The Nation Newspaper

Category: Barometer

  • Mugabe and Zimbabwe’s tragedy

    Mugabe and Zimbabwe’s tragedy

    UNTIL he was forced to resign last week, it was always hidden what Robert Mugabe thought of the country he was privileged to lead to independence in 1980. And until last week, few knew that he actually thought that Zimbabwe owed him a living. That is the only way to account for how he took the country from tremendous promise at independence to almost complete economic and political ruination when he reluctantly relinquished office. It was not that Mr Mugabe forgot how to fight for his country, as he eminently showed in the 1970s; his problem was that he lacked the depth of understanding to know what purpose that fight was meant to achieve.

    After more than one decade in office, Mr Mugabe had become a tragedy for his country. Instead of building the country to succeed him and instead of producing leaders for the next century, he wove everything intricately around himself, ensuring that the country could neither move nor breathe outside of him. He showed no foresight in building a strong and enduring foundation for the economy beyond the limited populism of land redistribution. And he showed no sense whatsoever in enunciating a great and inspiring political system for Zimbabwe, one that would be democratic, progressive and inclusive. He saw himself as the leader who fed the cow, and must therefore drink its milk to its last dregs.

    Despite his many years in the revolutionary trenches, and regardless of all the books he had read as he fought against white domination, it was still shocking that he was not influenced culturally and ideologically by the great political leaders and statesmen of the last century, some of them his contemporaries. History books will remember him as the man who led his country to independence; but his countrymen will not remember him with the lasting fondness and nostalgia accorded other great and founding leaders like Mao Zedong, Kemal Ataturk, Ben Gurion, Nelson Mandela, etc. And if he did not think of a great and prosperous legacy for Zimbabwe, it cannot be that he did not think of it at all or wish for it one way or the other; it must be that he lacked the character and intellectual depth to conceptualise its enduring rubrics.

  • Buhari, judiciary, intimidation and rule of law

    Buhari, judiciary, intimidation and rule of law

    IN his address to the All Nigeria Judges’ Conference last week in Abuja, President Muhammadu Buhari reflected on a number of issues, among which was the raid on some judges’ residences last year. He went on to anchor his reflections on the topic of judicial intimidation and rule of law. Arguing his case before the eminent judges, the president suggested that it would be wrong to think the raid indicated executive intimidation of the judiciary and a repudiation of the hallowed concept of the rule of law. It is not clear whether the president thought he made a good case, or whether he was able to prove his government’s altruism in raiding the residences of some judges. But at least, he made a case, even if it was tenuous and a little disagreeable.

    In his words: “Without the rule of law the government will degenerate into dictatorship or anarchy. The theme you have chosen this year keys in with our administration’s resolve to strengthen the three arms of government to effectively fulfil their constitutional obligations…My lords, earlier this year the judiciary came under investigation. Let me again assure the judicial community, this action taken by the executive was in no way a prelude to usurping the powers of the National Judicial Council (NJC) or aimed at intimidating the judiciary. Executive and legislative officials were also investigated. I am aware that the majority of judicial officers are learned and incorruptible and day-in-day-out acting in the best spirit of their oath of office.”

    The president doubtless sounded remorseful. But whether that apparent remorse was a reiteration of the ongoing rapprochement with various persons, interests and organs, or whether it was not quite as heartfelt as it appeared, is not yet known. The president is, however, dead set on pacifying many aggrieved persons and groups in the country, probably for the main aim of securing a second term in office. There is no other way to assess his curious outreach to aggrieved groups and persons after first insisting, for about two years, that he was right on virtually all issues, regardless of their controversiality and even illogicality, and everyone else was wrong. But if his statements truly reflect his new mindset, even if they do not justify his old mindset, then perhaps the country should be hopeful that after a tortuous journey of self-discovery engineered by its hesitant and sometimes uncritical president, the country might be set to embark on a more enthralling and lasting democratic journey.

    President Buhari must forgive his critics for doubting his bona fides. He had hardly assumed office in 2015 when he made the injurious statement that his main headache was the judiciary, suggesting that he came into office with a prejudiced mind against the third arm of government. Since then, it has taken a herculean battle to compel the president to be nuanced about how he dealt with judicial matters. Reluctant but still unfazed, it has also taken the president almost three years in office to embrace the constant amelioration a president would need to show in order to survive the cut and thrust of office, not to say find the deep ideological positions indispensable to societal transformation and renewal.

