The Nation Newspaper

Category: Femi Orebe

  • PDP: Reaping the whirlwind

    PDP: Reaping the whirlwind

    Why would a party chairman attract so many enemies?

    Up until Friday last week, everything pointed to my having to write, again, on Livingston, an enchanting Scottish town which I arrived some two weeks ago and about which I had written as follows on 26 June, 2011: ‘located approximately 25 km west of Edinburgh and 50 km east of Glasgow, Livingston is the fourth post-war new town in Scotland. Adorned every inch of the way by enthralling greenery, it is built around a collection of small villages – Livingston Village, Bells quarry and Livingston Station. The population, as at 2008 was estimated to be around 63,160 and the name dates back to the 12th Century when a Flemish entrepreneur, De Leving, built a fortified tower and the settlement around it became known as Levingstoun, Layingston and, eventually Livingston. Livingston is, without a doubt, a visitor’s delight’.

    I, however, woke up that morning, convinced this was no time to afghanistise, as truly momentous events are happening back home, the most important being the literally irreversible – Nigerians must endeavour to make it permanently irreversible – dismemberment of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP); a party which, through trickery and unimaginable dare-devilry, has succeeded in holding Nigeria down since 1999 when a military mafia divined it into being to keep its members’ loots safe. What that means, in essence, is that PDP has been true to its proprietors, and what little extra it has done ever since, is to increase the rate of rent seeking in the country. Nigeria has therefore not progressed an inch in spite of its massive resources and the cheap propaganda about transformation. It must be conceded, however, that there has been some transformation in corruption. We now have pension scams, almost unknown before, just as all manner of stratagems are now in place to steal the huge oil resources, among them, fraudulent oil subsidy payments, some to children of PDP’s past chairmen, and totally incredible levels of oil theft, even when billions are being paid to some contractors to stave off same.

    What then underpins PDP’s unraveling which, if successful, will ultimately redound to the benefit of Nigeria? Because it is made up largely of politicians without conscience, and cohered solely by patronage, PDP has severally found itself at the brink, but yet clawed back from disaster. Based largely on its performance, this article will examine the urgency of a necessary PDP break up if Nigeria must survive to take its rightful place in the sun. Storming out of its impunity- driven mini convention at which members rights were serially abridged on Saturday, 31 August, 2013, former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, alongside seven governors and some very senior party men, described the move as an attempt to ‘save the PDP from the antics of a few desperadoes who have no democratic temperament and are bent on hijacking the party for selfish ends’. Kawu Abubakar Baraje, chairman of the group, added that they are out to check the dictatorship which had resulted in political repression, restrictions on freedom of association and arbitrary suspension of members’. Deep down, however, it is well known that what is in contention is the question of a level playing field for the diverse groups and interests towards the 2015 presidential election which is , of course, seen majorly as an opportunity to continue to bleed the country. Whereas Jonathan and his gerontocrats want automatic selection for the president, his opponents want him completely out of contention having, they allege, severally promised to spend only one term in office

    If its members could dress their differences in such fancy language, not so Nigerians who had, for these many years, been at the receiving end of a totally clueless party whose policies have ensured that Nigeria is stuck within the lowest rungs of the Human Development Index like forever, with its latest ranking captured as follows: ‘Nigeria’s HDI value for 2012 is 0.471 –in the low human development category – positioning it at 153 out of 187 countries and territories’ with a life expectancy of 52. 3 years –Ekiti’s is 55 years plus – while Ghana ranks 135th with a life expectancy of 64.2. This parlous state of affairs includes a decrepit national infrastructure stock as well as an education system gone berserk. University teachers have been on strike since July, 2013.

    While the party, from inception, has had no redeeming features, driven as it is only by selfish motivations, its case worsened when President Obasanjo assumed all powers and brutally co-opted all its organs. He would hence forth appoint and dispense with party chairmen, chose and inflicted presidential candidates and did whatever it was he craved. When, therefore, Jonathan says Obasanjo caused the party’s problems, I interpret it to mean that the imperious Chairman Tukur sees himself in the Obasanjo mold. Unfortunately, the new chairman has no style; but rather reminds you of Peter Drucker’s authoritarian manager. Somebody needs to tell him that he is neither Obasanjo nor an elected president. It should be Nigerians’ wish, however, that he does not come down from his high horse. Why, for instance, would a party chairman, if he were busy, attract so many enemies and fights at the same time? Alhaji Bamanga Tukur is either fighting his home state governor, so he could install his son as governor come 2015, or fighting the governor Amaechi –led governors’ forum; he is either refusing to hold meetings of the party’s national executive or dissolving state Executive committees; Tukur is either calling founding leaders like Atiku Abubakar rascals or threatening to single-handedly declare legislative seats vacant. He needs a rude awakening but I am sincerely praying that, for the sake of Nigeria, President Jonathan would choose to retain him. In many articles before former president Obasanjo succeeded in persuading an otherwise reticent Jonathan to discount PDP’s zoning formula I, alongside many other Nigerians, pleaded with him to moderate his ambition to contest the 2011 election in the belief that four, or at most eight years down the line, he would have a very legitimate claim to the candidacy of his party and that Nigerians were most unlikely to forget his self abnegation. His insistence, and subsequent victory, at the presidential polls, has been partly responsible for the indescribable tension, even the escalating terrorism, in the country ever since. Only this past week, there were conflicting claims as to whether or not we lost some of our hard fighting men of the military to the irritants called Boko Haram. If only a Vice President Jonathan had remembered that there is always the day after! Finally , unrestrained impunity at all its levels, will account for a significant portion of the reasons the PDP went kaput, as it must, if Nigeria must escape the doom starring it in the face under a PDP stranglehold.

    I must, as usual, end this article with a word for the APC which stands to gain from PDP’s many troubles but which must, of necessity watch out for the crowd of politicians who may be opting to join it. The PDP, APC must remember, is a past master in planting moles and agents at very high levels in opposition parties. AD learnt too late and could only watch in utter bewilderment when its erstwhile chairman, Abdulkadir, and where is he today, became a presidential adviser to Obasanjo just as the ANPP did not know what hit it when its own chairman crawled, on all fours, to the PDP. The old PDP is desperate and the presidency will not shy away from deliberately suborning some desperate individuals to move into the APC, armed with a fat purse, to buy positions in which incalculable damage can be done to the party. Long before the schism, PDP was aggressively recruiting some self-opinionated members of the progressive political wing, bribing them with gubernatorial slots on either PDP or on any of its midget allies, like the Labour Party; promising them limitless funding and the tacit support of the country’s security agencies. Last word: Let APC put nothing beyond the Peoples Democratic Party and its serpentine allies.

  • As PDP unravels, where is Ekiti PDP?

    As PDP unravels, where is Ekiti PDP?

    If Ekiti PDP has always been fractious, its problems have now quintupled as the falcon can no longer hear the falconer.

    It the best of times, it is the tradition of the Ekiti PDP to have no idea about any matter, however serious, or pedestrian, until they have visited Ota.  Even at a time when former governor Gbenga Daniel gave Obasanjo, even as President, no quarters whatever in the affairs of  his native Ogun State PDP, our friends in Ekiti would still first visit with Baba or, at the very worst, divine his innermost cravings. Thus, at a point, it became impossible for Ekiti to nominate a candidate as federal minister on its own; and once, when they went beyond their bounds and nominated Dayo Adeyeye, it only took President Obasanjo enough time to remember that the prince was his nemesis as Publicity Secretary of Afenifere, and so, promptly collapsed the party’s temerity and Adeyeye’s earnest hopes.

    These were the thoughts running through my mind this past week as I posed the following question to the ekitipanupo web portal: Wither Ekiti PDP, as the ‘largest rally in Africa’ unravels?

    As I tried to sketch above, at no point in time had the party in Ekiti being as free as you found in Oyo, Osun, Ondo or in Gbenga Daniel’s Ogun. The few times President Obasanjo busied himself with state matters, any of Bode George, the late Baba Adedibu or Senator Omisore took charge; took as much contracts as he wanted or arranged charter flights  for the current governor, however transient. Indeed, when matters came to a head, our dear governors were not unknown to have run to a paramount ruler outside the state to help out. An instance was when an overbearing chieftain of the party was going to overawe the state governor with his  relationship with a top Abuja government official to get a seat on the National Executive Council of the party and the governor had to dash to Kabiyesi for succour.

    It must be said though, that at that time, all Southwest chapters respected the former president as it predated the current Buruji Kasamu’s suzerainty which has seen leading lights of the Obasanjo group shoved aside, even from posts to which they were elected.

