The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Jonathan’s late salvoes

    Jonathan’s late salvoes

    President Goodluck Jonathan may have eased out four members of his so-far uninspiring cabinet, and seems set to bring in more notable persons, but it is doubtful whether the reshuffle will have quite the remarkable momentum he hopes to create for his performance as president and his re-election campaign. His Chief of Staff, the much reviled and hated Mike Oghiadomhe, has been shoved out. So, too, were the haughty Stella Oduah of the Aviation ministry, the officious Caleb Olubolade of Police Affairs, the imperious Godsday Orubebe of the Niger Delta ministry and the relatively unknown Yerima Ngama, Minister of State for Finance. Having watched with macabre delight the effect the reshuffle was having on the country, the president, reports suggest, is now seized by a frenzy to draw more blood. Converted to bloodlust and energised by the sanguinary effect of sacking his men, the president will probably do a little more, if not at a high level, then at a more sober and lower level.

    The president is believed to be prepared to bring in well-known persons, some of them retired generals, former governors, senators and technocrats. Many think his new team is more likely to be accurately described as star-studded, and he himself seems to have rediscovered the zest to tinker with things. He will also probably think he is in the process of assembling a team that will deliver the presidency to him once more, that is, if the truculent and bellicose former President Olusegun Obasanjo does not derail his wagon. My private thoughts are that Dr Jonathan’s cabinet reshuffle is motivated by wholly expedient reasons, nothing to do with performance, public morality, or even ideas.

    His paradigms will not only remain the same, woolly and stifling as they have been since he assumed office, they will also fail as usual to achieve any significant purpose. The problem with the Jonathan government, as everyone knows, is not just a case of long-lasting policy inconsistencies, accentuated by bureaucratic in-fighting; it is a case of acute absence of a solid inner core around which his governing paradigms could coalesce. So, the reshuffle as well as the selection of new cabinet members will neither be dictated by any attempt to reinforce the ideas that underpin and propel his government nor be geared towards demolishing his image as a bumbling president and recasting him as a statesman or a charismatic leader. When he assumed office, there was no indication of a genuine conviction about what and how his government should look like; there is nothing at the moment to indicate such a conviction has been birthed.

    As a matter of fact, Dr Jonathan has shown over the few years that his leadership style is marked by a noticeable reluctance to do what is right and a marked stubbornness to amend what is wrong. He waited almost forever to get rid of Mr Orubebe even after it had become obvious the minister specialised in fomenting animosities in the Niger Delta than making friends for the president. Dr Jonathan also demonstrated an unrestrained foul mood in disciplining Ms Oduah after her serial indiscretions had all but alienated virtually everyone in the Aviation industry, civil society, and an incredulous international community stupefied by our government’s slothfulness. It is not clear what Dr Ngama’s faults were, or why the president should skip the head of that ministry and hit upon the seldom-seen and little-known Minister of State.

    Left to Dr Jonathan, and had circumstances not pushed him to act, there was no way he would have unhorsed Ms Oduah. He proved quite reluctant to do what was right when he stuck adamantly to Bamanga Tukur, the arcane gerontocrat who turned both the PDP and reason itself on their heads. Until it became impossible for him to ignore the uproar triggered by Alhaji Tukur in the ruling party, the president was determined not to touch the former party chairman. Whether now, in the past, or in the future, Dr Jonathan will neither act out of conviction nor out of principles. On many occasions in the past he had acted solely out of expediency, dithering and pussyfooting all the way; he will continue to do so until the end of his presidency, whether or not he gets a second term.

    Closely leashed to his often expedient way of handling grave matters is the fact that the president always acts when it is too late. When he finally and reluctantly removed Ms Oduah, he had left the matter to fester every badly until there was no honour left for him in the ugly incident of the armoured cars scandal. It had been expected the president would act firmly and expeditiously by sacking Ms Oduah and sustaining the integrity of the presidency. Instead, he left the matter for far too long, and tongues to wag ceaselessly, before he stirred himself. Whether he convinced himself his re-election chances were threatened by his lack of principles and promptness, or others persuaded him he risked a second term by doing nothing, we may never know. But at least we know he is a skilful procrastinator, one with an eye perpetually on the main chance.

    Some of the names bandied as candidates for ministerial appointments are gentlemen the country is familiar with. They are strong, may add value, even if nominal, to the Jonathan presidency, and are ordinarily not bad choices. But for a government devoid of positive qualities other than the character of nothingness it both embodies and engenders, and for a government that values expediency over principles, these ‘strong’ men may end up adding nothing to the government, not even in an election year, contrary to the president’s expectations. Indeed, we should expect more procrastination, more surrender to expediency, more sacrifice of everything valuable on the altar of politics, and less adherence to the cause of anti-corruption, justice, fair play and equity. These, in short, typify the essential character of the Jonathan presidency. This character will not change in a million years, and it must shock the rational mind that any talented politician should invest his accomplishment and person on a government whose primary and primordial notions take on life only when mediocrity and farce manifest.

  • The tragedy of 2015 presidential campaigns

    The tragedy of 2015 presidential campaigns

    Before the third quarter of this year, the profiles of the two main political parties’ standard-bearers may become discernible. Pessimism should be deplored, but the chances of the two big parties presenting inspiring candidates are fairly remote. President Goodluck Jonathan is doing everything possible, notwithstanding the vitriolic denunciation and unease of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, to get himself elected as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate. If he runs, as he is almost certain to do, it will not be on account of any exemplary work he has done to remake and refit the country since he assumed office, or on the grounds of any inspiring image he has projected thus far. As far as both work and image are concerned, Dr Jonathan is an uninspiring and exaggerated blank.

