The Nation Newspaper

Category: Barometer

  • IBB speaks dreamily of restoration

    AFTER he visited former military head of state Ibrahim Babangida in Minna, PDP presidential aspirant Ahmed Makarfi, a former governor and senator, issued a statement recounting the support and admonition he received from his host. According to Senator Makarfi’s spokesman, Gen Babangida was quoted as saying the following to the aspirant: “We need a new narrative in this country. We can’t go on like we used to. We need an articulated vision of a new Nigeria. I am not surprised that you give such narrative of the country. You did well in the legislature and you handled well one the most civilised and sophisticated states in Nigeria. You have my blessing and I will look forward to hearing from you on some of these articulations I heard from you today. Honestly I feel so proud. I was almost losing hope in the country; as a military man I wouldn’t. But having heard from the distinguished senator, I have become more enlightened and emboldened to say we have hope in Nigeria.”

    Gen Babangida has not shown as much remorse as he should for creating the fertile ground for the existential crisis Nigeria has been experiencing since the annulment of the 1993 presidential election won by the late MKO Abiola. That crisis, without question, actually triggered a chain reaction that still reverberates till today and sadly distorts the country’s politics. Gen Babangida speaks of restoration; unfortunately there is nothing to indicate the meaning of the word does not altogether escape him. He can of course support Sen Makarfi and be unequivocal about it, but he misses the point by a chasm what patriotism and leadership entail.

  • Obasanjo, Atiku and vengefulness incorporated

    IN the midst of the defection conundrums inflaming the entire country into moral and political outrage, former president Olusegun Obasanjo found the sense of humour to inflict God at his old nemesis, former vice president Atiku Abubakar. Dr Obasanjo has a PhD in Theology, claims to have found God in prison, and has written a few sophomoric texts on divinity and man’s manifest destiny. So, when he brought God into his re-enacted, an indeed unending, quarrel with Alhaji Abubakar, few were surprised. It is his custom.

    A few weeks ago, in the heat of his wrangle with President Muhammadu Buhari, whom he regards as inflexible, Dr Obasanjo reportedly gave the tenuous impression he was willing to back anyone for the presidency in 2019, be he the former vice president, simply to thwart the president’s second term ambition and rub his nose in the dirt. It seemed logical. For, having described the president as lacking the capacity to lead Nigeria, and having dismissed him as incompetent and nepotistic, he has felt obligated to sustain the bitterness against the insouciant general, and perhaps too, to underscore his own self-righteousness. The putative support for Alhaji Abubakar astounded many, but few were willing to dismiss it as inconsistent with both his vengeful person and unorthodox politics.

    But after hearing from Dr Obasanjo in an interview he recently had with Premium Times, it became clear that on the matter of his support for Alhaji Abubakar’s 2019 presidential ambition, the former president spoke with tongue in cheek. Indeed, it is not unlikely that he was flabbergasted by the media twist given his so-called support for his former vice president. He never intended support, and as he swore most vigorously, certainly not for someone he was determined to nurture as an eternal enemy. Hear Dr Obasanjo: “How can I be on the same side with Atiku? To do what? If I support Atiku for anything, God will not forgive me. If I do not know, yes. But once I know, Atiku can never enjoy my support. I do not have personal grudges with anyone…If you do not do well for Nigeria, you do not do well for all of us. It is not a question of working with or not working with an individual, If you are working for the good of Nigeria, I am working with you. If you are not working for the good of Nigeria, it does not matter who you are, I am not working with you. Most of you do not understand the way I operate. And I thought your own paper will understand better. I know Atiku very well. And I have mentioned my position with Atiku. My position has not changed.”

    Then he concludes facetiously: “On a personal note, If my children are getting married, he has sent representatives. If his children are getting married, I have sent representatives. That is social. That is not political. But on political ground, my position has not changed. If I support Atiku for a political office other than the one I supported him in the past when I did not know him, maybe; but not now that I know him, God will not forgive me.”

