The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Kwara’s strange investment model

    Kwara’s strange investment model

    Too many strange things do happen in Kwara State. And they happen without the critical actors (often time the government) batting an eyelid about what embarrassment such events/happenings cause the people. Sometimes so glaring a lie is told about state of things and so on.

    On February 18, I read the full text of an interview Governor Abdulfattah Ahmed granted some journalists. The interview came under different headings in different dailies. Of all these headings, however, I considered the one in The Punch most catchy and, perhaps innocently, most indicting. It reads: “We’ll hand over Aviation College to investors.” Having earlier read the interview under a different heading (“We’ll make Kwara Nigeria’s agric hub”) in The Nation of same date, I did not bother to read the interview again. The content is the same.

    Now I quote a statement from the interview, as published in The Nation. “For now, the school is fully owned by the state but don’t forget that the state government is not in the business of running aviation. So ultimately we will sell off 70 per cent of that business to those who know how to do it and then the school will run on its own internationally”. Something is very clear from this statement and that is that the Kwara State government owns the Aviation College wholesale! On Monday January 14, the governor’s spokesman, Femi Akorede, made the following statement on twitter: “Kwara will eventually sell 70 per cent of its stake in Aviation College.” Today, after reading the governor’s interview, I asked my 12-year-old younger sister to tell me what Akorede’s statement meant. And without much ado, she said it means the government is selling 70 per cent of its own shares in the business. Prodded further, she said the statement meant the state does not appear to own it 100 per cent. That was the exact interpretation I had in my mind. Instructively too, I recall somebody on twitter asking Akorede whether somebody else owns some shares in the college. He has remained mute ever since. Now the governor just told us Kwara owns the college wholesale. The “its” in Akorede’s statement clearly is ambiguous and I remember somebody had alleged it was a sign of very terrible things to come on this project, citing the Shonga Farm as an example. The governor of course made some false claims about the Shonga Farm such as declaring it a huge success when Mr Irvine Reid, one of the remaining Zimbabwean farmers, said in an interview with Financial Times of London (November 1, 2012, titled ‘Nigeria seeks to beef up farming industry’) that “our farming experience has passed its sell-by date”. Recall that 13 white farmers were there initially. The governor did not disclose that five of the white farmers had since left the farm, much less explain why they left. He did not also say that Kwara State government is having its funds being deducted at source on account of unpaid debt of the “thriving” Shonga Farm which the government says now belongs to “private concern”. An article titled ‘Operation Fool the People of Kwara’, published by Newswatch of March 09, 2012 in the wake of 70m Euro rice farming agreement the state government signed with one Valsolar Consortium of Spain, had far-reaching revelations about this. Why is Kwara shouldering a burden of a venture now belonging to a private concern or where it has a paltry 25 per cent?

    Now to the Aviation College. I do not know of any decent government that spends public fund to put a project in place and then hands same to some “investors”? Where were these investors when public fund was being committed to the same project? Here I repeat a question one terrified Olabisi Ogunwale asked Akorede about this issue: is the aim solely based on future divestiture? And worst still, the governor said in the interview that government has no business in doing/running business! Is this statement an afterthought or the governor had always known this? If he knew this, why commit government fund to a business when government has no business being in business? These clearly defy common sense. Also, we do not know precisely how much of public fund has gone into putting the college (including the facilities and man power) in place. If we do not know these and the government is not the type to give such fact, how do we know it is not being dashed out at giveaway price to so-called private investors?

    I have further worries. It is my prayer that the Aviation College does succeed. Else, Kwara will pay dearly – as it is doing for Shonga Farm. The Governor, clearly attempting to douse public anger at the news of Kwara’s plans to purchase additional 10 aircraft for the college in a state with legendary dearth of basic infrastructure, used the interview to explain that the money is not from the public coffers. He said the college is benefiting from the new EXIM loan that the Federal Government has signed with the Chinese and India governments. The aircrafts are to be purchased from the loan, the governor added, to be paid back by the college over a period of 10 years. Good deal. But the governor clearly was holding back some facts about the loan: who is standing surety for this loan just in case of default? What happens, God forbid, in the event that the college is not able to pay pack? Head or tail, Kwara people would be made to pay.

    But the bad news does not end there. The Aviation College was built from the N17b bond accessed sometime in 2009 from the capital market. Last year, additional N10b loan was taken to, in the words of the government, complete projects, including the same Aviation College! That money (N17b) is due for payment next year. With the college far from yielding any profit and the hope of it doing so remaining dim as at this minute, it is fair to say that the ISPO (Irrevocable Standing Payment Order) – which the state government signed in the event of the businesses for which the bond was taken defaulting from paying – would take effect from 2014, further depleting the meagre resources of the state. Yet Kwara people will soon lose ownership of this venture whose debt would be deducted from the treasury!

    Clearly too many things are not right here. The government will hit back on this, rather than explain itself. But definitely Kwara’s investment model is quite strange. And one would be forgiven to call it an outright fraud. This is the only state I know of where public fund is used to float an enterprise and the government will wake up one morning and auction it out. If my information is right, the multibillion naira Kwara Diagnostic Centre, also built from the N17b bond, is also gone. Kwara is no estate agent.

    • Ajakaye writes from Ilorin

     

  • Bankers’ bonus; In 2013, will political parties stop stealing from budgets?

    Bankers’ bonus; In 2013, will political parties stop stealing from budgets?

    No doubt we will again have the Bonus Saga with billions paid to managers and ‘wiz kids’ just because they handle cash and not like for professions which deliver blood, passengers, babies or children in schools. Can someone, may be CBN, tell us exactly what the bonus levels are in Nigeria – the richest poorest country in Africa. The subjugation of the world to monetisation is ugly and wrong, monetarily and morally. At the very least let all workers get a bonus equivalent to their worth calculated by an actuary. Landing a plane with 800 passengers, docking a ship with 5,000 passengers, running a university with 100,000 students, driving 33,000 litres of fuel from Lagos to Langtang or guiding 30 children through a year in school should all be more worthy of a ‘pilots’, captains’, vice-chancellors’, drivers’ or teachers’ bonus’ than the banker sitting in an office playing Russian roulette with other people’s money, stocks and shares and manipulating COT, bank charges, lending rates etc. A banker’s satisfactory outcome and cost cutting and increased share price is often won at the cost of job losses, death and destruction in the countryside. Nigerians also say no to Nigerians bankers’ bonuses, secret or revealed.

    We Nigerians have been bogged down with failed expectation and begging politicians to give us our rights to water, quick transportation, internationally accepted optimal education, adequate security and adequate recreational facilities. But ‘change has to come’! To correct the past, government must accept its errors, take budgeting line items more seriously, eliminate fraud in the contractor chain and get out of the ‘financial food chain’. The top priority question for all Nigerians is ‘Can political parties stop stealing and if not, will Nigeria survive 2014?

    It is March. Beware the Ides of March, Shakespeare writes! What are the omens? Are they good or bad? The budget is now signed. How much will be spent as budgeted and how much will be misused and stolen? It is a time of upheaval and restructuring and new decision-making in the major political parties. Many parties have been de-registered by INEC and many more may follow, releasing a tsunami of non-conformist, often idealistic and individualistic members, to choose a future in other surviving or merging parties or quit politics in disgust.

