The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

Fraudulent federalism; FRSC and Sunday service; Women and delivery services

When will true federalism come to Nigeria? Is the current wave of violent unrest in Nigeria not directly linked to the massive 40-year fraudulent federalism and fiscal fraud with the resultant underdevelopment that has reduced Nigeria’s children’s maximum aspirations to celebrate the sporadic arrival of electricity sparks while in other countries, even African countries, electric power never departed, but just increased in 40 years? Those other African countries have never known an epidemic of fuel fumes and generators. Governor Fashola has asked this ‘True Federalism’ question as many times as this column has. Who can reconcile ‘True Federalism’ with the warped LGA creation between Kano+ Jigawa with 77 local governments and only 20 for Lagos State? Add to that warped federal policies on water, power, railways, jobs, scholarships, education and health. It is a miracle of self-help allowing us to survive the evil machinations of federal rule!

To what purpose does the FRSC patrol the road on Sundays when locals are taking their children to and from church or lunch? Is it road safety? That is the time the FRSC selects to do ‘stop and search’ on the only day you are trying to get on the right side of God. I always feel sad when I see a danfofull of suffering citizens or a vehicle driven by a woman with her children or a family man with his family under such stress of Sunday. What motivates such FRSC officials to be out as early as 7am on Sunday in both Lagos and particularly in Ibadan on the Bodija/ Secretariat road? National interest, arrest number quotas, clearing the roads of dangerous maniac drivers or Road Safety which is their primary assignment?

Of course we must not suggest the dreaded but widespread self-serving ‘corruption’ as a motive but it is the responsibility of the FRSC and EFCC authorities to exclude that as a motive. Perhaps the motivation is just overzealousness as they are hoping to eventually replace their ‘oga at the top’ and need a powerful CV of road service as testimony to their ability? Seeing big strong FRSC men and women jumping sometimes from hidden positions into the road in Lagos, at Ogere and in Ibadan to stop vehicles merely going about their honest Sunday business does not speak well of the FRSC, especially if the vehicle is obviously on Sunday morning church mission. You must have noticed that even police have got their checkpoint mojo back through the back door by arresting anything moving with windows even faintly ‘tinted’. Opportunity knocks again. After that FRSC trauma, if they are released, the victims arrive in church late and frustrated if they are not arrested and the priests or pastor frowns at their bad example. ‘You do not go late to work. How dare you come late for God? If you are late for God, He will be late for you, Amen!’

Of course, FRSC must be no ‘respecter of persons’ when it comes to the law but Nigerians should respect women a lot more than they do. Natural courtesy demands publicly funded bodies behave in a becoming manner. Of course dangerous and nuisance driving deserves and demands intervention but does intervention mean ‘draconian intervention or intimidation’ like ABCD=Arrest, Booking, Clamping, Detention when it is obvious that ABCD=Advice, Before Caution, Detention would be the more humane and logical way forward? Where is the guiding hand? Should everything be through fear and intimidation? The expressway is still full of trailers and lorries dangerously driving on the left instead of the right lane. The nation’s professional drivers have certainly failed their ‘KEEP RIGHT’lessons of the FRSC.

At Ogere on the Lagos Ibadan Expressway exactly where the road has been cleared of tankers and trailers after 30 years of pain and anguish to millions of travellers daily, guess what? The FRSC has a permanent roadside checkpoint which narrows the road by their tactics of standing in one of the two lanes and waving you down. What was the point of opening the road into two lanes if the very force supposed to keep the two lanes open delights in creating an instant go-slow? Surely the FRSC patrol cars should not park in, or force vehicles to park in the same place it took 30 years to remove the trucks from? Does nobody supervise these patrol units? Sunday stop and search of women alone in vehicles and with children can be considered as a form of harassment and intimidation. It should be taken up seriously by women’s groups across the country including lawyers, nurses and NAWOJ.

Not everyone who declares ‘I love you’ wants you to live or actually ‘loves you’. I tell my female patients to look in a mirror and realise that the person in the mirror is the only one who has their genuine maternity interests at heart. The man is more interested in the baby than the bearer. So their being neglected, beaten, deprived of antenatal care or good delivery facilities is manifestation of a warped ‘love from their husband’. No one can love you more than you. Nigerian women should each look in a mirror, before it is too late! Women should take more interest in where they and their female children and sisters are taken for ante natal clinic and delivery. The men do not care. Mission houses are for deliverance, hospitals are for delivery.

May 8, 2013
An open letter to the NYSC Director-General

Brigadier General Nnamdi Okorie-Affiah,

Director General,

National Youth Service Corps,

Abuja.

Sir,

THE CASE OF ABUBAKAR IDRIS USMAN

First, let me apologise for this open way of drawing your attention to the rather pathetic case of a serving corps member who seemed to have set the record of probably being the first to be court marshalled for allegedly offending the statutes of your parastatal. I have decided on this approach because the issues involved are of public interest.

Second, let me declare my interest in the case. Abubakar Idris Usman, the corps member in question, is my son, in the African sense. He graduated from Abdullahi Bayero University, Kano, with a BSc (Second Class Upper) in Mass Communications. His father, who we all call Danjuma Yaro, and I have known each other since our childhood over 60 years ago, partly growing up as we did in the midtown Kaduna neighbourhood of Layin Shaba, aka Nupe Road, one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods which is predominantly Nupe. Danjuma himself is Hausa but speaks Nupe nearly as fluently as any Nupe. Not only that, Jamila, one of his daughters and elder sister to Abubakar, has been married for over fourteen years to one of my younger cousins. They’ve have had four kids. Abubakar is one of their favourite uncles.

Abubakar has been the subject of an unrelenting punishment by your subordinates in Kaduna which has been grossly out of proportion to his alleged offence. This open letter is an appeal to you to put an end to his travail.

The source of his seemingly unending trouble was his article published in the CAMPUSLIFE section of The Nation of November 22 last year entitled “In Kaduna, Corps members sleep in toilet.” The article, accompanied by a telling picture of a uniformed corps member sitting beside a bunker bed in a toilet converted into a room, sought to highlight the plight of corps members at the NYSC camp in the state as a result of its hosting about 700 graduates more than the previous year’s number.

The offending piece quoted one corps member as saying the hostels on the camp were “unfit for human habitation.” It quoted another as saying the overcrowding in camp “posed a high risk of disease and personal safety.”

The article also mentioned the Camp Director, Mrs L. D. Mburi, of complaining “bitterly” about female corps members who used to defecate into polythene bags in their hostels. It also mentioned the State Co-ordinator, Mrs. Victoria Ango, as telling you on a visit to the camp that the abandoned hostel projects on the camp would be completed in three week’s time as a way of meeting the challenge of inadequate accommodation on the camp.

