Category: Segun Ayobolu

In a robust and rigorous reaction to my submissions in the first part of this piece, a professor of Political Science and International Relations (formerly of the Abia State University but now an Executive Director with the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA), Professor Steve Egbo, disagreed with my views. Incidentally, that would apparently not be the first time he would respond to my column. As he wrote, “Good morning, Mr Segun. This is the second time I will be commenting on your article. You may still likely remember the first. As usual, you wrote in anger, but I am of the opinion that your column today in The Nation (Saturday), ‘Putin, the West and the rest of us (1)’ would have made a more interesting reading if you had allowed your angst against America and the West to be moderated more reasonably and less scathingly. My thinking is that you piled up a lot of things that are not tangentially related.”

Professor Egbo continued, “In a similar context, it seems that you brought in a lot of contradictions and juxtapositions just to convince yourself, and of course your readers, that America and her allies are no angels. I may agree with you on some of these bases though, but I will quickly point out that, at a comparative level, America has been a force for good much more than Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, Putin’s Russia and other dictatorships ever were or would have to be. Did you ever wonder what our world would have been if Adolph Hitler had won the race for the atomic bomb?”

While Professor Egbo vehemently condemned Putin’s war of aggression and territorial ambition in a 21st-century world, he also pointed out the Russian strongman’s error of judgement and strategic miscalculations in invading Ukraine hoping for a quick victory that has turned out to be completely misbegotten. I do not disagree fundamentally with his submissions.

My piece is no justification of strongman dictatorial rule even as the West struggles with the manifest crises of liberal democracy as their societies grapple with social and moral paralysis of ever-increasing gravity and intensity. Putin and other leaders of strong-arm dictatorships inevitably face eventual struggles for increasing democratic control of their governments by the majority of their peoples which is the dominant proclivity and inclination of mankind as indicated by the sweep of history across space and time.

The miscalculations of Putin in his aggression against Ukraine and the fallout of the aborted rebellion by the Wagner group of state-sponsored mercenaries, do not affect my thesis that “might is right” is the dominant rule in international relations and America and her Western allies are no exception to this dictum in their diplomatic practice. The Professor may well ask himself why America is not a signatory to the legal framework of the International Criminal Court and no American soldier can be brought to book under international law, no matter their perceived crimes.

In a book written over four decades ago entitled: ‘The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite,’ the polyvalent scholar, Chinweizu, gave a vivid and graphic historical depiction of the West’s inequitable and oppressive relationship with Africa over a period of five centuries; a relationship that cannot be exonerated from the continent’s current condition of underdevelopment, although the author launched “a damning and dangerous attack on Africa’s political and ruling elites who love to imitate the West, including copying bad ideas like wholesale liberalization and privatization of key sectors of the economy such as energy and water, which should be a preserve of the public sector.”

According to Wikipedia, Chinweizu dedicated his book “to victims of the West’s assault upon the rest of us, especially to Amerindians and aborigines of Australia who were exterminated and expropriated, millions of Africans who were enslaved in the Americas, countless Africans who died resisting European invasion and occupation, soldiers from the Third World who were conscripted to fight and protect western empires, Third World liberation fighters who have struggled for a better life for their people, and all of us who want to achieve a just, non-imperialist and enduring peace for all of mankind.” Chinweizu, it must also be said, was not sparing of the violent invasions, compulsory conversions, and slavery perpetrated in Africa by conquering Arab Muslims long before the European conquerors arrived on the continent.

We must be cautious in waxing lyrical about the West’s being a “force for good” in the world compared to the reprehensible dictatorships mentioned by Professor Egbo. Incidentally, Dr. Dapo Thomas, whose journal article on the Russo-Ukraine war, originally spurred this piece also has a benign view of the West’s benevolent and altruistic disposition as a force for democratic expansion in the world. Even then, Thomas cites Putin’s rationalization for his war of aggression against Ukraine and earlier on against Crimea and Georgia in its territorial sphere which were forcibly annexed by Russia.

According to Dr. Thomas, “Taking recourse to history and still trying to justify Russia’s anti-West policy, Putin reminded the West that it began its colonial policy back in the Middle Ages, followed it up with the global slave trade, the genocide of Indian tribes in America, the plunder of India, Africa, the wars of England and France against China. It was this that led to the opening of Ports for the opium trade.” In his words, “What they did was to put entire nations on drugs, purposefully exterminated entire ethnic groups for the sake of land and resources, staged a real hunt for people like animals. This is contrary to the very nature of man, truth, freedom, and justice.”

Even though Putin’s historical analysis in this regard can hardly be faulted, Dr. Thomas strongly denounces his military adventurism in the territories claimed by Russia thus, “Russia’s allusions to what the US and its Western allies did in Iraq, Libya, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Yemen, Belgrade, and Afghanistan would have been a very good justification for its actions in Ukraine. But unfortunately, while Russian invasions of Georgia, and Ukraine ended in a buffet of annexations of some parts of these places, the US and its allies never annexed any parts of the countries they had interventions in. Most times, the US and its allies would plant democracy, supervise the transition process; ensure the stability of the polity before withdrawing from those countries. This happened in Yugoslavia when Operation Allied Force of NATO destroyed the Yugoslav military infrastructure to halt the ethnic cleansing going on in Bosnia and Kosovo. Despite what was going on in Czechoslovakia, the US refused to intervene because it would constitute a rollback of communism in Eastern Europe. And it never wanted a collision or conflict with the former Soviet Union”.

It is open to debate about how many countries America and its Allies had succeeded in effectively transplanting democracy to in non-western lands. In any case, Saddam Hussein was a trusted and close ally of the US which armed Iraq in its war against Iran until relations soured between the two. Under the dictatorial Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, that country enjoyed harmonious relations with the US until the Islamic revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah. The US has shown no inclination to encourage democratization in Saudi Arabia, which is its close partner in the Middle East. But then, this is not to exculpate Putin for his citing historical cases of Western violence and aggression against others as a reason for exhibiting a similar disposition. Two wrongs do not make a right. He could as well have demonstrated his opposition to alleged aggressive behaviour by the West by behaving in a diametrically opposite manner showing higher ethical standards.

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But this does not preclude the fact that the US possesses the greatest potential and capacity to nudge the world towards the de-escalation of conflicts and, at least, the elimination of nuclear weapons in the short run. She is the preeminent global military power with considerable — and still unrivalled — economic power. In his 2004 book, “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire,” the historian, Neil Ferguson, depicts the extent of America’s military reach thus, “Commentators like to point out that the Pentagon’s budget is equal to the combined military budgets of the next 12 or 15 nations and that the US accounts for 40-45 percent of the defense spending of the world’s 189 states. Such fiscal measures, impressive though they sound, nevertheless underrate the lead currently enjoyed by American armed forces. On land, the United States has 9000 M1 Abram tanks. The rest of the world has nothing that can compete. At sea, the United States possesses nine ‘super carrier’ battle groups. The rest of the world has none. The United States is far ahead in the production of ‘smart’ missiles and pilotless high-altitude ‘drones’.”

The military position of the US must have significantly improved since the publication of this book in 2004.

Such a historically unprecedented constellation of military superpower can predispose any country to a hubris that can ultimately prove counterproductive. In 1966, the American legislator, Senator J. William Fulbright, published a book entitled ‘The Arrogance of Power’ in which he tried to urge on his countrymen the imperative of circumspection in the utilization of its immense powers. In his prescient words with specific regard to his country’s penchant for attempting to forcibly impose its democratic traditions on others, he wrote, “Traditional rulers, institutions, and ways of life have crumbled under the fatal impact of American wealth and power but they have not been replaced by new institutions and new ways of life, nor has their breakdown ushered in an era of democracy and development. It has rather ushered in an era of disorder and demoralization because in the course of destroying old ways of doing things, we have also destroyed the self-confidence and self-reliance without which no society can build indigenous institutions.”

While post-war Japan between 1945 and 1952 may have been an exception to Fulbright’s observation, his admonition speaks eloquently to developments in contemporary Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan among others following failed attempts at forced democratization projects in these countries by the West.

Understanding Russia’s adventurism in Crimea, Georgia, and Ukraine can benefit from the late political economist, Professor Samir Amin’s insightful perspectives in his book published in 2006 entitled “Beyond US hegemony?: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World.” According to him, “The ruling class in the US freely proclaims that it will not ‘tolerate’ the reconstitution of any economic or military power capable of challenging its global dominion. To this end, it has given itself the right to wage ‘preventive wars’, with three main potential adversaries in mind. First, the dismemberment of the Russian Federation following that of the USSR is a major objective strategic objective for the US. Until now, the Russian ruling class does not appear to have understood this… Has Putin finally understood this? Is Russia beginning to shake off its illusions?”

