By Idowu Akinlotan

Luck is a controversial subject, far more complicated than its ordinary definitions suggest. But in the way President Muhammadu Buhari used it last week to explain why he thought Nigeria had not collapsed despite Nigerians’ poor response to adversity, it is hard to say whether he approached the word with caution or any sublime understanding. He is right to suspect that Nigerians are curious about why their country has survived punishment more than twice enough to bankrupt and crush other more endowed countries. He attributes it to luck, a conclusion he reached, probably without understanding the full import of the word, when a delegation of the House of Representatives paid him a visit last Tuesday to present the report of their National Security Summit held on May 26. “We are a lucky country and should congratulate ourselves, despite challenges that could have torn us apart,” the president had said gravely. Nigerians may be mystified about how they had all along been carried on the wings of luck, when many of them had thought their ‘non-negotiable’ unity was because God had ordered forceful cohabitation.

The world may not be inspired by what President Buhari attributes his country’s survival to, and Nigerians themselves may be shocked to learn that luck had sustained their unity for 60 years fraught with life-threatening challenges, but finally Nigerian rulers have put the lie to the belief that some deliberate and scientific efforts by them explain the country’s survival. Former military head of state Ibrahim Babangida had also once wondered why despite all the stealing taking place in Nigeria the country was not bankrupt. He didn’t go ahead to suggest an explanation; but perhaps he spoke cynically like the amateur rhetorician he had always pretended to be. Under the Yakubu Gowon military government, a federal cabinet member had suggested that Nigeria’s problem was not making money, but spending it. What is, however, not known is what period of luck the president referred to: before independence, post-independence, before or after the civil war, or under his presidency which has been the most controversial and divisive.

When the president speaks of Nigeria being lucky, he implies that he is baffled to still see the country on its feet. For a leader who has repeatedly and publicly feigned consummate religiosity, it must indeed be remarkable that he speaks of luck, and reassuring that he does not attribute the country’s survival to God in the mindless and abstract manner many Nigerians are wont to do. More crucially, he indirectly acknowledges that he has done little to facilitate the process of national unity, and perhaps wonders how despite all he has been accused of, his policies and appointments have not tipped the country over the precipice. In the classical definition of luck, two words are key: unknown and unpredictable. Thus, in war, elements such as rain, snow, or any adverse weather for that matter could switch the direction and outcome of battle. But there have been stories of how such elements were overcome by enterprising generals and leaders. Indeed, in the modern era, militaries now plan and develop technologies to overcome unpredictable weather and terrains, among other intervening variables, provoking such terms as all-weather, all-terrain battle equipment.

Read Also: Kanu/IPOB conundrum just beginning

For national leaders, indeed any leader who knows his onions, unpredictable is a lexical and practical anathema. Leadership is both an art and a science. A leader is under obligation to study the concept, and imbibe and symbolise it: if an art, to demonstrate an instinctive and aesthetic grasp of its sublime and multifaceted elements; and if a science, to demonstrate by logic, experiment and examples the causality of national experiences and a grasp of how outcomes can be arranged and sequenced. To therefore speak of the survival or unity of a nation as an abstract controlled by mystifying factors extraneous to the leader or the elite of that nation is to be guilty of complicity, incompetence and recklessness. Indeed, to speak of luck as the explanation for national survival is to embrace a much deeper and more troubling submission to fatalism. Complete with that rudimentary logic, it is not hard to see the Buhari administration suggesting that if the country implodes, why, it must be God who wanted it so; or it must be sheer luck. This is abdication of responsibility at its unedifying worst.

The factors that have kept Nigeria from dissolving into chaos may in the end prove incapable of preventing it from imploding. If, for purpose of argument, it is luck, then as luck goes, it never holds up to the very end. It will run out sooner than later. And if it is something else, it is still unlikely that it would prove strong enough to prevent the descent to chaos. One factor frequently cited is the Nigerian himself, in particular his endurance, which the president alluded to when he received the House of Representatives delegation. For instance, despite the administration’s foolish obsession with both the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader Nnamdi Kanu, who was seized from Kenya in foggy and controversial circumstances, and the Yoruba self-determination advocate Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho, the evidence on the ground in all of southern Nigeria is that the people are unconvinced about secession. By their disposition and statements, they have indicated that they still hold out a little hope that the terrible crisis engendered by federal misrule is not beyond amelioration or remedy in the near future. They do not trust President Buhari to ensure a smooth transition in 2023, or even relinquish power at all, but the incurable optimists that they are, they believe that somehow the day would be saved.

Moreover, as sceptical as the southern public and leaders are, and regardless of their visceral distrust of the Buhari presidency, they nurse residual hope in the capacity of the good people of Nigeria to join hands in the nick of time to pluck peace from the jaws of disaster being engrafted by the government into the country’s manifest destiny. The president calls this optimistic disposition luck. It is hardly luck. Nigeria might already be at war had they not possessed the fortitude to bear their government’s incompetence and serial misdeeds. In addition, even if the south was disposed to secession, they still have to resolve in their minds whether President Buhari and his aides fully and genuinely represent the north. Then, to end all misgivings, neither the Southwest nor the Southeast appears convinced that the character and capacity of their self-imposed champions, to wit, Messrs Igboho and Kanu, are entirely agreeable. The two aggrieved regions respect and admire the commitment and passion of the two self-proclaimed champions, and wish that no harm should come upon them, but they do not see them, by reason of their education, temperament and principles, as capable of leading the two regions either to rebellion or negotiations with Abuja.

President Buhari has spoken of luck as the mooring upon which the survival of Nigeria is hinged, whereas, despite his evident lack of presidential capacity, the stability of Nigeria can partly be explained by the south’s reluctance to agree with or back their self-acclaimed champions of secession. Had Mr Igboho been capable of adding intellectual depth to his iconoclasm, and had he been even-tempered, wise, moderate, restrained and calculating, the Southwest would have given him a hearing far more threatening to ‘lucky’ Nigeria than the president can contemplate. And though they would remain unconvinced about secession, they would have kept their fingers crossed rather than voicing out their disagreement with Mr Igboho’s secessionist agenda. In addition, the idea of self-determination, despite the economic drawbacks, would have remained tantalizingly current and practicable. On his own, Mr Kanu alienated many south-easterners with his megalomaniacal disposition, his alleged dishonest bookkeeping habit, and his fiery and often instigative propaganda. Had he been wise and controlled, had his messages resonated robustly with the elite as well as with the ‘booboisie’ in equal measure, he would have presented a far more dangerous and unstoppable adversary to ‘lucky’ Nigeria and its hesitant and schizoid president.

In the words of President Buhari, Nigeria is lucky not to have disintegrated yet. The fact, however, is that the country’s contradictions and the president’s transgressions have simply not matured into ripened pimples. Reading luck into its unraveling and unstable condition is a misconstruction of its present state and future fate. The Buhari administration has still not done anything to erase the schisms it has nurtured since 2015, the debt peonage it is instigating with gusto, the flagrant hegemony it is promoting, the herdsmen terrorism it has connived at and which Messrs Igboho and Kanu have used as their casus belli, and the appalling and retrogressive governance it has instituted and seems completely incapable of remedying. Because nothing has been done to address these factors beyond applying superficial balm, the decay and conflict pushing Nigeria towards balkanisation remain tangible and suppurative.

