The Nation Newspaper

Category: Segun Ayobolu

  • Afenifere: Back to Awo

    A highly perceptive columnist with this newspaper, last Sunday, reflected critically and clinically on the three contending strands or tendencies within the Yoruba socio-cultural group, Afenifere, the dialectics of their relationship and their respective stances towards this year’s general elections. It is an important issue, which we will focus on in this space this week.

    The Chief Reuben Fasoranti-led Afenifere has unapologetically and unequivocally declared its support for the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, largely on account of the latter’s promise to undertake the restructuring of the country within his first six months in office. On its part, the Pa Ayo Fasanmi-led tendency within Afenifere is obviously inclined towards the reelection of President Muhammadu Buhari even though it has been rather tentative and less vociferous in asserting its position. I am unaware that Honourable Wale Oshun’s Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG) has expressed an opinion on the matter publicly.

    Incidentally, all three Afenifere tendencies trace their organizational, ideological and philosophical lineage to the legendary Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the first Premier of Western Nigeria in the first republic. This column has no cause to doubt the Awoist credentials of any of the three groups or their commitment to the best interest of Yoruba land. The difference between them has to do more with personality conflicts and different perceptions of political strategy rather than fundamental divergences of ideology or philosophy.

    However, is there really any concrete historical, organizational link between Awolowo and Afenifere as we know it today as represented by any of its current tendencies? What really are the historical roots of Afenifere? In his meticulously researched as well as lucidly and thrillingly narrated book, ‘The Kiss of Death: Afenifere and the Infidels’, Honourable Wale Oshun offers valuable insights into these questions. On pages 26 and 27 of the book, the author gives an account of a historic encounter between Chief Ayo Adebanjo and the late Chief Bola Ige as regards the origin of Afenifere at a reconciliatory meeting of the body in Ijebu Igbo on March 26, 2000. Chief Ige claimed on that occasion “that he founded Afenifere in 1994 in his Ibadan home, and reeled out names of persons who were with him from the start”.

    Chief Ayo Adebanjo, by Honourable Oshun’s account, countered that “Afenifere came into being in 1954” and that “Chief Meredith Adisa Akinloye coined the word “Afenifere” at the meeting of the Action Group leaders who wanted an easy sell to their non-literate Yoruba followers”. In chapter three of the book, Honourable Oshun offers his own position when he submits that “I am prepared to postulate that until January 15, 1966, when the first military coup occurred and swept away all the political parties, Afenifere was both an organization and a slogan…I am prepared to contend that any time Action Group as an organization was mentioned, it was “Afenifere” for the non-literate Yoruba for whom it was coined”.

    It is difficult to fault Honourable Oshun’s position that Afenifere existed as a slogan to simply explicate the Action Group motto of ‘life more abundant’ for the benefit of non English speaking Yoruba members prior to January 15, 1966. But I find it difficult to support the contention that Afenifere had any concrete organizational existence before the Cicero of Esa Oke founded an association named Afenifere at his Ibadan home in 1994. Since politics was banned at the time, Bola Ige obviously gave concrete organizational expression to the slogan, “Afenifere” in 1994 to mobilize the Yoruba in the struggle against the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election won by Chef MKO Abiola.

    In the Second Republic, the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) was the lineal organizational descendant of the Action Group of the first republic. But UPN was known in Yoruba land as “Egbe Imole” and not “Afenifere”. “Egbe Imole”, literarily means the party of light, which was derived from UPN’S symbol of a flaming torch. Thus, Afenifere existed neither as a slogan nor as an organization in the second republic. And neither in the first nor in the second republic was Awolowo ever a member of any concrete organizational structure known as Afenifere.

    Awolowo was never named leader of Afenifere as mistakenly believed in many quarters. Rather, as Chief Bola Ige narrates in his book, ‘People, Politics and Politicians of Nigeria’, Awolowo was unanimously chosen as ‘Leader of the Yoruba’ at a meeting of 100 notable Yoruba leaders from all political and ideological shades convened in Ibadan by the then military governor of the Western State, General Adeyinka Adebayo. Leadership of Afenifere is not synonymous with leadership of the Yoruba.

    It is instructive that with the exit of the military in 1999, Chief Bola Ige’s revived Afenifere then led by the late Pa Abraham Adesanya could not participate organizationally in the politics of this dispensation. Rather, it founded the defunct Alliance for Democracy (AD) as its political arm to contest for political positions and fight for political power. The stresses and contradictions arising from the failure to distinguish between AD’s role as a political party and that of Afenifere as a socio-cultural group not only weakened the latter, it led to the disintegration of the former.

    But Awo with characteristic prescience had foreseen this possibility as early as the 1940s. In 1945, Awolowo had spearheaded the formation of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa in London as a socio-cultural group with the aim of forging unity among the Yoruba whom he described at the time as “a highly progressive but badly disunited group who paid lip-service to a spiritual union and affinity to a common ancestor – Oduduwa”. However, with the birth of the Action Group as a political party on the 21st of March, 1951, Awolowo made a conscious decision to keep the new party organizationally distinct from the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, which was an essentially cultural association.

    In his autobiography published in 1960, Awolowo writes about the tension that initially existed between the Egbe Omo Oduduwa and the Action Group. In his words, “About May 1950, the Egbe feared that the Action Group when fully launched might become its rival and might even eclipse it. The Egbe, therefore, decided to enter into politics and to have its own political wing. It called on those of its members who were organizing the Action Group to abandon it and join the Egbe’s political wing…I was quite prepared to have the Action Group disbanded, leaving the Egbe free to start its political wing”.

    But at the end of the day, Awo writes, “The view was firmly held that it would be dangerous and contrary to its declared ideals for the Egbe to engage in party politics. Accordingly, a committee was appointed to meet the Central Executive Committee of the Egbe to argue the matter out and allay the fears of the Egbe. In the result, the Egbe reversed its former decision and agreed to remain a cultural organization, giving itself freedom of action to back any political party whose policy and programme appealed to it in the Regional elections”.

    Awolowo would no doubt have had serious reservations about any socio-cultural group claiming the proprietary right to take political positions on behalf of the Yoruba without being given any electoral mandate to do so. He would have been even more uncomfortable with any group claiming political or moral superiority to other groups in Yoruba land simply because they claim association with his name or political principles. This is obvious from the message he sent from prison to the Western Regional Conference of the Action Group held at Ibadan on 6th July, 1963, and published in his collection of speeches, ‘Voice of Reason’.

    Permit me to quote him at length: “Within the past few days, a good deal of words and ink has been expended in propagating the unity of the Yoruba, as if the Yoruba are disunited. Time was when there was real disunity among the Yoruba. But since the birth of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa in London in 1945, this objective has been relentlessly pursued and accomplished. Those who, however, believe in the unity of the Yoruba, of the Igbo, of the Hausa, etc, must never rest on their oars. But the line has been drawn, and must be kept indelible, between a Cultural Organization like the Ibo State Union, Ibibio State Union, Egbe Omo Oduduwa etc, on the one hand, and political parties like the Action Group and the NCNC on the other”.

    And to demonstrate that he did not consider his political tendency superior to others in Yoruba land, Awolowo told the AG delegates unequivocally that “It is erroneous to equate the Action Group of Nigeria with the Yoruba people, or to regard our party as being a Yoruba organization. Furthermore, whilst the Action Group does not participate in the Federal Government since January 1960, some outstanding Yorubas have been in the Council of Ministers since the last Federal elections. There are others in the NPC. These persons are as loyal to the cause of the Yoruba people as those of us in the Action Group”.

    All the tendencies within Afenifere should go back to Awo. As a cultural organization, no strain of Afenifere should take partisan political positions purportedly on behalf of the Yoruba. They have no mandate do so. They have no structure to meaningfully mobilize politically behind any candidate or party. As a group, let Afenifere outline for the people its vision of the political programme it considers best for the Yoruba at best as a guide or advisory. Let the choice of party or candidate be left to the best discretion of the individual.

  • Embodiment of civility

    It is understandable that the unruly, anarchic and utterly uncouth behavior of a not insubstantial number of legislators when President Muhammadu Buhari presented the 2019 budget estimates to the National Assembly last week Wednesday has been widely condemned by several analysts. The protesting legislators not only exhibited an unwarranted contempt for the person of the President, they also sought to diminish and treat the exalted office of President with ignominy. It is absolutely indefensible. You don’t have to like the incumbent. But you are duty bound to respect the institution.

    In the Second Republic, President Shehu Shagari and his fiercest opponent and critic, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, were not necessarily the best of political pals. But Shagari was gracious enough to award Awo the National Honour of Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR) for his contributions to national development even though it is a title reserved for occupants of the office of President. That is the height of graciousness and civility.

    Now, is the legislature supposed to acquiesce to the executive’s budgetary proposals or any other legislative agenda whatsoever without asking questions? Surely, no one can rationally make such a proposition. A robust legislature that steadfastly protects its systemic boundaries as an institution from the incursion of the executive is critical to the tenets of separation of powers as well as checks and balances that constitute the defining elements of the presidential system. The opposition, in particular, is expected to robustly but constructively interrogate the budget and other legislative proposals from the executive especially where legislators belonging to the ruling party are inclined to supinely act in accordance with party solidarity.