Samir Amin continues, “Second, the huge size and economic success of China are such that the US is seriously worried and here too has a strategic goal of dismembering the country. Europe comes third in the list, as seen by the new lords of the earth. Up till now, however, the North American establishment does not appear to be so uneasy about its relations with Europe”. No matter our differing ideological inclinations may be, we must not dismiss, out of hand, contending prisms for perceiving and comprehending contemporary global realities.

Professor Peter Ekeh contends that critical to appreciating the evolution and challenges of federalism in post-colonial Nigeria is the understanding of the disputes between the immigrant Fulani leaders and the Hausa Kings that resulted in the Jihad revolt of 1804. In his words, these disputes between the two sides “are worth re-examination because the themes of the disputes between the Hausa kings, who stuck to their native traditions, and the revolutionary cleric, Uthman Dan Fodio, appeared to have resurfaced in our own times, after almost two hundred years after those events. The essential accusation by Uthman Dan Fodio and his younger brother, Abdullahi Muhammed, was that the Hausa Kings were not faithful to the principles and tradition of governance established in Islam despite the fact that most of the Hausa had become Moslems for more than four centuries before 1804”.

A major grouse of Uthman Dan Fodio and the Fulani leaders of the Jihad was that the Hausa Kings were weak sovereigns who did not effectively and firmly enforce the hegemony of Islamic governance on their domains. Unlike the more liberal standards and practices of the Hausa Kings who subordinated the ruler to the state, the Islamic structures of governance as exemplified by the Sokoto Caliphate perceived the state and government as private property of the rulers. A significant point that Ekeh makes is that there were striking similarities between governance traditions in the pre-Jihad Hausa states and those in existence in indigenous states and empires in Yoruba land, Benin, Oyo and other areas of present-day Middle and Southern Nigeria.

Ekeh distills three principles of governance that separated pre-jihadist Hausa states and the indigenous states and empires of the West African region on the one hand and the post revolutionary Islamic caliphate. The first was the question of the ownership of the state. In his words, “The premier indigenous principle of government that was challenged by the Fulani Revolution was about the ownership of the state. Who owns the state? According to the theory in use in pre-Revolution Hausa land and indigenous Nigerian states, the state predates royalty and other forms of rulers. The state therefore belongs to the political community. In pre-Revolution Hausa land as it was in Oyo, Benin, Nupe and scores of other indigenous political systems, the King was a custodian of the state. It was this principle of government that Uthman Dan Fodio directly challenged. In his own words, again, “the government of a people is the government of its king without question”.

Other principles of governance which distinguished the pre-Islamic revolution in Hausa states as well as other territories in Middle and Southern empires and states of Nigeria were those of the question of the accountability of the state to the people and the status of the individual in the polity. In the indigenous political communities unaffected by the Islamic jihad, the ruler was ultimately accountable to the people and this was exemplified by the tradition in some of these ancient states that the king commit suicide if he lost the confidence and trust of his people. “By contrast, the ruler in Fodio’s theory of government was accountable to God through the intervention and interpretation of some theologians, Sheiks who are learned in God’s ways. Since these theocratic interventions would ultimately lead to Arab authorities, accountability in Fodio’s scheme would invoke an allegiance to foreign powers. This was a principle that Songhai disputed with Morocco”.

On the nature of the relationship of the individual to the state, in the indigenous governance systems, the individual was significantly relatively autonomous of the state. Thus, kith and kin groups existed as intervening factors between the state and the individual. The individual could own land while women’s conduct could not be dictated by the state. In fact, women constituted powerful interest groups that could threaten the position of the rulers. In primordial Hausa land, for instance, the famous Queen Amina ascended to power at the apex of the Zazzau Kingdom and gained her place as a significant figure in Hausa history. Indeed, the Islamic Jihad was partly motivated by the perception of excessive liberalism of the Hausa states in the permissive roles played by women in those societies, a tendency alien to the Islamic tradition which was more restrictive of the participation of women in public life.

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Consequently, as a result of the jihad of 1804, there emerged a bifurcation in the governance traditions and practices between the pre-jihad Hausa states as well as the latter Sokoto caliphate and the indigenous governance practices of the other states and empires comprising the rest of Nigeria. The Fulani Revolution led to the dominance in the Hausa states of a form of Islam which allowed “little room for the separation of society from the authority of the state or the separation of state and mosque. A primary tenet of Fodio’s confession of Islam was its construction of total state and society as two entities that cannot and ought not be separated, or differentiated, each from the other, in any shape or form”.

With the arrival of the British in the course of the 19th century, the imperialists ruled various parts of its conquered territories as separate administrative entities despite the amalgamation of 1914. Essentially, the Southern and Northern parts of Nigeria were governed separately in virtually watertight compartments with negative implications for the future evolution of federalism in post-colonial Nigeria.

As Ekeh put it, “The consequence was that Nigerians’ political attitudes were frozen and hidden from the knowledge of their fellow Nigerians for more than half a century. Southerners knew very little of the political situation of the Emirate North; nor did the Fulani and other leaders in Emirate Northern Nigeria know much about the Southern neighbors”.

He continues, “As Kirk Green (1968) has well intimated, the first meeting at the Ibadan conference of 1950 between Southern and Northern leaders was painful because of their ignorance of the political ways of the other regions. But the 1950 Ibadan conference was the first thaw in the frozen politics of colonial Nigeria. As it turned out, the entire decade of the 1950s was devoted to decolonization in which Nigerian leaders for the first time framed the national question and attempted to provide a solution to its mandate”.

The political and cultural differences between the North and the South; a situation complicated by tensions between ethnic majority and minority groups in each region, led the founding fathers in 1954 to opt for federalism as a way to enable the various regions of the country to rule themselves with reasonable degrees of autonomy.

Following the military intervention of 1966, however, the military virtually extinguished Nigerian federalism and replaced it with a heavily centralized structure in consonance with its own unitary organizational configuration. Ekeh notes that “A main price which military rulers paid for waging and winning Nigeria’s civil war against secessionist Biafra was the promise that they would uphold and expand Nigerian federalism. While the war lasted, and in the five years following it, federalism flourished in certain administrative matters, as military chieftains exercised considerable powers in their regions. But there was heavy resentment within the military against the permissiveness that this form of administrative federalism entailed. In 1975, Nigeria’s wartime military ruler, Yakubu Gowon, who tolerated these diversities, was overthrown by a military team led by Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo”.

The post-Gowon military pursued thoroughly anti-federalist policies including the imposition of a uniform local government system, centralized control of land, take over of state universities by the federal government, imposition of a uniform, centralized policing system and the proliferation of mostly unviable states. Furthermore, the Murtala/Obasanjo regime bequeathed to the country the excessively unitary 1979 constitution, which is scarcely different from the extant 1999 Constitution.

While it is well nigh impossible to revert to the regional constitution of the first republic, Professor Ekeh does not see an alternative to the thoroughgoing re-federalization of the current constitution to restore a reasonable degree of institutional autonomy and financial viability to the component parts of the federation. How to walk the tightrope in balancing contending centripetal and centrifugal forces and rejuvenating federal practice in Nigeria informed by the country’s historical heritage but not jeopardizing national cohesion will be a critical challenge of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration.

To those for whom the dominant source of information and perspectives on contemporary global affairs are such hegemonic news organizations as CNN, Skynews, BBC or Reuters among others, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, is the number one outlaw and most dangerous threat to law, order, peace and stability in today’s world. Ever since his country’s admittedly undesirable and, to a certain extent, unjustifiable invasion of a sovereign Ukraine on February 24, last year, the West, with its control of the global information and communication ‘disorder’ and its unrivaled mastery of propaganda, has persistently and mostly successfully painted the picture of a Putin who is a veritable ‘Hitler’ and intolerable villain that is an exception in a world characterized by widespread respect for the dignity, integrity and liberty of sovereign entities. Nothing could be more illusory. In war, the great Winston Churchill declared in the wake of World War 11, ‘truth is so precious that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies’.

Falsehood has naturally and perhaps inevitably been deployed in defence of what various vested interests perceive as the truth from their differing perspectives in the Russo-Ukrainian war. But this has been most effectively, and almost persuasively, done by the West led by the United States. Watching and listening to dominant western media monopolies’ reportage and commentary on the war, you would believe that war atrocities are perpetrated only by the Russian side while the Ukrainians are veritable saints; that there is only one narrative to the conflict – that which emanates from ‘underdog’ Ukraine and dutifully trumpeted and amplified by its Western allies and benefactors. From this prism, there are no Russian victims suffering injustice at the hands of the Ukrainians in this conflict and no Russian triumphs on the pitched battlefields even if the most crippling sanctions and unprecedentedly humongous financial and material support for the Ukrainians has not succeeded in rolling back the Russian intrusion significantly even though the aggressors have not achieved the kind of easy victory they assumed and which motivated the attack in the first place.

