Category: UnderTow

UnderTow 

If the Yoruba thought self-determination would be a walk in the park, they had better think again. The controversy and struggle for Yoruba leadership surrounding the person of Professor Banji Akintoye in the Yoruba World Congress (YWC) has suddenly made the various national quests of the Yoruba very problematic. Though they are generally cautious about voicing their desire to be independent, sometimes waffling about regional autonomy within Nigeria, they have left the radical side of their independence story to fringe groups in the Southwest. They do not give the impression they would be averse to independence if it came to that, but they have been careful not to be too forward about their desire. But given the acerbic exchange between some of their leaders and groups in recent days over the control of some of their umbrella groups such as the YWC, they will be even more careful now about the subject of self-determination. The issue of unity of purpose, they have started to understand, is not as easy to practicalise as it is easy to theorise.

The YWC was conceived between late 2018 and early 2019 but launched in August 2019 as an umbrella group of the Yoruba people all over the world. Prof Akintoye became interim leader. However, some 60 or 70 Yoruba groups came together last year in Ibadan, Oyo State, to elect the eminent professor as Yoruba leader in the mould of the late Abraham Adesanya. Since then, disagreements as to the YWC’s modus operandi and ideology have led to unease within the group. These disagreements culminated in an open falling out between the leaders, prompting Prof Akintoye to claim he had dissolved the group’s executive committee, and in turn causing the leaders of the YWC to also claim they had removed the eminent historian. At the bottom of the disagreements was probably the issue of style, with Prof Akintoye favouring an eclectic but radical and informal leadership instead of the more global, formal and restrained style embraced by the other leaders of the umbrella group. It had been thought that the continuing weakening of the other more well-known Yoruba group, the Afenifere, would lead the YWC to fill the gap, not replace its precursor, and help the Southwest to forge ahead in one form or the other in its quest for autonomy or even self-determination. This quest is now turning into a chimera.

While the Sani Abacha military government gave the Yoruba reason to unite and fight, using the annulled 1993 presidential election won by MKO Abiola as a launchpad, and the Afenifere pan-Yoruba socio-cultural and political group helped to anchor and channel those campaigns through political participation in the early years of the Fourth Republic, it has since then been a difficult and exasperating task uniting them behind any common cause beyond the idealistic. But with the deterioration of the Nigerian ethos and the divisiveness promoted by the Buhari presidency, Yoruba self-determination suddenly became attractive once again. That attraction had simmered for years, perceptibly under the Goodluck Jonathan presidency, and rising to a crescendo under the Buhari presidency. Now, considering the difficulty in uniting the Southwest behind a common and existential goal, the attraction for self-determination will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

Even when Afenifere held sway in the Southwest, the campaign for regional autonomy or self-determination was at best ambivalent. Split among Nigeria’s competing political parties, all of them propagating different ideologies and worldviews, the Yoruba were unable to transcend their partisan differences for a common cause. As a political and cultural force, Afenifere has ebbed, largely reduced in number and influence, and struggling to find a rallying cause and influence. It will take celestial intervention to return them to the politics and primacy of the past, probably when their race or ideology comes under relentless attack. Even then, it is increasingly doubtful whether they can find persons and leaders within the socio-cultural and political group who possess the temperament, selflessness and experience to rally the region. Though there is no discernible and urgent cause yet, the region still feels betrayed and shackled by a debilitating and limiting national consensus, and a culture of mediocrity.

Prof Akintoye was thought to be that man who, despite the absence of an urgent regional cause, possessed the political morality and personal virtues to rally the region. But in the words of his fellow leaders in the YWC, the eminent professor, while possessing the integrity and requisite intellect needed by the Yoruba to advance their common interest, lacks the temperament and methodicalness to rally the region and promote its ennobling ideas and cause. As one of the YWC leaders put it, when Prof Akintoye was removed as protem leader of the group, “We removed him because we found out he will not lead us anywhere with his leadership style.” While the respected historian remains Yoruba leader in the eyes of the more than 60 groups who elected him into that position, it is unlikely that the entire region will rally behind him or the ideas he might advocate from time to time. Indeed, as one of the YWC leaders argued, the Yoruba are still the only group who insist on rallying behind the antiquated notion of a single leader for the region, rather than rallying behind a powerful existential cause.

For a region so destructively regicidal, the current face-off in the YWC, the sometimes irrational interventions of many fiery Yoruba self-determination groups, and the difficulties experienced by Prof Akintoye in rallying the region around a cause and at a consensual speed, the idea of a patrician leader in the mould of Obafemi Awolowo, Adekunle Ajasin and Abraham Adesanya, may be a relic of the past. They may now find it increasingly tempting to crystallise, espouse and promote a common cause and ideology for the region. That unity of purpose seems, however, far off, for a people who gloat about possessing the most advanced civilisation in Nigeria. More realistically, not only are they limited in drawing the right lessons from the frenzied manoeuvres of other ethnic groups in the country, particularly the heterogeneous North, they are also more likely to promote internecine wars among themselves and, worse, place obstacles in the path of their best chances for national leadership. Their internal dissension, as their history shows copiously, often blinds them to the existential threats that confront them. Despite the challenges confronting a changing world, and in particular a country morphing dangerously into deathly competition for land, resources and even supremacy, the fairly homogenous Southwest is inured to the ethnic apocalypse looming over their region and ideology.

A sense of disillusionment may be settling over the region, for the reality of a different and complex Nigeria may be vitiating their formulaic approach to leadership. As the struggle within the YWC is also showing, opinion moulders of the Southwest are unlikely to adapt as quickly as the threats facing their region require. They are paralysed by history and culture from responding to the more nimble challenges and sinister manoeuvres of the other regions, challenges exemplified by last month’s burning of Lagos which they colluded in or at best connived at. They derive more satisfaction in humiliating internal regional opposition, despite its general harmlessness, than confronting and neutralising external opposition, which in full flight can be relentless, brutal, unsparing and even genocidal. There is a sense in which the YWC understands this considerably nuanced threat, but they are unable to effectively communicate this problem Southwest-wide, while their private animosities stand in the way of the consensus building and placation needed to promote regional peace and stability as well as advance their common interests. And if they cannot even manage their differences at the micro level of YWC leadership, how can they hope to pursue self-determination in the absence of an irresistible and unbearable national provocation?