    No thanks to a combination of President Jonathan and a rambunctious Chairman Tukur.

    Therefore, with the Presidency reportedly of the view that Obasanjo is behind the present crisis ravaging the party, whither Ekiti PDP?  Kasamu’s desire to add Ekiti to his Ogun conquest must have informed his boast to spend a billion naira on the Ekiti election, knowing full well that once his PDP people hear about money, all sense is lost.

    So what exactly is their permutation; which of the Tukur /Baraje groups offers the best for their chimerical hopes, for 2014 in Ekiti? This is the problem that must literally be eating them up now and I won’t be surprised if all manner of diviners, soothsayers and marabouts are already smiling to their banks. It becomes worse when one remembers that there are no less than 16 wannabe governors within their ranks.

    Writing in answer to the question was Wale Adeoye, a brilliant journalist, and Senior Special Assistant in the Fayemi administration. I shall quote him at some length. Wrote Wale: ‘The Ekiti and South West PDP are in a fix. It is unlikely they will come out unscathed. The Tukur faction, by crook and arm-twisting, will dominate the scene. The two sides are not fighting any ideological war. The Tukur faction wants the President, probably because he has paid his material price for the bidding or the pudding. The Baraje group, in turn, wants power so as to enhance the diminishing influence of the northern (Hausa-Fulani) oligarchy. Neither Tukur nor Baraje has told us that the battle is informed by the interest of Nigeria or Nigerians; neither has either disagreed with the ruinous economic policies of the PDP at the national and local frontiers. The devil is split in two: one is a rattle-snake, the other a scorpion. None is useful to mankind, not even for the eating, except to isolate and kill them before they finally pour their insidious venom on society. The Ekiti and South West PDP are split along the two divides: OBJ is an opportunist, trying to exploit the crack to full advantage. In reality, he is a vocal, devilish authority, but in praxis, he lacks any compelling political structure. Atiku, the knight of treacherous adventures, is using the PDM as a platform to destabilise the setting; to pave the way for his personal ambition or, at worst, to ensure the emergence of his crony as the next president. OBJ is not comfortable with Atiku, but for the plot against the President, he needs to surge at the hawk first, before he could chastise the rebellious, back-stabbing musketeers on his heels. This crisis has exposed the barrenness of the PDP, its lack of tact, its destructive antics, its lows, its self-seeking man-oeuvres and the imminence of its collapse as one of history’s most heinous political institutions.’ He then warns: ‘Let the progressive forces be aware: we need a movement; a movement in alliance with labour, students, workers, seafarers, haves and havenots, rich and poor, dregs and royals, to rise up and agree on the need to stop the PDP in all its deceitful shapes, come 2015.’

    If Ekiti PDP has always been fractious, its problems have now quintupled as the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. If the Oni group can be said to have been weakened by the vicissitudes Obasanjo suffered in the hands of Buruji Kasamu working as a Jonathan/Tukur hireling, the Fayose/Olubolade group, which won its rancorous convention, has uproariously atomised, with both men sparing no lurid word in publicly describing each other. While Akin Omole of the Oni group, who lost the chairmanship election, has since been in court asking it to send packing the incumbent state chairman, Makanjuola Ogundipe, on the grounds that members of the state executive committee came in through a manipulated congress election, as if rigging is not their party’s middle name, Ogundipe has, in turn, threatened to haul Omole before the enforcer, Chairman Tukur, for anti- party activities.

    Things have gotten even worse. There had been serial mutual suspensions of party chieftains, including both Fayose and Ogundipe.  Fisticuffs, cutlasses, guns and charms have also been brought into play with a former Speaker of the Ekiti State House of Assembly a major victim. Abuja has, as expected, done its usual abracadabra; rescinding Fayose’s suspension while tenaciously holding to the consensus arrangement which is the very reason Fayose is fighting to the death. In the meantime, the Oni group has been further affected by the publicised exit of Professor Lola Borisade to energise the PDM which is guaranteed to be Atiku’s next platform to confront the Obasanjo/Lamido group. And that will be the duel! Therefore, even if the Oni group, which is the single most cohesive group, joins the new PDP in the meantime, the romance will most likely be short-lived as most of the 16 aspiring to win the guber slot are likely to tilt towards the Jonathan group which, with power behind it, will most probably thump the new. But, in the meantime, fearing a mass defection into the new PDP in the state, the President will most probably go back on his erstwhile support for his Police Affairs Minister who, of course, has nowhere else to go besides the president’s group.

    That exactly is where the Ekiti PDP is today; their jigsaw puzzle, in no man’s land, marooned and, literally leaderless. Even then, in the most unlikely event that the party resolves its many problems, national and state, where is the PDP going to start from in Ekiti? Is it from its dismal failure to attract any meaningful federal project to the state in 14 years of their party’s stranglehold on the country? Is it in the federal government’s pernicious marginalisation of the Yoruba in the affairs of the country such that you cannot count a single Yoruba man in the topmost 10 jobs in the country? Is it the fact that nothing of substance stands to the memory of PDP’s seven years of locust in Ekiti? Compare that miserable record with the exploits of the Fayemi administration which, in under three years, has touched every nook and cranny of the state, having a minimum of at least one project in EVERY town, village or community; continuously impacting every segment of governance and very positively presenting the state to the world as a caring government via programmes like the monthly stipends to the elderly and the multi-birth care, to mention but a few.

    So to the question, I answer: Ekiti PDP is certainly in the doldrums.

  • Oladeji Fasuan: The consumate administrator at 82

    Oladeji Fasuan: The consumate administrator at 82

    Chief Fasuan’s working life reads like a history of the economic cum industrial
    development of the old West Region, and later, that of Ondo and Ekiti State

    When I last wrote about Chief Oladeji Fasuan, a man of razor-sharp intellect, he was 77 and that was on 7 September, 2008. He has since added five more glorious years of solid and continuous service to the nation, Nigeria, to Ekiti state and to the Are-Afao community of Ekiti state which I have the divine privilege of sharing with him. A man of many parts and gargantuan capabilities, Chief Fasuan will answer his Maker serving God and humanity. His illustrious contribution to the industrial growth of Western Nigeria in the golden Awolowo days, his service in Ondo state, especially during the administration of Papa Adekunle Ajasin, and his unequalled contribution to the Ekiti state creation, have all become folklore just as his sterling, and continuing service to our Alma Mata, Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti, will remain indelible. Without a doubt, the word ‘service’ can, with considerable justification, double as his middle name.

    I always consider it a privilege whenever I have the opportunity of paying deserved tribute to those of our icons who have, in their life time, left their names on the sands of time. I have done so for many which include, but are not limited to: Chief Alex Olu Ajayi, Chief Fola Alade, Chief Dele Falegan, Prince Juli Adelusi Faluyi, Professors Banji Akintoye, O.O Akinkugbe, Bolaji Akinyemi and Jide Osuntokun, Chief (Dr) JGO Adegbite and my inimitable Primary School teacher, Chief Fajana; men whose names command instant recognition from the services they have rendered to humanity in their various callings. These writings have been motivated , never by any sense of patronage, but by the Yoruba saying: yin ni yin ni, ko le se mi – meaning that where you show appreciation, you do not only encourage that person to do more but you are, indeed, asking others to emulate these good deeds towards God and humanity. Without a scintilla of doubt, Chief Oladeji Fasuan deserves this decent mention in this highest circulating newspaper in the country -The Nation.

    Chief Fasuan eagerly, indeed with a sense of pride, admits his humble beginnings. It is for this reason that his forthcoming autobiography is titled: The Back wood Boy -Scaling through Accidents of Life -An Autobiography. It has therefore been through God’s grace and by dint of hard work that he rose to become what he is today. Born to the family of Samson and Alice Fasuan of Afao-Ekiti on September 6, 1931, he attended St Andrew’s Primary School, Are-Ekiti, between 1939-45 and sixty eight years later today, he still carries with him his first school leaving certificate, eloquently attesting to his incredible care about things that matter. He proceeded from there to Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti, ’46 -51 and for his higher education , he attended the University College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, where he was between 1955-59, graduating with a B.A ( Econs) degree. He later attended, at various times in his chequered professional career, some short but specialized courses like that at the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank in ’72 and earlier at the Universities of Ife, Ibadan and Pittsburg, United States of America.

