The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Mandela: An excerpt from Three long goodbyes (December 30, 2012)

    Mandela: An excerpt from Three long goodbyes (December 30, 2012)

    It was an unplanned but remarkable coincidence around the Christmas holiday period of 2012. Nelson Mandela, 94, Margaret Thatcher, 87, George H. Bush, 88 all found themselves in hospital to receive medical attention. Mandela went in to treat a stubborn lung infection, Bush the Elder to treat a fever and other associated ailments that kept popping up one after the other, as his doctors ruefully observed, and Thatcher to remove a growth on her bladder…

    In a way, however, and no matter how much we still want the three leaders with us, I think they have started to say their long goodbyes. They left power a long time ago, and so their final departure may not have the same dramatic impact their exit from office had, but there is no doubt that much more than their countries, the world will be sad to see them go. They were not just iconic, brilliant, prescient and charismatic – Mandela and Thatcher more so – the breadth and content of their leadership, the visionary quality of their administration, and the continuing relevance of their policies, ideas and styles have combined to imbue them with a freshness and permanence that belie their age and health. Thatcher vacated office 22 years ago, Bush Snr 19 years ago, and Mandela 13 years ago. But it seemed like only yesterday…

    Mandela’s successors obviously do not take after the great man, perhaps because by having him so close to them, they have taken him and his qualities for granted. Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s immediate successor, for instance, could hold himself anywhere in the world intellectually, but he exhibited none of the charisma, joie de vivre and general humanism that hallmarked his predecessor’s leadership. In addition, his detached and sometimes woolly style, his seemingly non-partisan politics of expressive sombreness that grated on the ears of the South African rabble contrasted with the welcoming, lively and eccentric style of his successor, Jacob Zuma.

    Mandela in office sometimes seemed a paradox, with a half of him oozing gravitas, and the other half skirting close to an inscrutable form of libertinism that made him contradistinctively sociable and prudish. But the real paradox of South African politics is the unexampled fashion Mbeki took Mandela’s cerebral endowment without the redeeming and tempering influence of the great man’s sociableness; and Zuma took and embellished Mandela’s love for life without the catalysing and uplifting influence of Madiba’s deep longing and respect for knowledge…Of the three great world leaders, Mandela is probably the most solid and respected, Thatcher the most impactful and iconoclastic, and Bush the most measured and influential…

    With each passing day, Mandela has seemed to loom even larger than most world leaders, becoming an example of a statesman growing in stature and relevance, like a good wine, as his years out of power increase…More and more, as Africa produces mediocre leaders by the dozen, the power and nobility of Mandela are reinforced by his canniness in foreshadowing the problems of multiculturalism in a way even Europe has not come to terms with. Imagine if the superficial Zuma had taken over from F.W. de Klerk! Indeed, the long goodbyes of the three statesmen speak more to the leadership tragedy faced by Africa in general and more poignantly to the appalling refusal, not to say criminal negligence, of Nigerian leaders to learn both from the ancient history of their country and the modern history of the world in relation to the issues and phenomena that drive, sustain and shape great leadership.

  • ASUU, Wike and shifting ultimatum

    Convinced that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was being needlessly intransigent and combative in its strike, President Goodluck Jonathan and the supervising minister in the Ministry of Education, Nyesom Wike, have become even more openly bellicose. Would to God they had been bellicose against Stella Oduah’s malfeasances. The latest stalemate began when the leaders of ASUU sought written assurances that the federal government would keep its own side of the bargain. First to meet the university teachers with discourteous outburst was Mr Wike himself, Dr Jonathan’s redoubtable man Friday. There would be no written assurances whatsoever, he shut back in anger, nor any assurances for that matter. The president’s word was good enough, he claimed. Thereupon he launched into the most obscene and fawning rhapsodies of Dr Jonathan’s attributes and the incontestability of presidential powers.

    Dr Jonathan himself, inflamed by his aides’ rhapsodies and sweeping and uncouth denigration of his opponents, summarily and unprecedentedly declared that ASUU had become subversive and a tool in the hands of the opposition. If the presidential hysteria was not embarrassing enough, Mr Wike, still breathing imprecate against the government’s phantom enemies, reviewed the December 4 ultimatum he gave the striking teachers to resume or be sacked. They should now resume work on December 9 or get the boot, he thundered as one completely ignorant of the way universities are run.

    It is sad that a matter about to be resolved has become complicated by the insensitivity of the Jonathan presidency. Could university teachers, as enlightened and diverse as they are, offer themselves to be used by a political party? Is the decay in universities not apparent enough? And had teachers not gone on strike over the years, who could guess how much worse the rot would have been? Clearly the country is in need of being saved from the hands of Dr Jonathan and his fawning aides. If Dr Jonathan is still capable of listening, would former presidents please gently remonstrate with him to stop embarrassing the country he has misled for the past five years or so?

