Category: Sam Omatseye

The term mea culpa often comes up when a person of high standing or an institution of integrity wants to make up for a public wrong. It derives from a Latin prayer of the Catholic Church, and it means “through my fault.” Culpa means “guilt or fault,” and is the root of the adjective culpable. The last major mea culpa I recall came from America’s newspaper of records, The New York Times, when it apologised for misleading its readers on facts about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and for not probing the claims of the Bush administration about the despot’s stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction.

Something close to a mea culpa happened a few days ago. The Nigerian Judicial Council (NJC) made a pirouette and decided to suspend the judges now under investigation for corruption. It was a starchy and stuff act of contrition. It was not penitential. Neither was it reverential of the cathedral lordliness of the bench it represents. It merely reversed its position.

The NJC’s press release also spews out a contradiction. It said it has suspended seven judges and, in the same breath, suspended them. What was the chicken and what was the egg? Did the NJC respond to the judges’ decision to step down or the other way around? Was it an afterthought after a frenetic wave of civic coercion? I think so.

The judges were following the bar’s bumpy footpath. The president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) had first condemned the raid of the judges and railed at the DSS action as an assault on the judiciary. The NJC did the same, and we witnessed a turf war on the constitution. The DSS said it acted within its rights in what it mischievously called a sting operation. The NBA chief and the NJC said the independence of the judiciary had been impugned.

When the civil society let out an outcry, including this newspaper’s fulminating editorial, that the judges be suspended, the bar and bench recoiled. Their professional instincts forbade them to upbraid their fellow craftsmen. Sentiment predated reason.

They were caught napping, and their integrity fell short. The NBA came to the rescue of its bosses, although the NBA boss could not be said to be speaking for himself alone when he pulled the trigger on the DSS and defended the bench.

Decency lost anchor in this narrative. On both sides. The NJC was not decent when it did not think deeply before issuing an irate statement condemning the DSS for violating the principle of the separation of powers. For sure, judges are not supposed to shoot from the hip. When they speak, especially on matters of constitutional significance, it should be authoritative, deliberate and irreversible. As Cicero noted, “to stumble twice over a stone is a proverbial disgrace.” First the bar, then the bench.

In spite of its pirouette, the NJC left a bad trail. As I noted in this column two weeks ago, To Judge A Judge, what we want is not judgment, but justice. The judges allowed the heart to rule the head. Judges do not act that way.

That was where indecency lost anchor. They succumbed to sentiment. It was an act of immaturity, of a culpable impulse to defend a tribe. They forgot the overriding principle of the rule of law that makes everyone the same, whether king or judge. They were coy and they failed both the high bench and the constitution. Because of sentiment, they also lost judgment. They convicted rather than adjudicate. They called a devil before they looked.

They turned sentiment into legality. The same sentiment confounded Mike Ozekhome when he responded to last week’s In Touch and my CDHR lecture where I had noted that Jiti Ogunye got it right and he wrong on whether the DSS followed the law in raiding the judges. For all its verbiage, Ozekhome only argued on the side of decency but not on the side of law. He should know better that decency does not win in court. The court is not the Vatican.

Yet, I disagree with the DSS for its nocturnal raids. It was in line with the law but not with the values of a civilised society. We had this debate at The Nation editorial board and the house was divided. I believe, though, that when you decide to raid a judge at night for what you can also do at 8 am, you brought a quality of a gangster to the service of the law. We should be careful because demons can be vanguards of the rule of law. It is not the rule of law alone that ennobles, but also the intent of the lawyers and judges. The law, as Henry David Thoreau once noted, never made anyone a whit more just.

Last week, an incident happened in Britain. The court ruled that the Prime Minister could not trigger the BREXIT clause without going through the parliament. It would amount to undermining parliamentary sovereignty, the very fulcrum of its democracy. Some attacked the judges for undermining popular sovereignty. The judges had no right, they argued, to pooh-pooh the wishes of the people. In an editorial by The Times of London, titled ‘Judging the judges’, the newspaper argued that it was about the pursuit of the integrity of the law. Even the people who voted to leave Europe operated within the ambit of the law, and their vote had to be executed within the same ambit. My muse and that of The Times editorial probably worked in the same stratosphere, although I wrote first and about financial corruption and institutional abuse. The Times focused on the due process and limits of popular sovereignty. Was it possible, though, that The Times editorialist took a note or two from In Touch? Just kidding.

