Category: Barometer

Barometer

The fracas between the Oluwo of Iwoland, Oba AbdulRosheed Akanbi, and the Agbowu of Ogbaagbaa, Oba Dhirulahi Akinropo, will continue to electrify the Yoruba people for months to come.

The temperamental Oba Akanbi, who has acquired a reputation for settling minor scores fiercely and pugilistically, was alleged to be the aggressor when he manhandled Oba Akinropo in the presence of Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) Bashir Makama, over some long-standing land disputes involving many obas in Iwoland.

Oba Akanbi was the complainant in the land dispute, and the now infamous peace meeting to resolve the dispute took place in Osogbo, capital city of Osun State, in the presence of the police on February 14, 2020. Nothing, allegedly, could deter the Oluwo, not the presence of senior police officers, nor the presence of other obas.

A day after he allegedly manhandled Oba Akinropo, the Oluwo reportedly gloated that he used irresistible force to deal with the Agbowu when the latter attempted, as he said, to stick his staff in the Oluwo’s eyes. Hear him, as quoted by a newspaper: “It (deploying the staff to poke the eyes of the Oluwo) was heavily rejected with force which Agbowu could not withstand.” But when the outrage over the altercation began to rise, the Oluwo slightly rephrased his story, accused the media of bias and corruption, and gave a new account of what transpired at the ill-fated meeting, insisting that he did not touch Oba Akinropo nor knew anything about the cut on the victim’s face, a cut that was emblazoned on newspaper pages nationwide.

The Oluwo insists he is the victim, being the complainant trying to stop the other obas in Iwoland from oppressing their subjects and nefariously selling lands that did not belong to them. “I did not punch Agbowu of Ogbaagba, although there was altercation that almost resulted to exchange of blows, but that didn’t happen at all,” the Oluwo said. But Oba Akinropo and many of the obas who attended the meeting insist that the Oluwo was not just the aggressor, he also manhandled the Agbowu.

On Thursday, after many days of hue and cry, the Oluwo was finally suspended from the Osun State traditional council of chiefs for six months, not for fighting the Agbowu, as many expected, but for being rude to both the Alaafin of Oyo and the Ooni of Ife, which facts are somewhat unknown to the public.

According to the statement suspending him, Oba Akanbi will still be investigated over the altercation that took place between him and Oba Akinropo. It is not clear what the nature and scope of the suspension would be. He is suspended from the traditional council of chiefs, but does it also mean that he is suspended from the throne, a course of action only the local government is authorised by law to perform when the need arises?

The Oluwo had it coming. He luxuriates in controversy, becoming perhaps the most controversial oba in the Southwest, not just for his comic actions and statements, but for his cantankerousness and absolute lack of reverence for senior monarchs in the state.

Appointed as Oluwo in November 2015, it took him less than two years to alienate his main backers, among whom was Abiola Ogundokun, a senior chief in Iwoland. Chief Ogundokun once recounted Oba Akanbi’s quarrelsomeness, including a time when the oba wanted to beat him up in the presence of former governor, Rauf Aregbesola. The Oluwo is reputed for using foul language and is generally uncouth. Again, only this January, Governor Gboyega Oyetola of Osun State attempted to reconcile the pugnacious oba with his chiefs, many of whom revile him. But the oba cannot be placated.

Oba Akanbi is even more theatrical than pugnacious. In 2018, he adopted the title of emir, describing it as a metaphor for the disunity of Yoruba chieftaincy institution. What is metaphorical about that? Hear his rambling justification: “I will love to emulate everything that is good. I love a place where there is unity. There is no peace among the monarchies of the Yoruba as there is backbiting, backstabbing, and encroaching (?) among them. There is so much corruption in our cultural values and I have tried, I have been talking about it. I love my culture, I love my tradition, but if there are some bad things in there, we need to work on it and remove it. Talking about the emirship, do you know what happens in the north? Do you see emirs fighting each other? Because there is unity among them, they have respect for one another, they have love for one another. But in Yoruba land, what I met on the ground, since I was a youth, I have been hearing the Ooni fighting Alafin, this one fighting that one, and so on and so forth. I became the king, and the same thing is happening. It is in Yoruba land where you find an Oba lying against another Oba saying that an Oba is yahoo yahoo.”