  • ASUU strike: Fed Govt, Wike lose their heads

    ASUU strike: Fed Govt, Wike lose their heads

    I shudder to think what intensity of anguish Nigeria’s eminent vice-chancellors endured as they reportedly sat glumly through last Friday’s meeting with the supervising minister of education, Nyesom Wike. Mr Wike, as everyone knows, is a man of many parts. Bold, dogged and energetic, the Ikwerre, Rivers State politician has made a huge impression on his followers, and, as it is obvious, is also now making a monstrously bigger impression on many Nigerians. The vice-chancellors who attended the meeting with him would doubtless have left his presence dumbfounded by the quirkiness of university education that produced such an impertinent man who many years ago defied the force and natural inclination of nature to leave a notable mark on his local government as an administrator and grassroots mobiliser.

    Not only was Mr Wike twice chairman of the now controversial Obio/Akpor local government, he performed with such distinction that he managed to win the confidence of Governor Rotimi Amaechi to become his Chief of Staff. Graduating with a law degree from the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Mr Wike also developed a well-honed style of politics that saw him become an implacable force in both local and national politics. He even evaded the censorious gaze of the avuncular Peter Odili, a former governor of the state, to win his support at the initial stage of his political career. And he also managed to fool the feisty and sometimes impatient Mr Amaechi to earn the juicy and powerful post of Chief of Staff and later director-general of the Amaechi re-election campaign. He has now seduced President Goodluck Jonathan, who more and more finds solace in the arms of fixers and enforcers serenading him with sweet talk and bombast.

    It is important to understand Mr Wike’s background in order to find explanation for his hardline stand in the five-month-old Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike. He has a law degree, is streetwise, aggressive and gregarious. But those who know him and have worked with him insist there is little in his character or education, not to talk of the logic and judgement that sets an educated man apart from an illiterate, to justify the degree he is brandishing. He is a practical politician who is effective and skilful in herding votes. But at bottom, he is a man who conceals his unimpressive intellectual endowment beneath a morass of public works projects. Such a man is more likely to resent his betters when they meet in forums that require logic, thoughtfulness, restraint and cultured language and diplomacy. Mr Wike precisely found himself at one such forum last Friday when he encountered his betters, vice chancellors and former university teachers whom he gloated over.

    To a deep and lettered man, such a meeting would lead him inexorably to the veneration and modesty that the knowledge imparted to him in his university days should naturally elicit. But to one plagued by doubts and inferiority complex, such a meeting could only trigger in all its fury the resentment his intellectual failings have dammed in his angry soul over the years. Like former President Olusegun Obasanjo who under Gen Murtala Mohammed took perverse delight in purging the universities and demystifying the super permanent secretaries who mocked his inadequacies, Mr Wike has issued orders to his former teachers which no reasonable man should ever give and which even under the military no one could hope to enforce. Sadly, the Jonathan government is populated by many such upstarts who read politics into every dispute.

    Acting on behalf of the Jonathan presidency, and after opening another war front in the president’s many battles, Mr Wike has ordered the deployment of policemen in universities to secure those who would heed the command to resume work. After all, of what use is power when it cannot be used? He has also ordered the vice-chancellors to reopen the universities, when in reality it was ASUU’s withdrawal of services, not the shutting of the campuses by school administrators, that paralysed the universities in the first instance. Those who fail to resume work, Mr Wike commanded the National Universities Commission (NUC), should be sacked, notwithstanding the fact that the universities have neither the resources nor even the available pool of qualified teachers to fill more than 40,000 vacancies already existing. In the opinion of Mr Wike, force should solve a problem that neither logic nor diplomacy could resolve in five months. As far as he understood, and based on the Kano meeting of the university teachers less than two weeks ago, at least 60 percent of them already indicated willingness to resume work. Of course Mr Wike’s foolish order and outburst are bound to unite the teachers once again, for they are nobody’s fools.

    It is a worrisome indication of the incompetence of President Jonathan’s men that a crisis nearing resolution could be allowed to fester once again, thereby snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The president has himself not demonstrated brilliant statecraft, nor shown any indication he has the steady hands to propel the country to greatness. But by surrounding himself with devious and vacuous advisers and aides, he is more likely to take more wrong-headed steps capable of dooming his presidency. The president sees foreign destabilising agents, when nothing of the sort exists. Those who trouble him and the country are his ministers and aides. They are the ones who instigate him into hardline position, who alarm him with imaginary enemies, and fill his mind with anachronistic ideas of the powers and perks of a president. Thus they tell us that Dr Jonathan is the first president to engage the ASUU in 13 hours discussion, as if it is a regrettable thing, or as if his job is limited to effusing power without a corresponding acknowledgement of the burdens and responsibilities of office.

    The few outstanding issues in the ASUU strike were the warehousing of the first tranche of promised financial interventions, making the agreement already reached ironclad, and paying salary arrears. I find it difficult to see how these should be a problem. Instead, Dr Jonathan, Mr Wike and other supposedly educated officials who snivel around the presidency think it is an affront to doubt the president. Were there not enough reasons to doubt the presidency before now? Had that office not been desecrated before, and is it not now being desecrated by the thuggish characters that deface its hallowed corridors? As an adviser, I would have asked the president to approach ASUU’s new doubts (not new conditions, by the way) with the kind of self-deprecating humour US President Barack Obama is famous for.

