The Nation Newspaper

Category: UnderTow

  • Buhari’s re-election and Igbo 2023 presidential agenda

    LAST Tuesday, Imo State governor Rochas Okorocha organised a Southeast mega rally to unite and fire the All Progressives Congress (APC) in readiness for the 2019 presidential election and to support President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election agenda. The attendance was impressive, but the most notable Igbo leaders in the Southeast APC absented themselves from the governor’s show of political narcissism. The notables did not indicate why they shunned the rally, whether it had to do with the governor’s personal style, his monarchical tendencies, or his obstinate attempt to impose his son-in-law as the state’s next governor.

    In any case, those notable leaders saw no reason to massage Mr Okorocha’s ego, and feared that their attendance might indirectly be interpreted as endorsement of the governor’s hidden and probably nefarious agenda. More significantly, however, the rally made news for much stranger reasons than Mr Okorocha’s adamantine politics and matchless rhetorical flight of fancy. The Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha, who represented the president at the rally, spoke glowingly of the Igbo, their acumen, and the need for them to embrace a paradigm shift in their presidential politics. He admonished them to tie their future presidential ambition to President Buhari’s re-election. Said he: “The people of the South East are part of Nigeria and they have the right to make claim where the need arises and we will all support them.

    The Igbo are not good starters. But whenever they start, they can catch it. Let me say this, 2019 is an election that will make or mar the chances of Igbo in Nigeria. I want Igbo to make a paradigm shift. We have to know that the position of the presidency is negotiable. You can argue it from the point of strength and not from the point of weakness. 2019 will determine the future of this country.” Another report of the rally suggests that the SGF admonished the Igbo to eschew sentiments in looking at the 2019 polls. “What happens in 2019 will go a long way in determining the fate of the Igbo nation as it concerns 2023 presidency,” said the SGF apocalyptically. “So, it is important that they put away sentiments in the overall interest of the Igbo nation and ensure that the APC gets a landslide victory in the Southeast.”

    But hidden among the stalagmites and stalactites of Mr Mustapha’s cajolery is the provocative linkage of the Igbo people’s political future to President Buhari’s re-election. Mr Okorocha probably designed the rally to prove his continuing relevance in the Southeast and national political equations, and undoubtedly to underscore his support for the president. It is also possible that the governor genuinely believes that the best way the Igbo can secure the presidency in 2023 is to lend unqualified support to the president. Mr Mustapha also appears to associate with that linkage, but managed in the same breath to hem and haw in making that case. In fact, he stopped short of asserting that if the Igbo were to support the president’s re-election, he (the president) would ensure the victory of an Igbo man in 2023. It is nevertheless clear that regardless of the hemming and hawing, Mr Mustapha appears to insinuate that the Igbo support in the 2019 presidential election would be rewarded in 2023.

    It is not certain that both Mr Mustapha and the APC have not overstated their relevance and overplayed their hands. They may appreciate the Igbo support in 2019, if indeed they get it, but it is hard to see one party unilaterally determining the fate of the country, let alone its direction in 2023. After all, President Buhari himself does not believe in zoning and rotation. He contested every presidential election since 2003 until he managed to win it in 2015, and obviously disregarded the informal zoning arrangement that favoured the Southwest to take and keep the presidency for eight years from 1999. It is hard to see the same man now subscribing to the kind of political orthodoxy that he naturally repudiated in every conceivable way. Mr Mustapha in fact ascribes so much power to his party and the president that he finds it quite attractive to promise the presidency to the Igbo in exchange for their support in 2019.

    Neither the president nor the APC possesses the power to determine who wins the presidency in 2023. Such promises are therefore empty. When ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo foisted the late president Umaru Yar’Adua on his party as candidate in the 2007 presidential election, he had to support that atrocious aberration with a whole panoply of rigged ballots to make a qualified success of his political succession plan. The country is much wiser now, less inclined to tolerating political humbug, and a sitting president will need to shift the earth from its orbit to single-handedly determine which zone should produce a president. As shown by President Buhari’s own election, it is much harder for a zone or tribe to produce a presidential candidate than for a candidate to develop himself to a level of national acceptability that qualifies him to be given a hearing by more than three or four zones out of Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones. Rather than a zone artificially producing a candidate, the candidate must first produce himself, develop a political persona that is attractive to the electorate, propound a political philosophy, no matter how inchoate, that resonates with the country, and develop a wide circle of friends spread around the country to evangelise for him. Neither the president nor his party has managed to produce such a politician from the Southeast.

    So, how can they talk so confidently of Igbo 2023 agenda? Indeed, it is not even the responsibility of anyone, let alone the Southeast zone, to produce such a person, for the country does not want an Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa president, but a president of Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa extraction. Both Dr Obasanjo and President Buhari have shown why it is nonsensical to hanker after a president to satisfy tribal longings and zonal emotions. The opinion of the Yoruba has not changed about Dr Obasanjo, whom they regard as fundamentally at war with their values and ethos, not to say their developmental goals, despite his eight years in office. In fact they saw him as a negator in their developmental struggles. To the political elite in the North, President Buhari is viewed more as clannish and nepotistic than anything else.

    To them, and because of his insularity, he is seen as a bad sell for what the North stands for, particularly the inclusive politics the iconic Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, stood for and propagated. Mr Mustapha’s subordination of Igbo presidential ambition to President Buhari’s re-election is likely to be regarded with alarm in many parts of Nigeria, especially in the Southeast. It reduces politics to a series of buying and selling of defective and inferior goods. It indicates an embarrassing desperation in the president’s camp, a desperation they are apparently willing to spread ethnic veneer on without scruples or principles. If the Buhari presidency were as confident of the support of the Middle Belt and the Southwest as it got in 2015, presidential aides would not need to cajole the Southeast with the bait of 2023 presidential candidature. Having enacted a scorched earth policy in some parts of the country, and unsure where it is capable of securing the kind of solid support it received some three years ago, the Buhari presidency will increasingly yield to desperate tactics, even if those tactics appear crassly ethnic.

    If the Igbo were to give the Buhari presidency a hearing as Mr Mustapha solicited, they would be torn between seeing his entreaties from the prism of their 2023 ambition, assuming that ambition exists, or from the prism of what they regard as his mistreatment of the Igbo over the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) agitations. They are unlikely to be in a quandary. They have long suspected the president to loath the Southeast; it will take more than Mr Mustapha’s blandishments and Mr Okorocha’s glib rhetoric to change their view of the Buhari presidency. They are in fact likely to conclude that if an Igbo politician should desire the presidency, he would have to work hard to convince the country that by his person, ideas, capability, inclusive politics, and political contacts, he is more than qualified for the job. And that once entrusted with the job, he would see the country, not from the jaded prism President Buhari appears enamoured of, but from the uplifting and unifying oneness Nigerians earnestly yearn for.

  • Oshiomhole’s coronation runs true to form

    WITH the withdrawal of both Osarheimen Osunbor and Clement Ebri, both former governors of Edo and Cross River States respectively, from the All Progressives Congress (APC) chairmanship contest, the stage seems set today for the coronation of another former Edo State governor, Adams Oshiomhole, regarded since the last two months or more as the ruling party’s putative chairman. The chairmanship position is being vacated by John Odigie-Oyegun, himself a former Edo State governor. Chief Odigie-Oyegun is departing in a blaze of controversy, with the president and party leaders declining to allow his tenure extended, regardless of both the effluxion of time, a nifty but controversial term coined by Ondo State governor Rotimi Akeredolu, and the fear of acrimony overtaking the simple exercise of elective convention. At the end of today’s convention, and notwithstanding whatever hitches and hiccups accompany it, Mr Oshiomhole will become the party’s national chairman, in law and in fact.

    Chief Odigie-Oyegun was not always what he was cracked up to be. He showed a lot of promise when he was elected as the first chairman of the party in June 2014. Some two or three years down the line, he seemed to have lost the spark, became deeply divisive, embraced very contentious partisan and unpopular positions even within the party, and fiddled while the party burned. After failing to rouse party leaders and governors unanimously to his side in the effort to get his tenure extended, ostensibly to avert acrimony and fractiousness within the party as the next general elections loomed, he eventually bowed out and consented to an elective convention. But it took President Muhammadu Buhari’s unequivocal stand against tenure extension to dismantle Chief Odigie-Oyegun’s circus, a presidential intervention that has robbed the party of the chance to set a precedence of running a party not dictated to by one powerful individual, be he the president or not.