By Undertow

Justice Minister and Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, was determined not to appear before the Justice Ayo Salami judicial commission of inquiry probing the activities of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). He had authored a petition to the president against the former chairman of the EFCC, Ibrahim Magu, suggesting that many unseemly practices had taken place in the agency. Before the panel wrapped up its inquiry, it issued a subpoena  against Mr Malami at the prompting of Mr Magu’s lawyers in order to help determine where the case should lean. Mr Magu had been suspended on the strength of that strongly-worded petition. However, citing constitutional reasons, the AGF declined the invitation, and insisted that his role as a supervisory officer precluded him from testifying. In composing the petition against Mr Magu, he had merely responded to the petitions forwarded to his office,  he explained.  What he didn’t explain was why Mr Magu was suspended based on unproven petitions. Was he implying that all it takes for a public official’s goose to  be cooked is for a petition to be written against him?

Clearly, Mr Malami regarded his job done the moment he authored the petition to the president. Did his action help the president? It is hard to say. He was expected to have done his homework before advising the president to sanction the suspension of Mr Magu. The impression he gives is that no   homework was done. The judicial commission,  he hoped, would establish wrongdoing against the suspended chairman and the EFCC. But what if the suspended chairman was exculpated? Why, that would hardly matter.  They’ve got rid of him, and he is unlikely to be returned to office. The dilemma is, therefore, not for Mr Malami to concern himself with, nor for Mr Magu to pine over; it is for Justice Ayo Salami, a former president of the Court of Appeal, to groan over.

Under Mr Malami, the country’s laws have fared very badly, and have been clumsily administered. It is unlikely to improve, whether it concerns removal of judges or their appointment, or even when it comes to ensuring the sanctity of the law or the fair and unprejudiced prosecution of certain categories of offenders. In light of Mr Malami’s brazen subterfuge, the country should simply brace up for more galling legal and judicial chicaneries. They will not get better, and justice in its purest form will seldom be served.

Undertow

It will take time and quality attention for the Edo State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to get over the quakes and aftershocks that led to its defeat at the September 19 governorship election. They were well and truly trounced, with a margin that appears embarrassingly high, in astonishing excess of 80,000. That defeat began remotely with the internecine conflict between Governor Godwin Obaseki and the state’s former ruling APC members, traversed the primaries in which the governor got disqualified from one party and was nominated by the opposing party, and culminated in the aforesaid tectonic victory by the incumbent. The defeated APC will now be hard pressed to justify why they disqualified Mr Obaseki in the first instance.

But there is another sort of justification that few will bother with in the months ahead. After the APC defeat, the party’s former national chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, who was replaced by Adams Oshiomhole in July 2018, insisted that the defeat was merited, and that Mr Obaseki approximated the Edo people’s wishes more than the APC candidate in the poll, Osagie Ize-Iyamu, would have. There were many treasonable calls by party leaders feigning neutrality and admonishing the electorate to vote their conscience during the 2019 elections. Deployed perversely and with great effectiveness, not to say unfathomable ramification for the survival and future of the APC, such curious neutrality and calls appear certain to become an intrinsic part of the APC gene. President Buhari is credited with proposing that formula of voting according to conscience; and Mr Odigie-Oyegun with propagating it with devastating, and perhaps cruel efficiency.

The summary of the conscience weapon deployment is that the APC has lost Edo, lost its toehold in the South-South, and regardless of the speculation that Mr Obaseki might soon defect back to the APC, the national ruling party will be facing an uphill task in making an electoral dent on the solidified region in the 2023 elections. No part of the country’s six geopolitical zones is so uniformly besotted to one party as the South-South. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is now lockstep with the South-South, a romance that appears set to bloom in the months ahead and defy any seduction from the APC. It is unlikely that the national ruling party thought of this drawback in its  strategic considerations. Surely they could not be so ethical and so determined to serve Mr Oshiomhole his comeuppance that they abjure their own political future.

Whether in Edo or Ondo — and there is no proof that the APC will win the October 10 Ondo governorship poll, or if they win, by as healthy a margin as the PDP took Edo — every victory and defeat has special and general implications for 2023. The PDP seems more acutely aware of this conundrum than the APC. In calculating for Edo, PDP leaders voiced the regional influence they could muster if that last outpost fell into their hands. On the contrary, APC leaders, including President Muhammadu Buhari and Mr Odigie-Oyegun, have enthused over the PDP victory in Edo and made light of their defeat at the hands of an implacable enemy. While the president incredibly saw his party’s defeat as a corroboration of his fairness and commitment to democracy, Mr Odigie-Oyegun saw it as a vindication of his extraordinary conscience and repudiation of the pervasive unfairness that has riddled the APC. Both APC leaders’ actions of course mask deeper feelings and motives.

The president and those around him had convinced themselves that Mr Oshiomhole had become a liability. They seemed convinced that losing the state was the lesser evil compared with the raptures they would feel savouring the humiliating defeat Mr Oshiomhole, who indiscreetly personified the Ize-Iyamu campaign, would experience. They are wrong; but they won’t find this out until the rebuilding of the party begins in Edo in the months ahead, and when they begin to discover during their next elective convention that the fault lines in the party were neither caused by Mr Oshiomhole nor exemplified by his presence or absence. Mr Odigie-Oyegun will also soon discover that despite given Mr Obaseki open support in the last poll, his own status as an APC leader has been considerably diminished.

Worse, by openly identifying with Mr Obaseki and the opposition, a cynical compliment the APC rank and file would be eager to repay when the battle for the soul of the party is joined, Mr Odgie-Oyegun will find it tough retaining any influence whatsoever in the party going forward. On September 14, 2020, he had penned a diatribe against both his party and Mr Oshiomhole less than a week before the fateful poll, and had suggested that the party was patently unfair to the governor, an unfairness he argued should be punished. Even though he tried to disguise his animus by conflating it with political morality and a disingenuous quest for justice, few APC supporters had any illusions where he belonged. Without necessarily using the word godfather, perhaps in order not  to trigger suspicion about being in league with the opposition, Mr Odigie-Oyegun urged the state’s electorate to disrobe those who tried to arrogate to themselves the right to decide on their behalf. There was no room for what he termed primitive loyalty, an allusion to party loyalty.

Even if the former chairman had not voiced his preferences days before the poll, the outcome would still not have changed. The PDP had deployed its campaign mantra effectively, and in the face of a conniving presidency and national APC, there was simply no way the APC could avoid defeat. In the end, defeat came spectacularly for a galled party rank and file. Accused of campaigning for the PDP despite being an APC leader, Mr Odgie-Oyegun denied he sold his party out. No one believes him. But here is his logic: “I am a strong believer that when the rules of an association you belong to have been so flagrantly disregarded, put aside, not complied with then you have to go back to your conscience to say can I support what has happened, can I not support it? I cannot support injustice in terms of going out to work for injustice. Going out to say what I in my conscience consider wrong and I will now support working for it. I can’t do that and normal people should not do that. Your loyalty in life is to support what is right. That is the principle, every human being should believe in something. If you agree to kill a man for a sin he did not commit then something is wrong with you obviously.”

