The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Boko Haram’s controversial ceasefire/peace offer

    Both the federal government and Borno State have reacted with tentative unease to the offer by Boko Haram to declare unilateral ceasefire and engage in dialogue for lasting peace. On the part of Borno State, they are desperate to have any kind of deal as long as it would lead to cessation of hostility, but are not sure whether the sect’s proposal will fly, especially in view of the federal government’s newfound bellicosity. Abuja on the other hand is exasperated by the sect’s obduracy and refusal in the past months to enter into dialogue without preconditions. And in the face of the Mali campaign, which the government says may have disrupted Boko Haram’s command structure and safe haven, Abuja appears to think the sect is cornered and desperate. There is, therefore, brinkmanship on both sides.

    There has never been a consensus on dialogue with the Islamist sect. There will never be. But it is also understandable why Borno State, which has borne the brunt of the sect’s activities, is desperate to secure peace in order for economic and social activities to be restored. For both federal and state governments, the issue of setting a sound and principled precedent for leaders to follow in the face of anarchical groups levying war against the state is not urgent at all. This was why they pussyfooted for a long time over whether to dialogue with the sect or not. But just when the vacillating Jonathan government had made up its mind to fight until victory was achieved, the sect threw a hard bone into the mix, which Borno State seems resolved to chew with its milk teeth.

    In making up their minds on the sect’s proposal, especially the demand for N26bn compensation, it is important for both Borno and Abuja to know that the innocent dead, especially those whose lives were shattered for no reason other than either their religion or refusal to cooperate with the sect, cannot be part of that negotiation. The federal and state governments must also struggle with the deeply troubling irony of making a deal with the sect to reward its living and dead members for having levied war against the state and destroyed other people’s lives while purportedly fighting either social or economic injustice.

    Boko Haram militants, some state governments in the Northeast, and many of the sect’s sympathisers argue that since the federal government could spend hundreds of billions of naira to end Niger Delta militancy, it should be prepared to spend a decent fraction of that to end militancy in the North. Such arguments deliberately fail to take cognisance of the striking dissimilarities between the two types of militancy. While the Niger Delta campaigns were first and foremost directed at economic sabotage for years of indefensible neglect of the region, the Boko Haram campaigns were first and foremost an unconscionable human tragedy enacted wilfully by a misguided group that has now spawned more violently adventurous splinter groups. It is a disservice to intellectualism and to the country to excuse the destructions wreaked by the sect, or to monetise peace.

    Boko Haram sympathisers should be advised to limit their campaigns to pleading for amnesty for the sect’s foot soldiers. They should also limit themselves to suing the government for all the documented cases of extra-judicial killings carried out by security agents. Perhaps the courts may even compel the government to pay substantially more than the arbitrary N26bn the sect is asking for. But for the Republic to be saved and the law and constitution preserved, the sect’s leaders must be apprehended, tried and punished according to the laws of the land. In addition, security agents who engaged in extrajudicial killings should be brought to book, and the point made that Nigeria is not a lawless jungle filled with maniacal and uncontrollable killers in uniform. And then finally, the innocent dead and wounded must receive adequate compensation for peace to reign.

  • A judgment so bizarre, a Daniel could not have done it

    A judgment so bizarre, a Daniel could not have done it

    Some court adjudications, the last bastion of social hope for the average citizen, are so right on the mark that one can shriek with delight and exclaim like Shakespeare’s Shylock that indeed, a Daniel has come to judgment! On another hand, some are so incredible they can make one hiss and spit in disgust and exclaim that indeed, the law is such an ass! On a third hand, there are some judgements that are so bizarre they leave everyone’s mouth agape for the first five minutes. Then, the words start rolling out in gabbles as people go ‘gabble, gabble, judgement, gabble, bizarre gabble, gabble …’ The whole world, err, country is gabbling right now about the judgement of some seven hundred thousand Naira handed down against someone alleged to have pilfered over twenty billion Naira. It has me fair whistling now, and I tell you, I don’t whistle easily; I do it through the nose. That is also how I speak English.

    Now, if we remember anything about Shylock, it is the fact that the man was difficult to please. First, he drew a contract so tight that literally required that his debtor would not be able to wriggle out of it without shedding some of his precious blood. Next, he wound his daughter up in a domestic wreath so carefully woven with starvation that the poor girl could not legally get out of it without resorting to elopement. And that was what she did, with his lucre and diamonds. And that had him crying for his daughter and, yes, his lucre too. In the midst of his woes, he remembered a very comforting thought: the contract he had drawn up would at least give him the much needed respite of being able to obtain a pint of blood or two, just for the satisfaction of seeing someone shed some blood. The judge said yes, he was entitled, and so he enthused ‘… A Daniel come to judgement!’ Why am I giving you this long story in its entire height and breadth? I honestly don’t know except perhaps to give you the background of how Daniel, the biblical prophet, came to be associated with Judge Advocacy Duties (JAD).

    Good judgements are getting increasingly rare in Nigeria, perhaps because good judges are getting increasingly rare. Good judges are getting increasingly rare because, let’s face it, there aren’t many Daniels around anymore. (Don’t get me wrong; there are many people called Daniel but obviously, they are not necessarily judges.) So, good people are getting increasingly rare in Nigeria. Just to buttress that last point, I heard the other day that a couple in this country employed a supposed house girl; only to find the next day that their house had been swept clean of both goods and girl while they were at work. In English, this means that the girl disappeared with all their worldly goods before the good people came back from work the next day. What dangerous times we live in.

    And how’s this for a horror story? Someone recounted how the commercial vehicle he travelled in was waylaid on a Nigerian highway by the Nigerian highwaymen who demanded everything everyone had. After the robbers left, everyone was relieved to find that the only things they lost were material things, all that is, except one person who had cleverly quipped to the highway men that all fingers were not equal, that was why he could not give more than he did. They then made his fingers equal with their cutlass. I tell you, things are so bad in the country now you do not go around testing your wit against anybody’s anyhow. Now, where was I?

    Ok, like I said, everyone is gabbling about that judgement. People are wondering how on earth anyone can be said to embezzle something in the region of twenty billion Naira, and the court hands down a judgement that finds him guilty but awards only seven hundred and something thousand naira against him? That judgement stinks. It is laughable. It will encourage us all to steal and damn the consequences. That’s as good as throwing the judiciary into the dustbin of history like a discarded appendix.

    To start with, it has us all wondering what the role of the judiciary is in this world. I had always thought the judiciary was supposed to serve the purpose of arbitrating between two contending sides such as my dog and I. If I fulfil my contract of feeding, sheltering and clothing it (I brush his coat, don’t I?), then he should please bark to assure me he can guard the house. Now, when, rather than bark, he prefers to lick visitors’ feet, I have the right to call in the courts, don’t I?

    The judiciary should mediate between ‘We the People’ and anyone who decides he/she wants to go buy Italian villas adorned with swimming pools with the hard earned money of pensioners. We should expect the judiciary to hang such people for us by going after him/her, guns blazing and daggers drawn, on the side of The People against the corroding insect.

    But that’s just silly us talking. We must have thought we were in this normal country where everything runs as it should. Instead, we find ourselves in another country where the abnormal is not only common place but quite the norm because ‘friend, this is Nigeria’. Come, it is only in Nigeria that one can loot any number of billions and all you get is a tweak of your nose and a playful twist of your earlobe by the equally playful court. It is only in Nigeria that a major airport can be put in total darkness on the orders of a minion while his superiors are literally in the dark about it all. And all we do about these things is grumble silently.

    Really, I don’t begin to know the role of the judiciary any more, given their antecedents. Together with the police and the press, the judiciary is supposed to work for the progress and good of the society by punishing the bad and rewarding the good. Now, all that the judgement has done is show that the judiciary is crumbling. So, should these courts continue to adjudicate for us or should we look for another?

    Perhaps, we should look out for some wise men in our midst and set them up with all the paraphernalia of office without the wig, for I am beginning to suspect that wig. Just look at the colour. Ugh! That’s right, let us look for some hard-nosed, white-haired wise men who would come to judgements with only one thing on their mind: the good of the society. Forget your school-trained judges: they seem to be more preoccupied with wanting to be like the politicians – interested only in filling their offshore accounts that cannot be traced and which they will never spend. Believe me, I know; there are too many examples of Nigerians who did not spend theirs. Forget the law also: it is an ass anyway.