    If we take a cue from history, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, leader of opposition in the First Republic, offers us a model of how to engage the executive’s proposals, especially budgetary estimates, in a most rigorous, yet even-handed and constructive manner. Awolowo’s party, the Action Group (AG) was diametrically opposed to the ruling coalition of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) and National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) ideologically and philosophically. This meant, of course, that the AG had radically different ideas as to what ought to be the country’s socio-economic objectives and, by implication, what should be the budgetary mechanisms, the mix of monetary and fiscal policies, to achieve them. Yet, at no time did they vociferously seek to prevent the Minister of Finance from articulating the government’s economic programme as embodied in the budget in parliament.

    For instance, in a speech on the 1961 Appropriation Bill given in the House of Representatives, Lagos, on 7th April, 1960, Awolowo declared “It is common for the members of the Government Bench to speak of constructive criticism. They have accused the opposition on a number of occasions of failing to be constructive in their criticism…I think that the Government’s idea of constructive criticism is that people should come here and sing the praise of the government all the time; but our idea of constructive criticism is that we should point to those flaws and defects in the government’s policies and then proceed further, and not just stop there, to make suggestions as to how those flaws and defects could be removed and ameliorated”.

    Having laid this premise, the leader of opposition then undertook a pungent and unsparing critique of the budget proposals after which he said, “What do we then do to avoid this borrowing spree from various countries? I have eight points, which I would submit for the serious consideration of the government”. This was not just criticism for its own sake. But could the AG have given a thorough analysis of the budget and offered concrete alternative proposals to ameliorate its flaws, if its members had created a chaotic scene in parliament and strenuously sought to prevent a smooth presentation of the 1961 budget proposals?

    Would it not have served the PDP and indeed the nation better if its legislators opposed to PMB and the APC had listened attentively to the budget presentation, gone on to study its key proposals carefully and then during the session provided for its discussion at plenary, clinically dissect and thoroughly deconstruct the document? Unfortunately, by attempting at every turn to obstruct PMB’s delivery of the budget address, the opposition legislators created the impression that they had a hidden motive for not wanting millions of Nigerians watching the event live on television to hear what the President had to say. If the budget was irredeemably flawed and the government’s claims mostly false as alleged by the heckling legislators, why then were they so desperate to prevent the President from getting his message across?

    What was showcased, once again, by the indecent conduct of the opposition legislators at the budget presentation is what the late Claude Ake characterized as the ‘overvaluation’ of state power by the political class. This refers to the preoccupation of the political elite with the acquisition of power by all means and at all costs even if to the detriment of the public good. With the fixation of the PDP on reclaiming power at the centre next year after the 16 years of the locusts to which it subjected the country between 1999 and 2015, they do not mind to desecrate and devalue the high office of President, which ironically the party is desirous of occupying again. This is rather unreflective, short term thinking.

    The overvaluation of political power is, in turn, actuated mostly by the perception and utilization of state power as a means of corrupt enrichment and mindless material acquisition. It is indeed in the national legislature that this trait has been most prominent in this dispensation what with the humongous illegal allowances the legislators notoriously award themselves across party lines. It is important to stress here that the culprits in this regard are not just PDP opposition members as this is an attribute of the political class as a whole.

    After all, a number of APC legislators who lost out in the party’s primaries also joined their PDP colleagues in heckling and insulting PMB. What informs the desperate quest across party boundaries to retain or win party tickets at all costs? Again, the answer is obvious: The opportunity that control of state power provides to access and illegally ‘privatize’ collective resources.

    PMB is unquestionably the object of visceral anger on the part of large segments of the political elite because of his widely lauded aversion to mindless personal accumulation of wealth. True, he is not a Saint. But he may well be so described in contrast to many members of our notoriously rapacious political elite. The leadership he has offered in the last three and a half years has witnessed a sharp decline in the degree of venality by occupants of public office compared to the previous 16 years.

    Thus, in the run up to the 2019 elections, the opposition is seemingly investing more time and energy in trying to impugn PMB’s character and integrity than in outlining their own plans and programmes for the people. Their strategy seems to be that of proving that ‘PMB’s corruption is bigger than mine’. But that will be a herculean task for them to achieve even if the democratic context in which PMB is fighting corruption today makes him vulnerable to a degree of credible criticism. Unlike when he was military Head of State between 1983 and 1985, the President’s party has no choice now than to collaborate with electorally valuable decampees from other parties indicted for corruption but who are seeking refuge within the APC from the prehensile claws of the ubiquitous Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

    Much more importantly, the unfortunate incident of last Wednesday in the National Assembly vividly illustrates the erosion of civility as a virtue not just among the political class but in virtually every sphere of our national life. In his Y2000 book, ‘Standing for Something’, the American church leader and theologian, Gordon B. Hinckley, writes: “Civility, I submit, is what gives savor to our lives. It is the salt that speaks of good taste, good manners, good breeding…Civility is the root of the word, civilization. It carries with it the essence of courtesy, politeness and consideration of others. How very much of it we have lost in our contemporary society! All of the education and accomplishment in the world will not count for much unless they are accompanied by marks of gentility, of respect for others, of going the extra mile, of serving as a good Samaritan, of being men and women who look beyond our own selfish interests to the good of others”.

    Faced with heckling, insults and provocative taunting, PMB stood serene and unflappable only gently admonishing his traducers and appealing to their finer instincts and sense of patriotism if any. He stood tall among moral pygmies. The man of war became the embodiment of civility. What an irony!

  • Values matter

    AS the countdown to the 2019 general elections continues apace, the President Muhammadu Buhari administration will quite naturally inundate us with facts and figures on why it deserves to be re-elected for a second term. It will understandably focus on brick and mortar as well bread and butter issues. The roads and bridges it is building across the country. The tons of rice and other agricultural products produced and exported. The increased Megawatts of electricity it is generating. The number of beneficiaries of its several truly revolutionary social intervention projects from free school feeding to stipends for the vulnerable and cheap credit for traders.

    Impressive as all these are they are not, for me, the most critical highpoints of the administration’s performance over the last three and a half years. One key factor that demarcates the Buhari administration from its predecessors since 1999 is its amazing refusal to continue with the culture of national honours as obscene bazaar that was the practice in the preceding Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) dispensation. The radical discontinuation by the All Progressives Congress (APC) of the annual undiscriminating conferment of national honours on all kinds of characters, mostly sycophantic cronies of the ruling party, is one concrete demonstration of its commitment to a new regime of wholesome values that can serve as the basis for meaningful national transformation and development.

    It is not unlikely that a not insignificant number of APC ministers, governors, national and state legislators as well as party financiers and contractors will be quietly seething at the ascetic General’s seeming indifference to what should ordinarily be an elite ‘democratic dividend’ of being a member of the almighty ruling party. For, if it had been under the PDP, many of them would since 2015 have become decorated members of the ever growing army of national honours awardees with all the attendant privileges.

    Indeed, an online medium, in 2017 reported PMB’s perceived failure in this regard thus: “President Muhammadu Buhari has failed to confer national honours on any individuals since his inception of office in 2015 contrary to the usual practice of holding the investiture every year. The President who assumed office on May 29, 2015, failed to host the investiture in 2015 and 2016. With only three working days left this year, there are no indications that it can hold in 2017”. Well, it did not hold and, thankfully, the heavens did not fall.

    To the Buhari administration’s credit, the only national honours it has conferred so far were the posthumous Grand Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (GCFR) awarded this year to the late winner of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, Chief MKO Abiola, as well as the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON) awarded to Abiola’s running mate in the aborted election, Ambassador Babagana Kingibe and posthumously to the legendary human rights and pro-democracy lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi.

    The enduring positive values of courage, resilience, justice, patriotism and selflessness symbolized by Abiola and Fawehinmi in particular are well known. Those are the kinds of values national honours must be reserved for if they are to retain any significance for society.

    The online medium I quoted earlier reported further, “…The last time the conferment of the awards took place was on September 29, 2014, when former President Goodluck Jonathan conferred different categories of national honours on 313 persons. The investiture brought to 4,737 the total of the national honours so far conferred on individuals since its inception in 1963”.

    Among the 313 persons awarded national honours by Jonathan in 2014 as the practice had always been were selected serving governors, ministers, judicial officers and an assortment of other categories of public officers and private citizens. Many of the awardees were very ordinary and average performers in terms of contribution to national development with a sprinkling of truly distinguished and outstanding both in terms of accomplishment and character.

    Let us consider those conferred with the award of Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR) in 2014 for instance. They included Air Marshal Alex Sabundu Badeh, Chief of Defence Staff, Maj-General Kenneth Minimah, Chief of Army Staff, Rear Admiral Usman Jibrin, Chief of Naval Staff, Air Vice Marshal Adesola Amosu, Chief of Air Staff, Col. Mohamed Sambo Dasuki (retd.), National Security Adviser and Ambassador Ayo Oke, Director-General, National Security Agency (NIA).

