The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Troubling thoughts on the national conference

    Chief Ayo Fasanmi, former Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, spoke a few days ago, in an interview, about the National Conference which President Jonathan has initiated. In summary, his opinion is that President Jonathan’s calling of a National Conference is merely diversionary. I am sure that if Chief Fasanmi met me and we talked about this, he would want me to comment publicly on what he has said.

    To that end, here is how I would start. I believe that most Nigerians, and citizens of the Nigerian Southwest, who read Chief Fasamni’s reported comments some days ago know him only as one of the NigerianSenators of the Second Republic (1979-83) and, perhaps, also as a major actor in the dangerous politics of the Abacha era. I, however, know him deeper in the politics of our land. I know him as a major actor in a tougher chapter of our history. In my last column (last week), I wrote briefly the story of how we the youths of the Western Region erupted in late 1965, after the powers controlling Nigeria had blatantly rigged our Western Regional election of that year. Well, Chief Fasanmi was our highest man in that fight – a fight in which we, young men and women of the Yoruba Western Region, bluntly rejected the huge insult of the rigging of our Regional election, and pitched our little strength determinedly and unyieldingly against all the powers of the Nigerian state – against the Nigerian Federal Government, our own Regional Government, the Nigeria Police and secret services, and even some sections of the Nigerian Army. As President of the Action Group Youth Association, Chief Fasanmi was the leader of our central command, the coordinator of the minds that shaped and moved that glorious struggle. I cannot let pass the opportunity to say that those of us who worked by his side in that high command remember him forever as an indomitable and dependable warrior and leader, a man dedicated to the highest and best in our nation’s values.

    As for the National Conference, I agree totally with Chief Fasanmi that President Jonathan’s sudden conversion to the need for a National Conference is a diversionary political move. I am absolutely persuaded that that is so. The PDP party that brought President Jonathan to the presidency was in shambles. Slowly but surely, it seemed to be stumbling towards total dissolution. President Jonathan’s chance for one more term which he desired seemed to be crumbling. In spite of his earlier statements opposing a National Conference, he and his advisers could see that most of the peoples of Nigeria desired, and would gratefully embrace, a National Conference. So, the President converted – and he announced that he was calling a National Conference.

    A major Nigerian party, APC, has been saying for weeks, like Senator Fasanmi, that President Jonathan’s National Conference is only a diversion. I believe that most Nigerians areagreedwith the APC in this matter. I don’t believe that it is difficult to see that President Jonathan saw the issue of National Conference as a political life-line and grabbed it. Even among PDP stalwarts whom I have chanced to engage in conversation on the National Conference issue – I mean those PDP stalwarts who still belong to the Jonathan fragmentof the PDP and who strongly back his re-election bid –many have no illusion that their man’s sudden call for a National Conference was a political move aimed at saving his politicalambition. They say it is a smart diversionary move – and I agree. But it is a diversionary move nevertheless.

    However, the biggest thing now is thatwe, the nationalities that make up Nigeria, are desperate for a major change in the manner in which our common country has been crooked up. The situation calls for serious – nay, desperate – urgency. Our so-called Federal Government has become a demolition crew violently wrecking our country. Under its battering ram, our states have become dangerously impotent. Most parts of our country are retrogressing. Even the Federal Government itself admits that 60.9 percent of us Nigerians now live in absolute poverty. More than 75 percent of our youths are unemployed. In the more literate parts of our country (such as the Southwest) countless families are housing and providing for their young men and women who graduated from universities up to five years ago. Recently, I met one husband and wife whose five children are university graduates (two of them with Masters Degrees), all of whom are unemployed. Under these conditions, various species of sophisticated crimes are flourishing in our country – kidnapping for ransom, murder-for-hire, superior electronic frauds, outright terrorism, etc. More and more Nigerians are erecting barricades around their homes, and we are becoming a people living in self-imposed prisons. We are breeding a whole generation immersed in the culture of desperation, crookednessand deep-seated vileness. Nigerian nationalities are, more and more, becoming enemies of one another.

    That all these may result in the breaking up of Nigeria is no longer in doubt. No country whose society is being pulverized the way the Nigerian society is being pulverized can possibly live as one country for long. In fact, the greater fear now is this: Even if Nigeria scatters into many different countries, will the human materials now being generated in Nigeria be able to build any decent countries out of the fragments? In the context of Nigeria, is our whole future as peoples not being totally destroyed? Should we not now quickly dissolve Nigeria before Nigeria totally destroys us and all our future – before it is too late?

    Therefore, our nationalities as nationalities must seize every and any chance to re-order this country. We have no choice other than to grab the Jonathan National Conference and struggle together to use it to carry out needed changes. We must restructure our federation in a hurry. Either that or total disaster. No third possibility exists.

    Since independence, our nations have shown in various ways that they reject the excessive weight being given to the Federal centre in the life of Nigeria. Their reactions and resistance have created various difficult situations in our history. The Ijaw peoples of the Delta have been resisting might and mane, and sacrificing many of their youths, since virtually the day of independence. The Igbo led a secessionist move that provoked a terrible civil war and took the lives of millions of people. The Yoruba have, since even before independence, urged persistently that the Nigerian Federation be properly and rationally structured. Virtually all major political movements among the Yoruba, even if they disagree on other things, have come out clearly in support of a rational structuring of the Nigerian federation. In the course of the 1990s, the Yoruba came close to seeking secession rather than continuing as part of a federation that is destroying its component peoples.

    Thus, we Nigerians confront two truths concerning the Jonathan National Conference. The first truth is that President Jonathan’s calling of the National Conference is a diversionary political move, aimed at keeping his bid for another term alive. It is unlikely that he had any other intention beyond that. And the second truth is that we the nations that constitute Nigeria so desperately need to carry out very major changes in the structure and life of our country that we must accept the Jonathan National Conference and work mightily with it.

    The ball is therefore in President Jonathan’s court. Irrespective of his intentions for calling the National Conference, he must now work with our nationalities to make the conference an outstanding success. This may be the last chance left for Nigeria.

  • Adebanjo Vs new Yoruba leaders

    Pa Ayo Adebanjo’s interview in The Punch last week confirms why whatever he says has an attentive audience among his Yoruba people whom he along with other revered elders have served creditably for upward of 50 years. As was in his character, he stated without ambiguity the unanimity of thought on the recurring issue of the national question by his Yoruba people. According to him, it is “only a mad man who will oppose dialogue”. Yoruba position has always been that the national question can be resolved only through a national sovereign conference.

    However, some of his admonitions: that his Yoruba people should trust President Jonathan; that Awo never went into coalition with strange bed fellows; that ACN ought not to associate with Tom Ikimi who served Abacha’s despicable regime as well as Muhammadu Buhari who although is incorruptible but a non-progressive religious fundamentalist; that the Yoruba will not vote APC because of APC leaders’ visitation to Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar who should be jointly held responsible for the killing and prevention of a Yoruba son from ruling the country.

    I think Pa Adebanjo’s above declarations did serious damage to the Yoruba cultural advancement and political consciousness.

    Adebanjo no doubt knows that trust is earned among the Yoruba. But here we have President Jonathan who seems to be at war against Nigerians since his election, who provides refuge to corrupt elements, whose open display of politics of ‘the end justifies the means’ is on display at both the national and state levels; this is a president who has tucked away inside his locker, the reports of past dialogues, the Uwais electoral reform report, the Ribadu report among piles of others from the National Assembly unattended to. I am sure Pa Adebanjo knows that as much as we hold our leaders in high esteem, they are incapable of influencing who the Yoruba people trust. Awo himself as far back as 1952 said that the Yoruba will not vote for you because you are Yoruba if they cannot see an added value you are going to add to their lives.