Mr Odgie-Oyegun’s speciousness is befuddling. He is at liberty to advocate any position he chooses and support any politician of his liking within or outside his party. But he cannot have his cake and eat it. With his September 14 press statement repudiating his party, he made very clear how he felt and whom he supported. He felt aggrieved, not just because he thought the party had been unfair to Mr Obaseki, but also because he nursed long-standing grudges against Mr Oshiomhole and everything the now humbled former APC chairman stood for. The September 19 poll was a chance to even the scores. And they were exhilaratingly evened. Mr Odigie-Oyegun also clearly campaigned for Mr Obaseki, and exulted thereafter, in such a fashion that Edo, the national APC and the PDP knew where his heart was and where he stood.

It is not clear whether the chafing Mr Ize-Iyamu  will litigate his loss, or whether his party in the state and at the national levels will back him. It is not even clear whether he has the money to prosecute what might become a huge and expensive lawsuit. Indeed, by spontaneously acknowledging the outcome of the poll and congratulating the winner, the president has seemed to disavow any court action, no matter how promising. The APC is still divided; there is, therefore, no indication that those who sold the party down the river would render any assistance overtly or covertly to reclaim what might be considered a stolen mandate. Much worse, Nigeria’s justice system is a serpentine labyrinth of juridic sleight of hand. It is more plausible that Mr Ize-Iyamu would come to grief in the courts than receive succour.

Mr Obaseki is triumphant, and Mr Odigie-Oyegun relieved and vindicated. But in the end, the governor can neither change his behaviour nor be persuaded to give what he doesn’t have. In rebuilding the party in the state on the other hand, time is on the side of the feisty Mr Oshiomhole who says he has learnt his lessons, and with Mr Ize-Iyamu who has age on his side. It is, however, harder to see how time could help Mr Odgie-Oyegun paint the decapitation of his party in the election, which he connived at, as a life-saving favour.

Undertow

Last Tuesday, by a resolution, the senate once again, virtually passed a vote of no confidence in Nigeria’s security chiefs. In late January, they had passed a similar resolution when killings and banditry threatened to overwhelm the country. Now, just as then, presidential spokesmen have poured scorn on the legislative advisory motion to arrest the drift. The service chiefs, the spokesmen declared, still enjoyed the confidence of the president whose prerogative it is to ask them to stay in office or leave. By some estimates, between February and June, nearly four thousand people had been killed as a result of internal crisis and insurgency. Rather than abate, the problem has intensified, leading to the senate resolutions a few days ago and last January.

In January, the presiding officers of the National Assembly even met the president on the matter, following an animated debate in both chambers that led to the call on the service chiefs to resign or be sacked. This time around, the presiding officers have learnt their lesson, and are unlikely to seek audience with the president on the subject matter. It is enough for them that they have adopted a resolution asking the security chiefs to step aside. It seems also enough for them that the legislators have demonstrated to the electorate that they care about the security nightmare every Nigerian is facing. It must surprise the lawmakers and the public, however, that the presidency does not seem as agitated by the growing insecurity in the country, at least not enough to compel them to sit up or contemplate urgent remedies.

Nigerians recall in January how the senate president and speaker of the lower chamber talked tough before meeting the president. They had been egged on by the vociferous clamour of their colleagues and countrymen, many of whom were incensed by the seeming lethargy over insecurity, and had consequently voiced their apprehensions and dismay. The meeting was expected to be stormy and decisive. No one till today has volunteered the details of what the presiding officers discussed with the president, but by the time they came out of the meeting, the lips of the lawmakers had begun to quiver, and their initial resolve to coax the president to quit prevaricating over the delicate issue had weakened into conciliatory or even dilatory tones. Speaking to the press after meeting the president, they suggested placidly that the security agencies needed to be equipped and encouraged to do much more than they were doing.

Nearly six months after, and despite softening down considerably from their initial tough stand, the National Assembly, in this case through a senate resolution, observed with consternation the worsening insecurity in the country. It was, therefore, not hard for them, after a few hours of deliberation, to amend and pass the motion sponsored by Ali Ndume (Senate, APC Borno South). The puzzle agitating many lawmakers and citizens is how to reconciled the presidency’s misconstruction (or feigning ignorance) of the seriousness of the subject matter with how for five years the president has stuck adamantly to a formula that showed initial promise but has now petered out into almost nothingness. Everyone but the president is worried. Perhaps he knows something that others don’t know.

Just as they did in January after adopting the resolution to ask the service chiefs to step aside, senators have begun to waffle again. They agreed with presidential spokesman’s interpretation of the prerogative of the president to keep or sack the security chiefs, as if that needed any corroboration, and added that they had nothing against the chiefs except to ensure that insecurity was tackled adequately. After six months of quibbling over the same issue, they should finally be able to call a spade a spade. They want the service chiefs replaced, if the word sack is too injurious. Surely, in many evasive words they have been able to communicate that message to the president. If the president has done nothing about it, but prefers occasionally to growl at those who want to teach him his job, the lawmakers should not be fazed at all.

The greater tragedy is, however, not that the national lawmakers are showing the president a way out of his self-inflicted cul-de-sac, but that the president could not tie the growing insecurity to the declining efficiency of his security chiefs. Even if it is conceded that insurgents and bandits have become more sophisticated, imaginative and brilliant, security chiefs have an obligation to be also flexible and to possess the requisite professional skills to respond subliminally. If they are not able to muster that transcendental response to defeat the enemy, it becomes the responsibility of the president to draw the right conclusions and make the right and sensible call. There is, alas, little to suggest that the response to banditry and insurgency has been adequate and exemplary on the part of the security chiefs, and there is even less to indicate that the presidency has made the right assessment of where the problem lies, not to say muster the political will to proffer the right solution, including but not limited to sacking the security chiefs.

But it is also possible that the president is in fact absolutely convinced that the problem is neither the competence or assiduity of the security chiefs, nor that given more time the bandits and warmongers could not be overcome. If that is so, the president at least owes the groaning and increasingly restive public an explanation as to how he hopes to deploy and manage his security organs and material assets to defeat the criminals. That explanation, unfortunately, has not been tendered before the public who voted the government into office. But it must be tendered in order to quieten the agitations that are giving the government a bad name. Moreover, this state of what is often referred to as suspended animation should be ended, and the country, particularly the highways and countryside, be returned to normality. So far, all the public see is increasing insecurity that could upend the entire country. All they see is the evil spectre of bandits and insurgents creating a stalemate with the security forces, embarrassing them in battles, and opening the possibility of a worst-case scenario of balkanising and destroying the country.

