party guilty.

    These glitch thieves are the same people who vote, who protest, who fulminate in the media, who grab the lawmaker for being a thief. What would playwright Bertolt Brecht say today about his poem in which he asserts that the leaders held a meeting and they had a vote of no confidence in the people? They decided to dissolve the people and elect another one.

    With these 718, shall we say the masses are 419? Was Brecht right that we should dissolve the people? In his play Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s masses reject their own good. In the Bible, the people grab a king in Saul after a prophecy that Saul will whip their backs sore. Perhaps, hence French philosopher and novelist Jean Jacque Rouseau said, “force them to be free.”

     Bottomline: the people are not innocent.

    After all, the masses have perennially voted, by their own admissions, thieves and scoundrels. In democracy, it does not make sense to dissolve the people. In tyranny, it does not make sense either. The people are the state, no apologies to Louis XIV.

    We have to live with them, hug them, scold them, beat them up but accept them all the same because they are us.

  • The prerogative of revenge

    The prerogative of revenge

    The problem with revenge is that it never succeeds. That, sometimes, is the problem of official justice. Everything often tends to be based on the law, but law is only a part of justice. We however tend to equate, tragically, law with justice.

     Henry David Thoreau pondered this when he wrote that, “The law never made anyone a whit more just.”

    The idea of the prerogative of mercy that the president exercises is to bring a human, softer element to the hard face of the law.

     It is the story of crime and punishment. No one wants a criminal, especially of the hardened variety, in their neighbourhood. The murderer, kidnapper, robber, drug baron, et al, represent the poisoned scum, the scoundrels in our bloodstream.

    We want them dead. We want them locked away. Not their faces, not their sound, not their scents, or their breaths must pollute the air in our garden. So, when the president pardoned some of them, the impulse to yell was overwhelming.

    Even though we would quote Alexander Pope’s line: “To err is human, to forgive is divine,” it becomes abstract, even cruel when it comes close to us. Yet, we are a religious people, and all the faiths applaud pardon. All love God for his forgiveness of our sins. But we are not willing to let it work for the worst among us. We want God to forgive man.

    But many do not understand a number of points. One, the prerogative means it is a special power granted by the law, and that means the president can exercise without being questioned. It also assumes that the president would not act without reason.

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     Two, mercy also means the beneficiary is not innocent. Mercy is for the sinner, not even the sinned against. In his case, he set a committee under the office of the attorney general, Lateef Fagbemi, and it unfurled a list of 175 citizens.

    Then the uproar. It shows our fears, and our sense of righteousness. But mercy is to cleanse, not to criminalise. We are seeing the list as endorsement. There is a reason the prison is called a correctional facility. It is to correct.

     In the United States, it had a puritan tone, and it was called a penitentiary; that is,  a place for bad folks to gain penitence.

    Prisons are not for saints. Mercy is not for saints. The best abode for mercy, therefore is for the sinner. Christ said: “I come not for the righteous, but sinners.”

    Many know little about the names. We do not know their journeys. We just know that they have done bad things. Have they turned the corner? Are they undergoing a process of penitence, or becoming better souls? The process of pardon is not random? They are recommended, and it is based on those who know them, and evidence of progress they might have undergone since their conviction.

    One sore point is Maryam Sanda, who slaughtered her husband. She was recommended for pardon on the request of her father in law, who said she should be released to care for her two children. Those who know her say she has exercised remorse. If justice is to revenge, then we are overlooking another definition of mercy. That is, mercy as a rescue effort. Shall we destroy the mother and the two children? Or shall we save the two children with the pardon of a possibly repentant mother?

    What we are showing is probably not justice, but revenge. The mob is angry because it is trying to exercise its own prerogative of revenge. That is why the best example is that of Christ and the adulterous woman. “He who has no sin should cast the first stone.” The law saw its restraint in mercy immediately.

    In another instant, Christ was about to die, the robber beside him asked, “Lord, remember me when thou comest to thy Kingdom.” The Lord replied, “I say unto thee today, thou shalt be with me in paradise.”

    He was reflecting the power of mercy over law and over judgment. Remember in the book of Exodus, the mercy seat is above the ark of covenant. That means we must have the law, but mercy is superior. If we do not accept mercy for the worst among us, it means judgment without mercy. Apostle James says mercy prevails over judgment. James and Christ reflected on the mercy seat.

    The law is good, but law is brutal. We often speak of the spirit of the law, because the letter of the law, like the ark of covenant, can kill. It killed Uzzah in the Old Testament. He did not enjoy mercy. Hence John said, the “law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” We no longer live in the world of an eye for an eye, which makes everyone blind. But of the other cheek.

    In his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoeyevsky muses on the meaning of the word jurisdiction.

     A character wondered if there could be a neat divide between church and state even if the law says it. The jurisdiction could be in the mind, and where the power of church may go beyond the temple. The temple is the mind and so it is difficult to define.

    For instance, if the magistrate is beholden to the mercy of his faith more than the strict adherence to law, shall we say the legal jurisdiction has power over the judge? The west borrowed the church and state concept from the Islamic States around the Crusades.