    The moment President Buhari disavowed Chief Odigie-Oyegun and endorsed Mr Oshiomhole, every attempt to create the impression of internal democracy in the APC began to sound hollow. Despite the initial huffing and puffing by loyalists of the outgoing chairman, by early May it had become quite clear that any opposition to the new reality was hopeless and potentially costly. Soon the governors began to line up behind Mr Oshiomhole, who easily became recognisable as the president’s candidate, and everyone who was anybody began goose-stepping behind the new man. Mr Oshiomhole, unable to restrain himself in the best and mildest of times, given his natural impetuousness and feistiness, also began to speak alternately like the chairman of the party or the in-coming chairman. And he spoke forcefully, magisterially, and as usual with the flourish and fecundity he constantly, if sometimes irritatingly, ascribed to his past as a union leader.

    Even though Chief Odigie-Oyegun is all of 78 years old, and does not look it or act it, it was clear his leadership of the party had come to end even before the president weighed in with an imperial diktat. The outgoing chairman retained his strength and lived by his wits; but he no longer wielded the imagination and virtue, not to say the circumspection, needed to run the ruling but soulless APC. The younger and boisterous Mr Oshiomhole, who thinks like a strapping 66-year-old and looks confident and vibrant, seemed the perfect counterpoise the bewildered APC needed. They will have him, all of him, and hope that their self-made internal schisms, not to talk of their engaging amateurishness and incompetence, will answer to his talisman. It was never a great idea that the party circumvented elective convention, basing its fears on the supposition that the congresses and convention could turn ugly and fissiparous, especially with the nPDP already gnawing at its innards. But whether by accident or design, the party has finally and sensibly overcome its fears and pushed itself through the democratic process of holding congresses and convention as indicated by its own guidelines and the country’s constitution. It has discovered that despite some controversies here and there, the heavens have not fallen, and the party has not quite imploded as many speculate it would. If it would implode, it would not be because of the congresses and the convention. It would be because it had failed from the beginning to manage its unexpected success with the adroitness expected of its innovative leaders, and closed its ears to the grievances of the nPDP, a faction it has approached with indifference, haughtiness, stubbornness and disdain.

    The APC may by this convention manage to overcome its demons, but it has managed in the same breath to let loose a number of fierce goblins capable of wreaking havoc on both the country’s body politic and the intricate and sensitive tapestries of party organisations. In the foreseeable future, Nigerian presidents will continue to hold the ace in party chairmanship elections. No chairman will emerge without the overweening input of the president. It would not matter whether that chairman had demonstrated capacity and uncanny insight into the workings of the party and the system. What will matter is that the chairman of the party will remain both subservient and submissive to the powerful president. In any case, even where the president is apathetical to the chairmanship position, his aides will egg him on in the direction of establishing relentless control over the party.

    Chief Odigie-Oyegun did little to control a party that was spinning out of order, especially in the last two years. But it is safe to assume that Mr Oshiomhole has learnt a number of lessons from his outgoing predecessor’s nonchalance and connivance. As he has promised, he will exert control right from the beginning of his tenure, and deploy labour union negotiating tools to rein in party rebels. More, he asserts, he will bring to bear an uncommon sagacity and imaginativeness in running the party in order to build it into the best party in Africa. His enthusiasm cannot be faulted. But Mr Oshiomhole wrongly assumes, like his predecessor’s critics, that the problem with the APC is essentially one of low capacity, interest, and style of the party chairman. But the ruling party’s problems far transcend the symptomatic quarrels convulsing its organs and playing off one interest group against another. If Mr Oshiomhole does not carry out a proper diagnosis of the party’s problems, he will find himself administering the wrong medicines: painkillers for oncogenic problems, and placebos for diseases of unknown aetiology.

    There was no problem posed by the nPDP, for instance, that a conciliating president could not have resolved. But having yielded ground to cabals and caucuses of different backgrounds and goals, it was a question of time before the party’s values and mantras became contorted. With those values denuded by private and group interests rather than ennobled by national and constitutional dictates, it was not surprising that the party began to promote interests and individuals that war against common sense, the constitution and the rule of law. Legal subterfuges began to inundate the polity, sectionalism took root, and desperate internal struggles were triggered within the party and within the government itself. Consequently, the party became weakened, and everyone began to look up to a strangely immobilised presidency for interventions that were not forthcoming. These problems do not admit of negotiating skills; they call for the president and the party to conduct deep soul-searching and self-examination.

    No one doubts Mr Oshiomhole’s upbeat mood, or the inspiration and energy a party fresh from a successful convention can bring into the equation. Nor does anyone think that the incoming chairman’s diplomatic and negotiating prowess would not be of some value in smothering disgruntlement within the party. Nor, still, does anyone fear that his boundless enthusiasm and can-do spirit would race reprehensibly out of control. However, despite his gifts, despite his energy, despite his infectious candour, Mr Oshiomhole must both understand the roots of the discord in the APC and find a balance between his famed ability to mingle with and disarm party leaders, especially the president who shares a great part of the blame, and his sometimes unexplained proclivity to pander to the highest authority. After all, as everyone knows, Mr Oshiomhole’s glorious deeds both as governor and union leader were not undergirded by any recognisable ideology, but the simplest pragmatism. In fact, like most Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chairmen imposed by past presidents, regardless of what they believed or did not believe, Mr Oshiomhole’s coronation runs true to form.

  • Killer herders and full wrath of the law

    IN his Democracy Day national broadcast, President Muhammadu Buhari warned that the full wrath of the law would be brought upon culprits and sponsors involved in kidnappings and herders/farmers clashes. Contrary to how most media organisations reported that aspect of the president’s speech, he did not refer to culprits or sponsors as killer herders. That name-calling was strictly the invention of the media. In the president’s vocabulary, there is nothing like a killer herdsman. Had such a person existed, surely the president is not so unfamiliar with labelling to decline naming the culprits as the rest of the country would.

    The president was indeed quite clear what he wanted to say and how to say it, regardless of whether his opinion shows consistency with his previous position on a crisis that is dangerously tending towards religious and ethnic catastrophe. Hear him: “The unfortunate incidences of kidnappings, herdsmen and farmers’ clashes in several communities which have led to a high number of fatalities and loss of property across the country is being addressed and the identified culprits and their sponsors shall be made to face the full wrath of the law. All the three tiers of government are presently engaged with communities and religious organisations to restore peaceful co-existence among Nigerians.” The nearest the president got to referring to the so-called culprits as anything deeply reprehensible was when he described them as criminal elements.

    “I wish to assure Nigerians that we will not rest until all criminal elements and their sponsors are brought to justice,” he continued with measured detachment . “Government is boosting the capacity of our security agencies through recruitment of more personnel, training and procurement of modern equipment, enhancement of intelligence gathering as well as boosting their morale in the face of daunting challenges.” Nigerians must give President Buhari credit for sticking to his guns, remaining consistent over the difficult months that saw thousands of mostly middle belters murdered by rampaging armed men, and refusing to be drawn into any name-calling. His diagnosis of the bloody crisis in the Middle Belt of Nigeria may be unacceptable and even partial, a crisis he has managed to expand into embracing other forms of criminality like kidnapping and pure robbery and banditry, but no one will convince him that the orchestrated killings in the blighted region are anything other than unfortunate incidents. The number of deaths may be high, as he acknowledged, but it will not prompt him to dissect the problem with the skill of a surgeon, separate the herders’ menace from other forms of banditry, and find the most appropriate and effective remedies.

    Years of killings in that agrarian region have led many Nigerians and analysts to reconsider the fundamentals of the crisis. Gradually, they have shifted away from regarding the crisis as herdsmen/farmers clashes to seeing it as herdsmen invasion and attacks, irrespective of the motives. The farmers, according to the analysts, are after all sedentary and have not moved from one location to the other in search of fertile land. The herders on the other hand, they surmise, are constantly on the move in search of grazing fields, and have often ruined crops. Consequently, the crisis is no longer seen as clashes between herders and farmers, but attacks by herders. The herders have tried to justify their violence, and routinely claim responsibility for the attacks, but it is not clear to many analysts why the government insists on downplaying the confessions, or whether new and generally acceptable methods of animal husbandry would not adequately resolve the crisis.

    While many Nigerians appalled by the scale of savagery going on in the Middle Belt have started to consider alternative and sensible explanations for the crisis, the government has seemed to dither very badly or remain stuck in jaded logic. As this column has traced and reported in the past few months, the government unfortunately prefers to give the impression that its sympathies lie with the herders. Rather than separate the problem of herders attacking farmers over fodder and grazing routes from the sheer criminality of a group of people taking the law into their own hands and murdering fellow Nigerians, the government has muddled the problem and sought to justify the bellicosity of the attacking militias. Unable to separate the two issues, the government has been lethargic in finding the right multi-dimensional solutions. It was important for them to find a permanent solution to the problems caused by the restriction of grazing lands, a solution that would neither expropriate anybody’s farm lands nor leave the herders unattended to.