    As I wrote in my 2008 article, Chief Fasuan’s working life reads like a history of the economic cum industrial development of the old Western Region, and later, that of Ondo and Ekiti States , all rolled into one. The result is that apart from the executive positions he held in such institutions as the Western Region Investment and Credit Corporation (IICC), where he served as General Manager, same as he would later hold at the Ondo state Investment Corporation , he was Permanent Secretary in such key ministries as Economic Planning and Statistics, Chieftaincy Review Commission, Agric Credit Commission and, later, General Manager, Ondo State Water Corporation . He also served on the boards of the O’dua Investment co ltd, West African Portland Cement, Nigerian Breweries, Dunlop among many others and was chairman , Odua Textile Mills, Ado-Ekiti and Owena Motels Ltd. At the federal level, he served between ’99 -2004, as Commissioner on the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, Abuja. His various communities have also tasted of his public spiritedness. A three time Chairman of the Christ’s School Board of Governors, he was member, later chairman of the Ekiti government Advisory council between 2003-2006, member, Ekiti state joint account committee, 2004-2006, the same time he was chairman, Ekiti Elders Committee and Baba Ijo, St David’s Anglican Church, Afao -Ekiti, from 2002 to date.

    Important as all these are to Chief Fasuan, nothing compares to his Chairmanship of the committee for the creation of Ekiti (1991-1996) which he regards as the climax of his public service and the fruition of the Ekiti struggle for self determination which had started way back 1876 with the Kiriji wars which pitched the Ekiti Confederate Army against Ibadan. Chief Fasuan’s incomparable exertions towards that historic achievement have been severally commended. Among those who have done this is His Royal Majesty, Oba Rufus Adejugbe, the Ewi of Ado-Ekiti who wrote about Chief Fasuan as follows:’ In the cause of our interactions, I discovered that chief Fasuan is a very pleasant individual, an upright man who does not only want people to work with him openly without any secret agenda, but also that people should place their cards on the table face upwards. It is on record that his tireless and heroic efforts contributed immensely to the creation of Ekiti state. I see Chief Deji Fasuan in the likes of Sir Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. These are people who gave up the comfort and pleasures of the world in order to build up others and make them comfortable in life. Such people are Christ-like. They are men who aimed at higher values and pursued them relentlessly, not minding the sacrifices until such values are attained. Such people are heroes and sources of inspiration for all times’.

    At 82, Chief Fasuan does not suffer fools gladly. A highly informed commentator on public affairs, his latest contribution to public discuss was the one on the raging controversy over whether or not Local Governments should be granted autonomy; a thoroughly harebrained idea of the National Assembly which is apparently indulging in an unnecessary fishing expedition because its members simply do not know how best to serve the Nigerian nation. In chief Fasuan’s views, not only should the federal government have nothing to do with Local Governments, that tier of government should, indeed, be scrapped as only the state and the federal are the federating units. It is his belief that local governments add no value, but rather, that they are centres of corruption. It is the view of this columnist that all monies going to states should, in fact, go to the states and that it should be left to states to create the number of Local Government areas it desires and administer them without the slightest intrusion by any other arm of government. Indeed, for maximum effectiveness, Local Governments should be structured as extensions of the State government with the primary duty of helping it deepen good governance and development but certainly not as centres of opposition. Their creation should therefore be an executive action since there are instances where the ruling party does not have a majority in the state House of Assembly. This obvious truism, which we demonise and run away from, is the lone reason state governments do everything to win elections in ALL LGA’s, including the latest exemplar in Kwara State where the PDP candidate was declared winner in the re rerun election in the Offa LG in spite of the fact that the opposition, APC candidate won in 11 out of 12 wards. As long as anything other than what is being suggested here is in place, Nigeria will continue to have problems with regards to that tier of government. Autonomy being canvassed by the National Assembly is in total contradiction to the constitution which grants states the right to create Local Governments. Or what type of autonomy from the mother is the National Assembly canvassing for the child?

    – Chief Deji Fasuan is the Jagunmolu of Ado-Ekiti and the Agbaakin of Omuaran, Kwara state.

    Here is wishing him long life in glorious health.

  • South West APC leaders must beware

    South West APC leaders must beware

    “People who always want to have their ways at all cost and never provide better arguments but rather want to force their petty ideas on others are anarchists and pocket despots who will ultimately fail’ -AWO, during the Omoboriowo crisis  in Ondo state, exactly 30 years ago (1983).”

    Something is afoot in the South West APC and it is guaranteed to negatively affect the party if its leaders will not face up to it and deal squarely with it now that they still can. I am not one to speak from two sides of the mouth as neither my being Ekiti, nor having the rare privilege of being educated at Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti, will permit it.. I have written previously on this page about the PDP’s plan to encircle the South West in a pincer-like movement, effective 2014, using mostly disgruntled or over ambitious ‘members’ of the progressive camp who, our leaders, unfortunately, believe are beyond reproach. And if care is not taken, these ‘gentlemen’ will, before their very eyes, emerge the Labour Party gubernatorial candidates in their respective states and there would be nothing they can do.

    Something tells me this is a well-funded PDP project being coordinated by two Southwest governors, one serving, the other ex. At the recent launch of Prof Ropo Sekoni’s book at the Muson Centre, Lagos, one of these individuals, confessed that much to both Professor Akin Oyebode and myself. And this is where a too trusting Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, whose name, one of them keeps dropping at the drop of a hat, readily comes in.

    Without a scintilla of doubt, but behind his back, I must have used close to a million words defending Tinubu at several fora in the past 10 years, all because I believe in what he represents. And this has nothing to do with my writing for The Nation newspaper. Anyway, The Nation was not established 10 years ago. I have told all who care to listen how, long before he became governor, he had been promoting and extending the frontiers of democracy. I have written about how he mobilised and sent, both Hon Wale Oshun and now, Senator Femi Lanlehin, with funds to a West African country to assist in the campaign of a presidential candidate long before he became governor. Today, hardly does any official event happen in Lagos without representations from Ghana and Sierra-Leone, owing largely to his political reach. And, but for him, nobody knows where exactly Obasanjo would have left Yoruba land. I never cease to pray that the good Lord will continue to lead him aright. Directly on his handling of the removal of Hon Bamidele as Chairman of the Ekiti ACN Caucus in the House of Representatives, an event for which many Nigerians commended the discipline and orderliness in the party, Opeyemi gleefully came back to Ekiti to tell his few followers that Asiwaju merely came to Ekiti to play politics and that he supports his aspirations all the way. Though we know this is what Fela would have called shakara, such talk, unfortunately, emboldens his misguided supporters who, unknown to Asiwaju, have also been assured of federal support in matters involving the police.

    Full scale disturbances have therefore occurred each time Ope visited the state with APC members always being at the receiving end because it is also a PDP plan since the Police Affairs Minister, an Ekiti and a wannabe gubernatorial candidate, is on orders to deal with APC members.

    In respect of this plan, I recently wrote somewhere as follows: ‘We are inching toward the final denouement. This scenario will soon play out in both Ekiti and Osun States where elections are due next year. Starting innocuously, sleeping agents of the PDP, who are otherwise APC ‘members’, but inexorably destined for the Labour Party will, acting as agent provocateurs, mess up the current peace in the South West. The police, in turn, would thereby get the alibi they need to arrest and detain, indefinitely, targeted leaders of the APC as has happened to the Interim APC Chairman, Mr Jide Awe. Now, the plot has shifted to the governor’s Special Adviser on Security, who usually foils their many evil plans and whose town, Iyin -Ekiti, was the latest of Hon Bamidele’s hot spots, backed by members of the Dr Fasehun wing of the OPC. Reminds one of the new UPN!

    The plot is aimed at crippling the APC ahead of the 2014 election. If they succeed in Ekiti, Osun will be next. It is all a strategic bating which is not the brainwave of dunderheads, but a well-choreographed scheme of evil geniuses hell bent on having the South West under their stranglehold again. Indeed, mere writing about them is dangerous enough, but write we must if democracy must survive in this land.

    In a private letter to Hon Bamidele this past week, Igede-based Abiola Olufemi affirmed that the legislator had actually started holding nocturnal meetings all over the state long before the Appeal Court decided in favour of Fayemi, all in the hope of contesting against him. He wrote him in 2011:’ You were sending rice and vegetable oil all around the state and preparing the ground for your contest as you thought Fayemi was going to lose at the Appeal Court. But to your amazement, Fayemi became governor and rather than support him, you were too bitter about the senatorial ticket given to Ojudu. That was why you started branding Fayemi a non-performer, bandying about 2006 census figures in order to pillory the governor. I was so miffed that I had to react with an article I titled “Opeyemi Bamidele’s Selective Amnesia”. Rather than change, you granted more than ten interviews within two days, sounding more hysterical than ever. Like many of your concoctions, you claimed that the leadership had not endorsed Fayemi.

