The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

2014 not a good year for Nigerian arms

AN unwholesome impression has been created in many foreign capitals that Nigerian soldiers are afraid to engage Boko Haram militants in the ongoing war in the Northeast. While it is evident that our troops have retreated almost consistently in every engagement with the suicidal sect, it is hardly because they are afraid. They may have become complacent and enervated by years of peace, luxury and the easy privileges their uniforms undeservedly confer on them in the towns and cities of Nigeria, however, their unwillingness to fight may have nothing to do with any intrinsic cowardice. They may be reluctant to start a battle with the sect in the vast and impossible terrains of the Northeast, but that indolence may not be related to the harshness of the weather or the strangeness of the host cultures. The reason for their diffidence may in fact not be far from their instinctive abhorrence of the chaos and decay that have overwhelmed the federal government, not to say the corruption and chaos from which the military itself is not insulated. Why, they ask themselves, should anyone sacrifice his life for a country where oil, pension and power contracts thieves, among many others, are celebrated and canonised?

However, what is even more shocking about the past four weeks in particular is not the continuing decline of governance, something we already embraced with deep resignation, or the presidency’s lack of virtue and principles cruelly epitomised by both the Olusegun Obasanjo and Jonathan governments, but the poignant and unsparing vituperations against the person of Dr Jonathan by foreign media and governments. There is not one medium or foreign government that has not derided Dr Jonathan. They deplore his style, and they gape at his amazing lack of attention. They are bemused by his policies, which they describe as universally inept, and they are galled by his unimaginative responses to the creative destructiveness of militant organisations in Nigeria. While highly critical foreign governments are more tactful in deploring Dr Jonathan’s methods, the foreign media all but describe him as a mannequin in power.

That Dr Jonathan has attracted universal opprobrium is not particularly surprising; after all, the Nigerian media, save a few writers inured to reality, have been merciless on the president. But the country had managed Dr Jonathan so gingerly over the years that he looked set to romp into the next polls quite as remorseless and unperturbed as ever. He would have secured the presidential ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party as an average and undistinguished incumbent, but nonetheless as a president. He would have gone on to campaign with the ordinary effusiveness of a politician gifted with an undeserving ticket, mouthing achievements that were hard to find, let alone feel. He would have, as usual, good-humouredly embraced and defended every electoral chicanery the more relentless and ruthless of his party apparatchiks could muster without the prickly restraint of his delicate conscience that has morphed over the years in the distorted milieu of his acquired theology.

But now if he runs, he will do so as a hostage to the money power around him. He will run not because he has anything to give, and campaign not because he has anything to say, but because to do otherwise would be unthinkable and costly for his rapacious caucus. The reason for this drastic change of circumstances is the year 2014, and in particular, the past four weeks. If the reader will permit my adapting a Churchillian metaphor about French wines and military defeat, it is clear that 2014 is not a good year for Nigerian arms. Not only has Boko Haram punished us relentlessly and audaciously, it has masterminded the brazen kidnap of schoolgirls with all the dangerous and revolting connotations of sexual slavery. The sect has demonstrated an astonishing capacity for evil, and more adeptness at infiltrating the Nigerian military. By reason of the activities of moles, the Nigerian camp is as open to the rebels as the rebel camp is closed to the Nigerian troops.

The Jonathan government celebrates what it describes as the restriction of Boko Haram to the Northeast instead of the sporadic attacks the sect was making some years back. But the sect has merely changed tactics by repudiating its previous tendency to overextend its operational matrices, while concentrating on a more manageable theatre of battle for maximum impact. In that self-imposed cocoon, Boko Haram has deployed more viciousness and inflicted horrendous punishment on the civil society and to some extent the military marooned in their barracks. The consequence is that it is in fact the Nigerian troops that are overextended and demoralised, and are sometimes outgunned and outmanoeuvred. Before the Chibok schoolgirls were abducted, there was little tactical wizardry on display by the Nigerian Army, and no remarkable battles won. According to some sources, the soldiers were running into ambushes wielding low-calibre and misfiring weapons, and were even allegedly short-paid their allowances. The problem came to a head last week at Maimalari Barracks in Maiduguri when some of the soldiers violently disobeyed orders, leaving commanders scrambling to determine whether the soldiers’ behaviour constituted mutiny or not.

Dr Jonathan has passively acquiesced to foreign military help from over five countries. Soon after it became obvious that external help had materialised, the president glibly declared that Boko Haram was on its way to defeat. He also tactlessly ruled out negotiations with the sect over the abducted girls when he should have left his options open. I loathe negotiating with terrorists, but considering the fact that world unanimity and support looked set to compel Boko Haram to let the girls go, the president ought to have been more circumspect. The president’s newfound vitality evoked a World War II scenario when allied powers managed to evacuate from French beaches hundreds of thousands of their troops entrapped by the advancing German Army. On that occasion, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, cautioned his exuberant countrymen that wars were not won by evacuations.

It is now common knowledge that Nigerian troops have no answer to Boko Haram. It is not an enviable reputation to have. The foreign help Nigeria is receiving at the moment is essentially to rescue the schoolgirls. But even if the help transmutes into a longer and larger effort to help contain the sect, it would still amount to merely dealing with the symptoms. Given the way Dr Jonathan has spoken and acted, an approach the world has roundly condemned as unimaginative and superficial, there is absolutely nothing to indicate he, his aides and military commanders understand what to do about the sect or any other militant group still hibernating. In terms of policy, the government is vacuous. In terms of fighting unconventional warfare, the effort has so far been shambolic. And in terms of winning the confidence of the populace, the government’s repressive and insensitive approach to law enforcement has made its efforts appear dubious and desultory.

The challenges of the modern era, whether military, economic, societal or religious, require the highest form of intellectual appreciation of very complex and interconnected issues. The Jonathan government has not shown any iota of competence in that regard, nor have his cabinet and military shown the qualification and intuition necessary to tackle the challenges of the day. If he wins in 2015, is there hope that Dr Jonathan’s six years of impotence on the throne would abate in the next four years after 2015? I doubt. Indeed, it is highly unlikely.

