The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • The Message @ 7

    The Message @ 7

    Time flies. It was like a dream five years ago when this column named ‘THE MESSAGE’ began in the great newspaper called The Nation.

    This columnist had, by then, written Islamic and sundry other columns for 24 years in various Nigerian and foreign daily newspapers as well as weekly magazines including the National Concord, Tehran Times, Vanguard, The Inquiry, Africa Today and a host of others. Naming the column ‘THE MESSAGE’ in The Nation was deliberate.

    Perhaps, no other name accurately matches the divine religion called Islam as much as ‘THE MESSGE’ being the greatest mission to mankind from the Almighty Allah through His greatest Messenger (Muhammad).

    First outing

    In the preamble to the very first article published in this column seven years ago, yours sincerely stated as follows:

    “Here is an Islamic column entitled THE MESSAGE. It is starting today in the name of the almighty Allah, the compassionate the merciful. It will come up on this page henceforth, every Friday Insha’ Allah. This column will be meaningful, both in title and in contents, to the Muslim Ummah, home and abroad as well as to others”.

    Starting at a time when technology has reduced the world into a village and paring with the visionary title of this great newspaper called The Nation, this column promises to deliver THE (great) MESSAGE of Islam to all those who are ready to receive it with genuine intention”.

    Central Focus

    “The central focus of ‘THE MESSAGE’ will be the Man. And the word ‘Man’ here does not refer to Male gender alone. It refers to the most important creature of Allah on earth around whom all issues in the world rotate”.

    “It is only with Man that all other creatures in the world can be relevant. And, Man, whether in the primordial or contemporary sense, is a product of family. There can be no talking of over six billion citizens of the world today, therefore, without a fundamental reference to the family”.

    The family angle

    “Every clan, tribe or nation starts with a family. Thus, ‘THE MESSAGE’ shall be addressed first and foremost, to the family”.

    “And, since there can be no survival for any family without business, it becomes necessary for ‘THE MESSAGE’ to view the family from the premise of the business in which it is engaged”.

    “Arguably, the peace or otherwise of this world depends on those two matters: family and business. Each of these will form a major chapter in ‘THE MESSAGE’. The rest shall be like stars supporting the moon in a celestial entourage. This column will be interesting not only because of the depth of its research but also because it will be participatory in function”.

    The right of reader’s response shall be treated as sacrosanct. And, there will be no discrimination. Welcome on board of ‘THE MESSAGE’ being delivered to ‘THE NATION’ through The Nation….”

    And, when the column was one year old in 2007, an article meant to celebrate the occasion was written in this column. It was entitled:

    ‘A child at one’

    As a reminder, I decided to recall that article here for the purpose of gratifying the Almighty Allah who piloted us to this day through that odyssey. It went thus:

    “The young shall grow. With his brain, teeth and limbs, he shall evolve into a dependent adolescent. And, through the various circumstances of life, he shall grow into an independent adult. In the process, he must have learnt how to suck, how to eat, how to sit, how to crawl, how to walk and how to run. Thereafter, like a competent Cadet, he shall rise through the ranks to become an army General one day. Like a prince, he shall struggle through thick and thin to become a king one day. Like a student, he shall study days and nights to become a professor one day. Like a servant, he shall serve and serve loyally until he becomes a master one day. Then, he shall ask himself the vital question: “how did I reach this stage?”

    “It is not by leading battalions of army to war or by conquering an avowed enemy that a General of worth is said to emerge. What makes a worthy General is the ability to care for the rear as much as he ravages the war arena”.

    “For most Nigerian Muslim readers of newspapers, especially The Nation, this column is a ‘General’ in its own right. And, to be worthy of the name, it becomes a sine qua none to look back, at this point, and see if the archers are still there with their bows and arrows”.

    The arc

    “Today, ‘THE MESSAGE’ as a column, is one year old. It was all like yesterday when it started cruising, like the Arc of Noah, across oceans and seas, some of which are ‘Atlantic’ while others are ‘Pacific’.

    “On board of that ‘Arc’ were a number of issues revolving around Islamic religion. But like any newly christened child, only a few people were aware of the existence of this column until a few months ago”.

    “Today, however, the story is different. In virtually all corners of Nigeria and even some countries abroad, ‘THE MESSAGE’ is now a house hold name just like The Nation.

    “Readers of the column are not from amongst the Muslims alone. They are not from amongst Nigerians alone. They cut across religions, tribes, races, genders, ideologies and interests. Their reactions confirm this”.

    Original design

    “The column was designed from inception, to serve the purpose of a weekly Friday sermon in a written form. Thus, like any informed sermon, it discusses, comprehensively, all issues affecting the lives of Muslims vis a vis the fundamental principles of their religion”. It ascertains all perceivable problems and proffers Islamic solutions to them where necessary according to its intellectual ability”.

    “Going by its title, this column is not a message to the Muslims alone. It is a message to all civilised people who want to know the reason for the existence of Islam and the extent of its workings. It is a means of harmonising the similarities and dichotomising the dissimilarities between it and other revealed religions that preceded it”.

    “It is also a mode of interaction between the Muslims and non-Muslims over some issues hitherto considered knotty and unresolved. And by making the column a participatory one whereby readers are privileged to express their opinions and observations in reaction to its contents, a better understanding is coming to the fore”.

    “This is gradually reducing the mutual suspicion which had existed for years particularly between the adherents of Islam and those of Christianity in Nigeria”.

    Peace and no rancour

    “Now, by understanding that religion, in any society, is like a university where various faculties exist and admission seekers can enroll in any faculty without one looking down on another, readers of this column are beginning to see religion as an instrument of peace rather than that of rancour”.

    “Now, it is becoming clearer that religion is by personal conviction which should not be offensive to others who may yet be convinced. Neither should it be by coercion. And if, in the process of practicing what is believed, some elements of bigotry are reflected, let that be attributed to the messenger rather than the message”.

    Not all ambassadors are worth their mission. There is no sphere of life without bigots. Fanatics are not restricted to religion alone. They are found in politics, business, professions, cultures and even sports. Human nature must be separated from the precepts of religions.

    Major vices

    “Here in Nigeria, two major vices are abhorrent to Islam and Christianity on the ground of morality and justice. These are corruption and religious violence both of which are dangerous for Nigeria or any country”.

    ‘THE MESSAGE’ took up these two vices as part of its contents declaring jihad on both and exposing as well as condemning them wherever and whenever they surface.

    It is also noteworthy that this column does not overlook any wrong doing in the society, be it political, social, economic or religious. And credit is given to whoever deserves it without any discrimination on the basis of religion, tribe or politics.

    However, what ‘THE MESSAGE’ will not tolerate, is blackmail especially by political zealots and who think that politics is their own monopoly and a no go area for religionists. These are people elected to represent the populace in governance but on getting to office, turn themselves into masters using the people’s mandate to exploit the same people who put them in office. They steal public funds with unbridled audacity and expect no one to raise voice on it.

    “They use politics to intimidate and even invade the rights of professionals and private practitioners in other spheres of life without looking back. When seeking political offices, these self-centred politicians can go to Churches and Mosques to canvass for votes as well as spiritual support. But when they commit political or social atrocities in office and get condemned by Pastors and Imams, they quickly resort to blackmail, warning clergy men not to dabble into politics”.

    Sphere

    In Islam, there is no barrier between one sphere of life and another. The life of a Muslim is totally governed by the tenets of their religion. And those tenets cut across all spheres of life without any demarcation.

    Just as it will be improper and irrational for those in the economic or business sector to scare away politicians from economy so it is for politicians who want to prevent religionists from commenting on politics.

    That is an intolerable aggression which ‘THE MESSAGE’ as a pulpit in form of a column will not condone. Those who don’t want religion to be mixed with politics should not ask for votes in Churches and Mosques. As Muslims, we shall not allow anybody to use our political mandate to devastate our lives and still gag us.

    In this sphere, the Nigerian media men are like politicians. Under the cloak of religion or politics, they easily paint white in black colour and give blackmail a preference. It is they who coin such words as ‘marginalisation and Islamisation both of which cannot be found in any English dictionary. Like politicians and religious fanatics, Nigerian journalists are in their very best at displaying ingenuity when it comes to evil disposition. They are the primary inventors of political and religious conflicts in Nigeria. Yet, they behave like an ostrich that buries its head in the sand while its huge body remains exposed. They are a dangerous species to be wary of in the country as they impede all avenues of peace and harmony.