    Change is personal and political. Change is political party survival and revival of Nigeria. No change will mean death. We must all stop stealing from the budget and its derivatives during 2013 in preparation for 2014, the 100thyear of the infamous amalgamation. With new budgets in every LGA, state, the FCT, Abuja, and every MDA what political party resolutions have been made to change the culture of corruption? Or are the resolutions merely to continue the age-long ‘shortening the ration’ of the masses by theft alias corruption? Which media hungry TV political personality is making these stealing and theft resolutions in the political hierarchy, at party BOT meetings, in NASS, governor’s and minister’s and commissioner’s and top civil servants offices like Permanent Secretary Director etc? Before you steal, you must decide to steal!

    Just as you plan 2013 and your children’s school fees in your office, know and remember that these other places are real places where the real crime, stealing and theft, official and unofficial, legalised illegality, corruption against the people of the Nigerian nation, is hatched. There the crime is approved and rubber-stamped at 10,000 different levels each January including the tax office. Is no one clean in Nigeria’s political and civil servant hierarchy? Can we have such meetings where they will swear ‘We will not steal any of the budget?’ Or ‘We will steal only 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80% of the budget.’ Who is the chief thief who speaks at the party meetings and directs the theft at every level of corrupt government? For Nigeria to change, the first thing is for every political party to change from thieving, bribing, grabbing mode to service mode. If it happens it will immediately retain trillions in the budgets.

    From exorbitant parking fine fees-N25,000 in Ibadan while it is N4,000 in Abeokuta; to ridiculous environmental and land use bills, outrageous personal assessments, huge energy costs, to budgetary theft, the Nigerian suffers at every turn.

    Nigeria will never achieve the higher ground of better living standards unless we, the citizens, manage to reverse positions with the politicians and wrestle the budget from them. How do we control the political profession’s appetite for the public funds and manipulation of laws for party members’ maximum gain? It is certain Nigeria’s politicians need education and massive reorientation towards service and humility. Arrogance is a disease among politicians and they certainly need deliverance from the vices of greed, theft, stealing, arrogance, corruption of thoughts and actions and policies.

    Political parties must curb their appetites for the public purse and find new ways to raise money. They already have high fees for political office seekers and underhand bribes within the party including new words for theft like ‘palliatives’ and ‘soft landing’ funds. Let them study and use the mechanisms of relatively honest political parties abroad –membership, announced donations etc. and stay away from percentages of budgets, contracts and extortion. Nigeria cannot survive another year of this method of bleeding the state in addition to the murderous multibillion SAPing of political ‘Salaries and Perks’ and constituency projects.

  • Water, electricity not bullets

    Water, electricity not bullets

    Here we go again. By the last count, at least four students of the Nassarawa State University, Keffi, were callously mowed down last Monday. The students had turned out in large numbers on the fateful day to protest lack of water and electricity in their campus when the students met their death. Many more who sustained varying degrees of injuries were rushed to the school clinic and other nearby hospitals for treatment.

    Unfortunately, just like many of such horrendous incidents in the past, the blame game is on. The students have alleged that their colleagues were killed by soldiers from the army’s 177 Guards Battalion based in Keffi who were drafted to the scene. But Ibrahim Attahiru, a Brigadier-General and Director, Army Public Relations, has denied this. While commenting on the incident last week, Attahiru said, “Three soldiers sustained injuries following the stones, bottles and metals thrown at them” by the rampaging students.

    Thank God that the police have not been fingered in this latest killing. Eyewitness accounts said policemen who were drafted to the scene were very persuasive in their approach but, as soon as soldiers came in, they started shooting sporadically. This, the army has denied. But the question is: while the students were hauling stones and other available missiles at the battle-ready soldiers, with what did they respond? And how were they able to dislodge the warring students and got them back to campus?

    We have been told by the army that hoodlums and cultists had hijacked the protest and caused mayhem before the soldiers and other security agents were called in to quell the protest. As more revelations are made in the coming days, I am quite sure the story line will change again and again. Then we’ll be told that some of the students actually carried arms during the protest. And to support this allegation, a cache of arms seized from armed robbers since God knows when, will be displayed for people to see. Such is the nature of cover-ups often employed by security agents to nail people at all costs.

    Yes, the students could have destroyed some of the institution’s property or even public property during the course of the protest. This, in itself, is bad enough. Students cannot be protesting against lack of water and electricity and at the same time, destroying or vandalising many other infrastructure on campus or turn the heat on unsuspecting members of the public. Ordinarily, it doesn’t add up at all.

    Government property or any other public property is the people’s property and, as such, should be protected at all times. Huge sums of money are involved in putting these structures in place. With inflation and the downward trend in world economy vis-à-vis the nation’s economy, it costs a fortune nowadays to replace these infrastructures or property. That is why there must be care and caution even in the face of extreme provocation, denial or lack of facilities in view of the dwindling government revenue earnings which have affected the nation’s expenditure or spending power in recent times.

    I am aware that there are a few students who hide under this ‘Aluta’ of a thing to ventilate their anger unnecessarily on the society by going to the extreme. They hide under such protests to cause destruction. This will not do us any good. Now, some students who were sent to school with hard-earned money by their parents will be sent home in coffins. But then, when are we going to get over these incessant and perennial senseless killings of our youths in their prime?

    The appalling security situation in the country has not helped matters. Mind you, Nassarawa State is a contiguous state to the killing fields of Plateau State where deadly clashes have led to the death of hundreds of people, including scores of security agents, in the last few years. Even though there are occasional lull in the orgy of violence and wanton destruction of lives and property in that part of the country, the ugly situation has often had its collateral effects on many of the adjoining states of Nassarawa, Benue, Niger, and even the Federal Capital Territory, to name a few.

    The foot soldiers of these troublemakers are the hoi polloi in the society who have not been adequately catered for in terms of feeding, housing and other basic necessities of life. They live in abject poverty, deprivation, wants and disease. Life, to them, is meaningless, nasty, ‘short and brutish’. That is why they would take up arms in the name of hoodlums and hijack an otherwise peaceful protest by students.

    But it would appear that the soldiers who were hastily drafted to quell the protest must have used maximum force on the protesters. In the first place, it was wrong to have called in the army to quell an ordinary protest by defenceless students. The students themselves attested to the fact that the policemen who first accosted them were persuasive in their approach but the whole configuration changed when soldiers appeared on the scene. And soldiers, by their training, speak only one language: force.

    So, in essence, those who should take responsibility for this mindless massacre are not the soldiers who pulled the trigger that sent the students to their early graves, but the university authorities who brought them into the fray. It is also possible that the troops’ commanders may not have followed the rule of engagement to the letter.

    What is evident in the latest sad story of Nassarawa University is that those in positions of authority in this country may have totally lost confidence in the police and their ability to deal with all these protests especially by students. That was probably why the school’s authorities quickly called in the army to do what a well-trained police force could have done. Internal security is the business of the police and other agencies. The army or military, as the case may be, should only be called in as a last resort if the police cannot cope.

