Category: Idowu Akinlotan

Moments before Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, a Nigerian Professor of Linguistics teaching at a United States university, Uju Anya, remorselessly excoriated the dying British monarch, wishing her ‘excruciating’ death, and describing her as the “chief monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire”. In a manner of speaking, she spat on her grave even before she was buried. Prof. Anya has in turn been excoriated by critics for her ungracious and undignified words. Rebuking her has, however, not caused her to wince. Instead, she has doubled down on her views, which she insisted were considered, and has appeared to feel triumphant that she had in her own unique way helped bring to the fore discussions about what the Igbo in particular went through during the civil war as indirect result of colonisation and the chicaneries of the British Empire. As she tweeted with undisguised triumphalism days after the Queen eventually died, and in reference to the plight of the Igbo in Nigeria, “Together we shared our pain and taught the world our history.”

While Prof. Anya’s tweet has received some measure of global publicity, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos even making oblique reference to it, the British, let alone the icy British monarchy, will not dignify her with a response. From her short tweet, it is obvious that the eminent professor knows a thing or two about linguistics; but when it comes to history, especially history of the Nigerian civil war and its socio-economic and political underpinnings, she clearly knows little. She has instigated a swarm of responses to her wild historical exaggerations, generalisations and mischaracterisation, and many critics horrified by her speciousness have taken her to task. The reader should peruse some of these responses elsewhere. But it is enough to point out that the Southeast’s victim complex is indeed real and enduring. Because there has been no closure to the civil war for various reasons, including resistance by the Southeast itself, that complex will indeed remain for a long time, blighting relationships – some of which are now being exported – and obfuscating sensible analyses and understanding of the Igbo condition and politics.

During the 80^th birthday celebration of business mogul Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, Imo State governor Hope Uzodinma attempted to explicate and isolate some of the main causes of the Igbo failure in achieving reintegration or a successful bid for the presidency. In his lecture, the governor talked about the Igbo lack of restraint, their isolationism undergirded by a feeling of exceptionalism, and their contempt for diplomatic dealings with other groups and entities — in short their controversial worldview that needs a lot of restructuring. It is not clear how well-received his analysis on that delicate subject was, but he has not been the only one to see just how the tactlessness of the Igbo during critical situations, such as the post-1966 coup, had been self-defeatist, thus negating their ascendancy and acceptability. Indeed, in her response to critics’ condemnation of her first tweet on the dying Queen, Prof. Anya had needlessly isolated the Igbo for plaudits, despite her opinion resonating in many parts of the world, including Nigeria, which were at the receiving end of the evils of colonialism and neocolonialism. And what on earth was her sexual preference doing in her second tweet? Why does she think the world needs a reminder of her private peccadilloes?

Prof. Anya undoubtedly vulgarised the major and still ramifying issue of colonialism. Had she simply elucidated the topic and tied it to the mawkish celebration of the Queen’s illness and death, perhaps she would have received a less controversial and more dignified response fitting for a university teacher. Her fleeting portrayal of the civil war was brutally insular, and her reference to colonialism was, to put it mildly, horribly misplaced. The British Empire was of course self-centred, no matter how well clothed in saccharine British historians and colonialists paint it. In Nigeria they gave the waning Sokoto Caliphate a shot in the arm in 1904, and they amalgamated Nigeria in a way that was beneficial only to the Empire, not to the indigenous peoples of Nigeria. And at independence, they instituted a system that attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to create one destiny out of many nations. But there were many other things they were not responsible for, such as the Igbo responses to the misshapen institutions and dying embers of colonialism, and the Igbo vacillations and self-centredness that produced the ill-fated 1966 coup and the civil war. Rather than keep up the victim complex, and entrench the bitter and divisive rhetoric of tribe and supremacy, it is important for the Igbo and the rest of Nigeria to chart a path towards achieving a closure.

The Southwest Yoruba produced the inimitable Obafemi Awolowo, an administrator par excellence, who would have done wonders with Nigeria had he got the chance to rule. But, despite all the assumptions and approximations about the First Republic polls and the 1979 polls, he never came very close to winning a national election. It took Moshood Abiola in 1993 to show the Yoruba how politics should be played, despite his seemingly ‘unYoruba’ failings. The Yoruba may be losing their globally acclaimed secularism, that is, politics unencumbered by religion, but in Bola Ahmed Tinubu, they may be again incidentally making the bold and, for these times, radical statement that the Southwest should disentangle politics from religion. More, aping Chief Abiola, the Yoruba have begun entrenching the wisdom of building networks and bridges all over the country in order to inspire trust across ethnic groups and religions necessary to win elections. Neither exceptionalism nor triumphalism, as is unfortunately being marketed by the Southeast, would deliver the desired outcome. President Muhammadu Buhari had flown that chute three times in past elections to no avail, until he received help to build bridges to the Southwest and to other religions outside his cocoon.

Prof. Anya’s indefensible and execrable tweet, including the jubilant response from some Igbo commentators on social media, shows how suspiciously widespread the animus in the Southeast is, and how influential the spirit of the tweet remains an integral component of the Igbo worldview. The Igbo must find ways to deal with that problem. No one will help them until they realise that the spirit of the Anya tweet dangerously suffuses and pollutes their politics and inter-ethnic relationships. Sadly, Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has obstinately refused to learn the required lessons of building supranational networks, and the need to downplay the victim complex, or victimhood as some put it, and recognise that developing and nurturing a sense of entitlement would be politically counterproductive. That he has not learnt that lesson may be an indication that his presidential ambition is nothing but an afterthought, an ambition anchored on superficialities rather than a careful construction of networks, principles and ideology.

If the Igbo do not make effort to put the civil war behind them, as Europe has largely done after World War II; if they do not engage in the introspection some of their intellectuals have identified as critical to their existence and survival; if they sustain their antagonisms against other ethnic groups in whose lands they sojourn, and promote ethnic aggressiveness and unfounded and unrealistic supremacist ideas, the acrimony will persist. It will take years of careful planning and building bridges by a brilliant Igbo politician to elicit the trust and confidence needed to persuade the rest of the country to embrace a Southeast candidate. Should that happen, the country will then see such a candidate not as Igbo, but as a politician they can do business with, someone they can trust will not impose hegemony over them, someone they can rely on to check the revanchist tendency of his ethnic group. A thousand Peter Obis could not hope to leapfrog into the presidency.

 

Read Also: Why I wished Queen Elizabeth II ‘excruciating’ death — Uju Anya

 

Litigating and complicating ASUU strike

After seven months of dithering and imperious negotiations, the federal government has finally decided to litigate the strike by ASUU. The university lecturers’ demands are fairly well known by now. So, too, are the points upon which the government remains intransigent. Months to the end of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, there has been no concrete, futuristic policy on education, especially regarding funding and research. It was, therefore, easy for the government to be bogged down for years by the mundanity of responding awkwardly and constantly to interruptions in tertiary education. The same cancer has, of course, blighted the judiciary and health sectors, with those all-important sectors also suffering arrested development; but the crisis in education, the fulcrum upon which everything hangs and rotates, takes the biscuit.

The government seems to possess a self-destructive instinct. Just when it seemed a tentative solution had been found to the ASUU strike, which had by then lasted a dispiriting six months, the Education and Labour ministries pulled a rabbit out of the hat by tying the solution to the lecturers forfeiting six months pay. They were egged on by an undiscriminating public who often do not see beyond their noses. Whether the government recognised the insensitivity of that new conditionality or it was just being unduly legalistic was unclear. Nevertheless, shortly after reiterating their Labour laws to everyone’s hearing, particularly the exasperated ASUU, and having seen how badly the crestfallen youths of the country took the turn of events, the Education ministry constituted a panel of university administrators to take another look at the deal earlier reached with the lecturers. Everyone’s confidence was shaken, but it seemed commonsense had finally prevailed.

Alas, the government is staffed by magicians in love with rabbits. Just when hope had begun to materialise, the Labour ministry, brimming with recalcitrant and imperious officials, took ASUU to the National Industrial Court to compel an end to the strike. The case has been adjourned to tomorrow. Whether a dispute that has lasted for about seven months can be dispensed with using judicial fiat remains to be seen. And whether it makes sense to resort to litigation moments before a realistic and amicable solution is found also remains a mystery. It does not, however, seem that the Labour ministry acted alone. Their action may not make sense, just as the government itself has been tardy about practically everything since the administration’s assumption of office in 2015, but in the end, it is hard to see how litigation can resolve decades of ASUU-government misunderstanding sustained and energised by an incomprehensible lack of fidelity to agreements.

Decades of strikes and shoddy treatment of skilled labour had considerably depleted Nigeria of its workforce. That depletion continues apace, with virtually every economic sector denuded of the crucial support required to reinvigorate the system and keep it flourishing. Doctors, researchers, engineers, linguists, artists, some of them globally acclaimed, have migrated to foreign shores and are replenishing other systems. Stiff-necked and arrogant government officials flaunt their capacity to produce skilled manpower from schools and hospitals which, they sneered, are in high demand globally. If schools and teaching hospitals are so bad, they growled, why are they still in high demand all over the world? The fallacy of their reasoning does not strike them.

