The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Osun: Workers know their true friends

    Osun: Workers know their true friends

    After pillaging Osun State for nearly four years of its illegal occupation, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is eyeing the 2014 poll with a view to returning to power to continue the preying business. The party can’t ask for votes based on merit since while in office it posted no good performance to rest on. Nor has it, while in opposition to the Action Congress of Nigeria government of Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, offered laudable shadow governance to win the sympathy of the citizenry.

    In that case, as it is with all those bereft of honour and achievement as an article of service to the people, the party must resort to the rough and tumble of politics. That is what we are witnessing in the State of Osun. Otherwise why would a state known for its eminent labour relations suddenly start simmering with calls for a strike by workers?

    To be sure, this is against the run of play as they say it in football, when suddenly the team confined to its own half of the field by the unceasing onslaught of its better opponents, scores a goal through an official sleight of the hand, as it were, protests and boos rather than applause follow such a goal.

    A labour crisis in the form of a strike by civil servants is not what Osun needs at the moment. What the state needs at the moment is to build on the steady job creation process opened up by O’ YES programme, the massive construction projects state-wide, urban and rural transformation, recruitment of teachers to match the new vision of education reform and a host of socio-industrial concepts Aregbesola and his team are churning out.

    Very early in the administration, the government found out that the greatest challenge facing the state was the dearth of jobs, a situation that plunged the state into depression and crime. The government intervened with the creation, within the first 100 days of its advent, of a whopping 20,000 jobs. It had never happened before in Africa!

    Overnight an economy that was in shambles in the preceding era of the PDP government had been reflated. Young men and women had jobs. They also recreated jobs because they had increased purchasing power that got artisans and retail traders back to their enterprises. They also made small savings that they used to set up small businesses. The government policy had a rapid impact that made the citizens to ask: where was Aregbesola all along in the years of locust that fell upon us under PDP?

    Such approbation wasn’t coming from the local scene only. It is on record that the conservative but revered World Bank also noticed what was going on in the state of Osun. It asked to understudy the execution of the job-creation policy and promptly recommended it as a model of youth engagement and mass employment for other states.

    So obviously it is impossible to have a citizenry and a labour class that have benefited immensely from government policies to turn against that same government using a so-called freedom of right to declare an industrial dispute. It isn’t in their interest to do so given the fact that they passed through bitter times in the hands of the previous anti-people government of the PDP.

    It is clear then that a small suborned clique of the labour unions has played into the hand of the political class who wants to create chaos ahead of next year’s governorship ballot. We discern this from the disarray the aborted warning strike threw the workers into. The national leadership of Joint Public Service Negotiation Council (JPSNC) has dismissed the stand of Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) Trade Union Congress (TUC) and Osun JPSNC, saying they had no right to call on workers in the state to go on a strike.

    National secretary of JPSNC Omokhuade Marcus says NLC, TUC and JPSNC have no constitutional right to order an industrial action over wage agitation. He declared: ‘The NLC, TUC and JNC have no members. The members belong to the union. So calling a workers assembly for a strike is not known to law. They do not even have the right to call workers for that assembly. Only the leadership of the respective unions has the power of attorney to mobilize their workers to attend that gathering.’

    No wonder the strike call failed! The law of the land does not support it!

    But the biggest armament against the strike is the mammoth accomplishments of the Aregbesola government. He has secured irreversible gains as the foundation upon which even more attainments will be established in the years to come. The crisis the PDP is attempting to foment through a labour unrest will remain ineffectual in the face of the government’s achievements on the ground.

    Just as PDP’s attempted exploitation of religion and publication of stolen documents failed to move the public against the government of Aregbesola, so would the antics of the party to venalize workers come to a shipwreck, because the masses know who their true friends are.

    It follows also that they know who their enemies are.

     

    • Odunmade writes from Inisha, Osun State

  • Something for Abubakar boys?

    Something for Abubakar boys?

    Last week, the directive by the Inspector General of Police, M.D Abubakar on the use of vehicles with tinted glasses claimed its first casualty. A magistrate Hajiya Rabi Bashir, sitting in Gusau, Zamfara State, reportedly sentenced one Aliyu Abubakar, 30, of Talata Mafara town for driving a car with tinted glass without permit. The accused, arrested on April 11 was said to have pleaded guilty to the charge of driving his tinted Golf salon car along Sani Abacha Way, Gusau.

    He was however given the option of either spending one month in jail or a fine of N1, 000.

    The Punch which reported the summary trial unfortunately did not provide any details of the circumstance of the particular arrest – a case of summary trial and sentencing from all accounts.

    Be that as it may, there is enough to suggest that the last is yet to be heard on the Motor Vehicles (Prohibition of Tinted Glass) Act, CAP M21 Laws of the Federation of Nigeria (formerly Decree No. 6 of 1991). While it seems trite to state that millions of Nigerians are already caught in its web, the indications are that the law would be in for some hard testing in the months ahead.

    To be clear, the issue isn’t so much about the validity of the law. It is whether in our peculiar circumstances, the law can be said to be a realistic piece of legislation. I say this mindful of the fact that there are just as many good laws as there are bad ones. To start with, I do not see how anyone will argue that a law which purports to render almost every nthvehicle owner a potential lawbreaker can be anything but an incurably bad law. Moreover, the fact is that the law makes no pretence about providing the law-abiding citizen a leeway – rendering him a victim of circumstances far beyond his control while predisposing him to other lesser crimes.

    Clearly, the best argument that the Police High Command has made for resurrecting the dead law is that the security situation in the country has made it so. According to the Force Public Relation Officer, CSP Frank Mba, “statistics at our disposal show that 90 per cent of these crimes were committed with the aid of vehicles with tinted glasses. We must stop this in the interest of the nation.”

    Surely, Mba must know that his inference of relationship between tinted glasses and terrorism, is not only specious but bizarre.

    Of course, he argues rather persuasively that “Nigerians using vehicles with tinted glasses must look beyond the inconvenience of obeying and removing such glasses and act for the good of all”.