Many in the West believe that most African countries have been rather lukewarm in condemning the Russian invasion and have not been as vehement in denouncing the latter as they would have wanted. But the dilemma of Africa is understandable. Pray, where was most of the Western world, particularly the United States and Britain, when the defunct Soviet Union backed Africa in the war against colonialism and racist apartheid in Southern Africa? Didn’t Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and America’s Ronald Reagan openly canvass and support so-called ‘constructive engagement’ with the racist regimes in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe even as their favorite villain today, Viladmir Putin, was on the battlefront in Angola for three years and contributed his quota to the defeat of the last vestiges of colonial and racist imperialism in Africa? For us in Africa, it can certainly not be an unquestioning and uncritical acquiescence with Western perspectives on the Russo-Ukrainian war or any other conflict or issue.

It is of course only natural that African scholars and public intellectuals have understandably also focused interest on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and Nigeria is, of course, no exception. After all, the continent has also been significantly affected by the deleterious consequences of the disruption to global fuel, grains and other international supply channels occasioned by the war. Dr. Dapo Thomas of the Department of History and International Relations of the Lagos State University (LASU), casts his analytic searchlights on the conflict in his article, “Russia’s War Maxim and Paranoid Parallelism” published in the Vol. 06, June 2023, edition of the journal, ‘Social Science and Humanities Research’. The piece evinces the author’s characteristic flair for meticulous research and insightful exegesis but also reflects the uncomfortable tightrope which the African intellectual is forced to walk in confronting critical contemporary global issues.

The objective of the paper is to ‘interrogate the national tendencies and personal idiocies at play when a major power and a global power involved in the Cold War, the US and Russia (the substance of the collapsed Soviet Union) are again engaged in a simmering altercation capable of leading to a “Colder War” a la Katusa Marin’. In this regard, the paper discusses ‘the fragility of the system’s fundamentals and the behavioral latitude of the actors’ traction and energies towards strategic cooperation. The objective of the study is to draw attention to operational inadequacies in the international system whose basic function is to guide the world in shaping a global order that will engender peace and stability among the various state and non-state actors’. Thus, the writer submits that ‘The pursuit and personal desires by leaders via simulated national interest is a major albatross to an international system created to stimulate global peace and promote stability’.

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It would appear that implicit in Dr. Thomas’s main thesis in this piece is an assertive denunciation of what he insinuates in the title as Russia’s ‘War Maxim’ that is reflective of unjustified ‘paranoia’ and that country’s futile attempts to draw parallels with external conflictual aggressiveness, particularly on the part of the United States. Even if it is not clearly stated and is perhaps unintended in the essay, the Putin that comes across is that of the irredeemable villain of the West as earlier depicted above. As a scholar, Dr Thomas can readily be placed as a ‘progressive conservative’ and it is thus not surprising that his reflective focus on the roots, tenor and texture of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict evinces an inclination towards the US-led Western perception of the war.

After an exhaustive examination of Russo-Ukrainian relations dating back to the existence of both entities within the hitherto sovereign territorial framework of the defunct Soviet Union under communist ideological suzerainty, the writer is unconvinced about the reasons proffered by Putin for his country’s invasion of Ukraine. He thus is of the view that ‘Putin’s reasons for invading Ukraine were largely unfounded, egocentric and vengeful. It had always been part of his hidden agenda on assuming power to redress what he considered his ‘predecessors’ unforced errors’ over the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 and the termination of the Cold War in 1988 cum the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Both of his predecessors, Khrushchev and Gorbachev- whose actions he was trying to reverse – went down in history as men of peace. On his part, Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 for his leading role in the peace process in the international system that Putin is fiendishly working hard to rubbish’.

Of course, I do not subscribe to Dr Thomas’s over-romanticization of what he perceives as the commitment of the West led by the US to global peace and tranquillity. They are at best comfortable and content only with a peace that does not question or disturb the entrenched historic injustices and inequities they have profited from and continue to do so to the detriment of long subjugated, oppressed and exploited sections of humanity in our contemporary world. True, the unilateral invasion of a sovereign Ukraine by Putin’s Russia with the attendant large-scale loss of lives, destruction of infrastructure, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens is utterly without justification. But is Putin a madman as depicted by the West who just woke up on the wrong side of the bed and decided on the now stalemated military expedition against Ukraine?

As the author’s historical analysis itself shows, Russia and Ukraine have long historical and cultural relations and share considerable geographical contiguity. He explains thus, ‘Though the history of Russia and Ukraine has been complicated considering their cultural attractions, the Russians have always believed that Ukraine was part of them. When Ukraine asserted its independence in 1918 with its capital in Kiev, Russia decided to establish another capital in Kharkov. This led to a serious fighting between the two of them with Russia finally gaining the upper hand. That was what led to the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, one of the founding Republics in the Soviet Union in 1922’. At least 30% of the Ukrainian population are said to be Russian speaking. Does Russia not have a legitimate interest in seeking to protect the interests of its ethnic nationals in the neighboring country especially in the face of alleged threats by ultra-nationalist anti-Russian elements in that country? Happily, despite his own explicit pro-West ideological disposition, Dr Thomas is intellectually honest and forthright enough to aver that ‘Putin is not one to be persuaded or convinced that the US adventurism and activities in the international system are driven by any universal philosophy relating to global peace and security. No matter how much the US belabours itself to demonstrate to the world that it has good intentions in stemming the tension endemic in the international system, some of its actions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia are too sententious to agree with this position. Until the US reduces its ubiquity in the local affairs of some of these countries such as Israel, Japan, Ukraine, South Korea, Norway, Australia, its sincerity about working for global peace and security will remain unbelievable’.

This is the blunt truth and Africans especially, given our long inequitable and unjust relationship with the West as highlighted particularly by over five centuries of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, must not shy away from saying so. Can we ever forget the role of the US and/or its allies in the deaths of thousands in its genocidal war against Vietnam, in the overthrow and assassination of socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile, the sabotage and temporary dislodgment of the progressive President Ortega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the overthrow of the progressive governments of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Patrice Lumumba in Zaire, Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Murtala Mohammed in Nigeria, the assassination of Samora Marcel in Mozambique who died in a suspicious plane crash, Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso or Mouanar Gaddafi in Libya? The US proclaims her democratic credentials at home from the hilltops yet behaves like a lawless bully and tyrant on the international terrain. Putin makes no pretense to upholding the tenets of liberal democracy in his country and so his conduct on the global plane creates no moral contradiction and dilemma for him unlike America.

In any case, Putin had persistently warned against the unhidden determination of Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to get his country to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a move which Russia believed would endanger its security. It is interesting that the United States would seek to perpetrate in what Russia perceives as its geographical sphere of interest what she would never tolerate in hers. Cuba has suffered a crippling economic blockade by the US for over six decades now simply because she dared to adopt a revolutionary socio-economic developmental socio-economic paradigm of her choice.

Dr. Thomas appears to agree with those who contradict and question the validity of what Putin describes as a firm commitment given by past US leaders that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attendant dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, NATO would not expand eastwards. In the writer’s words, ‘According to the official recording of the meeting in Arkhyz, Gorbachev thought he had James Baker’s (the then US Secretary of State) word that NATO would not expand eastwards. Baker had indeed talked about America’s consideration on the matter. But nothing had been signed and sealed…According to Robert Service, a renowned biographer and author of Lenin: A Biography: ‘even Gorbachev’s supporters were to regret this omission in the 1990s when several ex-member states of the Warsaw Pact joined NATO’. But despite this attempted rationalization, is there any persuasive justification for the continued expansion of NATO with the enthusiastic nudging of the US even with the expiration of the Cold War and the latter’s emergent status as the lone global military superpower?

When he went the way of mortal flesh on November 19, 2020, Professor Peter Palmer Ekeh, the Urhobo-born eminent Nigerian political sociologist, had inscribed his indelible imprints on the shores of time as one of Africa’s most profound and insightful thinkers. Virtually all the innumerable tributes to him from his intellectual contemporaries and mentees across the globe made specific reference to his 1975 seminal article, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement” described by Wikipedia as “one of the most cited works in the field of African political and sociological studies in several universities all over the world”.

Ekeh, who taught in leading universities in Africa, Europe, Asia and the United States, was the pre-eminent figure in the Department of Political Science at the University of Ibadan between the late 70s and 1988 after the death of the towering Professor Billy Dudley in 1980. His insights into the hazardous moral consequences of what he perceived as the bifurcation of the public sphere in Africa into the primordial and civic realms, each animated by conflicting value systems, as a result of the colonial intrusion are still relevant to discourses on state legitimation, corruption, citizenship and alienation on the continent.

Professor Ekeh’s most enduring contributions to the understanding of state and society in Africa derive essentially from his focus on colonialism and its pervasive implications for the continent. He analyzed colonialism’s impact on Africa in epochal rather than merely episodic terms as assumed by certain schools of historical scholarship. Those who argue that we cannot continue to blame colonialism for the continuing dysfunction and underdevelopment of Africa over six decades after political independence forget that the colonial fingermarks are so deeply ingrained in our mental and psychological structures and processes sustaining an intellectual dependency that is at the root of our protracted backwardness.

