The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

Today’s bomb

I am going down the street to pick a piece of bread

The crowded street will only stall my steps

and hunger, my morning companion, has a few minutes to say goodbye.

Boom, boom, I heard amidst cries

Was that a bomb?

Yes, screamed a scurrying back

I am in no mood for the body count

Some people scampered about in fear

I stood still and saw in the distance a bloodied face

and another man lifting a child limp of limbs in

hurried alarm for a car to take the dying to the hospital

If, that is, the car does not bear a hooded omen

Of unexplored men and shrapnel

I looked at myself, crown to toe, I am

as new as the morning dew

I have nothing to worry about, and I move on

To pick my piece of bread and wish the morning companion goodbye

Today has had its bomb.

December 14, 2014
A sense of legacy

Not long ago, the nation witnessed a case of self-accounting. Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi sought the permission of the state House of Assembly to draw on the state’s savings. The state had reeled in the past year. The Federal Government had cut its monthly allocation by several billions, and its oil-rich fable had faded away.

Civil servants, teachers, and ambitious projects creaked desperately from neglect. He had to do something. Banks no longer obliged, so the road was shut to loans. Even the Federal Government had given a directive that banks should clear any state loans with the finance minister. The banks, run by timid souls, know the directive as illegal but they bow. They know it defiles banking independence and federalist principles, but they bow.

Amaechi’s vision had, however, bought his independence. He did not need to go to Jonathan with a beggar’s bowl. He did not need to cajole the cowardly consciences of the bank chief executives. When he became governor, the state rustled with money. He admitted that palmy days were not forever. He had a balmy thought – to prepare for the rainy day. He did not expect misery to howl in the now, in his era as governor. He looked at a generation away. In his lens, he saw an era looming with empty oil wells and emaciated purses, when oil would no longer be the queen of resources.

He had enough to work with, and so he chastened the spendthrift temptation of the day and kept at least a billion a month in the bank.

Well, the rainy day came sooner than anticipated. His vision marked the difference between he who sees and he who looks. Amaechi saw, even when the Federal Government had turned the nation’s reserve into a bleeding mule, thinning from $68 billion to $37 billion. Rivers State can chew its cud while others cuddle with anxiety.

What Governor Amaechi has done is the difference between a great leader and the routine man in the saddle. The Amaechi story is important because he is the chief shepherd of Rivers State, and that state is one of the pivotal entities in our federation. It is the beacon of the East, while Lagos holds the West and Kano the North. For a nation that relies on oil, Port Harcourt is the capital of oil. So, Rivers State is one of the states in the federation to watch as the present governor takes a back seat and a new one emerges.

We need a governor with the same – if not better – sort of energy and organisational acumen as well as vision to pilot the state.

Much has happened under the watch of the man who was once deprived of his right to the saddle. The Owu chief had a lifetime ago described with scorn his claim to the governor chair. He said his case had “K leg.” The cripple now walks with swagger. But the Rivers State he took over comes to memory, among others, as a state no one wanted to visit. I remember walking the street once and everyone in Port Harcourt had to raise their hands to indicate they had no guns. The air bristled with martial portent. Expatriates no longer loved the Garden City. Oil money became crude because safety was better.

Amaechi became governor without access even to the rudiment of a governor’s safety. He reached to his colleague, the ebullient Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State, to help him with security vehicles. Yet, it was Amaechi that drove the militants out of town and anyone can walk the entrails of the Garden City with hands in the pocket.

The job of any government is to eliminate poverty. In this society, the urban centres reflect the ugliness of class divide. The rich mock the poor with their extravagant decadence of cars, palaces, parties, private jets and boats. To bring the society into a place of fairness, we have often wanted governments to take infrastructure development and education seriously.

None of our literary lights has in the picturesque skill of the realist painted the Nigerian poverty. Not Achebe, not Soyinka, not Clark. When Dickens wrote his Bleak House, David Copperfield, especially Oliver Twist, the Prime Minister was worried and asked him if his characters really lived in London. The graphic tales of inequality permeate the narratives of Jane Austen, and Balzac told tales of the depredations of the post-Napoleon and the new industrial societies on the ordinary folks. No one can forget Balzac’s Old Goriot. We have not seen the tragi-comic spectacle of the disabled embarking on a parade known as the feast of fools as graphically set in Victor Hugo’s The Hunch Back of Notre Dame.

If our literature focuses generally on post-colonial anomie, it is probably time to tell specific stories of beggary and inequality. Right now it is newspaper reporters who bear that heroic task. But a great novel or play can immortalise this chasm between rich and poor. Festus Iyayi’s stories work as themes but not as artifice.

Rivers State is one of such states where the governor has made efforts to address the inequalities. We know that governance is a continuum. His education programme, for instance, in which secondary schools look like some of our universities in ambience, facilities, teachers and architecture, require sustenance. It is not enough to have them. It is important to see them as a way of life, not privilege for a time. My former teacher, Prof. Biodun Jeyifo, wrote in his column how he visited the model schools and one of the teachers made a darkly funny observation. She said although the children in the schools were from poor parents, their parents were not interested in their education.

An oil-rich state with so much inequality where the lazy and criminal live in plenty while industrious persons beg from them. The result is cynicism about education, which is a slow grind to light. Why wait for a nine-month pregnancy if you can induce the baby in nine days? That is the warped logic of oil in today’s Nigeria.

