The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Is there no more decorum in Taraba?

    Has civility deserted Taraba State, especially its leaders? Since late last year there has been pretty little to lift the spirits of the people, and so much to ache them. First, about 10 months ago, Governor Danbaba Suntai’s aircraft crash-landed, leaving him between life and death. Immediately an unhealthy and unnecessary controversy swept into the incident. Initial reports said Suntai, a pharmacist who also qualified as a pilot, was flying the I’ll-fated aircraft. Another report emanating from the governor’s camp denied that position. Now, virtually every account agrees that the Taraba leader was in charge of the small plane on October 25

    Did it matter? Yes. Public officers are entitled to some privacies but their health does not fall under such entitlements. Infirmity is no respecter of persons but the more open and forthcoming the afflicted public officer is the easier it is for the people to stand by him in his time of need. Besides, openness and truth show the respect the indisposed leader has for the electorate.

    In Taraba this was not the case, but things were to get worse. No sooner was the injured governor flown to Germany for better medical care than the structures that supported his administration were pulled out in a matter that many read to be the ambitious machinations of Deputy Governor Alhaji Garba Umar. Everywhere, and especially in traditional African societies, ill-health is viewed gravely and with positive concern; it is scarcely exploited for selfish ends. In Taraba of our day things are different. In all this, where do you picture the people who supposedly elected these leaders into office? I imagine they must be agonising as the subject of ill-health is turned into a platform of manipulation and subterfuge, if not outright political war.

    Now, 10 months after that fateful crash, Suntai’s return on Sunday has only worsened the bad blood running in the state, not only to the discomfiture of the Taraba people but also the horror of every Nigerian. Yes, he needed to be assisted out of the aircraft. And, yes, it made the headlines, and why not? The media has an obligation to report fact. If Suntai returned with a limp, say, reporters must report it, but his apparent frailty should not be a potent weapon in the hands of ambitious Taraba politicians. That Suntai needed help to debark from the aircraft in Abuja should not dampen the joy and excitement of his return. That the governor survived the crash should trigger happiness across the state, including the camp of the most ambitious politicians in the state.

    Suntai has also sent a letter to the state House of Assembly formally indicating his return and intention to resume duty. That was what the law required but upon receiving the letter, the leadership of the fractured House launched into fresh subterfuge disguised as protocol or due process. They said Suntai would not return to office before they had deliberated on the letter. After reading the governor’s letter, they said Suntai did not write it and that his signature was forged. When he addressed them, they said the manner of his speech was even more evidence that the governor was not fit to govern.

    In those 10 months of Suntai’s absence, the deputy governor who has been in acting capacity may have discovered a few sweet things about the office and is probably finding it difficult to back off as his boss returned. He may not be working alone; a report suggested that House Speaker Haruna Tsokwa will be happy to be number two to Umar, with Suntai out of the picture.

    This is as disgusting as it is befuddling. To start with, it is no business of Tsokwa and his gang if Suntai did not personally write the letter transmitted to the state House. He could dictate it. He could instruct someone else to write it, provided its content conveyed his desires.

    Finding much of the executive council disagreeable, Suntai sacked it, going ahead to also appoint two key officers, the Secretary to the State Government and his Chief of Staff. But that was what his deputy Umar needed to unmask his ambitions by promptly urging Taraba people in general and the sacked officers in particular to disregard Suntai’s directive. Tsokwa himself has told the governor he is unfit to govern and that he should return overseas for further treatment until he regained full health.

    How uncivil and indecorous can things get in Taraba?

    Some have questioned, even pooh-poohed the Tsokwa gang’s actions in their bid to turf out Suntai but there is still another unsettling dimension of the governor’s opponents’ judgments. They arrived at the conclusion that Suntai could not govern simply because, as they claimed, his manner of speech did not betray any impressive well-being. This is ridiculous. Suntai was away for 10 months under the expert eyes of probably the best physicians available. If they cleared him to go, Tsokwa and his co-conspirators are therefore unfit to declare otherwise.

    The anti-Suntai camp is making some disguised allusions to the Yar’Adua scenario but the facts and circumstances are not the same. The late president was not seen at all, or heard. The Yar’Adua cabal was brazenly manipulative and was widely condemned. In Taraba, the anti-Suntai forces are simply operating beyond the realm of reason and decorum.

  • Needless fuss about the Daniel of our time

    My six-year-old daughter returned from school the other day with the excitement of one that had just won a jackpot. As I was wondering what could be responsible for her gay and spritely mood, she announced with glee that she would be going to London.

    “London?” I wondered aloud. As a Lagos resident, she was yet to visit any of the landmarks in the city. She knew not the direction of the University of Lagos or the Lagos State University. She had not been to the National Stadium or the Teslim Balogun Stadium. She was yet to visit Lekki, Badagry or Bar Beach and did not know the way to the Iduganran Palace of the Oba of Lagos. Why then would her first exposure to the world outside her home and school be London?

    The natural questions to ask were her mission to London and how she intended to get there. To these, she beamed a cheerful smile and declared that she was going with her classmates and I had three days to raise N350,000 for the trip! Poor girl, I said to myself. If she knew how strenuous it was to raise her school fees, she would realise the futility of dreaming a trip to London on my own account. A Yoruba adage says it makes no sense to a child when his father says there is famine.

    I knew it was dangerous to tell her immediately that the proposed flight to London was impossible. She was in cloud nine and it made no sense draw her back to earth so abruptly. I waited till dinner to tell her the truth: a summer excursion to London was financially unrealistic and she was too young for that kind of exposure. Happily, she understood.

    Or so I thought until she returned from school the following day and told me that she had found an answer to my poor pocket. Her teacher said she could go to Ghana, if London was too expensive. For this, her teacher said she should bring “shikinni money.” And how much is the shikinni money? I asked. “Only N150,000,” she said. I told her, to her utter disappointment, that even the so-called shikinni money was a luxury I could not afford.

    Our perception of good education has changed dramatically over the years, particularly at the foundation level. The days are gone when the emphasis was on sound knowledge of Mathematics, English and other critical subjects. Now, it is more about how much exposure the child can gain to the culture of the western world. Our children are made to speak English from the womb.

    Childhood is vanishing if it has not already vanished. At age two, a toddler is garbed in oversize shirt and shorts that reach down to his ankles and make him to look like one poised for sack race. Then he is laden with a bag as he totters to school at an age that some of us were still busy sucking our mothers’ breasts. From that tender age, they begin to stock his head with foreign ideas. They eat foreign delicacies, wear foreign clothes, watch foreign movies and are generally orientated in the ways of the West until they become Europeans in black skins.

    Of course, exposure is good. There is a general belief that it is organically linked with knowledge. But there appears an urge among the handlers of our children’s education to over-expose them, with the consequence that we now ape the West to a fault. It is increasingly becoming a capital offence to pronounce an English word with African accent. You must bend your mouth and twist your tongue in a way that leaves an observer fearing that you might lose some teeth. These leave the average African child with the impression that our cultures and ways of life are inferior to those of the West and make him long for life in Europe or America.

