The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • At last, Ondo’s Aiyedatiwa gets his wish

    At last, Ondo’s Aiyedatiwa gets his wish

    After many months of stonewalling by supporters of ailing Ondo State governor Rotimi Akeredolu and pushfulness by the ambitious and impatient deputy governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa, the political imbroglio that had stymied development in the state has been finally put to some rest. It is not the kind of solution stakeholders longed for, nor the kind of truce that would conduce to long-running peace in both the state and the All Progressives Congress (APC) ruling party, but everyone involved in the crisis since it began early this year will for now heave a tentative sigh of relief. Whether he likes it or not, the governor is for now out of the immediate picture. He will stay fairly numbed on hospital beds in Germany or any other place he chooses. But for the ambitious deputy governor, who will now act as governor in line with his desire, he will call the shots as extravagantly as his fiery nature is accustomed. To the chagrin of the Akeredolu crowd, the new acting governor has the constitution fully and unsentimentally on his side.

    The story of Ondo State since Mr Akeredolu fell ill early this year has been a very uninspiring one – not for him, of course, but for his deputy. The governor had had a culture of transmitting power to Mr Aiyedatiwa whenever he left for extended periods, and had done so when his ordeal with health challenges became public. But things quickly soured and his last medical trip abroad was cut short in September reportedly to checkmate the ambition, irreverence and iconoclasm of his deputy. But hobbled by failing health, the governor was clearly and humiliatingly unable to mount the kind of challenge to his deputy he would have loved to muster. It was at that point that his longsuffering cabinet and animated legislators came to his defence by denouncing Mr Aiyedatiwa and describing him as culturally uncouth and even fetishistic. It was not clear how they came to the latter conclusion, but being naturally superstitious, they had little trouble in psychoanalysing the rampaging deputy governor’s methods and motivations.

    Once the die was cast in September, the state legislature moved against the deputy governor, tried to inveigle the courts to do their bidding, and hoped they could make a short work of the entire process in impeaching him. They did not count on a finicky judiciary, nor waited to form an opinion on how they would proceed should the intransigent Mr Aiyedatiwa stand pat. In the event, their quarry stood like an aurochs, met them measure for countermeasure, scorned their legislative and judicial efforts, and survived long enough to hurl his own stones and boulders at their unprotected heads. President Bola Tinubu tried to break the stalemate, but the animosity had festered for far too long in those dangerous few months that the deputy governor became emboldened enough to unleash a fearsome undertow of plots against his enemies. The legislature was transfixed.

    Finally, either because he had stayed away too long from his hospital bed in Germany or because his deputy governor’s bitter rivalry had put too much pressure on his organs, the governor, while still hibernating in Ibadan, Oyo State, had begun to decline in health precipitously. The deputy governor sensed he would outlast the governor and he turned on the screw a little bit more. The governor’s minders finally knew the game was up and capitulated. If they didn’t evacuate him to Germany quickly enough, all hope would be lost, for already questions were being asked as to the integrity of his signatures on official documents, not to say rumours about his health. If they waited a little more, rumours about his death would begin to circulate. They thus threw in the towel, got him to transmit power by any means – and no questions would be asked about whether the signature was his or not – and the legislature accented to the deputy governor’s leadership in acting capacity. That was all Mr Aiyedatiwa wanted anyway.

    It is unknown whether nature would requite the deputy governor’s effrontery. Should that happen, Mr Akeredolu would return at an appropriate moment to scupper his deputy’s ambition. If not, the immoderate acting governor will probably bludgeon the cabinet, seduce the party to his side or neutralise its apparatchiks, amputate or decapitate those who might wish to contest against him next year in the governorship primary, and prepare himself for an epic showdown with the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). He may be uncouth and witless, but he knows enough to understand that just as it happened in Kogi State in the last APC governorship primary, all he needs to do is present his party with a fait accompli, and neither the Ondo APC nor the unphilosophical big guns in the APC in Abuja would have any option but to endorse him. Sadly, in whatever way it is considered, Ondo State, like Kogi State, will next year sail between Scylla and Charybdis. Their more predictable governor is ailing, with little hope of recovery on time enough to relieve them of their great moral burden, and they may be forced to endorse and even embrace wholeheartedly the political pantomime in the State House if they are not to be skinned alive and eviscerated by the more ruthless PDP.

    Ondo has tragically come to a pretty pass. Yes, it may not be on the tragicomic scale of Rivers State, where the boisterous ex-governor Nyesom Wike also endorsed the astonishing misfit Siminalayi Fubara, but Mr Akeredolu’s poor judgement in selecting a deputy and casting him as his successor is also being requited very badly. At his resumption of office as acting governor last Thursday, Mr Aiyedatiwa, as ruefully as his little talent could carry him, said: “It is in this regard that we admit with all sense of responsibility that the intrigues that ensued due to Mr. Governor’s health challenges were indeed avoidable distractions. We ought to have done better to keep giving Ondo State the seamless and solid governance which Oluwarotimi Akeredolu had established in the state in the last six-and-a-half years. I cannot but specially appreciate the third arm of government, the Judiciary through the honourable Chief Judge, for its courage, commitment and dedication to protecting democracy and the constitution of the nation.”

    Read Also: Discordant tunes as Aiyedatiwa consolidates power

    Ignore Mr Aiyedatiwa’s triumphalism. What he didn’t say is that he was the progenitor of the intrigues. His cynical praise of the judiciary was triggered by the extremely cautious state’s chief judge who was too finicky to decide one way or the other whether to accede to the legislature’s objective of impeaching the unruly Mr Aiyedatiwa. Historians have always wondered what the world would look like had Adolf Hitler been killed during the Munich putsch of 1923, or if Gen Hindenburg had not appointed him as Chancellor in 1933, or if, after everything had seemed to fail, the plot anchored by Col Claus von Stauffenberg in 1944 had succeeded in blasting off the Fuhrer at Wolf’s Lair in Poland during World War II. What if Mr Aiyedatiwa had been impeached?

  • Restructuring as poisoned chalice

    Restructuring as poisoned chalice

    Barely five months after President Bola Tinubu assumed office, pressure groups began mounting pressure on him to lead efforts to restructure Nigeria. The groups are mostly Southern and Middle Belt socio-political organisations. The call will become more strident as he nears the end of his first term. Whether he will heed the call totally, respond to it piecemeal, or adopt a tokenistic approach to the controversial subject remains to be seen. Former president Goodluck Jonathan gestured in that direction close to the end of his first term, but his national conference effort, initially lost in a maze of nomenclatures, miscarried. Ex-president Olsuegun Obasanjo also dithered until the closing months of his presidency before kick-starting wide-ranging constitutional amendment that self-destructed on the altar of his third term ambition. For obvious reasons, former president Muhammadu Buhari was completely apathetic. If President Tinubu will heed the call, he will first agonise over its timing before occupying himself with the more salient issues of how to define restructuring and the even more difficult question of what shape it should take.

    Ultimately, restructuring is a subject that cannot be avoided for long. President Tinubu has demonstrated rare courage in grappling with needed and urgent economic reforms. He met a broken and empty treasury, and has begun clawing the administration’s way back to solvency. That has not been easy, for even presidential candidates in the last election, not to talk of the ordinary Nigerian, suffer from a gross lack of understanding of how the economy works, how badly broken President Buhari left it, and how long remediation will take in the face of a restive and impoverished public inured to logic and reasoning. Embarking on restructuring will not only require much more courage, it will also demand high-level perceptiveness and vision on a scale the country has never witnessed, no, not even during the constitutional conferences that predated independence.

