The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Wanted: Our help!

    Wanted: Our help!

    She came to The Nation’s office the other day, but she looked quite upbeat. But behind that exterior, Stella Monye was not the happiest mother on earth. Her son has been held down by an illness of damaged kidney, bladder and urethra that has crippled him since boyhood. Ibrahim who has earned a degree at home needs the mother to care for him everyday. She needs N20 million to take the son to the United States for treatment.

    Monye is no ordinary Nigerian. She has used her talent to sing and entertain and inspire. The least we can do is help her. Governors, senators, the president and his ministers: N20 million is small money to help the son. She sang “Oko mi ye duro timi o.” Translation: “My husband stand by me.” It is a plea for solidarity. She needs it now. It is a disgrace to us all that a woman like that who has been ambassador all over the world on our behalf is reduced to nursing a “vegetable” child when healing is on our wings.

  • Song for Lagos

    Song for Lagos

    There lies Lagos, the city at the edge of the sea and always on edge. And the people are sometimes at sea. There I was almost born but grew up there. I saw it in the 1960’s, when I first understood the identity of things on Ijaoye Street, near Yaba.

    But it was a city where I first found my tongue and feet. Where I kicked my first ball, wrote my first sentence, ran to safety with my father Moses during the civil war, made my first friend, loosed my tongue into its first song, crippled a toe in my first wound, knew the limpid sky above and learned about God and the devil, duelled a classmate, conquered a class test, inhaled the chemical anxiety of a hospital air where I went with my mother over a non-existent ailment.

    It was that very afternoon when the doctor said I was fine and that my frequent bouts of malaria were not because of any blood disease. I recall that afternoon my first encounter with amala, and my taste bud cringed gratefully to the meal with ewedu. Because I loved it, it became a home staple.

    Since then Lagos has been for me what it has been for Nigeria. It has known war and peace, the ragged and the brilliant, the elegant and brutal, the lover and predator, the quick and the dead, the tyrant and olive branch.

    Baba Sala made me thrill to the laugh as organised entertainment. The Bar Beach Show was a joy in literal language but barbaric in metaphor. It entertained until we saw armed robbers’ heads drop on stakes from gunshots.

    Lagos has been the cult of success. Everyone knew he or she would visit Lagos. In spirit. In their fantasies, they were singers, football stars, CEOs, heads of state. They gobbled the city’s delicacies and swaddled the tony arms of the rich.

    They came with their all, hoping to love and grow, make money and subdue it, own a big home, coddle a wife or man, breed a family, travel on its fabled highways and watch its televisions, encounter its celebrities from Julie Coker to D’Banj, from Ray Ekpu to Segun Odegbami, from Victor Uwaifo to Haruna Ilerika. Achebe wrote on how unwilling he was to depart the place when the Igbo fled the pogrom. Soyinka dedicated works to it. Ekwensi’s Jaguar Nana and other works roiled there. Ebenezer Obey, Sunny Ade found muse there. And Nigeria’s best ever, Rex Lawson, warmed his tongue in its entrails. Asa soared there first.

    It is the melting pot. The tribes come, whether Afemai or Ogoni, whether from a backwoods hut in Abia or an illiterate mother near Sambisa, Lagos has not only been a destination. It has been a destiny. The poor came to Lagos and rose to become a rose. The same city that birthed Olajumoke into a star also embraced a skinny lad like Nwankwo Kanu whose feet wrote Nigerian soccer into lore. Scientists like Awojobi and Chike Obi, social scientists like Claude Ake, or lawyers like Gani Fawehinmi and Falana. They all boomed there. Dele Giwa was letter-bombed into martyrdom. Even breakaway Ojukwu daydreamed about it in Biafra.

    The man born in Damaturu found traction in Isale Eko. The trader who could not bloom in Benin had a boost of clients in Alausa. At one time, Lagos swarmed with soldiers. As the nation’s capital, the youth did not want to be democrats. They loved the ostentatious impunity of the khaki men. Murtala Mohammed’s voice and its ability to conjure action did not vitiate the army’s glory in the senses after Dimka snuffed it out. It was almost like the Stockholm syndrome, the victim bonded with its kidnapper.

    Fela’s “Soldier go, soldier come,” became less of a republican query than a sonorous surrender in an age when to be a messiah was to be a bully. Even avatars like Soyinka and Solarin were almost beguiled when the gap-toothed one gave us a meretricious cake of a system. Boys fantasised about “good morning, fellow Nigerians…”

    Lagos saw it and ran weary. The jackboot ran its course. In the city, Zik, Awo, et al, duelled to free us from the white man’s fang. In the 1990’s, the big city was agog with fury again. “On June 12 we stand,” a slogan reigned about Abiola. The man started as a dirt-poor kid who sang for bowls of amala. He became the nation’s richest man and unparalleled philanthropist. Once on the side of the soldier, he waxed into a traitor to his past, morphing into the neon sign of democracy. His foes fell and rallied behind him. His fellow oppressors were aghast at his new incarnation.

    We all became democrats, including even peacock soldiers. They joined in the cauldron, including businessmen. In Lagos people dared and risked their lives. Rewane, Bagauda Kaltho, Kudirat Abiola, etc bubbled out of sight. Some almost died; Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Soyinka, Bayo Onanuga, Nosa Igiebor, etc had limbs and zeal to fight on.