    Virtually every one of these became embroiled in the N2.1 billion arms contract bazaar unveiled by the Buhari administration and have either returned humongous amounts of ill acquired funds and choice property to the federal government  or are currently facing trial for alleged graft. Has the national honour then not become in many instances a badge of national dishonor?

    Or take this sample of businessmen and/or former governors, ministers or deputy governors conferred with the honour of CFR, OFR or CON by Jonathan in 2014: Dr. Peter Odili, Engineer Muhammed Abba Gana, Chief John Odigie Oyegun, Chief Tom Ikimi, Senator Iyiola Omisore, Erelu Olusola I.A. Obada, Chief (Dr) Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu and Chief Jimoh Ibrahim. Again, none of these can be said to have made any truly path-breaking contributions to national development.

    True, we have had a case like that of Chief Obafemi Awolowo who was conferred with the Grand Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic (GCFR) by President Shehu Shagari even though he never occupied the office of President of Nigeria. In the same vein, President Goodluck Jonathan conferred the award of Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON) on billionaire businessmen, Alhaji Aliko Dangote and Chief Mike Adenuga. These awards were no doubt richly deserved by the proven lifetime accomplishments of these individuals and were not conferred just because they occupied certain offices.

    In sharp contrast to the distance it has kept from the tradition of indiscriminate conferment of national honours, the Buhari administration has consistently kept faith with the conferment of the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), which is the country’s highest academic award for her most accomplished intellectuals in medicine, engineering and technology, the sciences as well as the arts, culture and humanities. This is one order of honours that has amazingly retained its integrity, credibility and prestige since its institution in 1979. Its recipients consistently reflect the values of moral integrity, scholastic brilliance, uncompromising patriotism, generosity of spirit and unremitting hard work, which are the building blocks of national greatness.

    Past winners of the NNOM award include such academic giants as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark, Adiele Afiegbo, Lazarus Ekwueme, Taslim Olawale Elias, Francis Idachaba, Ladi Kwali, Niyi Osundare, Femi Osofisan, Benjamin Olukayode Osuntokun, J.F. A de Ajayi, Isidore Okpewho and Mabel Segun among others. In 2016, Professors Omowunmi Sadik and Tanure Ojaide were conferred with the NNOM award by the Buhari admistration for their accomplishments in the sciences and humanities respectively. And in 2017, the winners were Professors Bruce Onobrakpeya and Adesina Adesoji Adeniran for the humanities/Arts/Culture and Engineering/Technology respectively.

    On Thursday, December 6, President Buhari conferred the 2018 NNOM award on the prolific playwright, poet, essayist, literary critic, author, columnist, director, polemicist and teacher, Professor Olu Obafemi of the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts, University of Ilorin. A Fellow and President of the Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL), Professor Obafemi is a former Director of Research of the Nigerian Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos.

    While conferring the award on the recipient at the Council Chamber of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, President Buhari said, “Our country needs the knowledge, expertise and contribution of today’s recipient to help boost and improve its intellectual development…The recipient of today is admitted into this admirable, respected and distinguished class of Nigerians as the 76th member of the body of Nigerian National Order of Merit Awardees. He has made Nigeria proud with his remarkable achievements drawing global attention to our nation”.

    In his acceptance speech, Professor Obafemi gave a moving account of his academic trajectory, which is a grass to grace story. Even after gaining admission into one of the Northern Nigerian government’s Provisional Secondary Schools in 1964, “…the relatively small school fees could only be paid after my father had sold his cocoa/coffee plantation and my mother the finest of her few clothes”. Continuing, he said “It was not until the third year, when by government policy, the Provincial colleges in the region became full-fledged Government colleges, that my parents were marginally able to sponsor my secondary education with less hardship”.

    He was full of praise for the combination of good mission, regional, state and federal education policies of the 60s and 70s, which opened access and opportunities to qualified pupils and students to obtain sound education. In his words “The story of my life’s journey provides instruction on the value of merit in the attainment of possibilities for individuals, groups and societies…This has affirmed my conviction that merit is a veritable credo of governance and I propose that it is forever good to stick to what is just and right. What remains is for our governments to adhere to the merit principle as the objective condition for national transformation”.

  • Setting Lagos free?

    After one of their meetings to deliberate on the contentious new minimum wage in Abuja, the 36 state governors insisted that there was no way they could afford to pay the proposed N30000 demanded by labour without going bankrupt. But they made one exception. In the words of the chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF), Zamfara State governor, Alhaji Abdulaziz Yari, “We are not able to pay N18000 today. When the president assumed office, 27 states were not able to pay; not that they chose not to pay; now you say N30000 how many of them can pay? We will be bankrupt…Like Lagos that is paying about N7 billion as salaries, if you say it should pay N30000 now it will be N13 billion. From our calculation, it will be only Lagos State that will be able to pay N30000”. But then, the question is why will Lagos be able to pay? Her strategic location and population size are not enough to explain the geometric growth in the fiscal capacity of the Lagos State government since 1999.

    When people refer off handedly to the relative fiscal autonomy of Lagos today, they forget that it was not always so. Let us cast our minds back to Y2000 shortly after Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu assumed office. He had a running battle with the Comrade Ayodele Akele-led Lagos State chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) because of the state’s inability to pay the then proposed N7,500 minimum wage. There was a stalemate for close to three months. The governor was at least twice pelted with pure water and other assorted items at Alausa. Akele was adamant. Tinubu was unyielding. What was the stark reality? The state’s Internally Generated Revenue was N600 million monthly. The public service wage bill was N800 million monthly.

    Tinubu insisted the federal allocation would have to be expended on infrastructure and critical social services for the populace. He said he could not just pay salaries and shut down the state. At that time, Lagos was so much like a war zone. There were mountains of refuse on the streets. The roads were in terrible state. Residents were carrying assorted basins all over Lagos in search of water. Bank robberies and other crimes were occurring almost on a daily basis. School children were carrying benches and chairs on their heads to and from school every day. Traffic was chaotic. School walls were collapsing routinely injuring and killing children.

    So bad was the situation that President Olusegun Obasanjo described the city with characteristic lack of charity and perhaps some relish as no better than a jungle. At the end of the day there was a compromise with labour but the state had to downsize the workforce.

    The story of the financial buoyancy of Lagos today is a function of immense hard work as well as bold, innovative and creative thinking. Under the guiding hands of three  successive governors, Tinubu, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), and the incumbent, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode, the IGR of Lagos State had attained a quantum leap from N14.64 billion per year in 1999 to over N34 billion per annum today. It is a feat that did not just happen per chance. What were some of the measures responsible for this achievement? Let us cite some. For instance, the state undertook comprehensive tax reforms culminating in the introduction of the electronic tax Clearance Cards (etCC) as early as 1999, which is a vital, fraud free and convenient vessel of taxpayers’ records that significantly plugged revenue leakages.

    Another innovation in Lagos State was the early introduction of the Electronic Banking System/Revenue Collection Monitoring Project (EBS/RCM), which enabled the state in partnership with the private sector to create an enhanced tax payers base leading to substantial increase in IGR. The state’s Board of Internal Revenue (BIR), now Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS), was radically professionalized, modernized and granted operational autonomy again with positive impact on revenue generation.

    After protracted negotiations with stakeholders, Lagos State introduced the Land Use Charge Law No. 11 of 2001, which had yielded a total of N3.5 billion between 2001 and March 2007. The numbers must be more impressive now. Ibile Holdings Limited (IHL) was strengthened and recapitalized as the Special Purpose Vehicle for the state’s investment policy. For example, it was through IHL that Lagos State invested N69million in Celtel (former Airtel) in 2001, grew the investment to N3.48 billion in 2003 and by the time she divested in 2006, Lagos State reaped N19 billion, which was ploughed into the provision of infrastructure.

    Even as the state systematically grew her internally generated revenue, she devised ingenious financial engineering strategies for the radical modernization of infrastructure in diverse sectors to boost economic prosperity. For instance, Lagos State was the first government to go to the capital market in 2002 to source long term funds to finance its long term projects. In September 2002, Lagos State floated its 1st 2005/2006 Floating Rate Redeemable Bond through which it raised the sum of N15 billion at the capital market for scores of critical infrastructure projects across the state.  The bond was finally redeemed in September 2009.  The federal and some other state governments were later to exploit this option for project finance.

    Suffice to say that it is impossible to tell the tale of the still evolving but all the same remarkable radical transformation of Lagos State without mentioning the invaluable contributions of the APC governorship candidate, Mr. Jide Sanwo-Olu and his Deputy, Dr. Obafemi Hamzat. As Special Adviser, Corporate Affairs, Secretary of the State Tenders Board, Commissioner for Economic Planning & Budget, Commissioner for Establishment, Training and Pensions and Managing Director of the Lagos State Development & Property Corporation (LSDPC) at various times, Sanwo-Olu, a graduate in surveying and former banker has been a critical part of economic management and governance in Lagos State over the last one and a half decades.

    Under Dr. Obafemi Hamzat as Commissioner for Science and Technology, the Ministry, representing the city of Lagos, in December 2005 and December 2006, respectively, clinched the first position in the Science and Technology category of the prestigious World Leadership Awards, which both held in London. He was no less exemplary as Commissioner for Works in Lagos State and later Special Adviser on Works at the federal level. Both cerebral men had considerable private sector experience before coming into the public sector.