    President Tinubu will be extremely lucky to start the restructuring journey in the middle or towards the end of his first term as campaigners want. Both he and his aides suggest that Nigeria’s economic crisis is being resolved and is projected to be stabilised in a year or two. The country shares their optimism; but it is doubtful whether the crisis can be as responsive as they romanticise, especially given a rentier state preyed upon by powerful, remorseless and entrenched forces who for decades had so dug themselves in that it would take cutting off their hands to rid the system of their predation. Without stabilising the economy and repositioning it on the path of growth, it is difficult to see any bold and courageous leader tinkering with the constitution, let alone restructuring the system. Nigeria’s controversial presidential system vests enormous and tantalising amount of power in the hands of the president. A stabilised economy and imperial presidency reinforce each other and inevitably promote complacency. Once growth begins to occur, the country may need to measure the integrity of the commitment of the president to restructuring. Entrenched interests are loth to give up the perks and perquisites of power, as President Tinubu himself opined during the campaigns.

    Assuming the president commits himself to restructuring in line with his longstanding worldview and can get his timing right, he will face the next hurdle of definitional differences bisecting regional and ethnic lines. Restructuring means different things to different people. British colonialists faced a herculean effort cobbling together a tentative parliamentary system that demanded from Nigerian political leaders discipline and know-how available only in very modest quantities. Four republics down the line and two bastardised presidential constitutions later, those differences have neither been bridged nor erased. While it is axiomatic that political elites with the wrong or inappropriate attitudes would fare badly with even the best constitutions, it is increasingly evident that both the parliamentary and presidential systems imposed on or borrowed from elsewhere and sewn onto a variegated and perhaps ossified cultural and political systems that predated independence have proved treacherously difficult to operate.

    It was perhaps the difficulty Nigerians encountered in operating borrowed systems that led Chief Obasanjo to advocate Afro-democracy, a nebulous and indeterminate system which even he could not fathom. His insincerity and leadership incompetence doomed his suggestions. Worse, by calling for an indigenous democratic model, he failed to appreciate the deep and stratified differences in civilisational experiences of Nigeria’s major ethnic groups. It seemed it would even be far easier and less complicated to borrow and engraft a borrowed system than to devise an original one. Should President Tinubu master those differences, he will next have to contend with how to inspire in a generally immiscible people a new and workable system, whether a menagerie of borrowed constitutions or a wholly in digenous system. The problem is who or which team will conceptualise it, and to what extent it could harmonise political differences over which Nigerians have hardened themselves and gone to war during decades of ethnic, regional and religious strife?

    The parliamentary system was midwifed by the British whose worldview is alien to Nigeria. The Nigerian presidential system was the most cursory and inexpert borrowing ever undertaken by any nation. To produce a workable model, as this column reflected on in this place two weeks ago, would require astute and competent leaders who possess intuitive understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Nigeria’s native systems. Those leaders must not only have the ability to gaze far and deep into the future, they must also have an infinite and robust grasp of the country’s origins, where history and chemistry of races and indigenous empires and kingdoms cohere. Neither Chief Obasanjo in his first and second coming, nor Dr Jonathan, nor yet ex-president Buhari possesses such a grasp. President Tinubu is a dealmaker par excellence, his aides boast; but he will have to prove that in inspiring and envisioning a new constitution, he can be as quintessential as France’s Charles de Gaulle, the United States of America’s Gen. Douglas MacArthur, or German leaders who assembled 61 men and four women who drafted the still regnant German Basic Law of 1949, a constitution that anticipated and transcended Germany’s reunification in 1990.

    Read Also: Agric revolution will help Nigeria surmount insecurity, poverty – Shettima

    At the moment, there are indications that a powerful section of the Nigerian political elite, hoping to strike a middle course between the indifference of the core North and the activism and feistiness of the South and Middle Belt, prefer to tinker with the constitution, perhaps to make it more federal as they imagine. It is not clear whether the patchwork will make sense, for Nigeria has since 1979 continued to tinker with its political system without achieving any of the balances they dreamt about. The fundamental and radical changes needed to shoot Nigeria into a higher and more stable trajectory have been avoided like a plague. Indeed, it is feared that the barriers of tribe, religion and other differences will make deep changes almost impossible, especially in the absence of a great motivator. Past leaders have been too fearful of calling the country to those changes, but became wiser either shortly before leaving office or shortly after.

    If the Tinubu administration has a vision for the future, far beyond the challenges of today and tomorrow, far beyond superhighways and bridges and schools, if it has a vision of the great and unassailable future the country needs, it must return to the basics by repairing the foundations. It must resist the temptation to engage superficial changes, the uncontroversial, safe and soft things of the moment, and must engineer a fateful leap to that esoteric and subliminal level where presidents are not just kings but also philosophers, combining the gift of the alchemist with the transcendence of the mystic. There are building blocks to national greatness, but those blocks can only emanate from hard and often unpopular decisions. If the president does not already have a vision for that future, he must find it, for he cannot give what he does not have; nor should he dare to leave the parliament, with their disparate interests, to conceive a vision for him and the country. Let him get scholars to distill the histories of great constitutions for him to reacquaint and inspire himself to dream great and big, to help him understand why empires rise and fall, and to determine that in his time, Nigeria must rise and expand to greatness.

    Restructuring should not be the poisoned chalice it has been made out to be. If President Tinubu gets the timing right, and also gets the theoretical direction and philosophy of the new constitution right, he should find the ingenuity to assemble the few men and women who will inspire a document for the ages. That document should be citable in the decades to come, and apart from forming the rubric of a new and powerful nation, will inspire generations to come. There are a thousand and one reasons for the president to be cautious, indecisive, and conservative even in his progressivism. If he is as hungry for greatness as he has given the impression, if he is determined to learn from history, he will resist the temptation to ‘manage’ Nigeria and pass it on to the next leader as a nuisance, having satisfied himself like his predecessor that he had at least risen to the presidency at a point in the nation’s history. He will be wise to resist being stampeded or to allow the initiative be taken away from him, but he will be much wiser not to leave the country the way he met it, even if a tad more prosperous.

  • Ondo: fumbling into a resolution

    Ondo: fumbling into a resolution

    Just as Nigerians were trying to make sense of the leadership conundrums agitating Rivers and Ondo States, with Governor Siminalayi Fubara and Deputy Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa at their vortices, the Ondo farce took on added poignancy. Mr Fubara, like a dormant volcano, repressed his ambition only for about four months before erupting. The Rivers terrain is still smouldering. Ex-governor Nyesom Wike simply cannot fathom how he got it so wrong, why he mistook his genial successor, whose most noticeable feature was his glacial and deceptive look, for a gelding. Despite entreaties and mediations, Mr Fubara has remained implacable, unwilling and uninterested in mollifying the fierce anger of his predecessor.

    Mr Aiyedatiwa is no less determined to upset the applecart than Mr Fubara. As deputy governor, he is still subordinated to an ailing but absent Governor Rotimi Akeredolu reportedly convalescing in Ibadan, Oyo State. But whereas Rivers is governed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), thereby limiting the scope of President Bola Tinubu’s intervention, Ondo, which is run by the All Progressives Congress (APC), does not offer its deputy governor the latitude to give wings to his ambition, let alone seethe or smoulder even out of public glare. Everything is open before the ruling party, and the structure and dynamic of the state in relation to the supervening culture of the Southwest leave Mr Aiyedatiwa hamstrung, if not debilitated. He has writhed in pain, and has threatened in one breath and fumed in another; but he has found the straitjacket by which he is constrained unremitting.