Whatever the judges did in London, ours should learn a lesson. They were aggressive in their fairness. It recalls what Samuel J. Tilden wrote to the New York Bar Association about a century ago. “The bar, if it is to continue to exist, if it would restore itself to the dignity and honour which it once possessed, must be bold in defence and, if need be, be bold in aggression.” But always to be fair.

The NJC has a responsibility to put itself in a position of fairness. It has done a wrong and it has tried to correct it. In one of his sonnets, Shakespeare noted, “nor double penance, to correct correction.” Has the NJC cleansed itself with the about-face? They thought they had corrected the DSS the first time. Now did their volte-face correct their correction? Going forward, they have to prove that.

They should realise they are the last arbiter, the last hand in the relay of justice. It does not call for moral and sentimental gyrations.

The past caught up with me last weekend when I was the keynote speaker at the Annual General Conference of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, popularly called CDHR. I was its founding secretary- general and that was close to 30 years ago.

Since then, I have been philosophically an ally but I have not brandished its emblem to wallow and fight in the trenches. I was asked to give a talk on a burning national issue: The concept of the rule of law and the notion of justice in the survival of the Nigerian state.

I was impressed to see the body has bloomed from its infancy of a few rebels to a massive umbrella with branches across the country. Beko Ransome-Kuti, soft-spoken, doe-eyed, slight-built stormy petrel was the president. Another prominent member is the diminutive lodestar and the best legal mind of his generation, Femi Falana (SAN).

It was the era of IBB and the closure of media houses, the hunting of radicals, the time of fear and trembling among our spineless elite who knew they had to steal enough and betray enough to belong.

IBB ousted Buhari, whose reign was notorious for its barbarous strong arm and imposition of decrees two and four, the tenebrous detention rooms, the promise to rev our factories back to work that never materialised, the humiliation of two major monarchs in the Southwest and North, the interminable queues in bus terminals, the termination of the rail project in Lagos, etc. PMB rule was marked by the unsmiling visage of his deputy, the late Brigadier-General Idiagbon, the phrase, “The press, I will tamper with it,” the allegations of selectiveness in the arrests of politicians like Shagari and Ekwueme, the occlusion of a return to democracy.

IBB promised to bring fresh air to the political space. He lambasted Buhari for his clampdown. He abolished decree four, but left in place decree two, which guaranteed his fangs of tyranny. It was like killing a baby tiger but preserving its mama with all its snarls and paws. He was extravagant with his gap teeth, adorned TV screens with his smile, his mellow voice sang early to the Nigerian ear. He knew every journalist and junior officer by name, displayed a plebeian force by staying rain-soaked on a parade field with fellow soldiers during a national day, befriended the implacable Awo until the sage saw through him, and some say he never saw through him, waxed poetic with the refrain “Nigeria is our country and we must salvage it together.” He earned the name Maradona from his circuitous transition programme to civil rule. With decoy, flattery, military hammer, state funds, he coaxed virtually every man of honour into his beguiling nest and released them to their shame and public obloquy. He invited many to that party, only few decided not to be chosen. It was an era of elite burlesque where everyone was believed to have a prize. Wole Soyinka, against whom no ill was found, would later regret praising the affectionate fiend.

Naira began its awful descent, the era of ‘Andrews’ was born, Fela sang Second tier in savage homage to a failing economic programme. We had an IMF debate that looked as farcical as Luigi Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. The author, IBB, already knew he was taking the loan, but many did not know he had.

The IBB era led to the birth of many civil rights groups, some of them for opportunistic purposes, but the savage times were real. It was in that context that the CDHR was born and I became its chief scribe.

I noted that, in the early days of the CDHR, we were less interested in the rule of law than we were in justice. It is a testament to our progress that, today, we have laws we can embrace and a government we can hold to account, despite its fascination with occasional acts of impunity. The laws in the IBB days wove around decree two, and to ask for the rule of law was to ask for blood and death. We wanted justice, and that made us lawless. It meant arrests. Falana, who was the chairman of the conference at the weekend, recalled a meeting that was stormed by IBB’s SSS. As soon as the members knew of their coming, it became a church service. Everyone started singing a church song, and the visitors were perplexed.

