The Nation Newspaper

Category: UnderTow

EFCC, whistle-blowers and vagrant, orphaned loot

IT may amount to jumping the gun to describe the horrendous amounts of money being recovered by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) from unorthodox places in recent times as proceeds of crime. But with the exception of a few persons who admit ownership of monies traced to them, nearly all the others have furtively avoided being linked with the recovered loot. Yet each of the recovered loot is so indescribably and mind-bogglingly huge that it is difficult to believe it is owned by one person. In one week alone, and in two separate places, the EFCC discovered N.45bn and N.25bn at two locations. Then shortly before the week came to a close, about N15bn in foreign currencies was also found virtually abandoned. No one has been brave enough to claim ownership of the three stashes. In fact those whose names were mentioned with the apartments where the stashes were found have violently rejected any linkage. All together, in about a week, some N16bn has been found, and not one brave soul has owned up.

The EFCC gives assurance that the owners of the abandoned monies will be found, for there was not one find that was made without the assistance of a whistle-blower. If no information has been volunteered to the public by the anti-graft agency regarding the ownership of the monies, it does not appear the problem is knowledge of the monies’ circumstances. The reticence may be tactical. The shops where the monies were found have identifiable owners, and the ones meant to be converted into foreign currencies were brought by identifiable owners. There is indeed no mystery about the monies, only bewilderment about the value, and perhaps shock that each recovery seemed to be owned by one person.

Though neither public commentators nor the anti-graft agency itself can be hasty about ascribing purposes or motives to the stashing of the monies, especially determining whether they are the proceeds of crime, the value of the sums and the contemptuous manner they were disclaimed by their alleged owners suggest they were illicit monies procured and stashed away from the prying eyes of the authorities. Nor is it clear that somewhere along the line, someone would still not come forward to claim association, especially after the initial shock must have worn off and the alleged owners invented a reasonable explanation to justify the ownership of the humongous sums. A few weeks back, a former Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Andrew Yakubu, had, after initial hesitation, claimed ownership of a little less than $10m found stashed fairly unobtrusively in a nondescript apartment in Kaduna. He attributed it to gifts from unnamed well-wishers, an explanation his neighbours and traducers sneered at. Justifying ownership of more than $43m would be nearly impossible.

More of such illicit cash will likely be discovered in the coming weeks, often in very unlikely, embarrassing and demeaning places. With the whistle-blower policy firmly in place and immeasurably enticing, owners of illicit money will no longer trust anyone. To them the streets and neighbourhoods are brimming with betrayers. But to the nation, those unlikely ‘loot havens’ are brimming with patriots. Guaranteeing the safety and security of the whistle-blowers, some of them poised to earn in excess of hundreds of millions, will be the government’s next headache, if not nightmare. For no one can tell whether some of the stashed loot are not owned by more than one person, a few of them relentless and vicious.

The government and its EFCC will henceforth work with a few basic assumptions. If the stashed monies are in naira, they will be difficult to hide, and even more difficult to keep next to the owner. Their owners will need to prepare ready alibis to disown the monies. But if the owners elect to change the monies into foreign currencies, in order perhaps to miniaturise the loot and make it a little easier to launder, how can they tell which forex dealers would keep secrets secret in the face of tempting whistle-blower commission huge enough for any struggling dealer to retire on? These are doubtless difficult times for owners of illicit money. Their monies in the banks are been traced, and sooner or later the trace will point in their direction. And to keep money outside the banking system, whether in septic tanks or abandoned houses and shops, some of them in wealthy areas and others in poor areas, is the greatest dilemmas they face.

It is not certain that the media has identified whose brilliant idea it was to adopt and adapt the whistle-blowing policy. Whoever were behind the idea have done Nigeria a whole lot of good, far beyond what words can describe. If the policy is not abused, if the authorities can sustain it faithfully, and the whistle-blowers are not double-crossed or short-changed, more illicit cash will be recovered until, in frustration, public officials find it a great disincentive to fiddle with public funds, at least on the scale that now beggars belief. The measure may be insufficient to stamp out corruption, but it will contribute, among a welter of other policies and controls, to reducing it so drastically that funds for infrastructural development should be more readily and reasonably available.

Even then, the nation still has a lot to do to find an explanation for why, particularly under the last administration, public officials found it so easy to embezzle public funds and for a long time get away with that crime. More, it is important to do a study of the lax controls, bureaucratic and economic structures, and conniving policies that made the looting bazaar flourish so recklessly and so brazenly. Finally, it is also important to document for posterity the hundreds, and possibly more, of the public officials who promoted and energised the criminal bazaar in the past few years and turned it into such a destructive force. Now the image of the country is worth very little in the estimation of the world. The law, even if it is severely enforced, requites the crime somewhat adequately, but it is doubtful whether, given the insouciance those engaged in that unprecedented and mind-numbing stealing have demonstrated, enough deterrence has been put in place to discourage the crime. But one thing at a time

April 15, 2017
Gov Yari’s controversial hypothesis

GOVERNOR Abdulaziz Yari’s response to the outbreak of cerebrospinal meningitis (CSM) in Zamfara State has grated badly on the nerves of many Nigerians. Far worse is his Freudian slip that signposts the leadership dilemma and difficulties with which Nigeria grapples. Zamfara, with a casualty figure in excess of 200 out of a national total of about 336 so far, appears to be the epicentre of the epidemic. In his response to the CSM outbreak, the Zamfara governor was not reported to have summoned an emergency meeting or a task force to check its menacing march, nor did he demonstrate the franticness agitated leaders show when they are confronted by a new and frightening problem. Instead, he seemed convinced that the CSM outbreak was a reflection of the country’s spiritual health. This piquant reasoning in place of a hard-nosed approach might explain why Zamfara has accounted for about two-thirds of the casualty figures in the latest CSM crisis.