    Neither Mr Fubara nor Mr Aiyedatiwa has behaved honourably in projecting their otherwise legitimate ambitions. Mr Fubara wants to be his own man quickly, indeed obscenely quickly. He is helped by the Nigerian constitution which is blind to whatever extraconstitutional and extralegal arrangements and understanding he reached with Mr Wike, now Minister of the Federal Capital City (FCT). In the eyes of Nigeria’s censorious public, especially those still chafing at the manner the former governor delivered the state to the APC in the presidential election, the FCT minister has got his comeuppance. They anchor their stand on the inalienable provisions of the constitution and the principles of democracy, and they savage anyone, including the boisterous and often unforgiving Mr Wike, for insinuating anything undemocratic into both the constitution and the politics of Rivers. Mr Fubara has exploited those sentiments, dug his heels in, lathered his politics with a generous dose of ethnic politics, and dared the opposition as well as his mentor. He appears poised to do much worse.

    In Ondo, the far more luckless Mr Aiyedatiwa also stands theoretically unimpeachable as far as the constitution is concerned. Initially encouraged by democracy do-gooders outside Ondo, he embarked on subterranean machinations to grab power from his ailing and greatly enfeebled boss. In the estimation of a section of the public, the governor should have been declared incapacitated. The deputy governor merely winked at the suggestion, and took no practical steps to defend his boss. Instead he actually wished to be declared acting governor, a position he expected would strengthen his bid to succeed his boss. The party, the legislature as well as the empathetic Ondo people thought it was dishonourable and unfeeling for the deputy governor to act with such insouciance. They were not unmindful of the constitutional provisions guiding succession in such difficult circumstances, and they felt uneasy that their state had appeared to stagnate since the governor took ill; but they give the impression that neither democracy nor the constitution should be operated in a cultural vacuum. A stubborn but resolute people, they nevertheless possess the milk of human kindness, which explains their masochistic glee in enduring the punishment of poor governance while Mr Akeredolu’s health ordeal lasted.

    Mr Wike will probably get the better of Mr Fubara in the long run if he can find the wisdom to be restrained and circumspect in taking umbrage. The Rivers governor’s precipitate action, including his effusive and unnatural but needless projection of realpolitik, has made him more vulnerable than he imagines. He will not be trusted anywhere, not at home, not nationally, and worse, not even among his fellow governors who will cast wary glances in his direction. Mr Wike may be imposing and rambunctious, but Mr Fubara would have been sensible to let his predecessor’s excesses become visible to all before striking. Notwithstanding his sometimes indiscreet statements, the sympathy is for now with the FCT minister, and it will remain with him as long as he plays his card more deftly than he is accustomed.

    In Ondo, Mr Aiyedatiwa is probably finally shackled. The party looks at him warily for declining, in the Akeredolu matter, to behave with the decorum the Southwest is famous for. On November 24, he and his opponents in the struggle for supremacy in the state finally conferred with President Tinubu and resolved the impasse that had paralysed the state for months. The Ondo delegation agreed to sheathe their swords while the deputy governor would moderate his ambition by respecting the status quo. But days after the meeting, however, the hawks around the deputy governor made one last attempt to get him declared as acting governor, a status he believed would catapult him several steps ahead of his rivals for the 2024 governorship poll. It is not certain how united the party and the legislature were behind Mr Akeredolu before he took ill; but hobbled by his health challenge and needing to rush back while still frail in order to checkmate the deputy governor’s alleged vaulting ambition, the cabinet, party and legislature have stood behind him like a bulwark. Mr Aiyedatiwa has found this bulwark impenetrable.

    Read Also: Resignation, protests over appointment of Ondo council caretaker committees

    Beyond the question of what the constitution says in such matters in Ondo State, not to say the sensible thing expected from democrats involved in the saga, the deputy governor messed up the whole affair and ruined both his reputation and his chances next year. He will need the party in the state to get the ticket. There are indications that some individuals at the national level might be well disposed to him; but at the state level he does not have a cat in hell’s chance of winning the ticket. He had been brought into the Akeredolu ticket by the governor who was propping him up as his successor. Series of false moves, however, and lack of empathy for the governor’s health misfortune quickly ruled him out of the picture. The party is not backing him, the governor is not backing him, the lawmakers are not backing him, and the cabinet distrusts him. All that remains for him to smell the ticket is the death of the governor, which many had whispered into Mr Akeredolu’s supersensitive ears is actually the wish of the deputy governor. The whisperers probably slander Mr Aiyedatiwa, but he has done precious little to refute the allegations and has shown no wisdom in sustaining the primacy his appointment into the Akeredolu ticket meant for his ambition. In short, he bungled everything. Had he assumed office either in acting capacity or as elected governor, he would be more ruthless than the tremulous Mr Fubara.

    Last week, the Ondo deputy governor finally began conducting the business of state by holding executive council meeting, the first in many months. The combatants will probably sustain a truce that the deputy governor will find discomfiting, nugatory and enervating, a terrible reminder of how inept his putsch was and how impotent he has become in the scheme of things. His opponents in next year’s governorship race will probably heave a sigh of relief that real power is not in the hands of so uncalculating and immoderate a man. Those opponents will also hope that the status quo will remain till next year, including God sparing the life of the governor. The state may have fumbled into a tentative truce, but the turmoil of the last few months presents a signal lesson on the indispensability of intuition, wisdom and character in the leadership calculus. Clearly, leadership is much more complex and nuanced than both Mr Fubara and Mr Aiyedatiwa have shown the capacity to grasp, not to talk of exude.

  • Pressures on judiciary continue relentlessly

    Pressures on judiciary continue relentlessly

    After Labour Party (LP) supporters, popularly called Obidients because of their fanatical support for their party’s candidate in the last presidential election, fouled the political atmosphere with aggressive social media campaigns against institutions and individuals, Nigeria has found it increasingly difficult to regain its composure. Something has gone terribly wrong. The Obidients’ worst attacks were reserved for the judiciary which they hoped to intimidate into surrender by propaganda and street protests. Street protests, now weaponised by anyone fearful of losing legal cases, have continued in many states, including Plateau, Kano and Nasarawa States, though the Supreme Court is yet to determine the disputed governorship polls. Pressured and belaboured, the judiciary has struggled to stay above the fray, sometimes very awkwardly. It is assailed by critics, former heads of state, leading politicians, lawyers, and angry youths. Apart from lawyers who lost cases for which they blame the judges, and Obidients who are eternally angry and disaffected, the latest attacks have come from the triumvirate of Chief Obasanjo, Ayo Adebanjo, and Peter Obi himself. The attacks will continue for the foreseeable future until the Supreme Court decides. If it gives judgement against them, they allege it is bought; if it overturns the judgement against them, who can be sure that the court had not finally wilted before the relentless assault?