    Running for the office for the third time, the PDP candidate, Mr. Jimi Agbaje, remains likeable. He has a reputation as a decent gentleman, community pharmacist, entrepreneur spanning over three decades as well as civil society and pro-democracy activist. His deputy, Mrs Haleemat Busari is a lawyer with invaluable corporate governance experience in the private sector. Apart from being a Muslim activist, she brings the gender factor to the ticket.

    But it is not unlikely that Agbaje will confront hard questions on how he can be running on the platform of the PDP, which for over 16 years led Nigeria deeper into the bondage of corruption, poverty and underdevelopment and yet claim he wants to set Lagos free. What did the PDP do for 16 years to set the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway free from being a death trap that claimed thousands of innocent lives? What did the PDP do to set the Lagos-Badagry Express way free from craters and potholes? What did the PDP do to set the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway free from suffocating traffic and the attendant daily banditry?

    What did the PDP do for 16 years to set the abandoned federal facilities in Apapa free from gross neglect and dilapidation that has practically killed what should be one of the most vibrant economic hubs in West Africa? These questions may become pertinent because, in spite of this, Agbaje had no compunction whatsoever running on the platform of the PDP in 2015 and even campaigning ardently for a President Goodluck Jonathan who could barely conceal his disdain for Lagos and the South West. Is it not the Buhari APC administration that has begun to work frenetically on these long abandoned projects in the last three years  Agbaje will surely be asked?

    According to Agbaje, “When a formula does not give you the result you want, you change it! Lagosians must change this unprofitable team committed to govern for their own selfish interest”. Really? But Agbaje’s critics will contend that he canvassed votes for Jonathan in 2015 despite being intelligent enough to know what most Nigerians knew – he ran a hopelessly corrupt and inept government. Of course, most Nigerians voted to change the PDP unprofitable team.

    Can anybody really go about Lagos without being blind and claim no appreciable progress has been made over the last three administrations? Agbaje is a gentleman and truth should certainly be his watchword. Has Lagos arrived at the promised land? No one will say that. But she has certainly crossed the red sea. As the Buhari administration, its flaws notwithstanding, strives to bring the rest of Nigeria out of Egypt, where the PDP had left her marooned for 16 years, will Lagosians heed Agbaje’s call to journey back with the PDP across the red sea back into Egypt ? It is unlikely.

  • Unequal partnership

    Can there be any meaningful logical or empirical basis for a comparative analysis of the relative endowments of the United States of America (USA) and Nigeria with a view to assessing the political, social, economic, cultural, military and strategic relationship between both countries and the implications for the international geo-political system of which they are a part? Viewed from the prism of the contemporary situation of the two polities, most Nigerians would readily disavow the usefulness or validity of any such comparative exercise believing that their country is too far below the rungs of the ladder on which nation states are ranked relative to the United States.

    Considering the unequalled global military might of the USA, her enormous resource endowment and phenomenal economic capacity, prodigious industrial and agricultural productivity, her technological prowess and innovative dexterity as well as her unrivalled geo-strategic reach, it is not surprising that most Nigerians would tend to relate to the global superpower with a feeling of deep seated inferiority. To compound matters, the resilience of America’s democracy and the solidity of her political institutions have been vividly demonstrated in recent times by the capability of that polity to withstand and resist the relentless effort of President Donald Trump, by the sheer unorthodoxy of his style, to circumvent time tested values, structures, processes and norms that have served America well for over two centuries.

    This is in sharp contrast to Nigeria’s largely dysfunctional and often unstable polity, fragile democratic culture, debilitating economic dependency, inchoate nationhood and security vulnerability among other debilities. From this perspective, it is all too easy to presume that there is really nothing to be gained by a comparative analysis of the relationship between the two countries. After all, America is today a virtually stand-alone global economic, military and political behemoth; Nigeria a once upon a time self-advertised giant of Africa alas with feet of clay!

    Yet, in his newly published book, ‘The Political Economy of Nigeria-United States Relations’, Dr. Dapo Thomas, a senior lecturer in the Department of History and International Relations of the Lagos State University, (LASU), meticulously examines the multi-dimensional relationship between the two countries right from the pre-colonial through the colonial and post-independence periods providing useful insights and pointing out pertinent lessons that can guide the future theory and practice of Nigerian foreign policy.

    In six chapters and six appendices covering 258 pages, Dr. Thomas delves into an insightful theoretical discussion and theoretical analysis of the asymmetrical relations between Nigeria and the United States, historical and conceptual reflections on Nigeria-US relations as well as offering a reflective mirror into the evolution of the unequal relationship between the two countries. The book is further enriched by discussions on the strategic configurations of unequal partnership between the two countries particularly in the political and military spheres in addition to a close examination of the economic relations between both polities.

    One critical point that is poignantly made in this important book is that if Nigeria is today at a grossly disadvantaged, unequal, subservient and helplessly dependent position in its relationship to the US, it is not because it has been so divinely ordained by the gods. Rather, Nigeria’s inexcusably weak position in the international political economy relative to the US and other major world powers is largely a function of her reckless squandering of past opportunities and resources to strengthen and consolidate her once respected position in the world community as a notable African regional super power.

    In his words, “I tried to explain how Nigeria’s lack of seriousness and policy discipline caused it a prime position in the comity of nations. Interestingly, corruption was seen as an issue that made the difference between the two countries. If, as at today, Nigeria cannot call US bluff in some of the issues where there are fundamental disagreements, it is because it had failed to exploit some obvious advantages in the relations. In spite of Nigeria’s substantial export of petroleum products to the United States of America, it did not transform its relations of dependency to interdependency”.

    The author points out that in the immediate post-independence period, Nigeria and the US maintained cordial relations characterized by mutual respect. For instance, when Nigeria’s Prime Minister, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, visited the US between July 24 and August 1, 1961, he was accorded the honour of addressing a joint session of the United States Congress on July 26. The harmonious relationship between the two countries was partly due to the fact that the Balewa administration’s conservative ideological posture tallied with the US’s policy of containing and preventing the spread of the Soviet Union’s ‘communist influence’ across the world.

    This was despite the fact that key influence groups in Nigeria including students and radical youth movements, trade union organizations and even the main opposition political party, the Action Group (AG), exhibited a soft spot for the Eastern ideological bloc partly because of the radical anti-colonial posture of the latter.

    The discovery of oil in Nigeria and the subsequent phenomenal oil wealth, the popular ‘oil boom’ that this brought Nigeria, had significant implications for Nigeria – US relations. Perhaps the most significant development in this regard was the key role that the new wealth enabled Nigeria to play in the struggle for the independence of Southern African countries like Angola, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique from the clutches of colonialism as well as the eventual collapse of apartheid rule in South Africa.

    It was at the Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit in Addis Ababa, on January 11, 1976, that the Nigerian military Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed, delivered his great speech titled ‘Africa Has Come of Age’ that mobilized African countries decisively to rise against the US’s pernicious pro-Portuguese position in Angola, Mozambique and the rest of Southern Africa. In the run up to the Summit, the US had intensely lobbied African countries to support the pro-imperialist UNITA and FNLA as against the popular and revolutionary MPLA to form the immediate post-independence government in Angola. Nigeria was unflagging in giving staunch support to the MPLA. Before the summit, most African countries were geared towards towing the line preferred by the US as was always the case in the past.

    Murtala Mohammed’s fiery speech in Addis Ababa changed the scenario dramatically. Laying down his military cap, his eyes flaming red, the Nigerian Head of State rose to declare famously, “Africa has come of age. It is no longer under the orbit of any extra continental power. It should no longer take orders from any country no matter how powerful. The fortunes of Africa are in our hands to make or to mar. For too long have we been kicked around: for too long have we been treated like adolescents who cannot discern their interests and act accordingly. For too long has it been presumed that the African needs outside ‘experts’ to tell him who are his friends and who are his enemies. The time has come when we should make it clear that we can decide for ourselves; that we know our interests and how to protect those interests; that we are capable of resolving African problems without presumptuous lessons in ideological dangers which, more often than not, have no relevance for us, nor for the problem at hand”.

    It was a golden moment for Nigeria’s Afro-centric foreign policy. Needless to say, the MPLA formed the new postliberation government in Angola. Decisive economic action by the Obasanjo administration in 1978 against British oil and banking interests in Nigeria also compelled the British authorities to agree to conditions that ultimately led to the independence of Zimbabwe. Is the contemporary supine and servile foreign policy of Nigeria as regards the US and major world powers solely a function of the economic crisis attendant on the decline of oil revenues as a mainstay in global diplomacy? Not entirely. It is also a function of the dearth of bold, visionary and patriotic leadership.

    In this tour de force in comparative international relations analysis, Dr. Thomas casts informative light on diverse factors relevant to Nigeria – US relations including the Nigerian civil war, the phenomenon of corruption as per the Halliburton scandal etc, the rise of post-apartheid South Africa, the crisis attendant on the annulment of the June 12 election and the issue of asylum for former Liberian leader, Charles Taylor among several others.

