The Nation Newspaper

Category: Barometer

  • Obasanjo and his Carter eulogy

    Obasanjo and his Carter eulogy

    Former president Olusegun Obasanjo last Sunday justified why he organised a memorial service for the late United States president Jimmy Carter who died a centenarian. Speaking at the service held at the Chapel of Christ the Glorious King within his presidential library complex, Chief Obasanjo gushed over both the similarities he shared with Mr Carter and the great lesson he claimed he learnt from his life and presidency.  Referencing the similarities, Chief Obasanjo said of Mr Carter: “He was born into a farming family in Plains, Georgia, and I was born into a farming family in the rural village of Ibogun-Olaogun in Ogun. He grew up under parents who were disciplinarians, who instilled in him the essence of discipline, morality, hard work, integrity, kindness and humility, compassion for the poor and strong belief in God.” Then he added that Mr Carter “was a lover of humanity, a man of God” whom he would miss, “a great and true friend” he was certain he would meet again in Paradise.

    It is reassuring that Chief Obasanjo knows the qualifications for paradise, and if the similarities he claimed to share with Mr Carter are to be believed, Nigerians should also feel sanguine that in the two periods Chief Obasanjo presided over the affairs of Nigeria, he tried to imitate the former US president. Among the virtues he claimed he had imbibed from his parents are discipline, morality, hard work, integrity, kindness, humility, compassion, and strong belief in God. As a former military officer, he can very well speak about formal military discipline and hard work, two virtues that Nigerians undoubtedly saw in him, whether they liked him or not as their president. But morality? When did he begin to exude that virtue? In his old age, perhaps. Integrity? He will hope that his massive land acquisitions in some parts of the country and the vanity of his investments, particularly his presidential complex and university, validate his self-professed association with that virtue.

    Kindness and compassion? How could Chief Obasanjo speak so glibly of virtues he knows little about, virtues so alien to his mental constitution that it is a miracle he recognises, let alone confesses, them. His record as a military officer, not to say even more poignantly his record as a former head of state and elected president amply proved that nothing about him showed an atom of compassion or kindness. Not when he smashed his way through his party’s primaries, and certainly not when he whimsically enthroned and dethroned his party’s chairmen. In his hands, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) suffered untold abuse and hardship. Before his ascension, the party was solid, organised, focused and predictable. By the time of his exit from office eight years later, the party was unrecognisable, having transformed from a robust and futuristic party to an anaemic, stunted and phlegmatic organisation. It is bewildering that Chief Obasanjo, known to mouth imprecates with the profundity of a shortchanged vixen, could in the same breath mouth the virtues of kindness and compassion. He had no pretext to mention those noble virtues.

    And then wonder of all wonders, standing on the altar, he talked about his ‘strong belief in God’, almost cavalierly and mockingly. Chief Obasanjo put his audience in a dismal and unfamiliar position of judging him when they really have no business doing so. But who could resist punning a man so self-righteous as to sometimes think of himself superior to God, who openly and unabashedly once suggested that nothing he asked God was refused him, a morbid reference to the untruths he told about his third term ambition. No one in or outside the US thought Mr Carter did not possess strong and abiding faith in God. He demonstrated it copiously, not by speaking it, but by living it, even when he was president, and all the more since he left office. More, he taught it in Sunday school, drawing more crowds whenever he did than the main Sunday service of his local church. Chief Obasanjo has admittedly talked up a storm about his ‘faith’, but it is doubtful whether God was ever in his self-made earthquakes or fires.