    Chief Adebanjo, lawyer and factional leader of the Yoruba socio-cultural group, Afenifere, accuses the judiciary of acting as if it is influenced by government, insisting that Nigerians have lost confidence in the institution. He does not substantiate his wild generalisations. Perhaps taking a cue from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s portentous ploy to subordinate the Supreme Court to the parliament, Chief Obasanjo has sheepishly argued that three or five judges speaking ex cathedra should not be the final authority on political cases. Said he in reference to the appellate courts: “I believe whatever form of democracy we have or whatever system of government we have, three or four men in the judiciary should not be able to overturn the decisions of millions that have voted. Now, we have to find a way to handle that. I don’t know what the way will be, but for me, I think it’s unacceptable that millions (of votes), maybe 10 million on one side, maybe nine million on the other side, then, you have five people sitting down, three of them agree, two disagree. And you come up and make ex cathedra pronouncements that cannot be changed; I believe that should not be accepted. How do we do it? I don’t know…”

    Though less rigorous in making his case against the judiciary, Peter Obi is no less trenchant and melodramatic. Speaking in his Abuja office last month while marking the centenary of the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC), Mr Obi insisted: “We now have a situation, where known party card-carrying members of political parties, who were even involved in thuggery, are being appointed to be referee in our coming elections…IPAC should question why 90 per cent of our elections end up in courts, with huge resources that should be channelled to the people’s welfare being used for litigations. They should voice out why our courts have become courts of favour, courts of procurement, rather than courts of justice and the law…Look at what is happening in Zamfara, Kano and Plateau and others states, my party is not in any of them, but we are all affected by injustice. My concern is to do what is right…”

    Read Also: Give financial autonomy to judiciary, AGF tells governors

    While Chief Adebanjo can be excused for his generalisations, it is much harder to explain why a former president and a presidential candidate can speak so glibly about salient national issues, to the extent of denigrating and undermining the judiciary. In their speeches and statements, neither Chief Obasanjo nor Mr Obi delved into the substance of the legal cases in question. Nor did they attempt to situate their conclusions in the context of relevant past judgements. Both men have very little understanding of the law, but harbour enormous amount of anger against the direction of the judgements. Clearly, what they are unable to achieve by law, they hope to secure by wholesale and detrimental subversion of the rule of law and the judiciary. Did they attempt to contextualise the Plateau case against the 2019 Zamfara APC debacle? They simply ignore contexts, deride legal arguments, fume at legal technicalities as if those provisions are not part of the law, gloss over incompetent defence counsels, and proceed sentimentally and prejudicially to castigate the courts and dishonour the entire judiciary. All this in just one election cycle. Yet, if they had superior arguments to dethrone the court judgements in the referenced political cases, they neither made them nor took them into cognisance before rushing into public campaigns. As the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) said last week at the beginning of the 2023/2024 legal year: “In all we do, as interpreters of the law, we should endeavour to severe emotion from logic, and assumption from fact. We should never be overwhelmed by the actions or loud voices of the mob…” Considering that these are not the best of times for the judiciary, it remains to be seen how far they can hold out against a mob of fanatical elites with no consideration for the future implications of their statements and actions?

    Clearly, and without prejudice to the substance and integrity of the governorship suits before the Supreme Court, the protests in Kano, Plateau and Nasarawa States are setting dangerous precedents for the law. Both Chief Obasanjo and Mr Obi, among many other vilifiers of the courts, attempt unprecedentedly to foster the notion that protests could be deployed to determine legal outcomes. Yet, because of their status in society, there are some people by whom such notions should never be voiced. Unfortunately, in an atmosphere fouled by sometimes mistaken or controversial judgements, little attention is paid to the dangers of promoting insidious, partisan goals or downplaying the jurisprudential consequences of instilling fear in judges handling high-profile political cases. It is a slippery, tragic slope Chief Obasanjo, Mr Obi and Chief Adebanjo are determined to drag the whole country.

  • NTA interview: Buhari says little unpretentiously

    NTA interview: Buhari says little unpretentiously

    It was ex-president Muhammadu Buhari’s first major interview since he left office in May. It didn’t quite have the kind of enigmatic impact he and his supporters expected. But the country is grateful that he gave the interview, particularly on some issues that agitated the minds of many Nigerians. Yet, the interview was almost anticlimactic in its effect. Perhaps he should have held on for a little longer to give his reflections time to mature and be refined in order to avoid being precipitate in doubling down on some of his controversial policies or showing contrition on policies that had plunged the country into turmoil. The Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) interviewer, Thecla Wilkie, was empathetic, pleasant and restrained, sometimes rephrasing her statements to make them accessible to the often nonplussed former president. But when she sensed his dilemma notwithstanding, she baulked at pursuing her quarry, preferring instead to let go altogether or to gloss over the question with a fetching grin.

    The interview was hugely revelatory. It confirmed all everyone knows about his difficulty with words and his discomfort with complex and nuanced policy issues, especially those bearing exotic labels. It confirmed his expedient resort to deploying, often inadvertently, extraneous and tangential issues to explicate difficult or inaccessible questions. The Borno State governor Babagana Zulum story of thrift and ‘virtually incorruptibility’ was very handy to him. The former president has obviously nurtured his long-standing wisecracks, and was sometimes convulsed by his own laughter that flowed from his self-deprecating humour. His thoughts may wander sometimes, yet he remained his good old self, comfortable in his own skin, healthier it seemed, and mightily relieved that the nuisance which governing the country had become had been passed on to another perhaps luckless administration. He concluded derisively that governing Nigeria was a near impossible task when everyone else knew how to do it better than the hapless and vilified president.

    The former president spoke about being too preoccupied with domestic issues to bother about external and diplomatic relations; but it was clear that as widely travelled as he was, particularly during his presidency, his response to a question on Nigerian diplomacy was a cover-up for his inability to decipher what seemed to him an inscrutable puzzle. Nigerian borders were too extensive to be manned by Nigerian security personnel, he sighed, and then concluded that only God could do it. His views on borders were not new, of course, considering that his administration simply slammed them shut as a tool for curbing smuggling. And when he was asked, as a former military and elected president, to compare military rule and democracy, especially to find out how he navigated the strictures of checks and balances, he quibbled considerably, and eventually returned to the subject of his eternal fascination, insecurity. Thrice the interviewer tried to reroute the question, thrice the former president returned to insecurity. Ms Wilkie was gracious on all three occasions, rather than exasperated. What is more, neither the interviewed nor the interviewer fared better on the subject of the cause célèbre, Process and Industrial Developments Ltd (P&ID), which tried to scam Nigeria out of about $11bn arbitral award as a result of a bungled oil and gas contract in Calabar, Cross River State.

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    Three other germane questions lent themselves to him to finally display a fundamental grasp of governance and politics. It is unclear whether he satisfied himself with his sometimes convoluted and tangential answers. For his larger audience, they are more likely to be mystified by his responses than entertained. Indeed, that larger audience may become more convinced than ever why Nigeria went both broke and broken in eight giddy years of a president doing little in undistinguished ways. The naira redesign policy must rank as one of the hottest issues of the Buhari presidency, coming frightfully close to the end of his presidency as well as the fateful election of February 25, a mere few weeks away at the time. Answering the question of what spurred him to enact that deeply offensive and despised policy, he cited the objective of curbing Nigerian materialism as a factor in politics. In his view the policy became imperative to try and make Nigerians believe that there was no shortcut to successful leadership. He didn’t actually say how one fiery and disruptive policy a few weeks to an election could change in fundamental ways a country’s political behavior. Was the idea entirely his or was it what he was made to believe? It is hard to tell. Whatever its origins, and whichever way it is considered, it was a policy that made little sense.