The dismantling of the manifest political structures of colonialism is not enough avers the radical Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiongo. He advocates for what he describes as a fundamental decolonization of the African mind. The more insidious and subtle corrosive effects of the persistence of a neo-colonial intellectual mindset and framework behind the veil of farcical, nominal political independence has been rigorously interrogated by such progressive scholars as Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Claude Ake and Okwudiba Nnoli among others.

Last week, I came across to my great delight, a paper published by Professor Ekeh at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where he was Chairman of the Department of African American Studies until 2014. Titled “Nigerian Political History and the Foundations of Nigerian Federalism”, obviously published in the early years of this political dispensation which commenced in 1999, the paper vividly illustrates why it is difficult to make sense of the challenges of politics and governance in contemporary Nigeria without a deep appreciation of the governance traditions, processes and structures of our precolonial, indigenous past and the consequent corrosive effects on them of the colonial encounter.

As Ekeh asserts in the paper, “One of the most unappreciated aspects of colonialism was its intellectual and ideological barrier between us and our past traditions. For instance, there was in the colonial firmament an obstruction between us and our past traditions of governance. Colonialism magnified its own presence and rendered insignificant the epochs, including traditions of governance, that were abroad in the West African before the Arab and European slave trades devastated our lands from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century especially, and before the onset of slave trade’s historic successor, European imperialism”.

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In his analysis of governance traditions in West Africa with specific emphasis on the territory today demarcated as Nigeria, Ekeh focuses on the Songhai Empire which thrived between the 15th and 16th centuries. Wikipedia writes that “At its peak, Songhai was one of the largest African empires in history. The state is known by its historiographical name, derived from its largest ethnic group and ruling elite, the Songhai people. Sonni Ali established Gao as the empire’s capital although a Songhai state had existed in and around Gao since the 11th century “.

Ekeh stresses that the Songhai empire is not as historically and spatially distant to the pre-colonial communities that constitute post-colonial Nigeria as ‘imperial manners of scholarship’ suggest. Beginning from 1513, he notes, Songhai invaded and ruled several Hausa states which she perceived as having become unstable and posing a threat to the peace and viability of the region. Given its strength, Songhai was able to manage the affairs of these territories effectively while protecting the region from undesired foreign influences. There was, however, considerable Arab displeasure with Songhai influence in the Hausa states even though the Arabs had not felt threatened by the less extensive earlier Ghana and Mali empires. Ekeh cites the writings of an Arab scholar and traveller, Leo African us, as evidence of the prevalent Arab resentment against Songhai.

After visiting Kano and other Hausa territories in the 1520s, Leo African us wrote, “King Askia of Songhai sent governors hither who mightily oppressed and impoverished the Hausa people that were before rich; and the inhabitants were carried captive and kept as slaves by him”. For Ekeh, such unjustifiably harsh condemnation of Songhai rule only reflected Arab antagonistic intentions towards the powerful black Songhai state. Thus, he writes, “Less than seventy years later, Morocco, the most aggressive of the Arab states in the Maghreb, invaded Songhai in 1591, sacking its political system and leaving behind chaos and mayhem. That was the beginning of the fall of the great traditions of politics in our region. The year 1591 is a crucial demarcation date in our political history”.

But why does Ekeh come to this conclusion? He cites his reasons. First, the states that emerged in the region after Songhai’s fall lacked the latter’s territorial expansiveness, economic viability and relative coercive might. Second, these post-Songhai states and empires were rendered dependent on the benevolence and patronage of foreign powers. In the understandably desperate bid of these successor entities to retain their sovereignty and autonomy no matter how circumscribed by the new realities, they subordinated their governance practices and principles to Arab,and later, European overlords.

According to Ekeh, “Those, like the Hausa states and Benin, that stayed close to their indigenous traditions of governance lost out. But many states and empires began their existence in the period after Songhai’s fall. These newer emergent political entities were mostly bereft of the great traditions that informed governance in the West African region before the collapse of Songhai. Most of these owed their allegiances to alien Arab and European powers and to foreign values of governance”. Professor Ekeh’s analysis lays bare the foundations of the disconnect between governance and leadership systems in pre-colonial Africa and the contemporary post colonial nation states described by the late historian, Basil Davidson, as a curse and burden because they are anchored on alien, imported modes of governance that, decades after formal colonialism, do not appear adaptable to the African environment.

He has become an irrepressible gadfly ceaselessly tormenting those he sees as violating the canons of internal democracy, adherence to constitutionalism, and transparency within his political party, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Indeed, his can be likened to the lonely voice of a John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness for tyrannical party autocrats as well as dictatorial oligarchs to repent and embrace the virtues of intra-party administrative efficiency, openness, integrity and accountability in the management of party affairs. I speak of none other than Dr. Salihu Lukman, National Vice Chairman of the APC representing the North-West zone.

He has been a thorn in the flesh of his party’s leadership both before and during the tenure of the current National Working Committee headed by former governor of Nasarawa State, Senator Abdullahi Adamu. It will be recalled that as Director-General of the Progressive Governors Forum (PGF), Dr. Lukman was a consistent and unrelenting critic of the all too obvious antics of the defunct Caretaker and Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC), led by Governor Mai Mala Buni of Yobe State, to perpetuate itself in office with a view to manipulating the impending presidential primaries of the party to achieve a predetermined outcome.

Berating the CECPC for its suspicious prevarications in organizing a National Convention of the party to pick democratically elected party leaders who would, in turn, organize presidential primaries, Dr. Lukman averred, “Somehow, it is difficult not to conclude that the CECPC is intentionally promoting speculations around the APC National Convention by claiming to embark on ‘consultations’ with party stakeholders to prepare the ground for a rancor-free National Convention”. It is a testament to his unflinching fidelity to the principles he believes in that Dr. Lukman chose to resign from his position as DG of the PGF under pressure rather than renounce his firmly held convictions.

It is on record that his strident voice was one of the factors which ultimately led to the dissolution of the CECPC and the return of the APC to intra-organizational democratic normalcy. Indeed, as far back as 2020, Dr. Lukman had called for an urgent review of the party’s constitution with a view to instituting a code of conduct for elected and appointed officials of the party as bye-laws to regulate the conduct of party officials. This he said was imperative to ensure the adherence on the part of the latter to party values as well as commitment to the principles of public accountability.

Having emerged as National Vice Chairman for the North-West in the Senator Abdullahi Adamu-led NWC of the APC, many would have thought that Dr. Lukman’s crusading zeal would be dampened as he would presumably be content to quietly enjoy whatever largess came his way in that office. On the contrary, his advocacy for efficiency, adherence to constitutional principles, and integrity particularly in the management of party finances has become more intense and impassioned. In this regard, Dr Lukman has consistently been at loggerheads, especially with Senator Abdullahi Adamu and the National Secretary, Senator Iyiola Omisore. He has accused both the National Chairman and National Secretary of running the party through discretionary actions often without recourse to members of the NWC.

Dr. Lukman also blames the duo for the failure of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) to meet quarterly to review the activities of the APC as well as the NWC as stipulated in its constitution. He also accuses them not only of not ensuring that the NWC meets regularly but also of grounding and incapacitating higher organs of the party. The North-West Vice Chairman also pointedly accuses them of financial opacity and impropriety in the handling of funds from the sale of party nomination forms to candidates for elections at various levels. In particular, he demands from the National Secretary an accounting for humongous funds reportedly voted for the governorship and presidential elections in Osun State which he claimed passed through the latter’s hands. Although Senator Omisore has vehemently denied that he was the custodian of any such funds and even threatened to sue Dr. Lukman, it is unlikely that such allegations would have been made in the first place if there was greater transparency and openness in the party’s internal administrative processes.

In an open letter to Senator Adamu, Dr. Lukman writes, “Being the National Chairman who is respected by party leaders at all levels, it is worrisome that under your leadership, we will be back to the old problems of being unable to respect provisions of our constitution with respect to convening meetings of organs and ensuring that all our organs are allowed to perform their statutory functions as provided in our constitution…By any standard, no one will expect a person of your stature and experience in politics to be taciturn when it comes to managing the affairs of the party based on respect for the party’s constitution”.

Is Dr. Lukman being unnecessarily fussy and querulous, especially in the light of the silence of other members of the NWC who appear content with the status quo? I don’t think so. Indeed, he is a lonely voice of reason. Weak and inefficient internal administrative processes and deficient intra-organizational democracy have been the bane of the major political parties in this dispensation and this has negative implications for productive governance and sustainable democratic development.

In setting the agenda for the new President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration, hardly any analyst has addressed the critical link between a vigorous, vibrant, and efficient party organization and the degree of success and productivity of any administration. A rudderless, poorly administered political party which is nothing more than a vehicle for primitive accumulation by party leaders and functions no better than a parastatal adjunct of the presidency can add little or no value to governance.

