The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Kogi, Imo and Bayelsa polls

    Kogi, Imo and Bayelsa polls

    The three states of Imo, Bayelsa and Kogi went to the polls yesterday to pick their governors. The PDP will probably keep Bayelsa, and the APC, despite the worst efforts of the labour unions, will probably retain Imo. But Kogi’s APC and its insensitive and insular governor, Yahaya Bello, should not win the state for the ruling party’s candidate, Usman Ododo. Mr Bello plays abominable politics. He muscled out other governorship aspirants in the ruling party to pave the way for his candidate, who hails from his hometown. The governor sees nothing wrong in repudiating the fairness that should dominate politics in the state, perhaps because the Igala in Kogi East practiced the same folly for decades. Such narrow-mindedness should not be rewarded.

    Read Also: INEC uploads Bayelsa, Imo, Kogi election results on IREV

    However, the election in Kogi is a toss-up on account of the fragmentation of the opposition. Rather than cooperate with one another to punish Mr Bello’s audacious folly, the opposition think each party stands a chance. It remains to be seen, perhaps later today or tomorrow, whether their foolish gamble paid off or whether those rocky heights of the state and the rarefied metaphorical atmosphere in which they live and play their amateurish politics have addled their brains. Mr Bello is one of the worst governors among his peers, and he seems determined to reproduce after his kind. Worse, he reads Genesis literally despite fearing neither God nor man.

  • Rivers State and Wike’s  leadership burden

    Rivers State and Wike’s  leadership burden

    Federal Capital City (FCT) minister and former governor of Rivers State Nyesom Wike is the latest to fall out with his successor. Despite the acrimony that often ensues from such crisis and the abundance of dissuasive lessons, he will not be the last. For him and other former governors plagued by that peculiar kind of political and administrative dilemma, there will always be reasons to justify disputes between predecessors and successors. In Rivers, the dispute, among other reasons, may be connected with the need to sustain the integrity and durability of state party structure. It is suggested that Governor Siminalayi Fubara is loth to inherit his predecessor’s enemies, and wishes to hew out the path of a pacifist. Mr Wike, on the other hand, fears the reintroduction of his ‘enemies’ into the state’s governing Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), enemies who might be keen on taking over the party and leaving him high and dry. Whatever the reasons, real or imagined, the fight has started.

    The fight in Ondo between Governor Rotimi Akeredolu and his deputy, who merely acted as governor for a few months, is still smouldering. Had a succession taken place already, the propriety and tameness witnessed in the Rivers war, a war that erupted after only five months, would be impossible to find. Overall, there is hardly a state in which such wars broke out that the predecessor was not eventually worsted. Lagos probably bucked the trend, but only just, and in ways that are complex and nuanced. What really matters is not just that the wars exemplify administrative or ideological disagreements between two persons and contending forces, but that they are more significantly symptomatic of the crisis of leadership recruitment in Nigeria. The wars between successors and predecessors reached as high as the Nigerian presidency, between ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Yar’Adua, and between the same Chief Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan. None of the army generals who foisted Chief Obasanjo attempted to control him or fight him since they were his juniors in the army. And no one could control or fight ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, himself a retired army general. The predecessor/successor wars are idiosyncratically a civilian matter. Perhaps with time, the inevitability of such wars will convince political godfathers of the futility of imposing favoured candidates on states.

    Predecessors and successors will never lack reasons to disagree or fight open wars. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the United States despised each other, and both engaged in rhetorical and even administrative spat. It never went beyond that. Mr Trump’s current ordeal is more a product of his personal follies and foibles than anything connected with Mr Obama. While there may, therefore, be reasons to fight succession wars, it is not always inevitable, especially if the right things are done. Firstly, regardless of the desire to protect legacies or crimes, and ensure, perhaps, ideological purity and continuity, history has amply shown that no single political leader could eternally protect legacies, crimes or ideas. It is hubris to think otherwise. Admittedly, Mr Wike may be fighting to protect his future rather than defending a legacy or covering a crime, seeing how he straddled very unusually both the ruling APC in Abuja and the PDP in Rivers. His reasons will resonate with Abuja, considering the permutations being bandied around for 2027, but they will rankle with PDP oligarchs desirous of snatching the state from the mercurial Wike and punishing him for his perfidy and apostasy.

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    Until there is a deep and coherent paradigm shift in leadership recruitment, states which produce powerful and impactful leaders may continue to witness political succession instability. In the Fourth Republic, Lagos came closest than any other state in designing pragmatic leadership succession model. But that model is still a far cry from what is desirable. It may have fostered some sort of manageable stability, and even compelled fidelity to the state’s developmental blueprint far more evident than any ever seen in the country, but it has not always produced successors capable of passing brilliant torches to the next generation of leaders. Governor Bola Tinubu, as he then was, was more pragmatic than ideological, and his successor, Babatunde Fashola was equally practical. But while Senator Tinubu was faintly ideological in his pragmatism, indeed much given to a universalist and overarching perspective of regional rulership and development model, Mr Fashola was, despite his pragmatism, less regional and probably isolationist. The next governor, Akinwumi Ambode, though a builder himself, despised templates and blueprints, and was also not ideological. Had the state not been cajoled by then Gov Tinubu into some sort of stability, the developmental strides witnessed in the state, now taken for granted and regarded as a national benchmark, would have been difficult to midwife.

    Mr Wike probably has a vision to make Rivers another Lagos, perhaps even far better in line with his insinuations during some of his expansive state dinners. While that vision may be unimpeachable, it has not been matched by an inviolable blueprint or a carefully considered succession paradigm. Where Mr Wike had postured as Israel’s King David, Mr Fubara has neither proved to be cut from the same cloth nor acted like King Solomon when assailed by complicated troubles. The fault is not Mr Fubara’s. The problem is that Mr Wike’s ambitions have proved far more transcendental than his methods and visions. The Lagos model is fraying at the edges. In Rivers, the Lagos model will prove, for want of a better word, irreplicable, and will probably unravel much faster than Mr Wike ever imagined. This is because what Mr Wike left behind lacks coherence and depth, and the man who succeeded him, while seeming like a gentleman, seems to have a lot of trouble with the character, conviction and foresight of an ideologue. There are many ways to manage someone like Mr Wike, while at the same time keeping the dogs and hyenas outside the state at bay. Staying lockstep with the tempestuous and even nuanced Mr Wike, who governed far better than his predecessor, the self-absorbed Rotimi Amaechi, requires so much depth than the current governor can display.

