Category: Idowu Akinlotan

Niger State’s governor Muhammed Bago can be excused for reposing confidence in the option of negotiating with bandits. He was only recently sworn in as governor, and is just about three months in office. In those three months, he has met President Bola Tinubu a few times to discuss the subject of insecurity provoked by bandits and terrorists in his state. He had a highly publicised meeting with the president in June, and another one a little over a week ago. On the June occasion, he offered a brilliant analysis, by no means original of course, of the factors driving banditry and terrorism in Niger State. He was keenly aware of the rampage of the bandits, and he appeared to be clear on why they had become a terrible nuisance. But, his August meeting revealed an increasingly skeptical and disillusioned governor unsure how else to fight bandits who have become very active in five of the state’s 25 local governments.

After Mr Bago’s meeting with the president days ago, he told newsmen his government was toying with the idea of negotiating with the bandits and terrorists laying the state waste. Should negotiations fail, he said ruefully, he would encourage the military to use maximum force. Firstly, it is unlikely the military is not already deploying maximum force in fighting both banditry and Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgency. In Niger State, where the military recently lost some 36 soldiers, deadly force is already in use. So, scaling up the use of force is not an option the military is just contemplating. Secondly, Mr Bago, perhaps inspired by the Niger Republic conundrum and the argument over which comes first, diplomacy or deployment of force by ECOWAS, has spoken gravely but no less desperately about the utility of negotiating with bandits and terrorists. He obviously holds out some hope that some accommodation can still be reached with the militants.

With five local governments under the sway of banditry, and many more highways turned into gauntlets between which Nigerlites and other travellers must run regularly, a clearly exasperated Mr Bago can be forgiven for turning desperate. Worse, the security agents who have had more than a decade to rein in the bandits and stanch the flow of blood have struggled to counter the massacres and bloodletting. Farmers are left defenceless, and travellers are routinely abducted for ransom. The governor is afraid that the crisis could gradually escalate into unmanageable proportions, and he is anxious to remove every impediment to farming in this season. This may explain his desperation for dialogue.  But what would he tell the bandits, and what could he possibly offer bandits in exchange for years of living in splendour on the sweat of farmers and levies from gold and lithium mines? The governor deserves sympathy, regardless of the futility of his peace offerings. He feels the pains of his bedraggled compatriots, and he fears the creeping anomie that is beginning to overtake parts of his state, wondering when and how the horror would end.

But Mr Bago’s peace proposition is hardly original. If he does not think that his state could possibly match what the bandits get from crime, the failure of other states’ previous peace deals with bandits should alert him to the utter hopelessness of dialogue with hardened and intransigent terrorists. If what is happening in Niger State has anything to do with a clash of ideologies, dialogue could be an option. But it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, negotiating with bandits who profit from illegal mining and farming levies. Many years of ineffective counterterrorism and anti-banditry operations have only hardened the militants and made the crisis intractable. Mercifully for him, there is no shortage of dissertations on the banditry and terrorism crisis coursing through the Northwest. The problem is determining and executing the right and effective remedies. As the country is torn between options, bandits seized the opportunity to become better organised, their instruments of coercion expertly oiled, and their tentacles spread beyond the forests to lure highly placed individuals in the society. In short by their lethargy and sometimes complicity, Nigerian officials have allowed the disease to metastasise.

In June, Mr Bago’s analysis was impeccable. He had said: “We are endowed as a state with a lot of mineral deposits…Most of the places where you see this banditry are places where you have lithium or gold. So, a lot of these activities are associated with why banditry is springing up. However, yes, we will harness our mineral potential; we don’t intend to come to Abuja every month to collect FAAC or JAC or whatever you call it. As a state, we have to put all things in order so that we can harness these potentials. Now, the state also has an SPV. The state mining corporation, where we’re hoping to have an MOU or synergy with other mining companies so that we can harness that potential and I assure you that in the next one year, we will come out tops…”