    Read Also: Obasanjo lists similarities with Jimmy Carter

    Worse of all his panegyrics, Chief Obasanjo claimed to have learnt a great and unforgettable lesson from his departed ‘soulmate’, Mr Carter. Hear him: “One great lesson I learnt from (the late) President Carter was that in his leadership, he carried along an army of co-workers that shared the ideal and the burden of the work with him.  He led by example and in humility, and that made success to attend his way.” Forget the trite part of carrying along kindred spirit co-workers; everyone, including exploitative businessmen and women, knows the value of working with people who share or pretend to share visions with them. Politicians are not exempted from that truism. What is indeed humongous about his claim of learning from Mr Carter is his quaint extrapolation of the virtue of humility and leadership by example. But, pray, in what ways and since when has Chief Obasanjo shown any humility or led by example? Before he was elected president, when he badgered everyone with talk of his superiority and infallibility? Or in office as elected president when he pummeled everybody into submitting to his ‘indomitable’ will? Which example was he talking about, and which humility, when even in his twilight years he still talks profusely about himself, deifies his own name, nurses old grudges, keeping their vitriol potent and hot?

    No one can take anything away from Chief Obasanjo’s affection for Mr Carter, or his attempt to keep his memories fresh in his and everyone’s mind. He is thus entitled to his friendships and affections, and even more at liberty to demonstrate those affections as he deems fit. But he should not tell us tall and mawkish stories about learning anything from Mr Carter or from anyone else. Chief Obasanjo is incapable of learning anything new, and obviously even less capable of teaching anyone anything. He glories in being the first Nigerian head of state to receive a visiting US president, Mr Carter. Let him treasure that for the rest of his days. He can’t have more.

  • Still on Armed Forces Remembrance Day

    Still on Armed Forces Remembrance Day

    Last week’s Remembrance Day activities, particularly the interviews some television stations had with retired military personnel and widows of fallen heroes, should be an opportunity to reflect on the enormous sacrifices men in arms have made to the stability and defence of the country’s territorial integrity. It should also be an opportunity to examine whether the nation has done or is doing enough to appreciate serving, retired or fallen military personnel. The many insurgencies in some parts of the country make this examination more urgent. Daily, soldiers are either killed, maimed or psychologically impaired for life, implying lives truncated, families and family ties disrupted, and ambitions delayed or destroyed. Despite the sometimes difficult relationship between military and civilians, and the appalling records of particularly murderous military regimes, it is time to focus attention in the right direction of making military service worthwhile for soldiers.

    Read Also: Armed Forces Remembrance Day: Tinubu urges Nigerians to shun violence, promote unity

    Far beyond building barracks or adequately funding educational and health institutions run by the military, it may also be time, especially at a time of grinding economic upheavals, to establish and fund highly discounted markets and supermarkets for military personnel, where they could buy necessities for approximately half the price. Then the government must find the right formula that continues to cater for retired personnel as well as shield, within acceptable and reasonable limits, families of fallen heroes from economic vicissitudes. The government can of course not underwrite these changes alone, but they have a duty to lead the effort and campaign. Sometimes, little things matter. Soldiers at the war front need to know that sacrificing their lives, or ambitions in case of lifelong injuries, for a noble cause would not be in vain, and that their loved ones would not end up holding the short end of the stick. 

  • Edo councils and creative lawmaking

    Edo councils and creative lawmaking

    It is slanderous to credit Edo State local governments’ legislative arms as the originators of creative lawmaking that makes the law an ass. Other states and even the federal government had achieved that distinction years ago. In recent weeks, however, Edo LGs have managed to give some oomph to disingenuous political engineering. Barely three days after the House of Assembly, on December 17 and by an undisputed majority, suspended for two months the state’s 18 local government chairmen for insubordination and refusal to be accountable, the victims got an Edo High Court injunction on December 20 against both the governor, Monday Okpebholo, and the legislature to desist from tampering with the running of the councils and removing any chairman. Nonsense, said the legislative councils of the LGs weeks later, there are many ways to skin a cat; and they promptly began impeaching the chairmen, one after the other, parallel to the court injunction.

    Alarmed that the Edo State government appeared disinclined to obeying the court injunction, the chairmen coalesced their efforts and approached the Federal High Court in Abuja for relief from what they were certain was a budding All Progressives Congress (APC) tyranny. All the 18 chairmen, including Tom Obaseki, brother of the former governor, Godwin Obaseki, were elected in September 2023 on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) platform in a bitterly disputed election. Few states have so far been able to conduct free and fair local government elections. Despite being armed with Edo High Court and Federal High Court Abuja orders, the LG chairmen have still been unable to fend off the assault by the state’s legislature. Do they have an answer to the legislative councils’ actions? It is unlikely.

