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Category: Columnists

The decent society

The one was an infighting within the peacock class. The other was a fury from below. In both instances, we saw a mirror of a people lost from the call of dignity.

The second one happened first, but the first reflected the deeper underbelly of the greed and indecencies of our people.

The second one was a drama in the glare of Goodluck Jonathan. It involved Malam Nuhu Ribadu and Stephen Oronsaye, and the issue was the report of how the oil business has soiled the haughty fingers of the rich and crooked.

The first one was the story of the restriction of motorcycles (okada) riders away from the major arteries of the city of Lagos.

At stake in both cases was the concept of the decent society, the society that sets before itself the ground rules of engagement, the laws, the courtesies, discipline and fiery obedience to the logic of legal retribution to the breach. That inculcates a social contract, a tension of law and punishment, with the capacity to lure the bad to the bosom of the best among us.

Ribadu attracted flak from many, even within the inner sanctum of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), for taking a job under the man he reviled during the presidential campaign. A feisty, stubborn, if at times turbulent soul lurks in his fragile frame. It was an understated physical quality that rattled the seedy elite when he downed one peacock after another as the boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). He did not do this job with the flawless temperament of a Rabbi or a Christ or Alfa. With provable charges of selectiveness, his tenure as EFCC boss has remained controversial.

Hence some saw his acceptance of the Jonathan job as a bounty for a loser and the loser gladly accepted. Maybe it was. Maybe Ribadu had a reflex of integrity and turned the bounty from a material gift to a crusading moment by saving his name. So his report unveiled the sleaze of the oil world under the stewardship of Jonathan. To rebuff the bounty, Ribadu probably damned the giver, the President with his report, and became an avenging angel. If that was what Ribadu did, he had his critics to thank for his image rebirth. Ribadu probably had the mischievous grace from the beginning to spite Jonathan before the criticisms raged. But only he knows the truth.

The agony was the spectacle of the older Oronsaye, who played a puppet in a presidential oil game. The man condemned a report even though he was missing in action while Ribadu worked without sitting allowance. He had the shameless boldness to play righteous before the camera and the world. The point has been suggested that Orosanye, once a technocrat with tranquil grandeur and former head of service, became a rhetorical boxer defending a system as decrepit as it was dirty. Before the incident in front of the President, many did not know he had the gallery touch, the air of the bureaucratic impresario.

Jonathan was quietly gloating over this public jousting. The President, in his serpentine style, came to the fore again. Why was Oronsaye doing another engagement that took him away from this all-important task? Why did Jonathan sign up to such distraction? Did Jonathan not see that Oronsaye’s rebellion against the report was capable of suggesting that the man was planted in the committee to cast sufficient doubt on its probity? A classical divide-and-rule tactic. Once that was done, then the government can exercise a right to whittle down the weight of Ribadu’s work and assign the document, after all the hoopla of protest, to the cynical silence that other reports on oil have suffered.

This is a report about corruption, about billions of Naira fleeced without regards to law, bonuses appropriated with brazen fare, about the oil that immiserates the teeming poor in our society, about the lifestyle that furnishes outlandish holiday resorts abroad, cocky boats, soaring soirees, in private jets and palaces as homes.

The Presidency has latched on to the Oronsaye indiscretion to question the report. Ribadu had noted that there was some imperfection in the work, but that did not detract from the basic premise of its conclusion. Why did the President not say, well, we shall extend your time, finish the work? Oil is our wealth, not a partisan matter. It is about our patrimony and prosperity. It is about the future of our children, of our infrastructure and education.

The handling of the matter, above all, reveals our disregard for the basic decencies of civilisation. It is what Conrad calls “the nightmarish parody of administration without justice, without law, without order.”

In Lagos, we saw okada riders take laws into their hands. The law said they should stay off certain areas. They defied the basic meaning of the law. Where in the world do we have bike riders as major transporters? So bad were they that they caused many a death, maimed many too, and impoverished the artisan sector with everyone from plumber to mechanic viewing the trade as a source of quick money. If the people at the top have no regard for law and decency, how do we expect the folks in the plebeian bracket to do same? The National Assembly has looked into many issues, but none has been resolved. No convictions although we all know there were crimes. The power sector is just an example.

The okada question has raised the question of replacement taxis and buses. That did not happen today, and their organisation only paid lip service to the project so long as they could still scoot about legally. With the restriction, they can now settle to the ultimate model for development: a private-public relationship that we have seen with the phasing out of the molue.

Let us not forget the Makoko incident. The floating slum dwellers agreed not to cross a line, but they did. When they were given a 72-hour ultimatum to leave, they turned it into emotional blackmail. The shantytown on stilts is an anomaly, but even at that they want to extend all the filth and danger to environment and health of the entire city by polluting the lagoon.

All of this is corruption. But the root of the problem is far deeper. At an event last week, Professor Wole Soyinka argued that corruption is the cause of the decay around us. Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) saw it differently. Ribadu as EFCC boss noted with statistical dismay how corruption was the source of our bane. The governor, for example, argued that we should look deeper into our culture and our history. He saw corruption as a symptom. I agree. It is the society that creates corruption and not vice versa. As Jesus Christ said: “An evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things.” The tragedy though is that we created corruption, but it festered so powerfully that it is recreating us.

I blame all our founding fathers who did not set a ground rule for the nation. Rather, they travelled on ethnic tangents.

We have not created a nation of laws. When the United States started, there was a conflict between President George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who accused the leader of abandoning the revolutionary ideals. Jefferson dreamed of America as a rural paradise. Washington dreamed of a country of big cities and wealth. He hired Alexander Hamilton who crafted the rules by which American civil society operates, centering on the rule of law. Patent protection, the rise of the financial system, stock exchange, the prosperity of the world today derives from the genius of the immigrant trusted by a president who never attended university.

I believe it is our lack of ground rules that has led us to the path of corruption. When men like Oronsaye and the okada riders ignore law and decency personified by a man like Ribadu in the report, we shall continue to plummet in standards of living, have students who cannot read and write well and an ominous future beckons us.

What will rescue us is the shock wisdom that illumines Shylock’s eyes in Shakespeare’s classic, Merchant of Venice. When his impunity is exposed in court, he asks, “is that the law?” Rather, we mock the law.

Until we allow the law nourish order, we shall never have a decent society.

November 12, 2012
Jombo-Ofo: Matters arising

Every stunning scenario played out in Abuja last week at the inauguration of the newly appointed Justices of the Court of Appeal. Following the release of a list of 12 Justices for the ceremony, prospective beneficiaries had come to the venue full of expectations. But the unexpected happened. One of those listed, Justice Ifeoma Jombo-Ofo was not that lucky.

The Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Aloma Mukhtar refused to swear her in ostensibly on account of petitions alleging that the state she represents (Abia) is not her state of origin. Justice Jombo-Ofo had served Abia state for many years following her marriage to Mr. Jombo-Ofo, an indigene of the state. But she originally hailed from Anambra state.

Apparently sensing danger, Abia state governor, Theodore Orji was at hand to make a special case for Justice Jombo-Ofo. But all his entreaties came to naught. He was also said to have written to the CJN affirming that Abia state actually nominated Justice Jombo-Ofo and that she is from the state.

