The Nation Newspaper

Category: UnderTow

  • Is the genie of lawlessness finally out of the bottle?

    WHEN Undertow wrote on April 13, 2019 that Katsina and Zamfara States had become the poster boys of insecurity in the North, not even he was aware that Katsina would a few weeks later become the cynosure of all eyes as bandits successfully abducted President Muhammadu Buhari’s in-law and traditional title holder in Daura Emirate Council in Katsina State, Alhaji Musa Umar Uba. He is, according to a report, married to Hajiya Bilki, a niece to the president. This is probably the nearest the abduction craze has come to the president. Of course the president knows that banditry and all sorts of criminalities, particularly in the North, have reached epidemic proportions. What he may not know is whether his ‘law and order’ approach to combating the crisis, assuming that that approach is even well thought out, is the right panacea.

    Undertow had on that referenced day in a piece entitled “Zamfara tells Nigeria something far deeper” drawn attention to the widespread reports of abductions and banditry in Zamfara and Katsina States and alerte the federal and state governments to begin reappraising their understanding of the huge crisis threatening to engulf the entire North, if not the entire nation. The panaceas so far put forward, Undertow counselled, were generally ineffective and too restricted by stale orthodoxies to tackle the growing menace. The column was, however, not too hopeful that anyone would listen, considering that nearly everyone in government and the security services jealously holds on to old but futile interpretations of the extraordinarily hostile phenomena that have grown to become an albatross around the neck of Nigeria.

    The column added that the ineffectiveness of previous measures to tackle the mushrooming crime crisis was predisposing the country to far more cataclysmic problems. Said Undertow: “But because these measures have been applied in past years with immeasurable severity, but have failed woefully to have any major or lasting impact on the situation in those beleaguered states, there is nothing to suggest that they will work, having worked in fits and starts every time security forces were mobilised or deployed. With a little exaggeration, it is safe to say that the country is sitting on a powder keg. In fact, a little more indolence on the part of the governing elite might see the country careening into the ravine. The widespread attacks in nearly all parts of the country and the superficial impact the deployment of the security services have had on the problem suggest that the political elite have missed all the signals indicating the kind of trouble the country is contending with. But their misdiagnosis is unfortunately accompanied by the failure of rationality and character. The government has stuck to the use of overwhelming counter-force; and the rest of the country seems willing to sermonise over the problem, believing it is an attitudinal problem. Neither force nor sermon will work.”

    Undertow was even more unsettled by the desultory approach to the monumental crisis. It said: “If military and police interventions have proved only partially effective so far, and are in the long run ineffective; and money does not answer to a cancer that is fast metastasizing, then it may be time for the government to examine other ways of running the country, no matter how badly the new ways war against their ethnic sensibilities and stale orthodoxies. The National Assembly early this week angrily suggested state policing as a way out because, as they put it, all crime is local. But deployed in isolation, even this measure will fail to have the desired impact. What the political elite do not want to hear is that the existing structure of the country is fraying at the edges, and rupturing very badly in the middle. It is time, more than ever before, to reconsider the foundations of the country and initiate a total reworking of its structure under a new and more effective arrangement. Tinkering will not mitigate a crisis that is fast building up into a critical and explosive mass.”

    And finally, reflecting its frustrations with the government’s jaded and almost casual approach to the problem of widespread insecurity in the North, Undertow denounced the government’s insouciance in the face of what is building into a catastrophe. The column then concluded: “The population of young, angry and alienated Nigerians is growing at an alarming rate, resources are shrinking, economic growth is unable to match the rise in population, attitudes and values are shifting or even morphing dangerously, ethnic and religious relations are fraying, and the political elite insensibly and obstinately operates a costly, contradictory, ponderous and ineffective political system. There can be no worse recipe for disaster than what Nigeria is contending with today. Either the government does not know this, or it is too proud to acknowledge or care about it.” This conclusion may be apocalyptic and the problem resistant to any cure, but all that is needed is for the government to expand its brain trust, meet minds the proper and scientific way, and design useful remedies before it is too late. There are of course no guarantees — no guarantee that the government will humble itself and look for fresh ideas, and no guarantee that even the right remedies will not now prove too little too late. But since it is the business of government to constantly find ways of solving problems, they cannot afford to give up.

    The banditry and abductions have come despairingly too close for comfort for the president to stick stubbornly to whatever sure cures he had preferred. Those sure cures are anything but sure. His law and order option is proving inadequate and overstretched. He simply cannot muster the funds to overwhelm what is essentially not a financial problem. The scale of alienation is also abominably imponderable. The imponderability of the problem leaves the government precious little time to reflect, let alone devise solutions, and little elbow room to manoeuvre. Decades of financial malfeasance by Nigeria’s leadership elite, particularly and obviously the northern elite, have created a dangerous critical mass of angry, implacable, insatiable and unforgiving young and alienated people. They have tasted blood through bandit actions and abductions, have become resistant to police and military counterattacks, and may have begun to sense victory approaching if they can stay their nihilistic course.

    This column will say it once again that the Buhari presidency’s understanding of the national crisis manifesting dangerously in the North, especially its underlying reasons and scale, is monumentally defective. Current orthodoxies will not work, for they are based on the wrong perceptions and observations of a problem that has ossified along its multidimensional variants. Social scientists and other analysts have long feared that this day would come as a result of the country’s reluctance to honestly and courageously grapple with the fundamental problems afflicting the body politic. They knew long ago that the country’s political structure, its unitary system disingenuously touted as federal, lack of social justice, and the appalling and undisciplined approach to the rule of law would one day combine in a lethal mix and explode in everybody’s face. That day, alas, is either here or near.

    The Buhari presidency has not expertly handled the crisis well. They can, however, begin to find ways of correctly interpreting the issues at stake and the restiveness of alienated youths. They can also begin to weigh options which, to their leading lights, seem like political heresies but which really, like restructuring, may in fact be the only revolutionary way out. And the presidency must produce the right attitude to both the crisis and its solution without which little can be achieved. Sadly, for a government quite reconciled to excessive dithering, they do not have the time or luxury to continue the dangerous pussyfooting that has led them and the country to this terrible pass. Out of desperation, they may of course consider the declaration of a state of emergency or outright emergency rule in those troubled areas. They will, however, discover what other failed states have long realised: that no one plays his last card so casually.

    The solution to the North’s, and Nigeria’s, problem requires brilliance to conceive and courage to execute. This government has shown neither. But the time to take the bull by the horns is now. Let them take it scientifically and deliberately, not with the reckless bravado of a proud but faded and enervated bullfighter but with the suavity and nimbleness of a young and accomplished prize-winning bullfighter at his most impressive prime. There is no question that the genie of anarchy is out of the bottle. What is in doubt is whether it is completely out or whether it can be piped back into the bottle. Only the Buhari presidency can answer that question. The country will hope that they will eschew all encumbrances — ethnic, religious or ideological — to give the most appropriate answer to the puzzle.

  • Shi’ite nightmare won’t go away easily

    TWICE this week, the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), aka Shiites, has protested the continued detention of their leader, Ibraheem El-Zakzaky, and his wife Zeenah. The two have been in detention since December 2015 when members of the sect clashed with troops in Zaria, Kaduna State. During the clash, one soldier was killed, allegedly by Shiite members, for which Sheikh El-Zakzaky and his wife are facing trial in a Kaduna High Court, while about 347 Shiite members were killed by troops, according to a Kaduna State government inquiry. IMN leaders insist the death toll is much higher than state officials acknowledge.

    Since 2015, Shiites have been organising countless public protests, including marches, to demand justice for their detained leaders and members. Only last year, in October, the IMN alleged that some 48 of their members were killed by troops in one of such protests in Abuja to demand the release of their leaders. The Nigerian Army confirmed some deaths during that protest, but insisted the IMN figures were exaggerated. No soldier was, however, killed. In this week’s protest, IMN members took their long march and protests to both the United Nations office in Abuja and the National Assembly. They were undeterred by the Zaria killings and all other killings of their members since 2015. It is now very unlikely that they will ever be deterred.