    If he runs, he will not base his candidacy on what he hopes to do, though he and his party will effuse a smattering of national or even ideological agenda encompassing social, economic and political issues. Nor will he feel the compulsion to demonstrate competence, savvy, charisma and consistency, all of which are components of strong and statesmanlike leadership. He has not shown a modicum of these attributes right from his assumption of office, and they are not intrinsic to him. It is therefore inconceivable that he will feel incommoded by their nonexistence in his character makeup. He will instead base his candidacy, as his political tutelage has taught him, on the geopolitics of his background, the support he can muster from his rabid followers and supporters, the voluble and recriminatory effusions of jobholders and paid party hawks, and on the potentials of his appointees’ muscle flexing.

    When he assumed office, the convoluted process had nothing to do with him as a person, or on his background, or on his perceived competence. The people and the legislature were rightly concerned about issues of political decorum and the need to save and uphold the constitution. Concocting a so-called doctrine of necessity upon which Dr Jonathan rode into power was therefore as much a reflection of our concern for stability and continuity as it was an indication of the kind of polity we wished to nurture, one in which a person’s background, faith or social standing was irrelevant. But since he assumed office, Dr Jonathan has done especially little to burnish both his image and credentials. It is also clear that Chief Obasanjo’s reservations about Dr Jonathan has nothing to do with the president’s competence, for the former is himself famously regarded as a hugely distracted and anachronistic politician and leader.

    But the tragedy does not appear to end with either Dr Jonathan or the PDP. As a matter of fact, there is little indication that the opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), will itself present a remarkable paradigmatic difference. The party may not have tasted power at the centre to elicit assessment or comparison, but there is much already in it to present us ingredients for a fair conclusion of what direction the party may wish to follow. There are enough tested, charismatic and brilliant politicians in its fold, but its presidential candidate is unlikely to be judged by any of these great attributes or be produced with the peculiar and desperate needs of the country in view.

    The truth is that if the party is not to come to grief in 2015, it must also focus on the geopolitical dynamics of the country, the campaign for rotation, the need to be sensitive to issues of religion, and the general safeness and acceptability of the candidate himself.

    The party has promised a transparent process for electing its candidates; but that process will be modified and vitiated by exterior and even ulterior factors, leading to the selection of standard-bearers more safe than adequate for the country’s radical needs. But all may not be lost; for in the end, the performance of a candidate once he assumes office, and in particular for the APC, may be influenced by the internal competitiveness, ideological stature and general stamina and robustness of the party in power.

  • Placating the Southwest

    Consequent upon Dr Jonathan’s piquant but desperate cabinet reshuffle, it has been speculated that some of the vacant positions could be ceded to the Southwest. The president has apparently just woken up to the dire electoral circumstances his impending re-election campaign may face. And there are probably enough views and voices in the zone to encourage the president’s cold and cynical calculations.

    But if the zone’s conservative leaders are taken in by Dr Jonathan’s permutations, they must be much blinkered than anyone has cared to acknowledge. Given their unreflective embrace of the national conference and their hopelessly romantic notion of its timing and utility at this point, it will not surprise anyone if they remark and applaud the president’s whimsical acknowledgement of the zone’s importance and value.

    After all, did these leaders not wail over losing the battle for the leadership of the House of Representatives? Like everywhere else, even the Southwest has become depressingly susceptible to the mercantilist calculations of values and is now generally disposed to viewing justice and other noble values through the rose-coloured glasses of ethnicity and sectional parochialisms.

  • Religious distinction: before the lights go out

    Religious distinction: before the lights go out

    Last Sunday, Muslim protesters, many of them quite young, marched through Lagos streets campaigning for the right to wear hijab in public schools. The protest drew significant attention. But the state government continues to resist any attempt to create what it describes as distinctions in public primary and secondary schools. Tertiary institutions in the state and elsewhere do not bar distinctive dresses. Last week too, some students in Baptist High School, Iwo in Osun State took their campaign for dress distinction to a new height, perhaps flowing from the unresolved disagreement over the state’s controversial reclassification of schools. Christian and Muslim students not only wore distinctive dresses showcasing their religions, they insisted on conducting morning assemblies along distinct religious lines. A report suggested that even traditional religion worshippers in the same school wore dresses indicating their faith.

    Religious differences mixed unhealthily with deep socio-economic cleavages have turned the north-eastern part of the country into a difficult place to live and work. The trauma is spreading steadily but insidiously into the Southwest, a zone hitherto recognised as an oasis of religious, ethnic and class tolerance. Indeed, many Christian groups have begun to question what they believe is the dominance of the Muslim political elite in the zone’s governmental affairs. They have, for instance, started to campaign for the election of a Christian governor in Lagos State, arguing that with the exception of the brief governorship of Michael Otedola, no Christian had been governor of the state since the Second Republic. The campaign is of course a psychological one, for no Lagos governor has been accused of sectarian bias in any form.

    If sectarian differences are heightening in the Southwest, it is perhaps because the zone’s leaders have been unable to anticipate the problem and unsure how to handle the delicate issue. Lagos has been a little more assertive in sustaining the status quo, insisting that students in public schools wear the same uniform for the simple reason that public schools remain exactly that – public schools. Students in private schools are at liberty to wear regulation dresses and uniforms as their proprietors deem fit. It is, however, not clear how much longer Lagos can hold out, for the campaigns are unlikely to ease off without a major counter-campaign by the zone’s elite. The campaign to wear uniforms indicating one’s religious persuasion is gradually spreading in the zone. Indeed, Osun State is currently at the vortex of the crisis, having attracted controversy by making one concession after another to religious activists. Concessions, as everyone knows, beget even more concessions.

