By Idowu Akinlotan

IF President Muhammadu Buhari knew how close the country he presides over has come to fracturing irreparably, he would have caused a better Independence Day anniversary speech to be written for him. It is taken for granted that he does not write one; it is perhaps too irksome. But he has the resources of the entire country to commission a great speech anytime he desires, assuming of course that he has formed a firm and deep opinion of what he wants them to write, and assuming also that he has a comprehensive grasp of the issues germane to the country’s survival. On Friday, he read probably the worst speech of his presidency. It had no pretext to be called a speech, not only for its consistently misdirected fulminations, but also because of its failure to inspire anyone or even answer to the salient issues threatening to fragment the country. As the unaddressed issue of banditry in the Northwest has shown in the speech, and the usurpation of state administrations in the Southeast by non-state actors has illustrated, the Buhari administration has managed in six giddy years to bring the country closest to fragmentation.

The National Assembly, which risks drawing the fury of the people for its collusion with the executive, has repeatedly attempted to help the president reshape his administration and reorder his priorities. In particular, it asked the president to declare bandits of the Northwest as terrorists, a declaration that needed neither argument nor prompting. But the president, speaking to and hearing himself only, has obsessed about self-determination groups only, ignoring the obvious fact that secession campaigns were triggered by his administration’s exclusion politics. Other socio-political and cultural groups have also attempted to nudge the president in the right direction, but he has ignored them and sometimes savaged them with cynical and sarcastic statements from his irreverent aides. The October 1, 2021 anniversary address has finally convinced most Nigerians that the current administration cannot objectively and dispassionately address the country’s existential crisis. It won’t, and can’t. Political leaders will have to move beyond the administration to see whether it is still possible to retreat from the abyss threatening to swallow the country.

But political leaders themselves are immersed in the incompetence and filth stymieing the progress and stability of Nigeria. The problem is not often their hysterical exchange of bitter words, or their lack of purpose and profundity. Having become accustomed to preying on the country for decades as military and civilian elites, and seeing the country ceaselessly yield to them yard by yard, and miles on end, they have taken the view that no amount of brinkmanship could sink the country, and no precipice so far or near that the country could not retreat from it at the last minute. In both the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), political leaders had to be cajoled into contemplating the reality and ineluctability of zoning and rotation. They still squirm about the change afoot, of course, as northern political elites ruminate on how best to retain power in their region using all sorts of artifices, including deliberately untruthful political, population and electoral arithmetic. They will not be restrained from intriguing against zoning until the mishandling of the country by the Buhari administration makes change inevitable.

Last week, the country was in an uproar over what appeared to be the insistence by northern governors to retain the presidency in the North on the grounds that zoning or rotational presidency was unconstitutional. This was compounded by spokesman of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), Hakeem Baba-Ahmed’s provocative dismissal of southern attempts to force a rotation on the grounds of decency and political inclusiveness. Dr Baba-Ahmed is of course persuaded that the Buhari administration has been unworthy of support, but he seems convinced that by population, entitlement and ethnic exceptionalism, the North should retain power beyond 2023. First, the APC intrigued against rotation, then it finally relented and embraced zoning of national party offices as a precursor to the presidential race. It has zoned the party chairmanship to the North, but left the presidential ticket disingenuously open. The PDP also went down that chute, at first denying the need for rotational presidency, but later, through its national zoning committee, agreeing to zone the chairmanship to the North after desperately scouting for a southern chairman. However, both parties theoretically leave the presidential ticket open, a subterfuge they may be unable to sustain for long, especially in the face of the searing disconnect and division the Buhari administration has fostered.

In all this, President Buhari has said nothing on rotation. His body language, which befuddles even the most accomplished mind reader, seems to indicate that he is prepared to embrace whichever opinion wins the day. If his men in the APC can coax a northern presidential candidate out of their swelling but still acrimonious ranks, he will claim the virtue of a democrat to endorse it. If not, he will also resign himself painfully to the other reality. But as the discord grows in his party over zoning, it is tragic that he has felt too numbed to wade in on the side of a wise cause that should burnish his fractured image as a national leader. Should he immediately decide on the side of rotation, the PDP would be left stranded midstream, unable to proceed in the controversial course a few of its ambitious presidential aspirants have set for the hamstrung opposition. President Buhari’s body language and politics are designed to enhance ethnic supremacist arguments. He will only relent if he is left with no choice.

Indeed, it is tragic that the president underestimates the national significance of his office. He is not just the party leader who should set the right and virtuous direction for the APC, a path it should tread in the decades to come; he is also more significantly the president of the whole country, whether deservedly or otherwise. He has a responsibility, perhaps diminished by his cultural experience and background, to set the right, democratic, constitutional and institutional tone for the country. Ex-president Olsuegun Obasanjo, as shortsighted and tainted as he was, did not need a debate to convince him that after eight years in office, balance and commonsense dictate that power should shift to the North. Without being coerced, he did everything in his power to ensure rotation, knowing full well that neither the constitution nor political dynamics could midwife that sensible and desired outcome. What kick in the butt does President Buhari need to do what is right?

When President Obasanjo governed, few knew or bothered where he came from. Though he was unable to take advantage and build on that enormous goodwill, he did not rule as a Yoruba, and most Nigerians testified to his sense of political and interregional fairness. In speech, comportment, and policies, President Buhari has managed the ruling party and ruled the country as a northerner of the most acute variety, favouring herdsmen, soft on banditry, convoluted about Boko Haram, and unable to divorce his piety from statecraft. Former Kano emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, an interested party and self-opinionated dark horse, has spoken of zoning as capable of producing ‘two useless candidates’. Nonsense. Not only is it too early to tell who the candidates will be, whoever emerges in 2023 can’t possibly be worse than the preceding eight years. There is indeed every indication he will be far better and more nationalistic, going by the experience of the past few years.

 

Reckless PDP snatches a reprieve

IN their calculations for 2023, assuming looming chaos does not debar elections from holding, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has many things to be ashamed and afraid of. Unable to get its act together since it received a drubbing in the 2015 polls, or summon the imagination to purge its ranks and do a reset of its politics, it has postponed its dilemmas and agonies till now. Whatever zoning arrangement it finally embraces, it cannot pick its presidential candidate from the Southwest because it is poorly represented in the zone, and also lacks a man of solid political girth to fly its flag. Though it is well represented in the Southeast, despite suffering significant depletion in the past few months as a result of defections, it still cannot pick its standard-bearer from the zone on account of disadvantaged electoral strength and lack of a credible, sellable political figure. And like the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), it faces a massive national revolt if it picks a northern candidate after President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight tumultuous years in office.

Perched dismally on the horns of dilemma, and too adamant to confront its multifarious political and electoral interests and problems, the main opposition party seems once again poised to self-destruct in 2023. It has proceeded recklessly and irresponsibly in the past six years as if its rival was weakening with age, and as if it possesses a talisman to win the next polls against the run of play. That talisman failed them in 2015, and also failed horrendously in 2019 when the party’s sorcery was again put to the test. Its leaders are slow to respond to external threats as they are hesitant to decode internal dissensions promoted by wealthy party leaders and intransigent followers. No one has grown to be the party’s leading light or pathfinder. Instead, those who purport to lead the party or present themselves as servile followers have been flummoxed by the party’s lack of philosophical integrity. Since it learnt nothing from the 2015 debacle, and showed even more damning weakness in 2019, it has been unable to circle the wagons to protect itself from the predatory rampage of the grasping APC.

The APC caretaker leaders are short-sighted, given the way party panjandrums have led the party and ridden roughshod over their dissenting and less privileged members; but the PDP has been even less farsighted, its political sight occluded by the designs and shenanigans of its presidential aspirants. How they misread the mood of the country is impossible to imagine. They needed to proceed cautiously in zoning their party offices preparatory to their elective national convention. They needed to summon all the tricks permissible under the electoral law to let the APC foolishly commit themselves in their conventions. But the PDP blundered intrepidly forward, with their leading presidential aspirants plotting to cajole the party into zoning the party chairmanship position to the Southwest. Thus the country read the signal that the PDP planned to zone the presidency to the North, and the vice presidency to the South-South or Southeast. This bizarre plot came on the heels of the APC giving indication that it would zone its party chairmanship to the North in their national convention.

PDP governors, still the most influential in the party, have, however, saved the day by announcing after their Wednesday meeting in Abuja that the chairmanship would be zoned to the North, insinuating that the presidency could go to the South. The zoning arrangements are of course tentative; nothing is cast in granite. But it helps both parties, especially the PDP, to defer apocalypse until a later date when either party would have committed itself irretrievably to a suicidal plunge. This tentative arrangement may have thrown a spanner in the works for former vice president Atiku Abubakar, former senate president Bukola Saraki, serving governor Aminu Tambuwal, and former governors Rabiu Kwankwaso and Sule Lamido, but it is hard to see the party enjoying any other kind of elbow room in the coming presidential contest.

On paper, with its legislative and governorship ranks severely depleted by opportunistic defections, and with intransigent stakeholders like Rivers governor Nyesom Wike remaining acerbic, scathing, imposing and imperious, the PDP may have again foolishly and meekly gifted the presidency to the APC. Of course the ruling party has done little to deserve anything, let alone another victory in 2023, but, unlike the PDP, it still manages to present saner and stabler interior and exterior. The APC has not displayed its posse of presidential contestants in the garish and exasperating manner the PDP has done, but even in its shyness and incompetence, the ruling party has given the impression that its candidate, whomever that would be, would be the man to beat. If in the final analysis the PDP presidential frontrunners, nearly all of whom are from the North, are unhorsed by the dynamics of zoning, if not by their staidness and colourlessness, the party would be hard put to present any other credible somebody in a restricted field of party nobodies. And if against logic and history they manage to present a finely hewn somebody, they know in their heart of hearts that the cards have been stacked against them since they first failed to respond adequately to their 2015 loss, a loss now made grosser by their mortifying 2019 failure and the multiple defections that have bled their ranks and sclerosed their sinews.

 

Guinea, Mali and Buhari’s UN speech

IN his remarks at the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York late September, President Buhari deplored the resurgence of coups d’etat in West Africa, arguing that they constituted a setback to democracy in the region. He is right. He had said: “In West Africa especially, our democratic gains of the past decades are now being eroded. The recent trend of unconstitutional takeover of power, sometimes in reaction to unilateral changes of constitutions by some leaders, must not be tolerated by the international community…As leaders of our individual Member-States we need to adhere to the constitutional provisions of our countries, particularly on term limits. This is one area that generates crisis and political tension in our sub-region.”