Responding to a question by a BBC Hausa service reporter on the CSM crisis, the governor gave his own analysis of the problem by suggesting that the sins of the people might be the cause of the problem. Said he: “The World Health Organisation has carried out vaccinations against the Type A virus not just in Zamfara, but many other states. However, because people refused to stop their nefarious activities, God now decided to send the Type C virus, which has no vaccination. People have turned away from God and he has promised that ‘if you do anyhow, you see anyhow’; that is just the cause of this outbreak as far as I am concerned. There is no way fornication will be so rampant and God will not send a disease that cannot be cured. The most important thing is for our people to know that their relationship with God is not smooth. All they need to do is repent and everything will be alright.”

Appalled by Gov Yari’s response, commentators, among whom was the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, furiously excoriated him and dismissed him as ineffectual in the face of a modern health emergency. Stung by the overwhelming abuse he has received so far on his linkage of the epidemic to the people’s spiritual health, the governor quickly authorised a rebuttal through his Special Adviser on Media and Public Enlightenment, Ibrahim Magaji Dosara. Mercifully, the rebuttal did not suggest that the misunderstanding was due to interpretational difficulties, considering that the interview was given in Hausa language. Instead, the spokesman suggested that the governor’s remarks on the CSM outbreak was mischievously twisted and quoted out of context.

Said Mr Dosara: “The Governor noted that the situation was unfortunate because the state does not have enough vaccines yet for the Type C Meningitis. The governor thereafter enjoined all Nigerians to embrace prayers, as God who is aware of the outbreak of the ailment surely has antidote for it. The Governor specially appealed to Nigerians to make deliberate effort to be closer to God by shunning sins of fornication and other forms of disobedience so as to receive his divine health and other blessings, as he is closer to those who obey him and distant themselves from sins.”

He continued: “No doubt, as a God-fearing man, and a Muslim, the governor believes in the powers of Allah to inflict whatever punishment He decides on the human race. However, the governor who spoke in Hausa had a particular audience in mind when he spoke to the BBC Hausa reporter. The governor added, for example, that fornication should not spread so much in society that it becomes common place, and if that happens, Allah promises to inflict, on its perpetrators (people) a sickness that would have no cure. Let it be known too that the governor still insists that all diseases come from Allah and that at no point in his interaction with the reporters did he insinuate that Allah was punishing Nigerians but instead drew from the teachings of great Islamic traditions to buttress the point he was trying to convey.”

Mr Dosara should not have bothered, for his rebuttal was in fact no rebuttal at all. The governor was fairly copiously and eminently quoted on the subject. There was apparently no interpretational error, for even the governor himself did not suggest that language accounted for what he thought was a misunderstanding. After a lengthy and prefatory rigmarole, the rebuttal itself ended up by reiterating that there was a distinct connection between a nation’s spiritual health and their physical health. Given the magnitude of the health challenge Zamfara faced over the CSM outbreak, particularly its undiscriminating attack, the governor had no reason to speak of the connection between sin and health. He chose to do that, and must bear the reprimand of the public bravely. What the public wanted to hear him say, even if he would pass the buck, was to give the background to the health crisis, indicate what steps his government had taken to combat it, and suggest why those steps had seemed inadequate and what amelioration the government in Abuja could offer. Indeed, he began his response by giving the public a background to the latest CSM outbreak, but immediately derailed.

Two things emerge from Gov Yari’s initial response and the correction he authorised. First is the obvious fact that the governor actually and disturbingly forgets that he is not presiding over a theocracy that adduces open spiritual interpretations to physical phenomena. He is presiding over a secular state where his religious persuasion is of little significance in the face of serious challenges, such as the current health crisis. This persuasion, as the Emir of Kano suggested while responding to Gov Yari’s shocking hypothesis, can be a restraining factor in marshalling rapid and adequate response to a crisis that needed a totally different kind of approach, a response the state is nevertheless equipped to handle. Furthermore, how would this religiously minded governor determine what point of sinless existence the state must get to in order to attract a clean bill of health? He spoke principally of fornication as the cause of the CSM outbreak. Why not financial malfeasance, shedding innocent blood, oppression by the executive, bad and unfair laws by the legislature, perversion of judgement by the judiciary, etc.?

Second, Gov Yari’s heartfelt response to the BBC question represents in some ways the enduring lack of profundity manifested by many Nigerian governments at the state and national levels in the face of critical challenges. Most Nigerian leaders are poorly equipped for leadership and cannot respond quickly and competently to serious challenges. They are more obsessed with the benefits that come with power than the responsibilities that undergird it. Even if the state and the country were not prepared for the Type C strain of CSM, when they had been used to Type A, why must the Zamfara governor and the Nigerian government assume fatalistically that an annual outbreak of the familiar strain was inevitable? Are there not other predisposing factors they can battle to mitigate? Can a better urban and regional planning paradigm not obviate the predictable outbreak or consign the disease to medical history?