    Shakespeare defined mercy in one of the soulful perorations of his poesy in Merchant of Venice. “The quality of mercy is not strained./ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. / ‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes/ The thronèd monarch better than his crown./ His scepter shows the force of temporal power,/ The attribute to awe and majesty/ Wherein doth sit / the dread and fear of kings, / But mercy is above this sceptered sway. /It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings. /It is an attribute to God himself. /And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice.”

    Here we go. If it is like the gentle rain, the place beneath is hard, like a hardened criminal. It is also a testament to a society that when it gives mercy, it receives mercy. A sour society shall not enjoy the clemency of time.

     After the First World War, Parisians mobbed the defeated German delegation for the Treaty of Versailes. They threw stones and hurled abuses, and asked for revenge. They said they should squeeze them till their “kids squeaked.” The air of revenge did not cleanse Europe. It brought the Second World War and Hitler and the bloodiest slaughter in history.

    The French also, under Charles de Gaulle, inaugurated what was known as epuration or the purges or purification when the society turned on the collaborators when Germany occupied France during World War II. Thousands were sentenced to execution, public disgrace, and women’s heads were shaved in public for sleeping with German soldiers.  It was not justice but revenge. Its scar still haunts the souls of the republic today.

    Nobel Laureate Albert Camus, who was for the purges until he recoiled at its bloodletting, said: “it is human justice with its tremendous defects.”

    Justice Minister Fagbemi has said the list may be reviewed. It is a response to feedback. The irony is that those in uproar are not even in the mood to forgive the forgiver if they made a few errors. Again, it is still within the prerogative of the president to review or not to. Whatever the case, those who are pardoned, may not take the disgrace off their images. It is a stain they will never overcome years after they step out of jail. It is like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment when the murderer never knows peace even though he walks free on the streets. Or Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, in which the sinner carries the letter A on her chest as a forever indictment.

  • Atiku, Pitobi and their hero

    Atiku, Pitobi and their hero

    I wonder why Pitobi and Atiku are not saying anything today about their darling economist in Argentina. Remember not long ago, they made the Argentine President Javier Milei their hero. He is the rightwing fellow who would not float the currency, but decided to change the economy without the proper pills. Well, he is in trouble.

    He is now on his knees to President Donald Trump to help him or he will lose the election next time.

     The U.S. President decided to gift him with $20 billion just to keep the peso alive and pay some of the bills. The interest rates are high and inflation is roiling. Job reports are not flattering. That is what the fellows Pitobi and Atiku wanted to do here.

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    President Milei is a coward because he cannot do what President Tinubu has done. That is, to float the currency and face the inevitable headwinds head on. As they say, you can’t make omelettte without breaking an egg. He does not want the consequences of wise daring. He is not ready for the challenges of leadership, just like his cheerleaders on our soil.

  • Leaked DSS terror alert

    Leaked DSS terror alert

    What interest was the leaking of the security alert on the planned terror attack by Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP) on Ondo and Kogi states meant to serve? And who was responsible for the leak?

    These are the puzzles raised by the circulation of a memo from the Department of State Services (DSS) to the 32 Artillery Brigade of the Nigerian Army, Akure, Ondo State on the planned terror attacks on the two states.

    In that memo, the DSS alerted the army in Ondo State of credible intelligence confirming plans by ISWAP to launch coordinated attacks on several communities. The agency specifically listed Eriti Akoko and Oyin Akoko in the Akoko North-West Local Government Area as well as Owo town in the Owo Local Government Area as possible targets.

    The terrorists were said to have already commenced surveillance on soft targets in the affected areas. “Intelligence confirmed plans by members of ISWAP to carry out coordinated attacks on communities in Ondo and Kogi states anytime soon. The level of security alert across the identified communities should be immediately scaled up to prevent loss of lives and property”, the memo stated.

    The leaked alert came at a time the authorities have been fighting strenuously, to correct reports in the international media of alleged genocide against Christians. This reality instructs that the leak should not be allowed to escape public scrutiny. Not with the current altercations between the special adviser to the president on Media and Policy Communication, Daniel Bwala and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). Both incidents share common link in view of their capacities to resurrect heated discussions on interfaith relations in the country.

     So, what interest was the leak meant to serve: reinforce such claims given the agenda of ISWAP or underscore the pro-activeness of the security agencies to nip such potential treats in the bud?

     Whichever prism the matter is viewed, the development is bound to evoke sad feelings of the heinous crimes of the terrorists while pursuing their weird agenda. Such feelings will do no good to current efforts to correct narratives in the foreign media on alleged Christian persecution in the country. ISWAP as a brand name is bound to reinforce such claims.

    Though the insurgent group had in 2022 attacked St Francis Catholic Church, Owo in Ondo State leaving in its trail the death of 40 worshippers and injuring many others, that was perhaps, the first time it was extending its attacks to the southern part of the country. With the said credible intelligence unveiling their plans to attack Ondo and Kogi states which shares borders with about 10 other states, the fear is that the terrorist group may be spreading to other states in the south.

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    That is the foreboding signal from the exposed DSS memo. It depicts ISWAP as unrelenting in pursuing its weird ideology despite the efforts of the security agencies to contain their menace. The report is said to be based on actionable intelligence. Good! What was required in the circumstance was for the relevant security agencies including the DSS to have moved into quick action and apprehend the masterminds of the plan. That is the standard expectation in such sensitive security threats.