There is no question that AIG Makama and other leading political actors, including Osun State governors, can be character witnesses on behalf of the contending obas. Whatever they have to say will definitely not be complimentary, if they are honest. Did Oba Akanbi manhandle Oba Akinropo? Nobody will believe he didn’t do it. Does he have a history of abusing opponents and engaging in street fighting? Nobody thinks he is too sophisticated to be above such atrocious behaviour.

It is, therefore, curious that he could still muster some support in Iwoland, with hundreds of his loyal subjects rallying last week in his favour and against Oba Akinropo. He has been suspended for six months by the Council of Traditional Rulers of Osun State, of which he is a deputy chairman. They should make the suspension indefinite. More, the state should find the laws and regulations to dethrone him and rid themselves of the ridicule and embarrassment Oba Akanbi’s reign has become for the state. He is not indispensable.

Barometer – By Adekunle Ade-Adeleye

Presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, has become adept at defending anything and any position concerning the presidency.

Responding to the calls to sack the service chiefs due to the intractability of the Boko Haram insurgency, Mallam Shehu argued thus: “Our Armed Forces are doing an enormously good job; they are not resting on their laurels but the challenges have mounted because of factors extraneous to the zone, and Nigerians should have an appreciation and be sympathetic and see that all of the things about the collapse of Libya are not a fairy tale. Europeans, for their competing interests in Libya, were dropping weapons into villages in Libya. A lot of these elements have found their way into ungoverned spaces in the Sahel. Could it be better with the sacking of the service chiefs? My sense is that the President as the commander-in-chief is not a novice in the first instance.”

Put plainly and in terms Mallam Shehu can best understand, he is not telling the truth.

The service chiefs are not doing “enormously good jobs”, and if Libya is tangentially involved in the problem in the Nigerian Northeast, that involvement is only a partial, and indeed small, part of the explanation for the bloody stalemate.

The plainer truth is that both the government and the service chiefs have sat on their laurels for a distressingly long time. They need a vigorous push in their butts. Lying is, however, not part of that push.

Barometer

Many Nigerians see the federal government as meddlesome. The government’s reaction to the Southwest’s formation of Western Nigeria Security Network (WNSN), codenamed Operation Amotekun, has been viewed in many quarters as disruptive and even outrightly subversive.

And so when the federal government began underscoring its resolve to inaugurate its community policing scheme through what it described as special constables, critics saw the plan as designed to defang Amotekun. Alas, everyone appeared to be mistaken.

Though the federal government has begun planning its screening modalities for the special constables, some 40,000-strong, few knew that it would not be job for the boys.

The constables would not be paid, said some police spokespersons. Hear one of them: “And please, people should be told this truth and sound it clear to them; it is not a remuneration-based job. It is voluntary.

It is just going to be like the special marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps. It is for those who are gainfully employed or self-employed.

There is no salary for anybody in the community policing scheme. People are misconstruing it to mean another job opportunity and I have received so many calls over this.

Read Also: Why Amotekun bill was not signed in Oyo

It is not a paid job. Again, it is a voluntary job. And there is nothing like recruitment of constables. Also those to be engaged must be between the age of 21 and below 50.”

Another police spokesperson also said: “It is community policing; no money is attached to it. No special qualifications are needed.

The volunteers do not need to be graduates or have school certificates. It is a form of community policing constabulary. No money is attached.

In fact, people to be recruited must be gainfully employed somewhere. It is a volunteer service. That is why we warned the public to be careful of fraudsters who may ask them to obtain forms to be part of it.

It is the community that will screen the volunteers to testify to their character.”

Well, Amotekun guards will be paid the national minimum wage. The federal authorities, who are themselves masters of illusion, want constables who will be like extra eyes for the security agencies, and they will neither be armed nor paid.

And who will underwrite their movements around afflicted communities? Who knows, maybe the age of chivalry has not ended after all.

By Barometer

Apart from some of its judgements that have become controversial, and are being lampooned in many corners of the country, the Supreme Court of Nigeria is also plagued with shortage of justices. The apex court is supposed to have a mandatory 21 justices. Instead, it now has 13. The implication is that jurists are overworked, and who knows, maybe also over-stressed, with a consequential effect on their health. At least they are complaining. Before Justice Amiru Sanusi retired last Monday, the Supreme Court was waiting to receive President Muhammadu Buhari’s approval of the four-man list of justices forwarded to him by the National Judicial Council (NJC). The list had been forwarded since last October. In 2016, it took nearly two months for the president to approve a two-man list of justices sent to him.