Both Governor Yari and his spokesman, Mr Dosara, are wrong to assume that anyone had reason to twist the governor’s remarks out of context. Zamfara may be important as a component of Nigeria, but it is a rustic state, far too remote from the commentariat belt to elicit deliberate attacks of the kind they seem to imply. The governor goofed. Rather than blame phantom detractors and accuse them of trying to tarnish his ‘rising reputation’, he should use the harsh and vivid mirror held to his face by critics to retool himself and his leadership style and content. If he is overwhelmed by a health crisis that announces itself religiously (no pun intended) every year, which has apparently induced a complacent response, and he cannot also find the ingenuity and innovativeness to tackle it, how can he be trusted to face and solve the bigger and more visionary challenges needed to uplift the standards of his state, prepare his people for the future, and leave Zamfara far better than he met it?

Governor Yari, like most other governors, needs a radically new paradigm of leadership. The CSM outbreak shows why and how urgently he needs a new and intelligent administrative focus. He needs a team of thinkers and builders to help him conceive a great paradigm for the Zamfara project. He should seek out these experts wherever they can be found rather than ensconce himself in the bucolic philosophy and distorted theocracy that explain nothing and proffers no solution.

April 8, 2017
Senate, EFCC and Customs play cat and mouse

THE battle for supremacy and the ethical high ground between the Senate on the one hand and some appointees of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency on the other hand has been fierce, messy and troubling. But despite its troubling signposts, the battle is not what it seems on the surface. It portends something far more sinister and dangerous to the body politic. The senate, much more than the House of Representatives, is less bashful about fighting wars, any war, choosing the battleground no matter how irreverent, daring the public offensively, and playing brinkmanship with provocative adroitness. Nigerians, egged on by vocal commentators and civil society activists, seem to recognise and even conclude that the senate is less than altruistic in the ongoing combat. For now, the government side of the battle is exemplified and amplified by the ineffaceably cocksure Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) chairman, Ibrahim Magu, the sometimes coarse Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) comptroller-general, Hameed Ali, and the gruff and immense Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal.

On the surface, the war is about a pliant senate headed by Bukola Saraki, a senate alleged to be ethically challenged and imposing itself and its controversial moral code on both the presidency and the nation. Dr Saraki himself faces many investigations and court battles, and is assumed to be deploying the senate’s influence to pressure the presidency into soft-pedalling on the cases or sidestepping the investigations, or even stalemating the entire struggle. The particulars of the trouble Dr Saraki faces are doubtless troubling. There is the Code of Conduct Tribunal case in which he is accused of inaccurate declaration of assets; there is also the importation of a bullet proof jeep for his use that is mired in controversial payment of inaccurate duty leading to the seizure of the vehicle; and there is the newer and more damning case of N19bn allegedly siphoned from states’ share of the Paris Club refund and the N3.5bn reportedly traced to the senate president and some of his aides. There is, it seems, no respite for Dr Saraki, as his antagonists appear determined to thrust the knife deeper into his back. He faces an uphill battle convincing the country of his right ethical standing and bona fides.

Ranged on the other side of the battle are the senate president’s three formidable enemies hamstrung by their own peculiar bureaucratic or ethical challenges. Mr Magu is condemned by the Department of State Service (DSS) as unfit for the post he is seeking confirmation. In an equally damning report which the Service has been reluctant to recant, Mr Magu stands convicted of cavorting in an ethical miasma of his own finding and making. It is obvious the senate wants him removed from his acting EFCC chairmanship because he is not letting up in traducing and harassing the senate’s leadership. Mr Ali drew the senate’s ire by defying the order to appear before them in customs uniform. This was a totally needless controversy that had little or nothing to do with the law or constitution. But it has become a tortuous struggle for dominance. On his own, Mr Lawal is embroiled in a more straightforward case of alleged abuse of office in which a company connected with him reportedly applied for and won a controversial contract meant to palliate the sufferings of internally displaced persons in Boko Haram’s blighted Northeast.

The three men, together with the disputatious camps they belong to in the fractious Buhari presidency, are bonded by their sworn determination to make the senate either amenable to their wishes and the executive’s or at least unhorse Dr Saraki, their chief tormentor. Both the customs and the EFCC have thus begun a cat and mouse game with the senate. Dr Saraki’s aides, the EFCC threateningly announced, would be hauled in for interrogation over the N19bn illegally deducted from the states’ N522bn Paris Club loan refund, particularly the N3.5bn allegedly traced to the senate president and his aides. In addition to Mr Ali defying the senate over the uniform brouhaha, the Customs have also intensified their propaganda war against the upper legislative chamber by substantiating their allegations of customs duties evasion by the senate. Mr Lawal has been fairly reticent in recent times, but he had twice bad-temperedly defied the senate, sometimes using inflammatory words and declining their invitations to defend his actions.

In the midst of the long-running battle between the executive and the senate, a battle that has led to paralysis over the confirmation of 27 Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs), the Federal Executive Council (FEC) has wisely constituted a committee to mediate a truce or, more appropriately, seek ways to placate the obviously angry senate. The mediation group is headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. Government spokesman, Information and Culture minister, Lai Mohammed, acknowledged that democracy was bound to manifest the kind of struggles the country was witnessing between the executive and the legislature. It is part of the learning curve to find a balance between the powers and responsibilities of all the arms of government, he says. But after waiting until positions ossified so dangerously, it is not clear how the mediation group hopes to engender peace, especially after some government functionaries have joined the fray and spoken exasperatingly of the senate’s leadership style and role in the misunderstanding.