Perhaps, unknown to him, the CJN was relying on a subsisting, nay obnoxious policy in the judiciary that prevents married women from reaching the peak of their career in their husbands’ state irrespective of their qualifications and suitability for the post. Curiously, it was the same office that cleared her for the swearing in. For that, the hopes of this eminently qualified and promising Justice were dashed and she had to go home with her admirers and well wishers utterly disappointed.

The fate of Justice Jombo-Ofo has once again highlighted the inadequacies of some of the policies in the nation’s statute books. And in spite of the reasons that originally informed their formulation, some of them have consistently proved counterproductive in elevating our collective aspirations as a people. Instead of merit they have tended to promote mediocrity by placing very qualified candidates into serious disadvantage on account of their state of origin. We are thus faced with irreconcilable contradictions in barring married justices from ascending the peak of their career solely on account of having hailed from a different state before their marriage. Not only is such a policy discriminatory and stale, it is difficult to fathom the purpose it is meant to serve or how it can elevate the job of the judiciary. By preventing married women from reaching the topmost echelons of their professions, the policy no doubt, sacrifices merit for political expediency. Such a policy will be inherently deficient in promoting the cause of an efficient and virile judicial system. What sense is there in discouraging and disqualifying merit on the spurious ground that the woman did not originally hail from that state even when she had been married there for so many years? It is akin to denying married women employment in their husbands’ states because they happened to come from other states. It remains to be seen the type of values we seek to promote by insisting on that obviously very retrogressive policy. Regrettably, such an anachronistic and unprogressive policy has been allowed to stay in our statute books even as it has outlived its usefulness.

One also finds it an uncanny twist of fate that governor Theodore Orji was the person who fought this discriminatory policy without success. His state not long ago, sacked workers in its employ for the simple reason that they are non indigenes. Despite all appeals, he did not budge. He can now appreciate the feelings of those workers he sacked for the very spurious reason that they hailed from other states.

Jombo-Ofo is just one out of the several justices that have suffered incalculably on account of this useless policy. It may have been designed to ensure that top judicial offices meant for states go to their indigenes. That could as well be. But there is everything wrong in the thinking that a woman married in a particular state cannot be regarded as an indigene of that state even as her children are accorded the full rights and privileges of that state. This does not make any sense. It is even more confounding to require such women to get their nominations from their original states. It cannot work that way. What the policy has succeeded in achieving is to place a permanent hurdle on the career prospects of women married in states other than the one they originally hailed from.

Such a policy is out of tune with the realities of the time and ought to be expunged from our statute books without further delay. It is a matter of regret that female judicial officers have had to live with this retrogressive policy for years without drawing public attention to it. They should therefore share in the blame for keeping quiet in the face of a discriminatory and strangulating policy. Above all, the policy has once again drawn attention to such contentious and unresolved issues of our federal structure as residency factor and indigeneship.

It is at this point that the recent intervention of a retired justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Olufunlola Adekeye cues in very appropriately.

In a speech to mark her retirement from the Supreme Court, she had implored the CJN, the Chief Judges of states, the Judicial Service Commission and the National Judicial Council to review the policy barring married women from reaching the peak of their career in their husbands’ states. She noted that complaints of this nature are increasingly rampant in the judiciary and that since married women transfer their services to their husbands’ state, it is logical and in compliance with the tenets of marriage that the two become one. This goes without saying.

The retired Justice further contended that it is “unconstitutional as well as discriminatory to deprive her of her promotion in her acquired state as a citizen of Nigeria by virtue section 42 of 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”

Justice Adekeye has said it all. She has not only exposed the contradictions in the policy but gone a step further to show how that policy is inconsistent with the provisions of the constitution. However, it still remains puzzling why key functionaries as well as the regulating authorities in the judicial system allowed it to hold sway in spite of its negative effects on the moral and career progression of married women. Perhaps, if the women had spoken out before now, the embarrassment suffered by Jombo-Ofo and others before her would have been averted.

Good a thing, the attention of the National Assembly has been drawn to this embarrassing regulation. Obviously piqued by that show of shame, the senate had in a motion voted against the policy and directed the CJN to swear in Jumbo-Ofo without further delay. That is the right thing to do.

Now that the national assembly is in the process of constitutional amendment, it must work to identify all laws and policies that promote discrimination based on sex, marriage, religion or state of origin and expunge them from the ground norms of this country. We need policies that can tap from the best brains in the country irrespective of mundane considerations. We need laws that can pool the creative resources and energies of our various peoples for collective national progress. It is time to discard worn-out and rusty laws and policies from our statute books for those that conform to global best practices.

November 12, 2012
The Fortunate One

Sure, Obama’s lucky. He also relentlessly seizes his chances and makes every one of them count. By Daniel Klaidman

As heart-stricken Republicans tried to explain their unambiguous defeat by Barack Obama, some turned to the heavens. Hurricane Sandy, the explanation went, stopped Mitt Romney’s momentum in its tracks, gave Obama an exquisitely timed commander-in-chief moment, and blacked out media coverage of his opponent for several crucial days.

The hurricane was merely the latest reason to wonder: have the fates been smiling on Barack Obama? It’s hard to look at his stratospheric rise from obscure state senator to leader of the free world in just four years and not think that he might have benefited from a string of extremely good fortune.

True, Obama has faced plenty of obstacles in life. Unlike Mitt Romney, he was not born into great wealth; he is not a member of what Warren Buffett calls the “lucky sperm club.” And his race—not to mention a last name that is easily confused with Osama—undoubtedly hurt him with some voters as he ascended through American politics.

At the same time, think about the political luck that has come Obama’s way in the last year alone: in a race framed around fears of increasing economic inequality, the president drew an opponent who evoked the Monopoly millionaire. While Obama’s admen sought to portray their rival as a hopelessly out-of-touch plutocrat, Romney kept writing their copy. He tried to make a $10,000 bet during a debate, said he was “not concerned about the very poor,” and blithely wrote off 47 percent of the electorate as freeloaders. As he moved to the right to secure the Republican nomination, Romney got tangled up in sexual politics, suggesting that companies could deny women contraception. He offended Hispanics with his hardline stance on immigration. And on the night of the most important speech of his career—his address at the Republican convention—the spotlight was stolen from him by a buffoonish Clint Eastwood.

Then, just as Romney was looking stronger—and more moderate—late in the campaign, Obama got an endorsement from Colin Powell, perhaps the country’s most iconic centrist. As if that wasn’t enough, Hurricane Sandy sparked a politically valuable bromance between the president and Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey. The storm also led to an endorsement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who said that, in Sandy’s wake, he wanted a president who took the problem of climate change seriously.

“Give me generals who know something about tactics and strategy,” said Napoleon Bonaparte, “but best of all give me generals who are lucky.” Was Barack Obama in 2012 simply a lucky general? Or was there something more at work than mere good fortune?

While Obama’s rise through state and national politics was marked by key moments of serendipity, he time and again exhibited a pattern of meticulous planning—laying the groundwork for, and preparing to take full advantage of, whatever good fortune came his way. “What sets the really good politicians apart from the average ones is the ability to recognize opportunities, prepare for it, and capitalize on it,” says Chris Sautter, a longtime political consultant who did early polling for Obama as he was plotting his political ascent.