    I will agree with those who might want to say that protests in Nigeria may not be the same thing as protests in other countries like Britain, the United States of America, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal or even Egypt and other places. We have seen a lot of protests in these countries in the last two years often instigated by harsh economic realities as it happened in Britain, Greece, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria or bad governance in Egypt. At least, far less people have been killed especially in Egypt where the protests have often turned bloody and almost uncontrollable.

    It is true that in Nigeria, many of these protests are often infiltrated by armed hoodlums who convert the protests to personal gains. Many of the security agents too, treat their fellowmen with disdain, contempt and extreme brutality even in matters that require tact, wisdom and experience to handle. With such ruthlessness often exhibited by our security agents, sometimes on innocent Nigerians who are made to suffer unjustly, and or even extorted in the process, it then becomes a natural phenomenon that the average Nigerian, rightly or wrongly, harbours some certain degree of hatred for our security agents. All this must change in order for us to achieve some modicum of decency in our daily lives.

    I sincerely believe that what happened to the four unfortunate students of Nassarawa University is avoidable. The onus now is on our security agents to go back to the drawing board and map out new strategies to deal with the public, especially protesting students, so as to put a permanent end to this recurring human carnage in the name of quelling riots. The students too and indeed, all Nigerians, must strive at all times to be law-abiding, while the security agents should also operate within the ambit of the law. We cannot continue to waste our young, vibrant ones needlessly like this. After all, what the students asked for is water and electricity, not bullets and deaths!

  • Governors Forum: Why Jonathan is mistaken

    Governors Forum: Why Jonathan is mistaken

    When the dust finally settles on the on going face off between President Goodluck Jonathan and Governor Rotimi Amaechi’s led Nigeria Governors Forum, the wind would have blown and the fowl’s backside would have been revealed.

    If you don’t know what I am talking about then ask your neighbour as you are probably the only one around still in the dark about how the president’s rabid ambition to run a second term is tearing apart almost every known political structure and power blocs in the country including the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    Jonathan in case you don’t know is hell bent on running for the presidency again in 2015 and an Abuja court last week cleared the way for him to do so if he so desires, and there is no denying that’s exactly what the man wants. And there is nothing wrong in that if his party believes so much in his ability to win the next presidential election and hands him the PDP ticket. But he will still need to contend with the opposition, now growing in strength and confidence, and the electorate who are more than disappointed with his performance.

    But the man doesn’t seem to care about what the electorate think of him and his administration, all that matters to him is winning the PDP’s ticket by hook or crook and once again rigging his way to the presidency, and he appears to be well on the way to achieving that. Rightly or wrongly, he has identified the seeming obstacles to achieving this and has set about destroying them, but how far he can go remains to be seen.

    The first major obstacle it seems is the PDP and the man has succeeded, or so it seems, in hijacking the party’s leadership with the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) and the Board of Trustees (BoT) firmly in his pocket and gunning for the soul of its National Executive Committee (NEC), the highest decision making body in the party. NEC comprises of all the national leaders of the party including the powerful state governors and their chairmen. And he seems to be facing difficulty here.

    While he has pocketed Bamanga Tukur’s NWC with the sacking via the court of former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s men, and succeeded in installing his Yes man, Tony Aninih as BoT chairman, getting the PDP governors and their state chairmen on his side has been an uphill task, and this is where Rotimi Amaechi and the Nigeria Governors Forum come in.

    For lack of understanding of what the NGF is really is or absolute ignorance or both, President Goodluck Jonathan believes Governor Amaechi should be able to goad the NGF to do his (Jonathan’s) bidding, irrespective of the feelings of other governors, simply because Amaechi, as Governor of Rivers State is from the same south/south geopolitical zone as Jonathan, in essence, a paddy-paddy affair. Rubbish.

    Those who know Governor Amaechi very well would tell you the man is made of better stuff. He would not do a thing unless he is convinced it is in the best interest of the people, your closeness to him or otherwise notwithstanding. Moreover, leading a team of equals as the NGF is, Amaechi knows that he has to say and do what his brother governors want lest he loses their confidence and gets thrown out.

    Blaming Amaechi or trying to punish him for the president’s inability to get the governors behind his second term project is missing the point. Jonathan’s failure to rally the governors behind him is down to his lack lustre performance as President and Commander In Chief and has got nothing to do with Amaechi’s alleged refusal or reluctance to back him. And as just been revealed by the governor of Niger State, Dr. Babangida Aliyu, Jonathan refusal or failure to honour the agreement he made with PDP governors in the run up to the last presidential election to serve just one term, is also at the root of his problems with the governors. So, bringing Amaechi into the picture is akin to hiding behind one finger.

    The NGF as we have been made to believe and as shown by the utterances of its members is just a club of state governors and a forum for them to rub minds on issues of mutual interest. More often than not the Forum had been criticized for being too selfish, but that was exactly what it was supposed to do; selfish on the side of the states. And no state or state governor has come out to deny or back off what the Forum has been doing.

    Because more often than not the issues that cut across the states’ interests have been against or in sharp contrast to Federal Government’s position, the governors are seen as being antagonistic to not just the federal government but also President Goodluck Jonathan, and because Governor Amaechi as their leader often speaks for them and rightly so, he is erroneously perceived as an enemy of President Jonathan. This is wrong. Amaechi as those who know him well will say is a man of strong character who will never let his people down, hence he continues to enjoy their support and confidence. He may disagree with them and make his point or position known to them, but once a decision was taken and he was part of it, as the leader, he is bound by it and he goes out to vent and defend it. So, if speaking the minds of the governors is his offence, then all the governors are guilty.

    But is it not even stupid and unrealistic for the President and his men to think Governor Amaechi could swing the minds of all the 36 state governors from six different parties when the issues that bring them together are as diverse as Nigeria? I am sure the governors will be united and probably think one way as long as the issues at hand concern them equally, as we have seen with the issue of sovereign wealth fund, excess crude revenue and local government autonomy. When the Forum attempted to speak with one voice on the issue of state police we all saw what happened.

    But I am sure if the issue of a second term for Jonathan were to come up for discussion whether within the newly formed PDP Governors Forum or the more respected Nigeria Governors Forum today, the answer would be NO. So, Jonathan, Amaechi is not your problem neither is it the NGF. Look at the mirror and you’ll see your problem

    It is convenient for the federal government and the PDP to see the NGF as a trade union or pressure group that must be destroyed now simply because they can’t have their way with the governors. When the Forum intervened in the face off between Labour and Government to save the neck of the president and also sided with Federal government on fuel subsidy removal, it was a good body and Amaechi a good boy. But now that they can not pocket the group, NGF is a trade union and Amaechi an enemy. Ehn Mr. President? Time will tell whether what you are doing now is right or wrong but Nigerians surely know who their leaders are. They know who to trust and they will deliver their verdict at the right time. Chikena.