    Alhaji Atiku may have sarcastically advised the former president to return to God for absolution, seeing how unforgiving he has become in the face of his Christian conscience, but it is not certain that a change of heart would be possible. Dr Obasanjo has attributed his malice to God’s wish; it is unlikely that in his theology, that same God could inveigle him into reaching some accommodation with the former vice president. There will be no such luck in moderating or extirpating his vengefulness. He will keep it to his dying day, and he seems quite pleased to sustain that position.

    Dr Obasanjo is entitled to support anyone of his choice, or to deny anyone he loathes support. Perhaps Alhaji Atiku reminds the ex-president of certain humiliations in the past, as Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka recently alluded when he spoke on the manners and foibles of the ageing but still fit former army general. If so, there will be no reconciliation, not here, not in the hereafter. If Alhaji Abubakar intends to pursue his ambition successfully, he will have to discount the influence and support of Dr Obasanjo, for the former president does not take prisoners, Christian or animist.

  • Akpabio’s uncommon defection

    AFTER some extraordinary dithering, former Akwa Ibom State governor and Senate Minority Leader Godswill Akpabio finally defected to the APC. He was received with considerable fanfare, and will yet attract magnificent accolades as he berths in the ruling party with uncommon aplomb. Ignore the reasons for the defection; indeed it really does not matter why the hundreds who have defected have done so. Ignore whether he has ulterior motives for crossing over, as his traducers allege. What matters is what he himself has said of the defection: that he was taking that fateful step because, among other reasons, he wished to link his state with the centre. Really? Quite as simple as that? Nothing grand and ennobling?

    His consolation must be that hardly anyone who has defected has done so for noble reasons. Sen Akpabio is thus in good company. His rhetoric when he was received in the presence of a huge crowd was captivating, punctuated with grand oratory and the lofty prefix of ‘uncommon’. The defecting senator must pray, like other defectors including Dr Saraki, that when he wakes up every morning and looks in the mirror, he can recognise himself, especially what he looked like yesterday.

  • Oshiomhole and APC’s curious dilemma

    THERE is no satisfying Nigerians. Having spent the last three years or more complaining about the lethargy and complaisance of the former All Progressives Congress (APC) chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, dispositions that evidently hurt the ruling party in many ways, there are indications that the same people are now squirming over the hyperactivity of the new party chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, former governor of Edo State. Nigerians can’t have their cake and eat it. Circumstances and politics appear to be compelling APC members to choose between their former do-nothing chairman and their new but increasingly choleric chairman. It is a choice that may gall them, but it is one they probably reconciled themselves to when they elected the boisterous former governor to help them arrest the drift in their party and to challenge the horrifying orthodoxies threatening to sunder the party.

    Since his election as chairman, a position he undoubtedly coveted with every fibre in his being, Mr Oshiomhole has talked nineteen to the dozen. Indeed, even before he was elected, before his predecessor’s tenure ended, the former Edo governor had spoken and acted as if he had been sworn in. It is in his nature to be impatient, and he is naturally unable to quieten down in the face of distressing and pressing political maladies. More, he is restless, hard working and subliminally rebellious. Added to these attributes is his eagerness to call his soul his own, something he takes pride in, but a thing that nonetheless does not bar him at critical junctures from subordinating his entire being and ideas to the dogmas and sometimes caprices of the country’s leader. APC members complained of Mr Odigie-Oyegun’s sepulchral silence in the face of daunting challenges to the party; now they and the party’s top leaders must contend with and manage the shrill and unabating zealousness of Mr Oshiomhole.

    Affirmed APC chairman on June 23 and sworn in hours later, Mr Oshiomhole has not ceased to hug the limelight, speaking, dramatising and pontificating on issues that range from politics to leadership, and economy to ideology. Often he has spoken quite well, imbued as he is with a natural flair for oratory and composure, and courage and zeal, and with an itch to speak on everything and to run everything. His party will struggle to rein him in, filter his statements, and restrain him from provoking everybody. He at first spoke admirably about the querulous and dissatisfied Benue State governor, Samuel Ortom; but when the latter eventually defected to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the APC chairman was unsparing and scathing, describing the governor as good riddance to bad rubbish. Well, finesse is not among the party chairman’s forte.