His remarks were a direct attack on the two coups in Mali led by Col Assimi Goita in 2020 and again in 2021, both condemned by ECOWAS and accompanied by feeble imposition of sanctions. Once they allowed him to consolidate by embedding in the civilian government of the day in 2020, the cause of democracy was lost, and the second coup the following year was a foregone conclusion. He promises to restore civil rule in 2022. There is no concrete indication he will respect the date, especially with the September 2021 coup in Guinea led by former Special Forces commander, Mamady Doumbouya, who has pronounced an indeterminate date for a new constitution and restoration of democracy. But the problem of Guinea was not the constitution. The deposed Guinean president, after all, assaulted the constitution by altering the provision on term limits.

It is surprising that President Buhari is worried by the recrudescence of coups in the region and the denudation of democracy. He himself has done a lot to undermine democracy in Nigeria, promote division, abridge rights, and even ignore regional court decisions. So how can he provide the leadership sorely needed to combat the descent into authoritarianism in the region?

A little over one-and-a-half years to the end of his second and final term in office, President Muhammadu Buhari gave his presidency a shot in the arm by sacking two of his ministers, Mohammed Sabo Nanono of Agriculture ministry and Saleh Mamman of the Power ministry. The sackings were generally unexpected, and seemed to portray the president as firm, in control of his presidency, and eager to do definitively more in the weeks and months ahead. He had talked tough a few weeks ago, at least as echoed by his National Security Adviser (NSA), Babagana Monguno, who quoted the president as charging his security chiefs to rein in banditry and insurgency or suffer being shuffled into retirement. Last week’s cabinet reshuffle would seem to indicate finally that the president knows what he wants from his administration, and more, how to get it. After all, he had also recently declared that his administration would not end a failure.

Most Nigerians will, however, remain skeptical that the president can still save the day or his presidency, despite his stimulating declaration that he shuffled his cabinet to strengthen the chain that holds his administration together. His government had done a review, he suggested, and the review had exposed the affected ministers’ shortcomings, adding stirringly that “These significant review steps have helped to identify and strengthen weak areas, close gaps, build cohesion and synergy in governance, manage the economy and improve the delivery of public good to Nigerians.” It is evident that for about six years, his presidency had been lethargic, indecisive, and seemed poised to mummify in chaos as his tenure neared its end. But if what ailed his presidency were consistent with the reasons he gave for the reshuffle, this shot in the arm may in fact be the appropriate and helpful anodyne to a faltering administration.

However, what is at the root of public disenchantment against his administration are weightier than he has seemed to recognise, and even more nuanced than his cantankerous and vituperative aides and cabinet members have consistently adduced. It is true that the administration was lethargic for all of six years or so, either as a consequence of his struggle with poor health or the cabalistic stalemate his presidency had had to endure for some years. Perhaps now, there seems to be some clarity around him, and he seems to know whom and whose judgement to trust and infuse into public policy. The public can only guess. But what is even truer is that what really ail his administration are more fundamental than any of his close aides lends credence to, to wit, the religious and ethnic veneer that coats his policies, the lack of philosophical rigour that suffuses his administration but which is necessary to define and animate the country’s future and vision, and the absolute absence of a conceptual understanding of what Nigeria, the most populous black nation on earth, is and must represent.

It is undeniable that the Buhari administration struggles with a lack of ideological direction, despite the vaunted, but now repudiated, progressivism of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). The administration is sometimes eclectic, seeming even to rely on the personal touch and efforts of some of the ministers, particularly Rotimi Amaechi and Babatunde Fashola; but even that eclecticism has often been corrupted and weakened by both the deliberate subversion of Nigeria’s secular constitution as championed by the likes of Communications minister Isa Pantami and the attenuated war against insurgency and banditry led by the security agencies. Few Nigerians now believe that President Buhari can remedy the problem in 20 months, regardless of how animated his actions and speeches are. They find it inexplicable that he still talks of grazing routes in the face of clear evidence of the destructive activities of herdsmen, most of them foreign mercenaries without cattle, and in the face of a clear lack of constitutional support.

It was in the midst of this confusion that Information minister Lai Mohammed, speaking in Cape Verde last week during the 64th Conference of the UN World Tourism Organisation Commission for Africa, trained his guns on Nigeria’s political and religious leaders as well as opinion moulders whom he accused of incitement and lack of patriotism. These inciters, Mr Mohammed argues, are the problem with the country. He voices his displeasure fairly exhaustively. Hear him: “In the last few weeks, the country has been awash, especially from the broadcast media, with very incendiary rhetoric which has created a sort of panic in Nigeria. The incendiary rhetoric that comes from political, religious leaders and some opinion moulders have the capacity to set the country on fire. This is because the rhetoric is pitting one ethnic group and religion against the other and overheating the polity. Our serious counsel to stakeholders is that they should understand and remember that leadership comes with a lot of responsibilities, tone down the hateful rhetoric because they are harmful to the country. They should remember that every war is preceded by these kinds of mindless rhetoric, especially when it comes from otherwise responsible people who the people have the tendency to take seriously.”

He, however, grudgingly concedes some points to the opinion moulders whose patriotism he questions: “We agree that there are challenges but the government is doing its best in addressing insecurity, banditry, insurrections, and fixing the economy. What one expected from these leaders at this trying period is support and encouragement. It is, however, quite disturbing that they have thrown caution to the wind and it is no longer about leadership and maturity but about who can say something that can break this country… If what they are praying for happens, they will no longer be leaders but servants in other countries.”

Mr Mohammed’s umbrage exemplifies the Buhari administration’s inability to grasp the country’s fundamental problem. He tries to redefine the problem in terms of weak ministerial links imperiling the strength of the chain. But Mr Mohammed’s conclusions are questionable. Though an information man himself, and a lawyer to boot, not to say a propagandist who profited from the liberal atmosphere enjoyed by the media under the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidency, he seems obscenely eager to eviscerate Nigeria’s broadcast media which is regulated by the authoritarian National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), an agency under the purview of the Information ministry. It is a clear indication that the APC does not have a media policy, is unable to appreciate how the media can be tweaked to project Nigeria’s continental power or dominance, and is totally oblivious that one day, the APC in opposition could be hoisted with its own petard.

Mr Mohammed blames religious and political leaders for incendiary rhetoric. He is parrying the truth. Has he explained what the so-called incendiary rhetoric is directed at? Is it not a reflection of how opinion leaders perceive the Buhari administration’s handling of ethnic and religious issues – the security appointments, the grazing brouhaha, the skewed response to retaliatory attacks on vicious and rampaging foreign Fulani militia, and all other public policies that portray the administration as prejudiced? Remove these provocations, item by item, and see whether there would be ‘incendiary rhetoric’. Before one person lost his life as a result of the self-determination agitations of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), the administration had hastily described the Southeast group as a terrorist organisation, and proscribed it. The world recognises Nigerian bandits and herdsmen as some of the worst terrorist organisations anywhere, but the administration has refused to declare them as such, even failing to attack them with the same vicious official rhetoric it directed against IPOB.

Mr Mohammed is dishonest not to understand that the rhetoric he complains against was triggered by the perception of the Buhari administration as lacking in impartiality. The incendiary rhetoric will continue despite his threats, until the administration recognises what Nigeria means, and until it evolves measures that would see the government responding to security threats with the impartiality Nigerians yearn for. The Information minister probably also knows, but won’t admit it, that public dismay at the administration’s failings has been influenced by the government’s refusal to take proactive measures to rein in insecurity, measures such as restructuring, which would in turn trigger a welter of salutary changes capable of dousing tension and placating rebellion. The country is on the verge of open rebellion, and the administration’s response has been desultory, incompetent, abusive, oppressive, and almost entirely counterproductive. Few Nigerians think anything substantial can be done in 20 months to mitigate the descent to chaos. It is left for the administration to prove them wrong, not to threaten and insult them. It is inconceivable that terrorism in the Northwest, aka banditry, cannot be reined in, except if it is true that the administration is not as altruistic as imagined. Governance is collapsing in the Northwest, schools are shut in many states in the North, and ethnic militias and kidnappers are running riot on the highways, with many travelers traumatised and turned to nervous wrecks. Nothing explains the slowness of the administration in identifying the factors responsible?

Mr Mohammed threatens and blackmails dissenters with the evil omen of war. He accuses the country’s opinion moulders of trying to instigate war whose consequences the critics could not hope to escape. But there is nothing in the positions of those who take issue with the Buhari administration that suggests they are pro-war. They may be disenchanted, angry and despondent, but they are not warmongers; they are merely responding to the acts of omission and commission of the administration, to its lethargy and indifference, to its refusal to be evenhanded. Of course should war break out, as experienced by many states in the North, it is not only Mr Mohammed’s hated rhetoricians that would be affected. The administration, not to say the country itself, could not hope to remain unaffected. There is so much at stake that it is frustrating and annoying the incoherence with which the administration has handled national crises. Abusing or arresting dissenters will not obviate the enormous tragedy unfurling over Nigeria, or mitigate the suspicion that the administration is promoting certain nefarious agenda.

When he sacked two ministers – the term cabinet reshuffle is inappropriate, for that implies that the leader is a coach – the president indicated he could act with resolve and dispassion. He gave added indication that if he extended that faculty to other areas of national life, peace, stability and growth could be engendered. But it remains only an indication. Without qualitative and multicultural and multireligious infusions into his kitchen cabinet, it is hard to sustain the optimism that somehow, the president can find the formula to retool and retune the country. It may be unfeeling to write him off, but even he must admit that time is not on his side, notwithstanding Mr Mohammed’s propagandist predilection for blindly defending the administration’s policies.

 

Obasanjo’s measurement of war and peace

War and peace are two sides of the same coin. Strangely, the distance between the two is hardly perceptible. Flip the coin one way, and peace ensues; flip it the other way, and it is war. If it is understood that the distance is short, and the dividing line is wafer-thin, what of the costs then? Are they also indeterminate? No, glowed former president Olusegun Obasanjo, they are separated by a gulf, suggesting in addition that no matter what happens, it is always better to work for peace because it is cheaper than war. Speaking at a book launch and 85th birthday celebration of Prelate Sunday Mbang of the Methodist Church, Nigeria, the ex-president had propounded an intriguing costing for war and peace. In lionising the prelate as an exponent of unity, peace, security and progress, Chief Obasanjo had gushed: “I know that these are things that are dear to his heart. We want to assure you that Nigeria will continue to exist because the cost for Nigeria not to continue to exist is much more than the cost for us to make Nigeria to continue to exist.”