As a state senator, for instance, Obama made a savvy, forward-thinking move: he managed to get the lines of his district redrawn, pushing its boundaries north into neighborhoods populated by affluent white liberals. By then, he was already eyeing a Senate seat and understood he would need a broader base of support.

In January 2003, Obama jumped into a crowded Democratic-primary race. The leading candidate, multimillionaire Blair Hull, looked like a shoo-in. That was until his divorce papers were unsealed, revealing an allegation that he’d threatened to kill his wife. The revelation was certainly an advantage for Obama—but once it happened, Obama was poised to benefit because of the broad constituency of blacks and wealthy liberals he had begun putting together as a state senator.

In the general election, Obama was pitted against Jack Ryan, a telegenic banker whom many considered the frontrunner. But Ryan’s candidacy imploded when his divorce records were aired publicly. They revealed that Ryan had pressured his wife to accompany him to sex clubs. With Ryan out of the race, Republicans were left with eccentric conservative Alan Keyes. Obama sailed to victory.

Even Obama knew he had been lucky in the campaign. “[T]here was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune,” he would later write in The Audacity of Hope. “I was an outlier; a freak; to political insiders, my victory proved nothing.”

Before winning the election, Obama had one more bit of serendipity. Aides to John Kerry, who was then the Democratic standard-bearer, reached out to Obama to offer him an invitation to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic convention in Boston. But here again, it was Obama’s assiduous preparation that put him in a position to exploit his good luck. Despite his rich baritone, Obama had not always been a riveting speaker; he was too earnest and wonky. Yet, by the time he ran for the Senate, he’d carefully studied the cadences of black preachers and teamed up with David Axelrod, who counseled him to be a more emotive orator.

For all of Obama’s fortune in drawing weak, scandal-prone opponents, he finally drew the short straw when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. Going up against the mighty Clinton machine was a true proving ground. And prevailing was another indication that Obama’s rise represented something more complicated than a freakish alignment of the stars.

Arguably, Obama got lucky again in the general election, when his opponent John McCain looked erratic by suspending his campaign following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But what may have been politically fortuitous in the short term was a millstone around his neck once he was elected. The economy was losing 700,000 jobs a month, and if Obama didn’t find a way to break the trend, the country was in real danger of falling into a depression.

Yet Obama, who had spent the transition reading biographies of Lincoln and FDR, understood that crises also gave presidents opportunities. So while the sick economy would course through his entire term, obscuring many of his most impressive achievements, he was also laying the foundation for his political salvation.

One of the toughest decisions he had to make early on was whether to bail out Detroit. The country was suffering from sticker shock and simmering over government bailouts. And yet Obama and his advisers understood that letting GM collapse could have led to the loss of as many as a million jobs. What they probably also knew was that the president’s reelection might end up hinging on the northern belt of Ohio, which is heavily dependent on the automobile industry.

In the fall of 2009, Obama was at a low moment in his presidency. Populist rage was exploding over Obamacare and bailouts, fueling the rise of the Tea Party; the president’s poll numbers were plunging to new lows; and the White House was already fearing losing Congress in 2010. According to Jonathan Alter’s The Promise, with another critical health-care vote looming, Rahm Emanuel asked Obama, as the two men sat together in the Oval Office, “Are you feeling lucky, Mr. President?” Without missing a beat the president responded: “My name is Barack Obama, and I’m sitting here. So yeah, I’m feeling pretty lucky.” Six months later, health-care reform passed Congress with the slimmest of margins and no Republican support.

The commando operation that led to the death of Osama bin Laden has been characterized by some as Obama’s greatest stroke of fortune. After all, had it gone awry, it could have been a catastrophe for Obama’s presidency and American morale. But in many ways the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, was the classic example of opportunity meeting preparation. First, a strong argument can be made that the chance to get bin Laden only came about because Obama personally reenergized the hunt. Bin Laden’s trail had gone cold, and the Bush administration’s efforts had grown listless. Almost as soon as he came into office, Obama got the word out that finding bin Laden was a top priority. He began pushing his national-security team to come up with creative, new approaches to the manhunt, and once the intelligence community received its first big break, Obama and his team pursued a data-driven review of their options that would have made Romney proud. The final decision to launch the assault was not a cavalier role of the dice; it was a calculated risk backed up by one of the most elaborate and meticulous intelligence operations in American history.

The killing of bin Laden was a stunning military and moral victory for the country. But for Obama, governing at a time of such extreme partisan animus and still coping with a torpid economy, a second term was hardly assured. No president since 1936 had won reelection with unemployment above 7.2 percent. Once again, however, Obama was blessed by the weakness of his rivals. And once again he had the skill to exploit it.

The GOP primary field was a freak show that turned into a circular firing squad, which along the way managed to alienate all of the key constituencies Democrats had put together in their 2008 victory: women, Latinos, and even a healthy portion of the white working class, increasingly embittered by rising economic inequality. Obama made the most of the opportunities presented by this Republican rush to the right. To take one example: when Texas Gov. Rick Perry flared up as a brief challenge, Romney responded by taking a hard line on immigration and adding the infelicitous term “self-deportation” to the political lexicon. Hispanic voters were offended, and Obama savvily took the opportunity to solidify their support by unilaterally pushing through a version of the Dream Act—which halted deportation for as many as a million young, otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants. On Election Day, not surprisingly, Hispanic voters overwhelmingly opted for Obama.

Romney’s most important self-inflicted wound came in the form of the infamous “47 percent” video, in which he wrote off nearly half the electorate as moochers. Uncanny good luck for Obama? Partly. But the president had also carefully prepared to take advantage of this kind of divine intervention. Going back to the earliest days of the campaign, Obama and his political team had decided their best plan of attack against Romney was to paint him as an avatar of the 1 percent, the Thurston Howell of the private-equity business. The tape played right into a narrative that the Obama campaign had already laid down—giving it instant resonance. “It reinforced the whole case they had spent months laying the foundation for,” says David Corn, the Mother Jones reporter who broke the story.

One of the key traits that allows Obama to capitalize on good fortune is his tendency to take the long view of politics. The Colin Powell endorsement is a case in point. The general’s benediction came at the best possible moment, as Obama was trying to build steam heading into the last two weeks of the campaign. In that sense, it may have appeared lucky. But Obama had been consulting with Powell closely throughout his term. The two men met frequently in quiet White House sessions on a wide range of national-security issues, sometimes to the consternation of the Pentagon brass. There are few Washington wise men with whom the president is closer. Powell’s endorsement was likely not in question— only its timing.

As Republicans lick their wounds in the wake of their electoral drubbing, they may be tempted to blame their woes on Obama’s luck. But that would be self-defeating. They’d be better off finding solace in the fact this is the last time they’ll have to run against Barack Obama, a man who is so skilled at both creating and seizing on good fortune. “Obama is a preparation freak,” says one member of his cabinet, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He makes his own luck.”