    That is the context from which the botched ambition of 13-year-old Daniel Ihekina to travel in the tyre hole of an aircraft from Nigeria to America should be understood. After repeatedly watching the exploits of Sylvester Stallone, Roger Moore and Ian Fleming in such films as First Blood, The Expendables, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and From Russia With Love, the poor lad decided to put that which he had watched into practice by flying to America in the oddest of ways for a first-hand experience of the purported rosy life in “God’s Own Country”. But the expedition turned out an anti-climax. To his utter disgust, the Arik aircraft he thought was taking him to America only took him from the serene ambience of his Benin home to the rowdy and riotous setting of Lagos, a move, like they say, from frying pan to fire.

    But in spite of the disappointment the innocent lad might suffer, he should thank his star for becoming the only Nigerian to have survived the dangerous adventure. There were reports of a similar attempt by one Emeka Okechukwu Okeke to smuggle himself to the United States from Lagos in the tyre compartment of a plane belonging to Delta Airlines in 2010, but he was discovered dead on arrival in New York. The dead body of a young Nigerian was also said to have been found in the undercarriage department of a domestic airline’s plane on arrival from South Africa sometime last year.

    If the biblical Daniel is revered for emerging from the lion’s den without losing a limb, this Daniel of our time should be saluted for travelling in the tyre compartment of an aircraft from Benin to Lagos with his swathe shirt, rosary and black bag intact. We have strived so desperately and invested so heavily in making James Bonds of our children. Why then should anyone raise the alarm if a five-year-old boy hangs on to the tail of an aircraft from Lagos to Tokyo? We should be happy and contented that our efforts are yielding the results we desire.

    More importantly, Daniel’s botched trip to America has alerted Nigerians and the rest of the world to the porous nature of security at our airports at a time the Boko Haram sect is cashing in on every available opportunity to kill and maim as many Nigerians as possible with bombs. Most Nigerians have shuddered at the possibility of the sect gaining similar access into an aircraft.

  • Taraba and the vicious cycle of stupidity

    Taraba and the vicious cycle of stupidity

    It was the Nobel Prize literature laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, who in a moment of exasperation once lamented what he described as the vicious cycle of human stupidity. He was no doubt denouncing the tendency for generation after generation of the human species to repeat the same recurrent errors responsible for much of the available misery, grief, exploitation and injustice in which the world is enmeshed today despite the phenomenal increase in man’s technical and intellectual capacity to create an infinitely better world.

    Nowhere is this capacity for recurrent acts of destructive stupidity more apparent than here in Nigeria, the great Kongi’s own homeland. The way our politicians play the all- consuming game of politics today – the obsession with power devoid of service, the pursuit of self- aggrandisement and pecuniary accumulation, the cynical manipulation of ethno-regional, religious and other fissures – shows a political elite that has learnt little or nothing from past failures.

    It is simply difficult to imagine that a country that went through the harrowing experiences occasioned by the late President Umaru ‘Yar’Adua’s protracted physical incapacitation could allow the veritable theatre of the absurd playing itself out today in Taraba state. Despite Yar’Adua’sinherent personal dignity and nobility of character, a cabal capitalized on his physical frailty to hijack the machinery of governance and run the affairs of the country in his name.

    Completely indifferent to the debilitating physical condition of the ailing President and the excruciating psychological torture he was going through, this feral cabal kept him imprisoned in Aso Villa. They subjected him in his infirm state to the strenuous burdens of governance when a good rest out of public life in his native Katsina could probably have prolonged his life span. While the cabal furtively ferried him across the world in search of an elusive medical succour, they kept the country fed on a steady diet of falsehood as regards the President’s remarkably improved health and enhanced physical vigour.

    At the height of their treasonable antics, the cabal flew the obviously dying Yar’Adua back into the country from a Saudi Arabia hospital under cover of darkness and with a massive deployment of troops in Abuja that remains a mystery till date. By this time and following intense pressure from civil society groups and the opposition, the National Assembly had invoked the utilitarian ‘doctrine of necessity’ to declare Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan Acting President of the country.

    Yet, the cabal remained determined to prevent Jonathan from succeeding his terminally ill boss in office as demanded by the constitution. Appropriation estimates were signed and other activities undertaken in the name of a President who was clearly no more conscious of his environment.

    It is perhaps because those responsible for the treasonous antics of the Yar’Adua cabal, during his health travails, were never brought to book and made to account for their actions that the nation is being subjected today to another round of ‘cabalistic’ stupidity in Taraba State.

    Of course, the story of Taraba is straight forward. Until he crashed in a Cessna 208, 5N – BMJ jet piloted by himself in Yola, Adamawa state on October 25, 2013, Governor Dambaba Suntai was in sound health. Following the crash, however, he reportedly suffered severe injuries in the head and had to be flown out of the country; first to Germany and then the United States for sophisticated medical attention. During his 10-month absence, the Taraba State House of Assembly authorised the Deputy Governor, Garba Umar, to act as Governor pending the recuperation and return of his boss.

    In the absence of Governor Suntai, the Taraba cabal, in a manner reminiscent of the Yar’Adua days, fed the media with all kinds of stories and visuals portraying the man as making rapid recovery. Certainly none but the most gullible and mentally vulnerable could be persuaded by such crude and deceptive propaganda. The drama reached a climax on August 25th, when a supposedly fully recovered Suntai was flown into Taraba State from the United States. The visuals portraying his return were a public relations disaster.

    He was supported on both sides by hefty aides. He looked unnaturally blank and could not even manage a wave to his ‘teeming’ supporters. After a controversial 10-month absence, he could not even spare a word with news hungry journalists at the airport. Yet, the following day, he had purportedly transmitted a letter to the House of Assembly signalling his recovery and readiness to resume work. He followed this up by purportedly dissolving the state Executive Council and appointing a new Secretary to the State Government and a new Chief of Staff.

    These actions were naturally bound to generate intense controversy given the hovering uncertainty as regards the Governor’s health. The state was virtually plunged into crisis. Motivated perhaps by principle, a commitment to constitutionalism or their own sectional partisan considerations on Taraba’s treacherous and complex terrain, 16 of the 24 state legislators led by the Speaker insist that the governor has not demonstrated sufficiently that he either wrote the letter intimating the House of his return or that he is fit to govern and that the status quo thus remains.

    Emboldened by the stance of the House of Assembly, the Acting Governor has described the purported dissolution of the Executive Council as null and void attributing the action to a self-seeking cabal and not the Governor. Here I think both the 16 members of the House and the Acting Governor must tread carefully.

    Even if they believe that a pro-Suntai cabal is acting unconstitutionally, that must not be an excuse for them to also toe the path of lawlessness. They must thus be on firm ground that one, the letter did not emanate from the Governor and two that they are in a position to authoritatively pronounce on his state of health. Two unconstitutional wrongs after all do not make a right. This is especially because of the evidence that Suntai addressed the state and actually swore in his two new aides no matter how frail he looked or sounded.

    Having said that, let me stress that whatever may be the presumed motives of those who question his mental and physical fitness to rule, the onus still rests on Governor Suntai to demonstrate convincingly that he is fully ready to resume office.

    Taraba is too important, strategic, complex and sensitive a state to be left in charge of a man not fully in control of his physical mental faculties even for one second. And it is even more dangerous to leave the state in the charge of an unelected, mercenary cabal ruling in the name of a helplessly incapacitated man.

