The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Militia

    We call it election but rather than vote, we tote AK 47. Before that, there were campaigns, rallies, posters, songs and dances, party names and emblems, rhetoric and barnstorming. Azonto, shaku shaku, et al. It swings from a fanfare to a fair of death and rancour. It ends not as democracy, but impunity. It is comedy if we remove the blood. A comedy in which we are afraid to laugh.

    It is the ceremony of violence plus the blood, especially the blood. Polls in Nigeria now bow to blood. That is because elections are about violence. This rite seemed a right for all regions before, and many citizens often retreated to their holy hills for safety.

    But from the past two election cycles, a region sticks out like lone lava. Nothing is legitimate unless it is mated to fire and fury. It is what we call the south-south or the Niger Delta. Since 1999, it has not been the people’s wish that matters, but gangrene from a gang of elite hoodlums. They have no respect for democracy, or the coercion of the conscience. They want power and they snatch it, and they amass wealth, weapons, street never-do-wells, and what is left is the Churchillian blood, tears, sweat and toil. Except that Churchill meant it in the language of sacrifice to country.

    These politicians in the Niger Delta want it for personal, group interest, to ransack and flog the region to its knees and cart away the resources.

    Except for two states of relatively low tides of brigandage, all other states in the Niger Delta can only legitimate polls by gansterism. They include my home state of Delta, as well as Akwa Ibom, Rivers and Bayelsa.  The relative innocents here are Edo and Cross River, who show spasms of infection of turbulence from time to time.

    I wonder what the people, the helpless underlings of society think of democracy. They see it as a system of violence, by violence for booty. So, whoever represents anyone there must not be seen to have earned it from the authentic hearts of the people.

    It is democracy by fiat, fuelled by guns, bombs, machetes. We have seen it in the past two weeks in all the states. In Sapele, we read of gunmen shattering the calm election queue by a rat-tat-tat of guns. Voters scampered away, a few fell and died, blood coloured the pristine sand, screams upturned the morning air. Ballot boxes were destroyed and the instruments of power mingled with blood and sand.

    INEC offices are blown off in other states. Port Harcourt, Uyo, Yenagoa, Warri. Roads are apian ways of death. Hoodlums are hooded. In Rivers State, it is a military operation. Gunshots are a continuation of politics by other means. The foot soldiers are faithful. They parody the message of Christ in the Revelations: “Be ye faithful unto death and I will give thee the crown of life.” They fight, they ride on stormy boats, they flit through forests like silhouettes, they howl like wolves, they kill, they burn houses and ballot boxes when they are not stealing them.

    A video in one of the states is in circulation of militants in a frenzy of thumb printing. They are unfazed though. They are like young men in a workaday routine, doing a job as genuine as an accountant sorting out the day’s numbers. There is no air of guilt, but sighs of fulfilment with every thumb that smudges a paper.

    They see violence the way the ritualist sees it. In the shrine, the priest takes the goat or the cow, or the ram, and slaughters. The blood gushes out. The gore, too. The priests and others glow to the triumph. If it means fertility, then the child has come. If it means wealth, it means money will adorn every effort or lack of effort. If it is gunning down your enemy, your foe has fallen. You are triumphant. The ritual is a prophecy of victory. It is testimony in itself. After all, even the Bible says, a “testimony is the spirit of prophecy.”

    So the big men, governors, senators, representatives, local government apparatchiks, all converge to strategise. Not on  ideas about school for all, food for all, or road for all, but gore of all the foes. How to snatch the boxes, re-write the results, pay the billions to all who will do the task, and win.

    Is there any surprise that some of the governors do nothing but drone in luxury as they await the next ritual of the slaughter and mayhem that will bring them back to power? Why do roads but only a few months to the election, and pretend there has been no money all along? Some governors have done nothing of consequence but argued they had no money until  it was a few months and the billons started  coming out like spirits turned into flesh. We see the miracle and wonder.

    It makes one shudder about the region. What calibre of governors and legislators would have represented the people if the brigands did not take over the cathedral? We shall never know. When we have senators without theories, or governors without vision, or commissioners with the gift only to toady up to the master, then the region is doomed.  Militancy has been blamed for this, including the roars of the Itsekiri-Ijaw hostilities. When they downed the bullets and guns of hate, they did not drown. They morphed into political footmen.  Some of them took advantage of the resource control idea and exploited it for personal fortune.

    A place of immense wealth is a hovel of poverty of the people. The quest for resource control has followed after the analysis of the writer Eric Hoffer in his book, The True Believer. He said a movement starts as a cause, then it becomes an enterprise and ends as a racket. Oil is now a racket with politicians as the masters of the game.

    The best way to win is to steal, kill and rapine. In his novel, Bound To Violence, Yambo Ouologuem tracks the African obsession with blood and death. The problem with our political class is their lack of education. They therefore have no ideas. They crave nothing but power. Outside of it, they are bored and useless. Hence philosopher Soren Kierkegaard noted that not money, but “boredom is the root of all evil.” Their minds are too vacant to contemplate great ideas to lift their environment. They want power for power ‘s sake. They do not fit into Thorstein Veblen who demonstrated that the leisure class build new centres of pleasure with their excess wealth. Ours have no such imaginations. They build mansions and store money in the west. When they make more money, they are also bored. They seek excitement, what better way to get their veins a-boil with blood again than to shed blood.