    Going by the deeply disturbing sectarian killings, Boko Haram insurgency and other socio-economic revolts shaking the northern part of the country to its foundations, it is difficult to explain why the Southwest has refused to be proactive. When former Zamfara State governor, Sani Ahmed (Yerima), embraced religious distinction through what former President Olusegun Obasanjo called political sharia, I warned that the lights might be going out over Northern Nigeria. After mourning the collapse of secularism in the North where I grew up and schooled, I indicated that the region was beginning to spawn a brood of vipers with fatal consequences for both the elite and the underclass. I thought at the time that those consequences would be limited to perhaps some isolated cases of violence and terror attacks against secular or Christian targets. I never imagined we would experience the systematic conflagration triggered by the Boko Haram Islamic sect, nor did I even imagine that young, sometimes well-heeled individuals would embrace suicide missions.

    The consequence of the carelessness of the northern elite, who rode on the back of religion to power or tried to use religion as their footstool, is that many parts of the North have become ‘Lebanonised’ and ‘Pakistanised’. Nigeria struggled against periodic outbreaks of Maitatsine revolts in the 1980s; now they are grappling with consistent sectarian insurgency, complete with genocidal tendencies and ethnic cleansing. I do not have the impression that the North has learnt the right lessons of how to leave religion quite out of politics and out of social life, and I really think the problem will get much worse than it already is before the society wakes up to the sinister consequences of mixing governance with religion.

    I therefore expected the self-acclaimed enlightened Southwest to comprehensively understand the acute dangers of trifling with religion. They know the harmful effects sectarian controversies and violent disagreements have on development, yet they have puzzlingly decided to meddle with it, pretending they could tap its potentials and leash the genie. But we have the history of the Maghreb to learn from. In fact, the stalling of the Syrian revolt against Bashir Al-Assad’s rule, particularly the cold feet developed by the West in intervening in that country, is not unconnected with the complications introduced into the revolt by high-level sectarian overtone. Al-Assad has paradoxically turned out to be the defender of secularism, and his opponents are either affiliated to al-Qaeda or have developed their own peculiar hot brand of adulterated theocracy.

    While Tunisia was struggling to retain some secularist flavour and Libya was trying to discover the identity it prefers for this modern era, Egypt under Mohammed Morsi plunged unadvisedly into non-secularist governance. The Egyptian military, still bathing under the hue of Nasserism, has constituted itself into a bastion of mild secularism. This was why it moved against Morsi’s government, rewrote the constitution by deleting expressly theocratic provisions, and seems bent now on installing one of its own in power both to pursue the peace that has eluded the country for months and to protect the country’s secularist principles. Turkey, until recently, also had a military that served as the protector of the country’s secularism, inspired by the iconic Ataturk who brilliantly and foresightedly drew a line between state and religion, including banning the hijab in schools and offices.

    After the debacle in the North, from which the rest of Nigeria ought to draw lessons, it is sad that Southwest governors and political leaders have taken for granted the long-standing and enviable secularism of their zone. The cultural sinews that nourished and recommended the zone’s secularist tendency have today proved too fragile to keep the secularist principles instituted by the zone’s founding fathers. As a region and empire, the zone drew firm lines between its legislative, religious and executive components. The lines have been obfuscated not simply because of the march of time and civilisation, but because of the carelessness and meddlesomeness of the zones’ leaders. We cannot pretend that religious differences do not exist, but we can and should firmly and unrepentantly set boundaries for them. The heightening controversies and differences among the zone’s religious persuasions, which are already hardening into sectarian distinctions and enclaves, will not resolve themselves. The zone’s leaders must act now if the oasis of religious peace and interconnectedness that the zone has been for centuries is not to become a dangerous and seething mirage.

    As the sharp differences in the Osun school shows, when the problem starts, no one is immune. If Osun does not carefully handle the controversy and treat the disease from its roots, it is a matter of time before violence becomes a part of the crisis. The time to act is now. And like Osun, it is hard to know what intentions lurk in the minds of parents in Lagos promoting religious distinctions in the minds of impressionable youths. This is dangerous and short-sighted. We all have a duty to promote togetherness among our young ones, no matter their religious persuasion. If the zone’s culture, civilisation and humanity are no longer strong enough to bind the people of the zone together, then it is headed for even much more trouble than the North is experiencing.

    A few months ago, using Osun as the springboard for my analysis, I pointed out that political leaders in the Southwest needed to do something concrete about the incipient religious disharmony in the zone. The warning is still apposite today; for obviously the problem will not go away on its own. Instead, it will probably worsen if nothing is done beyond just appealing to religious leaders to maintain peace, and opinion leaders to refrain from stoking the embers of discord. Those sort of appeals profited the North nothing, apparently. They are not likely to profit anyone in the Southwest in any way. Governors and governments of the zone have an urgent need to stay away from religion almost totally if the zone is not to descend into a maelstrom of sectarian violence. Already the lights of peace and civilisation are flickering over Nigeria, the Southwest not excluded; we must not let them be extinguished altogether.

  • Jonathan needs a role model

    Jonathan needs a role model

    President Goodluck Jonathan’s supporters and admirers think many of his critics are either deliberately offensive or are zealots of the opposition. They are wrong. His critics, who owe no one any apology, are simply disappointed with a politician they risked everything to support in his unsteady effort to claim the presidency when his predecessor was too sick to continue. The late Umaru Yar’Adua was of course a tested administrator and his mind sufficiently robust in terms of the ideals of politics to elicit profound admiration from both friends and foes, but his illness and the hijack of state power by shadowy figures led many to damn the consequences of trusting the untested Dr Jonathan with more powers than he ever countenanced in his meteoric and fairy tale rise to prominence.