    By now, too, the Federal Government must be slowly becoming aware that applying lethal and often disproportionate force against the Shiites will amount to nothing in the face of glaring injustice and cruel and degrading treatment meted out to the sect. So far, no one has been held accountable for the 2015 Zaria massacre. The federal and state governments gloss over it. But until justice is done, neither the Shiites nor the Kaduna State government, nor even the federal government, will rest. There will have to be a closure. The federal government has attempted to deploy additional force to pacify the Shiites. But, as the crisis spirals, possibly out of control, all subsequent killings of Shiite members will have to be accounted for, and some state officials held accountable. If these remedies are not applied, there will be no closure. More wrong can never cure a previous wrong.

    A section of the public may be undecided over the Shiite matter, as they ruminate over whether in the face of sporadic religious restiveness all over the country, the government is not after all right to apply maximum force to quell every disturbance that gives a semblance of breakdown of public order. But with each deadly crackdown and consequent loss of scores of lives, it is a matter of time, as many Latin American and African countries have shown, before the undecided section of the public begins to distance themselves from government-inspired atrocities and deliberate flouting of the law.

    Both the killing of some 48 Shiite protesters in Abuja last year — if the figure is verified — and the killing of 347 Shiite members in Zaria in 2015, will very likely continue to provoke more protests in the near future until a closure is found. Many federal officials, military and security agents, and Kaduna State government officials themselves, will in due course no doubt be held accountable for the killings. Their handling of the Shiite crisis will be investigated and tried in open courts. And in a digital world of widespread availability of technological devices for chronicling  events, it is unlikely that anything can be kept hidden for too long.

    One year or so after the Zaria killings, an Abuja High Court ordered the release of the Shiite leader and his wife, and, among other reliefs, the payment of N50m compensation to each of them. The government has controversially and unwisely spurned that order and instead kept the Shiite leader incarcerated without recourse to the law. More than two and half years later, almost as an afterthought, the Kaduna State government has charged Sheikh El-Zakzaky and his wife in court for the murder of a soldier and for disturbing public peace during the 2015 Zaria massacre. The sect’s leaders have subsequently been detained while trial is ongoing. No evidence has been presented against the Shiite leader’s wife, and even the Department of State Service (DSS) once suggested that the only reason she was still detained was because she insisted she would not leave jail without her husband.

    Nigerians must brace up for additional Shiite protests in the months ahead. Until the Shiite leader is released and justice is done regarding the killings of hundreds of the sect’s members, the matter will not die. Each protest may in fact become more severe than the previous one, and each has the potential of becoming unmanageably deadly, with untold consequences for the governments of the day. Even though the Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai feels increasingly messianic, there is little chance that he will not sometime in the future be held accountable for his mishandling of the Zaria massacre. He and President Muhammadu Buhari, who has sadly not handled the Shiite crisis with statesmanlike  aplomb, must proactively find a way of defusing what is certain to be a future time bomb.

    Both the president and the Kaduna governor know that no law, and not even the constitution, no matter how it is liberally read or interpreted, supports the manner they have handled the Shiite crisis. They have unlawfully detained El-Zakzaky and his wife, indefensibly colluded with or connived at the strong-arm measures against Shiite protesters, and have simply ignored with disdain lawful court orders. To redress these indefensible actions, they must find ways of reaching out to the Shiites. They may love the Sunnis more than the Shiites, though historically in Nigeria the Shiites have been less violent; but as a government, they must find ways to accommodate everyone and every religious group, including those diametrically opposed to their own worldview. They cannot kill all the Shiites without profound consequences, and they cannot use state violence to smother them. That leaves them only one option: peacemaking based on justice.

    The case against the Shiites in a Kaduna High Court is tenuous. Indeed, it can still be resolved if both President Buhari and Governor el-Rufai find the humility and wisdom to dismount their high horses and speak the language of peace and justice. There is no question, however, that troops and their commanders who used unlawful and lethal force to pacify the Shiites in both Zaria and Abuja, must be held accountable. The president and the governor should be reassured that the country might, under certain considerations, be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, implying that while they may have given the orders to cage the Shiites, they perhaps did not order a massacre. But both leaders must realise that their loyalty is first and primarily to the constitution, not to those who committed crimes against humanity in trying to solve the Shiite conundrum.

    The Shiite crisis came about because of a fundamental defect in the government’s ruling philosophy. The government is elected, operates in a democracy, and must be subject to the rule of law. They, therefore, have no reason to operate outside the framework of the law, or act without restraint in dealing with what they fear could potentially become another Boko Haram. Their fears, they must be reminded, are absolutely unfounded. Had they subscribed to a governing philosophy that constrains them to act as servants of the people and in full deference to the rule of law, and had their security forces been well trained and not lacking in doctrine, the Zaria massacres would never have happened, and the atrocious and condemnable detention of the Shiite leaders would never have been necessary.

    Both President Buhari and Mallam el-Rufai must find ways, as elected leaders and presumed democrats, of managing this burgeoning crisis. Respect for the laws of the land does not invariably mean less firmness in tackling crisis of whatever persuasion or colour. They were elected into office because they are thought to have talents above the ordinary. Now, let them put those supposed extraordinary skills into practice and find a fitting closure to the Shiite crisis. If they do not find mitigating measures to resolve the problem, they will discover too late that the world will find them culpable through and through for the bloodletting the crisis has become.

  • Kogi governorship election and Bello’s disastrous rule

    ON Wednesday, Kogi State governor Yahaya Bello announced his intention to seek a second term. He predicates his ambition on the “people’s call to run for a second term in office as the governor” and the “tremendous achievements (his government) has made in the past three years”. He made his intention known, according to some newspaper reports, during the inauguration of the Kogi State House of Assembly Commission in Lokoja. Here is how he put it clumsily: “I would like to inform the good people of the state, the All Progressives Congress (APC) family and supporters from the state, the local government areas down to the wards and polling units as well as various stakeholders, opinion moulders, families and friends, of my interest to answer the people’s call to run for a second term in office as governor of Kogi State.” He then adds rather boastfully and chimerically: “We have made tremendous progress in the last three years and based on our achievements, the people of the state have been calling on me to run again to consolidate on our first term achievements.”

    Mr Bello is locked in battle for the position of the most ineffective governor in Nigeria with Zamfara State governor Abdulaziz Yari. Mr Yari is detested in Zamfara despite being at least empathetic towards his people and their sufferings. His chief problem is his vacuousness, his grinding incompetence, his peripatetic lack of focus, his many silly distractions. Mercifully, the constitution bars him from a third term, thus sparing his state additional misery. Mr Bello, on the other hand, can contest for a second term, as indicated by the constitution. But, on top of his gross incompetence, a vice for which he is no pushover when compared with Mr Yari, the Kogi governor is embarrassingly ignorant, brutal, servile and, for a man of so few accomplishments and gifts, paradoxically arrogant. He puts his decision to contest for a second term down to the call of his people. Not only does he not have a people he can call his own, no call of any kind has gone to him from anywhere. Kogi people are neither self-haters nor cannibals, nor yet so short-sighted that they cannot see the disaster Mr Bello’s second term would spell for Kogites and their children.

    It is hard to explain why Mr Bello announced a second plank upon which to anchor his second term ambition. He talks of himself and his cabinet having made tremendous progress. The phrase tremendous progress is bastardised in Nigeria, and insanely dragged to death by petty and arrogant tyrants passing for state governors. But for Mr Bello to seize upon that phrase to announce his ambition is to cruelly mock the people of Kogi and damn their horrifying sufferings under his cruel rule. No progress of any kind is or can be attributed to the person or government of Mr Bello, let alone progress that can be qualified as tremendous. Other than his insufferable manners and his starched agbada, both of which are contrived to mask his inferiority complex and incompetence, there is absolutely nothing noticeable or eye-catching about him. He does not pay workers their salaries. But when he deigns to do that, he pays them in fractions and trickles. Consequently, he is owing some of his workers more than 20 months salaries, and others some seven or so months. Every Kogi civil servant, some of whom have endured cruel and degrading torture of every kind, is stuck between poor or little pay, or late and badly fractionalised pay.

    There is in short nothing for Mr Bello to anchor his second term quest. He has done or said nothing to earn his party’s offer of right of first refusal. It remains to be seen what his party, particularly under its sprightly and pragmatic chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, would do with Mr Bello’s misbegotten ambition. Not only can the governor not win the poll if he is fielded, even if he could, he still should not. There was nothing gained in his first term, other than his preparedness to outdo the sycophants who gallivant around Aso Villa, and nothing can be gained in his second term, should the gods cruelly gift him a second term. He is said to be prepared to use strong-arm tactics to win, such as he unconscionably deployed in the last state legislative poll, and is said to possess the evil genius to cash in on the rumoured ambivalence of Kogites towards the APC. Not being a man of conscience, not to talk of a man with any morality at all, he may in fact be prepared to damn the world in order to win the poll, should he receive his party’s ticket. But Mr Oshiomhole will have to determine in the weeks ahead whether so unpopular and so incompetent a governor would not abysmally corrupt and belittle the flag of the party by becoming its standard-bearer.