So while Amaechi has built a solid foundation in education and infrastructure and health care, the state ought not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. If his successor does not understand the dynamics of governance and only eyes the opportunity to be a fat-cat chief executive presiding over thin and miserable citizens, it will be tragic. It is very easy to reverse the work of a visionary. As they say, a good success depends on a good successor.

It is going to be a slugfest between the urbane Peterside Dakuku and the PDP nominee to be decided Monday. Rivers State voters must guard jealously the legacy of Amaechi. If they vote the wrong person, they will see before their eyes the loss of what they have taken for granted. Rivers State is not only important to the people of Rivers State, just as Lagos State is not only important to Lagosians. Whoever takes charge of Lagos, Rivers or Kano holds a huge chunk of our patrimony in trust. But it begins with the people and their votes.

December 8, 2014
A president and hunter

The one is a dame of power, rides a private jet, looks silky and satiny, has bold and imperious eyes, defies the National Assembly, presides over the nation’s pot, speaks in public with bored and superior look, craves accolades and pooh-poohs the critic, rose steeply from a mocked minister to an Amazon of influence. Some despise her, some others fear her, some others adore her, but most admire her without liking her. Recently, she became a president and popped champagne.

The other has rural air. She is not a dame but she wields a Dane gun. She hunts rabbits and antelopes. She is charming without the effluvia of glamour. She cannot speak good English. She knows no fear, is indifferent to her influence, owns neither car nor jet, craves no air-conditioners or the glitz of accolades. She probably does not pop champagne, which might be a bibulous appetite and impious. But she pops guns. Recently, she – and her peers – shot Boko Haram out of town.

The one is our Oil Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, who recently gained world attention as the first female President of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries known as OPEC. The other gives her name simply as Ladi, and she was one of the few female hunters who wove a heroic skein when they shot Boko Haram out of some northeastern towns. The routed Islamists had turned the places, including Mubi, into redoubts.

Both are women, both are doing significant things, but one is heroic and the other is living a life of dubious glamour.

Few Nigerians are paying great attention to the stories of the young women like Ladi who are fighting for the survival of this country. Rather the front-page stories are bedecking the exploits of an oil minister who becomes a president and the first female one at that. She deserves the post not from personal distinction but from the accidental distinction that Nigeria is a major oil-producing country. Never mind that her ways are turning Nigeria gradually into a beggar nation and straightened agonies.

But Ladi bests Allison-Madueke. Ladi has put her life on the line. In a lucid report of the New Telegraph of Sunday November 23 by correspondent Ibrahim Abdul, the young woman of about 20 years of age defies the insurgents. She says: “Boko Haram’s days are numbered… we are ready to fight them.”

She flashes her Dane gun, unfazed by the tanks and modernity of Boko Haram’s armoury. “We know they are using sophisticated weapons but that will not deter us from facing them squarely,” she intoned. She dares the insurgents unlike our fleeing soldiers. She is evidence of the lines of poet and novelist Alyxandra Harvey who wrote, “If we act like a prey, they’ll act like predators.” She knows she is no prey.

While Ladi does exploits, some young women are doing harm. A picture of a female bomber ran viral on the Internet recently. She destroyed herself and others in a recent explosion in Niger State. Her face was beatific, but beneath the quiet repose dangled raw and charred remains of her full body. She believed, but killed. Ladi believes in the integrity of Nigeria. She flays the Federal Government for not doing enough to mow down the goons of faith.

Ladi, like other volunteers like the Civilian JTF, has mobilised the young against the spirit of surrender in Abuja. The civilian JTF exposed female partisans of Boko Haram who disguised as regular women in purdah.

But Madueke rides higher praise from an undiscerning nation. She is presiding over the best and worst times in Nigerian history. On her watch, oil price soared to over $110 per barrel. But our OPEC princess has reigned over an opaque accounting. Though awash in money, all economic indices turned upside down. Unemployment has jumped, and this is creating a ticking youth time bomb. A central bank boss charged that about $50 billion was missing. The outcry matched the outrage, but not the response from government. Her colleague, the finance minister, said it was far less – about $10 billion. For over six months since the scandal broke, no clear public accounting for the about $10 billion the government admits is missing.

The nation’s reserve has dropped from over $68 billion to about $37 billion on her watch as minister. The Federal Government cannot pay the states their share of revenue each month, driving them to stop many government projects and default on financial commitments, including to their civil servants. The finance minister says the nation is not broke, but the nation keeps borrowing. Now, the price of oil has fallen steeply to less than $80 dollars per barrel. The naira, which stood quaveringly at about N140 per dollar a few years ago, is about N180 today. Madueke claims that theft has depleted our oil but she and her government cannot hold to account the militants they paid billions to guard the oil pipelines.

The NNPC that supervises oil in the country has acted above the law, thanks to her. When the legislators summon her, she recoils with patrician disdain and does not show up. She even shunned the House of Representatives when she was summoned to answer questions on why she spent about N2 billion on private jet travels. Nigerians do not know how much we earn from oil, and when they give us a figure, we do the math and it does not add up to what we get in real terms. When the price of oil was over $110 and the budget benchmark was $78, we still could not pay our bills. Madueke has not accounted why NNPC cannot pay in spite of all we sell.

For all these, she becomes president of OPEC, and we congratulate her for what? For ruining our oil industry and economy? She and her Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, who covers for her and never holds her to account as the bread winner.