Hopefully, a peace deal can be brokered. Last year, going by the executive’s desire to win every argument against the senate and the judiciary, and given the injurious manner the sentimental discourse was framed, many observers began to fear that the struggle had become a zero-sum game where one of the parties simply had to lose for the other to win. In fact, at a point, the country came dangerously close to being worked up to overthrow what Nigerians concluded was a decadent and retrogressive National Assembly. There was no attempt to separate the National Assembly’s controversial and unpopular principal officers from the legislature as an institution.

Worse, and more depressingly, there was no attempt to anticipate how the chain reaction would end once the instigated public marched on the National Assembly. Not only was the executive wholly incapable of framing their arguments and position in the inspiring and lofty terms of the finest principles of democracy, the public also carelessly glossed over the unhidden fact that the presidency was no longer in the hands of the man elected to preside over the affairs of the country. The new jingoistic and usurpatory cabal, part ethnically bigoted and part religiously extremist, was more obsessed with the destructive materialism of power than its utilitarian relevance for democracy, good governance, and unity and stability. Years of experience with instability since 1966, when disaffection with one government did not necessarily lead to a better replacement, had apparently not taught the public the virtue of patience and moderation.

The Federal Executive Council is right to seek an understanding and settlement with the senate. This is not an indication of weakness, desperation or subservience. It is a manifestation of strength and wisdom, the kinds that have eluded a large section of the public. In a matter of years, the current principal officers of the National Assembly will vacate their seats, and possibly the legislature entirely. But that institution will remain. It is in the interest of democracy and the freedoms the constitution has so elegantly vouchsafed and guaranteed that the legislature must be guarded and helped to retain its relevance and influence, despite the obvious failings of many of its leaders. Members of the cabinet and heads of government agencies and civil society activists who have spoken unguardedly and emotively about the legislature, and are campaigning for its abrogation or occupation, are confused.

The senate’s principal officers, particularly Dr Saraki, has acted sensibly but purely accidentally in defending the legislature’s powers and influence. Why in the same vein he is unable to grasp the fundamental fact that he fouls the dignity of that hallowed chamber by his unconscionable and unethical private and public moral codes, not to say unending court battles, is hard to explain. Can he make amends? It is doubtful. For as the Nigerian society and democracy are currently structured along obsessively materialistic lines, it is difficult for exemplar politicians, the kind Nigerians crave, to win public office. The country must therefore look beyond Dr Saraki and his coterie of tragicomedian supporters. The legislature must be defended in order for it to serve as a bulwark against the increasing predilection of the Buhari presidency for dictatorship. After the legislature has been secured, then Nigerians must take up the onerous task of filling its hallowed seats with qualified and ethical lawmakers. Enough of the sentimental, reactive and uninformed approach.

The rapprochement begun by FEC must be encouraged, and the near unschooled defiance of Messrs Magu, Ali and Lawal must not be allowed to take root if Nigerian democracy is not to become malformed and endangered. Indeed, all this trouble could have been averted if the presidency had been both cohesive and visionary, not to say informed, enough to anticipate the dangers and consequences of its increasingly dysfunctional leadership style. However, all is not lost. If the public can summon the patience and reflection required to help rebuild Nigerian democracy, the current abhorrent struggle for supremacy between the senate and a few members of the executive arm could yet become a part of the learning curve that is an integral part of the African experiment with democracy.

April 1, 2017
El-Rufai’s scathing memo

EXCEPT Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State dispels the doubts of Nigerians, few will be certain his scathing memo to President Muhammadu Buhari last September did not cause him to be frozen out of the president’s inner circle or was not a consequence of his being frozen out of that select, imperious and now much-reviled circle. Far worse, it seems, is the perfect dilemma many an analyst will face over the memo, whether to separate the pungent 30-page message from the person and idiosyncrasies of the inscrutable and petit messenger, or to examine the politically seismic message strictly and intellectually in terms of the messenger’s pugnacious worldview or what Germans call weltanschauung. In any case, Nigeria has been in a lather since the memo leaked online some two weeks ago, spewing its indescribably acidic content in everybody’s face.

Leave his motives out of it for a while. In its pure content, the memo is a brilliant encapsulation of the failings and dilemmas of the Buhari presidency. It describes in unsparing language how that failure was procured and why, and who the dramatis personae are. He mentions names, from the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) whose interpersonal relationships he considers disastrous, to the Chief of Staff (CoS) whose political ignorance, he says, combines lethally with his incompetence. Then, fearlessly, he takes on the president himself whom he warned had unwisely allowed himself to be entrapped by the same factors that stymied his leadership in 1984, adding that he had even become more dangerously insular and parochial this time around. Finally, he dismisses the ruling party as rudderless.