    By now, the FCT minister must have realised that in the somewhat impressionable Mr Fubara, not to talk of Rivers and the PDP, he has a fight on his hands. Even if his ire and methods are beyond cavil, his inability to structure the state and the governorship succession scientifically will give him nightmares in the months ahead. He has stuck stubbornly to his guns, and has spoken daggers and is prepared to use them. But if he allows his rage to consume him, he will lose on all sides in the end. President Tinubu has rallied to his side instantaneously for obvious reasons, not the least of which is the cooperation afforded the ruling party by the Rivers PDP lawmakers in the National Assembly. Mr Wike will sustain his brittle leadership in Rivers if he moderates his expectations. Mr Fubara will not be the philosopher and solid steel the FCT minister imagines the governor capable of. Meanwhile, Rivers, with the protests and counter-protests of the past week, is still in formation. It is capable of bending in any direction for now. Had Mr Wike spent as much time shaping the mind and steeling the character and worldview of the state as he did building its bridges and public buildings, and had he paid attention to the state’s leadership recruitment rubric, he could go to sleep assured that neither Rivers nor its governors in the foreseeable future would betray the cause or be bought for a morsel. It is not clear whether it is not already too late for Mr Wike, despite his threat to fight long and hard; but it would be a mistake for him to assume or project the struggle to be about him or his ideas. He should speak less, considerably less, about himself or whether anyone is betraying him; for the struggle for political unity and party sanctity should be about Rivers, and Rivers only.

  • Atiku undermines his own ambition

    Atiku undermines his own ambition

    On October 30, former vice president and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate in the February 25 election, Atiku Abubakar, finally spoke on his loss at the Supreme Court in the case he filed against the All Progressives Congress (APC) and its victorious candidate in that election, President Bola Tinubu. The speech was undoubtedly written for him, for everything in the text stands in direct and scornful refutation of his life and ideas. He blames the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the Supreme Court for his loss. As far as he is concerned, he presented all the evidence necessary to get the case decided in his favour, but his valiant and noble attempt was thwarted by the incompetence and deviousness of the two institutions. He did not have an impressive school leaving certificate, but he brandishes a diploma in law (1969) and a master’s in international relations (2021). His speech, however, displays nothing of the higher learning or political virtue his education confers on him. He misreads the electoral law, misapplies the constitution, and far more embarrassingly, especially for someone who passes himself off as a statesman and patriotic political titan, misjudges both his personal accomplishment and the mood of the country.

    In the first four paragraphs of his speech, he tells audacious lies about the role he played in Nigerian politics, including what he has stood for all his life, and insinuations about what he may yet accomplish on a hypothetical tomorrow. In those prefatory statements, where he speaks with absolute cocksureness of what he supposed was the malfeasance of the two institutions in question, he avers that history will vindicate him. He knows nothing about history. Then he pontificates about democracy and the rule of law, of which he was both an avatar and a palladium. He does not say what qualifies him for the robes he wore in the speech, for the robes were ponderous and ungainly over the thin and spectral frame of his self-confessed qualities. But because some bright and dreamy hack writer composed his diatribe against the court and INEC, he believes that by merely making those self-adulatory claims, he was invariably entitled to wear those grand and noble robes.

    He repeatedly hammers on his years of litigations, which he assumes must be noble because they exuded a long and profound history of political activism and agitation, and he thus proudly wears that hat. It escapes him that his litigiousness, much of it anchored on flimsy and self-gratifying evidence, could in fact be baleful pointers to his disputatiousness, a grumbler eternally griping about minor hurts and chasing chimeras. He then zeroes in on his last Supreme Court case, speaks fondly about United States (US) courts from which he says he had procured unassailable evidence, and damns everybody else from APC to INEC, and from the Nigerian courts to Nigerians themselves whom he dismisses as complicit. For someone who claims to have a diploma in law, it is bewildering that he neither says anything about the sanctity of laws nor talks of estimating the evidentiary worth of his foreign evidence. He then proceeds to cast aspersion on legal technicalities as if they are distinguishable from the law, and feigning dismay, pronounces glibly on how the courts should have proceeded. The lower court that adjudicated his case, the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), gave its judgement on September 6, while the Supreme Court affirmed the judgement on October 26. Neither he nor his speechwriters had obviously read and digested the judgements, though they had enough time. Had he read the two documents, his law diploma should have impelled him to a better and deeper understanding of the inviolability of the justices’ reasoning and conclusions.

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    A final year law student, confronted with the arguments and evidence of the Atiku legal team, could not but come to the conclusion that the former vice president had no case, regardless of whether the student or any other person for that matter loathed the winner, President Tinubu. Worse, it did not need the same final year law student, after perusing the final address of the Atiku team, to come to the safe conclusion that the Supreme Court would unanimously dismiss his case and affirm the president’s victory in the election. Alhaji Atiku in his more than 2,700-worded speech paid no heed to the legal arguments adumbrated in the two judgements before coming to his conclusion that both the Supreme Court and INEC acted disloyally to the national cause and the cause of democracy. Instead, he focused cheerfully on the moral insinuation of a forgery he neither argued before the lower court nor tendered procedurally before the Supreme Court. He hoped his casuistry and the menace he and others had stirred in the wider and gullible public would be sufficient to intimidate the court. Six times, Alhaji Atiku tried to be president; he nearly could have become president in any of those times. For a man who trifles with facts, pays lip service to the concepts of democracy and the rule of law, speaks loftily about the future of Nigeria without discussing or propounding anchors for such a future, and wails apocalyptically about the failure of others while glossing blithely over his own abysmal moral and business failings, winning the presidency in any of those six times would have had tragic and lasting consequences for the country.