    It must be said here that the drafters of the 1999 constitution had envisaged and made provision for this kind of situation. Section 189 (a) of the constitution requires members of the State Executive Council to determine by two-thirds majority if the governor or Deputy Governor “is incapable of discharging the functions of his office”.

    And if the State Executive Council comes to that conclusion, section 189 (b) provides for a medical panel to verify the decision after which the Speaker will cause the result of the medical panel, if it confirms, the Governor or Deputy Governor’s incapacitation, to be gazetted and the Governor ceases to hold office.

    But then, can a State Executive Council appointed by the Chief Executive ever decide that he is incapacitated to rule no matter how true this is? The constitution certainly assumes that the Executive Council members are honourable persons and that their loyalty is first and foremost to the constitution and not the Chief Executive.

  • Just me…being self-righteous (4)

    As you read, a shameful thing is happening; men in their teens are meeting to determine the fate of the Nigerian State. Apology to teens, for many a teen have been proven to possess the intellect and soul of a man in his 40s. It’s amusing to see the so-called best amongst us: career youth leaders, activists, journalists, actors, musicians, artisans, professional associations and so on, court the devils we swore to divorce.

    Today, such characters parade themselves as representatives and spokespersons for the Nigerian youth. They are meeting with representatives of the ruling party and its rivals. They meet to chart a game plan; an almighty formula by which the ruling class may enslave us, for the umpteenth time.

    That has to pale in the face of logic; it does. Things are supposed to be different now. But they aren’t. As the 2015 general elections draws nearer, familiar trolls are joining hands with the witless amongst us; their intent is to use us against us in their usual plot to rob us silly. The end result of course, can be better imagined.

    Money changes everything. The need of it makes us human. Loving it could be practical but an obsession with it drives us to the brink, it shows us up, upside-down and inside-out – as men of vulpine souls and intellect, eternally forsworn to despise honour for the love of wealth.

    Many have argued that we can never sell out by playing muscle to the ruling class.

    “We will only be enjoying our share of our collective wealth that they steal from us,” they claim, as we get ready to be courted and plied with easy money and other inducement, by the same politicians who customarily treat us with disdain until the elections approach.

    Whatever justification we choose to give to it, a bribe is a bribe. And more often than not, it changes a relation. Once accepted, it vitiates a large chunk of the essence of the recipient, making him inferior, like a man who has paid to lie with a skunk, the same way the impotent pays to be sodomized by a horse thinking it would cure him of his impotence and aid him to sire by a woman, a blessed child.

    The folly of our ways shall soon dawn on us, as it did, few days after we installed the current dispensation. The meek and humble leadership we thought we had installed evolved to become one of the worst tyrannies Nigeria would ever produce. It’s worse than any other, given Mr. President’s manipulability by the murder of crows he has surrounds himself with.

    A brilliant tyrant could be trusted to a certain degree of depth and capacity to lead but a manipulable tyrant is infinitely more dangerous, as he cannot be trusted beyond his blandness, intellectual handicaps and devious plots of his coven of cronies, advisers and kitchen cabinet.

    In the corrupted currents of the world such men have foisted upon us, we can only devise more alluring ways to play dumb and project our generation as easy marks for the ruling class to exploit. The current liaisons between the ruling class and the so-called representatives of the Nigerian youth portends an ominous development.

    It presages the continued enslavement of the Nigerian youth and our incapacitation by obscene inducements and gifts of grandeur; the perpetuation of a system in which the youth are psychologically confined and broken by financial inducements, dubious segregation and manipulative politics; where the sentimental fops amongst us are programmed by rumors, innuendo and outright falsehood to shun the path to progress and tow the fast lane to destruction.

    Many have argued that the major problem afflicting the country is the dearth of inspired leadership mooted and drawn from the nation’s youth divide. A converse view is that of the presence of eminently capable persons out there, many have failed to altruistically and responsibly apply themselves. Like every other Nigerian, they are busy looking out for themselves. Likewise, prospective heroes we could rely on have learnt the wisdom in keeping silent. They tactfully scoff at our romanticized wish to abolish the status quo, knowing that, as usual, we would settle for an opportunistic contract between our exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour and youth leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin aptly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”

    I recommend as usual, uncompromising passion and will to act, guided by probity and a conscious quest to achieve the personal and collective good within the ambit of fairness, equity and unflinching morality. Without such humane attributes, every measure we endeavour to apply will fail woefully. Policies and practicable solutions are mere words on paper; they can only be activated by our conscious efforts to attain actualize them.

    Mr. President, the National Assembly, the judiciary, our 36 State governors and political parties are indisputably worthless and impotent without the support of the Nigerian youth. These societal creatures depend on our goodwill to survive. It’s about time we stopped playing disposable muscles and junkyard dogs to them.

    Money and other inducements they dangle before us shall be exhausted sooner than we can ever imagine. If we are indeed serious about installing visionary leadership capable of steering us from the threshold of ruin to the portal of hope and social renaissance, we have to start now.

    The Nigerian youth needs a platform. We need a more concrete forum than Facebook and Twitter. We need to create a rallying point by which we could sit to determine a bloodless path to a promising future. Yes, the current leadership won’t relinquish power easily; we will wait. But while waiting, let us identify and vote into power that particular breed whose idealism and pragmatism capably understands our painful silences and heartfelt dreams in order to speak and actualize them.

    Let us begin to ignore those who would desert us no sooner than they regain their hold on power. I speak of men and women like the current ruling class; today they recoil into their secluded compounds in Banana Island, Lagos, their palatial estates in Abuja, and exclusive neighbourhoods in Europe. They seek to isolate themselves from the tragedies that mar our world. So doing they indulge in unrestrained hedonism and extravagant consumption of their ill-acquired wealth. We, the suffering masses are however, repressed with greater ferocity every time we protest.

    Our resources are being depleted; soon they will be exhausted. And then our hollowed-out edifice shall collapse. Impoverished and severely robbed of optimism, we, the hopeless masses will rise against the ruling class in a premeditated and very savage strike – of which we shall suffer the worst consequence.

    Like in all such uprisings, Nigeria will plunge into a canyon of blood and maniacal murders, in the name of the “revolution.” The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in A Short History of Progress, “…extremists, or ultraconservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations ossify and collapse.

    Today, we tow a similar path.

  • Kwakwanso, Haruna, Odimegwu and Nigeria’s fictional censuses

    Kwakwanso, Haruna, Odimegwu and Nigeria’s fictional censuses

    There is an age-old Igbo wisdom concerning the managing of a rascally child’s internal injury; these people of yore thought of everything you know. The scenario is this: the playful, rascally child had gone and earned himself an internal injury and his mother (it’s always mothers of course bless them) would apply the hot water dabs. Since you are not exactly sure where lies the heart of the injury, mothers, (wise as spirits), would watch carefully and determine the sore spot by the reaction of the lad as they apply the hot towel. The saying therefore translates thus: you linger upon and dab harder where the child feels the most pain.