    Mr Bello, should he contest, cannot get the votes of Kogi West and Kogi East senatorial districts. It is doubtful whether he can get even half of the votes of his Kogi Central senatorial district, having disgraced them with his incompetence and fought against them physically and verbally. He will rely on his readiness to project violence and seduce the hungry electorate with money. He tried both tactics in the last legislative polls and seemed to have succeeded beyond his imagination. But Kogites know the futility of putting good men and women in the state’s titular legislature, a lawmaking body that has been wholly disembowelled or even entirely castrated by the governor. They will bide their time and show their resoluteness in the November governorship poll. They recognise that the past three years and more have been an unqualified disaster for the state, but that it was a disaster authored by a conniving APC at the federal level and a few governors and politicians from outside the state. To allow another four years of Mr Bello, they surmise, will pose an existential threat to them and their children. They may have concluded already that it is expedient for one man’s ambition to perish than for the whole state to be lost. They may not be as aggressive as would suffice to discourage their governor’s truancy and disrespect for Kogites, but they are smart enough to know that continuing to yield ground to a ruthless tyrant would doom them irretrievably in the near future.

    Kogi State has been one of the unluckiest states in Nigeria. Their first governor in the Fourth Republic, Abubakar Audu, was competent and even surprisingly visionary. But he was supremely arrogant and misanthropic. Their second and third governor, Ibrahim Idris and Idris Wada, were unmitigated failures, though not on the scale of Mr Bello. Had Prince Audu taken office in 2015, though vestiges of his arrogance would have remained, for old habits die hard, he would have given the state some succour on account of his competitive spirit  and intuitive feel for excellence. But instead of Prince Audu, APC conspirators imposed the vacuous Mr Bello on a state that sadly and unwisely put emphasis on their ethnic and religious affiliations. Still in that primitive mould, and after sensing the people’s despair, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have zoned the governorship slot to the most populous senatorial district in the state, Kogi East. Should APC fail to embrace the same zoning formula, not to talk of presenting the hated Mr Bello, they will probably lose the governorship poll. If the APC want to survive in the state, they have little choice but to repudiate Mr Bello and determine whether heading to Kogi East for a candidate would not present a sensible counter-force to the PDP.

    In the next few weeks, Mr Oshiomhole will face the dismal choice of either bowing to pressure and yielding to the power mongers in Abuja who have seemed to sustain the sycophantic Mr Bello, or remaining true to his convictions and unionist pragmatism by unseating the hated Kogi governor and handing over the ticket to a more sensible and competent candidate. The APC chairman’s antecedents indicate that he will opt for the latter, believing that therein lie the party’s best chances. He knows better than anyone else how Aso Villa — a place Mr Bello has dedicated the little dignity left in him to worship — will look at the dynamics of the coming Kogi governorship election before taking a decision. The often inscrutable President Muhammadu Buhari has not quite indicated what he thinks of Mr Bello, especially of his ineptitude and the sufferings of Kogi civil servants. But perhaps Mr Oshiomhole knows how the president’s mind works.

    Whatever the case, the APC chairman is left with little choice than to actively seek a new candidate for his party if they are to stand any chance in November. As it stands now, even if the APC ticket is given to someone else, their chance is already severely constrained because of Mr Bello’s boundless failings  and hostile statements and actions in office. The ruling party would be sailing near the wind to ignore the objective reality in the state and pretend that the governor has not done enough damage to cost them the election.

  • Zamfara tells Nigeria something far deeper

    ON Wednesday, during a town hall meeting in Zamfara State attended by the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Adamu, Governor Abdulaziz Yari wailed that his state had been overtaken by criminality, with bandits operating from eight different camps. He estimated that some 3,526 people had been killed in the last five years, more than 500 villages despoiled, over 8, 200 people injured, and economic activities virtually paralysed. There was no local government in the state unaffected by the crisis, he added gravely.

    Early in January, Governor Aminu Masari of Katsina State, told the state’s security meeting that his state was besieged by armed robbers, kidnappers, bandits and cattle rustlers. Not even he was safe, he groaned. Worse, according to him, no part of the state’s 34 local governments was spared. His cry of anguish followed hard on the heels of the alarm raised by the Borno State governor Kashim Shettima who also decried the distressingly high rate of insecurity in the north-eastern part of Nigeria. With 16 people killed in February alone due to bandit attacks in Dalijan, Rakkoni and Kalhu communities in the Rabah Local Government Area of Sokoto State, Governor Aminu Tambuwal also lamented that insecurity had become a nightmare. He confirmed that since July last year, some 81 people had been killed by bandits. In short, the Northwest is in turmoil.

    Governors of some northern states and researchers and experts suggest that bandits had made a huge expanse of the region completely unsafe, with thousands killed and roads rendered unsafe for commuting and economic activities. Widespread attacks said to be emanating from the Kuyanbana forest linking Kaduna, Katsina and Zamfara States are reported daily, leading to loss of lives, abandonment of land, and cessation or disruption of economic activities. Repeated interventions by security forces, sometimes in unison, and at other times, singly, have proved ineffective. The insecurity cancer had been long in developing as a result of elite irresponsibility and incompetence over the decades, and is now obviously metastasizing. But rather than propose a radical and targeted surgery, together with wide-ranging socio-economic mediation, the government at the state and federal levels have stuck to a futile and reactionary application of overwhelming force.

    However, the problem is growing in size and engulfing nearly all the states in the North. The South is, of course, not insulated. Cult wars, armed robbery, herdsmen attacks, banditry and kidnappings have combined to make the region unsafe for living and business, and have become unpredictable. Meanwhile, the blame game has continued unabated. The political elite blames the business elite, and the military elite blames the judicial elite. No one is accepting responsibility for anything. In fact, with the recent killings in Kaduna and Zamfara, and the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness the tragedies have triggered, Nigerians are becoming totally despondent. In panic, the presidency has ordered a ruthless law enforcement approach to the crisis, but has failed so far to ponder why that approach had proved desultory and ineffective in past years.

    The National Assembly is not inured to the customary knee-jerk approach often embraced by the country when gory events occur in rapid succession. For example, sufficiently provoked to do some public good early in the week, the Senate made fine parliamentary speeches and ended up setting aside some N10bn in the 2019 budget as security intervention in Zamfara State — that is if the allocation is cash-backed. But what of the other states afflicted by the same disease? Both the legislature and the executive showed by their responses that all they think about is the quick-fix option. The legislature thinks in terms of throwing money at problems, and the presidency, which is in control of the security services, thinks of applying more force, more ruthlessness, to stanch the flow of blood and the relentless drift towards anomie.

    But because these measures have been applied in past years with immeasurable severity, but have failed woefully to have any major or lasting impact on the situation in those beleaguered states, there is nothing to suggest that they will work, having worked in fits and starts every time security forces were mobilised or deployed. With a little exaggeration, it is safe to say that the country is sitting on a powder keg. In fact, a little more indolence on the part of the governing elite will see the country careen into the ravine. The widespread attacks in nearly all parts of the country and the superficial impact the deployment of the security services have had on the problem suggest that the political elite have missed all the signals indicating the kind of trouble the country is contending with. But their misdiagnosis is unfortunately accompanied by the failure of rationality and character. The government has stuck to the use of overwhelming counter-force; and the rest of the country seems willing to sermonise over the problem, believing it is an attitudinal problem. Neither will work.

    It is understood that there are tons of position papers on the crisis, with Zamfara State alone acknowledging it had inspired more than 7,000 pages of reports on the problem, including how to resolve it. The academic community have also provided deep insight into the crisis, and have made far-reaching suggestions on how to restore the region to the path of peace and development. So far, however, the federal government has not appeared to embrace anything more than the panacea of strong-arm, military approach. Some analysts have suggested that if the government’s approach is to work, it must be accompanied by wide-ranging measures to eradicate the camps of the bandits, while a whole panoply of socio-economic mediation must be instituted. But given the depth of the crisis and its longevity, it is doubtful whether these measures can have more than a short-term or placebo effect.