    But the Yoruba knew Abiola, who used the old western state scholarship to study accountancy in Britain, but was to later deploy his newspaper to mislead and wage war against Awo the leader of the progressives, was an enemy of the progressives. The Yoruba knew the difference between him, Babangida and Abacha, and other military apologists who made their fortunes through the state was that unlike others, Abiola ploughed back what he took to solve social problems across the country, a strategy that earned him a landslide victory in the 1993 election. Yoruba that contributed to that victory and fought to defend his mandate on principle can be trusted to make an informed judgment if and when confronted with making a choice between PDP and APC in 2015.

    Yes from hindsight we can say Awo was right to have resisted marriage of convenience in 1959. At least Pa Adebanjo accepted in the interview under focus that he along with our other respected elders (Afenifere) were misled by Babangida and Abdulsalami to support Obasanjo. As it turned out, Obasanjo and his self-serving mainstreamers only used Yoruba to build private empires and private universities while destroying the public institutions our revered leaders including Adebanjo put in place. The South-west mainstreamers used our people as stepping stone to join their counterparts in the east and the north who according to Alabi Isamah have jointly ruled our country since independence.

    But it is doubtful if Awo who applied a lot of intellectual rigour to finding solution to Nigeria’s problems will in 2013 still stick to a 1959 failed experiment as being canvassed by Adebanjo. Were he to be faced with similar choice of canvassing true federalism where each group can control her own destiny as against marriage of convenience as occurred between NPC and NNNC, he would most probably be compelled to embrace today’s Afenifere Renewal Group option, designed to achieve the same objective without danger to the health of the Yoruba people who can look up to a pan Nigerian national party that can serve as a balance of terror to desperate PDP hawks interested only in self preservation.

    And finally perhaps as a result of Pa Adebanjo’s unhidden war with the Afenifere Renewal Group that was accused of removing the carpet from under their feet, he would rather endure PDP than support any group ACN is linked with. For instance while insisting he “has no good word for the PDP,” which for him “are intolerable”; he also says he cannot ask PDP to be thrown away because like PDP, APC is an amalgam of strange bedfellows. Since according to him APC is a coalition designed only to uproot PDP from power, “he is not ready to move from frying pan to fire”. In other words, Pa Adebanjo is by inference saying we should allow PDP to continue its 14 years of mismanagement, of corruption and of national and international embarrassment. If this represents the view of the old Afenifere that Adebanjo speaks for, then it is clear there is a disconnect between our revered fathers and the over 40 million Yoruba whose today’s tenor, tune and tone they are unable to decipher.

    Now as it was in the first and second republics, the omen is potent. PDP is deploying state resources, logistics and security apparatuses to undermine the efforts of the governments of the Yoruba states that pose no threat to the party’s ongoing looting but only want to be left alone to manage their own affairs. PDP Abuja headquarters that has been busy suspending elected PDP governors for alleged anti-party activities have been fueling intra-party feuds in Yorubaland. They recently hailed Opeyemi Bamidele’s efforts at destabilising his party in Ekiti. In Ondo, Mimiko who was aided to retrieve his stolen mandate from PDP by Ahmed Tinubu has today become more PDP than PDP. Because of the strategic importance of Ondo State and its capacity to destabise South-west, Mimiko, a governor on the platform of Labour Party, had the singular honour of nominating PDP minister from Ondo. In line with PDP and the President’s perfidious brand of politics, in place of PDP candidate in the last Ondo State election, it was Mimiko that got massive Abuja support. Three days after his victory, Mimiko was in Abuja celebrating the birthday of the president’s wife. Dr. Frederick Fasehun who was recently engaged in public altercation over pipeline monitoring contracts with its other splinter Oodua group seems to be going ahead with state support to register his Unity Party of Nigeria in spite of existing decrees and laws banning use of names of banned political parties.

    Response to our unresolved national question requires new approach beyond hiding behind principles, philosophy ideology within a system where other actors behave like gangsters, guided by neither rules mores nor culture, and where even the judiciary has come under severe assault. Adebanjo has already expressed joy that PDP was uprooted from Yoruba land, without asking for the methodology the new generation of Yoruba political leaders like Chief Bisi Akande, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Wale Oshun, Niyi Adebayo, Segun Osoba and other young Yoruba intellectuals adopted to achieve the feat.

    Without resorting to “operation wet e” they have retrieved stolen mandates in Edo, Ondo, Ekiti and Osun from Obasanjo and his PDP Yoruba mainstreamers. They have gone ahead to mobilize, winning elections in Ogun, Oyo and Edo states. The young men at the helms of affairs in these states are said to be setting the pace of development for other states to follow. What more can our revered fathers ask for? If protecting this new achievement requires cohabitation of the new political leaders with our yesterday’s perceived enemies or those without the progressive badge, they have earned our trust to decide on our behalf. I am sure Awo in whose name the old and ‘renewal’ Afenifere fathers and sons swear will be happy in his grave that “in the destruction of the noble line, there is always a survivor”.

  • Wanted : People’s Police

    The job of the police is well cut out. It is to maintain law and order. In so doing, the police are expected to be up and doing, proactive and be ahead of criminals. The police, though not spirits, are expected to be everywhere in order to nip crimes in the bud. In societies where the police know their duty, they discharge their functions with the best of intentions. They leave no room for the people to doubt their integrity. How I wish our police could be like that.

    Don’t get me wrong, the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) is trying within its limited resources. We know its constraints but those are not enough for it not to rise to the occasion when the need arises. Our police do certain things which the larger public finds worrisome. They tend to pander to the whims and caprices of the powerful. The downtrodden have no chance with the police even where they are the aggrieved. It is very easy for the police to turn them to suspects suddenly and before they know it they are behind the counter.

    Getting out of the counter entails the greasing the palms of the policemen at that station. If they don’t pay in time, they may end up in court as accused in matters they know nothing about. Where they are lucky not to be taken to court, they pay through their nose because the longer they are at the station, the more they pay. The sins of our police are many. They arrest people at will and engage in extra – judicial killings. They also know how to perform what the late Afrobeat sensation, Fela Anikulapo – Kuti, called ”government magic”. They can turn blue to white and green to red in a twinkling of an eye. When they do such things, I wonder if our policemen have conscience.

    What do you make of the killing of a man, as it happened some years ago, who sought refuge in a police station at Mafoluku in Lagos. The deceased had been driven to the station by a taxi driver, who returned the following day only to be told that his customer was nowhere to be found. The driver, who suspected foul play, raised an alarm. It was later found that the deceased, who returned late from abroad the previous day had been killed because of the foreign money he was carrying by those who should naturally have protected him. Can those involved in such bestial act be called policemen? Many years after that unthinkable act, we don’t know what has become of the case. Were those involved dismissed and tried? In what court were they tried? Is the case still on or has it been concluded? Are the policemen still in service?

    We need to know all these in order to know how to reform our police, which do well when on peace missions outside the country. How can that be, you may wish to ask, when they treat us their compatriots like nonentities back home. Is it a function of those ”I know I can treat anyhow and those I don’t know I must respect”. We, the people, deserve all the respect we can get from our policemen to enable them discharge their job well. The police also deserve our respect. But with the hostile attitude of some of them, they have alienated themselves from the people. Many Nigerians will think twice before they help any policeman because they believe he does not mean well for them. But it should not be so.

    The police and the people should work in sync for their mutual benefit. The police leave room for suspicion when they engage in acts in which ordinarily they should not be found. Like Caesar’s wife, the police should be above board in whatever they do. When the story of the N255 million bulletproof cars broke, the police were not involved. Up till now, I cannot say if they are investigating the matter which involves the Minister of Aviation, Princess Stella Oduah. Now madam is not a small fry. Remember, she was the brain behind Neighbour2Neighbour, one of the groups that worked towards the election of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2011. The group, it was learnt, is waiting in the wings to reenact in 2015 what it did in 2011. The bulletproof cars will become handy then, sources said.

