I apologise to my Enugu readers who were deprived of the chance to read this column last week Monday. Governor Chime’s men bought the papers so that his fellow citizens could not read my comment on his farce of a marriage. I hope you read this apology.
Category: Columnists
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Confab: Search without rescue
While debates flourish over whether or not we need a national conference, we should take some time off to reflect on our frenetic search for an answer as a nation. This search predated our independence in 1960, and the search reminds one of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. It is a story of a man who carries a rock up a hill and when he is almost at the top, the monstrous object falls back to the bottom of the hill. Sisyphus carries it up again and it falls back to the bottom and the travel up and down the hill continues for ever. It fits into a perpetual rigmarole. In the words of poet Okigbo, it’s like a coming and going that goes on forever.
Nigeria has been yearning for a formula in that fashion since Lord Lugard made Nigeria one in 1914, and the odyssey from one constitution to another, from one conference to another, has turned Nigeria into a pathetic narrative of search without rescue.
Some Nigerians with the patriotism of desperados have clasped President Goodluck Jonathan’s carrot of a confab. Better an imperfect jaw-jaw, they contend, than a pie-in-the-sky war-war that defines the hope of callers for a sovereign national conference.
Desperation often reflects a hasty and uncoordinated soul. So, the hankerers after a sovereign national conference have said if we want to get it right we have to be sincere and deliberate. But from the way the nation is constituted we cannot have a sovereign national conference, or a conference of any type that will satisfy enough Nigerians. This is a recipe for paralysis, but it is true. The convener is as important as the convention itself.
To convene a conference must imply the convener’s readiness, like Kerekou in Africa, or Charles de Gaulle in the west, to cede his powers to the convention, which includes control of the purse strings and the military. We know of the conflict between legal sovereignty and popular sovereignty. Jonathan’s concession of a confab admits that the legal one is not so legitimate because many of our elected officers rigged their ways to power. The people have a right to withdraw their mandate.
The politics of ethnicity and the deep suspicions among the elites have cast us as a nation that can only succeed if we have a leader with a heft of a charisma. That charisma must transcend calculations of primordial loyalty either to tribe or religion. Even those who lack such insular worship of tribe and faith need to convince us, in their image, that they have such grand vision. Our tragedy is that no such personage has emerged in all our history. The only person who had it was Nnamdi Azikiwe in the morning of his warrior life as a nationalist. But he too was suffocated by the Nigerian disease and lapsed into ethnic fealty.
Nigerians are not ready to accept anyone as a Mandela today. Without such an overarching personage of great moral grandeur, we cannot be trusted to convene a conference of general acceptability. Americans had Washington and Franklin. Yugoslavia had Tito. I have also wondered if the election of representatives will not provide the beginning of crisis. Since the political class will take the lead, allegations of rigging may undermine their bona fides as the people’s voice. So, ab initio, a problem stalks. After that hump, can we guarantee that we shall accept the referendum results?
Basic to the clamour for a confab is the height of suspicion among the ethnic groups in the country, and that re-emphasises the suspicion that we shall never solve our problem by merely going into a conference. It is this suspicion that has raised the hobgoblin of regionalism, in the west, east, north and even the south-south. We have decided to take shelter in tribe rather than nation, or we have decided to call our tribes nations, and the only time we love Nigeria is when we can ride it to personal wealth or win sports tournaments.
It all shows a failure of the political class, and their inability to work out a template of values. Where no one trusts that his governor or his senator represents him, even in their own ethnic cocoons, we understand that the problem transcends tribe. It is just about the right values. It is the callow political class that cannot accept loss when it happens, cannot make a scapegoat of a corrupt colleague, or will not build an airport that does not leak. That class is to blame, and also a citizenry so browbeaten into seeking crumbs that it settles for a token school or hospital or road for performance. A few weeks ago, a plane could not land in Benin City because the airport, newly renovated, had no landing lights. The airport is also leaking barely a year after it was opened. In spite of N255 million for luxury cars!
In the same city, Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole pointed out that if we do not have a country, as it is asserted, “we should start building one.” He gave example of himself as a minority who won an emphatic victory over a son of the soil. President Jonathan won elections in many non-Ijaw areas in 2011 because many wanted to give a chance to an “other.” But he has governed without a sense of inclusion. If he had governed like a statesman, people will talk less about retreats to tents of tribes and faith.
Tribe does not give food or shelter or good education. Good leadership does. Few, for instance, can complain about the governor of example in Lagos, Babatunde Fashola ,SAN, who seems in a hurry to do everything from roads to schools to even registration of residents.
That is the conference of performance. A string of good works will abolish narrow loyalties. We have had many panels to examine virtually everything in the country since independence, and this abundance of archival details mocks us. Is it about the minority problems, oil, education, federalism, civil service? They are in the archives. Is it about student riot, corruption, sports management or health care, or infrastructure or power? You only need to seek and you will find. We seek in this country and we find. The missing link is rescue. I call it panelism. We are always learning and never coming to the action of the truth, to paraphrase St. Paul.
We need to create a museum of panel reports. We must have the worst records of a country that has discussed everything and implemented little. The museum should show all the panelists, all the files, or the memoranda, all the narratives. We can go there to see our solutions, and maybe that museum will tell us that we have already had a confab. We only need execution. Documents will ultimately result from any conference now canvassed, and I hope it will not find its way to that museum.
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence is about a rejected lover who creates a private museum to memorialise his times with a girl, including cups, bed sheets, hundreds of cigarettes, underwear, etc. Are our sundry reports times of innocence? Maybe it is naivety. Those are wasted opportunities, what poet Wordsworth calls a “sordid boon.” Or are we just happy in our misery with the militants, slums, Boko Haram, joblessness, etc.? Maybe we are like Sisyphus who never arrives. Albert Camus, also a Nobel laureate, says Sisyphus is happy and loves the fruitless routine. I don’t wish Sisyphus on us.