Predictably, the articles got the dander of the NYSC authorities in Kaduna up.

The first sign that Abubakar was in trouble came at lunchtime on the very day his article was published. The sign came through an urgent summons on his phone for him to go to the State coordinator’s office. On arrival he was confronted by an angry Mrs Ango who demanded to know who put him up to his “wicked” article. This was in the company of an equally angry Mrs Mburi and the Camp Commandant, Captain Dada.

After a barrage of angry words he was told that he’ll make the record as the first corps member to be court marshalled in the state. He was given enough time to get dressed up in his uniform for the trial which was to take place in Mrs Mburi’s office. On getting to the hostel to dress up he was told by some of his colleagues that some NYSC staff had been there and had ransacked his bag and taken away his digital camera, jotter, and his other mobile phone.

At the venue of the trial he discovered that two of the corps members he quoted in his article had also been summoned. This was in the afternoon. However, the trial did not begin till 7 pm. It was chaired by Mrs Mburi. Others on the panel included a State Security Service (SSS) representative, a police representative and a civil defence representative. According to Abubakar, no one questioned the accuracy of his article. Instead the panel’s concern was who sponsored him and how he was able to file the article when he was supposed to be on the camp; a silly question, if you ask me, in this digital age of the ubiquitous internet. The panel, he said, also wondered if he thought he could fight government. And so on and so forth.

All three apologised profusely for the embarrassment they said the article must have caused the state NYSC authorities and pleaded for clemency. Abubakar, however, said he tried to explain to the panel that he meant no harm and was only practicing what he was taught about the watchdog role of a journalist as a mass communications undergraduate.

The panel was not impressed. Instead at the end of the trial at 9 pm it sentenced the other two to severe drill. On his part as the main culprit, Abubakar was sentenced to the same drill, his phone seized and was told he will get a three-month extension of his service without pay.

The following day his father, Danjuma Yaro, appeared on the camp in the morning at the summons of the NYSC authorities, presumably for briefing about his son’s offence. Danjuma went along with one of the most respected elders of our neighbourhood, Sheikh Namadi. Both pleaded with the camp director for clemency for Abubakar. Their pleas fell on deaf ears; Abubakar would be forgiven alright, she said, provided he published an advert in three national newspapers retracting his article.

Anyone who knows what newspaper advertisements cost, especially in Nigeria, would agree that this was impossible for anyone on a corps member’s relatively miserable allowance. Worse, it would amount to committing professional suicide for any journalist to retract a piece whose accuracy and fairness was never in question, never mind a budding journalist like Abubakar whose entire career was in front of him.

Abubakar sought my advice as a father and a veteran journalist he said he’d always looked up to. I told him he was foolish to have written the article as a corps member but he must never retract it as long as he was sure of his facts. He heeded my advice and paid a stiff penalty for it; he was refused his posting letter when the camp finally closed on November 25.

Before then his case took a very sinister turn in the afternoon of the very day his father was summoned to the camp. That afternoon, he said, he was made to appear before an SSS staff who accused him of being a member of Boko Haram. That was a most cynical manipulation of the young man’s self-will and of his appearance; unlike his clean-shaven father, Abubakar may have sported a goatee but anyone who knows Layin Shaba will testify to the fact that no child of the neighbourhood has ever displayed extreme religious tendency.

Abubakar was interrogated extensively by the SSS operative but was not detained. Presumably the operative was satisfied that someone was merely trying to frame the stubborn young chap.

For weeks after the close of camp a stalemate ensued between Abubakar and the Kaduna NYSC authorities. Each time he went to the headquarters for his posting he was told he could only get it if he retracted his article. Eventually, they relented – or so it seemed – and posted him to teach at Government Secondary School, Warsa Piti, in Lere Local Government of the state. This was in spite of his earlier plea for posting to Kaduna North on health ground as someone who had tested positive to Hepatitis B in 2012 and needed routine medical check up.

However, even in seemingly relenting from their position, it was not without an element of cynicism; the same people who refused to post him until he retracted his article issued him a query that he had been posted since November 28, 2012 but had “refused” to collect his letter in violation of a section of an NYSC bye law! He was given the 24 hour to answer his query.

For a while it seemed the authorities were satisfied with his response. Last month it emerged that they weren’t but were merely biding their time to punish the hapless chap even more. First, he was served with a letter relocating him to Delta State “on health grounds.” When he wrote back to say he never requested for relocation he received two letters, the first signed by an assistant director on behalf of the state coordinator and a second by the state coordinator herself, which said he was being relocated as punishment for his “malicious article” in The Nation. In addition, the letters said he will serve an extension of 30 days.

Both letters said the reposting was at your directive.

Sir, I wish to appeal to you to review your decision. Abubakar has been punished enough by his initial posting, considering his health challenges and the trauma he’d suffered through the delay in posting him. Besides he has never been paid his allowances since he resumed at his primary post. His offence may have embarrassed your staff in Kaduna but it was never malicious.

I hope, sir, that you will answer the prayers of a father who prays that his son would one day become the kind of journalists any country that wants to progress needs plenty of.

May 8, 2013
Appeasing the unappeasable

With weekend abduction of the 92-year old Dr. Shettima Ali Monguno by elements suspected to be Boko Haram, the nature of the atavistic force unleashed by the Boko Haram should by now be clear to everyone. The signs, clearly, are that the group is neither ready nor willing to engage anyone; if ever it will, it will most certainly be on its own terms. Considering that the military Joint Task Force – rather than the Boko Haram – has understandably been on the spot in the aftermath of the so-called Baga massacre, the prognosis must be seen as truly, chilling. Aside the obvious psychological advantage which the group has since claimed, it seems highly unlikely that those behind the group will let off in their morbid push to wrest unimaginable concessions from the typically timid and rather unimaginative federal government.

In the circumstance, a heightened offensive by the group isn’t just a possibility, but one that is predictable. The idea of course is to weary the federal government.

Now, the ordeal of the elder statesman is certainly regrettable. The good news is that his abductors have decided to let him go. Even then, the kidnap saga must be seen as nothing more than a footnote in the bloody entrails of the group just as mercy release of the elder statesman does little to alter the group’s bloody records or its contempt both for humanity and the orderly society.