Governor el-Rufai said many other things in his very lengthy diagnosis, ending with an undoubtedly brilliant framework for remedial, if not revolutionary, action plan. The memo was written and delivered a little over four months before the president travelled for medical attention in London. Before then, the impatient and feisty Mallam el-Rufai who had thought he would be one of the main anchors of the Buhari presidency, especially governing from a contiguous and strategic state, Kaduna, had all but been frozen out of the corridors of power in Abuja. The freeze worsened after the famous and provocative memo, with the governor unable to relate with the president after the latter fell ill. With the leaking of the memo, which answers the puzzle as to the coldness between the irritable erstwhile mentor and nostalgic mentee, it seems certain that no one nor force will be able to defrost the icy relationship between the two northern politicians.

To the president’s inner circle who are probably livid at what Mallam el-Rufai has done, there is no question they will double down and do everything in their power to frustrate the Kaduna governor and hurt his political career. Whether they will succeed is a different thing altogether, for circumstances and realities, not to say the future, appear to favour the opportunistic stormy petrel. Indeed, the president’s inner circle faces war on another more delicate and dangerous front, the president’s wife. Before the president fell ill, Mrs Buhari had last year, in London, virtually described her husband as not being in control of his own government. A pernicious cabal, which knew nothing about the coalition and the ideas that propelled her husband into office, had taken over the reins of office, she wailed. From all indications, too, she was also frozen out of the president’s circle, and is believed to have even been frozen out much earlier before her outburst.

If anyone, including Mallam el-Rufai, expects the president’s kitchen cabinet to roll over and play dead, they are mistaken. On behalf of themselves and the president, they will fight anyone and everyone, and they will do so vengefully, remorselessly and fiercely. They will not shirk from combat, and they will not be discomfited by the sight of blood, real or figurative. They hold the levers of power, and having used it combatively in the past months and known how victims squirmed on the receiving end, they will loath its deployment against them. They are, however, caught in a quandary. Their instincts tell them that the president will become increasingly lethargic and may be disinclined to run in 2019, thereby validating Mallam el-Rufai’s intrepid but malevolent projections; but their optimism encourages them to imagine that the president might run, and his traducers put to shame. They will settle the puzzle by pursuing their goals avidly and pressing ahead as if nothing else matters.

On his own, and contrary to his wife’s dismay and Mallam el-Rufai’s advice, the president will do nothing to touch or damage the integrity of his inner circle. There may be a few cosmetic changes here and there, but the public should expect nothing really significant. If the Kaduna governor knew it, he was sensible enough not to voice the fact that at bottom the so-called cabal was able to hijack the Buhari presidency because the president in fact depends on them to navigate the arcanum that a modern government represents to him. The president has his values and virtues, but he may be depressed to recognise their inconsequentiality in the face of the complexities and convolution of modern politics and economics. Should he be compelled to cohabit with people alien to him, technocrats and intellectuals who have not learnt to massage his ego and flatter his inadequate comprehension of the digital age, his weaknesses will be so exposed that both now and in the future the temptation by this ‘untrustworthy’ menagerie to skewer him in future biographies would be almost irresistible. The president will therefore play safe, gingerly manage the dissonances in his government and inner circle, and attempt to project a calm and glacial face to the public and his critics.

But while Mallam el-Rufai has been proudly and exceptionally brilliant in his observations and recommendations, there are no matching indications he is altruistic in his motives. Do motives matter? Yes, for they show character and help to underline, reinforce and give purpose to intellect. Given his constant proclivity for falling out with his mentors, his relentless pursuit of private, even selfish, goals, his pervasive conceitedness and his undisguised promotion of ethnic exceptionalism, Mallam el-Rufai does not come across as a nation builder who understands the demanding nuances of societal cohesion as opposed to and distinct from the countervailing abstraction of materialism. Moreover, he is so high-spirited and so self-conscious that he imagines himself located squarely at the centre of everything, the inimitable fulcrum of societal growth and development, the moving force of national advancement. To position him anywhere else is to draw his ire and provoke his fulminations.

As far as they can manage, President Buhari and his kitchen cabinet will ignore Mallam el-Rufai. The governor will stay out in the cold, sometimes pissing in; but they will not mind his excesses, nor his obtruding manners. They seem to think that to have him close to them, and have his insufferable superior airs thrust under their noses, is even more intolerable. Indeed, the presidency will hope the tide will turn soon, and the economy will recover from recession, and amity will be re-established. This will be tall hope, but they will hope it will be the perfect riposte to a man so offensively restless, so insatiable, so unpredictable.

March 25, 2017
IBB, leadership and PDP’s military wing

IT obviously didn’t seem fair to former military president Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida that ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo should continue to hug all the limelight. But in recent years, Chief Obasanjo has managed by circumstances and deliberate orchestration to situate himself squarely at the centre of national affairs. General Babangida’s health may not permit, and the quality and relevance of his submissions may leave much to be desired, but having cavorted at that same national centre between 1985 and 1999, and even a little beyond that time, he seems pained that he is living as somnolently as one who is in suspended animation. He had once likened himself, perhaps unintentionally, to an evil genius, and to the football maestro, Maradona, and had thus dominated public affairs for years on end with his highfalutin political and social experiments. And with nostalgic fondness, he also remembers how the controversies he constantly and mischievously stirred helped nurture his myth. It is not unlikely that he craved an occasion when he could say something new and shocking, something to engage and agitate the public. That occasion soon presented itself last week, which he grabbed with both hands by speaking with gusto about a previously unknown Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) military wing.