    Answering a question on ASUU strike during his last media chat in September, Dr Jonathan said that in the heady days of the Ghanaian ‘revolution’ President J.J. Rawlings closed down universities for a long time in order to reorganise the education system. Though he added he was not thinking in that direction, it was embarrassing and insulting that his mind even wandered in that direction. If he thought nothing of closing down public universities because many around him didn’t have their children attending them, would he also close down private universities if he had his way? By now it must be obvious to everyone that we are dealing with a fascist government, not an elected presidency. (See box). They have begun to see external saboteurs and internal collaborators. They are bypassing a somnolent National Assembly and simply directly deploying the increasingly fascist police force to undermine the constitution and take away people’s rights.

    In the weeks ahead, and as the political noose tightens around his neck, a desperate Dr Jonathan will attempt extraordinary measures to keep himself in office. For all patriots, this is the time to abandon neutrality, a time to stand firm against fascism. The challenge before us then is how to guide this rampaging, paranoid bull through the country’s china shop lest we all come to grief. Indeed, the hysterical Mr Wike has managed to run the Jonathan government into a cul de sac. But if history is a guide, it is hard to see the government succeeding in its self-destructive course of action against ASUU. Not only are there no university teachers anywhere to recruit, Nigeria is hardly the right place for any competent teacher to come and offer his services, let alone for pittance and with no equipment to do the job. We are close to an election year; yet, Dr Jonathan is toying with the electorate and displaying unparalleled contempt for the youth. But perhaps we should wait to see what talisman he hopes to mesmerise us with in 2015.

  • Ongoing political realignment is last hope. No hyperbole

    After almost 15 years of unremitting political provocation, Nigerians are about to enjoy some relief from the tedium a succession of bad or incompetent leaders have subjected them to. Kawu Baraje, the chairman of the new Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP) that has just fused with the All Progressives Congress (APC), enthused last week that President Goodluck Jonathan should begin to prepare his handover notes. His effervescence is a reflection of the hopes elicited by the migration of five PDP governors into the APC, and the possible wholesale migration of the national legislators of the five states into the opposition party. If the migration is carried through in the National Assembly, it will mean an immediate and drastic alteration of legislative power. In addition, it will also mean in theory that the electoral vote-rich Southwest, Northwest and Northeast zones will go to the APC column. Political analysts recognise the impossibility of winning the presidency in Nigeria without two of these three blocs.

    It is hardly necessary to explain why the PDP could not keep the five governors, and why it may still lose a few more to the opposition. But it is important to state that the reason is not really the desire of the North to reclaim the presidency, after being shut out for a cumulative period of almost 13 years. The real reasons are the uncontrollable and spiteful internal dynamics of the PDP, and the almost absolute incompetence of the Jonathan government to engender progress and development and to facilitate peace. If Dr Jonathan had been a listening and charismatic president, the opposition against him would have been feeble. But now the opposition is potent and growing, and it is likely to succeed if it plays its cards well. More importantly, the country is an overripe pimple ready for a new party to take office, and new men, no matter their ideological disposition, to implement new political and developmental paradigms.

    But the expanded APC should not have illusions about its reach, power and readiness to take office. Its unity will remain testily brittle, and its ideological core will in the foreseeable future continue to be a kitchen midden of multifarious and sometimes conflicting worldviews. While the PDP has seemed to achieve some form of unity based solely on its long years in power, the APC will have to confect its own unity based on its members’ shared desperation to take power. Neither party’s unity will be contextually superior to the other, nor will one party’s style be less morally reprehensible than the other. The ageing PDP is a longstanding opportunist; the new APC is a latter-day opportunist. However, and more crucially, while the old opportunists have become inured to change and progress, and have even openly embraced fascism, the new opportunists, themselves idealists and theorists, appear genuinely interested in change, democracy, progress and stability. The choice facing the country is, therefore, clear and easy.

    Given the awful record of the PDP in government and the appalling characters that have seized governance and entrapped a willing Dr Jonathan, I have no hesitation in recommending change. Nor do I have hesitation in making the hyperbolic statement that four more years of Dr Jonathan would ruin the country. The signs are clear. But the APC must appreciate the kind of politics Nigerians play and why that sort of politics has held us in thraldom for so long. Dr Jonathan’s strength remains the fact that he is viewed in the Christian middle belt with a fondness and wistfulness that belie his unsuitability for the post he has held for nearly five years. In addition, many seem to find his consistent lack of composure and charisma, as well as his lack of profundity, both engaging and beguiling. (I have struggled to use inoffensive words for a man who merits the harshest adjectives for plunging the country into retrogression and chaos).