The point remains that this would not be the first time that the group will so defiantly throw dart at the very of the highly revered structure of authority in the North. Earlier in January this year, the group had picked on the convoy of the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Dr. Ado Bayero. The attack, during which the monarch was wounded, left his driver, orderly and a traditional guard who tried to protect him dead. Two of his sons also in the convoy were wounded. The attack coincidentally came three months after Major General Mamman Shuwa, rtd, one of the nation’s outstanding civil war heroes, was murdered in his Gwange Ward residence in Maiduguri metropolis as he prepared for the Friday congregational prayers.

To put things in some perspective, there is something in the latest abduction that stretches the typically malevolent symptoms of the current anomie to new limits. Call it – if you like – the final rite of internment for whatever pretensions about the group being amenable to reasoned dialogue. For a group that started off by taking on the security services, the group has since added style to its brutal methods from decapitations to the most heinous forms of bestiality. Whereas churches and other places of worship once presented as fair game for its squad of bombers, today, just about everything represented by humanity is considered legitimate target with perhaps the only restraints being those imposed by the JTF. Pregnant women are not spared; children – including those one writing examinations are not excluded. And as the latest abduction has shown, not even the aged are exempted. Of course, there is no such thing as consideration for race and colour just as the methods have since become a study in human regression on the evolutionary ladder – a throwback to the age of savagery.

Remember the story of the North Korean medics deployed to minister to the health needs of the people said to have been decapitated in the presence of their loved ones? I am not here referring to the hostages felled in the course of rescue attempt by security forces but the three medics butchered as their spouses watched.

This is the foe that Nigerians are up against – the enemy stuff that conventional armies dread. What to do with the group is of course the billion naira question.

Let me state quite clearly that I find no useful distinction between the so-called political Boko Haram and those other mutant derivatives. It must be said that those making the distinction have since failed to persuade of the validity of their distinction, since after all, a tree is said to be known by its fruits. The nation has obviously gone past the attempt to draw distinctions between mass killers and the merchants of terror.

Let’s look at the option of appeasement possible at this time. Understandably, nearly everyone is looking in the direction of the all-purpose therapy called general amnesty. That seems fine except that it seems another instance in which the word will lose its meaning in application. Now, the problem isn’t so about the amnesty per se but in the failure to appreciate that amnesty is actually an act of a sovereign. Here, the leadership of the sect would seem miles ahead of most Nigerians hence its rejection of the proposed deal off-hand. And why should it when it has nearly one-score local government out of 774 in the country under its rule – that is more than the population of Tonga, a tiny country in the South Pacific? Now, the reports about those local government councils being under the iron rule of the Nigerian Taliban are yet to be disputed, which in the circumstance, leaves the federal government the only option of exploring either a framework of co-existence or citizen swap as between two sovereigns! Even at that, the prospects, given the declared territorial ambitions of the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), should ordinarily be frightening.

So what to do? It seems to me that a certified paedophilia has a higher chance of transmuting to a baby nurse than the Nigerian terrorist would overnight become a model citizen. Now, talk is good, and as they say – cheap. But then, the idea of talk assumes that two parties are in agreement and that there is a minimum basis of understanding. The truth of course is that we are still a long way from the Grand Bargain moment, nowhere near the point where the Nigerian terrorist will be amenable to talks.

Let me make the point simple. Today, everyone talks about the relative peace in the Niger Delta and how the visits to the creeks and the backroom deals eventuated in the amnesty. Very few remember the Battle of Gbaramatu which forced the militants to the table. The point here is that those who hunger for omelette haven’t yet told us how to make one without breaking an egg. Either the nation finds the resolve to battle the terrorists or it should get ready to travel the path of slow and systematic disintegration.

May 7, 2013
A Lady Macbeth in the House?

Behind every successful man there is a woman, we are told, but no one seems ready to openly admit the converse that lurking behind every failed man is a certain woman. The closest I have heard people admitting this negative tendency is the African proverb that says that behind every wicked masquerade there is a wicked commander.

History is replete with the manipulative roles wives and/or concubines have played in the making of despotic rulers. Conversely also, some of the most successful leaders the world had produced had wonderful wives, who inspired them to greatness and goodness. No man born of woman, it should be noted though, is immune to the influence, good or bad of a woman. She could either be his wife, concubine, sister or mother. And in rare cases his daughter. However, most often than not, the unseen manipulative hand behind the good or the wicked man (leader) is his wife.

As the political temperature in Rivers State rises towards boiling point, Nigerians, especially those from that oil producing state should shine their eyes and use their magnifying glasses to see the wicked commander(s) behind President Goodluck Jonathan’s wicked masquerade.

Our dear First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan was reportedly annoyed last Thursday when a crowd of supposed supporters went to Port Harcourt International Airport at Omagwa to welcome her back home after a “hard week’s” work in Abuja, and a certain gentleman in the crowd called Chikaodi Dike, introduced himself as the chairman of Obio/Akpor Local Government Area in Rivers state.

Madam, a “daughter of the soil” who expectedly had been following keenly the ongoing face-off between her husband, Jonathan and her state governor Rotimi Amaechi over God knows what, reportedly asked Chikaodi whether he is the suspended or new chairman of the council, to which the man replied as being the latter. The response got her annoyed and Madam was reported to have described Chikordi “an illegal chairman”.

To those familiar with the power speak in Abuja, this was euphemism for trouble and it didn’t take long to arrive as armed policemen invaded Obio/Akpor local government secretariat the following day and sacked the interim administration of Chikaodi put in place by the state House of Assembly following the suspension of the former chairman and his councilors. The council (administration) as I write is under the jackboot of the Nigeria Police deployed by “Madam and Oga at the top”.

And since last Friday Obio/Akpor local government area and indeed the whole of Rivers State has been under a state of fear, fear of what trouble could come next (from Abuja), part of which was manifested Monday when thugs opposed to the new administration in the council invaded the premises of the state House of Assembly.

The descent to this ugly situation and seeming insecurity in Rivers State did not start last week, it’s been building up for a long time and could be linked to President Goodluck Jonathan’s yet to be declared ambition to run for another presidential term in 2015 and the need to secure the two million or so votes of Rivers State to ensure victory.

President Jonathan is well within his rights to want a second term in office while First Lady Patience would be failing in her duty as his wife if she refused to pull all the strings at her disposal to help her husband realize this ambition. The problem here is not that she is pulling strings, but the kind of strings she is pulling. If the First Lady calls the head of a local council administration lawfully put in place illegal and the police sack that administration the following day, who does not know where the order to the Police came from: Madam. She is exercising a power she does not have; that of the Commander in Chief. This is dangerous for our democracy.

Our constitution recognizes one centre of power; the Presidency, headed by Goodluck Jonathan as President and Commander In Chief. If his wife talks or gives directives and we see such manifesting almost immediately, then it is either the man gave the order to support the wife’s position or has ceded part of the power of the C-I-C to the First Lady. And this is not the first time Madam will be acting as such. In fact those close to the corridors of power at the Presidential Villa say even Service Chiefs do sometimes take order from her.

