The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Who will bury their dead?

    Who will bury their dead?

    “That the hypocrite reign not, lest the people be ensnared.”

    In a city called Lano, the king died, and the people decided to abolish the monarchy and install a novelty: a mayor.

    The position was on offer to the highest bidder. Muslims wanted their richest man Adamu to buy it and therefore enthrone Sharia. The Christians with their gung-ho bishops queued behind Isaac who was their plutocrat. If the Muslims knew Adamu with his liberal zakat offering, why could the Christians not praise the Lord for the munificence of tithing from their beloved Isaac?

    It was hard to tell who was richer until Suleiman Solomon or Solomon Suleiman materialised. No one was sure of the name order. But this man who sometimes wore the Islamic turban or the Christian cross and who knew his psalms as well as his recitation of Islamic text, preened over his pots of money. He preserved the mystery of his name order by calling Solomon his last name when he supped with Christians and Suleiman his surname when with Muslims. He owed eternal debts to the father of the faithful for the two faiths he bestowed humanity.

    Though he claimed his blessings came from his tithing and zakat, the elders of both faiths disavowed him and called him a corrupter of the faith. But the city elders who presided were moved by Solomon Suleiman’s campaign line: Muslim money for Muslims, Christian money for Christians. So, he promised that once he became the mayor, he would split the city’s money in half. Half of it would go to the Muslims and the other half to the Christians.

    The fundamentalists were defeated and the majority tagged along with their new interfaith hero. He was equal parts god and equal parts the devil, noted the citizens. The Christians said the part of him that called Jesus belonged to God, and the Muslims said the part that worshipped on Fridays at mosques belonged to Allah. The other part, depending on whether you spoke to a Christian or Muslim, belonged to the devil.

    The Lanoites went along in relative harmony until things began to unravel. One midnight, the two-year-old son of Nurudeen Mukhtar caught a serious fever, and in another part of town, the pregnant wife of John Jacobs was on the verge of delivery. They could not access their usual hospitals because of the distance. Mukhtar decided to visit Sacred Hearts Clinic. His son’s temperature had reached such a fiery point as he and his wife could not manage until the crack of dawn.

    So, out of desperation, Mukhtar bore his son on his shoulder and hurried to the Sacred Hearts.

    The frustration began early. On introducing himself to the nurse on duty to register his son, Mohammed, the nurse quickly replied, “but you should know that people with such names cannot receive treatment here. Why don’t you go to one of your hospitals? Even if I wanted to help, I would be in trouble.”

    Meanwhile the little boy, more febrile and fragile by the second, looked with an eye that looked as though about to expire. The father cried, and begged, and asked the nurse to have mercy.

    “It is not about mercy,“ declared the nurse. “It is about faith.”

    John Jacobs’ wife, Elizabeth, had no option but to rush into Ansarudeen Hospital, which was the closest and only one within range. When he and his wife managed to enter the premises, they expected sympathy. His wife, already irritant and cursing her husband for choosing that time of night for her delivery, would not listen when the spouse begged for forgiveness.

    The real forgiveness, however, was not forthcoming from the resident doctor who saw them and knew from their dressing that they could not be true believers. If he found out that they were believers, he would chasten them before reluctantly administering help. But the Jacobs did not want to forswear their trust in Jesus. So they both decided to say they were Christians and the doctor, a true believer, told them to go to the hospital of their God.

    “Can’t you see my wife’s condition?” protested John Jacobs.

    “Can’t you see that this hospital is named Ansarudeen? Even if we tried to help, you may die. The sovereign of cure is Allah, not Jesus,” replied the physician.

    While both families tried to overcome their crises, commuters and travelers had to come to terms with their roads. Suleiman Solomon had constructed two sets of roads, one for Muslims and one for Christians. That very night a transporter was passing through Lano, and then he met a roadblock. It was a Muslim roadblock with policemen clad in peculiarly Muslim police uniforms. They asked the driver his name, and he said he was Hussein but the policemen discovered that about a quarter of his passengers were Christians.

    They told the Christians to disembark, and that they were not allowed to take advantage of Muslim facilities. The Muslims remained on board while the Christians were ordered to walk a bush path for about seven kilometres where the Christian road began. They complied. After several hours of trekking they met the bus and the driver who obliged at the end of the Muslim highway, and found their seats. Before they reached there, they witnessed a dramatic scene. A very hungry beggar had Christian currency and wanted in that hour of night to buy tea and bread from a seller who catered to Muslims in the neighborhood. The Muslim would not sell and the Christian beggar wondered why he would not sell. “Can’t you see you have not sold anything all night? You get a customer and you say no,” the beggar intoned.

    “Your money is sinful,” replied the seller.

    But a Christian roadblock awaited them with Christian policemen dressed in Christian police uniforms. Hussein was not permitted to drive, so one of the Christian passengers took over the steering, while the Muslims entered the bush like the Christians and met at another intersection of Muslims. About two yards separated both roads, and it was called conversion pass. The Muslims rejoined them in the bus at about 4am and they decided to rest. But a strange and ravenous wind howled in and scooped the bus from the edge of the road and it rolled over into a deep ravine.

    That night, not faraway, buzzed with a Christian party and people had had their fill of rice and stew and lots of drink. Somehow the word passed round that the tomato in the stew was purchased from a Muslim market. No one was able to authenticate it. Even when one or two persons came to deny the rumour, it was too late. Nausea had caught everyone and they ran to the conversion pass. They looked over the ravine and puked profusely. The throaty choir of retching, puffing, rasping, coughing, spitting resembled a coarse comedy if it did not sound like a dirge. It could have been a funny sight as all of them in their glorious shirts and dresses decided to retch on the road and into the ravine.

    They did not know that a more terrible act of the devil had happened at the receiving end of their vomit. All the passengers and driver died as the vehicle caught fire and burned everyone beyond recognition.

    The next morning, the question was where to bury the bodies. They could not identify who was Muslim or Christian, and they could not bury them in any of the available cemeteries because there were only Christian and Muslim cemeteries.

    Even if they were to bury them, they could not put them in a casket. It was not acceptable to swaddle a Muslim in a Christian casket and vice versa.

    Suleiman Solomon or Solomon Suleiman pondered these riddles. It became the least of his worries when the news also broke that a Muslim boy died outside a Christian hospital and a woman delivered a stillborn girl on the roadside.

