The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Kidnappers and the demolition policy

    It is not clear what logic is behind the thinking that demolishing kidnappers’ properties would be an effective deterrent to kidnapping. But whether it is a deterrent or not, a few states have unthinkingly enacted laws empowering their governments to demolish or confiscate kidnappers’ properties. Interestingly, some of these states don’t even wait for the courts to prove the guilt of kidnappers before their properties are brought down. Timidity and perhaps also ignorance have not allowed the victims to test the validity of the laws in the courts, or if not the validity, then at least the processes. For even if the laws were valid, and I doubt if they are in light of the constitution, there is no kidnapper’s property that has so far been demolished in accordance with due process.

    One of the kidnappers involved in the abduction of Professor Kamene Okonjo, mother of the Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, was demolished shortly after he was arrested. The courts had not yet heard nor judged the case when the government hastily brought the property down. Chief Bonaventure Mokwe, the detained proprietor of the Upper Class Hotel in Onitsha is in court to prevent the Anambra State government from confiscating his property. It was brought down after some dry skulls were found in the hotel premises. He is yet to be found guilty of the crime, but the government has gone ahead anyway to demolish the hotel.

    In neighbouring Delta State, the Uncle P Guest House, estimated to be worth about N150 million, and owned by a retiree, Mr Pius Ogbeni, was also brought down, allegedly on the orders of the state government, for harbouring a kidnapper. The suspect had lodged in the hotel, like any other guest, for five days before checking out. His alleged victim was said to have been rescued in very controversial circumstances from the hotel. Today, no one is even sure where the victim was rescued from. But while the case was yet to be heard, let alone tried, the hotel was brought down.

    Kidnapping is of course a very serious crime that should not be condoned. But so, too, are murder and armed robbery. If the last two do not cause an abridgment of due process, there is no reason not to subject kidnapping to the ambits of the law. Apart from the dubiousness of the kidnapping law itself, and the indefensible, if not immoral, haste with which the governments demolish properties, there is a clear lack of rigour in the anti-kidnapping law. Has the death penalty curbed or eradicated armed robbery?

    In light of the abduction of Mike Ozekhome, a prominent Nigerian lawyer, it will be hard to counsel restraint in tackling kidnapping. But counsel I must. Let the states, which have passed laws on kidnapping, take a second and more reasoned look at the laws. More importantly, let them follow due process and not jump ahead of the law in their populist desire to fight kidnapping. I suggest that victims of government’s arbitrary application of the law test the matter in court, and test it to its limits. I doubt they can lose if there are still enough judges who can call their souls their own, and who understand the deeper import of law and justice.

     

  • We’ll miss Ngige/Soludo showdown

    In spite of the regrettable back and forth over the selection of the APC candidate for November’s Anambra governorship poll, I had hoped for the sake of Anambra State and the good of Nigerian politics that we would see a showdown between the cerebral Charles Soludo, former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, and the charismatic Chris Ngige, a senator and former governor of the state. From all indications, Dr Ngige, who seems increasingly built for the state house than for the senate, will still emerge as the APC candidate, notwithstanding the party’s indiscretion in announcing his candidacy without the conduct of primaries. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how Professor Soludo could emerge the candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). The party not only unnecessarily embarked on a barren screening exercise, it has left the sanctimonious Governor Peter Obi in a position where many are insinuating he is secretly directing choices from behind closed doors.

    My pain is that we would now not see a classical showdown between brains and charm, a sorry miss for Anambra, and a terrible distress for Nigeria. I do not, of course, imply that Dr Ngige has no brains. He certainly does. But Professor Soludo is not only an academician, he is fevered by his enthusiasm to conceive and enunciate policies, even as he seems to have excess of that endowment. Dr Ngige clearly outdoes most governors in Nigeria today in the charms department with his stately good looks, which for a short man is quite remarkable, with his suave performance on the soapbox, with his administrative acumen, with his intrepidity, and with his instinctive grasp of issues.

    The choice between Dr Ngige and Professor Soludo would have represented the age-old dilemma man faces in choosing his spouse: would he go for a brainy or beautiful lady? Sociologists would have been pleased to get an answer from the pace-setting Anambra electorate as an indication of how men think. After all, it is already settled that women do not set great store by how well a man looks, but by the content of his… Ah, why do I want to provoke a war?

  • APC and 2015: PDP is truly exhausted

    APC and 2015: PDP is truly exhausted

    As the months grind on towards the 2015 general elections, the true nature and character of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will begin to unfold. I expect the party to endure, of course, and if democracy is to be preserved, we must hope the party will find ingenious ways to sustain itself and even flourish as a great political party. In other words, I do not wish the party bad, nor do I yearn for its collapse. But there is simply no way it can retain its present character, for its present character is neither progressive, as we understand the term, nor conservative, as its members, leaders and well-wishers dare hope. In reality, and unknown to the many so-called progressives within its ranks, such as the highly adaptable Ebenezer Babatope, the party is unequivocally reactionary.

    There is a way reactionary politics tends to mask ideological differentiation. Radicals, it is well known, can also be reactionary, just as conservatives sometimes do not quite appreciate when they slip from ordinary conservatism to extreme conservatism. What is clear about the PDP today – and we do not need to hate them for their choices or unusual taste – is that its leaders are rigidly opposed to any serious or major shift in the political and economic structures of Nigeria. They want the police to remain as they are, education to limp along ponderously, health and aviation to involve nothing more than cosmetic renovation of buildings, and economy to be simply a case of prudent management of resources in line with World Bank standards.