    It is not that other regions are not fascinated with violence. We have read of a representative shot dead in Oyo State, of the Okota episode in Lagos. In the southeast and north, the polls result can be predicted even without violence. A herd sentiment marks out the regions. In the southwest, a sophistication shuts out the bull from the electoral china shop. The incidence of violence in other regions, though disturbing, pales in relation to my birth region.

    We sometimes forget that Edo and Delta were part of the old western region, and had what we know as progressive credentials. We also know that what was known as the Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers also flirted with the idea in the First republic. But how did those regions fall into the sway of brigands and they have been on the other side of the spectrum? In political history, such changes only happen after a sea change of values. But it was a coup of opportunistic elite, a rage of carpet baggers that have held them in thrall of violence.

    Elections there are a plebiscite on guns and not love of the masses, of military power, not the people’s will. Elections are a military operation, not a republican rite. It is a Hobbesian ceremony, not a people’s hurrah. It is therefore a farce. Most, not all though, who emerge from the system are frauds and impostors. We need an emergency on democracy there. Only when technology through e-voting upends human mischief can liberation come. Any other means will fail.

  • The Touchstone: Atiku is a sore, bad loser – Sam Omatseye

    Political analyst and Chairman, Editorial Board of The Nation Newspapers, Sam Omatseye, joined by Member, Editorial board, Femi Macaulay to discuss the 2019 Presidential election, President Muhammadu Buhari’s victory, credibility of the 2019 election, INEC, leadership of the of the National Assembly, and the governorship and Assembly elections.

     

  • The Touchstone: Why Buhari was re-elected – Sam Omatseye

    Political analyst and Chairman, Editorial Board of The Nation Newspapers, Sam Omatseye, joined by Member, Online Editor, Sunday Oguntola to discuss the 2019 Presidential election and President Muhammadu Buhari’s victory at the poll.

  • Dis-Atikulated

    “Tell your children about it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation,” Prophet Joel.

    A week to the polls, a friend phoned from the United States and thought Atiku Abubakar had won the polls. I had predicted a resounding Buhari victory all along.

    “From what I am reading, it seems the story is going to be different,” he piped out. He was under the spell of the internet of the social media variety.  Soyinka’s millipedes had cooked a viral diet and he had been at table.

    “They are minority of Nigerians,” I assured him. “Most of the voters don’t even know Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.”

    After the polls, a certain ennui wrapped the nation. Those who won are as though they mourn, and those who lost are in sack cloth. But the funeral air of the Atikus was eerie while the Buharis were like amused morticians.

    The APC was quietly jubilant, while a chest-thumping Atiku was a quarrel in the closet. You saw his screaming face but could not hear a word.

    President Buhari warned against gloating, but it happened in the shadows. The streets did not carp, the drum rolled in backyards, the clinks of wine glasses like muffled clicks.  Even the rhetoric of the winners was more about silencing the hoopla of the losers.

    During the Second World War, Churchill fired up Allied zeal with the following words: “In war, resolution. In victory, magnanimity. In defeat, defiance.” We saw resolution as both barnstormed the country. Buhari is showing magnanimity but Atiku defiance. Churchillian defiance was against an anti-democratic demon named Hitler. Churchill had warned that if the Brits were defeated, they would fight with everything, and in the end, even in defeat, history would say, this was their “finest hour.”

    It does not look like a fine hour for Atiku in defeat. He is sore and sour. He probably thinks he won the polls. He is like the social media folks who rollicked in their own echo chambers. They talked to themselves, embraced their own delusions, laughed at their own jokes, and mistook their peculiar narrow universe for that of the whole world. It is the character of fanaticism, only your world counts because only your world exists. Some persons have joked that Facebook CEO would swear in Atiku as president on May 29.

    They forgot that Buhari is like no leader in Nigerian history. The few that enjoyed such cult following are not close. They include Ojukwu, Awolowo, Kano and the Sardauna. None of them adored their icon like Buhari. Ojukwu led the Biafran war, and was a head of state. Awo was the greatest Nigerian who ever lived. Yet, for all his following, he confronted a rampage from a right-wing elite in Yorubaland that had its roots in pre-colonial Nigeria as enunciated in the writing of Richard L. Sklar. For all his fabled charisma, the Sarduana held an office and deployed it for effect. Aminu Kano corralled the Kano talakawas.

    Buhari’s rise in the hearts and minds of the talakawas across the north deserves a treatise in political psychology, something in the nature of Crowds and Power by Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. Buhari did not win their soul as head of state, but his mystique grew gradually over a few decades. He calls to mind a mystique Joseph Conrad describes in his immortal novel of the sea, Lord Jim.