  • Fashola’s commonsense

    Fashola’s commonsense

    Culture entraps a generation. A few men of vision open the cage. It begins with ideas. Ideas illuminate society. Doers take over with courage and they galvanise the people along the lines of the vision.

    In South Africa, Alan Paton wrote a searing novel, Cry, The Beloved Country, a work that jolted a society driven by caste based on colour. Others also penned, including playwright Athol Fugard and epics like Mazisi Kunene’s on Shaka the Zulu, the first blood of rage against caste. The courage, however, roared from the loins of Nelson Mandela upon whose levers South Africa broke out of the fetters of prejudice. He caught the fire of change and lit the tinder of equality in the land.

    We saw a short note recently from the governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, the governor of Lagos. His ruminations on the World Economic Forum hosted by this country in Abuja would make many a columnist’s ink freeze with envy. In short, clinical sentences with sapient punch lines, he gave us his takeaways from the forum. It is Sociology 101 for Nigerians.

    He noted five highlights. One, that we start our meetings with prayers and end them with prayers as though we run a vast tapestry of mosques and churches, wasting tremendous man hours. Two, in meetings, we interrupt sober sessions by serenading ‘who is who’ when we should go to the business of the day. Three, a knock on journalists whose cameras and torsos shade out the profiles of guests from the eyes of other attendees and even television viewers. Four, the facility and efficiency with which Transcorp Hilton conducted the affairs, a cut away from the routine failures of protocol and order in many of our public events.

    His take was less, to me, a knock on Hilton but more on the failure of our institutions across the board to rise to occasions. The fifth take focuses on education, and how a foreign personage rallied the corporate world to save a dying need. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown dredged up $10 million to secure 500 schools up north. It was a call to fiscal discipline.

    These takeaways from the governor of example were a cultural call to arms. It is a commentary on a culture captive to epicurean slothfulness and levity. It shows we are a people who love pleasure more than work, who tolerate chaos, who surrender to fate, who grapple to simultaneously worship God and man, and fail in between. Finally, it shows we love money for its plenty rather than make plenty of our money.

    His take on prayers reminds me of the investors’ forum Nigeria held in Toronto over a year ago. I was sandwiched in the hall by two Canadians whose faces shone with quiet contempt as our organisers insisted on opening and closing prayers that lasted forever. The prayers alternated between Muslim and Christian, even though the events opened earlier and closed later than schedule. Our obsession with faith makes the faithful fake and fake faithful. It has crossed over into politics where we must consider the god a man worships to elect him or her as though wealth creation, job creation, good hospitals, schools, discipline and maintenance of prosperity and value depend on whether the candidate gazes at star or moon.

    A comedy flows from his second take. At every event, we begin with long and winding introductions of chairmen, guests of honour, etc. Some VIPs deliberately attend events late for ego massaging. If the person – a governor, party apparatchik, business mogul, etc – arrives two hours late, the MC interrupts to pay homage to the person. No attention is paid to the fact that he has not shown respect to others there, and even the organisers of the event. They usually do not come alone. Their long and boorish retinue also assume the cocky air of their principal. Such display of supercilious extravagance is worsened, as Fashola notes, when he would have to displace others who respected the event by coming early. It is always an alawada moment in this country and it is made more farcical by the obsequious demeanour of reverence of everyone else in the hall as they wave, bow, clap and sing for the criminal of time.

    The Transcorp example is typically Nigerian. Usually we do not do the right thing. But the hotel has shown us one thing: things will work when we put our minds to them. The failure of hospitals, of election agencies, school boards, tax agencies, power companies, etc, is the failure of discipline.

    PM Brown’s story tells us that we do not want to run a country based on compassion. Our compassion is often in the wrong place. We are sorry for our aunt, so we steal public funds to fund her son’s naming ceremony, etc. If $10 million can safeguard 500 schools, it means two things. One, we have a business community unmoved by a sense of social engagement. They would rather fund vanity like a TV show on finicky celebrity than an education endowment. I wrote last year, that if we start a programme where the well-heeled adopt a bed, or ward, or equipment, etc, in hospitals across Nigeria, we shall see how easily we can tackle the problem of health care. But the rich spend money either to get power because they did not earn the money, or stash them away so they can have Dubai weddings and Madrid birthdays unmolested by the physiognomy of poverty back home.

    Fashola’s takeaways are a brutal set of words, subtle in indictment but total in its umbrage. This is a culture unsuited for the 21st century. We can pray, but let us work. We can salute VIPs but not as late comers. We can spend money but on the right things. Let our hotels and hospital work and not wait for the white man to show them the way. In one word, let us abandon the lazy culture of feudal Nigeria and embrace the industry of the internet age.

    In more sensitive societies, Fashola’s notes would needle us into mass introspection and institutional sobriety. But this is not revolutionary America where one Thomas Paine wrote a short note titled Commonsense. The pamphlet emboldened the nation to action. It told home truths that eventually led Americans to a war that ousted the British. It was the shortest writing that ever roused a people. It was longer than Fashola’s takeaways but no less penetrating in insight. We need such commonsense for our common sense and, ultimately, common wealth.

  • Swap the girls now

    Swap the girls now

    It began as absence of water. It has climaxed as absence of leadership. How it will end, especially as the saga of missing hundreds of girls surges on, lies in a foggy horizon.

    The crisis of Boko Haram was predated by the crisis of water, when the drying of the Lake Chad signaled the decline and fall of its status as the Nile of northeastern Nigeria. The lake provided not only jobs, but also livelihood. Not only livelihood, but also culture. Add to its culture an ambience of peace. It flourished an empire, spawned a big city, opened its portal to all faiths and all peoples, and glorified Africa’s longest reigning dynasty, the Seifawa.

    Then drought came but so did doubt. An environment of self-confidence led to questioning the certainties of generations of the economic practices and harmony of its residents. Farmers did not enjoy the nutrients of the soil. Traders could not ferry across to markets. Fishermen nestled their nests rather than fling them for catches. Markets shrank. Drought weakened a doughty people. Where there was food, they had gloom. A diverse and robust economy kept the politicians and leaders at bay. Commerce failed, but a few became powerful.

    The immiserated many followed to the lead of an indolent few, a peacock class with messianic agenda. Fruitful people became restless and idle. The first explosion was the Maitasine riots in Kano in the 1980’s. They blossomed in blood and rapine, but they hailed from the Maiduguri area, where Boko Haram first tenanted its zealots.