    There have been suggestions that his insistence on staying put in the country to help Nigeria in its struggle for democracy are designed to pave the way for a future run at the presidency. Despite his boastings, and notwithstanding his litigious propensity, Alhaji Atiku is not a democrat nor does he care a hoot about democracy. He never fought for it, and may even harbour contempt for the idea. Fighting for democracy implies having a deep understanding of the concept. Alhaji Atiku is decidedly and roundly superficial. His court forays, particularly weaponised to damage the credibility and reputation of President Tinubu, have also been imbued with sacredness as a way of preparing him for a future presidential race. Those who advance such arguments exaggerate Alhaji Atiku’s mental and physical capacity. Apart from his rudimentary grasp of running a modern and complex economy and society, not to say his failing strength, it will take a miracle at 81 years old in 2027 to run for president, and much bigger altruism to make him support a younger and capable candidate. He is too selfish to care. Alhaji Atiku has reached the end of his tether. He will not run for president in 2027, nor support anyone for the position; instead, he will fade away well before the next elections. 

  • Supreme Court verdict: What next for PDP, LP?

    Supreme Court verdict: What next for PDP, LP?

    Those who wish to assess the validity of the Supreme Court judgement in the petitions filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi are wasting their time. The final court, like the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) before it, gave judgement unanimously in favour of President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC). There is nothing the assessors can say and no logic they can adduce to convince the petitioners and their supporters that justice was not both bought and miscarried, whether it relates to the issue of 25 percent of the Federal Capital City (FCT) votes, the issue of IReV, or the incredulous attempt to introduce fresh evidence. The Supreme Court justices, all seven of them, and the PEPC justices, all five of them, were unanimous in their decisions. The justiciability of the suits has ended, but the politics surrounding them has not.

    Apart from the law of the cases, which is fairly uncomplicated for any sensible person and lawyer, there are two other issues Nigerians must pay attention to: the fresh momentum the decided cases must now afford President Tinubu himself and his administration, and the political futures of Alhaji Atiku, a former vice president, and Mr Obi, a former Anambra State governor. The Supreme Court verdict has now unshackled the president to launch freely and fiercely, within the constraints of the law, into his renewed hope agenda. He will no longer be distracted by the suits, nor does he need to pay more than a cursory attention to the ‘fishing expeditions’ in the United States embarked upon mainly by Alhaji Atiku who was determined to introduce wholly extraneous matters into the petitions, partly to confuse and intimidate the justices, and also to fertilise the conditions for a successful incitement of the populace. The president must of course pay attention to the opposition, and hopefully the opposition will offer sound and practicable alternatives to the administration’s policies and programmes, but he will now do so with much more confidence and even-handedness. With the conclusion of the cases, the president should hopefully be less prone to gaffes and missteps, most of them uncharacteristic of him and the legend associated with his name and politics.

    Probably the first casualty from the dismissed PDP and LP petitions is the dissipation of the synergy that had given fillip to the relationship and politics of Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi. For about eight giddy months after their shocking losses in February, both candidates had collaborated in their shared grief and malice: grief over their career-shattering losses, and malice against a winner they least expected to win and whom they roundly loathed. They had addressed so-called world press conferences and made statements festooned with sarcasms and cynicisms. But at every turn, and after their media excursions, their plots and plans had fallen flat. Nature, rather than any deliberate response by President Tinubu, had thwarted the losing candidates’ efforts and put their noses out of joint. Even Alhaji Atiku’s expeditions to the United States to dredge out inconsistencies and contradictions in President Tinubu’s educational background amounted to nothing in the end. Apart from his feeble suit, Mr Obi had also limited himself to essentially issuing tame allegations and baiting the president with tendentious statements.

    The PDP and LP candidates may have synergised their plots and incited the public against President Tinubu’s election victory, but strangely, the cooperation did not extend to their lawyers’ handling of their petitions. It is unlikely their counsels did not know the tenuity of their cases, nor the nigh impossibility of getting the election annulled. There is even doubt that the candidates themselves did not know that their petitions would both fail on points of law and in the court of public opinion to which they had recklessly and punitively resorted. The lawyers and the candidates most probably knew they were heading nowhere, if the ordinary man on the street already guessed that outcome even before the cases were decided. They, however, did their utmost, not to win in court, for that was impossible, but to confound the justices and furnish a revolution. In the end, the justices kept their wits and dispensed justice; and the revolution the opposition candidates had craved also fell through.

    Read Also: Supreme court ruling: Tinubu ‘ll now focus on Nigeria’s challenges – Adeleke

    Alhaji Atiku will be 81 at the next election cycle. He will not run for president again. Nay, he cannot run for office anymore. However, it will take him much longer than he envisages to purge himself of the gall of losing the presidential election for a record sixth time. There are whispers he will continue to snap at the heels of the president, both now and in the next election cycle, should God spare his life, anything to get his own back at a man and ‘upstart’, who ran him ragged and denied him the glory many soothsayers had predicted for him. It is not certain whether his broken heart will sustain him for much longer, but even if it does, there could be so many intervening variables that would make any consequential effort from him nugatory. Having been ridiculed with what in effect amounts to his frequent cathartic Dubai trips following election losses, Alhaji Atiku will make a point of breezing in and out of Nigeria, throwing the cats among the pigeons as he snickers through press statements and occasional legal suits, and attempting half-heartedly to plot revenge against those within and without his party who undid him last February.