We should celebrate Ladi instead. She is a warrior and a patriot, in the same tradition of female warriors in African history like Aminatu of Zazzau, who conquered territories. Or Oya, Sango’s consort, whose eminence struck fear to the extent that legend said she created hurricanes and tornadoes. Have we not heard of Yaa Asentawaa who fought the war of the golden stool? In ancient Dahomey Kingdom, female warriors known as Ahosi or king’s wives made mincemeat of its neighbours. There are great women and there are femme fatales. The great women cannot be ignored. We know of the imperious infamy of Jezebel, or the manipulative cruelties of Cleopatra. But who could beat the savage subtleties Livia’s genius. She was the wife of Emperor Augustus and, from the shadows, dictated the lives and deaths, the rising and falling of many in Rome. Few writers have documented Livia’s tyrannies like novelist Robert Graves in his book, I Claudius.

But of course we had the moral beacons of Margaret Ekpo, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Joan of Arc, The Egyptian Nefertiti and a host of others.

Ladi and her fellow hunters may not rise to the high horses of these mythical women, but they can aspire, even if they are not literate enough to know about them. Oya did not go school.

The likes of Ladi beat the militants with a hunter’s arms and heart. Her style is a recipe for Nigeria’s success: No frills, no corruption, fiery patriotism, faith in fellow hunters, heroics without seeking monetary rewards. She was not a beneficiary of the oil money that fueled the one trillion-Naira-a-year defence budget in the past three years. Yet we cannot give our soldiers sophisticated firepower to tame the insurgents. But Ladi wins with Dane guns. Her triumphal soldiery mocks our fabled trillions and the false swagger of our first female OPEC president.

December 1, 2014
Between Jonathan and Fayose

If one reads from outside the country the escapades of the Nigerian president and governor of Ekiti State, it would be tempting to say both men did not go to school. They have not heard of the word democracy, or were not instructed about the phrase the rule of law. That would mean they are illiterates.

But if one were illiterate and learned that these persons could speak English, one may conclude that they were not raised in environments that respected decency of the simple folks. In Niger Delta where the President hails from, the word decency is commonplace. The fisherman did not poison the pond for his fellow, neither did the farmer sully the soil for his neighbour who lived by subduing the earth. By being custodians of the earth, we are engineers of the community’s soul.

In Yorubaland where Fayose has lived and moved and had his being all his life, the familiar word is omoluabi. That word is a counterfoil to the human tendency to indecency, hubris and savagery. Both words imply a sense of civic decorum.

Tragically both men went to school, and both men have certificates to flaunt their scholarships. So if they are not illiterates, the real illiterates would wonder whether they grew up in the ambience of the African virtue.

They did not show this last week. In Ekiti, seven lacked the Yoruba etiquette of omoluabi when they, in kangaroo-style, took over the House of Assembly with the stolid backing of the police, to dislodge the Speaker and install one of them. This incident was taking place while in Abuja, the police were barring the Speaker from gaining access to the premises of the National Assembly. In both cases, the police were the barbarian at the gate.

We can say both men are stark illiterates but they are educated illiterates. Novelist Tolstoy made a distinction between those who went to school and who benefitted. He mounted the campaign to educate the educated. That refers to Jonathan and Fayose. They are leaders in desperate need of enlightenment. They are at the head of a barbarian horde in the name of democracy.

But what sort of brute is our President turning into? He flexes muscles where there is no fight. He shrinks at the sound and smoke of gunpowder. When Tompolo and his men threatened him in Delta State, he winced and meowed like a new-born cat. After boasting at Eagle Square his intent to declare open the Export Processing Zone in Itsekiriland in Ogidigben, he froze in Aso Rock where he said, in his serpentine way, that he had nothing against the Itsekiri. Boko Haram was pounding our soldiers out of territories and hunters fighting back to victories. But he was cutting a flimsy birthday cake among his fawning followers. It was like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, or Gowon’s lavish wedding while his soldiers died in Biafra.

That was not enough when he unleashed the secret service with soldiers on the opposition party, the APC, in Lagos, vandalising computers, molesting the workers and arresting them. All without any warrant.

This was the President who, a few years ago, lamented that Nigerians wanted him to be a Pharaoh. Well, he is no longer the meek President that his quiet deception of mien portrayed. He is the meek serpent. Blessed are the meek for they shall destroy the democracy. I still want to know if Fayose and Jonathan agreed, or it is the barbarian impulse of the tyrant in both men to act on the same day. I will not say it is a PDP thing because I know there are decent persons in that party.

When the President shed tears over the Pharaoh allegation, he said he wanted to build institutions. How do you build institutions by ordering your security operatives to unleash terror? If the President and his advisers do not know this, institutions are not built by angels that fall down from heaven. Humans do it, and they do it with a sense of fairness and integrity.