    For the avoidance of doubt, you have as much right as anyone to aspire to be governor. But I ask: were you truly attacked? In this computer age, social media and the lot, you failed to provide a single photo or video evidence of the attacks. Where are the scars or the wounds? Where are Jaruu’s marks on you? I don’t really like him, but I don’t also think you should demonise him in your attempt to make Fayemi look bad! The latest claim of attack from your camp has its roots in an incident that happened at a party in your hometown of Iyin-Ekiti on Friday, 23 August, 2013. Jaruu was uncharacteristically cool under your boys’ provocation but Niyi Apase who came later with his fellow members of the Gani Adam faction of the OPC couldn’t stomach it when your Fredrick Faseun faction of the OPC attacked him. You saw it all, but never called them to order since it would make a good spin for the tabloid.’

    I quoted that letter at some length for the reading public to know the truth about these many ‘attacks’ on Opeyemi. I know, first hand, both in his quest for the Senate and this one, that party leaders sincerely pleaded with Hon Bamidele to take things easy. In the Senate case which he never ceases to claim he won, I know, as a member of the ACN state screening committee, appointed by the National Chairman of the party, that the election was inconclusive as the rerun never took place owing to threats of ‘war’. In the current case, I am equally aware that long before the party leaders came to Ekiti to endorse Fayemi, both Chief Bisi Akande and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu met with the duo and actually believed they had settled it all, but Opeyemi did not do any of the things he promised the party leaders.

    In conclusion, I will like to plead with those close to Hon Bamidele to let him know that he needs no alibi to move to another party, if he must, to fulfill his ambition rather than take us back to those rancorous days of the PDP in Ekiti.

  • APC Vs PDP

    APC Vs PDP

     The common saying that wars are won in the map room cuts no ice with the PDP

    One major difference Nigerians would soon come to see between the All Progressives Congress and the ossifying Peoples Democratic Party is the amount of intellectual rigour the APC will put into the formulation of its policies, programmes and governance, as against the sheer vacuity we have come to know with the PDP in the past 14 years; a situation so reminiscent of the NPN when Awo observed then that while he was busy working at solutions to the country’s problems those in that party were carousing around women of easy virtue. So languid has PDP become that, under Chairman Tukur, its National Executive Committee hardly meets , as and when due, but yet, as if in a payback for a Second Republic favour done him, he went all the way to exhume the octogenarian Umaru Dikko to head the party’s disciplinary committee. It doesn’t get more surreal. Nor can you ever hear of a think tank in connection with the PDP. Rather, what it has in quantum is a rash of reconciliation committees: first, the Tukur Reconciliation Committee; then the Anenih and, now the Seriake Dickson Committee which was launched a while ago with the usual PDP bravura, mirroring uncannily, the presidential flag off of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway project on which nothing else, other than a crippling traffic snafu that takes you four hours to reach Lagos from the Redeemed church camp, has happened since. Nor will the Dickson Committee be the last as jockeying for the presidential and gubernatorial tickets in the party is about to commence in full. We should therefore expect to still see the mother of all Reconciliation Committees. The common saying that wars are won in the map room cuts no ice with the PDP. Otherwise, why would they mess up a whole former President, yank off members of his group even from elective positions only to come back, running helter skelter, seeking rapprochement and asking him to reconcile their warring governors?

    On the contrary, APC leaders, in these few weeks, but much longer in states where they are in charge of governments, have showcased their awareness that governance is no tea party nor is it about ‘family dinners’. The grim faces of the party’s leading lights -Akande, Buhari, Masari and others, as appeared on the front pages of many newspapers on Thursday, 22 August, 2013, at the launch of its manifesto, says it all. The entire week before that, party leaders and the party’s intellectual wing have been holed up in Abuja, working at the details of how to take Nigeria out of what the party calls Nigeria’s ‘ paralysis of 14 years’. Through some hard-headed interrogation, the party was able to flesh up its 8-point Agenda of: (1) War against corruption (2) Food security (3) Accelerated power supply (4) Integrated transport network (5) Free education (6) Devolution of power (7) Accelerated economic growth and, (8) Affordable health care,into what has been publicly announced to Nigerians as its Manifesto.

    Nigerians are well aware of the score card of the PDP on each of the issues contained in that Agenda. Therefore, none needs be reminded about how the EFCC has all along been shackled in the performance of its duties under the supervision of an Attorney-General who must give prior approval to any case it intends to bring against those it has investigated and who, in most cases, have links to the ruling party. We have also seen how anti-corruption agencies, especially the EFCC, have again regressed into tools against the political opposition as is currently the case with the EFCC in Rivers State where like attack dogs, it is going ferociously after state officials in the wake of Wike’s promise to make life unbearable for the state governor. Corruption, under the PDP, has manifested in every aspect of our national life: in pension scams which ensure that some of our senior citizens die on queues waiting for their pension payments, in oil and gas, the mainstay of the nation’s economy where massive scams and oil thefts are the order of the day in spite of huge oil security contracts to sons of the soil; in the federation account being deliberately, massively shortchanged, in a single minister allegedly running up multi billion naira air travel bill, with no higher official of state able to rein her in; in diminishing power generation and distribution in spite of lies of hoping to become one of the world’s topmost 20 economies in year 2020; in increasing poverty and an unemployment rate that has certainty become a time bomb since majority of the victims, being university graduates, actually need no further lessons in how to make Molotov cocktails to make life more horrible for all of us.

    Indeed, the PDP is too consumed with its own internal headache to think of solutions to these multifarious problems facing the country. Granted that it belatedly declared emergency in some states where Boko Haram had already established over lordship in certain areas and flew its flag, it was no doubt the equivalent of bolting the door too late. Such is the state of our insecurity today that poor Oyo State traders have twice been slaughtered in the north. You will not but wonder what constitutes the PDP’s manifesto which, of course, must have been written on the most expensive paper and published in glossy fashion since ‘it is the largest party in Africa’. You would almost think size is the issue, the way they bandy that about.

    Operating from the background that Nigeria is already “trapped in a vicious cycle of political crises, social upheavals and economic under-development, and has, in fact, become, not only one of the most unstable countries in the world, but regrettably, one of the poorest despite its huge human and material resource endowments, the APC, after some serious brainstorming, has come up with a party manifesto. In the words of the Interim National Chairman of the party, Chief Bisi Akande, the following are the issues the APC would eagerly devote its all to as a way of getting Nigeria out of its ‘near permanent trauma’:

    It shall vigorously pursue the expansion of electricity generation and distribution of up to 40,000 megawatts in 4-8 years as power is the centre-point of the development process which, if inefficient, impacts negatively on any economy. Concerning corruption, the party says it will fight it by granting independence to the anti corruption agencies and repeal all laws inhibiting their performance. It promises to embark on public sensitisation campaigns against corruption and to encourage whistle blowers in the anti-graft vanguard. Special anti-corruption courts will be established and remove immunity from prosecution for elected officers in criminal cases just as it will prevent abuse of executive, legislative and public offices through greater accountability, transparency and strict enforcement of anti-corruption laws.

    On the much needed restructuring of the country, an APC Federal Government will initiate action to amend the constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal Spirit. Regarding national security and defence, the party says it will decentralise the police and expand its local content to include community policing.

    It promises to urgently address capacity building of law enforcement agents in terms of quantity and quality and to establish a well-trained, adequately funded and fully equipped, serious crime squad, to combat terrorism, kidnapping, armed robbery, militancy, ethno-religious and communal clashes nationwide. It will also push for more support in the security and economic stability of the sub-region (ECOWAS) and AU as a whole and maintain a strong, close and frank relationship with the international community. It will also secure our borders, which are currently too porous for effective control. For this purpose, it will establish a National Coast Guard to protect Nigeria’s coastal waters.”

    On the economy, it promises to ensure that the Nigerian economy is one of the fastest growing emerging economies in the world. It will embark on vocational training, entrepreneurial, and skills acquisition schemes for graduates along with the creation of small Business Loan Guarantee Scheme to create at least 1million new jobs every year, for the foreseeable future.

    It will create additional middle-class of at least 1 million new home owners in its first year in government and one million annually thereafter, by enacting a national mortgage system that will lend at single digit interest rates for purchase of owner occupier houses.”

    The above, and much more, is what the APC has in store for Nigerians and I urge all Nigerians, including those currently trapped in the clueless party, to come over into the APC and take possession. It is ours and we must rise up and make it a mass movement because it means well for all.

  • APC, Awo’s predicted synthesis, must walk the talk

    APC, Awo’s predicted synthesis, must walk the talk

    The starting point for the new party, therefore, is to ask: what do Nigerians want and what vision of this sleeping giant does it see a few decades down the line? 