    In the first place, we know how bad the security situation in the country is without the additional scare-mongering about some tinted-glass-induced crimes. I suspect that most owners of cars with tinted glasses would readily surrender their prized toys given iron-cast assurances that it would end the menace of terrorism and kidnapping.

    It seems to me as yet another case of a government in pursuit of symptoms instead of treating the disease. Indeed, tinted glasses are merely the symptoms of the free for all environment under which vehicle importation trade is conducted. Of course, a better job would have been to outlaw the importation of cars with tinted glasses instead of the present course which amounts to chasing the violators on the highways.

    At this point in time, the more pertinent question is what to do with the millions of cars with tinted-glasses already in the country. Our man, Mba has an interesting answer. He cites the so-called Section 3 of the law which states that “a buyer, a donee or an importer of a vehicle with tinted glasses has a grace period of 14 days to either get a permit or remove the tint”.

    Simple isn’t it? Not so fast. To start with, the law is explicit on the exercise of discretion as to the conditions under which the permission to use tinted glasses could be granted. My last check shows that the twin conditions prescribed are “health” and “security” both of which in our peculiar circumstances would seem ordinarily lax or permissive enough. Even at that, it still leaves the question of how the millions of cars on our roads with tinted glasses could justifiably claim exemptions on the two grounds. I say this because the exemptions mean no more than a trip to Force Headquarters, in Abuja for a permit at the payment of between N25- N30,000 or in the alternative, risk the daily ordeal of extortion in the hands of Abubakar’s men.

    And, we do know those who qualify under the security and health considerations; these are our masters in Abuja!

    I agree in toto with Mba that it is not the business of the police to abrogate the Motor Vehicles (Prohibition of Tinted Glass) Act, CAP M21 Laws of the Federation of Nigeria); the job belongs to the National Assembly. It needs be stated also that the police has no business resurrecting a law that is as good as interred. To leave the law on our statute books is to supply the police with a sword of Damocles to be dangled at will over the heads of the citizens.

    Now, I must make the point that M.D. Abubakar as IGP has done such a good job of dismantling the infrastructure of extortion – the ubiquitous check-points on the highways. Sure, he still has a long way to go to build an effective, people-friendly crime fighting institution. Superintending over the erection of another infrastructure of sleaze comes nowhere near the job at hand; clearly, that is not the way to go.

    For the many Nigerians caught in the web, the easiest solution is to ask them to proceed to Abuja to obtain Abubakar’s permit. That would obviously boost the coffers of the Nigeria Police. But then, that itself throws up the question of the legality of the act – particularly as the institution is not known to be a revenue collecting agency.

     

  • Forget amnesty, try amnesia

    Forget amnesty, try amnesia

    Whatever spurts from Goodluck Jonathan’s blood-soaked power canvas is due to crass opportunism.

    He latched on to a “soft” presidency; blissfully forgetting the high folly of plunging your knife into a hippo someone else had hunted down. It is bound to cause life-threatening, if not life-claiming, diarrhoea!

    But the man of suspect luck is not the only culprit. No less guilty are his godfathers who conspired to vault him beyond his competence.

    Guiltier still, than these opportunistic political godfathers, are the giddy executors of Jonathan’s much-vaunted pan-Nigeria mandate of Southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt. In the ultra-reckless electoral ardour of the moment, they blithely proclaimed: we vote Goodluck, not PDP!

    Now, Goodluck is bad dream; and PDP no less a nightmare. There is no waking up from both!

    It is endgame, indeed, in self-induced political perdition! Welcome, poor souls, to the desert of slaughter, where Boko Haram is evil lord and master!

    In the rising appeasement hubbub, Boko Haram has declared it needed no one’s amnesty because it did no wrong! On the contrary, it was Its Murderous Majesty that must be begged to pardon the Nigerian state which, it claimed, had been wronging Muslims! Talk of the tail wagging the dog!

    But perhaps that would chasten the vocal minority, which stamps its often insensible holler with high wisdom; and dubs the dignified silence of the quiet majority as quintessential folly.

    But wait a minute! Where is Malam Adamu Ciroma? While everyone was betide themselves to make Jonathan president at all costs – let the heavens fall! – Malam Ciroma it was that maintained that dire warning: there would be consequences!

    Now before your fecund imaginations start linking the good malam with political Boko Haram, which Goodluck Jonathan has claimed is his major traducer, think hard and straight. Boko Haram might be the most explosive of President Jonathan’s many disasters. But it is not the worst.

    With absolutely no idea what to do with power, but straining every sinew to keep himself in the presidential saddle, the man of good luck brings with him multi-layered bad luck that would continue to haunt the country, even after he, and his nemesis, Boko Haram, would have become bad history.

    That Boko Haram may well score the double of being Nigeria’s nemesis as well should open the eyes of those who can’t see beyond a present power racketeering: that the House of Lugard is crumbling; and that, if care is not taken, there might soon be no territory over which to grab power and loot resources!

    Chronic, programmed and systemic underdevelopment is the wages of presidential incompetence. And Jonathan, with all due respect to his person and due reverence to his high office, is gold standard of that incompetence.

    Sure, Jonathan is not the first of these presidential incompetents. But when a presidential undertaker acts as though he had the latitude of the very first of those whose cumulative misdeeds have brought this country to this sorry pass, then the alarm bells must start clanging!

    That lack of rigour defines Jonathan’s flip-flops on Boko Haram; and allowing himself to be muscled into granting amnesty to a deranged and blood-thirsty band.

    Boko Haram is too deranged to recognise its all-too-obvious lunacy, talk less of showing penance and atoning for its high crime against millions of innocent Nigerians: in lost lives, hacked limbs and permanently shattered psyche!

    Indeed, what President Jonathan needs right now is amnesia, not amnesty. Amnesia would completely blot out all past crimes, no matter how wilful or heinous; and prepare the state for even more heinous future crimes, assured that future amnesties would wipe out future crimes, until the sick joke collapses in a heap!