    Mr Oshiomhole has not stopped talking since June 24. Nothing will quieten him, not even peace and tranquillity in the APC. Last Monday, he was particularly and characteristically fecund. Turning his gaze to the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF), he joined issues with the minister of the supervising Labour and Employment ministry, Chris Ngige, whom he accused of failing to inaugurate the agency’s board of directors. Dr Ngige, no slouch himself, and a combatant of ferocious disposition and temper, defended himself by suggesting that the ongoing probe in the ministry barred the inauguration of the board. Unimpressed and arguing that the probe was inconsequential to the inauguration, Mr Oshiomhole exploded a verbal depth bomb on the minister’s head, with shrapnel lacerating the cool and collected image of President Muhammadu Buhari himself.

    Hear Mr Oshiomhole: “If the minister refused, we will suspend him from the party. You know we must return to internal discipline. For me, it is the height of mischief for any minister. You cannot purport to be a honourable minister and you act dishonourably, and nobody is greater than the party. If the President condones disrespect for his office, I will not condone disrespect for the party. And when we expel the minister we will prevail on the President that he can’t keep in his cabinet people who have neither respect for his own decisions nor have respect for the party without which they would not have been ministers. There are no independent candidates in our system. Nobody, I emphasise, no minister is above the party, and they have taken undue advantage of the President’s fatherly disposition.” It is not clear to what extent the president was miffed by the APC chairman’s abrasive use of language. Nor is it certain whether the chairman has the kind of powers he seemed to have arrogated to himself. But the party and its members may be coming round gradually to the reality of a party leader whose words are often unmeasured and whose statements clearly race ahead of his thoughts and introspection.

    But Mr Oshiomhole was not done. Asked on the same day by State House correspondents in Abuja whether he was losing sleep over the defections convulsing the ruling party, the chairman retorted: “No, I am not losing sleep. I am sleeping very well. I still maintain that I don’t see any man of honour who with his eyes open left the PDP on the account of their gross mismanagement, abuse of the treasury and all of the crimes that the PDP committed; I don’t see them, whatever their irritations, that can be justifications, to return to that house. All we need to do is to play back their own tape about what the PDP represents and why they left. I still hold the view that you cannot vomit in the morning and convert it to lunch in the afternoon, if you have honour. That position still remains the same.” Mr Oshiomhole’s choice of words is unflattering. His logic can also be sometimes quaint. If the PDP did wrong yesterday, could that wrong not be amended sometime later? Mr Oshiomhole does not think so.

    If the APC can by a celestial sleight of hand coax Mr Oshimohole into some sort of verbal and polemical harness, his hyperactivity, oratorical flourish and workaholism can really avail the party of meaningful progress. He has correctly pointed out that the APC lacks ideological clarity and purity, and that once these were sorted out, the party could attract the right kind of politicians who would not be minded to defect at the drop of a hat. True; but the ideological warrior will have to start his ideological crusade with the arch-conservative, President Buhari, whose deeply ingrained conservatism is mitigated only by his infrequent and unconscious resort to pragmatism.

  • Rechristening the PDP?

    IT has not been confirmed, partly because the idea does not seem to make any sense, that the bedraggled opposition PDP might be contemplating a change of name. This contemplation is said to be predicated on two factors: the electoral liability of that name, given the party’s past atrocities; and the desire to reach accommodation with defecting political heavyweights who insist on a new and unencumbered name. Neither predication is sound. NEPA did not make ECN better, nor has PHCN made NEPA better. No name change will do the arduous work of real absolution and paradigm shift the PDP requires to successfully market itself to a suspicious and sceptical electorate. Secondly, it would be strange indeed if those defecting back to the PDP have asked for a new name for the party. APC did not win because it had a new name. After all, it was an amalgam. It won because it promised a huge difference, a promise now known to be anything but real. PDP will undermine itself by changing identity. Let it instead preoccupy itself by producing and projecting  substantial difference.