But measuring peace is fraught with a lot of difficulties. It is neither as straightforward as Chief Obasanjo puts it nor its metrics as easy and neat to calculate. To gain peace, sometimes war may be inevitable, especially if war, under any guise, is foisted on a people. Germany’s Adolf Hitler foisted World War II on the world, citing iniquitous World War I peace treaties. War was ineluctable. Of course, for the allies, war was far cheaper than the burden of slavery or occupation. As United States general and former president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, quipped, “…A soldier’s pack is not so heavy as a prisoner’s chains.” Chief Obasanjo is right to desire peace in place of war, giving his experience fighting one. But when gross inequity permeates a political system, and a people are in danger of being enslaved, fighting becomes a duty, and its cost infinitely more tolerable.

Nigerian leaders sentimentalise war. War will always be fought, for no political system, especially one built on injustice and unfairness, can last for all time. Even those built on justice sometimes fail, as past empires and kingdoms have shown. Nigeria is an impermanent arrangement, a hodgepodge its leaders have been reluctant or incompetent to remake to engender stability and equilibrium. Political and religious leaders say the country is not an accident, but was put together by God for a purpose. Can they tell whether that purpose has not lapsed, as it lapsed for past empires and alliances? After decades of fractious relationship, culminating in the near-war situation of today, should Nigerian leaders not seek ways of realigning the country along just and enduring lines instead of promoting dissension and ethnic and religious superiority?

Regardless of Europe’s advanced economies and civic cultures, not to talk of those of Asia and America, wars will still be fought on some apocalyptic tomorrow. Wars are a permanent feature of humanity, whether they are cruel and costly or not, and a student of warfare like Chief Obasanjo should know. Fighting or desiring war is not a question of cost or of the grief that accompanies it, or whether it is lost or won; it is a question of every generation doing its best to avoid it until it becomes inevitable. Germany lost nearly a generation in both the 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 wars, with its elite humiliated by defeat and the savagery that defined the bloodletting. For the sake of ideological ascendancy, China and Russia each lost nearly as many people as Germany lost in its wars; but all of them alike have recovered and developed political, social and economic systems that attract millions of immigrants. In future, they will fight more wars, costly or cheap, noble or ignoble. It was, therefore, not expected of Chief Obasanjo to be squeamish about war despite its tragic concomitants; instead, he should campaign for justice and equity, without which war would be inevitable.

THE reaction of the federal government to the murder in Jos of some 22 or 25 Ondo State-bound northerners two Saturdays ago is mystifying. Irigwe youths in Bassa local government area of Plateau State were blamed for the killings. Swiftly, the government brought down the hammer on the suspected killers, arrested scores of them, police chiefs and top military commanders visited the crime scene, Governors’ Forum decried the crime and condemned the killings, and the government itself, after deploying helicopter and other law enforcement assets, promised to bring the perpetrators to book. The killings were believed to have been a reprisal attack on the travellers who were returning from a religious retreat in Bauchi State, and were thought to be mostly Hausa or Fulani.

A week or two earlier, members of a Fulani militia had swooped on Irigwe land and murdered, by some reports, over 70 natives. The natives described the killings – not the first, they insisted – as ethnic cleansing and land grabbing. Mourners were actually in a procession to bury a few of their dead when they encountered the Ondo-bound pilgrims, and violence erupted. Plateau indigenes, angry and feeling abandoned and helpless, accuse the federal government of being indifferent to the seizure of their lands by Fulani militia. They are surprised that the government has done nothing to help them reclaim their communities – over 60 by last count – on which the Fulani have settled, even renaming some of the villages. Gradually, they may be starting to suspect that if they do not reclaim their communities from the Fulani by force, no one would.

In many instances, the federal government has painted the violence in Plateau State as clashes between herders and farmers. The Plateau people insist the killings are attacks on their villages and farms, because the killings take place on their lands, and are, therefore, not clashes in the classical sense. At other instances, such as the killing of the Ondo-bound travelers, the violence is painted as ethno-religious. In fact, all the stories and reports that emanated out of the killings have been painted as Christian militias murdering Muslim travellers, a religious narrative unwisely encouraged and legitimised by the police and the federal government barely hours after the killings. The violence may ebb and flow, but it is unlikely to abate, regardless of the force the federal government deploys. There does not appear to be sincerity or competence in tackling the crisis.

Read Also: Alaafin others want more promotion of culture and tradition

While the state government has been somewhat timid in tackling the ongoing crisis, frequently appearing to acquiesce to federal narratives than its own reasoned summations of the violence, the federal government has been flagrantly less even-handed in dealing with the violence. Not only have they abandoned neutrality going by their refusal to come out with a definitive statement on the land seizures, they have been more glib and sprightly in embracing the arguments of the Fulani militias, leading to suspicion by Plateau natives of a secret collusion between the herdsmen militias and the federal government. Moreover, both the paramount ruler of Irigwe land, Rt Rev Ronku Aka, and the national president of the Irigwe Development Association, Robert Ashi, for instance, have insisted that the military deliberately pulled their punches in responding to the invaders even though they were alerted. The suspicion of collusion will not go away. The federal government has been reluctant to speak to that puzzle. Governor Simon Lalung of Palteau State has also been accused of behaving obsequiously in threatening to arrest those who try to bail the suspects arrested in connection with the killings of the travellers, a step interpreted as a ploy to rewrite the constitution. Worse, Bassa LGA chairman also echoed his governor by supporting the state government and law enforcement positions.

Killings are deplorable, whether as attack or reprisal. There is no way to justify them, regardless of the reservations many analysts may have about the federal response to the crisis and the suspicious narratives being promoted to obfuscate the killings and drape them in misleading emotions. Murder is horrifying, and it must be condemned, for the innocent could sometimes be the victim. But the killings in Plateau, like those in Benue, Nasarawa and Kaduna, must be thoroughly investigated in order to establish their root causes and determine appropriate solutions. Narratives are conflicting, with victims painting the picture of the injured party, and attackers painting the picture of the needlessly provoked. What is clear, however, is that what began decades ago as clashes between farmers and herders over shrinking pastures have unrestrainedly metamorphosed into land seizures, perhaps for the purpose of acquiring grazing fields for cattle.

While it is acknowledged that the problem has lasted for so long, even defying solutions, it is still mortifying that the current Muhammadu Buhari administration has made itself a party to the conflict rather than an arbiter. Because of its many one-sided statements and actions to unconstitutionally secure grazing rights for herders, whatever solutions it proffers are more likely to be seen as dishonest. It may already be too late for the administration to portray itself as neutral, nor will any of the badly affected communities see it as one. Nearly the whole country now abjure the traditional form of cattle rearing; but the Buhari administration has persisted in backing ancient and untenable animal husbandry practices to the point of trying to reclaim inexistent grazing routes and reserves for Fulani herders through the deployment of federal power and its unlawful exercise. How it expects that this anomalous and intransigent exercise of federal might would not lead to further clashes capable of threatening the stability of the whole country is hard to say.

The federal response to the Plateau crisis undoubtedly showed bias, and it abhorrently played upon religious and ethnic sentiments. The authorities have arrested over 30 suspects with a swiftness and comprehensiveness it had never demonstrated when the Plateau locals were on the receiving end. The same orientation perfused the federal reaction to the Benue killings years ago, such that officials even suggested to locals to cede land in order to obtain peace in return and cessation from mercenary attacks. Sadly, the same attitude is observed all over the country where victims aggressively defending their lands and lives have been hostilely treated by the government while attackers, mostly herders and their mercenaries, have been left to pillage unhindered by law enforcement agencies and unencumbered by legal obstacles.

Last Thursday, President Buhari assured Nigerians he would not let insecurity define his legacy, promising to come down hard on crime. He was prepared to rejig his security system if necessary, he added. Does he not think that optimism is belated? It took more than six years to cast his administration’s insecurity record in stone; it is hard to see it changing in two years, especially because he has refused, or is unable, to appreciate the fundamental causes of the problem. At the bottom of that problem, alas, is his government’s faulty disposition to national unity, which administration officials neither understand nor possess the neutrality to deconstruct. Until he and his government reach a substantial understanding of the root causes of the various insecurity crises exploding upon the country everywhere, until he understands that his ham-fisted approach to dealing with malfeasant Fulani militias fuels their rampage, and until he realizes that he has sectionalized the country into we versus them, no appreciable progress can be made to restore peace.

Should the president feel confident enough to conduct an opinion poll on the people’s perception of his administration, he would be shocked to discover that they fear he has taken sides in the conflict, and indeed that he encourages Fulani militias to rampage for land. Most of the Fulani attackers are non-Nigerians in the first instance, but too many Fulani political elite in power simply do not see any border when it comes to herdersmen. The president and his supporters, particularly the incendiary associations of herders, have very little understanding of the forces they are inadvertently unleashing upon the country through their dissonant approach to conflicts in the Middle Belt and the South. Foreign Fulani mercenaries rummaging through Nigeria for land are encouraged by lax law enforcement and conniving government officials to run riot around farming communities in Nigeria. Even if the invaders pacify the country or seize as much land as they can, it still would not guarantee peace or bar the mercenaries from turning against those who gave them free rein to trample upon the country. Somalia should provide the ruling elite a cautionary tale that ethnic or religious homogeneity does not guarantee anything.

It was expected that an empathetic government and people would show outrage over the killing of 25 innocent travellers. Even the Irigwe people, who have been at the receiving end of Fulani mercenary attacks, have had the unpleasant duty of denouncing the killings while still mourning their dead. Reprisals have, however, continued. The vengeance killings will not end until justice is done to placate the injustice and tragedy felt by those whose lands have been seized. A decade or so ago, current Digital Economy minister, Isa Pantami, reportedly offered to lead a jihad against the Jonah Jang government in Plateau State, threatening mayhem in the same Bassa LGA. Despite his incendiary views which recently came to light, he remains highly influential in government. Who could blame the Irigwe people and other Plateau indigenes for suspecting a federal conspiracy against their lands and lives? It has been decades since a massive tragedy began to unfold on the Plateau. That tragedy is still playing out today because the arbiter who should resolve the crisis is neither impartial nor credible. Indeed, the administration has refused to disabuse the minds of those who lost their lands and farms, and who are today in IDP camps, that the federal government can be trusted to dispense justice without ethnic or religious colouration.