There is no proof that Boko Haram or its independent splinter groups can be permanently defeated even with foreign help. If Dr Jonathan had the requisite competence, and the Nigerian military deployed the right measures in the sect’s early years, Boko Haram would not have metamorphosed into the dragon it has become. Foreign troops will not help Nigeria beyond exercising the military option; and as everyone knows, military option alone, even if we were capable of delivering it with the expertise and ingenuity the times demand, will not resolve the increasing disposition of Nigerians to violent resistance to fundamental or state-inspired disequilibrium. The Nigerian civil war produced its heroes; so far the Boko Haram war has produced none. Indeed, it seems that in the end, only villains will be produced. But perhaps I exaggerate.

May 18, 2014
State of emergency is an overrated panacea

Few expected President Jonathan not to seek an extension of the state of emergency he declared in the three north-eastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe a year ago. It was also always going to be difficult for the National Assembly to decline to support the measure, as indeed the House of Representatives has shown by voting in favour of the continuation of the drastic containment strategy. From all indications, and from their antecedents, neither the Jonathan government nor the National Assembly has at anytime in the past six or so years exhibited the courage or innovativeness needed to propound radical and unorthodox measures to combat serious national security challenges. They are unlikely to do so in the coming years without the deliberate and persuasive intervention of the electorate one way or the other. Unfortunately, so far, the government, the public and the National Assembly have not really offered compelling reasons for either the vacation of the emergency proclamation in the Northeast or its continuation.

But consistent with my views over the past one year, I am unable to support the continuation of a state of emergency. Yes, it is true that what Dr Jonathan declared is state of emergency and not emergency rule, but given the experience so far, the proclamation has not curbed Boko Haram militancy nor ended the revolt. I had always known that due to the inability of the Jonathan government to understand the nature and course of the revolt, not to talk of the government’s incompetence in devising the right mix of policies and tactics to combat it, the objective of dealing with and terminating the revolt was going to be a tall order. Declaration of a state of emergency in the three states was simply a desperate measure to deal with the burgeoning menace. In the event, it proved to be a futile measure. The war, I am persuaded, can be fought without declaring a state of emergency.

There have been consolatory talks and arguments about the emergency restricting the militants to a smaller area of operation, unlike in the beginning when the sect seemed to be spreading like wild fire all over the North. While this is true, it is also a fact, as argued in the preceding article, that the constriction of the revolt has not attenuated its social, economic and even political impact. Nor has it stanched the flow of blood nor repaired the damaged bonds and shredded fabric that knitted the society together for decades.

More importantly, the government erroneously believed that the mere declaration of emergency was capable of dealing with the menace and precluding the need for a proper and adequate understanding of the fundamentals of the revolt and the paradigms needed to reorder and remould the society. In addition, the ongoing demystification of the army in the Northeast, and the appalling show of tactical inadequacy, general disinterestedness of the officers and troops to engage the enemy, and insufficient display of patriotic spirit have all combined to render counterinsurgency efforts ineffective, if not quite useless.

Until the army is reformed in all areas of operation, including intelligence and tactics, and competent officers and adequate logistics are deployed in the war effort, the extension of a state of emergency will avail nothing. During his last media chat, Dr Jonathan argued that he needed the state of emergency to avoid litigations that could arise from the military taking extraordinary but litigable measures in the theatre of war. Well, those extraordinary measures cost the government huge support in the early part of the war and catalysed the insurgents’ recruitment efforts. Though the army has improved its relations with the people, and generally avoided the brutal reputation that horrified the rest of the world, it has still been unable to deal the insurgency a death blow.

What the government needs are better tactics, less corruption in the procurement and supply of war materials, committed commanders, better and brilliant tactics, and a patriotic determination to fight the sect. But these will not come except the fighting troops can see a total cleansing of the government in Abuja and the entire bureaucracy to rid them of the larcenous and domineering ministers and aides who live big at the expense of the country while expecting soldiers to sacrifice their lives. If Abuja cannot show the patriotic glow consistent with the concept of national sacrifice, it would be hard to expect the war against Boko Haram to be accompanied with the determination and sacrifice expected from soldiers. More, inconsistent with the optimism of the public, neither the state of emergency, as promulgated, nor the foreign expeditionary forces will make the huge or permanent difference necessary to end the insurgency and secure lasting peace.

May 18, 2014
Jonathan and Chibok: the nonsense about conspiracy theories

Touched by massive and unalloyed support from more than five powerful nations, President Goodluck Jonathan has at last found his voice on the Chibok abductions. Addressing the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Abuja on Thursday, the president declared that Boko Haram terrorism was in its last gasp. His latest hyperbole stands in stark contrast to his waffling and dithering at the height of the Chibok saga between mid-April and first week of May, when he, his wife and PDP women leader Kema Chikwe characteristically insinuated that the abductions, if they took place, were more of politics than reality. The president had pleaded for victims’ parents to cooperate with him, while his meddlesome wife and Mrs Chikwe suggested incredulously that there was probably no abduction anywhere.

It seems now that Dr Jonathan is finally persuaded that hundreds of schoolgirls were indeed abducted, even if he is uncertain of their number, and he is upbeat that given the magnitude of international support, the girls will be rescued and Boko Haram will be vanquished. World support has also seemed to galvanise Dr Jonathan’s men. The National Security Adviser, the Chief of Defence Staff and other security chiefs have visited Chibok, as they put it, on a fact-finding tour of the affected town. Perhaps they were accompanied by senior military commanders who in all the weeks the abductions struggled to arrest world attention failed to visit the scene of tragedy. Many more officials will probably be visiting the town in the coming days, in a sort of tragicomic tourism. Maybe, too, Dame Patience, who had threatened to march on Borno State Government House, will find the good grace to visit that state, if indeed her doubts have been finally dispelled. Then to cap a spectacular volte face, perhaps the immovable and often imperturbable Dr Jonathan will find the nobility to visit the afflicted parents of the victims.