    The crisis of banditry, especially as exemplified by Zamfara State will, however, not be assuaged by ad hoc measures. Because the whole country is contending with one security crisis or the other, and the military and police are spread thin in nearly all parts of the country, it is time the government showed gumption in examining other issues directly related or tangential to the crisis. The existing diagnosis is faulty, and the prognosis is lacking in surefootedness. Financial intervention is undoubtedly welcome, but what has happened to the trillions of naira allocated by the federation and budgeted in the affected states by their state governments? Can they account for and justify their spending? Would fresh financial intervention not amount to throwing money at a problem that requires fresh thinking and new directions?

    If military and police interventions have proved only partially effective so far, and are in the long run ineffective; and money does not answer to a cancer that is fast metastasizing, then it may be time for the government to examine other ways of running the country, no matter how badly the new ways war against their ethnic sensibilities and stale orthodoxies. The National Assembly early this week angrily suggested state policing as a way out because, as they put it, all crime is local. But deployed in isolation, even this measure will fail to have the desired impact. What the political elite do not want to hear is that the existing structure of the country is fraying at the edges, and rupturing very badly in the middle. It is time, more than ever before, to reconsider the foundations of the country and initiate a total reworking of its structure under a new and more effective arrangement. Tinkering will not mitigate a crisis that is fast building up into a critical and explosive mass.

    Between the past six governments, some of them military, the country has toyed with about three national conferences. Other than tomes of reports, nothing has come out of the fruitless exercises. However, the agitations have not gone away. What is even worse is that much more than agitations, the country is itself fracturing before the very eyes of the country’s leaders who see restructuring as an evil ploy to balkanise Nigeria. They are wrong, naive and impressionistic. If they do not seize the initiative now to conceptualise and manage the needed restructuring to restore the country to the path of peace and development, but prefer to blame political and traditional elites whom they say are complicit in the crisis, the time will come when the tidal wave of events will sweep them away and replace them with something not very pleasant.

    The population of young, angry and alienated Nigerians is growing at an alarming rate, resources are shrinking, economic growth is unable to match the rise in population, attitudes and values are shifting or even morphing dangerously, ethnic and religious relations are fraying, and the political elite insensibly and obstinately operates a costly, contradictory, ponderous and ineffective political system. There can be no worse recipe for disaster than what Nigeria is contending with today. Either the government does not know this, or it is too proud to acknowledge or care about it.

  • Obasanjo and the PDP 2023 agenda

    DESPITE the fairly strong showing of the opposition at the last polls, former president Olusegun Obasanjo remains sceptical about the cohesiveness and resoluteness of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to win subsequent polls, particularly the presidential election. If the opposition is to dominate the next election cycle, he suggests in a speech last Sunday, they will have to embark on internal reforms and purges. Arguing that he knew they would lose the 2015 presidential poll, but reluctant to say whether he sensed the disconcerting outcome of February’s presidential election, the former president advocates for radical changes in the opposition if they are to make a huge impression next time. Chief Obasanjo may be right about the PDP’s dire situation, particularly their indolence in facing up to the rigours of the last election, but it is doubtful whether even he understands the many-sidedness of the problems the party is contending with and why they lost the last poll by such a significant, though not destructive or irrecoverable, margin.

    If the former president’s self-righteousness is deemphasised or ignored, it should not be too difficult to accept his diagnosis of the ailment that continues to afflict the PDP and has now twice barred the opposition party from regaining Aso Villa. “I am not a perfect person. I have my shortcomings,” said the former president with disguised self-satisfaction. “If I deny my shortcomings, it means I am not being truthful to myself.” In the very next sentence, however, Chief Obasanjo betrays his true feelings: “…My shortcomings have nothing to do with my love for Nigeria. It has nothing to do with being greedy or selfishness.” Really? Is he so optimistic as to think his shortcomings do not either indicate or betray his contempt for Nigeria? And does his conscience not smite him over what many analysts think are his principle vices of greed and selfishness, two powerful shortcomings that in combination indicate a terrible flaw in a man?

    However, despite his self-confessed limitations, Chief Obasanjo is right to warn the PDP to watch their politics if they are to make significant inroads in 2023. He recommends that the opposition should assemble a critical mass of committed leaders and followers to strengthen the party for the huge task ahead in the next election cycle. It perhaps needs to be restated for the umpteenth time that the main opposition party cannot continue with their conservative approach to the business of politics if they are not to come to grief a third time. Twice they have been put to shame, in 2015 and 2019. A third time would mark them down as both incorrigible and uneducable. The country needs them, despite the excoriating attacks on their integrity masterminded by the ruling party and a sometimes hostile electorate. Yes, the country needs them, but nevertheless in a different shape and course. They must prove capable of the changes both Chief Obasanjo and the country are asking of them.

    Before the 2019 polls, this column more than three times fiercely admonished the PDP to embark on reform and purges in order to recreate and align themselves to the changing and radical needs of the country, particularly to sate the increasingly fickle and demanding needs of a less discriminating and less inquisitive electorate. Instead, the PDP, obviously unaccustomed to opposition politics and environment, desperately turned to the former Borno State governor Ali Modu Sheriff for succour. Yes, Mr Sheriff was as hard as they come: temperamental but pertinacious, domineering but courageous and combative, and contemptuous of his opponents but rich and accommodating. Such a man, on the surface, seemed very suited to the period needs of a party that had just received a merciless drubbing at the polls. However, the PDP later found out to their eternal regret that despite all of Mr Sheriff’s enticing gifts, nothing in his attitude or disposition makes him amenable to the long term needs of the party or even make him relevant to the development of its fundamental character.

    And just as the party emerged from a bruising legal and psychological battle with their interim chairman, they launched furiously into a bitter fratricidal nomination war that left them depleted and angry. Having burnt their fingers once while romancing  the obtruding Mr Sheriff, the party was reluctant to sleepwalk its way into the fatal embrace of moneybag governors who had attempted to hijack the party’s body and soul. In the end, they had had to settle for a new defector as their presidential candidate, and needed a coterie of other defectors in order to even be in a position to record some significant milestones in the last elections. They severely left alone the fundamental things that needed to be done, such as purging their ranks of the divisive and tainted characters whom the public regarded as emblematising and stigmatising the party. They also saw nothing wrong in sustaining their amorphous ideological character simply because the ruling Al Progressives Congress (APC) is also ideologically impure and imprecise.

    Chief Obasanjo has appeared to call them to arms. They will do well to hearken to his voice and consider whether the next few years should not invite them to take the risks they have been wary of contemplating since 2015

    The PDP also had the peculiar problem of contending with, and helplessly relying on, many of their controversial leaders without whom, it seemed, they could not hope to survive. The party needed the money and standing and name recognition of those controversial figures. And given the ossification of Nigerian politics, particularly its mercantilist leanings and traditions, the PDP rank and file feared that if they were completely denied the experience and courage of the old brigade, they were courting disaster. It’s a double edged sword. Either they now summon the courage to change direction and embrace new forces and ideas, or they stay in their comfort zone and face the risk of being transfixed to death. Chief Obasanjo has appeared to call them to arms. They will do well to hearken to his voice and consider whether the next few years should not invite them to take the risks they have been wary of contemplating since 2015.

    Indeed, far more than the former president has sensitised them to the political and existential dangers they face, the PDP faces the equally major and urgent issue of fixing their fixation with the next election cycle, in this case, the 2023 polls. When Chief Obasanjo spoke in the presence of the PDP leaders that visited him last Sunday, he harped on the urgency of fixing the party ahead of the 2023 elections. But are the party’s problems not worth fixing regardless of the next elections and their hypothetical outcomes? As a matter of fact, had the party looked beyond 2019 in their pre-election politics, it is unlikely they would have performed more poorly than they did in February and March. They were desperate in 2015, and so glossed over the deep reforms they should have made in the party. They were equally desperate in 2019, and again glossed over the indispensable and fundamental reforms that should be their political elixir. Ignoring or deemphasising radical changes that would stand them in good stead in the near future in their short-term desperation to regain the presidential villa is counterproductive.