    The buffeted chairmen, some of whom have out of desperation defected to the APC, may appear to have the 1999 Constitution (Section 20) on their side, especially in line with the opinion of the Federal Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Lateef Fagbemi, on the matter, but it is unclear whether they have the Edo State Local Government Law of 2000 on their side, Section 20(1)(b) of which was deployed by the former governor in similar circumstances to upend the LGs. Mr Fagbemi insists no governor has the power to remove council chairmen or dissolve the councils entirely. But the House of Assembly and the governor insist by virtue of Sections 4 and 7 of the same constitution that the chairmen were not removed but suspended in line with the House of Assembly oversight functions on the LGs. Until the courts decide how far anyone can go in dealing with the LGs, a process that promises to be long and arduous, the legislative councils will continue to spring their ingenuity on everyone.

    Read Also: Police arrest 38-year-old man for spreading fake news in Edo

    Beyond who is right or wrong, including whether any state can actually conduct a free and fair election at the LG level, it is clear that the problem of the councils is much more fundamental than it is generally viewed. Last year’s Supreme Court judgement granting the councils financial – not administrative – autonomy may have rubbed the governors the wrong way, with many of them fearing that the federal government was deliberately and mischievously setting the cat among the pigeons, but everything points to the fact that Nigeria’s dysfunctional constitution and political structure may in fact be responsible for the abnormality. In the First Republic, the federating regions ran far better organised and elected local government administrations. That fairly workable and acceptable structure was dismantled by military intrusions into politics and governance. Since then, no formula has seemed to work at the local government level, with more patches creating worse tear.

    The problem is not Mr Okpebholo or even Mr Obaseki foisting 18 PDP LG chairmen on the state, or the alleged financial malfeasance of the chairmen, or the sometimes mysterious and facile decisions of the state courts, or the complicating judgement of the Supreme Court. The problem is the 1999 Constitution. It was unable to make up its mind how to seamlessly integrate the councils into the tiers of government, or defend them when the governors inevitably savage them. As the federation is currently structured, and the councils maladroitly integrated into the governance of states, it is unlikely that the anomalies perpetrated in the states against the councils will abate. Already, some states have found a way round the Supreme Court judgement on LG financial autonomy, and have conducted appallingly incompetent and self-serving LG polls to produce council puppets. They will do worse in the months and years ahead. The governors, it is obvious, have no patience with cohabiting with obstreperous or independently minded council chairmen. They can tolerate defiant councilors, but they will brook no opposition from any ambitious or ‘confident’ chairman.

    President Bola Tinubu tried to pacify the governors when they visited him at home in last December, insisting that the administration was more interested in impactful governance at the grassroots level than instigating LGs against them. They heard him, and nodded in apparent agreement. But it was clear that they remained unconvinced. They will return to their states and turn on the screw a notch tighter, leaving the federal government and the Supreme Court wondering what next to do to salvage the castrated LGs. The federal government, through its anti-graft agencies, has threatened to prosecute LG chairmen who cannot account for their spending, and will probably go on to make scapegoats of a few dissembling council bosses. The effort may, however, be unsustainable, legally and constitutionally. Instead, let the Tinubu administration take another look at the structure of the federation, the so-called restructuring plan, and determine just how far they can ginger what is today a clearly anachronistic political system into morphing its way into the future.

  • Waiting for disruptive Trump

    Waiting for disruptive Trump

    In a little over a week, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States of America, four years after serving as the 45th. He was disruptive in his first term, and bombastic, unpredictable, propagandising, and even apocalyptic in his threats. He will probably be more on his second term, if age has not slowed his body and superficial intellect down. In his first term, he talked down on the Western alliance, Nato, insulted China which he took a personal dislike to, and lauded aristocrats and autocrats, no matter how odious. Even before he is sworn in, he has talked up a storm over annexing Canada as the 51st US state, and taking over Greenland in order to guarantee their protection against unforeseen threats, presumably from Russia. Moreover, he does not seem to think much of the special relationship between the US and Britain.