But days ago, after feeling the heat of the bloodletting in his state, and forgetting that Zamfara and Katsina States had also once negotiated with bandits and still came to grief, Mr Bago had begun to moderate his enthusiasm for a decisive victory against the militants. “We are looking at two options: firstly, non-kinetic; as a government, we have put in machinery to start talking to the bandits,” the governor said resignedly. “We have also created a ministry for nomadic and pastoral affairs to look at the issues of Fulani herdsmen. You also need to understand that Niger State has the largest congregation of Fulani. Niger State is 8.3 million hectares of land with bodies of water, and the environment is very good for grazing. A lot of Fulani across the world, not just Africa, converge in Niger State, so we don’t want them to leave, we don’t want any major military activities, we want to talk to them. But if we don’t get to that level of dialogue, then probably, we have to go fully military.”

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It is a dangerous fallacy for the governor to see his state as a refuge for the global Fulani. Nothing suggests that Fulani people everywhere should see Niger State, or indeed Nigeria, as their patrimony. This strange and impractical idea is not only disruptive, as the governor and Nigerlites have now seen, it also complicates law enforcement and exacerbates national security crisis. It is not clear by what immigration or even economic laws the governor hopes to keep the global Fulani in the state. With such massive disruptions and killings as perpetrated in his state over mines and farms, it is shocking that Mr Bago still feels more primarily protective of the undocumented Fulani than the oath of office he took. Clearly, this confusion about who a Nigerian national is may also partly explain the hesitations and confusion in checkmating banditry and terrorism during the Buhari years. Niger State, and any other Northwest state for that matter, can of course welcome the Fulani from anywhere, but it must be in line with the law. Nigerian borders are well defined, and immigration laws do not leave any lacuna for foreigners to exploit for devious and violent purposes. If Mr Bago and others are conflicted about their identities and Nigeria’s immigration laws, it is the duty of the federal government to educate them. And if any foreigner should shed blood on Nigerian soil, regardless of his cultural affinity with a part of Nigeria, it is the duty of the security agencies to deal firmly and unequivocally with such crimes, not negotiate.

Mr Bago’s views on the internecine war in his state are revelatory. Perhaps some north-western governors think like him, torn between their filial loyalty to the global Fulani and their constitutional duty to their states. One of the implications of such confliction is the unacceptably high cost in money, materials and men dedicated to combating banditry. The previous administration may have unwisely allowed the crisis to fester; the current administration must not be immobilised by sentiments and indecision. Nigerian leaders took an oath to preserve and defend the constitution; they must be clear what that duty means. They have the opportunity of scores of studies explicating the crisis; they should also take advantage of those analyses to decide once and for all how to fight the menace that has kept the entire nation prostrate and debt-ridden. A few more years of the dithering that characterised the previous administration in the fight against banditry in the Northwest, not to say the terrible price young military personnel are paying for a needless and soulless conflict, could very well strengthen the militants and tip the country into the abyss. Suggesting dialogue with bandits is nothing but weakness, for the crisis at bottom is neither ideological nor a case of two people fighting. It is essentially a case of a group of people levying war against the state and revelling in it.

The excitement and funfair that accompanied the inauguration of the ministerial council last Monday will be talked about for months to come. But far beyond the sights and sounds of the inauguration is the delicate matter of what seem like campaign promises which ministers are mouthing as they assume office. Perhaps, having lost out in the giddy delight of promising heaven and earth in the campaigns, the ministers are merely playing catch-up. Left, right, and centre, they are promising everything. If they are not restrained, they will soon promise Nigerians Mars and Pluto.

Irrepressible as ever, Federal Capital City (FCT) minister, Nyesom Wike, has promised to deliver on the Abuja metro in eight months. Before now, the intra-city train service had almost become moribund, indeed stillborn, partly on account of how it was structured and the routes it was designed to service, routes which are a little removed from the city centre and densely populated areas. But Mr Wike, whose government in Rivers years ago was characterised by boisterousness and breathless infrastructural development, sees the Abuja metro as Lilliput, and himself as Gulliver. Like Hannibal, he will scale those ragged, icy Alps and take the battle to the snobbish, gluttonous Romans in the Abuja city centre. Eight months, he swore; eight months it must be.