All the successful countries in the world rely on selfless personages to build institutions. An example is that of the Roman general known as Cincinnatus. He was asked to lead with absolute powers when barbarians invaded the empire. He led his country to victory, and within two weeks, he relinquished his post. He retired to his farm. We thought we could have the same when the military relinquished power on its own in 1979. But the civilians who took over turned themselves under Shehu Shagari into a sort of military with the backing of the army. They failed to build institutions. Rather they started to hound the opposition. This compelled Chief Obafemi Awolowo to make a lone cry in the wilderness. He warned that the Shagari-led NPN was taking the country to the democratic despotism of the early 1960’s when opponents were hounded and pounded. They even buoyed the barbarities with a law known as the preventive detention act. It allowed them to harass and arrest opponents with impunity. That republic fell not long after. The Jonathan case is even worse. He is doing his without any law, no matter how primitive. This President said, wearing a colourful agbada on his birthday that he did not believe in the politics of do-or- die. Really? What did his men do in Lagos, Ekiti and Abuja? Let him stop deceiving Nigerians that he is meek. We have a dictator in our hands, who wants to win the elections next year even if it means by undemocratic means. We are already seeing this. He is not interested in building any institutions. The Roman leader Cincinnatus was the model for the first President of the United States, George Washington. He led the army to independence. After victory, he relinquished control and allowed the other statesmen to hold congresses on how to run the new nation. When the electors picked him as the first President, he was reluctant. Even at that, he worked against moves to make him a monarch or life President. He is often called a modern Cincinnatus, and the city of Cincinnati in Ohio was named in his honour and the Roman general’s. Selfless acts like that of Washington helped to build American institutions because the man built a template for selfless service. When a Fayose would subvert maths and make minority into majority and Jonathan subvert decency and stop the Speaker access to chamber to discus his own bill, we know we have the frontal abuse of democracy. The bill was to discuss the emergency, yet it was used as a ploy to play politics. It means politics of personal grudge is more important to Dr. Jonathan than the lives of Nigerians in peril in northern Nigerian. Jonathan may be the President but the presidency is not Jonathan’s. He is President but not presidential. He will be one when he decides not to install his ego but build systems, beginning with the rule of law.

Soyinka, Lagos Ibadan Expressway, et al

I was in Abeokuta last Saturday to attend the Ake Arts and Books Festival, and had two observations. One, I took the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, and I missed a good part of the event because of the interminable traffic jam. I told myself, this is an expressway but cars are moving like snails. I wonder what Jonathan and his men are doing on that road. Somebody was to deliver an item to me from Ibadan last week, and he was stuck in traffic for hours. This is unacceptable in Nigeria’s busiest route.
My other observation was at the event itself. Soyinka fielded questions from a variety of youths who filled the hall at the refurbished Cultural Centre in Abeokuta. The youths impressed with their knowledge not only of Soyinka the man, activist and writer, but contemporary Nigeria. Soyinka of course answered the questions with characteristic verve, depth and cutting humour. I am glad I was educated by the sense that this is not a generation lost to Yahoo shenanigans. It vitiated my frustration that even though I was about the first to raise my hand to ask the Nobel laureate a question, they preferred youngsters. Not to worry. It was a great outing.

November 24, 2014
Of imposition and impostors

It was a victory party that turned into a funeral pyre.

Son of former Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa had his followers waltz to the PDP secretariat in Abuja. Dressed in colourful outfit, they pulsed with songs and dance. The man, Abudul-Jhalil Tafawa Balewa, swaggered into the office to pick his presidential nomination form. While the fiesta flared on, he slouched out of the office, his shoulder sagged and his buoyant face dropped to a scowl. He infected the crowd of followers with his dour look.

The party said there was no form. The man brandished his receipt. He had paid for it. It was a breach of contract. But the only form available, we learnt later, was for one Goodluck Jonathan who had been endorsed as the automatic candidate of the party. That was how the victory song dropped many decibels to a dirge. It was a comic resemblance to the play by Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca, titled Blood Wedding, where a wedding turns into a dreary lamentation and mourning,

Never mind that later, after President Jonathan had picked his ticket, some form of arrangement was made for Tafawa Balewa to pick his. Everybody knows that the son of the former prime minister is no great shakes in the party. He is a mere ant in the sweepstakes. When the Jonathan wind comes, no one would even see the ant go. It will vanish inside the dust bowl.

Tafawa Balewa’s complaint is the sort of tear we see in this season. The word in town now is imposition. Some might have asked Balewa how he acquired the so-called bona fides to run for an office. Was his father not imposed on the Northern People’s Congress by the Sardauna of Sokoto? It is the irony of the day that imposition has become the excuse among politicians of both parties to justify rebellion when the ticket goes elsewhere.

When the ticket is theirs, or falls in the hands of their cronies, it is democracy, or consensus. When it does not, it is an autocratic folly. Welcome to presidential system. Some have said it is the curse of the system we borrowed from the Americans. Yet we know that even when the parliamentary system thrived in this country, we still had complaints of imposition. The battle between Awolowo and Akintola arose from the crisis of imposition. We should not wake up today and start throwing accusation of which we are all guilty.

Some have attributed it to the hangover from the military era. I have trafficked in this belief in the past. But I think it oversimplifies it. The military thrived in this part in part because we were beholden to a system of command and control embedded with centuries-old reign of monarchy. The king syndrome has overwhelmed us. It is feudalism writ large. It is politics of kings and chiefs.

It permeates every part of culture. It is not only because of our monarchical roots. It percolates family with its extended system. So we have to crave patriarchs. There has to be a strong family person. We carry it into the offices, into the farm system, into the village group system. How do we expect the political party to be immune just because we call it democracy? We have become a society of the big man because we have not shed the monarchical baggage.

We decided to adopt democracy as a system, but we did not know that it came as a cover of our ancient penchant for control. Hence the First Republic collapsed. The idea of democracy is progress, but are we biting off more than we can chew?

When the Americans gave themselves the presidential system, they did not start with universal suffrage. Even the woman and poor did not vote. Their first President George Washington was not a product of popular election. He was selected by what we call consensus today. In fact, a good percentage of the founding fathers wanted him to have royal powers, like King George. They, like Nigeria, looked back to Europe, which was just beginning to shed the yoke of the divine rights of kings. They based their system on a culture that was evolving piecemeal. We have swallowed the whole bottle of beer in one swig.