If it is true that the NEC of the APC has not met for a year, for instance, it is a matter of great concern. If an organ as important as the NEC does not meet regularly to appraise the activities of the NWC, what is the possibility that the party’s Board of Trustees (BOT) will ever meet at all? If that is so at the national level, we can best imagine what will be the case at the state, local government, and ward levels.

When the various organs of a political party do not meet regularly to exercise their functions, it is inevitable that such a party develops organizational arthritis and begins to atrophy and die. The APC since 2015 has not learnt the appropriate lessons from the experience of the PDP. The opposition party’s electoral unraveling of 2015 that propelled the APC to power at the centre did not just happen with unanticipated suddenness. It was the consequence largely of years of ever-increasing stifling of party organs, suffocation of internal democracy, and incapacitation of the party as an impotent appendage of the presidency. The APC can avoid this fate. It should take urgent measures to ensure the resuscitation and vibrancy of its various organs at all levels.

The abysmally poor turnout in elections in this dispensation is partly a function of the organizational docility of the parties particularly at the ward levels. For the APC no less than the PDP, the principal challenge now is to revive and reinvigorate their party machineries starting from the grassroots. It remains to be seen if the Labour Party (LP) that performed incredibly well in the last presidential election, riding on the wings of Mr Peter Obi’s ethno-regional and narrow Christian support base, can consolidate on this feat to become a formidable national political force.

There is, furthermore, an ineluctable link between the governance performance of an administration and the discipline, focus, efficiency and vibrancy of the party platform on which it ascended to power. An incoherent, anaemic and purposeless party platform is unlikely to produce a vigorous, effective and optimally productive government. The enduring admiration for Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s sterling and yet unrivaled performance as Premier of Western Nigeria in the First Republic, for instance, rests substantially on the viable party platform that his party, the Action Group (AG) gave him.

Pointing out the primacy that Awolowo gave to a virile and viable party organization, Chief Bola Ige, writes, “Awo had always been an excellent political organizer…He kept a close eye on the working of the machinery of the Party. He himself was a tireless worker. His meetings were scheduled and orderly, he did not believe in ad-hoc committees and decisions, and he made sure that proposals presented to the party were in form of memoranda and exhaustively discussed; he then saw to it that those decisions were properly carried out, whether or not, he himself had supported the proposals during the discussion”.

It was no different in the Second Republic when Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria(UPN) was again an exemplar in providing a solid policy platform for its governors in Lagos, Oyo, Ondo, Bendel and Ogun states. Like the AG, the UPN was known for its discipline, efficient organizational machinery, and its unwavering commitment to getting those elected on its platform to faithfully implement its party manifesto. A good example of this is given by the late Alhaji Olatunji Hamzat who was transportation commissioner in the administration of Alhaji Lateef Jakande in Lagos State.

He writes in his autobiography, ‘Reflections of a Public Man’ that when he was appointed as Commissioner for Transportation, he had contacted the University of Ibadan where he got a consultant to work on a transportation blueprint for implementation when he assumed office. He was unaware at the time that, in his words, “Ever shrewd and contemplative, the leadership of the UPN had already long written a blueprint for each Ministry even before elections were held…Alhaji Jakande simply asked me to dispense with my consultant. The party had not only provided a blueprint, the leadership had equally provided a non-political technocrat to guide and help to ensure the strategic adherence to the charted course and the protection of the purity of the scripted agenda”.

As the leader of the party under the presidential system of government, this is the standard of party organization and competence that the President Tinubu administration must aim at. A subservient, sycophantic, and ineffective party machinery will be of negligible value to his administration. He ought to ensure that the party is intellectually, ideologically and organizationally viable enough to be actively involved in policy initiation and implementation. The party must as a matter of urgency consider and take appropriate action on Dr Salihu Lukman’s suggested reformist agenda.

In the first part of this tribute to the memory of the eminent political scientist and engaging public intellectual, Professor Ayo Olukotun, whose tragic passage we were confronted with at a time we should have been savoring the commencement of a new year, we X-rayed his inaugural lecture as the Awujale of Ijebu Ode, Oba (Dr) Sikiru Kayode Adetona Professorial Chair of Governance situated in the Department of Political Science at the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State. In that cerebral offering, the engaging scholar interrogated the nexus between the media and governance in an emergent democracy with particular emphasis on the role, record and changing profile of the Nigerian media between 1999 and 2017 when that lecture was delivered.

In his second lecture in the series which was delivered at the Adeola Odutola Hall, Ijebu Ode, on May 10, 2018, the eminent specialist in political communication and governance shifted his characteristically clinical and rigorous scrutiny to the not unrelated topic of ‘Civil Society and Governance in Nigeria’s Evolving Democracy: 1999-2018’.

It comes out in the lecture that in the course of his academic career trajectory, Professor Olukotun had paid as much attention to the interface between the media and governance as to that between civil society and governance. The media and civil society are indeed intimately related and both loom large in his expansive publications on governance reforms with the aim of deepening democracy and promoting, from the intellectual prism, pro-people regimes characterized by accountability, the rule of law, openness and respect for human rights among other features of good governance.

Like many other scholars, he defines civil society as the non-governmental sector which occupies the vast terrain between the family as the most microscopic unity of the polity and the state, which defines the public sphere. In the same way, he makes a distinction between government which connotes public institutions and state actors and governance which encompasses civil society as well as non-state actors and institutions.

He traces the trajectory of civil society’s evolution in Nigeria from the anti-colonial revolts of the pre-independence period featuring women uprising, workers’ strikes, rebellious student agitations through the courageous and pivotal roles played by Civil Society Organizations in the struggles against military dictatorship in the 1980s and 1990s up to the somewhat less fervent and passionate involvement of these CSOs and NGO’s in deepening the province of human rights and substantive democracy in this dispensation since 1999 and offers the reader invaluable insights into the character, temper and complexity of the terrain of civil society in post-colonial Nigeria and especially in the current political dispensation.

The concept of civil society he avers is far more nuanced than the simplistic and misleading depiction of CSOs as those associational groups formed to oppose dictatorship, deepen good governance, strengthen constitutionalism or fight human rights abuses. For instance, he notes that there were indeed also some NGOs which were formed and worked in close collaboration with the military dictatorships of Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Abacha for instance. He cites such examples as Daniel Kanu’s ‘Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha’ (YEAA) or Arthur Nzeribe’s ‘Association for a Better Nigeria’ which worked for the perpetuation of military dictatorship in Nigeria. They are component parts of civil society.

Professor Olukotun notes that “What is interesting is the persistence of this syndrome into the current diplomatic dispensation as well as the weakening of civil society either through seductive government appointments or the winning of elections by former star civil society activists”. We will recall that the scholar in his first lecture on the media and governance made a similar point about the weakening of the media by the incorporation of some of its brightest hands as members of the governing elite through appointments as press secretaries or as Commissioners of Information or Special Advisers on Media.

He wonders if in the wake of the country’s transition to democracy, civil society has not gone to sleep and lost the democratic fervor it demonstrated under the military. In his words, “The question assumes salience with respect to the incorporation of many civil society activists into functioning parties or governmental sinecures in some cases to shut their mouths or buy-off their activism. Of course, there were some civil society activists such as Abdul Oroh of the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO), Ms Ayo Obe, Dr Kayode Fayemi of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), Professor Julius Ihonvbere, who was a presenter on Radio Kudirat, Professor Chidi Odinkalu, to mention a few who either contested elections and won or were given political appointments”.

Of course, the sober and careful scholar that he was, Professor Olukotun does not entirely write off the invaluable contributions of civil society in strengthening democracy in Nigeria over the last 24 years. He adopts a more nuanced position on the issue. The lecturer does not discountenance the value of the exertions of such groups as pastor Tunde Bakare’s Save Nigeria Group (SNG), or Charly Boy’s ‘Our Mumu Don Do’ as commendable efforts at strengthening and making civil society relevant in the never ending quest for deepening good and responsible governance. He also notes the persistence of the coalition of NGOs under the rubric of the Media Rights Agenda (MRA) over a 12-year period that culminated into the signing of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) into law – an epochal achievement of civil society in this Fourth Republic.

While acknowledging that in a democracy, civil society can no longer be the informal parliament or opposition which it was under the military since many activists are now members of political parties, he insists that much more can be done to nurture a kind of civil society that can more effectively “countervail state impunity or that can genuinely restrain predatory behavior on the part of state officials”. His suggestions in this regard include sustained campaigns to get people to own democracy beyond perfunctory participation in periodic elections, drawing up enforceable codes of conduct to regulate the behavior of CSO activists as well as enhanced collaboration and bridge-building among NGOs to make for better national impact.