Chief Obasanjo and Gen.Babangida have doubtless both played prominent, if not dominant, roles in Nigerian politics. Until they breathe their last, they will insist on doing so. Neither the irrelevance nor inappropriateness and controversiality of their views will attenuate that desire. Chief Obasanjo virtually took up the last two weeks. The next two weeks or possibly more will be taken up by Gen Babangida’s ‘PDP military wing’ talk. There will be editorials, and, as this column believes, there will be many column pieces on that shocking and disturbing revelation. Some of the rejoinders will be angry, and others snide and even outrightly abusive. But Gen Babangida will be satisfied that he is still capable of attracting newspaper front pages and dominating discussions, no matter how fleetingly. There are not many leaders out of office who are enamoured of anonymity or reclusiveness.

Gen Babangida chose the occasion of his interaction with members of the Strategy and Inter-Party Affairs of the PDP, led by its chairman, Professor Jerry Gana, to expatiate upon the founding principles and politics of the former ruling party. The committee, which reports to the Ahmed Makarfi faction of the PDP leadership, had visited him at his Hill Top residence in Minna last week to intimate him of their findings, and perhaps to solicit his support, even if indirectly, in the struggle for the soul and leadership of the PDP . “From foundation stage, I saw PDP as IRA (Irish Republican Army),” boasted the former military head of state in his response to the Prof Gana presentation. “We are the military wing of the PDP. We took a lot of interest, and when I say we, I mean my boss TY Danjuma, Obasanjo, myself, Gen. Aliyu Mohammed. I term us as IRA military wing of PDP. I thank God we came up with the old concept, and one of our counterparts then said that PDP would rule for 60 years.”

The general’s comparisons, as his leadership history shows, may be awful and disconcerting, and sometimes his words may not convey the right meanings he intends, apart from being often inexact. Otherwise, of all the comparisons in the world, why choose the militant IRA as a backroom model for the PDP when nothing in the founding of the party bore any semblance to Sinn Fein? PDP may have in its fold many retired generals, some of whom have maintained an implacable hold on Nigeria and continue to throttle its destiny, but both the founding and existential principles of the IRA and Sinn Fein bear no real resemblance to the PDP nor to its philosophically undistinguished military members. Sinn Fein was the left-wing nationalist face of the armed IRA that waged a military campaign for independence in Northern Ireland. What did the PDP military wing represent?

It is not clear whether the other generals Gen Babangida mentioned as constituting the membership of the military wing of the PDP see themselves as such, or whether they will repudiate that comparison. But likening themselves to IRA, despite Irish group’s dangerous denotations, is not even as egregious as gloating over the expected six-decade reign of the PDP. “One of our counterparts then said that the PDP would rule for 60 years,” Gen Babangida had said. It would be thrilling to know which of his counterparts made that shameful prophecy. Notwithstanding, the point is that the general and many PDP leaders obviously took that 60-year reign to heart. More importantly, Gen Babangida himself spoke fondly of that reign, and he would doubtless have revelled in it had it come to pass not minding its dangerous effects on the polity.

This is the crux of the matter. Even if the generals had seen themselves as the military wing of the PDP and had modelled themselves along the line of the IRA, and if ‘one counterpart’ or another had spoken giddily of the PDP ruling Nigeria for 60 years, the visit of Prof Gana’s panel should have afforded Gen Babangida the opportunity to declaim upon Nigeria’s leadership troubles. In particular, given his age and past roles, he would have contributed to the wealth of knowledge on Nigerian affairs had he spoken on the PDP’s founding principles, the suppositions held by many party leaders, military or civilian, and what lessons they have learnt and are recommending regarding the principles of democracy, federalism, rule of law and other salient leadership issues. Instead of these, the general preferred to boast somewhat.

Gen Babangida’s revelatory remarks are, however, not without some usefulness. He enables Nigerians to take a measure of their leaders, how sometimes parochial and insular they are, the poor vision that guides and drives them, and often what mean and base principles inform the choices they make. Surely it should have occurred to the general’s ‘counterpart’ that had PDP ruled for 60 years — a silly and arbitrary figure no doubt — democracy would have found it difficult to survive, let alone flourish. Unlike the Sinn Fein and the IRA, the military wing of the PDP obviously inspired and directed everything about Nigeria’s so-called biggest party. That inspiration was, however, short-sighted, abysmal and demeaning.

The PDP’s military wing is probably still strong and influential. But since they are neither principled as Nigerians would like nor ideological as they seem to think, they will continue to exert a very unhealthy influence on national politics. They virtually perverted the early years of Nigerian democracy during which they laid a militarised and illiberal foundation for civil rule. Should they regain power without the drastic and fundamental changes required to bring about the change Nigeria needs and yearns for, the country will groan unbearably. After all, festooned with its own military faction, the APC has ruled Nigeria like a one-party state, after apparently succumbing to the same spirit of intolerance and excesses that undid the PDP.