    Read Also: Trump asks U.S. Supreme Court to halt sentencing in New York hush-money case

    The world remembers the special relationship between the US and UK, particularly as nurtured by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It is impossible to see any glimmer of that relationship between British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mr Trump. Both men contrast in style, elocution, politics and worldview. Mr Starmer is predictable almost to the point of dullness, and Mr Trump is precarious, uproarious, insensitive and grandiose. But it is not only Europe that is apprehensive, indeed, the rest of the world is on a knife-edge, as Iran, Gaza, Syria, Ukraine and Mexico, among others, can testify. How to manage Mr Trump’s brittle ego for the next four years will be both their preoccupation and nightmare. Hopefully they will survive him. In fact, if the US president discovers that four years of his disruptive and explosive politics cannot change the world in fundamental ways, it may dissuade him from overreaching himself.

  • Bail: needlessly lionising Farotimi

    Bail: needlessly lionising Farotimi

    Even without the Federal High Court in Ekiti admitting activist and politician Dele Farotimi to bail in the cybercrime bullying case brought against him by the Nigeria Police, it was inevitable that the Ekiti State Magistrate Court where he is standing trial for criminal defamation would also grant him bail. The police are prosecuting him pursuant to the complaint of legal icon and educationist Afe Babalola, 95. The Federal High Court set, among other terms, a bail sum of N50m, while the Magistrate Court set bail at N30m. Mr Farotimi is unlikely to face any difficulty in meeting the terms of the bails. Indeed, his former boss to whom he was presidential campaign spokesman, Peter Obi, has offered to help him meet the terms.

    Clearly, going by how he pumped his fist outside the Magistrate Court in the midst of his euphoric supporters, he is not going to beg anyone he has allegedly libeled in his penny dreadful book, Nigeria and its Criminal Justice System. He may have, in the estimation of many Nigerians, particularly the Obidients and anti-establishment activists and civil society organizations, written himself into a storm, but all his adult life as a lawyer, he has been shrill in lampooning anyone he did not take a fancy to, especially government. He had hankered after a cause célèbre, now he has found one. He will milk it to the bitterest dreg in his legal jousting with Chief Babalola. He was reported to have suggested that should he face a suit over his trenchant and perhaps tendentious views, the case would drag on until the complainant passes away.

    He has been admitted to bail, partly on the condition that he must not grant press interviews. Like the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, he would find it irresistible not speaking to the media, obliquely or undisguisedly. It is in his nature to posture, and as his December 20 bail hearing indicated, he cannot resist the glare of publicity. Leading Obidient intellectuals, their foot soldiers, and surprisingly an undistinguished faction of the Yoruba political and socio-cultural organisation, Afenifere, had all warned before Friday that should the Magistrate Court decline to grant Mr Farotimi bail, they would embark on street action. It was an empty threat: they knew the offence Mr Farotimi was charged with was bailable, and they knew after the Federal High Court had given him bail that the lower court could not conceivably refuse him. By threatening fire and brimstone, like the man in the eye of the storm himself, they were just posturing.

    Read Also: New trajectory of NNPCL under Kyari’s leadership

    The collective assault on the judiciary is saddening. How does a simple defamation case, whether criminal or civil, become a celebrated case in which the complainant is demonised and the accused is lionised? Before, during and after the presidential election, the judiciary had been pummeled and intimidated. Because it has its own flaws like all other institutions, it has been unable to respond adequately to the calumniation orchestrated by some ethnic irredentists, civil society organisations, and lately Obidients. The Farotimi case is a continuation of the intimidation of the judiciary and an indication that political reasons are at the base of the abuse of judges. Because the calumniators have got away with murder on social media, the intimidation is unlikely to stop. It will, therefore, be up to individual judges to stare down their traducers and insist on judging cases on their merit.