    In the end, Lagos survived for Nigeria. The city after Abacha was an opportunity. Democracy was nothing if not how Lagos did it. Without oil, Lagos became the country’s richest state. Lucky always, it had good men at the helm. First, it was Jakande, an austere leader, who combined discipline with a frontiers man’s vision, dreaming free education, and infrastructure work. No colour, no finesse, but a lot to deliver to the people.

    Tinubu came after Marwa. He laid a foundation for what is modern Lagos. Not the Jakande austere worldview, he came with a fecund vision, blending grassroots flair with fertility of commerce. A soldier and refiner of democracy. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) took over and built assiduously on the vision and earned on this page the epaulette of the governor of example.

    The Jonathan years impacted Lagos. Nowhere was it more potent than the election that brought alpha Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to the throne. At the polls, ethnic hate halved the city as no time in the past 50 years. The vote tilted for peace. With a “one Lagos” vision of ground-breaking infrastructure work, Ambode has soothed wounds and subdued tribe or faith, emphasising one people, and levitated the city to its cultural vitality.

    Our embraces are more important than our races. Our kind places second when we are kind. As Lagos marks 50, it looks with faith to another 50 without fifth columnists, but a single march of one people. Poet Lord Alfred Tennyson calls it, “one equal temper of heroic hearts.”

  • Domiciliary president

    Domiciliary president

    We are today at a loss to define the state of the presidency. But more worrying, we are in a fog on the state of the president’s health. Is he asleep, is someone administering an injection, what sort of chemical, blue, red, green, thick, light, aphrodisiac, soporific, analgesic? Or is he asleep buried in a soft, seductive row of pillows, or is he buried in a pile of files?

    It is now a presidency that tasks the imagination. We cannot see him. We therefore imagine him. We imagine him in his sitting room, on a sofa. Is he having breakfast, or lunch, is he able to eat like other people? Does he remember or has he obliterated “the other room?”

    Is he agile? Does he have a regime of sturdy exercises? Is he more fragile than we think, his breath raspy to the ear? Is it all just a joke? Is the president all in fine fiddle while all of us fiddle with ideas that don’t exist? Our imagination is in a state of flux. The president is giddy in our minds. He is well, standing, eating, dizzy, laughing, squinting, in pain, growling, without appetite, gormandizing, helped to stand, showering without aid. A surreal presidency that inflicts our imagination with phantasmagoria.

    It is sad that we as citizens cannot vouch for the state of the man who presides over our lives? Is he fit to decide where the army should go or whether there is an army? Is he strong enough to determine whether he is strong enough?

    All we know is that the president does not attend Federal Executive Council (FEC), does not have to see his cabinet. That means the minister of labour can do his thing and the minister of agriculture can decide to abolish the plough.

    So, we have a president who is essentially home alone, if his office will now be in glorified vacancy, the seat permitted to spin in a cobweb, if the cleaner decides to stay home like the boss. What we have is therefore the making of a domiciliary president.

    It is instructive that the president has a few images in public. The most potent we have seen of late are pious. He appeared in the last two Fridays but one. He was clad for God, erect for God, smiling with diminutive Kaduna State Governor El-Rufai for God. Of course, we see him follow the rites of worship. I was about to characterise him as His Worshipful Excellency, a homage to T. M. Aluko’s novel, His Worshipful Majesty. But last Friday, the mosque did not see his holy shadow. So, he is more domiciliary than worshipful.

    But we saw false spiritual haloes around him when Lai Mohammed alleged that he skipped the FEC meeting because of Easter. But all of us did not show any rabbinical contempt for our work. So, we looked forward to the next meeting. But, then, he was not only absent, he offered to do the domestic. He said all the files should come to his home. That’s how we know a domiciliary president.

    Many leaders want to hide their illnesses. They do so not because it humanises them. Rather it makes them less so. While the farmer sweats away over his hoe, the seamstress sows a design into life and a computer whizz-kid whirs with new software, he is frail beside a healer in white frock and stethoscope, his heart hoarse.

    Much has been said about those past leaders who hid their afflictions. George Washington with his skin problem, Woodrow Wilson’s heart problem, and the heart attacks of William Harding and Dwight Eisenhower. Reagan could not work for more than an hour a day after his near fatal wound from the assassination. FDR was always on wheelchair but no television to expose the polio-ridden, handicapped man who led the world against Hitler. Perhaps the most charismatic of the 20th century American presidents had quite of few ailments. No one knew John F. Kennedy lived with Addison’s disease. The media knew of some of these presidential weaknesses but caved in to a deeper cultural affinity with secrecy.

    But the case with President Buhari causes us to worry. He left this country on the grounds of vacation and handed over to Vice- President Yemi Osinbajo. He arrived London and a vacation became a medical test, and then medical treatments and rest. We were not treated with facts but obfuscation.

    We were getting used to his resting abroad, only to hear him clatter into Abuja in a chopper. He had come to work. We thought the rest was over, but he said it was not over. He was not going to work at the normal rate and rhythm. In a nutshell, President Buhari admits he is not well but he will not let go. So, what is the nature of this illness? We don’t know.

    We are living with a president who embraces the good of democracy but not its demands of transparency. He is a democrat when he wins election, a feudal lord when it is time to give account. It has always been the problem with our democracy. We are not ready for the challenges of an open system. We have a fraudocracy. They are not only false to us. They lie when they call themselves patriots. What is sick is not that the president is sick but that the presidency wants to conceal it.

    His wife said he was captive to a cabal of power grabbers around him. Now, he is hostage to a fragility of health. This is a new definition of presidential double jeopardy. Poor health and power grabbers holding on to a septuagenarian clutching at presidential straws. The cabal did the same during the Yar’Adua months. They held on to him until one jeopardy cancelled another jeopardy and cancelled the cabal.