    But the president also made very interesting statements about the rule of law. The country should be grateful that he did, for it is necessary to hold him up to his words. He had said that without the rule of law, the country would ‘degenerate’ into ‘dictatorship or anarchy’. He is absolutely right. But it is hard to tell whether he believed his own statements. The peril of reading speeches written by others is that statements such as this, which is a veritable self-indictment, slip through the cracks and find their way into the public domain. President Buhari speaks of the rule of law when all it takes to controvert his assertion is to point him in the direction of two of the leading cases being prosecuted by his government, cases he apparently feels very emotional about. The Sambo Dasuki and Ibraheem el-Zakzaky cases stand as ringing rebuttal of the president’s fawning statements on the rule of law. It would be strange if the president does not see and feel the contradiction.

    If the president discussed and examined all the perspectives in his speech before the judges’ conference, nothing in all he said suggested that the process was carefully done. It was probably perfunctory, or at worst an insidious appeal to votes. Even if he gets the votes, assuming that was his goal, the president should be worried about what legacy of ideas and structures he would bequeath the country when he leaves office. He has a duty to dig far deeper than he has done, perhaps with the help of self-confident aides who have overcome the fear of standing before him and nullifying his dramas and jaded ideas.

  • Maina embraces media war

    Maina embraces media war

    Horrified that his enemies seemed to have a stranglehold on the media, where he is daily disparaged in terms and language that exacerbate his alleged crimes and troubles, former pension reform panel chairman, Abdulrasheed Maina, has taken to the same platform to answer his critics word for word, insinuation for insinuation, and hyperbole for hyperbole. The outcome appears to be certain, but readers will do well to keep their fingers crossed. Mr Maina was appointed in 2010 by Stephen Oransaye, a former Head of Service, to head a panel to examine pension payments, particularly in view of mounting complaints of exclusion and missing names. Along the line, the mandate of the panel, which had by then been renamed, was expanded to include the issue of reforms. But by 2013, Mr Maina had been relieved of his appointment and declared wanted after he fled trial.

    Four years later, Mr Maina resurfaced in the Ministry of Interior as a promoted director. But barely one month after in October, he had once again been sacked following an outcry over his reinstatement. After many years of silence, and in view of the relentless pummelling he was receiving in the media courtesy of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the former pension reform panel chairman has decided to answer his critics and show them a thing or two about media war. In one of the statements he authorised, he said he was fed up being a long-suffering victim of media traducement. How successful he will be in countering the attacks remains to be seen, for the EFCC seems to have swung the media and image pendulum against him so effectively that it is not clear whatever he planned to say might be of any consequence.

    It is, however, still significant that he is answering his critics back. Discounting the many times in the past three years that the EFCC had had a field day against him, it is equally noteworthy that the EFCC has kept at the luckless Mr Maina with a relentlessness that salves the injured feelings of Nigerians still groaning under the mindless plunder of their treasury. Hear the EFCC chairman, Ibrahim Magu, have a go at Mr Maina in the media: “We will go after everybody who is involved. I am telling you, we will not spare anybody. (Maina) has people who are protecting him and that has made it difficult for us to get him arrested. You can imagine, he was promoted. It is devastating, it is beyond my understanding…Of course if I knew Maina’s whereabouts why would I be appealing to Nigerians to give us support. We are determined to get to the root of this matter. That’s why we have renewed the investigation. We will retrieve all property or whatever must have been stolen from public funds. This is something that we have done as far back as 2011. The matter has been in court, and Maina was also charged in court. He was arraigned in absentia. I assure you, we will get him sooner or later. The national assembly is supporting us. We are collaborating and we are also giving them support. We have no problem with national assembly.”

    Observe very well the object of the EFCC’s attacks. It is not only Mr Maina on whom the EFCC’s guns are trained. Those who allegedly protect him, and who have made it difficult for the anti-graft agency to pick him up, also come under generous bombardment. If the cap doesn’t fit the Department of State Service (DSS), with whom the EFCC is at dagger’s drawn, and the police, against whom the EFCC appears to maintain uneasy truce, then no other head can be available for any cap. Quietly sensing that his enemies had their backs to him, Mr Magu affirms that the EFCC will go after Mr Maina and all his protectors. But mindful of fighting too many battles at the same time, especially on two formidable fronts, Mr Magu has sent an olive branch to the National Assembly with whom the DSS apparently once swore to the oath of omerta. Whether the legislature will bite that bait is also not known.