    Time was 1983 and the NPN had just rumbled through the country courtesy its ignoble ‘moon slide’ victory of that year and, like Dr Reuben Abati just did, talking down to Chief Bisi Akande, the interim Chairman of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Chuba Okadigbo, himself then a presidential spokesperson, was waxing lyrical, calling both Zik and Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim, the highly regarded GNPP leader, unprintable names and asking them to shut up or be summarily dealt with.

    It was in that circumstances, the Avatar, the ever clairvoyant Awo, made the prediction, a whole 30 years ahead, which is today uncannily unfolding before our very eyes. Summarising the events of that year’s general elections, one in which the writer was an active observer-participant, Awo made it clear that by its own hands, the then ruling NPN has self-destruct by acting like the thief who took far more than the owner. NPN had then just rummaged through the length and breadth of Nigeria, even claiming to have won in Oyo and Ondo states, both in Awo’s impregnable Western Region.

    Consequently, at a well attended congress of the UPN in Abeokuta on Thursday, 15 December, ’83, he declared as follows: ‘The goal of dialectic process is perfection. It aims at the perfect attainment of all the virtues embodied in it. Whether we like it or not, all human beings are inescapably involved in the binary compounds of thesis and antithesis of the dialectical procession. In other words, all of us in the UPN and those of them in the NPN and other parties are already in the thesis-antithesis war. When the war is over, only the best of us will be accommodated in the synthesis, with the best in the antithesis in complete dominance’. Going forward, Papa said: ‘I do not hesitate to aver, in all sincerity and solemnity, that the NPN, together with its political regime and all that it stands for, symbolises the thesis, and that the UPN together with all those who are conscientiously and honestly opposed to the NPN, symbolizes the antithesis. The war between the two is already being waged with vehemence and inflexible resolve. Sooner or later, I believe much sooner than later -the figurative ‘explosion’ will occur in which the forces of the thesis and the antithesis, in their original forms, will disappear. Then the synthesis will appear which will embody the best in the NPN (thesis) and the best in the UPN (antithesis). But the dominant feature of the synthesis will be the best in the UPN’.

    As those words rang out that historic morning in the historic Olumo city at which the writer was present, what they poignantly brought back to me , especially when Papa talked of the ‘figurative explosion’, were my classes in Dialectical Materialism at the great university of Ife, Ile-Ife, as taught by one of the very best in the business, my teacher per excellence, Dr Segun Osoba.

    How prescient Chief Awolowo remains was beautifully captured by Chief Jide Awe, the Ekiti state interim Chairman of APC, as state governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi, hoisted the APC flag in the state to the great admiration and acclamation of a huge crowd of jubilating leaders, members and supporters of the brand new party on Monday, 12 August, 2013 at Ado-Ekiti, the state capital.

    In a recent article in The Nation of Monday, 12 August, 2013, entitled :’ History, civil war and haunted house’, The Chairman of The Nation’s Editorial Board, Sam Omatsheye, wondered aloud as to how today’s events uncannily mirror the immediate pre civil war events in our country.

    One good example of things remaining largely the same, apart from the crass insecurity that envelopes the country, was how egregiously the PDP, like NPN before it, rigged the 2011 presidential elections especially in states in the North where the CPC actually won and, to cover up, found a solution in discrediting a just and redoubtable Judge who they never wanted to head the Presidential election Tribunal which they knew would have exhumed their electoral malfeasance. The very first thing the reconstituted Election Tribunal did, therefore, was to upturn all the reliefs the earlier panel had granted Buhari , including access to election materials and presentation before it of the database of the voters’ register.

    That, however, belongs to history and what must now concern us is a determination not to let our inability to learn from history repeat itself. Not many believed that APC’s registration would ever see the light of day and what did PDP not do to make it impossible? Working through agents external, and lackeys within the top echelons of the Electoral Commission, all manner of spurious, wannabe political parties with the acronym APC sprung up, one of them hurriedly filed by a self-confessed baby lawyer. It would later go to court hoping that its sponsors would be able to orchestrate the type of legal shenanigans that ensured Justice Salami’s matter was permanently before the courts. Like baby Moses in the holy writ, everything was done to abort APC but it is now here and about. It is now it’s bounden duty to shoulder those critical responsibilities Awo foresaw in what he called the Synthesis.

    The starting point for the new party, therefore, is to ask: what do Nigerians want and what vision of this sleeping giant does it see a few decades down the line? The Yoruba say, if you do not know where you are coming from, you will, at least, know where exactly you are headed. PDP, as a party and government, has taken Nigeria through a rudderless decade and a half and if Nigerians do not vote right, come 2015, this visionless party may just achieve its hoped-for 60 years and more.

    Without a doubt, circumstances in the country today are much more perilous than in the days of Awo and his contemporaries as, though a civil war we may have fought, nothing compared then to today’s Boko Haram which, as Abuja slept away until Obasanjo reminded them of something called carrot and stick, had carved out for itself, swathes of territory in a part of the country. Indeed nothing, not our epileptic power situation, nor the ravaging unemployment, more poignantly demonstrates the utter vacuity of the Jonathan administration than what Boko Haram has done, and continues to do to this country. Without peace, no government can embark, talk less of achieving, any meaningful economic development. Today, both Syria and Egypt are in shambles and one needs no rocket science to know that programmes for economic development must have taken a back seat in both countries.

    There is, obviously a crying need for infrastructural development, for stable power to jump start industrial and other economic activities just as unemployment, especially among our young graduates has to be tackled head-on. Corruption too has become so systemic that some concerned Nigerians are now planning to go on demonstrations in both the U.K and the U.S to draw international attention to our circumstances as the federal government has proved completely incapable of fighting it since it is actually its mainstay and hope for 2015.

    In order to make meaningful corrections and achieve much more, however, leaders of the new party must realise that they have the daunting task of going far beyond the merger. Reactions to my last week article were replete with accusations of lack of internal democracy -they called it imposition of candidates, – of religious extremism and ethnicity, amongst the leaders of the merged political parties just as many felt sure the party will most probably collapse on the altar of uncontrollable self-interest, especially when it comes to choosing its presidential candidate. These are all very weighty matters and although thus far, these leaders have demonstrated considerable self abnegation, much more will- power will be needed in subsuming self interest for the good of this very unhealthy country. Ego must be scrupulously kept in check and the leaders must ensure unimpeachable process of choosing its candidates for all elections, state, federal and presidential. As I concluded in my article under reference, APC has a distinct, indeed, very good chance of, not only re-engineering, but completely re- branding Nigeria.

  • Some PDP’s frailties that should leapfrog APC to power

    Some PDP’s frailties that should leapfrog APC to power

    Billions, no longer millions at which eyes used to pop and for which a distinguished FEDECO Chairman said he would have collapsed, now reads like pennies in PDP’s corruption odyssey.

    Corruption in Nigeria diverts financial resources from building roads, and bridges, curtailing the development of infrastructure that is needed to make Nigeria more competitive. It drains the federal treasury of funds that could do wonders in expanding and improving the education provided to millions of Nigerian children which, in turn, would enhance Nigeria’s economic future. Corruption forestalls additional spending on medical clinics and preventive health-care spending that countless studies have shown reap long-term economic rewards for a country when properly implemented. In short, corruption is a scourge that undermines virtually everything that could move Nigeria towards a brighter economic future.’ – Jeffrey Hawkins -U.S Consul-General

    For its frailties, which I define as inherent moral turpitude leading to inability to resist evil, top of which is corruption, of both material and the entire Nigerian governmental apparatus, the Peoples Democratic Party ought to have been dead a thousand times and more. That the party, consisting of an amalgam of those elder statesman Tunji Braithwaite described as ‘rats and cockroaches’ during the Second Republic, is still alive and kicking is due, not to the patronage and racketeers which cohere it, but the in-explainable inability of the opposition political parties to have massed against it when that was the earnest wishes of a majority of Nigerians.

    One thing that needs be emphasised from the very beginning is that this has little or nothing to do with the person of President Jonathan, a decent gentleman, as corruption is ingrained in the party’s DNA. Nobody within PDP today can tame it. It currently has very experienced octogenarians at its policy-making levels which should ordinarily translate to a more nuanced party management but what do we have? As the Yoruba would say:’kaka ki ewe agbon de, lile lo nle si’, meaning that, rather than the coconut leaf getting softer, it’s getting tougher by the day. Corruption has become the party’s raison d’etre and this manifests in every segment of our national life.