Courtesy: Newsweek

November 11, 2012
This government cannot fight corruption

NNPC is a cesspool of corruption

Contrary to the thinking in some places, it is greed, not poverty, which leads to corruption; corruption, in turn, then produces poverty that proves intractable if we try to address it through the distortions caused by corruption itself. Corruption causes its apostles to place self interest above the interest of the whole community, state or country and to become totally confused about the priorities that they should be pursuing in their positions of responsibility and influence.’ Those were the exact words of Ambassador (Dr) Christopher Kolade in his lecture on: POSSESSORS AT THE GATE’ which he gave as Guest Lecturer at the Golden Jubilee anniversary of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile –Ife, on Thursday, 8 November, 2012.

I had actually completed my week’s article a day earlier knowing I had to honour my invitation to that august occasion holding at Ile-Ife but a considerable part of all that had to change after listening to the world acclaimed Management guru and Diplomat. Having finished listening to him, I decided that this article should be more pedagogical than excoriatry. This is not to suggest that corrupt elements in our country do not deserve being thoroughly denounced for the horrors they put us through. It is rather my hope that bringing Dr Kolade’s lecture to the public space will make them see the futlity of their acts and spur some Pauline conversion into probity in them..

Said Dr Kolade: ‘In Nigeria, we possess a land that has been created by Almighty God, and, into which He has poured endowments of such superior quality that its human occupants should have no difficulty accessing the basic requirements for living a reasonably good life. The resources of this nation, he wrote, to which human beings have added very insignificant value, are more than enough to take good care of our true needs and that we can earn the respect of others through our performance rather than by how much wealth we display.’ In his view, ‘as soon as man begins to look for ways of feeding his greed, he enters a territory of discomfort. Whenever man tries to eat more than his system requires; whenever man puts on more clothes than are appropriate for the prevailing weather conditions; if he tries to ride two horses –or drive two vehicles at the same time, his situation becomes unsustainable. Concluding he said: ‘By the same token, trying to acquire more material wealth than one needs merely adds to ones troubles’.

These are the very things our rapacious political elite, especially of the PDP clan, and those they use to perpetrate and safeguard corruption in this country do not seem to appreciate.

Those trying to rubbish the Ribadu committee report, and who egregiously insulted the President to his face, confident they are above official rebuke, are to that Task Force, exactly what the one before them is to the House Report on the oil subsidy scam. They are nothing but mere quislings and lackeys of the Jonathan government but it still must come as a great surprise that otherwise respectable persons, who have chalked up truly distinguished service to the nation, could permit their integrity to be so easily roasted. Nothing confirms their slave assignment more than the claim by Dr Doyin Okupe, the President’s spokesperson, that the report required full assent of all members –confirming that subterranean reports of goings on in the committee were being passed on to the presidency. His statement to the effect ‘that the committee needed to have some clarifications and due process from the originating ministry’ and the minister’s confirmation that she has set up a committee to reconcile the committee’s perspectives with that of a guy who did not attend the committee meetings for any length of time, merely confirms A C N’s early fears that the government was only shopping for men of integrity to leverage on in their so-called anti-corruption efforts. But one should have thought they knew Ribadu better.

Given how effectively the Ribadu report shriveled the integrity of both the government and that of PDP as a party, the co-ordinated attempt to rubbish the report should not come as a surprise. Nigerians have come to know that under their watch, i.e, since 2001 up to 2011, the country has lost about N16 trillion and that the Petroleum Minister,at her whim and caprice, but like some before her, awards oil blocks without due process. No wonder the U.S Council on Foreign Relations says the PDP lives and thrives solely on rentiering from the oil and gas sector. With the country’s entire security apparatti fully under its authority, and, plus additional muscle from erstwhile militants, daily oil theft, says the report, has now reached an alarming rate. This must be the height of any government’s incompetence. Without a doubt, if the forever smart Petroleum Minister was so keen on appointing those two members to the highly lucrative membership of the NNPC board, why was it so hard for her and the President to insist that they both resign their membership of the Ribadu Committee? After all, this is a committee they both tout as important, even strategic, to reforming the oil and gas industry. At the rate this government recruits otherwise well regarded individuals to their ineffectual, anti-corruption feints, only to attempt to mess them up, there will come a time soon when fewer numbers of men and women of integrity will be available for use in these their serpentine schemes

Truth be told, and Ledum Mitee, Chairman of the NIETI has since confirmed this, President Jonathan actually did not need a Ribadu Task Force to tell him he sits atop the most corrupt phase in the entire life of the NNPC. And without a doubt, I make bold to say that it is a consequence of his contesting the 2011 Presidential election which he ought not to have dared given that he participated in the discussions/ meetings at which his party, the PDP, approved rotational presidency. That precisely is the juncture at which corruption took over in the country. I am not by this suggesting that he introduced corruption; far from it, but given the enormous cost at which his victory was secured, it became obvious there must be a pay back time. And the election financiers have remained totally unrelenting. After all, nothing goes for nothing. They will not stop until they bankrupt this government or liquidate the nation itself. They are behind the oil subsidy scam just as they will be ready to do anything to vitiate any Jonathan attempt to sanitise the oil industry, in particular. There is currently the notorious case of a company, presumably not registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission, but which allegedly got paid oil subsidy in two tranches with its name conspicuously left unannounced to the Nigerian public. It was also the same reason the President gave Nigerians the ungodly, 2012, New Year gift of removing the so-called oil subsidy with all the attendant consequences on the citizenry.

Report after report has shown that the NNPC is nothing but a cesspool of corruption and long before the Ribadu report, NEITI, a statutory body authorized to conduct forensic audits of the Nigerian oil and gas industry, has laid bare the stinking organisation that goes by that name. For instance, between 1999-2008, it conducted three cycles of forensic audits each of which showed gross debauchery but because PDP is all about rub my back, I rub yours, nothing came out of those reports to conduct which so much money must have been expended. NEITI has reported a loss of $9.8 billion or N1.373 Trillion during that period in recoverable funds which should have been paid into the federation account; yet states are languishing for lack of much needed funds. Or to what extent can a state tax its impoverished citizenry in search of enhanced IGR?

To conclude in the words of Dr Kolade,’ if these leaders will see themselves as gatekeepers –custodians, not only of our material fortunes, but, more importantly, as guardians of our values and standards’, it should be possible for them to rethink their predatory and acquisitive nature which includes storing riches for their unborn generations, like the biblical fool, not knowing who, in the end, will inherit it. And in the words of Pastor E.A. Adeboye, they should better know that all these – their wealth and possessions – are worth nothing to God and should therefore change unless they want to head to eternal fire..

November 11, 2012
’Aso Ebi’ for Obama

Lest I forget, we have to mark this victory of our ‘son’ who has been given another shot to lead the world in a big way during his inauguration in January. Towards this, we have organised a lot of activities, including performances by different masquerades that will entertain at the occasion. The fuel subsidy thieves and the beneficiaries of the scam are not left out as they are expected to cough up part of their ill-gotten wealth that our government has the wisdom but lacks the courage to collect from them.