    To start with, amnesia helps the president to forget, with bliss, that the impunity of his own rigged emergence, against his party’s zoning policy, may have birthed the so-called political Boko Haram.

    If indeed there is political Boko Haram, and it and its religious evil-twin had not been clobbered to seek a soft landing, why should they, for “amnesty”, hand over their ace to their writhing victims; taking a part when then could take the whole? And then what: cohabitate with Jonathan as they erect their beloved Islamic republic? Please!

    Whichever way you look at it, amnesty for now is a no-brainer. But the impasse that has forced it thunders a dire warning to future players in power and impunity: powerless is power acquired by dodge!

    Still, not even amnesia can excuse the shallow linkage between amnesty for Niger Delta militants and the one being proposed for Boko Haram.

    Turai Yar’adua has proffered a simplistic, exchange-is-no-robbery theory: her late maigida had granted amnesty to Jonathan’s creek anarchists. Why couldn’t Jonathan, court to court, just return the favour, to the militants’ Sahel cousins-in-terror? Jonathan, Hajia Turai seems to cry, bring this feudal transaction to closure!

    Gen. Muhammadu Buhari has also chipped in his own bit: amnesty for Boko Haram, as anything that can promote peace, should be encouraged. What of justice, the first condition for sustainable peace?

    Still, the Niger Delta case was different from Boko Haram, aside from the fact that the militants basically targeted oil-pipelines in the creeks, while Boko Haram killed with venom a defenceless urban population, even if there is clear criminality in both campaigns.

    But the most important difference: at amnesty time, the Niger Delta militants had been clobbered enough that the terror party seemed over; and the creek boys badly needed some soft landing; which their political leaders secured, in exchange for the free flow of crude.

    Boko Haram is different: a murderous, cocky, boastful and implacable foe, still flexing muscles and daring the state. What does anyone gain by granting such dogma-stoned anarchists amnesty – to turn the crumbled House of Lugard into the Taliban theocratic republic of their sick dreams?

    Jonathan and his traducers had better wake up. Nigeria, as structurally constituted, is close to end times. Restructuring for development is therefore the key. It is a stark reality: restructure or perish!

    After six years of blood and gore, Jonathan should take a bow, and quit his eternal scheming for power, even when it is clear he cannot add any value. He should therefore perish any thought of running in 2015.

    But his recommended exit does not obviate Nigeria’s structural debacle; which has made the country a developmental grave. So, whoever takes over from him, who blissfully forgets about this structural challenge, only plays with fire.

    That is why Jonathan must table concrete proposals on political and economic restructuring to give this polity a rebirth; and also propose a Nigerian Marshall Plan for the impoverished North East, which basically produces the wretched of the earth that sign up for Boko Haram and its evil campaign.

    Restructuring, along productive federal lines, would stop future Jonathans from seizing poisoned chalices coated with power; and condemning the rest of Nigerians to bloody trouble.

    That’s what the country needs – not some amnesty powered by amnesia!

  • Thatcher unreconstructed: A view from 1990

    Thatcher unreconstructed: A view from 1990

    What do you do with a lady who heads a cabinet supposedly run on the collegial principle, but who ain’t for stirring, much less for turning?

    Members of the ruling Conservative Party in the British House of Commons answered that question a fortnight ago.

    Their answer was: If the lady ain’t for turning, then she must be for dumping.

    And they dumped Dame Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to head the Conservative Party, the first to serve as prime minister, and in this century the person who has held that office longest.

    When she attained this last distinction, she seemed set to continue to rule, not merely to the end of the century but well into the next, if not forever. She had crushed the labour unions. She had won a resounding victory over Argentina in the Malvinas. She had cut Africans, Asians and Caribbean leaders of the Commonwealth to size and made it plain to them that they possessed no wealth in common with Britain. She had humiliated, and then dismissed from her cabinet, all those who helped plot her way to the leadership of the Conservative Party and sustained her during her first term.

    She had changed the face of Britain forever, and made socialism come across as something more frightful than bubonic plague – or so she claimed. Unemployment was up, but inflation was down, and so was productivity. Too bad for the millions thrown out of work; the important thing was that the economy was improving.

    Bereft of a sociological imagination, she brought to bear on the governance of the British Isles a book-keeper’s imagination and sought to reduce the human person to a slave of the market. The worth of everything was to be measured in terms of profit and loss. Forget about equity and justice. The only thing that counts is the bottom line – a phrase which, by the way, the British consider an unfortunate vulgarism.

    For her, greed was the motive force in human affairs, and to encourage it in every conceivable way was the highest principle of statecraft. Compassion was an unpardonable weakness. Where others had waged a war on poverty, Thatcher waged a war against the poor, ripping apart the social safety net that had insured the disadvantaged against the worst manifestations of poverty.

    She privatised everything in sight, and when she could not find anything else to put under the grinding wheels of market forces, she turned to water. Were it possible for her to privatise the air we breathe, she would have done so without a moment’s thought.

    Race relations in Britain steadily grew worse in the Thatcher years. She tightened the rules of eligibility for British passports in a bid to repudiate the obligation arising from centuries of British imperial conquest and pillage. Asian women seeking to join their husbands in Britain were subjected to degrading virginity tests.

    When Britons finally saw through the phantom prosperity that her policies had wrought, they blamed all their woes on the foreigners in their midst, especially those of Black descent. Race riots, unheard of in recent British history, erupted in several parts of the country on a scale and with a fury that was almost beyond belief.

    An Englishman’s word, it is said, is his bond – and an English woman’s too. With a few notorious exceptions in public life, this is still largely true. But one remembers how, at last year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Thatcher put her signature on a communiqué advocating tougher sanctions against apartheid South Africa, only to renounce the agreement well before the ink had dried on it.

    It would be hard to improve on President Robert Mugabe’s comment on Thatcher’s conduct on that occasion: “Despicable.”

    In no sphere of Britain’s foreign relations were her chicanery and duplicity more evident than in the question of sanctions against South Africa. No, the sanctions she had supported so enthusiastically against Poland would never work in South Africa.