    By offering to help Mr Farotimi meet his bail terms, Mr Obi, a former presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), lends credence to the suspicion that a carefully wrought agenda to undermine the judiciary was being undertaken. Whether the suspicion is true or false, Mr Farotimi and his supporters, including Mr Obi, will continue to view every case judged against them as the product of judicial compromise. As the criminal defamation and cybercrime cases continue, every court appearance will be an opportunity for Mr Farotimi to engage in legal histrionics. Since the Obidients are a captive audience led by the nose, they will also use the appearance to scandalise the courts. This pull and push on a national scale will likely continue for some time, aided by social media and an undiscriminating traditional media. Few persons will be concerned that Mr Farotimi and his supporters are playing a political card, a tactic they will deploy to the hilt as the cases drag on and evidence become scarcer to find or more arduous to present.

    But it must concern the courts that this case should not be allowed to drag on for much longer than necessary. Not only is the complaint registered by Chief Babalola of such huge legal and societal consequence, to leave it unresolved for an extended period is to entrench the injury complained about as well as subordinate justice to politics. Hopefully the cases would be heard with despatch, and the cause of justice served. If Mr Farotimi is exculpated, so be it. But if Chief Babalola gets the upper hand, the courts must not be swayed by mob intimidation to hem and haw on suits that are likely to define public behavior and political relationships in the years ahead.

  • Yahaya Bello’s Christmas wish gratified

    Yahaya Bello’s Christmas wish gratified

    After a long-running legal saga punctuated by many dramatic twists and turns, ex-governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State finally walked home late last week on bail after he honoured the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) invitation to present himself for trial over allegations of embezzling more than N110bn public funds. He had been summoned six times by the courts before he turned himself in on November 26. The cat and mouse game was unprecedented. Eventually, last Thursday, he was admitted to bail, and on Friday, he met the terms and was released. Before being given bail, many thought he would spend the Christmas and New Year in prison. But by incredible legal pyrotechnics between the prosecution and defence, Mr Bello got his reprieve.

    Read Also: Nigeria’s quest for energy security gets muscular

    So, why all the fuss that lasted for months when he could easily have honoured the EFCC invitation and presented himself for trial, especially because he continues to insist he is innocent? Why all the months-long fuss? The fact is that Mr Bello is a man of great excesses. He exaggerates his importance and worth, possesses a small mind which he thinks is big, and lacks judgement, not to talk of character. His eight years as governor were marked by hubris, recklessness, callousness, and a total disregard for truth, ethics, and common sense. And he capped his years of misrule by engineering a governorship succession that satisfied narrow ethnic interests and broke every known electoral rule.

    Mr Bello’s manipulative game reached a crescendo in November, months after toying with the law enforcement agencies, particularly the anti-graft agency. No former governor had played such hideous hide-and-seek with the EFCC, and no administration had been so indulgingly patient.

  • Unending PDP BoT crisis

    Unending PDP BoT crisis

    There is little anyone can do to stanch the flow of blood in the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Frustrated supporters and elected officials may not defect to other parties with the same avidity with which functionaries of the less endowed Labour Party (LP) defect to the All Progressives Congress (APC), but they have proved more resolute in fighting themselves to the finish over trivia. Once they lost the 2015 presidential election, and all other presidential elections since then, they had turned on one another with fiendish glee, slashing, lacerating, and devouring anyone that offered himself for leadership.

    For now, they give the impression that former Rivers governor Nyesom Wike and his lackeys in the party, chiefly the acting national chairman, Umar Iliya Damagum, are the problem with the party. Once they are either got rid of or inoculated, party leaders think the demons that gnaw at their livers would be castrated. They are wrong. The more their stay outside power lasts, the more difficult it has been to rally themselves back from the brink. They will need money no one seems eager or able to provide to run the party, except someone steals from the public purse. And they need a mobiliser, who is not Mr Wike but in his mould, a role their former presidential candidate and ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar has been loth to play for strange reasons. In the past six months or so, they have seethed with one plot or another to unseat Ambassador Damagum and hobble Mr Wike. Each time, they had failed.