    It was the echo chamber that killed the candidature of Atiku. He thought the polls were about him. I disagree. It was all about Buhari. For most parts, the polls were a contest between Buhari and Buhari. In the final analysis, even if Atiku won, it would have been Buhari, who won it for him. But Buhari won it for himself.

    Many who voted for PDP did not vote for Atiku. They voted against Buhari. They tended to be those who voted for faith, who voted for the era of free money, against the war on corruption, who voted in league with their pastors who were pulpit bullies, voted against the hunger in the land, against the divisive rhetoric that showed he lacked some of the ingredients of a statesman. They voted for Onnoghen, for tribesmen and tribe, against herdsmen crisis and the deaths, against the contempt for the rule of law, the spectre of coffins and blood, against the swarm of northern appointments.

    Not many leaders could survive such ululations of protest. The irony is that the rich voted against him, the poor for him. It was a sort of class war, a rebellion of a pampered elite. They snuggled in Ikoyi, Banana Island, Asokoro, and they voted for revenge, a cynical democratic quality of vision.

    We should remember another irony. Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki, came in line with his father as surrogate nobles. They seized the high throne of Ilorin from the legitimates through the ballot. The people voted for an authentic noble in Oloriegbe. They saw the Sarakis as subversive nobles and have voted for a historical one. Are they bringing nobility to the service of the republican idea, or the nobility has browbeaten the people with a feudal whip? Or is the prince acting like pauper, as in Mark Twain’s novel of that name? Time shall tell.

    The election is also a cautionary tale for the so-called men of God now turned into gods of men, who became warriors of the world instead of the word. They should have read Jesus’s words to Pontius Pilate to the effect: “my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom is of this world then would my servants fight…” A pastor prophesied Buhari’s death, some victory for Atiku, others turned the pulpit into a remorseless flogging of Buhari while asking their followers to obtain PVCs. Jeremiah warned: “a wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land. The prophets prophesy falsely, the priests bear rule by their authority and  my people love to have it so. What will you do in the end thereof?”

    Now that it is over, what will they concoct for their credulous sheep?

    If Atiku wants to head to court, he may. But he should know that the videos he claims to have may not be enough to cancel four million votes and he should know, too, that his APC folks also have videos in areas they lost. The election was not perfect, but for most parts observers and witnesses have adjudged it passed the test.

    Those who say Buhari did not do well, even among the thinking elite, are frauds of the intellect. He may not have done well enough for them. They also lack historical understanding. Buhari inherited a mess, and the world would have witnessed a Venezuela in Africa had Jonathan won in 2015. He stopped a haemorrhage. I know corruption still festers under him. What we have had under him is controlled, if reprehensible bleeding. Before him, it was a financial carnage. Under him, you thought before you leapt with that loot. His critics downplay  9.5 million kids who fed daily in school, or the market women who had Trader Moni, the Lagos-Ibadan rail, or the second Niger Bridge, or the highest power uptick in history in spite of challenges, or the seeds of Mambilla Plateau prosperity, the diminution of the herdsmen crisis, or pensions for Biafra soldiers and railway workers, or bailouts to ailing states for salaries, etc.

    The messaging was awful but the facts are legacy. Buhari should understand that a second term belongs to history, and he must not be tardy as he did in 2015. It’s time to be a genuine statesman. As Kennedy said, politicians look at the next election but statesmen the next generation. His last electoral hurrah should foreshadow a monument in the hearts not only of the talakawas but all persons of goodwill who will read his biography.

     

    So long, Dalung

    He spent quite some time fighting. He fought as sports minister. He even fought the leadership of his state APC, undermining the governor of his home state of Plateau. But when it mattered most, he flunked just as our sportsmen in important duels. At the last presidential polls, Solomon Dalung was not a winner. He did not deliver

    Dalung

    his ward, neither did he deliver his polling unit. At the Langtang South LGA, his party APC polled 873 while the PDP had 1955, a shellacking. In his polling unit, his APC picked up 118 votes to PDP 241. With this performance, I don’t see this fellow returning as minister. Nigeria did not excel under him. He is a lawyer, and he will do well in litigations. So he should return to the court.

  • The prize

    There is nothing more exciting in the life of a nation than the anticipation of the vote. The only thing more exciting is waiting for the results. After that, the disappointments surpass the joys. For in politics, a loss runs deeper than a win. In victories, we exhale. In losses, we choke.

    That is what we expect in a few days when INEC will reveal the pulse of the people. A few days to the polls, Lagosians lined up in banks and markets. They wanted the polls, but they dreaded the outcomes. Not the results, but the results of the results. Will the politicians absorb the losses like sportsmen, unroll their sleeves, sit back on their sofas and choke like gentlemen? Or will they spit fire from the rumbling within their frustrated breasts?

    Already we have witnessed flashpoints of ill temper. In Rivers State, where a new poll will take place because some men could not keep their fingers from the trigger. Or in Sapele where a gun man dazed a queue of voters and unleashed rage that left three persons dead, or in Ibadan where two people will not live to see whether it was Atiku or Buhari, who will shepherd our affairs in the next four years.