    Chief Obasanjo may be unqualified to serve as the party’s moralist and lodestar, but his counsel is not altogether worthless. If the PDP is to thrive and retain relevance now and in the future, and especially if they are to make a far more aggressive impact in the coming elections, they must look inwards, reform their methods, refine their philosophical and ideological platforms, purge their ranks of the jaded and mercantilist politicians that degrade their purpose and vision, and rediscover the altruism that ennobles their desire to reshape Nigeria and even Africa. They have shown some hunger for public office; they have however not shown nobility of purpose. They have become desperate to win elections; they must be much more desperate to be ideologically relevant. They have been more clearly conservative than the ruling party is progressive; they should stick to their conservatism and even make it sexy.

  • Nigeria’s bewildering state elections

    NIGERIAN politicians must by now be shocked by the unpredictable politics their country promotes with fanfare. No, not in terms of the expensiveness of their elections, which has become the leitmotif of their competition for office, or the gargantuan remunerations elected officials receive, but in terms of their defiance of every known orthodoxy that has typified and ennobled global politics for decades. Nigerian politicians defy the odds, subvert rules, mock conventions, and now, seem to sneer at even common sense itself. The just concluded governorship elections in 29 states, the last being Adamawa — Rivers State is in a class of its own — all but indicate that while democracy is to be preferred over every other system of government, Nigerian politicians have themselves been very reluctant to let that system grow and be nourished.

    In Rivers State where votes usually didn’t count but were customarily allocated, but are now been forced to count and be counted, the trauma of conducting true balloting has knocked political leaders in that endemically violent state sideways and exposed the state to some sort of politically-induced autoimmune affliction. The governorship election in the state was expected to be a straight contest between the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), with the ruling PDP perhaps capable of piping the main opposition party candidate at the post. Unfortunately, the imperious but evidently brittle and factionalised Rivers State APC was unable to agree among themselves who should be the party’s standard-bearers despite the straightforwardness of party guidelines and the Electoral Act.

    Unwilling to be consigned to observer status, and after trying valiantly to get the courts to sanction its participation in the election, the APC quickly adopted a forlorn party which had entertained no hope of participating in that election with anything properly describable as a glimmer of chance, let alone winning. That forlorn party, the African Action Congress (AAC), enthusiastically lent its structure and soul to the grieving APC to do as it pleased. But weeks of aggravated violence and strong-arm tactics, not to talk of wholesale seduction by an anxious PDP afraid to lose the election, had created such tumult within the state that even the hitherto somnolent AAC has been left terribly flustered by the aftershocks. Days before the conclusion of the April 2, 2019 collation of the March 9 Rivers State elections, the multi-purpose AAC vehicle deployed by the APC to upend the ambition of Governor Nyesom Wike had also been convulsed by desertions and defections. Indeed, while still waiting for the final collation in an election he was supposed to have participated in, the AAC’s deputy governorship candidate, Akpo Bomba Yeeh, managed to defy conventional wisdom by defecting to the PDP, embracing Mr Wike with gusto, and denouncing his former party’s alleged gangster tactics.

    But while defections were convulsing the AAC in Rivers and complicating the state’s political equation, and while tempers were still fraying over an election in which both leading sides were claiming victory, other kinds of curious scenarios were playing out in some other notable states like Sokoto, Kano, Zamfara and Bauchi, all states where arguably needless rerun elections took place. In Sokoto, Governor Aminu Tambuwal finally won the governorship poll by whiskers, in fact by a measly, threadbare 342 votes. For all his acclaim and experience as a politician, not to say his highly lauded stint as Speaker of the House of Representatives, it shocked many analysts that Mallam Tambuwal could not secure an emphatic win. Many observers were indeed left gasping for breath at the wafer thin margin of his victory. Mallam Tambuwal had four years to build on or burnish his legislative leadership reputation. If he could only eke out a win, some argued, it implied that he had allowed many things to go horribly wrong with his administration.

    And while many were still befuddled by the closeness of the Sokoto poll, especially given their expectations of a much higher margin of victory for Mallam Tambuwal, something quaint and flabbergasting was playing out in Zamfara State. The election had been concluded in the beleaguered Zamfara, and a winner in fact emerged on the APC platform. Earlier, the factionalised APC had just managed to throw its hat in the ring in the nick of time before the deadline set by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for submission of candidates list expire. But the internal party process that produced the APC candidates was alleged to be fraught with violations of the constitution, thus requiring the repeated intervention of the courts. First, the APC candidates couldn’t participate in the governorship and legislative polls, said the courts; then they could; then they couldn’t; and finally they could. Was that the end of the yo-yo? Alas, it wasn’t. Now, after some sort of victory had been procured by the APC, it turns out, says the courts again, that they really should not have participated because the party’s candidates were not produced by a valid party primary. This, too, is on appeal; and no one seems to know how the tragedy would end, whether dramatically or melodramatically.

    Then, also, there were the Kano and Bauchi polls, which were at first declared inconclusive. In Kano, the incumbent governor deployed every known trick in the book to retain office with less than nine thousand votes in an election that controversially saw the highest turnout in Nigeria in this election cycle. Both candidates received more than a million votes each, with the incumbent, Abdullahi Ganduje, besmirched by a financial inducement scandal. If the polls are to be believed, and notwithstanding the appalling violence that attended the rerun, Kano voters appeared to have been unfazed by the scandal actuated by the governor’s ethical challenges. If the courts deem the poll largely satisfactory, Dr Ganduje will rule Kano for another four years, though considerably hobbled by the allegations of graft against him. But if the courts should overturn the controversial victory, however, the PDP candidate, Abba Yusuf, must inevitably contend with a legislature dominated by the APC.

    In Bauchi where the former FCT minister Bala Muhammed defeated the incumbent governor, Muhammad Abubakar, by some 14,488 votes, it was an election that neither the people of Bauchi nor INEC itself could be proud of. At first, it seemed like the APC had wanted to avoid defeat at all costs. Then, again, it seemed that ethnicity had beclouded the electoral behaviour of the voters in much the same depressing and aggressive way religion had been whipped up in Kaduna to tilt the March governorship poll. But, at least finally, a winner emerged in Bauchi, and the incumbent was unhorsed. Like the Kano votes, Bauchi adds the painful reminder that both the electorate and the electoral process are really not what they are cracked up to be. It will obviously take a much longer time to get the process right, and even much longer to reform the political behaviour of the electorate and their political leaders. Nigeria should have the ambition to be Africa’s, or West Africa’s, leader and visionary. But given the unsatisfying elections of 2019, not to say the widespread violence that accompanied the entire process in many states, that leadership now seems to be gravely imperilled.

    By the time the returns of the elections in Rivers come in, especially with Adamawa eventually joining the opposition column, it should be possible to paint a more accurate picture than today’s terrifying silhouette. The picture at the moment — a picture that is unlikely to be altered significantly any time soon — is one of a high degree of chaos, some measure of incompetence by the electoral umpire, and a government unable and unwilling to administer the elixir capable of energising the system and making it function seamlessly and optimally. The voters themselves have been less than sterling in their behaviour, and most political leaders have shown a lack of patience and vision to let the poll run untrammelled by orchestrated distractions and governmental interferences. If nothing fundamental and significant is done to correct the anomalies noticed in the just concluded polls, if no attempt is made to study the 2019 polls and draw lessons, it will not automatically be better in the next election cycle. It will in fact get much worse.

    As exemplified by the aforementioned states, this year’s elections have shown very clearly that something is still fundamentally wrong with Nigeria’s wobbly and stultifying structure. If nothing is done to right the wrongs of this unsustainable structure, Nigerians should not be surprised if they encounter far worse and more atrocious electoral behaviour next time.

  • A mystifying and demystifying election

    During his presidential campaign, President Muhammadu Buhari suggested to the All Progressives Congress (APC) crowd that thronged his rallies in two or three states to vote their conscience. His admonition, it seems, did not fall on deaf ears in Imo and Ogun States, in particular. Analysts suggested that the president was in fact tactful in giving that admonition because the APC was divided in both states. Unwilling to take sides lest it jeopardise his own election, the president was believed to have solicited the party faithful and other journeymen who gaped in his rallies to vote him as president, and any other party’s candidates during the state elections. He got his wish.