    Read Also: Ex-Reps Deputy Minority Leader, Toby Okechukwu, dumps PDP

    But they won’t rest until they achieve their regicidal objectives. It may leave them vulnerable and a little flummoxed, but they yearn to be independent of the two gentlemen they describe as their chief tormentors. It is not clear how soon they can achieve their goals, but if and when they reach that point of no return, they will quickly realise how empty their politics has been, and how awkwardly they had chased a chimera. They still have all of next year to reach that point, but they can’t wait to meet their fate.

  • Donu Kogbara on Peter Obi

    Donu Kogbara on Peter Obi

    Columnist Donu Kogbara last week delivered what is arguably one of the most memorable putdowns of the year on former Anambra governor and ex-Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi. Asked on Arise Television to react to the defection of some LP national lawmakers to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), she brushed the matter aside and instead launched into a tirade on Mr Obi. He was a ‘sparkling inspirational figure’, she said, ‘who created a movement almost overnight and galvansied the youths’, but is now ‘like a firework that became a damp squib’. Unable to conceal how bitterly disappointed she has been, she summed him up as ‘so pedestrian’.

    Had she stopped at those searing words, she would have conveyed her message copiously enough, leaving nothing else to say, not even to the imagination. But she thundered on nevertheless: “He has become so pedestrian, making anodyne statements on TV. He is a good guy, but we can’t see a leader the opposition needs.” This was already and fully so dismissively characterising that she needed to say no more. But never one for half measures, she launched an extra, parting salvo: “I’m not an Obidient anymore, to be honest with you, because he’s such a disappointment. I mean there’s no aggression…” Well, Ms Kogbara’s verbs were vigorous enough and needed no further lexical help, but just to make sure that the cadaver stands no chance of any kind of resurrection, now or on the last day, she has had to dragoon some high-powered adjectives and fierce gestures during the interview to qualify the political specimen she once idolised.

    Observe very well Ms Kogbara’s quaint use of words: damp squib; pedestrian; anodyne statements; no aggression; not a leader; and on and on – all memorable individual putdowns, each goose-stepping after the other. Yet, she was not scurrilous, and never intended to disparage. But her words drove home the utter disappointment she felt, having, among LP’s and Obi’s other teeming and unquestioning supporters, deified her champion and cast him as a David armed with nothing more than a sling to slay the detested and flatfooted APC Goliath. That she and many mesmerised LP supporters came to grief was more unbearable than the fitting electoral disaster their champion experienced. As she ruminated on and declaimed upon Mr Obi’s lack of competence and capacity, it was unclear how she still held on to the falsehood that he probably won the election. Indeed, how she thought someone who couldn’t master or manage the art of opposition could have been trusted to run a multi-ethnic, multireligious and politically complex society remains unfathomable.

    But perhaps the biggest contradiction in what became a phonetic extravaganza between the interviewer and interviewee is her disinterestedness in interrogating the abject incompetence of LP followers in accurately gauging the capacity or even charisma of Mr Obi, their candidate and champion. They imbued him with some electric qualities when in fact right from the beginning there was no spark in him. It is remarkable that Ms Kogbara was only recently disillusioned only when it became obvious her champion could not muster the sense and composure to offer quality opposition to the APC. She failed to admit it in the interview, but what ailed everybody in the starry-eyed politics of the LP and its former presidential candidate was the lack of capacity of Mr Obi’s followers. They were impressionable, guileless peasants sheepishly dragged to the guillotine. They thought him ‘a sparkling, inspirational figure’, when in reality it was the platform of ethnicity and religion he rode on that sparkled. Mr Obi had always been himself, both as governor and as a political peregrinator. He has an engaging dullness about his politics, aided by his feline voice and chasmic lack of ideological depth. If they imbued him with something inspirational and deep, the problem was not that he disappointed them or that he suddenly lost those virtues; the problem is that his supporters endowed him with qualities they nurtured in their dreams and ambitions.