Olukotun laments, however, that all too often, civil society is as factionalized as the political public sphere noting that “Ethnic and religious conflicts, partisanship, corruption, cooptation by state actors and the locational concentration of civil society activities in the South-West are all factors that come into play” and that “A divided nation has merely produced a divided civil society “. Does he agree then with the view that civil society in Nigeria is dead? His terse response: “I don’t think so, but it is obviously in a state of stupor and requires reawakening”. May this incisive scholar’s soul rest in eternal peace.

It is obvious that the same constellation of forces- opposition politicians, sections of the media, ethnically motivated intellectuals and partisan clerics – who have conspired to discredit and delegitimize the outcome of the 2023 presidential election because it did not follow their utterly misbegotten predilections, will stop at nothing to cast doubt on the integrity of any judicial pronouncements on petitions before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) once such does not accord with their preconceived notions and preferences.

Without any reference to empirical facts or logical analysis, most of those who belong to these categories contend that the 2023 presidential elections were the worst ever in the country’s political history. Those who make such absurd and ridiculous averments were possibly far away on planet Mars and so did not witness the so patently flawed elections of 1983 in the Second Republic or those of 2003 and 2007 in this dispensation since 1999.

Right now, there is a fierce battle raging for the Speakership of the House of Representatives. While the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) won a comfortable majority in the Senate with 59 seats, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won 37 seats while for the first time ever, the Labour Party (LP) won 7 seats and other smaller parties had 5 seats. The outcome of the election in the upper chamber can certainly not be described as a landslide victory for the APC as the opposition parties held their own in a keenly contested election. The APC had only eight seats more than the opposition parties combined which speaks to a stiff competition and is one of the key hallmarks of a credible election.

In the House of Representatives, the keenness of the context emerges in even bolder relief. The opposition parties combined have won more seats than the ruling APC. The latter must surely tap the depths of its ingenuity to ensure that its candidates for the various leadership positions in the lower chamber triumph for the opposition parties have the numbers to cause an upset should they succeed in putting together a common front. As the Leadership newspaper put it, “Since the introduction of the Presidential system of government in 1979, no ruling party has failed to win a majority in the two chambers of the National Assembly. Should the numbers claimed by the opposition be confirmed, it would be a first”.

Yet, this is an election that intellectually fraudulent characters are so desperately trying to denude of integrity and credibility albeit in futility. Suffice it to say that the National Assembly elections which took place on the same day and at the same time as the presidential polls only mirrors the stiffness of the competition that characterized the latter. This column has spent the last few weeks analyzing the irrefutable logic of the presidential election and adducing empirical facts why the results could not have been otherwise that there is no reason for these to detain us any longer.

Those who claim the elections were massively rigged simply offer arbitrary assertions – no rational argument, no empirical validation, no statistical demonstrations. The Director-General of the Labour Party (LP), Campaign Organization the otherwise perceptive Mr Akin Osuntokun, for instance, asserted in a television interview that his candidate, Mr Peter Obi, won at least one million votes in Lagos! Just like that! He does not tell us by what mystical alchemy he arrived at this magical abracadabra!

Our concern in this piece, however, is with the no less strenuous attempts to discredit the judiciary as an institution and shorn it of all dignity and integrity now that the battle for the 2023 presidential elections has, predictably, shifted to the courts. Ever before aggrieved parties had even filed their petitions before the PEPT, there had been an attempt to frame the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Kayode Ariwoola, as partisan and traveling in disguise to hold a clandestine meeting with the President-elect in London. The abysmal falsehood failed catastrophically.

Now, that the PEPT has begun sitting, there has been the resort to subtle blackmail, open threats and intimidation to browbeat the judiciary into arriving at decisions in tune with the fancies of ethnic political and intellectual entrepreneurs and jaundiced social media attack dogs.

Perhaps the most reckless in this regard were the threats issued against the judiciary by the Vice-Presidential candidate of the LP, Mr Baba Datti-Ahmed, warning of dire consequences if the victory of the APC’s Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was upheld by the courts. The attempt by Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, to correct such aberrant, fundamentally anti-democratic behavior was met with torrents of abuse and insults by a horde of social media rodents most of whom are unworthy to untie the global icon’s shoe laces. But it is instructive that since then Datti-Ahmed has refrained from continuing on that path of ultimate self-immolation.

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No less thoughtless and pedestrian was the outburst of the National President of the Nigeria Labour Congress ( NLC), Comrade Joseph Ajaero, who, shortly after the constitution of the election petitions panels, thundered that “the Labour Centre will create a “hall of shame” for those judges that undermine the tenets of the judiciary and come up with ridiculous judgements on election petitions”. The clearly erratic comrade did not tell us who qualifies to determine whether or not a court judgement is ridiculous. It would appear that any judgement that is not in line with Ajaero’s prejudiced thinking would be defined by him as ridiculous.

Of course, the NLC President is entitled to his display of intellectual shallowness. But he does a great discredit to the depth of cerebral talent available within the rank and file of the Labour movement. It remains to be seen whether the cadres of the Labour movement will allow themselves to be led by the nose by an essentially ethnically actuated leadership such as the likes of Ajaero offers. But then, we have heard little or nothing about this “hall of shame” for judges since then and we can only hope that the good comrade has yielded to wise counsel and is treading a more cautionary path.

Other attempts to influence the outcome of the

petitions before the PEPT have been more subtle, intellectually nuanced and refined. For instance, at a recent interaction with the media, the Archbishop Emeritus of the Abuja Diocese of the Catholic Church, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, averred that all eyes are on the judiciary to finish the job the INEC did ‘halfway’ during the February 25 election. In his words, “All eyes are on the court. We tried our best to vote; we were told to go to court. We are now in court. All eyes are on the court. We have trust in the court that they finish the job that INEC did halfway”.

The problem is that I am unaware that INEC did any job ‘halfway’. It has conclusively announced the outcome of the election and is stoutly defending its decision at the tribunal. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, the cerebral Archbishop is not in court. The presidential candidates of the PDP, LP and APM as well as their parties are. Again, are the judges bound to come to a decision that aligns with the good cleric’s desire or else be upbraided and condemned? The court is the constitutionally designated channel for aggrieved persons in elections to seek redress. Once relevant parties have chosen this path, the courts should be given breathing space to perform their statutory functions.

Also in his homily during the last Easter celebration, the Bishop of the Sokoto Diocese of the Catholic Church, Bishop Hassan Kukah, had his own admonition for the judges. In his words, “To the Honorable Justices of the Bench: You face difficult challenges ahead and you are mortals. The future of our country hangs on your deliberations. I will not judge you. I can only pray that God gives you grace. It will be up to you to decide how you use that gift which no amount of influence or power can buy”. Continuing he said, “It is sad that your hard-earned reputation is undergoing very severe stress and pressure from those who want Justice on their own terms. Nigerians are looking up to you to reclaim their trust in you as the interpreters of our laws”.

Honestly, this kind of politically motivated sermon adds to the avoidable “severe stress and pressure” put on our judges. It amounts to insidious emotional and spiritual blackmail. They should be left to do their jobs in accordance with their consciences rather than be hectored, no matter how subtly, through unwarranted ecclesiastical intrusions into their decision making processes. This is particularly so from supposedly objective clerics whose partisan inclinations are hardly disguised.

And back to the highly revered John Cardinal Onaiyekan who threw his weight behind calls that the proceedings at the PEPT be broadcast live. As he put it, “It is in the interest of the judiciary to allow the people to see what is happening, even if it means adjusting their rules. Voters don’t havethe locus standi in court to challenge election outcomes. The matter is left to the candidates. That’s why it’s important that the court proceedings are seen live on the tv”. Of course, the PEPT has since thrown out this preposterous proposition. It is another subtle bid to undermine the integrity of the judiciary.

The insinuation is that unless the proceedings in court are being watched live on television, the judges cannot be trusted to serve the cause of justice. In any case, what percentage of the public who will presumably be the tv audience are intellectually, legally and technically equipped to make meaningful sense of the proceedings they are watching live? I presume that viewing centers across the country will make brisk business as the court proceedings will become the equivalent of football contests in the premier league with the side with the loudest cheering social media mob coasting home to victory. It makes scant sense to me.

Ever since the Second Republic, the judiciary has been a critical arbiter in resolving electoral disputes between ever so bitter contestants. Before now, parties and contestants were preoccupied with seizing control of the electoral umpire itself and thereby influencing electoral processes and determining electoral outcomes irrespective of the will of the electorate. However, with systematic constitutional amendments over time to strengthen the institutional autonomy of the Electoral Commission and the deployment of technology which has reduced the capacity of electoral officials to manipulate the process, it has become more difficult to rig elections particularly with respect to the 2023 elections. This has accentuated the role of the courts in being the final determinants of winners and losers in elections.