    If the loser acts in the spirit of the violence we saw, then those stocking up on supplies will have prophesied with their pockets and anxieties. In the bank, a young fellow across the counter marvelled at the traffic of customers depleting their accounts.

    “If you were grown up during the June 12 crisis, you won’t be surprised. Banks and all services were shut down for months. And the fever of war was everywhere,” I said.

    “Oh, did it have to do with…Abiola?” he asked, reflectively and unsure of his facts. It was a moment in historical ignorance of the young generation who know little of the nation’s past, a thing encouraged by the virtual wiping out of history from the curriculum. Obasanjo saw to that and we have not recovered.

    I reassured and told him yes, and gave him a few history lessons about streets empty, pockets and stomachs hollow, army on the prowl, deaths from guns and neglect, democracy warriors fighting back to retrieve our republican soul from a state of cold-blooded murderers.

    It was the unspoken voice in the bargains in the market and the courtesies between customers and bank cashiers. So, the loser should understand that it is not about him, but about us, and about a democracy limping along. Impunity, corruption and a lack of decency throb slyly and ominously at the foundation of this system.

    The reason many fear is that politics is the only game in town, the only cash cow and drone’s paradise. It is a veritable rewarder of them who work with diligence at the most indolent profession in the land. It is luxurious indolence but it inspires its special devotions, its peculiar efficiencies. For all its indolence, it extracts its own arduous labour. For instance, it takes a special acumen to plot the death of a fellow human who wants to take away your daily bread by a legitimate means called election. Or plot the snatching of ballot boxes, or rewriting figures for INEC.

    So in Rivers State, a certain Mowan Etete lost his life and so did his brother on the same day. They were cut down because they belonged to a so-called enemy party. It takes a special kind of efficiency to spot such an enemy, time his vulnerable hour and foible, identify the weakness of the security agencies, and chart the path of escape. The killer often has no grudge against the victims. He is just an errand boy of blood. In another clime and another day, outside the ken of politics, they might have been spotted in a suya spot. But someone employed the killer and the killer, with no scruples, was only performing a job.

    They might have returned to the sender and said, “sir, we have completed the assignment.” It is a nightmarish parody of a workaday routine. But those who send such people have enjoyed so much luxury from politics.

    The fellow was probably working as supervisors in a company or a business selling some fish or paint in a largescale. He made profits, but sweated to his gains and the gains came stingy. But this thing called politics turned him into an instant moneybag. He joined and the big man spotted his talent for despatching the enemy, and he organised a band of men and was given perhaps N15 million for the job. After paying his men, he carts home N10 million. He accomplishes this in one weekend.

    What a bonanza weekend. He ponders his life. How long and how much perspiration did he have to sacrifice in the past for such princely gain? He probably was denied lesser amount as a loan application in his bank. His efficiency makes him a prime star in the constellation of the party machine. He is given bigger tasks, and within six months his coffers swell to as much as N70 million. He is a specialist as a task master and he grows over the years to become a candidate. He has won an election or two, and has become a member of the Nigerian political elite. He probably has forgotten that he once sold fish or paint. He has built mansions, married quite a few wives and furnishes a bevy of concubines, with a dozen children, some of them in the choice universities in the United Kingdom and United States.

    He has become a brand of philanthropy, and members of his extended family and village who once dismissed him as an outlier and desperado in the city with little to show for it now bow to him. They laugh at his every joke and ponder at his every wisdom.

    His self-image has soared. He has made it. His ego bloats with the worst vanities. So, when an election comes, at stake for him is not democracy or progress, but all his accumulated indecencies and wealth and lifestyle. If he shot his way to the top, he will shoot his way down. Many innocent victims, many dead, but the spoils for them are inviolate.

    That is why it is hard for some to accept defeat, or not to rig. When it is a presidential poll, many of those who will goad the loser to reject the people’s vote also stake their vanities to the victory of their candidate. That was what Jonathan encountered before he followed the noble path of surrender.

    French Prime Minister Clemenceau once said petrol is more important than blood. In the violence of Nigerian electoral wars, blood is currency. It is the price of the ultimate prize: victory.

     

  • The Touchstone: Bad weather saved Nigeria from compromised polls – Sam Omatseye

    Political analyst and Chairman, Editorial Board of The Nation Newspapers, Sam Omatseye, joined by Member, Online Editor, Sunday Oguntola to discuss the 2019 General election, Democracy in Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari, INEC, PDP, APC, Corruption in Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar, Ballot box snatching.

  • Tinpot emperor

    His cap fits him, especially as a measure of his ego. It points up like an airport tower as though intending to graze the sky. Ibikunle Amosun’s head gear suffers from what Sigmund Freud and his followers would call phallic anxiety. From base to top, the cap occupies a real estate bigger than his face from fore-head to chin. To his credit, few politicians have so mastered what I would call the “political look.” Some showcase their shirts, others their shoes, many their caps. But few set themselves apart like the Ogun State governor as a fop of the head. Many say it is inelegant with the top rims caved in so the centre spikes up like a blade. But it is his own.