    Read Also: Peter Obi backs Tinubu’s tax reforms, says ‘they are overdue’ 

    In any case, after the fateful 2023 presidential poll, and after it was no longer tenable for Mr Obi to take refuge in his electoral grief, it was time for him to settle into the humdrum of opposition politics. In January 2024, he appropriated the title of Nigeria’s chief opposition figure, but has since then failed woefully to don that onerous regalia, especially in the face of the APC’s many missteps, as Ms Kogbara ably identified. But to be a leading opposition figure, Mr Obi needed to ride on the steady platform of his party, the LP. Unfortunately for him, the party, a small electoral and political vehicle he gave the impression he did a favour to adopt for the race, was itself mired in turbulence and confusion. That turbulence was his first test to prove his mettle, assuming he had the capacity to see it. It took months for him to weigh in on the party’s many crises, and once he did, he showed a spectacular lack of capacity to even manage the smallest of crises. He ran with the hare and hunted with the hounds, and assailed by friends and foes alike, he constantly beat an ungainly and unmanly retreat.

    Ms Kogbara may not have summed up her disappointment expertly, nor honestly admitted her culpability in being led by the nose despite her education and experience. But she gave a general impression of Mr Obi’s inadequacies and yawning lack of depth and charisma. As far as she is concerned, and notwithstanding the abuse of the Obidients or the pointless visit by Mr Obi himself to her residence days after she excoriated him, she is unlikely to return to the LP fold, a party for which, like her champion, she had never shown any affinity. For her, Mr Obi and LP are history. Had she been a politician, she would have, given the scale of her disappointment, toyed with defecting to the ruling party. But she is just one of those punctilious neutrals drawn to the embrace of an unworthy politician. She will lick her wounds quietly if Mr Obi will let her grieve privately.

  • Aregbesola attempts political redefinition

    Aregbesola attempts political redefinition

    Former Osun State governor and Interior minister, Rauf Aregbesola, has managed to retain some public attention as he continues to project his unique brand of politics in which he is accountable only to himself. His Oranmiyan political group has become more active than before, and he remains its lodestar. A man of slight build but immensely opinionated and charismatic, he is unapologetic about his brand of politics and takes his falling out with his mentor, President Bola Tinubu, with great poise. Video clips of his recent political junkets around some Osun cities, including Ejigbo, Osogbo, and Iwo, among others, have suffused the social media. They show him being serenaded by feisty groups of dancing supporters almost eerily casting him in the mould of Western Nigeria’s political icon, the late Adegoke Adelabu, alias Penkelemesi. That parallel may not have crossed his mind, but in some of the videos, he had, like Penkelemesi, sung and danced with his supporters as they whip themselves into frenzy.

    Mr Aregbesola served two terms as Lagos State Works commissioner, two terms as Osun State governor, and two terms as Interior minister of the Federal Republic. Longevity in public office, he has proved over and over again by his political boisterousness and unguarded utterances, seldom makes politicians humble or wiser. Instead, it makes them messianic. The mobilisation videos psyche his supporters to prepare to retake lost grounds in Osun, probably ahead of the next governorship poll. Of course, Mr Aregbesola does not have presidential ambition. How could he? When his second term as governor was about to end, he had attempted to foist a successor on the state whom he obviously felt would both do the job of governorship well and be accountable to him. His effort was, however, frustrated. To accentuate this failure, he was made to support the party’s chosen successor, Gboyega Oyetola, a bitter pill he was disinclined to swallow.

    The former Osun governor does not believe he lacks political and ideational depth. But he actually does, whether he agrees or not. What he has in abundance, and which could make up for his deficiencies, is his immense talent for grassroots mobilisation, which dovetails into bucolic cockiness that seems to impress the Osun rabble. For a man who loves to hear himself speak as well as declaim against the ideological vacuousness of his opponents, especially being himself a tenuous ideologue of the Cuban socialist genre, he seems capable of offering brutal and effective leadership in a state and at a time no one else, not even the dancing mimic at the state’s Government House, has stepped up to give. He has not indicated whether his mobilisation is to reclaim the APC, especially considering that his group has always insisted it is the authentic APC, or to set up a new party, or to transmute into a bargaining chip in the next election as he indeed did in the last election. He will, it appears, take one step at a time. Armed with this wisdom, he and his men have become very prolific in composing partisan dithyrambs to lift up their spirits and conversely dampen the enthusiasm of the leaderless, if not also rudderless, APC in the state.