Insecurity will be intensified in the months ahead, especially at a time the country’s unstable political structure appears to be reeling under the pressure of its own contradictions and the compounding inattentiveness of the administration. Anyone with a modest gift for clairvoyance knows that the crises inundating Nigeria will soon come to a head. Apart from misinterpreting the concept of luck, only the administration can tell why, despite all the warning signs, including unprecedented bloodshed and display of barbarism on the highways and farms, the coming apocalypse escapes its vaunted predictive and interpretative skills.

APC lauds democracy as PDP haemorrhages

No one is sure anymore whose definition and practice of democracy to respect: the APC’s or PDP’s. In its heyday, when the entire country was eating out of its hands, the PDP acted, spoke and ruled as if other parties had become social and political pariahs. It welcomed defectors, mocked and depleted the opposition, and boasted that it would rule for decades. But within its own ranks, it nurtured autocracy, and overthrew its chairmen, often for flimsy reasons, some as insufferably minute as the chairman giving voice to his private idealism. But every time it trampled on members’ rights, it was Pyrrhic victory that eventually undid the monstrous contraption, and ‘Attila the Hun’ eventually brought mighty ‘Rome’ to its knees.

But the APC is adamant in its refusal to learn from the PDP’s sullied history, and is elevating adamancy into an exasperating rubric of self-worship. The APC now also revels in defections, taking sanguinary delight in bleeding and weakening the opposition. (On the other foot, the shoe can afford to be as tight and discomfiting as possible). The party has also begun to speak highfalutin praise of its invincibility, and has changed hideously from an engaging and precocious party into a media stifling monster, a harbinger of blood in nearly all parts of the country, a loan guzzler which has boastfully announced that it would also rule for decades. Thankfully, neither the PDP nor the APC has spoken lyrically of democracy as a lofty and inspiring concept, nor composed panegyrics to the rule of law, justice and fairness. The country will, therefore, feel no pangs of conscience in dismissing them as charlatans and impostors.

Not too long ago, the APC seemed to have shown that the PDP could not hold the candle to it, even if it tried hard. But the PDP never stayed in the hands of caretakers for a year, and counting. After twice flouting its deadline to ‘reform’ the party and organize a convention, the APC days ago wrote the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) informing it of another decision to indefinitely postpone its July congresses expected to culminate in a convention before the year runs out. After the June 10 letter leaked, the party rationalized that the Sallah holiday was responsible for the short postponement, but privately hoped that its chicaneries would deliver the contrived outcomes they hoped would transform the party into the effigy of their choosing.

Whether the party would be able to shape itself in the unflattering image of the president, who had twice gloated in recent months that the party had been extricated from the hands of its former minders, remains to be seen. Few still remain sanguine about the president’s intention to help build and enthrone a great party, one capable of standing bold, firm, confident and independent, a party able to inspire other political parties in Africa by exemplary conduct, fidelity to ideological purity, and obedience to democratic principles. That objective of inspiring others is unlikely to be within the party’s reach, especially in the hands of an administration and its supporters who obsess about narrow ethnic ideals and fret over political trifles. Having set for itself the three-pronged goal of displacing the founding leaders and fathers of the party; contriving a weak, pliable and one-term presidential candidate for the party in the 2023 presidential poll; and transforming the president’s legacy party, the anomalously named Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), and the Northwest as the kingmakers for 2023, the APC will flout every rule, break every law, and oppress anyone in the process of remaking Nigeria along its mediocre goals.

It is almost certain now that the APC in its present form may never rise to the ennobling level Nigerians once hoped. Yet, governors on its platform describe the party as the future of democracy, nay the face of democracy. But the party is too corrupted by power and too empty of content and soul to satisfy that lofty ideal. Its national lawmakers are churning out controversial laws with a frenzy that indicts their earlier lethargy, perhaps in order to set them apart from their unworthy predecessors, the PDP-led NASS. Their frenzy will still push them to the sewers beyond the mockery they have made of the Electoral Act amendment, past even the controversial issue of electronic transmission of results. If the country overcomes its present crisis, many of the new laws will of course be reviewed or even abrogated. The dilemma Nigeria faces is that there is no settling the precedence between the APC’s greed and the PDP’s larceny. The PDP taunted democracy, and never subscribed to any lofty ideal. It was, therefore, not too difficult to dethrone. Unfortunately for the party and the country, it has now become so enervated that even if it suddenly became inspired, it could not hope to advance any ideal, let alone pursue such ideal with vigour.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Between 2015 and 2017 when he was first arrested and tried, Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), had prodigiously worked himself into trouble with the State, trying to raise consciousness about an impending, separate Biafra Republic. The trial came to a halt when he jumped bail and fled to the United Kingdom. He holds a British passport. Between 2018 and when he was ‘intercepted’ and hauled back to Nigeria last Sunday, the restless would-be revolutionary had in addition managed to talk himself hugely into trouble in his desperate and urgent bid to personify a renascent Biafra, the struggle for which was begun by MASSOB’s Ralph Uwazuruike until it petered out into a phony struggle. Predictably, many analysts have scored the re-arrest of Mr Kanu as a plus for the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, and many northern commentators and politicians have gloated over the turn of event. It is also possible that in fact the administration itself feels triumphant, has rediscovered its masculinity, and developed a sense of self-pride at how adroitly it had begun to project state power after years of irresolution.

Days after Mr Kanu s ‘interception’, the Igbo, with the exception of a few of their leaders, have been subdued over the plight of the young liberator. They had always looked at him warily, and distrusted him, his methods, his goals and his extravagant and supercilious demeanour, but they also recognised that in general he was fighting a cause they did not find altogether disagreeable. Their ambivalence towards him notwithstanding, they do not forget that he is still their son to whom they feel a filial sense of obligation to protect. President Buhari may pretend as much as he wants, but in the tempestuous beginnings of Boko Haram, he not only felt a sense of loyalty to their murderous cause, he went a step further than the Southeast has done in the case of Mr Kanu, in giving public vent to his frustrations over the strong-arm manner the then president, Goodluck Jonathan, was dealing with the insurgency fathered by the northern militants in the Northeast. There won’t be many south-easterners who will gloat over the ‘interception’ of Mr Kanu regardless of their mistrust of the misguided ‘revolutionary’. They will leave that excess of emotions to the core North or other Kanu haters across Nigeria.

No matter how partial and injurious to rights which the first trial of Mr Kanu was, it was wrong of him to jump bail, endanger the finances and freedoms of those who stood surety for him, and take sides with the ranks of those who, like the administration itself, pick and choose which court decisions to obey and even which trial to undergo. Mr Kanu himself set the stage for his fugitive years by first flouting the terms of his bail, and then fleeing abroad when soldiers horrendously shot their way into his home. He has, however, claimed that he fled because the government wanted to murder him. But despite Mr Kanu’s distressing and feeble excuses, and regardless of his appalling style and behavior, not to say his incontrovertible lack of capacity and character to lead the gargantuan cause of fully reintegrating the Igbo into the country’s body politic, nothing excuses the Buhari administration’s obsession with him. The young pretender is not the cause of the alienation felt by the Igbo, nor the real reason for the president’s innate distrust and dislike for the Igbo, nor his inability to run an inclusive government, nor the northern conviction that the Southeast is excessive in their demands for fairness and equality.