    What does not fit, though, is the man and his task. So, Amosun may be a governor, but he is not gubernatorial. He has never been gubernatorial, not even before he mounted the throne and grovelled in prayer from party leader to party leader, sitting in lobbies on end and playing the suppliant fellow as an impresario of humility. Like Oliver Goldsmith’s familiar character, Amosun thinks he stooped then. Now it is his time to conquer. He was afflicted early by the fear of gratitude, and his ogas must pay for his humble pie.

    The first shadow of the ego at work was a picture of a flood few months into his reign. The man paid a visit, and in spite of his ponderous boots, he would not allow his special footwear to touch the intrusive waters. He cruised on a canoe while the rest of Ogun humanity around swam. He, with his boots, was too pristine for the stain.

    Of late though, what he has done puts the man in bold relief, especially his bold belief. He wanted to post his successor, and he had the right to it. But he wanted to do it without due process. A godfather must earn the respect of his son. The scriptures warn parents not to provoke their children to wrath. It was lesson number one that he did not understand. He was less than the lesson. Godfathers must play a delicate game of balance and flattery of conflicting interests and tendencies. If he wants to impose he must follow the paradox of imposition by consent. He followed the path of imposition by fiat.

    Because he was too confident, he fell out of touch with the grassroots. The primary poll came, and he lost. His candidate for governor had to wait on the side-lines. But while others cheered, he lamented. His party, the APC, had thumbed its finger for another man, Dapo Abiodun. Amosun would not yield. His patriarchal air would not absorb such a defeat. He had to seek oxygen elsewhere.

    His path was to seek another party, and be on record as one of a few governors who are leaders without discipline. He betrayed what Joseph Conrad calls a “bravado of guilt” or “an adventurer’s easy morality.” He, like his Imo State mate of erections, Rochas Okorocha, announced that his candidate was going to another party. A party leader masterminded an anti-party activity. Party chairman Adams Oshiomhole yelled, but the man Amosun yelled back. He had cried that party leaders had squeezed him out of contention in his own realm.

    He screamed at Lagos, and at Abuja, and he screamed until he turned hoarse. He said he wanted to run as senatorial candidate of APC. The people of Ogun State he urged to vote him as APC senator and his candidate Akinlade of the APM as the governor pick. That was local politics.

    He who claimed to love Buhari more than the so-called cabal decided to play another stunt. His people should vote Buhari of the APC for president, him for senator and Akinlade for governor.  A confused trinity. He took his man Akinlade on a sojourn to Aso Rock. It was indeed a theatre when even Buhari received Amosun in Aso Rock and received the candidate and posed for the camera. If all politics is local, Amosun is making the byway the main road. Governor is main road but by asking his supporters to go to another party for the top post in the state, he made the byway the main road.

    Segun Osoba had to remind Buhari that he had erred woefully by taking the party pick to visit him. But Buhari is for everyone and nobody and the translation is that Buhari is for Buhari only. By that, Buhari had become guilty like Amosun.

    But nothing reflected the absurdity like what happened in Abeokuta at the APC rally when members of his own rival party APM pelted the president with missiles and boos. He endangered the life of the first citizen. Rauf Aregbesola called him a hypocrite. It was a lawless scene that day. Eyewitness accounts show that persons were mauled and one person’s eye was gouged.

    Yet he wants to be a senator. As I tweeted, we have enough of the tout in a certain fellow from Kogi State. The senate cannot abide another one, especially if he was once governor. Amosun is a great shuffler. That day, he jostled Abiodun from the front row. It took the vice president’s intervention who ceded his place beside the president to him. Prof Yemi Osinbajo had to secure a place on the other side of the president. More than one governor has told me that when his colleagues gather around the president, he often pushes them away so as to stand beside Buhari. Hence he is often beside the man for photo ops, unless on a few occasions when the shuffler fails.

    Amosun ought to learn about the limits of power. A friend of mine apprised me of a text message he sent Amosun as new year greetings in 2017. Excerpt: “…it is obvious the euphoria that greeted your ascension to power in 2011 has avoidably vanished… rather than be the solution, most inhabitants of the Gateway state, including civil servants, most politicians, civil society groups, market men and women now see you as the problem…this could be traced only to one factor: …you listen only to yourself…which can only lead to self-perdition…why are you daring God with your published statement that you know the person that won’t be governor come 2019…you’re determined to play Babangida here but we all know how Babangida ended…but try to reflect on why the populace of that state no longer like you. Remember the verdict of history and the incontrovertible fact that: today is not forever.”

    During the Yoruba Wars, the story is told of an Alafin, who grovelled by day and plotted by night, and he ended up in the night of infamy. For now, we can say Amosun is playing emperor, but an expiring one. His reign is going roughneck into that goodnight.  He is raging against the dying of his light, apologies Dylan Thomas.

     

    Like a comet

    We all woke up to a day different from what we slept for. The polls did not come but the day came and left. So after INEC chief Mahmood Yakubu explained all that happened, I said to myself, one week will be over soon, and the election will come and go like a comet. The significant point he made was that he wanted to avoid a scenario where most states would have performed their duties and a few would be left, like Edo or Taraba or Oyo, and it would look like a staggered election. So if it becomes a tight race, it would look like a few states would vote after the fact and exploit perceived momentum or spike it.