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IGP on the G7 meeting invasion
The question the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Abubakar, was asked to respond to by the House Committee on Police Affairs was simple: who ordered the Asokoro Divisional Police Officer, Nnana Amah, to invade and disrupt the G7 governors’ meeting at the Kano governor’s lodge some two weeks ago? The answer was equally simple though downright disturbing. No one sent Mr Amah, the IGP replied. The DPO was simply doing his job, he deadpanned.
It will be recalled that two Sundays ago, Mr Amah had led dozens of policemen to invade the G7 governors’ meeting in Abuja. According to a source at the meeting, the DPO had asked the governors to disperse or be arrested. The governors, five of whom were present at the meeting, would not disperse, but instead dared the DPO to arrest them. The invasion led to an altercation in which a chafing governor would have taken the unprecedented step of pushing the DPO out of the meeting had he not been restrained. The invasion alarmed the country, and was widely condemned by everyone with a sense of decorum. However, like all who dare to oppose the Jonathan presidency, the chafing governor is today under siege, with two of his sons detained for alleged financial malfeasance.
If Mr Amah’s effrontery alarmed the country, the response of the IGP was even more troubling, and the inability of the House Committee to pin him down with poignant and unnerving questions did in fact signpost the decline of Nigerian democracy. According to the IGP, “The DPO was not sent by anybody…As the officer-in-charge of the area, he had the right to know what was going on in his domain…He is the DPO of the area; if anything happens, he would be held responsible. He was doing his job.” He further explained that what the rest of us described as disruption of meeting was in fact nothing of the sort, and that we were all misled by media reports of the event. Alas, the IGP pretends to teach us English by redefining the word ‘disruption.’
Worse, by making light of Mr Amah’s grievous assault on civil liberties, the police boss attempts to rewrite the constitution, remould Nigerian democracy, and redefine the charter on human rights. But the IGP’s not-so-clever response shows very clearly why Nigeria is now a police state, why the police commissioner in Rivers State willfully defies the state governor without fear of retribution, why increasingly the police’s view of liberty is at variance with whatever liberty is vouchsafed to citizens by the constitution. And by handling the IGP last Thursday with kid gloves, the House Committee on Police Affairs also indicate clearly how complicit the National Assembly has become in the subversion of the constitution by a resentful and vindictive Jonathan presidency.
The fact is that though the IGP honoured the House invitation, he provided no explanation to show by what authority the police could disrupt the governors’ meeting or embarrass them, even if it was clear the governors met to ensure President Goodluck Jonathan did not contest in 2015, or if he did, not to win a single vote. The police, Dr Jonathan, and the faceless and shameless power mongers pulling the strings behind the thick presidency cloak of Aso Villa remind us of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party prepared the ground for fascism. The IGP is obviously no longer in full control of the police, for he seems to us a man of much grander character than the actions the police evince today. More and more, he will find himself justifying his men’s lawless actions, perhaps assured that in the process, and irrespective of what he thinks or not think, believes or not believe, he is pleasing the presidency and defending his increasingly untenable position.
More humbling, and faced with a fascist presidency, we have on our trembling hands a considerably weakened National Assembly without a full understanding of the role of a legislature in combating autocracy. For whatever this weapon in our hands is worth, the Senate seems to have lost its zest for lawmaking and for checking the excesses of the executive; and the House of Representatives has sensed the futility and loneliness of rising up stoutly in defence of civil liberties. They could not question the IGP to get his understanding of what the duties of a DPO were, and whether those duties included in any way the assault on the people’s liberties as contained in the constitution. They let the IGP off lightly by refusing to get him to quote the relevant parts of the constitution that empowered his officers to insult democracy and deny or circumscribe lawful association and assembly of the people.
Last year we started with a defiant commissioner of police proving to be more powerful than a state governor; now we have one DPO looking five governors in the face and telling them to shape up or ship out. Under the military, such effrontery could never be countenanced. In a democracy, it should never be imagined. But under the nose of a president who took oath to defend and protect the constitution, we are experiencing these clear and catastrophic assaults on civil liberties. Who can tell what will happen as the 2015 general elections draw near, when a desperate president egged on by faceless fascists take on everybody and the constitution? Who can tell what other abuses the president’s men will enact, and what other institution, other than the police, they will destroy or render contemptible?
Already, the campaign for state police has become almost unchallengeable, even unanimous. Whether a sovereign national conference is held or not, it is certain that the enthusiasm with which the police have lent themselves to be used to undermine the constitution has ensured that they cannot survive as they are constituted today. It is a question of time before the police are decentralized. When that happens, it will be good riddance to bad rubbish. For with the appalling excesses of the Jonathan government, no one is persuaded that a state government is likely to behave more unreasonably with the police than the federal government now heedlessly does.
Whether the already enfeebled National Assembly, which embraces partisanship to the detriment of the sanctity of the constitution, survives the impending Jonathan onslaught remains to be seen. They failed to understand the issues involved in the Rivers affair, where a few members of the House of Assembly plotted against the majority and then somehow manipulated the National Assembly to employ disingenuous neutrality instead of principled engagement. More and more, Nigerians are beginning to understand that this certainly isn’t the kind of legislature the country needs. Whatever they earn, if they could at least be firm and principled, the country would be grateful that though they cost a pretty penny they are nonetheless useful. Today, however, they look like an appendage of the executive, frightened, cowering and shell-shocked.
Mr Amah is likely to get away with his audacious challenge to the country’s democratic tenets. After all, his senior counterpart in Rivers is getting away with murder. In the face of such distressing exhibition of partisan policing, the IGP hides under semantics, and the National Assembly feigns ignorance, if not sickening amusement. Maybe, in quiet resignation, we should wait for the other shoe to drop. When that happens, let us hope it will not be too late to stir ourselves, too late to reclaim the country from the hands of those intent on destroying it, and too late to feel alive once again and be proud of this corner of the earth the good Lord has placed in our clumsy hands to tend.