    But regardless of the plots of the EFCC and any other person minded to join in the attack against him, Mr Maina has launched a fusillade of his own in the media against his detractors, including the office of the Head of Service which he felt had played a central and even disingenuous role in fomenting the new attacks. Silence was no longer golden. Responding through his spokesman in Kaduna a few days ago, Mr Maina launched his own coup de théâtre. Hear him: “Between the office of the Head of Service and the police pension office, a leakage of N5.32 billion per month was stopped. This is what civil servants steal monthly in the two offices out of the 99 pension offices in the country. Forty three persons were arrested and handed over to the EFCC to prosecute while 222 houses were seized from them…After Maina was driven into exile, N35billion was stolen in the office of the Head of Service.”

    Perhaps unsure whether the effect would be as devastating as he intended, Mr Maina plunged the knife in: “In the current media trial where all manners of stories have been published, there has been a lot of distortion of facts and sometimes outright blackmail, all in an attempt to paint Maina black like Lucifer…After the biometric exercise, there were 71,000 genuine workers in the police pension office who needed N826million to pay them unlike N5.3billion appropriated for them annually. They were pocketing N4.2billion yearly. They devised several ingenious ways to pull these cash out. They pulled out an average of N300million daily Monday to Friday. There are bank alerts to substantiate these assertions. There has been a lot of deliberate cover-up in a well-written script to give Maina a bad name. Emerging evidence has shown that Maina is just a victim of corruption fighting back. The then senate committee, in a bid to crucify Maina, did the hatchet job when they told Nigerians that he stole N195billion. Maina was just a victim of a high power play of some powerful individuals in high places. So, for three years, Maina suffered ‘media trial’, where he was found guilty several times on the pages of newspapers.”

    In effect, until he is arrested, after which he might be unable to present his own side of the story with the eloquence and comprehensiveness he is capable of, Mr Maina seems prepared to fling muck in retaliation for muck. A court of law might be the best place to make all the necessary presentations, but the temptation of muckraking and jousting niftily on media platforms is too tantalising for so adept a Scarlet Pimpernel as Mr Maina to resist. Expect more tit for tat, for the EFCC itself is no pushover in wading in muck.

     

  • Their fawning excellencies

    Their fawning excellencies

    The pictures of their interaction with President Muhammadu Buhari are evocative. In August, when the president returned from his second and extended medical trip abroad, one of the governors who received him was the proudly independent and outspoken Nyesom Wike of Rivers State. But as he shook hands with the president in the line-up, he bowed so low he was in danger of breaking into two had the president held his hand much longer. That was, however, nothing compared with the dutiful and giddy Willie Obiano of Anambra State who in early October sat cap in hand, either reverentially or penitentially with both hands resting on his laps, as the president received him in audience in Aso Villa. The president wore his own cap.

    It is protocol for everyone to rise to his feet when a president or governor enters a room. But gradually, that honour is being extended to sundry public officials, as indeed former Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman, Mahmud Jega, can testify. Though an academician and union leader, he did nothing to discourage that abysmal culture. Perhaps it is part of the Nigerian culture, as some Asian countries can corroborate. Or perhaps it is just seizing upon a great culture to expand the futile culture of fawning before leaders. So, how can they look the leaders in the face and take exception to their unworkable and sometimes heedless policies?

  • It’s Femi Adesina’s turn to mollify his rage

    It’s Femi Adesina’s turn to mollify his rage

    A few weeks ago, a columnist had asked Information minister, Lai Mohammed, to tone down his diatribe against opposition elements and any other person who disagreed vehemently with President Muhammadu Buhari. The minister had become hysterical, the columnist suggested, and needed to moderate his rhetoric and explore ways to conciliate rather than alienate the electorate that enthusiastically put the president in office. It is not clear whether he listened. Now it is the turn of everyone to counsel presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, to be less vitriolic in his many responses to the president’s critics, no matter how disagreeable they are. He needs to be told to seek ways of befriending the public on behalf of his master, for master is how he seems to esteem the president.