    Regardless of the evil antics of Nigerian politicians, journalists and religious bigots, as before, this column will continue to commend good deed and condemn evil actions in all spheres of life no matter whose ox may be gored. Islam is an international religion. It has no barriers in terms of nations, races and tribes. A Muslim in New Zealand is a brother to another in Alaska or Helsinki.

    Wherever and whenever they meet, the usual greeting is ‘Salam alaykun’ (peace be onto you). They pray together in the same language and Mosques; they face the same direction of the Ka‘abah in Makkah; they recite the same Qur’an in its original language; they fast together in the same sacred month of Ramadan and they come together once every year in an unprecedented assembly to perform Hajj in the vicinity of Makkah and Madinah.

    Thus, they are like a flock of sheep. If one of them is afflicted, the rest cannot be in peace. Thus, the problem of Muslims in any part of the world must be the concern of all other Muslims in the rest parts of the world.

    That is why ‘THE MESSAGE’ must comment on Muslim activities around the world if only to inform its local Muslim readers about the affairs of their brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world.

    Most of these had been part of this column in the past one year. They will continue to be. One other thing added to the column along the line is the resume on Islamic health through the use of bee products especially honey. This is considered an added value from which great advantage can be derived by readers who can appreciate the benefit of ‘apitherapy’ (the use of bee products to heal ailments in modern day health care. This will also be continued.

    Also to be chronicled in this column, from time to time, are some prominent Schools of Arabic and Islamic Studies, and other higher institutions as well as the great scholars behind them. All these are being packaged for a column which has some of the best intellectuals of this country as its readers.

    As the formidable ship of ‘THE MESSAGE’ is ready to cruise on the high sea, all those who are heading for the ‘cape of good hope’ are welcome on board. Congratulations for being alive to witness one year of this ship on its life’s odyssey’’.

    Comment

    The above article was published on August 31, 2007 partly as a review of one year performance and partly as a promise for improvement.

    Today, seven years after the commencement of this column in The Nation and six years after the quoted self-assessment, venerable readers can take the baton of comments from here.

    Has ‘THE MESSAGE’ lived up to expectation as an Islamic column? Has it fulfilled its promises in full or in part? What are the minuses expected to be rectified? What new frontiers should this column forage? Readers are free to critique, criticise, advise, make observations and even score this column in its seven years of existence.

    This columnist is not apathetic to criticism since there can be no growth without criticism. But a poisoned food is not worth the name of a meal. Besides, only reactions that are standard in language and reason will be published in this column. ‘The Message’ has transcended the pedestrian level of dirty politics and religious bigotry.

    Meanwhile, I wish to express a profound gratitude to genuine readers of this column. Their readership is the impetus propelling the spirit behind the ideas and thoughts appearing in this column every Friday. Without readers, there can be no columnists. Thus, readers are greater than writers. I am proud of you all.

    I pray Allah to safeguard our well illuminated path from getting blocked by the forces of darkness. Assalam alaykum!

     

  • Honours 2013

    Honours 2013

    We almost forgot it. Who wouldn’t, considering the evil that stalks the land all through the year, leaving little room for the clarity of thoughts that such an intellectual exertion demands. Boko and all the other harams. Plane crashes. Communal clashes. Robberies, Kidnapping. Assassinations. Extrajudicial killings. And more. I wonder how President Goodluck Jonathan still sleeps.

    Only last week, 25 people died in a stampede after a church programme in Anambra State. A few days before then, Boko Haram – o my God; what a scary name – attacked a wedding party, killing 30.

    Under such circumstances, you will agree with me, it is easy to forget all those remarkable achievements – politicians call them giant strides – we have made in the course of the year.

    A long preamble? Well, I just needed to make the clarification. Any notebook worthy of its name, needless to say, should put every issue it discusses in perspective so as not to be accused of obfuscation. Or grandstanding.

    Now, dear reader, welcome to Honours 2013. Remember this is the platform on which we recognise excellence, those rare feats by our compatriots which may have gone unnoticed, either because of some deliberate plots –envy, if you like – or sheer ignorance by the authorities. It is not in any way to be confused with the contentious and sometimes divisive national honours. No.

    Where else to start than politics where we have many nominees, whose giant strides –pardon the cliché, please – will confuse even the most painstaking of panellists. In other words, there are so many who deserve to carry the day. Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, the national chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has succeeded where many giants failed. Before he took office, the largest party in Africa – its ignorant detractors will always ask scornfully: what does that mean; is size a yardstick of performance; size sans sense? – was infested with that morbid disease that has killed many areas of our public life, indiscipline.

    Today, I am happy to report without any fear of contradiction by those pseudo historians who hide under the dubious nomenclature, social analyst, that Tukur has brought discipline back to the party –at a great personal risk.

    Only seven of the 23 PDP governors are threatening to leave the party for what they call its resistance to reforms, the very virtue that Tukur has brought bountifully. No more the slackness and hedonism of the past. A governor was suspended because he did not return the chairman’s call (bad enough to have missed the call in the first place- for whatever reason). Another was slammed for watching while the House of Assembly suspended a local government chairman. He refused to stop the lawmakers, claiming to be respecting the separation of powers between the executive and the legislature, according to the charge. Now, those who are still in doubt of the new dawn in the PDP will soon have their properties demolished. Should they attempt to hold any unauthorised meeting, the police will be sent to smash such gatherings.

    Not even the courts can protect any party member. The other day, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola was brandishing a court judgment that nullified his sack as national secretary. He said he would like to return to his desk. The Tukur leadership, apparently defending party supremacy as against the rule of law under which many arrogant members hide to weaken the system, resisted Oyinlola’s move.

    For all these feats and others that are too many to enumerate here, including the acceleration of the PDP’s plan to rule for 60 years –in the first instance – Tukur is the ‘Politician of the Year’.

    It was difficult picking the ‘Minister of the Year’, considering the array of cabinet members who are fit and proper and worthy in character and action to get this prestigious prize. For a long time, people were dying in accidents on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. A company won the concession to rebuild the road – Nigeria’s busiest – but for one reason or the other it could not do the job. There is also the East-West road, another killer highway. Both seemed abandoned until Mike Onolememen mounted the saddle. Now, President Jonathan has cut the tape to signal the commencement of work on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, but skeptics are asking: when will work start?

    But the prize is not Onolememen’s, despite his exceptional deeds. Neither is it Agriculture Minister Akinwunmi Adesina’s – for making cassava bread the king on all breakfast tables. Nor is it Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s – for all those esoteric figures which, to her, mark a remarkable leap in the economy’s growth, even as many go to bed hungry and the jobless queue is growing.

    Aviation Minister Stella Oduah is ‘Minister of the Year’. All our airports are sparkling, courtesy of multi-billion contracts that many poor students of arithmetic can’t just figure out, saying they are shrouded in secrecy, as if contract details should be pasted on town hall notice boards. There have been just a few crashes – thanks to Ms Oduah’s safety-first policy, which states that safety should not only be an all-flight affair. The Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) has bought two BMW bulletproof cars at N255m for her safety. The ‘Transaction of the Year’ has raised so much dust, in a manner that has confounded safety experts who know the value of a minister’s life. A young fellow who knows a Cabinet source told me the other day that he learnt the safety-first policy would soon be adopted by all ministries, who will be required to “do the needful” by getting more sophisticated armoured vehicles. Prices? Keep guessing.

    The Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) did not mean much to many, until President Jonathan got involved in its politics. An election to elect its chairman became a fratricidal strife that consumed its integrity. Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi won the election with 19 votes against Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang’s 16. Jang, goaded on by Akwa Ibom State Governor Godswill Akpabio and others of controversial democratic credentials, declared himself winner. His proof: there was an unwritten understanding among his colleagues that the job was his for the asking. Those who did not understand such a gentleman’s agreement in politics said His Excellency was naïve. Off to the Villa he went to show off his prize and to church to thank God for the victory.

    For believing in the strange logic that 16 is bigger than 19 and doing his all to defend it, Jang is the ‘Governor of the Year’.

    Besides Inspector-General Muhammed Abubakar, no other police officer is as popular as Mbu Joseph Mbu, the cantankerous Rivers State Commissioner of Police. The more he cries that he is a professional and not a politician, the more he gets immersed in the bitter politics that has split the state along two main ideological lines – those Amaechi variously calls thieves and looters and those crying for change, their leader being Education Minister Nyesom Wike. Mbu has banned public gatherings, tear gassing innocent people who he thinks have flouted the order. The road to the Government House was once blocked against Governor Amaechi and his guests. When the state government complained to Abubakar, he found nothing wrong with Mbu’s actions. In fact, Mbu got a pat on the back.