My lecture could not escape the subject of the judges’ arrests. I stated that the arrests were according to law, as against Mike Ozekhome’s unenlightened point. G.T. Ogunye educated him on the status of the law today. The issue of the law as the last arbiter came again to my mind. The DSS ought to understand that while nailing the judges is important, it must bow to the same judges who have, in their lack of good judgment, weighed in on the side of their fellow bench men. Popularity has nothing to do with justice. The Nazis were popular. So is Trump today in the United States, Putin in Russia, Duterte in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey, etc. It is the kind of danger that Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti highlighted in his opus, Crowds and Power.

Falana noted a point. Some Nigerians were appalled that some of the arrested politicians and judges were arrested at night, handcuffed and rough-handled. He noted that even if this was wrong, this happens all the time to the common man and no one has raised hell. The rule of law asks us to do same to all.

The other issue of note was the $29 billion loan the government is seeking. But, Falana said, we have the money only if we look. Four million dollars was loaned to the banks in the Sanusi era and six billion during the Soludo era. The oil firms loaned about 20 billion. Banks and oil majors announce staggering profits every quarter. If we get this money back, we will have more than the $29 billion for which we are about to mortgage our future. This led to the intervention of the bearded orator and long-time critic, Femi Aborishade. He asked why we don’t know how much we have extracted from the looters. He called for transparency and a special trust fund for the recovered money. This point was adopted by the human rights body as a campaign issue.

Delegates attended from the North, East, Southwest and Southsouth. I was glad that the CDHR, whose meeting decades ago was no more than five or six members, some of them reporters, has now morphed from a mustard seed into a big tree. We could not register it because it was not registrable. The President, Malachy Ugwummadu, announced it was registered two weeks ago.

 

Like Fela, like Dylan

Eventually, Bob Dylan accepted the Nobel Prize for literature. I had thought his was going the Jean Paul Sartre path who rejected it. Sartre said it was like giving a drowning man a floater after he had already found the shore. Critics say, however, Sartre rejected because they gave his foe, Albert Camus, before him.

Dylan said he was speechless. I had thought that the Nobel Committee chose Dylan to stick it the American literary elite who had pined over being routinely ignored for the prize. It gave it to a musician. This is not to downplay Dylan’s talent. He deserved it. If you read his works, they amount to some of the best lines in a century, appropriated by politicians, justices, businessmen, cultural heroes. Fela was no less important. The problem though is that Fela used an informal medium, the broken English so-called. But it is another language, just like Mark Twain.

Lines like “dead body get accident,” “dem go start to yab demselves harlem,” “44 sitting, 99 standing, suffering and smiling,” etc. Fela, like Dylan, was a social conscience. The Nobel committee compared Dylan to Homer and Sapho, who read and chanted their works. None of them was arrested like Fela was because he spoke truth to power.

Not a few know, or remember, that it is 30 years this month. A year earlier, the media had fluttered with anxiety and expected it to drop like a harvest of rare plums. But a French man shone with the accolade. Our spirits fell. In boisterous Kano of the post-groundnut pyramid, I was a corps member and I kept hope alive.

When it happened, a year later in 1986, I was in search of the nectar of life, a job. I was too embroiled in my daily dates with Molue as a job seeker to know the news storm in town. The morning after, though, lit with knowledge in the headline of The Guardian. Written with heart and rapturous flair, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi unveiled the news of the epochal day on page one. Wole Soyinka (W.S.) had won the Nobel Prize in literature.

It was not a time of mobile phones and instant communications. So, when I shared the joy with friends, it had already cloyed. Their joys were smouldering while my tongue sparked. Today we take it for granted and it seems the man has been a laureate all his life.

When I visited the Nobel Museum on the week of the Nobel Prizes this year, I mused on that time when Soyinka soared with the accolade. I had better appreciation of what happened 30 years ago. Tuesday is the day of grace at the Nobel Museum. I had arrived at 4:50 p.m., and the receptionist advised me to wait till 5p.m. A 10-minute wait implied I would not pay. It was free entry day.

The museum is located in the Old Town section of Stockholm, Sweden. It is a grand area of town with narrow streets, historic and quaint architecture, rising topography and many shops of memorabilia. The Nobel Museum shares that august neighbourhood with the parliament, the Nobel Academy, the city hall, where the Nobel luncheon takes place. The museum looks into a circular plaza that buzzes often with tourists.

Swaddled in my winter jacket and muffler, I strolled away to soak my eyes in some memorabilia. But my impatience to return to the museum was only worsened by the dry, nippy air that fastened to my skin and my feet zipped fast in a futile effort to attract heat.