    Then there were the quibbles on whether he knew a cabal had hijacked his administration as well as how he rated his administration. He did his best, he said ruefully, echoing what he had said a long time ago about suspecting that few Nigerians were impressed with his performance as president, but was unsure he had convinced the people he led. And on the cabal issue, he was tentative, almost indifferent. Perhaps a hijack took place, he said bemusingly, but no one who ran afoul of the law escaped punishment. He will be unable to prove that assertion, not even if he tried in a million years. On his watch the long arm of the law became the withered arm of the law, with justice blinder than a bat. On the whole, the interview ended without a major incident; yes, a few howlers, one or two deadpans, but nothing astonishing, and nothing provocative. But for those who expected a pearl or two, at least from a two-term president who had even had a stint as military head of state, they will have to go much farther afield than the mind can conjure to find a competent and diligent leader.

  • Obasanjo’s shameless sophistry

    Obasanjo’s shameless sophistry

    Former president Olusegun Obasanjo is keenly aware that he manages to attract significant attention every time he speaks or dissembles. Last Monday, for a few newspapers still hooked on his snake oil, he got the front pages and even took the headlines to boot. His talisman obviously still works. This time, however, his fixation is on Western liberal democracy which he considers, for Africans, a boondoggle. Shortly before the February 25 presidential poll, he was obsessed with railroading Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) into office. When it looked like his candidate was faltering shortly after ballot counting began, the former president desperately advocated the abortion of the election. When no one would buy his miscarriage pill, he advocated popular revolt and actively instigated it. When that also failed, he flirted with one-term presidential tenure. That sure cure also gained little traction, forcing him last Monday into what he described as ‘high-level consultation’ at his presidential library complex in Abeokuta on the subject of “Rethinking Western Liberal Democracy in Africa”.

    Nothing will come out of the so-called consultation. Not only is the consultation not altruistic, it is desultory and whimsical. There is often no rigour or substance behind his actions or thoughts. The high-level consultation he is swooning over is essentially to satisfy his narrow political agenda. He was Nigeria’s military head of state between 1976 and 1979 during which he superintended the adaptation and adoption of the United State’s presidential system. Political plagiarism, as he confessed to have embraced, can be very problematic, especially when the presidential system in question is adapted without much thought for its undergirding principles, cultures and philosophies. Chief Obasanjo is not a deep thinker, and he compounded this failing by inspiring a mechanical adaptation of a complex, disciplined and novel system birthed by a college of brilliant and foresighted thinkers. Much worse, even the adaptation was largely eclectic and egotistic. His military government dictated a number of no-go areas, and then hewed out parts of the presidential system that should ennoble the federalist principles without which the system would either wobble or remain inoperable.

    On his second tour of duty as president between 1999 and 2007, he stood for election without his predecessor first promulgating a new constitution. And when he assumed office and perused the document, he waited till the tail end of his second term to attempt a rejigging of the constitution. The enormous powers conferred by that pretentious document greatly gratified his senses. He would brook no attenuation of its immense powers, until perhaps he could trade it for an abridged third term. The obvious fact known to most analysts is that Chief Obasanjo is no federalist. He scorns federalism, an idea completely antithetical to his entire being and worldview. As president, he ran roughshod over the states, destabilised, enthroned, dethroned, subverted, impeached, and intimidated state governors, some of whom barely escaped his tyrannical attempt to jail them. The courts did their best to stand up to him; but against the judiciary, he was excoriating and scurrilous. Now, the same Chief Obasanjo has experienced the epiphany of Western liberal democracy failings. Had his favourite Mr Obi won the poll – the manipulative LP candidate he erroneously believed he could pull by the ears in reprimand – would he be campaigning for a new system he amorphously dubs ‘Afro Democracy’?

    Chief Obasanjo emerged from the Nigerian civil war a controversial, undeserving and narcissistic hero. His books, all of them incapable of teaching anybody anything either by experience or by theory, are completely dedicated to massaging his brittle ego. There is nothing in those books that reflect on the subject of federalism or that took apart Western liberal democracy, whether parliamentary or presidential. He spent much of his adult life cozying up to Western countries, struggling to remain in their good books, despite the nationalisation of British Petroleum (BP) during apartheid days, and he is now spending his twilight years suffering from buyer’s remorse. He came out of the civil war a 33-year-old colonel, became general and head of state at 39, and was elected president at 62. Finding himself on public payroll for nearly all his adult life, he has become inured to hardship, and at old age has also become accustomed to a life of entitlement. It is tempting for such a man to despise or at least ignore the reflectiveness that produces better understanding of arcane subjects like democracy, Western or Eastern, one-party or multiparty.

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    The problem is not his military background. In fact, two other military generals present striking and inspiring contrasts to Chief Obasanjo. France’s Charles de Gaulle, then a colonel, led the Free French Forces during World War II against Nazi Germany, and headed the provisional government in 1944 when the country was liberated. In 1946, he resigned because he disagreed with his colleagues about the workability of the constitution. Both the provisional government and the country distrusted his ideas for a new constitution, repudiated the changes he wanted to introduce, and even accusing of him being obsessed with power. It was not until 1958, when France faced existential threats from angry and rebellious generals that de Gaulle returned to office and gifted the country the Fifth Republic constitution written almost entirely by him. That constitution has endured till today, while the economic policy, the Dirigiste, which he foisted on the country in 1944, produced 30 years of unparalleled growth known as the Trente Glorieuses.

    The second example is from the East. Japan’s 1947 Constitution is described as the oldest unamended constitution in the world. It is a mere 5,000-word constitution drafted by American civilian officials under the supervision of Gen. Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) during the United States/Allied powers occupation of Japan at the end of World War II. The constitution is a rework of the 1890 Meiji (Emperor Meiji, 1867-1912) Constitution which in turn drew inspiration from the British and Prussian models. Unlike Nigeria’s ponderous Constituent Assembly, two US senior military officers with law degrees drafted much of the constitution while a few Japanese scholars reportedly reviewed and modified it before promulgation. That constitution has stood the test of time. Gen MacArthur anchored the new constitution on three principles, to wit, “make the emperor accountable to the Japanese people, eliminate Japan’s ability to wage war, and create a parliamentary system akin to the British system, abolishing the inherited power of Japan’s aristocracy”. The debate before the drafting of the constitution was robust, its philosophical principles were unassailable, and sculpting it as a visionary document probably guaranteed its future and relevance.

    Chief Obasanjo is 86 years old. But neither in his youth nor middle age did he engage in the contemplation necessary to birth lasting projects, whether they are constitutions or other legacies. Do his failings preclude him from proposing amendments to the Nigerian constitution or even asking for a total overhaul? No, of course not. His relentless mischief must never preclude him from making contributions to public discourse, no matter how skeptical and cynical the country has become. And nothing must be allowed to abridge or discountenance his rights. The problem, however, is that there is nothing in the consultation he convoked last Monday in Abeokuta, or in his own prefatory remarks at the occasion, that show that Chief Obasanjo is remorseful for the poor leadership he gave Nigeria when he was twice gifted the chance. Had he been capable of deep and lofty ideas, regardless of his lack of principles, he might be given a hearing on his rage against liberal democracy. They have talked empty bombasts at his presidential library; but nothing beyond the talk will translate into anything noble or implementable now or in the future. His time is long past, vitiated by his appalling politics and his immense appetite to burnish his faltering image. Few will henceforth pay heed to his preferences, knowing him for who he is and what he wants, even if he gets increasingly more cantankerous for being sidelined by the new administration.