    Step forward Officer Mbu, our ‘Policeman of the Year’. To many, you are a good example of a bad policeman, an officer but not a gentleman and a pugnacious fellow who lacks respect for constituted authority. To the IG, however, you are a fine officer. Isn’t this the real testimonial?

    Dangote Group President Aliko Dangote would have easily gone home with the ‘Businessman of the Year’ Award. After all, he is still Africa’s richest. Besides, he is listed among the world’s powerful men – and women. But what took Dangote years of toiling and sweating has taken some young fellows a few months to achieve. They have become billionaires overnight, without sleepless nights. This award is for the fuel subsidy merchants- many insist they are fraudsters- who had made it big long before the government woke up to the fact that we were being massively swindled.

    More awards will soon be announced. Watch out. To all our awardees, I say congratulations.

    Iyayi and a governor’s killer convoy

     It was devastating. Festus Iyayi, university teacher, writer, unionist and rights activist, died on Tuesday when a vehicle in the convoy of Kogi State Governor Idris Wada rammed into a bus in which some officials of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) were travelling. Sad.

    If the government had kept an agreement it signed in 2009, perhaps Iyayi would not have needed to travel. Why is Wada’s convoy so accident-prone? He got a broken leg the other time when his convoy crashed. What is the mental state of the governor’s drivers? Are convoy drivers above the law? Is the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), which is expected to enforce speed limits, helpless? Will Iyayi die in vain?

    With the death of Iyayi, the Nigerian state has succeeded in murdering another star. Many, stifled by the rot Iyayi and the others are fighting against, have long relocated overseas. May heaven accept Iyayi’s soul and console us all.

  • Salami : A postmortem

    For over two years, he was denied his right. Though he fought hard to regain what truly belonged to him, he was frustrated by the powers that got him out of office as president of the Court of Appeal on August 18, 2011. Justice Isa Ayo Salami is a principled man and he displayed this throughout the years he was on unjust suspension. They wanted him to jettison his principle for filthy lucre but he refused and stood firm to the end. Such men of courage and conviction of their actions are rare in our society.

    Justice Salami was treated like a non – entity because he refused to do the bidding of those who wanted to ruin the judiciary, which is the last hope of the common man. Politicians and some senior members of the Bench wanted to sell the judiciary to the highest bidder, but he said no. What did Justice Salami get? He was slammed with an unjust suspension. The few men of conscience in the society spoke against the suspension, demanding that Justice Salami be recalled. President Goodluck Jonathan, who in the first place should not have intervened in the matter, pretended not to have heard.

    If the president had not wielded the power he did not have by suspending Justice Salami at the behest of the then much compromised National Judicial Council (NJC), things may not have turned out the way they did. The president, his Minister of in(Justice)Mohammed Adoke and his party were on the same page on the Justice Salami saga. Their plan when they found that they could not get the man to sell his integrity for a mess of porridge was to look for ways to push him out of office. They succeeded in retching up wild allegations about his alliance with the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), which defeated the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in court in some governorship election cases.

    The Court of Appeal voided the governorship elections in Osun and Ekiti states, among others, to the annoyance of PDP. Since it is the party in power at the centre, it hatched a plot to get the president to deal with Justice Salami as head of the court for refusing to play ball. His refusal to play ball, a euphemism to turn a blind eye to what is wrong and allow injustice to prevail, cost him his job. Justice Salami found himself in the cold because he allowed the court he presided over to uphold justice. A judge’s oath to which he swore is all about being fair and firm no matter whose ox is gored. A judge, who cannot dispense justice without fair or favour, is not worth his seat.

    Justice Salami proved that he was worthy of his position. If those against him had found any thing against him, he would have been mince meat by now. There was nothing they did not do to nail him, but his honesty and sincerity stood him in good stead. We have many like that in the judiciary. My fear is that with what happened to Justice Salami these judges may start having doubts about standing by the truth come rain come shine. Won’t Justice Salami’s experience affect them negatively? Will they like Justice Salami abide by the conviction of their action when the chips are down? A society gets the kind of judges it deserves. With a corrupt political leadership, the judiciary cannot be expected to be incorrupt, except by the grace of God. This is why today our judiciary stinks. What happens at the customary and magistrates’ courts is a just a tip of the ice berg.

    What goes on at the courts of competent jurisdiction, that is, the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court is something else, going by the stories we hear. It is a case of if the head stinks, what do you expect of the body? It is a shame that we cannot boast about our judiciary because of the conduct of some judges, who believe that they must use their exalted position to make money, while doing what is wrong. Our society has become the worst for it. The few upright judges cannot do anything or else they will be ostracised. A judge, a good judge, deserves the protection of the state. A state, which believes in the rule of law, must not allow its judges to come to ridicule under whatever guise. Unfortunately, a state like ours believes in disgracing its honest judges.

    It allows the corrupt ones to go

    scot free because they are at its

    beck and call. They are the ones used to do the dirty jobs, which conscientious judges refuse outright. Must a judge be afraid of those in power? A judge, who knows what he is doing should not fear the political leadership, as clearly shown in the case of Justice Salami. If Justice Salami had skeleton in his cupboard, he would not have been able to stand up to those who wanted to drag his name in the mud at all cost. He has shown that a judge, who is above board, has nothing to fear but his conscience and God. Justice Salami should be happy with himself that he upheld his oath of office faithfully. This is what saved him in his fight with the forces of darkness. His joy should be that the same cannot be said of his antagonists.

    This is why today he holds his head high in retirement. They only succeeded in getting him out of office two years before his retirement, they did not succeed in killing the values of discipline, hard work, fairness and firmness, which he cherished. He has left the Bench, but he left something behind, which those still in office must ensure does not die and that is the integrity of the judiciary must not be compromised come what may. If Justice Salami had soiled his hands, he would not have left in glory as he did last week. From every part of the country people gathered to honour him; to tell him that they stood by him during his travail but could not do anything because they lacked the power to right the wrong done him.

    How did his tormentors feel, seeing him standing tall before a quality gathering in Abuja last month? They would have given anything to exchange places with the eminent jurist. But such privilege does not come cheap, it is earned. To earn it, every public officer must be God fearing, diligent and above board. But these are words many of them do not wish to hear. Politicians got Justice Salami not because he was “too rigid” as some are wont to say, they got him because his people were not with him. A man’s enemies are his own relations. This exactly was what happened to Justice Salami. “My colleagues, friends betrayed me”, he said at the valedictory court session for him in Abuja on October 31. The previous day at the presentation of a book : “Isa Ayo Salami : Through life and justice”, written in his honour , encomiums were showered on him for being the quintessential judge.

    All the speakers spoke glowingly of the man whose last two years on the Bench may in future be a research topic for law students. Why did the NJC act the way it did? Why did the president intervene in an issue in which he is not constitutionally empowered to act? Why did he not ignore the NJC recommendation to suspend Justice Salami? Why did he not reverse himself when the NJC subsequently asked him to recall Justice Salami? Can a president, who defied the court in suspending Justice Salami, hide under the same court in not recalling the judge? These are some of the posers law students will seek to unravel in future. It is painful when brothers and friends betray one. Such betrayals are felt in the marrow.

    This, perhaps, was what Justice

    Salami’s reflection was all

    about at his valedictory. Hear him : “The last three years of my career were dogged by travails which are not dissimilar to the fate of Joseph in the book of Genesis in the Bible. As his brothers conspired to destroy him by throwing him into a well and selling him into slavery, my learned brothers and friends in the legal profession planned and executed evil against me. The NJC created by the Constitution to protect me, nay any judicial officer, was in the vanguard of my travails. The NJC failed in its duties and thereby surrendered its functions to the Executive arm of government, thus ingratiating itself to the Executive…

    “…The NJC having cleared me of any wrongdoing, following the recommendation of CJN Aloma Mukhtar’s committee, ought to have recalled me ito office without asking the president to exercise the power that he does not possess, on the flimsy excuse that it had earlier referred the matter to him”. Milord, all is well that ends well. If they had not acted this way, we won’t have known the kind of friends they are. With friends like them, you don’tbo need an enemy. Happy retirement sir.