    General Alabi Isama assisted by soldiers like now Senate President David Mark quelled the uprising. The Sambisa Forest, now mythicised as an impossible fortress, was cordoned off, and the rabble of militants was ravished by a deft response under a so-called weak and indecisive Shehu Shagari in the second republic.

    Even then the Lake Chad was losing its swath of water to the systematic encroachment of the desert. We failed to plant enough trees. We failed to protect the water. It was the first failure of leadership. Places abound in the world today where they saved lives and civilisation because they saved the water. In the United States, the picturesque state of Colorado with all its luxuriant parks and lakes would probably be gone without care. All the trees in its lush capital Denver are hand-planted.

    The second level of leadership failure was the routine neglect of education and commerce by successive state and federal governments. The feudal north hid under a religious cover and entrenched a cynical brand of politics that elevated a few and alienated the rest. Disaster seeds are planted in eras of silence. One of them, now an APC chieftain, once gloated as governor that Borno citizens could not read, and could not understand the adverse media reporting about his failure. After the Maitatsine riots, no one inoculated the society. The disease gradually grew like invidious cancer, and the result was the rise of Yusuf. He rallied the indolent and illiterate, and gave them a society that the government allowed to evaporate.

    “Feed them first, and then demand virtue of them,” wrote Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his novel of patricide, The Brothers Karamazov. He also noted in the novel that what people want is not God but miracle. I believe if you associate the miracle with God, they will go with whatever the God is. Yusuf gave the boys miracle, and he had authority over them. This disaster was seething in quiet promise while the ruling class swaggered. When the monster matured, everyone was blindsided.

    Yusuf was killed, and the group’s rage escalated. But some of the governors of the region had used them for political violence in the same way the Niger Delta political class used the militants.

    Boko Haram became born and festered in killings, stealing, arson and kidnapping. This leads us to the third example of leadership failure. This involves corruption, ineptitude and incompetence. This began under Yar’Adua, under whose reign Yusuf was killed. But the man was ill, and did not act. However, much of the violence flared under President Goodluck Jonathan. A number of things have gone wrong. One, about N2.7 trillion of security budget has gone unaccounted for since 2011. The U.S. Congress lashed the Nigerian military as ill-equipped and ill-trained. They said our armed forces are even afraid of the insurgents. Foreign powers are now giving us technology that we could have acquired with the princely security budget allocations.

    Two, a disconnected leader. President Jonathan did not respond to many of the killings and depredations of the group other than by rhetoric of surrender. He has been uninspired, and he has hidden under a hallucinatory logic fueled by his acolytes that everything is a conspiracy to hang his presidency. The north wants him to fail, and that is the reason for the insurgency. So he appointed a northern oligarch as national security adviser. He has been of no effect. Sambo Dasuki, the NSA, is a prince. But the insurgents are paupers, and the prince has not saved the nation from the paupers because they belong to a different world. His defence minister Gusau’s reign is highlighted by internecine brawls with service chiefs.

    Jonathan’s acolytes have adduced the same conspiracy theory to obfuscate all Jonathan’s failures in infrastructure, power, education, corruption, etc. The terrorist has become the bogeyman.

    The same logic animated disbelief by Jonathan, his wife, and others in his circle when the Chibok girls were whisked away. Hence it took three weeks for the president to utter a word after his famous Azonto trip to Kano and Champaign fizz in Ibadan. It took the outrage of the world and the persistent reporting by CNN to jolt Jonathan and his “Chai! There is God O” wife to know that not everything is conspiracy. Even at that, he is saying he does not want to swap the detained terrorists for the girls. Some politicians and leaders hold that indefensible position. Hoisting a moral premise that we cannot negotiate with terrorists, they say it negates law and decency. Hogwash. They also say it is American principle.

    I love principle, but to quote Oscar Wilde, “persons are more important than principles”. Persons are real, and principles are based on persons. Principles cannot bring those girls back alive. If Shekau is not sincere, at least let us give him the opportunity to fail. But to say that we cannot swap is an act of hypocritical folly. In the past few years, the president’s uncle, the garrulous Edwin Clark’s son and Okonjo Iweala’s mother, among others, were kidnapped. Would they tell us that they were freed without negotiation and release of funds? Let us not be hypocritical. If any of our leaders were like the Chibok man who had two daughters and four cousins with the BH boys, would the issue of swap spark debate? It is an act of not only folly but example of disconnection with the people.

    In securing information on Osama Bin Laden, the U.S. gave an Arab partisan a Ferrari in exchange for a phone number. Talk about swap. What shall we lose if we give up those in detention, and get the girls? Not much. The released guys can fight us, but that is a price we can pay. It is an opportunity cost. Would we rather that the girls die or are sold off, or that the prisoners are released? Now that the world powers are with us, we can now track and destroy these guys.

  • Ekiti and Osun as guinea pigs

    Ekiti and Osun as guinea pigs

    We cannot live without technology, and that is at once the bane and grace of this age. Technology defines our age and makes great nations, and also unmakes their foes. All over history, nations grow on the level of their technologies. Whether it was the mechanics of Rome, the literacy of Greece, the navy of England, empires raise technology as their mistress of progress. Today, we have heard of new technologies, including the power of robotics.

    Very soon, it will turn humans into ciphers of their handmaidens. We will become slaves of our doing. Our Frankenstein wonders will make us merry and mourn.

    Today the edge the United States holds over others derives from its technological superiority. Its military, especially its navy, is the best the world has ever known because of its technology. The best Air Force of the world is the United States Air Force, and the second best Air Force in the world is the Air force of the U.S. navy.

    Security cannot be guaranteed with technology. The failure of Nigeria to tackle the menace of Boko Haram may be due to corruption, even if the President says stealing is not corruption. We are yet to know how all the trillions allocated to security in the past few years have been expended. We have soldiers and police even though we hosted the World Economic Forum with over 600,000 men who could have worked their way into Sambisa forest to chase down the terrorists and save the girls. But technology is prime guarantee, especially in monitoring and tracking the vermin of Boko Haram. It also helps in documenting and comparing data, what the United States used in decapitating Al Queda and dousing the life of Osama Bin Laden. Those who underplay the power of technology should read books on how Osama was tracked and killed. If members of our security council have not read them, at least they can watch the movie titled Zero Dark Thirty. They will realise how all the money we have wasted on corruption in the name of security could have made the help of the U.S. and other world powers superfluous.