With the acceptance of responsibility for the mass kidnap by Boko Haram, and given massive international support for Nigeria and the increasing number of grieving parents who have been interviewed by the press, it is likely that there will no longer be any debate as to the veracity of the abductions. From all indications, the debate may be moving towards a more sinister direction, one probably encouraged by the dithering Jonathan presidency and the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The new suggestion is that Boko Haram terrorism, not to say the abductions in particular, is a ploy by the North to pressure Dr Jonathan to abandon his re-election plan. This shocking argument is further divided into two areas: first is that the North, loosely defined, believes the presidency is its birthright and is therefore loathed to staying out of power for too long; and second is that there really is a subterranean religious agenda undergirding Boko Haram with the intent to annihilate other religions and helped the North promote Islam nationally.

Sadly, the Jonathan government has recklessly exploited these arguments and fears by adducing facts to corroborate the notion of northern and religious dominance. Only a few days ago, the Southern Nigeria Peoples Assembly (SNPA), an amorphous group purporting to represent the South as a whole, underscored these fears by affirming its opposition to a government produced by what it described as the dynamics of insurgency and blackmail. The group boasts members like former Vice-President Alex Ekwueme, represented by Dozie Ikedife, Edwin Clark, an elder statesman, and Bolanle Gbonigi, a retired bishop of the Anglican Church. The group was in other words saying that Dr Jonathan was being pressured to either abjure re-election or, if he goes ahead to contest, lose on account of his failure to curb the insurgency. A former minister from the South-South zone, Alabo Tonye Graham-Douglas, also identified with this trenchant and rampant falsehood by suggesting that Dr Jonathan was a victim of orchestrated manipulations by shadowy northern forces.

The SNPA’s conclusion is inelegantly couched in uninterrupted fallacy. It said: “Let it be known that the people of Southern Nigeria shall not allow themselves to be ruled by any government that is a product of insurgency or blackmail if the sponsors of insurgency in this country think they can brow-beat and pummel the government of President Goodluck Jonathan to abdicate the authority and mandate freely given to him by Nigerians to rule this country.” This farcical reasoning is not an aberration. It is rampant even in the supposedly enlightened Southwest, where many have allowed themselves to be seduced by such far-fetched and unfounded ideas about the country’s power dynamics and power equation. In addition, this farcical reasoning forms the overwhelming logic and bedrock of the Jonathan presidency, where officials unable to provide answers to Dr Jonathan’s abysmal failure as president have sought diversionary and emotive explanations both to explain contemporary events and to anticipate and possibly deflect what looks certain to be an electoral disaster.

It is, therefore, clear that Dr Jonathan rests his present and future political fortunes on the divisive tripod of alleged northern hegemonic machinations manifesting through Boko Haram insurgency, religion, and his ethnic status as a minority. Both he and his supporters downplay, if not excuse, his failures, his lack of charisma, his stark inability to provide leadership in moments of crises, his miscomprehension of the economic and social dynamics engendering crises in the country, his poor judgement and uninformed choices, and his preference for insular, retrogressive and parochial company. Dr Jonathan has often accused his opponents of politicising the insurgency. But he is in fact more disposed than anyone else to evoking politics as an explanation for his lack of a sense of urgency in national affairs. It is not surprising that the world press has dismissed him as a weak and ineffective politician presiding over a massively corrupt government.

Examined closely, the silly argument that the insurgency is a ploy to weaken and discourage Dr Jonathan does not hold water. If Boko Haram was designed to undermine Dr Jonathan, why was it founded before he assumed the presidency? It is known that the group, which was first described as the Taliban equivalent of the Afghanistan Taliban movement, had its beginnings in the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency. It later became virulent under the Umaru Yar’Adua government during which time its former leader, Mohammed Yusuf, was extra-judicially murdered by policemen. Not only was it clear that the last two governments misunderstood the sect, they also underestimated the social, economic and religious forces that drove it into extremity.

Dr Jonathan cannot also be exculpated from mismanaging the revolt. Apart from his failure in appreciating the threat constituted by the sect to national cohesion and stability, he also vacillated for a long time on whether to fight or mollify the sect. Even when he was encouraged by analysts to declare the sect a terrorist organisation, and foreign governments were prepared to take a lead in that direction, Dr Jonathan led a campaign to dissuade foreign categorisation of the sect as terrorist, while he also tried to pacify the group and describe it as a part of the Nigerian family. He left matters too late until the sect became a fierce ogre. Now he is encouraging the tendentious opinion that Boko Haram is a northern scheme designed to humiliate him as a southerner and Christian, an opinion strangely embraced uncritically by many in the South and elsewhere, an opinion that is sadly gaining foolish currency.

If indeed Boko Haram is a northern scheme to defeat or undermine Dr Jonathan, is the military also a northern army? Dr Jonathan has twice changed the leadership of the army. On both occasions, he opted for southerners. And since his army commanders and rank and file are not only northerners, why have they not devised brilliant tactics to defeat the sect? Are the factors hindering the army the making of northerners only? The truth is that the military is demoralised, and its equipment, sometimes in quality, and at other times in volume, do not match those of the insurgents. As testified by grieving Chibok parents, and contrary to what the military would have the people believe, when the insurgents raided Chibok, the army was forewarned and the detachment defending the town radioed for help. No help came. Soldiers have also told of tactical inadequacy and corruption in the war efforts, even as Chibok natives confirmed that the military never embarked on hot pursuit of the insurgents after the abductions.