    In Imo State, where the outgoing governor, Rochas Okorocha, demonstrated unalloyed loyalty to the president’s ambition but displayed unrestrained haughtiness towards the party faithful in the state, no one was certain the APC would go to the state elections united. Indeed, the mutually destructive and antagonistic sides were eager to pursue each other to the grave. They literally did that on March 9, 2019 when they split their votes and handed victory to a third force. Governor Okorocha planned to impose his son-in-law, Uche Nwosu, as the APC governorship candidate. The party rank and file, who were loath to serve the governor and his son-in-law, revolted and took matters into their own hands and pitched tent with Hope Uzodinma, a senator. Indeed, they were willing to pitch tent with Lucifer himself if that would liberate them from what they termed the bondage of the loquacious and imperious Mr Okorocha.

    Unable to foist Mr Nwosu on the APC, and despite spending a fortune to do so, Mr Okorocha eventually secured the governorship ticket for his favoured candidate from another party, the Action Alliance (AA). That ticket failed miserably on March 9, 2019, with the Peoples Democratic Party’s Emeka Ihedioha taking the diadem. Not only was Mr Nwosu’s ambition thwarted, even Mr Okorocha’s election as a senator for Imo West on the platform of the APC now seems also threatened. The returning officer for the Imo West senatorial election, Innocent Ibeawuchi, a professor,  told the world, as he announced Mr Okorocha’s victory, that he did so under duress. Consequently, the governor is yet to get his certificate of return. In all likelihood, the whole senatorial election in that constituency, or a part of it totalling about eight local governments, might be repeated. Whenever the Imo West poll is redone, Mr Okorocha is unlikely to win, thus completing the total humiliation and demystification of an orator who started very well until power got the better of his judgement and he veered towards the mundane and the frivolous.

    But the demystification of Mr Okorocha seems to pale into nothingness compared with the humiliation suffered by the Ogun State governor, Ibikunle Amosun. Though the Ogun governor won his senatorial election on the platform of the APC, having at one time been a senator also, his desperate attempt to install a successor, not to say the resources and emotions he heavily invested in the effort, have all come to nought in a spectacular, highly public and dispiriting manner. Like Mr Okorocha, Sen. Amosun stayed put in the APC, which he described as hated, while he pushed his favoured candidate and other supporters to another party to contest the governorship and other offices. That candidate, Adekunle Akinlade, defected to the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) to vie for the governorship. But he fell, not just to any candidate, but to the hated APC standard-bearer, Dapo Abiodun. Mr Amosun is still livid. Indeed, his fury is still incandescent. Having tried many times to profit from his closeness to the president, the Ogun governor is still shocked that that closeness has counted for nothing, despite the president admonishing the Ogun crowd at his February 11, 2019 campaign rally to vote their conscience.

    Mr Amosun may have secured the consolation goal of a senatorial seat, unlike Mr Okorocha’s path to the upper legislative chamber which is still paved with thorns, it appears the Ogun governor would have loved to lose his senatorial seat and gain the governorship for Mr Akinlade, his protégé. He had framed the governorship election as a contest of wills between him and the APC leadership. During the contentious and violent president campaign in Abeokuta less than two weeks before the February 23, 2019 presidential election, the beleaguered Mr Amosun had boasted that his APM candidate would win and thereafter, together with him, return to take over the APC. Indeed, for the governor, he and his APM crowd and other supporters were poised to put the APC hierarchy to shame after the elections. That goal may now be unrealistic. He is alleging shady electoral dealings on the part of his opponents, but the battle may really be over.

    But it is not only Messrs Amosun and Okorocha who have had their wings clipped; Governors Abiola Ajimobi and Abdullahi Ganduje may also have sung their Nunc Dimittis. Though Dr Ganduje is still bracing up for a rerun poll, the Kano electorate, if feelers are right, may have sealed the fate of the dissembling governor. In any case, whether he wins or loses, he has been thoroughly demystified. He had promised President Buhari some five million votes. He could only deliver a little over a million. Even that one million plus is suspected by some analyst to be controversial, given that figure’s deviation from the national mean. But for the governorship, he has been unable to deliver as much to himself as he coralled for the president. The reason, as Kano voters allege, is that the governor is dishonest, having been caught on camera soliciting for and receiving bribes. According to them, had there not been a definite sexing up of figures in some polling units loyal to the governor, the margin of his defeat would have been horrendous.

    The demystification of the Oyo State governor, Abiola Ajimobi, is even more dreadful and distressing. He won’t get over the defeat easily, though he has tried to put on a brave face. As recorded on this column two weeks ago, Mr Ajimobi of course lost the senatorial election. Recognising his failings and foibles, his party waded into the fray, helped him to cobble some alliances together, and attempted to placate the Oyo electorate. All the efforts were, however, a little too late. Not only were Oyo voters dead set against him, they let anyone who cared to listen know that the defeat they inflicted on him during the senatorial poll was just a foretaste of the horrifying rejection they planned for him during the governorship poll. Despite the emergency alliances, especially the one with former governor Adebayo Alao-Akala, Sen Ajimobi’s candidate, the brilliant and technocratic Bayo Adelabu of the APC, lost his local government and 27 other local governments to the PDP’s Seyi Makinde, gaining only five in the process. The APC defeat was emphatic. The ruling party lost essentially on account of Sen. Ajimobi’s politics, attitude and insensitivity. No demystification was ever so complete, and no defeat was so humiliating as one in which the senatorial and governorship polls are lost weeks apart and with uncontroversial margins.

    But what would anyone say of the crushing defeat inflicted upon Senate President Bukola Saraki who not only lost his seat by a wide margin, but also lost the governorship candidate he was backing by an equally astounding margin, and then lose a dynasty, if not an empire, through what can pass for a horrendous beating? His defeat was long in coming. When it came, however, it was a total repudiation. Messrs Okorocha, Amosun, Ajimobi and Ganduje were brutally crushed. If they are capable of recovery, the country will have to wait and see. Perhaps in one form or the other, one or two of them can attempt to stir themselves in the near future, though it will be a hard prospect indeed. But if Sen. Saraki is to bestir himself for a return to the throne, if he is to attempt any form of political recovery and reincarnation, he will need his successors to not learn anything from his fall, and for them to mistreat the electorate and inflict pain and mediocrity upon a disillusioned state. No one knows whether Sen. Saraki’s successors are capable of that precipitous decline.

    Overall, the electorate may be finding their voice and discovering the immense power in their hands. If they can secure the help of the system to continue to conduct elections that are credible, they will move to deploy that power in ways that will dispossess the political class of the false sense of security and omnipotence they have long tried to claim. Perhaps, in the short run, the electorate will misuse and mishandle that enormous power, enthroning and dethroning at will, with kakistocratic fecundity and unabated panache. But in the long run, after imbibing a lot of moderation and restraint, and being coaxed by circumstances and happenstances, they may use their voting power to deliver a civic culture. That’ll be the day.

  • 2019 governorship poll and state leadership

    If there is no postponement again, the governorship and Houses of Assembly polls should be taking place by now in at least 29 states. The outcome of the presidential and National Assembly polls alarmingly indicate that Nigeria, already a unitary state by every possible definition, may be heading for a one-party state. But whether at the federal or state level, particularly now at the state level, Nigeria has through decades of elections solidly entrenched poor leadership. A few states may be guiltier than the others, but overall, nearly all the states in recent years have demonstrated a lack of capacity to produce competent and secular leaders. Where a few of those leaders are competent, many others are unable to exclude religion from public life; and vice versa. In addition, many of the states have produced leaders who should properly be described as rulers, with many of them acutely lacking the talent to procure a legacy for themselves.

    The question on many lips today as the electorate troop out to cast their votes is whether Kaduna and Kano will re-elect their governors or dare to embrace change. The Northeast is almost solely responsible for the beginnings of the Boko Haram insurgency when they enacted and supervised abhorrent social and economic policies between 1999 and 2003 that pauperised their people and fed or pacified them with the fake elixirs of religion. Ignorant of the factors that predisposed Hausaland to Jihadist conquest, the Northeast, particularly Borno and Yobe, attempted to spread a veneer of sham religion on a socio-economic milieu that already left the people hungry, and rendered them uneducated and hopeless. Whirlwind follows the sowing of wind. But strangely, the rulers of the Northeast felt they could get away with their reckless and complicit handling of public policies. One or two of the outgoing governors of the region have attempted a few remedies, but their efforts have been uncoordinated and inadequate to smother the ongoing rebellion or stanch the flow of blood.