 

Drawing the wrong lessons from Afghanistan

IN his latest article in the Financial Times of London on terrorism, President Muhammadu Buhari reflects on the United States foreign policy debacle in Afghanistan. He tries to draw a few lessons from the crisis, most of them apocalyptic and absolutely tangential to the issue at hand, and rightly acknowledges that America could not eternally guarantee peace in countries threatened by war or terrorism. He suggests in addition that Africa is expected to be the next epicenter of global terrorism capable of endangering the West. He goes ahead to identify a few countries, including Mozambique, Somalia and Nigeria as countries embroiled in terrorism. He then plaintively appeals to the US and other Western countries not to be war-weary simply because of their experience in Afghanistan, in responding to global terrorism threats.

But Afghanistan did not need to collapse, or be liberated, before President Buhari appreciates the urgency of cobbling the right and homegrown policy responses to terror threats in Nigeria or in neighbouring countries. Though he correctly identifies a few social and economic drivers of terrorism, he disingenuously avoided any reference to religion as a factor, though it is the most critical because it lethally intertwines with ideology, as Afghanistan has shown. Yes, he speaks about a lack of policy response to the problems of burgeoning population and low investment in infrastructure, insisting incredibly that the latter justifies his inscrutable decision to build a rail line to Niger Republic when he has not built one to the eastern part of his country; but the fact is that Nigeria has done nothing about its burgeoning population, absolutely nothing, and has borrowed the country to ruin in trying to address the country’s infrastructural deficit.

Nigeria’s economic troubles, the president admits, create a gap for militants to ‘perversely’ exploit, and he thus advocates aid from the developed world. But Nigeria runs a ‘perverse’ national structure that enthrones inefficiency all-round — in the economy, in politics, and in the society at large. He calls for help from outsiders though his country runs a turgid and wasteful economic structure that rewards, through meaningless revenue allocations, all manner of incompetent and adventurous administrations at federal and state levels. Nigeria also runs a system of government that is huge, expensive and virtually useless because it is largely unaccountable. That twisted system is run by unimaginative and shortsighted leaders. President Buhari has strenuously refused to address these anomalies and inefficiencies, but shockingly seeks for economic assistance from the rich world. Surely, he can’t be blinded to the irony.

While President Buhari admits the limitations of force in solving terrorism, as the inadvisable US occupation of Afghanistan has shown, he has run his government and responded to crises under the illusion that force is the needed anodyne. His economic, social and political policies have promoted ethnic and religious exceptionalism, prompting leading politicians and former presidents to accuse him of bigotry and division. He gives the impression that he could impose, without fear of consequence, his proposed and one-sided Water Bill, Grazing (RUGA) policy, harbouring of repentant jihadists like Isa Pantami in his cabinet, flagrant diminution of the rule of law, and many other undisguised actions that have manifested in skewed security appointments. Having contradicted his own arguments on the applicability of force, he goes on to suggest in the FT piece that the US and other industrialized countries must not refrain from offering “…technical assistance, advanced weaponry, intelligence and ordinance”, adding that US air strikes on al-Shabaab positions in Somalia last month was effective and should be replicated, perhaps in Nigeria.

Boko Haram has lasted for more than 20 years. It curiously began as Nigerian Taliban. It is ideology-based, and it is relentless, unapologetic and inflexible in pursuing its goals. As the sudden but explicable collapse of the Afghan armed forces showed, despite the US expending more than a trillion dollars to build it, ideological (Taliban, ISIS, etc.) militants hardly repent, whether they are ISWAP or Boko Haram. It is suspected that many states in the core North of Nigeria, including government officials at federal and state levels, secretly harbour sympathies for the insurgents, sympathies now controversially extended to bandits in the Northwest. The Nigerian crisis is obviously just beginning, after more than 35,000 dead, as hinted by President Buhari in the FT piece. Years of fraternising with extreme religious groups in the name of Puritanism have produced a lethal mix of lawlessness and terrorism. Meanwhile, the Buhari administration has spent a fortune through a programme called sulhu designed to deradicalise and reintegrate factionally disaffected and displaced Boko Haram militants. The seed of future crisis is being sown. It will germinate.

President Buhari is unlikely to address the underlying issues predisposing Nigeria to terrorism. He has not drawn the right lessons from Afghanistan partly because neither he nor many in the North have seen anything repugnant about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. What is more, neither he nor most of his supporters view Nigeria from the prism of its religious and ethnic mosaic, a heterogeneity he believes taxes his patience and capacity, a mosaic he is not enamoured of. Past presidents and military heads of state chose subtle and surreptitious religious and ethnic control of Nigeria. President Buhari has instead engaged in open and hostile measures to divide and control Nigeria. His inadequate understanding of history bar him from appreciating the limitations the British, Soviets and Americans experienced in their occupation of Afghanistan. That inadequacy will not let him draw a parallel between those occupying powers and the occupation he is exhuming and fostering in Nigeria, more than a century after British colonialists in 1904 resurrected the fading and frazzled Sokoto Caliphate and coldly foisted it on the restive local populace.

 

ON Tuesday, ex-military ruler Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, more popularly known as IBB, will be 80 years old. He has done well for himself. Life expectancy in Nigeria is about 62 years, nearly 20 years less than the life expectancy of those who have had the privilege of ruling Nigeria. Olusegun Obasanjo is 84, or so he thinks; Shehu Shagari was 93 when he died in 2018; Yakubu Gowon is 86; Abdulsalami Abubakar is 79; Muhammadu Buhari, the incumbent, is 78, all other records being equal; and Goodluck Jonathan at 63 is still as strong as an aurochs. Their longevity is remarkable, especially in the face of the brevity of life to which their policies and methods have sentenced the people. Gen Gowon may be the archetypal officer and gentleman of the lot, but IBB is the one credited with understanding the nuances of power, despite applying that power wholly to private gain. Thus to keep himself in the consciousness of Nigerians, IBB granted Arise TV an interview last week in which he tried, perhaps for the last time, to explain and justify the leadership malfeasance that undid his administration.

The interview was naturally self-serving, as narcissistic as everything about him in and out of office. Arise TV has made a point of getting reticent leaders to grant interviews. No one can begrudge the broadcast medium from trying to coax other tongue-tied leaders to massage their own egos and vituperate their enemies. In June, they had inveigled President Muhammdu Buhari to loosen up. That interview left bemused Nigerians wishing it had never taken place. IBB said so many things last week but overall failed to explore new ideas or disclose hidden facts, virtually ending up saying exactly the same things he had said over and over again, only this time in different, bothersome ways. The media have an enduring fixation with political dinosaurs, and would give anything to get them to say a few words, whether those words make sense or not. But hopefully, like President Buhari, IBB will have no reason ever again to grant another interview. The country has had enough of their prevarications, their patrician airs, and their undisciplined, sectional and shortsighted self-portraiture.

There was nothing revelatory about the IBB interview. There was no new insight into his person or the workings of his mind. Both remain jaded and off-putting. There was no indication that years out of office, including lessons he gleaned from a second presidential race in 2010, had afforded him the chance to reflect on his years in power. He is incapable of self-reflection. There was also no indication in the interview that he was ever tempted to be honest with the public. Till his dying day, he will continue to revel in the imaginary heroics to which his childish longings had seduced him to lie; or when not lying, to quibble; and when not quibbling, to dispense with all restraints, to cheat. Thus he spoke of liberalizing the media space in Nigeria when in truth he repeatedly banned and played ducks and drakes with financially pressed but critical media establishments, and his government still stands accused of deploying strong-arm tactics against media owners and leading essayists.

It is inconceivable that anyone would describe the interview as redeeming. It had no redeeming virtue whatsoever. True, there were a few bon mots in it, such as the quip on Nigerians’ capacity to resist the imposition of one-party state, and the other quip that suggested the silliness of gagging the press. But if it was an indirect execration of the faltering attempt by the present administration to induce defections into the ruling party and thus overwhelm the polity, or if it was a ploy to tick off the Buhari administration over its abominable attempt to gag the press through sundry media bills, then maybe the interview could be of some use to the government. Otherwise the interview has little redemptive value. Indeed, the two major views which he expressed and which have become controversial bear no semblance to either logic or truth. In one, he affected to talk gravely about the age of the next president but ended up being discursive; while in the other he casually flung in the public face the real reason he annulled the 1993 presidential poll, thereby ruining the little reputation he had left and foreclosing any chance of redemption he had before the poll.

The IBB interview not only showed how limited and inadequate Nigerian leaders were before they took office, a situation that has still not changed today, but how sadly they have refused to improve themselves after their uneventful years in office. There are many books on leadership, some of them written by great statesmen; it is tragic that after ruining his leadership and reputation during his years in office, IBB never attempted to read those books or improve himself in any way. No one who has read books on leadership would advocate the drivel of qualifying the age of the next president to 60 years or younger. Why not 50? Why not 40? Are there no fools at 30, 40 and 50, just as there are fools at 60, 70 and 80? If his mind considered the piquant appeal of physical strength to a leader, perhaps because President Buhari at 78 years appears truly spent, is there anything to show that a younger president would ipso facto be stronger than an older president? He also seems to think that the next president must be versed in economics. With that one hideous argument, he simply erased other professionals from the power loop. IBB was young when he seized power; beyond that, he possessed little else to recommend him to the office he stole through the barrel of a gun. President Buhari is older, having fanatically coveted the office for more than three decades after his first brief foray as a military head of state, but the intervening decades have neither encouraged him to reform his person or ideas, including ameliorating his zealotry and rigidity, nor led him to the expansiveness and cosmopolitanism that are indispensable to successful national leadership.

History is replete with exceedingly young people who became famous for impactful leadership, and the same history tells of older leaders whose maturity and wisdom benefited, grew and empowered their empires. Perhaps IBB confuses warrior leaders who led troops into battle with modern leaders who furnish wars by the stroke of a pen and lead from the safe confines of underground bunkers. Remarkably, IBB talks of some of the qualifications the next president must have, and they include wide networks, connections and intelligence. Had he stopped at these, he would have made sense. As military ruler, however, obsession with age was the leitmotif of his many adventures in superficial political engineering. As head of state, he talked of new breed versus old breed, without doing anything to reform the substructure on which the different breeds, or his preferred breed, could be built; and he manipulated the country into embracing his indefensible logic. Yet, despite his profligate use of national resources, the country still managed to produce a transition programme and an election worthy of some support in 1993. But he stepped in and blew the process into fragments.