When the court judges the ASUU case, it will become clear how the union will react. It is futile to second-guess them, or anticipate whether the intervention by the House of Representatives will amount to anything. If the threat of forfeiting six months pay was not enough to dissuade the union, might court orders do the trick? What is disgracefully evident in all this is the fact that the administration and the ones before it lacked the capacity to envision an education policy capable of catapulting Nigeria to the right orbit. This failure underscores the leadership crisis that has blighted Nigeria from independence. Nothing suggests that the country is about to turn the corner. Take for example the common principle of a sense of urgency that should drive government policy. A day after she was called to form a government, British Prime minister Liz Truss formed her cabinet and was beginning to churn out policy initiatives but for the hiatus of the Queen’s death. It took Nigeria about six months to form a cabinet in 2015, and many more years to emplace boards of certain agencies. It is unsurprising that such lack of urgency has impaired the education and health sectors. Now, instead of trusting their sense of bargaining and ability to placate anger vented against their unfaithfulness to bargains, the government has turned to threats and litigation.

It is now unlikely that the administration will bequeath any solid initiatives capable of revolutionising Nigeria. Even though conditions favour drastic changes, and Nigerians are themselves amenable to radical changes, including state policing, there will be nothing grand and uplifting in the months ahead to entrench any legacy. Not in politics, not in the society as a whole, and certainly not in health and education. The administration met a convoluted landscape; it will leave the same landscape barren. The paradox, however, is that it is still the same party that appears best placed to redress decades of misgovernance which had ossified under its contradictory and sterile policies. Neither the stultified Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) nor the amorphous and highfalutin Labour Party (LP), nor yet the anonymous New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), is in any position whatsoever to do something about the crisis Nigeria is enmeshed in. Disregard their propaganda and the illegitimate wishes they have sired.

 

 

 

Atiku bites the bullet

 

With the composition of the PDP’s presidential campaign council and the continuing, if not final, diminution of Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike, the party’s presidential candidate and former vice president Atiku Abubakar has bitten the bullet. Last Wednesday in Ibadan, Oyo State, during the party’s stakeholders’ meeting, Alhaji Atiku, perhaps already exasperated, told his querulous host Seyi Makinde that the contentious issue of forcing the PDP chairman Iyorchia Ayu to resign could not be done without following the party’s constitution. He did not entirely rule out the possibility, and even described the process as attainable, yet it was clear that he was determined to forge ahead with or without Mr Wike who had inspired and led the campaign to unseat the chairman and foster a more equitable party in its top echelons.

The PDP now appears finally fated to self-destruct. Its presidential candidate and party chairman are from the North. So, now, too, is the presidential campaign director-general, Aminu Tambuwal, Sokoto State governor and former presidential aspirant obviously requited for delivering the swing ‘vote’ to make Alhaji Atiku the candidate. In the eyes of Mr Wike, they all appear poised to come South to campaign for a northern hegemony no less. Many Nigerians may squirm at Mr Wike’s histrionics, but they can’t help but notice how jarring it is for the PDP to present a completely northernised face. The South, at least, will resent that face.

Alhaji Atiku has finally called the bluff of Mr Wike; he will thus have to bear the blowback from a scorned and infuriated suitor. Whether he had a choice or not in the face of Mr Wike’s abrasiveness and inflexibility is another thing entirely. The Rivers governor is of course a member of the campaign council, but he will interpret his lowly listing as insufferable and annoying. He must now begin earnestly to calculate his options and determine whether if he goes all out to fight his party he can win or even retain the support of his gubernatorial allies who are being undercut relentlessly by their state chapters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The temptation to reduce the 2023 presidential campaigns to the general issues of insecurity, spluttering economy, infrastructural deficits, and anti-corruption war will be almost irresistible. How eloquently a candidate can be persuasive about dealing with them unencumbered by his background as well as connections with the current administration, will probably also be significant. Many Nigerians have counseled that the campaigns be limited to issues, just as the major issues are fairly well known. Former vice president Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will welcome issue-based campaigns, believing that given his experience and former executive position, he will do tremendously well in debates and field campaigns. Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) has also advocated for issues in order to deflect attention from his deficient track record, despite his Anambra governorship experience. He also believes that his glibness, not to say his statistical fecundity, will stand him well on the soapbox and in debates. Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) will probably also welcome issue-driven campaigns, believing that his profundity and solid track record will place him head and shoulders above his opponents.

Of the three, Mr. Obi is perhaps the most eloquent and hypothetical, particularly considering his flurry of statistics, accurate or otherwise, appropriate or inappropriate. He is of course not an orator, and while he can sometimes summon the passion to place a resonant emphasis here and there, the flexibility that oratorical cadence and gravitas give are somehow lost on him. For many youths taken in by his style and audacity, he is a breath of fresh air badly needed in today’s politics. Driven and egged on by social media, his candidacy has also suddenly seemed realistic, convincing and plausible. He will successfully raise tons of money, and with the energy of youth at his disposal, propel himself to heights that would seem fictional years ago, even to him. Yes, he will love attention to be fixed on issues, but before the campaign runs its middle course, he will seem jaded, having exhausted his theoretical postulations.

Though indifferent to whatever emphasis anyone or political party might push forward, Alhaji Atiku will probably see issue-driven presidential campaign as a cakewalk. He is not as fluent and persuasive as Mr. Obi, but he can hold his own admirably, and he can argue his position disarmingly and gravely. One way or the other, his party, despite the Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike snafu, will eventually rally behind him. But the party has neither been reformed enough to add significant value to his campaign nor ideologically streamlined to the point of contextualising his arguments and giving them fillip. Like his party, Alhaji Atiku will also struggle to define himself and his politics in ways that Mr. Obi has defined himself and his politics within the ambit of youths. The PDP candidate exhausted himself in the 2019 presidential polls; but he will still raise enough money to impress, if not etch, his candidacy upon the minds and affections of the electorate.

Of the three candidates spoken about in this election cycle, Asiwaju Tinubu will have the challenge of couching his campaign in mesmerising words. He expresses himself well, helped in no small measure by his depth and vision, but it will be easily deciphered in soapbox campaigns and debates that he can’t hold the candle to the other two. Like the others, he will also see nothing wrong focusing on issues, for he is at home when it comes to that facility, but he is unlikely to dwell on it as resplendently as his other two opponents. The reason is that fortuitously, at least as far as his ongoing consultations with stakeholders and interviews show, he has begun to navigate towards his strongest point, that is, his capacity as a thinker and visionary. Perhaps his instincts tell him he outclasses his opponents in those areas, including his boldness and passion that are catalysed by a restless and ingenious spirit. To deflect his attention, however, his critics will try to demean his person in order to force him away from selling his biggest attribute.

In the end, issues will not play as significant a role as many analysts hope. It is not because issues are intrinsically wrong or inappropriate. It is simply because they have become intertwined with campaign promises, and every candidate will struggle to outdo his opponent in promising paradise. By experience, voters have become used to hearing those promises and seeing them unimplemented or even feasible. By a stroke of genius or happenstance, power supply is improving and may remain vaguely so through the elections. The economy will also likely sputter into life and maintain a steady streak of health. Insecurity is being knocked into a cocked hat, and progress in infrastructural development has been significant, even remarkable in certain areas, states and regions. The country has of course not become an Asian Tiger, but as long as significant improvements can be sustained into the presidential poll, the genie of issues will remain bottled up or vitiated.

The factors that will determine the outcome of the 2023 presidential poll will defy expectations. For a people buffeted by so many ills and privations, they will want to be convinced that the candidate to vote for possesses leadership skills, including the ability to forge consensuses and elicit trust in as many parts of the country as is politically feasible. As desirable as restructuring is, especially to the Southwest, Nigeria’s political system and democracy abjure it. Yet, the country is undergoing such structural stress that is capable of tearing the entire system apart. This is precisely where someone with a vision and the ability to drive a hard bargain and coax a consensus is needed. Mr. Obi is not that man, as entertaining as his candidacy may be on the social media. And Alhaji Atiku has flip-flopped on too many issues of late that it is hard to see him embodying that role.

Two, the candidates’ party will also be a factor. Of the three parties, the APC, which started out the year on the wrong foot, has today grown into the most cohesive and threatening. It can muster a campaign purse incomparable with those of the other two parties, including Mr. Obi’s crowdfunding razzmatazz. More importantly, the APC, despite its controversial record under the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, is still the most charismatic and organised. Mr. Obi runs on his own steam, not his party’s. And Alhaji Atiku may have introduced fault lines into his party on a scale that cannot be tethered by the gods. The PDP will need a desperate transfusion of purpose and sanctity to resemble anything like a winning machine. The APC is the incumbent party, and incumbency has its many advantages. Those advantages will likely be explored and exploited to the hilt. Labour Party may not need any explanation on the matter of power rotation, but it is hard to see the PDP justifying the retention of the presidency in the North after eight years of the Buhari administration. After a few false starts, the APC has seamlessly embraced rotation.

Three, and perhaps counterintuitively, the APC presents the country with the most secular presidential ticket this country has known since the advent of the Fourth Republic. The mixed Muslim-Christian ticket of the Buhari administration did not prevent the abhorrent and insidious sectarianism of the past seven years, evidencing the fact that the worldview of the president is what really matters. In the case of the APC, which is presenting Nigeria with two presidents for the price of one, it is offering a truly secular ticket which is probably all that the country now needs to navigate away from the crazy and overt religionisation of the presidency and the polity. But it remains to be seen just how adroitly the parties and the candidates can discover and exploit their advantages once the campaigns begin.