There is even a more damaging prospect. Because the controversy over whether the service chiefs should be sacked or retained has dragged on for far too long than is reasonable, it has taken the shine off their sterling contributions to the country’s progress and stability. It is evident that when they were appointed the country was in dire straits, particularly with regards to the insurgency operations in the Northeast.  After swift counterattacks, territory after territory were eventually reclaimed from the insurgents, and a new lease of life was felt in that troubled region. But a few years after what has now become an illusion of victory, the insurgents bounced back under new tactics in which they no longer placed a premium on taking and retaining control over territories, even if they wished to. Worse, because insurgency has lasted for nearly a decade, the inability of the government to tame the problem and curb the proliferation of light weapons have combined to spawn and spur a new kind of insecurity manifesting as banditry cum kidnapping. Both new manifestations are very profitable to the criminals.

Unable to resign their commissions, and impotent to respond to the criticisms of Nigerians who decry their failings in the face of morphing security challenges, the service chiefs have been left dead in the water, vulnerable and diminished in public esteem. The presidency has no business leaving the situation unresolved for so long. It damages public estimation of the competence of the government, and also damages, almost irretrievably, the image of the service chiefs. Now, everybody is blaming them, even describing them as a spent force. These criticisms are uncharitable, for they do not do justice to the fighting and administrative skills of the service chiefs; but they are deserving. Banditry and insurgency will continue for the foreseeable future in the face of increasing lack of government resolve and initiative to combat the malaise. Correspondingly, the attacks on the image and competence of the service chiefs will also continue stridently and become even more reinforced.

Replacing the service chiefs have become both inevitable and desirable. It is time the president stopped dithering over the matter. The longer he fails to act, the worse it becomes for the image of both the government and the service chiefs. The presidency is accused of loyalty to the service chiefs above loyalty to the country, with clear insinuations of deferring to marabout sophistry in explaining national and regime security. On the other hand, the service chiefs are accused of abandoning their primary responsibilities to feather their own nests of securing the establishment of public universities in their constituencies, an extrabudgetary misadventure that in no way contributes to the efficiency or financial prudence of the military. The sooner the presidency takes responsibility to resolve the murky situation, the better for everyone. No one wants to hear the drivel about presidential prerogative, since no one is debating the constitutional truism of who has the right to appoint or sack service chiefs anyway. What everyone is waiting for is a decision to restore peace and normality in the country.

• * First published on July 25, 2020     

UnderTow

When the federal government conceived the policy of deradicalising, rehabilitating and reintegrating repentant Boko Haram militants, there was no indication how or by whom the idea came about, nor how to define and measure what repentance was or what it meant. Once the government had made up its mind on rehabilitating and releasing the militants, simply because they had surrendered and repented, the policy was firmed up and released to the public. Many people expressed reservations about the timeliness or relevance of the policy, but by an inscrutable logic, the government decided to do what it argued was the best in the circumstance. The policy had never been tested even on a small scale in these parts, but that was a small inconvenience. The policy was good to go, and money was voted to make it happen.

If the government did not get the rest of Nigeria to buy into the deradicalisation policy, perhaps the Northeast, the epicentre of the Boko Haram insurgency, had bought into it by a wide margin. Alas, it has turned out that the region is also deeply uncomfortable with the policy, though the region’s governors were wary of opposing a policy they were neither sure of its acceptability nor of its feasibility. Not to be wrong-footed, the region simply sighed and waited to see which way the cat jumps. To be fair to the region, which had borne the brunt of the insurgency in gross costs to their social and economic existence, they expressed their reservations, wondering why the federal government would shift its gaze away from the millions displaced by the revolt and instead concentrate on rehabilitating hundreds of militants whose bona fides no one could state or vouch for.

But perhaps their reservations were not fully or clearly expressed, for the government simply forged determinedly ahead, culminating in the rehabilitation and release of over 600 hundred militants last week, bringing the cumulative total released to about 800 since the programme began some four years ago. The militants had been deradicalised and trained by the military, which took charge of the programme, and they are being settled in various communities in the Northeast. They will be monitored, says the government, without indicating how robust their monitoring logistics would be. Countries which have robust parole systems have been wary of suggesting that their methods are foolproof. How the Nigerian authorities would ensure that the released Boko Haram militants would never cause fresh trouble remains to be seen.

Early in the week, however, and as an indication that the deradicalisation policy was not unanimously embraced in the country, let alone in the Northeast, especially when the insurgency is nowhere near ending, the senator representing Borno South, Ali Ndume, voiced the opinions of many who had remonstrated with the government over the policy and declared it both short-sighted and unfeasible. According to the senator, Borno indigenes have misgivings about the policy and are quite uneasy with it, and in any case would prefer the government to pay attention to the more germane social and economic issues and problems of internally displaced persons as well as keep the so-called repentant militants in prison until the war ended.

According to Sen Ndume, “If I ask those that released them to recall them tomorrow and let them come back to Gombe where they are, I don’t think they’ll have up to 50% of them. There’s nowhere in our constitution that allows for that even. When you commit a crime, it is court that will decide to free you. This programme is not what our people want…” More succinctly, speaking on a Channels Television programme, the outspoken senator argued: “Those that have been radicalised and released into the community, there is no monitoring device; and most of them that are back, I can give an example in Damboa. One of them only came back to kill his father and take away his cows and ran away with it. Some of them that returned to Damboa, after two, three days, they disappeared. I learnt reliably that even in the course of de-radicalisation, they said they are not willing to come to live with the infidels. This programme really needs to be looked into immediately. I am gathering information and position of my people and may even go legal…It is a very misplaced priority that is not supposed to happen now. This is a situation where we still have over one million internally displaced in various camps and host communities and they are still dealing with the trauma of the insurgency and the government is doing this Operation Safe Corridor bringing in those people that tortured, killed and maimed. The memories are still fresh in our mind. Almost all the people are against this programme. Why don’t you rehabilitate, resettle the people that are still coping with the trauma and give them start-up pack to start their lives in any part of the country? We have IDPs scattered all over the country. If the government is serious about a programme like this, it should start with the victims first, not the perpetrators.”

It is hard to fault Sen Ndume. He has had reasons to disagree with the prosecution of the war on terror, and has also criticised the mistreatment of victims and mismanagement of IDP camps. He has been critical of the government, and repeatedly expressed his frustrations with military tactics and sometimes high-handedness. He may not always be right, and has sometimes walked back his views on the insurgency, but he is well informed. In fact, at a time, he was even seen as a sympathiser of the insurgents and called to task. But overall, he has placed the interest of his constituency far above anything else, and has more often than not been right about his criticisms and suggestions. In this instance, however, his views are unimpeachable.