As Professor Richard Joseph noted in his classic, ‘Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria’, this is a most unenviable challenge for the judiciary to shoulder. As he presciently observed in the context of the contentious 1983 elections, “Yet, if FEDECO could not be the Leviathan needed to supervise the 1983 elections, the Nigerian judiciary was even less able to fill this role. The courts could not operate in any salutary way when drawn into the process of vote adjusting, of having to decide which of conflicting, and questionable, sets of results were most “improbable”, which impromptu solutions by overwhelmed election officials were most acceptable, which degree of malfeasance was excessive and which excusable. In the context of Nigeria in 1983, every decision of the judiciary could be made to appear, to some extent, to be the wrong one. Truth and fairness had become subordinate to political partisanship”. Not much has changed over four decades after. Our judges already have a Herculean task on their hands. Partisan clerics would do well not to compound their problems.

The point that Professor Joseph was making as regards the dilemma of the judiciary in deciding electoral petitions was amply demonstrated in the petition by Chief Obafemi Awolowo against the election of Alhaji Shehu Shagari in the 1979 election. The judiciary was called upon to decide what constituted two-thirds of 19 states. It came to the controversial decision that this was 12 two-thirds and not 13 as defined by the petitioners. Having come to this decision, it now had to decide what constituted two-thirds of Kano State, the 12th contentious state in which Shagari had substantial votes but did not meet the 25% threshold.

Quoting from the majority judgement of the apex court on the matter, Professor Kole Omotosho in his classic ‘ Just Before Dawn’ writes, “I see Exhibit T2. Under Kano State, the average total votes cast for the NPN was 19.94X. I see Exhibit T3. There are 38,760 possible two-thirds of Kano State going by local government area. In the absence of a computer, it will take at least one year to declare the result in respect of two-thirds of Kano State”. And the author notes wryly, “And the military did not have a year. In fact they had only a few days”. That illustrates the dilemma of the judiciary in determining election cases.

Even as this year, 2023, was being ushered in, the light of life was being snuffed out of one of the most cerebral, productive, prolific and patriotic Nigerian intellectuals of his generation – the late Professor Ayo Olukotun. More than five months after the demise of this stellar scholar who was one of the country’s best and brightest political scientists with specialization in political communication focusing particularly on the linkage between media and governance, his absence continues to be sorely felt and this sense of loss will persist far beyond our contemporary era. Although a bright young writer, Tunde Odesola with a unique literary style has taken over the back page column of The Punch on Fridays, it is still impossible for his ardent readers not to miss Professor Olukotun’s profound, stimulating and insightful offerings on diverse contemporary issues in that space for several years before his transition.

A public intellectual whose contributions to national discourse always evinced the highest standards of rigour, maturity, sobriety and restraint while being scathing and unsparing in its excoriation of societal ills and flagellation of erring leadership, it is not surprising that Professor Olukotun was found worthy to be appointed as the pioneer occupant of the Oba Sir (Dr) Sikiru Adetona Professorial Chair of Governance situated at the Department of Political Science, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye. Those familiar with the high standards with which the revered Awujale of Ijebuland is always associated readily testify that he would go only for scholars of the highest caliber to occupy his generously endowed academic Chair in Political Science.

One of the requirements of the occupant of the Chair is the delivery of an annual inaugural lecture on subjects relevant to the political and democratic development of Nigeria. In furtherance of this purpose, Professor Olukotun delivered the maiden lecture in this regard titled, ‘Governance and the Media in an Emergent Democracy: A Study of the Role, Record and Changing Profile of the Nigerian Media (1999-2017)’. Shining radiantly through this incisive lecture is Professor Olukotun’s thorough acquaintance with the Nigerian media terrain which is unsurprising given a career which in his own words “straddles town and gown, having alternated between university departments and editorial board rooms of newspapers”.

The lecture gives an elaborate portraiture of the state of the country’s media terrain in the period under consideration. He notes, for instance, “the phenomenal expansion in the media industry as a result of the liberalized political space, the exigencies of political competition warranting the replication of media outlets; as well as an economic boom riding on unprecedented increase in the price of oil in the world market for many of these “.

Thus, his research indicates that by 2015, for instance, Nigeria could boast of the biggest broadcast sector in Africa with 133 federal television, 122 state radio, 68 state television, 51 multi-channel, multi-point distribution services, 97 private radio, 43 private television, 63 federal radio and 27 campus broadcasting stations. This did not include community radios. In a similar vein, his research indicates that there are over 120 newspapers in the country not counting community publications “although many of these are shoe string enterprises which can capsize and sometimes reappear without notice”.

It is of course inevitable that the lecture also highlights the substantial increase in the range, role and influence of social media leading to “the growing number of Nigerians who are able to access the internet and social media networks, thus resulting in better engagement and participation of citizens in democratic discourse”. In his words, “It should be mentioned that the increasing use of social media platforms and internet application is a direct consequence of the continuous rise in the number of people who subscribe to the mobile telecommunications networks. The National Bureau of Statistics put the figure of subscribers at 86 million for 2016; up from 2.3 million subscribers in 2002”.

Even though the lecture considers diverse media genres such as print, electronic and digital, Olukotun narrows down primarily on the print media despite the downward trend in the circulation of newspapers in the period under reference because “newspapers continue to exercise considerable influence on policy making and enjoy a pedigree as arbiters of national conversation dating back to the anti-colonial and anti-military struggles. Hence, despite the fact that broadcasting and social media are increasingly relevant in a population made up preponderantly of youths, the focus on newspapers increasingly accessed online, is justified on account of their continuing influence “.

This lecture details virtually every instance of harassment and intimidation of journalists in the period between 1999 and 2017. It gives details of the economics of newspaper publishing and how prohibitive production costs are a key factor in the high attrition rate of publications. He dilated on the poor working conditions of Nigerian journalists, the non-payment of salaries by most media proprietors for prolonged periods and the link between the immiseration of the average journalist and the pervasive corruption that undermines the dignity and devalues the efficacy of the profession.

Casting a look at the ownership structure and spatial distribution of major publications, he notes that “although nine out of eleven major media institutions are located in Lagos, only three of these, The Punch, The Nation and National Mirror have Yoruba proprietors. Indeed, the emerging trend…is a preponderance (four out of eleven) of media owners from the Niger Delta area, a fact that may not be unrelated to the Petroleum-driven political economy of Nigeria and the incorporation of the elite from the Delta area into the national framework of accumulation and distribution of spoils”.

He notes the apparent breaking of the jinx of the all too frequent collapse of northern-based newspapers in what he describes as “the return of the north to Nigeria’s discourse map because of the rebirth of the Northern media in the years under study”. He contends that this rebirth is crucial especially within the context of Professor Wale Adebanwi’s jibe that Nigeria lacks a national media, but an Arewa media, Ngbati media and Nkenga media. Expatiating on this point, he notes that “What is of interest is the recent establishment and relative profitability of a clutch of newspapers based in Abuja such as Leadership, Daily Trust, People’s Daily and Abuja Inquirer among others…When you add to these, private television stations such as Desnims, founded by Halifa Baba-Ahmed, Gotell TV based in Yola, as well as the Kano based Radio Freedom owned by Bashir Dalbatu among others, one gets a sense of the bounce back of a northern regional media”.

Olukotun cites instances of success in the crusading role of the Nigerian media during this period including the forced resignation of the first Speaker of the House of Representatives in this dispensation, Salisu Buhari, for certificate forgery, the abortion of former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s third term agenda and the forced resignation of Ms Stella Odua, former Minister of Aviation as well as Mr Babachir Lawal, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation for alleged corrupt practices.

One interesting point made by Olukotun is what he describes as the negative impact on the media of “the incorporation of prominent journalists into an elaborate, spoils sharing arrangement through seductive appointments”. Amplifying on this, he notes that “One of the most prominent examples is Dr Reuben Abati, a widely respected columnist of the Guardian, who was appointed as President Goodluck Jonathan’s Special Adviser on Media and Communication. Before Abati, the late President Umaru Yar’Adua appointed Mr Olusegun Adeniyi, former editor of This Day to serve in the same capacity under his government; while President Muhammadu Buhari who took office on May 29, 2015, appointed the respected Femi Adeshina, former President of the Nigerian Guild of Editors to a similar position. This pattern is replicated around the states in the country and is believed by some to be one of the reasons why the media have lost their bite and for the most part failed to carry out investigative reporting”. This is certainly pertinent food for thought.

Despite his status, academic renown and reputation as one of the foremost political scientists with specialization on the politics of Africa particularly Nigeria, Professor Richard Joseph appears to have been substantially swayed by the largely propagandistic opinion polls that predicted a Peter Obi/Labour Party (LP) victory in the 25th February presidential election and the attempt to rely on this failure in electoral futurology to discredit the polls. In a brief critique of the election in the Chicago Tribune, the author of the classic, ‘Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria’ which was a rigorous and insightful analysis of the politics of the Second Republic, opined that “A highly touted system of electronic transmission of votes failed, leading to the manual collation of ballots. Accusations swirled that the failure was contrived so the results could be manipulated. Disregarding the protests on February 28 the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a former governor of the most populous State, Lagos, to be the elected President”.