  • Dasuki and presidency’s legal obfuscations

    WHILE claiming to defend the constitution as well as asserting its irrevocable commitment to the rule of law, the Muhammadu Buhari presidency has repeatedly encouraged Nigerians not to resort to self-help but to let the courts settle their disputes. As a result, many Nigerians, despite their misgivings about the rule of law and the judiciary entirely, particularly the slow pace and high cost of justice, have little choice but to go to court to get redress. Five times the former National Security Adviser (NSA), Col Sambo Dasuki (retd.), asked the courts for bail; five times he was admitted to bail with stiff conditions; and one time he got redress from the largely perfunctory ECOWAS Court. But the government has refused to obey all court orders on the Dasuki case, effectively elevating the presidency above the law.

    The crimes alleged against the former NSA are undoubtedly egregious, crimes estimated by the government to have cost thousands of lives. However, despite the suspicions of the people, the crimes remain unproved. The Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and Justice minister, Abubakar Malami, actually put the human cost at 100,000 lives. But the crime is bailable, and all the six courts which examined the arguments of the government still admitted the accused to bail. On what legal grounds, therefore, is the Buhari presidency ignoring the judgements? The AGF, according to a Premium Times report, finally provided the grounds for the government’s impunity. Hear him at length in an interview with the Hausa Service of the Voice of America (VOA): “What I want you to know is that issues concerning law and order under Muhammadu Buhari are sacrosanct and obeying court order is compulsory. However you should also know that there is a general consensus world over that where the dispute is only between individuals, then you can consider the issue based on the instant situation. But if the dispute is about an issue that affects an entire nation, then you have to remember that government is about the people not for only an individual.

    “So you have to look at it from this perspective. If the issue about an individual coincides with that which affects the people of a nation and you are now saying the government did not obey a court order that infringes on a single person’s rights. Remember we are talking about a person who was instrumental to the deaths of over one hundred thousand people. Are you saying that the rights of one person is more important than that of 100,000 who lost their lives?

    “Reports have shown that there was massive mismanagement of funds meant for military hardware which the military could not access and that led to the death of many, embezzlement of the fund and because of that many people have lost their lives. Obeying the court is not the issue per se. Are we going to take the issue of an individual more important than that of the people? The government’s main responsibility is for and about the people. The essence of governance is to better the lives of its people. So you have to weigh it based on that; the rights of an individual or the rights of the people.”

    It does not matter to the eminent Justice minister that when it comes to the issue of law, the government is in no position to arbitrarily determine what is right or wrong. It does not bother him that the president was, on the Dasuki matter, appropriating powers the constitution does not give the executive branch in terms of the final say on the freedoms of an accused. The AGF simply does not care that all the government’s arguments to deny Col Dasuki bail failed at the courts. All he cares about are assailing the public with frightening casualty figures entirely produced by the government, elevating the presidency’s preferences above the law and constitution, subjectively determining what is in the national interest or private interest, and lying about the government’s obedience of court orders.

    Mallam Malami is not just a Justice minister, he is a senior lawyer of many years’ standing, and will, it is expected, continue to be a lawyer after he leaves office. How his tendentious arguments about the government’s atrocious subversion of the rule of law do not offend him must speak to his innate inscrutability and short-sightedness. He abominably justifies what no legal mind of modest qualifications, let alone a senior advocate, should ever try to justify. And he has forgotten, apparently, that his statements and the judicial policies of the government he serves will outlast their time in office. If the presidency cannot comprehend the law, nor appreciate the implications of subverting the law, surely Mallam Malami would be expected to educate his employers, if he has the courage and character.

    By his admission, the Justice minister is saying that the Dasuki matter is no longer a question of the constitution or the law; it is a personal, probably vindictive, thing. He has indicated that the Buhari presidency reserves the right to determine what is a question of the law, and what is not. Worse, he is suggesting that whatever the government he serves does, regardless of the unlawfulness of their actions, must not be questioned by anyone, not even the courts. Mallam Malami and his employers, Nigerians must now know, are officially not just above the law, they are the law.