    But nothing of such is of public knowledge. Neither does the evidence in the public space give an inkling of that given the speed with which the leaked memo hit the pubic space with little time for the military to act. The memo was dated October 20 but barely two days after, it had already made media headlines. So, what time did the army have to act before the alert was leaked?

    Or was the memo deliberately leaked by to procure public confidence in the capacities of our security agencies to rise to the challenges posed by ISWAP? That objective is better served by the apprehension and possible public parading of those identified with the surveillance on soft targets. It takes humans to identify soft targets and mount surveillance on them. It also takes humans to detect those behind them.  Why no arrests were made is behind the suspicion that there may be more to the leak than ordinarily meets the eyes.

    Ironically, the leak only succeeded in creating panic among the public as evidenced by the confidence building meetings by the Ondo State Police Command and assurances from the governments of Ondo and Kogi states.

    Apparently worried by the impact of the leaked memo on its citizens, the Kogi State government had sought to rationalise the report “as a step towards victory noting that it demonstrates the proactive work of the DSS and other sister agencies in protecting Nigerians from criminal elements”. 

    Ondo State government said it is part of routine intelligence report shared regularly among security agencies and the government to identify and prevent potential threats. It touched on the propriety of the leak when it assured citizens that the report was already being acted upon by the relevant security agencies with adequate measures to ensure public safety and security in the state.

    The statements from Ondo and Kogi State governments contain obvious rationalizations for the leaked memo. The one commended it as evidence of the pro-activeness of the security agencies in identifying and eliminating potential threats. While the other said the memo was already being acted upon with adequate measures for safety and security taken.

    My reading of these interventions is that the memo may have been deliberately leaked to show that the security agencies are doing their work efficiently. That could as well be. But the leakage without evidence of arrested masterminds diminishes the credibility of the narrative.

    Even then, its timing is wrong. Coming at a time the government is contending with allegations of Christian persecution from the international community, the alert will only resurrect such feelings and throw spanners in the wheels of those efforts. That is perhaps, the dimension those who see the leaked memo as evidence of the pro-activeness of the security agencies may not have considered. The weight of this dimension diminishes whatever credit the security agencies may seek to take of the exposed plot.

    The overall interest of the country would have been better served had the memo been kept out of public view. But in seemingly seeking to take glory, we have succeeded in creating panic by drawing attention to the unrelenting weird desire by ISWAP to spread its terror agenda on the rest of the society.

    This also bears correlation with the avoidable altercation between Bwala and CAN on his interpretation of the outcome of their discussions when he visited their secretariat to get their view on alleged persecution and genocide against Christians in the country.  Things turned sour when CAN issued a statement describing the Presidency’s version of the meeting which gave the impression that the association dismissed claims of Christian genocide in Nigeria, as “completely untrue and unfair”.

    The clarification by CAN did not help whatever advantage Bwala sought to take of that visit. If that visit never held, CAN may have opted to maintain its silence and allow the authorities sort themselves out. Bwala’s apparent overzealousness dragged them into the fray with unpalatable outcomes.

  • Between Gumi and Sowore

    Between Gumi and Sowore

    Two separate events penultimate week, drew attention to the responses of Nigerian authorities to the festering multi-dimensional insecurity in the country. The first was the peace agreement brokered by the United States of America (USA) which ushered in a ceasefire and release of hostages in the two-year old war between Israel and Hamas.

    Though Nigeria had no role in the agreement leading to the cessation of hostilities, albeit temporarily, Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi saw parallels between that event and possible solutions to the unabating banditry in the country. In a Facebook post, he had said, “Peace between Israel and Hamas they term as terrorist brokered by USA. Who said there is no peace with terrorists? Make peace with bandits and let us have peace”.

    The reading of that comparison is that, if Israel can enter into a peace accord with a known terrorist organisation like the Hamas, there is no reason the Nigerian authorities cannot work out a peace plan with the bandits and restore order in the country. There is some sense in it.

    It is also suggestive of Gumi’s frustrations with the current military campaign against banditry. He did not disclose the shape of the peace proposal. But the fiery Islamic scholar is known to have at different times called for amnesty for the bandits to lay down their arms.

    Engaging in peaceful negotiations with the bandits would seem plausible especially if issues to the conflict are clearly known. But do the bandits have issues to resolve with the Nigerian state? If yes, what are those issues? I shall return to it.

    The second is the proposed peaceful protest march to Aso Rock Villa on October 20, by activist and publisher of Sahara Reporters, Omoyele Sowore for the unconditional release of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

    Though Sowore had some weeks back, made public his intention to galvanise support for the campaign, he has been visibly mobilising for the protest march. Available reports indicate that he has been securing the buy-in of some notable Nigerians including students’ bodies against the continued incarceration of Kanu in the past four years.

    In a viral video in which he appeared with the special counsel to Kanu, Aloy Ejimakor, among other activists, Sowore was seen querying the rationale for Kanu’s continued detention in the face of the clemency granted some categories of convicts among the 172 Nigerians pardoned for various offences. He is contending that if the heinous crimes committed by some of the convicts could be pardoned under the president’s prerogative of mercy, there does not seem further justification for Kanu not to benefit from such reprieve.