    But far beyond Alhaji Atiku, who is at the moment at a crossroads, is the fate of the befuddled and castrated PDP. Since the party lost the 2015 presidential election, it had remained concussed, unable to regain the animation and frenzy that saw it go from one conquest to another. The party is fortunate not to have a close contender in the opposition ranks, certainly not the eclectic LP. For about eight years or so, it had gone through three election cycles and failed miserably on each occasion, with each loss sending it keeling towards the abyss. Rather than pause, catch its breath, and reform and restructure its operations, it had instead preferred to put new wine in old wineskin and sew a new cloth on an old one. Then it chose to careen from one hired chairman to another, and ultimately, after many foolish dalliances, let itself be cuckolded by Alhaji Atiku, a serial and unprincipled political defector wholly destitute of principles and ideology. Until the PDP grapples with its existential crisis and embarks on wholesale reform and restructuring, it will continue to list dangerously, consuming and destroying ambitions, and demeaning the value of opposition politics in Nigeria.

    The more curious political prognostication concerns the wayfaring Mr Obi who deployed the all-purpose LP political vehicle to prosecute his ambition. In his response last week to Mr Obi and the LP’s loss at the Supreme Court, factional chairman Julius Abure feigns the importance of his party as the main opposition party which he was determined to build and sustain into the next elections. He was less categorical about what role Mr Obi would play in that build-up. But there is nothing in their loss, nor in their politics, nor yet in their amorphous ideology, to indicate that both Mr Obi and his borrowed party, not to say their social media fantasists, would retain relevance into the next election cycle. Mr Obi’s attention span is severely limited by his proclivity for commerce and, judging from his history of knee-jerk pragmatism, his disdain for hard and demanding loyalty to great causes and principles. He will balance his practical wealth needs with the sacrifice needed to sustain esoteric principles and ideals. It is not difficult to guess how he would decide when faced with such cruel and withering choices.

    For the LP as a party, surviving into the next election, given the pedantry of its leaders and the orphanage to which its founders have sentenced it, will be a game of Russian roulette. Nothing is ever certain for a political flirt who embraces whoredom as passionately as she opts for concubinage. The party will always be available as an election platform for the highest bidder. Like the PDP, the LP will probably continue to survive, perhaps with mixed fortunes from time to time, especially when the political atmosphere is clement. Mr Obi may remain in the LP for a little longer; but with the possibility of religious politics receding into the background, and unable to raise the kind of humongous funds as he did before the last polls, both the party and its presidential candidate could either contemplate parting of ways or face the even tougher fate of becoming irrelevant.  

  • Pat Utomi’s fascination with revolution

    Pat Utomi’s fascination with revolution

    Pat Utomi, a political economist and Convener of the Big Tent, has been fascinated with revolutions for a very long time. Every time he is frustrated, he advocates revolution. In this election cycle, he berthed at the Labour Party (LP) port, working with and currying votes for the LP presidential candidate, Peter Obi. With Mr Obi’s resounding losses both at the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) in September and the Supreme Court last Thursday, Prof Utomi is expected to become more strident in his quest for revolution. As recent as late last month, he still called for a revolution, insisting that social upheaval was knocking at the door. He spoke exultantly and blithely about revolution almost as if he could constrain it in a test tube, once it began, virtually certain that it would respect his imagined boundaries.

    But for every revolution that seemed to have delivered a favorable outcome, there have been two or more that miscarried, with attendant loss of lives on a scale that is unimaginable. Those advocating revolution must take care to ensure that such a fraught solution to social and political crisis can deliver on its promises and sustain the idealism of their fancies. The French and Russian revolutions, probably the most ballyhooed of revolutions, certainly never assumed the utopia they were cracked up to be. Prof. Utomi uses the revolution concept interchangeably with national transformation, as he in fact did in 2019 when he commented on social activist Omoyele Sowore’s quest for revolution. The two concepts were virtually the same, the eminent professor chimed, citing the case of South Korea that had to engage at a point in a reset of its national template. If any country needed a revolution, the professor suggested four years ago, it was Nigeria.

    In February and March 2011, Prof. Utomi was even more bellicose, indicating that his characteristic impatience with Nigeria’s political slothfulness predated his largely unprincipled and probably ethnic-induced excursion into Mr Obi’s LP. Let us crash this democracy, he had bellowed. As he put it: “We have a fundamental problem. We have to bring this system down completely and rebuild.” Astounded, his interviewer had asked him if he could elucidate on his pithy comment. “Destroy it,” he said fiercely. Unsure whether he heard the professor right, the gobsmacked interviewer probed further whether the professor was talking about destroying the democratic system. Prof. Utomi doubled down. “Crash the whole thing. It is not working for Nigeria; it will not work for Nigeria,” he said, lips quivering with anger. The current political situation, not to say the failure of his lionised presidential candidate, Mr Obi, and the severity of the humiliating losses in the courts must have sent the eminent political economist into a rage.

    His most recent call last month for revolution was spiced with allusions and illustrations from diverse parts of the world. His excursionary mention of Brazil, Somalia and notable social scientists and development economists all culminated in the intemperate assertion that the Nigerian system had become so crooked as to be unworthy of being patched up or saved. As he said, “My problem is not whether the Nigerian revolution is imminent; it is knocking on the door. The burden on my soul is that it could be the dawning of Robert Kaplan’s Coming Anarchy that may be a chauffeur-driven passage on the road to Somalia.” Earlier, in the same piece, he had concluded dismally: “…But today…I watch a legitimacy drought-stricken Abuja rush to do what it perceives as the desire of Paris and Washington DC against the interest of the people of Nigeria and Niger.” Here, he was of course referencing current political realities and frustrations which he thought ought to have produced only one outcome, to wit: “…In most countries, the angry poor would have poured into the streets, but this is Nigeria.”