  • PPPRA’s insensitivity

    The Executive Secretary of the Petroleum Products Price Regulatory Agency, PPPRA, Reginald Stanley says that the agency with a staff strength of 249, supervised by an unwieldy 22-man strong board, earning a scandalously whopping salaries and allowances of N57.9 billion per annum is a blessing to Nigeria. For him the company’s monumental achievement in the last one year as a result of selfless service of the staff and the quality of leadership provided by the minister of petroleum calls for celebration. PPPRA, according to him has become so transparent in the last one year that only unpatriotic elements and enemies of progress will fail to see such self evident achievements. Indeed, for him, if there had been any criticism of PPPRA at all, it could only have been the work of “fifth columnists who are out to spread odium, hatred and campaigns of calumny” because of the body’s “resolve to support the minister of petroleum resources to make the difference’.

    Last week, during a Channel Television programme, he had in a tone soaked with patriotic fervour, declared: “No amount of intimidation or smear campaign can make us to derail in our resolve to serve our fatherland with integrity and honesty of purpose”. He then went on to remind Nigerians that “the minister of petroleum resources has put measures in place that consistently prevented corruption in the downstream sector of the oil industry in recent years”. He did not however tell us if “recent years” covered 2011 when through acts of omission of the minister and Ahmadu Alli, former chairman of PPPRA, a whopping N1.7 trillion was, according to House committee probe report, allegedly stolen by those with close links with PDP and government.

    But nonetheless, he went ahead to reel out what he considered unmatched achievements of PPPRA in the last one year: Bringing sanity to the downstream sector of the oil industry; reducing the level of fuel consumption by Nigerians from 60.25 million in 2011 to 39.66 litres in 2012 and pruning down of the number of fuel importers from unwieldy 128 in 2011, to 39 in 2012″

    He ignored the House Committee report that dismissed the level of consumption claimed by PPPRA as false and the fact that it was the reckless decision of the minister and the then chairman of PPPRA that saw the number of fuel importers moved from less than a dozen to 128 all in effort to spread patronage among PDP members and sympathizers.

    Stanley also wants Nigerians to congratulate PPPRA for reducing the N2.1 trillion the body fraudulently claimed it spent on phantom subsidy in 2011 to less than one trillion in 2012. He pretends as if we don’t have the ongoing court cases arising from National Assembly probe which recommended some leading light of PDP and their siblings for prosecution for allegedly forging documents to claim fuel subsidy when in truth they, to borrow a phrase used by Audu Ogbe, a former PDP chairman, “never imported a bottle of fuel”.

    And finally, in what amounts to an unprovoked assault on our sensibilities, the PPPRA Executive Secretary said we should all celebrate PPPRA and the minister of petroleum for “bringing integrity, creating system, processes and stability in product supply”. How much more can a people take from a group of self-proclaiming patriots who treat all of us as if we are all kindergarten pupils? It is incredible how some government officials who in other climes should be in court defending their integrity freely apply pepper into our eyes, and ask us to laugh instead of crying.

    Beyond puerile attempt by civil servants with no ambition beyond serving political office holders to hood wink us, a closer focus on the emergence of PPPRA itself will show it was like the monetization policy, an ingenious creation of PDP new breed politicians designed to confiscate our common wealth. In other words, policy formulation and policy implementation have become instruments of corruption to further impoverish our people.

    By strange coincidence, PDP assumption of power in 1999 was greeted with long queues at the filling stations, a development not brought about by market forces of demand and supply but mainly due to manipulation of the market to create artificial scarcity. Cynics say it was a strategy by cash-strapped PDP’s newly elected politicians to recoup their investments following their public confession that they sold private properties to fight the 1999 election.

    As parts of achieving this objective, contracts for the refurbishment of the refineries were awarded to politicians instead of multinationals that built them. The refurbishment exercise failed as was planned.

    As if working to answer, President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the Petroleum Products Pricing Committee which in turn recommended PPPRA with a mandate to “liberalise the downstream sector of the petroleum industry, privatise the refineries, deregulate and liberalise the imports of petroleum products and, generally, make the products available at reasonable prices”. The Bill for the establishment of PPPRA was promptly passed into law in February 2003 and assented to by Obasanjo in May 2003 because PDP had vested interest. (PIB has been pending for over five years}

    But PPPRA’s assigned functions turned out to be mere duplications of functions of Pipelines and Product Marketing Company, (PPMC) which was set up in 1988 to “profitably and efficiently market refined petroleum products in the domestic as well as export markets, especially in the ECOWAS sub-region, provide marine services and also maintain uninterrupted movement of refined petroleum products from the local refineries.”

    For those behind PPPRA, the end justifies the means. Not even the existence of the NNPC Act 1977 which saddled the minister of petroleum with the responsibilities of “regulating and fixing petroleum product prices and supervising the MPR/DPR that has sole regulatory authority over technical standards, refining, and logistics in the sector”, was going to stop them.

    Today, 10 years down the line, PPPRA has served only the interest of those who set it up. The lot of the poor is worse today than it was 10 years ago. They still cannot afford the cost of cooking gas while the so-called subsidized kerosene sells for about N140 naira outside NNPC filling stations.

    It has also turned out that the argument of both Sanusi Lamido, the CBN governor and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Finance, that it was only the middle class owners of two cars and diesel engine generators who were beneficiaries of government’s so-called subsidy has been proved to be more political than economic. As a result of their false prognosis, many industries that depend on diesel to run their factories have all folded up. Those managing to survive cannot compete with fake and substandard goods flooding the market due to import licenses selectively allocated to party members. It was on account of this Dangote Cement temporarily suspended production not too long ago.

    Unlike, PPMC, PPPRA has shown more commitments to importation of refined petroleum products than making our own refineries work. Instead of using NNPC facilities or rehabilitating the over 4,000 kilometres of petroleum pipeline commissioned by Obasanjo in 1979, PPPRA depends on the storage facilities of members of Depot Petroleum Products Marketers Association (DAPPMA) (Obat Petroleum is reputed to have the largest and most modern storage facilities in the world). It also patronises Independent Marketers Company (NIPCO) that has invested billions in storage facilities and a jetty in Apapa. It also relies to some degree on the services of Oando and Zenon petroleum companies that jointly control over 200 trucks and a jetty owned by Zenon.

    We now know without consulting the duo of Sanusi and Okonojo-Iweala, that a government that expends so much of our resources through PPPRA to patronize parasites instead of buildings refineries serves not our interest but those of the parasites.

    PPPRA that guzzles N57.9 billion every year serves only the interest of those who set it up to recoup money spent on election. With N600 billion, we will probably build two medium refineries that will end our dependency on imported fuel and provide job for a few of our 29 million unemployed youth. Of course, it will force current beneficiaries of the so-called deregulation presently falling over each other to erect the largest storage facility in the world and rent to government that can neither manage existing refineries nor NNPC tank farms, to stop feeding on our blood.

  • The beast that we Nigerians must tame

    It the height of the Western Region crisis of 1962-6, the crisis that led to the collapse of Nigeria’s First Republic and the coming of Nigeria’s first military coup (of January 1966), a prominent Lagos lawyer, Femi Okunu, made a statement that became famous.  He said, “The power of the federal government has grown, is growing, and ought to be curbed”.

    Femi Okunu was speaking in an era when the powers of the federal government were still comparatively small and well-defined, and when our regional authorities were still the makers and movers of development and progress in our country.

    Today, what we still call our federal government does not operate as a member government in a federation; it rules all and dictates to all. We no longer have a federation; what we have is a chaotic jumble of ruins in which, and through which, a so-called federal government stampedes and rumbles at will.

    And herein lies the root of our country’s growing poverty and hopelessness.  Herein lies the ever escalating unemployment among our youths, the constant flight of our educated youths to other lands, the growing spectre of violent conflicts all over our country, the descent of some of our youths into aberrations such as Boko Haram and secret cults.  It is the root of that horrendous iniquity whereby we let the Delta lands that produce all our petroleum wealth become the poorest and most neglected part of our country.

    As natural resources go, our country is one of the richest places in the world. And as soon as our own leading citizens were given the duty, from about 1952, to manage most of our county’s affairs, we commendably began to strive to fulfil our country’s promise. In the context of our federation of three regions, we engaged in a lively rivalry for greater and greater socio-economic developments, and for constantly measurable improvements in the quality of the lives of our people. Our start-off resources for participation in the world economy were humble, consisting mostly of exports of a few crops – cocoa from the Western Region, palm produce from the Eastern, and groundnuts from the Northern.  But we made the best of what we had. Each region developed better and better programmes for supporting and encouraging the producers of its export crop, thereby helping those producers to earn more income and Nigeria to earn more foreign exchange.  Each region went on from this base to advance in its own chosen direction – free primary education in the West, ambitious industrialization efforts in the West and the East and, to a lesser extent, also in the North, and impressive infrastructural programs everywhere.