  • Obasanjo ramps up pressure

    IN a letter addressed to the chairman of the Northern Elders’ Forum (NEF), Ango Abdullahi, but read on his behalf at a one-day national summit on insecurity and killings in Nigeria conveyed by NEF and other ethnic socio-cultural groups in Abuja last Wednesday, former president Olusegun Obasanjo scathingly dismissed the Buhari presidency as lacking the capacity to deal with Nigeria’s horrendous challenges. He neither minced his words nor pulled his punches.

    Said he, directing his attention to Prof Abdullahi: “When you kindly paid me a visit a couple of weeks ago, we deliberated on the danger to our democracy, our common identity, our commonality of purpose, our dream and our unity in diversity. We lamented the harm that the present administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, by his action and inaction, has done and is doing to our commonwealth and our common heritage. The obvious indication is that the government is seemingly confused and has got to the end of its tether and the nation is being left divisively and perilously to drift. Earlier last week, I noted in a speech some undesirable elements being allowed and being introduced to our democracy by this administration. If these are not stopped, they could be the death knell of our democracy.”

    More of such dismissive characterisations of the Buhari presidency will issue from the former president. He will go at the president hammer and tongs. Should the APC lose the elections, Dr Obasanjo will feel proud and justified. Should the ruling party win, particularly President Buhari, the former president will not relent but sustain his vitriol far into the president’s second term.

  • Integrity, honesty and the fear of jail

    DURING his interaction with a delegation of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria some two weeks ago in Abuja, President Muhammadu Buhari, spoke endearingly about the exculpatory virtues of honesty and integrity. Since he possessed both virtues, he said softly, he could not be discomfited by fear of retribution, not to talk of being jailed. In a statement issued by one of his spokesmen, Garab Shehu, after the delegation left, the president was quoted to have said: “I am satisfied with what I am. I am happy I have kept myself and people close to me from benefiting from government’s contracts. I have been in many places, including Ministry of Petroleum. I would have gone to jail, if I had taken an oil well. For integrity and honesty, I have no regrets. By this, I have contributed to my social safety. I won’t go to jail. I have appointed ministers and they are in charge. I appeal to their integrity. When they come here (Federal Executive Council) Chambers, we ensure they follow the due process. If I owned an oil well, I would have gone to jail.”

    The president obviously mistakes the scaffolding for the building. He left office as military head of state in 1985; if he had shown interest in oil and gas business after leaving office, would it be wrong to bid for an oil well? Those who did — and not all past heads of state bade for oil wells anyway — did that automatically make them corrupt? Is there anything in the law books, not to talk of any human moral code, that excluded and still excludes former rulers from certain businesses in the country and even outside? Even though this supposition is far-fetched, perhaps President Buhari merely used the oil business as an example of the moral quicksand sitting and former presidents are liable to be entrapped in. But what tells him that a former president could not be jailed as a result of doing other businesses outside oil and gas? Clearly, there is a problem with President Buhari’s moral universe. It is apparently too labyrinthine for him to properly navigate his way around it, both as a sitting and former president.

    Despite his attempt to present himself as squeaky clean, President Buhari also probably overlooks one equally dangerous obstacle to the quiet and peaceful retirement of former rulers — the issue of vicarious responsibility. It is not only when a leader is found guilty of stealing or embezzlement that he is sent to jail. He can equally be jailed for gross dereliction of duty or criminal negligence. Governor Nasir el-Rufai presented this dilemma to a lenient Senate years ago when the parliament probed land allocations by the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) under his leadership. Shown evidence that toddlers got allocations when he was FCT minister, and asked to justify the practice, the hitherto sprightly minister, as he then was, growled that he could not be held responsible for the misdeeds of his subordinates. The legislators were aghast; but shockingly and inexplicably, they let the then minister’s defiance pass without any noteworthy censure. Mrs Rousseff, a former Brazilian president, was not so lucky for being a board member in Petrobras, Brazil’s oil giant, between 2003 and 2010 when a corruption scandal broke. She was impeached as president when the story came to light in 2015.