Yours sincerely is in close contact with President Obama’s kith and kin in Kenya and I can authoritatively tell you that I have the mandate as their sole representative in Nigeria to collect money for the ‘Aso Ebi’ (identical dress). If you are interested (as I guess you must be), please send the money ($500 only) for the dress to this account: Bank 419, account name: Pro-Fraud Monsters, account number 000419. Limited stock available; so pay now to avoid the last minute rush! Only those wearing the ‘Aso Ebi’ will be admitted into the venue of the inauguration. And, please, don’t allow yourself to be conned; ignore others who may purport to be rendering the same selfless service for ‘our son’. Yours sincerely is the only accredited person given that franchise in Nigeria. See you there!

November 11, 2012
Obama as Uber-man

The superman finally came to the American supermarket this past week. It is the rise of Uber-Man, a human phenomenon that transcends race, class and religion. Please permit the special coinage, a conflation of German and English. The Uber-Man is a superhuman being , but not in the classical German sense. It is an ordinary man who rose to extraordinary heights by capturing the moral imagination and better aspirations of his society.

There is something infinitely satisfying when good people finish first. It reaffirms our hope in the essential goodness of humanity and the possibility of human redemption. It speaks to the possibilities of paradise on earth, a quest which has resulted in much revolutionary strife and bloodletting in human history. In the permanent struggle between the good man of Rousseau and the cynical skeptic of Voltaire; between the wise savant of Obatala and the hardy warlord of Ogun, it is always reassuring to see Homo sapiens on the rise.

In every human society, there are forces for good and forces for evil. In the perpetual struggle between agents of darkness and servants of light, much depends on the structural and ethical configuration of the society. There are nations and there are nations. Some nations are structurally configured for the ascendancy of brute force and brutish amoral characters. These are the hell-holes on earth whose denizens are serving out some divine interdiction. It is always good to see a nation put its better foot forward, to see the collective good reassert itself. Goodliness is next to godliness.

To be sure, America is not a perfect society. No human society is as yet a perfect society. It is always wise to have a sense of perspective. When people make noise about America’s unenviable and unflattering past, all they need to do is to compare it with other societies, particularly theirs. Humankind is not a fallen angel but a rising ape. As Walter Benjamin famously puts it, there is no record of civilization which is not at the same time a record of barbarity. From the Egyptian pyramids to the American Pentagon, there is no human monument which is not at the same time a silent tribute to man’s inhumanity to mankind.

The good fortune of America is its capacity for ceaseless self-surpassing and endless self-invention. This is so because America is a nation founded by romantic intellectuals and starry-eyed idealists who believed against overwhelming evidence and their own innate disposition and inner judgement that all people are created equal. Once that benchmark has been fixed, it is left to ordinary and super-ordinary men and women to slug it out and slog towards the ideal. What a struggle that has been in America in the last three hundred years, from the civil war to civil rights protests.

These are the epic contentions and the ceaseless fire-fights for emancipation and freedom that have culminated in the Obama revolution. It was a close run thing. America is still bitterly divided and fractured along critical fault lines. For a moment, Obama himself appeared to have stumbled and faltered. There were moments when he seemed to have lost the script altogether. But he never lost his decency, his compassion for the disadvantaged, his unfailing politeness and courteousness and the extraordinary courage in face of adversity that has defined his life.

Had Obama gone under in the face of a determined onslaught, it would have been a cruel unraveling. Had the revolution been abridged, it would have been a great loss to America and humanity at large. The minimal strides of America towards a just and fairer society would have suffered a terrible set back. The forces of rightwing reaction were already celebrating before they succumbed to a stinging sucker punch.

The good thing about electoral revolutions is that they flow from the ballot and not the bullet; and they tend to unite society rather than divide it. Obama was elected not because he was a Black person, but in spite of that fact. The Black alone could not have elected him. It was a pan-racial, pan-class and pan-religious affair. It was the triumph of the good American. It was victory for the Uber-man as represented by Obama.

It would be foolish and presumptuous in the extreme to assume that under Barack Obama, America has suddenly become a fairer and more egalitarian society, or that it has lost its warrior-state mantra. The dogged pursuit and swift execution of Osama bin Laden is an awesome display of the bloody-minded and chilling resolve of a super-security state. But there is a conscious movement in the right direction. This is the lesson for all fractured societies and nations. Thye next four years should be interesting, that is if Obama survives a possible violent backlash from the loony right. We congratulate America and the Americans.

November 11, 2012
Looks like the best is long since gone

People, our glorious past is clearly behind us and nothing but a glorious chaos stands before us

One of the best things about looking over your shoulders is that it helps you measure your next step in relation to your previous one. If the previous steps have been too small, you can gently coax and persuade your feet to please take larger size steps so you can get to your neighbour’s yard before nightfall. If, as happens to most of us, the feet appear to be going faster than the brain, then you find yourself again gently persuading your feet to go, shall we say, a little slower so that you don’t find yourself ‘putting your feet in it’ too much. That’s when a husband goes at the wife: ‘Did I ask you to write to the president about my financial troubles?’ ‘Did you have to proclaim to the whole world that I was having financial troubles?’ ‘Did I even tell you that I was having financial troubles just because your house keeping money is short by a few miserable thousands? You this woman, be careful yourself o; don’t be putting your foot in your mouth o!’

I am aware though that most people who have to look over their shoulder do so because there is someone aiming an invisible rifle at them and they don’t know which of their fat shadows that rifle is going to shoot at. And it’s mostly because they have done something wrong, such as performing illegal clones of themselves, their girlfriends or their spouses. Or, it may be because they stole some meat from the soup pot. No, I’m joking. Mostly, it is because they probably stole some meat from the soup-pot.

When we in Nigeria look over our shoulder, we are not looking out for any rifles (those come from within) nor are we looking out for how not to put our feet in it. No, none of that. We look over our shoulder in nostalgia at the age of our innocence. The age of our innocence was the age when we all believed that we had a country, a place we could call our own, a place where no one in particular felt out of place. It was a place that accommodated everyone’s names within its walls without flinching. It was also a place where one’s brawns, mixed with a little brain, got one a good living off the land.

Then, there was no creed, no religion, no race that was looked down on. I remember growing up in a vigorous Kaduna in the swinging sixties with every tribe and religion in Nigeria represented on my street and with very little consciousness of the differences between us. Indeed, those differences were for referential purposes only. Now, it appears that Kaduna has become a hotbed of a one-sided religious passion and fervour, a place where people are regularly killed in the name of God. From my recent visit to the city, I could see that the place has indeed grown, physically. However, there was a sombreness to it that could not be shaken off as my guide pointed out the areas that I used to know so well, buildings old and buildings new, all of which were there but now wearing colours of great unease. This is the new Nigeria. Yes, I saw that too, the New Nigerian Newspaper (NNN) building where I had some teeth cut in writing and reporting in many months of training. It was just sitting there where it had always been, but now forlorn, the building that is, not my teeth. Gone was its vibrancy.

Barack Obama’s recent second victory acceptance speech titled ‘The Best is yet to come…’ includes the following:

I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you live. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.