The time did not come early enough. An ebullient old couple rescued me from my struggles to pose for a picture at the entrance steps. After taking the snapshot, he identified himself as a tourist from Luxembourg. He was impressed that I am a writer and journalist.

The interior is the size of a modest auditorium. The hall is barely lit, and my eyes leapt up to the roof where, instead of a chandelier, sheaves of pictures of past laureates overhang in circles and semi-circles. Behind the reception is a stand with the grandeur of an unraised secular pulpit. Stands with square screens form an arc, each indicating a prize category. At the time I visited, the prizes for medicine and physics had been announced. But the picture of the medicine winner alone bloomed on the medicine stand. On the floor were also screens like arrows that point to the stands of each prize. The stands of the six prizes are spaced from the other.

I was interested to find information on W.S. I went straight to the book store located on the right. It had books of past laureates, whether in medicine, economic science, physics, peace or literature. I was interested in the literature and economics categories. Not all laureates’ books adorned the shelves. I hoped I would not be disappointed. I did not look far to see Isara, one of Soyinka’s memoirs. A translation of You Must Set Forth At Dawn in Swedish, as well as some biographies of him graced the stands. Soyinka’s area was next to Earnest Hemingway, a writer of a different sort.

I thought I would see his plays, but no luck. I mused on the irony. He won the prize on his plays, especially such works as Death and the King’s Horse men and, his best work, A Dance of the Forest. Even his best literary ambassador, Ake: Years of Childhood, was not there. Across from the books was a picture shelf. W.S. bloomed among others. I picked one after clutching Isara.

In the main hall are stands with touch-sensitive screens. Each stand represents a decade. In the 1980s stand, I fingered the literature icon, and W.S popped up for literature in 1986. It gives brief bios of the past laureates. Soyinka’s was signposted with the citation, “Who, in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence.” Two other clips tell his career and life stories.

The hall was packed with tourists as well as students. Tour guides helped with additional facts. One guide explained a glass window exhibition of such items as a belt, a scarf, a frock, etc. It is what the laureates donated as emblems of their careers and lives. Malala donated a scarf. Another glass window displays dishes and plates that adorn the Nobel luncheon, and they are colour-coded. Literature is orange.

A guide drew our attention to a hall that featured a continuous video of 30 selected winners who spoke for about two minutes. I hoped W.S. would be among the many winners since 1901 when it was inaugurated. I knew I had to wait for long. I had just sat down, and, after a physics laureate, viola! Our W.S. He was spry, a sap of youth, with his beard the colour of pristine tar. It was not the Soyinka of the Abrahamic visage, buried in white, hoary foliage. Its Edenic tar harks back to another era, of bouncy activism, of poking a literary finger at establishment, etc. In this video, he sported a short-sleeved shirt buttoned half-way. As he spoke, he planted himself in tall grasses while the Idanre Hill loomed mystically in the backdrop.

He spoke about his works, of rebirth and antimony, and about the power of the Yoruba culture to regenerate itself, and of Ogun’s warrior profile in not only destroying the enemies but turning “on his own people.” He said it is in such ambience that myth develops. A footage also shows a funeral dance in Yorubaland, with men firing away at talking drums, and others dancing, in a mournful glee, even though an old person has just passed on.

The Luxemburg fellow sat beside him, and I told him, “that’s my country man.” He smiled and said, “I noticed.”

On the walls, tributes serenaded great minds who never won. One of them was a quote from philosopher Karl Popper, to wit: “What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas.” Also Thomas Edison, the man of sundry inventions. “Genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.” It’s his popular quote.

The Prize was instituted by Alfred Nobel, and two categories were missing: Economics science and mathematics. A tour guide refuted the rumour that Nobel did not endow a mathematics prize to preclude a prominent Swedish mathematician, who had an affair with his wife, from winning it. In fact, Nobel, a loner, never married. The economics prize was begun in 1969.

Nobel was an inventor of dynamite and incredibly wealthy. His family wanted the prize restricted to Swedes but he was cosmopolitan and international, so he wanted it to cover the globe. Literature was dear to his heart. He started writing poetry and plays early but he never succeeded. The prize was his deference to literary talent. His play, Nemesis, about a father’s sexual obsession with his daughter, was published after he died. His family recoiled from letting the world see it because it tainted his sublime image. It has been published in the Swedish and Esperanto.