If the president finally gets round to the task assigned him by the constitution in respect of the justices, the four-man addition to the Supreme Court would bring the strength of the court to 17, four short of the mandatory number expected to get it functioning at full capacity. There are no explanations for why the president has not approved the list. There are only rumours, with many judicial analysts speculating that the presidency has something up its sleeves. Others suggest that the list itself had become controversial, as some judicial activists had sued the government over a breach of procedure in appointing justices to the apex court.

But staff strength is the least of the headaches afflicting the apex court today. The court is, more worrisomely, grappling with controversies buffeting some of its judgements, particularly regarding political and election matters. Nigeria is a highly litigious society. Election results, even when polling is unimpeachable, are often disputed. The result is that many cases swarm the courts, right up to the apex court. Losers tend to excoriate the courts, and winners tend to rhapsodise them. In the midst of such fiery critical storms, the courts, and more crucially the Supreme Court, have appeared to make itself vulnerable. The recent Imo governorship case, in which Emeka Ihedioha was removed in favour of Hope Uzodinma, is typical of how inexplicably the apex court sails into stormy critical weather. As this column noted some two weeks ago, the judgement, while not too difficult to understand, however, raised a few arithmetical conundrums that statisticians have been trying to grapple with since.

Accused of being largely responsible for the conundrums, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has defended itself and its reputation by delivering, unofficially, a depth bomb of literary masterpiece designed to explode beneath the logic and integrity of the Supreme Court. Whoever spoke to a section of the Nigerian media on the issue on behalf of INEC must have a very fertile and poetic mind. The report does not identify him, but it captures his deft but insidious reasoning in a fashion that depicts his sophistication. After delivering his masterpiece, he leaves the reporters and other readers and critics with the job of reading between the line in order to guess who was wrong between INEC and the apex court and, more importantly, to let the public know what they in INEC think of the apex court’s epochal judgement.

Hear the unidentified INEC man: “The result of the Imo election is on our website. It is in the public domain. We have not altered what we have on our site to reflect the judgment of the apex court because we insist that the results the APC candidate presented were strange to us. We never authenticated them…However, while we do not agree with the judgment, we have accepted it because we have no choice in the circumstance and court orders or judgment are meant to be obeyed by the Commission irrespective of whether we like it or not…Most importantly, I think the Police should have it (the results) because it was the police that tendered the results in court. They tendered the results which we disowned, so you can ask them for the results from all the polling units in Imo state. They should have them in their archives.”

Now, in three brutal paragraphs, the INEC official insisted that they thought the outcome of the case was hogwash. More importantly too, they also sneered at the results tendered by the police which swayed the judgement in favour of Mr Uzodinma, insisting that since policemen had metamorphosed into INEC’s archivists by dint of the apex court’s sleight of hand, the public should know where to direct their inquiry. As defiant and detached as the apex court might wish to posture at all times, it is unlikely that such numbing sarcasm had escaped them. They will take note of it, but they will be powerless to respond to or rebut it. If their judgements induce paralysis and fatalism in litigants, the public’s snide remarks must of necessity also baffle them or even make them apoplectic.

It is a pity the anonymous INEC official responsible for that masterful response will never disclose his identity. Considering how much of a gem the response was, regardless of whether INEC was right or wrong, it would have been exciting to attach that response to a face, the face of a pistol-whipping poet with an enormous capacity to deliver depth bombs without drawing blood.

By Barometer

Piqued by Governor Seyi Makinde’s dissolution of Oyo State local governments, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, has written to condemn the action, declaring it as unconstitutional. Mr Makinde has, however, taken umbrage.

His spokesman, who is also Special Adviser on Strategy and Political Affairs, Babatunde Oduyoye, insisted that Mr Malami’s intervention was sub judice because the case was still being litigated in the Court of Appeal.

The AGF has long been accused of doing the bidding of the All Progressives Congress (APC) more than watching over the laws of the federation. That he has waded into the Oyo case unfortunately opens him again to the allegation of partisanship.

Mr Makinde’s LG dissolution, being an act by a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governor, appears targeted at the APC which won the May 2018 local government election overwhelmingly.

The APC, which is now in the opposition in the state, had won all the 33 local governments of the state as well as the 35 local council development area (LCDA) and 610 wards in the state. It left nothing to the PDP.

Until former governor Abiola Ajimobi conducted the local government poll in 2018, that exercise had been in abeyance for about 11 years, almost certainly because of unending litigations.