Blaming intrigues and northern blackmail for Dr Jonathan’s evident inadequacies and poor leadership is an elaborate ruse. While it is true that some politicians might have connived at the insurgency in its early years and even sponsored it, and while religion and ethnicity have become depressing and distortionary factors in Nigerian politics, these do not explain the president’s idiosyncratic failures. And whether the schoolgirls are rescued or not, or whether Dr Jonathan gets a second term or not, nothing will redeem him from his staggering lack of vigour and accomplishment in the face of stirring national challenges. He is one of a few damned by both their successes and failures. Nor will the multinational help he is receiving rescue his presidency from total failure or even imbue it with the right mix of policies required to rebuild Nigeria and make it a great nation. If they are capable of it, Nigerians must assess the Jonathan presidency more scrupulously than ethnic and religious jingoists have done. If in spite of themselves they manage to do that, Nigerians will uncover unsightly evidence that would lead them to punish this failed government severely in the 2015 polls. But if they don’t, the consequences will be inescapable and dire.

May 11, 2014
Government’s whimsical approach to counterterrorism

Either because it lacked the imaginativeness to do what is right or because it believed no abductions took place on April 15, the Jonathan presidency did not wake up to the full import of the kidnap of more than 200 schoolgirls of the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State. For more than two weeks after the abductions, the federal government pretended the problem was not as serious as the rest of the world thought it to be. But after worldwide consternation over the abductions reverberated as far as Nigeria itself, the Jonathan presidency reluctantly roused itself from slumber. That rousing, however, did not include visiting Borno State or immediately putting into place effective strategies to solve the shocking crime.

Instead, the awakening led to a flurry of activities in the presidency. Dr Jonathan summoned everyone but the military commanders on the ground. Since he had apparently met with his top security chiefs, that step was more than enough. But what did he discuss with them, if after meeting them they still could not convince him the abductions took place? And rather than handle the Borno State officials that met with him between May 3 and May 4, like a statesman, especially because the entire security machinery rests on his own shoulders, the president and his police chiefs treated them harshly, almost as if they believed the Borno officials orchestrated the abductions.

A day after the unpleasant experience with the president and the police, the same Borno government officials were hauled before the first lady. The officials were subjected to worse indignities, with the first lady all but accusing them of trying to undermine her husband. Even in a military government, that kind of atrocious intervention was unlikely. The first lady thereafter summoned another expanded meeting to which she invited more state and federal officials. There she indulged in indescribable histrionics and concluded she didn’t think there was any abduction; or that if there was, the Borno State government, not her husband’s administration, had the responsibility of rescuing the schoolgirls. By May 8, however, Dr Jonathan had seemed convinced abductions that outraged the world indeed occurred, and had begun to declare with his customary optimism that given the involvement of the rest of the world, Boko Haram’s end was near.

It was an eventful week, the like of which Nigerians may never witness again, not in two lifetimes. In three or four frenetic days the president, his enthusiastic and boisterously proselytising wife and somnolent aides had run the whole gamut of emotions between disbelief, epiphany, and exultant embrace of new realities. It would be tragic indeed if this state of suspended animation were to continue after 2015 because some obtuse thinkers believe that the gentle Dr Jonathan is a victim of an indeterminate conspiracy by internal hegemonists.

May 11, 2014
Jonathan and 2015

Since former President Olusegun Obasanjo tamed the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during his eight turbulent years in power, the party had become unrecognisable both as a party, in its fundamental sense, and as a democratic institution, in its structural and operational sense. All it required for the party to retain and nurture its new identity and continue to decay magnificently was for Chief Obasanjo’s successors to be tarred with the same imperious and imposing brush. Luckily for the party, it had a succession of equally overbearing chairmen eager to lend their talents and services, not to say their lack of critical thinking, to the presidents that succeeded Chief Obasanjo. The party thus mastered the art of motion without debate, premise without conclusion, form without substance, and silence without reflection.

This, therefore, was the ecosystem that produced President Goodluck Jonathan. When he emerged as running mate to the late President Umaru Yar’Adua for the 2007 election, Chief Obasanjo had cleared the way and silenced the opposition within the party. And when it came to the turn of Dr Jonathan to take over from President Yar’Adua as acting president, and to contest in 2011 on his own merit, he was not unmindful of his party’s new political culture. Those within his party he could not browbeat, he bribed; and those he could not bribe, he dealt with brutally. If his opponents within the party thought he was easy meat, he gave them a lesson in life and politics they would never forget. Chief Obasanjo was not always successful in dealing with opponents outside his party, for they were recalcitrant and querulous. But Jonathan too has met more than his match in the opposition, for they have not lost any of their fire and truculence.

Yet, of all the sure things in Nigerian politics today, probably the most certain is that Dr Jonathan will contest the 2015 presidential election. And given the nature and character of the PDP, it is more than certain that if anyone will contest against him, it will be merely a formality to dignify the party, raise its esteem in the eyes of the people as a democratic institution, and give the false impression that neither the party nor Dr Jonathan engages in the tyranny that has become the PDP’s sinews. Already, party chieftains and rank and file have lined up ingloriously behind Dr Jonathan for the 2015 race. They all understand on which side their breads are buttered. They are not disconcerted by the sham enthusiasm and offensiveness with which they sell the president’s candidacy. They fiercely urge him on and impress it on him that their assurances are all he needs to win.

But except Dr Jonathan is telling himself a lie and believing it, and the people around him are living in denial, they know the only chance they have of winning the 2015 race is for the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) to field an unelectable presidential ticket. A few months ago, before the insecurity problem magnified into an ogre, Dr Jonathan’s chances rested on the queer dynamics of the contest, especially the fact that he hails from a minority tribe and evokes hope in others like him tired of the tyranny of majority tribes that everyone, irrespective of state of origin, can successfully aspire to the presidency. There is also the unsettling use of religion as a tool of political mobilisation, which the president has raised into virtuoso art. Despite the dangers of elevating religion into the political arena in a country lacking in self-moderation in both politics and religion, Dr Jonathan has avidly plumbed that depth and made himself into some sort of quixotic religious champion.