    Not a few analysts were particularly incensed at the bellicose and undignified tone of Mr Adesina’s rejoinder to criticisms of the president’s interactions with the World Bank president, Jim Kim. Mr Kim had told the media in Washington D.C. on October 12 that President Buhari had asked the bank to focus its development efforts on Nigeria’s northern region. According to him, “In my very first meeting with President Buhari he said specifically that he would like us to shift our focus to the northern regions of Nigeria and we’ve done that.” For a country seemingly poised on the edge of ethnic conflagration, this was like a red rag to a bull. Critics naturally descended on the president and concluded that they were justified to have labelled him an irredentist.

    Some analysts and newspapers then zeroed in on President Buhari’s antecedents and, citing his past managerial and political behaviour, believed they detected his biases in presidential appointments and in the location of projects when he was chairman of the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF). Unable to stomach the hearty and unrestrained criticisms of the president, Mr Adesina exploded, unfortunately as he was wont. It was not his first time. Hear him at length: “Those who specialise in a deliberate twisting of information have wailed and raged endlessly on the news item credited to the World Bank Group President, Jim Yong Kim, who disclosed in Washington DC, United States of America, that President Muhammadu Buhari had requested a concentration of the bank’s intervention efforts in the northern part of Nigeria, particularly in the Northeast.

    “The ignorant and mischievous people, who twist everything for their vile purposes, are making it seem that it was a calculated attempt to give the North an unfair advantage over other parts of Nigeria. The truth is that President Buhari, right from his first week in office in June 2015, had reached out to the G-7 in Germany that Nigeria needed help to rebuild the Northeast, which had been terribly devastated by insurgency. He said the country would prefer help in terms of rebuilding of infrastructure, rather than cash donation, which may end up being misappropriated. In concert with governors of the region, a comprehensive list of needed repairs was sent to the G-7 leaders.

    “Also, during a trip to Washington in 2015, and many other engagements that followed, President Buhari sought the help of the World Bank in rebuilding the beleaguered Northeast, which was then being wrested from the stranglehold of a pernicious insurgency. It was something always done in the open, and which reflected the President’s concern for the region.

    “Those ululating over the disclosure by the President of the World Bank should be a bit reflective, and consider the ravages that the Northeast has suffered since 2009 when the Boko Haram insurgency started. Schools, hospitals, homes, entire villages, towns, cities, bridges, and other public utilities have been blown up, laid waste, and lives terminated in excess of 20,000, while widows and orphans littered the landscape. The humanitarian crisis was of monumental proportions. President Buhari simply did what a caring leader should do. He took the battle to the insurgents, broke their backs, and then sought for help to rebuild so that the people could have their lives back. Should that then elicit the negative commentary that has trailed the disclosure from the World Bank? Not at all, except from insidious minds…”

    In the opinion and words of Mr Adesina, the critics were either ignorant or mischievous, or even ululating and possessing insidious minds. The presidential spokesman was himself a columnist, and will most probably return to crafting rejoinders on national issues after his ‘master’ must have left office. As a columnist, Mr Adesina could take the liberty to describe those who traduce or oppose him in unflattering language. It would not be right; but he could conceivably do that. But as a spokesman of the president, he does not seem to be at liberty to say everything that crosses his mind, let alone with such grossness and acerbity. A certain amount of decorum is expected from Nigeria’s highest office.

    In any case, there is nothing in all the criticisms that could not have attracted a healthy, dispassionate and elevated response. It is the opinion of the critics that the president, even if he meant well — and that is open to debate — exhibited poor judgement in advising the World Bank president to focus on Northern Nigeria. He knows his country and the ethnic politics which he himself has stoked relentlessly, and which has bifurcated the land and provoked unending resentment. Given the state of the country and the mutual suspicion that has upended relationships, it was inappropriate for the president to advocate for regional skewness in external development interventions. He misjudged the issue.

    Had Mr Adesina stopped at simply explaining what motivated the president’s advice to Mr Kim, and indicated that there was neither ethnic nor political undertones to the president’s perception, he would have done his job as a spokesman, even if the public remained unconvinced. In less than 30 months since assuming office as a presidential spokesman, Mr Adesina has remorselessly coined abusive words to excoriate critics. There seems to be no end to the insults. Apart from demeaning the office of the president with his scurrilities, he does his own reputation great harm by giving the impression that an otherwise fine editor and columnist could so effortlessly and needlessly transform into an intolerant yes-man no longer capable of telling wrong from right.