    The Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), under the lead of a very forthright Nigerian attorney, Ledum Mitee who, but for God’s mercy, would have long been consumed by the forebears of these roaches, has again presented its Audit Reports in compliance with the requirement of the global Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) covering the period 2009-2011.

    It reeks of nothing but corruption. And as is usual, the culpable government agencies, NNPC and PPRA, the latter in particular, have been fighting to the death to salvage what remains of their integrity coming on the heels of the massive oil subsidy scam in which scions of PDP leaders turned out the major culprits. Meanwhile, as has become the norm, both the EFCC and the judiciary are playing poker over that serious matter such that by the time they came up with their slaps on the wrist, Nigerians, weighed down by their daily gruelling toils, would have forgotten all about it.

    The report covered physical and process issues that characterise business activities in the industry with a view to establishing if companies actually paid what they were expected to pay and if government indeed received what it ought to receive. The report recommends that the NNPC should: ·’settle domestic crude liability of N842.7 billion adhere to due process in accessing subsidy deductions out of crude oil proceeds;. carry out a comprehensive documentation system of the records and reconciliation of volumes and value of PSCs and Carry transactions; design a system that suitably controls gas income to the Federation; confirm remittance of $3.789billion (dividends from NLNG) to the Federation Account; strengthen controls over product importation and distribution and specify a unique methodology for managing crude sales during a Trial Marketing Period’.

    It should be noted that some of the above, where they are not direct thefts, are wonky systems put in place to facilitate stealing from the national treasury. PPRA is to remit N4.423 billion to the Federation Account for the period in review; a report which Reginald Ibe, its Executive Secretary, as should be expected, has disputed as if Nigerians do not know that agency enough.

    As is now well known, the PDP, for purposes of 2015, will never have the political will to deal appropriately with these well documented acts of non-transparency. As with the pension fund and the humongous oil subsidy fraud, so shall it be with the NEITI Audited Report.

    Nor is corruption the only issue APC should leverage on to send PDP to where it rightly belongs in historical infamy.

    The other day I laughed my heart out at the spectacle of our dear President at the wheel of a Land Rover besotted by a swooning array of well decorated PDP women in a scene so reminiscent of Mr Bode George’s court days. A few questions immediately crossed my mind about this ‘Sagamu road-show’, as my brother, and colleague columnist, Dr Jide Oluwajuyitan, has described it: Don’t these otherwise innocent women know that their zone of the party has long been forgotten by the powers that be in Abuja? I also wondered what became of then President Obasanjo’s no less imaginative ‘road show’ as he flagged off the Ibadan-Ilorin road as Baba Adedibu held court in Ibadan and elsewhere? Is the road now completed a decade after? Then I remembered the delectable and hard-working Mrs. Deizani Alison-Madueke then of the Works Ministry who, overcome by her lachrymal glands, cried like a baby whose milk was snatched, bemoaning the sorry state of the Ore-Benin Road post N300Bllion.

    Honestly, in ‘Mummy land’ – apologies music impresario Lagbaja, I think our ‘mumu e don do.’

    Worse though is the fact that nothing suggests,given PDP’s track record, that the Lagos-Ibadan Express Way project will ever be competed even if it rules for its chimerical 60 years. I quote Oluwajuyitan, again,to buttress this view point. Wrote Jide in his column in The Nation of Thursday , August 8: ‘The Presidential Projects Assessment Committee (PPAC), set up in March 2011 to look into cases of abandoned federal government projects claimed that there were 11,886 abandoned projects that will cost an estimated N778 trillion to complete…’ More interesting is the fact that many of these abandoned projects are located within the really favoured territories of the PDP , namely: the 400 metre long Utor bridge along Asaba-Ebu-Uromi road awarded in 2006, the 36 kilometre Bodo-Bonny road in Rivers state, awarded in 2002, the abandoned 285 NNDC projects not to mention the never- never East-West road which has not only pitted the Rivers State governor against the Niger Delta Affairs Minister but has ensured that foot soldiers have already been conscripted in Burutu, Warri, Ughelli, Ozoro and Asaba, in what should be the mother of all wars between respected Chief Edwin Clark and his son,the wannabe governor, Godsday Orubebe, two unmatchable supporters of Mr President.

    If all these are happening in the President’s geo-political zone, I do not think the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway stands a ghost of a chance of completion. After all,morning, they say, shows the day, and we already saw enough ruckus on that road. What that expansive ceremony and project would most probably achieve will be easy campaign funds, nor would that be the first time.

    If the above are material and measurable damages to our common wealth, the PDP had also ensured they damaged Nigeria so morally that an international pariah like Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean owner, could, with a wave of the hand, reject the African Union’s appointment of PDP’s one-time Chairman, Board of Trustees, and Nigeria’s, unarguably, most remarkable living statesman -Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, to lead its observer team to that country’s recent election. Mugabe did not have to think twice – no thanks to PDP’s record of ignominious election charades.

    The above are obviously only a small fraction of the multitude of PDP’s infractions which the new party should adroitly exploit in getting rid of PDP; a party which inner peace has long deserted as there is no moral authority within it any longer. Billions, no longer millions at which eyes used to pop and for which a distinguished FEDECO Chairman said he would have collapsed, now reads like pennies in PDP’s corruption odyssey.

    APC leaders, officials, members and Nigerians in general, must rise up like one man/woman, as has been elegantly canvassed by Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila,leader of opposition in the House of Representatives, and take ownership of this party which is destined to re brand Nigeria.

  • North’s unnecessary fears may create a federal monster

    North’s unnecessary fears may create a federal monster

    It is not yet too late for these representatives to put on their thinking caps before they bring more disaster upon the country.

    Without a scintilla of doubt, only northern fears, not national interest, especially concerning its ability, or not, to survive despite its untapped huge natural resources, could have led the National Assembly to so completely undermine the states whilst creating a centre with limitless powers in its constitutional amendment conundrum. So all-encompassing is the autocracy they are currently constructing that one cannot successfully be accused of exaggeration if he claims that Abuja is being imperceptibly turned to a monstrous incubus. All these, unfortunately, on the basis of a British -fabricated, but actually non-existent, higher northern population which would otherwise thump all known demographic principles. If they dispute this, let them publish the results of the one-day interaction with Nigerians on geo-political basis and see if the so-called massive ‘yes’ votes would not confirm an over reliance on results from one region out of three. It is no wonder, therefore, that of all the Local Government Chairmen’s Forum in the country, it is only the northern chapter, through its chairman, Mohammed Ali, that’s mounting pressure on the Senate to rescind its decision on local government autonomy.

    Waxing lyrical during the past week, Deputy Speaker, Emeka Ihedioha, gleefully announced to Nigerians that: ‘the House voted overwhelmingly to give full financial, administrative, executive and legislative autonomy to local government councils in Nigeria; making them a tier of government with a uniform four years tenure, regimenting their mode of exercising legislative power and abolishing Joint State Local Government Account which they replaced with the “Local Government Council Allocation Account.’ Like an over-exuberant birthday boy, he went on to say that henceforth, the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, would conduct elections for local government areas. Apparently, they forgot to abolish the office of the state governor. If only these self-serving legislators knew the meaning of a true federal system! And would they be kind enough to tell Nigerians where else on earth these monstrosities obtain.

    Let me, in the small space remaining, open their eyes and minds to the views, edited for space, of Chief Bola Ige, SAN, one of the few real democrats that ever graced the face of Nigeria, on local government. In an article he captioned ‘Man -Made Avoidable Local Government Troubles’ and which appeared in his column in The Sunday Tribune of 27 April, 1996, the legal luminary wrote as follows: “Anyone who has sound knowledge of the local government system, its history, theory and practice, not only in Nigeria, but also in civilised countries of the world, cannot be surprised at what is happening in various parts of the country since the Federal Military Government announced the “creation “of new local government areas. I personally have been shocked and pained by the violence that has since been unleashed.

    “But what we should admit is that the fundamentals of local government system, particularly in a federal set-up, have not been adhered to. One could even say that they have been violated.

    “There are modalities that govern local government systems all over the civilised world. The first is that a local government must truly be government at local level. In other words, the people of a given area must be allowed to come together, of their own accord, and in a spirit of agreeing to some sort of social contract, to run their local affairs. The community must of course be easily identifiable – usually they must be people of the same stock, or citizens who inhabit a given geographical area’.

    ‘That was what existed during the colonial times and during the era of the regions. That was also what happened when I was governor of the old Oyo State. In the north, local government system was based on emirates where they existed or administrative units where there were no emirates; in the west, it was based on the combination of the Oba-ship system and innate democratic inclinations of the peoples of Western Nigeria; in the east where the people were largely republican, the local government system was based on the clan. In all parts of Nigeria, the English and after them, the founding fathers of Nigeria – Awo Sardauna and Zik – never arbitrarily created local government councils and, in any case, being reasonable and knowledgeable politicians, they would never have done that.