Not surprisingly one of those quoted in Professor Joseph’s piece presumably with some subtle approbation was the globally acknowledged novelist and thinker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who in an open letter to President Joe Biden of the United States, had excoriated the election in which her fellow Igbo kinsman, Peter Obi, came third despite his much hyped pre-election probability of emerging triumphant in the polls.

Thus, echoing Chimamanda’s letter characterized by flawless prose reminiscent of her fiction but of negligible analytic value, Professor Joseph writes that “Peter Obi, a former governor from the South-East, galvanized a large following, particularly among youths, and was officially credited with 25% of the presidential vote. His ethnic group, the Igbos, feel excluded from Nigeria’s highest offices, and a fair share of power since the Biafran war of 1967-70. Obi’s “third force” poses a major challenge to the two-party dominant system”. Being substantially a fiction writer, Chimamanda can be forgiven for her imaginative flights of fancy in the realm of political analysis but not so a political scientist of Professor Joseph’s towering standing.

For one, within a decade after the Nigerian civil war, an Igbo man, the cerebral Dr Alex Ekwueme, had risen to become Nigeria’s Vice President in the Second Republic between 1979 and 1983. But for the military intervention of December, 1983, and the consequent prolonged absolutist rule, there is nothing to suggest that the dynamics and interplay of political forces would not have since produced an Igbo President. Again, during the respective presidencies of General Olusegun Obasanjo and Dr Goodluck Jonathan in this dispensation since 1999, qualified Igbo men and women occupied critical, influential and powerful national offices such that the hysteria of Igbo marginalization is mere emotive fantasy.

And while the dearth of Igbo representation particularly in the top hierarchy of the security architecture in the President Buhari Muhammadu administration was undesirable, the South-East has gained more in terms of infrastructural development in the region during the last eight years of the All Progressives Congress (APC) since 2015 than the preceding 16 years of the PDP despite the prominent positions of Igbos in government between 1999 and 2015. Professor Joseph thus ought to be more nuanced and restrained in his unquestioning regurgitation of the mantra of Igbo marginalization.

In any case, does the perceived marginalization of an ethnic group in high political offices in a complex, plural society like Nigeria mean that the apex political authority of the presidency will be conceded to them on a golden platter within the context of competitive elections even when they ignore the imperatives of negotiation, bargaining and bridge-building needed to actualize their objectives? If indeed Peter Obi’s “third force”, presumably the LP, has come to pose a major challenge to the two-party dominant system as posited by Professor Joseph, how come that the force of the veritable political “hurricane” had petered out by the governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections of March 18 with the LP winning only one governorship seat in Abia and even unable to win majority of legislative seats in Anambra, Peter Obi’s home state which he had previously governed for eight years?

Like Chimamanda, Professor Joseph makes much of the ‘large following’ supposedly enjoyed by Peter Obi among youths as a key factor in his undoubtedly impressive performance in the presidential election. But then, how come that his victories were in his ethnic South-East where he secured over 90% of the votes, Lagos and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), with considerable Igbo enclaves and Christian populations as well as the largely Christian-dominant areas of the South-South, Southern Kaduna, Plateau and Nasarawa states? Do we not have substantial youth populations among the electorate in the South-West, North-West, North-East and half of the North-Central where tremors of the supposed Obi electoral earthquake were hardly felt? All the claims of a national groundswell of youth support for Obi and the LP surely deserves more rigorous and serious analytic scrutiny.

Even then, Professor Richard Joseph is too honest an intellectual not to acknowledge the improvement in the electoral structures and processes in the 2023 elections relative to most previous elections. Thus, he states, “Were there machinations to secure his (Tinubu’s) commanding 37% of the popular vote? Perhaps, but that is not a novelty in Nigerian elections. However, the bar is set higher because of the work of many civil society groups, a new Electoral Act, huge government sums in improving INEC’s capacity and extensive social media”. Incidentally, Professor Joseph devotes a whole chapter in his magnum opus to ‘Electoral fraud and violence’ in the Second Republic.

As we noted last week, the 1979 elections, despite the undisguised partisan preferences of the military umpires of the election as represented by the General Olusegun Obasanjo regime, was competitive and credible just like this year’s elections were to objective and intellectually honest observers.

In the distinguished professor’s words in that book, “At 1.30am on the morning of 11 August 1983, a long five days after the first elections were held, Alhaji Shehu Shagari was declared re-elected President of Nigeria by a vote of 12,037,648 to 7,885,434 (for his nearest rival Obafemi Awolowo). Shagari’s vote had doubled from his 1979 total, that of Awolowo had increased by approximately 40 per cent. Of equal importance is the fact that Shagari obtained a minimum of 25 per cent in 16 states of the Federation, compared with 12 states in 1979…”.

Pinpointing the import of the NPN’s purported victory in 1983, Professor Joseph notes that “One major cause of the electoral disorder of 1983, as earlier advanced, was the effort by the NPN to move from being a ruling party whose strength exceeded that of other parties, to one which enjoyed a monopoly of power within the political system. To achieve this objective, it was necessary for the party to increase the size of its vote in the states it already controlled, through its control of the voter registration and voting process, and to pry away from the opposition the heart of their political bases”.

The keenness of the contest and the outcome of the elections, shows that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) did not even attempt the kind of electoral heist perpetrated by the NPN in 1983 in the February and March, 2023, elections. Even if the party had wanted to, the reforms referred to earlier by Professor Joseph had enhanced the institutional autonomy of the electoral umpire as well as the technology-driven transparency of the voting procedures particularly the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines, that made this impossible. Consequently, unlike the NPN which doubled its vote size between 1979 and 1983, the APC vote in the presidential election decreased from 15,191,847 in 2019 to 8,794,726 in 2023 while that of the PDP fell from 11,262,978 in 2019 to 6,984,520 in 2023.

Indeed, Professor Joseph ignores the fact that both Peter Obi who contested on the platform of the LP and Musa Kwankwaso’s New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) were break away key stakeholders from the PDP and they had a combined total of 7,598,204 votes. Had they not depleted the votes of the PDP in its erstwhile strongholds in the South-East, South-South and Kano states, the latter could very well have emerged victorious if it had contested the election as a cohesive whole. This speaks to the credibility of the election. Beyond this, while the APC won 19 states in the 2019 presidential elections and the PDP 17 states and the FCT, both parties won 12 states each in the 2023 polls with the LP winning in 11 states and the FCT and the NNPP sweeping Kano. Had Professor Joseph taken all these factors into consideration, and there is no reason why he shouldn’t have, he would have been unlikely to lend his not inconsiderable intellectual weight to dishonest attempts to dent the integrity of the elections.

In any case, the main reason cited in the public domain by the PDP and LP for questioning the credibility and integrity of the Presidential election was the non real time uploading of the results from polling units to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IREV) as admittedly promised by the electoral body. INEC has since explained that its system suffered unanticipated glitches which made it impossible for it to do so immediately but this commitment in its guidelines has since been complied with – and all the results now fully uploaded. Since all political parties have copies of results on designated forms signed by their polling agents, electoral and security officials, they should now be in a position to compare these hard copy of results in their possession with the uploaded figures on the IREV so as to demonstrate the discrepancies between both and the consequent alleged massive rigging in favor of Tinubu and the APC. To the best of my knowledge, only one Online medium has reported yet unverified differences in the results posted on the IREV portal and the actual results declared in one state.

The responsibility to credibly discredit the results on the IREV portal is particularly that of Peter Obi who vociferously claims to have won the election despite coming third. Just like Chimamanda, Professor Richard Joseph apparently places much store by the failures associated with the promised uploading of polling units results on IREV and the alleged implications on the outcome of the elections. But this appears to be treated only as a tangential issue in Peter Obi’s petition as the focus of his claims and prayers are on Tinubu’s alleged forfeiture of funds in the US almost three decades ago, the alleged illegibility of Tinubu’s Vice-Presidential candidate, Kashim Shettima to contest the election and Tinubu’s failure to score one-quarter of the votes cast in the FCT. None of these appear designed to demonstrate convincingly and conclusively that Obi won and should have been declared Victor in the election.

As a one time governor of Enugu State, Senator Chimaroke Nnamani, aptly put it in a statement this week, “Obi’s petition is dead on arrival. He does not have the spread or national appeal. His appeal to non-electoral matters is to de-market the President-elect and besmirch his reputation. His petition is ego-driven, a joke carried too far. His attempt to highlight non-electoral issues is trying to embarrass the President-elect. Obi now needs to come down from his high horse to allow sedate minds to negotiate on behalf of the Igbo and the South-East for a safe landing to include our stake in the national palaver and share of the accruals of the commonwealth”. Nnamani is a medical doctor and not a lawyer but he makes eminent sense in my view.

• This article was first published April 29, 2023