  • Oshiomhole right on Imo, Ajaero and NLC strike

    Oshiomhole right on Imo, Ajaero and NLC strike

    For two harrowing days last week, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) subjected Nigerians to a national strike called mainly to protest the brutalisation of their president, Joe Ajaero. They were disturbed by the federal government’s nonchalance in dealing with the hoodlums who beat up the NLC president weeks ago in Imo State. Before the national strike, the unions had first plunged Imo State into darkness by cutting electricity supply to the state. They also promised to sustain the punishment until certain conditions were met. They held the state by its jugular. When those conditions were not met, the unions escalated the crisis to the national level by punishing the entire country for two days over issues completely unrelated to the other 35 states. Union leaders were unanimous over the issue of the brutalisation of their president, and everyone who disagreed with them or commented on the crisis had first prefaced their disagreement or comment with a condemnation of the attack on Mr Ajaero.

    This writer refused to join the bandwagon last week of assuaging the unions. He commented on the NLC/TUC strike decision without first pouring libation at the unions’ shrine. Mr Ajaero was intemperate and his judgement poor, the writer had concluded. And by brazenly displaying partisanship and believing himself to be the embodiment of the union, the writer also argued, Mr Ajaero had attracted the insults and assault by the state’s homegrown enforcers. There was no dignity to his statements regarding the dispute between some public sector workers in the state and the government, nor was his boisterous and unguarded action in trying to arm-twist the state to achieve partisan ends defensible. Fortunately, even before the unions called off their strike, which lasted only two undignified and reckless days, Adams Oshiomhole (Edo North – APC) had staked his reputation and legacy by denouncing the unions for elevating local and even personal issues to a national problem. The senator did his best to smother his unease with the unions’ misjudgement. He didn’t quite succeed, for, unlike many of his dissembling colleagues and the pussyfooting federal government, it was clear where he stood.

    Last Thursday Sen. Oshiomhole was on Channels Television to speak on the strike issue again, especially because he had raised a few eyebrows in his earlier stance a day or two before. Having been president of the NLC between 1999 and 2007, the Edo senator was naturally expected to be sympathetic to the unions’ position. But if he disagreed with their strike response, they thought he should be loth to oppose his former comrades publicly. However, on Channels Tv, the senator denounced the strike, deplored the trivialisation of the sacred instrument of trade union activism, and wondered why Mr Aajero was so unabashedly partisan to the point of even equating himself with the NLC. Leadership, the senator counseled, involved the capacity to sacrifice personal comforts and operate magisterially above the common level and routine indignity. He then delved into the beginnings of the Imo stalemate and explained that as a matter of fact, the fracture in the Imo NLC leadership, which the state exploited, was traceable to Mr Ajaero’s obtruding personality and refusal to let the state chapter order their own affairs.

    What probably upset Sen. Oshiomhole the most was Mr Ajaero’s flagrant partisanship and absolute lack of moderation and restraint. The elections were over, he said, and commonsense required that everyone and every union, particularly the NLC which advocates better living conditions for workers, needed to support the efforts to revivify the country’s distressed economy. Many analysts, including this writer, had told the unreflective NLC president this truth many times, but he has remained intransigent. This is where Sen. Oshiomhole’s public rebuke of the NLC leaders becomes relevant. If Mr Ajaero and the TUC president who cried more than the bereaved last week still have the humility to profit from good advice, they should reflect on what their former president said last week. It is now more urgent than before that the unions must take responsibility for electing sound leaders. It is not enough to just elect fiery rhetoricians and hell-raisers; they also need to diligently assess candidates for leadership, men and women of sound judgement able to decipher the most complex of issues pertaining to labour and their wellbeing.

    Sen. Oshiomhole has done the unions a great service by opposing their excesses from within, both as a friend and committed unionist. The unions should not wait for their enemies to undermine them. Outsiders could be more merciless. By denouncing the unions’ methods and rationalisations publicly and eloquently, the Edo senator showed why he was a successful union leader, engaging politician, and governor for two terms; and he is well on the way to becoming one of Nigeria’s highly impactful senators. He has done well as a unionist and politician, and from all indications, he will continue to do impressively well in anything he does. Sen. Oshiomhole is of course not a theoretician, and his ideological leaning, which seems left of centre, is more practical and eclectic than theoretical. But he has often effortlessly come to conclusions which far more educated public servants and politicians come to laboriously and without certainty. Not only does he speak very well and with self-assured panache, and is capable of sustaining his logic and coherence of thought over the distance, he is also principled, thoughtful and admirably consistent.

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    His private ethics may be a different thing altogether, and he is also probably generous in his dalliances; but he is not alone when his principles are juxtaposed with the private scruples of his colleagues in the other arms of government. Sen. Oshiomhole will not throw the first stone knowing what his house is made of. And when it comes to such arcane matters as developing the next generation of leaders for his state or promoting a successor, he may exhibit weak knees and flustered hands. In fact, he may come across as less strategic and futuristic than his otherwise brilliant qualities would presuppose. But as far as public service is concerned, whether as union leader, or party leader, or governor, there are not many as gifted as he is. Even the self-satisfied Godwin Obaseki, the current Edo governor, cannot hold the candle to him. Indeed, whether the senator is deferential or not, he seems exactly the kind of man, party leader or politician who should have the president’s or senate president’s ear.

    But will Mr Ajaero listen to Sen. Oshiomhole on how not to mix politics with unionism? It is doubtful. The NLC president will have to be compelled by union executives to clean up his act. He will not do it willingly; nay, he cannot do it because he does not have it in him to paddle the union canoe with the moderation and intellect it deserves and demands. He meddled in the Imo chapter of the NLC, caused disaffection in the state chapter as a result of preferring one over the other, and has begun in recent weeks to feel megalomaniacally competent to build or to demolish anything that catches his fancy. After the Labour Party suffered a crushing defeat in the February presidential poll despite exploitating regional and religious sentiments and expectations, Mr Ajaero took leave of his senses and began to whoop hysterically. His party’s candidate, Peter Obi, ever the rational trader, briefly abandoned reason too but quickly reminded himself that there was a future to consider, and that such a future could not be built on the parsimony that formed the core of his cynical politics. Mr Obi’s running mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, for reasons unclear to both politics and science, has disturbingly walked the entire gamut of extremism.

    Mr Ajaero is unlikely to moderate anytime soon, assuming he has the poise. He claimed not to hold a party card. He is just being disingenuous. He is as partisan as they come. He is a dyed-in-the-wool LP patron, and would as soon commit a felony for the sake of LP as foment a rebellion for his favoured candidates within the NLC. TUC’s Festus Usifo had always seemed a stoical and reflective union leader, especially in the early weeks of the Bola Tinubu presidency when the LP and Mr Ajaero, instigated by shadowy characters, tried to instigate street revolt against the new administration and democracy. Mr Usifo was unconvinced that the right thing to do was subvert democracy so early in the life of a new administration. But when he took up the gauntlet and led last week’s fight to redress Mr Ajaero’s battered body and image, it was thought that he was propelled by nobility. But when told that the National Industrial Court (NIC) order prohibiting the unions from protesting was still subsisting, he insinuated that the order could be disobeyed because the federal government was itself serially disobedient. It takes one small act or statement to take the measure of a leader. Mr Usifo has determined who he is. He may not be as recalcitrant as Mr Ajaero or as dismissive and conspiratorial, but it is impossible to imbue him with more than his ambition.