    Democracies also thrive on technology and nothing demonstrates this better than the vote. Over the years, elections have worked on a simple principle: one person, one vote. But to realise this, technologists have adopted a variety of methods. The most obvious has been the thumbprint. For decades, the issue was social. Who should vote? It was initially patriarchal. Only men had the right. Then the women’s movement rose from the martial femininity, ardour and articulations of such amazons as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her fellow suffragist Susan B. Anthony. By fighting the patrician logic of patriarchy, property and politics they railroaded the world by partnering with abolitionists. Female angst and turbulence led the world to cow to Seneca Falls when the beginning of women’s fight began and led to the woman vote. Then the other matter was colour and what we know as universal suffrage, empowering everyone to vote.

    Here in Nigeria, feudal hubris that made only men and literate votes is succumbing. But we have a peculiar cultural problem with our vote. That is, the belief by an oligarchy that the vote is democratic only in theory but the result must favour their narrow agenda. That is why we have rigging. This has led to the abuse of our democracy, the fall of wisdom and the peacock reign of the bandit. When we fail to attack the essential nature of democratic banditry, we have rigged election and the wrong person takes reign. We lie that we have the right people in office. We gradually, if we don’t control matters, slide into the arms of the tyrant who parades himself as the people’s anointed.

    “One person, one vote” cannot work without technology. Hence the trend towards computerisation of the vote is intended to avoid the corruption of mathematics by those who count the vote. As Einstein once said, “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”

    That is the logic of the great world mathematician, and he was not necessarily referring to democracy of politics, but the democracy of sociology and economics, on which the democracy of politics partly depends.

    Einstein was the progressive of numbers and the physical world. He knew little of the impact of his ideas on democracy. Technology today owes a lot to him. That is why in the world over, once a person votes, technology takes over. The more technical the process, the less rig-prone will the vote be.

    That came to mind when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) decided not to use its latest technology of the card reader for the two upcoming elections in Ekiti and Osun states. The card reader, if implemented with integrity and purpose, is an antidote to the subversive cunning and impunity of the vote bandit. It records the imprint of the voter and forestalls the injuries of double registration and multiple voting. We cannot have a Mike Tyson vote and be counted in Nigerian poll.

    INEC insists it will use permanent voter cards alone without the technology savvy of the card reader. It says it will use the card reader in 2015.

    One can understand the fear of the electoral body about a new technology. It seems the best way to ensure its success is to try it in smaller elections. In Ekiti State where the election for governor will take place on June 21, 657,256 PVCs have been printed, although not all have been collected. In Osun State, where the election takes place in August, 1,256569 PVCs were reported printed but, like in Ekiti, not all have been collected. This is a fraction of the elections nationwide. This is manageable geopolitics. These states can be used as guinea pigs and lessons can be learned for the bigger ring of a national poll.

    In democracies, local elections are laboratories. Also technologies always thrive when begun in small places. The strengths and weakness become platforms for improvements and assured implementation. Osun and Ekiti are small states. INEC has denied that it ever planned to use card readers. That is beside the point. It still has the opportunity to use it. It is good for the integrity of the umpire and it presages confidence in 2015.

    The Anambra governorship poll is still wrapped in murk in so far as even the INEC boss felt helpless over an inconclusive exercise. Card readers are not magic, but they are the best armoury and counterfoil to fraud. As Alan Kay said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Societies have invented their futures with technology. INEC can do that for Nigeria by using card readers in the labs of Ekiti and Osun.

  • Azonto and presidential dance

    Azonto and presidential dance

    Before President Goodluck Jonathan visited Kano at the hour hoodlums whisked away 276 girls, I had not heard of Azonto, a popular dance rooted in African rhythm and domesticated by local maestros. It gives grace to the body, exercises the limbs and inspires ecstasy on stage and at parties. The old and young can execute its bold turns. Legs and torsos tighten on its physical toll.

    What bothered me, however, was the gory dance in town, the dance by the so-called randy goons of God who zipped away our girls. Nigerian beauties lost in the bosoms of defilers.

    But the president did not understand what he did. He felt for the damsels in his own way. However, he does not know how to feel for them as a Nigerian leader. Psychologists call it emotional intelligence, the ability to translate feeling into words and deeds. With that armoury, he can inspire a people to action to save the 276 girls.

    If he did not know how to feel, how could he have known that he erred in storming Kano before the campaign season kicked off?

    The president should understand he is a leader in times of crisis. Rather, he is a leader in crisis himself. He nestles in Aso Rock and routinely summons his service chiefs. The girls can be any of our sisters, cousins, nieces, daughters, friends, neighbours and potential in-laws.

    He has not shown leadership by symbolism, acts or speech. When Boko Haram boys shoot, bomb and kidnap kids, a leader does not leave the stage to protests on the streets. He walks onto the stage and inspires. He gives them speeches; he rouses with his eyes, words and other gestures. He galvanises the troops and flashes the light at the end of the tunnel. But the president has responded with lethargy and languor, as if those on top are asleep. Even if he is asleep, he can still wake up the way Jesus did in a storm-tossed ship and reassured his disciples. His many pastors ought to tell him.

    We have seen leaders rise in times of crisis and their actions jolted their generations. Winston Churchill is a potent example. England lay prostrate when Hitler’s army blitzed its way all over Europe and cowed the proud French. Churchill defied fellow leaders who wanted England to sup with the tyrant. Bombs fell daily, defacing England and killing droves. The great British Empire reduced to living on rations and in shelters. But Churchill inspired the nation with speeches and his personal appearances in public. He gave speeches that made the great journalist Ed Morrow to say that he inspired the English language to battle. He said England would fight in the land, on the seas, in the air, on the beeches and ended by saying “we shall never surrender”.

    Even if despair came, he had words for his people. “But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.”

    Whenever he visited rubbles of war in the city, the suffering compatriots eulogised the courage of their hero.

    His counterpart on the other side of the continent, Franklin Roosevelt, who sat on a wheelchair because he had polio, roused his nation in times of the Great Depression. Millionaires committed suicide because their wealth evaporated. The poor could not hope for food and bleakness pervaded America. “We have nothing to fear,” he crooned, “but fear itself”. Learning from Mark Twain, he spoke of the four freedoms, including freedom from want. With a sunny face in spite of his personal handicap, he gingered a nation to rebuild an economy and win the Second World War against the greatest tyranny in history.

    In the same era, we had Charles de Gaulle, the cocky Frenchman who levitated a defeated country back to its pride. He formed the Free French and gave speeches from outside the country as a tonic of revival to a disconsolate nation. He is mythicised today as the greatest Frenchman, perhaps since the little general.