March 18, 2017
Jinxed national conferences

FORMER president Goodluck Jonathan’s 2014 national conference was an afterthought that needed about five months work to reach a fair consensus on what shape and structure Nigeria needed. No group had its way hundred percent, and no group felt it could not survive with the compromises it agreed to. Though an afterthought, something much maligned when he finally conceded to it out of desperation in 2013, he was sensible enough to know that restructuring an ungainly and malformed Nigeria was inescapable. By the end of the deliberations, and given the scope of work done and the consensus arrived at, even opponents of the conference and those who thought the former president’s motives diminished or counteracted its value reluctantly agreed that it would be bad faith to dispense with the report.
But shortly after assuming office, and particularly in his first media chat, President Muhammadu Buhari told truly baffled Nigerians that he had not bothered to peruse the report of the Jonathan national conference. It was worthless he said, and he would not even bother to read a document he thought properly belonged to the archives. He has kept his word. It is not certain that he will ever call for the document, assuming a copy exists somewhere in the State House. As if this demonstration of short-sightedness was not enough, and despite the increasing complexity and untenability of Nigeria’s so-called federalist structure, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo last week added his voice to the anti-national conference hysteria. As far as he was concerned, said Chief Obasanjo who sometimes gives the impression that reflectiveness is a painful or demeaning exercise, the agitation for a national conference was a disdainful ploy to get a bigger share of the national cake. Yet, he organised one in 2005.
It is not clear just how many living Nigerian presidents/heads of state, especially elected leaders, harbour such atrocious thoughts about the anodyne effects of a national conference, let alone one already concluded with evidence of clinical recommendations to salve Nigeria’s structural wounds. Indeed, to hear Chief Obasanjo speak so contemptuously of the national conference is to be finally convinced why Nigeria’s problems appear so complicated and entrenched. Speaking to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) last week, Chief Obasanjo suggested that “We Nigerians need ourselves, and if anyone thinks he does not need another person, good luck to him.” Then, still warily eyeing those who agitate for a conference, he added the clincher: “What I see in all those groups trying to break away is that they want more of the national cake.” How on earth anyone would equate the agitation for a national conference, or the implementation of one already concluded, as a design to balkanise Nigeria beggars belief. But that precisely is what President Buhari and Chief Obasanjo have done.
Those agitating for a national conference should take appropriate and exhaustive caution from the narrow-minded views of these past leaders. They do not see the campaign to restructure Nigeria as a worthy and patriotic exercise. To them, there is little wrong with Nigeria that a president acting with patriotic zeal cannot fix. They fear that once they give in to the agitations, Nigeria could eventually be restructured in such an unrecognisable way that would delegitimise their presidencies. So, to retain relevance, their conceited private relevance, Nigeria must be kept in the same shape as when they presided over its affairs. If they are not guilty of this selfishness, then perhaps the real reason for opposing restructuring is simply because they are incapable of visualising any arrangement better than the unworkable one they had been used to. Either way, these former and serving leaders portray an unflattering view of their intellectual and leadership competence.
For someone who also initially had a deplorable view of national conference under any guise, Dr Jonathan has become its chief advocate today. Somehow, it seems, should the 2014 conference report be implemented, it would be his only and truly substantial and lasting legacy. While he was in office, he was too much caught up in the frenetic pace of enacting or implementing one policy measure or the other to pay attention to the bigger, grander picture. Out of office, and with the benefit of hindsight, or perhaps maturing a little more as a statesman, as Chief Obasanjo said of him, Dr Jonathan has ruefully contemplated the great things he left undone. Unfortunately, he came round to the idea of a national conference too late to be able to do anything with it. The late Sani Abacha, it must not be forgotten, also put together a national conference between 1994 and 1995, which he probably had no intention of implementing. Yet that conference also came to far-reaching decisions about restructuring Nigeria. Chief Obasanjo himself inspired and put together a National Political Reform Conference of about 398 delegates to do a lengthy and exhaustive constitutional rework which he attempted to hijack for a less than salutary objective. Given his present views, it is apparent he had no deep convictions about the conference, which explains why he played ducks and drakes with the feelings of Nigerians on the subject.
So, no past or present leader has convincingly spoken up in favour of a national conference. They are unlikely to, now or in the near future. In fact, there is no proof that all the geopolitical zones that participated in the 2014 conference are fully persuaded about its merits. It will therefore take more agitations or bigger conflicts of seismic proportion to persuade everyone of the need to embark on thorough restructuring of the malformed Nigerian federation. The present palliatives simply add to the jinx.

March 5, 2017
Obasanjo on Nigeria’s leadership crisis

IN the space of one week, and perhaps to indicate the weight he attaches to the subject, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo twice pontificated on the debilitating effects of leadership failings in Nigeria, but without the personal introspection and reflection that should ennoble the discourse. He first spoke on Sunday at a thanksgiving service organised by the Ogun State chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to commemorate his 80th birthday, and a second time at a seminar he chaired on the 38th edition of the Kaduna International Trade Fair. On both occasions he talked about popular misconceptions that corrode and limit Nigeria’s leadership, indicating what he thought should be the answer to the often daunting problem.

At the CAN birthday service to honour him, Chief Obasanjo joined issues with those who dismiss Nigeria as a terminal case of unremitting leadership failure. According to him: “I will be the first to admit that we have not been where we should have been, but note that we have also been far from where we could have been because it could have been worse. It is the height of ingratitude for people to say Nigeria has not achieved anything or much as a nation. The generation before mine fought for Nigeria’s independence. That is great. My own generation, which is the next, fought to sustain the unity of Nigeria…We Nigerians need ourselves and if anyone thinks he does not need another person, good luck to him. What I see in all those groups trying to break away is that they want more of the national cake.”