Mr Kanu is merely the current and probably ongoing manifestation of a much more alarming and underlying political disease that has both eroded and corroded Nigeria’s wobbly and untenable structure. He is not the only one angry with the exacerbated reality of a broken and so far unresponsive national political malaise. Different, strident voices are being raised in all parts of the country, provoked and aggravated by violent herdsmen and bandits against whom the administration has either vacillated or treated with kid’s gloves. Mr Kanu is, however, the most theatrical of all the voices, the most incomparable in appealing to the dispossessed of the Southeast, the most unusually charismatic. Before his ‘interception’, he painted the picture of a larger-than-life liberator with a divine mandate to procure freedom for the Igbo. The Igbo elite saw through his charade and dismissed his charlatanry as too feeble and brazen to hoodwink the sensible and educated. But, against all logic, the Buhari administration took fright and raised Mr Kanu’s noisome campaigns to the level of an apocalypse demanding urgent and frantic response. If the Igbo elite couldn’t fight or resist IPOB, the administration reasoned, it must be because they were complicit, not because they lacked the means or the courage.

It is shocking and depressing that the administration expended so much time and resources to ‘intercept’ a self-styled liberator who had frittered away the little goodwill he garnered in his boisterous and megalomaniacal face-off with the government, and who in recent weeks was on his way to obscurity. By bringing him in last week to resume trial, just as they inanely took him to trial in 2017, they have needlessly revived his feeling of self-importance and invested his campaign with the perfumery of revolution. Whether they try him in secret or not, concocted stories about his person and what he symbolises will waft into the media as well as into highly receptive and fertile public imagination. The administration is fixated on hearing itself only. It had been advised to ignore Mr Kanu and instead concentrate on pulling the carpet from under his puny feet by dialoguing with the south-eastern elite and addressing the issues that predispose the Igbo to resentment against the system. The heady and pugnacious administration chose to elevate what was clearly a disagreement into a major fight that has, leading to the exchange of incendiary, genocidal name calling.

Nothing useful will be gained by the resumption of trial. The IPOB leader is more charismatic under stress and mistreatment than under freedom. He will use this resumed trial to shore up his fading image and popularity, while the administration will seem contrastingly more biased, parochial, antidemocratic and evil than ever. Already Mr Kanu’s supporters are depicting him exaggeratedly as Nelson Mandela, asserting that his detention and trial will burnish his image and make Biafra more imminent. He will of course not be admitted to bail again, and his lawyers would probably not try to duel for one, but apocalyptic stories of how he is mistreated in detention would be smuggled out or disseminated in outbursts during his court histrionics. His trial will have zero positive impact on peace and security in the country or even on the Southeast, for, as everyone knows, what has exposed the country to brewing anarchy is not Mr Kanu’s hysteria, nor does he embody societal and governmental failings, but the administration’s lack of inclusiveness, poor grasp of the demands of a complex and modern society, its voyeuristic look towards Niger Republic, and its jaded religious, economic and social policies that have pauperised the country and pitted the people against one another.

 

2023: APC bleeds fragile, inept PDP

NIGERIANS two leading political parties are taking the country on an emotional and political rollercoaster. They are riddled with restless defectors who spare no consideration for visionary politics or morality. The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), whose illustrious and precocious background should have led it to moderation and reason, is having the upper hand today in the defection gale. With three governors and many national lawmakers snatched from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in controversial circumstances in recent weeks, it hopes to sustain its own brand of political travesty longer than the opposition party did in its tumultuous years in power. Nigerians remember with dismay decades ago that when the PDP took office in 1999, rather than refine its governance ethics, expand and consolidate its ideological platform, and take a futuristic and remedial view of the defective constitution that brought it into office, it wasted no time in priding itself as the biggest party in Africa, casting wary glances at the rest of the world, and wondering if as a party it was not really unmatched in most countries save China, Russia and the United States.

Its spectacular collapse 16 years after it took office, many defections into the party later, and just a few years after it made its offensive and arbitrary boast of ruling Nigeria for some 60 years unchallenged, offer enough lesson for a reflective successor. Alas, the APC was just a strapping lad unable to match its precocity and bulging muscles with intellectual or emotional girth. A few years after it gained office in an unprecedented leap in 2015, a controversial re-election victory in 2019, and many crucial defections later, it has begun to act, govern and speak with the fascistic hubris that destroyed many statesmen and ruined kingdoms and empires. Today, the party enjoys overwhelming control of the executive, legislature and judiciary, and with its octopal grip being extended to the media, not to talk of the slow poison of a surreptitious hegemonic agenda, Nigeria seems truly on the road to fascism. But that fascism will probably begin innocuously as a one-party, China-like democracy midwifed by compliant and sycophantic lawmakers.

The PDP is being disembowelled through controlled and deliberate bleeding of its famished ranks, while the ruling party itself, purged of reason and dissent, is set to become a tool in the hands of executive and party apparatchiks to foist a stratified political, ethnic and religious structure upon the country. Ignore the president’s unsubtle and misleading analysis on ethnicity and religion. It may seem far-fetched, but since 2015, everyone who has underestimated the hawks who seized control of the ruling party has done so at their collective peril. There is nothing anybody can say now or do to dissuade the APC from executing its hidden agenda. That agenda first saw the diminution of the ANPP and APGA legacy components of the party, then the castration of the ACN component because its young and fiery leaders in State Houses and national legislature became unruly and ambitious, and now the least capable and least ideological component of the APC, the president’s CPC, has seized the commanding heights of the party and is putting the country to the torch.

The defections will continue apace; it is part of the grand agenda to make the 2023 polls a foregone conclusion. And since the APC is sold on winning elections by defections, it will let nothing stand in its way, be it ideology, morality or common sense. The whole defection brouhaha may in the end culminate in a one-party state, for the PDP is even more shell-shocked now than it was in 2015, hence its futile recourse to street protests. The PDP had the opportunity to erect a solid foundation for the country in 1999, but it chose to bluff and bluster its way to dominance. The APC is following suit, perhaps too young to know the difference or too foolish to care about being entrapped by the same snares that undid the former ruling party. Sadly, PDP leaders are unable to respond adequately to the defections and other attacks inspired by the APC. Before the next elections, the two parties may finally achieve indistinguishability. They both subscribe to the same realpolitik, the same amorality, the same subterfuges, the same lack of principles and character, the same fascination for autocracy. Neither takes precedence over the other in promoting monstrous political values. So, how can the PDP supplant or best APC using the same ammunition and tactics? As a party, the PDP may not believe in God; but now they may find themselves hoping for a miracle, for only God can generate the tsunami capable of unseating the tenacious and rapacious APC.

Recourse to legal options will also not avail the PDP much. Contrary to what opposition party leaders suggest, the defecting governors have constitutional and legal backing to play ducks and drakes with the electorate’s emotions as well as to frolic as much as they want with the political and existential questions of the moment. The defectors know that Sections 68 (1) (g) and 109 (1) (g) as well as Sections 135 and 180 of the 1999 Constitution back them either by adumbration or silence. In any case, the 2007 suit between the Attorney General of the Federation and Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president, virtually settles everything and legitimises the crass and amoral defections that have riddled the polity. The PDP will be tilting at windmills to think it can upturn the defections and restore the status quo. It had its chance to do right by the country for 16 years; it chose to trifle with the law and constitution. It had the chance to undergird Nigerian politics with requisite sound principles and structures; it instead played amoral politics, thereby setting a bad example for the APC to imitate. And since the APC is too immature to think of tomorrow, it will happily repeat the mistakes of the PDP and bungle its own future.