Since the police sacking of Obio/Akpor council administration there has been no official word as to who sent the policemen. And with the seeming ease with which thugs invaded the Rivers State House of Assembly without any strong attempt to stop them, this could only mean that “Oga and Madam at the top”, are directing the affairs from Abuja with the connivance of a certain former Chairman of Obio/Akpor Local Government Area who currently sits in cabinet with the president as Minister of State for Education. This could only mean one thing; despotism.

President Jonathan and wife Patience are using the powers invested in him as Commander In Chief to bully and persecute both real and imaginary enemies. He is unleashing his police on Rivers State now, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is expected next while some lackeys in the state House of Assembly are being propped up for a hatchet job to impeach the governor. We have gone through this path before. If all fail they plan to foment trouble and cause chaos preparatory to a planned declaration of state of emergency in Rivers State all aimed at either getting Governor Amaechi out of the way or make it impossible for him to govern effectively and have a say in his successor.

Nothing is new, but the surprise is the enlisting of such technical agencies of government like the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and their parent Ministry of Aviation in this war of persecution against the Rivers |State Government. The more they came out to attempt to nail the state government over the purchase of an executive jet the more they exposed their inefficiencies and made a fool of themselves. If truly the aircraft has been flying illegally in Nigeria since it entered service last October where have all these agencies been since then? Is this how to manage our sky? As for EFCC, the anti graft agency can only go down if it continues to make itself available for use by politicians to settle political scores.

The aggregation of all this naked use of state power to bully, persecute and oppress perceived enemies by President Jonathan is that it takes us closer to dictatorship. And if you add the increasing clampdown on freedom of speech/expression/press, you get what I am talking about. Unraveling before our eyes is a budding despot and he is being pushed all the way by a Lady Macbeth beside him, in the full glare of a rudderless and toothless ruling party. And Nigerians are watching.

This is the time for the so called Council of State, comprising of sitting and former presidents, former Chief Justices of Nigeria and others to call an emergency meeting in Abuja to deliberate on the Rivers crisis and insecurity in the land and proffer solutions. The National Assembly should not fold its arms either. And where are the elders of Rivers State? Let’s save our democracy.

May 7, 2013
Okupe’s roadshow

It was a suggestive moment. Power employed the appeal of poetry in a move to seduce the fraternity of the pen. The clever play on words came at the end of a high-profile visit by Dr. Doyin Okupe, Senior Special Assistant to President Goodluck Jonathan on Public Affairs, to the corporate headquarters of The Nation at Matori, Lagos. A member of his team, Dr. Olusanya Awosan, Special Assistant to the President on Public Relations, was asked to close the meeting with senior journalists working for the newspaper. He came up with creative lines inspired by his Public Relations background. “This nation is ours. Let us use The Nation to work for our nation,” he said. These words, which formed the high point of his brief parting speech, drew a wave of laughter from the impressed audience in the company’s board room.

It brought about a light-hearted finish to an encounter that often featured intense passions and contentions. From the start, Okupe admitted he had entertained the view that the newspaper was “hostile”, basing his opinion on the identity of its publisher. However, he also confessed that the paper had proved him wrong by its “professionalism” even in its coverage of the presidency, which is of a dissimilar political complexion.

Dressed in white native attire, with a black cap and brown shoes, the fleshy physician who is better known as a politician spoke smoothly. He was on familiar turf, having served in a similar capacity in the early years of the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency. His comeback and responsibility in the current administration has been interpreted in some quarters to mean that Jonathan needed a more aggressive voice and greater bite in the handling of the government’s public communications. But, interestingly, the man didn’t growl at anyone on his visit. Rather, he was a picture of civility, and went to great lengths to explain and elaborate on issues that arose.

Perhaps predictably, he defended his boss, arguing that the president was misunderstood and unfairly characterized as “clueless.” His adjectives for Jonathan were: “human,” “sensible,” “intelligent.” However, he offered no convincing proof of Jonathan’s brilliance. The only premise that he supplied for his assessment was that whenever he had an official discussion with Jonathan, the president was usually able to recollect the minutest details of their previous interaction. Jonathan had a patriotic love for the country, Okupe testified.

Bad press was a difficult challenge to the administration, he declared, and told the fascinating story of how even his own 87-year-old mother had drawn his attention to the government’s reported poor performance. He was asked: Weren’t the so-called negative media reports faithful in their recreation of reality? Can it be truly said that the government was actually performing to public expectation?

Okupe called for understanding, and argued that as the head of a two-year-old administration, Jonathan had done well enough and only required more time to further show the stuff he was made of. To back his claims, he dwelled on an alleged revolution in agriculture and electricity supply. The interviewers rejected the rosy picture he painted. The divergence put a question mark on the integrity of information from government sources. Was the media expected to parrot official statements without professional mediation? Evidently, there should be a meeting point between the reported and the reporter.

Governmental openness isn’t quite as it should be, Okupe conceded. However, seeking an excuse, he blamed this democratic aberrancy on long years of military rule and argued that it would take some time before official secretiveness became a thing of the past. He broke the welcome news that, as a step toward greater directness, his unit planned to launch a regular information forum for public enlightenment.

The questions he had to tackle showed a glaring disconnect between public opinion and governmental activities. The range of issues raised included the status of First Lady Patience Jonathan who was controversially promoted to the position of permanent secretary in Bayelsa State; the government’s contentious consideration of amnesty for the Islamist terror group, Boko Haram; Jonathan’s perceived 2015 presidential ambition; the divisive state pardon granted Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a former governor of Bayelsa State convicted of high-scale corruption; and the 2012 US report on human rights abuses that alleged the existence of 6,000 kids in Nigerian prisons.

At one point, Okupe allowed himself the luxury of self-praise. “I have sense,” he declared to the amused interviewers. If that was intended to get the critical journalists to accept that he knew what he was talking about and should be believed, it was a faulty anticipation. Words were simply not enough on this occasion. Certainly, Okupe’s image as government spokesman necessarily came with a baggage. He couldn’t dodge the suspicion that trailed him. Even at those times that he yielded ground to the interviewers on some issue, that didn’t make him less of a mouthpiece. It is the burden of he who speaks on behalf of another. Indeed, how accurately can he mirror the other? Also, irrespective of his possible accuracy, how can he shake off the partisan badge of defender and advocate?