    He notes pertinently that “…the Nigerian state is endowed with immense natural and human resources capable of reducing the level of disparity between it and the United States and also make it a dominant power in the world. Even if it seems an unattainable feat to match the US strength for strength or wits for wits, the possibility of transforming to a nation to reckon with or a nation to fear should not be discountenanced…The Iranian government has demonstrated one thing with its current face-off with the US and other powers. And that is asymmetrical relationship should not be an excuse for weak nations to submit themselves to the eternal manipulation and domination of strong nations”.

  • Issues in party primaries

    Given the vehement outcries in several quarters as regards the outcome of the just concluded primaries of the All Progressives Congress (APC), was the party right to have gone ahead with the contentious intra-party polls rather than allow the continuation of the erstwhile Chief Odigie Oyegun-led somnolent status quo as desired by some stakeholders? Viewed superficially, the boisterousness and seeming descent into disorder in some states following the APC primaries is far less preferable than the peace of the graveyard that hitherto prevailed before comrade Adams Oshiomhole’s emergence as national chairman of the ruling party.

    Yet, the truth is that it would have been infinitely more dangerous for the APC to have gone into next year’s elections in the complacent and utterly delusionary belief that all was well in the party when deep seated grievances and frustrations were simmering ominously beneath the deceptively placid surface. Though often rancorous, chaotic and sometimes even temporarily destabilizing, inter and intra- party contests allow contending ideas and interests to compete openly thereby bringing disagreements, disaffections and misgivings into the public space and allowing a significant degree of healing to take place within parties or in the polity as a whole.

    Open and free intra-party contestations also enable the identification of individuals and tendencies that cannot reconcile their particular aspirations with the group interest of their political parties thus making it easier for such disaffected persons or groups to seek accommodation elsewhere. In apparent affirmation of the fact that most politics is ultimately local, the post primaries crises that have engulfed the APC in a number of states do not appear to have had any significant negative effect on President Muhammadu Buhari’s support base within the party.

    It is instructive that no aspirant was confident enough to challenge Buhari for the APC’s presidential ticket thus his overwhelming victory at the September 25th  direct presidential primaries, an exercise in which he garnered 14, 842, 072 votes nationwide. No less significant is the fact that those who left the APC to contest for the presidential ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – Senator Bukola Saraki, Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso and Governor Aminu Tambuwal – were unable to clinch the opposition party’s ticket, which was emphatically won by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.

    Quite apart from the alleged role of money in the outcome of the PDP presidential primaries, there is no doubt that the party’s key stakeholders were convinced that only Atiku had the requisite stature to offer a formidable challenge to Buhari and the APC at next year’s polls.

    At the very onset of his presidency, Buhari had given an indication that the kind of debilitating dwarfing and marginalization of the ruling party by the presidency witnessed under the PDP would no longer be the case during his tenure. He thus commendably kept the presidency at a respectable arms length from the internal affairs of the APC to the extent of not interfering with the process of electing the party’s inaugural leadership at the National Assembly. True, the efficacy of the PMB administration has been considerably hobbled by the emergence of a National Assembly leadership that not only was at variance with the party’s preference but actively nurtured the legislature into an effective opposition to the executive.

    But it is not PMB’s perceived antipathy to politics that is to blame for the dysfunctional relationship between the legislature and the executive under the current leadership of the National Assembly. Rather, the fault lies squarely with the complacent, indolent and lethargic Chief John Odigie- Oyegun led National Working Committee (NWC) that was pathetically unable to enforce discipline among the party’s ranks in the legislature as well as foster harmonious legislative-executive relations predicated on a common party platform.

    Since nature abhors a vacuum, the APC governors naturally moved in to seize the sovereignty within the party especially given PMB’s unwillingness to act the part of authoritarian imperial president as was the case with President Olusegun Obasanjo and Dr. Goodluck Jonathan under the PDP. As major financiers of the party within the context of the widespread poverty that incapacitates millions of party members from being effective financial members, the governors were well placed to assert authority over the party within their states and by combination to steer the party nationally in the direction of their choice. All they had to do was to ensure that their interests did not collide with that of an essentially apolitical but still very powerful and influential presidential incumbent.

    Against this background, it is misleading to label only one or two governors fiercely contesting the outcome of the primaries in their states, which they find disagreeable, as emperors. The truth of the matter is that by virtue of the positions they occupy and the ingrained political culture that had subsisted until now, all governors irrespective of their party platforms are veritable emperors in their states to varying degrees. If governors had largely imposed their candidates for various offices on their parties in the past, it is certainly not illegitimate for current occupants of the office to wonder why things should change in their own time.

    Yes, Oshiomhole deserves commendation for his courageous attempt to change the extant system favourable to governors, which he also benefitted from in the past as a former state chief executive. A far easier and possibly more beneficial path in pecuniary terms would have been for the national chairman to dance to the tune of the governors who are after all his erstwhile colleagues. The dominance of the club of governors in the APC would thus have been consolidated under Oshiomhole watch. The diminutive ex trade unionist leader’s preferred option of direct primaries is a revolutionary initiative to foster greater popular control of the parties by rank and file party members. It may indeed be one of the most epochal developments of this political dispensation if Oshiomhole summons the courage to remain steadfast.

    To paraphrase the late Professor Harold Laski, an increasingly obsolete and dysfunctional era in the management of the affairs of political parties in Nigeria, specifically the APC in this case, is dying. A new, more inclusive, transparent and democratic intra-party dispensation is struggling to be born. It is the Oshiomhole-led APC NWC’s historic role to be the midwife of the emergent, more just, equitable era, which will be hopefully less prone to financial manipulation. There can certainly be no new birth without the kind of labour pangs currently being witnessed by the APC.

    But as national chairman, Oshiomhole should be the chief unifier of the party. He should be able to stand firmly by the principles of transparent and credible intra-party electoral processes within the APC without engaging in avoidable public insults and brickbats with aggrieved members of the party understandably opposed to the change he champions.

    In my view, PMB emerges as the undisputed hero of the APC’s inevitably fractious primaries. Being the ruling party, the fierce scramble for the APC’s tickets at various levels is understandable. Whatever may be the fault of the party and its administration over the last three and a half years, it still offers the best prospects for aspirants to public office in next year’s elections in large swathes of the country. In this context, it is to his credit that PMB has not thrown his weight around unduly or utilized the immense powers of the presidency to circumvent or short circuit due process during the APC primaries.

    Some of those most aggrieved at the outcome of the primaries are known to be very close personal allies of Buhari. Yet, he has not constituted himself into a superior adjudicating authority to decide on the merit or otherwise of their complaints. Buhari has insisted rather that stipulated procedures be strictly adhered to. This in my view places him on an elevated moral pedestal that will be difficult to equal in this political dispensation.

    What has become obvious from the various intra-party electoral contests, particularly those of the ruling APC, is that party primaries are too important and critical to the smooth functioning of the political system to be left to the internal arbitrary devices of political parties. Going forward, this column advocates the establishment of a National Political Parties Regulatory Commission (NPPRC) to oversee the registration and deregistration of political parties as well as conduct intra-party elections both for party and elective offices at all levels. That way, party members will not be at the mercy either of domineering governors or all powerful national executives.

     

     

     

  • Oyebode, Basorun and restructuring

    As far as he is concerned, the subsisting 1999 constitution that provides the legal framework for the country’s socio-economic, political, spiritual, secular and moral life, is utterly, irredeemably defective and should be discarded altogether for the country to make progress rather than “going round in circles in a manner reminiscent of the potter’s will – all motion, no movement”. The proponent of this revolutionary view is none other than the respected, radical scholar of international law and jurisprudence, Professor Akin Oyebode.

    Delivering a lecture titled “The Nigerian Conundrum and the way forward” at an event organized by the Oriwu Club, Ikorodu in Lagos, the distinguished scholar averred that “The necessity for what the lawyers call an autochthonous constitution goes without saying. We cannot continue living a lie by calling a military decree, which propagates an untruth against itself, the country’s constitution. More importantly, the military-imposed constitution is lopsided, inequitable and dysfunctional and it should be jettisoned and replaced with a more acceptable instrument which adheres with the tenets of true federalism”.

    Continuing the distinguished scholar argued that “The existing division of powers needs to be reworked such that the Federal Government would shed its bloated powers and the constituent units would exercise more powers in a re-configured federal system. Luckily, there is already in existence a draft constitution elaborated by the National Conference of 2014 in the event that some would argue that the country does not require yet another constitutional conference…A new constitution is a condition sine qua non for the rebirth of this country”.

    Now, is it strictly true that the extant 1999 constitution is nothing but an imposed ‘military decree’ that ‘propagates an untruth against itself’? I don’t think so. The reality is more complex than that simplification. This column has had cause in the past to trace the trajectory of the 1999 constitution to the 1979 constitution, which was drawn up by 59 of some of the country’s brightest and most accomplished lawyers, intellectuals, diplomats and public administrators albeit under the aegis of the Murtala/Obasanjo military administration’s political transition programme.