    Poland’s crime was that it had suppressed the trade union Solidarity. As far as Thatcher was concerned, that was a far greater crime than apartheid, which the United Nations had in resolution after resolution denounced as a crime against humanity. But then, the only humanity she recognises is white humanity.

    From claiming that sanctions would not work in South Africa, she went on to proclaim, without recognising her own absurd logic, that sanctions would hurt only the Black majority that needed protection most.

    Suddenly, this woman who as education minister had not scrupled to snatch milk away from British school children to save costs was brimming with the milk of human kindness for Black people in far-away South Africa.

    She even resorted to blaming the victim, employing the language of the oppressor. The ANC was a terroristic organisation. But for the dirty tricks of the non-white Commonwealth nations, South Africa would have remained within the family.

    When the pressure for sanctions reached a crescendo at the 1985 Commonwealth Summit in Nassau, Bahamas, and threatened to disrupt the organisation, she hit upon a ploy to sidestep the issue: the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group (EPG). Well before the EPG’s report was published, Thatcher launched a campaign of denigration against its members severally and collectively. She would allow no person and no principle to stand in the way of her giving aid and comfort to apartheid.

    That is now why she fell, of course. Her fall was rooted in her domestic and European policy. And she crashed with the same gracelessness that had animated her for 11 years, a stunning lesson in the instability of human greatness.

    Some self-hating Blacks may continue to adore her as the greatest person that ever drew breath. In this corner, the most charitable thing that can be said about the ghastly woman is: Good riddance.

    *This article, originally titled “And so, the lady was for dumping,” is republished from the December 10, 1990, issue of the newsweekly, The African Guardian, now defunct. The writer was a contributing editor for the magazine.

     

  • Before the amnesty

    Before the amnesty

    December 1991 was historic in the life of Algeria as the north African Arab country held her first free parliamentary election and was on course to becoming a real democracy after decades of military-styled dictatorship. Against the sitting government’s expectation, the Islamic Salvation Front known by its French acronyms FIS, won the polls. Trouble.

    Both the government and its western backers, particularly France never saw this coming. An Islamist government in a North African country, just on the other side of the Mediterranean, over looking Western Europe? No,no,no, this is unacceptable, the government in Algiers and its allies seemed to be saying and before the Islamists could even savor the joy of their victory, the Algerian military moved in and cancelled the election. Another trouble.

    The Islamists would have none of this. How can you deny us the fruit of our labour? They were asking the military and when the soldiers refused to change course, the leaders of FIS felt they had no option but to claim their mandate, albeit forcefully. With most of their leaders now in jail or detained by the military, FIS took up arms against the state and Algeria effectively plunged into a civil war in January 1992, a year and few months before the then Nigerian military government annulled the June 12, 1993 presidential election, which consequences threw the country into a political crisis that even the advent of democracy in 1999 has not been able to fully resolve.

    For over a decade Algeria knew no peace as the civil war which reached its height between 1997 and 1998, when innocent civilians, especially whole villagers were massacred by Islamic extremists who had initially focused their attacks on government and its agencies and sympathizers including intellectuals and journalists, but abandoned political course and changed tactics to attack ordinary people and other soft targets, claimed no fewer than 100, 000 lives in a population of just 35 million.

    The arrival of democracy or a semblance of it in April 1999, with the election of President Abdulaziz Boutlefilka brought no immediate relief as the Islamists now buoyed by an emerging global terrorist organisation called Al- Qaeda were getting stronger even in the face of relentless military onslaught by the Algerian government.

    But with a combination of carrot and stick approach and a dodgy amnesty programme packaged in a Charter on Peace and National Reconciliation approved in a October 2005 referendum, the government granted pardon to both the Islamists and soldiers that participated in the civil war and killings on both sides thus setting the stage for the relative peace being enjoyed by Algeria today. Relative peace if you close your eyes to the activities of Al -Qaeda in the Maghreb, the terrorist organisation that masterminded the January 2013 hostage taking and attacks on a BP run gas field in eastern Algeria.

    Today, the Algerian government can claim to be on top of the security/terrorism situation in the country in spite of its flawed amnesty programme which has been dubbed amnesia in some circles. Can Nigeria say the same?

    Although the Federal Government amnesty programme for Boko Haram is still on the drawing board, I’ve gone this far to draw the Algerian inference because of the Nigerian government’s decision or readiness to draw inspiration and learn from such countries as Algeria that have had to combat terrorism such as we are witnessing today with Boko Haram.

    As the Foreign Affairs editor at Concord Press then, I could recollect that though the two key leaders of FIS, the spiritual leader and the political head were in jail but were still in firm control of the organization such that when the Algerian government decided to talk peace, the two were involved. In Nigeria nobody is sure who the real leaders of Boko Haram are and where they are. So, who do you discuss peace with?

    Again as the example of Algeria shows, FIS had a grouse against the Algerian government which it felt could only be resolved by resort to arms. What is the grouse of Boko Haram against Nigeria and what have the rest of us done to the group as a people to deserve all these killings and terror being inflicted on us?

    If we know what wrong we have done to Boko Haram then may be we can begin to appreciate where they are coming from and begin to talk. Flowing from such talks could be amnesty for the terrorist group as part of the solution to the problem. But offer of amnesty before talks is putting the cart before the horse.

    Amnesty is supposed to be forgiveness for wrongs done or crime committed. So, what wrong or crime has Boko Haram committed? Of course we all know it but government has to put such in black and white for all, including the terrorists leaders to see, so that when the peace talk that all seem to be clamouring for begins, both sides would be talking on points. Boko Haram, it is expected, would also put Nigeria’s crime against it on the table.

    When both sides agree to pursue peace then the terms would be set and responsibilities assigned. We can then begin to talk of ceasefire and amnesty. It is the absence of this kind of behind the scene talk that I think was responsible for Boko Haram’s rejection of the Federal Government’s offer of amnesty. If truth must be told, the terrorist group had by that action ridiculed the Federal government and exposed the whole idea of amnesty as an afterthought. Don’t forget that President Goodluck Jonathan was initially opposed to the idea when it was first suggested by the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar. Those who twisted the president’s arms to accept the idea of amnesty do not appear to have done their home work well on Boko Haram leadership. If they had done that the embarrassment caused by this rejection by the terrorists’ leader Abubakar Shekau would have been avoided.