    Though the presidency of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was not inspiring at all, and its policies showed little imagination and coherence, the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan has proved to be even much worse. Chief Obasanjo’s policies have not only been sustained, its negative tendencies have been exacerbated by the dithering of Dr Jonathan. Chief Obasanjo ripped the party’s innards apart when he imposed imperial rule on the country and party; Dr Jonathan has allowed the injuries to become gangrenous, with horrifying consequences for the ruling party and the country’s laws and constitution. We remember how besotted Chief Obasanjo was to his brain trust and how inexpertly he sometimes redacted their poorly digested and contradictory policies; but Dr Jonathan’s languidness has laid the country prostrate beneath the hurtful policies of his predecessor and opened her up the more to the fiddling of his own even more insular brain trust.

    As we hurtle towards 2015, the country will, therefore, be torn between taking a chance on the newly formed All Progressives Congress (APC) and its eight-point agenda for the country, and resigning itself to the jaded policies and politics of the PDP. To be sure, the APC is not exactly the immaculate progressives of our theoretical fascination. The party comprises clearly discernible elements of both progressivism and conservatism. But if party leaders can find the right chemistry to bond them together, they may not be as immiscible as sceptics fear. The country must remind itself that the last time progressives won an election (in 1993) under the aegis of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), they were certainly not as ideologically coherent as their label misleadingly gave the impression. But they were doubtless the more committed to change, however change is defined, and closer to progressivism on the ideological spectrum than its opponent, the National Republican Convention (NRC).

    Today, the fault lines in Nigerian politics are becoming even more pronounced. The country faces its most trying times ever, and in many ways exhibits a frightening tentativeness in governance as well as in policymaking. By the admission of government, the country loses nearly as much revenue through oil theft as it makes through lawful sales. As a result of the natural lethargy of the Jonathan presidency and its many misguided and contradictory policies in combating crimes, the country is being laid waste by kidnappers and other criminals who would love the roof to collapse on everybody. And in spite of the strong-arm and sometimes vacillating tactics against the ongoing sectarian and socio-economic revolt in the Northeast, we are no nearer peace than when the fight broke out in 2009. In short, there are clearly no major initiatives from the PDP government to tackle these alarming problems other than tinkering at best and helpless indifference at worst. The party is exhausted, its ideas jaded, and its leading lights obviously war-weary and punch-drunk. If it gets another endorsement in 2015, there will still be no initiatives, major or minor, and the party’s leaders will suffer predictable paralysis.

    To win, the PDP will rely on the frustratingly bizarre dynamics of Nigerian politics, which involves a crazy mix of exploitation of ethnicity, religion, age-long prejudices, and fraud. Given the proclivities of the old warhorses being assembled by Dr Jonathan for the battle ahead, the PDP may find itself inexorably drawn to underhand tactics. As it is, the party is itself not idiosyncratically averse to unorthodox tactics in winning elections. The party will also attempt to tar some of the leaders of the APC with the brush of religious fanaticism and political dogmatism. More crucially, the PDP will eagerly exploit the political ambivalence of the Southeast, a region that has perched on the horns of ideological dilemma for so long. Under the Dr Jonathan government, the Southeast has enjoyed a golden age like never before. It is hard to see the region turning its back on Dr Jonathan in 2015. This is more so because when the country faced a choice between a broadly conservative party and a sketchily progressive party in the 1993 presidential election, the Southeast narrowly opted for conservatism, excepting Anambra which the SDP won with over 57 percent of the votes cast.

    The PDP will steer discussions and politics away from issues in the 2015 polls for the simple reason that it fares very badly in that department. It has no concrete ideas to project, and when ideas are nevertheless thrust under its nose, it has neither the patience to grasp them nor the industry to steal and adapt them, nor yet the assiduity to logically take them apart through careful and diligent denigration. Apart from avoiding issues, the PDP will also talk less about its records. Instead, it will dwell more on extenuating reasons for either nonperformance or tardy performance. Dr Jonathan’s aides have denied his government ever attempted to exploit ethnic or religious differences. Not only has it remorselessly done so, its desperation in the coming months will see it embrace the politics of prejudice, perhaps even more shamelessly.

    And here precisely is where the APC stands a good chance. In place of the stultifying policies and administrative paralysis of the PDP, the new party, which is more accurately an amalgam of old parties, has already boldly offered a major and radical shift in the kind of thinking needed to heal, restore and renew the country. I am fascinated by its embrace of the decentralisation of the police – an idea that should have come more than two decades ago – devolution of power to states, independence of anti-corruption and electoral agencies, among a number of other serious policies and issues. I think its determination to create one million jobs annually is far-fetched, and its preparedness to remove qualified executive immunity nugatory. On the whole, the party is at least offering sensible steps and policies to remake the country. Even if Nigerians love punishment and are inured to the policy sterility of the PDP, and mistrust the policy initiatives of the APC, it is still necessary to make a change at the highest level of government in order to strengthen democracy and underscore the power of the electorate to change government at will, whether thoughtfully or whimsically.

    By 2015, the PDP will have been in power for 16 years. Sadly, those 16 years have worsened the plight of the common man, virtually destroyed education, impoverished and alienated the youths, predisposed the country to unremitting instability and criminality, exacerbated corruption, opened the country to insidious foreign military influences and creeping intervention, and shown the world how mediocre Nigeria has become in nearly all areas of life. The truth is that if the country does not change direction in 2015, the chances of its survival, not to talk of its growth and development, will be made much harder, if not clearly impossible. The rot is too much and the stakes too high to ignore how urgently we need to embrace change in the coming elections.