There are times when counter-attack, rather than defence, does the job. Okupe proved this on at least one issue. He did it with admirable skill, and even got everyone laughing. His unexpectedly hilarious response was to a question on the alleged war-like posture of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP). One journalist wondered why the PDP was drumming war beats two years to the 2015 general elections. Without a pause, Okupe countered with a rhetorical question: “What do you want them to do, play Owambe music?” The reference to the Yoruba melody of ease was remarkable, and implied that politics was war by other means.

Yoruba language coloured Okupe’s words now and again. When he reached for the resources of his native tongue to drive home a point, he relied on proverbs. In one instance, the Yoruba saying he deployed carried the imagery of medicine, his original profession. He said: Biegbo tin da ko lose jina. Translation: An injury doesn’t heal as fast as it was sustained. This was his way of arguing that the Jonathan administration inherited a rot that could not be remedied overnight.

Okupe’s visit provided information for two reports published in the newspaper the following day, April 23. Maybe the road show deepened his insight into the pros and cons of political image laundering. Will he come around another time?

• Macaulay is on the editorial board of The Nation

May 7, 2013
Lest we forget: this land was not always without honour

I have never in my entire public career, spanning nearly 50 years now, either given or received bribes, or any other form of gratification. I find doing so repugnant and personally demeaning – Dapo Fafowora

He called his memoirs, Lest I forget: Memoirs of a Nigerian Career Diplomat. But the book could well have been entitled, Lest we forget: This land was not always without honour – so trenchantly does his professed ethics rebuke today’s public service sewers.

How many public servants today can boast Ambassador Dapo Fafowora’s claim above, made in his book, due for public presentation at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos, on Thursday?

And if you think Dr. Fafowora’s declaration was that of a solo holier-than-thou, then consider this anecdote of 1959, which the young Dapo Fafowora witnessed, as a clerk in the Western Region Treasury.

An accounts clerk going on leave had added 10 miles to the distance of his home town from Ibadan, hoping to gain five extra shillings to his leave pay. One Mr. Kemp, his boss, drove to his village to investigate the claim, found the distance was 10 miles short, and dismissed the clerk for five shillings fraud. For shame, that clerk committed suicide!

Too good to be true today, when top bureaucrats accused of embezzling pension funds hire the best SANs to protect their alleged loot, superstar-style?

Also consider the case of Ambassador Fafowora’s late father, Chief Olagunju Fafowora.

As private secretary to the late Oba Akran of Badagry, a minister in the Chief Awolowo-led Western Region government, the minister had given the senior Fafowora 3,000 pound, to share among party hacks, without any particular list. Being no politician himself, Fafowora could not locate any politician; so he returned the money to his principal, reporting the failure of his Badagry mission.

A bewildered Akran, expecting the man to have somewhat helped himself, told him he would never be rich! Not a few of his contemporaries also thought he was crazy. But the senior Fafowora placed his personal integrity far above a few pounds, which nevertheless was quite a trove in those days. So, if the junior Fafowora felt gratifications repugnant and personally demeaning, you at least knew where he was coming from.

Then, the case of Pa Christopher Williams, Dr. Fafowora’s maternal uncle. He too was minister of Lands under the Awo Western Region government. But he resisted every pressure to allocate land either to himself or members of his family, pleading that the Action Group (AG) government frowned at such.

In The Accidental Public Servant, Nasir El-Rufai committed no crime by allotting land to his spouse who, as he rightly argued in his book, was a Nigerian citizen, was qualified and had paid the requisite fees. But the difference between the two ministers, over different generations spanning some 50 years, is the decline in rigour over public morality.

Still that past was no unanimous moral paradise, where everybody lived happily in probity. As Ambassador Fafowora would find out, his own personal probity would clash with institutional rot, fired by deliberate and systematic subversion of processes. That would lead to his sudden retirement at noon, when his career sun was most dazzling; and career halo most golden.

Fafowora and other victims of that retirement gale (which belied all logic), by the new Muhammadu Buhari military government, were victims of ethnic paranoia in the Nigerian public services. The North, at independence, could clearly not compete with the South, in Western education-driven skills. Yet, the British had fed the northern elite with a strange sense of entitlement.

But in fairness, the North’s fear was not unjustified; as the British themselves did not found Nigeria on any deliberate ethos of equity. In that crippling paranoia, the northern lobby succeeded in imposing the domination of the mediocre, which to survive, needed to eliminate real talents, which automatically became perceived threats.

But could southern domination have been of the meritorious? Nobody knows. But even domination by merit would be equally intolerable, even with its surface benefits. Only equitable access and just treatment across the board would do. That painful moral must be gleaned from the lunatic retirements, which gale swept away the ambassador and the 80-plus career diplomats, among the finest in the country’s stock.

For his retirement, Dr. Fafowora alleged a triangular axis of plotters: two dead, one still alive, in a chapter which he called ‘The Night of the Long Knives’. The late Lawal Rafindadi, director-general of the defunct Nigerian Security Organisation (NSO) precursor to today’s SSS, reportedly passed Fafowora’s name “in pencil” to Gen. Buhari, who reportedly approved in error, since the name was originally not on the retirement list.

But even with the error, both the late Gen. Joseph Garba (a former foreign minister in the Murtala-Obasanjo military government) and Prof. Ibrahim Gambari (another foreign minister under Buhari) allegedly colluded to ensure the error was done deal. Fortunately, Prof. Gambari is still alive to shed light on his alleged role in the exercise.

In Dr. Fafowora’s view, Garba was a serial betrayer whose “perfidy was relentless and without any remorse”; thus echoing the Shakespearean quip of the evil men do living after them, while their good deeds were interred with their bones.

Worse: the author also accused Garba of planting, to cover his allegedly confirmed perfidy, the yarn that Fafowora was wrongly retired because his name bore close similarity to another officer’s, listed for the exercise. So successful was that yarn that Prof. Jide Osuntokun quoted it in a tribute to the author! But Dr. Fafowora insisted that Magoro, another ranking member of Buhari’s Supreme Military Council, confirmed the retirement was the basic handiwork of Rafindadi and Garba.

Thus, one of the golden boys of Nigerian diplomacy, pressed into service twice to fix ruptured embassies in Uganda and Turkey; and on specific request drafted as brain box as Deputy Permanent Representative at the United Nations, was shunted aside 20 years into service and 17 years before his due retirement – and at mere 43!

His odyssey symbolised the prodigality, the waste and the lunatic self-bleeding that have turned the Nigerian bureaucracy a shadow of its once vibrant self – no thanks to the senseless purges of post-Gowon military barbarians, pioneered by Murtala Muhammad and climaxed by the grim Sani Abacha.