    There is a convergence of views between Gumi and Sowore on the path to resolving the insecurity in the country. Gumi believes bandits could still be engaged to lay down their arms and embrace peace despite being termed a terrorist organisation. This to him promises a better approach to ending the scourge of banditry that has left sorrow and awe in parts of the northwest.

    Gumi may have been led to this position by his knowledge of the bandits, given that a few years ago, he visited their camps in Zamfara forests where he interfaced with some of their leaders. Some of the bandits’ leaders who spoke during that visit cited cattle rustling, attacks by the military and being beaten up by the indigenous people of the state while on the road as their grievances.

    Then also, Gumi had called on the federal government to grant amnesty to enable them lay down their arms and embrace peace. But that did not happen apparently because of the difficulty in deciphering their proper grouse with the government, except the military attacks to contain their menace.

    But banditry has since metastasized with the government unable to contain the monster. This has compelled communities in some of the affected states to enter into some form of peace accords with the bandits for peace to reign. The most recent was the accord in the Subuwa Local Government Area of Katsina State in which traditional rulers and communities engaged directly with some of the bandits to foster dialogue and peace. Before now, a traditional ruler in one of the states was suspended but later reinstated for entering into similar peace accord with the bandits to allow local farmers access to their farms. Nobody can give a vivid account of the efficacy of such ad hoc peace agreements.

    But their lure inexorably highlights the helplessness of the local people in the hands of the bandits. And in existential challenges like this, it is difficult to fault those entering into such agreements in the face of the inability of the governments to maintain law and order in the affected communities. When Gumi canvassed amnesty or peace accord with the bandits, he may have been guided by this reality.

    The case of the IPOB and Kanu is more straightforward in the sense that the leadership is identifiable and their cause known as well. But the grouse Sowore and all those rooting for the IPOB leaders’ release have is with his continued incarceration for over four year without conviction by the courts. Sowore argues that with some of the names that benefitted from presidential clemency, it has become difficult to find justification for Kanu’s continued detention.

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    Expectedly, issues have been raised from government quarters regarding the propriety of such demands with the current court case in which Kanu is standing trial for alleged terrorism. Some other private individuals have even gone to the length of holding Kanu allegedly responsible for the killings in the southeast following the insecurity that trailed the self-determination agitations. They would want the courts to sort out his case before the issue of pardon could arise. They are all entitled to their views.

    But such antagonistic views fail to state how his conviction and possible jail will resolve the insecurity in the region, especially when weighed against the non-kinetic strategies of the same government to Boko Haram insurgency. Kanu has been in the custody of the DSS for over four years now and arraigned in various courts without being convicted.

    There is nothing preventing the committee on the prerogative of mercy from recommending his release among the 172 persons granted presidential clemency. There is also nothing preventing the president releasing him in the overall national interest if he decides to do so. If four years of detention and trials could to resolve the insecurity in the southeast, it remains to be conjectured what a jail term can do.

    Besides, the demand for a political solution to the Kanu saga is not new. Nearly everybody that matters in the southeast had at various times lent their unequivocal voices for the release of Kanu to deny oxygen to the band of criminals hiding under IPOB to commit crimes.

    The Ohanaeze Ndigbo sent delegations to the immediate past president to give guarantees for his freedom. But the most touching was the delegation led by first republic minister and elder statesman, Mbazulike Amechi, to late President Buhari on the eve of his 94th birthday in 2022 pleading for the release of Kanu to him as a birthday gift.

    There is nothing wrong in Kanu benefitting from the presidential clemency as part of the solutions to the insecurity in the southeast. The parallels drawn by Gumi and Sowore should not be wished away. Not with subsisting challenges in containing the nation’s insecurity.

  • King of tractor

    King of tractor

    He is named the king of tractors. Governor Mohammed Umar Bago, the helmsman of Niger State, has pushed himself to the forefront as the chief farmer of his state. He is called farmer governor. Niger State is such a vast land that it is big enough to feed the whole country. The Nigerian Institute of International Affairs invited him to give a keynote address on World Food Day. It was not a day to make a barn of rice but to say that he has knotted a deal with Dangote for over  a trillion Naira farm. It is not a day to feed Lagos, but he announced a deal with the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu for a N500 billion deal to make Niger State the farm and Lagos the barn. Lagos has the top appetite in the nation, so it made sense for food and mouth to coalesce.

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    He also spoke of his state as the capital of shea in the world, and President Bola Tinubu has proclaimed no to shea export. So, we can take it through its full value chain to the consumer. His address raises a point, though. He spoke of many crops going to waste for lack of use. How can excess cohabit with hunger? That is why he stresses, in tandem with many like Kaduna’s Governor Uba Sani, for infrastructure, storage and investment. The king of tractor is undertaking a royal trip to food sufficiency. Safe trip, farmer governor.

  • Warri: No to apocalypse

    Warri: No to apocalypse

    In my schoolboy days, we called it Wafi or oil-booming city, and the residents called themselves Wafarians. The word Wafarian vacated the lips with imperious bluster. Wafarians knew their city bested the rest. Warri no dey carry last.

    But today, Warri is a city stumbling for rhyme and rhythm after going belly up about two decades ago. We say Wafarian with a kind of humiliated ache, a wounded vanity, a pride that laughs at us.