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The death of Iyayi
What makes the death of Festus Iyayi deeply wounding is not simply the fact that he had an accident, as indeed anyone can have, or that he died in the almost hopeless quest of securing better university education for Nigerian students. Every death diminishes us, but none more so than the one procured in the hands of either an unimaginative person, such as an anarchist Boko Haram Islamic sect fighter, or an unimaginative state government, such as Kogi State government richly illustrated last week. Professor Iyayi, writer and former president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) died in an auto crash on the Lokoja-Abuja highway when, according to preliminary reports, the bus in which he was travelling with other ASUU officials was struck by an escort vehicle in the convoy of Kogi State governor, Idris Wada.
As if admitting guilt, and as if remorseful that Kogi State convoy drivers had needlessly avoided Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) training programmes, the governor has quickly offered to release his drivers for training. It took the death of Professor Iyayi to convince Kogi to do what is right. According to the corps marshal, Osita Chidoka, three accidents in as many months involving the Kogi government convoys were not even enough to get the governor amenable to the Road Safety training programme. Nor was another convoy accident involving the governor himself, in which he sustained a broken limb, enough to make the governor do something about his reckless convoys.
The state has tried to shift the blame to the victims, but some sources allege that the governor’s convoy is to blame. If investigations prove the convoy’s culpability, the governor will not only be sued for damages, he will also doubtless be stigmatized for causing the death of the renowned professor and for failing to get his convoys to act responsibly on the highways. Indeed, if the governor cannot be trusted to responsibly restrain his drivers from embarking on what looks like joyriding, how can he be trusted to administer the affairs of his state with the responsibility, consideration, fairness and moderation his office required?
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Nigeria, Boko Haram and belated US declaration
Finally, the United States of America has declared the Nigerian Boko Haram Islamic sect a terrorist organisation. The US has its reasons. But it is instructive that for more than two years, Nigeria stoutly refused to let the sect be declared a foreign terrorist organisation. The country claimed that such a declaration would negatively affect innocent Nigerian travelers who would automatically become suspects anywhere they travelled to in Europe and America. This time, however, there has been no objection to the US declaration even though nothing has changed. The sect has remained consistently bloody and undiscriminating in its campaigns. It still treats its victims with as much contempt as it has done since 2009. And it has neither reduced nor expanded its objectives.
What has changed, in fact, is that the Nigerian government has finally been overcome by self-made frustrations. While it previously and indefensibly believed it could secure some sort of deal with the sect, such hopes appear to have now evaporated. In spite of the appalling bloodletting at the Northeast epicenter of the revolt, and in spite of the killing of many of the sect’s leaders, the violence has seemed to worsen, especially in its total lack of discrimination.
To be certain, the fault for the late declaration of the sect as a terrorist organisation is not that of the US. It is strictly that of Nigeria. The country’s leaders have shown no imagination or good judgement in its war against the sect. It unwisely allowed the revolt to take root and spread before it belatedly declared war on it. While the sect controlled barely one local government in the early days of the revolt, the government was apparently unimpressed and failed to take the firm measures required to knock the problem into a cocked hat. Unimaginably, the government waited until, in its own words, the sect controlled more than 10 local governments in Borno and Yobe states before it felt it appropriate to declare what this column has described as an unnecessary state of emergency. Now, it seems as if the insurgency has become a war of attrition in which neither side appears eager to achieve victory or concede defeat.
Neither the US declaration of Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation nor the declaration of state of emergency will bring the insurgency to an end. With the anomie being sponsored and nurtured by the Jonathan presidency as he continues to undermine the constitution and impose authoritarian rule, and his demonstration of absolute mala fides in the practice of democracy, it is unlikely his efforts to restore peace in a part of the polity will be rewarded. Worse, it does appear that in tandem with its helplessness in dealing with the sectarian nightmare in the Northeast, the Nigerian government appears willing to open the country’s airspace and security (including intelligence, telephone security et al), not to say sovereignty, to US influence and drone activities.
Four more years of Dr Jonathan’s unexciting and undemocratic rule will push Nigeria to the cliff. This has nothing to do with where the president comes from, his party’s zoning policy, or whether it is the North’s turn or that of the Southeast or any other zone for that matter. The problem is absolutely one of competence, which this president or the two before him have not demonstrated in part or in whole. It is frustrating that the issue of who rules Nigeria is every time obfuscated by the ethnic or religious background of those aspiring to be president.
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Olodumare, these Children of Oduduwa again!!!
The Yoruba boast of being the most politically sophisticated people in Black Africa, nay Africa. The bragging and braggadocio are not without some solid merits. Urbanised for over a thousand years, with a cleverly nuanced traditional kingship system which abhors tyranny and despotism and which sets store by civility and courtesy, they have also produced some ancient world class philosophers that would have made the Hellenic civilisation cringe with envy.
The sad obverse of the coin is that every social and political advancement often comes with and at a stiff price. Urbanity produces its own social pathologies. In folk mythology the city is often demonised as the nearest thing to hell itself while city-dwellers are generally regarded as unreliable, wicked and devious in the extreme. To the urban sophisticates, the rural denizens are regarded as uncouth, ill-bred and dull-witted. This abiding polarization between the city people and the rural folks often plays out with great consequences in Yoruba politics
Yet it is also very likely that when urbanisation is not accompanied by a corresponding technological development and an increase in the store of scientific knowledge, the human imagination is driven back to mysticism and intellectual sorcery. As Karl Marx famously observed, all mythologies try to dominate nature in and around the imagination. It is the advance of science that dispels such rural idiocies.
There is no extant record to show that the Yoruba developed great demotic schools and democratic learning institutions to correspond with their great urbanising drive. Or to put things more cautiously, if ever there was such a thing, the colonial conquest killed it off in embryonic formation.
Consequently and despite the political sophistication, forests of a thousand demons abound. As everybody knows, mastering the Ifa corpus is not for the mentally deficient. It is a steeplechase of mental endurance and spiritual stamina. The privatization of knowledge often leads to the privatization of power which they had tried to avoid in the first instance.