I want to believe the forefathers of the Nigerian state also had something vaguely resembling this in mind. I think they sort of hoped that you and I, wherever you may be reading this, may be able to stand anywhere, shoulder to shoulder across our various divides, doing our best to raise this country up from its supine position. In this venture, what should count are the things which will not let anyone down in moments of stress. No, not a rich parent, no; it is character and skill. These were the things which marked our glorious past, the things we now peep at over our shoulders hoping that somehow they would once again catch up with us and even catapult themselves right into our present and future like magic.

Sadly, our present is riddled with an insatiable craze for money that has every one of us tearing our hairs and eyes out as we aim for each other’s jugular. The civil servant preys on the innocent populace, the teachers on their hapless students, the traders and businessmen on their buying public and the police and politicians on the entire country. Believe me, you cannot get a more disorganised food chain than this, certainly not what God had in mind, but who am I to complain. Good thing is, we are all partakers of the results of this penkelemesi. Daily, I find that I have to weave through all the barracudas to get a few comforts. Thanks very much; I get by with prayers and fasting. But it gets worse; Masters and Ph. D holders are even now seeking to become drivers in Dangote’s firm. Ha!

Now, that is just something, isn’t it, when intellectuals are vying for positions that require lower-level skills. But these strange goings-on are not altogether new, are they? They have been happening for a long time. It’s just that they seem to be getting stranger by the day. First, we had military rule. Ideally, the security is supposed to bring up the rear in any organisation. But here we were, rear-ended and up-ended, we stood on our heads with our feet in the air for so long we learnt to stop thinking. For one thing, we were even afraid to think lest we be arrested for that treacherous exercise.

Then we had marauders called politicians, who looked like they had been trained by the devil himself, take over the reins of the nation’s politics. Since they came, they have not only been looting, they have been mauling the country’s spirit, norms and ethics to bits and pieces, going at the tearing like maniacs. For one thing, they wake up from their nationally sponsored slumber only when they hear money mentioned. For another, they have succeeded in planting the seeds of tribal and religious bigotry deep within each of us so much so that everywhere you go, you are required to state clearly where on earth you come from and what creed you belong to. It is not enough that you are simply called a Nigerian. There used to be the Nigerian, now there is just a northerner, a south-easterner or a south-westerner.

People, our glorious past is clearly behind us and before us stands nothing but glorious chaos. Every group is now engaged in battering the other, propelled by fears and primitive, destructive or acquisitive instincts or all. No nation can survive on that. It is only when a people’s fears lead it to a more altruistic collaboration that it can get understanding. With understanding will come individual and collective wisdom which can lead the group out of the path of destruction into the realm of statehood.

November 11, 2012
Falling for Obama

We should learn from his election

We have fallen for Obama, again. We might as well admit it. The man makes our hearts go pitter-patter. He did it on Super Tuesday when the United States of America, a country brimming with over 300m people, went to the polls and re-elected him. Barack Obama softened us all up that day, just as he did when he made history four years ago, sending us into a swoon.

Late 2008 when he was first elected the name ‘Obama’ was on most Nigerians’ lips. We mouthed it everywhere. It boomed in the marketplace, echoed in the barber’s shop, reverberated in the offices. The bus driver knew it and, in some cases, even had it painted on his vehicle. Back then I feared we might also print Obama’s face on our textile materials. Some rich and influential people in our midst ate dinner over the name, even claiming to raise funds on its owner’s behalf, an assertion from which the Obama organisation distanced itself.

Congratulatory messages poured out from everywhere. Our president hailed him. Our senators praised him. The House reps expressed their adoration. The entire nation fell for him.

It was not for nothing. Obama was not just the first African-American to preside over the affairs of the most powerful nation on earth; he was also the first first-generation African-Americans to do so. His father was a Kenyan and died as one. So Obama achieved what many thought was impossible. He lifted our spirits. The smart politician that he is, Obama did not campaign on racial lines but when he spoke of hope in 2008, the African-American community also understood it to mean there was hope for them. So did the Nigerian, and indeed, the African everywhere. If Obama could aspire to such heights, so could we. If Obama could win, so could we. The man of magic renewed hope, and we could not help but say, or at least, feel ‘we can’.

Last week, Obama did it again, besting his hard-fighting Republican challenger Mitt Romney. He sent us all to cloud nine, again, even though much of the hope he spoke about four years ago had slipped away with lost jobs. We were relieved when he rallied to win one of the tightest presidential races in memory with a comfortable margin, after sliding in the poll ratings following a disappointing performance in the crucial first debate with Romney. As he was re-elected, Nigerians were congratulating one another as though the winner were of Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa ancestry or of any of our tribes. President Goodluck Jonathan has since fired off a congratulatory message, as have our lawmakers. Other leaders have waxed lyrical, praising the system that produced last week’s election and our own Obama as president. One of them wished we could have that sort of election soon.

Even in defeat Romney proved no less a leader. He looked forward to a new and better America under Obama. He not only showed much respect for the man who frustrated his attempt to rule America but also said he would pray for the success of the re-elected president. That was impressive.

Obama was unmatchable in his victory speech, proving that words are as much a crucial aspect of great leadership as is action. He praised not just the man who nearly denied him a second term but also the man’s family which produced Romney’s father, who after serving as Michigan governor also ran for the presidency himself. Obama saluted the Romney family for their public service to the American people. The president praised his campaign organisation with enough words and, later tears, to inspire them the way money could not. To his workers he showed respect; to his wife and family love.

From the eyes of his country men and women he drew tears of powerful, positive emotions when he told them the task of perfecting their union was moving forward. He spoke of the larger American family which rose from “war and depression” to the “heights of hope” and of a people free to “pursue our individual dreams”. He praised the voters, whether they voted for or against him. He reminded Americans that it is not their wealth that makes them rich, nor do they derive their strength from the country’s superior military. Obama said their much sought-after universities and cultures do not make Americans exceptional. What does, he told them, is their bond.

As he spoke, sustained cheers forced him to pause.

Obama urged his people to be stubborn in hope even when situations nudged them to give up. He dismissed politics as sometimes divisive, as we all saw in his famous duel with Romney, who got more white votes than he did. Obama rallied his compatriots, calling their country the greatest on earth.

They lapped it all up. And so did we, outsiders. We loved his speech prowess, probably even envied the ability of a fellow black to carry along such a consequential country. For different reasons we fell for Obama.

But what use is falling for him if we cannot learn from him? Will our politics ever produce respect among our politicians? Without aping Obama in speech, can our leaders truly rally our people with words even when action fails them? Obama said the best was yet to come for Americans. Is our best also yet to come or is it behind us?

November 11, 2012
Nigeria on my mind as Americans voted

US election shows we still have a long way to go

Nigeria was on my mind when the Americans went to the polls on November 6 to elect a new president. Of course, I had expected the election to be peaceful and devoid of deployment of any troops. Of course too, I had no doubt that a winner was going to emerge without much rancour unlike what we have here in Nigeria. Of course I had also not expected the Americans to contest the outcome of the polls; the winner being magnanimous in victory even as the loser was expected to accept his fate with equanimity, realising that there is always a next time. This is of course because they see the process as free and transparent.