    Look, I believe that people are really not interested in the law being an ass any longer in Nigeria. The sanctity of the law is the progress and sanity of the society. I therefore recommend that the country should reject that judgement and ask that it be reviewed. It is too bizarre to believe. Indeed, one should not even let it stay in the records because someday, if the Martians succeed in colonising the earth and they come across that judgement, it will give a very bad image of the country and leave a sour taste in their mouths, if they have any.

  • Maina, Elumelu, Lawan: The haunted hunters

    Maina, Elumelu, Lawan: The haunted hunters

    Panels in Nigeria do not just help the government to distract, entomb or procrastinate; they also consume virtually everyone who has had the misfortune of heading them. The examples of Abdulrasheed Maina (Presidential Task Team on Pension Reform (PTTPR), Ndudi Elumelu (House of Representatives Committee on Power Sector Reforms), and Farouk Lawan (House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on Monitoring of Fuel Subsidy Regime) are pointers to the contradictions that afflict the body politic. There are a few less significant cases, and many more near misses. The recent Mallam Nuhu Ribadu panel (Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force), a red herring, escaped the fate of the first three panels by the skin of its teeth and probably by the combustible nature of the panel chairman’s personality.

    After many months of controversial manoeuvrings, Maina was last week declared wanted by the police on the instigation of the Senate which had summoned him to shed light on missing pension funds totalling some N195bn. The Maina Presidential Task Team was constituted about two years ago to investigate pension funds mismanagement and to sanitise and modernise the procedure for pension administration in the military, police, Department of State Security (DSS), customs, immigration, prison and pension office (CIPPO) and the Head of Service Pension Offices. However, presenting the Senate’s case against Maina, Senator Kabiru Gaya said: “…N195 billion pension fund is unaccounted for. In the head of service alone, N139 billion was released but N100 billion was paid out to pensioners. In the police service, N131 billion was paid in five years but only N88 billion was paid out, N44 billion is yet to be accounted for. This money belongs to the masses and it is expected that it should be accounted for.”

    Why Maina avoided the summons has not been fully explained by any official in the Task Team. But he was quite enthusiastic in declaiming late last year that the team had discovered earth-shaking facts on pension maladministration. As he put it exuberantly and perhaps exaggeratedly: “I want to tell you that what we have uncovered will surprise Nigerians. We have found that pension fund up to N3.3 trillion was stolen by the cabal and we are going to recover all the money…we have recovered about N221 billion and deleted 71,135 ghost pensioners from the civil service list…In addition N74 billion of the N181 billion discovered has been mopped up for utilization in the 2012 budget…We have conducted biometrics for 170,000 pensioners, established e-pension management system, pioneered the payment of pensioners in the Diaspora and introduced smart cards to eliminate physical verification of pensioners.” By the time he began to lyricise his team’s achievements, he had become a hunted and haunted man.

    But a national reputation is not secured upon the basis of one aberration. While the Senate was engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Maina, with the latter still avoiding either arrest or imprisonment, Mr Ndudi Elumelu, a member of the House of Representatives, was left bewildered by how rapidly he transformed from hunter to hunted. It began with the late President Umaru Yar’Adua suggesting that his predecessor, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, had spent some $10bn dollars on power projects without result. Soon, the House of Representatives also declared alarmingly that the Obasanjo government actually spent $16bn on power projects with little to show for it. No one knew nor bothered to verify how the legislators did their calculations. But the sound of $16bn was enough to send the country, which was asphyxiating under a minuscule 3000MW generation of electricity, into a deafening uproar.

    In 2008, Elumelu was put at the head of the national consensus to get its pound of flesh from the enraged power sector (not fuel subsidy) cabal, not minding the collateral damage. But before the panel was through with its assignment, an assignment that saw it stepping on giant toes and engaging in acerbic exchange with Obasanjo, stories alleging bribery and corruption against the panel and its chairman became rife. Words of encouragement from governors and sympathisers were sadly insufficient to exculpate Elumelu. He was not even allowed to present his report, having barely managed to complete the assignment without being hounded into jail. He eventually went to jail for about a month, and was tried for allegedly misappropriating some N5.2bn Rural Electrification Agency (REA) contracts. It was only last year that he was discharged and acquitted. As for the panel’s recommendations, a total of some 88, most were thrown out, and the surviving few inoculated against causing damage to anyone’s reputation. The shell-shocked Elumelu is today quietly chewing the cud in the legislature.

    If Maina is scurrying animatedly from one rathole to another to evade what his pursuers call capture, and Elumelu has become almost phlegmatic, swearing never again to be lured into any national assignment where he would step on toes, Farouk Lawan, another House of Representatives member, is dismayed by how quickly he has fallen and how numbed he has become. If Maina is as clever as his words and visage indicate, he will humour the furious legislators probing the pension scam and get away with nothing but fierce censure. Elumelu has become a safe ruminant and legislative wonk. He was badly beaten and bruised, but he is still perching on what looks like the moral high ground. This is not the case with Lawan. The petit legislator has been beaten insensate by sickening, short-range blows from the executive branch and one of its men Friday, the illustrious and undiscriminating Mr Femi Otedola.

    Lawan’s story is probably the most dramatic and pathetic since Nigeria began its troubling experimentation with parliamentary practices. Member of the House of Representatives since 1999, his star rising with each passing year, and his elocution, like his rich voice, deliberate, endearing and near as oratorical as anyone who is not an orator can get, Lawan seemed made for parliamentary jousting and destined for parliamentary glory. Not only was he leader of the so-called Integrity Group in the Reps, a label he and others in his group acquired when they battled former Speaker Patricia Etteh over corruption allegations, he inspired confidence in many Nigerians about his bona fides, and evoked an unquenchable ability to strive for his country’s glory. In April 2012, according to the prosecutor, he solicited for a $3m bribe from businessman Femi Otedola, and only managed to collect $620,000 of the sum before his luck ran out. The state will try to make the accusation stick; but Lawan will try his best to wriggle out of the net. There is little hope, however, that he will succeed.

    But Lawan’s troubles began when he was named chairman of the panel on fuel subsidy payments. The panel did the job with such public daring and flourish that Nigerians were glued to what they dubbed the subsidy opera. In the din, Lawan’s mellifluous voice and characteristic surefootedness, both of which belied his size, could be heard and seen distinctly, soothing wounded hearts and lifting broken spirits. But with the Otedola accusation, the once confident Lawan voice has given way to a hoary, feeble baritone, slower than usual, and many of his statements contradictory and clearly illogical. A court has remanded him in prison until his bail application can be heard later this week. After stalling for many months Lawan now probably feels subdued, disconsolate and haunted, broken in spirit as he is in body, and perhaps with not the faintest idea of a way out.

    Of the three gentlemen, Lawan is probably the worst hit. While the courts will be procedurally restrained by legal exigencies to assume his guilt, the public is less troubled by any consideration of conscience. Once Otedola went public, they had concluded there was no conceivable way of escape for the petit PDP legislator from Kano. More, the public sighs in frustration at the paradoxical jinx afflicting panels in these parts, and the seeming impossibility of finding one good man in government by whom we could swear, or failing that, one good man anywhere to probe the failure of government.

  • The return of Mlungu

    The return of Mlungu

    (Towards the recolonisation of sub-Saharan Africa)

    As he lay mortally wounded in the open field, with vultures circling overhead and hyenas braying in the distance, Chaka made one final superhuman effort to raise himself from the valley of the dying. The great Zulu emperor was no stranger to near death experiences. He had survived horrific wounds before and outlived savage mutilations unleashed by enemy spears. But the gaping eyesores inflicted by his own envious siblings proved too close to call.

    His eyes glazed over with imminent death. But before he gave up the ghost, the great African warrior who was often referred to as a black Napoleon roused himself to give his historic verdict on those who had betrayed him. The great Zulu empire would not pass on to his resentful siblings. Mlungu is coming, Chaka noted as his great frame finally toppled over. Mlungu is the South African native epithet for a white person, particularly from overseas. As predicted, the empire promptly dissolved before the Boer invaders after some momentous bloodletting.

    As it is with everything African where legend is inseparable from reality and where fact meshes with fiction and fantasy, nobody is sure whether the prophecy is true, or whether Thomas Mofolo, Chaka’s fictional biographer, was indulging his splendid imagination. Some have even gone as far as accusing the great South African novelist of Sotho nationalism.