For if knowledge is also power, the restriction of access to this power breeds a spiritual and intellectual aristocracy which looms large It is the land of a thousand deities and there are more gods to appease than human beings. The result is a “natural” ruling class comprising of savants, spiritualists, royalists and other enforcers of the writ of the realm and a permanent sense of siege and unending civil war which assumes several guises and dimension. Colonial conquest merely destroyed the political and economic basis of this anti-royalist royalism but not its ideological basis. Hence, the new Yoruba aristocrat still comes with a strong sense of personal entitlement.
Had the Yoruba been an organic nation in their own right, it would not have mattered. The nation-state project is a permanent process of either working out, sublating or supplanting national contradictions. But when a people with highly developed social characteristics and idiosyncrasies are thrown into the same roiling crucible with other people, the principle and process of homogenisation makes them very vulnerable indeed. Enemies without find common cause with bitter enemies within.
This is not a closet theory of cultural superiority or historical persecution. Every human society or culture has its own way of apprehending reality or dealing with historical exigency. But there are cultures within the Nigerian nation-space that have tried to grapple with the problems of modernity by evolving into empires in their own right. When the imperializing and centralizing motif of all empire builders take hold of their ascendant avatars, they are bound to come into direct collision with other empire builders and hegemonic wannabes cohabiting in the same territory..
This is the crux of the unresolved Nigerian National Question. It is like boxing the Germans, the French and the British into the same colonial cage and asking them to get on with the job. The human toll is going to be prohibitive. There are some sharply individuated cultures that cannot be easily ground into colonial homogeneity and conformity.
So is it then that every time the Yoruba seem to be on the verge of arriving at a consensus about their fate in a multi-national nation, vicious internal dissension and dispute arise. Every time there is some progress, the progress is cancelled out by forces within playing hosts to forces without. Every time a successful mobilization of the Yoruba people around a cause occurs, swift demobilization recurs.
As the hazy outlines of the next civil war in Yoruba land appear in some relief, we must pause and shudder at the implications. In at least three states, loyal dissidents are poised and primed to challenge their political chi to a wrestling match. It is bound to end in tragedy.
Is there then some ancestral curse working itself out.? Does it mean that this land will not know any peace until the kingdom comes? Or is there some banal sociological explanation at play that continues to elude us? Could there be some sub-ethnic tension still at play which leads to a permanent polarization of elite formations?
All over Yoruba land despite the stunning advances of the last half a decade, political warlords are preparing for battle. As usual, the loudest noise is coming from the fissures within the new dominant group. As it was the case in the distant and immediate past, progressives are up in arms against progressives and as it has been famously noted by the authors of The Gods that Failed, the final battle is not between socialists and reactionaries but between progressives and former progressives.
This is what has been happening in Yoruba land in the past fifty years or more with former heroes and sturdy progressives suddenly finding themselves as internally displaced persons, or worse still, as itinerant political hookers and electoral miracle workers.. Snooper once had cause to publicly warn the late Chief Bola Ige against allowing himself to be so internally displaced to the margins of political reaction and irrelevance. It is usually the land of the unreturnable, apologies to Amos Tutuola. In an attempt to get even things often get more uneven.
How one wishes that the surviving Afenifere grandees could learn from this maxim and the terrible fate that has befallen the internally displaced. Snooper appreciates that these grand old men are fighting for their political life. But there is a fate worse than quiet political death. It is living obloquy and disgrace. When these old heroes begin to plot with a much reviled central government against the dominant political tendency they themselves have spawned it doesn’t get more tragically ironic.
In fifteen years after the D’Rovan Affair, Afenifere itself seems to have come full circle. The hunter has become the hunted. The brand has lost much steam and stock value. From a post-military global dominance of the Yoruba political horizon, it is now confined to an obscure corner. It has also spawned a younger breakaway faction which is more militant and uncompromisingly regionalist in focus and orientation. The fate it reserved for its old erring members now seem to beckon the surviving titans. Could this be the final working out of the D’Rovan imbroglio?
As the emergent gladiators in the South West prepare to battle themselves onto death, let them remember the fate of similar gladiators of yore who gravely misread the political signals or miscued the tempestuous dynamics of Yoruba post-colonial politics. Many of these men and women started out as heroes in their own right but ended up as villains.
Painfully enough, this is not a matter that can be resolved by ordinary morality. You can be morally right and politically wrong. Every political opportunist will eventually get his come-uppance. But there are moments when a political opportunist can be properly aligned and in turn with the aspiration of his people. We leave our readers this morning with a portrait of the two major avatars of our political curfew.
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Awo and SLA: Two Exemplary Paradigms
Forty seven years after the assassination of Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola and twenty six years after the death of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the relics of the bitter war are still taking up positions behind their departed principals. It was an epic duel which defined and crystallised the Yoruba political identity and which has determined the subsequent position they will occupy in Nigeria’s political evolution.
Like the ancient and mythical duel between Shango and Gbonka, it is not as if the victor and vanquished of that royal battle between two of the most illustrious Yoruba sons ever are unknown. But the politics of memory can be as harsh and even more vicious than the original engagement. As Walter Benjamin famously puts it: “if the enemy wins, not even the dead are safe”
To choose between Awo and SLA is not to choose between a villain and a hero, but to choose between a fallen icon and a resounding and resonating avatar. Both of them represent two paradigms that are present in a people, a society and nations at every critical juncture of history. These are the paradigms of heroism and pragmatism.
Akintola might have entered contemporary mainstream Yoruba consciousness as a symbol of political perfidy and betrayal but the truth is more nuanced in all its minute and discriminated particularities. As a person, Akintola was not incapable of heroism and personal valour. His heroic last stand against Captain Nwobosi and his men attests to his unusual personal bravery. He went out with a bang, and with his sub-machine gun smoking, like Salvador Allende of Chile would do later.