Though Abacha was outside the scope of the work, Buhari gave a foretaste of Abacha-era savagery when he railroaded the late Prof. Ishaya Audu straight from a summon, as Nigeria’s UN Permanent Representative in New York, into gulag without trial for 18 months; released only after Buhari himself was overthrown.

How did Nigeria get it wrong? This 549-page book, rich in anecdotes and even richer in sound knowledge of modern history to navigate diplomacy, might just offer a rich clue.

May 7, 2013
A morbid obsession

Why do they so desperately want Enugu State Governor Sullivan Chime dead?

He defied their morbid expectations just three months ago, returning to Nigeria “hale and hearty” even if wordless, after spending three months of “accumulated vacation” in the UK undergoing treatment for what was described as “nose cancer”.

While he was away, rumours of his death figured so frequently in the newspapers, on radio, and on the Internet that it required a huge leap of faith to believe that he was alive. His dramatic return dispelled rumours of his death, but his disdaining to address the throng that had converged on Enugu Airport to receive him only fueled speculations that he was gravely ill. No political leader would forego a chance like that unless he or she faced the direst odds.

Scarcely three months later, the rumours have resurfaced with renewed virulence. Sullivan Chime, even the more respectable newspapers have been saying, had died again, this time in India, where he had gone surreptitiously to receive medical treatment

These headlines, taken from various newspapers and Internet sites, tell the story in their own different ways:

Gov. Sullivan Chime dead in India – Rumour?

Enugu State Governor, Sullivan Chime, dies in India.

Enugu State Governor, Sullivan Chime might be dead.

Gov. Sullivan Chime dead?

Chime feared dead

Governor Sullivan Chime of Enugu allegedly dies in India

Is Sullivan Chime dead?

Practically all the platforms on which these headlines appeared attributed their stories to codewit.com, the web address for Codewit World News (CWN), which qualifies itself rather exorbitantly as “an outstanding, groundbreaking website that encourages citizen journalists to report ongoing corruption and government malfeasance in Africa.”

The portal, its sponsors claim, “is among the world’s leaders in online news and information delivery. The project is engineered by the new sound (sic) of Nigerians, creatively declaring the uniqueness and greatness of the African People”

As for its “vision,” it is nothing less than “to inspire the entire African people, starting with Nigerians, by employing credible media-driven platforms through which Nigerians can engage themselves, as well as the rest of the world.” The emphasis is mine.

It purports to accept as a challenge the high-minded task of effectively debunking “the persistent effort of the western media to consistently and erroneously portray us as the Dark Continent, characterised by the 5D’s: Disease, Despair, Destruction, Disaster, Destitution and Deceit.”

This project, the web site discloses, was conceived by Mr. Anthony Claret Onwutalobi, the founder of Codewit Global Network. Onwutalobi, the web site volunteers, is an author and educator who has developed a system of “philosophical thought” called “codewism,” in which he “clarified that the solutions to African problems lie in eight key principles.”

Here is the codewit.com story on Chime in its essence:

“A heavy cloak of mourning falls on the nation once more today as news of Governor Sullivan Chime’s death filters in.

“A reliable source who confirmed his death to codewit.com said he gave up the ghost an hour ago in India (9 pm Nigerian Time).

“His Excellency, the late Governor Sullivan Chime had battled an undisclosed illness for months. When citizens began questioning his prolonged absence from Enugu, the official story was that he was on a long vacation accrued over a period of 5 years. . .

“Efforts to get across to some commissioners in the state were not successful as their phones were switched off.

“May his soul rest in peace.

“More details shortly.”

The promised details never followed.

Given Anthony Onwutalobi’s antecedents and the provenance of the story alleging that Chime had died in India, one would have thought that the news media, actual and virtual, would handle the matter with a nice sense of discrimination. For, as news stories go, his is threadbare.

But it quickly went viral.

Many media outlets simply reproduced the codewit.com story verbatim, though with proper attribution. Those that didn’t reproduce it verbatim entered perfunctory reservations that raised no questions about the substance of the story. Then, there were those who sought to pre-empt criticism or liability by qualifying the whole thing as rumour.

But why give wings to rumour in the first place?

“A reliable source,” combined with the precise time of death – not last night or yesterday, but an hour ago” – must have made some editors rest easy. Isn’t that what many of them have been taught or have come to regard as the stuff of good reporting?

When codewit.com went on to explain that “an hour ago” in that context translated into 9 p.m. Nigerian time, and to add that “some commissioners” who could have confirmed or denied the report had switched off their phones, it was engaging in parody. But the parody seemed only to have conferred a patina of plausibility on the rogue story in some newsrooms.

Spirited denials issued by the authorities in Enugu gained far less traction than the codewit.com report that had been republished in the newspapers and many other online outlets. Since news signalises a rupture or disjuncture, Chime dead has greater journalistic salience and resonance than Chime alive. That is the morbid calculus of tabloid journalism.

Nor did it help matters when the officials said Chime was alive and well but could not say precisely where he was nor how he might be reached.

Chime himself could have ended all the morbid speculation by showing up dramatically in his office or at some event in Enugu and confounding his tormentors once again.

Perhaps he is taking consolation in the belief of our people that person falsely and maliciously reported dead is sure to live long. It must follow from this that the more frequently a person is falsely reported dead, the more assured that person is of longevity.

Still, enough is already too much. This is “dem-say, dem say” journalism taken too far.

It is more than enough to drive even the most accommodating official to elevate rumour-mongering to a penal crime and set up an entire bureaucracy, backed by a new law, to deal with this vexatious obsession.

If Chime does not want to adopt Bayelsa Governor Seriake Dickson’s strategy for dealing with the issue, he can, crackerjack lawyer that he is, find a remedy in civil law. Falsely reporting a person’s death meets the legal definition of “wanton infliction of mental and emotional distress.” And it is actionable.

If there is no Nigerian precedent, Chime could write himself into legal history by initiating a lawsuit to establish one.

May 7, 2013
The power to forgive

This is the time for pardon. We see people die daily in this country as though Nigeria is a vast slaughter slab. Woe is us already, and so we should just accept our tragedy as routine blessing from above.

That is why we are calling for amnesty for Boko Haram. All those calling for amnesty are only displaying love. Love for everyone. Love for those who kill and those who die, those who wield the dagger and those whose heads are lopped off. It is equal love. Love, according to the scriptures, works no ill against the neighbour. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. It is love for those who burn the market and those with nothing left to sell. Love for those who are without homes, siblings and parents is the right love so long as we also love all those who created the tragic blessings: that is the murderers.

The logic is straightforward. We cannot live a life in which we have bias or malice against our fellow citizens. Mercy is the quality of faith in Islam. And Jesus also said blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.