Ajaokuta Steel payments/penalties scandal

Just last month, the controversy over the Paris Club refund saga and the proposed deduction of $418m legal consultants’ fees from the refunds to the states reached a crescendo. While the consultants are desperate to get their money, the case is, however, stuck in court. But smack in the centre of the stalled payment is the Justice minister and Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) who argues that the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) had no reason to resist the fees of the lawyers who saw their case through.

Another controversy, this time even messier, has broken out relating to the termination of the concession awarded by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration in 2004 for the resuscitation of the National Iron Ore Mining Company (NIOMCO) in Ajaokuta and Itakpe. The concessionaire, Global Steel Holdings (GSH), citing breach of contract on the part of Nigeria, was prepared to claim over $5bn as damages. But after talks lasting many years, the undeserving company has finally been awarded $496m expected to be paid in less than three weeks.

Ignore the Paris Club refund saga for a moment. Though disheartening, it pales in significance to the GSH concession imbroglio. GSH is an Indian company that had been proved to lack the expertise to manage, let alone revive, the Ajaokuta Steel Complex. Somehow, it won the concession but failed woefully to revive the complex. On April 1, 2008, under the Umaru Yar’Adua administration, the concession, technically described as Share Purchase Agreement, was terminated just 55 days before it would have been due to be legally terminated, with Nigeria securing the added benefit of claiming about $26m in liquidated damages. Thereupon the GSH served notice of legally claim anything between $10bn to $14bn as damages. Eventually, it decided to claim $5.258bn, an amount that has now been reduced during alternative disputation resolution, instead of arbitration, to a full and final settlement of $496m.

But that is where the transparency ended. Every other thing, like the Paris Club refund, is enveloped in fog, in dismal and embarrassing opacity. On the surface, the alternative dispute resolution cannot be faulted, after the initial blunder of 2008, and the fact that had the matter gone into arbitration, the GSH would in all probability have won. By publishing the deal, the AGF office wants any Nigerian with objections to file claims. It is not clear whether there would be a groundswell against the deal, though there should be. Firstly, under the Jonathan administration, with threat of court action looming against the promoters of GSH, the Indian company waved its general claims, and agreed to hold on to Itakpe Iron Ore Mining Company while forfeiting Ajaokuta Steel. The report of a committee headed by the Solicitor-General of the Federation, Abdullahi Yola, recommending over $520m to GSH was also rejected. Indeed, reports suggested that the matter had been resolved at no financial cost to Nigeria. Secondly, the Buhari administration in 2016 okayed the new deal with GSH, and the then Mines and Steel minister Kayode Fayemi, in 2017, attested to the deal which he said did not encumber Nigeria with any costs. Some five years later, out of the blue, GSH threatened to go back to arbitration, thus prompting the new negotiations and a deal to pay the company $496m.

The recent developments have raised many questions. It would not be out of place to constitute a judicial panel to unearth the shenanigans that accompanied the contract and negotiations. One, the panel needs to get to the root of how a concession was in 2004 granted a company that had no expertise in the job it bidded for. Two, knowing the concession would fail, who instigated the termination of the concession just 55 days to its lawful and advantageous termination. Did they not peruse the contract papers competently? Three, the company engaged in asset stripping and tax evasion, among other crimes, why were its promoters not prosecuted? After all, what was involved was not private asset, but public, national asset which does not admit of forgiveness for criminal acts. Four, in 2016, the Buhari administration okayed the negotiated agreement carried out under the Jonathan administration. Why was it not implemented? The National Assembly and Mines and Steel minister announced that a deal had been reached at no financial costs to Nigeria. Why did GSH threaten to return to arbitration years after?

The $496m deal may have been done transparently, but all the issues that presaged it were anything but transparent. Many of the Nigerian officials connected with the affair were either incompetent or complicit, or both. The government has indicated it would pay the agreed sum in days, almost as if the country is being stampeded. The country has haggled over $23m Abacha loot repatriation and ASUU strike. But here are two insufferable cases of hundreds of millions of dollars being proposed to be paid to either legal consultants or a controversial and incompetent company. In total, about $900m is about to be frittered away in very questionable and disgraceful circumstances. The total sum would solve Nigeria’s education and roads problem in one fell swoop. The least the government owes Nigerians, after so much bungling and allegations of underhand dealings, is to subject the two payments to ‘integrity’ tests. The dealings are unlikely to pass muster.

 

 

 

 

Gorbachev will be missed

Most of the obituaries on the late Soviet Union leader and champion of Glasnost and Perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died two weeks ago at 91, have invariably veered towards both nostalgia for the ideological left and the transformation of the world from bipolar to unipolar. Because of the uncontrollable forces Mr Gorbachev set in motion, the Soviet Union unintendedly collapsed in 1991 after first transmuting from Soviet Russia (1917-1922) to Soviet Union (1922-1991). Elected into office in 1985 until he resigned in 1991, he supervised a reformation of the politics and economy of the Soviet Union that went horribly awry. His fascination with the France/US-type presidential system prompted him into adopting a liberalised political system, Glasnost (openness), that ultimately torpedoed communism in Eastern Europe. His economic reforms encapsulated in Perestroika was also not expertly managed, partly because it was not underpinned by a unique and homegrown economic model and ideology, like China implemented under Deng Xiaoping beginning from 1989.

The post-Gorbachev era was also sadly predicated on the wrong premises and built on inappropriate frameworks. The lack of immediate success, years of political hesitations, reduction in size of borders, collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and slow economic growth all created a vacuum the country’s national leaders yearned to fill with the nostalgic trappings of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin, current leader, exemplifies this error. Mr Gorbachev was unable to develop a unique political system to replace the old order, and Mr Putin has tried futilely to fill the vacuum with a malformed system modeled around himself. Whereas NATO is an agglomeration of developed and independent democracies, Mr Putin has attempted to compel former neighbouring Soviet Republics to willy-nilly sustain a subordinate association with Russia. In addition to promoting a few wars and land grabs, including the annexation of Crimea, the new policy has also inspired the Russo-Ukrainian war. Had Mr Gorbachev laid a solid foundation for Russian democracy, former Warsaw Pact countries would probably have seen a model to embrace and associate with, and Mr Putin would probably have had more success with his efforts to sustain a bipolar world and recreate his country’s nuanced suzerainty over the East as the US has nurtured over the West.

 

 

 

.

 

Months before a presidential election in Nigeria, political jostling reaches fever pitch. Next year’s defining poll is unlikely to be different. Because he will not be standing for reelection in 2023, incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari should rightly be inspiring the shape and colour of the next polls, not in an obnoxious, self-aggrandising way, but in selfless and self-confident push to ensure both probity in the electoral process and the emergence of a great president. The president should rightly be the cynosure of all the manoeuvres, the fulcrum upon which other efforts anchor and swing. Alarmingly, however, just as it happened in the ruling party’s presidential primary in June and the months leading to it, the president has been aloof and magisterial, promising only electoral fidelity nationwide, and to some extent loyalty to the party which he leads. Loyalty to his party should be unquestionable had he not waffled and made his support for APC candidates conditional in 2019 when his fractious party needed a man of character to be its lodestar and embodiment. As for his aloofness, it is characteristic. Because his loyalty is brittle and amorphous, and aloofness predictable and customary, these deficiencies have enabled ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo to attempt to fill the vacuum.

Of the five living Nigerian heads of state and presidents, Chief Obasanjo has been the most involved in political transitions. Goodluck Jonathan is still trying to find his feet as an eloquent and discerning former president. He is characteristically unsure of his person, politics, and ideology. Yakubu Gowon has restricted himself to advocating a spiritual agenda for the nation, occasionally offering staid and generally ineffectual advice on political ethic. The recuperating Abdulsalami Abubakar has carved a disingenuous niche for himself, which sees him, together with a few like-minded patriots, advocating for peaceful and fair electoral process. Ibrahim Babangida’s failure to return to office as an elected president, not to say his bastardisation and annulment of the 1993 polls, has not deterred him from pontificating at every election cycle on who best should win the presidential poll. But Chief Obasanjo presumptuously knows who should win, what the candidate should campaign on, and where he should come from. He has no electoral value himself, but candidates gravely and reverentially seek his endorsement, not because they think his support amounts to anything, but simply because they dread to have him snarling at them.

President Buhari has bestirred himself in recent months, almost as if he has belatedly realised the need to finish strong after about seven years of dithering. Should he assert himself, partly as a self-preserving ploy to weaken or even castrate Chief Obasanjo’s influence, he may discover the need to transcend his magisterial aloofness and work actively both to entrench electoral fidelity, as he has promised, and to back the best man to win. He will require a greater understanding of human capacity and character to discover such a man among the three or four prominent candidates, assuming his promise to back APC candidates does not already insinuate his preference; but it is precisely that understanding that many politicians find to be beyond his ken. There is indeed no proof that the adrenalin shot in the arm he has given himself in the final months of his presidency will translate to a change in attitude to Nigerian politics beyond his age-old insularity, or a change in asserting himself. If it does not, the clever and publicity-loving Chief Obasanjo will capitalise on that void.