Heroism has its limits, just as pragmatism has its limitations. The heroic may be nothing more than a quixotic quest, a march of criminal folly in the face of overwhelming odds and a recourse to wanton personal or collective suicide. But there are also moments when pragmatism defiles and dishonours a people, when it may be better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. Those who accuse the Israeli of a Masada complex, of wanting to fight to the last man know what they mean. Masada was the mythical battle site where the ancient soldiers of Israel perished to the last man rather than surrender. It has defined the Israeli nation till date.
It will take a harsh historical analogy to imagine the plight of the Yoruba nation in Nigeria after the imposition of the state of emergency in 1962 and the subsequent pincer-movement occupation of the west. Vichy France comes to mind. After the German Panzer divisions had blitzed their way through France in a stunning military manoeuvre that changed the concept of war, a group of respected Frenchmen came together and opted for an appeasement of Germany in order to save France from further devastation and punishment.
This was the birth of Vichy France. On the face of it, the argument was rational and respectable. It was the pragmatic thing to do. Marshal Pétain, the leader of the group, was not a spring chicken or a lily-livered coward. He was France’s most celebrated and decorated soldier. The hero of Verdun was arguably at that point the greatest Frenchman of the century. He was the most influential French statesman.
But unknown to Marshal Pétain and his collaborators at that point in time, the other paradigm, the paradigm of heroism, was stirring in the heart and bosom of many French people. Many were simply fed up with German military arrogance and the constant humiliation of their people. This spirit of heroic resistance was to find expression in a lowly obscure Brigadier.
Charles de Gaulle escaped abroad to make his historic broadcast bristling with fury and defiance. He was denounced as a traitor and promptly sentenced to death by the Vichy government. But at the end of the tunnel it was the spirit of heroism that triumphed. De Gaulle ended as the greatest Frenchman of the twentieth century while Marshal Pétain and his Vichy collaborators ended in the scrap yard of infamy.
While it lasted, the Awolowo-Akintola political marriage appeared to have been made in heaven: the one was a political genius while the other was a politician of genius. In terms of personality, they were also a perfect foil for each other. While Awolowo was retreating, reticent, remote and enveloped by a superb aura of mystical grandeur, Akintola was witty, down to earth and brilliantly alert. Affecting a jocose flippancy, nothing actually escapes his keen and agile and politically fertile mind. He was the grandmaster of political brinkmanship.
It is unfortunate that Akintola has not escaped a certain demonisation as an ogre. Nothing can be farther from the truth. He was in fact an unfailingly polite, warm and generous person, solicitous to a fault and an omoluwabi where it mattered most. It is possible that as he became more embattled, as his authoritarian scams exploded in his face and as the entire west rose in fury and resentment, the less flattering aspects of his personality came to the fore and he became a demonic nuisance, but like Marshal Pétain, he was not without his redeeming virtues.
The argument that finally separated him from his beloved boss was a classic instance of pragmatism versus heroism. Confronted by the overwhelming federal might and the awesome machinery of feudal compliance that the northern power masters brought to play, believing that politics is principally the allocation of resources, a function of who gets what and at which point in time, Akintola thought the west should be in alliance with the north.
It was, all things and the balance of force considered, a rational and prudent choice. There was no point in knocking your head against a brick wall. But to Chief Awolowo, this was nothing but a shabby compromise with evil, a shameless capitulation to the forces of servitude and feudalism. Documenting his aversion with the scholarly thoroughness and inflexible rigour that have come to be associated with him, Awolowo came to the rigid conclusion that Nigeria would never move forward until the feudal forces have been eliminated.
It was a harsh and bitter division but one that frames and maps the fault lines on which the modern Yoruba nation itself is founded. There are markers of cultural differences in the Awolowo-Akintola split which escapes most commentators. Although speaking one language, the Yoruba are not a culturally homogeneous group. Coming from the northernmost fringes of the nationality, Akintola’s people had a long history of continuous interaction and association with the north.
In fact throughout his life, the late politician was dogged by the rumour that his mother was from the Bachama ethnic stock. Were this rumour to be true, Akintola would have shared the same maternal lineage with the Sardauna as well as his kinsman Benjamin Adekunle, the tempestuous military hero.
Coming from solid Ijebu stock which looked toward the coast for cultural association and economic sustenance, Awolowo could not have been more culturally different and differentiated from Akintola. For him, the supremely calm and dignified Fulani aristocrats with their unfurling turbans would have been an object of unending intellectual curiosity and probable discomfiture.
In the event, it was at first a ding-dong affair. Akintola was unable to sell his vision while Awolowo was unable to extend his dominion to the Yoruba heartland. But what was perceived as his unfair persecution, unjust imprisonment and the hostile encirclement of Yorubaland dramatically altered the equation. Still bristling with the memory and ancestral resentment of repeated Fulani incursions and by now reaping the bounteous benefits of Awo’s visionary leadership, the Yoruba rallied wholesale to the Awolowo banner. The rest is history.
There are important lessons to be learnt from this historic face off. Let those who are attempting to rewrite Yoruba history as a result of recent internal colonisation deviously disguised as visionary emancipation beware. As the Yoruba enter another critical and crucial stage in the political evolution of modern Nigeria, the leaders they need are not those who show bravery after the event but those with proven records of heroism and gallantry in the service of the people.
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My convoy is longer than yours
A convoy is a power accessory – a symbol of your status. Wherever you find people exercising power you would find a trail of expensive vehicles in tow. The longer your motorcade the more eminent you are.
Nigerians didn’t invent the phenomenon. We’ve only done with it what we do with all things – gone to the very extreme and occasionally tipped overboard. This is the only country where everyone feels entitled to a 20-car motorcade: from the president to the private citizen convinced of his own importance.
Convoys of the high and mighty are in the news again courtesy of the exploits of the crash-happy drivers of Kogi State Governor, Idris Wada’s motorcade. Last year they were involved in a well-reported pile-up from which Wada emerged with a broken leg. His aide-de-camp died on the spot.