    With more gifted and courageous polemicists like Sen. Oshiomhole, there is yet hope that in the cut and thrust of Nigerian politics, there will always be enough men and women who can be counted to be the conscience of the nation. He was short on tactics and strategies when he led his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), but he is not short on sound judgement when it counts, nor devoid of the chutzpah required to give counsels that resonate on the national scene. He has rebuked and counseled the unions under Mr Ajaero; it is up to them to listen and take corrections. If they will not, it will not dampen the enthusiasm of the senator, nor vitiate the import of his reproofs; it will, however, be on record that someone spoke up in good faith as the unions careened into the abyss.  

  • 2027 mergers: Atiku wise after the fact

    2027 mergers: Atiku wise after the fact

    Last week, former vice president and candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the February presidential poll, Atiku Abubakar, gradually and finally began to embrace the dismal reality of electoral rejection. He and his supporters had initially insisted that the All Progressives Congress (APC) rigged the poll and got INEC to install President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as winner, thereby demonising the electoral commission and anyone and any organisation which drew attention to the fact that disunity in the PDP cost the opposition the election. He completely ignored what most analysts said about the poll, and shouted himself hoarse over the illusions that kept him from admitting the truth. Now, he has begun to equivocate.

    On Tuesday, while hosting the Inter-Party Advisory Council Nigeria (IPAC), he curiously admitted the indispensability of unity among opposition parties as a precondition for dislodging the APC in the next elections. Before the February poll, the PDP had split into four factions, three of which presented presidential candidates and scored a combined total of 14.58 million votes to the APC’s 8.79m. Rather than the opposition hugging shadows, any reasonable analyst could easily surmise that the PDP undid itself. Well, better late than never. Alhaji Atiku is now calling opposition parties to unite in the face of what seemed like political suicide for the PDP in 2027. But whether he has the political capital left at close to 77 years old to inspire that unity is another thing entirely. There is, however, nothing wrong with finally embracing reality and projecting ambition.

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    Speaking to his visitors, he advised: “The project of protecting democracy in our country is not about just one man. You have come here today to say that we should cooperate in order to promote democracy. But the truth of the matter is that our democracy is fast becoming a one-party system; and, of course, you know that when we have a one party system, we should just forget about democracy. We have all seen how the APC is increasingly turning Nigeria into a dictatorship of one party. If we don’t come together to challenge what the ruling party is trying to create, our democracy will suffer for it, and the consequences of it will affect the generations yet unborn.”

    As sensible as his latest admissions seem to be, he has again shown how superficial he has become. Alhaji Atiku has run for the highest office about six times, and on at least two occasions missed the diadem narrowly. Yet, it is strange that his knowledge of the world and his understanding of global politics, not to say the many variants of democracy that exist, lead him unquestionably to the anachronistic conclusion that only Western-type multiparty democracy qualifies to be described as democracy. Much more importantly, apart from his customary deception demonstrated in his quest for opposition unity, he argues that the APC is ‘increasingly turning’ Nigeria into a one-party state. How? He doesn’t say. Clearly, it is just one of his usual exaggerations designed to frighten and stampede the parties into the unity they casually repudiated months ago.

    Unfortunately, while still addressing his IPAC guests, he kept harping on the conclusion that APC rigged the presidential poll, in total disregard for the logical premises he had just presented before his hosts to justify political merger. His stock has waned considerably, and he is unlikely to get the merger he hankers after. There may be some mergers in the years ahead among the opposition, but at over 80 years old, he will not be the one to inspire it or take advantage of it. Instead of promoting internal and comprehensive reform in the PDP immediately after his electoral loss, he had initially embarked on totally extraneous fishing expeditions to the United States to delegitimise the poll, scandalise the judiciary, and taint the image of the country before the whole world. Both the Labour Party (LP) and the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), which he hoped to ally with, and perhaps with him at the head of the coalition, have snubbed his efforts. They see him as ossified and outdated. He will be shocked to see in the next one year how quickly the party reforms itself while consigning him to the periphery.

  • Obi raises falsed emocracy banner

    Obi raises falsed emocracy banner

    It took some 10 days before Peter Obi, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the February 25 election, reacted to the October 26 Supreme Court judgement affirming President Bola Tinubu’s victory. He addressed a press conference in Abuja on November 6 and gave what amounted to a concession speech, one which he should have given way back in March after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared the winner. Mr Obi’s ‘concession’ speech was badly written, lacking in sense and purpose, and destitute of facts and logic. But it is a relief he deemed it fit to put on record his view of his failed petition rather than rely on or adopt his party’s contradictory and alarmist reaction to the same Supreme Court decision. The LP had on October 26, in their response to the judgement, spoken of the shredding of the “sacred fabric of justice and good conscience…at the Supreme Court”. But Mr Obi decided to “set legal issues aside” and was instead bothered that the “Supreme Court exhibited a disturbing aversion to public opinion just as it abandoned its responsibility as a court of law and policy”.

    Even though both party and candidate suggested that the Supreme Court perverted the cause of justice, neither Mr Obi nor his party leader, Julius Abure, tendered any proof whatsoever in their public statements to convince their long-suffering and indulgent supporters. Mr Obi offered nothing before the Supreme Court to substantiate his allegations, nothing indeed deserving more than a cursory and dismissive attention by the appellate justices. His case was bad at the lower court, far worse than that of the Peoples Democratic Party’s Atiku Abubakar; and it was irredeemably worse at the Supreme Court, amounting to a total waste of court time. But having chanced on an effective method of hoodwinking his supporters, he knew instinctively that all he needed to do was slant his public speeches and press conferences in a manner that would make his tenuous ideas irresistible. Facts and logic are irrelevant to him. Alarmingly, facts and logic also no longer mean anything to his supporters, nor indeed to a sizable portion of the public disillusioned by incompetent Nigerian ruling elite.

    Uninterested in arguing any convincing case, especially why he thought the Supreme Court perverted the cause of justice, Mr Obi engaged in unparalleled verbiage and buffoonery. Incredibly, and for someone who aspires to rule Nigeria, he said this of the Supreme Court: “The Supreme Court exhibited a disturbing aversion to public opinion just as it abandoned its responsibility as a court of law and policy. It is, therefore, with great dismay that I observe that the Court’s decision contradicts the overwhelming evidence of election rigging, false claim of a technical glitch, substantial non-compliance with rules set by INEC itself as well as matters of perjury, identity theft, and forgery that have been brought to light in the course of this election matter. These were hefty allegations that should not to be treated with levity.” Disturbing aversion to public opinion? Even for a failed presidential candidate, this is excessive. So, public opinion is now part of the Nigerian jurisprudence. And in what ways did the court’s decision contradict the ‘overwhelming’ evidence he supposedly presented? What is undisputable is that Mr Obi and whoever he contracted to write that offensive speech did not read the lower court judgement nor had time and interest to read the Supreme Court decision. Having not read both, it is unsurprising that the LP candidate’s populism led him to the undignified conclusion he came to about the court’s decision while he continues to fantasise about the worth of the evidence he presented.