Already, despite his denial, Chief Obasanjo has seemed to adopt Labour Party’s Peter Obi as the best man for the office in 2023. Though he claimed his presence at the London political meetings the leading presidential candidates held last month with the Rives governor Nyesom Wike’s group was fortuitous, there is reason to believe, judging from his recent statements, that he favours the former Anambra governor. He is fairly open in his support for Mr Obi, but has pretended to be impartial and even regal in pontificating on the next presidency. Speaker of the House of Representatives Femi Gbajabiamila emerged from the meeting APC leaders held with Chief Obasanjo in Abeokuta last month to enthuse about the former president’s subtle support for the APC candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, despite initially cocking a snook at the candidate. Given his pronouncements on Mr Obi, his presence in London, and the visitations to both Gen. Babangida and Gen Abubakar in Minna, Chief Obasanjo remains unpredictable. He may not have made up his mind irrevocably, and may yet have cause to speak definitively in future about his endorsements, but it is safe to imagine that his ship has not yet berthed.

Chief Obasanjo speaks about a national agenda he would unfold soon, perhaps after he is through with ongoing consultations. But for eight years, he had the opportunity to reset Nigerian politics and lead efforts to redefine the country’s essence. Instead, he ensured everything revolved around himself, including cajoling his party into embracing his feeble succession project. For those eight tumultuous years there was no national ideology, no national agenda, no national vision, and no rejigging of the electoral process. He is no longer a member of any political party. How he hopes to introduce a national agenda without a party, let alone a caucus of diehard ideologues and loyalists, remains to be seen. Worse, there is doubt he has the capacity to envision the next leader for Nigeria, especially seeing how accustomed he is to backing candidates who either lack self-confidence or who might give him access to the seat of power to gratify his nostalgia for Aso Villa. Neither Chief Obasanjo nor any of the other living heads of state, nor yet many of Nigeria’s statesmen who romanticise about leadership and the Nigerian experiment, possess the acuity and depth of understanding to identify and promote the right leader for Nigeria in 2023.

Compare them with the perspicacious former French president, Charles de Gaulle, who in 1967 told the United States Military Attaché to France, Vernon Walters, that Richard Nixon deserved to be and would be elected president. This was after Nixon had lost the 1960 presidential election as a sitting vice president to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and also lost the 1962 California governorship poll, and was written off as politically dead. The French president cites Mr Nixon’ depth of intellect and appreciation of world politics, among other great reasons, to underscore his prophecy. Mr Nixon was elected president two years later in 1969. But Chief Obasanjo supports Mr Obi for the presidency based on the trifling grounds of the Southeast’s turn to produce the next president and for the sake of balance of power between ethnic groups, despite the LP candidate’s abominably pedestrian understanding of economics, global power politics, and even domestic power equations.

The failure of Nigerian leaders since Chief Obasanjo’s administration implies that there are no significant and enduring rules beyond the general provisions of the constitution to govern leadership transition. As the primaries of the two leading parties indicate, even the political parties themselves, including the contrived ones that produced Mr Obi of the LP and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), have only a tenuous system of leadership succession incomparable with that of Lagos since 2007. Leadership transition in Lagos, probably the best in Nigeria, is, however, imperfect and even deficient. For the leading parties, the situation is much worse. For Nigeria, the country is confronting a disaster, a disaster made worse by the inability of President Buhari to, in seven years, recognise the value of structured leadership succession and how to institutionalise it within the framework of the APC.

 

Resolving  ASUU impasse

STRIKING university teachers appear to have lost the public relations battle, but they have stuck to their guns and declared their industrial action indefinite. The federal government, however, sees the disagreement with ASUU as a turf war, a clash of egos they are determined to win. Yet, victory or defeat in this crisis is unlikely to be clear cut. Late last week, ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, who is still weighed down by public perception of his administration as a failure, cleverly compared his diligent resolution of a similar strike years back with the current strike. According to him, he chaired the meeting, locked the doors behind everyone who should be involved in resolving the problem, and cobbled a tentative agreement before the break of dawn. His message was clear: the current administration is bungling the crisis.

President Muhammadu Buhari does not think he has the willingness or imagination to resolve the crisis. In a moving irony, APC governors have, however, indicated their interest in tackling the crisis, if the federal government would let them. Since the Buhari administration is worsening the crisis instead of looking for a way out, its failure should encourage the progressive governors to give it a try, for whispers are beginning to be heard that the strike may weaken the ruling party’s election campaign. The governors know that if they lose the presidency, a bandwagon effect could produce electoral outcomes that would bury them, notwithstanding the axiom that all politics is local. If the administration knows this, its negotiators have not demonstrated any unease.

The federal government should eschew hubris and restart negotiations with ASUU. It is damaging to the administration’s reputation to expect striking teachers to demonstrate patriotism by returning to work when the government itself has been loth to accept responsibility for stymieing the future of youths by its obduracy and legalistic interpretation of Labour laws.

 

Wike, Ayu dig their heels in

For weeks on end, the bitter quarrel between Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chairman Iyorchia Ayu has dominated newspaper headlines without becoming blasé. Day in, day out, headlines scream news of their intransigence and announce their positions in the trenches. Months ago, not too long after the PDP primary ended anticlimactically and PDP presidential candidate ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar spurned Mr Wike to select Delta State governor Ifeanyi Okowa as his running mate, there was a fairly recognisable chance of reconciliation. Now, that possibility seems quite remote. Alhaji Atiku gives the impression he needs Mr Wike to make victory in next year’s presidential election certain. As a result he has been less impervious to reconciliation, and even less eager to call the bluff of the Rivers governor, despite his camp urging him to damn the consequences. Sokoto State governor Aminu Tambuwal and Dr Okowa are the major reasons for Mr Wike’s fury, much more than Alhaji Atiku’s primary victory. Both, unlike immoderate and inconsequential Atiku aides, have wisely and discretely kept out of the fray. They have said little about the acrimonious intraparty fight, not even snide remarks and gestures, and have sponsored nothing demeaning about the enraged governor. No one, however, knows how long the Delta and Sokoto governors, not to say the increasingly testy Alhaji Atiku, will keep their powder dry.

Not only is Mr Wike deliberately and provocatively sailing close to the wind with his intransigence, he has also begun to psychoanalyse his opponents, particularly the obdurate Senator Ayu, with whom he exchanges brickbats daily, and former Jigawa State governor Sule Lamido, whom he sees as irreverent and abusive. Newspaper readers are kept constantly entertained by the exchanges between the antagonists. Neither wants the other to have the last word. So, who will call the truce? Alhaji Atiku, who is anxious to unite the troops behind his candidacy, but who probably triggered the war in the first instance? The embattled Sen. Ayu, who now seems to enjoy his newspaper battles with the Rivers governor? Or Mr Wike himself, the adamant, imperious and self-assured politician who does not flinch from war, nor wince at abuse, no matter how gross? Or the opportunistic Mr Lamido whose political star had dimmed but wants it rekindled? Mr Wike describes the former Jigawa governor as a self-centred political in-breeder for promoting his son’s governorship ambition. More, when Sen. Ayu dismissed the Wike camp as children for seeking his dethronement, the Rivers governor riposted that the party chairman was an ingrate who paradoxically was taken from the gutter by the ‘children’ and made party chairman.

The invectives are unlikely to stop. Worse, the party is divided down the middle, to the considerable unease of the presidential candidate. It had taken the retention of Sen. Ayu as party chairman to ossify that division, but it is unclear, given how the antagonists have dug their heels in, whether that division would not have occurred by some other agencies and calcify as a result of the behaviour of the combatants. The immediate cause of the party squabble today is Sen. Ayu retaining the party chairmanship despite Alhaji Atiku’s election as presidential candidate. The Wike camp had sought his replacement with a southerner as chairman, arguing that it was unrealistic and provocative for the North to hold down the top offices of the party. The skewness of the positions, argued the Wike camp, would not favour a successful campaign in the South. Alhaji Atiku has been uncharacteristically reticent. But responding to the fears of party failure, Sen. Ayu had declared that his election to a four-year term was non-negotiable, and could not be capriciously altered by the Wike camp simply for the heck of it.

Then the combatants met in London, and it seemed a seismic shift was in the offing. The implacable Sen. Ayu might after all be persuaded to sacrifice his position, regardless of the constricting provisions of the party constitution that straitjackets his replacement to the same North. What the noise of the party chairman now indicates to the chafing and agitated Wike camp is that Alhaji Atiku is absolutely not keen to replace the party chairman. The chairman is his man: loyal, abnegating, euphoric about the Atiku candidacy, and unquestioning. Replacing him with an ‘unknown southern foreigner’ would be catastrophic. And if the presidential candidate stands solidly behind the embattled chairman, who is to move him from that coveted seat? Nobody. As of today, Sen. Ayu is immovable. The regnant opinion in the party is to dare the Wike maelstrom: heavens won’t fall, the Atiku/Ayu camp surmises. Mr Wike does not, however, appear ready to relent, though his options are narrowing badly, and his position becoming untenable. It will take a miracle to turn things around in the governor’s favour. Interestingly, he seems to sense the Atiku camp’s desperation, and has suggested acidly that if the PDP wishes to lose the election, he would be glad to lend them a helping hand. PDP leaders don’t want to sacrifice Sen. Ayu, but they can’t have their cake and eat it. They will, therefore, have to sacrifice Mr Wike, though the witty and gregarious governor loathes to be the sacrifice, preferring instead to burn the roof down, particularly with Sen. Ayu and the casual Alhaji Atiku in the building.