    The governor vowed from his first day in office to be its Sheriff of rebirth. Just as he has been working in the past two years, the same animal impulse that ruined Warri has returned. They are not back as Wafarians but in their ethnic tents as warlords and agitators. Their rhetorics carry blood and dagger. They are fulminating in their accents. We hear them on the streets and they bicker on television. Online, it is a swarm. They drip hate and tease the battlefield. 

    It is triggered by INEC and its new delineation of constituencies. Such matters often lead to offences and blowback. But threats of war and words of hate are not the way to go. Hence the governor, Sheriff Oborevwori, looked them in the eye and told them he did not want blood on his watch. He does not want Warri back to the days when the Ijaws and Itsekiris chose gore over love, and the streets sloshed with their neighbour’s tears.

    But this is a three-pronged fight. The Itsekiri cry foul. The Urhobo say no. The Ijaws say nay.  Some of those in the centre of these are either politicians or their hirelings. They are the fellows who want to benefit, and they are deploying their troops either to the streets or online. When they are not doing that, they are on television or in the shadows plotting.

    Times like this call for sobriety, not recriminations. It is not a time to revise history, to invoke atavistic grievances, to stress racial differences. As Winston Churchill says, it is better to “meet jaw to jaw than war.” Some have taken poetic licence as if he said, “it is better to jaw jaw than to war war.”

    Some of those on the streets and television were actually little babies or toddlers when Warri raged over 20 years ago. They are feeding on received hatred, and they speak with tendentious authority. Rather than seek those things that bring people together, they are speaking for effect. Some are drawing parallels with the Israel and Palestine, and they are playing victims to whip up passions. It is what is called danse macabre, or dance of death in Western mythology in the medieval times to remind humans of the vanity of human glory.

    They ought to go back to history, and see what happened in those days between the Itsekiris and the Ijaws. It was no play. If you were Ijaw and the Itsekiris targeted you, you were toast with your families. It was the same when the Itsekiris were targets. In either case, unhallowed human bones piled up. So, those who have lined up in furtive meetings and on televisions to whip up passions should stop it. They sometimes are witty at the expense of commonsense.

    Former President of the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) has released a short video to tell the story of Warri. Amaju Pinnick, who is also a former commissioner for sports in the state, reminds the residents what Warri was in its high noon. The documentary titled: Our Warri, reminds all that it was not just the body counts, separated families, or the dilapidated buildings that bloodied that era, but its way of life.

    It was not called oil booming city for nothing. The oil mainstays had their homes there. Shell, Haliburton, Texaco, AGIP, Schlumberger, Chevron. Their workers prided themselves as oil people, especially as the Warri Refinery underwrote the prosperity. With the oil wealth as guarantor, we witnessed a lifestyle distinctively Warri. We had businesses like Kingsway, BATA, John Holt, Chelarams, Leventis, Peugeot and even Bata.

    It was a complete modern city. with its commerce in gear, its social life and infrastructure were primed. An anecdote was about how market sellers distinguished the wives of oil staff members  from others. Their dressings, strut and looks gave them away and the sellers had special prices for them.

    The atmosphere bred names of money and business like Odibo, Okumagba, Edewor, Pessu, Rewane, Fregene, Pinnick, Eselemo, and so on. Each tribe had their own sign and scion.

    I recall Warri, as the Pinnick documentary lists, some of the great sports men of the time. The footballers, especially. Those who were alive then cannot forget goal keeping maestro Alabi Essien, goal-devouring Thompson Usiyen, Martin Owolo the elegant defender, and the swaggering shoulders and deft feet of outside left Josy Dombraye. Of course, captain Dediare and charismatic Wilson Oruma. Other sports had Anthony Urhobo, Florence Omagbemi, et al. Shall we forget cultural figures like Tony Gray, Mike Okri and debonair Chris Okotie, Omatsola, Ogholi and many others.

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    The terrible thing about this hour is the inevitable interconnectedness of the tribes. Hardly any Urhobo without relatives in Ijaw or Itsekiri and that is the case with all the tribes, including those parading themselves as torches of antediluvian violence.

    My father was Itsekiri and my mother Urhobo, and a fight between any of the groups is like a soul fighting itself. It brings to mind the line from Nobel Prize winning poet, Derek Walcott, “You will love again the stranger who was yourself.”

    The Olu of Warri, Ogiame Atuwatse III, has been one of those personages meeting stakeholders for peace. His majesty cannot allow his domain to regress to atavistic carnage. He knows that what is happening is like people fighting over a carcass that has begun to regenerate in limbs and blood flow. That momentum must continue.

    What happened about two decades ago was a carnage. If we have it again, it will be a Warri apocalypse. God forbid. That, however, is the reality that Beirut, the big city of Lebanon, is coming to grips with. It embodied a panoply of some of the world’s big corporations, and sat over a wealth and a culture envied by all in the Middle East. Today, it is a shadow of itself. Most of the companies have moved to the United Arab Emirates. That is what anger can bring to a place. Like Warri, Beirut was a metropolitan hub of diverse peoples. Hate overtook harmony, and the city is on its knees.

    Governor Oborevwori has set up a peace committee. My advice is that we should heed the advice of Paul in the scriptures: “All things are lawful but all things are not expedient.” You can be right, but it does not mean you are righteous.