That was at play when the senators of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) cried foul. They saw that the governors did not want them to return. In other words, they wanted to be imposed once again. They cried foul that governors had taken over the system and structure and they had no prayers. Hence, in a burst of the reckless, they abandoned their duty posts to the Nigerian people – not that they did much when they were working.

This trend is also all over the All Progressives Congress (APC) where some elements are crying over imposition. Presidentialism thrives on two things: money and influence. Influence is what we sometimes call party structure. Money, the mother’s milk of politics, plays a big role in it.

Those who recommended the presidential system for us thought it would be better than the parliamentary that gave us chaos, wetie and the civil war. Well, presidentialism has not fared better. The politicians who claim they expect it to fare better are hypocrites. They know the rules of the game going in. They know it is about who owns money and who exerts influence. It is a sort of Hobbesian mess.

So, when in Delta, Lagos, Akwa Ibom, etc, some of the candidates are shouting down a candidate, it is not because they want fairness. It is because it is not fair if they are not the anointed one. We are seeing it in both parties from the local government to senator to governor. It is clearly at play in the presidential sweepstakes in both parties. We also see it in the balance of forces, whether ethnic, dialectal, religious, geographic, in states. It is a numbers game in money count, delegates count, etc.

What we have is a sort of declaration of independence late in the day. Candidates are showing the streaks of princes who are fighting for the crown. They claim they belong to the right family and others are impostors. If I am anointed, I am not imposed but others are impostors. If I am excluded, the system has been subverted.

Even in the first Democratic Party primaries that Obama won, Hilary Clinton complained that the caucus system in states like Colorado gave the black man advantage. It cost money and endorsements. The recent off-year elections cost about $4 billion. Anywhere we cannot stop powerful people from exerting influence unless the system mounts a buffer against them. Ours does not. The richest founding father, John Hancock, wanted to be the first US president. His money failed him because money was not enough. Was he a threat? Yes.

Many people have said corruption is Nigeria’s problem. They are half right. The root problem is a culture in which we have to depend on somebody up there for things and direction, including money. It was fair in the past. Why are we complaining now when we have not changed the system?

We still run a feudal society in the guise of republicanism. Our federal system gives all the power to the centre. Even in states, all the power is in one man, as it is in a family. We fought a civil war because Ironsi gave us a unitary system. Since the war ended, we have not changed it. That is the only society we know. Unless we learn to change gradually into a system that all see to be fair, our politicians should stop complaining when it does not favour them. Hypocrisy is now the season.

Amuta writes the wrong

Columnist and literary critic Chidi Amuta unveils his collected journalism this week. Since he waded out of his professorial slough into the toga of a journalist, Amuta has written quite a few controversial pieces, especially as an avowed advocate of one of Nigeria’s flinty dictators, Ibrahim Babangida. He has received quite some flak for fuelling such a shameful flame. He never apologised for it. But other than that, his pieces have been quite progressive. He writes with clarity, insight and elegance of a man accustomed to the rigour of classroom debate and the concerns of the street. The book, Writing the Wrong, is welcome to the beehive of public debate.

November 17, 2014
Tambuwal won, GEJ zero

Everyone expected the defection. The PDP, working with the wily wisdom of the presidency, had their plans. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, had his.

The PDP wanted to ambush him. What we had was the flip side of the definition of war by the German general and war theorist Carl Von Clausewitz. In his bold and seminal work, On War, he describes war asthe continuation of politics by other means. Last week, Tambuwal turned this phrase on its head. Politics was the continuation of war by other means.

It was a version of D-Day of politics. When the Allies wanted to invade Normandy, they sent a decoy to northern Europe. The Nazi machine was a monster, and Eisenhower, Churchill and Roosevelt knew that Hitler’s military force was near impregnable. It was like a camel walking through the eye of the needle to defeat the Hitler bear of an army. The Allies sent troops and all forms of deceptive military presences to the north. The decoy worked. Hitler sent many divisions the wrong way. The Allies had their victory, and Hitler his humble pie.

So when speaker Tambuwal held the session, the PDP brass thought the intelligence was wrong. Tambuwal was not going to defect after all. Until the tail end of deliberations and all guards were down. The man spurted out the words, thanked all members and then the gavel fell.

It was a sort of politics as hypnosis. The ambusher had become ambushed. Never before had politics been so fascinating in the House of Representatives as when the same man, Aminu Tambuwal, and his deputy, Emeka Ihedioha, walked into the chambers in another form of ambush.

The sheer semiotics of their act that day still charms the imagination. Tambuwal dressed not like the Fulani man. Ihedioha abandoned the Igbo cap. His foes did not know who walked in. The foes did not know a coup, and an ambush, had happened. A speaker and his deputy had overthrown them. They had the bigger arsenal, the police, the SSS, the muscles of the law. The two men had cunning. The Yorubas say wisdom is better than strength. In fact, wisdom is strength.

A few years later, the PDP were caught napping again. They could not stop the man. He did it without the expected rancour, the chaos of flying chairs and blows and bruised faces and the alawada tragedy of Nigerian politics.

After it happened, they overcame the hypnotic ambush. The presidency scrambled to hold a meeting, a desperate postmortem of a shellacking. First they removed the security detail of the speaker.

They said he had defected and that meant he did not have a right to the rites and paraphernalia of the office. The police, under a pliant inspector-general of police, who has an illiterate understanding of the constitution, said they were obeying the constitution. Were they not supposed to act on the court order? When did the police become the interpreter of the law? Obviously, his boss, the sleek Jonathan, ordered the decision, and he unthinkingly obeyed.