    Oh, sure, there was partisan politics. That’s the nature of modern democratic countries. But “development” was the big game in our country, and the regions were where most of the big game was played.  Each region commanded adequate freedom and resources to be able to play its own share of the game, and to be able to make its own kind of contributions to the overall growing prosperity of our country. That is how a federation is supposed to be.

    But, then, in 1962, the federal government took the insane step of trying to establish federal control over one of our regions – the Western Region.  That step unleashed a cataclysmic progression of events which ultimately brought our military into the management of our country’s affairs.  Trained for, and used only to, central command, the military turned our country into a centrally commanded country.

    Run-away corruption became a close companion of over-centralized governing.  In the hands of our military rulers, the growing volume of petroleum revenue only bred an almost sub-human species of greed, accompanied by a desire to control more and more.  The regional and local passions and energies that had pushed our country steadily forward were destroyed. Focusing all attention on petroleum, our federal controllers abandoned the nurturing of the other assets that had been building our country’s economy.

    Denied the old regional help and encouragement, our cash crop farmers lost morale and hope. The federal authorities made the situation worse by establishing federal “regulation” (that is, control) over the cash crops.  By 1965, Nigeria was still one of the largest exporters of groundnuts, palm produce and cocoa in the world. By 1980, Nigeria had ceased to be a serious exporter of any, and our farmers who had been luxuriating on the income from those exports became pauperized. Their growing poverty rapidly spread to the general fabric of our society. Economists say that tropical Africa’s earnings from exports fell dramatically during the 1970s, losing about $70 billion per annum, and that much of those losses were Nigeria’s.  The peoples of the former Northern Region suffered the most, because, unfortunately, serious droughts ravaged the distant North in these years, blasting farming and cattle rearing – at a time when our federal controllers just didn’t have any attention to give to anything other than the petroleum from which they were stealing large personal fortunes.

    Concerning the “regulation” of our cash crops by the federal government, I heard a frightening story in 1989 from the Managing Director of a Nigerian private company in his office in Isolo, Lagos. The said company was doing a growing export business in gum-Arabic from the North – but suddenly the federal government ordered them to surrender the export business to federal government agencies. And within a year, Nigeria disappeared as an exporter of gum-Arabic.

    Someday, hopefully, some bright young historian will delve into these matters and tell the world the story of how the Nigerian federal government, in its mad zeal to control everything, destroyed all regional and local development energies, turned Nigeria into a poor country, attracted most enterprising Nigerians away from truly productive enterprises into a life of hustling and sharing of public money, and turned a land of bright hope into a land of utter hopelessness.

    Look in any direction, and you will see the destructive effects of federal seizure and control everywhere – in the brutalizing of the intellectual excellence of our topmost universities and the drastic weakening of our educational system in general.  You will see it in the virtual elimination of our local governments as crucial factors in our regional development efforts, in the collapse of some aspects of our infrastructures (like roads and highways) and our pathetic failure to make sense of other aspects (like electricity). You will see it in the actual deliberate federal obstruction of the efforts of some state governments to do good things for their states, and in the political instability resulting from the use of federal power to manipulate state elections and to impose favoured persons on our states.  You will see it in the destruction of the integrity of our higher courts.

    To return our country to the path of sanity and progress, we Nigerians must join hands, peacefully reorder our country, curb the monster that is wrecking our country, and free our energies to go back to constructive work.  That is the only path of hope for our country. Whoever thinks that Nigeria can exist for much longer than now under the present chaos of federal control is seriously mistaking. If Nigeria breaks up soon, as many informed people are predicting, then it will be because we let the federal government continue to be the unruly dictator and master of all.

  • Nigeria’s cultural tapestry and challenge of dev.t – 5

    If it appears that the Islamic polities of northern Nigeria had been monarchical right from the pre-jihad era, we should not lose sight of the codifications of norms that governed public civic culture. A striking illustration of this – the fact that governance was taken seriously and guided by some publicly declared rules – is that at least two treatises were written and circulated in the Central Sudan. During the reign of Sarkin Kano Muhammad Rumfa (d.1499), the celebrated Muslim cleric Muhammad b. Abd al-Karim al-Maghili al-Tlemsani (better known as Al-Maghili) authored a treatise, Risalat al-Muluk (The Obligations of Princes), which spelt out Islamic standards of good governance for the guidance of Rumfa, who was a notable Muslim in his own right. Two other examples from the early nineteenth-century history of the Sokoto Caliphate further illustrate the historical depth of the idea of a governance template.

    First, the leader of the Sokoto jihad, Uthman dan Fodio, authored the Kitab al-Farq (A Book of Distinction), in which he distinguished the practices of non-Islamic polities from those of the envisaged Islamic State. It is interesting that when the ulama al-sui, who were embedded in the power structure or siyasa (politics) of the day criticised him for preaching without separating women from the men, he countered that it was a minor and forgivable infraction compared to the greater fitna of keeping women in ignorance. From this we could see that Dan Fodio himself had struck an early blow in favour of girl-child or women education even in a conservative Islamic setting. Small wonder that the cleric’s own daughter, Nana Asma’u, was a poetess and celebrated author in her own right. Not only did Dan Fodio promote women literacy, he practised what he preached in his own household, unlike most modern leaders today.

    Second, in c.1807, in the early years of the jihad, Uthman dan Fodio’s brother, Abdullahi, a poet and lawyer, was so disgusted with the manifestation of worldliness among the jihaddists that he abandoned the struggle for a pilgrimage to the East. However, on getting to Kano, the local reformists prevailed on him to abandon his eastward journey. During his sojourn in Kano, where he also observed some deviations, he composed at his hosts’ request a treatise on how to run the government according to the tenets of Islam. Abdullahi dan Fodio’s Diyâ’ al-Hukkâm (The Light of the Rulers or The Principles of Government) was a sort of governance template for the emergent Kano emirate. It is a moot point whether any ruler in that part of the country is guided by that document or any other on good governance.

    Other examples can be cited from local settings across Nigeria. What is worth stressing is that our traditional values and practices should be re-visited to harness those that can help us to re-invent the culture of civility and developmental governance. How a society treats its women and what it does about peaceful co-existence or the treatment of so-called strangers tell much about its level of development. This is true of Nigerian communities even in pre-colonial times.

    The role of women in various societies is a case in point. In practically all Nigerian societies, even in the matrilineal ones, women have played second fiddle to men, even their own sons and younger brothers. Yet, women have also exercised soft power, which often affected the directions of state policy. The point is that many Nigerian communities recognise and accord women certain roles that men did not play. For example, till date, women are preferred as regents in some kingdoms; in some others they held titles and took part in direct decision making in the highest councils, though always as a minority. In practically all societies, women entrepreneurship was the norm, even when cultural practices limited their mobility. Where they suffered no such restrictions, they accumulated wealth, owned property and played overt politics. The mythical Queen Amina, the historical Madame Tinubu of Lagos and Abeokuta, Efunsetan Aniwura of Ibadan and Omu Okwei of Ossomari, or the more modern examples – Alimotu Pelewura of Lagos, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Abeokuta, Margaret Ekpo of Calabar, Gambo Sawaba, the stormy petrel of Northern Nigeria, Humaini Alaga of Ibadan and Abibatu Mogaji of Lagos – literally rocked the cradle and the crown, often tempestously.

    The treatment of settlers, now a bone of contention in modern Nigeria, is a key issue in the evolution of a developmental public culture. Plateau State has been a theatre of war and various Nigerian communities (Umuleri/Aguleri; Onitsha/Obosi; Warri (Urhobo and Izon versus Itsekiri) and Ile-Ife/Modakeke) have at various times demonstrated our abandonment of the cardinal principle of good neighbourliness and concern for strangers, so-called. It is instructive in this regard, and this is documented by Adamu Fika (1978: 158, n.82), that Yoruba-speaking peoples had settled in Iyagi and Yakasai quarters of Kano since the 17th century. There was no report that they were molested, massacred or expelled at any time during the pre-colonial era. Hausa and Nupe communities have been in Yorubaland for centuries, inter-marrying with host communities. In spite of the conflict that accompanied the rise of the Sokoto Caliphate, trade continued across the ecological divide between northern and southern Nigeria. While not painting an unrealistic picture of unbroken harmony, this writer suggests that indigenous peoples were probably better informed than their modern-day descendants about the benefits of enlightened self-interest, which dictated that one should not see inter-group relations as a zero-sum game.