    Although the princess has since denied that the cars were bought for her use by the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), the police and her henchmen appear to be manufacturing a reason why she should have such cars, if not now, but certainly in 2015 when she will again be in the forefront of the president’s campaign. How do I mean? The THISDAY, in its lead story on Tuesday, reported the police as confirming that there was an attempt on Oduah’s life in Abuja on Saturday night. She was said to have escaped the attempted assassination because she was not in the Escalade Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV), with registration number FST 914 BL. The paper forgot to tell readers if the SUV was bulletproof. According to the paper, a report of the incident was lodged at the Mabushi Police Station at 5.35 p.m., on Monday, that is about 48 hours after the attack.

    Now I can smell a rat. Those behind the story know what they are doing. With the House of Representatives indicting Oduah over the bulletproof cars, they believe that now is the time for them to act to save the minister’s neck before the president looks that way. The administrative panel set up by the president has also submitted its report. We know the content of the lawmakers’ report, but we don’t know that of the administrative panel. The House, which indicted Oduah, asked the president to take a decision on the issue because the penalty for the offence is three – year jail with N100,000 fine option. The president may not act on the House report, but since we don’t know what his panel recommended, we wait to see how he will handle the matter.

    But Oduah and her people are not waiting. They are moving fast to whip up public sympathy for her. This is why we are now suddenly getting to know that an attempt was made on her life last Saturday. Let us take the THISDAY report verbatim from here : ”The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Commissioner of Police (CP), Mr Femi Ogunbayode, through his Public Relations Officer, Mr Athine Daniel, a Deputy Superintendent (DSP), said what was found inside the car after the shooting was a mettalic object, which the police are investigating. The driver of the vehicle, whose name he withheld, was not injured, he added.

    ”Also speaking to THISDAY on the phone, Mr Joe Obi, the Special Adviser, Media to the minister, said the incident occurred on Saturday along the Nnamdi Azikiwe Road by Banex Bridge, Ministers’ Quarters, Maitama. He added that unknown to the gunmen, Oduah was not in the car at the time of the attack. He said the driver was lucky to have escaped the assassin’s bullets. Also, photographs of the Escalade provided by the Federal Aviation Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) spokesman, Yakubu Dati, showed that it appeared to be riddled with some bullet holes, but the reference to the bullet holes was inexplicably missing in the statement provided by the police on the attempt on Oduah’s life”. ‘’Inexplicably missing’’ link? No. Their lie caught up with them.

  • The Death of two ‘Mikes’ –Olatawura and Akhigbe. Lagos Ibadan a disgrace to govt

    Everyone dead or retired in Nigeria is a colossus, iconoclastic, a great leader or a mega-professional or even a good politician. In spite of this epidemic of icons in politics, medicine, education, engineering and the civil service, why are we in this mess? Perhaps ‘the guilty are not yet dead’? The press should deny them airtime unless it is for an apology and restitution. Why do we ask yesterday’s political failures about solutions to problems today created by them yesterday?

    Certainly we know the sterling psychiatry, medical, administrative, social and family qualities of late Professor Mike Oludare Olatawura of the Olatawura dynasty, famous in many areas including judicial and medical circles as attested to by his family, students, colleagues and various governments and me who was a medical student back in those days in UCH. He was humility and efficiency personified and must have been very bemused, if good manners denied him comments, at the level to which security buffers, officiousness and even ‘official viciousness’ have built up in areas where when he was in-post as Chief Medical Director, UCH, he operated a ‘few guards, open door-come let us chat’ policy. Of course there were fewer threats by touts, NURTW members, Okada unions and Boko Haram members on hospital staff then. His brother was a very distinguished incorruptible jurist who in his early legal life joined Samuel Oladele Ige, Bola Ige and Omotayo Onalaja and Moronfolu Olakunrin in defending Soyinka against charges of ‘robbery-stealing two tapes, with violence’ and being ‘the mysterious gunman at National Broadcasting House, Ibadan’ before Mr Justice Kayode Eso in November 1965. Though young then, they all went on to become distinguished in professional and political circles.

    Then there is late Vice Admiral and Vice President Mike Akhigbe under Abdusalam Abubakar when Abiola was to be considered for release, or so we naively thought. One Sunday I was visiting Uncle Bola Ige, as usual with great men, minions like myself were happy to merely breathing the nearby air and being ‘recognised’ as acolyte material. I do not remember why I was there as I ran a pretty busy schedule. Anyway the phone rang. Uncle Bola spoke briefly and agreed to go to Lagos the following day. He hung up and said he had been talking to Akhigbe, Number 2 in the military government. He had no driver for the next day being a Sunday and it was pre-cellphone days. I immediately offered my services as Sunday was free for me also. I picked Uncle Bola up on Sunday and drove him to Lagos, discussing what the options and brainstorming on the possible outcomes. Imagine me in an endgame discussion with Uncle Bola. We were interrupted by a solitary FRSC man who flagged us down for ‘nothing in particulars’ and proceeded to check everything in the car including the resident cockroach –perhaps an illegal passenger. Tired of the game which should have been over in a minute and after the particulars had been checked, the FRSC man was asked or went voluntarily to the passenger side where his jaw dropped to see an Ex-Governor of Oyo State and a founding father of FRSC in the passenger seat of a middle-aged 504 station wagon. He leapt to attention, returned my particulars and motioned us off, but not until after Uncle Bola said ‘We did not initiate the FRSC for ‘particulars check’ but for safe driving. Were we driving unsafely?’ We drove off planning that Uncle Bola would ask for Abiola to first see his family members and then the politicians he also wished to see and the final release should be expedited and come within a day or two.

    Once at Flagstaff House, Queens Drive, Ikoyi, the gates were thrown open and we entered. Akhigbe came into the sitting room without escort and after I was introduced, Uncle Bola was led away by Akhigbe for private discussions. I, back in my role as designated driver, watched big screen TV till Uncle Bola came out and off we went. The Expressway still lived up to its name and we were back in Ibadan in a timely manner. Akhigbe got government to do as our discussions had recommended but things went one step further. Chief MKO Abiola who may have let his guard down in the euphoria of impending release, was apparently assassinated by methods unknown but suspected from eyewitness and newspaper quotes to involve a teacup, lipstick or skin-absorbed poison while among other things receiving a delegation of American friends including Pickering and a Rice. So much for democracy. Since then Uncle Bola has himself been murdered. Even the expressway has deteriorated to an endurance course track. God has provided him with answers to all the murders Uncle Bola would care to enquire about including his own and my first cousin Funso Williams, governorship candidate of Lagos State. People say ‘Better alive than a dead street named after them’. But ‘Thanks’ again to Governor Fashola for the important message and gesture in ‘Funso Williams Avenue’.

    As we leave their graves, imagine the conversation between Uncle Bola and the two Mikes – Akhigbe and Olatawura – on the other side of life. It would make Wikileaks headlines.

    Meanwhile we face the tragedy called the Lagos-Ibadan road-a testament to ministry and federal PDP government 1999-2013 so far. Who will stop impatient drivers overtaking on the sides?

  • A new paradigm for these times

    A new paradigm for these times

    You know the situation is exceedingly dire when some usually sensible people start demanding that Professor Humphrey Nwosu who conducted the 1993 presidential election and could not even hint at the official result for 15 years be brought back to run future elections, following, the Independent National Electoral Commission’s disastrous outing in the recent gubernatorial poll in Anambra.

    Journalists should contemplate that prospect with the utmost wariness.

    To be sure, Nwosu was a journalist’s delight. He was very prolific in coining not just quotable quotes, but felicitous locutions for the ages as well. Remember how he brilliantly characterised the run-up to one of the elections of the era as being steeped in wuruwuru and magomago?

    He was, withal, hugely theatrical. The trouble was that the theatricality often got in the way of more serious business and created a clear and present danger to the physical well-being of persons within a close range.

    When he really got going, he would drive home his point with his arms and sometimes with legs. He would rock and sway back and forth and to the right and left in a manner that called to mind Ray Charles at the keyboard. He would spring to his feet on the least provocation or no provocation at all to enact those gestures even more emphatically.