The section of the law (68 of the Nigerian Constitution) did not say once a man defects, he loses his seat. It gives conditions. They include the issues of factions and merger, and these have to be proved in the case of the particular individual, whether he defected based on any considerations of mergers or faction. How did they become mind readers to determine what compelled Tambuwal’s action. He never said he defected based on consideration of mergers or factions. They did not yank off his security detail because he was now an APC man but because he is the speaker. So to annul that position, you need those, the lawmakers, who voted him in to vote him out. That is democracy and not the sort of gangster logic the presidency has just wrought.

It is not the speaker that defected; it was Tambuwal, a PDP man, that defected. The speaker was elected by other members of the House and only members of the House can remove him, so the speaker as a position does not carry any party toga.

The constitution provides for freedom of thought and action for any representative of the people’s mandate. In other words, you can defect if it is ideological or based on a new assessment of the people you represent.

The constitution did not ask the people to vote robots to power. To that extent, an independent strain of mind can necessitate defection. A people may vote a man to make peace but the circumstances may necessitate war. Like Obama who now has to rethink his profile as a dove.

This matter calls for respect for the rule of law. President Jonathan is hypocritical in this regard. Others have defected to PDP from APC, but he did not do anything. When the whitlow of the West, Ondo State Governor Segun Mimiko, defected to PDP from the Labour Party barely a month ago, the police did not ask him to vacate his office of governor. Neither were his security detail recalled. After remorseless denials, he came out in his true colours even though this columnist, without prescience, gave the nation advance notice of Mimiko’s PDP destiny and his treacherous profile. Did Jonathan not parley with Ali Modu Sheriff who crossed from the APC?

Is this clampdown on Tambuwal a case of a president who does not understand the law or who only understands it when it affects his interest dangerously? He clearly does not have much respect for the rule of law. He does not understand that, as president, he should rise above petty insularity, and act as father of all.

This is probably too much for him. Now, they want to go to court to get a servile judge to oust Tambuwal as speaker. They have accepted that they have lost, and rather than chew the humble pie, they are trying to clutch at straws.

What is at stake is not Tambuwal but the integrity of the constitution, and the decency of leaders. The president and Speaker Tambuwal have never been on the same page, and now that he has come out as an APC man, I wonder why he is jittery and outside his skin trying to play revenge.

Politics is the art of the possible. But the possible must operate within the ambit of law and decency. We know that Jonathan’s men enacted the topsy-turvy strategy in Port Harcourt to foment a lawless coup in the Rivers State House of Assembly. They failed disastrously because of the courage and timely intervention of Governor Rotimi Amaechi, who has upset the president’s every plan.

We cannot have such a gangster recourse in the sanctum of the federal legislature. It will amount to the president overthrowing this democracy. It would be a suicidal abomination, and a foul omen for the presidency. Mr. President, you have lost. Accept it.

November 3, 2014
Amaechi: Ode to prudence

Something happened recently that has not received much media attention. Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State asked the House of Assembly to allow him withdraw N19 billion from the state’s savings reserve. When he became governor, he harped on the need to save money as counterfoil to leaner times. He did not expect it to happen during his reign. That emphasises his vision and altruism. He seemed to have read the Bible stories of lean and fat years, and had the image of Joseph the dream interpreter close at heart. He knew oil was not forever. Today the price of oil is dipping, and some predict it may fall as low as $70 per barrel. Now, the states are starved of funds and Jonathan’s finance minister says we are not broke. Yet we cannot pay our bill. In the same period when $15 million is carted away recklessly, an aviation minister leaves office because of recklessness and an untouchable oil minister spends billions on private jet, Amaechi’s example is a wise and cautionary tale. He represents financial responsibility in an age of profligacy, in a time when the president says stealing is not corruption.

November 3, 2014
Dusk to dusk

The beginning of the day is hard to decipher. In his beehive routine, the start or end of day can only be arbitrarily determined. You cannot decide by when he sleeps if he slips into his night clothes at 3am. Or when he starts by the start of his executive council meeting at 8am. Sleep can come in snatches. Hours dovetail in hours. Days are like night and vice versa. Time is a blur.

You can start as I do at about dusk when he trots to his tennis court. This evening, with a cloud looking down without grace, his feet move deftly to the modern-looking arena. About half a dozen persons are with him. His attire is unmistakable. The Nike register distinguishes the short, shoes and top. When he enters the court, his racket is freed out of a bag. His face, embossed by earnestness, shows that he wants to make a quarry of his opponents.

Governor Emmanuel Eweta Uduaghan did not look like one on the verge of his sixth decade on earth when he defeated his opponent that evening. He did not look like a neophyte. His strokes were firm, his calculations cunning and his delivery definitive. This is quite unlike what my colleague and columnist Steve Osuji witnessed a few years back when the governor was bested. Could it be that the man had improved over the years? Playing with the liberty of equals, his opponents did not apply their strokes with respect. Hierarchy crumbled. It was their platform for psychological revenge, to square off against the most powerful man in Delta State.