    This old tale illustrates the matter between Eze Festus Odimegwu, chairman of the Nigerian Population Commission, NPC, and some of our northern brothers notably Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano State and Malam Mohammed Haruna, a senior colleague and syndicated columnist. Odimegwu simply applied the dab where it pains most in order to heal an injury fast and expectedly, there is an angry and excited reaction from those who were living off the old, retrogressive order.

    But before I return to Kwankwaso and Mohammed, let me blame Odimegwu for belittling himself by accepting such a silly job. One of the most brilliant men to be found anywhere, first he ought to have known that what we call census in Nigeria are fictional, farcical and silly waste of time and resources and as long as we are yoked the way we are under this dour flag of ours, you will always have the same falsehood he talks about which we have had since 1816 as he claims. Therefore, one expects him to be perspicacious enough to understand that he could never change a system that had been ingrained and perpetrated for over 200 years, with crafty British colonialists helping to perfect it, we must hasten to add. He ought to have known that census in Nigeria is the northern hegemonists’ primary instrument of domination.

    With their contrived census figures, they get more states, more LGAs and more electoral wards. With their bogus head count they dominate the military and security organs; the civil service and the entire government apparatus. They heft more allocation from the federation account, and they perpetually make the rest of us, especially Ndigbo second class citizens. One is particularly disgusted that Odimegwu didn’t seem to have this perspective otherwise he would never have taken a job that has been perfectly designed to fail. If he knew he would never have gone about opening his mouth so wide to speak so ignorantly about changing the system. How dose he plan to change the warped template of Nigeria’s head count? Would he morph into a bionic man and be in every household in Nigeria? From Birnin Nkonji in the uppermost fringes of Sokoto State to Ribao where Taraba State kisses the Camerouns he would lead all the counting teams and man all the collation units? If he has devised a fail-proof satellite mapping technology, how can he determine that one quarter of the much-touted huge population of Kano, Kwankwaso country are not probably Ndigbo and perhaps one third of the inhabitants are Christians, among other vital stats that cannot be captured from above?

    One was appalled that after years of excellent work life in the best of multinational corporations and with the best global minds; after the self-lacerating third term ruckus and the circumstance of his exit from his high office he remains quite excitable if not exuberant. Even if he has manufactured a wand to conduct the perfect census for Nigeria, considering the sensitivity of the process and the deep import of a national head count in a primitive society such as ours, one would expect him to keep his strategies very close to his chest. Lastly on Odimegwu’s shortcomings, he also suffers the Igboman disease: he tends to love Nigeria more than other Nigerians, he wants to outdo the average Nigerian and he strives harder and wants to be more nationalistic in an environment where constituent nationalities take care of their tribal interests first. One quick example: while Nnamdi Azikiwe was playing the nationalist (to the eternal pain of Ndigbo), Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello were more interested in taking care of their people and their region.

    Having said all these, I think Odimegwu should quit that silly job and as Ndigbo say, ka o we kwa yere onwe ya ugwu. Because Odimegwu utterly disrespected himself by accepting an accursed job that is why Kwankwaso, at the drop of a pin, would brand him a drunkard who has been inebriated from brewing beer all his life; but we know the hypocrites who drink in their closets and from their prayer kettles in the bid to fool their god. It is not enough to recommend his sack he has to be abused too. Haba Mr. governor how really would census figure affect your running of Kano State today?

    My brother of the pen, Malam Haruna was, true to type, quick to bring his lucid mind to bear on a farce. To be fair, every part of the country now does their best to rig the census figures but the north just has the patent to the ‘winning’ formula. But when highly learned men like Haruna begins to abet and justify a well-known fallacy then doom beckons on the land. Why is our country so distraught and disheveled today, we wander about as if we are not part of the world community? It is because we are living many lies the worst of which is that we base our policies on fictitious headcounts. Haruna, like most of us, know full well that we have been living a lie but because it benefits him, it is okay. I am sorry to say that he suffers acute myopia. The earlier we return to the path of truth, the better for us all.

    On the other hand, the likes of odumegwu if they are wise, instead of straining to fix Nigeria’s broken China, must begin to apply themselves to the urgent project of rejecting the vassal status Nigeria has consigned Ndigbo to. Census my foot!

  • Mark this logic

    Mark this logic

    The Senate is a hallowed chamber, the “Upper House” of the National Assembly where wise men and women, distinguished and accomplished, with an uncommon dedication,deliberate and legislate for the good of the country. They risk everything, including their lives for the cause of Nigerian unity, peace, and progress. Beside this dedication, of which some compatriots may mischievously feign ignorance, no one can doubt the significance of the responsibility that is bestowed on the Senate and its leadership for the good governance of the country. And as we know, the fruit of good governance is good and contented citizenry while bad governance yields bad and unhappy citizenry. If only for this reason, then, we must pay careful attention to the words and deeds coming out of this sacred space.

    Since its christening as a country almost one hundred years ago, Nigeria has weathered all kinds of political storms and survived, surely with deep and ugly scars, but still standing. Sometimes, this luck that has come our way tends to create a false sense of security and invincibility. We are not and cannot be Yugoslavia or Somalia, we tell ourselves. And certainly, we cannot experience the fate of the former Soviet Union. This is the logic of political hubris.

    While a section of the political class has internalised this logic and has been vocal in expressing it and recommending it, I am aware that there are wiser counsels across the board urging caution and open-mindedness in dealing with the fundamental issues that the country must resolve to ensure it doesn’t become another statistics. We have also been inundated with predictions of an ultimate disintegration. We do not avoid such outcomes with assertions of confidence or prayers of the faithful alone. We have to work arduously for a different and desirable outcome.

    A major challenge to good governance is the major instrument of governance, the foundation of all instruments, the groundnorm, the document that certifies the union and the shakiness of the ground on which it rests. And it was to the controversy surrounding this fundamental issue that the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria recently decided to contribute its authoritative voice through its President, Senator David Mark.

    According to media reports, Senator Mark gave an address at the 53rd Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in Calabar where he “urged proponents of sovereign national conference to forget it.” His primary reason was that such a conference was not possible “until the section on Constitutional amendment is reviewed.”

    Now it is important to note that the issue of convoking a (sovereign) national conference” has assumed a life of its own as if it were the end and not a means to the further end of restructuring the polity for the purpose of good governance. I don’t know of any in the legions of advocates for a (sovereign) national conference that have thought of it as an end in itself. The question has always been whether or not there is a more efficient and effective way of getting to the end other than through a (sovereign) national conference.

    Notice that in the above, I placed “sovereign” in parenthesis. It was deliberate to suggest that the issue of the sovereign nature of such a conference should also not be a hindrance. The purpose is simply to underscore the fact that, as the Senate president acknowledges, sovereignty belongs to the people and they may choose to delegate it the way they deem fit, through an elected representative or through a national conference, or yet through a constituent assembly. And they have the right to make this determination especially in the most important duty they assume as autonomous beings: the duty to make laws that they will be governed by. That is what we do when we create a constitution.

    In his Calabar address, Senator Mark provided an argument for his position, an argument that I have taken the liberty to reconstruct as follows:

    1. The 1999 Constitution may be imperfect but it is our groundnorm and the supreme law which expresses our sovereignty and creates all powers, institutions, and authorities of the state.