    The governor is rebuilding from a ruin, and those growling for blood over Warri are akin to a cackle of hyenas over a carcass. Those bearing torches of hate should go back to a state of peace in their hearts. They should react to instigators with the words of Goethe in his famous play, Faust. “The likes of thee have never moved my hate.”

  • Jonathan: Buhari won Boko Haram ‘technically’

    Jonathan: Buhari won Boko Haram ‘technically’

    Was former president, Goodluck Jonathan wrong to expect his successor, late Muhammadu Buhari to have defeated Boko Haram insurgency soon after assuming office? That is the question brought to the fore by Jonathan’s reservations last week, on Buhari’s inability to expeditiously bring the war to an end, despite being once named by the insurgent group as their negotiator.

    This question still needs answers irrespective of the clarification by Jonathan that his statement should not be misconstrued as an indictment on Buhari or suggestive of his complicity in the Boko Haram saga. Perhaps, interrogating the observation, may well get the country closer to comprehending the complexities posed by the festering Boko Haram challenge.

     Jonathan had during a book launch in Abuja said, “One of the committees we set up then, the Boko Haram nominated Buhari to lead their team to negotiate with the government. 

    “So, I was feeling that, oh, if they nominated Buhari to represent them and have a discussion with the government committee, then when Buhari took over, it could have been an easier way to negotiate with them and they would have handed over their guns. But it is still there till today”.

    The statement quickly drew the ire of Buhari’s former spokesman, Garba Shehu.  He described it as misleading since neither Boko Haram’s founding leader, Muhammed Yusuf, nor his successor, Abubakar Shekau, ever nominated Buhari for mediation. Shehu claimed that Shekau consistently denounced and threatened Buhari while recalling that Buhari escaped a Boko Haram bomb attack in Kaduna in 2014.

    Shehu however, claimed confusion over the nomination of Buhari arose after a Boko Haram faction, allegedly sponsored by his (Buhari’s) political opponents staged a press conference in Maiduguri, through one Abu Mohammed Ibn Abdulaziz claiming that the sect preferred Buhari and other northern elders.

    Even then, he said Buhari dismissed the report at the time as “just speculation” since nobody had contacted him directly.

    All that Shehu strove to prove is that Buhari was not nominated by the known leaders of the Boko Haram insurgency. But he admitted there was a nomination by Ibn Abdulaziz, a factional leader of the insurgency group who he claimed was a political agent. Shehu also sought to establish that Buhari has no known links with Boko Haram as they demonised and even attacked him in Kaduna. All that could as well be.

    Does Jonathan’s observation collapse just because Buhari’s nomination was not made by either Mohammed or Shekau presented by Shehu as the known leaders of the insurgent group? Or, how correct is it to presume that the nomination by Ibn Abdulaziz did not exist coming from the quarters it did, especially since the insurgency group demonised and attacked Buhari?

    Shehu’s answers to the two questions will likely be in the affirmative. In order words, having seemingly faulted the premise on which Jonathan based his expectation of Buhari to have won the war soon after assuming office, his statement should be seen as lacking in merit. That would however, amount to an oversimplification of the larger issues thrown up by Jonathan.

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    If Jonathan was wrong to expect Buhari to have won Boko Haram based on the factional leader that made the nomination and Buhari’s rejection of the same, what do we make of copious evidence where Buhari made claims of his uncommon capacities to tame the insurgency group?  Did Buhari leave anyone in doubt that he had the capacity to handle the raging insurgency in the country better? At any rate, was the fight against insecurity not one of the cardinal campaign programmes with which he sought the votes of the electorate?

    Buhari unarguably, was one of the greatest critics of the handling of the Boko Haram insurgency by the Jonathan administration. He not only accused Jonathan of “looking the other way” when the Chibok girls were abducted but was reported to have said in 2013 that the “military offensive against Boko Haram is anti-north”. Many northern leaders had at the budding stages of the insurgency faulted it and read political motives into it. Elite dissonance was one of the key reasons Boko Haram got entrenched.

    During his famous speech at Chatham House London, Buhari did not leave his audience in doubt that he had solutions to the Boko Haram insurgency. He did not only fault the prosecution of the war but promised to lead the war from the front.

    Hear him, “We will always act on time and not allow problems to irresponsibly fester, and I Muhammadu Buhari, will always lead from the front and return Nigeria to its leadership role in regional and international efforts to combat terrorism”.

    He also promised to pay special attention to the welfare of soldiers in and out of service: “we will give them adequate and modern arms and ammunitions to work with… to choke Boko Haram’s financial and equipment channels, we will be tough on terrorism and tough on its root causes”. Buhari received thunderous ovation from his audience for speaking so confidently on his plans to eliminate Boko Haram.

    Buhari was also reported to have assigned himself a timeline of six months to win the war against the insurgents after he won the 2015 general election.

    It is therefore not in doubt that Buhari’s statements and body language gave the impression that he had all it takes to tame the Boko Haram monster. So, Jonathan’s expectation of him to have won the war against insurgency soon after assuming office is based on solid foundation. In that also, he is with many.

    Irrespective of the quarters from which the mediation nomination came, Buhari left nobody in doubt that he had the magic wand to win the war against Boko Haram. Many believed him and he owes his electoral victory largely to that expectation. His profile as an Army General and former military head of state counted as added advantages.