The former president interprets national unity, especially the effort to sustain it over the decades, as an indication of the country’s manifest destiny, and an answer to its multifarious problems. To this extent, he considers the organisation of national conferences as diversionary, and he shows contempt for the effort to remould and retool the country, a task he regards as a needless attempt to balkanise the country for selfish, materialistic reasons. Neither on this occasion, about 10 years after he left office as president, nor at any other time since he first assumed leadership, was he led by experience or a love for philosophical exercises to examine why the country’s problems have persisted. If a generation of Nigerian leaders fought for independence, and his own generation fought to keep the country united, why is it difficult to contemplate that another generation could struggle to rejig Nigeria away from the stultifying assumptions and rubrics that undergirded Britain’s colonial constructs?

But Chief Obasanjo’s opinions and assumptions were to acquire a more worrisome dimension at the Kaduna Trade Fair seminar when he disparaged the contribution of prayer in resolving Nigeria’s national question. He was right that Nigerians had replaced patriotic, altruistic work with prayer, and had therefore transferred to God what should naturally be their own responsibility in rebuilding their country. But it is curious that he did not see how his own expositions indicted him much more severely than any of his predecessors or successors.

Hear him: “…Let us stop troubling God, because God has done all we need for us. We only need to play our own part… Our prayer should be that God should not take away all He has given to us as a nation…God in His mercy has given us all the needed resources, both human and natural, but we have not been able to put them together and manage them effectively. The countries that have developed and are performing better are not better than Nigeria in terms of resources. One problem that must be corrected is the problem of leadership. This is because our leaders lack focus, commitment, continuity and sometimes proper knowledge about economic and development issues, hence we have not been able to achieve meaningful result…Somebody came to me and said we need to pray to God and I said, for what? He said, ‘so that God can do for us, what we cannot do for ourselves.’ And I said, no, let us stop troubling God, because God has done all we need for us, we only need to play our own part…Another problem is that, we take one step forward and another step backward. Nigerian leaders must be tough and ready to bite the bullet, because Nigeria cannot have it easy. Until we get the right leadership, the problem will continue.”

Why Chief Obasanjo does not see himself squarely ensconced at the centre of Nigeria’s crisis is difficult to say. Indeed, he is at the very core of the failure of Nigeria to build the right foundation for Nigerian democracy in 1999. And when despite him the country appeared set to readjust itself and correct its failings, Chief Obasanjo again needlessly interposed himself between the problem and the solution and viciously distorted, if not completely aborted, the remedial efforts. His analysis did not reflect the abominable role he played in hijacking his party’s leadership and instituting a dictatorial culture. That dictatorial culture virtually destroyed the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), rendered it both powerless and ineffective, and ensured that the party’s principles of leadership recruitment could only produce either political monsters or grovelling and empty politicians. He said nothing of how he destroyed the party’s primaries culture, how he forced brilliant and principled aspirants to abandon their ambitions in 2006/07, and how he foisted his own preferred candidates on the party, especially knowing full well how incapacitated both the candidate and his running mate were, the former in health, and the latter in experience and resolve.

Chief Obasanjo assumed his own presidency was faultless or peerless. He assumes that his achievements, such as the debt cancellation he secured from the Paris Club of creditors, more than atoned for his failure to construct a solid foundation for Nigerian democracy. However, his achievements, which are in themselves controversial, do not atone for his failure in the greatest things that mattered — that of laying a great political culture for Nigeria, establishing absolute fidelity to the rule of law and constitutional rule, and creating a political environment where both the ruling party and the opposition can flourish. The effects of his failings have continued to reverberate since 2007 when he left office, not only in terms of the incompetence or inadequacy of successive elected leaders but also in terms of their appalling leadership culture. The problem has worsened, as he himself indirectly alluded to when he talked of taking one step forward and another step backward.

Indeed, much worse is his answer to the leadership crisis Nigeria faces. He says leaders must be “tough and ready to bite the bullet because Nigeria cannot have it easy”. Unfortunately, he still sees Nigeria’s problems in terms of discipline or its lack rather than that of lack of idea and a systematic and structured approach to problem solving. Very sadly too, he presumes that “Nigeria cannot have it easy”, when the problem is not a question of ease or difficulty, but one of failure to carry out the right diagnoses and enunciate the right prognoses. For instance, his presidency secured debt forgiveness, but Nigeria’s debt situation is back to nearly where it was before his presidency in 1999. Chief Obasanjo is emotive and, like many other Nigerian leaders, lionises force. Both vices are inimical to the growth of democracy and stability whose loss he now implausibly mourns.

As even the present national leadership shows, the most critical part of Nigeria’s problem is producing the right quality of leaders with enough intellectual endowment, strength of character and judgement to remould and inspire the country. Chief Obasanjo finds these virtues tedious. So, too, it seems, do his successors. The problems Nigeria faces are not new to the world nor quite as mystifying as Nigerian leaders make them. Until a brilliant leader and true democrat mounts the saddle of national leadership, the country will continue to grope and stumble in the dark. And whatever successes they achieve will only be incidental. Chief Obasanjo’s diagnosis is only partly relevant. No one should pay any attention to his remedies. They are not what they are cracked up to be, for, all things considered, he is as much a part of the problem as the incompetents he frequently points the finger at.

March 4, 2017