Clearly, Nigeria is heading for outright disaster. The PDP is too weakened, demoralised and mentally occluded to be of any help in providing a strong alternative to the marauding APC. The only option left is for nationalists and progressives from the North and South, indeed anyone who still believes in Nigeria – and their number is shrinking rapidly – to unite and save the APC from itself, or to create a third force to save Nigeria. No one should expect a miracle from a party that renamed its party headquarters after a sitting president, or a president whose dismissive characterization of party leaders as controlling and grasping does not inhibit him from sitting in the presidency and controlling and grasping the party as well as extending the tenure of its convention planning caretaker committee indefinitely. As this column warned last week, institutions are being vanquished, dictatorship is being promoted, divisions are being accentuated, and the security and law enforcement agencies are being deployed selectively against unarmed agitators and in favour of armed nihilists. The soul of Nigeria has never been so grieved, no not even during the civil war.

By Idowu Akinlotan

If Abuja, the federal capital, is not a part of the North-Central, President Muhammadu Buhari’s establishment of five universities across four geopolitical zones out of six may put the lie to the continuing marginalisation of the Igbo Southeast. The new institutions are to be established in the Southwest, South-South, Northwest, and Northeast. But the Igbo are unlikely to consider the establishment of the institutions fair. In fact, they are more likely to see it as one more proof of the deliberateness of the marginalisation inspired against the Igbo which began before the Buhari presidency but has been remorselessly given fillip since 2015. They see and feel the unfairness against their ethnic group, but by now, other than feeble remonstrations, they are probably paralysed by a sense of frustration and ennui. In the past six years, the more they complain, the more their grievances provoke official intransigence. They campaign for a sixth state for their zone, but the federal government points at the size of the Southeast, the proverbial landlocked dot in the circle, and snub them. They see how since 2015 some of the country’s service chiefs – one of the newly appointed chiefs has proposed one for his state too – site tertiary institutions in their states at public expense, and covet one for their zone. But because they have not produced a service chief since that abominable culture took root, despite being one of Nigeria’s ethnic tripod, they have been left holding the short end of the stick.

In response to what the Igbo described as a long-running and long-standing pattern of marginalisation, Southeast protest groups have roused themselves to challenge their continuing diminution. One of the groups led by Ralph Nwazuruike, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB, Est. 1999), became strident, unorthodox, irreverent and loud. The region’s leading political elite recognised the group as a challenge to their regional dominance. But years of attrition inspired by federal might eventually balkanised the group, birthing the more incendiary Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB, Est. 2012) led by the hysterical Nnamdi Kanu. But whether MASSOB or IPOB, the Southeast elite knew which side their bread was buttered. They opposed Mr Nwazuruike, denounced Mr Kanu, and though they lacked the courage to trigger or even win a frontal confrontation with the two, thereby forcing the elite to pull their punches, they had no illusion about what IPOB and MASSOB represented to their political hold on the region. They knew they would be supplanted should the agitators have the upper hand.

Since IPOB got the upper hand, however, the region’s governors and political elite have run the gauntlet of federal might and Biafra mob. Just like President Buhari – not to talk of a disproportionate number of northern opinion moulders and politicians – who was chary of condemning Boko Haram in its early years, Igbo leaders had engaged in hand-wringing until the president unleashed a string of sanctimonious and bellicose characterisation of the Igbo. They were landlocked, he gloated, as if the core North was not also landlocked. They were a dot in a circle, he growled, mocking the size of their five states and their overwhelming need to exhale into other geopolitical zones. And in any case, he said with a finality that was distinctly unpresidential, excessive, mendacious and provocative, they were well represented in his government. He exaggerates, of course. But that is his distorted view of his administration’s inclusiveness policy, notwithstanding that he comes across as divisive and insular. And when the now linguistically inclined president deadpanned about the violent language he would speak to the Igbo/IPOB – whom he regards as his coterminous enemies – the threat was complete and the humiliation final.

Weeks of militarisation of the region by government security forces, encouraged by weeks of attacks on police stations, INEC offices, and a few other government buildings by alleged agents of IPOB and their Eastern Security Network (ESN) created a siege atmosphere that seemed to prime the region for war. The problem was not beyond dialogue, many Nigerians counseled, since IPOB and other aggrieved people in the region, behaving like symptoms of a disease, were merely responding to hostile conditions engendered by a federal administration unenthusiastic about meeting the Southeast either half way, an administration that continuously baits the region. But finally, the Defence minister, Bashir Magashi, belatedly led a delegation to dialogue with the region’s leadership elite, thus thawing the ice. Wary of indirectly encouraging a war they neither wished for nor assented to, nor were even prepared for, Igbo leaders balked and began speaking effusively about the merits of national unity.

According to Igbo leaders who met in Enugu on June 19: “We condemn in totality the activities of violent and secessionist group in south-east and elsewhere. We firmly proclaim that we do not support them because they do not speak for South East. While we firmly promise to protect everyone either from our region or other regions living in our places, we plead with other regions to please note the threat to our people and please address the threat to our people and protect them. We condemn the killing of security agents, burning of infrastructure facilitate and killing of civilians in South-East and even in other regions. We request our security agencies to discharge their duties with the rules of engagement and law. We request our nation Assembly members from South-East to please support state creation and state police in ongoing constitutional amendment. The impression that Southeast governors are silent over our youths’ agitation and secession is not correct. South-East governors, Ohanaeze President, National Assembly members and notable leaders from South-East had come out publicly in the past to speak against such agitation. In other not to find ourselves in that unfortunate situation, South-East leaders have set up a committee to engage such group and allow the elders to address their fears.”

No self-abnegation can be more mortifying. The Igbo had at first been reticent, some of their analysts say, because there was no corresponding federal denunciation of herdsmen, Northwest bandits, and Northeast Boko Haram in the core North despite the enduring suspicion that all three terrorist groups had received some sort of official or regional connivance. Neither MASSOB nor IPOB/ESN, has engaged in the pillage, rape, land seizure and farm destruction akin to what herdsmen and bandits have carried out without let or hindrance, but it was IPOB that first attracted official terrorist label in 2017 while rampaging herdsmen, some of them foreign based, had and continue to receive official justification. No one has forced the core North political leaders to apologise on behalf of herdsmen, bandits or Boko Haram; but Igbo leaders have had to supplicate the country on behalf of a Southeast group that threatens to supplant them, provoke their overthrow and routinely lather them with abuses and all sorts of deprecation. Yet, in 2017, Igbo governors had declared IPOB illegal.

The Igbo are probably inexpert poker players. Had they been adept at bluffing, they would have known that as uncaring and indifferent to their cause as the federal administration has in these latter years become, there is a limit to which it can speak the violence language it threatened the Southeast. The administration wields the ghoulish symbol of war as a sword of Damocles over the collective head of the Igbo, but the alliances and forces that prosecuted the Nigerian civil war are all obliterated, making it impossible to coax the kind of cooperation that undid the Igbo in 1967. The Igbo have now eaten crow, and at least the spectre of war has seemed considerably diminished. But it will be a mistake to think that because the Southeast leaders have backed down, the seeds of future conflict have been extirpated. The Buhari administration’s constant dithering over restructuring, in the face of what is clearly an untenable and indefensible political structure, is certain to prolong the country’s existential malaise.