Nearly all the ministers are promising things, and it would be unkind to conclude that Mr Wike has promised the most in a ministerial council whose members seem eager to outdo one another with promises. In fact, compared to him, the vivacious and passionate Betta Edu, Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation minister, has scaled the Himalayas with her own manifesto. She promises that her ministry will create 10 million jobs. No, don’t faint. Ten million jobs? Why, it’s her version of the Punic Wars. Sword in hand, shield by her side, and breastplate covering her vitals, she is determined to storm Carthage, destroy joblessness, and enslave that vicious enemy for all time. Ten million jobs, heh. Well, then, let Nigerians banish cynicism. She has promised; she must deliver.

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Poets are not fond of mathematics, regardless of what WAEC and JAMB indicate as entry qualifications into tertiary institutions. But Art, Culture, and the Creative Economy minister, the poet Hanatu Musawa, spoke in the idiosyncratic arcanum poets love to use to assail the public. She will ‘generate unprecedented revenue’, she said candidly, without pausing to find out whether she left her audience flummoxed. What does ‘unprecedented revenue’ mean beyond the tacitness of the phrase? Don’t fuss, dear reader. After all, in the world of applied poetry, they call her quaint usage poetic inexactitude, or perhaps latitude. You would not respect their craft should they deign to use plain, easy-to-understand language.

And of all the promises members of the Tinubu cabinet made, that of the Defence minister, Abubakar Badaru, easily takes the biscuit. It took the Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari administrations about 13 years to ‘technically degrade’ Boko Haram insurgency, while leaving banditry nearly unscathed. But Mr Badaru, the generalissimo from Jigawa State, promises that banishing insecurity and containing banditry and insurgency will be done in a year, insisting that failure is not an option. “We hardly fail, and we will not fail,” he intoned. Very well, then. The clock is ticking. It’ll be a year soon, anyway. And the country can’t wait to see just what kind of guided thermobaric bombs his troops will use to bust the bandits’ bunkers and ferret them out of their lairs.

There are of course more promises from where those few mentioned above came from. Ministers who have not made a grand promise will soon do so; and those who have made feeble promises but now fear being outdone, will retrieve their previous promises and put some catalyst in them. President Tinubu should resist the temptation of thinking his own promises, gargantuan enough on their own merit, were comparatively puny. He will have a hard time meeting the promises he made during the campaigns; his glib and fecund ministers will have an even harder time, having set the bar in the stratosphere.

The African Union (AU) has taken a slightly different approach from the rest of the world to the July 26 Niger Republic coup d’etat. It welcomed and advised that existing sanctions be maintained and tightened, even adding one or two more of its own. While it refuses to be gung ho about the ECOWAS plan of military intervention, the resolution of the African Union Peace and Security Council (AUPSC), directing the Niger Republic “military personnel to immediately and unconditionally return to their barracks and restore constitutional authority, within a maximum period of fifteen (15) days from the date of the adoption of the present Communiqué,” clearly saves the blushes of ECOWAS.

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In retrospect, the West African regional body should have coordinated its response to the coup with the AU. It will be hopeless for Niger Republic to defy the whole of Africa. And depending on how the Niger Republic issue is resolved, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea will take a cue and moderate their defiance. But, despite all this, what are conservative AU and ECOWAS saying and thinking about the neocolonial overreach of France and other metropoles in the affairs of Francophone countries. The West African coupists disingenuously latched on to the subject, for they feel it more than any other country; it should not be ignored.  