    In the South-South, neither his incompetence nor dullness matters to the single-minded voters of that zone. What matters are that he hails from their zone, and that the North, which they describe as parasitic, is once again annoyingly hankering after the plum post. I confess that such mechanical consideration of politics can be off-putting and is a dangerous path to follow for a country passing through trying times. If APC is to take the presidency, it will have to select its standard-bearers with considerable aplomb by avoiding sentiments and jaded calculations, take a little of the South-South and North Central as much as it can manage, and sweep the Southwest, Northeast and Northwest. The arithmetic of the next elections, not to say the dynamics of the National Assembly, favours the opposition party. If the opposition does not underestimate the fanatical ruthlessness of the Jonathan government, if it manages its own diversities well, checks its fissiparous tendency, and puts up a winnable ticket, Nigeria will be rid of the confusion and disaster that have bedevilled it for more than a decade.

  • Anambra poll: An opportunity missed

    Anambra poll: An opportunity missed

    The forces malevolently interested in the November 16 Anambra governorship poll were much stronger than the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) could withstand or manage. No matter what INEC did, the election was bound to fail; for the stakes in that poll were so high that even if the electoral body had mustered enough administrative acumen and integrity to superintend the election, the political dynamics in both the state and the country had already spawned too many sinister factors capable of undermining the poll.

    Much attention has been paid to INEC’s failings in that election as an explanation for the almost comprehensive failure of the governorship poll. Because of this failure, the INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, has himself been described as a failure. In addition, many have called for the cancellation of the poll since it could not be guaranteed that the pollution and manipulation noticed in some polling areas had not affected the entire process. Professor Jega himself acknowledged that in some parts of the state, his men sabotaged the election. He was thoroughly disappointed, he said, that in spite of all the preparations for that poll, the election still miscarried badly. And though he didn’t quite say it, it appeared that the sabotage he talked about was aimed at the feisty All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Chris Ngige.

    The Anambra poll miscarried for two main reasons. But before considering the reasons, it is important to make one or two observations about the election. First, I think it was unwise of Professor Jega to have drafted so many top level INEC staff to supervise the poll, and also encourage the overwhelming policing of the same poll. By taking these extraordinary steps in the hope that he would deliver a near perfect election, he robbed himself and his commission of the opportunity to know how they would have performed were the 2015 polls to be held all over the country on November 16. In 2015, it is evident that neither the commission nor the security agencies would have the benefit of the number and stature of the officials deployed in Anambra for the inconclusive governorship poll of two Saturdays ago. The poll should have been used as a dress rehearsal for the 2015 polls. Second, by now Professor Jega and the frustrated electorate will have realised that it takes more than an INEC chairman’s well-meaning disposition and the deployment of overwhelming force to deliver a free and fair election.

    The failed Anambra poll can be explained in two ways. First is the simple fact that the Jonathan presidency has no interest whatsoever in ensuring a free and fair poll, notwithstanding its repeated homilies on the sanctity of the electoral process. Judging from the spectral silence of the presidency on the obvious and deliberate sabotage of the poll, and the effusive and exuberant praise of the same poll by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), it was clear that from the perspective of the Jonathan presidency, the goal of the election was to defeat Dr Ngige, not to ensure fair poll or give victory to the PDP candidate. The obsession against Dr Ngige is in turn informed by the overall strategic interest of the ruling party to checkmate the rising profile of the APC and stall, if not completely weaken, the opposition’s increasingly shrill and critical voice. This explains why the PDP was eager to endorse the misshapen poll and give the impression of being detached from crass partisanship, though its candidate lost in questionable circumstances.

    As part of this strategy of weakening, stalling or reversing the power of the APC, the PDP will next year attempt to take at least one state from the APC in the Osun and Ekiti elections and ride that momentum towards the 2015 polls. Two main factors underscore the strategy against the APC. One is the fact that Dr Jonathan himself lacks the intrinsic depth and vision to remake the country as a virile, progressive and pacesetting nation. Two is the fact that deliberately or accidentally, Dr Jonathan has managed to assemble a group of Machiavellian advisers and close aides who have gross loathing for principles. They are adept at reading the lips of the president and sabotaging every law and constitutional provision militating against the president’s re-election. Therefore, between Dr Jonathan’s surrender to devious politics and the energetic enthusiasm of his aides to foment trouble, everything, including the laws and constitution, not to talk of elections in particular, is fair game for subversion.

    The second reason the Anambra poll miscarried is the connivance of the state’s elite. No one denies the atrocious manipulations that undermined the integrity of the poll. But to remedy these atrocities, INEC plans a supplementary election slated for the end of this month. While there are calls for total cancellation of the poll from among a not-so-substantial number of Anambrarians and an overwhelming number of non-Anambrarians, the state’s elite have indicated the poll is not so irredeemable that a supplementary poll cannot correct. In media comments and television discussions, as well as jurisprudential expositions, the said elite have struggled to justify the poll and denounce the APC, its candidate, and any other person bold enough to dismiss the election as a sham. It is not surprising that such connivance offers endorsement for the electoral chicanery of two Saturdays ago and also provides adequate grounding and philosophical underpinning for the subversion of the electoral process.