    The draft constitution was later debated and ratified by an elected Constituent Assembly before being signed into law by the Supreme Military Council (SMC), which made some insertions that could easily have been expunged had the succeeding civilian political elite summoned the will to do so. There is no significant difference between the current constitution and that of 1979 that provided the legal basis for the defunct second republic (1979-1983). It is thus not correct to create the impression that the 1999 constitution is wholly an illegitimate jurisprudential child of military arbitrariness utterly delinked from the country’s political history.

    In any case, how did the military come to play a supervening role in the country’s political and constitution making process? Was the military intervention of 1966 not a function of the virtual breakdown of the essentially regional and parliamentary constitution of 1963 just as the failure of the 1979 presidential constitution resulted in the collapse of civilian rule in the second republic? Under the now highly romanticized first republic constitution, law and order had broken down in a large swathe of the country. In the Western Region, a legitimate and very popular government had been illegally removed by the centre in collusion with bitterly detested minority elements in the region.

    The badly rigged 1965 regional elections in the West spawned a reign of anarchy and total breakdown of governmental authority with daily blood- letting across the region when the masses rose up in the famous ‘operation wetie’ revolt. The first Premier of the Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and some of his associates were unjustly incarcerated on trumped up and farcical charges of treasonable felony while it was an open secret that the NPC and its NNDP allies in control of the centre were planning a full scale military clamp down on the opposition before the preemptive majors’ bloody coup of January 1966.

    Both the federal and regional governments devised ingenious schemes through which public funds were diverted to enrich those in control of state power and their allies though not on the current industrial scale of corruption in contemporary Nigeria. In the North, a brutal military repression had been unleashed on the minorities particularly the Tiv who were demanding political autonomy from perceived Hausa-Fulani domination. Why then must anybody create the absolutely erroneous impression that the first republic was an era of idyllic governance disrupted for no reason by the military, which then went ahead to replace a thriving  and stable four-regional structure with the current centralized multi-polar state structure?

    Hadn’t leading politicians from the south including Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikwe been advocating the creation of more regions in the country because they saw the existing regional structure of the first republic as unjust and unsustainable being overly skewed in favour of Northern Nigeria? What exactly does Professor Oyebode mean by terms like ‘autochthonous constitution’ or ‘a re-configured Nigeria”? Reconfigured according to whose definition and imagination? Does he mean a return to the discredited regional structure of the first republic as advocated by some? Is it not instructive that the 2014 National Conference’s draft constitution to which the professor approvingly alludes actually recommended an increase in the number of states in the country to no less than 54?

    Yes, hardly anyone disagrees with the fact that structural adjustments to strengthen democracy, deepen federalism, accelerate socio-economic development and enhance security in Nigeria are long overdue. But this can be done within the subsisting constitutional context rather than pulling down the entire existing structure and embarking on the ultimately illusory expedition of crafting a new, supposedly perfect constitution, emerging magically from a tabula rasa.

    Perhaps the most practical, realistic and achievable suggestions for restructuring Nigeria I have come across are those articulated by Chief Olorunfunmi Basorun and popularized in Dr. Femi Orebe’s column in The Nation of Sunday, October 14, 2017. Lawyer, former Deputy Director of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Secretary to the State Government in the high achieving Alhaji Lateef Kayode Jakande administration and now leading member of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Lagos State, the highly regarded Chief Basorun certainly has the experience to speak authoritatively on the issue.

    In his memo to the APC restructuring committee, Basorun advocates that items such as electricity generation, transmission and distribution, minimum wage, labour matters and industrial relations, fingerprint identification and criminal records, tourism as well as federal roads should be moved from the exclusive to the concurrent list “to enable the states, and by extension the local governments, have more responsibilities”. He also offers concrete and detailed suggestions on a new revenue allocation formula to enable the lower levels of government meet their new responsibilities.

    Chief Basorun’s brutal frankness on the issue of going back to regionalism illustrates the formidable political and emotional obstacles to attaining that objective. Femi Orebe summarizes his views thus: “For instance, he asks: in the Northwest, will the man from Sokoto or Kebbi, or the one from Zamfara want to come and report in Kaduna, his new regional hub? We, in Lagos, he says emphatically, will never like to go to Ibadan nor would people in Ogun, Ekiti or Ondo. When you go to the East, he continues, are you saying those in Abakaliki will now go to Enugu, or Benin to go and report at Port Harcourt; states in the North East to all head to Maiduguri and those in North-central to go and report in Jos? Regionalism, he concluded, will just not work. Rather, the six geopolitical zones should be included in the constitution to serve as units of sharing preferment”.

    Again, Orebe captures the sheer originality and audacity of Chief Basorun’s thinking specifically here on enhancing the financial viability of states and local governments: “It is his considered view that with the huge amounts daily going to owners of oil blocks in the country, and with every oil block making a minimum of N4 billion daily according to a former senator of the Federal Republic, government should embark upon a complete redistribution of oil blocks such that one each goes to the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory. Specific functions, he suggested, must be set for the revenue accruing from these, just as there should be an agency, domiciled in the office of the Vice President, to monitor and oversee compliance. Also, 10 per cent of the funds must go to the local governments to energize them and rapidly increase economic activities at the local government level”.

    Incidentally, radical human rights lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN), has also consistently advocated the allocation of oil blocks to the states rather than individuals in the interest of justice and equity as well as to enhance fiscal capacity at the levels of governance closest to the people. With creative thinking and the requisite political will, remarkable progress can be achieved under the present constitution without incinerating the valuable experiences – good and bad- of the last nearly two decades of slowly but steadily deepening practice of democracy and federalism in Nigeria.

  • Restructuring and the 2019 election

    There is no doubt a reasonable degree of consensus among informed Nigerians on the need at the very least of some measure of tinkering with the structure of the polity in order to overcome some of the persistent existential threats to the country’s peace, progress and prosperity. It is obvious, for instance, that the current unitary policing structure is grossly deficient to ensure internal security in a complex, plural society like Nigeria. Hence the glaring impotence of the Nigeria Police in the face of the prevalent high crime rate and the drafting of military task forces and specialized operational squads to perform police duties in no less than 30 states of the federation if not more. Consequently, the country’s internal security is not necessarily better guaranteed since the military is not trained for such civil assignments while the protection of her territorial integrity, which should be the sole focus of the military, is jeopardized due to the avoidable distraction of the latter.

    In the same vein, the federal government continues to be burdened with a surfeit of responsibilities including education, health, agriculture, trade and commerce, which can be more efficiently administered at the lower levels of government with the centre only setting and enforcing regulatory standards. Thus, the federal government enjoys a more than proportionate share of federal revenues while most of the states and local governments where the vast majority of Nigerians actually reside are perennially short of funds to even pay public sector workers not to talk of providing quality social services and infrastructure for their citizens.

    Most of the states are economically unviable not because they lack natural or mineral resources within their jurisdictions that could be exploited for the benefit of their people.  Rather, the extant 1999 constitution makes the ownership, control and exploitation of these resources the exclusive preserve of the federal government.  A good example is Osun State, which is reported to have considerable deposits of gold that she is constitutionally prohibited from mining. Experts contend that there is no state or local government in Nigeria that is not similarly endowed with diverse natural and mineral resources that could guarantee their viability if exploited.  Against this background, it is inevitable that the issue of restructuring will be a dominant theme in the campaign for the 2019 elections.

    One reason for this is that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has not taken any step towards effectuating, even minimally, the restoration of true federalism that is stated in its constitution. This is obviously because from the perspective of its leader, President Muhammadu Buhari, the fundamental problem with Nigeria is more behavioral than structural. Specifically, corruption will kill Nigeria if Nigeria does not kill corruption as the President is wont to say. It is, of course, logical to argue that corruption is a function more of personal moral deficiency than structural debility.

    This column has consistently maintained that structural change is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for accelerated national transformation in Nigeria. No less imperative is a thorough revamping of the country’s value system to inculcate in a critical mass of the citizenry significantly higher standards of ethical integrity. But this does not diminish the necessity to urgently eliminate the structural impediments to moral probity particularly in the country’s public life. The excessively centralized character of Nigeria’s federal structure itself provides fertile ground for corruption to thrive.

    Does this then mean that devolving greater resources to the sub-national units of government will necessarily help to check corruption? Not necessarily. It only implies that decentralization of powers, responsibilities and resources to deepen federalism in Nigeria must be accompanied by mechanisms to strengthen checks, balances and accountability at these lower levels of government.

    The failing of the APC in this regard has been smartly exploited by a wily political tactician like Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to place restructuring on the front burner of his campaign. Atiku signaled his intention to maximally exploit the not insignificant sentiment for restructuring in wide swathes of the country to his advantage when he took on the Vice-President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) on the issue recently. The Turaki Adamawa vehemently contested Osinbajo’s reported submission at an event in the US that what the country needs most critically now is good governance rather than ‘geographical restructuring’.

    Closely reading the public exchange of the two men on the issue, however, there seems to be hardly much difference on their perspectives on the ideal political structure for Nigeria. They both essentially advocate a deepening of federal practice in Nigeria through some degree of decentralization of powers and resources to sub national units of government. At the rhetorical level, Atiku sounds more radical in his advocacy of restructuring and this has no doubt endeared him to such groups as Afenifere, Ohaneze and the Pan Niger Delta Forum who have publicly thrown their weight behind his candidacy. However, there will certainly be the need, during the campaign for next year’s elections, for both parties to spell out in concrete terms exactly what they mean by restructuring. What are Nigerians to expect in terms of structural re-engineering of the polity if either party wins?