    Osun Election: US applauds INEC over inconclusive verdict, rerun 
    INEC boss

    It would look like a rerun rather than an election of the whole country. If epochs sweep by and are defined by a few sentences, like the Second World War or the life of Mandela, what is a week in a nation’s life? Time seems to grind when we are impatient, but it has the wings of a bat.

  • The Touchstone: Amosun is a gangster governor – Sam Omatseye

    Political analyst and Chairman, Editorial Board of The Nation Newspapers, Sam Omatseye, joined by Member, Editorial board Femi Macaulay to discuss the APC Presidential rally in Ogun State, President Mohammadu Buhari, Atiku Abubakar, PDP, APC, 2019 General Election, Presidential Polls, APC Rivers crisis.

  • Lest we forget

    As kids growing up in Warri, we dreaded a certain ant called Okurubas, a sly and nimble irritant. Its sting not only tumefied the skin but threw anyone, no matter how big, off balance in an instant. The victim could go down as though a softie of a wrestling match. We called the sting “site,” a pidgin verb to reflect the onomatopoeic effect of the assault.

    Atiku Abubakar suffered the Okurubas effect last week. It came in the way of a story published by world renowned news agency Reuters. It published a story that illumined his recent United States trip, and affirmed that Atiku paid lobbyists to get a “temporary reprieve” to visit the country.

    Atiku travelled with a retinue of glamour acolytes like Bukola ‘Eleyinmi’ Saraki and Senator Ben Murray Bruce of the common sense policy now turned awry. The report said Atiku paid a lobby firm, Holland and Knight, $80,000 and had paid another such firm $90,000 a month. The idea was to waive any infractions he might have committed against the law, and allow him a short stay, a whirlwind visit.

    With a gleeful picture of a young lady handing him a bouquet, his publicists presented Atiku as a colourful triumph over his critics who pelted him with accusations of corrupt dealings. They said he had avoided the United States like a malignant disease because he awaited prosecution. He even lodged in President Trump’s hotel in Washington D.C. as though to emphasize a subtle meeting of the minds with a U.S. president known not to know the difference between public property and private gain. Being the president’s customer came across as a sort of sop.

    Atiku intended to cancel two big lies with one small one. When he launched his whirlwind trip to the United States, we did not know it was a lie until Reuters told us. But the travel was the small lie, but it was the sort of small lie with large consequences, like an Okurubas sting.

    He joined hands with one of the conduits of American corruption, the lobbyists. Lobbying is an important American feature, and it can be used for good and evil. Many a scandal in U.S. history have had their roots in it, including an ongoing one with President Trump involving a meeting with conniving Russians in Trump Tower in New York. Lobbyists are not necessarily actuated by noble impulses. “I know what my client wants,” confessed an anonymous lobbyist. “No one knows the common good.”

    The word is believed to have originated from or popularised by President Grant’s lips to characterise men who visited him at the lobby of the famous Willard Hotel in Washington, and lobbyists can advocate anything from smoking rights to gun rights to gay rights. But they are for hire. “The lobby is the army of the plutocracy,” said American sociologist William Graham Sumner on the value of the rich in American political engineering. Poor people cannot lobby in the US, unless backed by some moneyed interest.

    The two big lies are Siemens bribery scandal where he was named and led to 13-year jail term for an alleged fellow accomplice Congressman Jefferson who hid his loot in his Louisiana refrigerator. Even Siemens pleaded guilty and paid $1.6 million. The other involved his fourth wife Jennifer Douglas in an alleged $40 million money laundering. The Reuters story shows if he wants to visit again, he has to knock on a lobbyist’s door with plenty of dollars in his hands. Secondly, we know that the charges against him still stand and he cannot just hop on a flight to Washington without consequences.

    This story puts in context Atiku’s assertion that he will give amnesty to corrupt people, an official surrender to corruption as policy and it would also disentangle him from his sundry iniquities. One of such was his exploiting his position as vice president to enrich his company Intels by making it fatten on oil and gas shipments. His deputy, Peter Obi, saw nothing wrong with investing billions of Anambra State money in his family business and banks in which he had interest. He said he benefited Anambra and his fellow PDP men eulogised him with claptrap and claps. But he did not say how much he and his family stowed away in the sweetheart deals.

    It only shows that the Atiku candidacy is corruption fighting back. Yet we cannot say the Buhari era has a holy writ. I have noted its contradiction, and even hypocrisies, including the $25 billion NNPC saga and the Ganduje show. Ganduje has immunity but a scathing condemnation and effort of the party not to give another ticket would have helped. Also chief of army staff did not convince anyone when he tried to justify his Dubai property against the background of his lifetime earnings.

    Yet Buhari can be accused of not systemising the corruption war. But what he has done is a beginning. He has convicted two ex-governors, terrified many who steal, and saved a lot of money. It is not a thing to condemn but to build upon.