    And it was also urgent for them to tackle the killings by first regarding them as murders which the laws of the land do not excuse. Quite shockingly, the government has done neither. Instead, they have tried inexpertly, and sadly and ignorantly, to walk a tightrope. So far their efforts have met with abject failure. In fact, more damaging to the credibility of the government, as this column has portrayed, is their inconsistent explanations, nay justifications, for the killings. First was their argument that the farming communities were unpatriotically unwilling to accommodate their fellow countrymen who were herders. If there was no resistance, if the farming communities received the herdsmen, argued the government, peace would be restored. This argument was then swiftly modified, upon some public pressure and criticisms, to paint the attackers as stragglers from the Libyan civil war, or bandits armed with weapons hijacked from the same Maghrebian war. Then, yet again, the argument was later painted as one that had to do with herders falling into a quandary over restricted grazing lands. In the opinion of the government, the herders had no other choice but to fight for their place in the sun. Not only were the arguments of the government tragically exculpatory of herders violence, the arguments also indicated official collusion and disingenuousness.

    This strange disposition has in turn led farming communities to fear ethnic cleansing, and their religious elite to fear sectarian purges. With the crisis in danger of morphing into something more apocalyptic than the country is capable of managing, it is incomprehensible that the government has continued to pussyfoot and prevaricate. Indeed, nothing will come out of the president’s oath to bring the culprits and their sponsors to justice. To resolve the crisis, it is indispensable for the government to reach a consensus on the diagnosis of the problem. But that consensus is unlikely to be reached, for the constant waffling of the government, accentuated by the president’s own reluctance to act swiftly and firmly on the side of the law, indicates nothing to the victims but confusion among the country’s leaders, if not partiality.

    It is deeply troubling that the president sees the killings, in particular, as proceeding from a lack of “peaceful co-existence”. By talking of “peaceful co-existence”, it is clear that the president means the herdsmen issue, which he describes as a clash rather than attacks and criminality. He could not be referring to kidnappings and armed robbery, for there is nothing in these other issues and crimes for anyone to encourage peaceful co-existence. And by also talking of “peaceful co-existence”, the president seems in addition to be suggesting that the only way he is willing to contemplate a solution is to coerce the farmers and herders into unaccustomed unity. That unity and that resolution will not happen, for the root of the problem, which the government has seemed to deny or wish away, is too fundamental and too mutually antagonistic to be resolved by peace talks rather than by a restructuring and reforming of ancient animal husbandry practices.

  • Military and Amnesty International’s rich pickings in Nigeria

    BY now, after many years of depressing interactions with their security agencies, Nigerians are either indifferent to or conversant with the controversies surrounding every Amnesty International (AI) report that questions the rights abuse perpetrated by the military and the police. Last Thursday’s damning report by the global rights watchdog entitled “They Betrayed Us” is no less poignant. While the cases investigated and reported by AI have been quite heartrending and serve as a reminder to just how far the Nigerian security agencies have allegedly strayed from their rules of engagement, the response of the military has been predictable, defiant and perfunctory.

    In the report, AI painted gory details of sickening rights abuse committed, apparently without any checks, by the military and their civilian militia counterparts (Civilian JTF) in the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in the Northeast. It involved the double victimisation of mostly women displaced by the fighting in the region but subjected to rape and torture by the security forces in exchange for sundry favours, including food and medicine. It painted images of wives and girls separated from their husbands and families, stigmatised, pejoratively labelled as Boko Haram wives because of the circumstances of their rescue, and then coerced into offering sex to avert hunger, disease and, worse, death. It also spoke of the rampant tragedy of avoidable deaths in the camps and the mismanagement or refusal by the authorities to take responsibility for the sufferings of hundreds, if not thousands, of victims.

    In the words of Osai Ojigho, Director of Amnesty International Nigeria, here is how AI paints the tragedy in some of the camps: “Scores of women described how soldiers and Civilian JTF members have used force and threats to rape women in satellite camps, including by taking advantage of hunger to coerce women to become their “girlfriends”, which involved being available for sex on an ongoing basis. Five women told Amnesty International that they were raped in late 2015 and early 2016 in Bama Hospital camp as famine-like conditions prevailed. Ama (not her real name), 20, said: ‘They will give you food but in the night they will come back around 5pm or 6pm and they will tell you to come with them… One [Civilian JTF] man came and brought food to me. The next day he said I should take water from his place [and I went]. He then closed the tent door behind me and raped me. He said I gave you these things, if you want them we have to be husband and wife’. Ten others in the same camp said that they were also coerced into becoming ‘girlfriends’ of security officials to save themselves from starvation.”

    He continues: “Most of these women had already lost children or other relatives due to lack of food, water and healthcare in the camp. The sexual exploitation continues at an alarming level as women remain desperate to access sufficient food and livelihood opportunities. Women said the sexual exploitation follows an organized system, with soldiers openly coming into the camp for sex and Civilian JTF members choosing the “very beautiful” women and girls to take to the soldiers outside. Women reported they were too afraid to refuse demands for sex. Sex in these highly coercive circumstances is always rape, even when physical force is not used, and Nigerian soldiers and Civilian JTF members have been getting away it. They act like they don’t risk sanction, but the perpetrators and their superiors who have allowed this to go unchallenged have committed crimes under international law and must be held to account…”

    But responding to the horrifying expose, the military, through one of their spokesmen, John Agim, a brigadier-general, decried the sinister motive of the rights group and dismissed the report as fictitious and a  calculated attempt to smear and discredit the military and its efforts to rein in insurgency in the Northeast. The AI report, he says, is full of falsehood and propaganda, and is designed to demoralise the troops sacrificing their lives to protect the country’s territorial integrity. In the light of past experiences, it is not clear just what weight of credibility should be given to the military’s denials. Indeed, in August last year, following a similar outcry against the military’s reluctance to abide by their rules of engagement, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, a law professor himself, set up a presidential review panel to review the military’s countervailing claim of adherence to human rights obligations in their operations. The report was submitted to President Muhammadu Buhari in February. So far, no action has been taken, nor is it even clear that the military was indicted.

    The Nigerian military’s Northeast counterinsurgency operations have been shrouded in controversies, a clear departure from the fairly professional manner they had conducted difficult but probably similar operations in the distant past. Whether this departure is a reflection of the decline in professionalism of the armed services or an indication of the revolution in information technology that makes it more difficult to hide anything, is hard to say. But what is obvious is that right from the beginning of the insurgency, when the leader of Boko Haram himself, Mohammed Yusuf, was extrajudicially murdered, the military has not seemed to be able to put one foot right in terms of sustaining a good image for Nigeria’s fighting force. Whether in Baga, Borno State, where a whole community was reportedly razed to the ground in 2013 during a clash between soldiers and Boko Haram insurgents, or in Maiduguri where the military allegedly supervised extrajudicial executions of captured insurgents in 2014, or Bama where extrajudicial killings took place allegedly orchestrated by some officers in 2013, the military has reeled from one controversy to another, trailed by Amnesty  International reports now described as hostile and offensive.

    The Nigerian government may find the Donald Trump presidency more amenable to their war efforts, but that does not neutralise the reservations held against them by the Barack Obama presidency which, to protest rampant human rights violations, cancelled the visas of a number of Nigerian officers accused of war crimes and refused the sale of desperately needed weapons. Regardless of the positive and unquestioning attitude of the Trump presidency to Nigeria, it is unhelpful that the Nigerian military either instinctively dismisses allegations of heavy-handedness or even potential war crimes, or stubbornly refuses to order investigations against troops blamed for atrocities. Because impunity has become apparently ingrained in the security forces, and misconduct continues to be entrenched, even transmuting from heavy-handedness against insurgents to alleged rape and torture against displaced persons, there is no telling what depths would be plumbed next.

    Impunity among the country’s security and fighting forces will not end until the authorities, both political and military, show zero tolerance against rights abuses. Given the stress of war and the brutality of insurgents, it must be acknowledged that the military may not always be able to prosecute a text-book war. Occasional lapses are bound to occur, whether orchestrated or accidental. For the sake of their image as a disciplined fighting force and the image of the country as a whole, it is critical that the military must be able to draw a line between honest mistakes and friendly fire on the one hand, and deliberate acts of impunity and war crimes on the other hand. The military must not assume that exposing war criminals from among their ranks is tantamount to denigrating the entire military force.

    It is also unhelpful when the government takes all of six months to review allegations of rights abuses against the military in their Northeast operations only for the report ordered by the vice president in 2017 to be put in the cooler for more than three months. The government does not seem persuaded to undertake the review in the first instance. And with the United States becoming more amenable to selling weapons to Nigeria without seeking guarantees, the restraint and discomfort hitherto shown by the Nigerian government may no longer be necessary. This, plus the desire to portray a positive, even if contrived, image of the armed forces may explain why the military quickly reviewed the allegations by a former army chief, Gen. T.Y Danjuma, against the army and dismissed as unfounded stories of military collusion with herdsmen. If care is not taken, impunity will continue to breed more impunity.