 

APC, media bill and presidency

JUST when the Nigerian media thought that it had won a huge respite for press freedom, it is again facing the battle of its life as the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, acting in stealth and through third parties, unsheathes its restless sword against the fourth estate of the realm through an amendment intended to reshape the media landscape from vibrancy to docility. The media defeated all the military governments that sought to castrate it since the end of the civil war, nay since colonial rule, and has lived to write the stories and obituaries of those infamous governments; there is no question that it will write an even more intense and fearsome epitaph to the current administration’s poor leadership, with a copious mention of all the dramatis personae involved, from the disingenuous and increasingly disagreeable Information minister Lai Mohammed to the boneless executive stooge Olusegun Odebunmi (Rep- Oyo Surulere/Ogo Oluwa constituency) in whose name the latest assault is being promoted.

Fortunately, the media never shirks a fight nor its duty, and having the advantage of time on its side, will fight this latest treachery against the constitution with all the gusto and experience it had mustered in its many decades of battling visionless military governments. The current administration has, in all its execrable essentials, acted and spoken as a military government veering towards fascism, but it has less than two years to go in office. It will of course fight with all the bitterness and fierceness it is capable of and accustomed to, especially knowing it has a little time left; but if history is any guide, it is inconceivable that it can win, regardless of how much regulatory venom and constitutional amendments it musters. But that will not deter it from doing maximum damage. Right from inception, when non-democrats seized the commanding heights of the administration in 2015, it always seemed that party members and leaders alike, not to say the trusting but sometimes amnesiac media in Nigeria, had backed the wrong horse. They are now ruing their hastiness.

The All Progressives Congress (APC) is now clearly regarded as Janus-faced. It presented a different, beguiling and perceptive face to the electorate in 2015, but has ruled since then with another face –  brutish, threatening, unconcerned with the future, and self-centred. There were a few Nigerians who warned that the party under its candidate was hoodwinking its way into office, but a majority of Nigerians frustrated by the shenanigans of the Goodluck Jonathan presidency believed that should the devil himself offer to lead the assault on the last administration, the country would rally to his side. See what they wished for. Well, immediately the new administration assumed office in 2015, it proceeded post haste to effect the most radical and dispiriting change in perspective and substance any new government was capable of.

First to be shorn of its ethical trimmings was naturally the executive branch itself. The cabal, under the phlegmatic leadership of its septuagenarian quartet, brusquely took over, purged the ruling party of any extraneous influence, emplaced those who would take dictations or are cut from the same cloth, and silenced the consciences of the idealists among their ranks who erroneously thought the progressives had finally arrived and would envision for Africa what the philosopher-kings who freed the continent from colonialism could only dream of. Then the administration proceeded to castrate the judiciary, and hiding under the anti-corruption mantra which it knew would seduce most Nigerians, set the cats among the pigeons while the country slumbered. But the Nigerian judiciary is notoriously slow and conservative, and was not as amenable to the caper the executive branch wished to pull off. So, the executive simply cut the Gordian knot, overthrew the dissembling leadership of the third tier, and has since then inoculated the judiciary against reason, law and commonsense. The executive arm needed less effort, and met with few complications, in disemboweling the legislature.

Now, it is the turn of the media, which has for long hidden under the grandiloquent label of fourth estate of the realm and drawn its moral strength from Chapter Four of the 1999 constitution. But as the Information minister told the House of Representatives Joint Committees on Information, ICT and Justice during a consideration – it looked less like the probe they claimed it was – of the Twitter ban, whatever rights anyone thought the flawed constitution vouchsafed to the Nigerian through Section37, 38, 39, 40 and 41 are qualified by Section 45. As far as the APC is concerned, they could always, if pushed sufficiently, find a constructive corollary in the constitution, any constitution, to abridge rights, promote tyranny, and regiment the country back to its Neanderthal past. The administration had since 2015 laboured to deal with a media that menaced the government’s intrinsic authoritarian disposition and detestation for rights and freedoms; but it had met a brick wall every time it mustered the courage and strength. Desperate to redeem lost time, and flustered by the constant needling of the press, the administration has finally found its Man Friday in Oyo, the puppet Hon Odebunmi, to lead the charge against free speech. Don’t believe presidential spokesman Femi Adesina and Information minister in their attempt to distance the government from the execrable bills against the press.

The desperation has seemed repugnant to many Nigerians. In fact they suspect that the obsessive desire to control everything, regardless of democracy, implies that the administration has a nefarious agenda to execute before 2023, whether in regards to Fulani hegemonic interests or in engineering some other political forces to birth new political realities, to prompt the realignment of political interests whose locus would be permanently shifted to predetermined destinations, or to create a dominant class or group. These objectives do not take into consideration the possibility, no matter how small, of a hypothetical tomorrow in which another party would win office. Should that happen, the same draconian laws that are now been inspired to dominate everywhere and everybody might be deployed to stifle the APC in opposition, just as the late military strongman Sani Abacha deployed the anti-coup decree promulgated by the Olusegun Obasanjo military government after the 1976 coup to entrap him in the 1995 phantom coup.

Mr Lai Mohammed has public relations and legal background. But he has offered himself in the past few years as a consummate propagandist entranced by authoritarianism, if not fascism. He must not expect history to be kind to him. There is no way he and the administration he serves unreservedly and heedlessly can win this needless battle with the media. They do not have the same staying power the Nigerian media possesses. They may whisper their admiration for the Chinese model of democracy and even prosecute both their domestic and foreign policies with the gung-ho adventurism of North Korea, but their hedonistic lordships have neither the discipline and depth to match the Chinese nor the self-flagellation and imperturbability the dynasty in Pyongyang projects. APC thinks they will always be in power, or retain power by engineering defections from other parties; but they have done enough to lose power in a free and fair election. However, there may be some method to their madness: by trying to promote individuals like presidential aide Lauretta Onochie into the Independent National Electoral Commission as a national commissioner in flagrant opposition to the law and common sense, they signal their readiness to redefine the rules and principles of democracy along the Oriental perversity which past African leaders had admired and clumsily operated to the shame of the continent.

 

By Idowu Akinlotan

Arise Television anchor and This Day newspaper columnist, Reuben Abati, should have let bad enough alone when, in his column last week, he needlessly sought to defend the interview President Muhammadu Buhari gave the news channel two Thursdays ago. The interview produced relevant questions, contrary to what some analysts think, but there were no follow-ups, perhaps as a precondition; and it was also more notable for answers that betray the president’s suspect depth, ethnic bias, promotion of old prejudices, and insensitivity to Nigeria’s existential crisis. In his piece last Tuesday, Dr Abati implausibly defends the interviewers’ questioning style, but was probably too awed by the success of getting a reticent and reclusive president to speak than pay scrupulous attention to how the questions were answered. Whether Dr Abati likes it or not, though the questions were relevant and even bright, their refusal to ask follow-up questions betray either a prior agreement not to ruffle the president’s feathers or the interviewers decided from the beginning to empathise with him on account of his well-known trait to go off on a tangent.

Notwithstanding the questionable professionalism of how the interview was conducted, what hit every Nigerian in the face when the president was modestly grilled was his demonstrable lack of capacity as president of a multiethnic and multi-faith society. Dr Abati tried to dispel the popular notion that the president was afflicted by some kind of psychological problem, perhaps dementia, or other debilitating illnesses that continuously sap his mental strength. The president was in control throughout the interview, understood the questions asked him, and gave forthright answers to the best of his ability, Dr Abati pontificated. No one doubts the president was in control, or that he gave the best answers he could, or that he had lost his sense of humour, as dry as it has been for years. What those who watched the interview say is that the president lacked ratiocinative vigour, repeatedly went off on a tangent, could not and has not overcome the biases and parochialism of his youth, and was filled with unadulterated, even cynical, rage and hatred. Dr Abati had no answer to these observations, except to strangely imbue the president’s answers with tact and poignancy.