    This failure notwithstanding, the Federal Government should not go back on the offer of amnesty, if anything, it should move swiftly to reach out to the leaders of Boko Haram, if not directly initially, but through their proxies and sympathizers of which there are many in the north. The northern leaders who have been calling for the amnesty should also move out to ensure that the core Boko Haram leadership buy in to the amnesty programme. And their hands can be strengthened in this regard if government comes out as soon as possible with the terms of the amnesty programme which I think should be holistic, both for Boko Haram and the victims of their crime. It should not just be about forgetting and wiping out the crime, but also compensating the victims and preventing the circumstances that led to the insurgency in the first place.

    It is clear that the divide and rule tactic employed by the security agencies to factionalise Boko Haram has not worked as the escalation of attacks by the group in spite of a faction declaring a ceasefire not too long ago, has shown, hence the need to bring the Shekau’s faction into the picture.

    If the amnesty must work, all the necessary hands must be involved then we must talk and agree to forgive and forget and move forward as one. There should be no distraction as being currently exhibited by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). Jonathan should call his people to order.

     

  • The Pharisees of Osun

    The Pharisees of Osun

    Few weeks back, the Osun chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria declared that Governor Rauf Aregbesola planned to islamise the state. I examined this matter and the farce seems something out of Soyinka’s plays.

    They claimed that the governor scheduled events for Sunday and that he had imposed hijab as school uniforms. They also caviled his school architecture. Lastly, they wept over calling Osun the state of the virtuous. St. Paul said, to the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupted is nothing pure.

    If anyone heard them, they would think the governor routinely schedules events for Sunday, whereas he did it only once in 2011 and it was a press conference over a matter that they wanted urgently to beat deadline for the Monday papers. I know that his predecessors held some events on Sundays, where was CAN then? No one has shown by evidence or policy where the governor had imposed hijab. An Islamic group is in court now trying to coerce the government to use hijab because the governor has not followed that path. The so-called Christian leaders did not address that issue.

    On the land of the virtuous, the Christian men were disingenuous. The expression “Living spring,” did not come out of a Christian concept of the state but its natural endowments of waterways. That the CAN saw it as a Christian idea for Osun meant that they wanted the state to Christianise Osun. They are guilty of their accusations. Again, they should understand processes before making high decibels of nonsensical noise. The phrase “land of the virtuous” came out of the phrase “omoluabi.” In translation, it became “virtue.” Virtue does not belong to Muslims alone. St. Peter wrote, “add to your faith, virtue…” He was not addressing non-Christians. Overwhelmed by their spirit of adversary, CAN and its fellow cohorts are denying a preeminent Christian quality. As a Christian myself, I weep.

    If the CAN is not happy with the modern schools Ogbeni is building, they must be turning CAN into institutional apostasy. The Bible says we should follow whatever things are pure and of good report. I have seen the schools and only a CAN inspired by politics rather than virtue will condemn them. Have they seen the urban renewal going on there, the strides in educational amenity, or health care, or infrastructure? If CAN would rather see ghosts of zealotry, it is tragic. They are Pharisees in Nigerian politics, “whited sepulchres” with dead men’s bones within, apologies to the Christ.

     

  • From amnesty to paralysis

    From amnesty to paralysis

    What is mocking us today is not love but faith. Yet faith should proceed from love. Faith has abused love, and love faith. The twain, to paraphrase Poet Rudyard Kipling, shall not meet.

    The cries over amnesty evoke the union of incompatibles – religion and politics. They don’t blend very well. The crisis in the Middle East is intractable because one side regards itself as God’s and the other as Beelzebub’s. Mutual contempt is guaranteed.

    Most Americans threw their weights behind President George W. Bush when he railroaded the world’s top military into Iraq and his lies became truth about weapons of mass destruction when he cast Saddam as the Satan.

    Evidence is irrelevant in faith because it is its own proof.

    We saw that dark farce last week. Character A offers pardon. Character B says no and feels offended. Character B says it cannot brook the effrontery of Character A because the offender is not Character B but Character A. Character B says it owns the moral high ground and so it is on the right platform to offer pardon.

    That is the character of dark farce. One side, that is Boko Haram, said it owned the moral force. The Federal Government under Goodluck Jonathan said the religious militants were miscreants of the macabre with a blood trail of massacres. The Christian Association of Nigeria ruled out pardon even before Boko Haram rejected.

    This is a season of allegations. Everyone says it is on God’s side. The CAN says it cannot forgive, and the Boko Haram says, in spite of all the bloodshed, it owns the right to forgive. In the final analysis, we know that no one is on God’s side, and what is going on is the religious taking advantage of the political and the political taking advantage of the religious. Two toxins have entered into a bucket, and the only result is poison. So, the fury and bloodshed rage on.

    Less emphasised is the plight of the victims. Those who have died all these years, the fathers lost, the sons slaughtered, daughters slain, wives widowed, whole families impoverished and dislocated. Amnesty is good, what of amenity?

    Where communication fails, peace eludes. Those who call for amnesty are heard but not understood by those who reject. Those who reject are heard and insufficiently understood by those who can grant. Those who can grant cannot grant because of unrequited love. Those who profess the love of Christ cannot forgive even if Jesus commanded it.

    Now, what we have is not a theocratic state. It is not even a society of believers. It is a secular state professing a belief in a higher God whom no one obeys. Like Charles Dickens’ novel on the French Revolution, it is the epoch of belief and the epoch of incredulity. Everyone is going to heaven and everyone is going the other way.

    If we say we want to grant amnesty, it provides a conundrum. Who do we forgive and who do we punish? This is a season of anonymous massacre. No deaths bear any one’s imprints. It is either we forgive all or punish all, but we can do neither. So we face faith without evidence. That works for religion, but it does not work for politics.