  • Gov Okorocha’s self-righteousness

    Gov Okorocha’s self-righteousness

    Faced with growing anger over his impulsive decision to erect a statue in honour of the discredited President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State has intemperately argued that he neither regretted the decision nor intended to reverse it. Here is his argument: “While the good people of the state and all men and women of goodwill were celebrating the good things Mr Zuma’s visit has brought to the state, in the short and long-run, the opposition in the state, out of glaring frustration, decided to make much ado in the social media over the statue of the man in Owerri. Those of the former Vice President, Dr Alex Ekwueme, and others had earlier been unveiled, and these enemies of our people did not see the good things associated with Mr Zuma’s visit or what it portends for the state. They only saw the statue that was erected as an encouragement to the man.”

    No one is sure how much the statue cost, whether about half a billion naira, as some say, or less. But the self-assured governor is happy that he had managed to bring to Imo a notable African personality, attracted foreign investment to the state, and is happily engaged in erecting statues regardless of his difficulty in meeting his financial obligations to serving and retired workers. It is a waste of time to blow up the governor’s dubieties. He is too thick-skinned to care, and too obtuse to be persuaded to see things differently. It is hoped that the state has learnt enough lessons from the Okorocha snafu to ensure that their next governor is a temperate, consensus-building and empathetic democrat without the aggrandising tendency that has hobbled and derailed most Nigerian politicians

  • Angela Merkel’s example

    Angela Merkel’s example

    For the perceptive, the September 2017 German Bundestag elections is a clear lesson for Nigeria on how to interpret elections and draw the appropriate lessons from both victory and defeat. With Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU conservatives winning 32.9 percent of the votes, and the far-right, anti-immigrant AFD taking an unprecedented 12.6 percent, the first time in 60 years, Germany may be set for very trying moments. The result has been seen as a referendum on Mrs Merkel’s policy of admitting about a million refugees into Germany, leading to a fear of cultural dilution and social and political distortions.

    The AFD, which takes about 87 seats in the parliament, has promised to put Mrs Merkel on her toes. The implication is that the governing CDU/CSU alliance, in addition to its two coalition parties, will be opposed virtually every step of the way on many issues, including refugee policies. Ominously, the AFD has promised to pursue policies that would help Germans to ‘take their people and their country back’, apparently from the influx of refugees from Syria and other Arab countries. There will undoubtedly be fireworks in the years ahead, fireworks that may be complicated by any minor or even existential threat posed by refugees who flout the laws of the land or dilute the cultural homogeneity of their hosts.

    But rather than hit out self-righteously at the far-right party, especially the Nazis who constitute a significant percentage of its membership, and rather than threaten the AFD and assail it with real or imaginary constitutional bugaboos, Mrs Merkel has suggested that she and her party would do everything to regain the confidence of voters who bolted from the CDU/CSU alliance — about eight percent of them — and embraced the anti-immigrant party. She would win them back, she promised ruefully. She added that her party would ‘listen to the concerns and anxieties’ of the voters who repudiated the CDU/CSU alliance, thereby enabling her conservative alliance to achieve a victory that ‘was not as good as she had expected’.

    Contrast Mrs Merkel’s diminished and chastening victory to Nigeria’s All Progressives Congress’ victorious candidate in the 2015 presidential election, Muhammadu Buhari, who sneered at the voters who repudiated him. He had promised to give much better attention to the 97 percent who voted for him than the five percent who didn’t endorse him, without however being unjust to anyone. In both his victory speech and inaugural address, there was nothing in President Buhari’s statements that acknowledged any regional colouration in the map and demographics of his victory, let alone recognise the overt and covert messages and anxieties in the texture and tapestry of the small repudiation he seemed to growl at. Unable to conduct this elementary distinguishing exercise, it was not surprising that the humility that should accompany his understanding of his victory was supplanted by a messianic euphoria that flowed from his massive and unprecedented electoral margin.

    Two years after his great victory, President Buhari has still not understood the role and significance of the APC as a party in his victory. He has also not said a word about the worldviews of those who repudiated him, and why they rejected him, not to talk of appreciating the narrowness of his victory even in some regions where he was accepted. In speech after speech, he has spoken (or more accurately, given impression) only vaguely of the messianic role he conferred on himself, refusing to undergird it with the stirring philosophical and ideational supports required by law and politics. Unfortunately, this has complicated his approach to governance and set him on a collision course with the Southeast.