  • The deductive death of Boko Haram’s Shekau

    The deductive death of Boko Haram’s Shekau

    Just before it yielded command to a new army division expected to take over its functions in the Northeast, the Joint Task Force (JTF), which has been combating terrorism in the region, announced to a bemused country that Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, might have died from gunshot injuries sustained in a firefight with security forces sometime in June. They offered no proof except circumstantial evidence from unstated and probably untested sources. They themselves were careful not to sound definitive. So, why did they feel the urgency to make the announcement, given the importance of the topic? They didn’t say, and they offered no clue. However, it is possible that the JTF simply wishes to depart in a blaze of glory. I was one of the worst critics of JTF operations in the Northeast, but even I must acknowledge that they had cleaned up their acts and fought a much cleaner war after the controversial Baga revenge killings. Even without evidence of Mallam Shekau’s death, the JTF still deserves plenty of accolades.

    Both the presidency and the Defence Headquarters (DHQ) are chary of being drawn into the controversy. They needn’t feel queasy. In Nigeria, when government’s lies are exposed, no one is punished, and apparently even the voters do not exact revenge on their deceivers in subsequent polls. So, the government and its agencies can safely lie without fear of retribution. And, as the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has discovered, no one flinches when the government unabashedly and routinely dishonours its word.

    In the matter of Mallam Shekau, deceased, living or injured, I think the JTF merely allowed itself the luxury of deductive reasoning. Apart from other sources which told of Mallam Shekau’s death, the most potent, to me, appears to be the last YouTube video released by the sect. In it, Shekau stated he could never be captured. Now, not even Osama bin Laden, the late Al-Qaeda leader, ever made such a boast, not even as a confidence building tactics. I therefore deduced from Mallam Shekau’s supremely confident assertion that since he is/was not a ghost, he could not say so confidently he was above capture, if he was not already dead.

    If another YouTube video does not surface in the next few weeks showing clear proof that the Boko Haram leader is alive, we may have no choice but to respect the JTF’s deductive reasoning and come to the same unproven conclusions as they hastily did last week. Nonetheless, the departing JTF, the incoming army division, the presidency and anyone who has analysed the Boko Haram phenomenon surely understand that killing the leader of a terrorist group does not amount to extirpating the menace. It is often no more than a morale booster, especially when not accompanied by a mass arrest or interdiction of its other leaders.

  • Kindergarten insult in humourless Aso Villa

    Kindergarten insult in humourless Aso Villa

    President Goodluck Jonathan’s media adviser, Reuben Abati, is not sure whether to categorise the All Progressives Congress (APC) chairman’s memorable putdown of the president’s leadership style as libellous and defamatory or as indecorous, hypocritical and unpatriotic vituperations. Whatever it is, the APC chairman, Bisi Akande, obviously ruffled the feathers of the presidency when he dismissed Dr Jonathan’s style, perhaps even the president himself, as kindergarten in grappling with national issues and problems. Dr Abati’s fiery and florid rebuke of Chief Akande, for reasons only the press can explain, received even wider publicity than the original attack, now famously dubbed the ‘kindergarten insult.’

    It is not known whether Dr Abati initiated the reply to Chief Akande on his own or whether he was prompted by the president. If the former, it is a depressing indication that the normally urbane and cultured media adviser has become infected with the melancholy permeating the humourless Nigerian presidency since the unsmiling and sensual Gen Sani Abacha took the reins of power, after an annoying hiatus, from the deceptively friendly Gen Ibrahim Babangida’s military presidency. But if the latter, it is a mere confirmation that redeeming Aso Villa’s deeply ingrained humourlessness may be an impossible mission. A smart president would have punned kindergarten and deployed it against Chief Akande.

    The APC chairman had two Saturdays ago described the Jonathan presidency in the following words: “I have my reasons not to admire President Goodluck Jonathan. I have not found him to be a serious-minded leader. Jonathan is Nigeria’s problem today. He is not a thinking leader. I have had two meetings with him since 2011. I have had a long telephone conversation with him. I have written him twice discussing the serious challenges facing the country, but he has not found the courtesy to reply. He has reduced governance to kindergarten level. He is not serious-minded.” It takes exceptional literary skills to turn this fairly harmless, albeit wounding, but descriptively accurate statement into a denigration of the Jonathan presidency. And the accomplished Dr Abati, as everyone knows, has more than a passing knowledge of literary facilities.

    Hear Dr Abati: “We urge Chief Akande and his fellow travellers to remember that there are laws against libel and defamation of character in this country even if there are no legal impediments to indecorous, hypocritical and unpatriotic vituperations. It is certainly rude, ill-mannered, uncharitable and hypocritical for Chief Akande to falsely and cavalierly allege that a President, who toils tirelessly every day of the week, evolving and implementing workable solutions to Nigeria’s problems, is handling national issues with levity. Also, nothing else but gross ignorance and lack of consideration could have led Chief Akande to refer to a President who, having served as deputy governor, governor, vice-president and president, has far more experience of governance at the highest level than him and his preferred “candidates”, as a kindergarten leader.”

    Dr Abati was not only a respected columnist, he was a leader writer and, if I am not mistaken, at one time a teacher of literature. He knows very well that describing a president’s style as kindergarten, while it may injure his pride and the collective pride of those paid to advise him, is certainly not unpatriotic, let alone amount to denigration. I could prove over a few paragraphs that Dr Jonathan’s style has truly reduced governance to kindergarten level, but why do I want to repeat Chief Akande or expose myself unnecessarily to allegations of defending the APC? I think it is sufficient to merely restate the indisputable fact that the Jonathan presidency has not offered a cerebral approach to Nigeria’s problems, just as Chief Akande poignantly concluded.