The 2023 campaigns are a little over a month away. They are expected to be kick-started towards the end of September. But other than the pretentious Labour Party (LP) that hopes to defy gravity by winning without a structure, platform or even ideology, the two leading contenders for the throne are at sixes and sevens in their parties, and sometimes at odds with the country itself. Their presidential primaries, more than the other tiers of primaries, have birthed a host of troubles for them. After many years of indulging terrorists, appeasing them or conducting futile negotiations with them, it seems the Muhammadu Buhari administration has recognised the urgency of taking the battle to the terrorists and pacifying them before the February 2023 elections. The two contenders for the ultimate prize, APC’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu and PDP’s Atiku Abubakar, are desperate to unite their parties behind them in order to run cohesive and fruitful campaigns.

Just weeks ago, the elections were starting to look doubtful. From all indications now, and regardless of every doomsday prediction, the elections will be held. The parties know this, and the candidates also sense it. They will, therefore, work on the assumption that the polls will hold. The country’s political and economic structures are incapable of inspiring growth, development and stability in the medium to long term, but until something is done about the way the country is untenably configured, the parties or anyone with ambition will work on the basis of the present configuration. Self-determination groups will naturally continue their agitations, but not even they can predict just how or when their efforts will yield anything, whether fruits, collapse of the system which they long for without a clue how to manage its potentially catastrophic fallout, or a new order. In a country of competitive ethnic and religious groups, some of them promoting exceptionalism, and others promoting hegemony, no one can be sure of anything should they let the chips fall where they may.

The APC may be trying to get over the hangover that followed its Muslim-Muslim ticket choice, and may even be frantic and anxious about it, but it is the PDP that is groaning the most about how to manage its post-presidential primary fallout. Lately, APC stakeholders have begun to whisper about unseating their chairman, the vacillating former Nasarawa State governor Abdullahi Adamu, and they appear eager to fish for other issues to divide their party, but for the PDP, the scorned governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, has become quite a handful. He is not only teasing their temperament, he who had been accused of possessing the wrong temperament, he is also testing their resolve. Twice they scorned him in quick succession, first as presidential aspirant, then as running mate potential, but they implausibly hope to cash in, literally and figuratively, on his oil-rich state and population to fund their 2023 campaigns to secure victory. To Mr. Wike, however, it is not just the act of scorning him that is driving him up the wall, the way PDP leaders have been exultant in putting him down, and framing it in colourful and acerbic language, drives him insensate. The PDP leaders hope that his promise of staying loyal to the party, come what may, would be sufficient to prevent his defection to the flirtatious APC.

Mr. Wike may prove them hopelessly wrong. He is unapologetically flirting with the APC like a beautiful woman with many suitors, and has started to give top leaders of the ruling party primacy of place in the state’s public relations drive. APC leaders on their own also hold out the tantalising hope that his defection, which they long for with all their hearts, would solve their South-South electoral conundrum and put them in pole position for 2023. Gnashing their teeth due to Mr. Wike’s bellicosity and his cruel and remorseless baiting, but alarmed he might make good his unspoken threat, PDP leaders have waffled considerably, unsure what to do next, whether to call his bluff or to placate him. Their agony is worsened by the politics surrounding the zoning of the party’s chairmanship position. Iyorchia Ayu, their doughty chairman, comes from the same North as their now hobbled presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, quite contrary to their initial zoning arrangement before the former vice president usurped the party’s ticket.

Undoubtedly, both the APC and the PDP will overcome their present aggravations. They will be tested to the limit, and their opponents will stoke the fire against them, but as the campaigns loom, they will resolve their differences smartly or paper over the cracks clumsily. The APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket is a fait accompli; it will be carried to the elections because the ruling party has burnt its bridges. It is not clear whether the whisper against their chairman will prompt them into open revolt; if it does, they will make short work of it and not lose any sleep. For the PDP, it is unclear why, on the chairmanship zoning issue, they want to have their cake and eat it. With the exuberant Mr. Ayu tasting the plum of office and needlessly embroiling himself in the election of the PDP presidential candidate, he has boxed himself into a corner and will be unable to convince anyone he should not step down for the position to rotate south. There are indications Mr. Atiku feels comfortable with Sen. Ayu as chairman, or at least shows a sense of loyalty to him for the role he played in the presidential primary; but in the end, sustaining the present iniquitous arrangement would be difficult.

Both the APC and PDP cannot pretend not to recognise how decidedly antagonistic the mood of the country is to them, particularly because they exemplify the old, decadent order. This frustration explains the electorate’s infatuation with former Anambra governor Peter Obi of the Labour Party. The hobnobbing will amount to very little ultimately, but it could prove somewhat harmful to either party. It means nothing to the electorate that Mr. Obi has enunciated little, embraced no discernible ideology, and continues to campaign mainly on the self-aggrandizing claim of frugality as a policy. Only the APC, despite its dismal record, and the PDP, despite its appalling past, stand any chance of forming the next government. Revolution could thwart that sanguine outcome, and general unrest could switch the pendulum; but it can be safely surmised that despite the agonies of the two leading parties, the LP will be missing on the day when the battle will be truly joined.

 

Train attack rescue options

Finally, Nigerians now know for sure why the doomsday option Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai touted in respect of the use of lethal force against bandits has not been embraced by the federal government. At a meeting between himself and some representatives of victims of the Kaduna train abduction, President Muhammadu Buhari insisted that he rejected the option of force because he could not guarantee there would not be collateral damage. He would prefer to rescue everybody alive, he said wistfully.

According to him, “It is understandable that emotions typically run high; we have received several suggestions about the deployment of lethal military force in extracting those still being held in captivity. This option has indeed been considered and evaluated. However, the condition to guarantee a successful outcome and minimise potential collateral damage could not be assured and therefore that course of action had to be reluctantly discarded.” But, as this column asked a few weeks ago, was blitzkrieg the only forceful option available? What of besieging the bandits’ dens and carrying out surgical, Special Forces strikes?

It is true that even in surgical strikes there are no guarantees. But countries which embark on such a radical option know that armed rescue sends message to terrorists that they could not attack and hope to get away free. By not approving any kind of forceful rescue operations, as evident by the dithering that led to the massive abduction of schoolgirls in the Northeast in past years, schoolgirls now perhaps lost forever, terrorists were encouraged to second-guess the government and continue their campaigns of extortion and pillage. The el-Rufai option of carpet bombing is of course a hard sell, but not doing anything for months is even more difficult to defend.

It is also possible that the Buhari administration had embarked on a number of ill-fated options behind closed doors to rescue abductees, with terrorists either outsmarting the government or cynically double-crossing the administration. In the end, at least so far, the administration has met with limited and qualified success. President Buhari is right to deprecate bombing raids or lethal force, but he was wrong to give the impression that other than negotiations, many of which have miscarried badly, there were no other forceful options. However, at last, by taking the battle to the terrorists, the administration seems to be stirring.

I read Palladium’s second installment on the Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, after the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s candidate, the incumbent governor of Osun, Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola, predictably lost the governorship election of July 16 to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). It is not flattering at all.

The author is unpretentious in his mission of inciting the APC leadership against the minister by blaming him for the loss of the state to PDP and worse still for antiparty activities. Palladium, at least in his last three columns, has been very unkind and mean to Aregbesola, viciously attacking his person in the most intemperate language, exhibiting a deep-seated animosity towards him. Yet Aregbesola was not a candidate in the election. He did not even vote.

From his columns, it is clear Mr Akinlotan has a very poor – or no – grasp of the Osun debacle and the self-affliction responsible for the governor’s loss in the election. His main arguments and excoriation of Ogbeni Aregbesola were unapologetically lifted from the laughable press statement of Mr Gboyega Famodun, the embattled chairman of the APC in the state. But every politics is local and except you have a very good grasp of the issues, a columnist runs the risk of looking ordinary, if not stupid, before the actors and those who are knowledgeable on the matter. I can just imagine how the people of Osun would have reacted, reading Palladium on Sunday August 7, 2022.

The loss of Governor Oyetola had been predictable (and predicted) not less than two years ago and had become apparent at least six months before the election. Indeed, a week before the polls, it had become inevitable. Though democratic elections must have an element of ‘bounded uncertainty’ to be credible, people living in Osun were fairly convinced that Oyetola would lose, except some miracle happened.

Governor Oyetola, out of hubris and political naivety, took defeat from the jaws of victory, literally gifting PDP the election. The seeds of the factors that culminated in the defeat of the governor were sown before his election in 2018, but instead for him to uproot them after his inauguration, he began to nurture and water them, until they bore him the fruits of his routing.

Governor Oyetola wrongly believed that then Governor Aregbesola did not want him to succeed him in 2018 and upon his inauguration, he began a systematic war of payback. He divided the party into ‘those-for-him’ and others. Government and party offices became the exclusive preserve of members of his Ileri-Oluwa caucus in the party. Others were excluded. He ran an exclusive system in a political party that should be free for all joiners.

The alienated members of the party formed a caucus named The Osun Progressives (TOP) in April last year. On May 14, they went to Ogbeni Aregbesola to offer him the chairmanship of the Board of Trustees, which he accepted. So, it wasn’t Aregbesola that formed TOP, but the excluded members of the party. This means that if Aregbesola had supported the governor without him reconciling with the aggrieved members of the party, he would still have problem with the election.

Still pursuing his exclusive political agenda, Governor Oyetola rejected all calls and entreaties for reconciliation. The party’s reconciliation committee came to the state after the party’s primary election was held and listened to both sides, but the governor rejected the demands of TOP for inclusion. The committee left in frustration. So, the veiled attempt to incite the party’s leadership is futile because they know the local situation that led to the loss. This much was acknowledged by the party chairman in his reaction to the result.