    Jonathan may not have gone this length, but the issues were obviously at the back of his mind when he spoke the way he did at the book launch. It serves no useful purpose misconstruing his statement as suggestive of Buhari’s link with Boko Haram. Buhari made such claims and there is nothing wrong holding him accountable to his words.

     Buhari was conscious of the promises he made on the matter. It was in apparent bid to fulfil them, that he gleefully declared in December 2015, barely six months after assuming office that “Nigeria has technically won the war” against Islamist Boko Haram insurgents. He had predicated his claims on the grounds that the militant group could no longer mount “conventional attacks” against security forces or population centres.

    For him, Boko Haram had been reduced to fighting with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and remained a force only in its heartland of Borno State. His claims were seen as hasty and received with mixed feelings by those versed in asymmetrical warfare.

    But all these claims were soon to collapse like a pack of cards. The insurgents quickly to put a lie to them as they resumed onslaughts against military formations and population centres. These took enormous toll on the military both in human and material capital despite efforts to contain the insurgents.

    It is an irony of sorts that Buhari failed to win the war against the Boko Haram insurgency until he left office. What has rather been witnessed has been the emergence of more splinter groups with some attacking population centres in parts of the country they were not able to access when Jonathan held sway.

    Just a few weeks ago, Borno State governor, Babagana Zulum raised an alarm on the regrouping of the insurgents around the Tumbus areas of Lake Chad and Mandara Hills within the Sambisa Forest in the state. This is in addition to several attacks, killings and abductions by the insurgent group.

    But the more troubling arising from the book launch, is the seeming lack of clarity among leaders on what Boko Haram really stands for, its sponsors and the best strategy to eradicate the scourge.

    Jonathan believes the issue of Boko Haram is far more complex than it is often presented. He sees their motivation beyond the hunger-narrative even as he fingered external sponsorship given their sophistication in arms and ammunitions.

    The Chief of Defence Staff, Christopher Musa wants the underlying factors that incubate insecurity; poverty, lack of education and unemployment to be addressed. For former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, the country must ask itself hard questions about how it has handled the crisis over the past 15 years. If by now there is no consensus on some of these issues, is it surprising Boko Haram appears to be defying solutions?

  • Biafra again?

    Biafra again?

    Biafra took a plum place at a recent literary fest known as the Quramo Book Festival that holds annually in Lagos. I was a member of a panel that also starred writer Professor Dul Johnson, film maker Emeka Ed Keazor, soldier and writer General Akintunde Akinkunmi, host of books on Channels Television Kunle Kasunmu, who also laid the context for the parley.

    Novelist Tade Ipadeola held the time, pulse and tempo as moderator.

    The title, a mouthful, was “961 Days, Brothers at War. Never again…” I spent quite some time reflecting on the points and narratives of the panelists, and the first is the topic’s relevance today, even as top men in the east are asking for Nnamdi Kanu’s release even though he has not renounced Biafra.

    They guarantee his good behaviour when he has not even made any such pledge. They want the president to upend the rule of law by setting him free.

    The other side of the story is the subliminal rage on the streets and even among the Igbo intelligentsia, a temperament not yet canalized or defined in public. Sometimes it is a boiling kettle without a whistle.

    Two things the other panelists said cut me to the quick.

    Filmmaker Keazor recalled an incident with his mother who was seized by a moment of distemper and slapped her son for no reason.

    It was an onset of PTSD, a reflex of war trauma. The other was by Professor Johnson, whose life changed when only one of his three brothers returned from the war.

     There is no superior tragedy but his case had the dubious mercy of numbers compared to the Second World War yarn of the Ryan family documented in the movie, Saving Private Ryan. Three brothers were already killed. War General Dwight Eisenhower ordered that the lone surviving brother must be saved.

    There were two issues for me as I reflected after the fete of ideas. One was ego. I asserted that the war was not necessary, and only ego precipitated it.

    I said the actors  were about 30 years of age, and their immaturities provoked the slaughter of innocents. Ojukwu and Gowon were about 30 years old, and the nation’s future lay in their callow hands.

    Ego set in because Ojukwu said he could not serve under Gowon as his Supreme Commander. General Akintunde, who wrote a book on the Nigerian army titled: Hubris, titillated the audience by tracking the careers of Gowon and Ojukwu, and how in alternating episodes each was the other’s superior until they both were promoted lieutenant colonel the same day.

    So, after Ironsi’s death, Gowon was made head of state having served as Ironsi’s chief of staff. Ojukwu would none of it.

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     This happened in two contexts. One, the pogrom in the north that targeted Igbos especially but lapped up other southern groups including Efik, Ibibios, Urhobos, Itsekiris, etc, a point that drove me to work the minority angle in my novel, My Name is Okoro.

    Here again, we witnessed the error of age. The countercoup leader, Murtala Muhammed and his colleagues, shunned an important opportunity for peace.

    They could have accepted Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe, the most senior army officer, as the head of state. If they did, they could have avoided the pogrom in the north, the battle between Ojukwu and Gowon and the civil war.

    It was Murtala’s erratic folly and his lack of political intelligence, including his advisers, that led to Nigeria’s tragic moment.

    Even then, when the pogrom happened, Ojukwu might have averted the war for a number of reasons. One, the prospective economy did not have the resources to win the war.