    Dr Jonathan is perhaps hard-working, as his media adviser said, and may even be toiling day and night to look after the welfare of Nigerians. The problem, however, is that his exertions, like Olusegun Obasnjo’s before him, have been altogether futile when not misplaced, and vainglorious when it manages a modicum of relevance. I recognise that in the face of the predatory invasion of his turf by the less scrupulous and more voluble Dr Doyin Okupe, a presidential assistant, Dr Abati has an increasing need to justify his relevance, if not his pay. But as a former columnist, and a brilliant one I dare say, Dr Abati ought to have his eye on history. He has the greater burden of sustaining the character of a fine writer and analyst, and the morality of one who has tried over the years as a leader writer to build himself into an agent of social change. Already, however, he has flip-flopped so precariously on account of his responsibility as a presidential adviser that neither he nor our long-suffering selves can recognise where he once stood, or understand where he now stands. He has purged himself of virtually every conviction in the service of a vacillating and equally unconvincing president that he would be lucky to recognise his own face in the mirror after he leaves the president’s employ.

    To the critical question of whether Chief Akande’s remarks constituted an insult or, as Dr Abati unabashedly and exaggeratedly put it, amounted to a denigration of the presidency, surely he has read wide enough to know that comparing the Jonathan style to kindergarten is tame in the extreme. It is obvious that in these parts, many unlettered and untraveled people regard the presidency as a sacred institution, and fawn over it with the impressionable boyishness of a primary school pupil. What if Chief Akande had described the Jonathan presidency as inept, a remark that would have been both appropriate and accurate? Dr Abati cites the president’s anti-insurgency efforts as remarkable and gutsy. Absolute nonsense. What was the president looking at as the insurgents raised their flags from one local government to another until they got to 10?

    But much more crucially, and in spite of our cultural sensibilities, I think that not only was Chief Akande mature and restrained in his ‘kindergarten insult’, Nigerians have indeed been extremely tolerant of their leaders’ indolence and ineffectiveness. This column is of course an exception. Palladium may not describe Dr Jonathan as kindergarten, or denounce him as inept, but he has used enough words and left no one in doubt, idiom by idiom and word for word, that Dr Jonathan’s puny talents are completely unsuited to a modern government, and that he himself is evidently anachronistic. Would Dr Abati consider me uncouth? What would he say then of the Chicago Times which deprecated Abraham Lincoln’s now oft-quoted Gettysburg address in the following terms?: “We did not conceive it possible that even Mr Lincoln would produce a paper so slipshod, so loose-joined, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp. He has outdone himself. He has literally come out of the little end of his own horn. By the side of it, mediocrity is superb.”

    What umbrage would Dr Abati take if he had been media adviser to former United States president Warren Harding when journalist H.L. Mencken described him unflatteringly as follows?: “He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and tumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

    Or what would he say to e.e. cummings’ description of the same president as “…the only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.” With what exuberant phrases would Dr Abati denounce Benjamin Disraeli’s notable putdown of former British prime minister Robert Peel as someone whose smile is like the silver fittings on a coffin? What of Winston Churchill’s description of Lloyd George as “The Happy Warrior of Squandermania”; Clement Atlee as “A modest little man with much to be modest about”; and Aneurin Bevan as “someone who will be as a great curse to this country in peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war”?

    Contrary to what Dr Abati thinks, I observe that we have been exceedingly charitable to our leaders. While it is true that there are many ways to skin a cat, politicians and writers have a responsibility, in spite of the gruffness and menaces of the Okupes and Abatis, not to so inoculate their phrases as to become ineffective in accurately portraying the indolence, incompetence and chicaneries of poorly endowed leaders.

    But here is a question for the APC chairman: if Dr Jonathan now runs a melancholic kindergarten, and Chief Obasanjo ran a medieval monarchy of Ottoman proportions, and Gen Abacha ran, well, a gigantic brothel and bazaar complete with paedophile rings, what kind of leaders should we expect from Nigeria’s leadership nursery in the coming years?

     

  • The Lagos deportation saga and 2015 politics

    Given the irresponsible and remorseless exploitation by Bode George and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of the controversy that arose from the ‘deportation’ of some Anambrarians from Lagos recently, it is guaranteed that the matter will linger well into the 2015 general elections. Even if we ignore the fact that the so-called deportation, or resettlement as Lagos described it, has been going on in some states for a while, the problem is sufficiently serious enough to alert the country’s leadership and all patriotic Nigerians to the potentially explosive problem of how to define an indigene of a state, and what his rights and obligations are. The problem has been left dangerously unattended to for far too long.

    I think the Lagos State government was not sensitive enough to the implications of resettling those it described as destitute. It must find ways of making amends, whether it meant well in taking the action or not, or whether others had done it before or not. But Anambra and all those prattling about the rights of the destitute must also understand the security concerns of Lagos, the limited resources at the disposal of the state, the fact that the federal government has irresponsibly not made any special allocation to assist Lagos in tackling its worsening social and economic pressures, and the fact that there is a limit to how Lagos can cater for the jobless and the dispossessed within its borders. In any case it is hard to see how resettling a little over a dozen people constitutes a deliberate and wide-ranging policy of discrimination against anyone or state, let alone an ethnic group.