    ‘The ideal thing is for any community that wants a local government to have it, as long as certain basic criteria concerning ability to be economically viable and rudiments of government are met. I always gave examples of local government councils in Europe and the USA to attest to this.

    “Unfortunately, the Murtala-Obasanjo federal military government began the nonsense that has remained with us. In fairness to Gowon’s regime, that government did not poke its nose into local government business. I guess that with the presence of seasoned politicians, led by Awo, in that government, such foolish mistake would not be allowed to happen.

    “On the pretext that better administration should be found for local government throughout the country, a Commission headed by Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki was set up. In my opinion, the recommendations of that commission were the worst disaster to happen to local government system in Nigeria. For instance, it was from there that the idea of uniformity in size, scope and administration was introduced. I confess that I suspected a hidden agenda in the recommendations: in order to strengthen the administrative stranglehold of the emirates, all of Nigeria was advised to base its local government system on defined populations and elaborate administrative system. Fortunately, it never worked. And it will never work.

    “But I also had the suspicion that the military wanted to have a way of pulling more strings through manipulating the local government system. Dasuki Commission brought about the plague that is still afflicting Nigeria.

    Which leads me to the next point: In a federal set-up, the federal government must have nothing to do with the creation or running of local government. Nigeria is the only federation in the whole world where the federal government decides how, where, and when a local government council must run. In all civilised countries, and in all democratic countries, it is the state or provincial or regional government that legislates on local government.

    “The solutions are simple, but I doubt whether the Federal Military Government will take any suggestions. First, let the Federal Military Government hands off local government affairs, and allow the people to decide how many local government areas they want, their administrative set-up and their boundaries. State government must allow the people in a given area to determine their local government destinies.

    “Secondly, state governments should formulate guidelines for the setting up of new local government councils. They must be of universal application and not tinkered with. Once any community satisfies the criteria in those guidelines, they should have their own council.”

    Chief Ige’s fears are as potent today as they were when he penned them in 1996, and, watching this National Assembly create a looming disaster of an ultra strong centre, I have this nagging feeling that the PDP truly believes the hogwash that it will rule for 60 years as was first propounded by its now embattled, one-time chairman, Ogbuluafor. Otherwise, nobody in his proper frame of mind will suggest that INEC should conduct local government elections in the states which we know is intended to enhance their stranglehold through their now well-known ‘do and die’ rigging methods. At a time when the cancellation of a humongous WAEC and NECO with full staff compliement has been suggested, it is totally ludicrous that the National Assembly could approve that INEC, with mostly ad hoc staff, take up elections into all local government councils even if it were not already encumbered by constant allegations of bribe-taking like we saw in Ekiti State during the rerun election in 2009.

    It is not yet too late for these representatives to put on their thinking caps before they bring more disaster upon the country. After all, this is a legislature whose members earn the equivalent of $189,000 annually as against their counterparts in the U.K and France who earn $105, 400 and $85,900 respectively.

  • The gathering storm

    The gathering storm

    At no time since the civil war was Nigeria in more perilous times than now. A new report entitled ‘Nigerian Unity in the Balance’, authored for the United States Army War College has, again, warned Nigerian leaders to beware of another civil war or an outright break-up following what it called ongoing divisive trends in the country. The report, released by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S War College, was written by two former American servicemen, Gerald McLaughlin and Clarence J. Bouchat. The foreword written by the Director, Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College, Professor Douglas Lovelace, observed that secessionist tendencies are endemic in Nigeria. Under such stresses, it emphasised, Nigerian unity may fail. Should Nigerian leaders mismanage the political economy and reinforce centrifugal forces in the country, Nigeria could break up along its previously identified fault lines, the report concluded. Unfortunately, in Nigeria where we are content with living in denial, presidential spokespersons will readily lecture you as to how ‘political wrangling among competing interests has no consequences on the nation’s political stability whatsoever’.

    Conversely, unlike us Nigerians, Americans scholars don’t just talk; rather they talk, based on observable and verifiable facts which are then subjected to serious interrogation at the end of which the most likely probabilities are drawn.

    In tandem with these American views, a Nigerian Oxford scholar, Dr Antony Akinola, recently observed as follows on our current circumstances: “At the national level, we are getting more and more divided on sectional, ethnic and religious bases during Jonathan’s regime than at any other time in our national history. The Nigeria Governors’ Forum is fractured; further bringing out the divisive tendencies in the polity. The governing party itself is fissured, wobbling towards collapse. The president has had to assume emergency powers, the most extreme of presidential powers, to provide security, failing even the most basic ingredient of governance, that of passing national budget,” even in the third quarter of the financial year.

    Neither Papa Edwin Clark nor Asari Dokubo is helping matters with their bellicose tantrums. The north is not sitting idle. But while the north is yet at the visualising stage, the presidency has moved, deliberately stoking the fires of avoidable conflagration all over the place. And to them it matters not if that move is the most banal or the most illogical, as long as they can show us they are in power. Therefore at the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, the president is backing those who stand logic and common sense on the head, claiming, tenaciously, that 16 is greater than 19 and, funny enough, a whole state governor permits himself to be so paraded. From there their agents have gone to the Rivers State House of Assembly, desecrated it under the watchful eyes of a federal agent, doubling as a police commissioner. Also, in Rivers State, in what has become the norm, the presidency is earnestly backing those who claim that 5 is greater than 27 and Mr President is believed to have since received in the Villa that great joke – one Evans Bipi – who claims he is Speaker and mouthing the profanity that Mrs Jonathan, the President’s wife, is his Jesus, albeit with a small j. And you can bet that if push comes to shove, the state police commissioner will be backing him all the way in that ludicrous claim. But that wasn’t the first time either.

    Before inviting Gov Jang to the Villa Mr. President had first recognised him as his own NGF chairman at the PDP Family Dinner at which Baba Anenih pretended to be the seminal author of the automatic nomination idea even when he was nothing more than a puppet. A perspicacious scholar has recently asked if there would be a President Jonathan today if Chief Clark had succeeded in his ‘Gowon forever’ campaign of the ’60’s or Anenih in both his Abacha forever campaign as well as his support for Obasanjo’s ill-fated Third Term Project.

    Now, while the north is restive and both the east and the south south appear to be working in tandem, mum is the word in the southwest and since nature abhors a vacuum, the presidency is assiduously working on how to use the zone as its launching pad for 2015. Today, all manner of discredited politicians attend Afenifere meetings just as some otherwise respected elders, who had, without a doubt, rendered sterling services in the cause of the Yoruba, are being had on the cheap for no other reason than to weaken the region ahead of the 2015 agenda. How, for instance, were some of the elders going to fund the spurious ‘political parties’ they are exhuming or claim to champion if not through some underhand means like the so-called oil security contract, since hopefully successfully shot down, and, what electoral purpose are they supposed to serve other than act as agent provocateurs and spoilers of the majority wish of our people in the region? Today, no thanks to them, there is not a single Yoruba leader who can successfully call a meeting of Yorubas across the political divide except in a dire emergency which we do not pray for.

    But it would still have been tolerable if the presidency was content to stop at that. Rather, they have much more dangerous designs on the southwest beginning from the 2014 governorship elections in both Ekiti and Osun states during which they intend to test run their 2015 do-or-die but extremely risky electoral shenanigans, using none other than some Yoruba politicians, in the typical ‘use a monkey to catch a monkey’ scenario.

    As at the moment, the story in town in Ekiti is that the President is rooting for his one-time benefactor, and now Minister of Police Affairs, Navy Capt Caleb Olubolade, which we learn is why one of their candidates, former governor Ayo Fayose, who believes he stands the best chance to square up to the sitting governor in the election, is dead set against a consensus candidate. He has just now been suspended. But also going the rounds, is the whispering information that the President is keen on supporting Olubolade so that once the minister resigns, he would be gifted the opportunity to name a ‘do or die’ member of the colony of Ekiti PDP gubernatorial wannabes as the new minister whose primary duty, he would be instructed, is to ‘win’ Ekiti for the PDP, no matter how.

    This should not come as a surprise because Obasanjo had set that precedent. Determined to win Ekiti for PDP in 2007, he manufactured the inchoate impeachment of Governor Ayo Fayose so he could put his kinsman, the Emergency Administrator, in place to ensure that. The events of the night of the election, 14 April, 2007, when results dramatically changed when Ekitis were already dancing on the streets for Dr Fayemi’s victory, more than confirmed that. And Nigerians know all that followed.