  • Jonathan bares his fangs

    Jonathan bares his fangs

    After last week’s duel between President Goodluck Jonathan and the Nigeria Governors Forum, it seems unlikely that anyone would ever again dare to underrate the capacity of the President to take on his opponents or even doubt that he has come to his own. Not with the serial victories of the last fortnight starting with the one over his nemesis, Olusegun Obasanjo. Like a good learner, such has been the unaccustomed dexterity of the erstwhile godson that the structure inelegantly put together by his Baba has been taken down with barely audible whimpers. Like the Biblical quest, Jona’s lines are at the moment falling onto their right places!

    Now, the anointing of Anthony Anenih as the chair of PDP Board of Trustees was supposed to be the icing on the presidential cake. The president obviously got a double in the long-awaited onslaught against the Nigerian Governors Forum – and by extension, the spat with the irrepressible Rivers Governor Rotimi Amaechi – which came within micro-seconds of the former.

    Thanks to President Jonathan and his PDP Governors Forum, the nation has a lot to learn from the power arithmetic in which a part is deemed to be more than the sum of the whole. A PDP Governors Forum is after all, some steps to decapitation of the bigger body. The President may not have had the head of the chair of the NGF on a platter –John the Baptist-style, the journey to its internment is well on course. The trophy of the PDP governors’ forum is after, all as good any.

    If we add last week’s judicial victory clearing the coast for candidate Jonathan in 2015, the momentum of unchallenged and unchallengeable power would seem infinite. We expect more of such victories – either procured or earned – even as the premature countdown to the 2015 polls begins in earnest. And as Governor Godswill Akpabio, the President’s Man Friday cared to remind last week, part of the sideshow is to fix the Judases and the traitors in the party. By then, the move to carve the PDP in the image of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan would have been near perfect – completed.

    Not even for most part of the imperial Presidency of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, did we see him herd the club of governors to the Villa with the sole aim of choosing their leader for them. Of course we know why the Presidency would pay so much attention to a body it once charitably (?) described as an extra-constitutional body. One Presidential minion – Ahmed Gulak – actually described the body as a trade union. Earlier, Presidential godfather Edwin Clark had described it as an opposition movement perpetually in breaches of both the 1999 Constitution and the constitution of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

    The story goes all the way back to a minor incident in the Okrika waterfront in 2010. Nigerians would recall how a visiting Dame Patience Goodluck chided the elected governor of her home state over the latter’s use of “must” to convey his administration’s resolve to demolish and upgrade the blighted Okrika waterfront. The spectacle of the President’s spouse snatching the microphone from Amaechi and the equally dramatic putdown of the former with undisguised venom is one Nigerians are unlikely to forget: “I want you to get me clear. I am from here (Okrika). I know the problems of my people. So, I know what I am talking. I do not want us to go into crises….But what I am telling you is that you always say you must demolish. That word ‘must, you use is not good. It is by pleading. You appeal to the owners of the compound, because they will not go into exile. Land is a serious issue.”

    Of course, Amaechi’s sins have since grown in leaps and bounds. His leadership of the NGF has been uncompromising in its opposition to the Federal Government’s expropriation of funds belonging to the states and local government to establish the Sovereign Wealth Fund. There is also the lingering matter of the excess crude account which the federal government sought to disburse as it pleased but which his leadership of the NGF would insist on contesting in court. The dispute between Bayelsa and Rivers over the status of some oil wells and which the Rivers Governor had openly accused the President of meddling in favour of his home state of Bayelsa merely added salt on a gaping wound.

    Governance is however not the only area of disagreement. If the raging battle in Adamawa is a revelation of the extent to which the governors club is locked in combat with the President and the national chairman on just about every and any issue, the tension between the National Working Committee of the party and its executive council are as equally revealing of a party in turmoil.

    However, just as much has been written about the struggle for the soul of the PDP as the 2015 race hots up as the driver of the animosities, there is another factor often glossed over. Psychoanalysing the President is certainly far from my mind. However, one only needs to go back to the travails of former Governor Timipre Sylva for an inkling into the character flaws of the number one citizen. I refer here to his intolerance of those perceived as remotely challenging his authority, plus his inability to overlook a hurt or forgive an injury. To these add his penchant to elevate personal issues to state matters and his lack of restraint in the use of state instruments to push a personal agenda.

    Now, where do these lead? I make some guesses. Already, with two fixers in office, there shouldn’t be shortage of enemies to find and fix in the run down to 2015. It is futile to ask a man riding the crest of victory to slow down or dismount.

    Not unexpectedly, the developments have come with interesting side shows. Just like in Sylva’s case in which an alleged insubordination would become the subject of a thriller at the Villa, Amaechi story is already being promoted in Jonathan’s court as a block buster in gubernatorial insolence! How about something to excite the bored presidency?

    The point is – this presidency knows a bit or two about the use of power – in a perverse way. Gone are the days when presidents drew from the well-spring of moral authority to get things going. With President Jonathan, the seduction to raw power has become so irresistible as to constitute the barometer to measure the decline of the moral authority.

    Sure enough, everyone is guaranteed to learn the unknown equation in power relations: the rule of unanticipated or unexpected behaviour. It’s something for the gloaters to ponder over.

  • In the shadow of Rosa Parks

    In the shadow of Rosa Parks

    Irony rarely comes in a more profound form.

    It is Black History month, and in the rotunda of the Capitol, in Washington, DC., President Barack Obama is unveiling a statue of Rosa Parks, the demure black seamstress who refused to give up her seat at the back of the city bus to a white passenger, in Montgomery, Alabama, in the American Deep South, where racial segregation was official policy.

    That singular act of defiance led to her arrest, and to a boycott of the bus service coordinated by a little-known local pastor who ultimately became the acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement in the United States, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and is acknowledged as one of history’s great men.

    Across from where the unveiling is taking place, the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing oral arguments in a petition urging it to strike down a law that bars states from changing their voting laws in ways that could disenfranchise residents without the approval of the Department of Justice.

    The law, revalidated by a unanimous decision in 2006, was enacted as part of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made it possible for generations of African Americans to register to vote for the first time, without having to pass stultifying literacy tests and without having to show that they owned property.

    The tests were so brazenly manipulated that very few even among educated and propertied African Americans could pass them, leading a frustrated Dr Martin Luther King to complain that, at the rate at which it was being carried out, voter registration of the black residents of the state of Alabama would take about 150 years.

    Today, the right to vote continues to be circumscribed, especially in states controlled by the Republicans, in ways that on their face seem to apply to the general population but are designed to suppress the vote of African Americans and Latinos who tend to go with the Democrats.

    It is well known, for example, that African Americans generally flock to voting centres to cast early ballots after Sunday worship. To prevent that, some states outlawed Sunday voting. In a variation of that theme, they also cut early voting so drastically that, as happened last November, it took eight hours for some voters to cast their ballots. This measure was calculated to make the cost of voting almost prohibitive for persons at the lower end of the economic scale.

    In yet another variation of that theme, the Republican majority in many states redrew electoral districts in such a way as to dilute the black vote and make the election of African Americans or a Democrat virtually impossible. So that, today, although Republican candidates polled at least a million votes fewer than Democratic candidates, they hold a commanding majority in the U. S. House of Representatives.

    It took spirited legal challenge mounted by disaffected citizens, with the backing of the Justice Department, to block the enforcement of the more brazen of these voter suppression laws.