    It was alleged that a resentful Mofolo never forgave Chaka for smashing up his people’s pre-colonial fiefdom.. On the historic scale of a testament-like dismissal and denouncement of a whole race for perfidy, this one is at par with Alafin Aole’s celebrated denouncement of the Yoruba race. Ironically, they both happened around the same time. It was death and the king’s horsemen again as two different African communities in different parts of Africa experienced the same stress and strain brought about by historical pressures on old African feudal formations.

    Almost three centuries on, the successor nation-states to the old African empires are experiencing the stress and strains brought about by new historical realities. All over Africa, particularly in its sub-Saharan region, the nation-state paradigm is in dire straits. It appears as if the colonial falcon no longer hearkens to the post-colonial falconer. As anarchy is let loose in the region, the old imperialist cartography of the continent is under siege.

    If the pictures coming out of Mali this past fortnight are to be believed, Mlungu is clearly back in Africa, that is if he ever left. A recolonisation of failing and failed states in Africa is underway. If in the past, the recolonisation was often purely ideological or predatory, this time around it is for reasons of self-preservation. Let the African political dinosaurs who have failed their people and their nations continue to strut and preen about the imperial metropole without any sense of shame or sobriety. The judgement hour is at hand, and it is going to be a messy and savage denouement indeed.

    An engrossing historical paradox is unfolding before our very eyes. The crowds of native Malians lustily cheering and hailing French troops as they swept through the historic cities of Gao, Timbuktu and Kildai are welcoming their old colonial conquerors as new post-colonial liberators! It doesn’t get more paradoxical than that. This is not some desert mirage, or a sandstorm-induced optical illusion. It will be the same if the scene were to be repeated in many African countries.

    As we have noted repeatedly in this column, a dead man will have to be buried, if not because of his relations but because his corpse constitutes a health hazard to the rest of the community. As at this moment, many African countries, particularly in the sub-Saharan region, constitute a health hazard to the international community. As it has been brilliantly formulated, globalisation is both the universalisation of the particular and the particularisation of the universal. In other words, except where it meets successful local particulars, western modernity will try to extend its domain to every nook and corner of the world.

    With the globalisation of the social media network and the universalisation of satellite communication, the native Malians even in their desert encroaches know what good governance is all about. They reject the incompetent and bankrupt government in the South and the savage species of prehistoric Islamic fundamentalism that was foisted on them by the al-queda militants in the north.

    The Islamic fanatics did nothing to endear themselves to the local populace while they were in charge, and it was clear they had nothing to offer except the wild and merciless cruelty of their Stone Age inquisition. The testimony of the natives who had suffered under the harsh misrule of the frowning jihadists is apt and compelling. “Cest ne pas bon!,” they chorused in broken French with near universal revulsion.

    It was clear that to the average Malian there was nothing to choose between the buffoonish incompetence of the political elite left behind by colonisation and the Stone Age barbarity of the Islamic fundamentalists who are the sadistic relics of an older Islamic civilisation masquerading as a new variant of modernity. They chose their old colonial masters instead.

    In the continent of Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah, Herbert Macauley, Julius Nyerere, the former Benjamin Azikiwe and the former Jeremiah Awolowo and all the great titans of the decolonising project that seized the African imagination in the period leading to independence, this is like going back to one’s vomit. These great avatars of African consciousness must be turning in their grave at the plight of the continent.

    But let us be clear in our mind about one thing. The tragedy we are witnessing in Mali is not about a clash of two civilisations, that is western civilisation and its Islamic variant. Rather, it is the endgame of a dismal miscarriage of the two civilisations on the continent of Africa. This is about aborted western modernity and rationality as seen in the chaotic mess of sub-Saharan Africa and the debasement of the classical tenets of Islam as seen in the antics of the unenlightened jihadists that have seized the desert dunes of North Africa.

    With this in mind, the central question can now be posed and answered. Why is it that modern Mali, conceived as a true nation-state cannot solve the security challenges posed by corrupt and inefficient governance and the subsequent threat posed to its corporate existence by the Jihadists’ rebellion? And why is it that neighbouring countries in the West African community were so lax and laggard in coming to the aid of their sister-country until France seized the bull by the horns? The answer is that most of these colonial contraptions are not true nation-states in the classical sense of the paradigm. You cannot give what you don’t have..

    France is not in Mali on a naïve humanitarian mission. This is a security operation abroad for the purpose of maintaining internal security at home, such as happens with the periodic occupation of Haiti by the US in what is known as immigration control at source. With its large immigrant community of African extraction, a fundamentalist Islamic corridor straddling the desert fringes of northern Africa is a direct threat to metropolitan France.

    As the Islamic terrorists melt away into their desert redoubts wilting under the superior firepower of France, it is not yet Uhuru for Mali. They will be back as soon as French troops withdraw, to inflict momentous casualties on African peace keepers and the renegade Malian army. The jihadists already had a measure of Malian troops and they know they are not up to scratch. The Sahara Desert will be foaming with blood for a long time to come.

    After military expedition must come political expiation. It is not surprising that it is France that is showing utmost clarity in the confusion, calling on the Malian government to initiate negotiations with the more moderate elements in the north. This is the way forward not just for Mali but for other failed and failing states in sub-Saharan Africa. The political basis of these structural time-bombs will have to be re-negotiated clause by clause and phrase by phrase before their political elite bring the populace to further peril.

  • Justice, interventions and revolutions

    Justice, interventions and revolutions

    As the French Sahel Assault is on course in Mali, Nigeria, at a donors conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia told the audience it had spent $34m on deployment of Nigerian troops in Mali – while in the same newspaper that carried the report on the expenditure, there was another report that two weeks after the deployment of Nigerian troops to Mali , the troops are yet to leave Nigeria because of lack of funds. In the Middle East, Israeli planes were reported to have bombed a defence research facility in Syria, a fact that the Russians decried, while warning it could escalate the Syrian war. This is because Iran, an implacable enemy of Israel, had declared earlier that any attack on the Assad regime would be treated as an attack on Iran.

    In Egypt, youths and demonstrators waged violent demonstrations in Egyptian cities against an Islamist president they say had hijacked the revolution that overthrew the regime of Housni Mubarak two years ago – and the Egyptian army, standing on the sidelines ominously warned that the state of Egypt is under threat. Again in Nigeria the judgement in the case of a former pensions director who who stole 27 bn naira but was sentenced to just two years and fined 750,000 naira by a court caused such public outrage that the accused has been re arraigned while some groups have called for the probe of the judge that gave the initial verdict.

    In all these issues – which I admit albeit grudgingly, are enough for today- the common bonds are the quest for justice, order, security and stability. It is obvious that in some cases the socio political institutions and apparatus for achieving set goals and objectives of society have failed to live up to their billings and ad hoc or impromptu alternatives have had to come in, occasionally violently, to create some form of social, political or even regulatory equilibrium or balance.

    In some instances the law has been made an ass while in other cases or instances, regulatory or supervisory oversight has just turned a blind eye. Which really shows that interventions, if they are to be successful have to be decisive, fast and smooth like the French Intervention in Mali – he Sahel Assault – or as expected of regulators’ intervention in times of financial crisis in banks or financial institutions, to avoid panic or bank runs.

    Starting with the AU Donors Conference, President Goodluck Jonathan was reported to have told the audience at the 20th Ordinary Session of the African Union in Addis Ababa that ‘Nigeria has commenced the deployment of 900 combat soldiers and 300 Airforce personnel as part of AFISMA.

    Nigeria has so far provided about $32m for the immediate deployment and logistic support for the troops.’ Nigeria he also reportedly said would give additional $5m for helping the Malian defence forces as part of a Security Sector Reform Intervention Fund. Undoubtedly Nigeria’s intention on Mali is laudable and is good for regional stability. Nigeria is also living up to its billing as a force to be reckoned with in the West African sub region. But something seems to be wrong in the way and forum that the expenditure has been announced and the situation in Nigeria itself.

    In the report mentioned earlier which said Ni gerian soldiers are stranded at home it was also written that ‘the deployment was hurriedly done because of the deployment of French troops in Mali and the need to ensure that Nigeria does not lose face as the big brother in the sub region. Obviously the Nigerian authorities need to reconcile the Presidents lofty and ready statements of commitment in Addis Ababa with the disturbing news at home on the deployment of our troops in Mali.

    The report also went on to state that Nigeria would spend about 10bn naira on the Mali intervention noting that if half that had been spent at home Boko Haram would have been sent packing long ago. That really is making fun of Nigeria’s regional diplomacy. The consolation, if any, in that however may be found in the fact that Boko Haram was reported to have issued a statement that after a meeting with the Borno State government it has started a ceasefire. I expected the Nigerian authorities to cash in on that and say the thrust of its intervention in Mali has made Boko Haram to kow tow and see reason just as the Islamists in Mali melted into the Sahara or thin air at the approach of French troops.