From all indications, however, and in the face of the worst security challenges the country has ever had to contend with, neither religious affiliation nor area of origin will avail a politician much. The more Boko Haram terrorists inflict punishment on the country, whether in the Northeast or in the suburbs of Abuja, the more Dr Jonathan’s government demonstrate its impotence. Waves upon waves of attacks elicit from the presidency only messages of condolence and the summoning of security meetings. There are no new approaches, no inspiring and rousing talk of steely resolve in moments of national angst; and beyond cavalier wish of victory, there are no demonstrations of hope and confidence that the terror monster can indeed be defeated. As the Boko Haram attacks become more audacious and telling, so the Jonathan government has become more stupefied and feckless, sometimes even showing the violent sect sinister respect, and at other times pledging to it, out of desperation and fear, a most unnerving and counterproductive clemency.

It must be noted that Dr Jonathan seized upon the moronic tools of ethnicity and religion to anchor and give fillip to his flagging campaign because he despairs at ever finding concrete developmental achievements to parade. The economy has not yielded to his panaceas, nor has the society responded to his native charms. Even his talisman, which many tie teleologically to his name, has failed to reorder politics beyond his bucolic and innocent sermonizing. The consequence of these multiple failures is that, even without the aggravation Boko Haram’s terror was always capable of causing, the Jonathan government was doomed, to put it mildly. If these multiple failures irritate and vex the electorate, nothing rouses them into a greater rage than the poor judgement the president often exhibited whenever he confronted the mundane issues of the day.

The country has often been treated to his quaint and outrightly unsophisticated views on what should pass as the philosophical challenges of the day, and to his dour responses to the ordinary provocations of the people and especially the opposition. He dragged his feet on the Stella Oduah scandal and impatiently and infuriatingly dismissed our concerns because, as the Information minister Labaran Maku said, critics and the opposition politicised everything. Even when he sacked Ms Oduah, Dr Jonathan did it reluctantly, sullenly and bad-temperedly. The president has also ignored our irritations on the Diezani Alison-Madueke affair involving frivolously and expensively chartered jets and unremitted oil receipts, perhaps because we also ‘politicise’ the shocking disclosure of opaque public accounting and suspected sleaze in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. And he has done absolutely nothing about the Abba Moro Immigration Service recruitment scandal, perhaps, this time, because the Internal Affairs minister is backed by the president’s arch supporter, Senate President David Mark.

By trivialising public administration and policy so abysmally, Dr Jonathan illustrates and underscores his perfunctory and emotive approach to governance. This attitude hardly conduces to electoral triumphs as much as it provokes angry rejection. And by presiding over a government that tolerates ministers who sue the legislature to stall investigations, the rot in the system, not to say in the Jonathan presidency, can’t be more complete. So, Dr Jonathan can’t run on achievements, and he can’t run on sound judgement either, for after all, nothing exhibits poor judgement as his refusal to empathise with Borno families whose teenage daughters were abducted by Boko Haram militants, possibly for sex slavery.

Indeed, Dr Jonathan is cornered, just as his supporters are irrational to still embrace a president who can’t run on his records or on his ideas, or as it is becoming apparent, given his considerable staidness and lack of grit, on his personality. He will run only on if the opposition APC makes the wrong presidential ticket choice. The APC is still in a quandary over the 2015 ticket, perhaps still consulting. The party will require the highest gift of clairvoyance to do what is right, and to, as it were, read the mind of God. If it is any consolation to them, let them consult Churchill, Nixon, JFK and De Gaulle when those statesmen had to make life-changing and life-defining decisions without the faintest idea what powerful changes the outcomes would trigger. God help the APC.

In short, in a free and fair election, Dr Jonathan and the PDP can’t win the 2015 presidential election except the APC loses it. Given the president’s string of bad decisions, bad judgement and bad and ineffective policies, and notwithstanding his constant and exasperating resort to ethnic emotionalism and religious grandstanding, the initiative is no longer in his hands; it is in the hands of those he likes to romanticise as his enemies. Let these opposition enemies, therefore, be as ruthless as Chief Obasanjo was when that wily farmer and general corners his enemies, an idiosyncrasy that took the former president repeatedly but undeservedly to heights of glory and splendour in his many tumultuous decades on earth, starting from the time his friend Major Kaduna Nzeogwu planned a coup without telling him, and his former boss General Murtala Mohammed died alone on the streets of Lagos.

May 4, 2014
FIFA: Nigeria in the eye of the storm again

During his 90th birthday luncheon in March, the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, sarcastically described Nigeria’s corruption as a reference point which his countrymen should violently repudiate. Said he on that occasion: “Are we now like Nigeria where you have to reach into your pocket to get anything done? You see, we used to go to Nigeria and every time we went there, we had to carry extra cash in our pockets to corruptly pay for everything. You get in a plane in Nigeria and you sit there and the crew keeps dilly dallying without taking off as they wait for you to pay them to fly the plane.” Mr Mugabe was in an expansive mood, and his thoroughly entertained audience, reports suggested, roared with approving laughter. Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs ministry officials have protested that denigration, but nothing, absolutely nothing, will come out of the protest.

Barely a month later, another very damaging corruption allegation has been made by a convicted Singaporean match-fixer Wilson Raj Pemural who claimed in a new book that in exchange for gratification he helped Nigeria and Honduras qualify for the 2010 World Cup through match-fixing. FIFA has launched an investigation, including watching videos of the alleged matches, and it looks like one way or the other Nigeria’s goose will be cooked. Indirectly lending corroboration to Mr Pemural’s sordid allegation, one-time coach of England’s national team, Sven-Goran Eriksson, has also alleged, again in a new book, that Nigeria’s football administrators asked for half his salary in order to give him the job of coaching the Super Eagles for the same 2010 World Cup. He went on to describe our football administrators as ignorant and stupid.