    Reporters covering his news conferences had to worry at least as much about the possibility of getting an inadvertent head butt or a punch to the nose or a kick to the groin as they did about delivering on the assignment at hand. And so, as a means of self-preservation, they kept a safe distance.

    But I am sure it is not on account of Nwosu’s singular ways that some people are asking him to be brought back to run future elections.

    After Maurice Iwu who made a hash of the general elections in the preceding cycle and under whom the “Independent” in Independent National Electoral commission became a standing joke, Professor Attahiru Jega came as a breath of fresh air.

    He brought to the job a reputation for integrity, and a commitment to principle and fair dealing. Previous elections had for the most part been travesties of the plebiscitary principle. Millions could not vote at all, millions voted without choosing, while a handful of officials chose without voting. What these officials chose was then presented as the outcome of the election – and anyone who didn’t like it was free to go to court.

    Jega was going to be different.

    Unlike most of those who came before him, he was self-effacing to the point of reticence. He had a name and a reputation and a pedigree to protect –his father served as private secretary to the late Northern Premier and Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, and was a pioneer permanent secretary of the old Northwestern State. And his experience as vice chancellor of Bayero Universtity, one of the most fractious campuses in Nigeria, would undoubtedly stand him in good stead.

    If anyone could pull it off, it had to be Jega. That was the national consensus.

    Despite his best effort, he has not pulled it off. Under his watch, election after election has been vitiated by poor preparation, failure of logistics, voter disenfranchisement, syndicated rigging, and false returns. Not much seems to have changed, except that, unlike his predecessors, Jega has been quick to own up at every point to the manifest inadequacies of each poll.

    That is class. But it also makes all the more puzzling his insistence that the Anambra gubernatorial poll can be salvaged by staging “supplementary elections” in those constituencies where no voting took place. There is nothing to supplement.

    Even where voting took place the exercise was gravely flawed, going by media accounts and the reports of accredited monitors. A “supplementary” election cannot undo the flaws of the previous outing and may well end up perpetuating them. There is nothing to supplement.

    Despite all that Jega has going for him, the fact remains that he has not met the high expectations that greeted his appointment. Those expectations were grounded on a misapprehension, it is now clear. He is after all only an individual. Unless he can clone himself to take charge at hundreds of critical points during an election, he cannot ensure that the outcome will be a true reflection of his own high standards, much less of the popular will.

    Most of his predecessors may not have subscribed to his high standards, but they are entitled to the same extenuation. Even if they wanted the best, they had to rely on thousands of other people over whom they had no control to make it happen. We may have judged them too harshly, given the desperation of candidates and their sponsors to win at all cost, and the willingness of election officials to cash in on that desperation.

    Is Nigeria doomed, then, to live with “elections that are no elections,” to borrow the phrasing of a leading article in the University of Ibadan-based journal, Nigerian Opinion, back in the 1970s?

    Is there a way forward?

    There is indeed, according to one influential school of thought. Without our realising it, the school maintains, the way forward has been staring us in the face since the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida. And it is summed up in one word: Privatisation.

    Since that era when it was driven home relentlessly that government was wasteful and inefficient and could not be trusted to manage any enterprise or achieve any worthwhile goal, privatisation has been the standard recourse for solving the nation’s problems.

    They privatised the national airline. They privatised the steel plant that was to serve as the fulcrum of the nation’s industrialisation. They privatised the paper mills and the aluminium plant and the fertiliser plant and other state-run enterprises. They privatised the national telephony system. They even privatised the printing of official government documents.

    More recently they have privatised electricity. They have privatised the investment of the nation’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. Plans are afoot to privatise the oil refineries. Once they finish rehabilitating the railway tracks, the system is scheduled to be handed over to the private sector, the “real sector” as some of its worshippers now call it, in contradistinction to what they consider a phantom or virtual sector.

    In every instance, the gains have been astounding.

    Take the deadening hands of bureaucracy out of the things that really matter; hand those things over to the real sector and let market forces and Adam Smith’s invisible hands work their magic. That is the gospel according to the Privateers.

    Now, if Nigerians are agreed on one thing, they are agreed that elections matter. Is it not time, then, to take the deadening hands of bureaucracy out of elections and hand over the entire process to the private sector?

    It will be managed more efficiently and transparently, costs will be reduced drastically, huge savings will be made, and the nation will be spared the upheavals that usually trail each election.

    Thereafter, only one more step will be required to harness Nigeria’s vast potential and propel it finally and irreversibly toward its historic destiny: Privatisation of the entire machinery of government.

  • Osun: three years after

    The November 16 Anambra election echoes the Uba brothers’ Anambra selection of 2003.

    That itself echoes the Ekiti Ido-Osi electoral rerun travesty of 2010, which ties back to the “original sin” of 2007: the most audacious electoral heist in Nigerian history, in which Osun, with other states, fell to brazen electoral robbers.

    On Anambra, a later revisit; since the children of electoral perdition are still at their game. Emotions run sky high; and the jury is still out on how the self-destruct game would end.

    But a grand irony seems to have escaped the dramatis personae: the champions of impunity in 2007, now scamper to the courts as victims of impunity in 2013!

    But thanks to the Court of Appeal, under Justice Isa Ayo Salami. From the ashes of that electoral nadir of Osun 2007, with all its self-assured paralysis, sprung new hope three years later in 2010, boasting legitimacy-fired vitality.

    Another grim irony: Justice Salami, for the temerity to save, from themselves, non-democrats in Nigeria’s troubled democracy, was conked with heinous conspiracy that challenged his honour and integrity. But he triumphs today by the notorious fact that yesteryear emperors of impunity now cower before the courts – Justice Salami’s sacrosanct instrumentality to bring felons of all hues to book – for protection!

    The Rauf Aregbesola government in Osun, child of judicial integrity, birthed on 27 November 2010. That government would be three years tomorrow.

    Like the famous 7up radio commercial, the difference would appear clear: paralysis from electoral robbery versus release from sound electoral mandate. Again, that difference appears lost in the present Anambra imbroglio!

    On the Osun story, two personal reminiscences. In 2008, Sola Fasure, then The Nation Editorial Page editor, lost his dad. At the funeral reception at Ilesa, it was a tug of war between beggars, hungry, aggressive and cheeky, and guests; with the beggars at the ready to sweep the remnants off the guests’ table! That was paralysis ala the ancien regime!

    This year, 2013, Bolade Omonijo, a member of The Nation Editorial Board, also lost his mum. Destination: the same Ilesa. Sure, there were still beggars. But that desperation to snatch the guest’s plate at the burial reception was gone. Between the ancien regime and the present order, the difference is clear!

    That, of course, should be the trite: a government with legitimate mandate, after a free and fair poll, knows it floats or sinks on the strength of its service to the people. That would appear the hallmark of the Aregbesola government, as it goes on an overdrive to make up for the paralysis of the Olagunsoye Oyinlola era.

    Yet, the governor has not been without controversy, most of it tantamount to what is called “unforced error” in tennis; or “own goal” in football, despite his wide canvass of near-excellent service delivery.

    The governor’s “principal sin” is zest for his Islamic faith, hardly a crime! Many growl his beard is shaggy and rather un-gubernatorial. Others in pious rage point at his going for sukuk, the Islamic loan, as evidence that Mullah Rauf wouldn’t rest until he had Islamised Osun. Others foam in the mouth at his penchant for donning the Islamic skull cap, even at official functions.

    Indeed, a particular commentator, playing the prescriptive emperor, virtually ordered the Ogbeni (a moniker which, by the way, many deem too plebeian for high gubernatorial office!) to go shave his beard since, according to him, it robs negatively on people; and also told him to junk his school reclassification policy and go hand over schools back to their missionary “owners”, in proud and combative ignorance of extant situation in Osun.

    Another bellyached over the metaphysics and alchemy of governance and concluded, rather sadly and gravely, that though no Islamisation “smoking gun” existed, the governor remained legitimately charged, by his body language!