    If the Muhammadu Buhari presidency chooses to believe that the image of the country’s security forces is intact and that there is no urgent need to order a holistic review and purge, the government may inadvertently be fostering upon the country a situation of might is right. The inescapable fact on the ground, it is clear, is that the image of the security agencies in Nigeria is at its lowest ebb. Pretending that everything is alright will not automatically transform the country into a stable and united entity when the country’s leaders have demonstrated that they lack the will and understanding to validate the idiom that a stitch in time saves nine. Everything is not alright with the country, not the least the freedoms and happiness of Nigerians, and they know it.

  • Anti-graft war and 1985 post-coup perspective

    Last Tuesday, President Muhammadu Buhari once again voiced his opinion on why he believed he was deposed in the 1985 military coup that brought Ibrahim Babangida to power. It is not clear why the president continues to reiterate the view that his deposition was mainly because corruption fought back against his anti-corruption war, or why he has refused to banish the memory of that period. But it is at least clear that the events of that year have not left him nor ameliorated his animosities. The inauguration of the N24bn corporate headquarters of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) provided the president a fresh opportunity to recall his ouster in 1985 and the lessons he drew from the obviously unsavoury experience that has left a permanent scar both on his mind and his attitude to leadership and politics.

    In his remarks, the president reminded Nigerians that his conclusions about the 1985 coup were indisputable. It was clear to him, he said, that he was deposed because he fought corruption, and corruption fought back. “This government promised to fight corruption, but corruption will continue to fight back,” he said of his presidency with a hint of plaintive resignation.  “During my first attempt to fight corruption (December 1983-August 1985), corruption fought back successfully.  I was removed as the head of state, detained for three years, and people who we recovered stolen money from were given back their money and I remained in detention up until my mother had to die to save me from detention.”

    Perhaps age has tempered his tendency to name names. But back in 2012, he had pointedly revealed the identities of those who he claimed were corrupt and who fought back until he was overthrown in the coup of 1985. He named Generals Babangida and Aliyu Gusau. He could not at the time swear that Gen Babangida was corrupt, he admitted, nor that he (IBB) was the target of a purge initiated by his government, but he insisted that Gen Gusau, whose appointment into certain key positions he had opposed, was to be retired for a number of reasons, including alleged corruption. In the said interview some six years ago, he confirmed that he presented the proposal to retire Gen Gusau before the Army Council, a proposal he concluded led to a rallying of forces against his leadership of the country.

    During the inauguration of the EFCC Headquarters, President Buhari stuck to his earlier conviction that he was deposed because he fought corruption, and corruption fought back. He confirmed to his audience that based on that experience, he knew enough to suggest that in his current battle to undo the forces of corruption in Nigeria, corruption would fight back, and is indeed fighting back. He offered no indisputable proof, not in 1985, and not now. In his own account of the circumstances surrounding the attempt to retire him, Gen Gusau however asserted that despite his active and significant role in the overthrow of the elected government of President Shehu Shagari, the number one beneficiary of the coup, the then Gen Buhari, treated him shabbily, denying him significant postings.

    In an interview published about two months ago in the Daily Sun, Mustapha Jokolo, a former aide-de-camp to President Buhari when he was military head of state, gave a totally different account of the circumstances surrounding the 1985 coup. According to him, the new Buhari military government was unfair to those who financed and participated in the coup, and was even more irritatingly inaccessible. Hear Alhaji Jokolo who was at the time a major: “They (the coup plotters) knew it was easier to have access to Babangida. And it showed so. When we took over, none of the coup plotters was given political appointment. The only two people who were given appointments were David Mark who was posted to Niger State as Governor, who I believe was influenced by Babangida because it was his home state, and Ahmed Abdullahi in whose house we were doing a lot of things, that was made a minister. He was made Minister of Communications. Apart from those two, all other coup plotters, none of them was given political appointments. And that set the stage for the coup of 1985. What happened was that when we came to Dodan Barracks with Buhari, he was holding meeting with some senior military officers, and all the coup plotters were outside, and they came to meet me in the office of the ADC. Shagaya, Akilu, Sabo Aliyu, Zaki, Tanko Ayuba, all of them who were in Lagos at that time. They told me ‘Mustapha what the bloody hell is going on?  Why are we outside and these people are inside, not holding meeting with us? We have just finished this coup and honestly we are going to stage another one now. They said that to me. They are alive.’ “

    Speaking more directly about the allegations of corruption made against Gen Gusau, Alhaji Jokolo averred further: “Aliyu Gusau too, in spite of the fact that there is no love lost between me (Jokolo) and Aliyu Gusau, he helped us because he financed the coup. Okay, like the import license (controversy), which was sold to one German through Mai Daribe, the money was used to facilitate the coup. It is not even that one that is important. What was important was that Aliyu Gusau, as Director of Military Intelligence, was the one who protected us from the Nigerian Security Organisation (NSO) led at that time by Umaru Shinkafi. We would have all been arrested. He had good connection with Shinkafi, and any time some of the coup plotters got drunk, they spoke rubbish and threatened people. The NSO agents were picking up reports and were sending them. So that was what Aliyu Gusau did. In any case what brought the problem was that Buhari was not comfortable with Aliyu Gusau. I asked Buhari why we didn’t make Aliyu Gusau the Director General of NSO. He said he would not give two security positions to Babangida’s people. One, Haliru Akilu, and not Hallilu Akilu as you people have been writing; it is Haliru Akilu. He was the one appointed Director, Military Intelligence. So Buhari was not comfortable giving the NSO office to Aliyu Gusau who also was Babangida’s boy because he had some…I don’t know what went wrong with two of them but there were some misgivings between the two of them, Babangida and Buhari.”

    The account of the 1985 coup will always be contested. So, too, will the content and direction of President Buhari’s anti-corruption war, not to talk of some of the people that have become the war’s victims. Rather than dwell on the pains and punishment inflicted upon him after his ouster, it should have been a sufficient exculpation for the president that he finally won the 2015 presidential election, and by May next year will have presided over the affairs of Nigeria for four years. Every other experience, including those that followed his ouster, ought properly to serve as lessons for him, especially for his leadership style. But he has dwelt too long on the pains of the past, and in the process has either deliberately twisted historical accounts by depressing some facts and promoting others, or the passage of time has reshaped and coloured his memory of what transpired in those feverish months when he rewarded those outside the coup circle and alienated those who propelled him into office.

    The president suggested at the inauguration of the EFCC headquarters last Tuesday that corruption was fighting back, and that he expected it. But Nigeria would be best served had he demonstrated, much more than the resolve he prides himself in, that he is capable of the introspection required to reshape and fine-tune the anti-corruption war. It is suspected that he does not fully understand the issues involved in the war beyond arresting and prosecuting some of the corrupt officials the government can find. Nor is it clear that his government possesses the intellectual depth to conceive and emplace philosophical underpinnings to the war. There is no policy that will not produce its supporters and enemies. What is important is to first understand the factors that promote the corruption cancer, such as the country’s fragile and untenable political and economic structures, and then design appropriate remedies.

    The fact on the ground, regardless of the recovery of stolen funds adumbrated by the EFCC boss, Ibrahim Magu, is that no structured war against corruption is really going on. There are undoubtedly campaigns, and naming and shaming. But in terms of substance, no war can really be fought until the roots of the problem are identified and tackled. The government has up till today continued to preoccupy itself with combating the symptoms of the disease; that is why the war has become difficult, even tedious. And that is why, in addition, it is unlikely that the Buhari presidency will have a profound impact on the crisis. Worse, the presidency’s stubborn refusal to fully understand the ramifications of the problem and brilliantly conceive a structured and philosophical response to the crisis will continue to doom the campaign to nothing more than ephemeral propaganda propelled, as it is becoming increasingly obvious, by doubtful and perhaps private and prejudiced motives.

    Fighting corruption is a noble and laudable task. It is time the Buhari presidency understood how to prosecute the war if it is to achieve the kind of result it boyishly continues to dream about.

  • Herdsmen killings and Garba Shehu’s theory of war

    THERE will obviously not be an end to the government’s theories explaining the persistence of killings in many parts of the country. A significant section of the worried public blames herdsmen, suggesting that the conflict between cattle breeders and farming communities was taking its toll on the country and predisposing the society to complete breakdown of law and order. But the government continues to struggle with many explanations, some of them quite difficult to  rationalise. After the seemingly unending rigmarole and dithering, the presidency, through one of its spokesmen, has now propounded a new theory about the killings.