    Mahatma Gandhi, derided as the little brown man in a loincloth, is in the class of all the others. He was not only a nationalist; he was a humanist of the first rank. By self-sacrifice, moral courage and austere dignity, he coalesced a diverse people against the British. He disarmed them by his disdain for violence and as the first practitioner of Henry David Thoreau’s doctrine of non-violence. Without inspiring a shot, he subdued the biggest empire the world had ever known. Once the Hindus and Muslims did not see eye-to-eye and engaged in zero-sum bloodbath. He did not fight with guns or with words, but with a gesture of self-sacrifice. He would fast until the killings ended. Both Muslims and Hindus stopped the butchery so that Ghandi might live.

    When Mandela left jail, he met a people on the verge of a civil war. He inspired them not by aloofness, but by engaging each group with empathy. Perhaps hence he said, “Lead from the front – but don’t leave your base behind”.

    President Jonathan can also learn from President Bill Clinton. When he confronted a bad economy, he uttered perhaps his best line, “I feel your pain”.

    With now 276 girls missing, we need leadership. We need the girls back with their parents and society, to dream and be human again. Images flood the imagination of what might be happening to the girls. Are they wives in bed with hoodlums, washing their dirty clothes, cooking for them? Are some of them being beaten up for resisting or subjected to all forms of bestialities? Are some of them trying to escape, and did some try and were stopped? Have some escaped but are clueless where they are? Are all of them alive? The zealots no longer want their virgins in heaven but here on earth.

    In Homer’s The Iliad, the Greeks rescued Helen, a beauty captured by the Trojans. Hector was a great fighter but he fought to keep Helen in the hands of the kidnappers. The Greeks suffered in battle, and they suffered many dead until Achilles came to the rescue and killed Hector. “By trying”, wrote the poet Theocritus about one of the hardest fought battles of all time, “the Greeks got into Troy”.

    Those girls are our Helens, and we need Jonathan to play Achilles and save them by providing leadership.

    If history remembers his Azonto dance rather than the girls’ rescue, his would be a tragic presidency. He can redeem it with a victory dance when the girls come home.

     

  • The new kidnappers

    The new kidnappers

    The parents who prowled the Sambisa forest left nothing to an impotent state. They prowled the woods for the souls from their souls, blood from their blood, those for whom they had invented a future at birth, as toddlers, at puberty, as nubile beauties.

    They did not envision bigoted goons, red-blooded and hooded, hounding and carting them away into a forest, defying the law and a state of emergency.

    But that is the desperation of the Nigeria of today. What the beastly boys of Boko Haram did reflects a society not just of self-help or of impunity. It is a mirror of a return to feudal savagery. The sort of life that these boys evinced is already at play in all aspects of our lives. The powerful invade the weak and take away their valuable assets. We are back to the modern version of pre-capitalist society. They are the new kidnappers.

    The feudal system prospered on the logic of a few with military and economic might. They took over the society and made the laws. The men worked for them, the women were their wives, sex slaves and sometimes glorified whores and the children grew into the servile roles of their parents.

    They owned all the land and that was why some of them were called landed nobility. The wives were property.

    The feudal lords, who then were the kings and Obas as well as the chiefs and other feudal elites, could corral anyone’s wife, or accost her at a village intersection or bush path and avail themselves of instant pleasure and move on. That is the context of the Boko Haram boys and their brutish rights to entitlement. They have created their alternative society since the days of Mohammed Yusuf, their founder, and they are their own lords.

    They are a shadow of the larger society that has lost its capitalist mooring. The business elite, weaned on the colonial masters, understood the value of productivity. When they left power to the Nigerian elite, the principle persisted for barely two decades.

    We had businessmen who turned out wealth from almost nothing. They were the capitalists, like the Fajemirokuns, Rewanes, Odutolas, etc. They knew how to eke money out of sweat and resources. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who bred technocratic elite, showcased men like Simeon Adebo. In the centre, we boasted geniuses like Asiodu, Udoji, Ayida and Agodo. They understood that wealth derived from ideas and industry. That explained the rise and glory of the middle class and the high standard of education from primary to university levels. Standards were vehicles to success.

    But with the rise in oil revenue after the civil war, we began to witness a decline. Yet the standards still glowed. Parents did not dream “miracle centres” and products from our education system still preened against their British and American counterparts.

    But the military punctured our pride. It started with Gowon, who allowed indulgence with oil money. Our oil wealth made its debut with scandal. Murtala wanted to instill disciple, but his reign was a soap bubble. The Obasanjo and Shagari eras resumed our fascination with materialism fueled by opportunism. In fact, opportunism subsumed opportunity.

    The Buhari regime saw the lapse but it did not have the cunning to address the drift, as it was also caught in its own moral sleight of hand, especially with the 53 suitcases saga. The Babangida era let loose the Freudian id of greed and, from then, the society saw a free fall. That has led to the new feudalism of today. What is important is not the ability for rapidity of success, but connection for concession from the mighty. That has meant the decline, not only of values, but of value for talent. Our society makes billionaires of the lazy, like the jet set titans of subsidies. They are like stock broker Jordan Belfort, the American wolf of Wall Street, who lived a life of false glamour and extravagance on the misery of others. He was a baboon dey chop. His book, The Wolf of Wall Street, depicts such a contract with Beelzebub, like a hyena crying gloatingly on bleeding flesh.

    The new invasion begins in politics. They rig elections. But the larger society frowned at it in the first republic and, hence, we often welcomed the messianic adventures of soldiers. Now, the military pool also became poisoned.

    The political elite invade power. While in old feudal societies, the militarily powerful worked with a few others, today, the new feudal elites are the politicians. Rigging is their version of invasion of political power. They kidnap power. Then they work with bureaucrats, bankers and contractors from the civil society. The rout is complete. Now, the lawyers and judges, media barons and a few others become accomplices.

    In this setting, they kidnap power, business, law and information.

    The nation’s pot is the prime abduction. We don’t need to produce, but to consume. Oil provides the wealth. They are a consuming elite and we a consumptive society. They rig to office, get the judges to legitimate them, they plunder and bankers formalise their fraud, pastors canonise their rule and a section of the media elite burnishes their image. Ours is a kidnapped society.