    Perhaps that is why the president wants to stay at home. This cabal rejects the prospect of not having Buhari see the files. They want him there to sign the files. He probably did not do that when he was out of the loop in Nigeria House in London. They shed some tears over that.

    But how long will he conceal his condition? The United States leaders concealed before the communication age. No leader can do that now. So, it pays this country if the president either works or resigns. He cannot be at once homey and home alone.

  • The Nexus

    The Nexus

    Like a streak of light, alpha Governor Akinwunmi Ambode illumined the Nigerian economy at the opening of the ultra-modern headquarters of The Providus Bank in Lagos recently. He saw the chaos in the foreign exchange impact on interest rates. He did not like it. He called the Federal Government and the CBN to harmonise them. Barely a week later, former central bank governor Chukwuma Soludo articulated the same sentiment.

    Governor Ambode was speaking as the man at the crest the creative hub of Africa’s fifth-largest economy. He mooted the idea as a nexus between investment and prosperity. The giddy up-and-down of the current exchange rates makes for an unstable market and it spills onto investment market where all labour is hired and profit minted.

    He also said this as a dreamer. The governor sits in the middle of transformational ideas like the Lagos Smart City projects, fourth mainland bridge, Oshodi transport interchange, Badagry Deep Sea Port, Lekki Free Trade Zone among others.

    He showed this verve at the weekend at the Guild of Editors convention when he said, “recession is not a crime,” rather it is a wake-up call to reset the economy’s buttons. Infrastructure is the main key. That is what he is doing with massive infrastructure work, one of the signal landmark is the Abule-Egba bridge that will open in a few weeks and turn a riot and rut of traffic into thoroughfare.

    He needs the dollars and rates to coalesce in a stable atmosphere, not only for his projects but also for the suite of big investors who partner Lagos for a raft of ambitious projects. Where most states struggle to pay salaries, Lagos is humming as a major buoy of the Nigerian economy. All stops in its way should step away.

  • Is that the law?

    Is that the law?

    Though justice be thy plea, consider this
    That in the course of justice, none of us
    Should see salvation” – Shakespeare

    Imagine that in the course of investigating the source and sinners behind the over $43 million, no one is caught, and the story peters out. Imagine further that names roll out, file before the court, get judgment that releases them back into the halcyon luxury of their homes. The names go home not as a roll-call of the damned but the justified of the land. Imagine also that, in the grass-cutter saga, Babachir David Lawal fizzes gloriously out of sight as quickly as he has snapped into scandal.

    Both dramas ease into anti-climax. The courts and inquiry panels say goodnight, the pens freeze and gavels drop. The people sigh. The government pivots away to another business. The nation pines for another rite of officials behaving badly. Then follows the cynical rigmarole that leads from allegation to acquittal. We are fed with scandal as entertainment. We have seen it before. We are blessed because we shall be entertained again very soon. We don’t need to stay tuned. Its channels will find us, even when we are not paying attention.

    It is this scenario that propelled me in the past few weeks to herald the virtue of justice over law. It is not enough that the law should acquit a person. The society should know that it has had justice. When that fails, the law fails. Some reactions, especially from lawyers, have cavilled at my view, accusing me of calling for arbitrariness. They claim my view will usher in chaos and tyranny in the court. Those who say that know little about the way justice works. They have become slaves of texts, or what in jurisprudence is called textualism or originalism.

    They believe that the law is the end of all things. But as Apostle Paul said, the law is only a school master, and a shadow of a better spirit, the spirit of the law. Students of history know what damage the law can inflict. Was it not the law that locked Nelson Mandela away for 27 years, that incinerated millions of Jews in concentrated camps, that swept Awo in Calabar prisons, sprang Hitler as Chancellor of Nazi Germany, that justified Franco, anointed the tyrants of Rome like Caligula and Nero who almost obliterated Christians and others who made Christianity a tyranny.

    Was it not law that made blacks less human in America, hanged Ken Saro Wiwa here, deported Shugaba in the Second Republic, imploded France into a revolution and canonised violence in the names of Robespierre and Danton, blessed the shipping of millions of Africans across seas of no return, etc.

    When law does not serve justice, we have nothing but the tyranny of lawyers who work for the despotic and manipulative elite. We should not speak of law as though it is a series of words of wisdom. Nor am I saying we should have no laws. We should, but we should bring it to social but not textual justice.

    Some judges claim it is all about balancing. The lady of the law is blindfolded. But as Femi Falana (SAN) noted in an interview on my television show on TVC, the lady with veil over her face is no longer innocent. The best legal mind of his generation said, “she has been raped.” But that is partly due to the neo-colonial heritage of our laws.

    We imported the western law into our land, and want to use it uncritically. Our society did not follow their historical pattern. Their law was based on their history, which involved revolutions, religious ferment, ideological collision and synthesis, economic stress and rebirth, colonial wars, cousin conflicts, etc. Their experience produced the law, and our founding lawyers schooled in London and the USA, imbibe their standards because the colonial fathers transplanted the laws here. With little adaptation, we consume and practise them.

    We may call ourselves a nation of laws, but we are witnessing neo-colonial justice. This calls for activism that takes what is good and adapts it and jettison the alien. In addition to the story of Justice Ademola, Patience Jonathan, Ayo Fayose and the Ozekhome link, we have SGF Babachir Lawal and Ayo Oke. It means the people are not only happy to see their funds returned to the central bank as in Oke, and a process of accounting as in Lawal, but solution that involves justice. It is not about doing away with the law, but doing away with evil.