But in the world of convoy drivers one year is a long time to retain the memory of a tragedy. So just this last week the same bunch of kamikaze artists snuffed out the life of a one-time president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Professor Festus Iyayi, who was on his way to Kano for a meeting.
Last Wednesday morning around the U-Turn axis of the Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway, another unidentified government convoy made up of seven vehicles careened into the expressway from a side road.
A lorry hurtling down the road, in a bid to avoid the convoy, smashed into pedestrians – hitting 11 persons and leaving two dead. The heartless convoy drivers stopped a good distance from the carnage they had caused. But that was all they did. Gun-totting policemen simply peered at the horrified crowd and sped off after a few minutes.
In the course of my job I have had a chance to understand the psychology of convoy drivers and guards. Their arrogance is breathtaking! As someone once said a big man’s maiguard is himself a big man!
In the course of ferrying their principal about these drivers and policemen view other road users as lesser beings to be run off the road. Ostensibly they act in this manner to check any security threat to the VIPs they are carrying.
In reality what they exhibit is simply the anti-democratic temper reigning in the land. It is the mindset the causes us to elevate public office holders to deities to be worshipped. It is the reason a security agent would think nothing of brutalising a TV cameraman for getting too close to the dignitary he’s covering.
I have heard some of the drivers brag about how fast they can go and the risky maneuvers they have tried. I have seen them almost crash very expensive automobiles in a dispute over which car should be next to the vehicle carrying their principal.
The outrageous behavior of these drivers has been going on for ages. Although the Iyayi killing appears like the tipping point, things may not really change unless concrete action is taken to reform the way government officials travel.
The first step is asking hard questions. Are convoy drivers no longer subject to Nigerian traffic laws just because they are ferrying VIPs?
In 2005, a chauffeur and two police officers driving then New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark to watch a match involving the country’s rugby team, the All Blacks, were prosecuted for dangerous driving and fined.
Clark’s three-vehicle convoy had been travelling as fast as 170 kmh, but the prime minister who was a backseat passenger in one of the cars said she was too engrossed reading some paperwork she had no idea how fast they had been travelling.
It would be interesting to know how many Nigerian killer convoy drivers have faced prosecution in the last decade. Actually, those who drive in vehicles with government number plates, or those who wear uniforms, feel the laws don’t apply to them.
In instances where there are fatalities the lunatic driver would no doubt be liable being the one operating the vehicle at that point. But there’s a sense in which his boss who has winked at his speeding bears some moral responsibility.
Over and again people have asked whether convoys have to travel at such dangerous speed. One rationalisation is the need to get bosses to different engagements quickly. An appropriate riposte is that with planning even the busiest individual can leave in good time to keep appointments.
The late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said that she got to her engagements a good 15 minutes before time. If she came too early she would drive round the block to while away time. But come the hour she’ll be knocking on your door. If our big men can learn to keep time there will be no need for convoys to turn our roads to race tracks.
The other excuse I have heard is security. The standard line is that it is hard to aim at a moving target. The sense that any convoy – no matter how fleet – is a guarantee of safety is overstretched. Innumerable leaders and political figures have met their end in moving motorcades. One-time United States President John F. Kennedy was shot as he drove through the street in an open car.
Even if movement is meant to thwart the hidden sniper, I suggest that any governor or minister who allows his convoy drivers to move about at breakneck speed has actually handed the steering wheel to an assassin. Kogi Governor Wada escaped with a broken leg last year; he could have suffered the same fate as his ADC.
Someone said most VIPs are too busy with more important matters than worrying about the management of motorcades. This is supposedly the forte of security and protocol staff. I once heard a governor blithely declare that he was at the mercy of these officials who determine his goings and comings.
Conversely I know of another governor who takes an interest in such things so much so that he instructed his motorcade not to travel faster than a certain speed within city limits. After one crazy stunt by one of the drivers, he directed his aide-de-camp to send the whole bunch to driving school.
Any official who surrenders these things to some convoy commander without setting out broad guidelines is playing Russian roulette with his life.
I also believe that you can get a glimpse of a man’s character by the way his motorcade conducts itself. Wild driving and lack of consideration for other citizens as road users points to a principal who lacks discipline, is inconsiderate and detached from the real world. If he doesn’t approve he would find such over-the-top conduct grating and take action.
Coming to costs, the size of most government convoys shows how wasteful we are. People are quick to point to the size of the convoy of the US president. America’s resources can pay for the flights of fancy of their highest office holder. Can we fund ours? Even in the US there are regular stories about the size of Barack Obama’s motorcades – meaning the magnitude and expense remain issues of debate in a country used to such gargantuan motorcades.
But the US shouldn’t be the only example. Why are people not asking how many cars are in the convoy of the British, Canadian or Swedish Prime Ministers? David Cameron’s car as PM moves about escorted by a lone outrider even in an age when the UK has become a major target for terrorists.
In reality these motorcades have little or nothing to do with the quality of governance. Is Britain less efficiently run because the Prime Minister’s entire vehicular train is just two cars and a motorcycle? According to the Wikipedia entry the Nigerian President’s entourage consists of “30 cars and ten escort motorcycles, along with police cars and six Mercedes S-550 of SSS surrounding the president’s car.” In spite of this imperial cavalcade the country is such a mess.
Let’s get real! It’s time people took another look at these monstrosities giving office holders a bad name.
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Abysmal statistics, facts and realities that define and yet do not define us (2)
Meritocracy: noun, 1. an elite group of people whose progress is based on ability and talent rather than on birth, class privilege or wealth. 2. the persons constituting such a group. 3. a social system formed on such a basis.