    The Northwest is virtually in full-fledged rebellion, with Zamfara quietly but bloodily becoming the epicentre. Full deployment of military and police assets in the zone has barely made a dent on a crisis that is threatening to escalate beyond its present immediate confinement. The rebellion, like in the Northeast, was triggered by poverty, alienation and misrule. And like the Northeast also, religion was boldly deployed as a tool to distract and engage the populace, with only token efforts made to find an answer to the socio-economic crisis confronting the populace. So far too, the Northwest has been unable to produce a first-rate leader of men and resources, a visionary leader capable of offering the kind of leadership that could bring a significant number of people out of poverty and misery.

    In the First and Second Republics, the Southwest used to have a reputation for producing excellent leaders. Now, such leaders are few and far between. The last two election cycles were even worse; they managed to produce third-rate leaders who couldn’t hold a candle to the worst of the worse, leaders more grandiloquent and megalomaniacal than the most comical the Second Republic ever produce. From the swampy southernmost tip of Nigeria to the humid savannah of the Middle Belt, and the erosion-plagued communities of the Southeast, Nigeria is locked in a vicious circle of producing incompetent administrators and mediocre politicians quite unfit to govern even a local government.

    It is in the midst of this crisis that the country is once again heading to the polls to elect governors and state lawmakers. No state in Nigeria has managed to emplace a vigorous and independent legislature. If voters do not resist the temptations put before them, they will once again elect misfits into their legislative houses. No one can tell whether they will do what is right today. But far worse is the likelihood of the voters electing mediocre governors. Flowing from the convincing win the president secured in some states in the North, some governorship candidates are hopeful that the electorate would overlook their failings and foibles and re-elect them. Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State is one of a few examples that constitute a moral and political dilemma for the electorate. Accused of demanding and receiving bribes to the tune of millions of dollars from contractors, with electronic evidence deployed as proof, the governor has stonewalled. Aided by what some critics described as a conniving legislature and a downright colluding judiciary, the governor has been able to stall both a potential trial and impeachment proceedings. Even the president has waffled over the accusation, wondering what type of technology was deployed to, as it were, entrap Dr Ganduje, one of his most ardent supporters.

    Should Kano vote for him this Saturday, the electorate would have made nonsense of the anti-corruption campaign garishly embarked upon by the president at the early stages of his presidency. With the courts inexplicably putting an obstacle before the governor’s leading Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) opponent a few days to the election, Dr Ganduje seems poised to retake the State House except voters can enact a full-scale rebellion against the state’s ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). After having voted massively, perhaps in defiance of statistical logic, for President Muhammadu Buhari, it remains to be seen whether the electorate can truly dissociate the controversial governor from the cult-like personality of the president. If they do, they would be displaying their remarkable sophistication. If they do not, they would be reiterating their commonalty, as fellow voters in the Northwest exhibited some two weeks ago when they broke the numbers bank.

    Kaduna State is contending with a far worse dilemma than even Kano. Yet, no one can tell how they will resolve the existential crisis facing them. Together with Kano, Kaduna State has faced some of the most violent religious crisis Nigeria has ever witnessed. That religious question has been further compounded by deep and unresolved ethnic fissures. The governor, Nasir el-Rufai, is of course not the cause of a crisis that predates him. But so far, both by his lack of restraint and poor understanding of issues, not to say his absolute lack of wisdom and irritating cocksureness, the governor has managed in his first term to aggravate the multiple crises the state has been contending with for some decades.

    First, he announced that he paid off those attacking the state, implying that he was able to identify them; but rather than bring them to justice, he preferred to use taxpayers’ money to mollify the fury of the criminals. Then at every turn, he has been unable to manage the state’s religious and ethnic differences and struggles, barely managing to disguise his biases. Now, he has finally set out to prove that he could break the political convention and received wisdom of presenting a mixed candidacy of Muslims and Christians for the State House.

    Today, the state will either reinforce Mallam El-Rufai’s iconoclasm or punish him. He believes that flowing from the president’s election, his repudiation of conventional wisdom will carry the day as voters turn out to make nonsense of the state’s religious calculations. He is daring, very daring. But there is nothing to suggest that he could not in fact get away with his cold and ruthless calculation. If the electorate support his redrawing of the state’s political and behavioural map, they will have voted for the present and hope that they would not reap any whirlwind sometime in the future. Mallam El-Rufai took on the more sensible and ethical Shehu Sani, a state senator, and vanquished him. Consequently, the governor, who is never a moderate and modest man to begin with, is already feeling invincible, nay immortal. Should he carry the day, his enemies will groan in anguish for years to come.

    But whether the electorate endorse him or not, it does not detract from the fact that Mallam El-Rufai’s legacy will be controversial at best, and poor beyond description at worst. It is inconceivable that a politician who has inspired so much division, while not matching it with grand and gargantuan futuristic projects and programmes, can hope to last in the minds of the people.

    Many other states will be grappling with their own peculiar issues and troubles. How they resolve these issues, starting from the votes today, will determine how far their states can go in the coming years. Using Kano and Kaduna as examples, there is not much optimism that the 36 states as a whole can go very far. They are crawling now when they should be walking briskly, and have embraced the wrong arguments and personalities in their prolonged quest for development. They must hope that the choices they make today would not completely paralyse them or, worse, predispose them to the full-scale rebellion ravaging some states in the country.

  • Melaye, Okorocha, Akpabio and Poll 2019

    DEPENDING on which part of the divide the hypothetical voter stands, there were many upsets in the last National Assembly poll held simultaneously with the presidential election on Saturday.

    Oyo State governor Abiola Ajimobi fell to defeat probably by dint of his political longevity and his controversial Ibadan politics. He lost the senatorial contest to represent Oyo South. Senate President Bukola Saraki got entangled in his own unending political rigmarole, his impatience wreaking havoc on his political obsessions and fantasies. He lost his Kwara Central senatorial seat by an embarrassingly wide margin. Former Akwa Ibom governor Godswill Akpabio also came to grief in his ultimately doomed quest to return to the Senate from his Akwa Ibom North-West constituency. The only politician the South-South has produced who can talk a waterfall virtually, it seemed, talked himself to political death. But Imo State governor Rochas Okorocha, by dint of his levity, won a gruesome and tentative victory to represent Imo West in the Senate, with the returning officer in that poll alleging that he announced the governor’s controversial victory under duress.
    However, far from the madding political crowd in the South, the pompous and witless Dino Melaye won his re-election to the Senate as his Kogi West constituency conflated the election with the state governor’s oppressive and unintelligent approach to governance and politics. It was hardly because of anything the senator did; his constituency simply established an inverse relationship between the comical senator’s victory and Governor Yahaya Bello’s grief. To them, the only way to torment Mr Bello was to ensure he secured no political victory of any kind despite deploying strong-arm tactics against his opponents, as indeed he did in the other two senatorial districts of the state during the same election. Kogi West was eager to be his undertaker, and they wanted to do it with considerable glee.
    Before the February 23 polls, most Nigerians were unlikely to understand the incestuous dalliance between Kogi West and the infamous Sen. Melaye. They saw him as pompous, egocentric, greedy, servile and theatrical. There was no iota of seriousness in him, they concluded, and they saw nothing of the nobility they associate with a lawmaker, especially their lawmaker. If any lawmaker was deserving of defeat, why, no one, in their estimation, fit the bill quite like Sen. Melaye. Contradistinctively, however, they only vaguely conceived of the Kogi governor as incompetent or oppressive. But he was at any rate distant in their summation of his person and office. What is more, they did not strangely see Mr Bello as a disgrace to the hallowed office of governor. It was, in essence, more urgent to them to dispense with the senator than to humiliate the governor, for Mr Bello had very expertly hidden his incompetence and lethargy far from the public view in a way Sen. Melaye could not disguise his triviality.
    But Kogi West was not taken in by the political laissez-faire that clouded the eyes and occluded the judgements of the rest of Nigeria. Having felt more acutely where the shoe pinched them, and having been shackled and emasculated by the governor’s misrule, Kogi West feared no worse fall than he who is down, even if that fall was inspired by a comical politician, and no worse indignity than to be represented by and associated with a clown, even if Sen. Melaye were to be described as the world’s most ardent comedian. When the time finally came to choose their senator last Saturday, it was not surprising that Kogi West voters were not indecisive at all. Were they wrong to establish a quid pro quo between Sen Melaye and Mr Bello? As a matter of fact, that connection was already unnaturally made when fate brought the clown and the inept together under the same metaphysical auspices, and bonded them in the same time and space.
    At this point, or at least by last Saturday, Kogi West emerged, through the Sen. Melaye crucible, as the most discriminating and scrupulous of the three senatorial districts in Kogi State. Of the seven local government areas in the district, six reposed their grudging confidence in the cantankerous senator, showing to the world how adept they were at drawing the line between exemplary public conduct and the tangled issues that bind the bitter governor to the defiant senator. Of course they have never found his buffoonery to be entertaining, considering that as their representative he was exposing them to global ridicule, but their animosity towards Mr Bello was of such severity that they were perfectly willing to renounce their respect and admiration for the senator’s opponent, Smart Adeyemi, himself a former senator. Sen. Adeyemi is a far better person and politician than Sen. Melaye, and his tenure in the Senate was devoid of the scandal and controversies that have dogged the politics of the re-elected senator. But his mere association with Mr Bello was such a burden that Kogi West found it therapeutic to vote against him.
    Sen. Melaye is a far worse politician than Sen Adeyemi. While the latter twice genuinely won his seat in the Senate, this is the first time Sen. Melaye would be winning both the primary that made him a standard-bearer and the main election itself. He had previously muscled himself into taking the primaries and the tickets, whether for the House of Representatives seat (2007-2011), where he enjoyed brawling with his colleagues, or the Senate seat where he played the zany to the outgoing Senate President, Dr Saraki. It is an irony that it had to take a hostile political environment and the sledgehammer of both the state government and the law enforcement agencies to enable Sen. Melaye claim his first genuine electoral victory.
    Those Nigerians ashamed to contemplate Sen. Melaye’s re-election must console themselves that at least he is not their representative in the Senate. They are left aghast that such an unfit character bestrides the legislature, but his harmless skits and parodies demean the reputation of his constituents in inverse relationship to the wreckage Mr Bello’s quietly turbulent misrule imposes on the indigenes of the state.
    Given the chance a second time, and a third, and a fourth, Kogi West would vote Sen. Melaye into the Senate over and over again under a similar political environment, except Mr Bello can find the chutzpah to back him against Sen. Adeyemi. For now, the governor will be spared that act of self-immolation. And the country, especially the Melaye haters, will also be left to chew the cud on the travesty of crowning a clown and letting him loose on the legislature.