    The only way we can resolve religious issue among humans is in the turf of politics. There has to be a panel. There will be accused, witnesses, prosecutors and judges. They will all be human, and they will consult neither the Koran nor the Bible, but the constitution of Nigeria. How do we anoint a secular text to resolve acts beholden to the canons of deity, secular system against theocratic temperaments?

    We have evidence against detainees, the ones caught, and they are inevitably consigned to punishment. But most of the militants are out of our ken, hidden in shadowy communities of the North.

    How do we galvanise a believable system of assessing criminals and punishments? We also know that in the Niger Delta, all are forgiven. But the issue has not even been raised by Boko Haram because they believe they are God’s army. They should dispense God’s justice. So who is anyone, who is human, to challenge them since they have the ultimate backing of the Almighty?

    President Jonathan says he will not negotiate with ghosts. What it shows is that the President has run out of ideas. If he had control, these offers and rejections will not happen. His first task as president is security, we are reduced to exchange of offers for rejection, and a general clamour in the open because the centre cannot hold. President Jonathan is a cagy commander.

    It is time for a new paradigm. Repetition of a jaded approach brings repetition of failures. It is a collective frustration. This is a frustrated country because it elected a frustrating leader. The billions spent, the states of emergency, the soldiers deployed and intelligence officers of impotence, only point to failure. He has not worked with northern governors like Kashim Shettima of Borno. The much bandied talk about the North not cooperating with Jonathan is the excuse of the lame. He claimed a pan-Nigerian mandate when he won in 2011. Now is time for a pan-Nigerian peace.

  • Burying the dead

    A very interesting but unusual event played out in the Awka diocese of the Catholic Church in Anambra State last week. According to reports, the Catholic Bishop of Awka, Rt. Rev. Paulinus Ezeokafor has banned the compulsory levying of church members in the diocese. For him, members should rather be encouraged to donate freely.

    The Bishop also banned the practice requiring relatives of a dead person to clear their church dues before their dead relation can be buried. He said, such clearance should be for the dead alone and not include their relatives. Bishop Ezeokafor justified his decisions on the ground that the church should show “compassion to the bereaved as such insensitivity makes people leave the church after burial”.

    Bishop Ezeokafor has said it all. He has demonstrated that he is at home with the realities and sensibilities of the people of his diocese. He must therefore be commended for this visionary and compassionate decision. Catholics in the Awka diocese who would have been grieving under the yoke of sundry levies will now heave a heavy sigh of relief. It is very surprising that relatives of the dead are made to clear their dues in the church in addition to those of their dead relations before the dead can be buried.

    Given the high cost of burials especially in the eastern part of the country, such a practice adds up to increase the burden of the bereaved while trying to bury their loved ones. And in a cultural setting that has been contending with sundry demands on the bereaved, asking them to clear their debts before their relations can be buried amounts to adding salt to injury. Little wonder those who have had the misfortune of losing their loved ones usually post a record of debts after such burials. Burials in that part of the country have turned into a huge business. There are minimum standards a burial must meet irrespective of the financial standing of the families involved. And by a very conservative estimate, that minimum is definitely beyond the reach of an average family. That is why most families resort to taxing adult members each time they are faced with burial plans for their loved ones. But for the small gifts that come by way of condolences, the situation would have been something else.

    Beyond all these, the decision of the bishop has brought to the fore the attitude of the church and the larger public to the dead. I do not know what obtains in other churches. But in the Catholic Church which is under focus, there is the need to show more compassion to the bereaved especially in the rural areas. The conduct of some church leaders when it comes to securing clearance from the church to bury a dead member is something to watch. Some of those charged with overseeing such matters sometimes go outside their mandate to enter judgment on the conduct of a dead member. They behave as church judges with awesome powers to determine who to bury or not. And at issue most often, is money. Given the limitations of some of those who preside over these decisions, their rulings on matters brought before them can sometimes irritate.

    Little slips are blown out of proportion sometimes to settle personal scores. Families have been denied their burial rights on issues that ordinarily should be resolved in their favour. Many of those who could not bear it are known to have even left the church in protest. That is the point the Bishop raised when he spoke of compassion and how such insensitivity compel people to leave the church after such burials in protest.

    The issues the bishop addressed are so fundamental that they should not be limited to the Awka diocese alone. Multiplicity of levies and the issue accountability for such have to be looked into. There are several levies members are asked to pay in the rural areas that sometimes end up in the pockets of some unscrupulous officials. These should be streamlined. Sometimes, it is also difficult to say with some measure of accuracy what constitutes the mandatory levies members should pay.

    It may be on account of the confusion that goes with this that the bishop had to take the radical decision of abolishing all forms of levies. Good as the decision is, the real problem with the levies is in the manner concerned church official deploy them to deny members of their rights especially at death. They exploit the desire of every catholic to be buried by the church to intimidate, harass and deny members of their rights on very flimsy grounds. Admittedly, a church member should be up and doing in his church obligations. But the church is not all about money. The church should not discriminate between the rich and the poor. Where a member is unable to meet all his financial obligations at death, the church could still bury such a person. It is our duty to bury the dead. That is the compassion the bishop talked about.

    More seriously, traditional churches are increasingly facing serious challenges from the new ones. Some practices are also being challenged by events in the new generation churches. Some of these new generation churches, even with all their limitations focus more on the welfare of their members. Little wonder the increasing patronage they are getting. The Catholic Church cannot shut its eyes to these developments.

    The bishop struck the right chord when he averred that multiplicity of levies and requiring members to offset their dead relations’ debts before they can be buried sometimes compel members to leave the church. It is a statement of fact which the Catholic Church cannot afford to ignore. It is true that the Catholic Church is a universal church. It is also true that apart from some of these levies and the abuse of them by sundry church officials; it is one church where people contribute according to their volition.