All these came to pass by the time a winner was emerging Tuesday night, when results from areas that mattered most had been declared, such that it was mere formality by the time the entire results came in. Incumbent President Barack Obama of the Democratic Party trounced his challenger, Mitt Romney of the Republican Party by 60,782,354 votes (50.4 percent) to Romney’s 57,884,882 (48 percent). Obama also floored Romney at the Electoral College with 303 votes against Romney’s 206. All Obama needed was 270 of the 538 Electoral College votes and by the time he had crossed the 270 votes mark, it was clear he was the winner of the election, even though his popular votes were as at then less than that of Romney.

This was a thing that unsettled people like Donald Trump, a well-known Obama hater who called the election process a ‘disaster for democracy’. “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” he tweeted. Trump called for a revolution. “More votes equals a loss…revolution!” Trump said in another tweet. Trump represented the typical American business interest but he knew the limits of his frustration as he reportedly deleted his angry reaction from Tweeters.

I am sure many of our top politicians watched the proceedings from the comfort of their mansions, courtesy of the CNN, Al Jazeera and other cable networks. The same thing happened in many other countries because America’s presidential election is not an American affair alone; it is a global affair. Everyone was interested in the outcome because it has ramifications not for Americans alone but for the world. For instance, Nigeria has joined other countries in congratulating Obama. This is despite the fact that America has reduced its crude imports from Nigeria by over 700,000 barrels per day. Obama has America uppermost in his mind in whatever policy necessitated this drastic cut in crude imports from Nigeria.

One question that I kept asking myself is what lesson did our politicians learn from the election? This might be a rhetorical question in the sense that that was not the first of such rancour-free, transparent election they ever watched. Although it took some time for Romney himself to come up with his concession speech, the fact is that he still did and his speech was short, sharp and straight to the point. He said he had congratulated the president on his reelection; greeted his (Obama’s) wife, their children and even supporters. You could see in his speech, despite the fact that he lost, that America was also uppermost in his mind. “The nation, as you know, is at a critical point. At a time like this, we can’t risk partisan bickering and political posturing….I so wish – I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction. But the nation chose another leader. And, so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and this great nation”, Romney said.

This was an election in which all interested Americans worldwide voted. No one made a fetish of polls as we are wont to do here. And really, what is the big deal in organising elections? Elections become akin to bones in the mouth of old people when there are sinister motives. If people who voted from across the globe were able to collate the results without disputes, how come those of us in Nigeria give all kinds of excuses, like bad terrain, to delay election results? It is in the process of waiting for results from so-called difficult terrains that figures are falsified; that is if the entire results do not get lost on the waters. The current US population is above 300 million and we had slightly over 118milion who voted during the election, representing a turn-out of about 60 per cent of eligible voters. In Nigeria, we are never close to the 118million that voted in that election, yet, we hardly get it right. And that is deliberate. That, too, is the reason why people hardly perform after ‘winning’ elections here.

Now, tell me why Obama would not perform when he knows that he fought a battle of his life to remain in office. In the heat of the electioneering, he joked that he had grown gray hairs in the White House. That is evidence of hard work, it is also a lamentation that he has not been able to do as much as he loved to. How many of our own elected officers have grown such gray hairs for Nigeria? A colleague jocularly said what they grow in Nigeria are pot bellies. That is what leaders who are working hard in the wrong direction (like our own leaders) grow. It is only in a few places that we have such keenly contested election here. Most people just come into office here via election results that had been written long before the polls; all that is required is for the favoured candidate to work to the answer at the polls. Sometimes they are so overzealous about it that they end up having more voters than people registered to vote. And our legal luminaries throw ethics to the dustbins; dust their gowns and prepare for legal contests that end up as no contest after all. Meanwhile, they’ve made their billions!

’Aso Ebi’ for Obama

est I forget, we have to mark this victory of our ‘son’ who has been given another shot to lead the world in a big way during his inauguration in January. Towards this, we have organised a lot of activities, including performances by different masquerades that will entertain at the occasion. The fuel subsidy thieves and the beneficiaries of the scam are not left out as they are expected to cough up part of their ill-gotten wealth that our government has the wisdom but lacks the courage to collect from them.
Yours sincerely is in close contact with President Obama’s kith and kin in Kenya and I can authoritatively tell you that I have the mandate as their sole representative in Nigeria to collect money for the ‘Aso Ebi’ (identical dress). If you are interested (as I guess you must be), please send the money ($500 only) for the dress to this account: Bank 419, account name: Pro-Fraud Monsters, account number 000419. Limited stock available; so pay now to avoid the last minute rush! Only those wearing the ‘Aso Ebi’ will be admitted into the venue of the inauguration. And, please, don’t allow yourself to be conned; ignore others who may purport to be rendering the same selfless service for ‘our son’. Yours sincerely is the only accredited person given that franchise in Nigeria. See you there!

November 11, 2012
The Fortunate One

Sure, Obama’s lucky. He also relentlessly seizes his chances and makes every one of them count. By Daniel Klaidman

As heart-stricken Republicans tried to explain their unambiguous defeat by Barack Obama, some turned to the heavens. Hurricane Sandy, the explanation went, stopped Mitt Romney’s momentum in its tracks, gave Obama an exquisitely timed commander-in-chief moment, and blacked out media coverage of his opponent for several crucial days.

The hurricane was merely the latest reason to wonder: have the fates been smiling on Barack Obama? It’s hard to look at his stratospheric rise from obscure state senator to leader of the free world in just four years and not think that he might have benefited from a string of extremely good fortune.

True, Obama has faced plenty of obstacles in life. Unlike Mitt Romney, he was not born into great wealth; he is not a member of what Warren Buffett calls the “lucky sperm club.” And his race—not to mention a last name that is easily confused with Osama—undoubtedly hurt him with some voters as he ascended through American politics.

At the same time, think about the political luck that has come Obama’s way in the last year alone: in a race framed around fears of increasing economic inequality, the president drew an opponent who evoked the Monopoly millionaire. While Obama’s admen sought to portray their rival as a hopelessly out-of-touch plutocrat, Romney kept writing their copy. He tried to make a $10,000 bet during a debate, said he was “not concerned about the very poor,” and blithely wrote off 47 percent of the electorate as freeloaders. As he moved to the right to secure the Republican nomination, Romney got tangled up in sexual politics, suggesting that companies could deny women contraception. He offended Hispanics with his hardline stance on immigration. And on the night of the most important speech of his career—his address at the Republican convention—the spotlight was stolen from him by a buffoonish Clint Eastwood.

Then, just as Romney was looking stronger—and more moderate—late in the campaign, Obama got an endorsement from Colin Powell, perhaps the country’s most iconic centrist. As if that wasn’t enough, Hurricane Sandy sparked a politically valuable bromance between the president and Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey. The storm also led to an endorsement from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who said that, in Sandy’s wake, he wanted a president who took the problem of climate change seriously.

“Give me generals who know something about tactics and strategy,” said Napoleon Bonaparte, “but best of all give me generals who are lucky.” Was Barack Obama in 2012 simply a lucky general? Or was there something more at work than mere good fortune?

While Obama’s rise through state and national politics was marked by key moments of serendipity, he time and again exhibited a pattern of meticulous planning—laying the groundwork for, and preparing to take full advantage of, whatever good fortune came his way. “What sets the really good politicians apart from the average ones is the ability to recognize opportunities, prepare for it, and capitalize on it,” says Chris Sautter, a longtime political consultant who did early polling for Obama as he was plotting his political ascent.