Perhaps Nigeria will again protest this defamation. If they do, it will also amount to nothing. Nigerians remember the ignoble manner Amos Adamu was removed from the FIFA executive committee in 2010 and banned from sports administration for his involvement in bribery incidents connected with the hosting of the 2018 World Cup. He went to court and lost. Earlier, in 2008, the late President Umaru Yar’Adua had removed him from his position as Director-General of the National Sports Commission (NSC). The stories of Messrs Pemural and Eriksson, not to talk of the fall of Mr Adamu, indicate clearly the rot in Nigeria’s football administration. Worse, the stories, together with Mr Mugabe’s testimony, also show just how far gone Nigeria is.

But the biggest story of all is that to President Jonathan, Nigeria’s corruption story is one of perception, a chimera that has transfixed critics and the opposition. With such deliberately altered mindset, how can we ever fight the cankerworm?

May 4, 2014
APC and 2015 presidential ticket

The leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have been a little edgy over public comments on the party’s proposed presidential ticket. Citing what they believe to be feelers from party leaders, especially concerning a proposed Muslim-Muslim ticket, the commentators have argued vociferously that that proposed ticket was insensitive to Nigeria’s contemporary political culture, and is doomed to fail. That assertion, whose most public proponent was former Aviation minister Femi Fani-Kayode, was doubtless sweeping, judgemental and a little sectarian and polarising. Two weeks ago, this column addressed Mr Fani-Kayode’s frantic but subtle dalliance with both the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and President Goodluck Jonathan himself. But as I indicated then, Mr Fani-Kayode had the right to strongly object to his party’s dispositions, though as I also suggested, he needn’t migrate to another party in order to underscore his opposition to his party’s policies or direction.

Neither the APC nor its leaders have said anything quite significant about Mr Fani-Kayode’s views or his manner of tiptoeing around presidential corridors. Perhaps they are watching to see which way the cats will jump. But judging from many snide remarks here and there by party loyalists, and the impatience demonstrated by a few party leaders over the Muslim-Muslim ticket speculations, I suspect that if not now, then perhaps sometime in the immediate past, APC top shots had flirted with that unusual and controversial proposal. More, I also think that in particular, former head of state, General Muhammadu Buhari, features prominently on that proposed ticket. Given what seems to be their tenacious adherence to a rigid but unstated position on the ticket, it is hard indeed to tell what is driving the APC strategy: their belief in the direction they think the country should be heading, or their appreciation, or lack of it, of the actual direction the country is headed.

My sympathies for the APC are well known, and they are based principally on my frustrations with the abject incompetence of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to redeem Nigeria from policy inertia and ineptitude. My support for the progressives, apart from sharing ideological affinities with them, is influenced not just by what the APC stands for, which I admit can be sometimes amorphous, but by what the ruling conservative PDP does not and cannot stand for. The PDP is loth to embrace principles, chary of adopting democratic tenets, and has produced a slew of successive presidents whose only claim to the presidency is hinged on the circumstances of their background than the value of their academic qualifications and mental attributes. Their first Fourth Republic leader, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, was an unmitigated disaster to whom the wobble of our current democratic experience is wholly attributable. The next two presidents, the late Umaru Yar’Adua and Dr Jonathan, have not been inspiring at all.

It is not certain why the APC has been fairly reticent on its presidential ticket, especially its reluctance to state clearly, in the face of hostile controversy, the values and principles that will inform their choice. By allowing the speculation about its ticket to proceed in the hurtful manner it is going, the APC gives the impression it is unaware of the damage to its credibility as a thinking and progressive political party which such negative speculations can elicit. I am in fact surprised that the party seems oblivious that in the past few weeks, especially after the highly successful and imaginative presentation of its road map, it has lost huge momentum in its drive towards 2015. Not only has the PDP checkmated the APC’s blitzkrieg, it has in my opinion turned the table on the progressives, an unscrupulous advantage that has not even been vitiated by the ruling party’s obnoxious and inept handling of the anti-terror war, rising poverty, tragic and exploitative employment methods, and stultifying energy crisis, among other failures.

In an election period, it is not unusual for the pendulum of public approval to oscillate back and forth in favour of one party or the other. But the APC has a responsibility to ensure the pendulum does not swing against it too wildly. The party may have spent a huge sum of money to build itself, as it were, from nothing into a huge something, but it is not the only one investing in its future and fortune. Many of us who are not members of the party, but who see in the party an opportunity at this point in time to defeat the mediocrity that the PDP constitutes, have also invested tremendously and emotionally in the success of the APC. We know instinctively that if the APC fails, the future of Nigeria will be bleak indeed, if indeed that future is not to be erased almost entirely. We, therefore, have a responsibility to manage and coax the progressive party in the direction that will ensure success. Party leaders may be willing to take huge risks decided upon by their mystical calculations, but those risks, which can also backfire badly, must be tempered by our own detached and sometimes more informed appreciation of social and economic issues and political choices shaping the coming combat.

In short, the APC must consciously begin to reverse the momentum it unwisely surrendered to the PDP in the past few weeks. It must not hope that chance will deliver the needed opportunities to it, as it must have no doubt appreciated from its elaborate and sophisticated road map presentation. The party not only needs to consciously devise programmes and policies to stay in public glare in a qualitative and positive fashion, it must learn how to listen to the electorate, and more importantly recognise that its existence and success are defined by how best it captures or approximates the yearnings, values and ambitions of the people.

Except the APC is living in denial, it must by now have recognised that one of those areas in which it has lost ground to the PDP is the speculation that it was about to embrace a Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket. A few years back, such a ticket might have passed without too much controversy. But the fact is that both the PDP and Dr Jonathan have politicised religion to such an appalling and disgraceful level that an all-Christian or all-Muslim ticket will play into the hands of the other party. Risks are second nature to politics and politicians, but a one-religion ticket, given the horrifying slaughter going on in the Northeast and the church runs embarked upon by Dr Jonathan, will be an invitation to electoral disaster. Should the APC lose the 2015 polls, it is unlikely to have a second chance, given the tentativeness of its structure and the inchoateness of its platform. In tandem with the wish of majority of Nigerians for change, the APC has a responsibility to win the next polls, and it can only do so by taking only educated, sophisticated and not-too-radical risks.