After over an hour, it was over. My trip to Stockholm had been worth the Nobel, and it was time to move.

As the economy sings a dark song, it is time to wear a garb of cheer. Not to dwell on our duels, but to look at ways out of our well of troubles. They are mounting, and it is time to close ranks, to think of new paradigms for prosperity.

The price of oil, for all its new promises, cannot give us the loose change of the past, even as the change mantra loses its birth aura. We are talking up a diversified economy. The Buhari administration has dangled the virtue of the farmer. We should become, again, earthbound creatures, tilling the ground, growing the crops, storing them and minting money from them as manufactured goods. We also have minerals: gold, lead, bauxite, kaolin, coal, etc.

Some countries disgraced oil in public as a platform of wealth. Japan with technology and its continental shelf. Switzerland as a model of innovation as a chocolate giant without a cocoa farmer. Jordan as a rotund and oil-less island in a Middle East awash in black gold.

It shows that wealth does not rely on resources but on the sources of the imagination. We have seen a few such silver linings in Lagos, where fiscal genius has turned a city state of a few millions not only into a national experiment and an oasis of fortune, but also as an economy all its own in Africa.

The emphasis on the earthbound farm is important. We sometimes forget the fisherman and all that water offers. But when we do, we think in Shakespeare’s words, “fishes live in the seas, as men do at land; the great ones eat up the little ones.”  We get the fish, and we are all done with the water.

But there’s more.  We have also seen the Customs unit as a veritable revenue earner, a fruit of anti-corruption war. Yet the sea and waterways offer more to us, and we need to look at how we can turn them into goldmines. And that refers to the work of the Nigerian Maritime and Safety Agency (NIMASA).

It is a sure source of revenue in an age of diversity. It has suffered in the recent past from the surge of corruption and ignominy, and its value today comes into reckoning with the emphasis on a new source revenue. For too long, the relationship between the NIMASA and the sea has been like Hemingway’s immortal novel, Old Man and the Sea, in which the old man works the sea, earns a big catch and gets to shore alive without its big prize. The shark hacked away at the big fish with only its stark skeletons for the old man. We want a sea of flesh, not bones of misery.

Over the years, NIMASA’s revenue has dropped by 51 per cent owing to the ravages of the oil industry and the diminished vessel traffic on our high seas. Of course, the background to this bad news has been a wave of corruption.

It’s time to realise this great prize, and the wealth of the seas. But it has first to achieve two things. One, it has to enjoy an improved air of safety. Two, it has to operate in line with the rule of law.

Just as we need safe land to do business. The sea, which is the platform of maritime prosperity, must be secure. We have, for land prosperity, revved our guns at the militants on land, in the Northeast and parts of the Niger Delta. It is only in the contest against the crimes of the seas that we can make cabotage laws rule. Cabotage refers to the dynamics of sea trade from port to port, both nationally and internationally, but more of the latter in our case.

We have experienced many obstacles in the past decade. Sea robberies, round-tripping, pipeline vandals, unregistered vessels sailing unchecked, piracy, etc. while it is the job of the Navy to enforce and defend, it is the work of NIMASA to administer, to, as it states in its mission, “achieve safe, secure shipping, cleaner oceans and enhanced maritime capacity in line with the best global practices…”

This is a source of major foreign exchange, also in an age of diminishing Naira against world currencies. For the Naira to rise, we must ensure a free fall of sea gangsterism.

Under its new helmsman, Dakuku Peterside, a new energy has turned on the agency, and it should be watched. It is what I can call the bird’s eye of the mermaid. It has unleashed two things. First is the intelligence capacity. The point is to track all vessels, whether oil vessels or the small river-craft, to ensure that Nigeria knows all who sail on our waters. This way we cannot only reduce maritime crime, we can also document what businesses are going on illegally and fleecing our money. It has also installed radars in Lagos, Bonny and Forcados. It has stepped up engagements with the Navy, Marine Police and Immigration.

The revenue decline also means that a lot of money is being lost to debtors. Just like at the national level, we need to draw our debts. Some of them were done in murky circumstances. With a new string of consultants, Peterside hopes to restore such lost revenue while opening the way to new ones.

But to achieve this, it has also kept tabs on the vessels to ensure compliance with the Cabotage Act, update its register and pursue the goal of 100 per cent local content in ship building, but our aluminium and steel industries lag lamentably. With the rule of law, sabotage will yield to Cabotage.