    We can also extract building blocks from our core values, sage philosophy and aphorisms. Hence, the Yoruba “omoluabi” model, which rested on civic education right from the cradle,  the Igbo concept of “igwebuike,” which encapsulated the virtue of cooperation, and societal opprobrium against anti-social behaviour, such as greed (which the Yoruba express as “anikanjopon,” “wobia,” “jegudujera,” “kenimani,” “ere  ajepajude,” “eni kan kii je ki ilu fe”), injustice and oppression, should be woven into the tapestry of our public culture. But the foregoing cannot be done in the absence of leadership, a critical element in the new developmental culture we are proposing. However, that leadership culture also cannot operate in isolation. It is a siamese twin of the developmental state. One such example is the immediate past ruler of Qatar.

  • Nwabueze’s distortions of Nigeria’s History (III)

    Nwabueze’s distortions of Nigeria’s History (III)

    Last week, I ended this column on the note that a national conference of the country’s ethnic groups is a non-starter. I then promised to make this conclusion the subject of my column some other time, possibly this week.

    I believe the idea of a conference of ethnic nationalities, sovereign or otherwise, couldn’t be more reactionary. I shall, however, discuss this only next week, God willing.

    For today I will round up my critique of the last two weeks of Professor Ben Nwabueze’s thesis in his recent essay on the 1914 amalgamation of Nigeria that Northern Nigerian unity and identity was a dubious British fabrication which was, and remains, a threat to the country’s unity because, by its sheer size and population, the British intended it to hold a veto over the country’s politics.

    Our learned senior academic lawyer claims the idea of a “Northern Nigeria” has “impacted adversely on the unity of Nigeria and the evolution of one Nigerian nation…through (its) persistent demand for power shift to the North which reared its head since the end in 2007of the eight year rule of President Olusegun Obasanjo, a southerner.”

    Apart from his contention that the North had monopolised power for 30 of the 33-year period between 1966 and 1999, he said, in effect, the region has no moral right to demand for power shift back to it because, first, it had, and continues to date to, monopolise military and security power and, second, some of its political, traditional and religious leaders have sponsored the current Boko Haram insurgency “in pursuance of an agenda aimed at promoting northern domination and the supremacy of the Moslem religion in the affairs of Nigeria.”

    When the professor says the North has “monopolised” power for 30 of the 33 years between 1966 and 1999, the man is clearly indulging in an abuse of language. The common sense definition of the word monopoly is complete possession or control of something by an individual, group or organisation. By this definition it is obviously wrong to say the North ever monopolised power in the country.

    Dominated power, yes. But as the professor knows all too well as a senior lawyer who knows the importance of precision and clarity in language and as the minister of education under General Babangida, no military head of state ever ruled this country without consulting and sharing power with his military colleagues from other parts of the country, at least most of the time.

    Second, our learned lawyer cannot eat his cake and still have it; he cannot divide the North into “True North”, Middle Belt and other states without a label in between the two and still insist that the region had “monopolised” or even dominated power. He cannot, in other words, talk of a united North when it suits his argument and a divided one when it doesn’t.

    It is precisely because he has tied himself into knots over this that he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to understand why someone like Chief Paul Unongo, would insist, quite rightly, that being a Middle Belter and a Northerner are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It is also why the professor is baffled by how the much lamented late Chief Sunday Awoniyi, a Yoruba Christian from the North, would gladly accept to chair the Arewa Consultative Forum for years and eventually die in active service trying to strengthen the region’s unity in all its diversity.

    The professor also objects to power shift to the North any time soon because of what he calls the region’s “complete” control of the security of the Nigerian state, something which he adds “has remained largely undismantled up till now (August 2013)”.

    The only evidence he presents for this sweeping statement is a quotation from Bishop Mathew Kukah’s book, Witness to Justice: An Insider’s Account of Nigeria’s Truth Commission, in which the bishop listed General Abacha’s chief security officer, national security adviser, chief of defence intelligence, inspector general of police and head of a then newly created counter-terrorism agency, as all Northerners. The man’s insinuation in listing the Muslim sounding names of all these officers was obvious; they were all not only Northerners, they were also all Muslims

    The problem with this evidence was that one of the Muslim sounding names, AVM Idi Musa, the chief of defence intelligence, was a Christian. It also conveniently ignored other security services like the Navy, the Air Force, the State Security Services and the National Intelligence Agency, whose officers and other ranks were, and are, hardly dominated by Northerners or Muslims.

    Another problem with the learned professor’s evidence is that in the case of the army, where Northerners had dominated coup making, he did not do a count of the country’s army chiefs since Major-General J. T. U. Aguiyi Ironsi took over from Major-General C. B. Welbey, as the first indigenous army chief in 1965. If he did, he would have found out that of the 24 army chiefs we have had between Ironsi and Lieutenant-General Ihejirika today, six were from the South.

    However, out of the 18 from the North only five (Hassan Usman Katsina, Abacha, Mohammed Aliyu, Alwali Kazir, and A. B. Dambazau) were from the “True North” the professor apparently loves to hate. Of the remaining 13, eight were Christians from his beloved Middle-Belt, with the remaining five being Muslims from the same sub-region. All of which is to say that to date Nigeria has had 14 Christian army chiefs and ten Muslim; hardly the stuff of monopoly by any group.

    As to the man’s claim that the “True North’s” so-called monopoly of the military and security services has remained “undismantled to date”, anyone who has been living in Nigeria since President Obasanjo returned to power in 1999 knows that officers from the region were by far the hardest hit by his massive purge of so-called political soldiers from the military no sooner than he moved into his office. Since then only one “True Northerner”, (Dambazau), has been an army chief.

    It is also interesting to note that the current army chief should have retired more than a year ago, having since served out the 35 years of service for mandatory retirement. Under him it is a notorious fact that recruitment into the rank and file of the army has been blatantly skewed against Muslims, North and South.

    Also the army chief’s retention beyond his 35 years of service has fuelled speculations of the possible, even probable, use of the military, along with other security services, to rig the 2015 elections and violently suppress any attempt at protest against any such rigging.

    Not only does our professor claim, obviously wrongly, that the predominantly Muslim North has monopolised the country’s security services. He also claims that Muslims have been given an undue advantage in the country’s judiciary through “the long rule of Northern military heads of state.” Few claims could be more tendentious, if not downright dishonest.

    The learned senior lawyer’s evidence is the fact, as he put it, that except for one Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) from the Middle Belt, who he himself said was “a northerner” – there we go again with his self-inflicted confusion about whether there is only one North or two or even three – all our CJNs “for the past nearly twenty years” have been Muslims.

    As in the case of the security services, a more balanced examination of the Supreme Court should have included its history from our independence in 1960 up to 1987 during which all the CJNs were from the South, and, except for Atanda Fatai-Williams and Teslim Olawale Elias, were also all Christians. Equally, a more honest view would have acknowledged the fact that since 1987 when Mohammed Bello became the first Northerner Muslim CJN, the unbroken string of Northern CJNs has come about not by design but because, on average, most justices of the court from the South have been older before joining the court than those from the North due essentially to the longer history of Western education in the South. As our legal professor knows all too well, it is the combination of this and the court’s mandatory age of retirement at 70 that has led to a higher turnover of Southern and Christian justices of the court than Northern and Muslim.

    Still on his claim about Muslim judges being favoured in the judiciary, if our learned senior lawyer was honest with himself he would not have isolated the more visible Supreme Court but would’ve included the Court of Appeal and the Federal High Courts where Northerners and Muslims are clearly the underdogs in number.

    Again a more honest view would have acknowledged the fact that the CJN, like all his colleagues in the Supreme Court, has only one vote and cannot veto the majority which had been and, with its present number of 19 justices, remains Southern and Christian. Besides, whatever anyone may say of our courts, the last thing they can be accused of is voting for ethnic or sectarian considerations. For example, in the General Muhammadu Buhari versus President Olusegun Obasanjo case of Election 2003, the panel of judges voted unanimously for Obasanjo regardless of their region or religion. Again, in the 2007 case between the two where the panel split evenly between the two, the CJN, Justice Idris Legbo Kutigi, a Northerner and a Muslim broke the tie in favour of Obasanjo.