    The results are the impotence of the civil society and the whittling away of the middle class. It leaves two classes: the very rich and very poor. The middle class afforded loans to build their homes, educated their children, bought cars on higher purchase, had decent medical care and had the pride of life. These attributes only belong to the rich today. We cannot make businessmen who rely on their sweat and resourcefulness anymore. They get contracts from belonging to the ambience of power. At independence, we had a false start with meritocracy. Now we have mediocrity from the top. We buy degrees, wives, contracts, pastors, Imams as we buy political offices. While the BH boys kidnap with raw weapons, our elite kidnaps with law, guns and money.

    When they plunder our resources, they live large, fly jets for N10 billion, dance when others die in bomb blasts, accuse others of genocide without evidence, call elections war without apology, move from campaigns in Kano to champagnes at Ibadan when girls are abducted, the lazy lap billions, the smart ones smart from lack of jobs and die searching. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is cited by Time Magazine as one of the world’s influential persons even though she cannot add simple numbers. When we earned less than $105 a barrel, we could pay all the states their entitlements. Now we earn more, we pay 60 percent of their allocations.

    Nothing explains this era of moneychangers more than the recent discovery that when we rebased our economy into African preeminence, we also became one of the poorest in the world. Pastors cannot caution them because they have no moral authority. Rather, they anoint them and welcome them to their churches with front row seats and benedictions. Jesus would not have welcomed leaders who stole the people’s money. Rather, he would have rebuked them in the fashion he did to the Pharisees.

    In the United States, President Obama has embarked on a campaign against inequality and that is because the United States is witnessing a big gulf between the rich and poor. The top 85 richest men in the world are richer than 3.5 billion people on earth.

    Now a new book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, by French economist Thomas Picketty has caused a storm in Europe and the U.S. by making the case that western society is going back to the pre-World War 1 era when wealth was based on inheritance and family pedigree, rather than merit. In this book seen as modern Das Kapital, income and hard work have suffered a divorce. And those with capital keep making more capital, and the so-called theory that skilled labour determines wealth has lost face. In our society, it is primitive acquisition. Ours is worse than the west because the rule of law, unlike here, can redress it. Their rich did not steal from the government.

    Just as our lazy jet set – politicians, business elite, clerics, etc – sees the society as free booty, so the BH goons see the girls and food and other valuables as their share. Society created the crime. They committed it.

  • Nyanya and other storms

    Nyanya and other storms

    That shall we say now, but shall we continue in silence so that violence may abound? We forbid.

    Many will contend that all have been said of the Federal Government’s impotence in tackling Boko Haram. We have heard, now as before, that we are witnessing a failure of intelligence. But what we have not established is whether the failure derives more from naivety or corruption. We know it is certainly not equal parts. We just don’t know in what measure naivety and corruption share the ignoble pie.

    We have said also that President Goodluck Jonathan falls shy of appreciating enough the gravity of the epidemic. Not just because of the cavalier fatalism of his speech that it will all vanish someday. His deeds show it. Barely two years ago he flew across to Brazil after Boko Haram bombs and guns made carrion flesh of human lives at home. His men said in a world of e-governance, he could direct affairs from anywhere. He resonated more with the samba of Brazil than with the heartbeats of the bereaved. Last week, he did same. His face wrinkled with grief in a hospital the day 75 persons died from the Nyanya bus terminal explosion in Abuja. The next day, he danced on their wounds at a campaign ground in Kano and jetted to Ibadan to clink birthday glasses with the Olubadan.

    So who is the real Jonathan, the one with compassion or the campaign man with a will to power or the merry man at Ibadan in the ambience of champagne?

    No one wanted the President to donate blood, but the soulless act of the Kano visit came to high relief when a diplomat was donating blood to the victims in Abuja. On that day, the president revealed he gave money to delegates through Kano State Governor Kwankwanso to give to delegates to ease his electoral victory in 2011. Sin upon sin, this time the sin of inducement for electoral victory.

    But that was not the time for such detonation of angry words when others, including Speaker Aminu Tambuwal and former Governor Bukola Saraki paid visits and donated blood.

    Again, the PDP spokesman and Goebel’s mock reincarnate, Olisa Metuh, said the opposition APC was responsible for the bombing. Neither the president has publicly called him to apologise nor has the party sanctioned him for such reckless effusions in mimicking Hitler’s publicist.

    This is not the sort of drama from the presidency that affirms a sense of sobriety and aggressive thinking in stamping out Boko Haram. If the president acts with such Janus-faced devotion to war, what do we expect from the intelligence agencies, the military and the other staff involved in the combat against the bigots.

    That is why no one has a right to be silent about the weaknesses in the fight against terror. Lives are being lost, markets shut down, schools in paralysis and societies on hold.

    Terror was the matter the same day he danced in Kano and joyed in Ibadan when 129 girls were whisked away by the red-blooded militants. Was that news not enough to call off any such matter? Was it out of place for the president to say that the nation was in sackcloth and dour moods and no time for barnstorming and birthday revelry? Even his supporters in Kano, who are no strangers to such bloody inanities, would have understood. Ditto the Olubadan.

    The story of the girls became another narrative of lies and distortions. The army headquarters said it rescued over 80 of them. The news reporting in the media should have been more wary because the army’s own story did not show any rescue. In their footloose account, they reportedly found the girls already free. You don’t rescue free people. The girls who fled in defiance were the heroines of the tale. The army recanted but it calls in question how much of earlier press releases from the army about captured militants and weapons impounded bear credibility.

    All of these reports tell us how shabbily we are fighting this war. Again, Saturday Punch of April 19 reported that N76 billion was wasted on technologies to monitor the terrorist mischief in Abuja. All of it has broken down. Is this accountability or corruption or incompetence? According to the report, the programme did not cover the area of the Nyanya bombing even if it worked. Year after year, princely sums are devoted to defence, specifically against Boko Haram. What has happened to all of it?

    The APC has called for a summit with neighbouring countries, including Chad and Niger. Those countries can help, but the nation ought to wring the hands of France. Our neighbours are, at heart, still French satellites, a decision they made in the years of President Charles de Gaulle. France has not taken the matter as seriously as it has deployed forces and diplomatic pressures on French-speaking nations on the continent like Mali. The insurgents there have been subdued.

    But the issue of summit barely addresses more fundamental issues. If the neigbouring countries fail to rein in the militants from entering our country, is it now their responsibility once they are in Nigeria? Where are our cameras to monitor the movements of these militants and the personnel to react? What role do the civilian JTF boys play these days? The insurgents attacked two schools in about a month. How was it that cameras could not track them down, if they were available?