    2. From 1. it follows that the “sovereign national conference” doesn’t have a source of authority. (This is presumably because the constitution doesn’t recognise such a conference.)

    3. The people are sovereign but “how do we get the people to confer sovereignty on such a conference?” (It would appear that this is the heart of the matter for Senator Mark.)

    4. Therefore, from the foregoing, there has to be an amendment to the 1999 Constitution to provide for the making of a new Constitution.

    I read the media report of Senator Mark’s address without the benefit of the full address. So I hope that the report is a correct summary of his address. If so, I confess that I am optimistic that the Distinguished Senator means well and that in the interest of the nation and with due recognition for his revered position, he has given serious thought to what appears to be a difficult subject. It is in light of this understanding that I want to take him up on the matter.

    First, we share agreement about the fundamental nature of the constitution of a nation as its groundnorm. That is the assumption, the reality of which depends on the seriousness with which the task is taken in specific situations and circumstances. In our case, it was clear to everyone that in 1999 the haste with which the constitution was adopted, and the secrecy under which it was incubated ran contrary to its pretention as the groundnorm.

    Senator Mark acknowledges the imperfections and the debatable origins of the document. But he seems to insist that despite these foundational flaws, the document remains a reality. It is indeed a reality but the task of the Senate as the representative of the people is to reject a reality that (a) contemptuously ignores the people and (2) stands in the way of good governance for their welfare. Consider an analogy. Anopheles mosquito and the malaria disease that it causes are realities of our clime. Do we accept it as such and not deal with it?

    Second, if the constitution doesn’t have its source in the people who are acknowledged as sovereign, then its reality cannot be an impediment to the aspiration of the people to be the source of the laws that govern them. If a thief sneaks into a house and with the power of his gun forces the occupants to obey its commands, they may prudently obey because they have no choice. But they will do whatever is humanly possible under the circumstance to free themselves from the intruder. Should they have access to a superior weapon, they will take advantage in a jiffy.

    This was what the Icelanders did in 2008. Assisted by a financial disaster that wiped out the entire domestic equity market, the “Pots-and-pans revolution” demanded a new constitutional framework. The Iceland Parliament set up a Constitutional Council which then solicited inputs from the people through social media on the basis of which it produced a draft constitution submitted to parliament which in turn put the new constitution to the people in a referendum that won by 2-1 margin in October last year. As of March the final approval was pending in parliament.If Iceland can do it with a sitting Parliament and a 1944 constitution that had no provision for replacement, surely Nigeria can.

    Third, all we need is to truthfully acknowledge the sovereignty of the people. They can decide to confer or refrain from conferring sovereignty on a conference. But first, the question must be put to them.What we must not do is assume the impossibility of conducting a referendum on what the people want. The most disingenuous approach to my mind is to propose “an amendment to the 1999 Constitution to provide for the making of a new Constitution.” For that is making a fetish of a document that we all agree has numerous imperfections (consider the number of amendments proposed thus far) and a debatable origin.

  • There we go again

    Shortly before Taraba State Governor Danbaba Danfulani Suntai returned to the country on Sunday after a 10 – month sojourn abroad, this paper had an encounter with him. It was a lucky meeting between him and our reporter, Joke Kujenya, at the Sea View Hospital Rehabilitation Centre and Home on Staten Island, New York, United States. They saw eye – to – eye but could not talk to each other because Joke was there ‘unofficially’, that was how they put it, and so could not walk up to the governor for a chat.

    Despite that, the description of what she saw last Saturday following her chance encounter with the governor before he was brought home painted enough picture of his state of health. Her report, which was published on page three of The Nation on Sunday, reads in part : ‘’While waiting, I did a quick look – around. And there, he was. I got locked in eye contact with the man himself, Governor Danbaba Suntai! He sat on a wheelchair in Room 503 beside his bed laid in white with three pillows well set aside each one.

    ‘’The name tag on his room read : Dan Fulani. He wore a red T-shirt on an off – white pair of trousers. He also wore a grey coloured sneaker to complete the outfit…But, he did not utter a word to the reporter neither did he move his body. He only raised his head on the same spot. On impulse, he looked up and saw the reporter. Then he locked his eyes on the reporter squeezing his face probably for a recollection. This lasted for over 10 minutes…After a while, he looked away and bowed his head’’

    The foregoing shows that no matter what some people may be saying, Suntai still needs care and serious care at that. We thank God that he is getting better, but he should be allowed to fully recover before being rushed home over unnecessary fears that he may be impeached as governor to pave the way for his deputy, Garba Umar, to step in as the countdown to the 2015 elections begins. That he survived a plane crash is enough reason for him and his family to thank God. The cases of many others were not as serious as his and yet they died. I believe that God preserved Suntai’s life because he still needs him, but it may not be in the capacity of a governor. This is the bitter truth his loyalists don’t want to hear. Unfortunately, his wife is on their side.

    Suntai should let the will of God prevail in his life instead of allowing people, who don’t mean well for him to push him around for their own political interest. This is the problem with our politicians. They can play politics with anything, including human life. The signs all point to the fact that Suntai is not in full control of his mental senses. Just a look at him as he was being carried out of the plane that brought him home on Sunday was enough to tell any sane person that the governor still needs to be under close medical watch.

    Why then did his wife , Hajia Hauwa, friends and political associates rush him home in such a critical condition? The answer is simple; they want to manipulate him for their own political gains. I am particularly pained that Suntai’s wife could be a party to the manipulation of her husband. Does she truly love the man? Does she have her family’s interest at heart? It is true that women love power, but a woman must know where to draw the line when the life of her husband is involved. Will Hauwa be happy if something untoward happens to her husband in this bitter contest for power now playing out in Taraba?

    She doesn’t need to travel far to see what happened to people in similar circumstance not too long ago. I am sorry to use the Yar ‘Adua case as an analogy, but I am forced to do so in order to bring home to Mrs Suntai the danger she is playing with in allowing her husband to be used as a pawn on the political chess board of some people. What else does she want after being wife of a governor for six years before the unfortunate plane crash in which her husband sustained the injuries he is nursing? Instead of being thankful to God that she still has her husband to hold on to, she wants to carry her sacrifice beyond the mosque by dabbling into politics.

    I hope she will not end up burning her fingers. Today, Taraba is facing a crisis of leadership because of her husband’s sudden appearance on the scene, despite not being mentally alert to discharge the obligations of his office. What will Suntai lose if if his deputy continues to run the state while he continues to attend to his health? Is being governor more important to him than becoming hale and hearty first? Is it not the person that is alive that can think of holding political office, whether president, governor or whatever?

    At this point, everything lies

    in the hands of Mrs Suntai.

    She can change things by putting a stop to this political shenanigan. What will it profit her if she acquires all the political power in Taraba, but loses her husband? She should not be part of the political statement that her husband is strong, healthy and raring to return to work being mouthed by people like former Information Minister Prof Jerry Gana and one – time publicist of the defunct National Republican Convention (NRC) John Dara. What should concern her now is the wellbeing of her husband if she wants him to be father of her children till the couple grow old together.