    Of course, all these are happy ammo for the governor’s opponents who, mercilessly routed at the realm of ideas, have happily embraced the high passion of lies and blackmail as their last stand.

    But the governor need not bother about columnists as Rip Van Winkles. The original Rip snored for 20 twenty years only to jerk awake, and find things irreversibly changed! Merchants of lies and blackmail too are fated to irrelevance.

    The inevitable is that many years hence the Aregbesola government would be remembered by generations, many of them not even born now, for its ambitious infrastructure programmes and projects, aimed at vaulting Osun from the socio-economic backwaters it had sunk into, after years of neglect, from the pristine hub of commerce in the Yoruba heartland.

    The tell tale of such stunning modernisation is already on and will, as day follows night, signal the political death and un-rued burial of many.

    But what would really stand Aregbesola out in Osun, as did the legendary Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the old Western Region, is his audacious bid to fix the Osun infrastructure of the mind.

    In a state hitherto regarded, by many, as the rumour capital of the globe (a euphemism for mass ignorance and susceptibility to mindless elite manipulation), an “Islamist-governor” has given everyone, Christian, Muslim and African traditional adherent, a sense of religious projection, in the best tradition of religious equity.

    Not only that: he has attacked educational reforms in Osun with a revolutionary zeal, second only to Awo’s much-abused free primary education policy turned much-revered development elixir, that earned the modern Yoruba paterfamilias the moniker of Ebudola (Yoruba, for scorn-turned-praise).

    Now, if Mullah Rauf wanted to Islamise his state, why would he give Osun children and youth the key to unlocking their minds with sound education, and making their own informed choices, like the odyssey of the cave man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? A mind hitherto chained to darkness in a cave, got exposed to lamp light, then to electricity and finally to the full grandeur of the sun! What release!

    So long for the manifest idiocy of emotional Islamisation!

    The glaring fact: Aregbesola has the courage to take risks on the strength of his conviction. The sukuk as developmental loan is a good case. The emotional army was priming their big guns until Westminster that brought Christianity to Nigeria, as part of its own cultural imperialism en route to colonisation, announced with glee that London was ready to be sukuk’s global leading mart!

    Sukuk would not turn Canterbury into Mecca any more than it would Islamise Osun roads, bridges, power plants, hospitals and other developmental projects it is put to. It is only an investment window!

    So far, so good – and the Osun renaissance could not have come at a better time, after nearly eight years of paralysis. But it is time the governor also tampered risk-taking with tact, by shunning needless controversies.

    The last three years have been nothing short of phenomenal. But Osun needs no less than eight years – and more of progressive tinkering – in its developmental race against time

    Ogbeni Aregbesola can achieve this by staying focused and shunning needless controversies.

  • Anambra: Between gods and godfathers

    Anambra: Between gods and godfathers

    Atahiru Jega is a typical Nigerian in the game of deceit. His face does not show it. His voice does not tell it. His manners do not demonstrate it. But his results devastate us. Like his boss Gooduck Jonathan, he carries a mien of deceptive gentility.

    This image made many acclaim Jonathan for appointing a former don as our electoral umpire. He introduced himself with a cherubic face, a fragile pair of eyes and a voice immune to the vulgarities of the age.

    He cut that cartoon figure last week as he tried to explain away his incompetence over the Anambra governorship elections. In one breath, he told us he did a shoddy job. In another breath, he asked us to abide with it. The election, he confessed, was inconclusive. But there was nothing he could do about it. His hands were tied. We are supposed to accept the violation like a raped nubile. The experience was awful. Blood abounded. But the deed was already done. The rapist told us it was a pity we did not enjoy the performance. But we could go to the bathroom and wash up and hope the next experience would be worth the moans and screams.

    He gave us the result as a fait accompli. Hear him: “we regret shattering the expectations of Nigerians but we did our best under very difficult circumstances to have a free, fair and credible election.” In one word, the results that made the Fidelity Bank candidate, Obiano of Governor Obi’s APGA, were not credible. He now says the aggrieved should go to court. Yet he wants to pour more sand in the garri of the other parties by setting the supplementary elections for another date. The foundation, by his own confession, was frail. How do you want to build on it?

    Those who were supposed to register did not see their names on the list. Those who were supposed to vote did not have voting materials in the booths. In a case, a candidate could not vote, as well as his family. A family is the basic unit of a society. That shows basic failure. While adults could not vote, minors were allowed to vote. Underage girls smothered their heads with Brazilian and Venezuelan hair in tune with the fashion of the day. So, a girl that should be 16 is portrayed as 31 at the polls.

    We understand the power of incumbency in an election. Governor Obi of the feminine voice wanted to show that having ruled the roost for eight years he should be able to anoint his successor and hand over to him. He claims to have deserved that honour from the Anambra people for his doings in eight years. Obi has not done such groundbreaking work for his people. His performance as governor can at best be described as modest. Such performances do not enthuse a crowd or stir the blood of loyalty. Rather they rake up lukewarm zeal.

    Lukewarm zeal does not give a governor that automatic honour of anointing a successor. That was Ngige’s strength. The APC candidate is the most important personality to have emerged in this generation from that state. We cannot forget so easily the theatrics of gods and godfathers when he was governor. He allegedly swore to a god at Okija that he would bow to his godfathers. When he became governor, he bowed neither to the gods nor to his godfathers. Rather he kneeled to the people and the constitution. He swapped the oath to gods with those to his citizens, the secret oath fell to the public one.

    The politicians inaugurated the theatre of kidnapping by first nabbing an elected governor. He would not yield to them. He would rather pay the money to the people in terms of infrastructure, education and healthcare than ply the pockets of peacocks. He was held hostage by Anambra and Abuja, but he never chafed. He would rather fail his godfathers and their gods, rather than the people. He left office on those terms.

    A few years after he left office, I visited Anambra State when Obi was governor, and I travelled to some of the towns. The motif of my conversations with the ordinary people was a nostalgia for the days of Ngige. A driver taking me from Awka to a neighbouring town exhaled that his car was guaranteed some longevity because Ngige had opened up quite a few roads and tarred them. The bumps and potholes would not flog his car to premature death.

    That billed the Anambra State election as an election between nostalgia and now, between Obi of the feminine voice and Ngige of the legend. It was a surprise that Nwoye, who never campaigned much, and whose candidacy threw a storm within the PDP, could have even come off second.

    It all shows that the results followed a clandestine script. President Jonathan entered a pact with Obi of the feminine voice who has been one of Jonathan’s ardent supporters. Remember the NGF elections and all he did? They fear Ngige the most. To deny Ngige any prayer, he had to come third. It was the same script in Ondo State, when Jonathan entered a pact with the whitlow of the west against his own party. The dreaded candidate came third.

    So the cry by Jega that the Anambra election was unfortunate and we should just abide it is part of a system that imposes mediocrity on all. Being afraid of Ngige’s return, they are engaged in a battle against memory. So we can say the Anambra election is an example of what Tatalo Alamu called the politics of memory. They are also cringing from the memory of politics and that is Ngige’s soldiery against the mainstays of decrepit system. Stephanie Meyer once wrote in her New Moon of a person “forbidden to remember; terrified to forget…”

    Anambrarians who were terrified to forget voted for Ngige. Those who hated Ngige’s guts are forbidding the people to remember. Conscience has accused them. They cannot have a clear conscience now, because Mark Twain said “a clear conscience is a sign of a bad memory.” They remember the days of Ngige and it sends shivers.

    Ironically, this column fought for Obi to remain and be governor in those heady days. He knows what it means to deny a person of his due. Why is he accepting an election that even the umpire decries as inconclusive? He has become a godfather himself, a status bred in Fidelity Bank and anointed with money.

    Jega should resign if he has honour. He knew early enough that things did not work and he could have canceled the polls like he did in 2011. But he allowed the rotten egg to release its odour before he uttered his lachrymose regret.