  • Poll postponement and its many aggravations

    FOURS before polling booths opened last Saturday, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced the rescheduling of the 2019 elections to new dates.

    The presidential and National Assembly polls are probably taking place right now as you read this piece, while the governorship and state legislative polls have been rescheduled for March 9, 2019. There was nothing, not even a suspicion, as this piece was being written on Thursday to indicate that the polls could once again be aborted. The electoral body spoke confidently and convincingly on Wednesday and Thursday that the polls would hold as rescheduled. Nigerians, however, remember that a few days before the polls were originally scheduled to hold, INEC also spoke confidently and soothingly about their readiness for the polls.

    The electoral body is committed to conducting the polls, starting from today. The country wishes them well. But until the polls open and close, no one can pass any judgement on how well they were organised. When they failed the first time on February 16, 2019, not only was harsh judgement passed on them, their failure released a lot of pent-up feelings about politics, power and leadership in the country, with some of those feelings reverberating on tangential issues like due process, rule of law, the role of the military in elections, and policing of elections. The electoral body did its best early this week to dispel as many bad and false notions about their readiness and impartiality, but there is nothing to suggest that the parties and voters repose as much confidence in them as they did before the postponement. Certainly, and surprisingly, the presidency has been the most vociferous against INEC in ways that are far more unprecedented than has ever been witnessed in these parts.

    At a stakeholders’ meeting convened by INEC immediately after the postponement, agents of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), including their chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, were unsparing of the electoral body, which they described as incompetent and compromised. The APC representatives sensed that the public would refuse to believe their claims that the government knew nothing about the postponement, especially going by the example of the previous government of Goodluck Jonathan which seemed to have schemed for a postponement of the 2015 polls in order to secure an advantage over the then opposition APC. The APC agents even briefly called for the resignation of the INEC chairman.

    But when the ruling party convened an urgent national caucus meeting in Abuja on Monday, party leaders seemed to have done more than enough to convince a sceptical electorate and the rest of the country that they knew nothing about the postponement. Indeed, going by their body language and what they thought they sensed from the opposition, APC leaders gave the impression that they were the last to know of the impending postponement. President Muhammadu Buhari was particularly incensed, even allowing himself some incendiary remarks and innuendoes about the electoral body, and making very provocative and unconstitutional remarks about voters and the voting process. Taking a cue from the president’s injured pride, the Department of State Service (DSS) briefly but unwisely and tempestuously waded into the fray by inviting some principal officers of INEC for investigation and interrogation, not minding the disruptive effects of such invitations.

    While the DSS has mollified its irritation, at least for now, there is nothing to suggest that the president has calmed down, his feathers probably ruffled by the fact that he was among the last to know of the decision to postpone the polls. He was very hurt, it seems, but he probably glossed over the fact that INEC might be trying to protect him from allegations of collusion or, at best, connivance. INEC was wrong to have left till very late on Friday the decision to postpone the election, but whether by design or by coincidence, they were right to have insulated the president, indeed the presidency and particularly the APC, from dangerous and unfair barbs. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), either individually or collectively, might have got hint of the postponement of the polls ahead of the APC, but it is hard to see how that confers any advantage on them beyond perhaps the conservation of financial resources.

    The electoral body should have handled the setback far better than they did, and should never have allowed themselves to panic or be overwhelmed by the logistical nightmare that rushed upon them in the dying hours before the opening of the polls; but they were smart and quick enough to have shifted the polls by nothing more than a week. They must now hope that they can deliver on a credible and smooth poll that would confound their detractors and pleasantly surprise their friends and confidants. There are indications that officials of the electoral body have not worked together with the seamlessness expected of them, their ranks having been bifurcated by politics and politicians, and by ethnic and other petty considerations, however, Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC chairman and a professor of political history and international studies, has the gargantuan task of dispelling whatever misgivings still exist about the capacity and cohesiveness of INEC to deliver on a fair election.

    The president may be justified in his rage against INEC — who would not, given the reassurances INEC gave shortly before the polls opened? — but he has not altogether handled his anger with the gravitas and presidential panache expected of him and his office. He was undoubtedly under pressure to convince Nigerians that he did not know anything about the postponement, but he ought to be circumspect about his reaction and careful in weighing his words. In the circumstance, he has unleashed a firestorm of protest among the political class and leader writers of the republic over the measures he announced his government was prepared to take to safeguard a free and fair poll. It is not clear what worried him the more: the postponement of the polls by a week, which is tolerable despite the cost to investors and voters, or achieving peaceful polling, which was not really and overwhelmingly an issue at the time of the postponement.

    By insinuating that poll riggers and disturbers of peaceful polling be shot, the president was both overdramatising the problem and deliberately subverting the laws of the country. No anger and no provocation must ever justify impunity or self-help. The president’s order to the military and the police to deal ruthlessly with electoral offenders virtually gives the security agents licence to use disproportionate force in excess of what the law recommends. No one, not least the president, must ever be allowed to take liberty with interpreting the law far beyond its intendments, simply because they have conjured the threat to the republic in such a manner as to alarm the public and give justifications for extralegal measures.

    The president’s aides have of course doubled down on the president’s order, and consequently there will be no walking back the extraordinary and defeatist measures enunciated at the APC caucus meeting. It is a tragedy for any society to distrust and undermine its own capacity and wisdom to deal with malfeasance by constantly embracing excesses unknown to its own laws. Happily, the electoral body has contradistinctively sworn not to go outside the ambits of the law in policing the elections or interdicting poll offenders. That is how it should be, and the presidency is encouraged to follow this example rather than needlessly dispute the semantics of the controversial order given to the security forces. It is time the country matured and wised up in handling unusual and prickly situations.

    Indeed, rather than vent its spleen so publicly and a little recklessly, the APC should be thankful for the postponement of the polls in the light of reports about the subterranean efforts allegedly made by their chief opponent in the poll to probably subvert popular will. In any case it hardly matters now whether the APC knew about the postponement or not. The elections will hopefully hold, starting from today, and a winner will emerge. If the APC is to win, it should hope that its victory will not be anchored on strong-arming the electorate and alarming the public, but on convincing them that it had done enough in about four years to earn their respect and confidence.