    The lawyers rely on the western dictum that everyone is presumed innocent before they are guilty. That works in their societies because the law abides in their hearts. In the American squall to dislodge England, Benjamin Franklin said the revolution was in “the hearts and minds of the American people.” So, if their society roared into shape, ours is still a jungle. We cannot apply the law of well-bred dog to the sty of screaming pigs. You cannot bring the ways of organised society into a jungle and expect it to bring justice. That is why Nigerians presume their public officers guilty even if courts declare them innocent. A breach of contracts festers between the judiciary and the society.

    Law should serve our culture for justice, not the western system that sets the powerful loose. Scholars of law have interpreted Shakespeare’s play, Merchant of Venice, to show how technicalities can destroy justice. Shylock asked for the pound of flesh of his debtor. He rebuffed lawyers and judge who begged him for leniency. He insisted on the law. When the knife was dangled, he was warned against any blood drop. Shylock asked, “is that the law?” This was a case of justice using technicalities. The judge could have argued that the blood is part of the flesh. As the Bible says, the life of flesh is in the blood. But because Shylock was savage, the law smiled on the debtor. Hence, a character, Bassanio, asked the judge to “wrest once the law to your authority. To do a great thing, do a little wrong.” To do wrong here is a plea to pragmatic use of texts for the good of all.

    Ifedapo Adams Adedipe in response to my column last week ran away at a tangent. He described my comments as “unfair, and unjust attack on judges and lawyers. As the lawyer who argued the matter for Patience Jonathan, I can confirm to you sir, that the EFCC did not appear in court. Neither did it file any form of defence. To expect a judge to nonetheless wait for EFCC at its own pleasure to come to court is to expect too much from the courts. And regrettably, for a senior journalist to conclude, without knowing all the facts show (sic) how human we all are after all. So, it is not all lawyers that need to be saved. So too are our all-knowing journalists, who are too busy to investigate matters before judging others.”

    I appreciate the false humility in the latter end of that note from the senior advocate of Nigeria. Before I address those jabs, let me reiterate his confirmation of my agony with the so-called SANs. How could a man who has risen to the top bracket of lawyers truly want to defend a woman who was first lady and had no job by law and even in practice except being an absentee permanent secretary in Bayelsa State? How could he even do that and be proud of it? Was he not supposed to question her on how she came about $5.9 million? He should know, if he doesn’t already, that SANs like him are not the beloved people of our society when they defend cases of such low moral content.

    He says EFCC could not keep the court waiting for too long? How long? A few months. How many SANs have complained over the many cases of corruption that have endured years in court without verdict. Some cases have been in court for about a decade and they have thrived on dubious technicalities. And behind any such delayed case is a SAN. Because Adedipe was clouded by his case, he could not read my article for truth the way he reads his law for technicalities to defend the ilk of Mama Peace. I investigated and found the disgust of a judge who hurriedly asked for the money to be released to the woman.

    Most SANs have rigged the law for the elite, and they are partners in darkness.

    Just as Bassanio in Merchant of Venice, we need avenging angels of technicalities who bend the law for justice. They know the law is an ass but would not let it ride us.

  • For justice

    For justice

    We should ponder the paradox. Magu is fighting thieves. He takes them to court but loses. Lawyers smile home with their fees and judges get their pay. The people do not get their due though. Why? Because when whistle-blowers scream, stolen money erupts from hidden places.

    A shop from a high-end store spews out about N500 million. From a market where iya amala retails folksy delicacies, a kiosk spits out N250 million. From an airport up north, five bags burst with crisp currency on the border of N50 million.

    An unknown receptacle of other people’s money stashes N4 billion in an unnamed bank. Then a flat hoists $43 million. A sitting governor salivates for it and accuses his predecessor of ferreting it away from a project. The National Intelligence Agency says it is their own, as though the Nigerian money should not reside in the bank. So, on its own, the huge sum rented a flat in a tony loft on Victoria Island.

    The people are miffed, and when the man who stalks the larcenous monsters goes to court, some lawyers of great knowledge know better. They hang onto technical matters of the law, and hang the prosecution. Magu weeps. The thieves sigh. The people wonder.

    The eruption of loot in private places juxtaposes with the SANs and justices who give victory to the defence. This shows us, as I indicated last week, that law has failed us in Nigeria. The courts say the thieves can go free, we can go to hell. What then is the purpose of the law?

    They claim the cases were not properly presented. It’s an excuse to canonise criminals. If the society as a whole owes itself the task to battle sleaze, the onus lies on the court, lawyers and judges to bring it to fruition. There lies the value of the lawyers.

    Yet, it is the same lawyers who fail to make the case, and the judges who fail to give the right verdict. So, is it the law that we should blame? Well, a little bit. Our laws pretend to be rooted in our culture. But it is an import from Europe and the United States. Nothing wrong with that. But we have failed to adapt them to our peculiar social context. The laws are domiciled here but not domesticated. It’s like a broadcaster employed from Coventry whose accent skews a local name on NTA.

    But those judges who claim to be loyalists of technical details know little about what the law means. In western societies, the technicalities work because the values are settled. For instance, a society that forces a judge to recuse himself because he is suggested to have a link with a lawyer is acting out of a sense of justice. In such a society, the law knows its technicality does not bow to mere letter of the law, but the spirit. It is the same spirit that forces the judge to resign that informs the jugular of verdicts.