    It is good a thing that the bishop has spared some thought to practices that are capable of demoralizing ardent members to the extent of leaving the church. Before now, such decisions to leave the church were hard to come by. But not anymore as things are fast changing. The subsisting protests at the Ahiara diocese of the Catholic Church in Imo state over the appointment of a new bishop are clear indications that it is no longer business as usual. Before now, such protests led by very senior priests against the decision of the Pope were unthinkable.

    The Catholic Church must therefore rise to the challenge of identifying extant practices that create problems for members and modify them in keeping with the realities of our time. Bishop Ezeokafor has taken the lead and it is in the overall interest of the Catholic Church that such practices that force members out of their faith are either modified or abrogated. Where there is need to maintain some of these levies, steps must be taken to reduce abuse.

    Above all, the church must do more to prune down the high cost of burials in the eastern part of the county. That is the key message brought to the fore by Bishop Ezeokafors’ directive.

  • State foreclosure in Nigeria

    State foreclosure in Nigeria

    Foreclosure stares the Nigerian state grimly in the face. It is a terrible irony that our endlessly squabbling politicians do not yet appreciate the dangers to the nation. Their attention is completely fixated on the elections coming next year and in 2015, even as the object of their fixation is slowly yielding to the forces of internal strangulation.

    At no point in its history, either colonial or post-colonial, and certainly not even during the civil war, has the Nigerian state appeared more fragile and vulnerable. Trapped between two extreme and extremist cultures of political violence, the Boko Haram insurgency in the north and the MEND insurrection in the Southern creeks, strafed by a thousand armed gangs bent on bringing to heel its remaining emblems of power and authority, the state appears powerless and paralysed.

    Like a solitary schoolboy ambushed by bigger bullies, the state offers its drink to one and its victuals to the other, hoping that they will go away and leave it in peace. But they are not about to. Inflation is the natural law and logic of bullies. When you appease, you must be ready to yield more appeasement. This is because the more you try to give, the more they demand. Appeasement without a demonstration of strength and resolve, and without compelling evidence of your own minatory deterrence, is a voluntary suicide mission usually dead on arrival.

    This week even as the Boko Haram sect continues its routine devastation of the north despite the prospects of amnesty dangled before it, the MEND opened a new front by threatening and actually carrying out its threat despite the substantial economic and political pacification from the government. The decomposing bodies of 11 policemen must speak volumes for the dire straits in which the state has found itself..

    The powerful Nigerian military has battled valiantly and heroically to confront and contain these nation-destroying demons, but it is also beginning to show signs of weariness and demoralisation. As this column has repeatedly cautioned, this kind of well-heeled insurgency fired and inspired by ideological zealotry and operating in an economically blighted region suffering from political disorientation, is not in the conventional military manual.

    Without a conventional order of battle (ORBAT), the military will have to learn its lesson on the hoof, and as the war without defined fronts progresses. In addition, the military is hobbled by overriding political considerations and the inconsistency and feeble-minded opportunism of government policies. Saying one thing today and doing the very opposite the next day, Goodluck Jonathan himself comes across as a tragic comedian in a perplexing political tragicomedy.

    But it is not a funny matter when the state becomes a big joke despite its awesome powers of enforcement and coercion and when the bully finally becomes the bullied and the tormentor the tormented The problem of the post-colonial state in Nigeria is compounded by its vanishing legitimacy and authority even in the areas where it holds unchallenged sway.

    For many Nigerians, the state is seen as incapable of projecting itself as a true defender of national interests. It is so grotesquely corrupt and inefficient that its moral authority over its own citizens has evaporated. This is in addition to its military incapacitation in the face of armed critiques of its existence. Although this did not begin with Goodluck Jonathan, he seems bent and destined to drive the logic to its ultimate summit and summation.

    When a state loses its power of moral and ethical suasion over its citizens and when the power of its apparatus of coercion has dramatically diminished in addition, that is state failure looming. It is now too late in the day to begin to suggest measures to shore up the authority and legitimacy of the government. This will involve a drastic self-purgation, and with its eyes fixed on the election of 2015, the Jonathan administration cannot even afford to toy with these measures.

    Unfortunately, it is not a problem that can be wholly redressed or addressed by elections. As it has been demonstrated so many times in the history of post-colonial Africa and Nigeria, elections superimposed on seething national contradictions do not solve or resolve anything. In most cases, they worsen the contradictions and exacerbate the national fault lines.

    It is the business of recreating the Nigerian state and nation which the political elite shy away from that is the hardest task. Yet without this fundamental shift in the paradigm of state-making and nation-building, there is nothing to stop this embattled nation from eventually dissolving into anarchic bloodletting the like of which has never been seen before.

    The old African pre-colonial political elites seemed to have managed the contradictions of society-building and state-making very well. This was because the old African state was an organic outgrowth of pre-colonial African society and there was therefore a uniformity and homogeneity of political culture which allowed for faster consensus building, the odd tension and political dissonance notwithstanding.

    This is quite unlike what obtains in colonial and post-colonial Africa where the state largely remains an alien and alienating contraption forcibly grafted on disparate and often mutually contradictory political, economic and religious cultures which makes national consensus very difficult except when it comes to stealing which wears a universal mask and does not require any mental rigour or highfalutin ethics.

    Where the state-nation is lucky to have a visionary founding father who can skilfully weld and fuse the disparate ethnic strands together to achieve a homogeneous entity, it is easier to fashion and fabricate a national consensus. Unfortunately, most founding fathers in Africa left their nations writhing in the debris of political and economic chaos.

    In its classical incarnation, the state was the most powerful embodiment of national aspirations surfeit with mystical notions as the ultimate guarantor and protector of the sacred destiny of the people and the society. This is true of any pre-colonial society. In royalties, monarchies, empires and fiefdoms, state actors are carefully groomed and nurtured through a rigorous and painstaking selection process.

    When and where a mistake is made, it is left to other powerful countervailing institutions to correct the anomaly with speed and utmost discretion without destabilising the polity. This is unlike what obtains in post-colonial Africa where tyrannical and unjust rulers often manage to circumvent elections as the expression of the sovereign wish and will of the populace.