    It is indeed a reflection of the unresolved national question, an issue that is worsening as the years go by, that the Igbo somehow inexplicably and hysterically rose up nearly in unison to attack Lagos for discriminatory practices. Very incendiary remarks have been made, and there are threats of political backlash against the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015. There has also been incredibly silly and inaccurate talk of Lagos being a no man’s land, especially by its nature as a former federal capital. In the past one decade or more, and as Lagos began to rebuild its collapsed infrastructure, it has become a magnet for millions of Nigeria, thus further putting pressure on its limited resources. The challenge before the state is how to cope with these pressures; and its dilemma is how to define the Lagosian within the ambit of the constitution.

    Lagos State is undisputedly the navel of the former Western Region. There is no conceivable ethnographic argument that will make it less so. Indeed, in the light of the crisis in Plateau State, it is irresponsible that any group could hint directly that it would introduce and even actively nurture ethnic politics in the 2015 elections in Lagos. This indicates that the controversy over definition of a state indigene in Nigeria is too urgent to be postponed or left to resolve itself. Time will not resolve it.

    In my numerous contributions on the Plateau crisis, I had suggested it was unrealistic, as the National Assembly has unwisely tried to do, to define a state indigene as the Americans do. Nigerian ethnic groups have an unbreakable and fanatical attachment to their lands and languages. It is pointless to make it otherwise. Unlike the Americans and Australians who shoved aside indigenous populations and virtually rewrote their histories afresh, Nigerians are unlikely to ever admit to that kind of novelty. I go as far as to suggest that linguistic affinity should be the basis of Nigeria’s federal arrangement if we really want to settle the national question and achieve peace.

    I sympathise with Lagos and appreciate the dilemma it faces in trying to provide the good life for its indigenes and all taxpaying Nigerians resident and working in the state. It should patiently and cautiously approach the problem and do its best to resolve all lingering issues and disagreements within the framework of a united country. It must learn to ignore peddlers of hate ideology as it strives to build a multicultural megacity and work out ways to resist and defeat those who try to exploit ethnic differences. The problem is, however, not Lagos alone, or first, to resolve. The initiative must come from the centre, and the problem must be tackled holistically. Sadly, the Jonathan government and the unconscionable leaders of the PDP in the state, as the last political campaigns showed, are more eager to fan ethnic hatred for political gains than provide the leadership these dangerous times need.

  • Meeting 2015 breakup prediction with presidential chutzpah

    Even if by his actions he manages to consistently undermine his own public optimism for a great society, President Goodluck Jonathan must still rank as one of the most sanguine leaders the world has ever known. While speaking with Muslim leaders who paid him the traditional Sallah homage last Thursday, Dr Jonathan as usual made a few memorable statements. He couldn’t imagine a Nigeria without Christians and Muslims, he said wistfully, as if the religious polarisation of the country conferred special advantages on all of us, and almost as if we should become inured to the pains they have caused us and even begin to enjoy them. If we were retrogressing, he suggested implausibly, it was because we failed to exploit the possibilities of our religious diversity. Once we found a way to harness the diversities, the country would enjoy peace and development. Never mind that in his nearly four years in office, his presidency never issued even one tested idea as to how that elixir would be brewed.

    Moving away from his strange theology, the president revealed he had observed the Ramadan like any other Muslim. His waist had trimmed down, he announced joyously, and he would perhaps in the short term need new pairs of trousers. If his visitors thought he would explain why he felt compelled to fast, or prove the relevance of his fasting to national development and policy purity, they were mistaken, for he wasn’t forthcoming at all.

    But perhaps the most memorable statement he made was in connection with the ballyhooed prediction of Nigeria’s breakup in 2015, a prediction authored by some United States military analysts many years ago. Those who made the prediction, said the president in reference not to the original authors but to Nigerians parroting it, would be disappointed. We must not assume that the president has not read the details of the prediction, or that when it was made, the intense religious, ethnic and social conflicts wracking the body politic had not even assumed dangerous dimensions. If he read the prediction, he should have seized the opportunity of speaking with his visitors to address two or three major factors raised by the analysts, and of course debunk them. Instead, the president met the prediction with his usual presidential bravado. It won’t happen, he thundered, and that was all.

    If structural problems anywhere, whether in a country or organisation, had shown a tendency to respond well to positive thinking, countries and enterprises would be easy to govern. Given the president’s logic, the more chutzpah you summon against a problem, the more likely your triumph. What is Dr Jonathan’s appreciation of the social revolt undermining the Northeast? It hardly matters; for the problem to him is one of law and order. What does he think of the great heist stymying oil exports in the Niger Delta? Just pay thieves to watch over the oil. What does he think about the collapse of education? Why, agreements, to him, are neither worth keeping, nor the huge education bill worth the trouble of addressing. What of unemployment? He has passed on that nuisance to the Minister of Finance and to the centenary committee.

    And what about the most important question of all – democracy? Its problem, he deadpans like the workaholic but yet cavalier Obasanjo, is that the opposition is too troublesome and unpatriotic. If everybody would cooperate with him, and critics practiced their sorcery softly, and the media were less sanctimonious, and on and on to getting God to be less fussy and rigid about principles and moral standards, Nigeria would be a great, united, peaceful and developed country. Perhaps, someday, we would pin the president down to telling us what he thinks of the complex problems besetting the country, and what bright ideas can be coerced from his vast kitchen midden, which he passes off as personal philosophy from a complex mind.

  • Mbu’s style symptomatic of deeper national malaise

    Mbu’s style symptomatic of deeper national malaise

    It had been expected that given the demonstrable lack of professional detachment by Police Commissioner Mbu Joseph Mbu in the Rivers State political crisis, the police authorities in Abuja would be embarrassed into redeploying him as soon as the chance presented itself. Instead, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) has unabashedly attested to Mr Mbu’s professionalism and earnestly underscored the police commissioner’s aloofness from politics. Mr Mbu may be aloof alright, but it seems more accurately that he is aloof from the constitution of the Federal Republic rather than from Rivers State politics. What is clear now is that the police will stand pat on the Mbu affair, and the anomalies evident in the Rivers crisis, no matter how galling and humiliating, will endure for much longer than our patience can bear.