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    It has probably not occurred to him that his history of political diatribe lends itself to only one possible conclusion: that once he fails to get what he wants, he prefers to throw away the baby with the bathwater. It is curious that he does not seem bothered that his extreme and repeated responses to Nigeria’s existential crises pigeonholes him, a notable intellectual supposedly gifted with a wider vista than the ordinary commentator, into the same cocoon as the hysterical Oby Ezekwesili, Chimamanda Adichie, Charles Oputa, aka Charly Boy, and a host of others. His intellectual vista is much wider, and he has cultivated the friendship of far more enlightened and liberal social scientists enough to lead him to better and deeper understanding of how societies work or unravel. But in his association with Mr Obi inside the stifling LP vehicle they borrowed to prosecute their political agenda, the professor has been dismissive, unyielding, acerbic and obviously annihilative. Yet, Mr Obi was for much of his campaign before the elections pedantic, unideological, incoherent, divisive, and in a disturbing sense even theocratic. Had the LP candidate won the presidential race last February, it is unclear Prof. Utomi would be so apocalyptic. There is ultimately something self-serving, if not quite naïve, and something rather regional and insular about the professor who pretends to be cosmopolitan and academic.

    Whether national transformation or revolution, Prof. Utomi’s advocacy does not appear as altruistic and nationalistic as he seems to suggest. Much worse, he and others like him calling for a revolution and inciting the public on all sides simply don’t know what they are wishing. The Roman Empire could not sustain its power for more than a 1,000 years, that is discounting Byzantium; nor did Greece, Medo-Persia, the Chaldeans and the Babylonians last for eternity. Even Marxism, whether of the Russian, Chinese or Yugoslavian variety, has all but petered out. Cuba’s socialism has lost steam. Yet these were well founded ideological systems that had a purpose and drive. Prof. Utomi’s call for revolution is not based on any ideological foundations, nor has he suggested any structured and systematic template to guide an understanding of the kind of society he visualises. What is clear is that he wants some general improvement in how institutions and structures are run in Nigeria. What is not clear is why anyone who has studied European history up to the modern era, including their revolutions of 1848, would believe that a civic culture could only be birthed by a revolution, not to talk of one promoted so discordantly by Prof Utomi?      

  • Tinubu’s first tentative steps

    Tinubu’s first tentative steps

    Last week, President Bola Tinubu stepped down the nomination of 24-year-old Imam Kashim Imam as board chairman of the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA). The administration should have foreseen the controversy certain to trail the appointment, even though the first-class mechanical engineering graduate, and son of the president’s associate, was believed to have been nominated by Works minister Dave Umahi. In early August, Kano State nominee Maryam Shetty was also dramatically dropped from the ministerial list hours before senatorial screening, perhaps on account of her dogged and enthusiastic support on social media for the doomed Yemi Osinbajo presidential bid. Former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai was also controversially dropped from the ministerial list when the senate declined to screen him until security reports cleared him. The suspicion is that the administration is neither consulting enough nor doing adequate homework.

    But just as the Tinubu administration suffered some notable hiccups in appointments, nearly all of them avoidable with a little more spadework, some of the administration’s policies and programmes, suffering from lack of consultations and research, have also suffered unpleasant reversals. Its negotiations with striking Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) were, to put it mildly, inexpert and hesitant, punctuated by embarrassing and sometimes quick reversals. It has doubled down on its brusque removal of fuel subsidy, a policy it anchored on creative verbal engineering, but probably wished with the wisdom of hindsight it executed that fine policy much cleverer than it managed. The naira float, too, has been problematic, not because it is a bad policy, but because its execution was akin to a peremptory decree. The administration is in fact still trying to rein in the consequences of naira depreciation. Last Friday, it granted university teachers and resident doctors waivers over the no-work, no-pay policy which had led to the withholding of their salaries. It was kind of the administration; but by paying ASUU half of their withheld wages, and wringing a signed concession from them, the administration exhibited grudging regard for the issues at play. It refused to admit that lecturers do so much more in the universities than just teach.

    Apart from the lack of surefootedness in a few of the appointments made by the administration, including the mistiming of the EFCC and ICPC appointments, President Tinubu may be signaling anxiety in the minds of his fanatical supporters while triggering exultation in the camps of his enemies. He has spent over four months in office, probably enough time to calm down and settle into a far more solid and less seismic method of doing business. Outside the administration, there are questions about whether he is overwhelmed by the newness of his surrounding and the unprecedentedness of his assumption of the presidency. As far as human calculations go, he was indeed nearly not elected. Succumbing to malignant campaigns against the person, health, and behavior of Senator Tinubu when he was an aspirant and candidate, his predecessor, ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, did his best, including deploying state power and resources, to prevent the ascension of the former Lagos State governor. The plots would have worked had the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), not snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by splintering into four irreconcilable parts.

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    But if President Tinubu is not surefooted in some of his policies and appointments on account of the sheer remarkability of his election and the suspicion that it is yet to dawn on him that he is indeed the president, might the reason then be because of the unresolved PDP and Labour Party (LP) suits against his election? It is unlikely. President Tinubu is an intuitive and perceptive leader. If he is unable to accurately assess the substance of the suits against him, his lawyers, who are among the country’s finest, must have educated him that his defence is ironclad for the simple reason that neither the PDP candidate nor the LP candidate led evidence to show that they won the February 25 presidential poll. Their pleadings were simply gaseous air, with scant evidentiary value, insignificant enough to create doubt in the mind of any jurist, let alone merit victory. Whatever ails the Tinubu administration can simply not be because he is mesmerised by his new status or because he entertains any fear about the Supreme Court deciding against him. Nevertheless, whatever factors are causing the hiccups seem potent enough to chip away, slowly and insidiously, at his reputation as a can-do leader. He will need to deal with those factors and neutralise them both for the sake of his reputation and in order to have an easier run at a second term should he choose to take that option when the time comes. He has proved a courageous leader, and it has advanced the cause of national stability that he was elected as president not beholden to any private and powerful interest. What is more, merely looking at his general cabinet, it is evident he seems a great recruiter of talents.