    Unfotunately, Mrs Suntai is becoming too much involved in the political undercurrent of her husband’s illness instead of nursing him back to good health. Though, I was not there, but I believe that the doctors would have told her that ‘’madam, please ensure that your husband takes his drugs regularly and rests well until he returns here for examination’’. Can Suntai have that rest if he returns to work now when we know that the job of a governor demands a lot of rigour no matter how backward that state may be?

    If there is nothing to hide about the health of her husband, Mrs Suntai will not be shielding him from members of the House of Assembly, who have oversight functions over him. Those who say he is fit to return to work or who assisted him in writing to the lawmakers that he was ready to resume should bury their heads in shame. They should remember the damage they did to the country during the Yar ‘Adua saga. They should not make us to travel that road again. Suntai’s life should be more precious to us all than him being a puppet governor.

    Let Ozekhome go

    Every day our country keeps sinking deeper into a morass. People leave their homes without knowing whether they will return safely. We live each day as if it is going to be the last because of the fear of the unknown, When we leave home and return safely, we do thanksgiving. We live in fear in this country today; the fear of Boko Haram, the fear of kidnappers, the fear of ritual killers, the fear of night marauders and the fear of rapists. Of the lot, the fear of kidnappers makes our hair stand on our head because we don’t know where and when they will strike.

    The kidnappers’ latest victim is Mike Ozekhome (SAN), who was kidnapped on the Benin – Auchi road last Friday. Since his abduction, we have not heard from his kidnappers to know what they want. Is it money? Is it that he should drop a case that he is handling? Is it that he should stop his activism? Rather than answer these questions, the kidnappers are keeping us in suspense. If only his kidnappers know Ozek baba, that is how some of us call him, they won’t have snatched him. Unknown to them, they have abducted a man they should have befriended. They may have a reason for their action, but they got the wrong person

    Ozekhome’s place is not the kidnappers’ den. Nobody’s place is the kidnappers’ den any way. So, I appeal to the kidnappers today to let Ozekhome go. They should let him return home to his family unhurt. Ozek baba, I am praying for your safe return.

  • A recent trip to Ghana – 2

    The Republic of Ghana is a thriving democracy under its current young President, Dr. John Dramani Mahama who is an intellectual in his own right. What I find extremely interesting about modern Ghana is that the country is run by the young people who are mostly in their 30s, 40s and 50s; the kind of people who will be pushed aside in Nigeria. The simplicity of the Ghanaian leadership is overwhelming. In my recent visit to Ghana, one of the Senior Protocol Officers in the Presidency who was in charge was a young lady in her 30s who was simply dressed in Ankara fabric sewn into a gown and I immediately imagined what a senior protocol lady in Nigeria would have been wearing. The minister of state for tertiary education was a young member of parliament most likely in his late 30s or early 40s. The Ghanaian constitution enjoins on the President to appoint substantial members of his cabinet from parliament. This is something those reviewing our constitution should look into. I personally like the South African model where the President is also the leader of his party in parliament so that he can channel his policies towards enactment into Acts of Parliament. There is so much to learn from Ghana that probably writing a book about it is what would be required. For example, there is no dichotomy between the cities and the rural areas. City houses are not vastly different from what you find in the rural areas and electricity is available everywhere. Hence, rural-urban migration is severely mitigated.

    The most glaring disparity between Nigeria and Ghana is the whole question of monuments and legacies. There are no monuments in Nigeria of the past; the houses of our past leaders are treated as ordinary abodes rather than national monuments. The Premier’s lodge in Ibadan I believe has been sold to an individual or turned into a high court. The Premier’s lodge in Kaduna, the so-called Arewa House is some kind of archive whilst the Prime Minister’s lodge in Lagos is now an army officer’s mess. The federal parliament and the original federal secretariat and its successor in Lagos have been abandoned, burglarised and vandalised and are now inhabited by rodents. We have not even been able to build the mausoleum for Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in spite of millions set aside for it and the graves of our leaders are taken care of by their families. But when you go to Accra, Nkrumah’s graveyard and that of his wife are tourists’ attractions. There is a museum for his books, his clothing and even the bed he used in Lincoln University as a student. If it is not too late, may I suggest that there is a need to build in Abuja monuments to our heroes as well as a country home somewhere in the woods or hills of Abuja for our President to escape to for reflection so that he does not spend eternity in Aso Rock totally isolated from reality? Nigeria is much richer than Ghana in resources and wealth but much poorer in management and vision. I am passionate about the two countries, Nigeria is my home, my daughter is married to a Ghanaian hence, Ghana is my daughter’s home.

    There is little sense of nationalism in Nigeria and our flag does not attract the kind of attention and sense of patriotism that the Ghanaian flag enjoys. Yet you cannot build a nation without symbols and monuments. We just do not have rallying points and heroes around which we can build the sense of pride which a developing country needs. When I visited New Delhi, I was taken to Jawaharlal Nehru’s home and showed his house and his bed on his last days on earth and the simplicity was simply overwhelming. In Accra at the Nkrumah Gardens, the Cadillac car he used as President is preserved compared to the vandalization of Murtala Muhammad’s car deposited for ‘safe’ keeping in the National Museum in Lagos.

    Whenever I pass by Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s personal house in Ibadan and see crates of Coca-Cola in front of it, I feel a sense of loss about how the place could be turned into a tourist attraction. There is so much that is missing in our lives and it is not really a question of money or budgetary allocation. What seems to be the problem with us is that we simply have no sense of vision and mission and our sense of who we are is befuddled by our current problems many of which are self-imposed.

    Perhaps the problem of Nigeria is the official lack of the sense of history. I use the word ‘official’ advisedly because the ordinary man on the street has a sense of history and he can easily connect with the past. This is why the caliphate for example is still a strong force that connects the past with the present among the Hausa-Fulani. The institutions of the Ooni and the Alaafin are potent rallying points in Yoruba land and any politician who denigrates these institutions, does so it at his own peril. Even among acephalous societies of the Igbo, the Ibibio and other Nigerians who until recently did not have centralised institutions of monarchies, their sense of history is no less important and individuals can relate to this sense of history. But at the official level where for reasons best known to government, history has been yanked out of primary and secondary school syllabi apparently on the advice of Americans who came here in the seventies and advised our government to introduce what they call “social studies” in place of history. This is something they do not do in their own country where American history with its theme of their manifest destiny is drummed into the ears of young people so that they could feel they are a special people and almost a chosen generation. But we who need this sense of nationalism because our nation is in a state of ebullition were wrongly advised and probably deliberately made to operate in an historical and cultural void. Unlike Ghana, which has a sense of purpose under Nkrumah and would brook no interference in the educational system of their people, we have been made to go through a system of disconnect between the present and the past; the consequence of which is the total absence of the sense of history in our national life. After 53 years, we have no monuments to point to for the coming generation and to take tourists to while visiting our country. There are no national symbols of our sovereignty, of our history, of our unity. We think the numbers of cars and trucks on our roads and the variety of foreign restaurants and eateries and the innumerable generators and other manifestation of our dependency on Western culture are signs of modernity. We leave the exhibition of our 2000 year old civilisation in Nok, Ife, Benin, and Igbo Ukwu in the hands of oil companies in various metropolitan centres of the world happily without any condescension on their part. This should have been the duty of our government to showcase our past to the rest of the world but our leaders are more interested in feathering their own nest and looting the treasury and building mansions which their children will not be able to maintain and which would have to be turned to museums in the future. Perhaps it is not too late to make amends and I sincerely hope that when our leaders visit other parts of the world including Ghana, they would learn the lesson of building monuments for the future. Life is not about material well-being alone, there are things that appeal to the spirit. A nation could be developed physically but be spiritually poor. A city like Abuja for example may be beautiful but it has no soul and it is incumbent on planners to try and infuse soul into such a city. This is why Abuja is deserted at weekends and people flee to places like Lagos, Kano in spite of the fact that they are not as developed as Abuja. As a nation, we need to be thinking of the future and of our children and grand children and the legacies we would leave behind. This is why civilised countries spend huge amount of money on museums, art galleries, libraries, national monuments which are what will endure and not whatever money we have in bank vaults.