    According to the presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, the killings are an attempt by some nameless characters to instigate war. Said he: “These persistent killings are not spontaneous; there are subterranean forces with a sinister agenda to instigate war in the country for selfish purposes. Although unconventional war is particularly complicated, our security forces are making rigorous efforts to better understand these enemies, with a view to decisively checkmating their evil attacks…It is very clear that there is an attempt by some people, within and outside the country, to create a war. There is intelligence available that clearly indicates that, yes, there are Fulani herds people who kill, but this country also suffers from attacks by ISIS, which has come into the country and they found a place in the cleavages that divide the country.” At last, Mallam Shehu has grudgingly conceded that perhaps sceptics were right in some of their suppositions all along, particularly as it relates with the activities of herdsmen. “Yes, there are Fulani herdsmen who have taken to this criminality,” he moaned; “there is also the Islamic State in West Africa factor, and the fact that the opposition political party seems to be operating from a different country.”

    In the statement he released a few days ago, Mallam Shehu made no mention of the earlier four theories bandied about by the same government he serves. So, Why should the public take this latest explanation, the fifth so far, seriously? Here are some of the past theories given by the same government to explain the killings:

    1) “Your Excellency, the governor, and all the leaders here, I am appealing to you to try to restrain your (Benue farmers) people. I assure you that the police, the Department of State Service (DSS) and other security agencies have been directed to ensure that all those behind the mayhem get punished. I ask you in the name of God to accommodate your countrymen. You can also be assured that I am just as worried and concerned with the situation.”

    President Buhari, January 15, speaking with Benue State leaders at Aso Villa

    2) “Obviously it is a communal crisis, for herdsmen are part of the community. They are Nigerians and are part of the community; are they not? Let’s use the example of Benue, you know most of these states where you have several languages, you know it is an issue of communal misunderstanding. I think what we should be praying for is for Nigerians to learn to live in peace with one another, I think it is very important.”

    IGP Ibrahim Idris, January 5, after the New Year’s Day massacre in Benue.

    3) “Whatever crisis that happened at any time, there has to be remote and immediate causes. What are the remote causes of this farmers/herders crisis? Since Independence, we know there used to be a route whereby these cattle rearers use. Cattle rearers are all over the nation, you go to Bayelsa, you see them, you go to Ogun, you see them. If those routes are blocked, what happens? These people are Nigerians, it’s just like you going to block river or shoreline, does that make sense to you? These are the remote causes. But what are the immediate causes? It is the grazing law. These people are Nigerians, we must learn to live together with each other, that is basic. Communities and other people must learn how to accept foreigners within their enclave, finish!”

    Defence minister, Mansur Dan Ali, January 25, after emerging from a meeting with the president and other security chiefs

    4) “The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region. They were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram. Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions.”

    President Buhari, April 11, speaking in London with Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby

    Clearly, Nigerians want both the killings and the government’s vacillations to stop. They are tired of the back and forth, and are exasperated by the government’s seeming impotence in the face of the relentless murder of their fellow countrymen. They are right to distrust the government, and to fear that it may not even be sincere in trying to put down the malady and stanch the flow of blood. The government has been anxious to suggest that the killings have nothing to do with the country’s religious divides. But by failing to curb the madness, and by initially offering what seemed to many victims justifications for the killings, they open themselves up to public suspicion, and the country and the crisis itself to all sorts of nefarious explanations.

    Garba Shehu
    Garba Shehu

    Now, the dismal show of combing for theories is continuing, with Mallam Shehu arguing that some shadowy characters and groups might be working hard to instigate a war, and that the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) might be unhelpful in their criticisms. Alas, the APC did worse in their days in opposition. Even then, the PDP has been very restrained in taking the government to task both in terms of the government’s understanding of the crisis and the application of solutions. But both in the president’s London analysis and Mallam Shehu’s latest theory there were no indications that the government understood nor could explain why the instigators and agent provocateurs they so glibly talked about skipped over the Sahel region of Nigeria to land smack in the middle of the country. Mallam Shehu suggests implausibly that the reason for selecting the points of attacks may be because the instigators know the Middle Belt to be the fragile and vulnerable dividing line between Christians and Muslims, and between the North and the South. And though he suggests that there is a welter of intelligence to underpin this curious theory, it will remain far-fetched until more proof is found.

    Before the year is over, no one can tell whether the government will still not propound another theory of the killings. They will probably continue to reel out theories until they run out of explanations. Meanwhile, what Nigerians demand of their government are expertise and competence in understanding crises — for crises will always come — and firmness and fairness in finding and applying solutions. The government has demonstrated no competence in both. It will, therefore, continue to be susceptible to well-founded suspicions, and the country itself unnerved by all manner of theories and complications about the killings. Christians will feel justified to wonder why they must be on the receiving end, and the Middle Belt of Nigeria will wonder whether there is really no subterranean plot to expropriate their lands. The longer the crisis persists, the more complicated and intractable it becomes.

    Given the government’s inexpert approach to the crisis so far, not to say the propagation of untruthful and puerile theories, there is no indication it can get to the bottom of the crisis any time soon. This is apocalyptic. It is truly shocking that the government has been unable to assemble the team needed to help the country reason and forge a way out of the terrible quagmire. It has spoken contradictions and acted contradictorily. The country even senses that their government is at sixes and sevens over the killings, approving costly but ultimately unworkable and tedious establishment of security bases in the time-worn flat-footedness that has unhinged security operations in the country. There may be no significant opposition rallying force at the moment, but the Buhari presidency must still urgently find a way out of the bloodletting if it is not to be undone by the kind of panic that finished off the Goodluck Jonathan presidency. This government has been more heavy-handed than its predecessors, but it is not certain that a resort to strong-arm tactics, as it has begun to show in its overconfident approach to governance, would not eventually doom its electoral chances in next year’s polls.

  • Odigie-Oyegun, Oshiomhole and APC’s future

    BY the time he was through riding the emotional roller coaster of the past few weeks, the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), John Odigie-Oyegun, had all but perished the idea of cobbling up a formidable coalition to retain his position as party boss. The deciding factor was President Muhammadu Buhari’s definitive statement indicating support for the younger and more agile former governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole. Between January and March, it had seemed like it would take a herculean effort to unhorse the adamant party chairman. He had the support and encouragement of most of the party’s governors, many of whom seethed in revolt against what they termed the obtruding influence of some national leaders of the APC. Party executives at all levels also appeared to vote for continuity, arguing with engaging self-centeredness that stability was paramount in what to them is an election year. The ding-dong battle of wills and wits, much of it based on legal cum electoral sophistry, continued in favour of Mr Odigie-Oyegun until the vacillating president finally put his foot down.

    Now, with Mr Oshiomhole certain to enjoy coronation at the party’s national convention, probably sometime in June, Mr Odigie-Oyegun’s fate seems sealed, except he can make the heavens fall. But neither he nor any of the voluble governors who had sworn to stand by him through thick and thin has the appetite to take on the president. They had all hoped to sway the president by the massive support shown their nervous chairman, and had even made a show of opposing the president by citing many constitutional and legal provisions in support of their stand. As persuasive as the provisions were, and as copious and convincing as the pro-Odigie-Oyegun forces were, they all came a cropper once the president took a stand.

    In fact, when the ding-dong was still going on, the party chairman had made cynical allusions to the futility of the media campaign engineered against his person, obviously referring to this newspaper. But the smug was soon wiped off his face when the president, weighing his chances in the coming polls, and perhaps convinced that the legal ground on which the discordant options the party was inclined to embrace was wafer thin, found it enormously attractive to repudiate Mr Odigie-Oyegun and promote Mr Oshiomhole’s candidature. Given the age of the chairman, not to say his ineffectiveness in partisan politics at the local level and his inability to offer the party the inspiring leadership needed to overwhelm the opposition, he will probably retire into the background once this is all over. He fought a bold and courageous tenure elongation fight to retain his office for an extended period — or at least till after the next general elections — but in the end, the cards were heavily stacked against him.

    If Mr Odigie-Oyegun can somehow manage to efficiently organise the May-June party congresses and convention with the aplomb he claims to possess, the party might experience some lift, some renewal, some energy, even some added cohesion. But nothing is cast in granite. Many safe assumptions can still go wrong if the president does not continue to put his foot down as severely as he has done lately. The chairman’s supporters may have been cajoled into repudiating their previous objectives of either temporary tenure elongation or even four additional years for the party’s executives, but nothing suggests that their bitterness has abated, or that they have become resigned to admitting defeat or supporting the new officials who will be elected at the coming congresses and convention. In fact, they will now probably be more determined to ensure that the tendency represented by Mr Odigi-Oyegun should fill vacant positions and influence the thinking of the party in the foreseeable future. They know by instinct that as powerful as the president may be, there is a limit to how widely and how long he can ride roughshod over their feelings or the party.