It was perhaps too optimistic to expect some of Nigeria’s political clerics to relent after their presidential election predictions spectacularly misfired. They were hushed up, indeed chastened for a while, approximately for some three months; but after catching their breath, after watching their predictive sequel suggesting there would be no inauguration misfire badly, they had seemed to surrender to indescribable gloominess. Now, after just two months or so of the new administration introducing pain-inducing economic policies, clerics have again found their voice and begun to thunder against the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration. Experience should have taught them to be wary of the bold posturing that turned them into objects of derision before and shortly after the May 29 inauguration, indeed to be wary of how they second-guess God in the name of prophecies, but their anger and dismay will not let them. Obviously, for reasons not easily explicable, the clerics will not relent.

August has been productive for them, as they find ecclesiastical rationalisation to underpin their political discourses and statements. There are video substantiations for their pastoral outbursts. Pastor Obi Ogbo of the Garden of Grace International Church, Awka, Anambra State, in one of his services raised poignant innuendo-laden prayer points against the five Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) justices presiding over the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP) petitions against the victory of President Bola Tinubu. He emblazoned the church pulpit with the photographs of the five justices, and declared they would ‘rule in the fear of God’, and would not ‘bow to satanic inducements’. He then magisterially restrained them from ‘unjust judgement and from wicked judgement’. He followed up by mentioning each of the justices by name and then declaring they would not ‘bow to witchcraft, to Satanism, and to occultism’. He finally decreed that they would not ‘judge against Nigeria… and the Spirit of the Lord would overrule them, and they would do the bidding of God’ in order to save Nigeria. Clearly, he had presumed the justices to be inclined towards injustice. More, he was unable to disguise his pro-Peter Obi leanings.

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Aubja-based Pastor Sarah Omakwu of the Family Worship Centre was no less overtly and scathingly pro-Obi. Before the elections, she had taunted critics who warned that a vote for Mr Obi was a waste. The Christian community was ready to waste their votes, she said offhandedly. She meant that fruitless casting of votes in the cynical and sarcastic sense; but she turned out to be prescient. Now, this August, she has begun to fulminate again, discomfited by how the voting turned out in February, not to say how nothing thwarted the inauguration in line with many clerics’ apocalyptic predictions. In her message uploaded on August 15 or so and applauded by the churlish Charles Oputa, aka Charly Boy, the fluent and engaging pastor wailed: “I have noticed that Nigerians have moved on politically. We have accepted what has become. On one side of our mouth, we said we did not want a Muslim-Muslim ticket. And then on another side of our mouth, we have accepted it and we are going on. So, I come to say, no, we can’t accept it. This government is still Muslim-Muslim. And some of you have accepted it. You are even wishing that somebody you know would be made minister. Ministers over what? Ministers over illegality?” Of course, she said so much incandescent more.

But then came Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Citadel Global Community Church, also last Sunday, with his customary mixture of sarcasm, political and legal theories, and theological contextualisations. But just as he vacillated over the previous Muhammadu Buhari administration – scathing today, and amenable tomorrow – he was difficult to place last Sunday. It is not clear why he occasionally turns the pulpit to a soapbox, but anyway he spoke on a wide-ranging number of political issues under the theme ‘Vice, Virtue & Time: Three Things That Never Stand Still’. Hear him: “I’m reminded of the warning that I sounded to Nigerians in January 2023 in my address titled, ‘Bridging the gap between politics and governance.’ I warned that the politics of entitlement; the ’emilokan’ type of politics would breed an imperium presidency, one that would slide towards dictatorship and would be intolerant of dissent. This same impulsive leadership style was clearly evident when the president recently led the Economic Community of West African States to violate an ancient principle of diplomacy that is recognised even in the Holy Book that you must offer peace before declaring war. By placing military invasion on the table from the very start before subsequently exploring diplomatic options with the coup plotters in the Republic of Niger, President Tinubu once again put the cart before the horse, thus placing Nigeria and the sub-region in a precarious situation.” The pastor did not say how impulsiveness translated into dictatorship. But at least the sarcasm was unmistakable.