On many occasions in this column, I have reported how shocked and bewildered I was the very first time I came across the 98.2% failure rate in the NECO November-December 2009 examinations. Let me now report that soon after I had absorbed the bewilderment of that discovery, I felt some relief! As a matter of fact, on July 13 this year when I delivered a lecture at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) and mentioned this fact of a great relief that followed my initial shock, the Deputy British High Commissioner, Mr. Peter Carter, who was on the high table, rather spontaneously abandoned all diplomatic niceties and composure and blurted out rather loudly, “You were relieved! Why?” Yes, I had felt relieved, I replied; I had felt relieved because after I had thought deeply about the matter, I recognised that no group of children on the planet could be so dumb, so congenitally retarded as to score that abysmal failure rate of 98.2%. Obviously, I added, the essential problem was not with our children, it was with our system of education. That system of education is failing our children, robbing them of their right to relevant and quality education.
The same logic could be applied to employers of labour in our country who, as I have reported on many occasions in this column, have for a long time now been complaining that the graduates produced by our universities and other tertiary educational institutions are in general so poor in quality that they are “unemployable”. Well, let me now add to that observation an assertion that as far as anyone can tell, employers of labour in our country, those among the demographically small circle of the very wealthy in Nigeria who pride themselves on having worked for their wealth, have never done much to improve the quality of education in our secondary schools and universities. They have, it seems, just assumed that somehow, quality education, quality graduates just emerge from tertiary institutions the way fruits naturally grow from trees. In all the struggles that teachers in our secondary schools and lecturers and professors in our universities have been waging to have funding that is adequate to the task of educating millions of our youths, these employers of labour have generally watched as bystanders, as neutral observers with no stakes in the outcomes of the struggles.
This observation can, and indeed should, be couched in terms of macro-institutional policies and the ruling political order itself. As ASUU has been informing the country and the world for decades now, the Nigerian state consistently scores very low on UNESCO guidelines for capital investment in educational infrastructure for the developing countries of the world. There are many things terribly wrong with education in Nigeria; perhaps the single most important factor is consistent under-investment in education over the decades. And this period happens to be the very period in which the country’s political and economic elites grew immensely rich while the vast majority of our peoples became more and more impoverished. With very few exceptions, the employers of labour that endlessly complain about the quality of graduates produced by our universities have been at the heart of this process of obscene self-enrichment at the expense of the vast majority of Nigerians, at the expense of the development of educational and other infrastructures in our country, at the expense indeed of the quality of life and prospects of the future for our youths. We must not lose sight of this factor and its significance in the calamitous decline of meritocratic values and practices in virtually all aspects of life in Nigeria in the last three to four decades. Indeed, we must place this factor at the heart of all our conversations concerning the abysmal statistics and data that indicate that corruption, mediocrity and rot have eaten deep into the fabric of the social order in our country.
I should perhaps state very clearly here that I am not a warrior, not an ideologue for pure and unadulterated meritocracy in Nigeria or indeed in any part of the world in which we live. For no pure meritocracy has ever existed and will ever exist in human society. Indeed, relatively speaking, meritocratic values and practices first came into prominence in the modern era largely on the heels of the bourgeois world revolution. As status based on noble birth, inherited wealth and social pedigree was powerfully challenged by ability and talent as the commanding criteria for the creation of the industrial and financial capitalism that changed the world forever, meritocracy achieved a prominence that was unknown in any previous stage of human development. However, in nearly all the countries of the world, “old money” based on meritocratic values and practices constantly gives way to “new money” that largely derives from the subversion of meritocracy as an important organising principle in the social order, especially by large-scale and endemic corruption.
For Nigerians over the age of fifty, these observations will perhaps induce some sentimental nostalgia for late colonial and newly independent Nigeria when merit, talent and ability, mostly obtained through education but also expressed through a dogged spirit of industriousness, mattered a lot, when “old money” derived from trade and commerce reigned as the benchmark for the creation of wealth in our country. School children used to make educational trips to the industrial and commercial enterprises of magnates; I think here of the Odutola Tyre Manufacturing Factory in Ijebu-Ode. Transport magnates like Sir Odumegwu Ojukwu, the father of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, were fabled embodiments of “old money” in that period of our country’s economic and social history. And when the so-called “industrial estates or corridors”, as the first mark of state capitalism in Nigeria, were created in the three regions of the country, they were for the most part run efficiently, at least for some time and especially in the Western Region.
I personally feel no nostalgia, no sentimental wistfulness for the particular order of meritocratic values and practices of that period in the economic affairs of our country. In the present discussion, I cannot get into a full discussion of the reasons for feeling this way. Perhaps at some future date in the column, I shall do so. For now, it suffices for me to state that what I feel, what I urge is this: meritocracy has its place in all modern societies, not as the reigning or supervening element, but as a sort of salve that gives assurance that democratic governance and peace, progress and justice will not be subverted, will not be wiped out by corruption run amuck. Pure meritocracy always inevitably leads to alienated rule by technocrats and bureaucrats; on the other hand, a significant absence of meritocracy leads to the sort of rampaging and destructive rule of kleptocrats and unregenerate oligarchs that has Nigeria and Nigerians under its heels at the present time. Ability and talent are not morally neutral qualities; in the hands of opportunists and cynics, they can be the weapons of thieving, unjust rulers; conversely, when allied to the forces of justice, equality and dignity for all women and men, they can be used to break down the walls of oppression and misrule.
As a people we are not unchangingly defined and constituted by those abysmal statistics, data and figures that are regularly trotted out by both concerned patriots and bemused, unbelieving traducers of the Nigeria in which mediocrity, corruption and rot have become like second nature to the rulers and the ruled, the powerful and the disenfranchised. Any number of refutations can be given to illustrate this contention. Here’s one of them: the children of Nigerian immigrants in the U.S. regularly outperform the children of many of the other national immigrant communities of that country. So, there is nothing naturally “wrong” with our children here in the country; it is the system, the prevailing order that is failing our children at home. Here’s another point to keep in mind: even with the disastrous fall in standards in education in general and writing in particular, the intellectual life of the Nigerian nation is generally far more vibrant than what obtains in many other countries in Africa and other parts of the developing world. And here’s another point that is hardly known, even in Nigeria itself: even with the poor ranking of our universities in the African continent and in the world, against all the odds, many home-based Nigerian academics are producing works of world class standard and are very, very dedicated to their students; moreover, when given the chance in the international arena of global academia, they give very good accounts of themselves.