Oyetola pursued exclusive and vindictive agenda till the last day before the election, supremely confident of victory, without the support of his predecessor and a large segment of his party. When Asiwaju came to Osun on the Monday before the election and asked the governor’s men on their expectation, they told him they were sure they would win but what they were working on was to extend the margin of the win.

This hubristic and belligerent posturing runs against the grain of party politics when candidates approach election with a united front. This is a universal practice not unique to Nigeria. Donald Trump couldn’t get re-elected in 2020 because he alienated the Bush and the Koch dynasties in the Republican Party, concentrating on his nationalist front. Same happened to Mitt Romney, a Mormon, in 2012 when he lost to Barack Obama because the evangelicals stayed away from voting for him. Al Gore too lost his presidential bid to George W. Bush because of his alienation from Bill Clinton and his group in the Democratic Party.

Indeed, after the narrow win in 2018, Governor Oyetola and his men devised an ingenious argument that Aregbesola’s misgovernance was responsible for the not so stellar performance of the APC in the governorship election. This was to discount his contribution and any positive role he played in the election. It sounds so curious and a contradiction to, in one breath, accuse Aregbesola of being culpable for the narrow win; and after alienating and fighting him for nearly four years, to then turn round and blame his non-support for the APC candidate as being responsible for the loss to PDP.

Mr Akinlotan reminds me of the story of Joseph Stalin calling his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, on his sick bed in 1953. He warmly told him of the three notes he was leaving for him and a directive to open the notes only when he got into serious crises. He opened the first note few years later when he got into his first crisis. It read ‘Blame everything on Stalin’. Then later he got into a more serious crisis and opened the second note which also read ‘Blame everything on Stalin’. When he got into the third and very ferocious crisis, he opened the third envelop which this time read ‘Prepare three envelops’. The election was Oyetola’s third ‘very ferocious crisis’.

Mr Akinlotan sounds bitter, angry and inconsolable over the loss in Osun, reading the main piece, as he projected a thinly veiled partisanship in a fight in which he had (or should have) no dog. He, no doubt, is unhappy at an outcome that vindicated Aregbesola in a bizarre way.

Some people were bitterly disappointed that Adeleke won, meaning Aregbesola and his supporters were not disgraced on the outcome of this election. They had wished that Governor Oyetola would win and except Aregbesola came back to them, begging on all four, he would be consigned into permanent political irrelevance. The loss of Governor Oyetola has affirmed the legitimacy of Aregbesola and his supporters, to their chagrin. Palladium will now fall into this category and I don’t think he has done himself or his literary reputation any bit of good at all.

 

 

 

 

 

The collapse of security in Nigeria, particularly in the northern part of the country, began unsuspectingly, even incrementally. Few saw it coming on the scale it has manifested. Before he assumed office, President Muhammadu Buhari was thought to have difficulties with managing a modern economy, and perhaps too, a modern and complex society. So, most analysts feared a collapse of the economy years into his presidency, not a collapse of security. The two, sadly, have conflated and are proceeding pari passu, with insecurity having the clear and unassailable upper hand. Indeed, events of the past few weeks have shown how quickly and calamitously a mismanaged economy can precipitate a far greater catastrophe, how quickly things can go from bad to worse, and how in fact the country seems to be peering down the cracked tunnel of an existential end game.

Last Sunday’s attack on soldiers in Abuja and the follow-up attack at a checkpoint in Zuma, Niger State, close to the Federal Capital City (FCT), have, therefore, stoked fears of a siege residents of the capital city are unused to. The attacks were of course not the first ever on Abuja, but unlike in the past when insurgents and terrorists sneaked upon the city, last week’s attacks were worrisomely audacious, carefully planned, and seemingly presaged a doomsday scenario both for the city and Nigeria. Weeks before these latest attacks, terrorists in other parts of the North, particularly Niger, Katsina and Kaduna States, had given dark hints they were even minded to capture President Muhammadu Buhari himself and Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai. It is unlikely they meant their threat or have the capacity to execute it, but their rampage in the past few weeks till date shows just how much they have grown in confidence and perhaps how subtly they have begun to nurse grandiose political ambitions far in excess of the infantile theocracy they rhapsodised in the early years of Boko Haram.

Given the cavalier manner the federal government formulated and implemented national policies on immigration with respect to the northern borders and the fatalism with which the administration has resigned itself to the pressures occasioned by the collapse of Libya and other socio-economic dislocations in the Sahel, it was a matter of time before Abuja began to feel the heat. Patriots had warned of the insensitivity of the administration’s immigration policies, its ham-fisted manner of battling militancy and insurgency, its hasty and desultory appeasement of repentant insurgents, and its dangerous flirtations with religion and zealotry, but little was done to arrest the drift. The terrible consequence is that bandits and terrorists have proliferated all over the North, and despite the immense suffering inflicted on the region, conspiracy theories of official collusion with the vicious armed gangs have begun to gain traction. In fact, some southern analysts fear that a vicious but faceless group probably exists in the administration dedicated to fomenting crisis and unrest in order to promote unstated religious and political agenda, including averting power shift.

Administration spokesmen have repeatedly put the lie to these scary speculations. They insist the government is as worried as any other person or group about the looming chaos, and is doing its ‘best’ to rein it in. They have, however, found new excuses to explain the crisis, including dragging in the Russo-Ukrainian War and the delicate fuel subsidy removal decision the president seems determined not to undertake. But whether internal or external, every factor is fraught with danger. Decades of failure to refine petroleum domestically or curb crude oil theft are examples of internal failures. Undisciplined and quirky approach to macroeconomic policies, not to talk of untrammeled borrowings and untenable debt servicing ratios, has virtually brought the economy to heel. Libya’s collapse and the war in Ukraine merely complicate, not even engender or exacerbate, Nigeria’s economic crisis. Embracing a conservative approach to the country’s urgent political and security crises, instead of administering a radical and farsighted approach, has also meant the postponement, not extirpation, of the factors predisposing Nigeria to anarchy.

Abuja now seems to be surrounded and vulnerable. The government will do everything possible to lift the ‘siege’, and may even take some radical steps to ameliorate the terrorism wasting the countryside around the capital city and other forests in the north-western part of the country, but it is doubtful whether the plans would be coherent and long-term. Just as witnessed in the Boko Haram war, the government and its military seem strangely unwilling to take the war to the insurgents. Despite spending hundreds of billions of naira in retooling the armed forces, the government has preferred a reactive, largely defensive approach to the wars in the Northeast and Northwest. The terrorists who planned the train attack of March 28 and plotted the July 5 Kuje jailbreak to free their comrades, and are now extorting hundreds of millions of naira from their hostages, are sequestered not too far from Abuja-Niger-Kaduna ‘axis of evil’. They can be accessed by air, by drones, and by road, including bush paths. The terrorists have a wide and impressive but definitely not foolproof communication networks involving humans and technology; yet, the government has incomprehensibly failed to cordon them off to undertake surgical, Special Forces operations. This is why speculations about official collusions are rife, and many Nigerians are beginning to wonder whether the elections would hold; or whether there is no ethnic or religious agenda already unfolding. If the administration does not quickly dispel these speculations, the hysteria might get louder and uncontrollable. But if these fears and speculations are unfounded, then, could the country be confronted with a very bad case of administrative incompetence? Unable to manage the economy or envision a great, stable and progressive society, paralysed in the face of a costly and fractious political system, incoherent in applying the right military doctrines against insurgency and banditry, and unprincipled in promoting a secular constitution, the administration has given the country no reason to hope for a reprieve.

For the first time in more than a year, doubts are beginning to surface that the country would hold together beyond the year or even conduct a general election early next year. But these doubts should be deplored by everyone. Anarchy does not easily lend itself to neat compartmentalisation. Ask the homogenous Somalia, or the puritanical Afghanistan, or other countries which have had chequered histories through the ages. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senate is angling for impeachment of a president they have written off as incompetent and lethargic in the face of mounting crises. And many others are suggesting a collapse of the old order in order to emplace a new order. If only these outcomes can be neatly midwifed. But the better option is to encourage and help a clearly reluctant and bewildered president overcome the present challenges, ensure a credible election and a new administration next year, and through constitutional reviews and sometimes too, litigations, see whether Nigeria could not be transformed into a federalism closer to national aspiration.

Abuja is today on a knife-edge, and the rest of the country is consternated. Alarmingly, it seems that the administration is losing control. There are three scenarios many political leaders and commentators are juggling. Firstly, they suggest that the only way to reestablish control is for the administration to declare war on the terrorists and bandits laying the Northwest waste. Specifically, they suggest carpet or saturation bombing to obliterate the enemy and pacify the restive regions and forests, regardless of the collateral damage to hostages, even if the dead hostages number in scores. Here, two outcomes are possible: either the bombings really obliterate the militants and force them to sue for peace, or scatter them and compel them to regroup and rejig their tactics and begin operations from other more impregnable fortresses. Mali’s militants are an example. Either way, the administration and the sometimes flatfooted military and intelligence services will discover that they have to really put boots on the ground, pursue the insurgents to their redoubts, and exterminate them. There is no room for stalemate or a war of attrition.