    In Europe and the U.S., the same constitution that compelled the society to burn blacks at the stake was used to enfranchise them in the flush of the civil rights movement. The society must allow its values to determine the law. The society rose against racial injustice, and the eyes of judges were opened to the law that espouses equality. It was always there in the US law, that “all men are created equal.”

    They saw it when the society evolved. Before then, no matter the cleverness of the prosecution, the judges looked the other way as dark-skinned folks flared to ashes. Hence Gani Fawehinmi noted that if he had a case between the rich man and the poor man, he would find the law for the poor man. The law may be an ass, but we must not let it ride us. An instance was recently, when Justice D.D. Longi let two armed robbery suspects free because of “lack of diligent prosecution.” The justice was lazy. Did he not have the capacity of the law to scream to the state authorities and the media and compel them to make the case? If he wrote them formally and asked the attorney general to wade in, the media would holler with headlines. Social media would echo it. Longi made technicalities work against justice. The fellows may be innocent or guilty. He owed us the duty to exhaust all institutional resources first. It’s matters like this that made D.H. Thoreau say that “the law never made anyone a whit more just.”

    The founding father of Botswana, Seretse Khama, was denied under a technical law from being king because he married a white woman. They manipulated local chiefs, including his regent uncle. But he marshalled the law to expose the British, including shifty Winston Churchill, who were less interested in justice than the diamond in the bowel of Bechuanaland.

    Behind every big case of fraud is a SAN, and behind any judgment that liberates a thief is a judge with a callow mind. Shakespeare’s Henry the VI character, Dick the Butcher, said, “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” He meant it in jest, but the quote has endured through the ages because of the intellectual duplicity of wigs. Our SANs are a great bane of the age. Hence Jesus poured woe on lawyers because they have “taken away the key of knowledge. You have not entered yourselves, and you have hindered those who are entering.”

    The verdicts on Patience Jonathan, Ozhekome, Ademola point to this general decadence. To save the law, we have to first save the lawyers. The society has a role to play. The lawyers have fallen short, so have our judges. The judges failed in the three EFCC cases because they did not apply the principle of hermeneutics for justice. The reader interprets a text in context. No text is bland until the reader makes it. If the lawyer is making an imperfect case, a good judge will do the right and save the case. That’s when the rule of law makes sense. But our justices are lost because they love themselves and their money more, and the society less. “The more one judges, the less one loves,” wrote French writer Honore de Balzac. We want lawyers and judges that love our society more.

  • Man for this season

    Man for this season

    One of the virtues of Yorubaland is that Christians and Muslims live in harmony in ways not replicated elsewhere in the country, even in the world. Well, in Borno State, especially the southern part, it is the case. In an interview in the Daily Sun, comes a revelation from the Chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Bishop Naga Williams Mohammed. He spoke on how the harmony was ruptured by the 2006 Danish cartoon scandal and the rampages of Boko Haram, and the extraordinary interventions of the present governor, Kashim Shettima.

    The cartoon led to the killing of Christians and destruction of churches. The former governor, Ali Modu Sheriff, now a PDP storm in a tea cup, refused to fulfil his pledge to the Christians and alienated them until Boko Haram rose and turned many communities to dust and blood. Bishop Mohammed, whose father was Muslim, crooned in the interview how both faiths lived oblivious of each other’s loyalties. Just as in Yorubaland, where Muslims celebrate Easter and Christmas with their sibling Christians, Christians slaughter rams with their fellow Muslims during Sallah.

    The Christians groaned until Shettima entered the scene. Hear him: “In the history of Borno State, there is no governor that has been as fair to the Christian community as much as Governor Shettima.” The bishop, who is the former head of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria in Borno, spoke of how Shettima personally visited the wards and allocated tens of millions of Naira for the welfare of the displaced Christians in the IDPs, as well as non-indigenes. He also waded into the pulverised churches. He monitored and ensured the rebuilding of many of the churches, allocating hundreds of millions to that project. He also is the first to allow the state sponsor pastors and other believers on pilgrimages and paying personal visits to the bereaved and supporting their families. He even wanted Christian and Muslim IDPs to stay together, although the religious leaders were wary of the move. Compassion trumps policy any day.

    Shettima is a man for all seasons, especially this season when people see blood instead of brothers. Kaduna State can learn from this example.

  • Of pinfall and pitfall

    Of pinfall and pitfall

    Magu had a pinfall. If it were once, we would say, it is okay. After all, he was only just smacking his lips over the Ngilari triumph. The former Adamawa governor’s drop signalled the first true and substantial victory in the war against corruption. So, it would be a draw; one for corruption and the other for EFCC and moral uprightness.

    But Magu fell two other times. His ICPC counterpart fell once. So, if we were in a football pitch, it would be a clear shellacking, Magu’s EFCC grovelling 1-3. But the war against corruption does not answer to the arithmetic of sport. Ridding the nation of scums and scams is not about sums of scores from sweaty men and women on the pitch of play.

    So, we are witnessing a sort of judiciary backlash over fiduciary fraud. As we say, corruption is fighting back. The losses have nettled the presidency. Hence it wants to get the EFCC back on track. It is afraid a sore thing has happened. The forces of graft have engrafted their lifestyle in the nation again.

    It thought corruption was in the emergency ward. He breathed laboriously, his limbs wilting, his skin perforated with perspiration while the doctors were weary and out of wits to save the monster. But suddenly, they remind one of the phrase in Charles Dickens’ famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities. A man thought dead and forgotten is suddenly “restored to life.” Not because he dies in flesh and blood, but because his activities are out of sight and hearing.