    The suspicion overall is that he has simply not got his kitchen cabinet right. No, the problem is not his health, regardless of whatever anyone thinks, and certainly not any demons pursuing him. Until he puts together a far better and more competent and gifted team to constitute his immediate circle, he will continue to experience needless hiccups and find it cumbersome forging a winning formula out of the rich talents he has assembled. His cabinet may be a bit bloated and a mockery of the prevailing national economic mood, but it is redeemed by the many brilliant and eager technocrats and politicians among the number. When he decides on a kitchen cabinet, it will advise him on periodic meetings with men and women of substance, intellect and heft who would look the president in the face and caution him against some of his rambunctious and spontaneous policies over which he is proving adept at flip-flopping. He does not lack such elder statesmen whom he had known for decades. But there is nothing to indicate that he meets with them monthly. There is also nothing in his policies and programmes to suggest that he has already put in place secret and alternative means of getting honest feedbacks from the public, so that he does not get used to hearing himself and those around him saying and reinforcing virtually the same orthodoxies of their fancy. President Tinubu should change tack as he begins to recognise and grapple with the complexities and intensities of a culturally and politically variegated Nigeria. He knows he is surrounded by too many enemies who want him to fail.

  • Ondo crisis symptomatic of Southwest leadership decline

    Ondo crisis symptomatic of Southwest leadership decline

    Governor Rotimi Akeredolu’s attempt to impeach his luckless deputy governor, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, has stalled legally, procedurally and politically. It will now require a lot of concentration, daring and persistence to unhorse the disfavoured politician and controversial husband. It is doubtful Mr Akeredolu can summon that persistence and concentration, considering how enfeebled by illness he has become. For more than three months, he was away in Germany treating an undisclosed illness. While on medical leave, reports of his deputy’s disloyalty deafened and incensed him. It is not known whether those alarming reports were responsible for his premature return home, or whether he really feared Mr Aiyedatiwa was capable of getting him declared incapacitated. But shortly after he arrived in Nigeria and took ‘refuge’ in Ibadan, Oyo State, the irate governor kick-started impeachment moves against his deputy by first stripping him of all his aides.

    That impeachment effort, which has dragged on uncharacteristically for more than a month, has now become snarled in the legislature, All Progressives Congress (APC) national headquarters, and the Federal High Court in Abuja. When the impeachment moves began, this column argued that it would take a miracle to save Mr Aiyedatiwa, especially because both the governor and the legislature were on the same page on the matter. The two are still on the same page. It is not clear how the courts will adjudicate the matter, but it can be safely assumed that the APC, which in recent years has proved less calculating and prescient than it pretends to be, will set store by its ability to perform the role of a fire brigade and peacemaker. Clearly, if the impeachment effort drags on for a little more than the governor’s liver can take, he will be distracted, if not lose interest altogether.

    The Federal High Court, Abuja will rule on the matter on October 30; for that was where Mr Aiyedatiwa took refuge to forestall his impeachment. The APC reconciliation committee headed by the level-headed former Katsina State governor Aminu Masari will probably do its best to ensure that the Ondo boat is not rocked too much as to jeopardise next year’s governorship election. It will lean on the governor to embrace peace and reconcile with his deputy. The legislature will toe the line of the governor: if he forecloses impeachment, the lawmakers will follow suit. But if the governor and the legislature cannot throw out the deputy governor, for his sins are actually grievous, they will do their best to neutralise him politically speaking. Mr Aiyedatiwa desperately wants to succeed his boss, and was evidently impatient and unfeeling in birthing his ambition while Mr Akeredolu was writhing in pain in Germany. Indeed, he has been largely tactless, amoral and reckless. He may now actually get his first wish, if things align fortuitously for him; it is, however, hard seeing him win the primary ticket, let alone win the main governorship poll in 2024.

    Mr Aiyedatiwa is privately and publicly unfit for a position of responsibility. His home front is unflattering, and his public office is marked by series of poor judgements and shocking calls. Unable to give loyalty or exude camaraderie, he is even more disabled from attracting or soliciting any kind of deep affection. On the surface, he is debonair, confident and soft-spoken. But at bottom, he has neither depth nor gravitas, at least nothing to qualify or recommend him for high office. However, he only bears secondary responsibility for the political morass swirling around Ondo. Mr Akeredolu in fact bears the greater responsibility for the unnecessary crisis enveloping the state, including its lack of inspiring example to the region. He fell out with his former deputy, Agboola Ajayi, and ensured he did not return with him for a second term, and was perhaps partly responsibility for his defeat in the last senatorial race. No one was certain that in his relationship and dispute with Mr Ajayi, he was not guilty of poor judgement in nominating him, in the first place, as running mate. In the nomination of Mr Aiyedatiwa, the governor was solely responsible, a selection now clearly based on poor judgement.

    It is not easy blaming Mr Akeredolu for anything, seeing how hobbled by illness he is. But this is politics and governance, not sentiments. He made the wrong call when he nominated Mr Aiyedatiwa as his running mate, and was a poorer judge of character by failing to vet his proposed deputy in all possible ways, including whether the nominee had the character and capacity to succeed him should anything unforeseen happen. There is little to suggest he carried out the necessary vetting. His failure may not be surprising. Even his leadership of the state, particularly in terms of innovativeness, leaves much to be desired. Far more than the human and economic resources available to the state, Mr Akeredolu had proved inadequate and unexampled. He seemed, therefore, quite the kind of politician capable of nominating flawed and incompetent deputies.

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    But mediocrity and lack of inspiration and innovativeness are not limited to Ondo State. The problems are regionwide, with Ondo merely symptomatic of the region’s worst. Shockingly, perhaps with the exception of Oyo State – but only just – the Southwest under both the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and APC has entered a period of leadership decline so enervating that there is no period in history to compare with it. The Southwest has managed to trundle along in comparison, but not quite in competition, with the rest of the country. Its rich history has become unsustainable, while it has also become less ideological, less profound, less visionary, less secular, and increasingly more average and superstitious. Nothing distinguishes or differentiates the Southwest from the rest of the country, though it manifests a semblance of peace and stability. Lagos is corrupted by influx of migrants, its strength and soul and identity vitiated by a strange miscegenation of hostile and insidious cultures. And while Osun has lost pretence to administrative rationality, Ogun dithers in paralysis.