    Politics is like a mud fight. There are no pretty people in the ring. We strive but we don’t get swamped in idealism. Hence Theodore Roosevelt wrote his famous lines on the Man In the Arena: “it is not the critic who counts…The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…”

    Buhari’s great sin is his lack of sensitivity in social sector of governance. Skewed appointments, although his main critics were silent, sometimes raucous beneficiaries of the same thing in the Jonathan era. If he wins, and it seems likely, Buhari must turn the corner to social justice, and that is perhaps one of the reasons why some believe without reflection that he has not performed.

    Here is a list of some of what he has done. Some major infrastructure work, including major roads in the Southeast and Niger Delta, some with Sukuk money. Lagos-Ibadan expressway in good speed with little allocation from Saraki’s men. Ibaka seaport with procurements completed to ease Lagos. Arrested the Jonathan-era Naira freefall. Lagos-Ibadan railway and Itakpe-Warri railway ready. Second Niger Bridge with 12-storey building of work underwater. Series of N projects, including agriculture, with loans made available in what may be the beginning of a genuine welfare programme. School feeding for over 9 million children. Pension payment for Biafra, railway, Nigeria Airways retirees. Adoption of made-in-Aba localised fabric for police and army, including locally made vehicles for government use. Mambilla Plateau hydro-power project for 3,050 megawatts after 40 years of abandonment and it will trigger a city and a new economy on its own, including a tea plantation boom. Power rose from about 3000 megawatts to 7000, with some problems with distribution, including gas and transmission woes. It’s work in the making. And more.

    Buhari worked with plummetted oil price and earned the lowest revenue of any regime. Jonathan earned the highest with over $380 billion while Buhari earned about $93 billion. Reports say two weeks to election, Jonathan pulled over $290 million from the coffers. You can see why the economy could not sing. One of the great problems of the Buhari administration is messaging, both in tackling its crisis and in celebrating its triumphs.

    We have quite a few candidates, but only two have a chance to win. The idealists may pooh-pooh both, but election is about realism, and you choose what you can use. Realism is not foolishness. Buhari may not be a great candidate, it is the better option today. I would rather make the best of what is available if I cannot make the best available.

     

    Good Samaritan

    Some might say he was playing politics. But those who now live because he showed love are not complaining. Death knows no politics. Its hands are cold. The warmth of Oyo State Governor Abiola Ajimobi banished the icy hands from the two citizens, an okada rider and female passenger knocked down by vehicle. Onlookers were wary.

    Ajimobi

    The governor could have driven by, or cynically and mechanically ordered a staff to attend to them. But he was a genuine Good Samaritan who personally took them to the University College, Ibadan and ensured the best care available. Those who know Ajimobi’s biography will not be surprised as a man who grew up in a communal family compound of about 25 rooms in Oja-Oba, Ibadan, where cousins were as close brothers and sisters.  They received people with warmth from east and west and lived in empathy with their neighbours. That is the root of that day of Ajimobi’s hospitality. The governor’s heart of flesh made the difference between life and death of fellow citizens.

    If it was not charity, whatever it was enhanced Oyo State and the human family. The residents hailed him and the world is better for it.

  • 40 years of solitude

    It is wealth that beckons, beauty that seduces like a maiden, hills that kiss the clouds, scenic languor, the swagger of mountains, breath-taking channels of rivers and streams, treeless greens rolling to the horizon, moist soil, Nigeria’s highest peak, the charm of dreams. Our own Mambilla Plateau is what the poet John Dryden would describe as “here is God’s plenty.”

    Yet, it has remained one of the poorest on earth. In the west, such a magnificent panorama would hang high in the world’s elite tourist heavens.  Here it is like the poet John Gray’s flowers “born to blush unseen.” A muted paradise. An Eden of wealth. Yet the place is one of the metaphors of failing government in Nigeria.

    Nothing demonstrates this better than the instalment of a power project in that place. Government after government for 40 years have been at it, and stumbled and fell, only to rise and fall again. It has triggered litigation, punctured egos, exposed board intrigues, reflected our ineptitude and lack of will as a people, and revealed why we have failed to develop any sector of our national life.

    Like the Greek character Tantalus, who was punished with a hanging fruit that he almost touches and is ever out of reach, the power project eluded Nigeria for 40 years. Now, we seem to be coming to the end of the curse.

    Under the bellwether minister, Babatnde Raji Fashola SAN, the FEC eventually signed on to a power project and work already has started. It is about power, but it is about building a new conduit of wealth, a sort of Dubai in seed if we are determined. The power project, as Fashola has envisioned it, is the back on which all others will bloom: flourishing large-scale farming, real estate boom, infrastructural explosion, markets, schools, game reserves, etc. It is like starting a city upon the hill.

    The story of power project is the beginning. It is with the power project that the plateau’s gifts will be unleashed. Fashola accompanied President Muhammadu Buhari to China to hatch a huge partnership and the contract price is $5.7 billion, and the Export Import (EXIM) Bank China with Nigerian counterpart funding of $868,874,559.30. This will provide power of 3,050 megawatts, which is over half of what is available today. Although the Fashola power strategy has been gradualist with capacity rising to about 7000 megawatts, about 5000 megawatts are available, with such factors as gas, equipment, GENCO resistance, etc, standing in the way of the 2000 megawatts balance.