    Same to corruption. From the optics of the EFCC in the past two years, some thought the mighty bear had been subdued, even if not killed.  They saw figures and big figures exposed. We witnessed their lean and humbled looks as they waddled like ducks to the court. We also saw the mien of a gladiator in Magu, soft-spoken, reticent but poised always to bring down the crook. In the words of Apostle James in the Bible, he gave judgment without mercy. Buhari, also austere like his employee, clucked quietly behind the rocks of the presidency.

    Some now see it in the form of a revenant “restored to life.” They might even remember the phrase of the angel to the women who visited Jesus’ grave on the third day: “Why seek ye the living among the dead!”

    Now the presidency thinks what is wrong is that the cases were strong, but the EFCC was naïve in its legal weaponry. It has not employed the right investigative strategies and its lawyers lacked the intellectual brio, subtleties and aggressiveness.

    Yet when the stories first popped on the public radar, the targets were convicted generally in homes and offices in the country. So, why would Patience Jonathan who was no dollar millionaire hold such princely sum as $5.9 million in a bank account? How did Justice Ademola become so blessed that someone would, in the gladness of his or her heart, drape his wife with N30 million? Others wondered why Nigeria’s stolen money could easily become a lawyer’s fee of N75 million in the vault of feisty lawyer Mike Ozekhome? What of the election day hysteria man Orubebe, who was cleared because the money was still intact?

    The problem with the cases is not that the lawyers were mentally porous, or the judges were tendentious errants, or because the investigations lacked an eye for detail. It is simple. We have left the war on corruption in the hands of the EFFCC or ICPC alone? The two agencies have become lone rangers in a war that can only be waged with every segment of the nation up in arms.

    So, when a Patience Jonathan wins in court, she will feel justified. She believes the money was not stolen from the government? She may be right. And if she is right, that is the real problem. How did a first lady who was the president’s wife get so rich when she was only a permanent secretary in absentia and had no powers or access to the till?

    If she did no contract, or inspired none directly, we cannot see a legal way to convict her. That is the issue. We see the war on corruption as a case of law when it should be about justice. When the spirit of the law convicts and the person defeats the law in letters, we live in a corrupt and unjust society.

    The same applies to the case of Ozekhome. If Fayose pays a lawyer from the nation’s money, and we cannot retrieve that money, it is because Ozekhome is entitled to his fees. But what is the snag? That money is Nigerian and at the same time Ozokhome’s. Yet, we know that Nigerian money should not be used as fees to defend the allegedly stolen funds.

    When such matters arise, the law fails us. We know our money has not been made available to us. We have fallen short of what the father of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant, called “the categorical imperative.” There are some things that are so universally right that we have to do them. If we don’t, we shall not rest. Kant would say, all that money is in the wrong place, and we should bring the money back to where they should be: in our coffers.

    To use the language in the Water Gate scandal of the Nixon White House, we should follow the money. The news source known as Deep Throat always urged the Washington Post reporters along that line.

    We are not following the money because we want the ICPC and EFFC to do so. As this column has noted before, all societies that brought down the high and mighty brow of corruption did it with public participation. This involves all the professions, the civil society groups, market women, banks, house wives, etc. Nigeria is not the first to be undercut by the maggoty mush of corruption. England, France, the United States wallowed once all in the mire. The phrase prebendalism did not originate in Africa. It was a European rot where big men placed their fronts in offices to steal for them. They have reined that in. in the US, the progressive era highlighted a massive purge of bad eggs and it redounded in the rise of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency.

    Buhari needs to understand that convicting a man is not the same thing as dispensing justice. Just as my consistent assertion that the rule of law is a good thing, but we must have good men to enforce it. Or else we will have rule of law givers. Impunity can be explained within the law when we have bad judges who kowtow to an ethic that allows mere technicality to overshadow substantial justice.

    The law is made for us and not man for the law. I am for the rule of law, but I want to get the right law and the right persons. Hitler and Napoleon in their dreary days abided by the rule of law. The US fought against rule of colonial law, just as Zik and Macaulay did here. Trump is bringing a racist template of law to drive out dark-skinned folks.

    It is that same fidelity to obnoxious law that will set free thieves. Gani Fawehinmi once told me that if there is a case between a rich and a poor man, “I will find the law for the poor man.” So, the law is flexible. All I ask is that it be made for justice and not the law giver. To achieve that, the EFCC cannot work alone.

    It can research all it wants, get great legal strategies. But the presidency needs to galvanise the society, so it can play its role. Racial injustice was upheld with the same laws that defeated it in the United States and Europe. Justice cannot come to a society that is not ready for it. Our institutions cannot be clean when we are dirty.

    If we are ready to rid the nation of corruption, Magu would not have the pinfalls. To avoid such again, the pitfalls of an indifferent society must first be removed.

  • On the make

    On the make

    A bully reigned on his street, a huge boor whose visage, gait, brawls and conquests menaced everyone around. But he was nothing like the thug. He was slight of build, thin and lightweight. By all perception, the tough would gulp him up in one swoop.

    But he was no one to bait. The coercer came his way and wanted to browbeat him, especially because he did not share in the intimidated respect others nursed for him.  Before the bully struck him, Bola popped his faced with a head butt. The brute retired as the neighbourhood tyrant, his face squished into a dam of running blood.