    Now, scarcely four months later, a county in one of the states with the most odious record of discrimination – a county in which an election was cancelled because it was going to be won by an African American despite all the mago mago –is asking the Supreme Court to void the federal law mandating District of Justice to vet changes of that kind to the state electoral laws.

    And despite this recent history, despite the cumulative evidence of continuing disenfranchisement and voter suppression, a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court, an institution now widely regarded as the Republican Party in black robes, seems inclined to hold that the federal law at issue has run its course and should go.

    Chief Justice John Roberts says the United States had changed to the point where the law was no longer necessary. Then, he went on to cite Massachusetts. which is not subject to the law being challenged, as a state with a poorer record of American African American voting than Mississippi – the same Massachusetts which has as its elected governor Deval Patrick, Jr.

    This, as has been pointed out, is a distortion of the Massachusetts record. In any case, the issue is voter suppression and disenfranchisement, not the quantum of minority voting.

    The Court’s resident bully, a perfect refutation of the perception of judges as the epitome of sobriety, and the leading exponent of a soulless judicial doctrine which holds that statutes are only to be construed the way the framers understood them – they call it “originalism” — said that continuing enforcement of the federal law at issue would amount to “perpetuation of a racial entitlement.”

    Now, few words evoke greater resentment in American experience than “entitlement.” When an issue is framed as a “racial entitlement” from which only the usual suspects stand to profit, the mooching, freeloading 47 percent, that cause is doomed. That is race baiting at its most unsubtle. But then, Antonin Scalia is about as subtle as a kick to the groin.

    As is his habit, the only black associate justice in the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, sat impassively through the 79 minutes the oral arguments lasted, seeking no clarification and offering none. He has probably made up his mind to vote for striking out the law. He is as predictable as an automaton.

    Though a beneficiary of affirmative action, he automatically votes to void any measure aimed at redressing or on-going discrimination, claiming that such considerations have no place in the supposedly race-neutral society he claims to inhabit.

    He even voted to strike down the Affordable Health Care Act, the law designed to make health insurance available to more than 30 million Americans, the majority of them blacks, who had none previously. For good measure, his Caucasian wife had campaigned vigorously against the law, on the platform of the now exhausted Tea Party.

    Planting Clarence Thomas in the Court was a masterstroke by President George W. Bush and the Conservative Establishment to slow down, if not reverse, the march of civil rights and indeed the progressive agenda in America.

    If a case with the contours of Brown v. Board of Education were to come before the Court today, there is little doubt that Thomas would cast his lot with the proposition that having separate schools for whites and blacks is not inherently unequal.

    His appointment to the Court is an insult to the legacy and the memory of Thurgood Marshall, his black predecessor, whom The New York Times described as “a model and a monument.”

    The first President Bush probably spoke a greater truth than he realised or intended when he claimed that Thomas, who had no judicial experience whatsoever, was the best man for the job, their job.

    In the African American community, there were dozens far more qualified than Thomas on every score. But none could be counted upon, like Thomas, to be a scourge to his own people.

    The Supreme Court will hand down its opinion in Shelby County, Alabama v Eric Holder in the summer. It would be irony most profound if, during Black History Month and under the shadow of Rosa Parks, it laid the ground for overturning a crucial element in the most important civil rights law even as the substantive evils it was designed to prevent are still so brazenly practised.

    Whatever the outcome, one impression will stay with me: the consummate skill, the erudition, and the calm self-assurance, with which our distinguished compatriot Debo Adegbile, attorney for one of the respondents in the case, marshaled facts and figures to score telling forensic points, as splendidly reflected in the Court’s transcript.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The visit

    The visit

    So far, it is the photo of the year. Even if you give allowance for partisan posturing, you cannot miss out on the significance of its poetry. The headlines could come in many incarnations. Eleven governors visit Borno State. Scratch that. Eleven Governors walk the streets of Maiduguri. Scratch that. Eleven Governors beat Jonathan to visit Maiduguri. Scratch that again. Eleven Governors defy…

    They did not dab across a street in the hurried frenzy of a rabbit. They did not don shorts and tee shirts. No bullet-proof clothing as far as the eye could see. They filled the street, apparently wide enough to take a football team and then some.

    They waved their hands at the inhabitants, most of them, even if you were as tall as the Governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, (SAN) in his cap and buba and sokoto, which was the most anti-athletic attire to don if you wanted to dodge a bomb. Or a small man like Adams Oshiomhole, or a smallish man like the grassroots governor, Rauf Aregbesola, whose bouncy physique undermines his fiftyish years. Or the cerebral Kayode Fayemi who knows a thing or two about military strategy and the vulnerabilities of the powerful.

    It was billed as the meeting of the governors of the All Progressives Congress, but it was easy to play the coward. They could have burdened the streets with the braggadocio of power: armoured vehicles rumbling, sirens fluting arrogantly, military men in heady and defiant gear, guns threatening, the governors themselves nestled in a bubble and invisible from outside.

    That was exactly the picture of the last visit from the number two citizen, Namadi Sambo. All markets were shut down, schools ironically fulfilled the Boko Haram agenda by shutting down, an unofficial curfew and restriction of movement darkened the city of Maiduguri. It was shut down not by the terror of the Islamic group but by the presence of the purveyor of peace and conciliation, the government from Abuja.

    But unlike that dreary scene, these governors walked the streets, and they also visited a girls’ school and sat with the pupils. Is that not what the people had wanted from their president since he ascended the throne?

    Yet the reports had it that the Presidency and the SSS did not want the governors to go. The reason: a report that the new terror group known as ANSARU was going to attack them. The directors of SSS in the states visited the governors and asked them to refrain from the visit. But the governors understood that leadership is not about fear, but about action.

    They acted like Charles de Gaulle who would not shrink from a public ceremony because security reports hinted that his assassination was afoot. As Frederick Forsythe recorded it, the French leader defied and triumphed over the day of the jackal.

    So, they flew their planes and left their homes to what many now see as a war zone. Their host, the debonair Kashim Shettima, the governor of Borno State, had thrived like Daniel Webster’s black birds through the cumulus clouds of Boko Haram.

    The Jonathan SSS did not want the governors to go. They wanted to unitarise fear. If they had disdain for true federalism, they had to impose fear on the governors too. The governors federalised courage and good sense by defying a self-serving report.

    A President who cannot hold ceremonies of state outside the Presidential Villa wants to corrode the states with the spirit of cowardice. But it was after the governors’ visit that the Presidency has now let it out that the President will visit Maiduguri. So what is the purpose of the President’s visit? Is it to show that he loves them? If it is love, after how many markets razed and reborn, churches blown apart and restored, lives lost without hope of resurrection at least in this life? After how many mosques and police stations atrophied and schools out of joint? Did he not flee to Brazil once when one of the northern cities burned?

    Who does not think that Jonathan’s visit is about politics and not empathy? He wants to win enough northern states to cancel out his expected losses in the Southwest. He wants, as it is speculated, to endear himself to enough northern votes so he can defuse the new switch of politics: APC.