    One of those philosophical underpinnings was the incredulous argument that Dr Ngige represented the face of the Southwest’s expansionist agenda. The state’s ruling party, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), was the only surviving Igbo party that must not be humiliated, they said. It no longer mattered that APC’s Dr Ngige was their son, or that he had ruled the state meritoriously and can probably do much better than his rivals, or that his competence could not be doubted at all. The unabashed suggestion that Dr Ngige represented outsiders harked back to the Yoruba/Igbo rivalry of the 1950s and 1960s, and gave the impression that little progress had been made in Southwest/Southeast relationships. To these conniving analysts and amateur philosophers, it does not matter how the APGA candidate wins.

    But such dangerous reasoning carries equally dangerous drawbacks. It shows that the Southeast has learnt nothing, forgotten nothing, and has all along been an impassive observer of the changing dynamics of Nigerian politics and geopolitics. Even though Dr Ngige’s candidature was the best opportunity for the Southwest to build a credible and durable bridge to the Southeast, it was even a much better opportunity for the Southeast to expand its reach nationally and also break the implacable iron curtain that has seemed to divide the Southwest and the Southeast. For a region desirous of winning the presidency in the years ahead, it is strange that the lessons of MKO Abiola’s victory in the 1993 presidential election are lost on them.

    It is also surprising that they fail to understand that while the Southwest intelligently preferred Olu Falae in the 1999 presidential election, Olusegun Obasanjo enjoyed the better crossover appeal which propelled him into Aso Villa. More crucially, it must be understood that the seeming consensus that appeared to produce a Yoruba president in 1999 could not be divorced from the 1993 presidential election annulment. Such a consensus is unlikely to be built again, and each party and ethnic group will have to explore sensible and multipronged strategies to win the presidency.

    If the partial results already sanctioned by INEC are taken into cognisance, and given the way they are skewed against the APC candidate, it is hard to see Dr Ngige winning. If he loses, it will not be because he failed to run a credible and efficient campaign, or because the electorate didn’t vote for him. It will be because he ran against a manipulative and amoral federal government, an unscrupulous Governor Peter Obi who pays only lip service to democracy, a short-sighted and parochial elite anxious to protect imaginary boundaries, and an unconscionable public who can’t seem to understand the fuss over an unfair electoral process or the principle of fighting for and defending truth and justice.

    It is also quite remarkable that some of those who denounce the APC in the Anambra election and turn a blind eye to the corruption that accompanied it come from the Southwest. Their reasons are totally unrelated to the noxious details of the electoral manipulations observed in the Anambra poll by everyone. Indeed, the unusual Southwest support for injustice is merely a reflection of the divisions that have now become integral to Southwest politics, one in which everyone defines progressivism according to his taste and embraces it according to his whim. The bitter political struggle in the Southwest, which always spills over to other parts of the country, will continue for some time to come, for it has become burdensome and discomfiting for those who had associated with Obafemi Awolowo in the First and Second Republics, and long ago passed themselves off as progressives, to mollify the pangs and reproof of conscience triggered by their betrayal of democratic principles.

    Those who suggest that the Anambra debacle presages a catastrophic 2015 are right. The Anambra poll failed because there are fewer people today in the country with the character and principles that conduce to good electoral behaviour. Anambra has probably sealed its fate. But the buck-passers of INEC, the vicious and amoral presidency of Dr Jonathan, and the shallow and sentimental analysts crawling all over Nigeria with spurious logic will guarantee that this long-suffering country, not just Anambra, inexorably moves closer to meeting its fate in two years’ time.

  • Oduahgate, a hesitant president and Gov Amaechi

    Oduahgate, a hesitant president and Gov Amaechi

    Nearly one month after President Goodluck Jonathan set up a panel to probe the scandal surrounding the two overpriced bulletproof cars allegedly bought for the Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), and more than one week after the panel reportedly submitted its report, the president has not said a word. No matter what his aides say about his fidelity to both the truth and the anti-corruption war, Dr Jonathan is clearly reluctant to act on the matter, for Ms Oduah is said to be a favoured minister, one quite important to the president’s election in 2011 and his re-election plans in 2015. But act he must, notwithstanding speculations that he seeks a way out for the embattled minister. This column has no inkling what the panel’s findings are, but whatever happens, and given what we already know, the president will be demonstrating unparalleled audacity not to give Ms Oduah more than a slap on the wrist.

    As far as Dr Jonathan is concerned, and in spite of his often buoyant sermonising in speeches and in churches, his presidency has formed a pattern of never meaning what he says, and of damning the whole world when his critics become too impassioned against his puny virtues. To be fair to him, he has not been inspiring in waging war on corruption, but he at least gestures in that direction and frequently pretends to be earnest in facing the problem squarely.

    As if to reinforce the perception of the moral aimlessness of the Jonathan presidency, his Special Adviser on Political Matters, Ahmed Gulak, last week explained why Dr Jonathan turned down the invitation by the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) to deliver a keynote address at its Sokoto retreat. According to Alhaji Gulak, the president turned down the invitation because he did not recognise the NGF led by Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State. The president, he said unashamedly, recognised a faction of the NGF created and led by Governor Jonah Jang of Plateau State.