In fact, Mr Ajimobi was in his seventh year in office before he could conduct the LG poll, an exercise that prompted the then opposition PDP to allege desperation and chicanery against him.

The LG dissolution case is in court. Did Mr Malami not know? If he knew and still went ahead to accuse Mr Makinde of acting unconstitutionally, would it also be unfair to accuse him of acting as an APC partisan? In any case, Mr Malami should be aware of the court cases surrounding the LG dissolution, and ought to have been more cautiously restrained in making his latest intervention, considering the legal knots he had become entangled in recent years, including his misspeak on Amotekun.

By Barometer

cf the parliament building in Abuja was misplaced. Speaking to a newspaper last week, acting spokesman of the Senate, Godiya Akwashiki, argued that both the budgetary estimate and the decision to renovate the parliament building were the exclusive preserve of the Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA).

He sidestepped the more critical question of the morality of spending such a huge sum when other more pressing infrastructural challenges demanded urgent attention. The suit was brought by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), BudgIT, Enough is Enough, and over 500 other Nigerians determined to halt what they termed as wrong prioritisation.

Filed in the closing week of last December, the suit simply wants the courts to compel the government and its agencies to rethink the expenditure and focus on the opportunity cost of spending such an amount on a facility that in all probability will not earn any revenue. Other pressing needs exist, the litigants argue.

Hear them: “The National Assembly complex should be a safe and conducive environment for those who work there. But spending ₦37 billion to renovate the place is not commensurate with the constitutional commitments to public services and goods; decreasing public revenues and increasing level of debts as well as the poor economic and social realities in the country… Spending N37 billion to renovate the National Assembly complex is self-serving, wrongful, illegal and unconstitutional expenditure of public funds, as it means less money for educating millions of out-of-school Nigerian children, providing access to clean water and healthcare to Nigerians including the elderly, or repairing the country’s roads and bridges.”

Neither the FCDA nor the federal government has said anything about the suit. Badgered by pressmen, however, parliamentary spokesmen have spoken about the project. They have not given the impression that they regret the project or feel any remorse about its opportunity cost; instead they have been extremely formal, inscrutable and legalistic about both the project and the budgetary outlay.

As Sen Akwashiki put it: “They (SERAP and others) are wasting their time. We don’t have anything to tell them in court. National Assembly doesn’t know anything about what they are talking about. We don’t know how they (the FCDA) arrive at their figure. The money is also not in our budget; so, why are they taking us to court when the building does not even belong to us…What’s the outcry for; that they (the FCDA) should not renovate the National Assembly or what? I have said this before that this issue has nothing to do with the National Assembly. It is all about the Federal Capital Development Authority. The building belongs to the FCDA, which built it. The FCDA management knows how much it needed to fix the complex which is in a dilapidated condition.”

The senator is probably right. The Senate and the NASS as a whole can hide behind plausible deniability. Even if they were involved in conceiving the project, they were careful not to make it obvious. But by failing to question that huge outlay, just as the government itself has been largely silent, they cannot escape the charge of guilt by association. Not only have they refused to address the huge project’s inescapable moral burden in the face of grinding poverty and crushing budget deficit, they have also shown themselves to be unfeeling. Their parliamentary building is unwieldily big and obscene, and it reflects poorly on the mindset of those who conceived and built it. Like an ogre, it will continue to gulp huge maintenance funds in the future, with perhaps no possibility of a way out.

No matter how serious the litigation by concerned public is, the case is unlikely to go anywhere. Legally and constitutionally speaking, the agencies involved in the project have not acted in breach of the law. Indeed, it appears that SERAP and its co-litigants merely hoped to raise public awareness enough to create a critical mass of pressure to force the government to reconsider its priorities.

To what extent that will happen before the case is over is unclear. Government in these parts have become desensitised to the sufferings of their countrymen. That has in turn coloured their perspectives, compelling them to see deprivation as an integral part of existence. When Sen Akwashiki was asked if the senate did not feel any pang of conscience about the project, it was to find out whether they still had any conscience at all. Perhaps they do. But they have not been able to persuade anyone that they do.

Now, Nigerians are waiting for a magical outcome in which either the government or the parliament would be so conscience-stricken that they would reconsider the project whose maintenance cost is almost equal to the construction cost. But having not had a history of conceiving moderate or low cost projects, and having been so long averse to moderation as a whole, it is hard to see where that kind of conscience that leads to transformative change would come from.