It was not the opponents alone that played equal. The element also did as a baleful cloud unleashed its content. With the rain unstoppable, the game ended with the score in Uduaghan’s favour. The game was a routine of Governor Uduaghan to keep fit. But more potent was the collegial air about him that encouraged the opponents to compete without let or intimidation, something I witnessed the morning after at the executive council meeting that began promptly at 8am. It was a meeting of irony, humour, deliberations, statistical queries, repartees, polemical intensity and flashes of vanity. A full dish. Two things stood out. A bill to criminalise cults proposed by the attorney-general, Charles Ajuya. Some members of exco cowered at the topic. In irony, Governor Uduaghan reeled out names of members once associated with cults, when they were in university, the pirates that Soyinka started in Ibadan. Some deadpan humour it was. But the cults on the table that day were ferocious gangs laying waste state infrastructure, engaged in armed robbery and kidnappings. They were everywhere and they had to be criminalised. Some said why not identify the individuals, others said they hid under cults. Destroy the cults and the criminals stand exposed. The bill was accepted by majority.

Some of the contract figures came up for corrections, and the governor said they were missing figures because they did not belong to the sciences. On a contract sum, Uduaghan quipped about the commissioner who was a lawyer, noting that if it was legal fees, he probably would miss the sum.

A member did not do an assignment because he did not know his 2014 budget. He still spoke of 2013. The governor, usually calm and reticent, rebuked him and threatened to fire him if he did not complete the job before the next exco.

“Your documents speak for you. It is clear you don’t know that you have a budget for 2014.”

The petrified man eventually collapsed to his chair. Roads, the rehabilitation and compensation of Sapele market after a fire disaster, the completion of school projects, hospitals and a number of roads were treated with urgency. The governor says he wants to commission before he leaves. The meeting ends on a traveler’s note. The United Nations would, in its Annual General Assembly in New York, unveil a report on assessment of Delta State activities under the governor. He would visit with a few members of the exco. A sense of congratulations greeted the announcement. The governor said he allowed the assessment in order to see if he met international best practices. He was happy he did. He is the first governor to have subjected himself to that scrutiny.

After the exco, he hops into an SUV with Information Commissioner, Chike Ogeah, beside him. Uduaghan is driving. He says he loves driving. He moves in a rainy day to a meeting with pensioners. He enters the hall, and the pensioners, all gloomy and scowling, gather in a section of the hall.

“Wetin una want?” the governor asks with humour to tease the pensioners out of their melancholy.

“Una want rice, eba, fufu?”

The pensioners, especially a woman who was gorgeously dressed, had no time for humour. They said they were not getting their pensions. They presented their cases, and the issue took up to an hour, and it was learned that the pensions were coming to them but it was not stated in their slips. And it became clear that the government was paying about 10 per cent contribution, higher than the statutory seven and half per cent. The meeting ended with the governor walking to the pensioners and pumping hands with them, some of them cheered up, some others with the grimace of discontent. Some of them were frustrated that the system as it stood was as prescribed by one of them. Irony.

Governor Uduaghan hopped back into the vehicle and drove back to the government house. He was to meet with the new executive of the Nigerian Bar Association. Their new president, Augustine Alegeh, was there but his team was not ready. In another part of the government house, the chief executive of Agip Oil and his team awaited him. It was a meeting of irony. The governor was happy that AGIP came on a routine courtesy visit. In the past they often came to complain about theft and vandalisation. After AGIP head’s glorious talk about their work with IPP and gas pipeline under construction, he ended with complaints about criminals damaging their installations. Talk about irony.

He met the NBA chiefs later. After the rituals and niceties of protocol, the governor lamented that lawyers encourage politicians out of governance, pointing out that while politicians are preparing for elections, lawyers are preparing for tribunals even before the first ballot is cast. Lunch followed. But a brief lunch it was as the governor had to meet with the top brass of both the National Sports Commission and the Nigerian Football Association. Amaju Pinnick, the ebullient new President of the NFF, was the chairman of the Delta State Sports Commission. Unmistakable in the contingent were Paul Bassey, ace commentator, and Nigeria’s international Victor Ikpeba. It was part serious fare about Uduaghan’s sports feats, part traditional fealty with the breaking of colanut, and humour.

It was the softest part of the day. If, that is, the day started at 8am. My day ended there with him because many people were waiting to see him. He met with some individually and others in private groups. In my arbitrary definition, it began with sport and ended with sport, one indoor and the other outdoor. The full day was dusk to dusk. He had not fazed. It was not a day like when he held meetings of nocturnal frenzy that pinned down the Kokori militant or irritant as messiah, or when he was a heartbeat from death when he paddled in the creeks near militants with cocked guns, or when he operated in the theatre, or when he worked the phone on social media responding to enquiries and comments on his stewardship…

It was a full day. Not like a movie titled One Fine Day, starring George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer. That was a romantic comedy. There surely was no romance, unless if you observed that first lady Roli Uduaghan often sat on the sidelines when her husband played tennis. Or the classic novel, One Fine Day, by Molly Panter-Downes on England after the ravages of the Second World War. No ravages this day, but building. Or the plot of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. That was too gloomy even though it gave the author the Nobel Prize. It was a peep into the heady day of a man who, last week, turned 60 in the saddle of Delta State.

October 27, 2014
How the girls haunted Jonathan

This columnist cried to the rafters after the Chibok girls were whisked away by the bandits in the name of God. I titled the piece, Swap the Girls Now, on May 19, 2014, and not a few thought it a heresy.

The presidency forswore dining with the enemy, which was what the whole idea was interpreted to be. Now, they want to exult that they have actually dined with the damnable foes and are on the verge of releasing the girls after six months in captivity. But is this an act of heroism or desperation by the Jonathan administration?

When the tragedy first occurred, the Jonathan administration did not accept it. They asked questions rather than provide answers. Some of them asked, how was it possible that hundreds of girls could be abducted in a convoy and no one stopped them? So they said it could not be true. The enemies of Jonathan were at work again. They did not wish him well. Even the president went live on national television asking the parents of the abducted to provide the names of the students. His wife categorically said the girls were not missing. That was the first scene of the drama. It was the stage of denial.