    Today, things are worse for the PDP in the southwest and in Ekiti, in particular. Apart from PDP’s utter confusion as a party, Ekitis have come to see and know the meaning of multi-sectoral development and the finer differences between PDP and AC N. Thanks to the administration of Dr John Kayode Fayemi. It is therefore in the best interests of professional riggers, and do and die politicians, no matter how seemingly powerful, not to think of any ‘Fehingbepon’, meaning, there would be no room here in the southwest for any act of impunity.

    Two egregious errors

    Last Sunday, on the Law makers’ salaries the following explanatory words: “figures represent proportion of persons per GPD’, was mistakenly cut off.

    Also, I wrote that Professor Oritshajolomi Thomas was sacked on 17 November, 1973. No, it should have read 17, November, 1975.

    Both errors are duly regretted.

    Arthur Medeiros, adieu

    We lost a wonderful friend this past week. We are here referring to the likes of Chief Bayo Famotibe, Engr Dave Oni, the Oniwinde twin brothers, Taiwo and Kehinde (Junior), and, of course, Akin Medeiros, his own brother and Mrs Bimbo Johnson, his niece. Arthur, a dashingly handsome and absolutely gregarious young man in our Apapa road days, when COOL CATS INN was our watering hole, passed on as a result of complications arising from a stroke which he suffered some years back. We will sure miss him.

    We commiserate with the family he left behind: the wife, the children, Kemi and Femi, the grandchildren and his siblings.

    May the good Lord rest him.

  • Prof. O. O. Akinkugbe: Hurray! my boss, my hero is 80

    Prof. O. O. Akinkugbe: Hurray! my boss, my hero is 80

    There is so much impunity and unseriousness  demonstrated by our leaders

    My hero for life! Congratulations, sir. I was privileged my life path crossed Prof’s at a beautiful point in my life. I was young, bright and had only a few years back left the university. On the decision of the University of Ibadan Council, I guess under the chairmanship of the inimitable Sir Samuel Manuwa, the University Registrar, another of my few heroes, the late Chief Sam Okudu, reached out for me – to him a total unknown- but then an Administrative Assistant to my numero uno educational hero, Professor H. A Oluwasanmi, Vice Chancellor, University of Ife, and off, I dashed to Ibadan, to go drive the humongous 25th anniversary celebrations of that great institution – a roaring success dampened only that very night of 17 November 1973, during the 7 pm network news by a very bad and discourteous Obasanjo directing the retirement of the Vice-Chancellor, the iconic, ever impeccably dressed medical scholar, Prof Oritshejolomi Thomas, who was his chief host a few hours back.

    Prof Akinkugbe, who was Chairman of the Ceremonials Committee and with whom I worked directly in those harrowing months, would later request that the registrar redeploy me to his office – Dean’s Office, College of Medicine. Such was the synergy between boss and his boy that I would be one of the very first he encouraged to respond to adverts for recruitment into the University College, Ilorin, to which he had just been appointed Principal (V C) and to which I subsequently went, as its first Senior Assistant Registrar (Academic) and functioned, first, as the Faculty Officer to the three inaugural Faculties of Arts, Science and Education. I learnt a lot at the feet of my oga (boss) and it was my distinct pleasure to see him more regularly in the last 12 months and as dapper as ever: first at the wedding of the daughter of my dear brother, Bayo Jimoh, the highly perspicacious Group Managing Director of the O’dua Investment Co Ltd, then at the beautiful 50th anniversary of the great-read Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile -Ife, where his Government College Ibadan classmate, Ambassador (Dr) Christopher Kolade, gave the anniversary lecture and thirdly, at the epochal inauguration of his other GCI classmate, the Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, as the inaugural winner of the Awo Prize for Leadership, an event that truly showed Dr Tokunbo-Awolowo Dosumu as a true daughter of her illustrious father, the redoubtable Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Prof looked radiant and was as jovial as ever. He cracked jokes with Bayo Jimoh and I and patted me on the back, saying, ‘Femi, those were the days’. Sir, you have more than earned your stripes. Long may you live in glorious health, in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.

    It’s Ekiti Panupo again

    There is so much impunity and unseriousness demonstrated by our leaders

    For far too many times, I have indicated in this column that nothing of worth passes in this polity without it being properly interrogated on the ekitipanupo web portal – an Ekiti intellectual roundtable with members numbering in thousands – where we meticulously critique or criticise, at times with mutual sabre rattling, even harsh words depending upon where you belong on the political spectrum, policies of governments: federal, state, local and even foreign, as well as those of agencies of government, and most times, conclude by proffering solutions/proposals, as may be appropriate, for the way forward.

    This past week was no exception as our matriarch on the forum, our 80-year-plus-one -old, Mama Adebimpe Okunade, omo Orinkinran, Oye, a scholar and world- renowned teacher of nursing, who I first met when I was an Assistant Registrar in the Dean’s Office, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan in ’73, weighed in as follows on some issues about which Nigerians have become thoroughly disillusioned.

    Happy reading:

    PHCN and other matters

    My question for you Dr. Adu: (Biodun Adu, a UK-based O&G Consultant is my friend and classmate at The School -Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti). Help me to understand that when you woke up this morning, you mean you went straight to your television screen? I guess that was why you saw the “miracle”! You had electricity supply: that explains why you can afford the luxury of watching TV in the morning.

    On a more serious note ‘Biodun, just this morning, the PHCN, formerly known as ECN, NEPA et cetera (the conglomerate in charge of darkness in Nigeria and through which billions of naira usually evaporate) announced to hapless Nigerians that it will continue to increase electricity tariff with or without electricity! There was an increase only last year!

    Impunity you will call that?

    Even though, Mr. President announced to the whole world from far away USA via the CNN recently that electricity supply has improved in Nigeria, compatriots are still anxiously waiting to see the improvement.

    Abiodun, Nigeria is a place where money is extorted by governments from citizens for services NOT rendered! Examples include forcing us to pay for darkness instead of light. Paying road tax/vehicle license fees while the roads damage your car and ruin your body joints and cause you body aches.

    The latest extortion is that we are forced to change number plates of our motor vehicles throughout the country with a deadline of September 30, 2013. Despite protests, the obnoxious policy stays! Even though the National Assembly informed us that the cost per vehicle is N10, 500.00 what is extorted from us ranges from N24, 500.00 to N27, 000.00!

    My dear, what is more painful in all this is that we are so helpless! As if these were not enough, salt is constantly being rubbed on our open wounds by the wife of Mr. President who talks and behaves without decorum. There is no one to call her to order!

    Impunity is the name of the game here. Have you ever heard/experienced arrogance of power in its crudest form? Come home and see things for yourself.

    I can assure you that despite the perilous times, most Nigerians guard jealously their sense of love, humility, kindness, peace, and other virtues seen in decent societies, mama concluded with her trade mark: ‘PEACE AND LOVE’.

    Rewarding work

    At last, our National Assembly members should be ashamed of themselves. What have Nigerians not done to make their representatives volunteer a word about what they cream off poor Nigerians monthly/quarterly/annually? Mum has been the word. Now it is all out in the open. Maybe not in cold figures but the world at large now knows that in a country where not less than two thirds of the population live below the poverty line, its so-called representatives lead the world in how much they earn, almost for doing nothing.

    Who exactly will take Nigerians out of this savagery?

    It can only be Nigerians themselves, through concerted effort. No one else. And any political party that seriously wants our votes come 2015 must let Nigerians know how it intends to bring these unearned earnings down from the mount Olympus where it presently perches.

    Please come with me as you read the following being the result of a recent study in the United Kingdom:

    The following figures, the result of a recent research in the UK, confirm this ignoble position of our National Assembly legislators.

    Figures represent: Nigeria, 189.5; Kenya, 74.5; Ghana , 46.5; Indonesia, 65.8; South Africa, 104; Brazil, 154; Thailand, 43.8; India, 11.2; Italy, 182; Bangladesh, 4; Israel, 114.8; Hongkong, 130.7; U.S, 174; Japan, 149.7; Singapore, 154; Australia, 201.2; Canada, 154; Germany, 119.5; Britain, 105.4; France, 85.9; Sweden, 99.3 and Norway 138.

    If our National Legislators are men and women of conscience, they will appreciate that nothing under the sun entitles them to what they take home monthly for a job that can very well be done on part time basis. Nigerians must rise like one man and ensure that legislators’ pay, including their stupendous allowances, which in the first place were never approved by the appropriate agency of government, becomes a campaign issue, come 2015.