    Africans must find some redemptive resources from the pre-colonial past. African elites, unlike the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese and the Arabs, do not consider themselves modish and sophisticated until they have started casting aspersions on their pre-colonial culture. Yet as we demonstrated in this column last week, the continuing virility and potency of some of these institutions long after the subversion of their political and material base ought to serve as a cautionary reminder.

    In a famous passage on Greek Art, Karl Marx, the grim materialist and patriarch of periodisation, wondered aloud why artistic products from ancient Greece have continued to please and intrigue us long after the superannuation of the material culture that supported them. “The difficulty is not that they pleased us but that they continue to do so”, Marx rued. It was surely an affront to materialist logic.

    The same logic should now be extended to post-traditional societies. Why do certain institutions, rituals, emblems, sacred totems and tropes from the pre-colonial order have a lingering efficacy and potency long after the colonial amputation of the political and material basis of their existence? These are powerful ideological apparatuses of the old pre-colonial state and they will continue to be for a long time until they are overtaken by a combination of events. The death of material base does not automatically translate into the demise of superstructure.

    However that may be, all of this must indicate to us why the Nigerian state faces grave problems. It is a state that has been unable to grow any authentic national institution with the possible exception of the military which has also had its misadventures. It is a stunted state suffering from pedological leprosy. Nothing will grow on nothing. The political elite are riven by primordial fissures. The national psyche is centrally fractured. The state preys and predates on the nation directly leading to armed objections to its existence. .

    We have been careful to distinguish between state foreclosure and total state failure. Let no one at this point come up with the bogey, the blackmail and the buncombe that all this may lead to military intervention. In any case, military rule is preferable to the apocalyptic meltdown and the genocidal bloodletting looming. If the Boko Haram sect had succeeded in bringing down the Third Mainland Bridge, it would have taken some extra constitutional measure to restore parity to the nation. The mere threat, which is not over yet, brings the national tragedy to sharp relief.

    Whereas state failure compels a drastic and radical re-composition of the state and reconfiguration of the nation, state foreclosure, like a foreclosed property, demands immediate change of ownership and perhaps ownership restructure. The revolutionary turmoil in the land ought to tell the PDP that it has nothing left to offer the nation. Despite payment rescheduling and mortgage modification, the ruling party has failed to meet its obligation to the nation. Urgent repossession is the only solution.

    Since it has proved incapable of internally reforming itself, not to talk of coming up with the visionary policies to move the nation forward beyond the initial demilitarisation, all Nigerians, including patriotic members of the PDP driven by enlightened self interest, must rise up in one guise and under whatever national platform to see off this pernicious party before it sees off the nation.

    When compared with other grave possibilities facing the nation at the moment, this is the equivalent of mild surgery and a compromise in favour liberal democracy. Otherwise, state failure will accelerate at full throttle. The hazy outlines of radical anarchy are already with us.

  • Mourning Margaret, the Dowager of Downing Street

    Mourning Margaret, the Dowager of Downing Street

    Margaret Hilda Thatcher, who has just died, was arguably one of the greatest and most impacting leaders of the twentieth century. But she was also one of the most divisive. Even in death, she continues to provoke bitter divisions and controversies. While world leaders fell over themselves to pay her deserved tributes, the streets of Buenos Aires in Argentina and Brixton in Britain lit up in instant rejoicing and jubilation at the passing of the woman they love to hate. Thatcher, the milk-snatcher and the conqueror of Argentina, has shed mortality for immortality.

    The basis of her greatness lies in simple but stout convictions which she was ready to pursue to their ultimate end without caring whose ox is gored. She would not be crossed lightly. When truly roused, observers have noticed a lunatic glare in her eyes which hinted at deep psychological instability, but which also explains her deep reserves of strength and character. She was a long distance runner when it comes to feuds and friendships.

    There can be no doubt about her strength of character and steely resolve. The daughter of a Methodist alderman, the former Ms Roberts brought certain Christian fundamentalist principles to bear on politics. Among these are the virtues of thrift, prudence, restraint and self-help. Let those who do not work not eat. It is as simple as that, or is it? Ironically when these noble virtues are pushed to their ultimate logic, they lend themselves to the berserk individualism of an uncaring and deeply divided society. Thatcher herself famously posited that there is no such thing as society.

    This glorification of individual strength and personal salvation at the expense of communal care and affection was the ultimate chink in her formidable visionary armour. Thatcher’s fundamentalist zeal as well as the limits of her messianic certitude rose to the fore whenever she brusquely informed critics of her economic policies that there was no alternative, a mantra which earned her the nickname of “Tina”.

    In the end and even for her long-suffering party colleagues, there was no alternative to dumping the Iron Lady. It was a typical British political coup which was brilliantly effected in an autumnal morning of long knives. With tears in her eyes, Margaret Thatcher headed for Buckingham Palace in a lone funereal procession. The Iron Lady had become history.

    Margaret Thatcher was an unusual and atypical figure even by the standards of British politics. She was a profound anomaly for a political society which prides itself on its tolerance and the gentle virtues of pragmatic compromise. But there can be no doubt that the moment chose its Margaret. Before her, there was a historic deadlock. Britain had become a huge economic almshouse disposing munificence while Authur Scargill and his unionists held the nation to ransom. Britain needed an unusual political figure to drag and handbag it out of the millennial rut. Thatcher frogmarched Britain to her neo-conservative version of economic modernity. She earned herself an “ism” in the process.

    While her greatness is not in doubt, snooper regrets a certain gleeful insularity about Thatcher which lends itself to a racist smugness. Her support of rightwing regimes called her political judgement to question. Her dismissal of the ANC as a terrorist organisation which would never come to power was cruel and obtuse.

    In a befitting historical irony, snooper monitored Margaret Thatcher as she journeyed to South Africa much later to negotiate with the new authorities an escape clause for Mark, her wayward and accident-prone son. The ANC government obliged. It was a touching demonstration of the superiority of traditional African values. May Margaret find sweet repose.