    The principles those who fought for Dr Jonathan in 2010 promoted are of course unassailable, and they would be as eager to fight for them today as they did many years back, notwithstanding the disillusionment only hindsight is capable of giving. But given his almost total lack of inspiration, not to say his bland and offensive manner of railroading inchoate policies through the legislature and the bureaucracy, those who fought for him in 2010 are now almost sorry they did. The problem, it occurs to them, is not that Dr Jonathan is intrinsically bad, especially in the light of his often likable bursts of bucolic homilies. The problem is that since he assumed office, Dr Jonathan has not for once given any indication of one statesman, living or dead, whose style or ideas he admired, shared or is competent to redact.

    By training and by temperament, whether off the cuff or smuggled into his speeches by speechwriters, Dr Jonathan indeed only manages to give indication of someone who rose too rapidly politically to have the time to imbibe deep, noble and inspiring ideas of statecraft and leadership. Metaphorically speaking, his bones are perhaps too creakily dry to lend themselves to something delicate, lustrous and engaging. Other than his homiletic forays, no one has heard him declaim on any great issue with the depth, sagacity and nuance of a statesman. Could we therefore expect that far into his presidency and well into middle age, he is capable of the instinctive moulting familiar only to youths? I have my doubts. But this must not stop us from making recommendations to him.

    Africa does not have a long list of statesmen and great leaders – perhaps only Nelson Mandela in the truest sense of the word – but Dr Jonathan lives in an era when science and technology have obliterated boundaries. He has an illustrious global list to pick from, if he is capable. He is a zoologist by training. He will have to adjust a little to begin studying man in greater detail than he is accustomed to, beginning with history. He does not have to have a military background to choose well, nor is he required to be a lawyer or political scientist. All he requires are the discipline and the passion to learn and to imbibe the lessons of time and history.

    My private suspicion, frequently restated in this place, is that Dr Jonathan is too far gone to profit from this advice. Had he the gravitas and adornments that line the souls of great leaders, it is inconceivable he would have permitted, let alone perpetrated, the atrocious assault on the constitution still ongoing in Rivers State and elsewhere.

  • APC and 2015

    APC and 2015

    The All Progressives Congress (APC) boasts an incredibly lofty political and social ethos it wants to midwife for the country. But if care is not taken, it could find itself entangled in pitfalls and traps of its own doing. The problem, it will be discovered, is not that the party has set goals too high to be accomplished. No, the problem is that it has so far been unable to structure its operations and ideas in such a way that the gap between its ideals and its identity is narrowed substantially for the electorate to embrace the party overwhelmingly. Unfortunately for the party, it has very little time to do the almost impossible; very little time to, as it were, shuffle the galaxies, tweak the earth’s magnetic force, and prevent any of the planets from spiralling out of orbit.

    If Nigeria is to be saved, if the black race is to be redeemed – forgive the hyperbole – the APC must do the impossible in the next few months to save itself and the country. For if it fails, not only will the mega coalition it has cobbled together so gingerly be endangered, even the very notion of country which we have struggled over the years to sustain will itself be gravely imperilled. As for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its leaders, particularly those in power in Abuja today, I have long written them off as a total disaster, notwithstanding what jobholders and sycophants worming their ways around in Abuja say.

    A good place to start in admonishing the APC – they should forgive my imperiousness – is the recent order they gave to their legislators in Abuja to stall President Goodluck Jonathan’s policies, bills, budget, and confirmation of service chiefs. Is the party justified in linking its cooperation to the president’s attitude and presumptions? I think it is, for if some pressure is not brought to bear on a president and party that have actually and irreverently spun out of control, that political lassitude could unwittingly encourage the ruling party and the president to entrench themselves in their anti-democratic misconduct. But is the APC wise to condition its legislative cooperation upon the president’s good behaviour? I seriously doubt it.

    The first problem is that the party obviously misjudges the Nigerian voter to be highly enlightened and even somewhat idealistic. If he were enlightened, he would effortlessly appreciate that something drastic ought to be done about the creeping disaster and recklessness manifesting in Rivers State, a disaster given fillip by the president’s own lack of private and public scruples, and by the opportunistic alliances of Dame Patience, the meddlesome first lady, Nyesom Wike, the superficial and ingratiating Minister of State for Education, and Mbu Joseph Mbu, the conniving and servile police commissioner for Rivers. And if the voter were idealistic, he would understand that it was imperative to sacrifice a few legislative bills relating to our existential comfort in order to achieve the pristine and much higher goals of sustaining and nurturing the country’s infant democracy.

    The APC must not forget that even in the United States, a point many commentators alluded to in newspapers in the past few days, the fairly well-educated voters in that developed democracy still spurned any attempt to play politics with their meal tickets. I wager that in any society, no matter what lofty principle is imperilled, issues of meal ticket will always predominate. The APC should, therefore, stop insisting on its legislators’ defiance in the National Assembly. It should also stop rationalising the orders it gave its lawmakers. The voter will not buy it, period. Nor does the party even need that tactics.