Secondly, there are fears that, overwhelmed as it appears to be, the administration might declare a state of emergency or outright emergency rule. Should it take this option, officials will soon discover that the first option is inescapable. They will still use the same troops already available to them, and be forced to determine how best to use force. The administration may get the added ‘benefit’ of suspending or tinkering with the constitution and civil rights, obviously in line with their original desire when they argued years ago that civil rights should be subordinated to national security, but they may then discover that they will be opening the gates of hell from which retreat may be impossible. They could in fact find themselves contending with the possibility of another ‘hijack’ of the administration by a more sinister cabal even while the president is still in office and the indefinite prolongation or abandonment of the ongoing transition – quite like working from a nefarious answer to a malevolent question.

Thirdly, there are suggestions that the current crises could inspire a military takeover. There may be sections of the political, military and business elite who have lost out and who may not be averse to such a cataclysmic alternative. Not only will this option damage and corrupt the ongoing, albeit imperfect, democratic experience, there is nothing to suggest that the military elite is any different from the existing political elite. They are the same: interwoven, prehensile, visionless and, as a few countries in West Africa are showing, unreliable and even more inept. This option is so thoughtless that it would be surprising if any sensible democrat and patriot contemplates it at all, even as a ploy to continue hegemonic rule. That the Buhari administration has been unable to grapple with the country’s problems is no longer in doubt. That it allowed sinister cabals seize control of the administration and exploit it for ethnic and religious reasons is also not in doubt. The only option left that makes sense is what this column recommended two Sundays ago, when it called for the ruling party and APC leaders to rally round the president to help him over the finishing line. (See box). If the president is not to welcome doomsday scenario, he should invite that help now before it is too late.

Buhari needs all the help he can get

First published here on July 17 under the headline “Buhari’s unsettling eagerness to go”, this piece is repeated today for its relevance

For most presidents anywhere in the world, constitutional term limit is a hindrance to their work and vision. Either the term limit is too short for their ‘world-changing’ visions or the powers and privileges of office are too tempting. But in the case of President Muhammadu Buhari, he can’t wait to go. He had achieved two terms as elected president, and that achievement is deeply satisfying. Barely a year or so after winning a second term, he had seemed already contented as a leader, and could hardly wait for the next three years to come and go quickly. When a few people suggested there was a conspiracy to get him tenure elongation, this column had sworn that any conspiracy, if it really existed on the scale some observers had insinuated, would amount to nothing in the face of the president’s determination to go. He may not always be a man of his word, susceptible as many people now know him to be to egregious modifications of promises, colourful prejudicies and even alternative truths, but on the issue of third term or the kind of tenure elongation ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo gave vent to in 2006/2007, President Buhari was unalterably opposed.

He was and still remains pristine and genuine on the subject of respecting term limits. He is unlikely to quibble over it. His basic instinct, though sometimes overwrought, rejects anything politically complicated and devious; and as everybody knows, the issue of third term or elongated tenure is truly complicated. It addles wits and tasks the strongest and bravest of men to their limit. It is a credit to the president that right from the outset, third term never crossed his mind, not even when, as presidential spokesman Garba Shehu recently insinuated, tenure elongation conspirators shuffled their pampered feet around him. Analysts may suspect why he seems dead set against third term, including reasons connected with his health and the overweening dependence on other people’s brains to navigate complex policies and ideas, but in the end the country may have to accept his reasons for respecting term limit. As he put it last Monday when he received APC governors, legislators and political leaders who visited him on Sallah Day, “I am eager to go. I can tell you it has been tough. I am grateful to God that people appreciate the personal sacrifices we have been making. By this time next year, I would have made the most out of the two terms, and the remaining months I will do my best.”

The president really never contemplated third term. He is more anxious to complete his second term than seek for an extension of dubious benefit, as he confessed last month in Rwanda when he sneered at his predecessor whose unconstitutional machinations ensured he ‘didn’t end well’. But in those Sallah remarks are indicants of worrisome and hardly altruistic reasons for his eagerness to end his tenure and return to Daura, his hometown. When he suggests that the job of president is tough, it implies that many factors, including his age, health and education probably circumscribe his capacity to handle the job with the aplomb that should make it either easy or at least exciting and challenging to accomplish. Even his plaintive declaration that he would do his best in his remaining 11 months was suffused with hesitation. There was no conviction in his promise to ‘make the most out of his two terms’ or ‘to do his best’. In sum, his Sallah remarks indicate someone who has virtually given up. This is where the danger lies.

The next 10 to 11 months are fraught with a lot of dangers and difficulties. Apart from the elections and the bad-tempered campaigns preceding them, the economy is in a tailspin, while hunger, anger and violence are rife and festering. Banditry is laying much of the country waste, and ISWAP/Boko Haram terrorism has caused massive dislocations in the North. No part of the country is safe from kidnappers, cultists and highway robbers. The Ukraine-Russia war has worsened everything, depleted national savings, pummeled exchange rate, and caused inflation rate to soar through the roof. Yes, these issues are tough for the most consummate of presidents to tackle, let alone one just marking time, but the times call for the president to go beyond doing his best to positively believing in himself and confessing his capacity to tackle the crises. The next few months, even to the most optimistic, can quickly turn nasty and revolutionary, as Sri Lanka has shown, and developed economies have exhibited as they fray at the edges. With no enduring structures or constitutional and institutional ramparts, not to say workable policies to address the crises, situations can quickly deteriorate.

The president’s Sallah comments to the visiting governors are certainly not good enough. They do not inspire confidence that Nigeria would survive the testy times ahead. This is where the ruling party and party leaders must step in. The APC must rally round the president to help him, for mercifully, the situation has not spiralled out of control. Perhaps the president still misses the late Abba Kyari, his former chief of staff, while the cabals around him, which had for long retained a menacing vice-grip on his presidency, have overreached themselves and have become less potent than in earlier years. APC stakeholders must gently coax the president to take far-reaching decisions on the economy, ASUU strike, epileptic power supply and irrational billing, anti-terrorism war which can be ended swiftly if the political will exists, and other crises which are still amenable to control and amelioration. The past few months have witnessed a lot of governmental lethargy and desultory policies. If the country is to transcend these perilous times and hold elections as scheduled, the presidency and the ruling party must reestablish control and give a sense of direction and purpose. The president’s comments do not give confidence that his administration plans to do that. But it can be done if in his final stretch he yields to better, deeper and more inclusive instinct to stabilise and propel the country into the right orbit.

In November, when Ademola Adeleke is sworn in as the governor, having bested Gboyega Oyetola with a margin in excess of 28,000 votes, Osun State will become a regency. The state’s angry and adventurous voters want it that way. They don’t give a damn how qualified, intelligent, even-tempered and deep Mr Oyetola is. All they care about is that for reasons no educated person can fathom, they prefer Senator Adeleke, aka the dancing senator. Mr. Oyetola is not a typical politician: frivolous, falsely engaging, deceptively friendly, and pedestrian. He is an administrator, a workaholic and a meticulous manager of public finance. Such studiousness and fastidiousness infuriate the people of Osun. When Sen. Adeleke mounts the throne, he will be an intellectual and administrative minor, requiring the services of a regent. One of his brothers or sisters will fill the gap. After all, the Adelekes are an illustrious family who can produce regents at the drop of a hat.

Mr. Oyetola has been scalped. If he reflects over his loss, he will find a thing or two he could have done differently to make that fate evitable. He didn’t need to lose. But he lost. It is partly because Osun State is a specialist in cutting its nose to spite its face. Former governor Bisi Akande did well, extremely well, by the state when he governed between 1999 and 2003. But he was also atypical, ramrod straight ethically, couldn’t give a damn what you thought, and would as soon follow the rules of governance as cock a snook at your wishes and peccadilloes. Unused to such suffocating order and financial finicalness, Osun rolled out their votes and threw their administrator under the bus. Thereupon the state proceeded to labour under the bureaucratic delusions of ex-governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola, whom some have described as a do-nothing governor, perambulated through eight years of the romantic socialist wannabe, Rauf Aregbesola, and were dragged screaming and kicking under the Byzantine leadership of Mr. Oyetola. Four years of the latter was all they could take. Incensed and humiliated, Mr. Oyetola now wishes to litigate his loss; but it won’t profit him anything. The election was free and fair. Of course Sen. Adeleke did not win the poll; Mr. Oyetola lost it, and he lost it by years of disengaging the snouts of the state’s cognoscenti from Osun’s feeding trough and treasury, and also by many more years of not ‘financially empowering’ those desperate for inducements, some of whom are his aides and cabinet members. He was too straitlaced to rule a state with a murderous predilection for destroying their saints, a people so regicidal that they pride themselves in electoral bloodletting.

Osun is of course not alone in cutting noses to spite faces. Edo State, drunk on catchphrases like ‘Edo no be Lagos’ also disgracefully mined twisted public sentiments to install Governor Godwin Obaseki for a second term, though his first term was mediocre in the extreme. But fancying themselves as warriors against what Nigerians call ‘godfatherism’, a reference to how they disemboweled both former governor Adams Oshiomhole and the APC national leader, Bola Ahmed TInubu, who had paid avuncular attention to happenings in the state, Edo rolled out their votes and hammered out victory for the incumbent with the help of scheming and unethical APC governors and leaders. Mr. Obaseki’s second term has proved more disastrous than his first term. Nothing will redeem his second term; just like nothing will redeem Sen Adeleke’s governorship, should Osun be tired of drinking electoral blood as to give their incoming governor a second term.