    If Mr Akeredolu is unable to get rid of his deputy, he will bide his time, waylay his victim during the primary, and punish him before the governorship poll. The deputy governor will, however, hope to outlast the ailing governor whom he had not spared kind or sympathetic thoughts. But no matter how things shape out for the governor, his political family is strong enough to make a difference in endorsements, and indeed powerful enough to make the difference in the next governorship election. He may not have been exemplary as many thought he would be on account of his training, exposure and experience; and he may even have lacked the capacity to make a lasting impact on Ondo, but he has had a significant rule sufficient in the short term to punish his enemies and reward his friends. Whether Mr Aiyedatiwa survives the Akeredolu barrage or not, he will be number one on the guillotine.

  • Lagos environmental sanitation nostalgia

    Lagos environmental sanitation nostalgia

    On September 22, while touring the state to assess adherence to environmental laws, Lagos State governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu reportedly mulled the reintroduction of the state’s monthly environmental sanitation practice. He was said to be unhappy about how the state’s environmental laws were being flouted. Obviously he believes that conducting a three-hour clean-up once a month would do the trick. Did it solve the problem before? He seems to suggest that it is only those three hours on that one day in the month that the state’s environmental laws could be enforced. In other words, the state lacks the wherewithal to enforce environmental laws on other days of the month. There can be no worse admission of a state’s impotence in the face of violations of the law, or of a state’s lack of innovation and imaginativeness.

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    Reintroducing the monthly environmental practice is nothing but a feeble and unimaginative surrender to nostalgia. For a megacity and commercial capital of a country of 200 million people, and a state with an estimated population of over 20 million people, it is worrisome that it appears to put so much premium on a one-day, three-hour clean-up measure to remedy the abhorrent environmental practice of lawbreakers. Has the state government calculated the economic cost of arresting commerce for three hours? In a world that has become highly sophisticated, where environmental issues and other societal challenges are dealt with at the highest technologically innovative level, it is disturbing that the state is attempting to return to a primeval era. Mr Sanwo-Olu should enforce the law and put a team together that can innovate Lagos out of its environmental quagmire, rather than look for simplistic ways out.

  • Nigeria, wars and global uncertainties

    Nigeria, wars and global uncertainties

    Few observers gave Nigeria any chance of surmounting the electoral uncertainties and socio-political and economic crises that plagued the country in the past one year. But the country triumphed, not because it knew how to save itself from itself, nor because it had any magic wand to wave, but because forces far stronger and probably celestial simply decided to intervene. Despite enormous amount of negative pronouncements and threats, the election campaigns were largely violence-free, and the elections and inauguration went on without any significant hitch. Insidious attempts by a few powerful individuals and former presidents to abort the process also miscarried. In the midst of global uncertainties, wars and economic downturns, and despite its knack for economic mismanagement and national failings, Nigeria has remained inexplicably and surreally an oasis of stability and hope.

    The rest of the world has not been so fortunate. Russia is at war with Ukraine, a needless and avoidable conflict based on ideological absurdity and national pride. Thousands of lives have been lost, billions of dollars in property and infrastructural damage sustained, and global and debilitating economic forces unleashed. The war is no nearer being resolved than it was when the first shot was fired in hubris. Parts of Southwest and Southeast Asia are also up in arms. In the Taiwan Strait, China is sabre rattling against Taiwan, North Korea is projecting bellicosity, and South China Sea is no longer at ease, especially with a resurgent Philippines and fretful Japan waking up to their historic duties in the region. Meanwhile the Middle East never stopped smouldering, and with ISIS recently decapitated, and Syria hobbled by war and economic and infrastructural disaster, it has been one crisis after another. Then Azerbaijan, using military force and caviar diplomacy, marched into Nagorno-Karabakh last month and put paid to decades of Armenian self-determination struggle. No one, not even the United States, is strong enough to check the wholesale destabiliation of these regions.

    Just before the paroxysm of rage and fire in Palestine two Saturdays ago, West Africa, a region the world expects Nigeria to influence positively, also caught the flu of coups upon coups. Guinea, Burkina Faso (which wants to build a nuclear reactor with the help of Russians after driving out the French), Mali, Niger Republic, and Gabon have suddenly discovered their hidden fascination for coups d’etat, while military officers are bent on gratifying their hunger for power. They have not enacted visionary laws to ginger their societies into greatness, nor built economic models that are sustainable, nor yet found a solution to Jihadi extremism inundating the Sahelian region. Instead, they have remained apoplectic, stultified by leadership incompetence and almost total lack of vision and altruism. Gabon’s coup was simply musical chairs; Niger’s was a palace coup; Mali’s was a pirouette of superfluous leadership changes; and Burkina Faso’s was even more farcical, as Lt.-Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba took over in January 2022 only to be replaced eight months later by 34-year-old Captain Ibrahim Traore, a special forces commander. Neither had been able to reclaim about 40 percent of the country lost to Jihadist rebels in the North. In West Africa’s coup belt, Russia is replacing France.

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    The unease in Central Africa has not abated, nor has East Africa been completely pacified, what with Somalia still a failed state, and Ethiopia, Eritrea and others still disquieted by instability and economic crises. It was expected that Nigeria, having escaped doomsday by rampaging bandits in the Northwest, Boko Haram in the Northeast, herdsmen fury in the Middle Belt, so-called Unknown Gunmen in the Southeast, and self-inflicted injuries by past administrations deploying ethnic exceptionalism and economic cronyism, the electoral success the country pulled off early in the year would inspire the political and business elites to curtail their exuberance and vote for peace. Instead, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, leaders of the opposition PDP and LP, and labour unions unmindful of decades of economic depredation, have been calling for insurrection, either through coups or through street protests. They seemed determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and war from the tremulous hands of peace. No national elite has been so irresponsible since the advent of the Fourth Republic, as they seek to return Nigeria to the 1966 and 1967 era, and supposing that in the face of trouble or chaos they would escape unscathed.