    Lagos State has established a model for all of Nigeria with real-time cameras covering vital arteries and institutions in the state. The governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, has showcased this and it has worked with evidence in tackling criminals and unearthing cells in the state. It is a sharp contrast to the N76 billion extravaganza.

    As the penman of conservatism, Edmund Burke, once asserted, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” In this case, is it that our government is doing nothing, or they cannot do the right thing? I weigh with the latter.

    It is not as if we don’t have the resources or potentially the men. The point is, the government is not ready. Declaring a state of emergency was hailed last year. Clearly it is hard to call it a success when the group clucks defiantly while we bleed and weep. They lull us into false triumph with strategic retreats and wake us into horror with bombs, shootings and abductions in their macabre rhythms of silence and thunder.

    Said Winston Churchill who knew about winning a war that seems hopeless: “no one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.” Our government still doesn’t know how to deserve it.

  • A literary tear for Marquez

    The news came over the weekend of the passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was an enchanter of a writer and an author that nobody worth his or her literacy should pass this earth without reading. Some critics said his marquee novel, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1982, was the best since the book of Genesis. Others say, his is the best book written in Spanish since Cervante’s Don Quixote, which ranks as the best novel of all time. His other works like the Autumn of the Patriarch and Love in the Time of Cholera, show him a writer of rare gift. He popularised a technique called magical realism that we have seen here with Fagunwa and Tutuola. He was a writer’s writer, powerful in narrative, picturesque in scene, titillating in philosophy, creating wonder at the end’s tale. He had the kind of creative gusto of a Wole Soyinka and the prose spirit of a Vladimir Nabokov and the subtlety of a Victor Hugo. A thunder just passed at 87, but his echo will turn into many melodies for many generations to come. Good night, Marquez.

  • Big for nothing oil

    Big for nothing oil

    When the news of Nigeria’s new laurel broke as the GDP icon of Africa, I was interested in the celebrity status for a different reason. I looked for indices. I thought about oil. But they said our status came not because of oil but because we had added other players to the repertoire of our economic drama.

    Without oil, all the other indices will pass for little. Oil money provided the capital for the other investments, including agriculture. We live and die by oil as a state, in spite of the greater roles of agriculture, technology and, of course, Nollywood. In oil, we live and move and have our beings. Is it not because of dwindling oil revenue that we cannot pay states their allocation? Yet, if we read the news well, we will worry over what is going on with oil giant Shell. It has decided to sell off its wells in Nigeria. Few people are asking: to whom? If we don’t handle that sale transparently, we shall fall into a bad place. So what oil has given us in GDP, oil may take away in revenue, jobs and other areas of an already tottering economy.

    However, everyone likes a little praise here and there. We want to take credit when we do well, just as some persons in government are happy that Nigeria is the biggest economy in Africa. But no one wants to be mentioned if we describe that economy as big for nothing. As we select language, so also we select figures. The beauties of words and figures are in the eyes of the beholder.

    You can find the words that can make a thing great and the same thing a devil. For instance, an imperiled man can look at a gun and describe it as a weapon of liberation. In another breath, an opponent can condemn it as a murder weapon. The South African athlete, Pistorius, has said he shot his girl friend, Reeva, accidentally. Others say he committed murder. The bottom line is Reeva died. The Bible says money is the root of all evil. The same book says money answers all things.

    When the United States fought with Iraq in the era of President George Bush, Sr., missiles were unleashed to Saddam Hussein’s territory. The United States media called them Patriot missiles. When Iraq shot similar weapons, the U.S. media called them scud missiles. Both killed and destroyed. But from the U.S. angle, patriot missiles fulfilled a noble mission of death, while the scud missiles pursued an ignoble mission of death.

    So we do with figures. A football team manager once said he could turn a billion dollar profit into a billion dollar loss and vice versa. As Einstein said, it is not the figures that matter but those who count them. And I may add, how they count them. So while GDP made us one of the best in the world, the World Bank says we are at the bottom three of the poorest in the world. So, what statistic do you want? I do not however belong to the ambience of those who say the GDP status is a bad thing. But it is not a good thing until we turn it into prosperity. Until then, it is only numbers. Numbers don’t lie. But numbers don’t put food on the table.

    We have seen here how banks turned red accounts into black and the chief executive officers of the banks basked in glamour. They became role models, philanthropists and pastors. Until the ousted CBN chief, Lamido Sanusi, exposed them, we did not know that they were fraudsters and famous debtors in suit and agbada and immaculate syntax and the snob culture of the polished. Of course, they were frontbenchers in Christian crusades against iniquity and they donned our national awards and chieftaincy titles. Our leaders anointed them and our marquee pastors solemnised their paths.

    So let no one rejoice at the size of an economy that hoists the same size of suffering. What is the size of our healthcare, or education, or middles class? How many people live on less than one dollar a day? Most Nigerians. Some countries with smaller GDP have power and many of them have better educational systems and health care guarantees.

    We cannot have real growth without power and today we pretend in that category. Just after we spent billions of dollars to get DISCOs and GENCOs, we are told things have fallen apart and darkness is still here to stay. That leaves us with oil, the free gift of nature. But it seems that also is in danger. We cannot get good refineries. All we do now is rely on swapping our crude oil for dollar and other products on arrangements known only to the NNPC and the presidency.

    To complicate that, we have the story of Shell, the oil giant. Just as we saw due process doomed, I fear that if care is let loose, oil wells managed by Shell for decades will fall into incompetent hands. This is because the oil giant is throwing in the towel and is about to sell off our patrimony. The oil wells belong to Nigerians. If Shell is pressured to sell it without transparency, we shall have what Fela described as “dead body get accident”.

    According to reports, some of the bidders include Vertex and LetterOne, Aiteo and Taleveras, MidWestern Oil and Gas with Mart and Notore, Lekoil, Seplat, Transcorp, Sahara Consoritum, etc. Licences known as OMLs are now choice cake and the pedigrees of the owners of the bidding companies must be scrutinised. Who are they? What are their links with government? We must know whether they have strong competences. That is one of the critical agonies with our DISCOs and GENCOs.

    We did not do due diligence. Unlike the telecoms companies, the power deals were handed over to the friends of the powers that be. They thought it was all gold in the power sector. They got the DISCOS and GENCOs and they were disappointed to see dross instead of gold. They felt like a bridegroom who did not know his bride well and choked on body odour at night. The DISCOS and GENCOs complain every week. The victims are the common Nigerians who sweat it out with their I better pass my neighbour power generating sets when they can afford it. The Frankenstein wonder has become their Frankenstein monster.