    It is not clear exactly what kind of relationship and synergy exist between the president and his party. But if they still listen to each other, it may be time for the party to help their president see what he has so far failed to see: that his victory, as robust as it was, is neither eternal nor immutable. They should help him see the complex realities of that 2015 victory, appreciate the hidden messages in it, and decode the future from the interplay of routine but engaging electoral back and forth, acceptance and rejection. They should help steer him away from the stifling insularity of his deep longings, and get him to open up to the vast array of possibilities the DNA of his victory signals.

  • Federal toll gates again

    Federal toll gates again

    After many months of speculation, the federal government has finally indicated that toll gates would return to many federal roads. The decision obviously followed the terrible decay and neglect that have made many federal roads all over the country impassable. According to the Minister of Works, Housing and Power, Babatunde Fashola, the government intends to borrow money to fix the roads, and then toll them. This decision was inevitable, some have argued, in order to guarantee the maintenance of the roads on completion.

    There is unlikely to be any significant opposition to the tolling of federal roads, given the excruciating hardship road users endure. What is imponderable, however, is the back and forth of decision-making in Nigeria. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo woke up one morning as president and demolished all toll gates in the country, arguing that they had become unnecessary because of the fuel price increase he was proposing in which a road tax was embedded. It was clear he strived to present a fait accompli on the country. But the drastic step failed to accomplish its purpose once the labour unions successfully haggled a lower fuel price.

    It is significant that the demolition of the old toll gates took place in the midst of a national debate on fuel price hikes and the relevance of toll gates that had admittedly become a cesspit of corruption at the time. Till today, the same federal government has still not institutionalised the right culture of debate. Opponents of controversial public policies are sometimes cast in the mould of enemies of the state, while sycophancy is encouraged, lauded and even rewarded. It is important for the public to interrogate public policies, encourage robust debates, and force the government to open its books and calculations for the public to appreciate the pros and the cons of its vaunted policies and measures.

    It is not enough for the government to speak generally of funding the reconstruction of the roads and tolling them, how they hope to achieve these goals must be adequately spelt out. The public will not buy a pig in a poke. In addition, if toll gates are to be constructed all over again, it must be spelt out what they would cost, which roads would host them, and what the toll fares would be. If the policies are retrogressive, the public must have the last say.

  • Restive Modu Sheriff on the move again

    Restive Modu Sheriff on the move again

    EVEN though no one seems to know what they discussed, the meeting last Thursday at Aso Villa between Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and former controversial Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Ali Modu Sheriff, has set tongues wagging and got many political heavyweights scheming for 2019 fidgeting. Another report suggested that the All Progressives Congress (APC) party chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, was also at the meeting. The the vice president’s spokesman, however, insisted he was not at the meeting. Former governor Sheriff, who lost  the leadership of the PDP to ex-governor Ahmed Makarfi by a Supreme Court judgement in July, is precisely the kind of politician a party should embrace rather than allow to roam dangerously free and feral in the thicket of politics with unpredictable consequences.

    Until either the APC leadership or the vice president’s office disclose the reason for the meeting between the two, speculations will run riot. Chief among the speculated reasons for the meeting, as a columnist with this newspaper’s Saturday edition suggested two Saturdays ago, is the need to recruit as many big political names as possible into the party in anticipation of the footwork expected to convulse the party next year during its preparation for the coming general elections. Senator Sheriff is the kind of man the aloof APC leaders believe is needed to face the fire both from within and without the party. Having alienated the coalition that brought it into power in 2015, and unable and unwilling to trigger a rapprochement within its quarrelsome ranks, the APC is in desperate need for fighters. Sen Sheriff is the archetypal fighter.

    Were Sen Sheriff to meet President Muhammadu Buhari himself, as indeed ex-president Goodluck Jonathan would have done when he led the country and faced the desperate challenges of re-election, the public would easily read meanings into the meeting. It was, therefore, expedient that the president was away when the meeting took place. Though it is still too early to say whether the president wants a second term, and indeed will not say until sometime well into next year, there is little doubt that the former Borno State governor will have tremendous and consequential impact upon the party should he and his supporters return to the party, of course, more as a cat among pigeons than a peacemaker and foot soldier.

    His state chapter of the APC does not want him, even though he still has sympathisers there. And the leaders of Borno APC, who resent his obstreperousness and brusqueness and deride him as Alhaji Allah, will have absolutely nothing to do with him. He knows, and Borno APC leaders also know, that the entry of Sen Sheriff will trigger a movement and a shuffle of truly seismic proportions in the state chapter as well as the national organ. They see his imposing mansion in Maiduguri as an execrable architectural ogre overlooking the State House, and his impudence and pride so insufferable that the Alhaji Allah nickname they gave him poetically describes him scornfully as next in rank to Allah, if not quite a god himself.