    When he does visit, will it be a visit, or an occupation? Will it be like Napoleon’s army in Moscow? The French general expected a royal entry like Jesus but found a deserted wilderness. Will he follow the magnificence of the governors and wave his presidential hands, not to an arranged crowd, but to a street of habitués and to a market? Will he pay visits that will show that he came out of love and not out of cynicism?

    Even when he visits places like Lagos, the city capsizes with traffic bedlam and schedules fall into anarchy. The day belongs only to the President and the city dwellers sacrifice the day like a lamb.

    Governor Shettima does not have the power that President Jonathan possesses over Maiduguri. As the commander in chief, he deployed the soldiers and the police that have kept charge. Governor Shettima is the chief security officer of the state, but neither the head of the army nor the commissioner of police reports to him. Yet, he has the courage to work the schools, do the roads, preserve the hospitals where the slain go to like a ritual.

    Yet, the President who controls all of the armed forces has not even sniffed the region to buoy the spirits of the men in uniform. The Borno and Yobe examples are a grand mockery of our federal system. President Jonathan has made this mockery even more emphatic. Was President Bush not flayed for not visiting Katrina when the flood ravaged Louisiana? Did Obama’s fortune not change because of prompt responses to Hurricane Sandy? Did both men not endear their hearts to their countrymen and women by their visits to Iraq and Afghanistan?

    Yet he preens when it is to corral PDP governors to Aso Rock and bully them with video clips and hectoring menaces about how to oust Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi as chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum.

    Why is it taking the President now to visit, or could it be that he has been planning this for a long time? Maybe the schedulers are to blame. You laugh. How far is Yobe from Abuja when Governor Ibikunle Amosun could fly a world away from Abeokuta?

    When prose stylist Joseph Conrad writes about a long journey, he chooses a long short story titled Youth, and it is about a 20-year-old who steers a ship from England to Bangkok. The journey takes long, but it is not for lack of trying. T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi valorises an epic walk over a long distance by those who know where they are going and won’t yield.

    The people who live in Maiduguri, according to the testimony of one of the governors, have too much love of life to allow the rite of violence to refrain them from the routine glories of their days. They eat, love, play and work daily. That was what the eleven governors affirmed from the picture.

    But if the president is visiting now, when politics has suffused the polity, his move has lost all innocence. Where were you, Mister President, when they wanted your love?

    Like the play by Friedrich Durrenmatt called The Visit, the President’s sojourn to Maiduguri will come away as a move to extract a debt rather than exude a love. If the President wants to exalt his coming, he must play a high act that even his foes will call gracious. It must match, if not exceed, the act of the eleven governors.

    If not, he would be fulfilling the words of the inimitable Oscar Wilde, who wrote that “when one visits, it is for the purpose of wasting other people’s time.” Let his visit be a photo and not a photo op.

  • Jonathan going Obasanjo’s way

    Jonathan going Obasanjo’s way

    When recently former president Olusegun Obasanjo unleashed a tirade against President Goodluck Jonathan, I had observed in this column that Obasanjo has embarked on a journey which nobody dared when he held sway without severe repercussions. This conclusion was largely informed by his strong aversion to and intolerance of criticisms especially from public functionaries.

    Then, you dare criticize or challenge his influence at the risk of having all manner of subterfuge pulled against you including but not limited to unleashing the all powerful EFCC just to settle scores. And those who had the effrontery to nurse presidential ambition without his consent saw the rough side of him. Ask former Rivers state Governor Peter Odili how he had to chicken out of his presidential ambition at the last minute. And what happened to Audu Ogbeh the then national chairman of the PDP for attempting to assert his independence?

    Such was the high level of intolerance of that era that many had likened him to a dictator masquerading as a democrat. Then, the fear of Obasanjo was the beginning of wisdom.

    It was therefore curious reading Obasanjo’s criticisms of Jonathan on sundry issues and even leading a coalition of the PDP governors and the party’s National Working Committee against him. We saw how the party’s decision in the Adamawa crisis was upturned to spite the president and the party’s national chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur. We saw how the election of the chairman, Board of Trustees of the party was severally stalled until just last week when Jonathan woke up from the slumber and tried to rescue himself from an apparent loss of control of the party. Obasanjo was said to be the unseen hand in all those events to whittle down the powers of Jonathan.

    All these tended to portray the picture of a weak president or one who was bereft of the right ideas on how to confront the mounting challenges increasingly eroding the credibility of his regime. Questions were raised as to why in and out of government, Obasanjo still remained the dominant character shaping the course of events. This became more puzzling given that even when he is known to have fallen out of favour with the government, Jonathan did not seem to have a handle on him.

    Not unexpectedly, the scenario began to raise some possibilities in the minds of discerning members of the public. Some of these were that perhaps, Jonathan was afraid of Obasanjo, his towering stature and background as an army general. The fact that he literally picked and installed him both as a vice president and in his present capacity, further created doubts as to whether Jonathan could possibly turn against his mentor. But all these doubts began to fizzle out last week with some actions initiated by the president to regain firm control of his party and the government and unambiguously reassert his capacity to bite. So it was when in a pre-determined meeting at the seat of government, a new body known as the PDP Governors Forum emerged with Akwa Ibom state Governor, Godswill Akpabio as chairman.

    Apparently buoyed by the success of that election, Akpabio was to announce soon after that the new outfit became imperative to enable them do away with the Judases in their midst. This was a veiled reference to some PDP governors known to be anti-Jonathan. Among them is Chibuike Amaechi of Rivers state who is also the chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum NGF. Not only has he been very critical of the Jonathan administration, the move is part of the strategy to weaken the growing influence of the NGF which he leads and his loyalty to Obasanjo. It was for the same reason that election into that body was stalled with the government making frantic efforts to see to it that he does not return.

    Since then, Tukur has been telling whoever cared to hear that the PDP will field a consensus candidate for that post come May. That candidate can be any person but definitely not Amaechi. It is also very instructive that Akpabio emerged from the South-south as the new leader of the PDP governors. That choice definitely forecloses the chances of Amaechi irrespective of the support he enjoys from some of his colleagues and governors of the opposition parties.

    With that, Jonathan has put at bay the overbearing influence Obasanjo on the NGF and PDP governors which in the last couple of months had generated tension and paralyzed activities in that party. We also saw how key personages loyal to Obasanjo have been edged out of their posts in the party including that of the national secretary.

    So who says Jonathan cannot bite? Even Jonathan with his seemingly gentle mien and non controversial disposition could also succumb to the prism that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Jonathan, like Obasanjo his mentor has definitely succumbed to the corrupting influences of power and logic of self preservation. And in the matter of the election of the chairman of the Board of Trustees BOT of the party, he has also demonstrated very strikingly that he is no alien of the game of self survival.

    Loquacious Jerry Gana did the magic. His committee did the ‘wonderful’ job that enabled Jonathan to install Chief Tony Anenih as his choice BOT chairman without Obasanjo and haven did not fall. Obasanjo is no longer talking. He may have recoiled to his shells. Who says Jonathan has not succeeded in silencing him at least for now? The scenario playing out is akin to what Obasanjo did to Ibrahim Babangida and Atiku Abubakar when he was in power. Obasanjo may have after all, fallen victim of the monsters he created during his autocratic regime. It is nemesis. That is the danger in playing god with temporary power. That is the folly of those who see power as an end unto itself rather than a means to approximate public good. That is the inherent dysfunction of creating personality cult around leaders instead of building self-sustaining institutions and structures. It is largely on account of these institutional weaknesses that very ambitious and self-serving leaders manipulate the rules to satisfy their selfish predilections. Africa is replete with such characters and Jonathan is not immune to the dire repercussions of such monsters.