    In May, the NGF had conducted its leadership election in which Mr Amaechi emerged winner with 19 votes to Mr Jang’s 16. Many observers saw a direct and uncomplicated election; but the president chose to recognise the loser who was his candidate. Other than the 16 governors who recognise Mr Jang as NGF chairman, no other sensible person does. But what does the Jonathan presidency care? He sees no paradox in lending presidential weight to open indiscretion. If he finally and reluctantly chooses to punish Ms Oduah for her errors and lies, it will not be because he thinks it is the right thing to do; it will be because he has no choice. As for the NGF, don’t ever expect him to recognise the truth, no matter what loathsome impression it creates of his presidency. He abhors the upstart Mr Amaechi too much to give a damn. After all, in these parts, the impression presidential aides have of presidential power is that no president must ever lose an argument to anyone, let alone lose a deathly political struggle with a lowly governor. In their view, democracy endows a president with far more power and glory than a monarchy or outright dictatorship.

  • IGP on the G7 meeting invasion

    IGP on the G7 meeting invasion

    The question the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Abubakar, was asked to respond to by the House Committee on Police Affairs was simple: who ordered the Asokoro Divisional Police Officer, Nnana Amah, to invade and disrupt the G7 governors’ meeting at the Kano governor’s lodge some two weeks ago? The answer was equally simple though downright disturbing. No one sent Mr Amah, the IGP replied. The DPO was simply doing his job, he deadpanned.

    It will be recalled that two Sundays ago, Mr Amah had led dozens of policemen to invade the G7 governors’ meeting in Abuja. According to a source at the meeting, the DPO had asked the governors to disperse or be arrested. The governors, five of whom were present at the meeting, would not disperse, but instead dared the DPO to arrest them. The invasion led to an altercation in which a chafing governor would have taken the unprecedented step of pushing the DPO out of the meeting had he not been restrained. The invasion alarmed the country, and was widely condemned by everyone with a sense of decorum. However, like all who dare to oppose the Jonathan presidency, the chafing governor is today under siege, with two of his sons detained for alleged financial malfeasance.

    If Mr Amah’s effrontery alarmed the country, the response of the IGP was even more troubling, and the inability of the House Committee to pin him down with poignant and unnerving questions did in fact signpost the decline of Nigerian democracy. According to the IGP, “The DPO was not sent by anybody…As the officer-in-charge of the area, he had the right to know what was going on in his domain…He is the DPO of the area; if anything happens, he would be held responsible. He was doing his job.” He further explained that what the rest of us described as disruption of meeting was in fact nothing of the sort, and that we were all misled by media reports of the event. Alas, the IGP pretends to teach us English by redefining the word ‘disruption.’

    Worse, by making light of Mr Amah’s grievous assault on civil liberties, the police boss attempts to rewrite the constitution, remould Nigerian democracy, and redefine the charter on human rights. But the IGP’s not-so-clever response shows very clearly why Nigeria is now a police state, why the police commissioner in Rivers State willfully defies the state governor without fear of retribution, why increasingly the police’s view of liberty is at variance with whatever liberty is vouchsafed to citizens by the constitution. And by handling the IGP last Thursday with kid gloves, the House Committee on Police Affairs also indicate clearly how complicit the National Assembly has become in the subversion of the constitution by a resentful and vindictive Jonathan presidency.

    The fact is that though the IGP honoured the House invitation, he provided no explanation to show by what authority the police could disrupt the governors’ meeting or embarrass them, even if it was clear the governors met to ensure President Goodluck Jonathan did not contest in 2015, or if he did, not to win a single vote. The police, Dr Jonathan, and the faceless and shameless power mongers pulling the strings behind the thick presidency cloak of Aso Villa remind us of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party prepared the ground for fascism. The IGP is obviously no longer in full control of the police, for he seems to us a man of much grander character than the actions the police evince today. More and more, he will find himself justifying his men’s lawless actions, perhaps assured that in the process, and irrespective of what he thinks or not think, believes or not believe, he is pleasing the presidency and defending his increasingly untenable position.

    More humbling, and faced with a fascist presidency, we have on our trembling hands a considerably weakened National Assembly without a full understanding of the role of a legislature in combating autocracy. For whatever this weapon in our hands is worth, the Senate seems to have lost its zest for lawmaking and for checking the excesses of the executive; and the House of Representatives has sensed the futility and loneliness of rising up stoutly in defence of civil liberties. They could not question the IGP to get his understanding of what the duties of a DPO were, and whether those duties included in any way the assault on the people’s liberties as contained in the constitution. They let the IGP off lightly by refusing to get him to quote the relevant parts of the constitution that empowered his officers to insult democracy and deny or circumscribe lawful association and assembly of the people.

    Last year we started with a defiant commissioner of police proving to be more powerful than a state governor; now we have one DPO looking five governors in the face and telling them to shape up or ship out. Under the military, such effrontery could never be countenanced. In a democracy, it should never be imagined. But under the nose of a president who took oath to defend and protect the constitution, we are experiencing these clear and catastrophic assaults on civil liberties. Who can tell what will happen as the 2015 general elections draw near, when a desperate president egged on by faceless fascists take on everybody and the constitution? Who can tell what other abuses the president’s men will enact, and what other institution, other than the police, they will destroy or render contemptible?