But what is more alarming about the interview, the president’s six years anniversary, and his leadership style and achievements is the careless manner analysts suggest that his comparative record in office should propel Nigerians to give him the benefit of the doubt. Whatever achievements he has recorded are, however, counterbalanced by the deliberate manner he has undermined his own government and divided the country to such a level that it would be a miracle to heal the wound after his term ends. After all, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan also achieved many things at a considerably lower level of debt stock. President Buhari’s record has been undergirded mainly by debts, allowing him to claim triumphs and reliefs today at the expense of driving future generations into debt peonage.

Much worse, by enthroning the worst forms of cruelty in the suppression of dissent as the Shiites experienced in Zaria, Kaduna State, in December 2015, and as the Southeast is experiencing today on account of the folly of alienated and dreamy youths in the region, the seed of future bitter divisions are being sown. Then add the administration’s obstinate and unconstitutional attempt to ‘reclaim’ grazing routes that were never lawful in most parts of the country in the first instance, sponsor a shortsighted attempt to amend the Nigerian Press Council Act, foster an administrative environment to empower the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to control and censure online media organizations with draconian regulations, and emplace a ban on Twitter, and Nigerians are left with the distinct feeling of being ruled by an administration ossified in the past, uninterested in the future, and unwilling to learn anything either from its own past or the tragic history of fascist regimes.

Despite the many flowery and tendentious essays of presidential spokesmen, there are not many Nigerians who think the legacy of the Buhari administration will be assured or protected. Instead of hurtling forward into the 21st century and beyond, the country is sliding backward into the 18th century. Garba Shehu peddles a lot of mendacity in his essays and interviews, juxtaposing his indefensible assertions with Femi Adesina’s heresies, and widening the interstices for Information minister Lai Mohammed to cavort with disconnected and injurious and autocratic media regulations – all this in an atmosphere where the country’s laws are perverted and hideously carved by Attorney General Abubakar Malami to enslave the country and justify repression.

Nigerians repose confidence in the ongoing constitutional review to meet their modest demand. But in the face of bitter resentment against the administration’s hegemonic tendencies, whether executed through herdsmen or biased security agencies, what the country needs is a new constitution that will rearrange how the country is cobbled together and governed. For Nigeria to survive, enjoy peace and achieve progress, centrally allocating resources must be taken off the table, and new ways of leadership recruitment must be instituted. From the histories of China since 1978, France since the beginning of the Fifth Republic, Britain which has produced a slew of great prime ministers and has run a stable parliamentary democracy, Singapore under Lee kuan Yew, and Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad, attention must be paid to how the country should produce its leaders. Nigeria has no durable or intelligent system of producing leaders. Misfits have become the order of the day.

Had Nigeria been a parliamentary government, no party would thrust a hypothetical Prime Minister Buhari forward. He will not be able to withstand the intellectual rigour, farsightedness, wit and ripostes that pervade parliamentary debate and are indispensable to a successful political career, nor tolerate the inclusiveness and intrusiveness which political parties presuppose in the battle for party leadership and national offices. It would be impossible for any ethnic champion to aspire to leadership, let alone win office either at the party or national level. Decades of untenable, exploitative and centralized revenue allocation system have dulled the senses of Nigeria’s national elite in producing great leaders, formulating efficient policies – not fanciful policies recklessly driven by cheap oil money – and building enduring political and economic structures.

Dr Abati sat in the interview; it is mystifying that he misjudged both the quality of the interviewers’ interventions and the discomfiting tone and import of the president’s responses. The president also probably revels in the shock he gave Nigerians who had wrongly speculated about his physical condition; but he should be more worried that everyone now clearly sees him for what he really is, what he represents, and the futility of trying to affect his mood and policies. His audience was pleasantly surprised to note that, contrary to popular belief, he could call his soul his own and even embody his policies. But they must chafe at what he owns, how altogether unsuitable for national growth and stability they are. If those who interviewed him missed those nuances, how could his ordinary supporter be trusted to put the interview in perspective, especially seeing how Ali Ndume, the senator representing Borno South, could not resist gushing over the president’s six-hour trek around Maiduguri last week?

June 12 protests misconceived, misdirected

First they were supposed to be about insecurity and other allied crimes that stifle life and extinguish the joy of living in Nigeria; then they became protests against the abridgement of fundamental human rights; and finally, on the day of protests, the rallies in some parts of the country became a campaign to unseat President Muhammadu Buhari. Days earlier, as if jolted out of his languor by a horse dose of electric stimulus, the usually somnolent president had begun breathing threats against sections of the civil populace, particularly those advocating either self-determination or outright secession. He had tough words for the symptoms, but barely acknowledged the factors predisposing Nigerians to anger and rebellion. For the president, it was all about effects rather than causes. Predictably, his panaceas drew the ire of the public, riled many global rights groups, and perplexed foreign countries worried about the dire messages encoded in Nigeria’s hasty and ill-tempered Twitter ban.

Whether out of sheer weariness or a misconception of what June 12 symbolises, the protests did not capture popular imaginations or attract huge attendance. And when along the line placards were raised to the effect of compelling President Buhari to relinquish office, the entire June 12 protests became a huge misadventure. The president had become unpopular despite the impressive turnout of spectators and supporters during his visit to Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, an unpopularity reinforced by his government’s incoherent and immature approach to the existential challenges unnerving Nigerians and baffling the rest of the world. But to crusade for his removal in a political ecosystem rife with ethnic suspicion and secessionist agitations was, to put it mildly, tilting at windmills. He might be unpopular, even incompetent, but to his supporters, many of them living in the core North, the effort to unseat the president was nothing but treason. Even a commonsensical reading of the ethnic and religious dynamics of Nigeria should have doused the enthusiasm of the Buhari-must-go campaigners as well as deterred their campaign entirely.

For a populace wearied by protests and groaning under economic losses and general political paralysis, rallying for a concept as subliminal as June 12, at least to those born after the epochal annulment of the 1993 presidential election, was too distant to trigger or fire their enthusiasm. Too many Nigerians have lost hope in the country; it will take much more than a nuanced June 12 anniversary to rekindle their interest. The rally organisers who have properly contextualized June 12 ought to understand that as significant as that date is to Nigeria, the EndSARS generation needed to be schooled in its significance to elicit both their attention and brave input. June 12 protests were supposed to be about seminars, lectures, film shows, documentaries, books, plays and playlets; in general, media platforms of all kinds to remind Nigerians that their country nearly got it right with a Muslim-Muslim ticket in 1993, and a presidential candidate whose personality and large-heartedness endeared him to the populace and propelled him, against political orthodoxy, to victory. Instead, the protests morphed into something less transcendental.