    Finally, to our learned senior lawyer’s claim that Northern politicians, traditional rulers and Muslim leaders are the sponsors of Boko Haram in pursuit of an agenda of Northern domination of, and Islamic supremacy in, the country.

    Of all his reasons for North- and Islamophobia, this one is the most absurd. Next week, God willing, I’ll attempt to show why before discussing the fallacy of a “conference/dialogue/conversation” of ethnic groups which our learned professor is a great champion of.

  • Golden Eaglets; Books and budgets; Soyinka; Potholes, Politics and Lekki Bridge

    Congratulations to the Golden Eaglets who politicians feel have given us temporary unity. Nigerians are united in suffering from power failure and potholes and no books or sports equipment in schools.  We await true unity from the national conference.

    If you want children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want children to be more intelligent read them more fairy tales – Albert Einstein. There is a new giant library in Birmingham, UK. Is there a new non-Presidential library in Nigeria? Unlikely! Our schools are designed for failure. I had a delightful experience at the privately run Zaccheus Onumba Dibiaezue Memorial Library on Awolowo Road Ikoyi Lagos run by Mrs. Ifeoma Esiri and her wonderful team. I discussed and read from my book The Laterite Road to SS2 students who had also read the book. The President will be presenting his budget this month for 2014. Is there a meaningful budget for books in schools?

    Next year we will go wild celebrating Professor Wole Soyinka@80 and his Nobel Laurels. Would it not be a fitting tribute if every Nigerian student in school had a copy of at least one Soyinka book? In fact why does every Nigerian single school not have a collection of selected Soyinka books available in their library? Probably because there are so few libraries and there is no budget for library books in most Nigerian education budgets. Even if we do not value books for our children, let us at least value our Nobel Laureate. The shame of the Nigerian government knows no shame. It now relies of corporate bodies to give books to its children, a secret responsibility of good governance while delighting in giving out exercise books with no knowledge content in them.

    Every room, home, office, taxi, danfo, bus space should be discussing their topic the Sovereign National Conference. It is a non-political topic. This is a non-political journey hijacked by politicians. The journey is not about politics, though it has a political component which has been overblown to take the lion’s share of the discussion. It is about life itself and the happiness and wellbeing of its citizens.

    It is only in Nigeria that bridges flood and it costs more manpower to make a hole in the bridge to drain the rainwater than exists in the coffers or the craniums of the collective engineering genius of FERMA.

    FERMA should face questions of ineptitude and threats of disbandment for forcing the additional and needless suffering of travellers.  In civilised countries, engineering teams mark and fill immediately all the major potholes. Here, only in reaction to extreme public pressure and blood on the roads we are finally marking potholes. It will still take months to fill them. Which part of ‘EMERGENCY MARK-AND-FILL POTHOLES’ does the multibillion organisation like FERMA and construction companies like Julius Berger and RCC not understand? The very idea that roads should be repaired only because holidays are approaching or a president is visiting is repugnant. Is going on holiday at Xmas/New year more important than getting to work for the rest of the year? How can government allow a government agency like FERMA to pretend to be Father Christmas, delivering a birthday present of pothole filled roads only for the same roads to be abandoned immediately after the festive period? Shame! Worldwide, work is made easy by providing mass transport, good roads. Holidays are a by-product but the main thing.   If this is the mind-set of FERMA and even the FRSC which works mainly during ‘EMBER Months’ then no wonder we remain the slowest moving nation on wheels, five to six hours to travel 127kilometers and with the East-West Road still a mirage. Heads should roll for neglecting their work during nine months of the year only to wake up when the outcry becomes thunderous or when ‘Jesus comes’ annually at Christmas. ‘The Nigerian Pothole’ should be enshrined in the forthcoming constitution as an eliminable goal. No Nigerian pothole should be given the freedom to grow for nine months or nine years in Nigeria before it is filled for a presidential visit or at one Ember Month or one Christmas or the other. Care and concern for citizens welfare is and must be a daily government concern. Governments which perform just before elections are failures even if they succeed in returning to power by any means necessary. We must install meaning to our lives and governments must realise that more selfishness by it and its agencies will destroy Nigeria.

    The newly created and carefully timed federal government –Lagos State stand-off over the new Lekki-Ikoyi Bridge is an interesting example of how little government at the centre is concerned with the suffering of the citizens in the states. Rules are more important to evil governments than people even when the rules are relics of colonial oppression and control. Is government supposed to be oppressive? The bridge is good, the waterways are local. Federal government would be wise to zero in on building a second and third Niger Bridge and completing the East-West road rumoured to be 65% complete, instead of disturbing a perfectly executed bridge project. Could it be that the current federal government is jealous of the success of the cooperative effort the government of late Yar’Adua and Lagos State? Or is this a disguised political petty attempt to discredit the Lagos government’s contribution to traffic control?

  • Near-encounters with Mike Akhigbe

    Near-encounters with Mike Akhigbe

    Vice Admiral Okhai Mike Akhigbe, at various times military governor of the old Ondo State and of Lagos State, flag officer of the Eastern Naval Command, Chief of Naval Staff, Chief of General Staff in the military regime that handed back power to an elected government in 1999, and at his death last week in New York, a property mogul in Lagos and a significant player in the nation’s oil and gas industry.

    He was also a qualified lawyer, having obtained a law degree from the University of Lagos and completed the obligatory post-graduate diploma in the course of his multifaceted public career.

    I never met him. Yet, he occupies a unique place in my recollections of my years in Rutam House as an editorial writer and columnist for Guardian Newspapers.

    For it was on account of him that one of my columns was pulled from the final edition that served Lagos and the Southwest, which then accounted for some 60 percent of the circulation, after it had been published in the first edition that served the North and the East.

    An earlier column had rattled Akhigbe somewhat, according to some inside administration sources in Alausa. He had publicly questioned General Olusegun Obasanjo’s patriotism because of Obasanjo’s outspoken criticism of the Babangida regime’s benighted Structural Adjustment Programme.

    Now, Obasanjo was once Akhigbe’s commander-in-chief. He had seen battle long before Akhigbe took his first lessons in the art of war at the Defence Academy, Kaduna. Akhigbe’s conduct, I wrote in my column, was a breach of military etiquette with few parallels.

    He did not like it. To his credit, he had tried to explain away his outburst, only to repeat the offence more or less. I was of course not the only commentator who had rounded on him. Subsequent criticism by The Guardian of some projects he was planning to embark upon in Lagos seemed to have led him to develop a sense of siege, and to believe that the paper was out to get him.

    One of them was the establishment of a newspaper, Lagos Horizon, to serve as the state’s publicity organ. Lagos State, The Guardian argued, needed no such organ; it was home to the nation’s most vibrant newspapers, all of them giving it the comprehensive and sustained coverage that a state-owned newspaper could not.

    Akhigbe was also planning to build an ultra-modern official residence house in Ikeja, where visiting dignitaries would be lodged. Akhigbe had just returned from a visit to the United States, where he had been hosted by a governor of one of the states.

    His goal, he said, was to make sure that whenever the governor from America came calling on a return visit, he would be lodged in a befitting residence.

    A third project called for upgrading the old UAC Stadium across from the National Stadium in Surulere into a world-class facility. At that time, the National Stadium was a thriving concern. It made no sense, The Guardian said, to construct another stadium opposite it, in a residential area already groaning under the weight of vehicular traffic.

    The fourth project in the package was yet another stadium, to be built in Ikeja.

    Akhigbe had outlined the projects in a major policy statement, and The Guardian’s editorial, it is necessary to state, was a response to that statement, not a running critique of his administration.

    But it was too much for Akhigbe.

    So, off he went to Vice Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, Chief of General Staff who formally ranked second to the military president in political hierarchy, and to whom the military governors reported in the first instance, brandishing the ethnic card, in Nigerian politics the ultimate weapon of blackmail.

    Alex Ibru, an indigene of Bendel State as it then was, Akhigbe charged, had offered the Yoruba on his payroll a platform to run down the person and administration of a fellow Bendelite, his good self Mike Akhigbe, for no reason other than that Akhigbe was not Yoruba, unlike his predecessor, Air Commodore Gbolahan Mudashiru.

    Aikhomu, also a Bendelite, had summoned Chief Michael Ibru, the head of the Ibru dynasty, to demand an explanation. The senior Ibru had in turn passed on the message to his younger brother, the Guardian publisher, and negotiations aimed at reaching some understanding were underway.