    At the centre of the current manipulations by Jonathan is his desire to run for another term. Though he is constitutionally entitled to another term, the circumstance of his ascension to power and the realities of the power equation in the country are such that some shoulders would be ruffled if he runs. That was the purport of the reminder by the Niger state Governor Babangida Aliyu that he signed a single term pact with the governors before the 2011 elections.

    Events of the primaries of the PDP for that election, account for the escalation of insecurity in the country. The situation is bound to polarize with the current bickering in that party over the presidential ticket in 2015. Yet, Jonathan’s posters have once again appeared on the streets of Abuja. Tukur has said that he has a right to run. Other key officials like Kema Chikwe have equally been drumming up support for Jonathan’s 2015 ambition. Jonathan silence or ambivalence in the face of these weighty campaigns for him can be taken as acquiescence. And like his estranged godfather Obasanjo, he is set to uproot all obstacles to that ambition. How this will eventually work out and its larger repercussion for the polity is only a matter of time. But the future is loaded, very loaded indeed!

  • Turmoil in Governors’ Forum

    Turmoil in Governors’ Forum

    After the vicious cut and thrust of the past 10 days in the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), few within and without the association now expect it to remain the same, either as influential as it was before, or as cohesive as it had hoped when it was founded. It may be premature to write it off, considering that the convulsion tearing it apart is essentially trivial and limited to disagreements within the ruling party, but in the long run it is really hard to see it retaining the kind of relevance that thrust it to the forefront of national politics. Indeed, with the creation of the Peoples Democratic Party Governors’ Forum (PDP-GF), after the Governor Amaechi-led NGF refused to yield to the entreaties of the President Goodluck Jonathan government, it will take some doing to bring the governors back to the sort of unity they were accustomed to. For in fracturing, the governors did not just go their separate ways, they went about it acrimoniously using words that neither dignified their offices nor showed the kind of character many naively thought inhered in state executive mansions.

    For NGF, fame has become a double-edged sword. Founded in 1999, the Forum only became notable when it played prominent role in abating the constitutional crisis triggered by the illness of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua. Since then, the body has flexed its muscles on a number of exigent national or party issues including the election of party chairmen, excess crude account, constitutional reform, and electoral reform, among other things. Until now, it had also been fairly stable, with no overt leadership squabbles. So far, too, it has been chaired by five governors, including the long-serving former Governors Abdullahi Adamu and Bukola Saraki of Nasarawa and Kwara States respectively. Before the presidency took the Forum apart using the willing hands of a few governors, in particular, Governors Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom and Ibrahim Shema of Katsina, the public thought governors reasoned more expansively and with admirable depth. Their supposedly copious rationality was thought to be a bulwark against the meddlesomeness of higher powers, including the presidency.

    The reason given by the presidency for undermining the unity of NGF is that the association had become a trade union. According to the Special Adviser to the President on Political Matters, Ahmed Gulak, “The leadership of Amaechi in that forum has completely gone contrary to what PDP expects a PDP governor to do. The Nigeria Governors’ Forum has really become a trade union. Some elder statesmen have really come out to explain things in that perspective. For instance, about three weeks ago, Prof. Jubril Aminu came out publicly to say the NGF was not supposed to be a trade union. It is supposed to be an association of governors coming together to discuss common challenges in the country, not to hold the country to ransom.”

    While it is true the NGF has been forceful in championing certain causes, even appearing to act as an opposition party to the ruling party, dismissing the Forum as a trade union masks the imperceptible undercurrents in the PDP and in the polity. First, there is a general feeling of dismay that the Jonathan presidency, with its sometimes baffling pronouncements, its mystifyingly uninformed policies, its general lethargy and incompetence, its wastefulness, and its gross inability to inspire the country into innovation and greatness, is unable to rise to the occasion the times demand. The NGF is not inoculated against these frustrations, nor, even if it sympathised with the ruling party, could it pretend to be indifferent to the country’s massive drift towards aimlessness. There is also a limit to how the NGF could promote the interest of the PDP or pull its punches when the ruling party is overreaching itself. After all, the NGF is an umbrella body of 36 governors, not a PDP creation for PDP governors.

    Second, much more than merely reacting to what the presidency described as Amaechi’s boisterousness and opposition politics, one of the chief reasons for the president’s hostility is Poll 2015, an ambition that would be endangered if the NGF consistently wrong-foots the presidency. In addition, presidency officials rightly or wrongly believed Amaechi himself nursed presidential ambition, and was probably using the NGF platform to boost both his leadership credentials and countrywide appeal. Amaechi in fact did not help matters by playing the revolutionary. He had a highly publicised disagreement with the president’s wife in Rivers State in 2010, and openly disagreed with the president on a number of issues including disputed oil wells situated between the borders of Rivers, his state, and Bayelsa, the president’s home state. The Rivers governor in fact began to come across as Amaechi the Just, or even Amaechi the Revolutionary. And if left alone, perhaps, he could, in the secret opinion of the Jonathan presidency, start to come across as Amaechi the Great.

    But having created those heresies and infused them into Amaechi, the PDP leadership and the presidency committed themselves to burning the new wizard at the stakes. It is no small matter that the Rivers governor himself provided the fuel for the lynch mob. He often spoke candidly when circumspection would have been sufficient. He thought aloud instead of silently, though his thoughts were nothing but alarming revolutionary heresies. And he seemed incapable of stopping at simply playing David to the presidency’s Goliath; but must paint by his words, connotatively or denotatively, a Goliath that is clumsy, vacuous and intemperate. Worse, he seemed to enjoy the new role circumstances thrust upon his shoulders, for he was trusted by his colleagues in the Forum, and they knew he was earnest and honest in his utterances and predilections. Everything about Amaechi, however, drove Jonathan and his aides up the wall.

    At any time, there will always be many governors in Nigeria and in the NGF (if it survives) who think rationally and patriotically. They will resist the coercive and corrosive influences of the presidency, and their pride, as well as their natural inclinations, will make them abjure the tendency by the presidency to corral the entire country into one lobotomized whole. Unfortunately, however, there will also be a few governors who think rather obtusely, whose convoluted patriotism is interpreted in terms of the private yearnings of the president, and whose definition of unity and example of duty are rooted in monarchism and focus primarily on a servile relationship between the president and his subjects.

    Last week, in the final hours of the collapse of NGF resolve, it was thought only six or seven governors believed Amaechi led the association improperly or imperially. Suddenly after a meeting with the president on Tuesday, and for reasons reporters only speculated, about 16 governors had been persuaded to vote for partisanship over common sense. Thereafter, Akwa Ibom’s Akpabio exuberantly rationalised the creation of PDP-GF and talked of kicking out the Judases within the PDP governors’ ranks. The PDP national chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, also exulted about a new spirit sweeping through the party, which spirit he believed would engender greater things and open a limitless vista of achievements for the party. It wasn’t apparent to both gentlemen that their newfound enthusiasm could in fact be a reflection of puerile politicking or of betrayal of general and party principles, values and virtues.