    But a security spokesman in Lagos was reported again to have said that we will have to wait for a month at least to ascertain if Boko Haram would keep its ceasefire or not. That really creates a huge balancing problem for the Nigerian government not only in terms of expenditure announced in Abuja and its accounting in terms of Boko Haram and stranded troops in Nigeria, but more importantly on the international credibility of our regional diplomacy on the Mali Intervention.

    Many reasons have been proffered as the motive for Israel’s aerial intervention in Syria’s bloody civil war and the ever taciturn Israelis have not helped matters by keeping mum. But the more credible sources say the Israelis have acted to prevent arms and chemical wapons being made at the Syrian facility from getting into the wrong hands namely that of Hizbollah – the Party of God – based in Lebanon and a staunch supporter of the Assad regime just like the Russians. But the Russians and Israeli bring to these unfolding Middle East saga different types of reputation on the way and manner they have entered the fray. The Israelis are renowned for swift and efficient intervention while the Russians have a policy of docility towards their allies in the area. Two examples will suffice.

    During the Israeli premiership of Menachem Begin, the idol of the present PM of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israelis put out the nuclear facility of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein just like they did this week with the Syrian facility. The assignment was top secret in Israel such that Begin did not tell members of his cabinet he had summoned at midnight until the Israeli jets had hit their targets in Iraq and were on their way back to Israel. Such was the speed and efficiency of the assignment that even Saddam did not know what had happened till some days later.

    In the case of the Russians they promised support for Muammar Gaddafi during the presidency of Ronald Reagan when Gaddafi promised to stop US military exercise in the Mediterranean over a dispute on international waters. The Russians had their naval fleet in the Mediterranean promising support for Gaddafi like they are doing now for Assad. However on the night US fighter jets came calling and killed Gaddafi’s baby even in his underground bunker in Tripoli, the Russian navy had its full lights on in the Mediterranean so as to avoid any mistaken identity problems with the blazing US jets overhead. So much for Russian support for Gaddafi and even now for Assad – as the Russians are making plans to evacuate Russians from Syria in anticipation of retaliation for Russian prolongation of the war while blocking any outside military intervention in the Syrian crisis.

    Egypt’s situation is a sorry democratic dilemma in which there is a political situation begging for military intervention and yet the military must watch its steps in making such a move, if ever. The military boss recently appointed by President Mohammed Morsi has already issued a veiled threat but it remains to be seen how and when he will intervene . This is because the Egyptian street revolution of 2011 was supposed to have put paid to military rule or diarchy in Egypt. The army played its role in the revolution and bowed to public opinion. It supported and supervised the trial of its icon and leader -Housni Mubarak and his two sons all three of who are still in prison for corruption in Egypt while a popularly elected president was sworn in just last year.

    Now President Morsi, after demonstrators have been shot over his ploy to have even more powers than Mubarak, is as unpopular as the leader ousted by the popular uprising two years ago. Is Egypt in the throes of a second revolution so soon after the first, just two years ago? Is the Egyptian army bold or stupid enough to intervene and prevent a descent to chaos and instability inevitable if the army stands by and does nothing? Really there are no clear answers to the political situation or equations in the land of the Pharaohs as the inputs are changing so fast that it is even dangerous to hazard a guess on what defines stability or its antithesis and when or how military intervention can be the solution.

    Lastly, let us look at the case of pension theft of a huge sum of 27bn naira from a regulatory perspective that calls for the intervention of the Central Bank of Nigeria in the matter. Surely the culprit and his accomplices must have bank accounts and must have laundered the huge sums of money in various projects or shell companies. The CBN should intervene by sending its examiners to the banks in which these culprits are customers by using its Know Your Customer –KYC- policy and CBN limits on Money Laundering Declarations.

    Surely some bank managers operated these accounts which must have brought juicy bank earnings at the expense of Police Pensioners. It is the duty of the CBN to bring such banks and bankers to book. If they had followed the KYC rules from the CBN and made requisite money laundering returns these culprits would have been found out and arrested long before they could wreak such huge financial damage. The ball in terms of intervention rests with the CBN more than our courts which can only decide on evidence brought forward from the banks . We hope the CBN lives up to its responsibilities.

  • Humongous nonsense!

    Humongous nonsense!

    It would have been a breeze of pleasant surprise had Dr. Doyin Okupe, the President’s adviser on public affairs decided to keep quiet for once. Curiously, none of those in Nigeria’s perverted corridors of power has dared to take up the challenge of squaring up with Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili in a public debate over allegations of “brazen misappropriation of public resources” levelled against the Jonathan administration. Nonetheless, it would have been shocking if Okupe had not sought to bring down the full weight of his office (no pun intended) to bear on Ezekwesili for daring to finger President Goodluck Jonathan as one of the major players in the ‘misapplication’ of $67bn foreign reserve left by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration.

    The Okupe I know is not one that would allow a Labaran Maku to take the shine off his office through a hurriedly-arranged press conference. By the way, Ezekwesili used to be a highly visible member of the economic think-tank in the Obasanjo administration. Popularly called ‘Madam Due Process’, she was appointed a minister after injecting some measure of credibility into the due process unit. From Knucklehead’s point of view, unlike her traducers, Ezekwesili’s intellectualism, passion and love for this country has never been in doubt. For a woman that enjoyed the support of Obasanjo, I had labelled her ‘crazy’ when she walked out of the ministerial appointment and accepted to serve with World Bank as Vice President for Africa. Why abdicate such ‘juicy’ post as a cabinet member for a regulated pay which could end up being a toothbrush allowance for a Nigerian minister, any minister? Yet, Ezekwesili made her choice!

    Perhaps, if she had decided to play by the rules and keep a permanent smirk on her chubby face as the transformation train wobbles on a slippery rail, Ezekwesili would not be in the eye of the storm today. But, ever since our encounter in Aso Rock when she was a senior aide to Obasanjo, I knew Oby was not one to suffer fools, especially the parasitic elite, gladly. Her mission seems quite simple: stop the looting and fix the nation for good! In our countless interactions, I never fail to remind her that she was probably the lone dreamer on that train. To her, I was just being a cynic. Today, I doubt if she is still bustling with blind optimism about people in power and their intent to raise the nation a notch higher than the derelict structure they met. There were simply too many pretenders even in the Obasanjo cabinet and they wore split images. Most of them would sacrifice an arm and a leg to belong to that group of rapacious elite that Oby so much despises because of the callous way they continue to impoverish the poor. And I guess she knew any confrontation with this clique is bound to be met with something close to a deadly, custom-built earthquake.

    And so when the retired World Bank chief kicked the Jonathan government in the groin, accusing it of wasting a large chunk of an estimated $67bn (N10.8trn) left in the nation’s foreign accounts by Obasanjo as at May 2007, she must have anticipated some sort of angry rebuttal from the President’s men. For a woman who rarely cuddles controversy, I want to assume that she was sure of the authenticity of the figures before rolling them out in a lecture delivered as part of the convocation ceremonies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She must have been truly troubled to have coined the fiery words used in passing on that message. She must have been convinced that something needed to be done to reverse the gradual slide into economic stagnation. This is not just about what she said but the way she couched it.

    Listen to her: “They squandered the significant sum of $45billion in foreign reserve account and another $22billion in Excess Crude Account, being direct savings from increased earnings from oil that the Obasanjo administration handed over to the successor government in 2007. Six years after the administration I served handed over such humongous national wealth to another one, most Nigerians, but especially the poor, continue to suffer the effects of failing public health and education systems as well as decrepit infrastructure and battered institutions.

    “One cannot but ask what exactly does this level of brazen misappropriation of public resources symbolise? Where did all that money go? Where is the accountability for the use of these resources and the additional several hundred million dollars realised from oil sale by the two administrations that have governed our nation in the last five years? How were these resources applied or, more appropriately, misapplied? Tragic choices.”

    For an administration with a short fuse for absorbing criticism no matter how flexibly constructive, it was not long before the dogs were let loose on this wife of a pastor. For daring to raise questions on accountability in governance in addition to having the effrontery to table humongous charges bearing on sheer waste against Jonathan and his late predecessor, Umaru Yar’Adua, Ezekwesili has come under ferocious attacks. She has been called a liar; a rabble-rouser; an unqualified interrogator; shameless peddler of incorrect figures and a grand-stander that should not be dignified with a public debate to verify the true figures. Between Maku and Okupe, picking the winner in the craze to unleash verbal expletives remains too close to call. They are sure earning their pay!