    The party may at last have been coaxed into some form of peaceful resolution of the crisis ravaging their ranks, a kind of unity they are unaccustomed to, a unity they dare not hope is real or even achievable. However, that peace is unlikely to be more than tentative for reasons party leaders know all too well. The APC, despite its grandstanding and ideals, never seemed structured right from its foundations to unite or to operate as a formidable and enduring party. It is an agglomeration of strange bedfellows, competing ideologies, and frantic and quarrelsome leaders. That they won the last general elections was, among other factors, probably because the former ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), expired under its own weight of contradictions and lethargy. Since the APC could not invest itself with the energy and vision needed to crown its electoral effort with permanence and strength, it led to muted but bitter factionalism within the party, a division that is now vented through the fissures among party leaders, cracks which the president has now spread a thin veneer of normality.

    If the APC should assume its problems would be resolved by the exit of the disputatious Mr Odigie-Oyegun and the entry of the frenetic Mr Oshiomhole, they cannot be more mistaken. The current chairman is simply a manifestation of the lack of order and clear structure in the party. It is probably true that had he possessed the neutrality and political acumen needed to anchor the party firmly, both operationally and ideologically, he would have built the party into a formidable machine for electoral conquests as well as provided the balance the party’s ideological vacuum has made frustratingly slow in coming. Ordinarily, a president under the Nigerian constitution has tremendous influence in shaping the integrity and direction of the party. But the reluctance of President Buhari to help shape that direction and integrity in the last three years has partly led to the disarray in the party as APC leaders fight to fill the vacuum.

    Apart from the dissension among party leaders, the young APC needed to make a commanding ideological statement as well as undergird its operations with unambiguous and solid philosophical frameworks. Since the president has remained a proud conservative, and since he has shunned the complexities of envisioning a transcendental philosophical direction for the party, the APC was left without a soul, not to talk of a soul it could call its own. To some extent, the country could tell what the president stands for, as confusing and simplistic and contradictory as these sometimes are, but no one can tell what the party really stands for or is prepared to even die for. Perhaps the 2019 campaigns would help the party forge that identity.

    It is against these yawning partisan lacunae that Mr Oshiomhole is sold by the president and many party leaders and faithful as the deus ex machina to vivify party organisation and activism, a redeemer to extricate the party from the confusion stultifying its vision and identity. There is some sense in sharing this partisan delusion. Mr Oshiomhole has a vibrant labour union background, once ruled Edo State with a fair degree of success, largely has a mind of his own, and possesses the instinct of an accomplished negotiator and dealmaker. But his unionism is mistaken for an ideology, for the former governor is really nothing more than an enthusiastic proponent of pragmatism, a pragmatism the party apparently hopes to profit from when it should really flourish more by the former governor’s inexistent but distinguishing progressivism.

    Though he is more likely to run the party much more firmly and perhaps far better than Mr Odigie-Oyegun, there is, however, nothing in Mr Oshiomhole’s background to indicate that he has the depth and vision required to recast the party’s wobbly foundation. The fundamental problem facing the party is not just its lack of a lofty and sturdy foundation, but the inability of the president himself to imbue the party with anything properly resembling a concise and coherent body of ideas, and his refusal to conceive a leitmotif around which the party’s competing factions could coalesce and draw breath. Given his aggressiveness and can-do spirit, Mr Oshiomhole should be able to make a dent on the problems confronting the party. But he is unlikely to fashion the APC into the inspiring and revolutionary organ needed to make it run as a disciplined political organisation, let alone one that can impose discipline and exert influence on its elected officials.

    Above all, by enabling the president to virtually singlehandedly determine who would be the party’s chairman, the APC may have inadvertently conferred on the president dictatorial powers certain to undermine the party in the long run. The PDP fell on that obsolete sword. If the APC will not discipline itself to find the right balance between its governors, party leaders and the presidency in electing and selecting its officials, especially given the almost total lack of ideological flavour and depth in the party, it is a question of time before they experience the withering rejection that is still causing the PDP so much distress.

  • Buhari, NASS and unlawful use of $469m ECA funds

    On April 9, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters (Senate), Ita Enang, lied to worried and inquisitive Nigerians that the president was yet to authorise the payment of $469m from the Excess Crude Account (ECA) to buy 12 Super Tucano military jets from the United States government. It turned out that as far back as February, despite repeated denials, the president had both approved the said sum and authorised disbursement. It was only the Defence minister, Mansur Dan Ali, who somewhat truthfully hinted early February that the procurement had been done in order to meet the deadline set by the American government for the deal to be consummated.

    It is unlikely that Sen Enang, who is himself very conversant with legislative appropriations process, did not know that the approval had been given and the payment made. Nor is it likely that he does not know the gravity of the executive branch arbitrarily and unilaterally authorising the disbursement of funds not appropriated. The special assistant knew; he only chose to lie. Here is what he said when the public initially suspected that the president had made the unauthorised disbursement of ECA funds: “…That the said sum has not and cannot be approved for spending by Mr. President. That in accordance with best practices, Mr. President, having received approval of the sum from National Economic Council made up of all the governors, now had a meeting with the Minister of Defence, service chiefs and the Inspector-General of Police, among others, to collate the needs of each of the services and the money available for appropriation…As of now, the process of approving the money for use is inchoate and still undergoing executive standard operating procedure before laying same before the National Assembly for appropriation.”

    When Sen Enang told this open lie, members of the National Economic Council (NEC), the president himself, and the vice president already knew that the money had been disbursed. They chose to keep quiet, associated with the lie, and perhaps sought for ways to blunt both public and legislative reactions to the unlawful use of ECA funds. The governors who in December authorised the withdrawal of $1bn from ECA on the grounds that previous governments periodically accessed the account for one reason or the other also knew by experience in their states that the executive arm, in this case the president, could not spend a kobo without appropriations. Instead, they incredibly decided at a meeting headed by the vice president that their collective assent was as good as legislative assent because no one complained when previous governments made similar withdrawals.

    To put the whole matter at rest, and knowing that the infernal lie told by Sen Enang and connived at by the presidency could not be sustained for too long, the president finally wrote to the National Assembly this April to inform them that he had spent the money from ECA, and asked for their understanding. Other than implying that the urgency of the spending necessitated the illegality, the president offered no other substantial or persuasive reason for breaching the constitution. According to him: “I wish to draw the attention of the House of Representatives to the ongoing security emergencies in the country. These challenges were discussed with the state governors and subsequently, at the meeting of the National Economic Council on 14th December, 2017, where a resolution was passed, with the Council approving that up to US$1 billion may be released and utilised from the Excess Crude Account to address the situation… It would be recalled that, for a number of years, Nigeria had been in discussions with the United States Government for the purchase of Super Tucano Aircraft under a direct Government-to-Government arrangement. Recently, approval was finally granted by the United States Government, but with a deadline within which part payment must be made otherwise, the contract would lapse.”

    The president continues: “In the expectation that the National Assembly would have no objection to the purchase of this highly specialised aircraft, which is critical to national security, I granted anticipatory approval for the release of US$496,374,470.00. This was paid directly to the treasury of the United States Government. I am therefore writing, seeking approval of this House for the sum of US$496,374,470.00 (equivalent to N151,394,421,335.00) to be included in the 2018 Appropriation Bill, which the National Assembly is currently finalising. The balance of the requirements for critical operational equipment is still being collated from the different security services and will be presented in the form of a Supplementary Appropriation Bill, in due course.”

    There is no question that the president knowingly and subversively took the money from ECA. But nothing justifies it: no emergency, no urgency, no security situation. There was nothing to suggest that since the governors decided on that course of action last December, the president didn’t have enough time to present a supplementary estimate to be thoroughly scrutinised by the legislature. He missed the point by giving the impression that critics who denounced the executive arm for disbursing ECA funds were unmindful of the country’s security situation, or insensitive to the urgency of making the military purchases. Critics in fact sensibly suggested that though the motive of the purchase was sound, it was nevertheless wrong to eye the ECA fund meant for the three tiers of government, let alone make the disbursement outside due process. For neither the president nor the governors, nor yet the local councils, approximated the legislative assemblies of their various tiers. Moreover, even the seller of the jets, the US, would be privately appalled by the illegitimacy of the process through which the $469m was released. Such flagrant abuse could never be countenanced in the US. It also beggars belief that those who kept the money feigned ignorance of the proper process by which the funds are to be shared constitutionally between the three tiers of government

    It is disturbing that President Buhari, sitting at the head of a government that prides itself on being ethically different from its predecessors and intolerant of past abridgement of financial regulations, could countenance that constitutional affront. By his letter to the legislature, he seems to think that both the urgency of the purchase and the intensity of the insurgency problem justified the spending from ECA. It is even worse that he indicated in his letter that he expected the legislature not to turn down his request, hence his approval of the unlawful ECA spending. This unilateral action is truly shocking. How could he tell the mind of the legislature? Does he not know what the law say very clearly? The truth is that the Buhari presidency and the federal government under him, including the cabinet and security agencies, think very little of the legislature. They think that if the public were forced to choose between the executive arm headed by the ‘saintly’ President Buhari, and the parliament headed, for instance, by the Machiavellian Bukola Saraki, the public would sack the parliament and embrace the executive. This is the classical beginning of fascism.