The billions of dollars in potential revenue means the Buhari administration has to turn its eye to the work of seas even as we focus on the farmer. We love the farm; but we shall not live by the farm alone. Some good work is going on in that direction as the alpha governor, Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State, has stepped up its tie-up with Kebbi State.

Peterside is staking out NIMASA in his moves so far to make his agency a high-octane revenue source. He is to be watched, and just as the NPA and Customs, are part of the ways to use the sea, we ought to abide by Shakespeare’s words to “take arms against a sea of troubles.”

To succeed, NIMASA will work as a mermaid with a bird’s eye. Mermaids do not work in shallow waters. But a mermaid with a bird’s eye sees the deep and shallow water, and can show the strength to make NIMASA and Nigeria glory in the “full sea,” as the Bard of Avon puts it. This is the task before Peterside, and the former lawmaker and works commissioner has staked out a claim of a doer.

Odigie, oh Oyegun!

The APC chairman, Odigie-Oyegun, has earned the title of an interloper. He dipped his dirty hands in Ondo politics as a fraud. Then he said he was focusing on Edo governorship election. In a free and fair contest, he stumbled and fell in his own polling unit. That’s a basic disaster, or home trouble. The physician could not heal himself, his own people, and he wanted to heal a whole national party. What a way to be demystified. Politics, they say, is local. He wants to be a giant who has nowhere to stand. He failed at home, how can he win confidence outside except by fraud.

He, a political orphan, should stop sharing in Edo success. The credit goes to Governor Adams Oshiomhole and governor-elect Godwin Obaseki, who worked like a Trojan with a dedicated team.  Odigie, silence please! You do not know dedication. Also, the following stone-age men should retreat to their clay huts: Tony Anenih, Tom Ikimi, Igbinedion, et al, especially the men with “T” first names, the tees of failure. They, as well as the Igbinedions, are Neanderthals of Edo politics. Their political beards have withered to pale and their hairs have disappeared with their elderly wisdom. The Edo people voted against a past that did not work.

It is not the best of times that we hear of great economists. Things must go sour, money must fall, hunger must reel on the streets, companies must spin out of investment options, the very nation must gasp for breath.

Many believe we are grasping for solution, as the Naira cascades faster than we can keep up and inflation suffocates us out of our options to buy some even more basic things as food. It is a time like this that we have economists, fair or foul, who try to fetch us out of foul times.

The suggestions are legendary. Raise the value of the naira. Reduce the worth of the currency. Leave it, let it float. Shut down the borders. Import rice. Ban rice imports. No, how can we survive without rice? So open the borders. Pump money into the economy. Be careful about that, or inflation will drown us? Have you heard of the American experience with stagflation? Be careful about being too careful.

Hail TSA. Woe on TSA. Sell our refineries. Depend on Dangote model with his work in Lekki. No, it is a sacred trust. We cannot cope with private buccaneers playing vampires on our oil. Regulate the banks. If you do that, you will smother them and we shall have nowhere to keep and even hide money. Pare interest rates, others yell. Where is the political will? Only idealists think that way.

Invest in infrastructure; invest in power, free the central bank so it can guide the economy. So, where will the politicians be if we have an independent central bank? Remember the case of Jonathan who ordered men to go straight there and dip their filthy hands in our pot of gold.

Free the BDCs. Jail the BDCs. Some are saying what of all the money we have saved? Shall we not spend them? How much? Others are following the niggardly ways of the play, Pot of Gold, by the Greek writer Plautus, about a miser who guards his pot of gold but it is stolen. Shall we continue to play the miser? Others say it is not that we are tight-fisted but that the purse is tight. No much money to spend.

This sort of chaos of ideas or fertility of intention is not new. During the last recession, Obama was drowned in perspectives. FDR confronted many in the throes of the Great Depression. Japan in the late 1990’s was almost asphyxiated when some even asked the eastern titan to abandon culture for full-throated laissez-faire. The economists boomed without any boon to the society. “Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists,” quipped John Kenneth Galbraith, a world-renowned economist himself and the author of The Affluent Society. He knew economics is not an exact science, although the economists act as though the world lies in their hands.

“If all the economists were laid end to end,” wrote playwright George Bernard Shaw, “they’d never reach a solution.” We cannot leave economics to economists alone, as Henry Kissinger noted in an essay during the 1980’s recession.