His reason for the annulment of the 1993 presidential election is even more controversial. He was of course silent on whether he wanted to stay on in power, as indeed his body language showed. He was also silent on whether he would have vacated office, and no coup would have been attempted, had the Kano politician, Ibrahim Tofa won. All he said was that there would have been a coup against Chief MKO Abiola had there been an attempt to swear him in, and that would have in turn led to more instability. How the offensiveness of his argument escapes him every time he mouths that egregious logic is hard to fathom. Even though he had in 1993 disputed the sanctity of the election, and even denigrated it, it is clear he no longer thinks so, and has in fact boasted that he conducted the best election in history. Last week’s interview was not the first time he would make this self-serving boast; hopefully it would be his last.

Elaborating on his annulment defence, IBB gave the impression that he listened and eventually submitted to pressures from military and civilian conspirators in order to determine what to do with an election he knew in his heart was concluded and won. When he decided to annul the poll, his future place in history was a distant consideration; nor did he care what his conscience dictated, having spent nearly all his time in office disrespecting and muting that conscience. He did not even worry whether his conduct violated the officer and gentleman mantra which his trainers inculcated in him. He despised his oath as an officer and loathed anything that suggested he should vacate office. In matters of principles and values, he suffered no qualms in refusing to consult with his conscience or the faith he extravagantly feigned in those days. Instead, he chose to consult drifters and adventurers who pimped power; indeed he listened to them attentively, and he finally succumbed to their solicitations though it was obvious to him that their moral compasses had been cracked by greed and avarice. Instead of clearing the Augean stable and enabling the winner of the poll to take office, IBB cowered behind extenuating arguments and hidden and bigoted excuses. Without doubt, his place in history is assured, regardless of how many interviews he grants and the same arguments he keeps parroting. Fittingly, that place will be remorselessly unkind to him.

 

IPOB, Igboho, tollgates and Plateau massacre

WHILE the federal government is determined to tax and levy Nigerians out of existence with the unwise and retrogressive return of tollgates, especially considering that ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo demolished them in 2003 in favour of other tax alternatives to finance road maintenance, Plateau State is battling with the massacre of the Irigwe people in Bassa LGA by land grabbing Fulani mercenaries. Plateau State is of course not a national border community, but it has become so porous that mercenaries from West Africa are running riot in the state and seizing land. More than 50 communities have been ethnically cleansed so far, and hundreds of people massacred in a country that supposedly has laws, security agencies, and governments.

But if the federal government is unable to summon the wisdom and competence to rule a country of more than 200m people, surely self-determination groups which purport to fight for their people’s freedom should do far better. Sadly, the reality is also different. Both Southeast and Southwest self-determination groups led by Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho, respectively, have been unable to exhibit the desperately needed wisdom capable of shaming the fumbling federal government. Only Mr Igboho can explain why he boxed himself into a corner despite pursuing a great cause. And only Mr Kanu and IPOB leaders can shed light on why they think frequent self-flagellation will win the Igbo to their side and advance the cause of freedom.

Don’t count on the federal government doing anything to ameliorate the massacres going on in many parts of the country, whether in southern Kaduna or Plateau, or the perennial cholera ravaging the land at a time thousands of doctors are allowed to emigrate. And don’t count on the tollgates, even if they are restored, surviving for long. Insecurity and corruption, not to say accidents and extortion-inspired killings that polluted them in the past, will not permit their survival. And for Mr Kanu/IPOB and Mr Igboho, why, there is no way water can flow uphill.

 

APC, PDP publicly choreograph crisis

TO resolve the logjams in their parties, leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have adopted nearly similar tactics. PDP chairman Uche Secondus reportedly had four months left before his tenure expired. But since agitations for his removal had reached a noisome and exasperating peak, and because his leadership had bifurcated the party, party leaders decided to halve his remaining months in office. An elective convention would be held in October, party leaders chorused during last week’s reconciliation meeting. It is not clear whether the embattled chairman is pleased with the resolution, especially the rather abrupt and unwholesome manner all members of the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) were barred from tenure renewal, but it seemed the best relief he could glean from desperate and warring party leaders.

Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike is believed to be the PDP chairman’s chief enemy and critic. He had wanted the dissolution of the NWC and the sacking of Mr Secondus for being inept and unresponsive to the assaults the ruling party had waged against the PDP. Mr Wike had labored for months to convince the party to dispense with their chairman. It is thus not clear whether he was satisfied with the half measure adopted by the party to obviate the madness engulfing the APC. If he had got his wish, however, no one could predict that the PDP would not be entrapped by the same legal conundrums afflicting the APC. At last week’s press conference to announce the face-saving deal, Mr Wike sat grim-faced in the front row, next to the ebullient Sokoto State governor Aminu Tambuwal.

On the other hand, the APC has seemed to recover from its initial paralysis following the Ondo State governorship election judgement that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Mai Mala Buni caretaker leadership of the party. Responding to the obvious implication of the apex court judgement, which suggests that for both the Nigerian Constitution and the APC constitution, no state executive could play the role of a party executive, whether caretaker or substantial, the party has snubbed everybody. The constitutions and the judgement are clear enough except to the rosy optimists of the APC. They have met both the judgement and the crisis it engendered with a denial of reality. They have issued their own interpretations of the judgement, insisting that since no pronouncement was made on the role of Mr Buni in particular, and the minority judgement in the Ondo case could not be cited as precedent, the congresses so far organized by the Buni-led caretaker committee were legitimate.

How APC chieftains hope their wishes and private interpretations of court judgements would supersede the reality on ground, not to say the interpretation of many other senior members of the party, including Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s, remains to be seen. They are taking a lot of risks, perhaps believing that they had either so mastered the judicial arm that no political harm could befall them from that quarters or that they had received private communication from unnamed justices to the effect that the apex court ruling had no bearing on the legitimacy of the Buni committee. Either way, in the end, the party will still be compelled to confront the reality of the Nigerian and APC constitutions.

But it must rankle badly that both leading parties are embroiled in crises and controversies. They were supposed to be the hope of Nigerians, with each serving as alternative to the other in mediating national disgruntlements. It is, however, clear that both parties are endangered. They will need plenty of luck to navigate the dangerous rapids birthed by their incompetence and hubris, not to say the malevolent politicking tearing them apart as they jostle for dominance.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Embattled national chairman of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Uche Secondus, escaped immolation by the whiskers last week when some members of the party leadership mutinied against him. The crisis had been simmering for years, and worsened in the past few months, but everything came to a head last week when seven national officers, all of them deputies, put their monies where their mouths were by relinquishing their offices. Though the revolt was neither planned nor led by the Rivers State governor, Nyesom Wike, he was the spiritual mastermind, the chief rebel who had the courage of his convictions. Voluble, peevish and lacking subtlety of speech, Mr Wike was unafraid to personify the rebellion against Mr Secondus. The revolt has, however, miscarried, leaving the rebel leader with egg on his face.

Five other national officers, this time of more weight than the previous seven, were slated to relinquish their positions had the Board of Trustees (BoT) not stepped in to stanch the metaphorical flow of blood. Mr Secondus is largely the creation of the party’s scheming governors; it was to them that he made recourse last week to survive the putsch against him. Collectively, and together with the imprimatur of former vice president Abubakar Atiku and BoT chiefs, they signaled their opposition to the dethronement of their somnolent chairman. He might be sleepy and unpolished, but he was still their safest bet until a convention is held. Mr Secondus and his team have just four more months to go before elections to fill the party’s national offices; it therefore seemed unreasonable to party chieftains to sack the chairman and emplace a caretaker committee. The bloodletting in the All Progressives Congress (APC), not to say the clumsy subversion of their constitution, is still very fresh in the minds of PDP leaders to countenance treading a path that leads to confusion.

Mr Secondus may have survived the revolt against his leadership, and Mr Wike may be a deplorable political tactician, but the Rivers governor is right in every way about the ineffectiveness of the party chairman. While overthrowing the party regime barely four months to an elective convention may be improper and even irrational, especially in light of the experience of the APC which also embarked on self-help to party members’ dismay last year, there is no denying Mr Wike’s observation that Mr Secondus is unsuited for the exalted party leadership he has held down for years. The chairman wants to see out his term in office, and his wishes seemed to have been granted, but the next few months will be useless for the party and hostile to the plotters. Having spent a lifetime reinforcing his uncharismatic leadership style, the PDP chairman will not change suddenly simply because the BoT had given him a slap on the wrist regarding his unexciting administration. Similarly, the rebels will not suddenly become affectionate towards Mr Secondus simply because they had been prevailed upon to sheathe their swords. The think their chairman is ineffective; they will keep thinking so, and will probably soldier on melancholically until the convention puts his nose out of joint.

Read Also: APC’s continuing distraction (2)

PDP chiefs may have quieted the symptoms of the crisis seething in their party, they will, however, not be able to perform a resection on the disease. Their party is rotten to the core, and had always been rotten since the beginning. Mr Wike did not, of course, make it so, but it is significant that he possesses no political virtue himself to ameliorate the evil that besets the party nor has he demonstrated any other culture other than the nihilism his party had made famous. The PDP needed to purge itself after the shameful beating the victorious APC inflicted on it in 2015. But for the first four years, the party lived in denial, announcing to everyone on whom they thought their talisman still worked that in 2019 they would be back. Clearly they watched too many Terminator movies. Not only were they not back in 2019, they suffered a far worse trouncing than they experienced in 2015. Four years, it was thought, should give them the impetus to fit into the role of an opposition party, and give the APC a run for their money. Alas, four years saw nothing but the PDP’s regression to nothingness, and this in the face of the APC’s self-destruction and incompetence.

Mr Secondus obviously did not birth the mess in the PDP. The decay began as soon as the party took office in 1999. Removing him a few months to the expiration of his mandate, as Mr Wike unreflectively wished and ham-fistedly plotted, would both be counterproductive and incapable of engendering a new, invigorated party fit to present the APC a worthy opposition. Mr Wike is still sulking from his inability to have his way with Mr Secondus. Even his former allies, such as Sokoto State governor Aminu Tambuwal, and Alhaji Atiku, were chary of assenting his brash and purposeless drive for new, probably caretaker, party leadership. How he will respond in the next few weeks will be hard to determine. He cannot leave for the APC or join forces with the so-called Third Force political party of the former INEC chairman’s conjuration. In fact his temper and manners are really best suited to a party like the PDP, an opposition party hobbled by two defeats in a row, shorn of charismatic leadership, destitute of principles and values, and unable to rouse itself into a fervor of any comparable amperage with the vindictive and ethically confused and often lawless APC.