    It was expected of Tukur, as party chairman, to grandstand unscrupulously before the country in favour of the president, for the president had provoked an earthquake in order to crown and canonise him. On the other hand, the same ingratiation was not expected of Akpabio, for he is legally recognised as chief executive of a state, with rights and immunity vouchsafed to him by the constitution almost as powerfully as the same constitution has done for the president. That he chose to forswear those powers and instead read the politicking in the NGF through the president’s prism was a matter of choice to him. More, however, they were also an indication of a major flaw in his character. By speaking gutsily and with striking imperturbability against Amaechi, Akpabio gave notice of his capacity to listen to his heart rather than his head. That single embrace of the presidency, and the risible justification he lent his action, has probably defined and tarred his politics for all time. It is an action he may not be able to live down.

    The turbulence in the NGF was inevitable. The association was indeed becoming more powerful than even opposition parties, and its leadership, when it was personified by a Saraki or an Amaechi, had bigger halo than both party and national leadership. Its strength and ascendancy were underscored by the corresponding weakness and decline of a mediocre presidency. A clash was, therefore, unavoidable. And such a clash, thankfully, always helps to sharpen contradictions and expose leaders and politicians overrated by their accomplishments rather than rated by their lack of virtue and character. This is why I think that while NGF’s future is in doubt, the dismal future and political retrogression of both Akpabio and Shema are not. All it takes sometimes is just one wrong turn to consign a politician to the dustbin of history.

  • Did you or did you not?

    Did you or did you not?

    Did Jonathan sign any pact on one term? 

    No one needs to be told that the race for 2015 has begun. Sometime ago, some strange campaign posters appeared in Abuja, the federal capital territory, canvassing a second term for President Goodluck Jonathan. The Presidency disowned them. Of course that was the logical thing to do, especially for a government that has been in power for close to two years and has so little to show for it. But that is the way they have been running Nigeria. May be President Jonathan has been somewhat charitable not to have come out with his intention to contest for a second term earlier because of the too many troubles that his administration has had to contend with, chief of which is the security question. Most other elected officials – president, governors and all, used to begin campaign a little after their first year in office.

    But the allegation by Governor Babangida Aliyu of Niger State, to the effect that the President had an agreement with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governors not to stay beyond one term in office is like an objective question which requires a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. However, we have not heard a convincing answer. Rather, the otherwise innocuous statement by Governor Aliyu has led to unanticipated reactions within the ruling party.

    We, the people, may not know yet if there was such an agreement; but what we know is that someone is telling lies or is being economical with the truth. It is either such a pact exists or it does not. The implication now, lends credence to the fact that this country has been in the firm grips of Judases. If people cannot be truthful over little things, how then can we continue to trust such people with our future?

    I am not necessarily saying he did; but I remember that one of the very first things that President Jonathan did was to fly a kite on a seven-year single term mandate for the president and governors in 2011, two months after his swearing in. The President was said to be concerned about the acrimony generated by reelection after four years. Secondly, he had earlier told the Save Nigeria Group that he considered four years too short for any leader to make any meaningful impact. Jonathan had said then though, that he did not intend to benefit from the arrangement. But Nigerians who had travelled that road several times saw through the shenanigans and rejected it outright.

    What the Presidency needs as defence on this issue is brandish good governance instead of harassing people who brought the alleged pact into remembrance. Unfortunately, the PDP has failed to give good governance in about 14 years. That is why the party’s big wigs are jittery and that is why we are having all these scheming and rumblings in the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF). Even if President Jonathan signed a pact with the PDP governors not to serve beyond a term in office, that will become null and void if he is adjudged to have done well by the time the 2015 elections come. Again, even if the President admits to signing such an agreement and on his honour announces his intention to leave the stage in 2015, it is Nigerians who will insist that he stays on to ‘complete the good works that he has started. ‘ It is because the party knows that Nigerians are now more aware of its failure and the widespread corruption that the party has legitimised that it is now turning the whole thing into ‘rofo rofo’ fight. Again, unfortunately, this would lead the PDP nowhere. The party has fooled the people almost all of the time and it is not likely it would get away with that again.

    PDP itself seems to have realised this and that is why it has brought expiring people who should be tending to their grandchildren at home to come and ‘fix’ things for it come 2015. But the party would be hugely disappointed that Nigerians would resoundingly reject it in 2015 if it fails to improve on its record, in a way that the ‘Fixer’ himself would be too dazed to fix anything.

    But what is happening in the PDP should surprise no one. Many people had predicted that it was only a matter of time for the party to implode. I guess that prophecy is about coming to pass. The party itself has acknowledged that it harbours more Judases than genuine disciples. Even ‘baby’ Christians know that Judas Iscariot, the only Judas among Jesus’ 12 disciples, was one too many. Now that the ruling party has confirmed that it has more Judases in its fold than genuine disciples, we do not need to look too far for why this country has been like this, especially since 1999. The problem now is that we do not know which of the factions is the authentic Judas’ faction, because, for every original, there is always a fake. We saw that in Moses vs. the Egyptian magicians.

    Instead of telling Nigerians that ‘yes’, the President signed a pact, or ‘no’ the President did nothing of such; governors were summoned to watch the video recording of Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State who allegedly ‘disparaged’ the President. It’s like watching of video has become a pastime in our seat of power. We remember how a general was shown in one such video in the military era prostrating for another general when caught in the quagmire of a coup. The fretting general, a learned man for that matter, did not know when he mistook ‘masterminder’ for mastermind! A case of when a hunter of humans sneezes, that of elephants catches cold?

    All said, we all know that for Nigeria to make progress, PDP must speak in incoherent tunes. Unless the party breaks, we cannot move forward. If it could happen in Ogun State in 2011, it can happen again and again. We should pray ceaselessly for a repeat of the Tower of Babel crisis in the PDP. For those who are getting worried about a budding dictator, they are only worried over nothing. God has always fixed every such dictator in this country; they either retraced their step or they got consumed like the greedy fly that follows dead bodies to the grave. That is why I will never lose sleep over dictatorship, budding or full blown.

    Only last week, I said Mrs. Patience Jonathan must have wrestled seriously with death to be alive after nine operations within one month since no one in her shoes would succumb simply because Mr. Death sneezed. In the same vein, for ill, Nigeria’s presidency is just too powerful. That is why the President would summon governors and they would run to Abuja; their tails between their legs. That is why the President could threaten to castrate state governments financially and he would get away with it. Some have argued that many governors tremble at the President’s feet not because they do not know their rights but because their hands are soiled and the President has the dossier to do them in if they fail to fall in line. No one wields such enormous powers and capitulates on the basis of a pact condemning him (as it were) to one term. It takes more than honour to admit that such a pact exists, not after tasting the mudun mudun (sweet things) in government at that level. If ever such a pact existed, I guess it was done at a time of ignorance.