If we give mercy to Boko Haram, we should extend the same quality to others. There was a story recently of armed robbers in parts of the country. They are only hungry and want some cash, so we should forgive them. In fact, we should expunge criminality from our constitution and replace it with love. Everything is done out of the love of self.

Who can question that? All men are by nature selfish, said philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The same man said life was brutish, nasty and short. Don’t mind Shakespeare who accused a character in the play Twelfth Night as “sick of self-love.” There is nothing wrong with that. The Bible says we should love our neighbours as ourselves. You ought to love yourself.

We gave amnesty to militants in the Niger Delta, and it was a good thing. They left the creeks, all of them. Recently, there was a report that a dozen policemen died from the bullets of militants. What militants? Those who enjoy pardon don’t fight again. I think it was ghosts that killed the police, not human beings. Those who enjoy pardon often enjoy their lives. Nothing stops them. Ask the guys who now enjoy billion naira contracts, in charge of pipelines and ports in the country.

If you are killing people and blowing up pipelines and kidnapping people, the right reward is pardon. Once you get the pardon, you live in five star hotels, lap up the best food and gurgle the best wine. That is the benefit of forgiveness. If Tompolo can get pardon and become a big man, why should we hesitate to give the same quality to the others? After all, the militants made great sacrifice by leaving the creeks with all their access to big cars and limitless cash as well as melody and romance of mosquitoes. Some of them were generals and heads of state. Now they have become bloody civilians. What better sacrifice is that?

There have been stories of kidnapping. Is it not the best way to take what they did not have? Many do not have jobs, and they give themselves one and become self-employed. Who can beat that? Other than that, they would have no access to anything in the land. They decide to capture the relatives of the rich and the rich themselves. With that, they attempt to equalise wealth. Is that not what we want, for the poor to also be empowered?

After all when they kidnap, they still feed the people. They are only giving the victims small vacation, some rest from the daily grind of work. They feed the victims from their own pockets, and that is an investment. Should they not get their reward? After all, we want entrepreneurs in this economy. Now, we have them. Okay, we still forgive them because we did not bargain for it. But we cannot forget they are taking after the big men in society.

If impunity is the order of the day, they are following a great example. When, from an order from above, the Inspector General of Police can shut down a local government headquarters in Rivers State without the backing of any law, how do we claim moral superiority to those who take over a bank or a bureau de change without recourse to law. Two Leadership newspaper journalists were arrested boorishly for an article rather than a recourse to the rule of law.

The militants and the religious zealots have said they will never forgive Nigeria for committing crimes against them. It reminds me of the historian who asserted that the Nazis will never forgive the Jews for the holocaust. The Nazis claim that the Jews made them into devils. So the Nigerian state made the armed robber a killer and a thief, the kidnapper a snob of freedom, the militant for decades of neglect, etc.

They have seen a governor who stole billions go free in the court. They have seen a person who never enjoyed love in his community become senator term after term. They have seen a loafer with little education and integrity throw a N60 million wedding for his daughter when they were suffocating to secure N60,000 for their daughter’s school fees.

They saw a governor receive pardon over billions stolen when their neighbour who stole a tin of geisha has been languishing in detention without trial for the past five years. So who should forgive whom?

It is the somersault of the hierarchy of forgiveness that bothers me. The people have always forgiven the leaders of this country. They are allowed to stab their ears with sirens, splash mud off their Mercedes Benz and Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) at the poor, announce contracts that never materialise, brandish billions for tea and refreshments at Aso Rock when the ordinary folks look merely for survival.

The political leaders say they have the right to decide who gets forgiveness. They have missed the point. The people own Nigeria, and the leaders occupy positions of authority on trust. They have appropriated the trust. Yet they get pardon.

So the people have forgiven them by their silence. They don’t protest, or foment chaos in the streets in the name of revolutionary angst. They just siddon look, apologies to Bola Ige.

The people forgive the leaders after ruining the lives of the people. Poor education, broken infrastructure, bad hospitals, etc. and they are forgiven. So why not forgive the criminals who want to wipe all law-abiding people off the face of the Nigerian earth? If we cannot abide by the law, let us forgive everyone.

May 6, 2013
Turai/Patience: Embarrassing land battle ends somewhat

After more than two years of nasty controversy over the revocation and reallocation of a prime land in Abuja, and an embarrassing court battle between two First Ladies over the same land, an Abuja High Court has resolved the matter, at least for the moment. Though the spokesman of the First Lady, Mrs Patience Jonathan, said the land battle was between Turai Yar’Adua, widow of the former president, Umaru Yar’Adua, and the Federal Capital City (FCT), everyone knows that the bitter fight was between the two First Ladies. While it is true Dame Patience was not joined in the case when Hajiya Turai headed for the courts, it was widely known that by being the beneficiary of the land reallocation, she was by far the most interested party in the tripartite land dispute. Not only did she defend the reallocation in her scabrous but expansively entertaining style, she left no doubt whatsoever that what she planned to do with the land would summarise her legacy.

During the presentation of the PDP Women-In-Power 2013 Calendar in February, she had this to say: “The wife of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, Maryam, built the National Women Centre while the wife of Gen. Sani Abacha, Maryam, also built the National Hospital. None of them (former First Ladies) left with the buildings. I am not the owner of the AFLPM, and when I leave, I will not take it away. It is not a pet project of anyone.” The land in question is situated in the Central Business District in Abuja. In February 2010, it was allocated to the Women and Youth Empowerment Foundation (WAYEF), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) run by the immediate past First Lady, Hajiya Turai. However, in November 2011 the FCT minister, Bala Mohammed, revoked the allocation and transferred ownership of the land to African First Ladies Peace Mission (AFLPM) now led by Dame Patience. The First Lady had planned to build the headquarters of the AFLPM on the land, and for which the ingratiating FCT controversially budgeted about four billion naira.

Though Ayo Osinlu, the First Lady’s spokesman, has attempted to present what amounts to a fresh case in the newspapers to sway the public, Justice Peter Affen was emphatic that he gave judgment based on the facts before him. It is, however, possible that some of the facts available to Mr. Osinlu and his bosses were not available to the judge. But that can be explained, as Mr Osinlu himself acknowledged, by the fact that the case was not between Hajiya Turai and Dame Patience; it was between the former First Lady and the FCT. The FCT has indicated interest in appealing the decision. It is entitled to push the matter even up to the Supreme Court, though it is hard to see Affen’s decision being overturned. What the continuation of the case will do, however, is to further prolong Dame Patience’s misery, open the government to more ridicule, and damage the little reputation the President Goodluck Jonathan government pretends to have for taking dispassionate views of issues – as if the Rotimi Amaechi case is not enough refutation.