    The NNPC owns 55 percent of the OMLs while Shell owns the balance with AGIP and ENI. I know the presidency and the oil minister must have voices in this matter.

    The National Assembly has to intervene and probe the financial profiles of the bidders. We don’t want government loan guarantees for them or those who woke overnight into money whose sources we cannot verify.

    If the selloffs are not transparent, the consequences will be dire. If they lack strong and resilient financial bases and lack competences, we shall wake up one morning and discover that our oil wells cannot yield oil because those in charge are still working on the technicalities of drilling and shopping for those who can do the job. Today, the federal government has complained that it does not have enough money to pay states even though oil revenue is soaring higher than the budget benchmark. Imagine the scenario when we don’t even have the oil to sell.

    Shell is selling off because of pipeline vandalisation, oil theft, oil spills and restive host communities. The next complaint might be just like the story of Nigeria with great GDP side by side with great hunger. It will be a parody of poet Samuel Coleridge’s line: oil, oil everywhere but not a drop to drill.

    If it is one thing to be without power, have we imagined Nigeria without both power and oil! Our oil will be big for nothing, just like the big-for-nothing billions of dollars spent on big equipment that has given us darkness for electricity.

  • Above the law

    Above the law

    It has no objection to due process unless it suspends Justice Agumagu before issuing a query. ‘Obey before complain’ is as true with soldiers as with the NJC

    Then T.S. Eliot wrote his play, Murder in the Cathedral, quite a few literary neophytes did not grasp his idea. They thought he was writing about murder in the house of God. He was.

    But the sort of murder he targeted was not the superficial blood fest of a human killing another in the holy of holies. I have encountered instances of such shallow zeal in Nigerian newspapers. Eliot, like all great artists, was more enthralled with metaphor.

    If Eliot were to locate his play in today’s Nigeria, he would have crafted murders in many temples. One of them is the National Judicial Council.

    He would have recast how that august body murdered justice in its hallowed place: judiciary. It is a cathedral of justice without safety nets. If it is a safe place, why should justice die in its sanctum? Why should the righteous run into its tower and not be safe?

    That happened in the story of retired Justice Ayo Salami, where the chicanery between that body and the presidency tossed a man of such heft and legal carriage into a cesspool of judicial miscarriage.

    It is one of the sour regions of Nigeria’s contemporary legal history. We inflict a wound in the image of justice and allow the comely visage to contort into a cadaverous face. It is ugly like Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, a satiric swipe at elite lack of grace.

    Now in Rivers State, where a measure of calm has returned after the inanity of a presidential busybody and blabbermouth, the NJC has insisted on wielding the power of a king in a democracy.

    The matter began last year in an apparently routine way, like one of those irritations one expects to peter out with time. But when Peter Agumagu’s nomination met roadblocks, it became the case of the NJC denying justice in the same way Peter the apostle denied Christ.

    The issue is simple. A quartet of the governor, state judicial service commission, the NJC and the house of assembly decide who becomes the chief judge of a state. All three decided in favour of Agumagu except the NJC. The law calls for the most senior member of the bench for the post. By all accounts, Agumagu, who had served as chief judge before becoming president of the state customary court, is the methuselah of the court.

    The NJC said no. The governor took the matter to court and the court ruled that the wisdom of Solomon picked methuselah in the person of Justice Agumagu.

    But it seems the NJC does not understand the path of justice in this matter. It is not interested in age. It is only interested in “under-age”. Hence it chose D.W. Okocha, a junior, to topple Agumagu. It does not subscribe to coups except when the oga at the top is not their man. It believes in the court system but it must be the court it chooses. It will accept any verdict except that of the federal high court.

    It has no objection to due process unless it suspends Justice Agumagu before issuing a query. ‘Obey before complain’ is as true with soldiers as with the NJC.

    It does not matter when there is a conflict of interest, as some persons have wondered whether a member of the council is a relative of its nominee. The NJC believes in exception as rule, rather than the rule with exception. Is that why it has particularised the case of Rivers State when similar cases have been glossed over in other states? The cathedral body defies persons who have started to perceive the NJC as a presidential poodle. Who does not ape the virtue of loyalty? So, like Ruth in the Bible, we can hear them bellow, “Wherever the presidency goes, there you will find us.”

    Is the NJC not an advocate of federalism, and is that not why it has allowed some other states to have their judges? It only treats Rivers State differently because it has to follow the canon. The canon allows for exception to the rule. Goodwill is important to the NJC, but not like strong will. After all, did Shakespeare not say “lawless are they that make wills their law?”

    It believes in institutional integrity, hence the law must serve it rather than the people. They are cannibals of law, and what is wrong with that? We must build strong institutions. Did the president not say so?

    In spite of uproar about the partiality of the grand body, the NJC kept a venerable silence. I wonder what happened to the venerable silence of old? It is not fighting shy in a public spat with a governor.

    The august body decides that it will not follow its own precedent. In the case of Ayo Salami, it recommended suspension to the president, who signed off with a cynical glad hand. Again, if the NJC recommended suspension to a president in the case of a federal judge, why did the NJC not do the same to a governor with regards to a state judge? It could have written its own recommendation to the hard-charging Governor Rotimi Amaechi.

    It could be so grandly worded. A sampler: “The National Judicial Council hereby recommends that Your Excellency should suspend Justice Peter Agumagu for allowing himself to be sworn in and even allowing you to recommend him as the chief judge of Rivers State. We also reiterate that the right person for the post is the one you rejected, the honourable D. W. Okocha. Signed.”

    The NJC could still pen the letter, and I am sure, Governor Amaechi would lustily enjoy such a love letter and reply with the clinical effusion of a tiger. He might reply, with laconic words such as, “I cannot be expected to go back to my vomit. It is against my fate as a Catholic.” The public may even hear from Governor Amaechi before the NJC thinks of any response.

    The NJC lords may not know it. In their lofty gowns and solemn halls and exalted chairs, they already think of themselves as monarchs of the law. Like the law of the Medes and Persia, what they say cannot be changed. “So let it be written, so let it be done,” was their refrain in the ungainly glory of that era.

    We often hear of the court of kings. Here we have kings of the court, a misnomer that suits the ego of some judiciary bigwigs enmeshed in the travesty of law and society. Of course, the NJC knows it is above the law; hence it would not respect the decision of a federal court.