    The myth was over. A diminutive fellow had played David, and the goliath scampered out of sight. Bola stunned not only the tormentor but the street. “Sometimes, it is the people no one imagines anything of,” noted the great computer code breaker Alan Turing, “who do the things that no one can imagine.” Everyone knew he was spry and stubborn. Few expected the giant to turn clay at his feet.

    As Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu marked his 65th birthday last week to an uproar of praise as a political high roller, few know he has been a giant killer from childhood. It is perhaps to make the symbolic point that former world heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield will meet him in the ring in May. He does not see giants. He is not like the 10 Israeli spies in the Bible who returned with fright and saw their enemies as giants and themselves as grasshoppers. He is like the other two who knew that the enemies were little.

    He is also a practical gladiator. He knows the fight to accept, when to unleash a blow and how. He is not a megalomaniac like Hitler who boasted before the Second World War when he crooned: “Our enemies are tiny little worms. I met them the other day at Munich.”

    While the party lasted and the colloquium buzzed, President Muhammadu Buhari came close to classifying the stature of Tinubu when he described him as the greatest politician of this era. That understates him. Any credible student of Nigeria’s history would know that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is not only the greatest politician since independence; his is the greatest since Herbert Macaulay.

    As he beat the bully, he has been replaying that script all his life. He has done so in the corporate world as auditor. He shook up Mobil with a report that capsized the company’s top brass. The CEO fell. He earned the fear of his bosses, but the respect of the headquarters in the United States. He did it in the democracy struggles as senator in the June 12 struggles as well-documented in an upcoming book. He baited, dared the Abacha junta, was gaoled, escaped death a few times, and amassed resources and brain to fight the despot till his death.

    He returned to slay giants and became governor of Nigeria’s signal state, Lagos. As governor, he inhabited an island when the centre under the Owu chief could not unseat him. He challenged and outclassed him. With his party of one state, and the rest of the country under the sway and resources of a behemoth of the PDP, some saw his obituary. His colleagues fell after the first term, and OBJ was shocked Tinubu returned a glory.

    Lagos became the last bastion, what in Texas history is called the Alamo. They expected him to fall in 2007. They plotted Obanikoro to unseat his party and best Babatunde Fashola. Obj dallied and wanted his troops to move on Lagos. Security forces warned him against it. Eventually, he yielded and Fashola became governor. The king had become kingmaker in the most contentious of elections.

    With all of these, he had earned himself the plaudit of a great politician. He was not yet in the big league with the great politicians of our history. He was still a regional wrestler.

    He was still so when he brought the West back to the progressive fold. Osun. Oyo. Ekiti. Ondo. Ogun. Then even Edo.

    It was time to go national, and that was the big task. No politician had been able to rally forces in our history to victory. We had in the First Republic an alliance to bring down the NPC government under the Nigerian National Alliance. They owned the centre. To topple them, other parties coalesced under the United Progressive Grand Alliance. It did not fly, and the result was not only the turbulence of the West, but it triggered a coup that gave us a 30-month bloodbath.

    The next attempt was the PPA in the Second Republic. Some were sanguine and expected the coalition, especially of Awo’s UPN and Zik’s NPP and Waziri’s GNPP. They could not form a melting pot. Ego replaced concord, and each party went its separate way. At one stage, Zik landed in Enugu airport after what seemed a cheerful dialogue in Lagos airport. He accused Awo of contempt. NPN won the election but it lasted only a few months when Buhari struck.

    The only attempt to bring parties across the regions for a truly national foray was spearheaded in 2011. It all seemed it would work but it fell apart in the last flush. Jonathan had his way. Buhari is president today after many expected the APC to be a bust. The party’s formation is the biggest fruition in our political history. He single-mindedly envisioned, architected and worked it. Even a little detail like getting the logo right made him travel across the country from Lagos. US President Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs that the proof of a tough guy is not only to make a tough decision but his ability to bring his associate along the path.

    The big feat was not so much the 2015 election as the APC primary, which he choreographed without a bitter aftertaste. The primary prefigured the ultimate triumph. That triumph, history will show, saved us from the abyss. Jonathan and Nigeria was ineluctably on the path of perdition. Debts and corruption were out of control.

    Macaulay rode the nationalist movement across tribes and regions. Zik succeeded him but the NCNC progressively shrank into a regional party. Zik was a diffusion. Tinubu is osmotic. He has been in this odyssey since he abandoned his lush job as Mobil treasurer. He slept on the wet and damp floor of Alagbon prison, ate on the fly, ran out of money, hid in bushes and stared death in the eye. He never accepted the Mobil offer to return to the luxury of his former life.

    Yet his is not about politics alone. It is politics as buoy to policy. He began a governance template that compelled Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun to confess that they want to copy it in the centre. No politician in history has enjoyed such emulation in politics and governance. It is not for nothing that Lagos is the one great story of governance today under alpha Governor Akinwunmi Ambode.

    Not since independence have such an array of bigwigs in politics, business and culture gathered in honour of a man who left office a decade ago. Governors, former governors, bureaucrats, captains of industry, CEOs, cultural mavens, et al.  They were there. It is a tribute to his soft power, apologies to Harvard Professor Joseph Nye. Hard power collapses easily. But soft power endures. Those who have not read Governor Ambode’s parable of the coconut should digest it for its import of a man who, in spite of many laurels, is still a phenomenon on the make.

    What other major statesman is known by his chieftaincy title from a different tribe!

    Just as he fell the bully, he still has giants to bait and beat. Except that he sees grasshoppers when others see giants.