    Read Also: Tension in Anambra over disappearance of Anglican Archbishop

    But the likelihood of returning to, or regaining, or repossessing the APC is very slim for Oranmiyan. The chances are in fact next to zero. Mr Aregbesola may be an ideologue suffering from messianic complex, but he can be so naïve to believe he still has a role or a place in the APC, whether he thinks he is the authentic APC or not. He burnt his bridges when he joined a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) coalition to rob Mr Oyetola of second term; and when he displayed aggressive iconoclasm by denouncing then candidate Tinubu’s presidential ambition in terms that made many but his diehard supporters wince, the rebellion was complete. It requires boyish optimism to think that he would be allowed to seize a chapter of a party led by political leaders he had turned into archenemies. They won’t let him, and there is little he can do about it. He tried valiantly to reclaim Alimosho local government in Lagos State where he cut his political teeth and flowered, but he was checkmated. Reclaiming Osun APC will be a bridge too far, regardless of how courageous, iconoclastic, and charismatic he thinks he is. It will have nothing to do with whether anyone likes him or not; it is indeed a spectacular matter of how tragically he had let his impatience and characteristic triviality damage his brand.

    His political leaders always thought him a special breed and politician, partly because of his seeming and enthusiastic commitment to his mentors and the party, but he later demonstrated that his loyalties were at bottom flaky and conditional. Making the same mistake Nigeria made by denying MKO Abiola the presidency in 1993 at the cost of six agonising and bloody years, Mr Aregbesola could also not abide the reelection of Mr Oyetola for a few years in order to keep his enviable place in the party and sustain the indescribable awe in which his mentors and leaders held him. It was a small price to pay; but typical of his excesses and supercilious disregard for others, he launched heedlessly into the political abyss. How he does not see his present predicament as a correlate of his unfathomable inadequacies is hard to understand. One guess can be safely ventured: Mr Aregbesola is already locked in a vicious orbit of perfidy, and there is no amount of charismatic posturing or musical improvisations that will bring him out of it. Alas, he now wallows in infamy; but it is apparently a fate far better than the public ridicule he has continued to relive.

  • Netanyahu, Trump and Palestine

    Netanyahu, Trump and Palestine

    Last week, President-elect Donald Trump warned Hamas there would be “all hell to pay” if the nearly 100 hostages left in captivity in Gaza were not released before he is sworn in on January 20, 2025. In addition, even though he did not mention Hamas directly, he also threatened that “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America.” They may only just be realising it, but Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran contributed in a way to the election of Mr Trump. Americans who voted him thought he was far more capable of restoring peace in the Middle East, and Palestinian-Americans also suggested that he would stop the ‘genocide’ in Gaza much quicker than the ‘dithering’ President Joe Biden.

    Read Also: First Lady donates N50m endowment fund for best graduating FUTO female student

    While it is not clear each would get its wish in the way they expect it, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has by his arrogant and entitled approach to the war in Gaza and Lebanon continued to show his lack of grace and empathy as well as his entitled overview of Israel’s expectations in the regional crisis. Israel has undoubtedly undertaken a most accomplished tactical campaign against Hamas and Hezbollah, but the collateral damage has been enormous. Now, as the advent of a second Trump presidency nears, Iran and its proxies will be hard put to know how to respond. The incoming American president is more pro-Israel than Mr Biden, and resentful of Iran and its proxies. He is the answer to the Israeli prime minister’s prayers. Worse for Iran, the amoral Mr Trump is not timid of projecting American power in the region, making him a darling of the region’s conservative rulers and monarchies. It remains to be seen, however, whether the grossly miscalculating Hamas will heed Mr Trump’s warning. Iran and Hezbollah have meanwhile remained sensibly muted.