    President Buhari has made a song and dance about his honesty and integrity. But there is nothing to indicate that had a forensic audit of some of the agencies he supervised been done, he would not be vicariously held responsible for some of the misdeeds of his subordinates. He may of course avoid jail, but it will probably be due more to the culture of sitting presidents refusing stoutly to call their predecessors to account. Had that omerta not become a culture among the camorra of former Nigerian presidents, it is doubtful whether any of them could avoid jail. After all, it should amaze them that other than the late dictator, Sani Abacha, who died at 55, perhaps due to unnatural causes, all Nigerian former leaders have lived beyond 70 in a country where the life expectancy is about 54.

    More importantly, it is truly baffling that President Buhari seems to insinuate that honesty and integrity are the most invaluable possessions of a leader. No, they are not. It is assumed that before offering oneself for election, a leader must possess those virtues, just as any Nigerian employed in any company or government establishment. Honesty and integrity should be taken for granted, not to be celebrated as rarities. A Nigerian leader or president must have an expansive vision of society, embrace inclusive politics, possess a clear philosophy of leadership and humanity, project a far greater sense of justice than even law officers, and demonstrate religious neutrality in a sea of sectarian intolerance and rage. President Buhari should more appropriately and fittingly judge himself against these other yardsticks and virtues, and celebrate them if he has them. He would reassure his long-suffering countrymen should he esteem these other transcendental leadership qualities far higher than the honesty and integrity the society must take for granted in their artisans, airport workers and taxi drivers.

  • Saintly military, police and paramilitary agencies

    NIGERIA’S security agencies have a default answer for every complaint against their errant personnel: “We disagree. We are innocent. We are blameless.” It does not matter where the complaints are coming from, local or international, the security agencies have the same answer. It used to be that the main complaint came from Amnesty International, and the security agencies always responded by suggesting that there were external plots against the country and its image, plots designed to bring the agencies into disrepute and rubbish the country. The agencies even managed occasionally to rouse some idle civil society groups to organise protests against the fault-finders. And the situation sometimes became so murky that Nigerians began to doubt whether Amnesty and other human rights watchdogs were not overreaching themselves.

    Well, while the responses of the security agencies have not changed one bit, the identities of their accusers have changed. Recently, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) issued a report in which they accused Nigeria’s military, police and paramilitary agencies of rampant drug abuse. Addressing a press conference to mark this year’s United Nations International Day Against Drugs and Illicit Trafficking, the NDLEA chairman, Muhammad Abdallah, said, “The military and paramilitary surely are involved in drug abuse, and they know it.”

    But rather than ask for evidence with a sense of responsibility, the agencies outrightly denied that their men were involved in drug abuse. The Defence Headquarters fumed that the allegations were untrue, but that they would study the NDLEA claim. The police feigned ignorance, and asked for the NDLEA to provide more evidence. The Customs turned preachy, moralising that they did not tolerate drug abuse. It is the custom of Nigerian security organisations, military or paramilitary, never to accept responsibility for anything except they are caught in flagrant delicto. Is it any wonder that the country is convulsing with violence and bloodshed, twin evils the government seems to have no answer to, evils that worsen by the day?

    In a country run along unitary lines, though it pretends to federalism, and where the security system is controlled by the federal government, and more accurately by the presidency, security challenges are bound to weary the society and grow more complex and intractable. Until the nation’s constitutional paradigm shifts, and radical and transformational changes are introduced, it is impossible for the same tried but worn-out methods to produce the desired positive changes. The problem is too massive and complex to respond to tinkering.