The deradicalisation, rehabilitation and reintegration (DRR) programme was badly mistimed, misjudged and misplaced. It is unconscionable to leave the humongous problem of IDPs and stranded and helpless victims still largely unresolved while extravagantly taking on the less urgent and dubious issue of taking care of those who levied war on the nation. There is no way to justify it. The government misplaced its priorities by not fully settling the problems of the victims of the war, many of whom are scattered in different parts of the North, before taking on the minor and less urgent problem of repentant insurgents. This misplacement of priority has opened up the government to allegations of cuddling Boko Haram, a view stridently expressed in other parts of the country and also now in the Northeast. And by not putting in place all necessary measures to police the programme in a manner that would reassure the public, the government has seemed to show indifference to public apprehensions.

It was wrong of the government to design a programme that was improperly conceived and debated. It was railroaded through the public policy mill, and pigheadedly executed without the customary restraints of parliamentary oversight. It not only exhibited regional bias, it also gave the unwholesome impression that there was something more than usual to be gained by rehabilitating the insurgents other than public interest. Now that the Northeast is aghast at the policy, the last plank of supposed support has been yanked from under it.

It is also a sign of the frailty of public protest and participation that there was no sufficient outcry against the policy, both to defeat it and compel the government to put relevant and adequate premium on resettling victims of the revolt. Having embarked on this short-sighted course fraught with a lot of implementation difficulties, the government will be hard put to walk back the reintegration policy. But it must heed the misgivings of the public and find foolproof means of instituting measures that would prevent abuse. Sen Ndume pointed out one or two examples of errant behaviour by rehabilitated insurgents. If true, this is a huge blow to an already controversial and impracticable policy. That errancy must never recur. To ensure that proper monitoring of the reintegrated militants is done, measures must be emplaced to make that errant behaviour a one-off.

There is, however, in fact no way to defend the policy as a whole, whether it is foolproof or not. So this is the time to suspend it. It is time the government concentrated on the better and more noble policy of rehabilitating victims of the insurgency, most of whom are still in IDP camps, while security agents who fight the militants are still groaning under the pressure of long tours of duty, inadequate military equipment, and what they allege are poor remunerations and allowances. Rehabilitating militants was a needless distraction that has engendered bad faith and suspicions. The government should cut its loss over a policy that is ambiguous, unethical and certainly not well received. It should face the war squarely and fight to win it. Few at the moment believe that the government and its military want to win the war, for the public cannot rationalise how a band of some three or four thousand insurgents can pin a whole military down, a military that suddenly decided to develop the futile idea of super camps instead of taking the war to the insurgents and clearing the country of their menace.

Undertow

Last Tuesday, by a resolution, the senate once again, virtually passed a vote of no confidence in Nigeria’s security chiefs. In late January, they had passed a similar resolution when killings and banditry threatened to overwhelm the country. Now, just as then, presidential spokesmen have poured scorn on the legislative advisory motion to arrest the drift.

The service chiefs, the spokesmen declared, still enjoyed the confidence of the president whose prerogative it is to ask them to stay in office or leave. By some estimates, between February and June, nearly four thousand people had been killed as a result of internal crisis and insurgency. Rather than abate, the problem has intensified, leading to the senate resolutions a few days ago and last January.

In January, the presiding officers of the National Assembly even met the president on the matter, following an animated debate in both chambers that led to the call on the service chiefs to resign or be sacked. This time around, the presiding officers have learnt their lesson, and are unlikely to seek audience with the president on the subject matter.

It is enough for them that they have adopted a resolution asking the security chiefs to step aside. It seems also enough for them that the legislators have demonstrated to the electorate that they care about the security nightmare every Nigerian is facing. It must surprise the lawmakers and the public, however, that the presidency does not seem as agitated by the growing insecurity in the country, at least not enough to compel them to sit up or contemplate urgent remedies.

Nigerians recall in January how the senate president and speaker of the lower chamber talked tough before meeting the president. They had been egged on by the vociferous clamour of their colleagues and countrymen, many of whom were incensed by the seeming lethargy over insecurity, and had consequently voiced their apprehensions and dismay.

The meeting was expected to be stormy and decisive. No one till today has volunteered the details of what the presiding officers discussed with the president, but by the time they came out of the meeting, the lips of the lawmakers had begun to quiver, and their initial resolve to coax the president to quit prevaricating over the delicate issue had weakened into conciliatory or even dilatory tones. Speaking to the press after meeting the president, they suggested placidly that the security agencies needed to be equipped and encouraged to do much more than they were doing.

Nearly six months after, and despite softening down considerably from their initial tough stand, the National Assembly, in this case through a senate resolution, observed with consternation the worsening insecurity in the country. It was, therefore, not hard for them, after a few hours of deliberation, to amend and pass the motion sponsored by Ali Ndume (Senate, APC Borno South). The puzzle agitating many lawmakers and citizens is how to reconciled the presidency’s misconstruction (or feigning ignorance) of the seriousness of the subject matter with how for five years the president has stuck adamantly to a formula that showed initial promise but has now petered out into almost nothingness. Everyone but the president is worried. Perhaps he knows something that others don’t know.

Just as they did in January after adopting the resolution to ask the service chiefs to step aside, senators have begun to waffle again. They agreed with presidential spokesman’s interpretation of the prerogative of the president to keep or sack the security chiefs, as if that needed any corroboration, and added that they had nothing against the chiefs except to ensure that insecurity was tackled adequately.

After six months of quibbling over the same issue, they should finally be able to call a spade a spade. They want the service chiefs replaced, if the word sack is too injurious. Surely, in many evasive words they have been able to communicate that message to the president. If the president has done nothing about it, but prefers occasionally to growl at those who want to teach him his job, the lawmakers should not be fazed at all.

The greater tragedy is, however, not that the national lawmakers are showing the president a way out of his self-inflicted cul-de-sac, but that the president could not tie the growing insecurity to the declining efficiency of his security chiefs. Even if it is conceded that insurgents and bandits have become more sophisticated, imaginative and brilliant, security chiefs have an obligation to be also flexible and to possess the requisite professional skills to respond subliminally.

If they are not able to muster that transcendental response to defeat the enemy, it becomes the responsibility of the president to draw the right conclusions and make the right and sensible call. There is, alas, little to suggest that the response to banditry and insurgency has been adequate and exemplary on the part of the security chiefs, and there is even less to indicate that the presidency has made the right assessment of where the problem lies, not to say muster the political will to proffer the right solution, including but not limited to sacking the security chiefs.

But it is also possible that the president is in fact absolutely convinced that the problem is neither the competence or assiduity of the security chiefs, nor that given more time the bandits and warmongers could not be overcome. If that is so, the president at least owes the groaning and increasingly restive public an explanation as to how he hopes to deploy and manage his security organs and material assets to defeat the criminals. That explanation, unfortunately, has not been tendered before the public who voted the government into office. But it must be tendered in order to quieten the agitations that are giving the government a bad name.