    It is not certain that the party can even enforce its directive to its national lawmakers. But if it can, it will have to look for ways of surmounting a distressing backlash certain to follow the order. Does the party not appreciate that Dr Jonathan has thoroughly misruled the country, and his budgets, even when they seem to make some sense, have become worthless pieces of documents that fail every objective test of practicability, consistency and coherence? Dr Jonathan’s budgets have impoverished the country, and they do not work. Why would the APC want to be blamed for a budget designed to fail anyway? The party should publicly rescind its directives and let the lawmakers do their jobs dispassionately and professionally. Had the APC not intervened with its hasty directive, the budget would have naturally suffered searing and merciless reviews from the lawmakers. Now the legislators will have to be more accommodating so as not to be seen to be implementing APC’s order.

    More crucially, it is now more urgent than ever for the APC to set up think tanks for the 2015 elections if the humongous goodwill it has accumulated with the electorate is not to be frittered away. I do not have the impression, for instance, that the party thoroughly debated its visit to former president Olusegun Obasanjo, let alone the decision to flatter the imperturbable aurochs. The ex-president is the most reviled politician in the country, hated by his enemies and friends alike, and in equal measure. It was completely needless visiting and coaxing someone so incorrigible and so absolutely unessential to the wellbeing of the country and its fledgling democracy. The party must resist the temptation to play emotive politics. It must encourage debate, seek out devil’s advocates when a position appears unanimous, and sleep over its decisions before making them public.

    But perhaps the most difficult issue the APC will grapple with in the coming months is its presidential standard-bearer. If it gets it wrong, the campaign will at best be a huge struggle, and at worst be completely doomed. In electing its candidates, no matter what methods it prefers, whether open primaries or caucuses or a combination, it must not pretend to be ignorant of what and how the voters are thinking. Nigeria has changed, and with it, its politics too, perhaps in ways so frightening and threatening that it sometimes seems pointless for any principled man to offer himself for the thankless job of leadership. One of those changes concerns religion. The PDP, it is clear, has seized on religion as a campaign tool, and Dr Jonathan has already embarked on that dangerous journey with incomparable carefreeness and adroitness. The APC must not just condemn that dangerous folly, it must counter it, not defy it.

    Without being told, the APC knows its aspirants who have been rightly or wrongly stigmatised as either fairly or completely bigoted. No matter how valiantly those stigmatised have worked for the mega coalition, no matter how popular they are, and no matter how electable they are in certain parts of the country, the party must resist the temptation to elect them as standard-bearers, not even on point of honour. There are younger, fairly accomplished and more connected politicians in the party, perhaps some of them not yet fully APC. The party must be flexible enough and ready to accommodate them. For, in the end, what matters most is not how honourably the APC has structured its politics, or how principled it has kept faith with its political and ideological views. Indeed, what matters most is winning the elections, regardless of the suspicions about the order of elections and the horrifying chicaneries of the ruling party.

    The APC is on the threshold of a great and uplifting experience. It cannot afford to be careless, and its leaders must not allow themselves to be distracted by abuse, envious politicians mouthing strange historical heresies and inaccuracies, and political foes luring the party to commit blunders. They should go out there and make history, for history beckons to them.

  • National conference and perennial half measures

    National conference and perennial half measures

    If anything can be said for the national conference the Goodluck Jonathan government is organising, it is that the vacillation over what to call it – national conference, national dialogue or national conversation – has finally ended after many months of waffling. What have not ended are the debates over its relevance, whether to subject it to a referendum or not (which nuisance the government has passed on to the conferees themselves), uncertainties over the nomination process, and legal and constitutional issues surrounding its convocation and adoption. There are probably a few more uncertainties, but these will manifest as the conference gets underway.

    The opposition to the conference is quite sizeable and vigorous, encompassing many interest groups and the main opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). Their opposition is hinged on the nearness of the conference – clearly an afterthought to the Jonathan presidency – to the elections of 2014 and 2015. Too many political events will be taking place this year for a weighty conference designed supposedly to end all conferences to receive adequate attention. In addition, reports of past conferences, which had received copious attention and active involvement of pressure groups, have been ignored without explanation. Moreover, the National Assembly is itself undertaking major constitutional amendments; so, why another exercise?

    But all these arguments have not swayed President Jonathan. He is determined to push through his effort to organise a fresh national conference. He is not interested in a new constitution and, alas, he has set the customary no-go areas for his own conference, but Nigeria’s unduly optimistic pressure groups are willing to give it a shot. More critically, the president has refused to be decisive on key issues capable of undermining the conference. He says conference decisions will be by consensus, but failing that, by 75 percent majority. What if neither general consensus nor 75 percent majority can be reached? And rather than determine the legal and legislative underpinnings for the conference’s decisions, the president has pushed that difficult, if not impossible, responsibility to the conference itself.

    However, the booby trap is that, as he acknowledged before now, the conference decisions will be incorporated into the existing constitution. But there is already a modality for constitutional amendment, which no external force other than the legislature can tamper with. The president, however, knowingly and deceptively tries to take advantage of the ongoing constitutional amendment process expected to end by June. He obviously hopes that some of the conference decisions will find their way into the final work of the legislature. Failing that, but without saying so, he expects the conference delegates and the rest of Nigeria to put pressure on the legislature to do what some of Jonathan’s ministers sarcastically describe as the needful.

    If the perverted nomination process enunciated by the government does not convince proponents of national conference that President Jonathan is playing ducks and drakes with the feelings of the country, and the unresolved and contentious issues surrounding the actual conference itself do not raise suspicion as to the president’s motives, then Nigerians must be indescribably inured to danger and to common sense. For instance, anticipating the fact that opposition states would decline nominating delegates, the president has accumulated the obscene power to carry out that responsibility on their behalf. If past conferences undertaken in fairly congenial atmospheres failed to see the light of day, what do we expect from a conference being hastily, if not feverishly, undertaken in an atmosphere of doubts, confusion, suspicion and sheer political chicanery and malevolence?