  • APC manifesto: Nigerians want miracles

    APC manifesto: Nigerians want miracles

    The All Progressives Congress recently unfolded an eight-point cardinal programme that covers electricity generation, war against corruption, food security,   integrated transport network and free education. Others are devolution of power, accelerated economic growth and affordable health care. While the party has tried to assure Nigerian that the programme will transform Nigeria, the ruling PDP has through its National Publicity Secretary, Chief Olisa Metuh said that the APC eight point programme, which offered nothing new was “a very poor imitation and a bland parody of PDP manifesto.” And echoing similar sentiment, Dr Doyin Okupe, says “It is a plagiarized version of the PDP manifesto and it lacks vision”.

    It is difficult to disagree with the two misinformation merchants though their claim in itself is an admission of failure by PDP that in 1999, promised through Obasanjo, its leading star, to provide stable electricity within two years, embark on agricultural revolution, end massive importation of foreign goods as well as fight corruption, some of the issues the rival ACP now says it intends to tackle. After eight years of Obasanjo roadmap, Yar’Adua’s seven-point agenda and President Jonathan’s own transformation agenda that has run for over two years, outside PDP and its leading light, the verdict today is that we are worse off than we were in 1999.

    What the APC eight-point agenda has offered the electorate therefore is only a choice between PDP’s 14 years of failed promises and APC’s hope based on the credibility and the past records of its chief promoters, Buhari and Tinubu. The party wants the electorate to be guided in 2015 by the record of Buhari who ensured during his short term in office, the nation not only stopped importation of wheat, our problem became how to store locally produced grains; the nation not only creatively ensured we did not waste billions on importation of refined fuel, but was exporting refined fuel; and of course the record of the defunct ACN governors from Lagos to Edo who have set standard of performance yet to be matched by those PDP governors who collect from the federation account in one month what some of the opposition governors collect in 12 months.

    But I think Nigerians want more. The APC eight-point programme like the PDP 14 years recycled agenda, are routine responsibilities of government that do not require the intervention of angels or men with special talents. They remain intractable because of the greed of PDP leaders who chose to serve themselves rather than fulfil their obligation to Nigerians. This is not just the views of a critique of PDP’s inept management of the nations affairs, it is also that of the various probe bodies set up by the government itself as well as that of the judiciary that at different periods indicted nearly all the past PDP chairmen, past Senate presidents, past Speakers of the Lower House, ex-governors some of whom have served jailed terms at home for financial malfeasance or abroad for money laundering.

    An army of frustrated unemployed youths driven into the embrace of Nigeria’s prosperity prophets by PDP 14 years of uninspiring leadership have grown to become miracle seekers. They therefore want nothing less than miracles from APC. Their expectations are legitimate. The challenge of what appears impossible task, which often come through dreaming dreams, is what after all make political parties relevant to their societies. Political parties in the US, Britain, Japan and China modernized their societies by dreaming dreams.

    Nearer home, we have the example of the western Nigeria under Obafemi Awolowo in the 1950s. When the AG launched its freed education programme, others that could not dream dreams dismissed it with a wave of hand. In fact NCNC went a step further to undermine it through campaign of misinformation which resulted in AG’s loss of federal election in 1952. The success of free education became a testimony that those who dared to dream often perform miracles. More miracles followed. The Awo-led AG awarded more foreign scholarships to youths of the defunct Western State in their first year in office than the total number of scholarship the departing colonial masters awarded to the whole of Nigeria in the preceding three years.

    Nigerian miracle seekers, assaulted by PDP’s celebration of generating 2500MW in 14 years after frittering away of over US$20 billion want dreamers who will generate 40,000MW in four years, repair our refineries in six months, insist we eat our own local rice in one year, stop importation of used tyres from Ghana, South Africa and Europe in three months by giving bailouts to Michelin and Dunlop to relocate from Ghana back to Nigeria.

    Beyond the yearning of Nigerians for dreamers, APC eight-point agenda whose originality is being violently contested by PDP can hardly be attained within the present system that has sustained PDP anarchy and rape of our nation for 14 years. This is why one finds it curious that restructuring is conspicuously missing in the APC agenda. This omission cannot be attributed to differences in ideological orientation of the merging political parties. Restructuring formed the major platform of Buhari’s quest for the presidency in 2011. Of course restructuring and regional integration are experiments that have started to yield dividends in the states controlled by the defunct ACN.

    They can be best achieved within a restructured Nigerian federalism. The six power blocks that emerged after the 2011 election which bear semblance to Alex Ekwueme ‘s recommended six geo-political zones as the building block for a federal arrangement that will reflect our cultural and ethnic diversity can become the platform for APC dream of a restructured Nigeria. The current 36 state structure with 774 arbitrarily created LGAs have become channels for the depletion of resources desperately needed for developmental efforts.

    For instance the current six states of the South-west do not need more than a governor and perhaps six deputy governors to coordinate the activities of LGA which should be the responsibility of the zones/regions instead of depending on father Christmas from Abuja whose interest is in patronage not for development, but for destabilization of states as it is now evident in the sponsored crisis in Rivers and Adamawa.

    And at alleged N50m monthly allocation for security to a governor, the six state governors take away N300m in a month or N3.6billion in a year, or N14.4billion in four years, enough to make the South-west self-sufficient in rice production or turn the South-west to a major exporter of ‘ofada and Igbimo’ rice. Savings from just the rationalization of governors alone can perform the same miracle with cotton in the North-east now made ungovernable by jobless religious fundamentalists, groundnut in North-west palm oil in South-south and South east.

    Of course it will be a miracle to restructure a nation where ‘Nigerian army of anything is possible’ created states for their wives and local government for their media assistants; where the obsession of the young and the old in their 70s who had served as ministers and senators is to become governors of their unviable states; where governors of insolvent states that cannot pay salaries of teachers fly private jets and ride in armoured vehicles; where state representatives at the centre are the highest paid lawmakers in the world; where hardly literate local government councillors are better remunerated than university professors and where ministerial appointments like oil block allocation are shared on the basis of state representation.

    But then beyond mobilization for elective political office or ensuring actual takeover of power, what political parties are in the main called upon to perform, are miracles. And only parties that dream dreams succeed in this endeavour. APC must note that traumatized Nigerians who have lost hope in all politicians, military and the current ruling class, are impatient. They don’t want more of the same. They want dreamers. They want miracles.