    To be candid, no one had expected them to stay on the topic without hitting Oby below the waist band. As far as they are concerned, all is fair in this verbal war. Still, it was uncharitable for Maku to insinuate that Oby mis-managed the ‘humongous’ funds released to the Ministry of Education whilst she in charge of that sector. Unless he wants to confirm our fears that files bothering on corrupt practices by people in government are kept in a special cabinet in the President’s office to be employed just they can be employed as tools for blackmail should the need arise, I really cannot figure out what Maku wants us to make of his allegation that Oby squandered over N430bn without any remarkable shift or improvement in the fallen standard of education. I just hope Minister Maku, a one-time deputy governor in Nasarawa State, was not too young then to understand the damage the term ‘policy summersault’ has inflicted on the polity. He couldn’t have forgotten so soon that after Oby resigned and joined the World Bank, that sector was put under the care of a former governor who was more concerned with the grandiose arrangement for the celebration of his marriage anniversary than fixing a sector that was in complete tatters after Oby’s reform was thrown out of the window. In spite of the fact that lecturers had been on strike for over nine months and those who could afford it had sought admission for their wards in neighbouring countries including Togo and Cameroun, didn’t the minister go ahead to have the shindig of his life? In any case, if the government thinks it has a strong case against Ezekwesili, the appropriate thing to do is to drag her before the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and not this whimsical allegation of wasting a ‘humongous’ N430bn by a regime accused of frittering away a whopping N10.6 trillion in five years.

    Yet, we return to the real issue at hand. This outlandish and utterly humongous joke must stop. Ezekwesili’s allegations are too serious to be trivialised or waved aside by the government as yet another ranting by someone who once ‘mis-applied’ money entrusted in her care as a public officer. That argument simply doesn’t wash just as the primitive tactic of name-calling begs the question. If the government truly wants to come clean on this matter and convince us beyond any reasonable doubt that Ezekwesili manipulated figures in order to give it a bloody nose, then it should gladly accept the public debate. This issue surely deserves a dignified response and not the usual bulldozing whereby the “accuser or agent provocateur”, as Okupe puts it, is shouted into silence. Nigerians deserve to know whether it is true that we are in this quagmire due to the “tragic choices” made by some people in Aso Rock. We need to know when and where the rain started beating us!

    It is soul-lifting that the National Assembly, specifically the House of Representatives, has stepped into the matter. We wait to see how far Okupe can go with his puerile argument that spent fund cannot be described as squandering of riches simply because it was budgeted for! Would the lawmakers accept the laughable excuse that Ezekwesili was merely ‘ playing to the gallery’ and that it was yet another calculated but ‘unsuccessful’ attempt to maliciously “incite” the public against Jonathan and bring his administration into disrepute unjustifiably? Surely the government would need more than Okupe’s gabbling and foul-mouthing Ezekwesili as a “wilfully perjured individual not worthy of any respect or recognition whatsoever.” Hmnn, maybe these attributes were parts of the things that endeared her to the World Bank where she excelled!

    Be that as it may, the dusts being raised about how the nation’s money is being managed provides Jonathan an opportunity to clear his name that, in words and deed, he has truly transformed the much promised mirage of “breeze of fresh air in governance” into a reality. All he needs to do is to avail the nation of the facts, figures and what exactly the funds were spent on. Evidently, this is not the time to gloat about imaginary enemies hiding behind the huge ghost of misgovernance to damage anyone’s reputation. Good enough, Ezekwesili’s questions are routine and should be quite easy to deal with by any self-respecting government. Was there a brazen misappropriation of public funds? If no, then why was the nation’s foreign reserve gravely depleted and what was the money used for? Can someone render accounts on how the additional billions of dollars realised from oil sale by the two administrations that have governed our nation in the last five years have been applied? How were these resources applied or more appropriately, misapplied? And did we end up wasting the resources on what Ezekwesili dubbed ‘tragic choices?’ Haha, answering these questions shouldn’t be rocket science for eggheads in the corridors of power.

    Obviously, these questions couldn’t have emanated from the warped rambling of a perjured mind. So, why are some people bent on heaping this humongous nonsense that shames a nation in historical proportions on us all? Must opaque management of public resources and crass disregard for genuine accountability forever remain a directive principle of state? Maybe while our VIPs plan a centenary to celebrate what citizens know not, it is beyond us to ask them to account for how they have spent our money. If they continue treading this wayward path, one day, the Arab spring would look like a picnic when the people rise to ask questions with one voice ringing loud and clear across the land!

     

  • It’s unbelievable

    It’s unbelievable

    It is unbelievable but it happened. There

    was panic in the land in the days leading

    to Nigeria’s last group game against Ethiopia. If we were anticipating a marathon race, it would have been right to dream of a Nigerian upset, which in any case would have been far-fetched. Expecting an Ethiopian upset for Nigeria in football was simply unacceptable.

    People nursed fears about a likely exit of the Super Eagles. Many wanted this writer’s position on the outcome before it was played. One felt insulted but retorted by asking my enquirers what the sum of two added to two is. They became furious but I cooled their angst by stating that if the Eagles couldn’t beat Ethiopia, then we had no business remaining in South Africa. Some agreed, although many hissed as they walked away.

    Beating Ethiopia should be a stroll in the park. The logic of the fear of minnows should be buried when it comes to football between two countries. The Ethiopians won’t flinch if the challenge is on marathon, because that is their forte.

    We should play against Ethiopia in such big soccer competitions celebrating the emergence of new stars and not struggling with established players. When such things happen, they only help to gauge the development of the game here.

    Stories that should gladden our hearts from matches against Ethiopia should be that goalkeeper Vincent Enyeama headed two corner kicks into the match in the closing minutes of routing.

    One laughs each time we resort to prayers before matches, especially given the injustice in the way the coaches picked the players for this assignment. The coaches would have to explain to Nigerians how they could keep injury-hit Gabriel Rueben in the squad and drop Dike, who has tremendous ability to play for the team.

    Again, the inclusion of such players as Oshinawa Juwon leaves much to be desired, especially when we have Taiye Taiwo sitting at home. The coaches would have found Taiwo very useful to fix the team’s wobbly defence. They wouldn’t have had any second thought fielding Taiwo. His inclusion would also have offered the coaches the opportunity to play him on the left side of the midfield, like Shauibu Amodu used him in some matches. Taiwo, if taught on how to direct his shots from set-pieces, would have been an asset to the Eagles, especially against Cote d’ Ivoire on Sunday.

    Where do we start to assess the Eagles? One won’t want to join the legion of buck-passing critics. What is, however, clear is that we need to tinker with our coaching crew. The composition will be determined by those who recruited these ones in South Africa.

    It is difficult to explain why the coaches pulled out a striker for a defender, with one Ethiopian out with a red card. Shouldn’t the coaches have introduced another striker and asked the players to shoot at the goalpost, knowing that the man there wasn’t the regular goalkeeper? After all, we could have scored a goal or two to top the group. Who knows, it could have been more.

    It is true that we have to build new players. But those in South Africa have limited abilities. Victor Moses showed that he plays with a thinking head. He made the difference and it looked simple despite the apprehension for 78 minutes.

    Twice he undertook to rescue the team with his audacious dribbling skills that earned us the two penalty kicks. He didn’t need anyone to ask him to take the kicks. Moses conceived what he wanted to do in his head, teasing the naïve Ethiopians to launch the bad tackle and masterfully tucking the ball into the net twice that he struck it for Nigeria’s wining goals.

    The Eagles played badly against Ethiopia. They were nervy and lacked the imagination to organise and string passes to rip the opponent’s defence apart. We didn’t see any off-the-ball runs such that when Moses surged forward in the dying minutes, he ignored his freer mates to take the team’s destiny in his hands by refusing to lay the pass for a better placed striker. Moses may have saved the day, yet it is important that the coaches correct this flaw as the Ivoirens are too experienced to fall for Moses’ trickery in the penalty box.

    We played slightly better in the defence. We were also able to plug the gap between the defence and the midfield, yet there is the urgent need for our strikers to learn how to make the decoy runs that would open the gaps in the opponent’s defence.