    By every indication, President Jonathan is both unreflective on the conference and mischievous in his politics. The desire to restructure the country has unfortunately lured many Nigerians into embracing the president’s half measures and into ignoring the many booby traps he and his cynical aides have strewn all over the path. Since he assumed office, Dr Jonathan has not been able to fix anything tangible. Yet, he does not think it presumptuous that he is attempting to fix a weighty and elegantly nuanced matter as the restructuring of the country, when he has been unable to fix the plainest and most elementary of Nigeria’s problems, say roads or electricity.

  • 2015: Bad omen all round

    2015: Bad omen all round

    “The president’s new ministerial list is not a reflection of the managerial competence of the appointees, or of the short time left in the president’s tenure; it is a reflection of the idiosyncratic belligerence of the president himself, his evasive and deceptive patriotism, his intolerable lack of fidelity to truth and lofty ideals.”

    Last week’s tit for tat between the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) is a reminder of the biblical story of the altercation between Israel’s King Ahab and the most prominent prophet of the day, Elijah. Responding to Ahab’s spectacular misrule, Elijah had decreed very harsh repercussions on the country, prompting the king to accuse the prophet of troubling Israel. But the prophet simply retorted that on the contrary, Israel was troubled by the king and his household. The outcome of the struggle between the king and the prophet is too well known to require any analysis. Ahab and his family later came to grief.

    Comparisons, the English say, are odious. But on Thursday, after the APC gave what amounted to a political ultimatum to President Goodluck Jonathan over his government’s increasing and rampant resort to undemocratic, if not entirely fascist, methods, and the PDP had retorted that the APC was attempting to truncate democracy, it was hard to resist comparing contemporary Nigeria under Jonathan with ancient Israel under Ahab. President Jonathan may not have taken anyone’s vineyard in the direct sense of the word, but he has done much worse by undermining democratic rule in Rivers State, involving himself in oil wells controversy, usurping state powers in favour of the police, and giving the general and depressing impression his sole idea of the presidency is to act and fight in favour of his party, supporters and people. It is difficult to explain why he is not unsettled and deeply nauseated by the brazenness of his methods in Rivers and the openness of the state police commissioner’s partisanship.

    The president’s wife, Dame Patience, ever so replete with testimonies of God’s goodness in her life, continually proclaims peace, love and national harmony. But she has been accused of being a puppeteer in the Rivers crisis, with direct links to the state’s commissioner of police, the recalcitrant and fawning Mbu Joseph Mbu. The first lady has done little to refute the allegations of undermining peace and good governance in Rivers State; instead, she has spoken cynically and condescendingly of contributing to the progress of her home state, and has undisguisedly nurtured a hostile attitude towards the elected leaders of that state. Indeed, she speaks peace, and has even christened herself the mother of peace. But she acts war and, in the background, fights it. It is likely that to the very end she will indulge in interminable battles, never retreating, never surrendering.

    It is against this alarming background that the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the APC met in Abuja on Thursday to review the state of the nation, particularly the condition in which the misrule of the Jonathan presidency has diluted the country’s democratic experience and weakened its foundational principles. It was no longer realistic, they said, to tamely endure the battering and buffeting of the ruling party, in Rivers as well as elsewhere. It had become clear, the opposition party said, that both the president whose proselytising tendencies on social and political issues have turned dull and vacuous, and the PDP whose implacable resolve to demolish the tenets of federalism has become all too obvious, merely paid lip service to peace, institution building, economic development and federal principles.

    Having made these observations, and having been convinced that the ruling party had no interest whatsoever in conducting peaceful and fair polls in 2015, the APC has decided on a more activist path in pursuing its political objectives. It would block passage of bills, particularly the budget bill, and oppose the confirmation of the president’s men, including the service chiefs. Though it is not exactly clear how it hopes to achieve these delicate and draconian aims, the opposition party is doubtless able to discomfit the PDP in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The PDP has begun to fight back dirtily, as this column guessed it would. And if it is taken into cognisance that the opposition APC is still battling with fractiousness in its ranks, not to talk of the inelegant structural and policy distractions promoted by some of its more obstreperous and domineering state leaders, it seems clear that the auguries are not good at all.

    As the APC put it: “Following the forgoing and in view of the joint resolutions of the National Assembly on Rivers State, and other constitutional breaches by the Presidency, the APC hereby directs its members in the National Assembly, to block all legislative proposals, including the 2014 Budget and confirmation of all nominees to military and civilian positions to public offices until the rule of law and constitutionalism are restored in Rivers State in particular, and Nigeria in general.

    The NEC of the APC has now resolved that if these acts of impunity and lawlessness continued unabated and the Police persist in being as an enforcement arm of the PDP to the detriment of our members, it will have no alternative but to ask our teeming members all over the country, and especially in Rivers State, to take whatever steps that are necessary to protect their lives and property.”

    Unmindful of their party’s unhealthy contributions to the country’s lifelessness, PDP spokesmen have suggested that the APC’s plans to respond forcefully to the ruling party’s misrule were deliberate attempts to truncate democracy, create chaos and cripple the economy. As its wilfully misleading tactics in the National Assembly show, the PDP is expected to embrace the worst forms of realpolitik as the 2015 general elections draw near. The party has ignored the law and the constitution so far in Rivers State, and in the National Assembly, judiciary and in many other states; it will continue to do so eagerly, unconscionably and remorselessly. The secret service and the police have become indistinguishable from Aso Villa general office staff; the president will continue to run the two law enforcement agencies as if they are nothing but appendages of the ruling party.