  • Plateau killings and APC, PDP spokesmen

    IN their reaction to the killings in about a dozen Plateau State villages between June 23 and 25, during which rampaging herdsmen reportedly killed over 200 people, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) declared a seven-day mourning period. That declaration, more than anything else that the PDP said through their spokesman, Kola Ologbondiyan, provoked presidential spokesman Femi Adesina into accusing the opposition party of hypocrisy. To underscore his assertion that the PDP acted mala fide in its response to the killings, Mr Adesina gave a historical account of the killings that took place under the PDP government in its 16 years in office but which did not elicit any declaration of mourning period.

    The PDP mourning period was undoubtedly more political than empathetic, and more melodramatic than poignant. But Mr Adesina’s furious riposte was also clearly misplaced, disproportionate and misconceived. The presidential spokesman in fact feared that his unusual reaction to the PDP’s melodrama could be misinterpreted; why then did he embark on that pointless journey? In his response to the PDP, Mr Adesina recounted the grisly carnage that marked the PDP years in office, from 1999 to 2015, some of the killings actuated by the PDP itself, and others instigated by external forces like the Boko Haram which propagated a twisted version of their religious ideology. The presidential spokesman then wondered why the PDP would now declare a period of mourning when it was not impelled to do so under far more cataclysmic loss of lives in its years in office.

    Mr Adesina should have resisted the urge to respond as he did by citing comparative death statistics. It was sufficient that he castigated the PDP for hypocrisy. But to delve into morbid comparisons as he did, knowing full well it was bound to be misunderstood or even misinterpreted, is hardly the wisest of steps in this period of grave national provocation. More than 200 people are estimated to have lost their lives in the Plateau State killings; any innuendo that diminishes the gravity of that loss, no matter how cursorily, will be deemed by nearly everyone as offensive.

    The presidential spokesman himself knows this. Hear him: “Those who take pleasure in twisting statements from the presidency may claim we are saying that many people were killed under PDP than under President Muhammadu Buhari. It would be unconscionable to do so. The intendment of this statement (the comparative death figures) is to show that wanton killings had been with us for sometime…Every single soul is precious, and no man should take a life which he cannot create. But when tragic situations as had happened in Plateau State occur, such should never be used to play politics. ”

    But it does not require a twisted mind to conclude that the presidency, given the statistics it published, is in fact saying that more people were killed under the previous PDP governments than under the APC government. The statistics Mr Adesina published indicated that simple fact. It does not require any twisting. Predictably, the PDP spokesman, Mr Ologbondiyan, has latched on to that comparison and described it as odious and insensitive, asserting that the APC’s predilection for making “morbid references to past killings” was unhelpful and dishonourable.

    Whether Mr Adesina likes to hear it or not, the APC does in fact have a predilection for indulging in wholesale comparisons, much of it truly befuddling and odious. For the first two years of the Buhari presidency, for instance, the APC kept up a fusillade of comparisons that seemed to paralyse their own government and excuse its lethargy and confusion. It has taken bitter criticisms and objections to force the APC to squarely face the task of governing the country, for, as the critics argued, that was why the former ruling party was rejected at the polls. But for the APC and Mr Adesina, old habits seem to die hard. Whenever they are inspired, the ruling party will still lapse into their default mode.

    After all, last March, President Buhari himself spoke in Jalingo, Taraba State, during one of his unproductive condolence visits, suggesting that the killings in Mambilla, Sardauna local government area of Plateau State, and Zamfara State exceed that of Benue State. He was probably using that statistics to justify the order of his visit, more than anything else. But such comparisons always tended to obfuscate the issues at hand. It bears restating that presidential spokesmen have a responsibility to weigh their words and measure their responses, especially in times of grave national crisis. The APC has been slow in recognising the severity of the existential crisis facing Nigeria, and is therefore a little casual in tackling it with the dispatch and depth the problem requires. The PDP is not the cause of the APC’s lethargy or the muse for their serial misspeaking. Nor are the crises all over the country an indication that both the opposition and critics of the ruling party are intent on undermining President Buhari. The president should get on with the task of ruling, a responsibility he has met with deep aversion for rigour, and grumbling.