    There are different contending perspectives on what constitutes restructuring. For some, it is a radical and drastic alteration of the current order to either return the country to the regional structure of the first republic and/or the restoration of the parliamentary system of government. Others advocate the merger of states across the country or the adoption of what amounts basically to a loose, confederal structure that is difficult to distinguish from disintegration. Is Atiku likely as President to embark on any of these wild, emotive and arbitrary adventures in political engineering? By temperament, ideological outlook and personal disposition, I do not see him doing so.

    If elected as President, will Atiku have the constitutional latitude in a presidential democracy characterized by countervailing checks and balances to engage in such experiments with unpredictable outcomes even if he desires to? It appears to me that built into the extant constitution are institutional road blocks to prevent such indulgences in political phantasmagoria except by revolution. This may have been a restraining influence on the APC’s federalist aspirations even though I doubt if the party in the last three and a half years summoned sufficient political will to move the country even tentatively in the direction of true federal practice.

    Ironically, from the perspective of a radical organization like the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), those seemingly radical advocates of restructuring in the form of a return to regionalism or strengthening ethnic micro nationalism are part and parcel of a backward and reactionary political class. In an insightful publication in The Punch of Thursday, July 5, 2018, ASUU avers that “The debate on restructuring goes on within the context of domination of the economic, political, educational, and all welfare institutions in Nigeria by the same group of Nigerians, from all states and all geopolitical zones, who have since 1960 used their political power as a tool for collective looting of the country’s resources. The debate about restructuring is, at the base, about how to satisfy the demand for redistribution of political and economic power among the contending ruling class groups in the country. The debate is conducted without the participation of the people of Nigeria; it is dominated by coalitions of ethno-nationalist leaders, politicians, businessmen and women (contractors) and their intellectuals”.

    There is certainly much that is true in ASUU’s submission and we will be taking a deeper look at the organization’s perspective in due course. If the APC were a radical progressive party and not just a little to the left of the PDP ideologically, that is the kind of position on restructuring that would set it apart distinctly from the former ruling party.  Paradoxically, it is the ideologically ultra –conservative but morally puritan President Muhammadu Buhari that seems to be the most notable exception to ASUU’s sweeping categorization of the Nigerian political class as largely venal, exploitative and self-serving irrespective of their ethno-regional origins or religious conviction.

    Buhari’s fierce aversion to corruption or mindless material acquisition by ruling class elements must certainly be informed to an extent by some empathy for the millions of poor and downtrodden victims of the excesses of Nigeria’s political class. Unfortunately, he apparently lacks a corps of intellectuals capable of shaping his elementary views on morality, puritanism, religion, discipline and governance into a coherent and easily assimilable body of political ideas around which a mass, pan-Nigerian movement can be mobilized.

    More damagingly, the embarrassingly nepotistic inclination of Buhari’s inner circle, the infamous cabal, casts a dark shadow over an otherwise quite luminous political figure in contemporary Nigeria. And it is largely because of the sectional and arrogant antics of this cabal, as demonstrated by the impunity exhibited at the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) during the week, that restructuring will be a key issue in the campaign. Many Nigerians are so angry and pissed off that they will be easily swayed by ethnic entrepreneurs and regional political merchants masquerading as advocates of restructuring.  It is a pity.

  • Behold, a new Obaro of Kabba

    Ah!  What a season of efflorescence it has been for the institution of traditional authority and rulership in post-colonial Nigeria particularly in this political dispensation since 1999. Today, a landmark book, ‘The Benin Monarchy: An Anthology of Benin History’ written under the authority and warrant of His Royal Majesty, Omo N’Oba Edo Uku Akpolokpolo, Ewuare II, Oba of Benin is being presented to the public at the Oba’s Palace in Benin City. The ancient throne of the Benin Kingdom continues to enjoy far greater prestige and reverence among the people than any democratically elected government can hope to do.

    On Monday this week, the Alaafin of Oyo, Iku baba yeye, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi III, marked his 80th birthday to wide acclaim within and far beyond his domain. The youthful Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi Ojaja II, who clocked 44 on October 17, continues to exhibit wisdom and exude a charm and quiet dignity that belies his age.  Every year the annual Ojude Oba festival through which the industrious Ijebu pay obeisance and homage to their highly revered traditional ruler, the Awujale of Ijebu land, Oba Sikiru Adetona, grows ever more glamorous and elaborate.

    From the Sultanate of Sokoto to the Emirate of Kano and right across the North, the traditional institution continues to be the object of immense awe and adoration.  In his slim classic, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ published about three and a half decades ago, the great Professor Chinua Achebe noted that even the republican Igbo who once prided themselves on having no king have embraced the  institution of traditional authority with remarkable gusto. The inimitable novelist estimated at the time that there could be no less than 400 traditional rulers in the old Anambra State. It will be interesting to take a census of the situation today!

    So intrigued was the noted political scientist, Professor Richard Sklar, with the persistence and resilience of the institution of traditional authority in post-colonial Africa that in 1993 he published an in depth study of what he called the phenomenon of ‘dual authority’ in postcolonial Africa. He was referring to the co-habitation in African polities of modern sovereign state structures which possess electoral mandates and/or monopoly of control over the instruments of coercion with unelected traditional authorities that retain considerable influence and legitimacy despite their denudation of all legislative, executive and judicial authority as a result of the colonial encounter.

    Yet, despite the reality that stares them in the face, some African scholars and thinkers continue to live in an illusory world as regards the continuing, even increasing, relevance of traditional political institutions in post colonial Africa. For instance, in their 1989 discourse, ‘Integrating the Past with the Present: A Futile Exercise?”, Professor A. Badejo and S.A. Ogunyemi contend that “The institution of traditional rulership is an historical relic that belongs to antiquity. These relics of bygone instruments of oppression which are a constant reminder of uneven social development and sociological disunity in Africa are irrelevant to a society currently subject to the objective laws of capitalism controlled from the Western seats of capitalism”.

    They are supported by Professor Ekong E. Ekong who, in another article in the same book, submits that “In Nigeria, if we sincerely desire to build a strong and united nation, we cannot afford to retain a traditional government at the grassroots and expect to superimpose a successfully run non-traditional government at the state and federal levels”. Mercifully these kinds of theoretical flights of fancy are effectively counteracted by a scholar like Ilufoye Sarafa Ogundiya who, in another publication in 2005 contends that “traditional rulers are vital to governance in contemporary Nigeria and equally vital to the search for national integration. These rulers continue to wield tremendous influence among their people and in their communities, despite attempts to make them irrelevant to constitutional governance and the political process over the years”.

    The veracity of Ogundiya’s submission is confirmed by the sheer excitement that has gripped the ancient Kabba community of Kogi State since the announcement by the Kogi State government of the appointment of His Royal Majesty, Oba Solomon Dele Owoniyi, Obaro Otitoleke Oweyomade 1, as the 44th Obaro of Kabba and Chairman of Okun Traditional Council. The new Obaro will be formally presented with his Staff of Office today by the Governor of Kogi State, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, at the prestigious Saint Augustine’s College field at 10am. Oba Solomon Dele Owoniyi succeeds his highly revered predecessor, Oba Michael Olobayo, who joined his ancestors in May 2016 having reigned for over three decades.

    Born on January 1, 1957, in Ile-Ife, Osun State into the family of Mr and Mrs Owoniyi, Oba Solomon Dele Owoniyi started his primary education in the ancient city in 1964 before moving to Saint Andrew’s Primary School, Egbeda, Kabba, Kogi State in 1966 where he obtained his first School Leaving Certificate in 1970. He was admitted into Ijumu Anglican Secondary School, Iyara, Kogi State in 1971 and graduated from the institution in 1975. Thereafter, in the same year, the new monarch was admitted into the Jos Campus of the University of Ibadan for his preliminary studies. In 1976, Oba Owoniyi and other undergraduates of the institution were moved to Ibadan, the mother campus, where he graduated with a degree in history in 1979. Showing a foretaste of things to come and his tremendous leadership potentials and love for his community, Oba Owoniyi served with distinction as National President of Kabba Students Union in 1978.

    After his compulsory one year participation in the National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) scheme in Niger State, the new monarch was employed as a News Editor with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) where he served with characteristic diligence and industry until 1988 when he joined the Nigeria Custom Service (NCS). Oba Owoniyi retired from the NCS in 2015 having risen to the position of Deputy Comptroller of Customs. Married and blessed with children, Oba Owoniyi perfectly fits the bill of a noble personage described by the Yoruba as ‘Atobatele’, one who had always exuded royal bearing, carriage and responsibility ever before ascending the throne. This is particularly because of his philanthropic disposition to the downtrodden and unrivalled commitment to the development and progress of Owe land.