    Africa is convulsed by unrest, even as the rest of the world is fixated on the Israeli-Palestinian nightmare. It is time Nigeria took its responsibility to the sub-region and the rest of Africa more seriously, firstly by reordering its priorities, and secondly by taking deliberate and sensible steps to establish peace and order. No country is immune. Israel woke up one morning to the sound of gunfire and RPGs, and has now mobilised for war; so, too, did Ukraine. The consequences to global energy and food prices are incalculable. It is thus dismaying that with fairly calm and acquiescent neighbours, Nigeria is nevertheless foolishly turning on itself to engender war when peace beckons so bravely and eagerly.

  • Israel versus Gaza/Hamas: wars without end

    Israel versus Gaza/Hamas: wars without end

    The October 7 attack on Israel by over a thousand Hamas Palestinian militants has so far, even in the absence of ground offensive into Hamas base in Gaza, cost nearly four thousand lives. The estimates are about 1,350 killed in Israel, and 2,200 (and counting) killed in Gaza in reprisal attacks. More than 11,000 have been injured. But far beyond the casualty figures, the share scale of the surprise Hamas offensive, and the execution of civilians and infants in a world where social media amplifies and sometimes valorises violence, may have cost Hamas as much as it believed it had gained. Middle Eastern countries and other militant groups which should have rallied enthusiastically to its cause have, on account of the details and images that came out of the attacks on Israeli Kibbutzim, been less eager to lend massive and unfettered support. In contrast, nearly all of Western Europe and the United States have been so horrified by what took place on October 7 that they have not thought twice about rallying behind the Israeli banner.

    Yet, Israel has not always been a model of exemplary behavior in the region, a fact that accounted for the previously uneasy relationship between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United States president Joe Biden. Before the Hamas attack, Mr Netanyahu’s governing coalition had been ultra-right, leading to the steady expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, police operations on Al-Aqsa mosque, and bloody forays into Gaza. Decades of war of attrition had turned Gaza into what some Palestinian activists and other global security analysts describe as an open-air prison. Having spurned a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis about five times, preferring instead the extermination of Jews in Palestine, particularly with the encouragement of Iran, the competing Palestinian authorities in Gaza and the West Bank have watched helplessly and frustratingly as Israel hardened its position over four or five Israeli-Gaza wars.

    The Hamas attack of two Saturdays ago must be understood from the perspective of the social and economic conditions in Gaza, the frustrations over the long stalemate, and the periodic shelling of the strip that follows every missile attack on Israel. Communities in most parts of the Middle East and some other parts of the world first erupted in joy on learning about the success of the surprise attacks, and how Hamas gave Israel a bloody nose, not to talk of the about 150 Israeli hostages ferried back into Gaza. While nearly all Arab countries are still thrilled by the Hamas invasion, there is great apprehension as to what would happen next, especially with the determined steps taken by the US to forestall a widening of the war. Iran has been somewhat ambivalent about the attacks, while still expressing general support for the Palestinian and Hamas cause. But the rest of the Middle East has been chastened by the deployment of brutal medieval tactics and methods by the militants. The world seems to be saying that missile killings and aircraft bombings, while they cause death and destruction, are nevertheless not the same as massacres and executions. Worse, the Hamas tactics also galvanised the West against the militants whom they describe as terrorists.

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    The days ahead are ominous should Israel embark on a ground offensive. While siege and targeted probing attacks would do the job more effectively, boots on the ground appear to be more popular in Israel. They have the hardware and the financial muscle to carry out the campaign; but it will be bloody and perhaps less efficient, without the possibility of bringing about a desirable outcome in the long term. Hamas and Islamic Jihad may both be destroyed and expelled from Gaza, but it will not be the end of militancy in the region, either in terms of missile or terror attacks from Gaza or through Intifada in Israel, as long as the predisposing factors remain. And as long as Israeli politics remains fractionalised, working out a peace deal may become increasingly complicated, especially with hardliners like Mr Netanyahu remaining in office, and the geopolitical significance of Jerusalem continuing to tantalise the world.

    Hamas may have introduced an unprecedented chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian war, overall, however, many analysts are pessimistic that a solution can be found to this extensive and regional battle for a piece of estate not longer than 20 minutes journey from one end to the other. It is not a religious war, contrary to what many people think, though Christians have tended to back Judaistic Israel, and Muslims back the Palestinians. There are debates about the histories of the original inhabitants of the land, with the Jews insisting they predated the Arab Palestinians in that corner of the world. And while both sides to the conflict in Palestine share in the blame, there are also other strategic considerations and calculations complicating the crisis. Indeed, some analysts believe that the precipitate action of Hamas militants two Saturdays ago may have been designed to truncate the impending Saudi Arabia /Israel peace deal gloated over by Mr Netanyahu just weeks ago at the UNGA, a deal Iran and Hamas clearly objurgated. The Middle East is a veritable smorgasbord of hard line politics and ambitions, mediated and sometimes moderated by great and super powers. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian cause may in fact be just a few of the pawns in an extensive and long-running regional and international power play.

    Israel is responding massively to the unprecedented Hamas attack. If Mr Netanyahu does not satisfy his countrymen’s popular and sanguinary craving, his government will fall. Indeed, there is no Israeli government that will not respond with clear severity to the humiliating provocation of October 7. Prime Minister Golda Meir (fourth prime minister, 1969 to 1974) responded fiercely to the Yom Kippur war in 1973, but her party lost the elections the following year, though she was not blamed for the surprise attack by a coalition of Arab forces led by Egypt and Syria. After her party’s 1974 electoral loss, she resigned as prime minister. Mr Netanyahu will almost certainly be punished one way or the other after the Gaza war, even if Israel were to achieve a stunning victory against Hamas. His least consideration now, however, is not the tenuousness of his position as prime minister. His main concern will be how to win a complicated war in Gaza foisted on him by militants who have turned that narrow and densely populated 40km strip of land into a maze of booby traps undergirded by human and hostage shields. He will also be less bothered by what Bible prophecies say about another dispersal occurring to the Jews before the end of days.