    Going by the ministerial list awaiting confirmation, and in view of the extreme conservatism and pro-Jonathan inclination of the Senate, the president seems to be reinforcing his ‘war cabinet.’ He has the legitimate right to appoint ministers who will be an asset to him, and who could swing votes in his direction, but the appalling reality is that most of the president’s appointees have the same malicious and malignant mindset as Nyesom Wike, the Rivers State-born Minister of State for Education. The president’s new ministerial list is not a reflection of the managerial competence of the appointees, or of the short time left in the president’s tenure; it is a reflection of the idiosyncratic belligerence of the president himself, his evasive and deceptive patriotism, his intolerable lack of fidelity to truth and lofty ideals.

    If the APC were to be reluctant to respond in kind to the PDP’s damnable tactics, it could be smothered by the continuing misuse of presidential powers and the mischievous interpretation of the law and the constitution. Nevertheless, the greater burden is on the APC. Unlike the PDP, which has a fairly long and stable tradition upon which to swivel, balance and launch ferocious and overarching attacks, the APC is just starting to accrete its partisan powers, define who it is, locate its strengths as well as recognise its weaknesses, and mould itself into a united and disciplined fighting force. The opposition party, it is clear, is a child born in wartime. It will require perceptive, brilliant and selfless leaders to help it reach adulthood quickly in one piece, not to talk of acquire the strategies and manoeuvres necessary to outfox such an indomitable and relentless foe as the PDP.

    In the coming months, the country will find itself trapped between the PDP’s fiery lack of moderation and distorted nationalism at one end, and the APC’s intrepid and fanatical desire to challenge the ruling party, pound for pound, shell for shell at the other end. It would be chimerical to expect the country to fare very well between the two powers, not when the PDP can count on unnumbered and soulless state officials eager to betray every noble cause, including the country, and the APC can count on its Young Turks frazzled by intraparty contentiousness and weaned on harakiri.

  • Oduah conjures phantom, intransigent enemies

    Oduah conjures phantom, intransigent enemies

    Responding to President Goodluck Jonathan’s pussyfooting on the bulletproof cars scandal involving her and the Aviation ministry she heads, Stella Oduah has embarked on a frenzy of public relations propaganda to shift the blame away from the scandal to the doorsteps of her ‘enemies.’ It took nearly two weeks after the scandal was exposed before the president set up a panel to look into the disgraceful buck-passing enacted by Ms Oduah after it transpired she had knowingly sanctioned, some said inspired, the purchase of two armoured cars at inflated prices. It took more than two weeks after the panel submitted its report for the president to angrily acknowledge he had received the report. Now it is taking forever for him to do something about the report. Unlike the Justice Ayo Salami case, in which he agreed to suspend the jurist with alacrity, he is in no hurry to lay a finger on the special woman, Ms Oduah.

    After it became clear the president would continue to dither with scant regard for the dignity and nobility that should accompany his office, Ms Oduah opportunistically launched attacks of her own against those she described as her long-standing enemies. The reprisal attacks are coming after many solid weeks of extraordinary lobbying to save Ms Oduah’s job. But if the president couldn’t save Bamanga Tukur’s job, even though his fault was nothing more grievous than serial indiscretions and tactlessness, it is hard to see the president saving Ms Oduah’s job when her failing is obviously one of atrocious disregard for truth, general and particular mischief in aviation matters, and obscene and indifferent embrace of luxury at a time of great national deficit and scarcity.

    But it gratifies and promotes Ms Oduah’s spuriousness to confuse two entirely distinct issues. Only a confused mind could juxtapose the problem she has with her supposed enemies with the self-made scandal of flouting budgetary restrictions and corruptly inflating car prices. Hear Ms Oduah: “For over 38 years that our airports remained damning commentary on our status as part of the civilised world, or when our airspace existed without the modern and workable equipment and facilities to make the airspace safe, these category of persons saw no evil and heard no evil while they happily clapped their way to the banks. This group has carried on with bitter venom, throwing decency and honour overboard, lying and misleading the Nigerian populace even when they knew the truth, because my team and I changed the game in favour of Nigeria attaining her pride of place…They are the entrenched, corrupt and profligate individuals and entities that have caused the serious rot in the aviation sector.”

    Having failed to lather her case with ethnic jostlings, she now refers to the implausible and arbitrary figure of 38 years ago, when both she and her traducers were probably just emerging from their teenage years. Whether Dr Jonathan likes it or not, Ms Oduah’s position is no longer tenable. She will have to go, of course without the honour that should normally accompany a decisive president, or the sense of shame a dignified woman should never lose. Ms Oduah is not plagued by enemies, for she is too insignificant to have any notable one; she is undone by shamelessness, an affliction that is now evidently an integral part of the Nigerian presidency.