In spite of itself, the APC must begin to ask very hard and unsettling questions about its ambitions and how to achieve them – in particular, how to win the presidency. Such questions must be bounced off those who are not members of the party, those who are not current or aspiring jobholders, and those who really couldn’t care less if the party decided to commit political suicide. One of those questions concerns General Buhari, who in one way or the other is speculated to be on the proposed ticket party leaders might attempt to cajole their members to embrace. In spite of my love and admiration for the laconic and principled general, I am not as optimistic as the party that given the fast changing dynamics of Nigerian politics, and notwithstanding the fanatical following the general elicits especially from the North, he can guarantee success for the progressives.

If the APC is to succeed, it needs a radical change of paradigm driven urgently by a new momentum designed to leave the PDP gasping for breath. I invite the progressive party to remould itself by recognising that its priority is to win the next polls first. To do that, its leading lights will have to sacrifice almost their lives. But nature is not so cruel as to leave those sacrifices unrequited.

April 27, 2014
Chibok abductions: two weeks of national impotence

There are not many countries where over 270 teenage girls could be abducted by criminals in one fell swoop and a national emergency had not been declared, or a task force saddled with the urgent responsibility of securing their release. Reports in fact suggest that at the expanded security meeting held on Thursday at the instance of the president, the military claimed to have a secret tactical plan to secure the release of the remaining 234 schoolgirls still being held by Boko Haram militants. If it is true, that fact, notwithstanding its secrecy, must be at least a little reassuring. However, except perhaps in a hostage situation, I do not recollect where so many young girls had been abducted so easily and for purposes that leave little to the imagination. If the abductions do not reflect poorly on the tactical prowess of Nigeria’s security organisations, they at least reflect on the impotence of the nation, and in particular, the impotence of the Jonathan presidency.

The President Goodluck Jonathan government must excuse us if we blame him wholly for these abductions. He was elected to ensure the country’s safety and well-being. If in the process of executing the mandate given him to rule over the affairs of the country he encounters a vicious insurgency, it is entirely his responsibility to devise means of battling it, including knowing how to energise the country’s security network, inspire confidence in his methods and ability, and rally the people to the last man to counter the worst bestiality Nigeria has ever seen. If he is unable to do all these, the failure is entirely his.

Sadly, apart from not giving us confidence in his counterinsurgency measures, his style has also left so much to be desired. He and his aides are too easily irritated by criticism, preferring an unearthly and gentle form of correction that even a dictatorship would find patronising and hypocritical. His judgement is also too strange to be deciphered. While the disaster that the abductions were was yet to sink in, and the shock yet to abate, Dr Jonathan took off to Kano for a superfluous political rally where shockingly he practiced a few dance steps that, in the eyes of the opposition, seemed to mimic the fiddling Roman emperor, Nero. Neither he nor his aides have successfully defended that alarming absence of judgement in the face of grave national emergency.

But at last Dr Jonathan is gradually converting to the full horror of the abductions. His expanded security meeting of Thursday, not to talk of the meeting’s resolve to ensure the abducted girls were rescued, somewhat indicates that conversion. But the Jonathan presidency will have to struggle in the coming days, as the captivity of the schoolgirls continues, to douse national suspicion that it failed to appreciate the urgency of the matter because the daughter of no one of importance was involved. The country recalls that when the president’s 70-year-old uncle, Nengite Nitabai, was abducted in February, it took less than three weeks to arrest the suspected kidnappers and free the septuagenarian. They also recall the alacrity with which the son of the elder statesman E.K. Clark, Ebikeme, was prised loose from the grips of his abductors. Not only were the suspects in the case arrested, together with their families, the abduction lasted only one week.

Such comparisons are bound to surface in the days ahead given both the initial lethargy of the Jonathan presidency to the schoolgirls’ abductions and the business-as-usual attitude it exhibited when the full import of the horrifying news was just being felt. The initiative of the Jonathan presidency may have been dulled by the quality of the personnel in his team, but given the bad press he has attracted over the emergencies of the past few weeks, it is time Dr Jonathan took the job he schemed so passionately to secure more seriously, especially given his fresh scheming to keep it for another four years. He can however only get a second term if he justifies the confidence the electorate reposed in him in his first election. So far there is nothing in his responses to Boko Haram or any of the other social, economic and political ills afflicting the country to justify his craving for another term.

April 27, 2014
‘General’ Sambo goes to the war front

Last Wednesday, Vice President Namadi Sambo spoke of his party’s preparations for the Ekiti and Osun elections slated for June and August respectively. He is of course entitled to speak and act with as much self-aggrandisement as he can muster, and to inflate the hopes and expectations of his party and its candidates. But what he is not entitled to is his undignified and provocative use of language, one that absolutely does not edify his office or person. “We are going to the war front to bring back our stolen mandate,” he said brutally, if a little surprisingly, for someone previously thought to be mild-mannered and more polished than his principal. “Everybody knows that Ekiti belongs to PDP: they used all instruments to take it away from us.”

With that careless innuendo, the vice president spoke many untruths and denigrated his high office. Comparing the Ekiti and Osun political campaigns to war fronts in a society struggling to exorcise the pernicious influences of military rule and the concomitant effects of militarised minds is both reckless and unreflective. He might, like any other nostalgic civilian, wish to romanticise the electoral battles ahead as military engagements, but the demands of his office, not to say the long-running battles his country has waged to democratise the polity and rid it of arbitrariness, ought to have sensitise him to the use of proper language and etiquette.