    It is also strange that with all the lawyers and constitutional experts around the president, he could still subvert the constitution in the manner he has done. This speaks to the lack of cohesion in the government — in such a manner that suggests only a few people carried away by the importance of their offices take decisions for the presidency and present a fait accompli to the rest of the cabinet — or to perhaps the fear of confronting the president and educating him on the dangers of flouting the constitution and diminishing the importance of the parliament, as his government and cabinet have serially done.

    A far more disturbing truth is that, given the arguments and logic of some of the governors rationalising the ECA spending, there are indeed very few democrats presiding over the affairs of their states in this Fourth Republic. The Governor of Jigawa State, Muhammadu Badaru, for instance, simplistically argues: “We forget easily. If you recall, we have been battling with approval from America to buy these equipment in 2014. We have been begging America to sell this equipment to us. We tried Dubai, they could not allow us; we tried a factory in Brazil,  the federal government tried, we couldn’t get it. America still could not sell to Nigeria. Then luckily, President Trump said it was okay to buy. So we had to quickly buy before they change their minds. Because there is also deadline and this is a state to state transaction, no middleman, and we are all here concerned about security and they are raising questions on way and manner you protect people. This is an emergency situation.” The puerility of Mr Badaru’s logic is numbing. No less bewildering is the Ebonyi State governor, Dave Umahi, who sheepishly suggested that critics of the spending as well as the National Assembly  should not just look at the law but the interest of Nigerians. Awful!

    The National Assembly knows that it can only cry itself hoarse over this needless controversy. To impeach President Buhari, even if the divided legislature can be coaxed into unity, will be nigh impossible, not because an impeachable offence has not been committed but because the presidency seems to be counting on the masses who can neither understand the illogic of the ECA spending nor appreciate the role of the parliament in sustaining democracy. Had the people been educated enough to know that it is the parliament that sustains democracy — not the executive, not the judiciary, as important as they are — they would have found a way to force the resignation of the government. But the government is counting on the people’s ignorance to constitute a deterrence to the legislature, or if push comes to shove, join hands with the Buhari presidency in sacking parliament.

    The NASS will have to find a way of saving face on this appalling matter. The cards are stacked against them. Meanwhile they can legislate away the temptations that so easily take the Buhari presidency prey, such as ECA itself. There is no reason for the dedicated. If President Buhari cannot discipline himself and his government to find legitimate and constitutional ways of raising money to execute their agenda, and the governors are either too obtuse or too timid to think straight, and the people will not eschew sentiment in public discourse, it is time for the legislature to anticipate other possible temptations beguiling the presidency and remove them.

  • Buhari faces justifiable youth anger

    EVERY Nigerian by now knows how prone their president, Muhammadu Buhari, is to saying the wrong things at the wrong moments about the country it is his privilege to preside over. If his outing in London early this week had gone without any verbal incident or accident, his patient and long-suffering countrymen would have found it out of character that all was calm on the Western front. But though Nigerians were not taken by surprise that their president misspoke yet again last Wednesday at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London, they were still flabbergasted that he plumbed new depths of misspeaking in the dignified and stately presence of snickering business and global leaders.

    Responding to a question not stated by reporters or even the president’s spokesman, Femi Adesina, nor apparently a question even targeted at getting him to speak directly about his country’s young, President Buhari shocked his audience by making a sweeping generalisation about Nigerian youths. Said the president in his response to the unidentified question: “More than 60 per cent of the population is below 30. A lot of them haven’t been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare, education free.” For the incensed public back home, the president had said more than enough for them to understand his drift. To them what he had to say was both untrue and unpleasant, and it was typical of him. They recall how in an interview with a British newspaper in the same London in 2016 he had insinuated that some Nigerian youths seeking asylum, and probably thereby embarrassing Nigeria, should not be indulged by their hosts because they had embraced criminality. The reactions then was furious.

    It was, therefore, expected that though he would now and again ski verbally off-piste, so to speak, he would exercise the best precaution and adroitly smother his private prejudices and reservations. To the perennial dismay of his minders, however, the president often lets loose during his overseas travels in equal measure as he lets his hair down in those salubrious environments. It is obviously not an accident that most of his gaffes were made during his often animated foreign trips. But last Wednesday’s was particularly bad, regardless of his spokesman’s valiant effort to put a gloss on it. In Mr Adesina’s opinion, the president neither said anything provocative nor anything wrong. Indeed, he indifferently sidestepped the wrongness or rightness of the president’s statement on the youths.

    “At the Commonwealth Business Forum in London on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, President Muhammadu Buhari gave a keynote address on Making Business Easier Between Commonwealth Countries,” Mr Adesina began cautiously. “The presentation was followed by a discussion, and question and answer session. Responding to a question, President Buhari had cause to talk about some Nigerian youths, and he said: ‘We have a very young population; our population is estimated conservatively to be 180 million. More than 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. A lot of them have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.’ ”

    The president’s spokesman then went on to inveigh against those he claimed were so unlettered as to be unable to appreciate the nuances of language, who could not understand what he described as the wide gulf between “all” and “a lot of”, manipulators and twisters of language who loved to “transmogrify” words mischievously and unconscionably. As this column once noted, Mr Adesina needlessly encumbers himself with so much anger in responding to issues and remarks on behalf of his principal. There are ways to correct mistaken impressions and producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.’ ”

    The president’s spokesman then went on to inveigh against those he claimed were so unlettered as to be unable to appreciate the nuances of language, who could not understand what he described as the wide gulf between “all” and “a lot of”, manipulators and twisters of language who loved to “transmogrify” words mischievously and unconscionably. As this column once noted, Mr Adesina needlessly encumbers himself with so much anger in responding to issues and remarks on behalf of his principal. There are ways to correct mistaken impressions and quotes in such a manner that both the image of the president, whom he works for, and the sensitivities of the public, whom he interfaces with, are not hurt. But the angry spokesman spurns wise counsel.

    Yet, the grammatical distinction Mr Adesina makes is not quite as evident and overarching as he thinks. He speaks of “all” and “a lot of” as if “a lot of” is not such a significant and offensive categorisation when it comes to a negative statement about a group of people. First of all, “a lot of” is indeed and truly very significant as a representation and quantifier of a universal set. What matters, as a matter of fact, is not the little distinction — not wide gulf, as Mr Adesina puts it — between the two descriptions of the youths the president had in mind but the sweeping and demeaning things he said about them — whether all of them or a lot of them. Mr Adesina’s anger often gets in the way of some of his sensible rebuttals; but much more than his anger are the sometimes futile distinctions he draws when he seeks to ameliorate the president’s perverse use of language. It was bad enough that the president saw any of his countrymen as a parasite; it is worse that he felt he should regale the global audience with his uncomplimentary putdown of the people he presides over.

    What undergird President Buhari’s worldview are his sophomoric understanding of right and wrong, his indefensible dualism of life in Nigeria, his definite but tenuous defence of his own constricted moral universe. When these things mix together, they colour his perception of reality, make his convictions inflexible, and paint virtually every other person as questionable and suspect. This was why he saw “a lot of” the youths of his country as idlers and leeches who would not seek education but demand everything free. If, as he said, they would not seek education, has he asked himself why they do not? And supposing they do not, has he done anything about ensuring they seek education? Since his assumption of office, and in the light of the agreement his predecessor reached with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has he released a kobo to redeem even one tranche of the agreement?

    President Buhari constantly whines. That is why he blames everybody for everything. It is not true, as his spokesman has said, that he has high opinion of Nigerian youths. He does not, despite his guarded use of the controversial quantifier. He thinks everyone is obsessed with the country’s oil fortune, but he has done nothing to convince anyone that he himself is not besotted to oil, given his retention of the petroleum ministry portfolio and despite not having enough time to pay attention to its worsening dynamics. After all, he has also heavily criticised the judiciary, which he generalises as the criminal justice system, without propounding ideas for deep reforms, or allocating substantial sums to revamp the broken infrastructure of that blighted and forgotten sector.