    Part of the crust of this arrangement is that three firms who had at various times in the past four decades secured federal nods that went nowhere have now coalesced into the joint venture with some arbitration still going on. This is what has been lacking because we have allowed greed and political calculation trump our ability to deliver the goods for our people. It has taken a methodical thinking and focus on the goal for the Mambilla project to take off.

    It is not just Chinese firms, but at least 40 percent of Nigerian firms are already working. At the initial stage, it is expected to put about 30,000 people to work and provide livelihood for over 120,000 persons. Cement and steel companies in Nigeria are being engaged, and four dams – Nya, Sumsum,  Nghu, and Api Weir –  headline the power project. It will take advantage of the Donga River that flows from the Benue River.

    To achieve this, about 100,000 people around the project will be evacuated and resettled, and real estate consultants are at work on this.

    This is one of the highlights of the Buhari administration, and it is a feat that must be commended for breaking the knots. Similar work is going on in the Second Niger Bridge, and as vice president Prof. Yemi Osinbajo noted to a group of business persons in Uyo last week, work on it has risen to about 12-storey building under the water, a report that drowned the President in boos in the Senate last year. Or the Itakpe-Warri railway project and the Lagos-Ibadan rail line all billed to buzz into action shortly.

    Yet, the Buhari administration, for all its work in infrastructure and social-economic support, should stop shooting itself in the foot by pivoting the country to ethnic and religious suspicion as it has done with its tendentious appointments and its failure to follow court procedure, not in the Onnoghen case, but in the cases of El Zakzaky and Sambo Dasuki.  When you say words like ‘’live peacefully with your neighbours’’ during the Benue crisis, it detracts from the glories of the Mambilla project and the Second Niger Bridge. When you fell some governors like Jolly Nyame(Taraba) and Joshua Dariye(Plateau) for corruption as we have seen, the government plays it down when it does not condemn the Ganduje dollar show, or take steps against the open contradiction of chief of army staff’s lifetime earnings that cannot afford his acclaimed property in Dubai, or the N25 billion conundrums in NNPC under Baru on his watch. Such self-inflicted drawbacks embolden Atiku and Obi to boast that they used public funds to finance private companies. Atiku abused his office as vice president to prop his company Intels by routing oil and gas deals to it, and Obi invested Anambra State funds in family business and banks in which he had interest. So we can see how the Atiku/Obi ticket is evidence of corruption fighting back.

    We have seen that even those who rail at the Sukuk funds as Islamising Nigeria are benefiting from it in infrastructure work. editorial board member and The Nation columnist Gabriel Amalu recently testified in his travel East on major road work completed in the Southeast. Jonathan’s only gift to the Southeast was appointments of its cynical elite and his name Ebele and Azikiwe. He did not flatter the Southeast with such achievements.

    “No one’s virtue is complete/ the great Galileo loved to eat,” wrote German playwright Bertolt Brecht. But Buhari should realise that social and cultural factors can downplay major achievements because they are emotional time bombs. The work on the Mambilla is the making of a legacy, and I think the minister and his president are on the right track. Irony is that even the Mambilla Plateau also witnessed death in the high fire of the herders crisis. The grass on the plateau showcases it as a viable location of ranches. Its greens shine on without trees for miles. Imagine a place where nature forbids mosquitoes or tsetse flies to visit or breed, or where Nigeria can pull off tremendous foreign exchange from tea farming, and the industries that can transform the economy.

    It has the coldest climate, and it has hills where settlements can thrive. It is higher than Plateau State and more lush. Forty years of stagnation calls to mind one of the world’s greatest ever novels titled: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Garcia Marquez. A family of great thinkers, leaders, adventurers destroys itself systematically over a century. Thanks to this administration that this one boon that stagnated for close to half a century, actually since 1972, is now on the move. It is wealth we seem not to have seen like Christ’s disciples who were fishing all day on the wrong side of the river when prosperity was shimmering on the other side. My hope is that this does not become another false hope, and it is up to the president and his bellwether minister not to drop the ball.

    Highlands always bolster new cities as great empires. Ibadan began as a refuge during the Yoruba Wars. It has grown to become a Yoruba bastion and its biggest place and where Awolowo tenanted his genius.

     

    Udom’s futuristic ignorance

    When Vice President Yemi Osinbajo visited Uyo last week, Governor Emmanuel Udom sent only his secretary to government at the airport. His excuse came a day earlier. He said he was not aware of the “purported visit.” So, he was not aware of it even if it had not happened and it was just the next day? The man is guilty of not only

    lying, but lying ahead of the fact. I call it futuristic lying. Of course, the vice president was there to support his APC, and to give a talk to some business persons. But it was in the course of courtesy and protocol to show up. Was the man bitter? Whatever it was, Udom’s attitude is a way not to bear grudge in public and an example of how not to lie.