    Rather we have an election as a failure of mathematics. The number of invalid votes is more than the valid ones and only 27 per cent of valid votes counted with more than that percentage invalidated. Ngige’s place had to be the area that elections did not happen. And the winner was declared when the number of votes not counted surpassed the difference between the winner and the contestants.

    It is also a failure of English language. How can you say something is inconclusive and the result is announced, and you want a supplementary election because you want to avoid the word rerun? It is also the failure of logic when the party in the state cries foul and the PDP in the centre says halleluiah. Who does not see the Jonathan-Obi pact here? It is a failure of law when the law produces injustice. When values fail us, the law cannot rescue us. In a sane society, our sense of right and wrong will force all parties to withdraw and ask for a rerun. Values save laws. But the gods of greed and godfathers of fraud will accept a cesspit of an election, no matter the cries for justice.

  • Joyless jollification

    President Goodluck Jonathan probably has too much on his plate. This could have been a factor in his unexpected and unexplained illness in London, which caused him to miss the opening ceremony of a two-day meeting of Nigeria’s Honorary International Investors’ Council (HIIC) that coincided with his 56th birthday on November 20. In particular, a major challenge must be the imminence of the country’s 2015 general elections, which continues to generate emotionally charged arguments for and against his possible pursuit of reelection. His elusiveness on the issue has, predictably, compounded an already combustible context. If there is one subject that threatens to cause a political convulsion, it is Jonathan’s suspected but unconfirmed second-term ambition. If he is relying on perfect timing to share his presidential dream with the public, as his words imply and body language suggests, his dilatory tactics are simply postponing the day of reckoning.

    Notably, the background to his mind games is similarly labyrinthine. First, the controversy that attended his defiant decision to run for the office in the face of credible claims by high-profile members of his party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), that an extant zoning arrangement precluded his aspiration. Having stepped in, as vice-president, to complete the four-year term of the late President Umaru Yar’ Adua, his antagonists calculated that he would subsequently step down for a candidate from Yar’ Adua’s northern political base to finish an anticipated second term. It is revealing of his character and the party’s unpredictability that he rejected the alleged formula and capitalised on his incumbency with the backing of the party’s leadership.

    This original “sin” degenerated with his declaration that he never swore to spending only one-term in office after his 2011 election, contrary to the insistence of his adversaries that an alleged gentlemen’s agreement underlined the specification. By inference, therefore, he is free to run for a second term in 2015, if he so wishes, which is highly probable. These central scenes from the thought-provoking political drama were unavoidable as Jonathan advanced in his fifties.

    Interestingly, while Jonathan arrived in London for the HIIC meeting, which did not necessarily indicate that he was too preoccupied with the country’s affairs to celebrate his birthday, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) marked the anniversary briefly with a cake-cutting show before its weekly meeting presided over by Vice-President Namadi Sambo, who described his boss flatteringly as “a gift to the nation.” Sambo’s effusive remarks betrayed a self-serving mentality that was as unbelievable as it was enlightening. His words: “We are privileged Nigerians sharing from the grace of God upon his life. There is no doubt that the great destiny of this man has helped our individual destiny. We will continue to pray that Mr. President succeeds in transforming the country.” The striking reference to “individual destiny” suggested a collective self-centredness at the FEC, elevated above the greater good of the people.

    It is significant that Jonathan’s administration prides itself on being transformation-driven, a projection that was in 2011 symbolically defined by his launch of the Transformation Agenda summarising the government’s strategic priorities as well as the ways and means by which it would accomplish its major programmes and projects for the period until 2015 coordinated by the National Planning Commission (NPC). It is instructive that in September, in reaction to bitter intra-party divisions, Jonathan sacrificed nine cabinet ministers, including Shamsudeen Usman, then Minister of National Planning and coordinator of the Transformation Agenda, who was credited with its design. It is unclear to what extent the removal might work against the plan.

    With leaders who enjoy the self-flattery of the tag “giant of Africa”, without in any way thinking gigantically, it is disgraceful that the country was ranked 41st on a 52-country list called the 2013 Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), a project of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. The country not only scored lower than the continental average (51.6), it also ridiculously scored lower than the regional average (52.5) for West Africa. Assessment was based on four key areas: Safety and Rule of Law, Participation and Human Rights, Sustainable Economic Opportunity and Human Development.

    A bigger and particularly poignant irony is the fact that although Jonathan is the first doctorate holder to govern the country, he is apparently also the leader most disparaged for alleged incompetence, cluelessness and lack of vision in the country’s political history. With a PhD degree in Zoology and experience as a lecturer, it is one of the tragic expressions of his administration that Jonathan has failed to demonstrate the depth of intellectual resourcefulness that would normally be associated with an individual with such background.

    It is as well paradoxical that he has not only acquired seemingly implacable political foes right within his party, he is indeed also presiding over a dangerously dismembered party with a dubious future. Perhaps this juncture was predictable, given his antecedents. However, it exposes brinkmanship of the most thoughtless kind and unenlightened self-interest. If the PDP suffers an implosion under Jonathan’s leadership, which seems likely, that would be a fitting monument to narrow-mindedness of the most limiting type.

    It is the sort of crudely restrictive thinking that has transformed Jonathan into a local champ among his Ijaw group whose spokesmen routinely perform the ethnic drama without restraint while dreaming of Jonathan’s reelection. Fixated on sentiment rather than social validation based on good governance, such support is certainly far removed from the ideal. Added to these supporters who wear the ethnic badge is the group of power sycophants from the outside who are simply fair-weather friends.

    It is noteworthy that the Jonathan presidency, more than any other peacetime administration in the country’s history, has been burdened with the menace of ostensibly revolutionary opposition in the form of the Islamist terror organisation, Boko Haram. The extension of Jonathan’s climactic initial six-month imposition of emergency rule in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states reflects the scale of the security challenge. It is disturbing that there are insightful insinuations concerning the longevity of the insurgency, linking its rigid resistance to the manner of Jonathan’s ascendancy.

    In addition, there is no denying the fact that official corruption is an encumbrance for the Jonathan administration, which seems to be sinking deeper and deeper into the mire as its tenure progresses. It is difficult to point to any major case of corruption that the government has tackled with the desired intensity of seriousness, despite its hypocritical loudness about a so-called anti-corruption crusade; and this tolerance, unsurprisingly, continues to embolden the army of morally deficient public office holders.

    However, perhaps the ultimate albatross around Jonathan’s neck is his other half, First Lady Dame Patience, who is credited with an unrivaled grip on her husband and has earned him an uncomplimentary image. With such a plateful of problems, it is not so difficult to guess what Jonathan must be going through.

  • Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (3)

    Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (3)

    In bringing this series to a conclusion, the opening section of the famous first sentence of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities comes to mind:”It was the best of times and it was the worst of times”. The “two cities” of Dickens’ novel are London and Paris in the months and years of the French Revolution, one of the most earthshaking events of modern history. Perhaps when a novel of comparable power and popularity comes to be written about the pre-revolutionary times we are living through in our country at the present time, its opening sentence will be, “it was the worst of times and it was, yet again, the very worst of times”. That opening section of Dickens’ novel applies to everybody who was alive in the period, rich and poor, the powerful and the downtrodden. If, heaven forbid, that novel comes to be written about Obasanjo’s, Yar’ Adua’s and Jonathan’s Nigeria and it opens with “it was the worst of times and it was, yet again, the very worst of times” this will also apply to all Nigerians alive now and living in the country.

    Yes, a few thousands of the 170 millions of Nigerians are immensely wealthy. And yes, our political and public officeholders, especially our parliamentarians, are the best paid, the most handsomely remunerated in the world. But don’t we all live in a society in which the conditions of life, in its bare, irreducible essentials, are dire for everybody? Heaven help any Nigerian, rich or poor, who gets very sick and needs the most reliable and efficient facilities that modern medicine can provide, for they are either completely absent in our hospitals and clinics or, in the few hospitals where such amenities can be found, they are so expensive that even the very wealthy among us find it better to go to India if they wish to survive. The education that our schools provide is generally so poor in quality that even moderately well-off Nigerians who really cannot afford it nonetheless invest their life savings in sending their children abroad if they want their offspring to have the kind of education they had in this very country in their youth.