  • Ali versus uniform

    Ali versus uniform

    If you have stood close to Hameed Ali, you will see two things that collide. The air of an aristocrat and the mien of an army officer. In between, you observe the impulses of an entitled man. So, if you are the Senate, you cannot expect the man to simply cave in when you ask him to wear a uniform.

    Ali will not say it, but he believes he is done with the uniform. He was done when he retired as a soldier. To him, when you say “old soldiers never die, they only fade away,” it also includes the uniform. His army uniform, in all its imperial glory and starch, is fading away, and that is just fine with him. For him to put on the uniform of the Customs officer, he sees as degrading. You cannot be a soldier, where you rose to an elite rank and became military governor, and stoop to an inferior garb.

    After all, as military governor and senior officer of the Nigerian Army, the Customs was a subordinate agency. Its comptroller-general could not puff beside a colonel during the military era.

    The army officer sneers. But then he is also an aristocrat in bearing. He believes he belongs to a power elite in ethical and ethnic senses. With such double-barrelled accolade, he did the Senate, with the Oloye snorting, a rare privilege by appearing in the chamber to answer their questions.

    Ali thus represents the irony of power in our democracy. He imbues the hauteur of an army officer and emblem of a feudal elite, and why did he agree to be the comptroller-general? Because he can, and he can get away with such contradiction. He sees himself as superior and saviour. In his special way, he has stooped to conquer. By asking him to wear uniform, they are trying to conquer him into stooping. Oliver Goldsmith’s 18th century play, She stoops to Conquer, fits into this narrative. Except that the play’s principal actor disguises to conquer. Ali is too patrician to hide under any cloak.

    That is why he is defying calls to wear a uniform. He knows no law court can compel him to do so. No law asks him to wear it. Decency is the only reason, and who is to tell an aristocrat what is decent? Decency is for the common pool, and we don’t tell the big man what to wear and how to dress. As Mokokoma Mokhonoana, a South African writer and philosopher noted, “what to wear: an employee chooses. How to dress: His employer chose.”

    Ali does not see himself as an employee. He sees himself in the mould of an employer. If you come from the vault of power, how else can you think? Enough has been said about how the fight between him and the Senate betrays the fissures in the APC. But for me, it is a far more symbolic thing.  Wearing a uniform was a way to make the strong-head Customs head conform.

    The man is known to be doing well on his job. He is raking in money. He is a sort of corruption czar in a cocoon known as the Customs. The top brass of that agency must be nervous to have him around. The agency is, by common consent, the most corrupt in the country. Those who work there live the peacock life, the sort their legitimate incomes can never even dream of.

    It seems the real peacocks of this democracy somehow fell into the shadows of the Customs bear. They wanted a bear hug, instead the beast pounced on them. The animal has them in their claws. I am referring to the Senate and scandal of Senate President Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki, the extant Oloye of the upper chamber of Nigeria’s legislature.

    Every member of the top class wants a big car into the country one time or another. We have learned that Oloye has fallen into the man’s net with a big, armoured vehicle. Oloye is denying ownership of a Range Rover impounded by the Nigeria Customs. Saraki’s spokesman says it is a matter of the supplier. But they have not been able to clarify why his name was not inserted in it. Well, we now know that the Senate intervened not because of the outcry over NCS impunity on the streets by impounding vehicles with antiquated papers, but because it touched their bones. What a selfless Senate and its leadership. Oloye had to fight back, and he wanted to put the man back in line by wearing uniform.

    It’s clear now, this is no trivialisation of uniform. The Oloye has a keen sense of symbolism. Politics has always used uniform or sartorial markers for effect, either for good or ill. It’s not for nothing that presidential candidates changed their clothing from region to region during campaigns. Goodluck Jonathan was adept at this. The stiff Buhari, who never cared to change his habiliments, was compelled to do so in the last presidential hustings.

    Appearances are too important in politics to be left in the hands of stylists. Key political actors are their own aesthetes. Hitler had his tuft of beard. Mahatma Ghandi looked grand in his half-cloth, and defied Churchill who called him “a half-naked kafir” in the heat of the Indian’s anti-colonial maelstrom. Abacha loved his goggles. Trump’s turbulent toupee is gaining notoriety. Charles de Gaulle had his cap and so did Churchill. Nyerere had his French suit.

    Yet these men knew that the hero was not about the uniform, but about the man, as Andrea Randall wrote: “Heroes don’t always have capes, badges, or uniforms. Sometimes they support those who do.”

    Ali believes he is supporting those who wear uniforms. Saraki and co. want to force him to don one.  The uniform, for the point of view of Oloye, is not the stuffy khaki. It is obedience. Ali gets it and that is why he is kicking. Uniforms are about obedience. Individuality is about sacrifice. Ali would not sacrifice his individuality, though, to an institution. The reason is that he has come as a messiah. Messiahs in history have tended to be humble. But they have also been individual without alienating their folks. Jesus whipped the money changers in the temple. What do you expect when a combo of soldier and patrician takes over a can of worms like the NCS? Perhaps, Ali may have the moral bona fides for the job. He does not seem to have the humility. Just like his boss, Buhari, the fight against corruption calls for men of integrity. But history tells us that winners triumph with other weapons as well, including cunning and strategic flexibility. Sentiment, sometimes, supersedes principle, when appropriately harnessed.

    Ali would not wear the uniform, and that is wrong, not in law but in optics. As Apostle Paul noted, all things may be lawful, but they may not be expedient. If he can stoop to fight the corruption war, he should respect the men by donning their clothing. He becomes their leader in and out, in and out of uniform. It does not make him less of soldier or patrician. It makes him a better man.