    Mr Obi said more egregious things about the judgement, even deploying the word ‘appalling’ to describe the behavior of the Supreme Court, accusing the justices of condonement of constitutional breaches, and inappropriately describing the court decision as ‘counterintuitive’ in a manner that transfers ‘heavy moral burden’ to the conscience of Nigerians. Assuming the reader can make sense of that verbiage, he then concludes that Nigeria’s “young democracy is ultimately the main victim and casualty of the courtroom drama”. Mr Obi’s school leaving certificate was undistinguished, but it is disturbing that a graduate of philosophy could pen those words and hiss at all that transpired in the court as drama. Which drama? His incompetent petition that was bad through and through, or the courts that painstakingly took his petition apart? Or the drama he and his supporters, whom he now lionises as the fulcrum of future political opposition, had enacted on social media with ceaseless buffoonery? Then, almost like an afterthought, he grudgingly admitted that the court judgement “may represent the state of the law in 2023 but not the present demand for substantive justice”. Nothing could be sillier. What kind of dichotomy was he trying to establish? One based on chronology? Could jurisprudence become so malleable as to be determined by the mood of the times, a sort of Hegelian encapsulation of zeitgeist versus volksgeist?

    Like Alhaji Atiku, the PDP candidate, Mr Obi knows little or nothing about democracy, let alone a fledgling democracy. Had he known something about democracy, his approach to politics and his responses to political adversities and challenges would have been informed by principles and precepts far deeper, more nuanced, and infinitely nobler. It is unlikely Mr Obi himself penned his disagreeable summaries of his case and the Supreme Court decision. But he read it, approved it, and gave voice to it before the whole world. He accuses the Supreme Court of mixing principles and precepts, but these are terms he did nothing to show he was capable of understanding or differentiating. And for him, the press conference was about placing on record his “disagreement with and deep reservations about the judgement”. Yet, there is nowhere in his speech where he elucidates on the alleged disagreement or reservation beyond superficialities.

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    Well, all bad things, like all good things, must somewhere along the line come to an end. His unctuous speech designed to massage the outsized ego of his supporters was obviously designed to come invariably to the conclusion that the ‘Obidient movement’ had become a force, a new political opposition. Said he: “Going forward, we in the Labour Party and the Obidient Movement are now effectively in opposition. We are glad that the nation has heard us loud and clear. We shall now expand the confines of our message of hope to the rest of the country. We shall meet the people in the places where they feel pain and answer their needs for hope. At marketplaces, motor parks, town halls, board rooms, and university and college campuses, we shall carry and deliver the message of a new Nigeria. As stakeholders and elected Labour Party officials, we shall remain loyal to our manifesto. We will continue to canvas for good governance and focus on issues that promote national interest, unity, and cohesion. We will continue to give primacy to our constitution, the rule of law, and the protection of ordered liberties.”

    There is of course no ideological nexus between LP and the Obidient movement. The former is a political all-purpose vehicle available for hire, and the latter a pretentious and ad hoc assembly of nihilists peddling cultural and religious bitters. Nothing of any significance sustains each in its cocoon, and worse, nothing binds both together. Without a platform or an ideology, nor yet any understanding of the ennobling values that unite and lift a nation, it is unclear what kind of opposition Mr Obi hopes to champion. The LP candidate is a self-absorbed and superficial politician whose ways and ideas are closer to demagoguery than the democracy he glibly and inexpertly enunciates. He talks of manifesto; yes, the same document he initially declined to conceive or publish before the campaigns got underway. The real Obi manifesto is in the careless nothings and imprecates he mouths on the hustings. He is averse to the tedium of sweating through homework and research to develop a canon of political philosophy and a platform of ideas capable of withstanding the test of time. He talks of giving ‘primacy’ to the constitution, the rule of law, and protection of ‘ordered liberties’. The presumption for a man and politician who thinks nothing of the constitution and the rule of law, of course, is that there are disordered liberties.

    Apart from Mr Obi’s perfunctory reference to party manifesto, a manifesto he neither believed in nor made reference to during his entire campaign for the presidency, he also advocates “good governance and focus on issues that promote national interest, unity, and cohesion”. Very little profundity was observed under his governorship in Anambra where he equated parsimony with state policy. However, when he talks of unity and cohesion in his ‘concession’ speech, especially against the background of his religious politics, every sensible Nigerian knows he is lying. He has no deep conviction about secularism, no conviction at all about democracy, and no clue what cohesion and national interest mean. But he knows how to talk the talk, mere rhetoric amplified by his battalions and divisions of social media warriors and latent revolutionaries whom he is now priming for a future takeover of Nigeria. It takes excess gullibility to be influenced by Mr Obi’s sweet nothings. Perhaps this is an exaggeration. The truth, however, is that there are a few pearls in his speech. One of them is probably the bon mot about moving the nation from consumption to production. Why this dream does not taste sour in his mouth as a politician and businessman who has dedicated all his life as an adult to the practice of retail trading is hard to tell.

    Mr Obi knows he is lying when he talks about bridging Nigeria’s religious divide; but his biggest and most salient pitch is rousing the youths into resuscitating, sometime in the future, perhaps before the next election cycle, the revolution he claims was stymied by the outcome of the presidential election. The youths of today are, however, not as disciplined, profound and resilient as he romanticises. They have demonstrated their fickleness on social media, and are eager to goosestep behind every deceiver that can flamboyantly market any utopia or elixir. The country must, therefore, beware of Mr Obi’s fondness for revolution, and readiness to exploit the heedlessness and insularity of youths in the next election cycle, assuming he survives the political vagaries of the years to come. The LP candidate raises false banner to democracy. So, too, do Alhaji Atiku and the LP as a party. They cannot help themselves; for to do otherwise would require embracing a punishing regimen of discipline, intellect and application of sound judgement and policies to make serious and lasting impact on Nigeria. They are not capable of that altruism.

  • Imo and NLC’s supercilious posturing

    Imo and NLC’s supercilious posturing

    Days before Imo State, with two other states, went into governorship elections yesterday, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) led by Joe Ajaero, an Imolite, scheduled a state shutdown protest by workers under the guise of labour dispute. The NLC owns the Labour Party (LP) which presented a candidate for that election. Naturally, the state’s local toughs, allegedly with police indifference, resisted the NLC and gave Mr Ajaero a black eye. Responding to the assault, the NLC and its ally, the Trade Union Congress (TUC), shut down the Abuja Airport, threw thousands of travelers into despair, and announced glibly that the exercise was to punish Imo State. Incredible. All because of one man.

    For months, the federal government has been yielding inches and feet and yards to the bellicose NLC purportedly fighting for the rights of workers worsted by economic adversities linked with the government’s policies. Anytime the NLC sneezed, by threatening to shut down the country, the federal government quaked or froze. The government knew that the NLC had become indistinguishable from LP, and that the union had acted in disgruntled and conspiratorial unison with the party which came third in the presidential election. Abuja also knew that before the courts delivered their judgements affirming the victory of the All Progressives Congress’ Bola Tinubu as president, the NLC was fomenting trouble in order to help ginger a revolt and cause social upheaval. The plot was obvious to many observers.

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    But instead of taking the battle to the NLC, perhaps fearing that a clampdown could worsen the crisis, the government has preferred to back down in the face of provocation, each time yielding ground so much that it now yields miles. In effect, the NLC, and indeed the LP, appears to occupy the driver’s seat. Emboldened by its tactics of pressuring the administration and amused by the pusillanimity of the government, the union embarked on the aforesaid Imo political adventure two weeks ago. Unfortunately for Mr Ajaero, his people in Imo knew him and were unprepared to treat him with kid gloves just days to election. Thugs beat him black and blue. They alleged he was using the NLC to engage in flagrant politicking, a ploy they were unwilling to suffer gladly. Whether the NLC likes it or not, or whether the government continues to yield miles or not, a point will come when the fight that has been avoided for months will take place to determine who was elected to rule the country. That time is near. What is clear is that in matters such as those kinds of confrontations, the government seldom loses.