Moreover, this state of what is often referred to as suspended animation should be ended, and the country, particularly the highways and countryside, be returned to normality. So far, all the public see is increasing insecurity that could upend the entire country. All they see is the evil spectre of bandits and insurgents creating a stalemate with the security forces, embarrassing them in battles, and opening the possibility of a worst-case scenario of balkanising and destroying the country.

There is even a more damaging prospect. Because the controversy over whether the service chiefs should be sacked or retained has dragged on for far too long than is reasonable, it has taken the shine off their sterling contributions to the country’s progress and stability. It is evident that when they were appointed the country was in dire straits, particularly with regards to the insurgency operations in the Northeast.

After swift counterattacks, territory after territory were eventually reclaimed from the insurgents, and a new lease of life was felt in that troubled region. But a few years after what has now become an illusion of victory, the insurgents bounced back under new tactics in which they no longer placed a premium on taking and retaining control over territories, even if they wished to. Worse, because insurgency has lasted for nearly a decade, the inability of the government to tame the problem and curb the proliferation of light weapons have combined to spawn and spur a new kind of insecurity manifesting as banditry cum kidnapping. Both new manifestations are very profitable to the criminals.

Unable to resign their commissions, and impotent to respond to the criticisms of Nigerians who decry their failings in the face of morphing security challenges, the service chiefs have been left dead in the water, vulnerable and diminished in public esteem. The presidency has no business leaving the situation unresolved for so long. It damages public estimation of the competence of the government, and also damages, almost irretrievably, the image of the service chiefs.

Now, everybody is blaming them, even describing them as a spent force. These criticisms are uncharitable, for they do not do justice to the fighting and administrative skills of the service chiefs; but they are deserving. Banditry and insurgency will continue for the foreseeable future in the face of increasing lack of government resolve and initiative to combat the malaise. Correspondingly, the attacks on the image and competence of the service chiefs will also continue stridently and become even more reinforced.

Replacing the service chiefs have become both inevitable and desirable. It is time the president stopped dithering over the matter. The longer he fails to act, the worse it becomes for the image of both the government and the service chiefs. The presidency is accused of loyalty to the service chiefs above loyalty to the country, with clear insinuations of deferring to marabout sophistry in explaining national and regime security.

On the other hand, the service chiefs are accused of abandoning their primary responsibilities to feather their own nests of securing the establishment of public universities in their constituencies, an extrabudgetary misadventure that in no way contributes to the efficiency or financial prudence of the military.

The sooner the presidency takes responsibility to resolve the murky situation, the better for everyone. No one wants to hear the drivel about presidential prerogative, since no one is debating the constitutional truism of who has the right to appoint or sack service chiefs anyway. What everyone is waiting for is a decision to restore peace and normality in the country.

By UnderTow

The Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) is probably the most riveting, complex and controversial corruption story in Nigeria today, if not ever. It is also, bar the love scandal that gripped the North in the early 1970s (names withheld), the most romantic.

Whether the country likes it or not, it is also probably the most complete human affairs story Nigeria has seen in recent years. Corruption and mindless accumulation of wealth often for conspicuous consumption used to be the full and complete story of Nigerian public officials; now, courtesy of the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs Godswill Akpabio and the former Managing Director of the NDDC Joi Nunieh, Nigerians see their hidden soft part mirrored in the flamboyant and exhilarating lives of the two quarrelsome public officials. Indeed, the NDDC is both the archetype and embodiment of everything that is uniquely and deprecatingly Nigerian.

How did the three people mentioned in the title to this piece, the law enforcement agency, the Niger Delta Affairs ministry, and the Development Commission get themselves so thoroughly entangled in a miasma of shocking financial and romantic escapades to create the lethal brew and lewd stories that have titillated Nigeria for weeks? It began inauspiciously with the National Assembly’s innocuous attempt to investigate the NDDC, which, according to allegations, and in the space of three months, ‘recklessly’ spent a whopping N40bn, or over N81bn in about a year between 2019 and 2020. Senator George Sekibo sponsored the motion.

It was not clear which three months the senate targeted for the probe. Soon, however, with allegations of financial wrongdoing flying everywhere, the former NDDC boss, Mrs Nunieh, was sucked in. So, too, the Interim Management Committee (IMC), which soon landed smack in the eye of the storm, particularly for its tragicomic spending pattern exemplified by its expenditure of N1.5bn for COVID-19 relief for commission staff. More risibly, the commission allegedly spent N23.8bn on consultancy, and N3.14bn on the nine police commands in the region and 4,000 staff, including the famous N1.5bn COVID-19 relief and N475m for police face masks.

Put in much grosser perspective, the commission received about N281bn between 2016 and 2020 for the purpose of ameliorating the desperate problems of the region. But, among other things, it managed in three months to spend some N40bn of this allocation. Indeed, in the eyes of the public, and as one sordid revelation unfurled another, the NDDC gradually became an unrecognisable cesspit.

It was impossible for the presidency to feign disinterest. President Muhammadu Buhari has, therefore, finally waded into the fray and ordered through investigations, the initial assignment given to the IMC before it got sucked into the vortex of everything peculiarly horrifying about the NDDC. So the Senate, House of Representatives, theoretically the IMC itself, and now the presidential forensic mandate are all engaged in probing the NDDC. The region is to be pitied. They have the Niger Delta Affairs ministry and the NDDC, and yet can hardly boast of anything inspiring about the region’s infrastructure. Worse, in the hands of Mr Akpabio, even the ministry is also allegedly leeching on the NDDC.

As if the financial malfeasance was not bad enough, stories of sexual harassment and all kinds of fetish practices and dalliances have surfaced. Anxious to save her neck, Mrs Nunieh, who some in the NDDC described as intemperate and high-handed, insisted the alleged financial malfeasance did not take place on her watch. She laid the blame almost solely on the present NDDC interim management.

What is more, she told the press, she was victimised by Mr Akpabio whom she described as a veritable lothario, a lothario she extravagantly claimed to have slapped for exceeding official boundaries and sexually harassing her in his guest house where he constantly scheduled official meetings. The minister debunked her story, saying he never touched her, despite a group photograph in which he wrapped his right arm around her, nor harassed her, despite the unrequited slap. Then, too, there were stories of uncompleted National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme, and other cobwebs of allegations bordering on incompetence.

NDDC simply and irresistibly became the most riveting story of the day. But while matters were building to a crescendo, and Mrs Nunieh — yes, she of four husbands, according to the Niger Delta Affairs minister, waiting probably for Mr Akpabio as the fifth — was preparing to depart for Abuja to testify before the House of Representatives ad hoc committee, the police invaded her residence and were prepared to whisk her away.