But while Mr Secondus is not the cause of the crises in the PDP, he has been unable to address the problems. He does not have the talent or the energy to even attempt any amelioration. His foolish response to Mr Wike’s plot indicates how both intemperate and undiscerning he is. Assured that he had nearly all of the party behind him, but unable to judge just what that support meant, Mr Secondus lampooned Mr Wike in unexampled language. He described the Rivers governor, whom he lacked the courage to name in the bad-tempered statement he issued on the intraparty crisis, as a Father Christmas deploying huge public funds to corrupt and destroy the party. Said he: “We, therefore, wish to alert the general public, particularly media houses and party stakeholders, to look out for strange deployment of luring gifts from this destructive ‘Father Christmas’ all aimed at having a grip on the soul of our party by having a caretaker Committee. What continues to shock many party observers is the real reason behind the desperation of this man to get at the National Chairman and the quantum of public funds being expended to achieve this illicit goal a few months to the National Convention.”

Mr Secondus still has significant support within the party, not on account of his competence or judgement – and was therefore destined to survive the Wike-led plot – but on account of party chieftains’ reluctance to toe the ruling party’s self-destructive methods. The chieftains did not wish to deliberately or inadvertently trigger forces and factors in their party they could not hope to control. The brief revolt has, therefore, damaged both the party and its chairman. Instead of concentrating on dealing with the ruling party, and purging themselves of deadwoods and redesigning their party to present a viable alternative to the APC, the chairman will in the foreseeable future preoccupy himself with placating or fighting the rebels around his table, and party leaders will be obsessed with electing a more energetic and competent chairman and national officers in December. Their crisis management capability is meager, just like that of the APC, and their vision of the future too opaque to be of any use in rediscovering their essence or engaging in a noble fight with the opposition. They ruled poorly for the 16 years they were in office, but surprisingly they governed far better than the APC has done in six catastrophic years. Yet, going by how badly they run their party today, it is hard to see them supplanting the APC.

Could there really be a third force then? It is hard to say, just as it is also hard to rule out both parties at the moment. They can still engineer a turnaround in their parties, if the reactionary politics of their governors would allow. Should that turnaround occur and one or both parties rediscover their identity and vision through a massive purging of their ranks and reshuffling of their leaderships, a third force would be superfluous. In the APC, now led from Aso Villa through the machinations of a motley menagerie of cabals and unintelligent aides, caretaker Mai Mala Buni, Governor of Yobe State, has cavorted endlessly amidst party chieftains and sycophants, while abandoning his primary responsibility of presiding over blighted Yobe. After overcoming the initial shock of the Ondo Supreme Court verdict, which gifted them a technical victory despite being embroiled in legal and political snafu, APC leaders will continue to try valiantly to reinterpret the judgement as favourable. But there is no conceivable way to interpret it other than to dismiss the Buni leadership as illegal. In the PDP, which is paralysed by fear and political inertia, eminent politicians will continue to jostle for power rather than face the enemy. Former INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, observed last week that no amount of doctoring would do either party any good, hence the need for another viable political force. It is not clear whether there is time to build another coalition or, in the light of the betrayals unnerving the APC and the mediocrity perforating the PDP, whether such a party could muster the will, courage, honesty and intellect to galvanise the country against the incumbents. The next few months should clear the fog.

 

APC should lend Oshiomhole to PDP

IT is one of the most exquisite ironies ever that the victorious ‘general’ who led the APC to victory in 2019, Adams Oshiomhole, has been put to the sword, while the defeated ‘general’ who led the PDP to ignominious defeat in the same year and serial poaching of its governors and lawmakers barely two years later, Uche Secondus, continues to enjoy the confidence of party leaders. APC loathes the person and symbolism of its former chairman, and would have done more harm to him had he not quietly accepted his fate and sunk into anonymity. On the other hand, the PDP has celebrated and rewarded its defeated general with more laurels and certainty of tenure, and denounced those within their ranks who pointed at the travesty of keeping their shell-shocked chairman. Delicious ironies will not end, nor will travesties ever be in short supply in the opposition party.

It was, however, not smooth sailing for Mr Secondus, as a few party leaders and national officers decided to weigh him in the balance, and found him wanting. They blame him for the defections, the defeats, the colourless leadership, the confusion. They can’t seem to understand his glacial indifference in the midst of so much trouble. They can’t understand why he is not rallying the troops to fight the APC enemy weakened by multiple treacheries, by years of poor leadership, and by the escalation of violence, bloodletting and division. They see an enemy ripe for the taking; but they see their battle-weary chairman reluctant to join the battle or even engage in theoretical war games. They fear that a general who does not have the honour to fall on his sword after a heavy defeat cannot be trusted to understand the price of victory.

Beyond the surface, the PDP, probably more than the APC, understands the futility of building a fine edifice on a structurally weak foundation. They would have loved to have a chairman as dynamic as Mr Oshiomhole – a man who is neither afraid to take risks nor frazzled by setbacks, a compulsive political gambler willing to stake an entire party on one crazy throw of the dice. They would have loved to have an Oshiomhole with warrior instincts, who would not shirk a battle, and who would not be fazed by blood. The placid Mr Secondus faints at the sight of a drop of blood; Mr Oshiomhole is animated by it. Since the APC – president, governors, lawmakers and all – want a quiet, self-effacing and pliant chairman; and the PDP to the last man, despite their temporary support for their chairman, want an exuberant warrior prince, perhaps then, a trade by barter would not be inappropriate.

But PDP apparatchiks rightly sense that what their party needs is not a boisterous and agitated chairman, no matter how competent, but the right political structure in which any chairman, no matter how lethargic, can function untrammeled by governorship intrigues and presidential malfeasance. Former president Olusegun Obasanjo constipated them with his malfeasant revolving doors and banana peels upon which PDP chairmen squeaked and fell. They also recall the megalomaniacal drivel which one-time interim chairman and journeyman, Ali Modu Sheriff, inflicted upon them, not to say the apocalypse he nearly brought upon the party through his reckless politicking. And finally, they see the despair and disrepair in which the APC has sunk in their mad gambit for a messianic leader. They got their Teflon messiah alright, but the country is now deeply chagrined. Nevertheless, the country would be honoured should the APC lend Mr Oshiomhole to the PDP; after all, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. A role reversal in this most atrocious of times would relieve the dullness and mediocrity of Nigerian politics – except the APC can find the wry amusement, as they do in football, to pay Mr Oshiomhole to stay unemployed.

 

Abducted students and impotent government

More horrifying videos are emerging of young Nigerian students and pupils whose lives are being destroyed by bandits and kidnappers as the government engages in hand-wringing. The official government policy is that ransom payment is fuelling the kidnapping business, and so the government will no longer pay. Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai recently gave voice to this vexatious policy when the Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka, students were abducted and the government did little but quibble. The president himself has prevaricated over the matter, but seemed in support of the Kaduna argument. Now, the Minister of State for Education, Chukwemeka Nwajiuba, has reiterated the federal government’s attitude to abductions. Ransom payment, he says, worsens insecurity.

Nigeria, in short, is saddled with incompetent and cruel governments. They choose to see the ethical fineness of not paying ransom; why do they not see the more damaging and unquantifiable trauma of abandoning Nigeria’s young and defenceless pupils and students in the cruel and bloodied hands of kidnappers and bandits? If they don’t want to pay ransom, they should ensure that students and indeed abducted Nigerians are protected. And if they can’t do the job, they should vacate office. Apart from displaying their callousness and incompetence to the world, as more macabre videos of mistreated students in the dens of kidnappers emerge, the government also shows that they do not even have a clue as to the relationship between the untenable political structure of the country and the impotence they manifest. Well, it is not their children in the hands of the soulless bandits.

By Idowu Akinlotan

ONDO State governor Rotimi Akeredolu is a very fortunate man. Referencing the split decision of four to three that gave him victory at the Supreme Court last week, he went back to judicial history to insinuate that he didn’t just win by the skin of his teeth, but that counting from the tribunal judgement through to the unanimous Appeal Court decision in his favour, his victory becomes more substantial and very legitimate than the apex court decision suggests on the surface. His explanations are superfluous. Victory is victory, whether by a hair’s breadth or by a landslide. If his main opponent in the October 10, 2020 governorship election, Eyitayo Jegede, had secured an upset at the apex court, after winning just three local governments out of 18, it would have been an undeserved technical victory. Mr Akeredolu won 15 local governments and beat Mr Jegede by almost 100,000 votes.

It is understandable why Mr Akeredolu is mortified by the Supreme Court’s split decision. While he dithered considerably in his first term, and even seemed lethargic, aloof and inconsiderate, indeed apolitical, he has come into his own in his second term, a seemingly consummate politician with an uncanny feel for the yearnings and agonies of Ondo people. He reminds the Southwest and Ondo of the boldness and courage of former Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) governors and politicians, a man with the character to face up to the manipulations and hegemonic drivel of the central government in Abuja. But it was not even the vivification of his governorship that gave him victory last October; what stood him well with the electorate was that he had begun to stir himself, seemed more reliable, and had immersed himself in some infrastructural renewal of Ondo that persuaded the electorate to stay with a somewhat safe and tested hand.

Mr Jegede is no pushover himself. A lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) like Mr Akeredolu, he seemed strangely more eloquent, more self-assured, very urbane, and a team player who was quaintly more cosmopolitan. There was no indication that he put up a facade during the election. Undoubtedly, he fought a good fight, and if he had won, would possibly have made a great governor. But perhaps his party was the albatross around his neck. Ondo State was, in short, fortunate in the last governorship election to have two eminently qualified candidates facing each other. Either one would have deserved victory. Mr Akeredolu probably recognizes this fact, and has spoken to his opponent in conciliatory tones and related with him suavely. Judging from Mr Jegede’s reaction to the Supreme Court decision, in which he has congratulated the governor and managed to not damn the judiciary with faint praise, the state may experience more boisterous politics in the next polls.