  • Southwest’s new paradigm

    Southwest’s new paradigm

    In the 1999 presidential election, the two leading contenders hailed from the Southwest, deliberately so because there was a general feeling of pacifying the zone for its loss caused by the annulment of the 1993 elections and the tragic death of the winner of that year’s presidential poll, MKO Abiola. The Alliance for Democracy (AD) and the All Peoples Party (APP) reached an understanding to field Olu Falae, while the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) fielded Olusegun Obasanjo. Chief Obasanjo won, but the nature of his win and the timing of the victory hid the emerging trend in Nigerian politics. That trend, which began to mature in 2007 and reached full bloom in the 2011 elections, affected the Southwest in more incalculable ways than it exposed the North’s impotence in zonal (extrapolative) politics. Henceforth, no zone could single-handedly determine who wins. The North had long ceased to be monolithic, especially politically. For its candidate to win, he would need a huge dose of inclusive politics that reaches out far and wide. The failure of the Gen Muhammadu Buhari campaign underscored this point. By accident rather than by design, or the factor of incumbency, the victory achieved by Candidate Goodluck Jonathan showed clearly what a candidate must be like to win. While it is important to examine the shifting trends in Nigeria’s presidential politics, my main concern today is the Southwest’s apparently surprising realisation (or new paradigm) of what Nigeria’s presidential politics has become and how the zone can best retain relevance. We are, of course, familiar with the Southwest’s long-standing approach to presidential politics. Between the 1950s and 2007, the zone repeatedly tried to produce a candidate that was deeply intellectual, principled, humanistic, ideological and popular. The candidate and the entire zone itself were projected in a way that made both to be anchored on solid left-of-centre, progressive ideology. The zone then reached out with that sacrosanct ideology to either like-minded progressives in other zones or opportunists masquerading as progressives. Because that ideology, now roughly cast as immutable, showed strong hues of Yoruba culture and history, it was often difficult to attract popular and credible politicians from other zones. In a highly competitive political environment, they feared being dominated, humiliated or even obliterated. The Southwest, it now seems, has begun to realise that it must quietly mitigate its messianic orientation to politics, sugar-coat its dominant ideological orientation of progressivism to make it less offensive, and when necessary be prepared to sacrifice its ambitions for the larger good. This discovery is, in my opinion, largely fortuitous, even as the zone’s leaders as well as the previously dominant Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) appear to define the ‘larger good’ in broadly philosophical and abstract terms. I say fortuitous because when the ACN opted to support the candidacy of Aminu Tambuwal for the post of Speaker, House of Representatives, in 2011, that choice seemed less strategic than political. It is unlikely the party already conceived at that time the grand coalition that has today metamorphosed into the All Progressives Congress (APC), nor imagined that the rainbow coalition, including the peaceful mass defections in the House, would be partly facilitated by the party’s inclusive politics, relationship with Hon Tambuwal, and a host of other factors. But even if the grand coalition was already conceived as far back as 2011, the scale of its success, not to say the structure of the coalition itself, must surprise those who inspired it. Part of the misunderstanding between the Southwest’s leading politicians and groups can be traced to this emergent trend. There are on one hand those who are still nostalgic about the Obafemi Awolowo days; and there are on the other hand those disillusioned by the impotence of the politics of the past. The first group, broadly speaking, is made up of the rump Afenifere and many opportunistic elements in the Labour Party (LP). They either describe themselves as the only truly progressive politicians in the zone on account of their association with the heirs of the Awolowo dynasty, or they sometimes see themselves as another progressive group outside the ACN component of the APC. This group still hugs the illusion that it could present a puristic and traditional form of Southwest progressivism around which a national coalition could be formed. The second group, now fully ensconced in the APC, believes that the puristic form of progressivism has over the past five decades proved either inadequate or at least problematic as a vehicle for winning the presidency. Like some leading political parties in the US and Britain, some of which had had to rediscover and remould themselves in order to achieve greater electoral appeal, this second Southwest group believes it must broaden its progressive ideological base by, if necessary, mitigating its form and structure to make it appeal to a wider swath of the country, especially to groups and zones not terribly averse to any left-of-centre ideology. It reasoned that if ethnic politics and divides were to be transcended, supporting Hon Tambuwal in 2011 was a good way to begin. It hoped that when it came to national politics, the Southwest electorate would understand why Hon Tambuwal was a better option to tear to pieces the iron curtain of distrust that had separated the North from the South for so long, and why supporting his Southwest opponent, Mulikat Akande-Adeola, was nothing but offensive and retrogressive ethnic politics. The Southwest’s new paradigm for national politics, and in particular, presidential politics, is based on very sound but evidently futuristic suppositions. Like anything new and radical, this paradigm will bring with it teething problems, especially because many of its leading lights simply lack the depth and perspective to appreciate the implications and benefits the major realignment being midwifed by the zone’s political iconoclasts will trigger. Already, it would seem the increasing fractiousness of the crowd in the APC is the logical antithesis to the grand coalition’s possibilities, stability and survival. But if coalition leaders at national and state levels could subordinate their ambitions to the common good, and grasp through their minds’ eyes the nirvana they seem at the threshold of midwiving, they might succeed in reinforcing the new trends Nigerian politics needs to survive as a nation, democratic, stable and free. In the new reality, the Southwest appears to be the zone making the hugest sacrifice for very little profit. In time, however, the zones in the North will realise quite clearly what they now suspect: that the only way to guarantee stability and eliminate bigotry and prejudice is to embrace politics of inclusiveness. In time they will also realise, just like the Southwest did when it favoured Hon Tambuwal over Hon Akande-Adeola, that what the country needs is not for politicians to seclude themselves in, and reinforce, their ethnic cocoons, but to embrace healthy politics even if it seems illogical and unrewarding in the short run. In time, too, the Southeast will recognise that it must open up quite courageously as the Southwest is doing, build politicians with crossover appeal, and begin to practice the politics of inclusiveness. It is unlikely that a time will come when by common agreement the presidency would be surrendered to a Southeast candidate. The zone will have to work for it by taking the new dynamics of zonal politics into cognisance or, like Dr Jonathan, hope to take the presidency by default, with all the accompanying uncertainties.