     The most important asset in a war is not a mere will, important as it is. Napoleon said, “Morale is to the physical as three is to one.” But the morale must be fed by a good economy. The same Napoleon asserted that “an army marches on its stomach.”

    Ojukwu and his advisers did not reckon on the stomach. Before the war, the eastern region relied on food, including fish and meat from outside.

    How do you start a war without a food economy? Hence, the soldiers kept raiding markets in the Midwest for food and sustenance.

    The Awolowo currency change and the food blockade worked because Biafra relied on food from outside. If its economy was able to produce its own food, then its currency would have worked for itself in spite of federal devastations.

    On the economy, Ojukwu made a gamble. He signed a deal with the Rothschild Bank of France guaranteeing sole exploration of oil wells he had not secured. It brought France into the Biafran side but too late indeed to change its fortunes.

    There are so many reasons for victory in war. But hubris, over the centuries, has played a role. Hence Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that, ‘’in analysing history, do not be too profound for often the causes are quite superficial.” Because of its weak economy, it could not equal the federal side in the acquisition of arms. Yet, having declared Biafra, he did not stay home. His soldier marched onto the Midwest and headed towards Lagos.

    A dissipation of scarce resources. Reminds one of Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa.” Why did Ojukwu do so? His heart was still Nigerian, if he didn’t  know it.

    He wanted to be part of a country he was renouncing. Hence, when he died, I called him Omo Eko. He wanted to teach Gowon, who he called Jack, a lesson.

    That was hubris. He was in two binds. One, he could not feed his people without going out. He could not teach Gowon a lesson without conquering Lagos.

    He succeeded in neither. Biafra became a lost cause. Ojukwu spoke Yoruba, attended King’s College, lived in Lagos and blended with its metropolitan elan.

    So, If Murtala and his advisers did not make Ogundipe the head of state, Gowon did not seem to want a war. So, he declared a police state, and we had for some time what historians called a phony war in the beginnings of the Second World War tensions of soldiers without conflict.

    In Soyinka’s memoir, You Must Set Forth At Dawn, he recalls a meeting between Awolowo and Ojukwu to avert the war. But after a long talk ended, Ojukwu took, later that night, one of his associates to Awo’s chalet and told him he and his people had decided on war. He respected Awo too much to waste his time. Awo could not dissuade him.

    If Ojukwu walked to his people and said, “no war,” Christopher Okigbo had allegedly said even market women would stone him on the streets. He might have saved millions of lives, including Okigbo and, on the federal side, Adaka Boro. Winston Churchill misquoted: “It is better to jaw jaw than to war war.” The wartime leader actually said, “it is better to meet jaw to jaw than war.”

    Maybe Ojukwu relied on his officers. The Igbo had the better officers in the country, pound for pound. But in war, as in sports, one ingredient does not guarantee victory. Alexander Madiebo explained in his war memoirs that they did not have the armory.

    The war, in the final analysis, reflected the interdependence of the east with the rest of the country, and that was why Quramo fittingly titled the discussion, Brothers at War

    In spite of all these, the bitterness of Biafra creeps into any narrative of our oneness as a people. Is it because we have never had a real jaw-to-jaw confab or the jaw does not touch the mutual hearts? The answer to a slaughter is not another slaughter.

     The answer to the pogrom was not another one in the name of a civil war.

    In the United States, Donald Trump embodies the rebirth of American civil war malice fought in the 19th century. As novelist Viet Nguyen wrote, “A war is fought twice. One on the battlefields and the second in the mind.”

    It is better in the mind than on the battlefield, so long as it does not spill blood. We must learn not to have men not old enough for authority, who cannot distinguish between power and strength. The crisis of the 1960’s prospered on the hubris of politicians, especially in the Western Region. It is remarkable, as former inspector general of police  M.D. Yusufu reveals in a biography written by Ayo Opadokun, that the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) had opted out of the deal with Akintola and his NNDP. Northern leaders Kashim Imam and the Sardauna Ahmadu Bello told the colourful premier they did not want to be the source of his fight with his kinsmen anymore.Just a day before the January 15, 1966 coup when he was killed.

     Yusufu said he was a witness to the conversation with Akintola.

     What if the decision came two days or three before the coup?

    We might muse on what might have been, but we cannot but ponder on why Nigeria keeps going back to its problems as though we have not gone past them.

    Philosopher Nietzsche calls it “eternal return.” We keep exhuming our ill-tempered ghosts, just like in the line from the Poet Afred Lord Tennyson: “ O me…why have they not buried me deep enough?”

  • A Rohr deal

    A Rohr deal

    It is not that the Benin national team is coming to town tomorrow. But my grouse is with Gernot Rohr, the team’s coach. His team will knock heads with their feet against the Super Eagles. Rohr is coming back here to commit a crime.

    He wants to defeat the hand that once fed him. I met him years ago at the Lagos Airport when we were on the verge of the World Cup qualifier. I asked him of our chances.

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     He was genial but not confident. He did not speak like an inspirer or a force for his soldiers on the field. I hope the man is too bad to commit a crime in our match tomorrow in Uyo.

     Nigerians are juggling the math of possibility, on Nigeria’s chances for the Mundial. I only focus on Rohr. I hope Rohr does not hand us a raw deal.