Poor National Assembly, nobody fears them anymore, yes, not even the police, nor the NDDC management, which scoffed at them a few days ago by walking out of the ongoing hearing. The invasion, Mrs Nunieh claimed, occurred around 4.00am. She resisted the invasion, locked herself adamantly behind her security doors, and sent an S.O.S to Nyesom Wike the Rivers State governor, who for many distressed and sometimes proud and rebellious Riverians, has proved to be the knight in shining armour.

In the break of day, and with a posse of press hounds in tow, Mr Wike stormed the Bastille and ferried Mrs Nunieh to safety in the Government House. There she has felt free to pontificate about her traducers and intended captors. Mr Akpabio was corrupt, she alleged, and was walking free while she the blameless was besieged. She left the country to ponder the paradox. Yes, the country is bewildered that the NDDC has failed miserably to develop the region and has instead turned into a pork barrel for powerful private interests.

It has also heard and digested stories of how money was being ferried everywhere for silly and crooked projects, some duplicated as in the case of contracts for clearing seaweed, an ocean algae called water hyacinth. But much more, Nigerians, who in the past few months have been besotted to the dramatic Mr Wike, are mesmerised by tales of the governor’s derring-do. They see him as the closest reincarnation and personification of the Age of Chivalry, and Mrs Nunieh as the archetypal damsel in distress. No tale in recent years has been quite so evocative and romantic, and none fetches the heart and the public so completely.

Wrong-footed, the usually tongue-tied police have rushed out an explanation for their mysterious invasion of Mrs Nunieh’s house in the dead of the night and without a warrant of arrest. They felt obliged to respond because the governor, in ‘rescuing’ Mrs Nunieh, had impugned the integrity of the police and suggested that the invasion was carried out without the knowledge of the state police command. Said the police:  “The attention of the Rivers State Police Command has been drawn to an Online Publication, credited to Vanguardngr.com , where it was erroneously reported that ‘the MOPOL presence at the residence of Joi Nunieh was not the directive of the Command’…

1. That the Command is not oblivious of the fact that Social Media is a loose cannon, where all manner of things are thrown into…
2. That the Officers who were at the residence of the former Ag. MD Joi Nunieh were from the IGP Monitoring Team in Abuja and were here on Official assignment.
3. That before they proceeded to her residence, they observed due protocols and requisite standard operating procedures, including going through the processes of arriving themselves at the Headquarters with their Investigation Activities duly signed and approved by the Commissioner of Police, CP Joseph G Mukan psc (+)
4. That they went to her residence with Mobile Policemen, suggesting of course that they were there on official duty and not illegal duty as speculated.
5. That, the reference indicating that the Officers were there without the directive of the CP nor the IGP is preposterous and most unfortunate., hence should be discountenanced and disregarded.”

Both the police invasion and Mr Wike’s prompt response in thwarting the arrest point to the disturbing anomaly still undermining the Nigerian practice of federalism. This anomaly is compounded by the disturbing penchant of the police to lend themselves to unconstitutional abridgement, if not entirely abrogation, of the rights of citizens. It is significant that the police statement made no reference to why the invasion occurred in the dead of the night, why doors to Mrs Nunieh’s residence had to be destroyed, why they have not tendered the order to effect the arrest or a duly signed warrant, and what she was being arrested for. Surely the police cannot be a law unto themselves.

Mr Wike, the one this column once described as a lovable rascal for his abrasive manners, probably undermined good governance by obstructing justice, whether the police are right or wrong to besiege Mrs Nunieh. But how can a governor stand aside when a wrong is being committed in his state, a wrong inspired and executed by an agency that should rightly be controlled by the state but is unfortunately not? The paradox does not end there.

Given the sometimes immaturity of Mr Wike and a number of other governors, would a devolved police force not be an instrument of tyranny in the hands of autocratic governors? Indeed, given the Nigerian condition, most governors are generally regarded as dictatorial. But so too, damningly, is the federal government, thereby presenting the country a veritable Catch-22 situation. In this instance, however, it is hard to fault Mr Wike for standing up for the oppressed. Given all that is in the public domain regarding the NDDC affair and the probes still ongoing, it was unwise and pre-emptive to arbitrarily arrest Mrs Nunieh when she could have been invited to either the police command in Port Harcourt or police headquarters in Abuja. The night invasion was foolish and needless.

The NDDC affair has just started in earnest. It will not end soon. More sordid financial malfeasances will obviously still be uncovered. Perhaps a few arrests will still be made. Hopefully, however, the investigating authorities will learn to clean up their act and carry out their responsibilities, including arrests when necessary, professionally. Here, the federal government must set the tone.

It didn’t keep a clean nose when it whisked suspended EFCC acting chairman, Ibrahim Magu, before an investigative panel. It should not be surprised that other agencies copied its rule book. But the country reserves the right to be appalled by the lewd stories and corrupt cases coming out of the NDDC, and be benumbed by the unprofessional manner security agencies routinely trample the rights of citizens.

Undertow

 

In desperate manoeuvres that began last year before and after the 2019 polls, and two false starts involving improperly convened National Executive Committee (NEC) meetings, the All Progressives Congress (APC) finally got rid of their chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, on June 25.

The deposed chairman, embattled for much of his reign, has now had more than two weeks to reconcile himself to his new but somewhat humiliating status.

From calling the shots in the ruling party, a role he relished with aplomb, Mr Oshiomhole has found himself virtually idle, unlikely ever again to preside over the affairs of a party he has loved and tried his best to redefine and imbue with a new sense of mission and purpose.

Though he has publicly aligned himself with the summary decision of President Muhammadu Buhari to kick-start the reconstitution of the National Working Committee (NWC), the former chairman has said and withheld enough to let the party and the rest of the country know that he abhorred his overthrow and the manner by which it was procured.

He knew that his enemies were so powerful, and their backers in the presidency also so conniving, that it did not matter what he did or didn’t do to attract the punitive move against him.

It was enough that he had strong character and was willing to stand up to the many powerful interests in the party, especially the coterie of governors dedicated to his overthrow.

Being merely himself, when the job demanded a snivelling, ingratiating chairman, was all it took for the hunting pack to dismantle him and knock him insensate.

Of course Mr Oshiomhole was cognisant of the politics of presidential election 2023, and probably had some definite ideas of how things should progress.

He probably also knew a thing or two about how the plots against him was shaping up, and the leaders of the rebellion.

It is unlikely, however, that he guessed the relentless plot to unseat him would mature as quickly as it did, and his chairmanship unravel almost without resistance.