Abrasively, Pastor Bakare then declared that the honeymoon was over for President Tinubu. After just two months? But unlike the sulking Pastors Omakwu and Ogbo, the Citadel pastor’s criticism of the administration appeared not designed to favour Mr Obi; and as a lawyer who has probably read the final written addresses of all the lawyers in the petitions before the PEPC, and as someone unfettered by the foolish sentiments that blind the man on the street, he knew that neither Atiku Abubakar of the PDP nor Mr Obi was going anywhere with their petitions. Instead of expending unproductive energy in wishing for a judicial miracle to overthrow the Tinubu presidency, or joining ranks with clerics who surreptitiously wish for a popular revolt to overthrow the system, he capped his advice to President Tinubu in the following words: “Take the yoke off the neck of the poor, go after the looters, recover the loot, and retool it to the benefit of Nigerians. In simple terms, Mr President, kill corruption, not Nigerians…”

Why it has not occurred to the clerics that the fundamentals of their faith abhor the unwarranted politicisation of their pulpits, especially given the fact that some of their members could belong to other political parties apart from the favoured one, is exceptionally hard to explain. Would it not be far better and safer and unimpeachable to restrict themselves to the love rubric that forms the core of their faith?

Until President Bola Tinubu grants a no-holds-barred interview to explain himself, Nigerians will be left with conjectures on why it took nearly six months after he was elected to emplace his cabinet. Constituting a cabinet at the state level is a cakewalk; replicating the process at the federal level is both daunting and nerve-wracking. There were a few surprises in the Tinubu cabinet, but nothing earth-shaking, not in the list itself, nor in the assignation of portfolios. There were women on the list, but not enough; and there were youths, but also not significantly remarkable. On the whole, however, and notwithstanding that the cabinet registered little impact on the Richter scale, it is a functional list, one that could conceivably help the president deliver on his vision. Many of the ministers already acquired reputations from different backgrounds; they are thus expected to hold their own in cabinet debates and maintain their points of view. They will of course give quarter, knowing full well that their membership of the cabinet is at the discretion of the president. But they will be loth to abandon their convictions or personalities.

Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo dominated his cabinet, even towering over his ministers, especially because of his military background and his idiosyncratic impatience and ideological perfunctoriness; and Goodluck Jonathan infected his ministers with his doubts as well as communicated his lack of surefootedness to his cabinet by virtually surrendering critical aspects of his administration to a few individuals in his cabinet. But President Tinubu, given the constellation of big and aging names he has assembled around himself, not to say his earthiness and the permanent grin on his face which youths may find disarming, will probably feel more like primus inter pares. It is, therefore, bewildering why the opposition against him has been both instinctive and unremitting. Instead of recognising and applauding the denotative value of his presidency, that he is a president not beholden to any power group or interest – whether ethnic, religious or class – his opponents in the last presidential poll and their supporters have done everything possible to undermine the election or delegitimise it.

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The opponents could not have won, not after fracturing their ranks and playing awful politics, including securing the conspiratorial collusion of the past administration using state economic policies. And as the courts will judge, they in fact never won and, worse, were unable to prove that they won, going by the superficiality of their final written addresses. But obviously, their opposition to the Tinubu presidency, egged on by social and traditional media and other powerful political and economic interests, will continue for a very long time. Some of the opposition wish the entire system to collapse, anarchy to overtake the country, or the military to stage a coup, and have indeed surreptitiously sponsored invitations to that effect on social media. Yet, and profoundly, the Tinubu electoral victory beats a remarkable pathway to a great democratic future where anyone can win the presidency despite huge official and unofficial opposition from the government of the day, despite Nigeria’s errant and ossified religious fault lines, despite ethnic background and population politics, despite intraparty conspiracies, and despite countervailing demographics. But incapable of hard-nosed analyses, Labour Party’s Peter Obi and his pugnacious army of dissenters disregard the opportunities presented by the Tinubu victory to rebuild their coalition in order to make a fresh bid in 2027. Powerful interest groups inspired by people who think like Chief Obasanjo have also failed to see that Poll 2023 represents another opportunity to reclaim and relive the advantages the 1993 election afforded Nigeria to overcome and heal its religious schisms; and that regardless of the size of a presidential aspirant’s ethnic group, it is possible for him to cultivate trust in most parts of the country and build a rainbow coalition that transcends all divisions.