    But the APC is not unused to seismic movements, going by the epochal shift they managed to trigger between 2013 and 2014 when many politicians undertook an Mfecane movement from the ruling PDP to the then opposition APC. For now, and in football parlance, Sen Sheriff is a free agent unencumbered by any loyalty whatsoever. It is not that the rambunctious politician is discomfited by loyalties; it is just that his present state actually helps his often private causes, chief among which is to stay highly relevant, if not in the ruling party, then in the opposition party. What is inconceivable to him is to stay unattached: without a party, out of the glare of publicity, and unheralded and unsung.

    If Sen Sheriff’s meeting with the vice president was for political reasons, as indeed it seemed, then it can be safely surmised that both the APC and President Buhari are casting a sheep’s eye at 2019 with respect to the PDP’s permutations. Something is definitely afoot. Were the president to be indifferent to his own future ambition, it is doubtful whether they would be trying to cobble alliances as early as 2017. The president has not said anything, and his aides, close or distant, have not said anything either. But even in their silence can be heard the distant drums of re-election and second term, and the rat-tat-tat on the doors of political mobilisers to open up and engage.

    Nothing disquiets Sen Sheriff, nor does anything agitate his quaint political morality. Whenever he sees political opportunity, he will take it. And if that opportunity does not appear to exist, why, he will conjure it. He appreciates the politics of marriage, and is an in-law to the right people in right places. Perhaps he actually asked for the said meeting at Aso Villa. Or perhaps they called him in from the cold. Whatever the case, he is determined not to be left behind. He can’t go back to the PDP; for they will have nothing to do with him. And, given the huge image he has constructed of himself, before which he pays constant  and unbroken obeisance, it is hard to see him shuffle his bulk to a minor party. The only place left to go is therefore the APC, where he is connected both by genealogy and marriage. Except something extraordinary happens, that is where he will berth for the 2019 voyage, and give battle with the undiscriminating fecundity he is famous for. The coming 2019 manoeuvres suit his person and politics, and they also suit his image and worldview. Let his enemies within and without the APC brace up for impact, for that impact will surely come.

  • …As Adamawa APC brutalises with sarcasm

    …As Adamawa APC brutalises with sarcasm

    WHILE pundits were still speculating about last Thursday’s meeting inside Aso Villa between the vice president and Sen Sheriff, the Adamawa State chapter of the party had in fact earlier begun a furious but puzzling political intermediation of its own. Still smarting from the determined but evidently vexatious statements of the Women Affairs minister, Aisha Alhassan, and her mentor, ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar, against President Buhari, the state’s APC organising secretary, Ahmed Lawan, told the media with brutal sarcasm that the party’s state working committee would wade in and find out what was amiss.

    According to him, “The utterances of the former vice-president only portrayed him as a man whose sole motive for contributing to the success of the party is to profit from it, whilst it ought to have been selfless. We all sacrificed, nobody wanted to get something from it. If you want to contest, you wait for 2019 to test your popularity. If you are very popular, the people will listen to you and vote for you. There’s no need for any utterance which is capable of portraying the party in bad light. We are very surprised that the former vice-president came out to say the party didn’t reward him, which is like saying the party didn’t reward him enough. We all sacrificed, nobody did it because we wanted to get something out of it.”

    Apart from Adamawa APC not being united, it is also clear that the larger APC is beginning to deal cruelly and surreptitiously with its enemies as they identify themselves. The former vice president has presented himself for target practice. They will take potshots at him. Sen Alhassan has opened her flanks; they will attempt to outmanoeuvre her. A titanic battle is definitely afoot in the APC in the next few months as those shut out by the president after the electoral victory of 2015 attempt valiantly to reclaim the party. If the revolutionaries are squeamish, the president, who feigns indifference to a second term, and his men who are determined to press him into re-election mode, will crush them. There are, however, no guarantees that even if Aso Villa should get the upper hand, it would not be pyrrhic victory. It is not only the political future of the president and his men that is under threat, even the whole future of the APC itself is also in jeopardy. Once the battle is joined sometime in 2018, and the combatants are arrayed in battle, it will be possible for military analysts to predict the sanguinary direction of that phony APC war.