When the AFLPM met in July last year in Abuja, the land battle was still unresolved and the budget allocation for the AFLPM was yet to be sorted out. But through the intervention of the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Adoke, Dame Patience, surrounded by a bevy of other First Ladies, managed to lay the foundation stone for the AFLPM’s permanent secretariat. It takes unusual gusto and indifference to the law and propriety to circumvent legal and administrative objections with such flourish. Dame Patience doubtless has a fighting spirit. If only it could be harnessed for irreproachable causes.

But the First Lady is not all defiance. She was probably emboldened to fight for the land based on the testimony of former FCT minister, Aliyu Moddibo Umar, who told the Voice of America radio service that the idea for the AFLPM’s permanent secretariat was actually his own, not even Dame Patience’s or Hajiya Turai’s. He had secured the land, prepared a C-of-O for it, and had a structural drawing for the project done, all in 2008. He added that he thought it would be a legacy project for Hajiya Turai. But after he vacated that office, his successor, Senator Adamu Aliero, was said to have reallocated the land to Hajiya Turai’s NGO, an action, Dame Patience insisted, the current FCT minister was trying to correct.

Thrice the trial judge gave the disputants opportunity to settle the matter out of court, and thrice they spurned the chance to act reasonably. According to Hajiya Turai’s lawyers, the land offered the former First Lady was either too small or it was situated in undeveloped area. In the end, the judge decided that the land should not have been revoked or reallocated. The main problem with the land battle, however, is not whether Hajiya Turai was right, as the law has now affirmed, or whether FCT/Dame Patience was wrong, going by the court decision. The problem is that the two First Ladies opened up the country to ridicule. It is inconceivable that the African First Ladies that attended the foundation laying ceremony of the secretariat last year did not hear or read about the unseemly struggle over the choice land in Abuja. They probably shrugged their shoulders, satisfied that they were not the ones making a mockery of their position or their countries. If Nigerians felt shameless about such matters, it was the least of the problems of the other First ladies.

The blame for the intractable land dispute should be put squarely at the feet of Jonathan. It was wrong of him to allow the case to fester openly for so long to the point that Nigeria became a spectacle. It is okay for him to affirm his respect for the rule of law, and to accord the law the widest latitude in resolving conflicts, but in this instance, as in nearly all instances, it was better the case had not gone to court at all. Even if Hajiya Turai was wrong, greedy and duplicitous, for the sake of the country’s image and the high esteem many hold the presidency of Nigeria, Jonathan should have insisted the AFLPM looked for another piece of land, whether prime or not. After all, the FCT is still developing and expanding.

There are times when tenacity is a virtue; but there are also times when it is unhelpful. The disputed land exemplifies tenacity as a vice. Jonathan should have put his foot down to avert the court dispute. He is not only president in fact, he is president in law, and he is supposed to embody the country’s self-esteem and approximate its self-belief. When he acts nobly, it rubs off on everyone; when he acts disreputably, it also tars everyone with the same brush. It is unnerving that that distinction escaped him in the dispute between Dame Patience and Hajiya Turai. How many more such distinctions will escape him before his term is finished?

Now, the damage is done, and it is incalculable. If Jonathan had made the AFLPM to forgo the land, he could have appropriated to himself and his government a nobility far in excess of what he has exhibited so far or is in fact capable of. But even if he were to win the case on appeal, it could not mitigate the public relations damage the original loss occasioned, for many would see his importunate government as rapacious and vengeful. But if the FCT/government/Patience should lose again, it would be the ultimate humiliation they could not hope to live down. In other words, damned if they win; and damned if they lose.

The president may again pretend to his usual detachment on this embarrassing legal battle, but the unavoidable fact is that the buck stops at his desk. He can either pick the buck and throw it away in denial, or remove his desk and declare with quixotic relish he had vanquished the phantom, or act with the wisdom expected of his office. What he cannot afford to do is stand still, pretend the nuisance battle is strictly legal, and hope the problem would resolve itself in the near future.

May 5, 2013
Baga: Satellite evidence turns army logic on its head

Theoretically speaking, no one is certain that the death toll from the clash between the Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) and Boko Haram insurgents in Baga, Borno State is as high as locals say or as low as the military authorities swear. But whether the 36 dead declared by the Army or the 185 dead asserted by the locals, the circumstances of the clash and the furore that followed it indicate that something deeply troubling happened in that community. Following the outcry that greeted the high death toll and the thousands of houses allegedly burnt during the nearly two-day operation, the military quickly empaneled a team of officers to investigate the clash. Its report was not substantially different from the initial account given by the commanders of the Baga operation. They insisted there were fewer than 1000 houses in Baga, thereby questioning the account of locals who said more than 2000 houses were deliberately torched by the rampaging soldiers.

Nigerians met the military investigation reports with deep cynicism. Senator Maina Ma’aji Lawan, whose constituency includes Baga, has denounced the military statistics as an infernal lie. He swore that a massacre occurred in the town. He also suggested that in fact much of the town was sacked, not in fighting, but in reprisal. There are a few other teams of investigators empowered to look into the clash. They are expected to give less colourful and more believable accounts. But meanwhile, a US-based rights group, the Human Rights Watch (HRW), has unexpectedly supplied satellite images of the destroyed town before and after the clash, thus proving that a huge swath of the town was indeed sacked and burnt. It further analysed that the conflagration could not have been triggered by small arms and light weapons, as speculated by the military.

The military authorities are yet to reply to this new evidence. But it is fast dawning on everyone that in the face of modern science, there is no hiding place for anyone or atrocity. If the HRW satellite images stand, and there is no reason they should not, the officers who endorsed the military report may have imperiled their integrity and commission. They and President Goodluck Jonathan who was quick to embrace the report will be surprised to know that even in Africa things are changing, and the atrocities connived at in the past have become anathema.

The National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria (NHRC) will also be investigating the clash. But it has implausibly and precipitately cautioned that the Baga incident should not be politicised. Absolute nonsense. Of course, no one is politicising the massacre. The fact is that everyone is too shocked by the scale of killings that it smacks of gross insensitivity and even snobbery for the government and the NHRC to suggest someone might be politicising the issue. Let us hope that the NHRC’s hasty caution does not prejudice the outcome of its report. As for the president and the military, they seem quite desperate to downplay the incident. But even if 36 were killed, it still amounts to crime against humanity if the victims were defenceless civilians instead of armed militants. Surely, the government and the military can tell the difference.

May 5, 2013