The protests were needless. As the hijack of Nigeria’s political space by non-democrats like President Buhari and his close aides show, June 12 can no longer be actualized. Ethnic and religious issues have so fouled and bifurcated the country that Nigeria needs special intervention to save it as a living entity, not to talk of helping it fulfill its manifest destiny. Under former military strongman Ibrahim Babangida, June 12 vexed every soul, and the country’s destiny was shaken and weakened. And under both ex-presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, that destiny, that hope of a big and united African country, the largest concentration of black people anywhere in the world, was beginning to resurrect, albeit hesitantly. Indeed, it seemed to many Nigerians that the ordinary man on the street was more keenly aware of the country’s potential than its rulers. But in six crazy and obscene years under the present administration, the country not only became divided even worse than during the civil war years, it also became bereft of hope of any kind as bandits, security agents (refer to the EndSARS litany of complaints), the political class and aggrieved populace orchestrated the most sustained and consistent attack on the integrity of the country either as a real entity or as a concept.

It was a huge disservice to what June 12 symbolises that the anniversary was polluted by a campaign to unseat President Buhari. June 12, whether as an idea or a 1993 reality, is too wholesome to be conflated with what is certain to be the depressing legacy of the Buhari presidency. The president and his increasingly authoritarian predilections should have been left out of the June 12 anniversary celebrations completely. Nigerians could by all means protest against this administration, for the Information minister’s strident campaigns and effusions are enough provocation, but it should not be on June 12 anniversary, as tempting as that may be. If care is not taken, the salient and noble idea of June 12 may be lost the same way the EndSARS gains were frittered away and even completely nullified by youthful exuberance. Now the police have rebooted and returned to their old ways, and, surprise of all surprises, even the president has concluded that the EndSARS protests were about him personally and his government.

June 12 anniversary may have regained relevance because of the serial malfeasance of a government completely sold on anti-democratic principles, and won’t give a damn if it is so characterized, but it will be a shame to forget what happened to that election in 1993 just because the right administration takes office and fulfills the yearnings of the country’s fractious founding fathers. If it is not too late already – for this administration irredeemably scorns democracy and can’t seem to envision a great and powerful country in the future – June 12 will still be celebrated in the years ahead. Let that celebration not lose focus, and let it not be about the mundaneness which the current administration so grossly encapsulates.

Ndume on Buhari’s health

FOR many Nigerians who used to scoff at President Muhammadu Buhari’s troubled health, they have the word of Senator Ali Ndume to contend with. He suggests that the president, at 76 years old, is much healthier than anyone imagined, including perhaps the senator himself at 61. According to him, he was on the entourage of the president for six hours and was mesmerised by the septuagenarian’s agility. The president never really paused, he said, while he, the senator, got winded.

It is gratifying that the outspoken and sometimes controversial senator pointed out the president’s reinvigorated physical condition to a sceptical public, even as many Nigerians who watched the president’s recent interview on Arise Television also marveled at his conversance with and ownership of his administration’s reactionary policies. As a good host, it was of course not expected that the affable senator would contrast the president’s newfound agility with his administration’s divisive and centrifugal inclinations, nor mention his lenient wink at policies such as herdsmen grazing routes that promote his fundamental hegemony.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Late last month, the All Progressives Congress (APC) marked six chequered years in office without fanfare. Three months earlier, the party also marked eight years in existence as a political party. Fittingly, no celebration was attempted on both occasions. The suspicion is that both anniversaries would have been celebrated had the party felt confident about its achievements. Instead, it retreated into its shell and brought a rabbit out of the hat in President Muhammadu Buhari’s bombshell television interview and Democracy Day address. The party was barely two years old when it took office in 2015, an unprecedented feat for a political toddler. And in the face of steep opposition, it also won re-election four years later. These are milestones deserving of celebration for an eight-year-old party.

Sadly, the precociousness that brought the party into office and the political genius and chutzpah that saw it aspiring to national leadership at two years of age and winning presidential election and re-election with such daring and adeptness have been woefully inadequate in helping it to responsibly manage the enormous power at its disposal. Every challenge it faced – from insurgency to banditry and kidnapping, and from economic crisis to EndSARS protest, not to talk of the Southeast and Southwest self-determination/secession conundrums – has been met with incompetence, clumsiness, ideological vacuity and dismal lack of foresight and surefootedness on its part.

The party is supposed to be the most ideological in Nigeria, if not in Africa, going by its claims and posturing. But it has ended up as an organization destitute of ideology. Its only claim to principles has been its sometimes practical but nevertheless ad hoc approach to governance. If it makes sense, regardless of lacking consistency with its manifesto, it will promote it. Beyond that, the party has simply trudged along, groping its way into an uncertain future, hesitant about what kind of legacy it should envision for itself or bequeath the country. The public naturally presumed ideological purity for the party, believing without evidence that the party’s extravagant claims had indemnified them against being duped. They also hoped that the party’s ambitions would be escalated into grander ambitions for the country. Instead, the party has collapsed into internecine conflicts and disseminated barbarous antagonisms across the country, corrupting and weakening every sinew, and poisoning the lifeblood and muscles that sustain the nation.

A celebration would have enabled the APC to renew their contract with the electorate, sell their ideas of how to recreate the country from the ashes of despair and discontent, and instill hope in a greater and inspiring tomorrow. But if the party could not celebrate because it is also facing its own despairing identity crisis and brutal internal struggle for control of both the levers of the party and its soul, then perhaps the president would want to roll out the drums as a modest celebration of his own success in personifying the resilience of a country that stands strong in the face of daunting crises.

However, as the president’s Arise Television interview showed last Thursday, his grasp of the existential crises facing the nation remains rudimentary, his snide remarks about who dictates what to the party inflict wounds on loyal party hierarchs, and his panaceas for reclaiming the country from mediocrity remain exasperatingly simplistic. Every leader needs a deep mind that can call to deep, a mind labyrinthine in its reach and network, a mind capable of grasping the complexities of national challenges as well as proffering answers and solutions that are no less complex and visionary than the problems are entangled. That kind of mind is, however, lacking.

From all indications, there are no guarantees that the APC would glide into the future stronger than it has shown the capacity to do, despite the president’s exultation last Thursday over the so-called rebuilding of the party, a rebuilding that now appears to be emptying the party of its soul, weakening its hope, and damaging its resolve. In fact the danger for him, much more than his party, is that he may end up being reviled in the Southeast – but he probably does not care – dismissed and derided in the Southwest, disapproved in much of the Middle Belt, received with mixed feelings in the Northeast, and ignored in the Northwest. Both the president and his party have just two brutally short years to repair the damage to their image and persons. Whether they will make amends is not quite as clear as whether they can.

The president’s interviews and Democracy Day address sum up the entire body of his life’s work and person. That summation is not flattering. Contrary to what many people think, not only is it clear that the president is in far greater control of the policies and character of his government, he is also enthusiastic about them, and has openly shown he personifies them, despite his illness and seeming detachment. He speaks of democracy when everything he does wars against it, including his inability to read and appreciate the import of the EndSARS protests. On Friday, he belatedly decided to jaw-jaw with leaders of the Southeast, though he had spent the better part of his years in office undermining the influence and authority of APC leaders in various zones, including the Southwest, and even threatening them. Above all, he has boasted more attachment to Niger Republic and defended the extraordinary commitment of Nigerian resources to that country on the lamentable excuse of familial connections and unsubstantiated business advantages. And he has subscribed to and sanctioned an unconstitutional and unlawful return to grazing routes and reserves though the policies were never enacted nationally even in the First Republic that he extols as a paragon of law and order.