  • Daniel goes to Lagos

    Daniel goes to Lagos

    LET’S get it right from the outset. This is not about the former governor and chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – sorry, an error there; the Labour Party(LP) – Otunba Gbenga Daniel.

    Neither is it about politics, its rough and tumble, twists and turns, intrigues and treachery. Nor is it about politicians and their wily ways, their inconsistency and ineffectuality that have bred a stifling socio-political situation. Boko Haram. Kidnapping. Armed robbery. Ritual killing and other despicable acts. No.

    The story is familiar. A kid packed his bag, left home in Benin City, headed for the airport and jumped into the wheel compartment of an aircraft getting set to fly. The pilot, who had earlier complained that he saw an unusual movement, was cleared to take off. He did. Some passengers said the take-off was not smooth. They claimed that there was a bang and many were screaming: “Jesus! Jesus!”.

    Thankfully, the plane landed safely in Lagos. The passengers disembarked and congratulated one another for a safe trip. From the tyre compartment emerged a boy, in all the innocence of a kid. He wore an orange-white sweat shirt with a hood, a white rosary dangling from his tender neck and a black backpack in his hand. He was grabbed by a security man who held him so tightly as if he was his after-race prize.

    Poor boy. From his countenance, Daniel was upset. Probably not because he was seized like a Lagos pick-pocket. No. Most likely because the trip ended so soon. He was, surely, not yet in his destination. Daniel was heading for America and realising that he was still in Nigeria must have infuriated him.

    After watching some movies, he had confided in his younger brother that he was one day going to fly to America. What he didn’t say was that he was going to so do in such a sensational manner.

    Why did 13-year old Daniel choose to travel in that weird way? His mum, Mrs. Evelyn Ohikhena, said he was never maltreated. He couldn’t have been running away from a hostile home. To psychologists, this is a practical expression of the fecundity of a youngster’s mind, the raw power of imagination. Even the famous movie pranksters, Aki and Pawpaw, could have found Daniel’s feat a bit odd. Neither Edddie Murphy – Coming to America – would have imagined a kid stowaway. Nor Nkem Owoh’s peregrination in Osofia in London would have harboured such a stunt.

    Like in such strange matters, the Daniel story has suddenly bred an army of emergency aeronautics engineers and beer parlour pilots, who have not allowed the experts to talk. They have been arguing that the huge sound the plane was said to have let out at take-off couldn’t have been caused by the kid’s presence in the tyre area. Can that happen without the person who may have caused the obstruction being hurt? What is the size of the tyre? How possible is Daniel’s action, going by the laws of aerodynamics? Where does avionics come in? Is the tyre area lit for Daniel to see during his flight? The row goes on and on.

    If the pilot had aborted the take-off – assuming he was not sure the obstacle he saw had been cleared – the next day’s headline would have been so electrifying. Sample: “Hundreds escape death on Arik Air flight.” And such other sensational stuff.

    Spiritualists have entered the fray. A senior government official who was on the flight described Daniel as “an evil spirit”. He was shaking as he spoke – apparently thinking the boy had some ethereal force to bring down the aircraft but was handicapped by a superior power. Some even said the little one thought he was going to heaven.

    There is also a large crowd of security experts, who have been postulating on how our airports –we have thrown billions into knocking down and rebuilding terminals with little consideration for the human element, the personnel – should be secured against cows, sheep, birds and touts.

    The Daniel story is yet to end. Who are his class mates? Who is his teacher? What kind of pupil is he? Brilliant? Troublesome? Talkative? Naughty? Where is his dad? What does he do? What are Daniel’s other ambitions, besides just flying to America? Who are his heroes? Can he sing the National Anthem? In other words, does he believe in Nigeria where his future is assured? What fired his imagination? The American dream? A mere case of an idle mind being the devil’s workshop? Infant fantasy? Shouldn’t he have been in summer school, like the kids of the rich? The questions are many.

    His sister told The Nation yesterday: “He always said he will surprise us one day. His younger brothers also informed our mother that Daniel told them that one day, he would make our family popular. Thank God he is alive to tell the story himself.”

    Will Daniel’s antics open a new door of opportunity for terrorists as it is being suggested in some circles? That is neither here nor there. What is sure is that our overzealous security agents may have got a new licence to brutalise innocent people. Watch out for accidental discharges at airports!

    Daniel’s escapade may not have been driven by poverty. Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the Christmas Day underwear bomber, is not from a poor home. The son of a respected banker, he was seduced into extremism by the thoughts he harboured. He, apparently for some inexplicable psychology reasons, lent himself to radicalism. He remains unrepentant till date.

    But Daniel is not the first stowaway. According to The Telegraph of UK, American Clarence Terhune became perhaps the first aviation stowaway in 1928 after he hid himself on an airship, flying from the United States to Germany. So thrilled by his daring feat, the Germans offered Terhune a job at a department store.

    Mere imagination may have fired Daniel to undertake the Benin-Lagos flight. Not so for another Nigerian. Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight from New York to Los Angeles in 2011, using an out-of-date boarding pass. He was arrested in LA after attempting to board another flight, using the same invalid boarding pass. When the police searched him, they found 10 other boarding passes, none of which bore his name.

    There was also the crafty cleaner who in 2009 boarded an aircraft at Medina Airport in Saudi Arabia on the pretence of cleaning it. He hid in the toilet of the Jaipur, India-bound flight. He was discovered when a passenger tried to use the facility.

    Kid sensations are scare nowadays, except for some pop stars singing lewd songs that are neither elevating nor inspiring. All noise, no sense – to the old school.

    I hope Daniel is doing fine with the security agents who have been questioning him. He should be allowed to go home and continue dreaming. It is from such dreams that great deeds sprout.

    He is daring, the very quality that many of our leaders lack. It is this lack of boldness and courage – and character – that has kept the nation in toddlerhood even at adulthood. The Nigerian paradox has planted in the minds of our leaders a strong feeling that state police is not possible; why don’t we try? A national conference is avoided like a plague. Isn’t it imperative now, considering the quagmire in which we have found ourselves?

    Nigeria needs dreaming and daring leaders. How do we get them?

     

     

    The return of Suntai

    TARABA State Governor Danbaba Suntai’s return on Sunday from a 10-month overseas medical trip was as dramatic as the circumstances that led to his incapacitation for that long. But the Taraba show is yet unfolding.

    Suntai is, no doubt, physically exhausted. He needs time to recuperate in peace – no stress, no worries. But, like in the late President Umarau Yar’Adua’s case, the selfish forces that are gaining from his being there, even if he is out of form in every way, will not let him throw in the towel.

    He sent a letter to the House to say he was set to return to work. The governor followed it up yesterday with a shocking dissolution of the executive council. Besides, he made a short broadcast, thanking the people for standing by him. Lagos lawyer Femi Falana is calling for an inquiry into the health of His Excellency. That is what the law says. If he is certified fit, he should continue to run the show.

    Suntai will not lose anything if he is allowed to quit, should doctors confirm that he can’t do the job. The forces that seem to be holding him captive are being unfair to him and the people. The buffoonery is unnecessary.