    Football is a very cruel game. Many may tip the Ivoirens to roast the Eagles. It could just be a mirage as our players know how to play such prestige games. I foresee the game on Sunday between Nigeria and Cote d Ivoire going into a penalty shootout.

    Our players know that the Ivoriens are better than them. The fear of avoiding a heavy defeat will push our boys beyond our expectations. My worry is that we could lose the next game after beating Cote d Ivoire because we would have given it our best shot.

    Would this scenario be worth the effort? I don’t think so. But looking at the fixtures, one was happy that if we beat the Ivoirens, we are likely to meet South Africa in the semifinals because I feel that they could upset the Malians in their quarter-finals tie. Let us not count our chicks before they are hatched. I digress.

    From what we have seen so far and from the few matches we have also watched the Eagles play at the AFCON 2013, one fact sticks out and clearly so – there has been no significant improvement on what ex-Eagles coach Shuaibu Amodu achieved for the national team.

    If anything, the performance of the national team has been on a downward spiral. The more you expect a change, the more things remain the same. We have retrogressed from a fairly average team to outright mediocre outfit bereft of ideas and initiatives.

    While we may not be shedding tears for Amodu, our hearts bleed for what has become of our once darling national tea, the Super Eagles. So sad.

     

    Where is Shuaibu Amodu?

    I have searched in vain for former Super Eagles chief coach Shuaibu Amodu’s comments on Nigeria’s matches. I also tried to reach him on the telephone. No dice.

    So, where is Amodu? No one seems to know but if I know him very well, he would be hiding in Okpella, doing his business and enjoying himself.

    Amodu is not one to condemn his mates. He would throw his salvo at the administrators. I expect him to break his silence if NFF and NSC chieftains try to make the coaches the fall guys, in the event that the Eagles don’t meet our expectations.

    It’s clear that the domestic league cannot produce the talents to seize the stage like we saw with Clement Temile at the 1984 Africa Cup of Nations. Temile was a local boy with Bendel Insurance FC of Benin when Adegboye Onigbinde picked him to give Tarila Okorowanta a fight for the right flank shirt. Temile was introduced when Tarila was fumbling. Temile went on to win the golden boot as the top scorer of the competition with three goals.

    When Amodu described our local league as dead and its products unfit for the big stage, this writer lashed him. Amodu described the Eagles as a bunch of average players and got the stick from everyone.

    Amodu remains the best Nigerian coach in terms of achievements. Need I list them for anyone to appreciate what I’m saying? Take a bow, Shuaibu Amodu.

  • Readers’parliament 21

    Your analysis is correct. Some parents are boastful of their ability to purchase seats for their wards to cheat at JAMB and SSCE centres. It is sad to see what our country has degenerated to. God will help us. 08023137600.

    Haba Tunji. This your piece was too harsh to Nigerians. I am sure you are not residing in Nigeria. 08033754830.

    Olatunji, I agree with you totally that, ‘We are very bad people.’ If Mr. ‘Integrity’Lawan Farouk could fall the way he did, then hope is not in sight for this society of ours. Look at the appointment of Dame Patience as Permanent Secretary. Very absurd. 08034053328.

    Remain blessed for saying the truth. All men need to be forcefully castrated, so that we can stop breeding baboons and then let the country return to stone age.08037967898.

    I wish you continue with this line of write-up. You strike a definite chord in our psychology and sociology with the message. I wake everyday with these foreboding realities of the basic Nigerian psyche. I fear for the future of this race and generation…I totally agree with your thesis. 08054967602.

    Excellent piece of writing. I agree with you 100 per cent. We need to change ourselves because we are indeed very bad people. 08079890367.

    “It is good to be bad and bad to be good in contemporary Nigeria,” truer words I have never read in Nigerian newspapers. Brilliant article today, Mr. Ololade! Please keep up the good work. And the truth shall set us all free. 08178675967.

    Thanks a lot dear. You did very well in your piece. May God bless you with more knowledge and wisdom. Amen. 08063675643.

    May Almighty God bless you for telling the truth the way it is, ‘We are very bad people.’ 08037036487.

    Olatunji, what you are saying cannot be disputed. What has eluded us is the way out of the quagmire. From Cyril Chinweike Eze. 08037907122.

    And Patience Jonathan is now a permanent secretary. Only in Nigeira can such happen. We are very bad people indeed. 07035347838.

    I have never read a more honest description of you and me. We are very horrible people. From Ehimare Ehoho. 08081322995.

    May God bless you for telling us the truth. Please keep it up. Luka Jos. 08081767426.

    Of course, we are very people Olatunji. In Port Harcourt where I live, it’s really the picture you painted. Success through hard work is no longer the way of life. What of teachers known b ydear patience, they are now the vampires that devour their wards. Thanks. Good piece. Ray from Port Harcourt. 08056666484.

    You said it all. We are indeed very bad people. None could be worse. From Barrister Obi Anierobi. 08031157593.

    Olatunji, I like your write-up. Let us be accountable for all our actions, let us stop blaming our leaders. An average Nigerian man is a criminal. Zuby from Port Harcourt. 08051603828.

    Your article is a very good one. Unfortunately you are talking to people who have long chosen the path of amorality. The assertion that the followership is as bad as the leadership is true. But in all climes, it is the leadership that sets the pace either for moral degeneracy or righteous living. The theory of the vital few cannot be wished away. The elites, opinion moulders and policy formulators who develop the framework for policy implementation and are supposed to enforce compliance are the first culprits. No society has only good people; what deters people from wrongdoing is the arm of the law which is supposed to be enforced by the leaders. That’s why foreigners come to Nigeria and beat traffic lights. Let’s get good leaders and things will fall in place. From Etokowoh Owoh Uyo. AKS. 08037975031.

    Your ability to put reality in pure perspective is outstanding. Until Nigerians move away from pretence, egoism, deceit, avarice, hate, etc, I wonder where our religious disposition will take us. From Paul Vingil. Abuja. 08035880838.

    I honestly agree with you and I pray that God endow you with wisdom, knowledge and blessedness to tell the nation the root of our problem. God bless you bro. From Wellington, Sango, Ogun State. 08060244044.

    Mr. Olatunji Ololade, your write up, ‘We are very bad people (1),’ I must confess, is the best write-up ever in this morally bankrupt and unholy entity called Nigeria. More of it, please, my brother. They will surely meet the people’s justice in 2015. May God keep more of your type for the battle ahead. Henry Oputa esq, Port Harcourt. 08033125515.

    Nice piece Olatunji. We need more of your type. Self tendencies have destroyed us all. I think that Nigeria can only be better when Nigerians think better. Indeed, we are very bad people.08036851612.

    Your write-up captured the sad reality of the contraption called Nigeria. You mirrored the true state of the inhabitants of this country and as sad and fearful the truth is, we are all culpable in the mess our dear country is in. More ink to your pen. From Tapshak Armstrong. Jos. 08166032757.

    We are very bad people 1 says it all. Keep telling the truth. You are superb. From Kehinde Olalemi. 07063504030.

    Tunji my brother, I totally agree with you. I fully understand your angst. Our society is largely populated by monkeys and baboons in human garb, primitive in thinking and bestial in deeds. I have never seen or heard of a society so depraved as ours. Until we, as a people, embrace those things that are truly important in life and jettison the mindless and blind accumulation of vanities, we are eternally doomed as a people spiritually and naturally. From Gerard Ifeanyichukwu Okonkwo. Onitsha. 08023656124.

    What do you have to say about the south-east of the country where people are kidnapping fellow human beings including new born babies in the name of money? And all of us claim to be Christians. 08160149957.

    In fact, you have said it all and I totally agree with you. What can we do now to stop this menace and attitude of ours because each time? From Shakiru. 08030699828.

    Olatunji Ololade, since I was born in this feeble but very wicked and perverse country that is called Nigeria in 1953, I have never discerned anybody’s heart like I’ve just did yours…having gone through your humble and earnest dispositional topic, I thought I were you but of course, I’m not. This is to erase the unscrupulous position of the doubting Thomases that will oppose your write-up in anyway because Nigeria is just simply negative to the core. I’m in this position because some agents of negativity will want to counter the message of good people to this. They will want to smother this great message by which you teach all of us about how bad and wicked we are in this hopeless and worthless country we live in that is called Nigeria…A people that hails criminality are very bad people. A people that condones wicked preachers that pray for government officials who steal public money are very bad people. A people who allow their previous leaders to walk the streets with their loots, even after these leaders have lost immunity are very bad people. A people that have made their generation a thieving one are very bad people. 08036925729.