How can these positive or hopeful portents be used as transformative tools? How can we make Nigerians of all social groups and ethnic communities begin to believe that our children can perform as well at home as they do abroad, that our rulers will not always be unconscionable looters and wastrels, that honesty, compassion and decency might one day actually form the composite ethos of our society? There are no easy answers to these questions, but neither are they beyond the pale of what is possible, given the right kind of environment. This will be the starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series.
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Matters confusing
Just about every aspect of the country’s way of life engenders confusion
It should not be hard to write about matters capable of confusing normal and intelligent people in our country. Just about every aspect of the country’s way of life engenders confusion: infrastructure, traffic management, political governance, political party culture, etc. But today’s column is not about any of these ubiquitous problems. It is about a few things said or half-said about serious issues by those who should know better.
The first confusing issue is about the ‘explanation’ given recently about how Prof. Festus Iyayi died two days ago. The Chief Medical Director of a Specialist Hospital to which Prof. Iyayi was taken after an accident nearLokoja said: “The late ex-president of ASUU had a penetrating injury to his heart, which might have killed him instantly.” The same expert said later that “the same penetrating injury may not have reached his heart,” adding that “beside his seat was a pair of Novas, an anti-hypertensive drug which suggests that he might have been hypertensive.”
What is this medical talk designed to achieve, a science-driven identification of etiology of death? Did Dr. Amodu’s observations derive from the result of post mortem examination? Or, is he a forensic pathologist who can predict from just looking at the body of Iyayi to determine the cause of his death? What has having hypertension to do with dying at the scene of an accident? I am not a medical scientist but I happen to know as a former member of the Postgraduate School Board at Ife about the four sub-specialties under pathology: morbid anatomy, chemical pathology, microbiology, andhaematology. If Dr. Amodu is not a morbid anatomist, should he not have waited for the findings of an expert in this field before giving conflicting or confusing information to the public about a tragic death of this proportion?
All the postulations made by Dr. Amodu should have been delayed to grow out of a thorough post mortem examination. Any attempt to speculate about whether Iyayi died from hypertension or some penetration to his heart should have waited for a post mortem. The statement by the hospital’s sole administrator: “I believe that what will be will be. Iyayi was just destined to die this way because nobody was unconscious in the vehicle” not only contradicted what Dr. Amodu, a chemical pathologist, said but also blurred, avoidably, the line between scientific thinking and fatalistic resignation.
What is expected from members of a medical scientific community is to inform the public about what a thorough post mortem on Prof. Iyayi indicates, not speculations or sermons from medical scientists. After all, the country is not short of morbid anatomists to help conduct a post mortem. I can still remember such names as Professors Odesanmi, Obafunwa, Akang, Anjorin, and Elesa, to name a few. As far as the regular public is concerned, Prof. Iyayi must have died because of the accident. To bring in the issue of his being seen carrying with him anti-hypertensive medications is to give the impression that the authorities in Kogi want to diminish the role of the accident in Iyayi’s premature and sudden death.
A similar distraction is manifested in the testimony attributed to Dr. Francis Idoko, a medical attache to the Kogi State Governor’s convoy. Dr. Idoko is said to have reported that the convoy’s rear vehicle rammed into the bus which was trying to avoid a pothole, adding that the convoy ‘brushed’ the side on which Iyayi was sitting. The question that comes to the average newspaper reader is where exactly was Dr. Idoko when the accident happened? Was he in the last car in the convoy and at what point in time did he determine that the vehicle conveying Iyayi was trying to avoid a pothole? Is Dr. Idoko able to tell the public if the last vehicle in the convoy that rammed into Iyayi’s vehicle was moving at a speed reasonable for a road with potholes? What is needed at this point of national mourning of a man who had made so much sacrifice for the good of this country is not to rush to any conclusion and give the impression that people in high authorities in Kogi are interested in watering down the impact of the accident that killed Iyayi.
Another confusing matter is a recent statement by Senate Deputy President, Ike Ekweremadu:”There is no way the national dialogue would affect or necessitate the suspension of the amendment process….We cannot wait for the national dialogue because we do not know when it will start or when it will end.” It is not clear what the National Assembly plans to achieve by rushing to conclude an exercise that has been on for almost three years, on account of the inability of lawmakers to find out from the president when the national conference will start or end.
Is it possible that the national assembly may know what the rest of the country does not know in respect of the national conference announced by President Jonathan? Many politicians have said that the President is not in a position to be serious enough to hold a meaningful national conference while many others have decided to give the president a chance and count their losses when he fails to deliver on his promise. For the body that has been trying for years to amend the constitution that a national conference is billed to remake or replace to say that it cannot afford to wait for citizens to indicate their preferences on the constitution they want may imply that the lawmakers and the president are not exactly on the same page on the importance of the constitution and on the role of citizens in the making of a constitution that affects them.
If, despite the millions of naira spent so far on efforts to amend the 1999 Constitution, the president came to the conclusion that a national conference was direly needed to have an inclusive approach to amending the constitution, then somebody needs to tell the nation exactly why we should continue to spend money on ongoing or what seems to be interminable amendment of the constitution and also embark at the same time on spending millions on a national conference towards creation of a people’s constitution.
It is too soon to give the impression that the national conference is part of the business as usual governance style that has bedeviled the country over the years. Common sense would indicate that two parallel exercises to amend or remake the 1999 Constitution should not be allowed. If the President believes that the ongoing amendments are adequate to keep the country sustainably united, he should quickly disband the presidential Advisory Committee on National Conference. If he seriously believes that a national dialogue is needed to achieve amendments that citizens can own, he should find ways to persuade the national assembly to give him a chance to do the national conference. What is not clear in the new rivalry between Ekweremadu’s position and that of President Jonathan with respect to the way to keep and grow Nigeria as a Union of Affection among the federating units is where both the president and the federal lawmakers locate the country’s sovereignty.