    Already, the campaign for state police has become almost unchallengeable, even unanimous. Whether a sovereign national conference is held or not, it is certain that the enthusiasm with which the police have lent themselves to be used to undermine the constitution has ensured that they cannot survive as they are constituted today. It is a question of time before the police are decentralized. When that happens, it will be good riddance to bad rubbish. For with the appalling excesses of the Jonathan government, no one is persuaded that a state government is likely to behave more unreasonably with the police than the federal government now heedlessly does.

    Whether the already enfeebled National Assembly, which embraces partisanship to the detriment of the sanctity of the constitution, survives the impending Jonathan onslaught remains to be seen. They failed to understand the issues involved in the Rivers affair, where a few members of the House of Assembly plotted against the majority and then somehow manipulated the National Assembly to employ disingenuous neutrality instead of principled engagement. More and more, Nigerians are beginning to understand that this certainly isn’t the kind of legislature the country needs. Whatever they earn, if they could at least be firm and principled, the country would be grateful that though they cost a pretty penny they are nonetheless useful. Today, however, they look like an appendage of the executive, frightened, cowering and shell-shocked.

    Mr Amah is likely to get away with his audacious challenge to the country’s democratic tenets. After all, his senior counterpart in Rivers is getting away with murder. In the face of such distressing exhibition of partisan policing, the IGP hides under semantics, and the National Assembly feigns ignorance, if not sickening amusement. Maybe, in quiet resignation, we should wait for the other shoe to drop. When that happens, let us hope it will not be too late to stir ourselves, too late to reclaim the country from the hands of those intent on destroying it, and too late to feel alive once again and be proud of this corner of the earth the good Lord has placed in our clumsy hands to tend.

  • The death of Iyayi

    The death of Iyayi

    What makes the death of Festus Iyayi deeply wounding is not simply the fact that he had an accident, as indeed anyone can have, or that he died in the almost hopeless quest of securing better university education for Nigerian students. Every death diminishes us, but none more so than the one procured in the hands of either an unimaginative person, such as an anarchist Boko Haram Islamic sect fighter, or an unimaginative state government, such as Kogi State government richly illustrated last week. Professor Iyayi, writer and former president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) died in an auto crash on the Lokoja-Abuja highway when, according to preliminary reports, the bus in which he was travelling with other ASUU officials was struck by an escort vehicle in the convoy of Kogi State governor, Idris Wada.

    As if admitting guilt, and as if remorseful that Kogi State convoy drivers had needlessly avoided Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) training programmes, the governor has quickly offered to release his drivers for training. It took the death of Professor Iyayi to convince Kogi to do what is right. According to the corps marshal, Osita Chidoka, three accidents in as many months involving the Kogi government convoys were not even enough to get the governor amenable to the Road Safety training programme. Nor was another convoy accident involving the governor himself, in which he sustained a broken limb, enough to make the governor do something about his reckless convoys.

    The state has tried to shift the blame to the victims, but some sources allege that the governor’s convoy is to blame. If investigations prove the convoy’s culpability, the governor will not only be sued for damages, he will also doubtless be stigmatized for causing the death of the renowned professor and for failing to get his convoys to act responsibly on the highways. Indeed, if the governor cannot be trusted to responsibly restrain his drivers from embarking on what looks like joyriding, how can he be trusted to administer the affairs of his state with the responsibility, consideration, fairness and moderation his office required?

  • Nigeria, Boko Haram and belated US declaration

    Finally, the United States of America has declared the Nigerian Boko Haram Islamic sect a terrorist organisation. The US has its reasons. But it is instructive that for more than two years, Nigeria stoutly refused to let the sect be declared a foreign terrorist organisation. The country claimed that such a declaration would negatively affect innocent Nigerian travelers who would automatically become suspects anywhere they travelled to in Europe and America. This time, however, there has been no objection to the US declaration even though nothing has changed. The sect has remained consistently bloody and undiscriminating in its campaigns. It still treats its victims with as much contempt as it has done since 2009. And it has neither reduced nor expanded its objectives.

    What has changed, in fact, is that the Nigerian government has finally been overcome by self-made frustrations. While it previously and indefensibly believed it could secure some sort of deal with the sect, such hopes appear to have now evaporated. In spite of the appalling bloodletting at the Northeast epicenter of the revolt, and in spite of the killing of many of the sect’s leaders, the violence has seemed to worsen, especially in its total lack of discrimination.

    To be certain, the fault for the late declaration of the sect as a terrorist organisation is not that of the US. It is strictly that of Nigeria. The country’s leaders have shown no imagination or good judgement in its war against the sect. It unwisely allowed the revolt to take root and spread before it belatedly declared war on it. While the sect controlled barely one local government in the early days of the revolt, the government was apparently unimpressed and failed to take the firm measures required to knock the problem into a cocked hat. Unimaginably, the government waited until, in its own words, the sect controlled more than 10 local governments in Borno and Yobe states before it felt it appropriate to declare what this column has described as an unnecessary state of emergency. Now, it seems as if the insurgency has become a war of attrition in which neither side appears eager to achieve victory or concede defeat.