Many other factors have been adduced for the defeat of the APC in the Osun poll. They are wishy-washy. One of the factors is the putative spoiler role played by the rebellious Mr. Aregbesola, former governor and ineffective Interior minister under whom the prisons have done nothing significant but changed name. He had fallen out with Mr. Oyetola shortly after the latter became governor, and soon that estrangement rose in scope to envelope Asiwaju Tinubu, his mentor, whom he scalded for disallowing him from being Osun’s godfather. Mr. Aregbesola accused Asiwaju Tinbu of orchestrating the collapse of the state’s governorship rotation formula, a collapse he claimed unduly benefited Mr. Oyetola. Then he accused the outgoing governor of muscling out his faction within the ruling party. He was, however, silent on the fact that his tenure was disastrous, in fact catastrophic, as he upended and uprooted cultures, traditions, icons, and enthroned half-baked socialist ideas on a state that is decidedly capitalist or bucolic and conservative. Mr. Oyetola spent precious years and debt repayment trying to sanitise the financial, administrative and political mess created by his predecessor.

Whether Mr. Aregbesola and his APC faction like it or not, they will be strangers to the commonwealth the rival Adeleke family will be creating in Osun State. His best bet was to stomach the indignities he claimed Mr. Oyetola heaped on him, because at least, the APC would remain in office. Sooner or later, time would heal the divisions in the party, and perhaps reintegrate him and his men. Now, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will be in office for the next four years. They will not recognise him in the way he yearns, for they will recall how he bastardised the state, scattered the holiday regime of Osun, and ingeniously introduced sectarianism into one of the most secular of states in the Southwest. In fact, the ultimate repudiation of his administration is the victory of a Christian-Christian ticket at a time when the twisted logic of many critics who abjure Muslim-Muslim ticket nationally is running rampant. Mr. Aregbesola added nothing to the victory of the PDP in the state, despite the duplicitous claims by some of his aides that he did. Indeed, Mr. Oyetola did not lose because of the divisions within the APC. Had he outbid PDP pursers before and during voting, and allowed his men to help themselves a little to state funds, and had he also scrupulously serviced the state’s leading lights, he would have won. The margin of loss was not insurmountable.

Should the APC win the presidency, Osun will find itself outside looking in. But few in Osun seemed to care when they flung the genial Mr. Oyetola out of the window. Instead, the PDP in Osun, nationally and in Lagos, are beginning to tantalise themselves with the prospect of causing a major upset in the coming polls. Well, firstly, Osun went into the election with a Christian-Christian ticket, seemingly disproving the belief that a Muslim-Muslim ticket would not fly. Secondly, it is true that the Igbo vote in Osun, rather than be cast for the Labour Party whose rave, Peter Obi, had tried to galvanise voters with his newfound social media popularity, and probably voted for Mr. Adeleke whose mother was Igbo. Could Lagos replicate that political behavior in the next poll by getting the Igbo to vote PDP or Labour, especially in the legislative poll? It remains to be seen just how iconoclastic Nigerian voters have become on account of the improvement in making votes count.

But don’t count on Osun keeping the Adelekes beyond four years. Osun voters are too fickle to stay the course, especially when that course becomes arduous and trying. They have got their wish today, and are reveling in the power and freedom their ability to enthrone and dethrone ‘kings’ at will has given them. The economy is in a tailspin already, and they need the steadying and futuristic financial engineering which Mr. Oyetola offered them. But not been pampered by the rustic trappings which that engineering needed, the outgoing governor’s methods offended them. States are about to enter a very trying time in their finances, and Osun now has the distinguished honour, regent or no regent, of having a dancer and bohemian at the helm. Steering the laden and creaky Osun ship between Scylla and Charybdis without the financial rudder and captainship Mr Oyetola came into office with will tax the untried intellect and untested resolve of Sen Adeleke and his regents beyond measure. Freedom, like nobility, imposes obligations; if Osun has not learnt the rudiments of fasting, now is the time to take crash lessons. But from the way they cavalierly discharged their voting responsibility last week, there is no proof that they are capable of the reflection required to save themselves and generations unborn from hardship and embarrassment.

 

2023: Buhari leaves some things undone

DESPITE poor ratings, mostly fuelled by insecurity and inexpert management of the Nigerian economy and inexplicable appointments of key aides, President Muhammadu Buhari has accomplished many things. His achievements, some of them attributable to the initiative and drive of a few of his appointees, may ultimately be more impactful than his predecessor’s. In the closing months of his presidency, both he and his admiring public will recount such key accomplishments and probably celebrate him in a way that will cause him to shed a tear or two. If that is to be the culmination of his presidency, he will have to ensure that the economy spiraling out of control does not finally go into a tailspin, and insecurity does not lead to an explosion. He will have to dexterously manage state affairs, be advised by the best hands he can find from anywhere, Christian, Muslim, traditional religion, despite his personal revulsion, and regardless of political leaning.

However, of the many things he has left undone, one stands out: state police. If he does not do it, his successor will do it. Having spent over seven years not managing the national economy brilliantly, nor structuring it in a way that would make it self-sustaining, it is not expected that he would suddenly find the master key to redeeming it and getting results. And having spent an awful long time cobbling together a skewed and insular kitchen cabinet, together with security agencies that remained blatantly conservative, if not reactionary and unresponsive to the changing dynamics of the moment, there is not much he can do now to restructure and reorient them along very Nigerian lines. And having also sadly given the impression for years that the boyish religious fantasies he embraced had changed little and continue to inform his worldview and relationships, not to say his presidency, it is not clear that in the remaining months of his presidency he can suddenly become open-minded, liberal and inclusionary. He was also best placed to lead the restructuring of the country to eliminate the dissonance of today and the day after tomorrow, but he was too fearful to attempt that leap.

But there is one thing he can do to shore up his sagging and battered image, one thing that can help him begin addressing the dire problem of insecurity holding the country hostage and stultifying its potentials. It will not be easy, and he will probably not complete the structural transformation needed to birth it should he embark on it because it will include constitutional changes involving the states. However, he can start the change, drive it, get it to a point where it cannot be reversed, and since a consensus has already been formed around it, even claim some credit for thinking or originating it. Had President Buhari begun implementing the idea of state police for which virtually all the states were in agreement for years, he would probably have achieved it by now, and the country’s insecurity crisis would have been considerably ameliorated. It is true he feared abuse by state governors, perhaps worse than the federal government is abusing the police already, but despite the tardiness of the national legislature, constitutional safeguards could have been built into the radical reforms.

State police is an idea whose time came more than four years ago, before security challenges morphed into the monster it has become. His party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), through a 2017 committee on restructuring panel headed by Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai, recommended it and suggested operational guidelines and template. The panel’s recommendations were simply discarded. Since then, insecurity has clearly become cancerous, despite the solution staring everybody in the face. Whether the president likes it or not, the situation will not get better. The authorities can kill as many bandits and terrorists as they can, and smoke out Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgents as their resources can give them the leeway, but federal effort can hardly check the criminals, not to say completely stanch the flow of blood. The economy is getting worse; it will not get better in the months ahead. This and other factors that enable and energise crime will make the crisis intractable and unresponsive to the feeble ameliorations the government in Abuja has seemed to master.

In the past few months, the president has appeared to strangely come alive. It cannot be because of his health. Yes, he has brought some measure of control to that department, but his health is obviously not robust enough to explain the mental and physical reinvigoration he is thankfully manifesting before everyone. His cabinet has remained desultory and knee-jerk in its approach to complex issues, and is composed of the same people as in the beginning. It is a mixed bag of great and mediocre individuals who have not given the public reason to exult that the country is in safe hands. See, for instance, how he reacted decisively to the ministerial coterie angling for the presidency, even though he was unable to pull it through to the defiant end. And consider how after some pussyfooting and hesitations he finally managed his party’s chairmanship election and presidential primary. His approach could be neater and more statesmanlike, but considering where he was coming from, it is a miracle that he got as far as he did. Much more, he has begun to speak fairly eloquently about electoral fidelity, despite hemming and hawing about democracy and the rule of law. And when he quickly spoke his mind about the outcome of the governorship election in Osun without reference to his party, he seems to have acquired a new and independent spirit. For a man thought to have a split personality, President Buhari appears to be turning a more definitive new leaf.

Now, let him bring this new spirit, this new essence, this somewhat robust appreciation of what governance and the presidency should be, into play in his last months in office. He will not, and obviously cannot, complete state police restructuring, but he can start it and get it over the initial mountain hurdle. This column had been wary of his patriotism, having argued all along that he seemed more narrowly concerned about augmenting the circumstances of the core North and Islam than anything else; but given present concerns and the dark alley Nigeria must navigate in the months ahead before 2023, the president should be encouraged to do as much as is constitutionally possible before he leaves office. Last week, this column accused him of prematurely throwing in the towel when he described in evocative detail how his retirement would be. But if he can manage a few changes, let him disprove that conclusion. More, let him assemble men and women, not necessarily in or from his cabinet, who can help him finish strong.

He is definitely going to borrow his way to the end of his second term in 2023, just as he will likely find the funds to deliver a rapprochement with striking university teachers and justify his newfound zeal to bring the ASUU strike to a closure. In like manner, wherever he is getting the inspiration, let him drink from that primeval spring once again and pleasantly surprise the nation on the subject of state police. Above all, let him not go without addressing that subject and impacting it in a way that will be unforgettable. Can he manage that last gasp?