    The president’s unflattering opinion of Nigerian youths, whether all of them or a lot of them, is consistent with his sanctimonious conclusions about the integrity of every other person and group in the country. If his minders want to help him overcome his jaded social and political views of life, they must patiently take him through the general philosophy of life afresh, wean him off his suspect misanthropy, and re-educate him on the general principles of constitutional rule and the huge moral responsibility that goes with the high office he occupies. Otherwise, he will continue to see the world from a wrong prism, a world he would conclude is irredeemably evil. But with a president so cocksure of everything, and a spokesman who gushes so unrepentantly over his principal with all sorts of grammatical extenuations, not to talk of a slew of aides stupefied by the president’s contrived grandeur and reticence, there is little hope that President Buhari would not misfire again at his next trip abroad. Had the president reserved his gaffes to shaming outsiders in other countries, the distress Nigerians face when their president skewers the country and humiliates them would be far more tolerable.

  • Herdsmen killings: Government speaks from both sides of the mouth

    ON Wednesday, while receiving  the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in London, President Muhammadu Buhari strangely decided this time to blame the influx of Libyan gunmen into Nigeria for the unending killings many thought were perpetrated by herdsmen. He did not indicate that he had a rethinking of the subject, nor did he struggle to convince anyone that his previous thesis on the killings, and those of his security aides, do not brazenly and disturbingly war against his present convictions. After the august visit, no one, not any of the president’s aides, has argued that he was misquoted. Here is how he apportioned the blame for the killings when the archbishop raised the issue of herdsmen/farmers clashes with him: “The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region. They were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram. Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions.”

    The President then went on to suggest that “irresponsible politics” had been infused into the farmers/herders’ crisis, without indicating that had the clashes not occurred, and seemed to have defied all solutions,  no one would have politicised the mater. Indeed, it is hard for the president to substantiate his allegation of politicisation, as the opinions of his security chiefs in the past few months will show presently. Worse, it is even harder for him to link what he described as the “sociological and economic” underpinnings of the clashes to his present thesis of Libyan gunmen influx. After all, that the so-called Libyan gunmen were encountered in the Boko Haram insurgency does not in any way imply they were behind, or were involved, in the herdsmen killings. The gunmen, assuming they were of a significant number, were nothing but mercenaries during the insurgency, just as the Goodluck Jonathan government also hired mercenaries from South Africa to fight Boko Haram.

    It is indeed becoming increasingly clear that the herdsmen killings have defied an answer because the Buhari presidency has been curiously unable to accurately decipher and explain the problem. Not only does the president give the impression he is finding it difficult to delink himself emotionally from the subject, he has also apparently not been able to assemble dispassionate and hard thinking security chiefs and advisers able to afford him deep and sensible analysis of a crisis that is threatening to completely undermine his presidency.

    It is also clear that the president has since his assumption of office vacillated between describing the killer herdsmen as foreigners and describing them as domestic troublemakers and militiamen. He is not helped by the initial impression angrily communicated by the Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar III, who during his 2016 Eid-el-Kabir message, argued against stereotyping Fulani herdsmen, most of whom he said were peace-loving and law-abiding. He had said: “All those so-called Fulani herdsmen, moving with guns, causing violence, fighting with farmers, are not Nigerians. These are foreigners coming into Nigeria to cause a breach of the peace of the nation. They are therefore terrorists and should be treated as such by the Nigerian security agencies.” It is apparently to this 2016 message of the Sultan that the president has finally returned last Wednesday in London. Meanwhile, the Sultan as well as Nigeria’s top security leaders have since moved on from this misleading perspective, not to say the president himself who in January this year described the herdsmen as fellow Nigerians.

    Here is what the president said on January 15, when Benue leaders and the state governor sought an audience with him over the killings: “Your Excellency, the governor, and all the leaders here, I am appealing to you to try to restrain your (Benue farmers) people. I assure you that the police, the Department of State Service (DSS) and other security agencies have been directed to ensure that all those behind the mayhem get punished. I ask you in the name of God to accommodate your countrymen. You can also be assured that I am just as worried and concerned with the situation.”If they were Libyan gunmen, it would be hard to justify the president asking for accommodation instead of military engagement, not to talk of looking for reasons both to justify the government’s pusillanimous approach to foreign invasion and misleading perspective, not to say the president himself who in January this year described the herdsmen as fellow Nigerians.

    Here is what the president said on January 15, when Benue leaders and the state governor sought an audience with him over the killings: “Your Excellency, the governor, and all the leaders here, I am appealing to you to try to restrain your (Benue farmers) people. I assure you that the police, the Department of State Service (DSS) and other security agencies have been directed to ensure that all those behind the mayhem get punished. I ask you in the name of God to accommodate your countrymen. You can also be assured that I am just as worried and concerned with the situation.”If they were Libyan gunmen, it would be hard to justify the president asking for accommodation instead of military engagement, not to talk of looking for reasons both to justify the government’s pusillanimous approach to foreign invasion and to explain why Libyan gunmen would leapfrog over borders and come right smack into the middle of Nigeria to levy war.

    It is even much worse that there seems to be no coordination at all between the president and his security chiefs. If last Wednesday the president could blame Libyan gunmen and not the local herdsmen for the attacks and killings, how does he explain the statement by his top police officer, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris, who on January 5, a few days after the New Year’s Day massacre in Benue suggested that the crisis was communal, as if that justified the lack of capacity, indolence and poor expertise demonstrated by the law enforcement agencies. Shortly after meeting the president on the Benue crisis and other security problems, Mr Idris had told the press that, “Obviously it is a communal crisis, for herdsmen are part of the community. They are Nigerians and are part of the community; are they not?” Then,  continuing, he had shocked reporters by saying, “Let’s use the example of Benue, you know most of these states where you have several languages, you know it is an issue of communal misunderstanding. I think what we should be praying for is for Nigerians to learn to live in peace with one another, I think it is very important.” Two disturbing facts come out of the IGP’s conclusions. First is his rhetorical question about the nationality of the attackers, whom he described as a part of the community. And second is the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness which he exhibited before the public when he asked them to pray for peaceful co-existence.

    But if the IGP prevaricated very badly, the perspective of the Defence minister, Mansur Dan Ali, was even more flabbergasting. Speaking with reporters on January 25, more than three weeks after the Benue massacre, and shortly after he joined other security chiefs to meet with the president on the crisis, he rationalised the herdsmen killings in the following befuddling manner: “Whatever crisis that happened at any time, there has to be remote and immediate causes. What are the remote causes of this farmers/herders crisis? Since Independence, we know there used to be a route whereby these cattle rearers use. Cattle rearers are all over the nation, you go to Bayelsa, you see them, you go to Ogun, you see them. If those routes are blocked, what happens? These people are Nigerians, it’s just like you going to block river or shoreline, does that make sense to you? These are the remote causes. But what are the immediate causes? It is the grazing law. These people are Nigerians, we must learn to live together with each other, that is basic. Communities and other people must learn how to accept foreigners within their enclave, finish!”

    First is the fact that the Defence minister in company with other security chiefs just came out of a meeting with the president in which apparently the terrifying issue of the clashes were presumably discussed. Second,  the minister twice described the attackers as Nigerians, perhaps to emphasise the Nigerianness of the herdsmen whom many were beginning to say should be forced out of the country for bringing so much trouble. And third is the simple and unambiguous fact that he attributed the clashes partly to the passing of anti-open grazing laws by Benue State and others, without saying why Ekiti State, which was the first to pass a law on the matter, had not witnessed the scale of barbarity experienced by Benue and others. Indeed, the IGP, after first recanting and apologising  for describing the clashes as communal in origin, was to later identify with the Defence minister’s explanations. Said Mr Idris on February 28, shortly after honouring an invitation by the House of Representatives: “It will do us good if we avoid the hasty formulation and implementation of such laws (anti-open grazing laws) across the country in the interest of peace and unity.”

    Perhaps the president did not anticipate a question on the herdsmen/farmers clashes and the horrendous bloodletting that has accompanied it. But even if he did not anticipate such a question, had his security team looked at the problem dispassionately and approached the crisis as patriots in whose hands the levers of power have been deposited in trust, they would have since come out with a sensible and practical understanding of the problem, and devised workable solutions. But as his London outing suggested, and in particular his response to Archbishop Welby’s question on the herdsmen crisis, it is profoundly disturbing that the government simply does not appear at all to have an understanding of the nature and course of the crisis. With no understanding in sight, there does not seem to be any prospect of a lasting solution. In an election year, the people must be poised to force the president to address the issue to the country’s satisfaction. But much more critically, in the same election year, the Buhari presidency must be quite apprehensive that this issue, particularly the chaos in the presidency’s approach to the cancer, could very well complicate the president’s re-election chances.