    I would learn of these developments only much later when I wrote about a firefight that had almost broken out between Customs officials at Murtala Muhammed Airport and Akhigbe’s security aides, on hand to expedite clearance for his wife Josephine returning from an overseas trip

    At issue was a consignment of typewriters Mrs Akhigbe had brought with her. Customs officials had demanded payment of duty on the freight, but Mrs Akhigbe was apparently unwilling to pay, and had abused one of the officials. Her husband’s aides had weighed in, a noisy argument had followed, and guns had been drawn. Mercifully, a shoot-out was averted.

    The Guardian had reported the incident with the sobriety and the scrupulous attention to detail for which it was revered.

    Mrs Akhigbe would later explain that the shipment was not for the secretarial institute of which she was reportedly the proprietor, but a donation to some institution catering to the handicapped. In whatever case, I wrote in my column, her conduct was of a piece with the husband’s reputation for high-handedness.

    The column had appeared in the first edition which circulated in the North and in the East. Before the second – and final – edition was printed, a call came from Managing Director Stanley Macebuh asking me to see him.

    Dispensing with the usual preliminaries, he went straight to the point.

    “I would like to have your permission to clear your column from the second edition,” he said, just like that.

    “May I know why? I asked.

    “Akhigbe,” he said.

    He went on to explain how Akhigbe had complained to Aikhomu that Guardian publisher Alex Ibru, unmindful of the common heritage (Up Bedel!) all three of them share, had given free rein to Yoruba elements at the Guardian to run down the person and office of the military governor of Lagos State.

    The Guardian’s criticism of his plan to set up a newspaper was self-serving, Akhigbe had been saying. It was grounded on the fear that the paper would put the Guardian out of business. However, until that time came, he had instructed Lagos ministries, parastatals and agencies to cut their subscriptions to The Guardian and stop doing business with it altogether.

    Criticism of his plan to build a befitting lodge in Ikeja for official visitors was just as self serving, Akhigbe had also been saying; it stemmed from fear that the edifice might put Sheraton Hotel in which the Ibrus had a major interest out of business.

    If my column on the airport incident should appear at that time, Macebuh said, Akhigbe would regard it as a fresh provocation and as an act of bad faith to boot, given Chief Michael Ibru’s on-going mediation, at Aikhomu’s instance, between Rutam House and Akhigbe.

    My judgment and good faith were not in question, then?”

    “Not in the least,” Macebuh said.

    It remains to add that the stadium Akhigbe said he was going to build in Ikeja never got off the ground. The “befitting” lodge for special guests was never built. But construction started on the stadium in Surulere.

    Lagos Horizon hit the newsstands, but was received more as a curiosity than a serious journalistic proposition. It helped neither itself nor its proprietor when it declared in its debut edition that it had come to serve as “a melting pot of ideas.” It certainly never lived up to Akhigbe’s exorbitant billing.

    The foregoing, I should make clear, is only a slice of my reminiscences on my Rutam House years. I had set out with no larger purpose.

    As for Mike Akhigbe’s times and legacy, my Rutam House contemporary Sonala Olumhense has entered on several platforms, The Guardian and SaharaReporters among them, a summative piece stamped with his accustomed rigour and forthrightness.

    Titled “I knew NNS Fearless, Mike Akhigbe”, the piece instantly went viral.

  • Babangida Aliyu: A Colossus @ 58

    Not many knew Dr. Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu’s pedigree as a unionist. His activism predates the now controversial G7. Way back in the early 80s, he had etched his footprints on the sands of the nation’s democratic struggles as one of the leaders of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) under the administration of former President Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari. His chairmanship position in the Niger State chapter of the NLC thrust on his shoulders the responsibility of being a major actor and one of the prime negotiators in the many interfaces between the Nigerian workers and the then government.

    There’s no gainsaying that the Hassan Sunmonu NLC was a model for labour struggles in Nigeria. It was also a period of a series of struggles that marked out that era as one of the most challenging in the country’s history. Aliyu’s resilience, straight talks and intrepidity won him the hearts of his people.

    As a mark of reciprocity, he convincingly won an election into the House of Representatives in 1983, while still writing his final examinations for his first degree at the Bayero University, Kano. That set the template for the engaging credentials that now mark him out as a statesman.

    When he left the shores of Nigeria for the United States to pursue further studies at the University of Pittsburgh following the military coup d’état that truncated the second republic, his interest in the democratic enterprise remained unflinching. After his successful academic sojourn in the US, Dr. Aliyu returned to Nigeria and joined the federal public service. For several years, he served meritoriously in various sensitive positions and in different public institutions – Ministries and Agencies, including being a Director in the Cabinet Secretariat and Director Maritime Services in the Federal Ministry of Transportation.

    Always a high flyer, through a dint of hard work and the grace of God, Babangida Aliyu rose to the pinnacle of Civil Service as a Permanent Secretary in 1999. Fortuitous circumstances took him through the high levels of decision making and policy implementation. From the ministries of youths, sports through the cabinet secretariat to Federal Capital Territory (FCT), National Planning Commission, Transport, Establishment and Pension Matters, he applied himself scrupulously to the tenets and ethics of the service. These are the features that made stakeholders draft him to run for the governorship race in Niger state in 2007. And he won.

    In the last six and a half years, his strides in mass mobilisation, resource utilisation and management and guts have left developmental imprints that are difficult to ignore. His openness has attracted as many enemies as it has endeared him to more. His large heartedness and capacity for elevated reasoning also many times put him at crossroads. But they have led to giant leaps in the fortunes of the state.

    Niger State, today, under Mu’azu’s watch has recorded impressive gains in all considerable fields of human endeavours. Is it education, health, agriculture, infrastructure and social security? Nigerlites have a reason to miss him when he eventually leaves the state and wish that he had come earlier than he did.

    The administration had tackled some issues that were hitherto thought intractable. Immediately he mounted the saddle, the non-payment of gratuity and pension which had accumulated for almost a decade vamoosed. Shortly after taking office, Governor Aliyu directed that the labourers deserve their wages. He ordered the prompt payment of all outstanding arrears of gratuities and pensions to all retirees. Till date, he has not defaulted. He continues to pay as at when due, monthly pension of these old folk as a major plank of his administration’s social contract with the people. This was probably informed by his civil service background. Like he usually says “you cannot expect discipline out of a staff you owe”.

    A lot of work has been done in the educational sector. The introduction of tuition-free education is remarkable. The

    Payment of WAEC and NECO fees to all students regardless of students’ state of origin in Niger schools has become an embarrassment for those who still discriminate on basis of state of origin. He has equally addressed challenges in the health sector. The implementation of free medical care for children between the ages of 0-5 and for the aged has come to stay. The ripple effect of this on the psyche of the populace cannot be over-emphasised.

    Aliyu has also embarked on rapid reconstruction of township roads. He is providing access roads in all the local government areas through the construction of 10km roads in liaison with the 25 local government councils.

    Conscious effort has also been made to ease housing problems faced by Nigerlites. This is done through the provision of housing units in all the major towns of the state. Other areas of intervention by Governor Aliyu include the establishment of graduate employment scheme and distribution of agro input to farmers starting from the ward level to make it more accessible to the rural dwellers.

    Perhaps the most popular dividend of democracy in the state is the introduction of Ward Development Projects Initiative. The recognition of the ward as the smallest political unit and the target of development programmes is apt. Through a state legislation, each of the state’s 274 wards receive monthly grants for the execution of capital projects that are considered relevant to the socio-economic life of the wards.

    Governor Aliyu has extended his Midas touch across the political landscape. With his election as chairman of the Northern States Governors Forum (NSGF) in 2007, his leadership has made impact in terms of peer review and experience sharing. Before then, NSGF leadership was rotated amongst the governors of the region with each selected to chair sessions. He reckoned that this kind of spatial arrangement defies logic, as cohesion was sacrificed.

    However, the influence of the NSGF as a socio-political entity has transcended the myopia of sectionalism. It has become a force to reckon with, a voice of wisdom and against despotism and lawlessness.

    Through the NSGF, the governors have been able to galvanize the interest of the people of the North, Nigerians and international community on the potentials and investment opportunities existing in the region. These are no lame duck efforts. They are real marks of intellect and courage.

    As he trudges on, here’s a wish for a happy birthday to the man who prefers to be the Chief Servant of his people.

    • Ndayebo writes from Minna, Niger State.