  • PDP RETURN: The Orji Kalu redox

    PROLOGUE: The Call of the Wild: This matter of the rather desperate return of Chief Orji Uzor Kalu (OUK) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), keeps reminding me of Jack London’s more than a century- old classic, The Call of the Wild. Those who are familiar with this little but hounding book will recognise that PDP and even to a larger extent, Nigeria, could well be the setting for London’s 1903 epic novel. Simplified, The Call of the Wild is about the crazed era of the gold rush of the early twentieth century when the Western world thought there was a surfeit of gold in the ice-decked Northern hemisphere. The quest for gold in a hellish environment was brutish and ultimately futile as “In the end, the gold is washed away. It returns to the earth from which it was pried.” The Call, in summary, tells us that we humans in our frenzied pursuit of the banal, miss the essence of life.

    PROGNOSIS: I had written about Kalu and his attempt to re-join his PDP cohorts late last year after the Wadata House (PDP’s Abuja head office) drama during which his state governor literally mobilized to fence him off the precincts of the building. Though the action of the Abia State governor had caused a stir, I had argued that Kalu’s desperation to regroup with a party he jettisoned about seven years earlier to found his own party, is, to say the least, embarrassing and inimical to his quest for Igbo leadership. I raised numerous questions including the fact that he would never in the life of him, have brooked the effrontery of a parallel camp in a party where he sits as a governor and leader. NEVER. And I posited that if he had a political party that captured two states in the Southeast and which Ndigbo were willing to align with had he provided the requisite leadership, and he threw it all overboard, then his leadership credentials are suspect.

    One would think that Kalu would sleep over this ill-advised and utterly denigrating political gambit. Not by any chance, it seems. He must have had a most remarkable Yuletide plotting and sharpening the dah for his next political masterstroke which is to seize the Abia PDP – by any means possible. The plot matured in the New Year and by mid January, some village wags were corralled into issuing Kalu a verisimilitude of a PDP membership card. Knowing that loose brotherhood called PDP very well, you could ‘generate’ a membership card and register by any street corner if you so desperately seek to do so. It is a very loose, if not lousy confederacy, PDP.

    When it came out that Kalu had eventually returned to the PDP passing through an obscure bush path in his Igbere village, one only had a good laugh. This is the ultimate Orji Kalu redox – a desperate and diminishing quest for relevance; and it had to be executed secretly in a rustic, nether area of the country; far removed from the rest of the world. Say, how could this show have escaped the ubiquitous beam of the media? How could an Orji Kalu return to PDP without feasting and fanfare; without the knowledge of party leaders in the State? Again, is this how the OUK persona has shrunken? Why wouldn’t the PDP hierarchy accord him some respect by way of a reception?

    Now that Kalu has ‘rejoined’ PDP through the back yard, has he publicly renounced the leadership of his party, the Progressive Peoples Alliance (PPA)? Or is it possible to be a member of one party and a leader of another? What is his message to his mass of confused followers currently trapped in PPA? Where does this leave Ndigbo and Kalu’s campaign for an Igbo to be the next president of Nigeria?

    EPILOGUE: What we see here is opportunism sneaking into bed with megalomania. It is indeed a call of the wild. This entire enterprise is all about three persons: Orji, Uzor and Kalu locked in a futile yet maniacal pursuit of the great ‘prize’. It is gold rush as always. Poor Abians are the grass that will be trampled in this turf fight being set up by Kalu. The sitting governor will now be distracted more than ever as he spends time, energy and resources fending off the onslaught of Kalu and his hounds and fighting for the soul of PDP in the State. Isn’t there is a certain godly virtue in stepping away from the arena, especially after you have done your bit and allowing your underlings some space to make even their own mistakes? To tarry in the arena eternally is to play god.

    Kalu could have led and can still lead PPA to greatness if he was a leader. Where are honour, principle and dignity in this singular move of crawling back to PDP? This explains why few leaders have emerged from Igboland lately; most so called leaders are desperate hustlers even after being two-term governors. It is hoped that kalu would someday grow bigger than Abia, than even PDP.

    LAST MUG: Maku’s merry-go-round across Nigeria: Irrepressible federal information minister, Mr Labaran Maku has his job well-defined and cut out for him but we wonder why he is currently criss-crossing the country trying to do the jobs of state information commissioners and chief press secretaries. Pity, that Maku may have happened upon the dubious template used by the erstwhile occupier of that office, Prof Jerry Gana and he chose to run with it. What great pity? The no-brainer he calls the “Good Governance Tour” which takes him across the States of Nigeria must be part two of the Media Tour of about 10 years back that earned Gana no plaudits.

    How can Maku deign to tour the 36 States and inspect their projects? That’s what we call Afghanistanism in journalism; he should be inspecting and showcasing federal government projects. That is his brief and he is failing at it if he must know. Even the modest efforts of his government are not adequately showcased to the public. Where are the power plants? Where are the green field refineries? Where are the on-going airport remodelling? Where are the FG-assisted rice plants? Where are the strategic grain silos? Where are the burgeoning new federal universities? There must be some roads being fixed by FERMA and the Ministry of Works; where are they? Where is the monthly Nigeria Journal that was doing a bit of this sometime ago? Where is his Ministry’s weekly reports and updated website, etc? Honorable Minister there is so much on your table to do so quit chasing the wind and dabbling into other people’s job which you lack the capacity to do anyway. What would be your legacy?

    The clean-shaven criminal: if a clean visage betokens a benign heart, Mr John Yakubu Yusufu would be an angel. I have never seen a better shaven face since Gillette declared war against the male beard (don’t look up now) and other bodily hairs. Did you see his photo in the papers yesterday? He cropped even his eyebrows so clean as if to erase his guilt. Of course we all must know Yusufu now; the deputy director of Police Pension Office who admitted to stealing over N20 billion. We ask: if a mere deputy director could heft so much cash, where were his directors, permanent secretary, t he supervising minister and the auditors? What manner of man would covet so much cash and what manner of system would let him have such access?

  • Muslim marital homes

    Muslim marital homes

    Marriage is part of my tradition. Whoever is capable but refuses to marry is not part of me” Prophet Muhammad (SAW)

     This article is being recalled here today due to popular demand. When it was first published in this column sometime ago, many Muslim couples in Nigeria saw it as a true mirror of their matrimonial homes. Many others took it for a matrimonial handbook capable of serving as a guide for the conduct of their homes. Yet, many who missed the article at that time and only heard of it from others have since been calling for its repetition in this column. And because of the value it may add to Muslim homes and the role it may play in resolving conflicts in those homes, ‘The Message’ decided to re-publish it here today for the benefit of all and sundry. Here it goes:

    “A radical 20th century India-born British journalist and novelist, George Orwell, wrote a famous allegorical fable entitled ‘ANIMAL FARM’ in 1945. His tacit focus in that novel was mainly on the Russian revolution of 1917 which he satirised venomously. While writing the novel, that social critic never thought that any possible ripples could arise from it which might have a backlash effect on the entire human social life in the 21st century. But ironically, with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), in the early 1990s the real exoteric application of that book has become manifest on the entire social life of today’s mankind. This will be explained shortly.

    Perhaps no institution in human life is as temporally or spiritually valuable as marriage. This is an indisputable fact across nations, races and religions. Marriage is the main axis around which the continuity of human existence on earth rotates. It is the pivotal source of decency or clear cause of malfeasance in any given society. Without marriage, human societies would have been like Orwell’s Animal Farm. And were Orwell alive today he would have probably redirected his attention towards the matrimonial homes globally.

    Through the media, we read and hear of dissolution of marriages in our customary courts, everyday, as if dissolution is the main character of marriage. And the impression often created in the media through the names of the involved couples is that these dissolution affect only Muslim marriages. What is most disturbing in this development is that the local courts which dissolve those marriages were never involved in their consummation ab initio. And yet marriages dissolved daily without passing through any court are uncountable. Nowadays, the rate of dissolution of marriages is by far higher than the rate at which marriages are consummated. At least, going by the local customs of the various tribes in Nigeria one can conclude that marriages are conducted weekly throughout the country as against the daily occurrences of divorce.

    There is a pertinent question here: What is the role of religion in marital life? Most marriages in our society are consummated in Mosques or Churches because majority of Nigerians claim to be Muslims or Christians. Yet the same Mosques and Churches turn their backs when those marriages begin to collapse and pretend not to know that the homes of their adherents are crumbling. Isn’t a major duty of religious bodies to maintain tranquility in the society? How can societal tranquility be maintained without matrimonial stability?