So, there. The only area where theory and practice seem to concentrate now, is the CBN, and in the tongues and hands of Godwin Emefiele. He is the one experimenting, rolling the dice, playing the monetary and fiscal, the man in our economic arena. As we try to stop the bleeding from the Jonathan years, he has been there. In trying to steer the Naira in good stead, he is there. In stimulating, what economists call foreign direct investment, his hand is writ large.

He is the optimistic face of the economy today, a sort of vicar of our pot of gold. He is the one who must guard it. He has spoken and exercised a role in working a formula for inter-bank rates. He has intervened in the matter of fuel price. He has also weighed in on the issue of quantitative easing, and pumping the economy with fresh funds.

He has also been a moralist, saying we ought to concentrate on what is Nigerian, and focus of local production.

But that’s as far as he can go. The central bank is an important institution, central to the pulling of the economy from its stronghold. But the central bank is an alarm signal as well as a guide. After that, the responsibility is in the hands of the other institutions.

The CBN governor is not the minister of defence, or the Immigration or Customs chief, so he may weave a policy of self- reliance. But he cannot implement border control. While the smuggled rice and unhealthy chicken zip through the border, he can only look with frustration. He can soar over the need to give loans to SMEs but he is not GTB or Zenith or UBA, and if the banks play coy, the economy suffers. All the banks today pay lip-service to helping the economy and the small guy. But we know only the same circle of vampires suck up our economy’s blood. He makes foreign exchange available to firms, but he does not pick their staff-members nor decide where and how to invest and motivate personnel.

When the list of the big debtors was released not too long ago, the culprits were familiar. He might be the familiar vicar of the economy, but he is no priest. We don’t look to the CBN for counselling on good behaviour and integrity with the funds of everybody.

He is not Lai Mohammed who will want to roar with Change Begins With Me. He cannot be everything. He does not construct roads, nor build the hospitals nor monitor the schools. “Most of the policies that support robust economic growth in the long run are outside the province of the central bank,” noted Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the United States Federal Reserve.

It all depends on the spirit of productivity. We need to whip up a sense of balance between theory and practice. We have seen some good spots. The FIIRS has started to generate more money, some road works have begun, the Customs man is generating more money. But a lot more has to be done. The decision to pump more money into the economy to the tune of N350 billion can help galvanise the economy.

But it is the way we turn policy into productivity that will make the difference between the pain of today and the gain of tomorrow. Or we shall be like Plautus’ play where no scholar knows for sure whether the pot of gold survives or not, everything is in the realm of speculation. There is too much at stake today. Jonathan and his dame have done the damage. Now is no time for despair. We should not only repair but redeem ourselves. But we have no time.

Why should the EFCC chief call most lawyers rogues and vultures? The other question is, why not? The role of lawyers in a democracy just came to the fore, and what many are interested in are the insults rather than facts.

It all began with the new NBA helmsman when he called for the stripping of EFCC powers. He wants it to stop suing people. It should only investigate. The new NBA chief, Abubakar Mahmud, knew he had rasped like a wasp, and somebody was going to buzz back.

Magu rolled down his tanks and he fired salvos through his media man. He said most members of the bar are rogues and vultures. We were in the terrain of metaphor. Lawyers fought back with professional hubris. No, they were not rogues and they were not vultures. They are patriots and custodians of the law. They tell us what the law says in order to attain a just and egalitarian society.

I am sure they were laughing inside their kidneys when they said that, including the NBA chief. Lawyers are important in every society, especially in a liberal and democratic society. But I am with Magu on the vulture metaphor. Vultures sniff rottenness. They are morticians of sorts. But the lawyers are also saviours and avenging angels. They are doves now, vultures now. Peace and death are in the loins of the lawyer.

That is the problem with lawyers. They are on both sides to save us, a sort of redemptive schizophrenia. The problem is not with lawyers, according to some analysts. It is with the law. The law gives the interpreters too much room to pursue justice and injustice simultaneously. That inspired the lines from Arthur Baer: “It is impossible to tell where the law stops and justice begins.”

When President Buhari addressed the NBA last year, he asked the law exponents to key into the anti-corruption scheme. Clearly they are an asset to fight filth. But the story gained traction because we all know that lawyers have fattened on corruption. How can a dirty hand clean up the dinner fork?