But likening politics to war was not the only gaffe the vice president made last Wednesday in Abuja. Like the often bucolic President Goodluck Jonathan, he also suggested wildly that the victories of the APC governors in Ekiti and Osun were procured by dangerous artifices, in particular through conniving courts. It sadly did not occur to the vice president that his office imposes great responsibility on him to sustain rather than undermine the independence and sanctity of the judiciary. As a matter of fact both he and the president, not to talk of the many philistines and hawks in top echelons of the PDP, actually believe the court judgements that brought the APC to power in Ekiti and Osun were illegitimately procured. Even if it were so, it is still unbecoming of the vice president to lend credence to such dangerous and damaging insinuations. Once the highest court of jurisdiction gives a judgement, state officials at the level of the presidency must act and speak decorously.

Vice President Namadi may have been put in charge of the PDP campaign to reclaim Ekiti and Osun States, but his reputation as a robust and suave mind should have dictated a better approach to the self-styled war he wishes so indecorously to wage. Had he in fact forborne a little and not excitedly subscribed to the historical fallacy bandied by PDP apparatchiks, he would have rephrased his inaccurate ascription of the two states’ ownership. While it is true that the PDP once governed the two states, it is even truer that the APC, through its progenitors, first governed the two states at the dawn of the Fourth Republic.

The vice president is, however, unlikely to find the motivation to restrain himself in his actions and use of language. It takes much deeper understanding of issues, not to say exposure to the politics and styles of other great climes, for those in high office in Nigeria to embrace measured and polished language. The desperation to win the coming polls in Ekiti and Osun, and everywhere in 2015, will consistently predispose both the president and the vice president, and of course many others in the PDP, to their characteristic fallacies and flippancy.

Two problems emerge from the vice president’s dangerous rhetoric. One is that the Nigerian government’s continuing misuse of power, as their often violent language and actions show, is one more confirmation that African rulers don’t react well to issues of power. Even though they are beneficiaries of modern constitutional arrangements, they have remained substantially and instinctively monarchical in mind and in practice. Any challenge to their persons and policies is nearly always perceived as treason, or in mild cases, as disrespectful of the ‘exalted office of the President.’ They therefore have less motivation in speaking or acting with the courteousness Nigerians demand of them and are constitutionally entitled to.

The second problem is the general unwillingness of African leaders to institute conditions and structures by which their societies could flower and endure. It is not too clear what is behind that slothfulness. Could it be a lack of knowledge, or just plain indiscipline? Looking at Dr Jonathan’s policies and hearing the vice president’s statements on Ekiti and Osun, it is tempting to think it is a question of ignorance. If they knew the positive implications of promoting democratic values and principles, they might be motivated to honour their oaths of office, knowing full well that in the long run, their successors, country and people, not to say their own children, would thrive in a stable polity, one in which justice, fairness and equity would reign.

But perhaps it is a question of lack of discipline. African leaders are notoriously undisciplined, privately and publicly, as past Nigerian rulers showed. Until Nelson Mandela came along, it was thought that the continent was an unrelenting landscape of brutal and undisciplined rulers who find it difficult to even obey the laws they themselves wrote. Vice-president Sambo owes it to himself as the polished mind we are used to not to surrender to the putrefactive mannerisms of his party. He is surely enlightened enough to know how to fight an election and campaign for votes with the decency inherent in his professional training and the civilisation intrinsic to his fundamental make-up. As for his principal, the one who enthrals only when he indulges his bucolic simplicity, this column gave up a long time ago.

April 20, 2014
Boko Haram, sex slaves and counterinsurgency

All those who ever secretly or openly supported Boko Haram either as a social, political, economic or sectarian revolt should feel deeply mortified by the sect’s atrocious and nihilistic transformations. The sect always had it in them, especially judging from the circumstances surrounding its founding and initial operations, to engage in very appalling and destructive anti-social behaviour. But it fooled many who were hoodwinked by its sectarian appeal, many who thought that in some quaint way it represented an uprising against political and economic corruption, many who were beguiled by its regional proclivities. Given its second major abduction of schoolgirls this year, it has become abundantly clear that the sect is irredeemably evil and that it represents the twisted and selfish interest of its demented and perverted founders and supporters.

As I indicated in this place a few weeks back, I am not sure that Nigeria has learnt the appropriate lessons from the disturbance sufficient to end the uprising. Neither the federal government which was for a long time ambivalent in fighting the sect, nor the religious, social and political elites of the North which initially saw the sect as a puritanical and messianic tool for societal cleansing, nor the dispossessed who saw it as a fitting retribution against government at all levels for years of official tyranny , has had a new and deeper appreciation of the concepts of tolerance, justice, fairness and equity, and that these values actually transcend tribe, religion, class or political grouping.

More practically, however, it beggars belief that the security agencies were not proactive in defending the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, nor was their defensive dragnet tight enough to forestall the abductions of over a 100 students from that school. The first major abduction of about 20 schoolgirls at Konduga in Borno State in February caught the government and its security agencies flatfooted, notwithstanding the declaration of a state of emergency in that state and two others. Not all the girls have been freed. And now this. Coming a day after the Nyanya, Abuja bombing in which more than 75 people lost their lives, the Chibok, Borno State abductions are bound to fuel a feeling of hopelessness and to underscore mounting lack of confidence in the ability of the government to perform its constitutional duty of protecting its people.

Every Nigerian, especially parents, must be deeply distressed by the abductions and the implication for the safety and chastity of the abducted girls. It is truly heartrending. Indeed, every such abduction brings the country frightfully close to an implosion, as reports of parents determined to go into the bushes to liberate their daughters show. Dr Jonathan has called a security meeting, as he always does every time such horrendous crimes are committed. But does his government have a new plan to fight the sect? Does he himself inspire courage in the society and in those fighting the anarchists? Not only has the president inexplicably failed to visit the affected areas and show heartfelt empathy, even when he visited, all he did was talk down to the traumatised people of the emergency states.

More and more, the Jonathan presidency looks absolutely befuddled, if not paralysed, in fighting the sect. But the president clearly does not have time on his side. Nor do we as a country. If we do not defeat the sect very soon, the sect will be the death of us, for the country is so dangerously close to the precipice and so inflammable that a small fire at any remote part can provoke a conflagration.

April 20, 2014