Later the same administration knew that it had happened. It started to tell the country that it knew what was going on. It was the work of the opposition party, the APC. When Oby Ezekwesili rallied the young and the old behind her #Bring Back the Girls movement, they accused her of working with the opposition party. They wanted to rally Nigerians behind Jonathan’s innocence. He is an innocent man. He provided the soldiers. He declared emergency. What else could he have done? The APC should leave Jonathan alone. They put the point as nakedly as they could. This became worse when CNN flew into the country, and reported day by day the updates of the events. Doyin Okupe said to the nation on CNN about the Nigerian military being on the trail of the militants with aircraft and tanks, etc. We never saw any result. It was the stage of propaganda.

When propaganda did not work, they saw that the whole of the world focused on us. John McCain, senator and former presidential candidate in the United States, lambasted our bumbling military and leaders. Ditto Hilary Clinton. We heard nothing but silence from the vaults of the presidency. They wanted to divert attention from what was going on in the country. They wanted to see if it was possible to scale the acceptability of the president against the narrative of the missing girls. So, they orchestrated a new campaign called Bring Back Jonathan. It back fired. It was the desecration of the innocence of an idea. Like crude oil spilling on pristine waters, it was a dangerous gamble. They also made surreptitious moves on the media to play it down. But three newspapers, inspired by The Nation, began a permanent column on the front page, urging the federal government to bring back the girls. They had no answer. They sulked. They demurred. They cowered. It was the depression stage.

Not long after, Malala, the now winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, came calling. They had no choice but to allow the relations of the missing girls to visit Aso Rock. It was a grudging concession. The humiliation was colossal. It took a teenager to wake them out of their supercilious torpor. The president had called off, in official cowardice, a trip to the village to show solidarity. Now, in a torpedo of the African tradition of visiting the bereaved, it was the bereaved that visited the condoler, and what condoler! This was the end of denial. They no longer could say, even to themselves, that it was a politically motivated kidnap.

Again, the matter had begun to sour. The matter became intractable. More and more people died from the bullets of the godless bandits. Territories fell, Boko Haram flags flew defiantly, video clips proclaimed the rhetoric bluster of their leader, pictures from the northeast bled with gore and streamed with tears, soldiers mutinied, their wives blighted the streets with protests. What the Jonathan administration thought would go away became a monstrous albatross.

It became difficult to blame the opposition, although there was some level of gloating from the APC that it was Jonathan’s cross. But Jonathan is leader and leaders take responsibility. From depression, they descended to a place of ambiguity. They had no answers. The imagination was empty of rhetoric. Ezekwesili and her followers drummed up the campaign. Although CNN and the international media had moved elsewhere, Nigeria was still on the radar. The conversation never ceased. It was like a low burning flame that never petered out, stubborn, illuminating, spreading, lapping up more victims of leaves and dry paper. The big house, with its big kerosene tank, is threatened.

Then the inner sanctum of the regime started worrying. Not because the girls were not released. But because the TAN campaigns were revving up and it was getting close for Jonathan to unfurl his ambition. He will not have “I have no shoes” kind of mantra to latch on to. Rather the Chibok girls will stick to him like what we in the Niger Delta call jiga, that little worm that hid under toes of shoeless boys playing around rivers and ponds. He did not want that. They – he and his team – had to get this Chibok nonsense out of the way. They moved into the desperation phase.

That explains why he eventually dined with the enemy. Remember that picture of him with Ali Modu Sheriff with Chad leader? That was part of the deal. Hypocrisy is the hallmark of the desperate. He can don any identity in order to get things done. Why did he not say, well, Modu knows a thing or two about this matter, and we can parley with him so we can get the girls out? Rather his party called APC Boko Haram party when Modu was an APC man. But when he became a PDP man, Olisa Metu and presidency votaries lost their tongue, only to regain it in chatting with him on the Chibok girls.

So, are we to thank Jonathan if the girls actually come out? Or he will thank himself for having taken an albatross out of the way of his ambition. It is what we can call a gift horse in the mouth. A cynical boost of goodwill. He would not release the girls if not because his campaign is about to take off. It is an act of selfishness. It reminds me of Lord Byron’s lines in his Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, “He had no objection to true liberty except that it would make the nations free.” Jonathan was less interested in the Chibok girls’ freedom than the freedom for him to campaign for the second term.

October 20, 2014
Fayose versus Fayemi versus Maths

After all his rhetorics at his swearing in, Governor Ayo Fayose said his predecessor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, left a debt of N84 billion. Fayemi responded through his former Information Commissioner Tayo Ekundayo that it was not right. Ekundayo said the debt was far less. Explaining that of the N25 billion bond, N14 billion has been paid, he urged the new governor to look at the handover notes and figures before bellowing falsehood to the world.

Hmm! So what is the story? Is it that Fayose does not understand maths? Or is it that Fayemi wants to deny his debt? If it amounted to N84 billion, we never knew that any such loans were taken unless he took them in secret, and such loans are never done in secret. They are matters of public record. Fayose has the opportunity to unveil the documents to the public now. Or it will be assumed that he wants to acquire N84 billion in debt to buy rice and stew for Christmas in furtherance of his stomach infrastructure policy. God so kind, he has appointed an office of stomach infrastructure. If he does not unveil the debt clearly, then he will be involved in what is called fuzzy math.

October 20, 2014