However, it was not the personality and character of the candidates that made the apex court decision reverberate around the country. Reporters, analysts, and aggrieved APC chieftains have quoted the minority judgement with gusto, inflicted it upon the polity, and weaponised it against scheming APC leaders who hijacked the party from former chairman Adams Oshiomhole, and turned it into a stepping stone for the elevation of a wing of the ruling party, the belittlement of other wings and leaders, and the erasure of the party’s vibrant culture. Lawyers do not tend to place so much weight on minority judgements, except for academic purposes, let alone cite them as precedents. But for reasons that are not too puzzling, the country is abuzz over the minority judgement read by Justice Mary Odili.

The petitioners wanted the apex court to disqualify the caretaker chairman, Mai Mala Buni, and nullify all he had done for functioning as governor and party chairman at the same time on the grounds that both Section 183 of the Constitution and Article 17(4) of the APC Constitution bar him from doing so. And if he could not exercise both powers, it meant that he had no right to author the nomination of Candidate Akeredolu in last year’s election. Both the majority and minority judgements do not disagree on the interpretation of the relevant constitutional provisions guiding the nomination of party candidates. Their disagreement centres on whether the petitioners joined or did not join Mr Buni as party to the suit. In finding the petitioners’ case incompetent, the majority judgement insisted that not joining the Yobe governor as a party to the suit, when all the issues in the appeal revolved around him, was fatal to their case. The party was already joined, argued the minority judgement on the other hand, and since Mr Buni was nothing more than an agent of the APC, it was superfluous to join him. Surely, it could not be this delicate difference that is now being weaponised by Buni haters.

Beyond whether Mr Buni was joined or not joined as a party to the suit, or whether he was thus afforded the opportunity to defend himself or not as the lead judgement implied, is the far more central and now weaponised issue of whether an unelected National Executive Committee (NEC) could author the nomination of party candidates, and by extension the organisation of congresses. The APC constitution does not envisage the party could do without an elected NEC for a whole year. Indeed, originally, scheming party leaders who kicked out the Oshiomhole-led executives had intended the caretaker committee to, in six months, organise the election of national officers, which would in turn organise the congresses. But soon after assuming responsibility for the party, the caretaker committee expanded its mandate and operations to include updating party registers and other ancillary matters. After extending their tenure twice in circumstances that may eventually be litigated, party leaders (read, the president) as well as members are no longer sure when a national convention would be organised. Everything has become tentative and drawn-out in the party.

The apex court decision may have alerted the APC to just how fraught with litigious uncertainties their cavalier approach to party affairs and their future have become. They may recognise that the court’s split decision could have gone either way, but they have chosen to be sanguine about their future standing with members and the electorate. Judging by their defiant resistance to the ramifying import of the apex court decision, they appear determined to persist in their set ways. The leaders see themselves as the owners of the party, especially having captured the heights of the party and neutralised all opposition. They also think that the issue of whether the caretaker chairman was joined or not joined as a party to the suit does not vitiate the mutually reinforcing provisions of the Nigerian and APC constitutions which unambiguously prohibit the governor or party official from holding any executive position in the party or government respectively.

If the congresses go on as planned, the party seems to have advised itself, along the meddlesome legal subterfuges of Justice minister Abubakar Malami, that the pronouncements of the majority and minority decisions of the apex court bear no relevance to their undertakings. It is a big gamble to take. But perhaps they are convinced that they have so mastered the judiciary that they can browbeat or even blackmail judges into doing their biddings. What if their arm-twisting tactic fails? Having spent months scheming supremacy and exclusion in the party, they may now have opened themselves to terrible repercussions, including possible catastrophic and distractive litigations, in the near future. Their overthrow of the Oshiomhole leadership was not legally tidy in the first instance; and had the former chairman and his supporters taken the risk to litigate their sack, they would either have won or at least fettered the party. In any case, the party must now brace for lawsuits in the months ahead, despite Mr Malami’s obtrusion, for too many party members and leaders remain aggrieved and had forborne heading for the courts only because they feared what cudgels the presidency might bring upon their dainty heads.

Of all the inanities the PDP is embroiled in, the most telling seems to be its tactless wading into the APC fray. After the apex court decided the Ondo case, the opposition immediately asked the Yobe State governor Buni to resign his position as APC caretaker chairman. What is their business with who heads the ruling party? Would it not be in their interest if the APC serially violates the constitution? Instead of planning to take future advantage of the APC’s contravention of the law, the obtruding opposition party prefers to nudge its rival into rectitude. Fortunately, Mr Oshiomhole and those who denounced the way the former APC chairman was dethroned have not said a word since the fateful judgement. They should resist the temptation to say anything. When he fought Governor Godwin Obaseki in the last Edo governorship election, having realised the threat the governor constituted to democracy and good governance, the electorate rose in fury to thrash him and the APC candidate, Osagie Ize-Iyamu. When he also fought some serving governors before the last polls in order to recalibrate the APC but was defeated, he was held in derision and beaten black and blue. Barely a year after the charade began in the APC, Mr Oshiomhole is in many ways being proved right, despite his private failings. More than anything, the apex court decision on the Ondo governorship may indicate that the APC could be heading for an implosion. Apocalypse can, however, be averted if the party would humble itself and make amends. But the incentive and culture for amelioration simply do not exist for APC leaders who today see themselves above the law.

 

Vengeful Kaduna vindicates El-Zakzaky

MORE than five years after he was arrested and detained for various offences, including the alleged killing of Corporal Yakubu Dankaduna during a clash between Shiites and soldiers in Zaria, leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), Ibraheem El-Zakzaky, has finally been discharged and acquitted by a Kaduna High Court presided over by Justice Gideon Kurada. The Shiite leader was charged in court in Kaduna in 2017, a few months after a contempt proceeding was brought against the government for failing to release him despite court orders. He had been arrested in December 2015, ordered released in December 2016 by a Federal High Court in Abuja in addition to the government building him a replacement house and paying him and his wife N50m as general damages, and arraigned again in 2017, but finally discharged and acquitted last Wednesday after the court upheld his no-case submission. It speaks volumes about the temper of the Nigerian government and the fragility of the justice system that it has taken nearly all of six years to do justice in that sorry case of repression and executive lawlessness perpetrated in Kaduna and abetted by the federal government.

There are indications that Kaduna may appeal the acquittal, and has obtained the judgement in order to study it. Other sources indicate that the Shiite leader would in fact be charged with treason and terrorism. If an appeal is filed, it would demonstrate that the government is listening only to itself, and has constituted itself above the law and constitution. If he is hauled before another court for terrorism, it would mean that state power has become horribly polluted and discredited in Kaduna. In acquitting Sheikh El-Zakzaky, Justice Kurada had noted that he was charged in court in 2018 pursuant to a penal law enacted in 2017 and for an offence allegedly committed in 2015. How does a state, except it desires to persecute a citizen, begin to appeal that acquittal?

The leitmotif of the Nigerian government and Kaduna State is repression or personification of executive power. That is the only way to explain their goal of keeping the Shiite leader out of circulation or their ungracious decision to file terrorism and treason charges against him. They are helped by the public’s sentimental conflation of the person and religious ideology of Sheikh El-Zakzaky with his alleged crimes against the state. The people of Zaria were believed to have an axe to grind with the flamboyant and sometimes excessive demonstrations of Shiites, particularly during their annual Arba’een walk, which in the first instance provoked the clash with soldiers in December 2015. It is also noted that Zaria and Kaduna seemed to have heaved a sigh of relief at the castration of the Shiites.

Kaduna State is reportedly toying with the idea of appealing the acquittal or bringing fresh charges against the sheikh. It is unlikely they expect a different judicial outcome; they simply and remorselessly want to punish the Shiite leader and remove him from circulation. In the December 2015 clash in question, a clash that was spontaneous and which was neither inspired nor directed by the sheikh, one soldier allegedly died by the hands of Shiites while 347 Shiite members were massacred by soldiers. The victims included women and children. Shiite members themselves put the death toll at nearly a thousand. So far, no soldier or officer has been put on trial; and indeed, no state agent has been blamed for the massacre, excessive use of force and mass burial in a democracy. Both the public and Kaduna State government, not to say the federal government, refused to empathise with the families of the slain; instead they accused the Shiites of running a state within a state. At the time, there was a distressing and galling justification of the use of extraordinary force on the Shiites on the grounds that their exuberance grated on the nerves and sensibilities of the public.

Sheikh El-Zakzaky and his wife, Zeenat, may want to seek better medical attention abroad. But while the state is still breathing repression against the sheikh, it is time Shiites themselves began seriously to think of suing the Kaduna State government, the Army and some of its officers, and the federal government for crimes against humanity. It is time they had their backs to the wall. The massacre must be requited; it should not be allowed to pass into history as an unexplained event. When the Zaria clash occurred in the opening months of the Muhammadu Buhari and Nasir el-Rufai administrations, it gave a disturbing indication that Nigeria was headed for a horrendous era of repression. Subsequent events show that those fears were not misplaced.

Though Nigeria is a democracy, the dictatorial instincts of some state and federal officials are far worse than those of a fascist government. It is shameful that there was no federal probe of the Zaria massacre, just like the country glossed over the Odi (Bayelsa) and Zaki Biam (Benue) military invasions. It is even more shameful that neither the federal administration nor the state government empathised with the families of the massacred Shiites. After defying court orders for almost six years, the Kaduna government is now peeved that Sheikh El-Zakzaky and his wife got a belated reprieve. Just how low and how callous can a government get?

By Idowu Akinlotan

It is too early to determine just how the arrest and extradition trial of Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho, would play out. Picked up in Cotonou as he made to board a plane to Germany in company with his wife last Monday, the three-week Scarlet Pimpernel’s fugitive journey that began on July 1, 2021 when his Soka, Ibadan, home was sacked by the secret service came to a screeching and anticlimactic end. He has been the most notable and charismatic self-determination campaigner to emerge from the Southwest in recent years. The manner and place of his arrest in a neighbouring country have quite remarkably not taken anything from his colourful image, despite curious and uncorroborated tales of his tearful breakdown in the face of punishing ordeal. In the days ahead, and irrespective of how his extradition trial goes, he will probably regain his composure and begin once again to regale his captive audience with his mastery of Yoruba idioms and folktales.