    Of course, given the immense prestige of the Obaro throne, there were other illustrious contenders for the office apart from Oba Owoniyi. This has always been the case not just in Owe land but across Yoruba land. Indeed, some claimants to the throne had even gone to court apparently in futility to stop the installation of the new monarch. But the overwhelming sentiment is that with the emergence of the new Obaro, all stakeholders in the peace, progress and development of Kabba and Okun land in general should sheath their swords and join hands with the new Obaro in strengthening unity and stability in the community as a basis for accelerated positive transformation.

    Given his rich administrative and managerial experience as well as his deep immersion in the mores and traditions of his people, Oba Owoniyi certainly has what it takes to forge an enhanced sense of community and harmony in Owe land while running an inclusive traditional administrative style that carries all along. It is widely acknowledged that Kabba, indeed Okun land, is endowed with tremendous natural, agricultural, touristic and other potentials that remain largely untapped. A versatile traditional ruler like Oba Owoniyi can contribute significantly to complementing the developmental efforts of the state government and also in mobilizing the people for the arduous and challenging task of self development.

    In his aforementioned thesis on the concept of ‘dual authority’ in Africa, Professor Sklar posits powerfully that “The African national governments are fragile, and there is great need for authority based on consent of the governed. In this circumstance, a separate source of authority, embedded in tradition, could powerfully reinforce social discipline without abandonment of democratic forms of government. The rejuvenation of traditional authority would not, then, imply a resurgence of either “feudalism” or political oligarchy”.

    And in his classic, ‘The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the curse of the Nation State’, the famous late Africanist, Basil Davidson, contends, with the then Gold Coast as the specific example, that Africa’s post-colonial history and destiny could most likely have been radically different if at the end of the colonial era power had been “returned to acknowledged African chiefs and kings” who “were often persons of genuine authority and expertise who drew their status and prestige from a long pre-colonial history, in itself one of successive changes and developments”. He continues: “To reject their claims to take over from the British when Britain withdrew must be tantamount to rejecting the claims of Africa’s self-development through countless centuries. In that case the institutions of renewed African independence would have to evolve out of a void, or rather out of the utterly different history of England”.

    As the new Obaro receives his staff of office today, there is widespread expectation and hope that the king will build on the successes of his predecessor and help elevate Kabba and Okun land to a new pedestal of peace, prosperity and progress. May God Almighty help Kabiyesi in the no mean task ahead.

  • Atiku’s hour cometh?

    In the run up to the 2015 presidential elections, I wrote a column on this space titled ‘Buhari’s hour cometh?’ Everything just appeared to be working in the direction of a predictable victory for the taciturn and aloof General from Daura. Here was a man who had sought the country’s highest position on three previous occasions – 2003, 2007 and 2011 – with nothing to show for it. It did not matter that he was widely admired for his asceticism, frugality and simple outlook on life while enjoying a cult following among the masses of northern Nigeria. For the first time, however, Buhari had a broad based political platform in the emergent All Progressives Congress (APC) that also equipped him to win sufficient support particularly in the South West and middle Belt geo-political zones that enabled him to defeat an incumbent at the centre in the 2015 elections.

    With the emergence of Alhaji Abubakar Atiku as presidential candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), however, it is pertinent to wonder if his much awaited political hour has finally come for the former Customs officer turned mega businessman and politician from Adamawa State. For one, the 12 other aspirants the Turaki defeated in the   PDP intra-party elections appear to have united in support of his candidacy at least for now. That was how other defeated presidential aspirants in the historic APC National Convention of 2014 accepted Buhari’s candidacy, refrained from quitting the party and with some even working assiduously for his victory in the general election. Incidentally, President Goodluck Jonathan who later lost the election had been returned unopposed as PDP presidential candidate at a time when Buhari had to face competitive intra-party contest within the APC.

    Of course, one cannot read too much into such coincidences because the APC, from all indications, appears to have rallied behind Buhari’s candidacy despite the seeming monarchical coronation that characterized his unanimous affirmation as presidential candidate at the APC’s non-elective national convention.  However, it is not out of place to ponder if indeed Atiku’s hour of glory may be at hand given the support he his garnering from unusual quarters. For instance, the Yoruba socio-cultural group, Afenifere, has endorsed Atiku’s presidential bid presumably because of his new found love for restructuring of the polity.  This has long been a cherished desire of the Afenifere leaders.

    In the same vein, Atiku has been aggressively courting South-East, South-South and Middle-Belt political leaders and groups.  Even then, will these zones particularly in the South want to risk electing an Atiku who will most likely have the possibility of spending two terms of eight years in office compared to Buhari, who if he wins next year, will be entitled to only one more constitutional term of four years? I ask this question in the light of the unwritten and informal zoning formula that has characterized political competition especially at the presidential level in this dispensation. Atiku has reportedly promised to spend only one term in office if he emerges as President next year. Do most people believe him? I don’t think so. Yes in picking Mr. Peter Obi from the South East as his runningmate, Atiku has shown that he means business.

    No less significant, is the endorsement that Atiku has received from his former boss and implacable foe – the unforgiving and pugnacious former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Obasanjo in characterisc exhibition of self –righteousness, claimed to have forgiven Atiku for his many sins because the latter has apologized to him and demonstrated contriteness and mortification for his alleged iniquities. If Obasanjo had all along claimed at diverse fora that his former Deputy had sinned against God and Nigeria, can he now just casually bestow the benediction of forgiveness on the PDP candidate presumably on behalf of God and the rest of us?

    Some analysts have claimed that Obasanjo has only minuscule electoral value. They miss the point.    The former President’s political influence far exceeds his electoral value. This was the pithy point made by Chief Obafemi Awolowo when Chef MKO Abiola quit the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the Second Republic causing seismic political tremors despite his scanty following in the South West at the time.   It is better to have Obasanjo at your ringside when engaging in electoral or political battle. But even then, it is not impossible that he may yet meet his waterloo at the hands of the tactically astute military turned political strategist from Daura.

    Again, the question: ‘Is Atiku’s hour of electoral glorification at hand?’ The eloquent and often prescient convener of the Save Nigeria Group (SNG), Pastor Tunde Bakare is seemingly non committal even though clinical in his analysis. In his words: “It is not going to be an Eaglet versus an eagle but an eagle versus eagle: an old eagle versus new eagle and probably both of them old eagles”. Continuing, the fiery cleric surmised “I can’t say Atiku will win or lose. You see, I am not advocating for him. Among all the PDP aspirants, who contested the party’s ticket with him, he is perhaps the most cosmopolitan; he is a Wazobia man… He has been a businessman with business acumen and he has exposure. But you see, that is not what qualifies you to win. A lot comes into play; so, again, I cannot say whether he will win or lose”.

    Ordinarily, in my view the next election ought to be a straight walk over for the ruling APC. No candidate on the platform of the PDP should stand even a tenth of a chance against President Muhammadu Buhari. The havoc wrought by the PDP in its 16 year-rule of the locusts that virtually brought the nation to its knees is still all too fresh in the national consciousness. Unfortunately, the ruling APC has committed too many unforced errors thus making it possible for the PDP to even dream of coming to power again so soon at the centre after the horrendous bleeding of the national treasury that took place under its watch.

    Luckily for the APC, Atiku seems to be couching his political communication in terms of Nigerians wanting the PDP back in power. Nothing could be further from the truth.  To have even a fighting chance of giving Buhari a run for his money, Atiku must, in my view, sell his personal qualities, attributes and achievements while de-emphasizing his mortally damaged party platform.  If he must refer to his party at all, Atiku’s bold message to Nigerians must be one of being committed to supporting the institution of  genuine reforms within the PDP and more meaningfully re-branding the party and enthroning a new and higher moral ethos as well as ethical standards within the party.

    But does Atiku possess the moral integrity and character to project himself as a moral change agent both within the PDP and as leader of Nigeria if elected next year? Most of his adversaries will vehemently answer this question in the negative. For some inexplicable reason, the toga of alleged corruption hung on Atiku has appeared to stick. I find this baffling because to the best of my knowledge, Atiku remains unindicted by any court of law within or outside Nigeria for any acts of corruption. There have been reports of alleged financial infractions in the United States that make it impossible for Atiku to travel to that country. The US government has, however, maintained a studied silence on the matter thus leaving it at the level of unproven and unproductive speculation.

    Against a candidate like Buhari, there is no way Atiku can dodge responding fully to the integrity question. For despite his all too obvious flaws, millions of Nigerians still admire Buhari’s obvious disdain for materialism and ostentation in a clime where the criminal plunder of public resources is the pastime of the political /business elite. However, if Buhari does not move fast to distance himself from some of his closest aides and inner kitchen cabinet who have hidden under the banner of his integrity to commit all manner of atrocities as epitomized, for instance, by the scandalous Rasheed Maina affair, the still unexplained cash haul at Ikoyi, or open defiance of court judgements and violations of the rule of law, for instance, he may unwittingly aid the fruition next year of Atiku’s hour.

    For now, it is my view that Buhari has done well enough, scoring a slightly above average performance to merit re-election next year. If that happens, someone may likely describe Atiku someday as another ‘best President Nigeria never had’! I wish both Buhari and Atiku best of luck. But the next few months will be crucial.