    Mr Mbu himself has been giddy with excitement over the Rivers crisis in which the bullish Governor Rotimi Amaechi has locked horns with an Abuja cabal led by the portly Nyesom Wike, a minister of state, his surrogates from Obio/Akpor Local Government Area, and increasingly unruly rented militant crowds. The cabal is in turn beholden to the presidency, and is indeed indirectly propagating and executing an agenda not at all disagreeable to President Goodluck Jonathan. The police commissioner has not only walked gingerly around the Abuja emissaries and their excitable and mostly violent proxies, as if on thin ice, he has also either waffled when it comes to tackling their malfeasances or become strangely tongue-tied when it comes to denouncing their lawlessness and provocations.

    The IGP’s endorsement of Mr Mbu is, however, not unexpected, though deplorable. While the crisis lasts, Mr Mbu will continue to prattle endlessly and, if need be, meet the defiance of the governor inch by inch, grammar for grammar, and eyeball to eyeball. This is because he is smart enough to know which way the cats are jumping in Abuja. He knows that while the president and his aides struggle to distance the presidency from the Rivers crisis, the truth is much more sobering. His long years in the Force, not to say his boastful baccalaureate from the University of Lagos, and his own innate predilection for loud and excited talk, have armed him to second-guess his superiors and fawn all over them. If the presidency says it is uninterested in and unconnected with the crisis in Rivers, his skilful use of quantitative methods teaches him to turn the statement into a null hypothesis and test it. Every such test he has made has repeatedly confirmed that Abuja would rather gladly bring the house down on everyone than tolerate Mr Amaechi for one day longer, irrespective of what the constitution says.

    And if Mr Mbu is foxy enough to indulge Abuja and wink and embrace its mischief, the more accomplished and experienced IGP could not be any less artful and indulgent. The IGP may protest that his assessment of Mr Mbu is honest, sincere and practical, and not coloured by any consideration of the whims of the presidency; however, it must be recognised that no one gets to the top of the police profession by being moralistic, principled and dogmatic. Both the IGP and Mr Mbu will continue to accommodate the presidency as long as it is required, and pussyfoot on lawlessness when it is safe to do so, whether orders come to them directly, indirectly or in whispers.

    Both the IGP and Mr Mbu rely on constitutional provisions to defend what they term as necessary aloofness and depoliticisation of the Force. The provisions, they argue, insulate the police from politics, and no one would be allowed to drag them into politics’ murky waters. In other words, they insinuate into the spirit of the constitution such loftiness and grandeur that neither the letter nor commonsensical interpretation of the constitution ever pretended to grant. The police ordinarily ought to be above politics, neither beholden to the money power nor to the lumpen. And this should be in spite of whether constitutional provisions put the police in the power of governors or the president. If this were so, it would indeed be a very lofty pedestal to occupy, and the police would be able to earn respect and the awe they crave.

    The reality is, however, different. First, no one, certainly not a visionless and fearful presidency, nor yet an unimaginative and backward-looking legislature, has been able to appreciate the need for state police or squirm at the contradictions of a federal constitution providing for a unitary police system. The proponents of unitary police argue that if police powers were conferred on states, they could be abused. This is of course nonsense. Do we not have the common sense to know that if you manufacture a car, you must put brakes in it? Second, every black man must feel humiliated that Nigerians have become so immobilised by fear of the unknown that they are unable to grasp how to make a decentralised police system work. Surely, we are not so lacking in gumption or so self-deprecating that we think only developed countries can run a decentralised police system.

    The police of course do not blame themselves for both the shortcomings in the 1999 constitution and its clear inadequacy in providing for the safety of Nigerians and their properties. However, it is beguiling but nonetheless futile that both the IGP and Mr Mbu, irrespective of the limitations in the letter of the constitution, are ascribing a nobility of spirit to a constitution whose shackled and defective spirit can simply not soar above the letter.

    Even if we find a solution to the Rivers impasse, it will doubtless be tentative, as everything is tentative in and about Nigeria. But now no such solution is near, for the Mbu conundrum – in which an appointed police officer looms larger than an elected governor – is symptomatic of the malaise undermining the peace, development and unity of the country. However, Mr Mbu, I think, is not the problem: he is simply exploiting the lacunae in the system to hold tightly to his position, and may in fact be privately galled by his own compelled volubility and indiscrete and ludicrous posturing. The IGP, who strikes many of us as urbane and thoughtful, is also not the problem. Against his better judgement, he may have found it inescapable to defend and endorse his police commissioner. As I once said in this place, his success as IGP, sadly, would not depend on his brilliance or wisdom, but on the vision, intelligence, detachment and patriotism of the president. If the president lacked these attributes, the IGP would be hamstrung, I had concluded.

    This, therefore, is the crux of the matter. It is unhelpful to lampoon Mr Mbu, even if he sometimes gave impression (some say proof) of his eager duplicity. It is unhelpful to castigate the IGP for feigning ignorance of his subordinate chiselling away at the democratic basis of governance in Rivers. And it is easy to blame the National Assembly for being so trusting of the presidency, so retrogressive in lawmaking and so protective of the powers of the centre, when in fact they have apparently never contemplated a country in the mould of the Nordic countries, and may never envision anything better for Nigeria than its dismal position in Africa. Who then is to blame?