    As I have been arguing in this series, perhaps the most confounding manifestation of these evil and unhappy times that have befallen our country lies, I strongly believe, in the collapse of every mark of meritocratic values and practices in all aspects of our collective existence as a nation, a society. Ability, talent and merit now have little or nothing to do with how the majority of our wealthy got rich and with how most of our professionals got the certificates they wield as passports to good, superannuated jobs. For the most part, the majority of those who rise to immense political power and authority in our country have little ability, imagination and vision to show for their success – as everyone can see from the quality of the present occupant of Aso Rock. There are examination malpractices galore in private and public examinations conducted to test the ability and training of the pupils of our primary and secondary schools; and sometimes, when a diligent invigilator spots the miscreants and tries to “book” them, violence is visited on that would-be conscientious examination official. Even in the religious institutions, in churches and mosques where an inordinate amount of moralizing and sermonizing goes on, pastors and imams, church wardens and imams’ assistants are known to lend their seal of approval or, indeed, sanctification on very wealthy members of their congregations that are known to be openly and brazenly corrupt.

    At the end of last week’s piece in this series, I promised to conclude the series with a reflection on the few hopeful signs and portents that indicate that things could be far better in Nigeria than they are now. I intend to keep that promise, even though I also said that there are no easy solutions to the immensity of the crises traceable to the collapse of meritocracy – in those of its forms that are compatible with popular democracy and social justice – in our society. In three discursive steps, I now wish to enter this concluding and cautiously optimistic section of this series. In the first step, I give some comparative statistics and figures to show the roots of the problem. In step two, I argue that Nigeria was very, very different about four decades ago than what the statistics and figures in step one reveal. And in step three, I argue that logically, if things were actually quite different in the past, they could be also very different in the future, given an honest, courageous and, let us admit it, probably very painful encounter with the past and the present.

    Step One

    With a population of roughly 1.3 billion people, a land area of 1.26 million square miles, India has only 28 states (plus 7 so-called “Union Territories” that do no have the political and administrative status of states). Moreover, the political heads or chief executives of India’s states are not called Governors; their designation is “Chief Minister”. Now let us consider the figures for Nigeria: land area, 356.7 thousand square miles (less than a third of India’s land mass); population, 160 million (less than one-eighth of India’s population). How many states do we have? 36, with agitation still going on for yet more states to be created! Moreover, the political and administrative head of our states are called “Governors” (In Ghana, they are called “Regional Ministers”)

    In case there are readers of this piece who wonder what’s in a name, what’s in a designation, the answer is that a “Governor” (Nigeria), unlike a Chief Minster (India) or a Regional Minister (Ghana) combines the post of head of government with that of head of state. Thus, while the Chief Ministers of India’s 28 states are no doubt powerful politicians, singly and collectively, they do not remotely come near the influence, authority and powers of patronage concentrated in our Governors, all of whom are no less than mini heads of states. This is why in relative administrative cost of governance, Nigeria is second to no other country in the world, with the probable exception of only the United States of America, the richest country on the planet, the center of gravity, at least so far, of global capitalism. The colossal waste and squandermania that is constitutionally woven into political governance in Nigeria at the present time is not only the worst in the world, it is the structural and material base of all the corruption, all the rot that pervades all aspects of our collective existence. It must be terminated and soon, because for as long as it remains, the corruption, the rot in our country will not only persist, it will grow ever bigger and bigger. Why is this so? For an answer to this question, let’s move now to step two

    Step Two

    At one time in Nigeria when the country was administratively divided into three regions and the economy was based on a combination of export crops and a nascent light consumer goods industry whose market was the entire West African region, we did have Governors in this country. But they had no political or administrative power; their posts were mostly honorific and symbolic, corresponding to that of a head of state that is not also head of government. I recollect here that for the most part, the occupants of these positions were highly respected and/or beloved officials: Sir Kashim Ibrahim in the North; Sir Francis Ibiam in the East; Sir Adesoji Aderemi, the then ruling Ooni of Ife in the West. It so happens that all this took place before Nigeria became awash with oil wealth, with a near mono-culture economy based on a mainly offshore extractive industry that requires little or no value-added production in the hinterlands of the country for the oil wealth to continue to flow to the benefit, mostly, of the oil conglomerates and a just few thousands of Nigerians.

    I recall these facts here not for nostalgic or sentimental reasons but simply to make the following crucial point: with the change of the national economy to an offshore extractive industry that is not primarily based on developing the infrastructures and human capacities necessary for value-added production deep in the hinterlands of the country, we began to have Governors who are both heads of government and heads of their states. With one or two exceptions, none of the thirty-six governors (including the President himself) has a fraction, an iota of the enormous respect that Governors had back then in the First Republic. Indeed, for the most part, and again with only a few exceptions, most of the Governors now care not one jot for the respect or love of their people. As a matter of fact, many of them do everything, it seems, to attract anger, shame and disrespect from their peoples!

    Step Three

    We cannot go back to that past when Governors were only 3 (later 4), not 36; that past in which the Governors were highly respected public appointees. For one thing, the economic and structural basis of that past is gone, seemingly forever. The benefit that we may derive from reviewing that past is this lesson: we must design our mode of political governance with a keen eye to the economic foundations of the society. Waste and squandermania were not unknown in the First Republic; but they were nowhere close to being the worst in the African continent, not to talk of the whole world. To put this in the language of political economy, waste and squandermania were not (yet) a significant part of capitalism as it was then known and practiced by the ruling class parties of the country. And if waste and squandermania have become so colossal now, it is because the capitalism now practiced, now regnant in Nigeria is one of the most backward and unproductive forms of capitalism in the world: an economy dominated by an offshore extractive industry that seems to have no compelling need for development of infrastructures and human capacities in the country’s hinterland. There is nothing inherently Nigerian in this extremely backward form of peripheral capitalism; it simply the case that none of our ruling class parties, I repeat none at all, has shown a real interest to do away with the present economic order in which, with very little infrastructure and human capacities developed in the country’s hinterlands, the oil wealth continues to flow and their Excellencies continue to live and act as the lords of universe.

    No developing country in the world can afford the level of waste and squandermania in the Nigerian socio-economic and political order of the present historical moment, especially because this (dis)order serves as the foundation of all the corruption and rot in the country. Seen in the light of what the totally needless and voidable suffering that this (dis)order imposes on lives of the majority of our peoples now and potentially in the future, it is arguably one of the most stupid forms of governance on the planet. This is not an act of gratuitous abuse on my part; it is simply an assertion, a proud one at that, that we are not a stupid people! We are only, for the present moment, governed by political elites most of whom are completely unembarrassed by stupidity. The darkness and suffering caused by this stupidity will not last forever; only we must hope that they don’t last for too long. The more enlightened, patriotic and egalitarian among our political and business elites will – must – eventually separate themselves from the presently dominant crowd of greedy, barawo cretins who, for want of a better term, I call “Obasanjo’s political brood”. Capitalism will then enter a new phase in our country. I say this with full knowledge of the fact that constitutively stupid political rulers never give up their misrule voluntarily or easily. Let us just hope that it will not be too violent, too self-maiming, the process that will lead us out of the present darkness and stupidity.

  • The tautology of politics

    The tautology of politics

    The crisis bedeviling the nation is not just a crisis of politics but a crisis of the grammar of politics, or political grammar, if you like. As Albert Einstein has noted, insanity is doing the same thing all over again and expecting a different result. In grammatical tautology, there is an unnecessary repetition of meaning, using multiple words to effectively—or ineffectively—say the same thing.