One example is that lawyers have stood between the EFCC and conviction of many cases, especially high-profile cases. They adjourn and adjourn, and frustrate the cases. By that they glamorise public robbery, and encourage the governors, civil servants, ministers to come to their lairs, drink of their legal shenanigans, be free and sin again.

Some of the culprits are the senior lawyers, the Senior Advocates of Nigeria. They go about charging billions to these ex-office holders who pay handily. So, the lawyers think: you stole, and you want me to defend you. Well, shall I have a piece of the action? Of course, the ex-office holder obliges and we witness a long-winded merry-go-round in the courts.

Other than that, they cling to technicalities. That is their way of frustrating the courts and the search for justice in society. In its response, the EFCC chief accused the new NBA man of serving his interest. Magu accused Mahmud of defending former Delta State Governor James Ibori in a case that landed him conviction in London. We must add though that even Ibori prosecutors are in some boiling soup right now in London. I would like to know what Mahmud wants to say for himself on that score.

More ashamedly, I have seen in the past few years SANs defend a client on a certain premise and oppose another client on the antipodal premise, and win both cases. Is that not intellectual fraud? Is it not the way of the vulture?

I must note though that Magu’s EFCC has had to contend with the charge of impunity, but who advised the EFCC and who defended the EFCC? Of course, the lawyers. So, we cannot pretend that the lawyers -not all, but many prominent ones – are in the kitchen sink of corruption.

In any society, nothing works without the law. You set up a social club, or a software firm, or political party, with two important staff-members: a lawyer and accountant. You steal with the accountant, and the lawyer waits to defend. The concept of the vulture comes out in times of recession. Companies go under and they become cadavers. Lawyers become undertakers, and they write the legal documents to certify their deaths. In the last recession, especially in Obama’s early presidency, lawyers rallied in major US cities presiding over the graveyards of firms. They flourished on the corpses. The tragedy is that we need them.

Nigeria had so many stories of corruption under Jonathan. Who are the defendants running to for defence? The EFCC has its weaknesses in the fight for financial sanity. It has looked for the law to keep some people in detention without due process, including former NSA Dasuki. It had to find the law – and lawyers – to justify its position. It reminds me of a conversation I had with the late Gani Fawehinmi. He said if there was a case between a rich man and poor man, “I will find the law for the poor man.” Our SANs have been doing the opposite. In his poem, The Vultures, David Diop wrote: “You knew all the books you did not know love. “

Corruption is rottenness, and anyone that allows it to fester is a vulture. Our SANs have not excelled for integrity. In fact, to be a SAN you don’t have to be a man or woman of integrity. You just have to excel in the technical virtues of the law. You don’t have to be a good man, you just have to be a good lawyer. After all, are we not witnesses to the case of two SANs who allegedly bribed somebody and about a dozen of them (SANs) backed them like the solidarity of Baal! It echoes the words of Will Rogers: “Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.”

It’s this frustration that drove Shakespeare to cry: “The first thing we do, let’s kill the lawyers.” I won’t go that far. I want our lawyers to ape the Progressive Era in the U.S., when men like Theodore Roosevelt turned law into a platform for reform. We have a few in Nigeria who have taken the law as instruments of justice. I bow to them. But for others, I shed my tears.

In his novel, The Great expectation, Charles Dickens paints the picture of London’s best-known lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, who is cynical, wealthy, contemptuous, manipulative but inevitably iconic and successful. Mr. Jaggers is about the most colourful brute fiction has painted for the law profession.

I accept with thanks Mahmud’s suggestion that EFCC should not prosecute and investigate. That is scratching the surface, though. It works in England with the Serious Fraud Office. It is the battle between rational choice and institutionalism at play. When we have the right values, you don’t need to bicker over conflict of interest because the larger morality of the society will work the law to check excesses. In the United States, the attorney-general can prosecute anybody, including the president. Hence Janet Reno appointed Kenneth Starr, a Republican, to investigate Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes. In Nigeria, the EFCC prosecutorial powers can be checked by the attorney-general. Aondoakaa did it to Ribadu under Yar-Adua.

Mahmud put the cart before the horse. It’s like the call for a distinction between attorney-general of the federation and attorney-general of the government. It’s a meretricious colouring. If we have the right values, no one can abuse his powers without drawing umbrage and penalty.

What we need is a good society. Law and lawyers will have no choice but fall in line.