    Some people define marriage as a legalisation of intercourse and procreation of children without any reference to its divine sanctity. Others call it a social contract culturally or legally consummated between two consenting mature people of opposite genders. The latter definition is also silent on the obligation and responsibilities of such a union. In Islam, marriage is much more than both definitions. It is on one hand, a promise made by the male gender who is soon to become the husband and on the other, a trust personified by the female gender who will soon become the wife in the custody of the husband. It (marriage) is an agreement between two families aimed at creating an avenue for continuity of social life through a common social venture jointly managed by the two representatives of both families in their bid to set up a home of their own. In the life of any serious human being, three events are fundamentally essential. These are birth, marriage and death. The three form the axis around which the entire human life rotates. All other events are peripheral.

    Throughout the world today (Nigeria inclusive), marriage has become a balloon which can be casually inflated in one minute and deflated in the next minute. It has been taken for a mere chess game played for the fun of the players as well as that of the onlookers. To most Nigerians today, marriage is only as important as dining, wining, singing and dancing. And to many young couples, it is just a legitimate means of actualising sexual urge that would have been perceived as a social aberration without passing through a formal matrimonial communion.

    In a public lecture delivered in Lagos sometime ago, yours sincerely compared a marital couple to a pair of scissors which has two blades. Each of those blades faces a different direction. The one faces right while the other faces left. These positions are not naturally interchangeable. Yet, with the nuptial tie knotting them together in the middle to seal their common destiny, the two blades jointly work assiduously in their move to certify the essence of that togetherness.

    If you look at a pair of scissors very carefully, you will discover that the two blades therein sometimes stick closely together and sometimes stand out separately. Their meeting and parting randomly accentuate the essence of their togetherness. Through those meeting and parting, the two blades of the pair of scissors communicate effectively and mutually function dutifully. There is a marital lesson for human beings to learn from this. No husband can play the role of his wife. Neither can any wife play the role of her husband. The separation of powers in the matrimonial home has been naturally ordained.

    Just as the two blades of a pair of scissors face different directions but work intimately together so should any marital couple be. If the blades stick together permanently without opening and closing, the tendency is for them to rust away and become useless to each other. And, if on the other hand, they stay apart permanently thereby leaving the scissors in permanent open position they will never be able to jointly carry out the assignment for which they are manufactured. Thus, through random meeting and parting of those blades, the pair of scissors is able to perform its duty without any hindrance. And as the blades grow older, they become weaker and less active. So is the situation with marital couples.

    Unfortunately today, marriage has become like the country called Nigeria where projects are hurriedly executed to satisfy the secret (under the table) terms of contract without any consideration for the quality and maintenance of such projects. When two young people of different genders and backgrounds are coming together to form a couple, they hardly think of the implications of such a union in terms of individual differences and the possible challenges that may emanate from those differences. Young couples of today perceive love either from beauty point of view or from endowed wealth or even from pleasure of sexual intercourse. And that is a way of turning infatuation or possession of material wealth or sexual enjoyment into love which is usually the cause of marital collapse.

    In marriage, love develops only gradually with mutual understanding especially when it becomes evident that one spouse accommodates the weaknesses of the other through tolerance and compromise. The attraction which beauty or wealth or intercourse engenders can only at best generate tentative LIKENESS and not LOVE in the real sense. This is where the foundation of divorce is often laid even before the consummation of marriage. There is nothing called love in a matrimonial home in the absence of thorough study and understanding of each other as well as compromises and tolerance. It is not enough to claim mutual understanding through mutual study during courtship. No matter how long it may last, the period of courtship can never be enough for any couple to fully understand each other. That period is usually to impress each other while the tendency to pretend is often disguised.

    Marriage is a serious business which must be seriously negotiated initially by the concerned couples and their parents. At the courtship stage, the concerned couple must not only discuss the modalities of coming together as husband and wife they must also negotiate the factors of sustaining their marriage through proper maintenance of the home. Any marriage without a programme of maintenance and sustenance will become like dew used by a farmer for watering crops into fruition.

    In his recommendation to men searching for wives, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said: “Wives are married on the basis of four factors: beauty, wealth, family background and faith”. He however emphasised (Islamic) FAITH as the strongest factor for Muslim couples. He did not recommend such factors to women knowing the difficulties that women might face in making choice of men but he strongly recommended that a woman’s consent in a marriage involving her be considered as germane. The Prophet then concluded that any marriage without such consent is invalid.

    Marriages are globally collapsing at an alarming rate today because couples and their families have closed their eyes to two key factors in maintaining the matrimonial home. These factors are COMMUNICATION and MUTUAL RESPECT. No marriage can ever survive or succeed without a thorough pre-marital counselling by parents, guardians or religious clerics who must not only tutor potential couples but also demonstrate practically to them how marriages are sustained using their own marriages as examples. Newly married couples often dream of building their homes on the models of certain older couples in the society. The consummators of new marriages in the Muslim community must be part of those models.

    There can be no matrimonial peace in the absence of adequate communication between husband and wife based on mutual respect. Nothing signals the collapse of a marriage more than the breakdown of communication in the home. A marriage without communication is like a house without door. Of course, the children from such homes are mostly the victims of any ensued divorce. If a marriage is initiated and consummated with communication, how can anybody think that such a marriage can be sustained without communication?

    The real essence of marriage is for husband and wife to disagree in order to agree, not the other way round. And in the process of disagreeing or agreeing, communication is the only key instrument without which the home can never remain intact.

    Any couple that closes the matrimonial door to communication has surely opened that door for divorce. Even divorce, whether through mutual agreement or through court injunction, must be communicated in one way or another to both parties.

    In Islam, one of the most potent ways of ventilating communication in the home is to worship and pray together at least twice in a day (morning and evening). A Muslim husband must at least be knowledgeable enough to lead his family in Salat and to preach and pray for such family daily. Through such worship and prayer, many knotty matrimonial issues are untied. And besides, the children will learn to be good-mannered and to resolve disagreements among themselves. That is why Muslims are urged to acquire knowledge about their religion. The spate of divorce in any society today is much higher among the ignorant couples than the knowledgeable ones.

    By remaining indifferent to the rate of divorce among Nigerian Muslims, the Mosques are shirking one of their foremost responsibilities. It has been said repeatedly in this column that Mosques are not meant for Salat alone. As a matter of fact, Salat can be observed congregationally or individually anywhere that is clean and not necessarily in a building called Mosque. A Mosque in Islam does not have to be a building if its purpose is just to observe Salat. That is why Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said “the entire earth has been made the Mosque for Muslims once it is purified”.

    One of the fundamental duties of a Mosque is to sanitise the society by finding resolution to conflicts. And since no conflict can be more devastating to any society than that of the matrimonial homes it becomes incumbent on every Mosque to have a Conflict Resolution Committee constituted by learned scholars and headed by an Islamic jurist.

    As a duty, the Imam of the Mosque must also be well educated enough to educate the congregation in his Mosque on the need to take their matrimonial conflicts to the Mosques or Shari’ah courts where such conflicts can be solemnly resolved rather than to customary courts where marriages are dissolved with fiat. Matrimonial conflicts are not new to any modern society. What seems new and worrisome about them is the geometric leap they are taking these days.

    The very first conflict in human history was over marriage. And that was the conflict between the first and second sons of Adam (Qabil and Habil) otherwise known as Cain and Abel over the choice of wife. And the genesis of the perennial disagreement between Muslims and non-Muslims of Semitic origin in the world today was the matrimonial rivalry between the two wives of Prophet Ibrahim, Zahrah and Hajarah, (Sarah and Hagar).

    If the Mosques cannot resolve conflicts arising from the marriages they once consummated to save Muslim homes, what other conflicts can they claim to be resolving? It is embarrassingly shameful to see hundreds of Muslim marriages demolished by customary courts while the Mosques keep aloof.

    Today, Nigerian society is prone to danger of insecurity mostly because of matrimonial instability. And the more marriages are consummated, the more matrimonial homes crumble. Who, then, will save the society by saving our matrimonial homes? That is the biggest question of this time which is begging for a very positive answer. The security of Nigeria as a country depends very much on the stability of matrimonial homes. That is why emphasis should rather be laid on stability of homes than on distribution of contraceptives for the purpose of reducing procreation. There can be no peaceful nation without peaceful homes. God bless our homes.