    Neither the US declaration of Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation nor the declaration of state of emergency will bring the insurgency to an end. With the anomie being sponsored and nurtured by the Jonathan presidency as he continues to undermine the constitution and impose authoritarian rule, and his demonstration of absolute mala fides in the practice of democracy, it is unlikely his efforts to restore peace in a part of the polity will be rewarded. Worse, it does appear that in tandem with its helplessness in dealing with the sectarian nightmare in the Northeast, the Nigerian government appears willing to open the country’s airspace and security (including intelligence, telephone security et al), not to say sovereignty, to US influence and drone activities.

    Four more years of Dr Jonathan’s unexciting and undemocratic rule will push Nigeria to the cliff. This has nothing to do with where the president comes from, his party’s zoning policy, or whether it is the North’s turn or that of the Southeast or any other zone for that matter. The problem is absolutely one of competence, which this president or the two before him have not demonstrated in part or in whole. It is frustrating that the issue of who rules Nigeria is every time obfuscated by the ethnic or religious background of those aspiring to be president.

  • Why I endorse Ngige for Anambra governorship

    Why I endorse Ngige for Anambra governorship

    If all the politicians in the Southeast, including the very interesting and amusing but often hyperbolic Rochas Okorocha of Imo State, Chris Ngige seems to me to be the most colourful. On Saturday, he hopes to defeat 29 other candidates in the Anambra State governorship election. Analysts think the election will be a four-way race between Dr Ngige of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Willie Obiano of the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA), Tony Nwoye of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Ifeanyi Ubah of the Labour Party (LP). I had hoped the race would be a titanic two-way race between Dr Ngige and former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Charles Soludo. With the manipulation of Professor Soludo out of the race in APGA and the official sanction of Mr Obiano as candidate by the state governor, the only credible, independent person of substance remaining in the race is Dr Ngige, irrespective of what his chances are.

    Mr Obiano is clearly Governor Peter Obi’s favourite, and the governor has undisguisedly tried to advance his candidature. But if the APGA candidate has any fine attributes, and it is likely he has many, not least his banking background and his District Officer looks, they are, however, buried beneath the controversies that accompanied his enthronement as the ruling party’s candidate. He speaks well, and has a fair understanding of financial issues. But he is a dour and incomparably unexciting politician, and he lacks the charisma, rigour, excitement and independence that make both Dr Ngige and Professor Soludo tower head and shoulders above virtually all politicians in the Southeast. Mr Obi himself is not a colourful politician, nor is he anything more than merely pragmatic and somewhat businesslike. He probably sees much of Mr Obiano in himself, much more than the fact that the candidate who comes from Anambra North satisfies the party’s zoning ambition.

    Comrade Nwoye is a latecomer to the race, having only last week secured the Supreme Court nod to be fielded as the PDP candidate. He has a union background and is a dyed-in-the-wool PDP politician. But in a race as tight as Anambra’s, and with a surfeit of eminently qualified candidates, anchoring a divided house on him and entering the race barely 10 days to the election are hardly the kind of credentials that dispose to victory. And like Obiano, he will rely on his party to create an artificial whirlwind to procure victory for him. Should he win, he will bring no experience and no special talent to the office. Mr Ubah is a businessman who is willing to put his enormous money where his mouth is. But beyond that, and his zestful face and longing eyes, the state will be as undeserving of him as it is undeserving of both Mr Nwoye and Mr Obiano.

    That leaves the irrepressible Dr Ngige. I have been a longstanding fan of this witty, colourful and politically passionate senator form Anambra Central. He was governor between 2003 and 2006, after the scheming Chris Uba, an unscrupulous businessman, procured a misbegotten governorship victory for him. But two months after being sworn in, Dr Ngige simply dismantled his godfather, denigrated him openly, and created such a din as no governor had ever done before him, nor is ever likely to do after him. The manner of his fight with Mr Uba, not to say the panache with which he secured victory in that deathly struggle, was as entertaining as the manner his enemies, led by the avaricious Mr Uba, tried in 2003 to unhorse him using a maudlin policeman, Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) Raphael Ige. I of course do not crave entertainment from an Ngige governorship. The plain fact, however, is that though there is no dull moment with Dr Ngige, he is always careful not to subordinate brilliant governance to entertainment.

    While Dr Ngige can be foresighted and diligent, as indeed he seems configured to be all his life, his years in office showed he is also a very practical politician, where practicality can sometimes be defined as not being averse to heroics that borders on outright mendacity. (Imagine if he had not led Uba on before the 2003 poll, and then undid him so spectacularly and dramatically to the relief of all Anambrarians and the mirth of every Nigerian!). I have no trouble whatsoever in endorsing Dr Ngige as governor of Anambra, notwithstanding his anonymity in the Senate where he sat in lugubrious and painless solemnity. He will come to the office of governor with plenty of useful experience and exuberance, uncommon vision, a great deal of joie de vivre far surpassing those of his three main rivals, and certain to put the state in salutary spotlight. Should Dr Ngige lose…no, no, perish the thought.