The arrest of the more bellicose Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, and his extraordinary rendition from Kenya ended even more anticlimactically. Whereas Mr Igboho had not in the weeks leading to the invasion of his residence given the impression he was above arrest, at least given his clever diminution of his rhetoric against the government, Mr Kanu had burnt his bridges and dared Nigeria, a.k.a. the zoo, to do its worst. Kenya has tried to wash its hands off the arrest, torture and rendition of the Biafra agitator, but it seems clear now that he was taken from Kenya in very controversial circumstances, and without too much ado, and bundled back to Nigeria on June 29, 2021. For an agitator who has acted and spoken militantly, it was astonishing that he was easily apprehended and brought into Nigeria, dazed and deflated. But like Mr Igboho, the IPOB leader will also regain his wits and begin jauntily and colourfully to defend himself and make his case when he receives the adrenalin shot of open trial.

Messrs Igboho and Kanu will arrest public imagination in the weeks ahead. Both agitators will also perversely put the Muhammadu Buhari administration on a bigger trial much more than the alleged malfeasances of the self-determination/secessionist campaigners can ever do under cross-examination. The public will scrutinise the faces of the agitators when they are brought to court, in the process gleaning as much information about their state of mind as is legally possible, and trying to determine whether they are holding up well under adversity, and matching their rhetoric with the stoicism which they had preached boldly and spoken about cavalierly before their ugly encounters with the Nigerian secret service. Benin Republic’s handling of the Igboho case is probably proceeding slowly after the Kenyan extraordinary rendition of Mr Kanu became controversial. But slow or fast, questions will be asked concerning the attitude of the Nigerian government to southern agitators vis-à-vis northern bandits and insurgents who have killed thousands. Comparisons will also be drawn about how quickly and simply the Benin Republic courts freed Mrs Igboho who was arrested with her husband, unlike Kaduna State government which charged Ibraheem El-Zakzaky’s wife, Zainat, in court despite the DSS initially indicating she had no case to answer. It is taking the Kaduna courts years to know what to do with Zainat, while her trial has become deathly farcical.

In addition, questions will inevitably be asked about just how much resources the government has poured into apprehending Messrs Igboho and Kanu, and why the mere thought of secession elicited the government’s fiery and irrational response. Answers will, however, not come because the administration has neither acted as if they govern a multiethnic and multireligious society nor do they really care. Self-determination is, to them, abhorrent, and everything must be invested in quelling the very thought of it. Anything that would threaten the monthly largesse from oil proceeds must be exterminated with rage. Because the government will be the prosecutor in the two cases, assuming Mr Igboho is extradited, it will not be on trial, and will not need to answer any serious questions about its motives. It will only be required to answer questions about its methods.

Benin Republic has a flimsy case against Mr Igboho, but it has charged him in court nevertheless, supposedly for immigration contraventions. The legal fight is yet to be fully joined, and the fleeing agitator will be in court again on Monday. However, Nigeria had hoped that their intimidatory presence as a neighbour and economic power would cause their smaller, less endowed neighbor to quake in their boots. Cotonou has so far approached the whole kerfuffle with equanimity and has shown a semblance of following the rule of law, a style and restraint strangely alien to Nigeria which overtly or covertly, but shamelessly, subordinates the rule of law to national security interests. Cotonou will try to stand pat, especially being more beholden to France than it is to both ECOWAS and Nigeria. Nigeria occupies a commanding height in Benin Republic economy, and the latter has often been browbeaten into doing Nigeria’s will whenever the whim catches the bigger but obviously poorly managed neighbor. For more than a year, Nigeria kept its borders with Benin Republic shut, while it is building a rail line to Niger Republic and bidding futilely for its northerly neighbour’s pipeline contracts. It was this same Idiroko border that Mr Igboho forcefully and briefly opened last May. Whether Cotonou remembers that brief reprieve is not certain; but they will probably let their legal system run its full course in the Igboho case, untrammelled by executive interferences.

Nigeria itself is in a quandary about what to do with Mr Igboho, apart from pursuing him with single-minded determination. Their quarry has, however, filed for asylum, and diplomatic dynamics will likely take over and make his extradition more complicated. Nigeria is yet to file for his extradition, with many analysts suggesting that whatever treaty was endorsed with Nigeria does not cover political grounds. Nigeria’s clumsiness may eventually doom the extradition process, and in fury the country may double down on its inane border closure policy and turn itself into a nuisance in ECOWAS. But Nigerians have already found a way around that economic policy folly, and will persist in their defiance as long as the policy is in place.

Overall, the administration hopes that by taking Messrs Igboho and Kanu out of circulation, some quietness would be restored in both the Southwest and Southeast. This is an illusion. Not only would other ambitious and probably more extremist leaders step in to fill the gap should the government fail to address the factors that produced Messrs Igboho and Kanu, their regions as well as other aggrieved regions would persist in restiveness. The two agitators are a product of the administration’s awkwardness and bigotry; they would not be campaigning for separation had the government not in a few crazy years created a fertile condition for their agitation. Who would campaign for separation in the absence of hegemonic intimidation and domination? Some parts of the core North and a section of the that region’s political elite may fail to understand, having of course benefited immensely from the one-sidedness of the government, but the Southwest and the Southeast respect and connive at the campaigns of their self-appointed liberators. They may resent the two agitators’ style, rhetoric and competence, but they see in their campaigns a last-ditch attempt to rectify the Buhari administration’s poor understanding of pluralism, secularism and democracy. Where the administration sees the Igboho/Kanu campaigns as a danger to national unity, the two region’s elites see them as an opportunity to warn the president of the consequences of his continuing recourse to unconstitutional rule.

If Mr Igboho is extradited, the administration will have brought back home troubles that nature had preferred and conspired to spare the country. Nigerian leaders’ inability to tolerate criticism both at home and abroad has led the administration into unwisely domesticating its self-created afflictions. It must now own the troubles and seek ways to minimize the damage they will occasion the government at close quarters. It will cost them money and time, and probably open them up to ridicule, but they are past caring the shame a profligate use of state resources brings. Having captured the judiciary by shenanigans, they could go on to railroad self-determination agitators into jail in order to minimize the damage accruing from a needless and unwinnable trial. But the administration will be hard put to find the key to curb the agitations sprouting from the regions at a time when a worsening economy and poor management of the political space appear set to unleash a tsunami of chaos upon the country.

 

Banditry, separatism: chaos lingering, spreading

IN September 2015, a few months after the inauguration of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, six Fulani herdsmen abducted Chief Olu Falae from his farm in Ondo State. Upon his release days later, after paying N5m ransom, he confirmed that his abductors were indeed Fulani. Some northern traditional and political elites remonstrated with him and newsmen whom they claimed provocatively ‘ethnicised’ the abduction, insisting that no herder would leave his cows to embark on kidnapping for ransom. Chief Falae was right about the identity of his kidnappers, and even righter about his warning that if the budding trend was not curbed, it would grow worse until it engulfed the country. He was prescient. In 2017, the abductors, all of them Fulani, were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Six years down the line, and a government that mollycoddles Fulani herdsmen running rampage on farmlands in the country, kidnapping has ballooned and festered. Hardly any part of the country is spared. And sensing that the administration connives at their crime and excuses and rationalises their rampage, herdsmen have turned abduction and land seizure into an industry, provoked responses that have led to farmers-herders war, a.k.a. banditry, and birthed self-determination/secession groups. An old proverb says: “For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, For the want of a shoe the horse was lost, For the want of a horse the rider was lost…” Had the Nigerian government taken this proverb to heart, had the administration taken an inflexible and uncompromising approach to law and order, the herdsmen crisis would not have morphed into secessionist agitations.

There is no longer any dispute as to the beginnings of the herdsmen crisis or their adoption of kidnapping as a tool for financial reward. The administration may still dither and quibble over the depopulation of farmlands by herders who pillage and rob and rape their way through communities, but there is no denying the consequences now. Farmers can’t go to their farms, food is expensive and prices are soaring, crime has become the new normal, bandits are still running riot, self-determination agitations have multiplied, and government’s hold on the country has become increasingly tenuous. At a time when ISWAP and Boko Haram have joined forces and are coordinating their insurgency operations in the Sahelian belt from Mauretania, through Mali to Niger, Chad and Nigeria, it is criminally negligent for the government not to put its house in order so as to rally the country to fight the surging militants and battle the catastrophic effects of climate change.

It takes the Buhari administration living in denial to pretend that the country is not in a state of fear and tumult. Shorn of competent aides and bold ministers with expansive view of the world and deep comprehension of complex issues, the government has become mired in mediocrity and specious arguments about all manner of dangerous and insular policies to give succor to herders. At the last Eid prayers in Muri, Taraba State, Emir Abbas Tafida, in frustration, issued a 30-day ultimatum to herdsmen, whom he identified as Fulani, to vacate the forests surrounding the town. Said Dr Tafida: “Our Fulani herdsmen in the forests, you came into this state and we accepted you, why then will you be coming to towns and villages to kidnap residents, even up to the extent of raping our women? Because of this unending menace, every Fulani herdsman in this state has been given 30 days ultimatum to vacate the forests. We are tired of having sleepless nights, and the hunger alone in the land is enormous and we will not allow it to continue…”

The government still does not feel Dr Tafida’s kind of urgency. During his visit to the Emir of Daura before he returned to Abuja last week, President Buhari gave an insight into how his mind is working on the country’s insecurity crisis. In his words: “We want to thank God always for keeping us together as a country. From January 15, 1966, the country was thrown into political crisis. We had a 30 months civil war that resulted in the loss of about a million lives. We still thank God for keeping us together. We remain grateful to all those who showed interest in our unity and progress. May God continue to bless them.” Rather than attempt a deeper understanding of the factors predisposing the country to crises and chaos, the president is fixated on the last civil war and national unity. This probably explains his administration’s obsession with self-determination groups, his hunting of separatist agitators, his subjection of the rule of law to national security as if the two are mutually exclusive, his intolerance of a robust media, his disinterestedness in addressing the huge displacements of local communities in the Middle Belt by foreign Fulani and their local, shortsighted collaborators, and his discomfort with democratic principles, secularism, and restructuring.

The problem with Nigeria is not that it is buffeted by climate issues in the Sahel, insurgency in the Northeast, banditry in the Northwest, and all kinds of agitations in the south and Middle Belt; the real problem is that there is no national resolve and competence to deal with these lingering issues. It is a little reassuring that after the president made his incendiary comments about the Southeast during his last Arise TV interview, a section of his administration quietly went to work to rally the elites of the region into developing a consensus of some kind; and the military is following suit. But they must work much harder to see whether they can also disabuse the president’s mind of the cultural and religious baggage that has clouded his reasoning and militated against the development of a solution to the country’s crises. That is if he will let them.