Someday, perhaps soon, many Nigerians will see the value of the 2023 presidential poll outcome. Despite the subtle ethnic and religious blackmail against the judiciary, the courts will rule justly. The system will stabilise, there will be no coup, and notwithstanding the prevailing harsh economic conditions or the identity crisis suffered by Labour unions and their party, the LP, Nigerians will weather the storm, reinvigorate their democracy, rebuild their system and economy, and forge ahead in the hope they can ignite something in the souls of the rest of Africa.

President Tinubu took much longer than expected cobbling together a cabinet, and even began very warily and laboriously in assembling a corps of advisers; but if he manages to regain his composure in rethinking and recalibrating the Nigerian economy while eschewing the spontaneity that has thrown a spanner in the works of his policies, he will have a great and successful presidency. There are bright flashes already in some of his policies, obviously backed by convictions; but out of his seemingly disparate cabinet, he must now forge a kitchen cabinet capable of helping him to avoid the kind of complicating mistakes that dogged his initial and awkward response to the Niger Republic coup crisis, his bold but desultory and palliating approach to fuel subsidy removal, and his inexplicable reluctance to begin engaging with his countrymen.

Rising from a meeting with Vice President Kashim Shettima last week, former Edo State governor and past APC chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, insinuated that the previous administration put the economy out of joint, necessitating the drastic and painful remedies being applied by the current administration. According to him, “The government inherited a terrible economic situation. Everybody knows it. The government inherited an economy in which our total national revenue was barely enough to service our debt burden, spending 96 percent, which is to say (for) every N100,000 Nigeria earns, N96,000 goes into debt repayment, to service debt. So, you have only N4,000 left to pay all the salaries.”

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But this is a subject the Tinubu administration has been extremely wary of investigating or discussing. It is a big dilemma. Everybody knows how the mess was produced, even fulminating clerics know, not to say the civil society and pressure groups all over the country. Mr Oshiomhole and a few top politicians and administration officials may occasionally vent their spleen on the past administration, especially when pressure mounts on the APC to deliver utopia faster than is possible or even rational. But for President Tinubu and Aso Villa, there is not going to be a word on ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, regardless of what everybody knows. They would prefer you read their lips.

Last Sunday, newspapers published reports on the Defence Headquarters‘ view of the request made by some Nigerians for the military to carry out a coup d’etat. The public then excoriated the DHQ for not first arresting those who came to them soliciting for their intervention. Chastened, the DHQ said there was no coup request before them. But the back and forth was nothing more than a storm in a teacup. Here is the original statement by the Defence Information spokesman: “The Defence Headquarters frown at a report being circulated online about welfare issues in the Armed Forces of Nigeria. The report’s call on the military to interfere in our democracy is highly unpatriotic, wicked, and an attempt to distract the Armed Forces of Nigeria from performing its constitutional responsibilities.”

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How the media, particularly the social media, construed this statement to mean there were coup requests before the military is baffling. Obviously, it’s a question of semantics. Alarmed, the DHQ issued this rebuttal: “The Defence Headquarters is concerned about false and disturbing social media reports twisted to state that the Armed Forces of Nigeria received a request to effect a change of leadership in the country. We want to use this opportunity to reiterate that the Armed Forces of Nigeria never received nor made such a declaration at any time to anyone or any group…”

Even after the election tribunal had ended its work and the losers stopped drawing parallels between horses and wishes, such malevolent twisting of statements will continue, perhaps mitigated as time goes on. Illiteracy may account for a part of the slipshodness; but overall, the semantic overreach beloved by the social media will be put down to dangerous incitement by conspirators eternally dissatisfied with the outcome of the last presidential poll.