    In political tautology, the same actions are repeated all over and we are told to expect a different result. The result is a crisis of political disorientation or mental disequilbrium in which the actors are conditioned by a stubborn mindset to believe their own lies no matter how outlandish and to seek to inflict same on a cowered populace. As everybody knows, incantation and political magic thrive on repetition and the linguistic violence of formulaic bombardment.

    Let us now begin to plot our way out of this jungle of post-colonial political tautology. The greatest and most compelling argument for the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference is the brutal abrogation of the political rights of Nigerians by colonial and post-colonial administrations, whether military or civilian. But this is also the greatest and most compelling incentive against its convocation.

    Nowhere in the world has the sovereignty of a people or nation for that matter been ceded lightly. It must be demanded or fought for; or there must be some compelling disincentives which force the hands of the rulers. The struggle for sovereignty affirms the sovereignty of struggle as the organising principle of all emancipated human societies. From Magna Carta to the Chartist movement, from the world-historic revolutions to the American Civil Rights protests, it is the struggle to affirm the sovereignty of the people that turn the habitants of a nation-space from inert, passive entities and nonentities to full blown citizens . This is when the nation in itself becomes the nation for itself.

    As it can be seen from the recent Delta Central Senatorial abracadabra, the brisk abolition of the electorate in Offa and the programmed electoral anarchy in Anambra State, Goodluck Jonathan , while paying lip service to a National Conference, is also relentlessly steamrolling the country towards a historic catastrophe that it cannot survive in one piece. What then is the purpose of a National Conference when evidence abounds that rather than attempt to solve the National Question the powers that be are working towards a predetermined National Answer and final solution?

    All over the world, national conferences are always an elite-driven affair. They are a specific mechanism to redeem and retain elite control of the levers of power. In the total absence of pressures from below and the margins, this is not a bad thing, and since current politics in Nigeria is a play of giants disconnected and disarticulated from the populace, Jonathan may yet get away with blue murder. But this is going to be a temporary respite until there is some fundamental retribution which will alter the character of the current political class.

    While waiting for this world-historic rupture and disruption of the mental conditioning of the political elite, it is appropriate to add that in the dispiriting fog of political tautology, nothing can be more refreshing than a fresh breath of scholarly analysis and its illuminating insights. This is the time for our thinkers, philosophers and intellectuals to rise above the fog of mental debilitation in order to fashion a new order for the nation.

    Ben Nwabueze, distinguished professor of Constitutional Law and a foremost legal theorist, is without any doubt the leading illuminati and intellectual star of our current political curfew. Snooper is not always on the same political page with the cerebral titan, but whether you agree with him or not, Nwabueze is a serious reader’s delight any day.

    Approaching his mid eighties, it is obvious that Nwabueze’s capacity for hard work remains undimmed and undiminished by advancing years. There is a seminal rigour to even his most casual pieces and an analytical clarity which marks him out as a master of clinical exposition. In the current depressing state of the nation, there is something to be cheered or even wildly applauded when a man of such age and distinction devotes all of his God-given sterling intellectual talents to solving the problems of his beloved nation as he deems it fit.

    Yet there is the troubling and persistent feeling that current favours, current partisanships and current passions often get in the way of the analytical rigour and seminal exposition. Despite the forthright eloquence, the radical fervour and the simmering contempt for the inanities of the Nigerian political elite, one often goes away with the impression that the distinguished legal theorist is nothing but a defender per excellence of the ascendant political status quo.

    His latest outing, defending the proposed Jonathan National Conference, gives the game away in all its damning and tortured ellipsis. Nwabueze is right to affirm that all the so-called conferences we have had so far are nothing but elitist conclaves which have never given the Nigerian people the right or choice to determine their sovereign destiny. He is particularly spot on in dismissing the 2005 Obasanjo National Dialogue as a sham, or charade lacking in immanent integrity and seriousness of purpose. Nwabueze believes, and tries to make us believe, that the proposed Jonathan Conference would be quite different.

    Yet the main plank and platform for staking his considerable integrity on Jonathan’s fidelity and seriousness of purpose is based entirely on faith and the fact that his group had submitted a draft proposal to the government, and not on a rigorous analysis of the political antecedents and current inclinations of the said administration. Last Thursday in a moment of late lucidity, Nwabueze seemed to be backing away in anticipatory disapproval.

    There can be no doubt about Nwabueze’s sterling standing with the administration. His nominee, Solomon Adun Asemota, the equally distinguished lawyer and respected advocate of a sovereign conference of ethnic nationalities, was eventually coopted after the Nyiam fiasco. But when matters as critical and crucial as this are entirely judged on the basis of cronyism and mutual back-rubbing, one must begin to wonder about the integrity of the whole process.

    In any case, let us not press our luck too far on this ethnic nationalities business. It is one of the pious myths of the decolonising project and the post-colonial nation process that the native people were not consulted before they were boxed into a colonial cage. The reality was that there were no people to consult as such. Force is the organising principle of the colonial project. Nigeria came into being after numerous native armies and economic conglomerates were put to sword by the colonial overlords or militarily browbeaten into submission.

    If we are looking for the real pre-colonial owners of what became Nigeria, we will have to search for the relics and debris of the ancient Ibadan army, the Ekiti insurgents, the Niger Delta barons, the Ilorin army, the Arochukwu magnates, the Nupe generals, the caliphate troops who took a shellacking in 1903, the abducted king of Benin, Jaja of Opobo, the Ijebu armed forces and many others.

    These are the lost and lapsed sovereigns of the numerous pre-colonial states in what eventually became Nigeria and not some mythical, fluid and flux nationalities. In a multi-national nation, there is nothing wrong with ethnic identity politics, but the unpleasant fact we are trying to avoid is that Nigeria, like all colonial nations, is a creation, concoction and contraption of state violence. And violence has been its organising principle ever since. This is what explains the centrality of arms and their bearers, despite the civilian lulls and lullabies.

    How then do we humanise this violence-suffused entity and make real life livable for its stricken and afflicted denizens? As a corollary to that important question, what are the possibilities of a sovereign national conference? Pray but keep your powder dry, says the famous admonition. Nwabueze is surely right in vesting the Jonathan administration with full sovereignty. There can be no dual sovereignty in a functioning state except as a precondition for anarchy.

    It is interesting to note that all the African countries listed by Nwabueze where sovereignty was seized by national conferences are Francophone nations. The French, taking a cue from their own history, imposed a system of presidential monarchy on their African holdings. The idea is to let an authoritarian strongman rule as father and founder of the nation until a biological coup d’etat intervenes and blows the lid off the roiling cauldron. This is what has led to civil wars in the two Congos, Mali, Cote D’Ivoire, Guinea and simmering discontent in Togo. The current harshly monarchical presidential system which does not take into account the fact that Nigeria is powered along by a negative equilibrium and by competing and countervailing centres of power is bound to end in similar grief.

    Nwabueze is at his most bearish and bullish when it comes to the vexed issue of the permanent conflict and endless contestation between legal and popular sovereignty and between the people or forces claiming to represent them and the ascendant sovereign authority. This is also where the political and intellectual contradictions appear in boldest relief. The legal titan is of the opinion that if Jonathan reneges on his promise, if he decides to play hanky-panky by throwing the buck back at a delinquent National Assembly, then the proposed National Conference can assert its authority and seize sovereignty.

    This is a direct and dire warning to the Jonathan administration. The patience of its most ardent intellectual supporters is wearing thin. Nwabueze does not tell us how this will happen, and probably rightly so. But if history is our infallible guide, it is a damp squib. On the few occasions when the Nigerian people have acted with a pan-Nigerian concert to assert their sovereignty, sections of the elite have always moved in to scupper the nascent national consciousness, leaving room for the best organised power cartel to seize sovereignty. It is unlikely to be different this time around. The constitutional pundit ought to know. But this is the bane of political tautology. Professor, welcome to the political laboratory of the great scientist Albert Einstein and his theory of insanity.