    Let us pose the problem in a different way. Even if the presidency was not behind both the excesses of the police in Rivers and the lawlessness of Mr Wike, and in addition knew nothing of the madness that convulsed the House of Assembly recently with the predetermined aim of unnerving the president’s opponents, what lofty statements has the president made on the long-running crisis, and what noble deeds has he undertaken to cure Rivers and the system in general of the disgraceful and childish resort to undemocratic practices? Absolutely none. The president was not just silent on Rivers; he self-effacingly lunched into a declamation on democracy and the rule of law in his usual engaging but nugatory style. But it is not declamations the country needs. Even though we exaggerated his leadership qualities, it was hoped he would at inauguration avail us a fairly deep and logical insight into the content of his vision for Nigeria and, perhaps too, Africa.

    In the end, he proved as spectacularly distracted and specious as Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Worse, he finds it difficult to appreciate the import of many of his actions, not to say his statements. Leadership is not simply about firmness or setting upon a line of action flowing from the advice of cabinet members and aides. It is about something deeper and variegated; something rich, luscious and instinctive; something great, coherent and noble – all going into the leader’s mind like dross, but coming out purged and processed into something much richer and more enduring, something festooned with crystal clear ideas of what to do and when, and something that transforms into pure and almost infallible judgement that emphasises the long view, and that creates and forges a great and incomparable society far better than any. However, ability must match ambition in order for a leader to be worth the title. Alas, as the Rivers crisis and many other challenging issues of the times have shown, and as the chasm between sense and nonsense denoted by the Mbu indiscretion shows, there is no indication whatsoever that we have a leader with a grasp of the moral imperatives of these times, let alone one suited for the complexities and hard choices of this age.

  • Finally, two-party system underway

    Finally, two-party system underway

    As the political careers of Lincoln, Churchill and de Gaulle demonstrated, it takes unusual and even cataclysmic circumstances to produce great leaders. Unusual leaders manifest in unusual times. However, when unusual times fail to produce unusual leaders, the society is endangered. It may take a few more years from now and exciting political outcomes before Nigerian historians and political scientists agree on whether the founding of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the turbulence in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) constituted enough grounds for the making of a great Nigerian leader required for the tumultuous times. But whether that leader is revealed or not, in 2015 or well after, there is no denying that Nigeria is ripe for substantial, if not fundamental, change, on account of the great political, economic and social contradictions the country has sadly had to endure in the past one decade or more.

    The registration of the APC was itself anticlimactic. Not only was there opposition to its registration by alleged PDP proxies, only few people were sure the leadership of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) could not be compromised by an immoral ruling party. And though it was needless and pointless for the PDP to stymie the registration of APC using the excuse of a dispute over acronym, no one was sure how far the ruling party was willing to go to discomfit the opposition. In the end, common sense prevailed, and a major opposition party was birthed last week. The new amalgamated party, with all the dangers associated with alloys, will hope to exceed both in reputation and achievement the records of its famous predecessors known to us as United Progressives Grand Alliance (UPGA) in the First Republic and Progressive Parties Alliance (PPA) in the Second Republic, notwithstanding the undeniable observation that the circumstances of their births were not too dissimilar.

    APC’s final appearance has doubtless met with euphoric responses from citizens harried by more than 14 years of unimaginative PDP rule, and analysts bored stiff by the fundamental staidness of describing rather than analysing PDP victories after every election. Now, pundits will have to earn their money, and citizens can look forward to real politics of issues, competence, geographic, and behavioural considerations. It is not an exaggeration to also say the country may well finally be on its way to a much more realistic and enduring two-party system, one that may ensure political parties work hard for votes and make those votes count. The country can also look forward to a more boisterous and reflective legislature, one the presidency will have to engage more respectfully and more intelligently than it had done so far. Indeed, not only are the possibilities endless, the emergence of the APC could very well be the tonic needed to guarantee the survival of democracy.

    Even before considering the prospects of the APC in future elections – and it is perfectly sensible to do so even now – it is necessary to look at the new party itself and assess its architecture. The easiest part is the coming together of the three main constituent parties in the amalgamation, to wit, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). Staying together will be more challenging; and finding the right formula to win elections will be the most challenging. Once they win power, it is all but evident that they would do considerably and enthusiastically better than the tired PDP.

    The hardest part of the amalgamation is how the two leading parties in the coalition – the ACN and the CPC – will subordinate their strong identities to the new party and work towards forging a new character and identity, much stronger and idiosyncratic than their individual moults, and capable of resonating with voters, hammering out realistic and unifying political platforms, and fighting major electoral wars with well-oiled machines. It must be remembered that previous attempts by progressives to reach out to other parties never went beyond reaching an understanding with other parties through the instrumentality of coalitions. This, therefore, is the first time in Nigeria major parties under progressive panoply are fusing together across ideological divides. But progressivism, as all the progressive parties of Southwest origin have repeatedly demonstrated, is much more than merely a convenient vehicle or an ideological or philosophical force; it is a moral force encapsulating superior and almost theological arguments about how societies are founded, organised and governed. A progressive party, like any metal with unique linear expansivity, responds to external stimuli differently from a conservative or pseudo-progressive party by reason of its intrinsic properties.