There were too many in the other corner, and two few in his corner, to matter what nimbleness of feet he had shown and how fanciful his punching grace and power were.

There is also no doubt that he knows all too well the first and second eleven, so to speak, of those who finally knocked the bottom off his chairmanship.

There is little he can do about them now, except perhaps rue his fall and the abominable methods by which his temporary political demise was midwifed.

Mr Oshiomhole will now have to look into the future. He is a more natural progressive, though not the archetype, than nearly all of those who conspired against him.

So he will stand pat in the party. There is no longer a need to mollify his enemies, and being a good puncher himself, he will not shirk a fight with them, nor pull his punches henceforth.

He has seen how vulnerable a party leader can be once his base at the ward level has been compromised, as his vengeful and compromised ward chairman confessed early this week; so he will return home to stitch up the loose ends.

He probably now has a better understanding of his party’s fidelity to both truth and party constitution; so he will have no illusion that both can and will constantly be denigrated, twisted and co-opted into openly selfish ends.

The former chairman’s education was completed when officials within the party who had no locus whatsoever seized upon a dishonest action by Mr Oshiomhole’s ward chairman to extract favourable judgements from the courts.

After suffering humiliation by being tied up in legal knots for weeks on end, he now understands perfectly the toxic and putrefying relationship that sometimes exists between some courts and powerful state and national interests.

For all his grandstanding and volubility, Mr Oshiomhole was in fact an innocent in the APC arena. He now knows he was and indeed cannot be as realpolitk as many powerful figures in his party, many of whom have sold their souls to the devil.

More, he now knows that the presidency midwifed by his party and installed in office since 2015 is in fact a pawn in the political and moral smorgasbord of the APC.

On June 25, the idealist in Mr Oshiomhole died with his deposition as chairman. While his reign lasted, he did a number of controversial good.

He infused a new sense of responsibility in the party, starting with the party organ itself, and did his best to curb the distinct feudalism, if not outright nihilism, of many of the party’s prominent leaders.

His predecessor paid lip service to ideology, and Mr Oshiomhole himself, starting out, was not clearly and definitively ideological.

But he nevertheless set about redefining the party in such pragmatic ways that no one should ever confuse it with the conservative and increasingly reactionary People Democratic Party (PDP).

That redefinition process has now been aborted, with the party helplessly prostrate in the temporary stranglehold of a few powerful but less moralistic and ideological party leaders, many of them governors and former governors.

If he had enough time, Mr Oshiomhole would have whittled down the number and influence of this predatory group.

Today, however, his enemies are in the majority. It will take time, if ever, to transform those who have tasted blood and loved it, into a minority, a minority devoid of influence and voice.

After June 25, Mr Oshiomhole seems to have been born into a new realism. He sensed the futility of fighting the presidency, though he knew clearly that the president erred in siding with the amoral group that raised rebellion and fused it into a judicial bugaboo to overthrow him.

He, therefore, sensibly threw in his lot with the new reality, as objectionable and repugnant as it was.

He backed his own overthrow, he croaked despondently, and would continue to be loyal to both the party and the president.

Moreover, he also groaned, he had learnt a thing or two about partisan politics. He had been damned with faint praise by many in his corner, particularly from his state, Edo, but unlike his predecessor, John Odigie-Oyegun, who refused to reconcile himself to new realities, Mr Oshiomhole seems eager to prove that he will do nothing to upset the apple cart, nor take issue with the president’s inexplicable embrace of one side in the fray, the wrong side in fact.

Whether the APC caretaker convention committee likes it or not, Mr Oshiomhole will play a significant role in the election of a new NWC.

He is so naturally irrepressible. His enemies, who have begun to foment more trouble in the party with an eye on 2023, will keep an eye out for him, determined to match him plot for plot, and swagger for swagger.

But the former chairman has many things going for him, not least among which is his pluckiness; and he will continue to wage battle in the hills as well as in the valleys, incommoded by nothing, not even the sanguinary vista of spilled blood and strewn corpses.

He is not afraid, and he is never tired. Importantly too, he has a mind of his own. Such natural warriors always go the distance, except hobbled by illness. For such a man, setbacks are nothing but stepping stones.

The immediate task before Mr Oshiomhole is winning the Edo poll for the APC. He had backed the wrong horse in 2016, Godwin Obaseki, a short-sighted politician who feigns charisma.

Now, he is placing his wager where he should have placed it a long time ago, on Osagie Ize-Iyamu, a more natural politician and former charismatic youth leader.

Mr Obaseki has antagonised virtually everyone he could not afford to make an enemy in Edo, and has caused raised eyebrows in polite circles that now see him as a dictator devoid of the inspiring instinct of an administrator.

A larger portion of the state resent his obtruding nature and high-handed politics. But the wily Mr Obaseki, never known for restraint or the ability to carefully measure a response, has adamantly framed the coming plebiscite as one of fighting godfathers and freeing the resources of the state for the people.

His narrative will resonate. He has also attacked the APC campaign coordinators and singled some of them out for excoriation in billboard campaigns.

Mr Oshiomhole and his team must resist the temptation to be incensed. They have a majority of the electorate behind them.

They must, therefore, calibrate and time their responses, while not reducing the amperage of their campaign. Mr Obaseki has said and done few things wisely.

Mr Oshiomhole and his team must expose the governor’s obtuseness and folly as carefully and forcefully as they can. Above all, they must find fitting answers to the godfather accusation levelled by the governor and his team.

There is nothing to suggest that even if Mr Oshiomhole’s party loses the poll, as some APC governors indeed want in order to prove a point, his political coffin would be nailed, but it helps considerably should he and his party win.

The former chairman must have known by now that he has enemies in both the PDP, which he and his party will be facing in a matter of months, and the APC, which has in five dizzying years spawned a nest of adders so vicious and masochistic as to desire shooting themselves in the foot.

Between himself and his enemies who bested him a few weeks ago in the party’s NEC, Mr Oshiomhole is the more likeable person and politician.

He is not a dyed-in-the-wool godfather as some allege, and he is acutely aware that Mr Ize-Iyamu, a far better politician than Mr Obaseki, will as governor be even harder to control.

Mr Oshiomhole will nevertheless survive not only in the short run, despite being out of the party’s leadership, but also in the long run.

He is said to be brusque and in possession of a sharp tongue, but he is a consummate party man, hard working, fairly ideological, unlikely ever to defect simply because of a loss, and less vindictive and vengeful.

He needs Edo governorship victory to guarantee bouncing back. But he will bounce back regardless, for he is at bottom a good-natured man, one with such joie de vivre that he knew instinctively how to balance antagonistic forces during his labour union days, and ruled Edo sensibly and productively for two terms leaving indelible marks.