As a state senator, for instance, Obama made a savvy, forward-thinking move: he managed to get the lines of his district redrawn, pushing its boundaries north into neighborhoods populated by affluent white liberals. By then, he was already eyeing a Senate seat and understood he would need a broader base of support.

In January 2003, Obama jumped into a crowded Democratic-primary race. The leading candidate, multimillionaire Blair Hull, looked like a shoo-in. That was until his divorce papers were unsealed, revealing an allegation that he’d threatened to kill his wife. The revelation was certainly an advantage for Obama—but once it happened, Obama was poised to benefit because of the broad constituency of blacks and wealthy liberals he had begun putting together as a state senator.

In the general election, Obama was pitted against Jack Ryan, a telegenic banker whom many considered the frontrunner. But Ryan’s candidacy imploded when his divorce records were aired publicly. They revealed that Ryan had pressured his wife to accompany him to sex clubs. With Ryan out of the race, Republicans were left with eccentric conservative Alan Keyes. Obama sailed to victory.

Even Obama knew he had been lucky in the campaign. “[T]here was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune,” he would later write in The Audacity of Hope. “I was an outlier; a freak; to political insiders, my victory proved nothing.”

Before winning the election, Obama had one more bit of serendipity. Aides to John Kerry, who was then the Democratic standard-bearer, reached out to Obama to offer him an invitation to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic convention in Boston. But here again, it was Obama’s assiduous preparation that put him in a position to exploit his good luck. Despite his rich baritone, Obama had not always been a riveting speaker; he was too earnest and wonky. Yet, by the time he ran for the Senate, he’d carefully studied the cadences of black preachers and teamed up with David Axelrod, who counseled him to be a more emotive orator.

For all of Obama’s fortune in drawing weak, scandal-prone opponents, he finally drew the short straw when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. Going up against the mighty Clinton machine was a true proving ground. And prevailing was another indication that Obama’s rise represented something more complicated than a freakish alignment of the stars.

Arguably, Obama got lucky again in the general election, when his opponent John McCain looked erratic by suspending his campaign following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But what may have been politically fortuitous in the short term was a millstone around his neck once he was elected. The economy was losing 700,000 jobs a month, and if Obama didn’t find a way to break the trend, the country was in real danger of falling into a depression.

Yet Obama, who had spent the transition reading biographies of Lincoln and FDR, understood that crises also gave presidents opportunities. So while the sick economy would course through his entire term, obscuring many of his most impressive achievements, he was also laying the foundation for his political salvation.

One of the toughest decisions he had to make early on was whether to bail out Detroit. The country was suffering from sticker shock and simmering over government bailouts. And yet Obama and his advisers understood that letting GM collapse could have led to the loss of as many as a million jobs. What they probably also knew was that the president’s reelection might end up hinging on the northern belt of Ohio, which is heavily dependent on the automobile industry.

In the fall of 2009, Obama was at a low moment in his presidency. Populist rage was exploding over Obamacare and bailouts, fueling the rise of the Tea Party; the president’s poll numbers were plunging to new lows; and the White House was already fearing losing Congress in 2010. According to Jonathan Alter’s The Promise, with another critical health-care vote looming, Rahm Emanuel asked Obama, as the two men sat together in the Oval Office, “Are you feeling lucky, Mr. President?” Without missing a beat the president responded: “My name is Barack Obama, and I’m sitting here. So yeah, I’m feeling pretty lucky.” Six months later, health-care reform passed Congress with the slimmest of margins and no Republican support.

The commando operation that led to the death of Osama bin Laden has been characterized by some as Obama’s greatest stroke of fortune. After all, had it gone awry, it could have been a catastrophe for Obama’s presidency and American morale. But in many ways the raid on Abbottabad, Pakistan, was the classic example of opportunity meeting preparation. First, a strong argument can be made that the chance to get bin Laden only came about because Obama personally reenergized the hunt. Bin Laden’s trail had gone cold, and the Bush administration’s efforts had grown listless. Almost as soon as he came into office, Obama got the word out that finding bin Laden was a top priority. He began pushing his national-security team to come up with creative, new approaches to the manhunt, and once the intelligence community received its first big break, Obama and his team pursued a data-driven review of their options that would have made Romney proud. The final decision to launch the assault was not a cavalier role of the dice; it was a calculated risk backed up by one of the most elaborate and meticulous intelligence operations in American history.

The killing of bin Laden was a stunning military and moral victory for the country. But for Obama, governing at a time of such extreme partisan animus and still coping with a torpid economy, a second term was hardly assured. No president since 1936 had won reelection with unemployment above 7.2 percent. Once again, however, Obama was blessed by the weakness of his rivals. And once again he had the skill to exploit it.

The GOP primary field was a freak show that turned into a circular firing squad, which along the way managed to alienate all of the key constituencies Democrats had put together in their 2008 victory: women, Latinos, and even a healthy portion of the white working class, increasingly embittered by rising economic inequality. Obama made the most of the opportunities presented by this Republican rush to the right. To take one example: when Texas Gov. Rick Perry flared up as a brief challenge, Romney responded by taking a hard line on immigration and adding the infelicitous term “self-deportation” to the political lexicon. Hispanic voters were offended, and Obama savvily took the opportunity to solidify their support by unilaterally pushing through a version of the Dream Act—which halted deportation for as many as a million young, otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants. On Election Day, not surprisingly, Hispanic voters overwhelmingly opted for Obama.

Romney’s most important self-inflicted wound came in the form of the infamous “47 percent” video, in which he wrote off nearly half the electorate as moochers. Uncanny good luck for Obama? Partly. But the president had also carefully prepared to take advantage of this kind of divine intervention. Going back to the earliest days of the campaign, Obama and his political team had decided their best plan of attack against Romney was to paint him as an avatar of the 1 percent, the Thurston Howell of the private-equity business. The tape played right into a narrative that the Obama campaign had already laid down—giving it instant resonance. “It reinforced the whole case they had spent months laying the foundation for,” says David Corn, the Mother Jones reporter who broke the story.

One of the key traits that allows Obama to capitalize on good fortune is his tendency to take the long view of politics. The Colin Powell endorsement is a case in point. The general’s benediction came at the best possible moment, as Obama was trying to build steam heading into the last two weeks of the campaign. In that sense, it may have appeared lucky. But Obama had been consulting with Powell closely throughout his term. The two men met frequently in quiet White House sessions on a wide range of national-security issues, sometimes to the consternation of the Pentagon brass. There are few Washington wise men with whom the president is closer. Powell’s endorsement was likely not in question— only its timing.

As Republicans lick their wounds in the wake of their electoral drubbing, they may be tempted to blame their woes on Obama’s luck. But that would be self-defeating. They’d be better off finding solace in the fact this is the last time they’ll have to run against Barack Obama, a man who is so skilled at both creating and seizing on good fortune. “Obama is a preparation freak,” says one member of his cabinet, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He makes his own luck.”

Courtesy: Newsweek

November 11, 2012