    Despite the unending arguments in the Southwest about the progressive credentials of the ACN, there is little doubt that it is the foremost progressive party in Nigeria, and this is in spite of itself, its unorthodox definition of internal democracy, and its sometimes perplexing succession patterns inherited in part from its regional progenitors, the Action Group (AG) and the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Indeed, to restrict the definition of progressivism to its internal democracy mechanism is to miss the more essential attributes of that political ideology as it relates to the pursuit of rapid societal change and protection and advancement of civil rights, among other things. Now, juxtapose both ACN’s positive paranoia on civil liberties and its doctrinaire progressivism with the pragmatism of the CPC on one side and the vestigial conservatism of the ANPP on the other side, and you begin to get a sense of the sacrifices the amalgams will have to make in order to confound the PDP naysayers. It will certainly not be an easy task, especially with both the ACN and CPC having been led by two mercurial personalities.

    The reasons the APC was formed must, however, not be forgotten. Its constituent parts seemed to have a foreboding of their impending destruction if they continued to stay disunited in the face of the obtruding PDP. They probably remembered the statement made by Benjamin Franklin before signing the US Declaration of Independence in 1776. He had said: “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall hang separately.” The APC has chosen to take the American’s counsel, fully conscious of and willing to live with the drawbacks of lying on the same bed with strange fellows and loth to resign themselves to the hopelessness and helplessness of being slaughtered in every election. Surely, they are no gluttons for punishment. I think also that they considered the tantalising prospects of winning the 2015 polls and what great and might things they could in consequence do to reform and transform the country, which mighty things the PDP seems happily and indifferently oblivious of.

    If the 2015 polls were held today, and the APC had the good fortune of presenting the right candidate to face the underperforming President Goodluck Jonathan, the result is unlikely to be a close one. Quite apart from the fact that the president’s wife has not exactly been an asset, he has himself comprehensively alienated the Southwest, Northeast and Northwest. As for the North-Central and South-South, he is facing revolt in key, vote-laden parts of the regions, while his hold on the Southeast is only three-quarters sure. To reverse these positions will take a miracle by even the most studious, charismatic and dogged of leaders. But as everyone knows, Dr Jonathan’s main strength lies in his earthy, though often misplaced, candour. That strength unfortunately does not usually translate into votes.

    The scenario above assumes both the nomination of Dr Jonathan and the exactitude of the APC fielding a winning ticket. But here, precisely, is the dilemma the APC and indeed the whole country will face in the coming months. How would they draw the balance between what their hearts tell them about the kind of ticket the country needs for strong leadership and rapid, even revolutionary, transformation, though it be unorthodox and unconventional, and what their heads tell them about the kind of conventional-wisdom, religion-sensitive ticket that is in consonance with national pedantry, though it be counterproductive in the long run? It is in the nature of countries never to be able to resolve such dilemmas.

    The APC on its own will have to determine how safely it can break the mould and stretch the baffling dynamics of Nigerian politics to its elastic limit. More, it will have to determine what its priority is: to win the next election, even if it entailed a horse dose of hypocrisy, or to provide the kind of fiery leadership that will take Nigeria to the big league. Apart from the fact that these two objectives are often mutually exclusive, history tells us that some of the world’s greatest reformers took power in unusual circumstances thereby freeing them from the strictures that would otherwise hobble a leader produced by normality and conventional democratic apparatuses.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Palladium on vacation? If wishes were horses

    Palladium owes his readers a little apology. For some five weeks, the back page column of this newspaper bore a postscript announcing that Palladium was on vacation. He was not. He was in fact ill, and could hardly think about national issues, not even the presidency’s egregious constitutional affronts and meddlesomeness, let alone sit down to write. Though he is on the mend, he has struggled to write today’s pieces in order not to appear like he has permanently abandoned the battlefield and taken his loyal and even enemy readers for granted. Really, what would his enemy readers do without their weekly dose of provocation? However, I wish I had really gone on vacation.

    While Palladium was away, Dr Jonathan behaved imperially, forgetting the oath he swore to, and the need to sustain and nurture the leprous democracy handed over to him by former president Olusegun Obasanjo. (The late Umaru Yar’Adua presidency was an interregnum). It is in fact significant and fitting that the president recently described Chief Obasanjo as his father. Dr Jonathan of course meant his sonship in the metaphorical sense, but if only he knew how accurate he was even in the biological sense as well. Chief Obasanjo undermined democracy and the constitution, and rode roughshod over the states, persons, and political parties. Dr Jonathan, not to talk of his wife, has also ridden roughshod over the states, persons (be they governors or eminences grises), the constitution and parties. Chief Obasanjo will not flinch at betraying the constitution; neither will Dr Jonathan balk.

    Obasanjo could neither differentiate between democracy and monarchy nor draw a line between law and lawlessness. Dr Jonathan talks effusively about democracy and acts aggressively like a monarch. Palladium of course does not hate monarchy, for as he has argued in this place many times, democracy is seldom as competent as monarchy in filtering bad leaders from the number one seat in any country. After all, it took democracy to inflict Obasanjo and Jonathan on the country.

    While Palladium was away, the courts absolved Major Hamza al-Mustapha of complicity in the murder of Kudirat Abiola. This judicial thunder did not, however, peal as loudly as it exposed the buffoonery of the founder of the Odua People’s Congress (OPC), Frederick Fasehun. Dr Fasehun thought nothing of the anomaly of escorting the freed al-Mustapha to Kano; he also ascribed to his action a nobility of purpose and a grander task of representing and saving from retribution the entire Yoruba people. Politics can sometimes be comical, and any man can suffer from delusions of grandeur. But to degrade politics to the level of burlesque seems only reserved for those like Dr Fasehun who have become chimerical. To hear him declaim against his sidekick in the OPC and fellow federal contract seeker, Gani Adams, indicates the ugly and risible depths ‘revolutionary warfare’ has sunk, not only in the Southwest, but elsewhere, as the Rivers State House of Assembly disgracefully exemplified recently.