For some 16 years, the Peoples Democratic Party trifled with democratic principles and acted as if party leaders were both immutable and infallible. But despite their frivolity, they never substantially threatened democracy. On the contrary, partly because hawks and non-democrats accompanied the Buhari administration into office, it has taken only a few years for the administration and the APC to demolish democracy’s building blocks, enthrone regional and ethnic exceptionalism as the guiding principle of state, and displayed inestimable contempt for democrats, other ethnic groups, religions and civil society. In addition to their brinkmanship, they would have declared martial law in order to have a better grip of statecraft had they been sure they would not either come to grief or unite the opposition against themselves. The president said he hoped the APC would go on and on beyond 2023, and he believed that he and the party had done enough to elicit and sustain popular confidence. If only wishes were horses. Having turned Nigeria into a regimented people forced to goosestep behind him, having shortsightedly engrossed the Fulani worldview while displaying cavalier attitude to other nationalities, and having submerged Nigerians in debt to, in his argument, remedy the nation’s infrastructural deficit, it remains to be seen whether the people would place premium on their stomachs or on their freedoms, especially as neither goal is being placated by the president’s purposeless leap into the democratic and economic void which he has created and nurtured.

 

Ex-presidents rally for unity

Worried by the seeming lethargy of the Buhari administration in addressing Nigeria’s worsening insecurity, the Committee for the Goodness of Nigeria (CGN) comprising the Interfaith Initiative for Peace led by Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, and His Eminence, John Cardinal Onaiyekan; the Socio-cultural Consultative Committee led by ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo; and the National Peace Committee led by former military head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, met in Abuja on Thursday for hours. No communiqué was issued; but it was reported that they had sought audience with President Buhari. It is not certain whether they should bother, for the president’s mind is already made up on a number of critical national issues that unfortunately promote insecurity and instability.

The coalition must, however, not be discouraged from trying. They see the disaster looming in the horizon, which the Buhari administration, because of its nefarious motives, does not see. The president and his administration, including the hawkish advisers who cajole him to be inflexible and to eschew dialogue, will not yield an inch in mitigating the factors promoting insecurity in Nigeria, including the controversial grazing routes and reserves that hark back to the last century, and the restiveness in the Southeast which the administration is exacerbating by its insensitive, provocative and incendiary statements.

But the country must also remind Chief Obasanjo and Gen Abubakar that they were also partly responsible for the disaster overtaking the country. When Gen Abubakar foisted a secretly written constitution on the country, a constitution that brazenly lied to the public and to itself, what did he expect? When Chief Obasanjo cruelly undermined the then ruling party and manipulated his successors into office against the will of the people, why would he expect peace and progress? Having laid the foundation for disaster and thwarted the will of the people, it was natural that one day a monstrous government would take office and perpetrate atrocities. Now the former leaders are trying to quench the raging inferno with a spoonful of water. Tough luck.

 

At last, a presidential interview

Those who clamoured for President Muhammadu Buhari to address the nation on the wave of insecurity drowning the country are probably disillusioned by now. This column had warned that as foreboding as his silence was, it would be better for everyone should the president resist the temptation to speak. From experience, his silence was often more golden than his speeches. But should he surrender to the clamour, this writer painfully concluded, he would probably exacerbate the problem and cause more frustrations. Alas, the president gave in on Thursday by agreeing to be interviewed on Arise Television on wide-ranging issues affecting the country. Now that the people finally had their way, and have heard what he had to say, they would be left deeply mortified that the president again lost the opportunity to endear himself to the world and show himself a statesman.

The engaging simplicity of his answers seems to portray the president as reluctant to cause anyone grief. However, the answers do not hide the painful fact of his incapacity in addressing the country’s complex challenges with any degree of depth or altruism. The Arise TV anchors asked the right questions, even though follow-up questions seemed curiously stifled. The anchors were as aggressive in their questions to the extent politeness and respect for the president would allow, and they were generally eloquent and dispassionate. If questions alone could produce an enjoyable interview, the Arise TV anchors did enough to arrest the attention of the stupefied audience, most of whom did not know that an interview was in the offing.

Nigerians got the interview they craved; but the injury inflicted by the ancient disposition of the president, not to talk of his misconstruction of the questions, the evident lack of substance and depth in his answers, and the revelatory parochialism that many feared has greatly compromised his presidency manifested in vivid and gruesome colours on Thursday. If this interview does not cure the appetite of Nigerians for more presidential interviews, then they must be gluttons for punishment. There was hardly a question the Arise TV panel asked that was not appropriate; but there was no presidential answer that rose to the level of sublimity the public half expected. Since he assumed office, perhaps the president condescended to only three or four television interviews; for the sake of peace and order, there should be no more interviews for the next two years as the influence and relevance of this administration ebb away.

Consider these few questions and the presidential responses. Asked how he hoped to tackle worsening insecurity, the president passed the buck to the governors: “You were elected like me. Go back to your states and provide security. You can’t just go round, win elections and then sit down and expect others to help you with your work.” Dumbfounded? Well, wait for more. You had thought that given the relentless hemming and hawing of some presidency and government officials on the subject of open grazing the presidency had sensibly modified its position and finally aligned with modernity. How cruelly wrong you were. Said the president, and this is probably the final opinion of the Buhari administration on the subject: “Two Southwest Governors came to me to say cattle rearers were destroying farms in their states. I asked them what happened to the grassroots security panels from traditional rulers to local governments who meet regularly to identify the root of their problems and identify crooks within their environment and apprehend the criminals. Who destroyed this system? Go back and fix it, give your people sense of belonging. I don’t like it when people campaign to become governors and people trusted them with their votes, and after winning, they can’t perform, they’re trying to push responsibilities to others.”

It is not just that his answer was misplaced, nor that the buck passing was exasperating, it is also frightening that given how food production has been blighted in the past one or two years, not to talk of the appalling loss of lives all over the country caused by rampaging herdsmen, the president could still hold on to such outdated views of animal husbandry. The way he responded to the question, especially the threat to expropriate land for his favoured herders, most of them foreigners, it was clear that he had so much on his chest, so much rage – too much in fact that in the same breath, he betrayed his contempt and dislike for those who opposed his perspective. In addition, his views on insurgency, appointment of the Chief of Army Staff, operations of local governments, the EndSARS crisis, and the factors encouraging foreign investment were too simplistic and convoluted to give any hope that these problems would be resolved soon. They will not be resolved; the country can only hope they will not be worsened. The president will keep caressing them, because they are ulcers that won’t heal; but his efforts will be fruitless since his presidency is lacking in both quality advice and nationalistic perspective to understand and treat salient national issues with the astuteness and impartiality needed.

If the audience needed an answer that exemplified the shortcomings of the presidency in responding to grave national issues, they got one when the president bemoaned his inability to fight corruption as much as he would want because of the strictures of democracy. In other words, the most transparent and least corrupt countries in the world, which incidentally are democracies, are of no significance to the administration. Virtually all the responses of the president were nothing more than excuses to explain why simple issues could not be accurately interpreted, let alone understood, and why the government cannot be effective, despite all the constitutional tools given the administration to impact the society. The general sterility is suffocating. The interviewers must have been pained beyond endurance to see their thoughtful questions pulverized by a contrasting and debilitating lack of understanding from the president.

By Idowu Akinlotan

After his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela was confronted by some African National Congress (ANC) leaders, including his feisty wife, Winnie, to permit vengeance against apartheid leaders who tormented, humiliated and murdered blacks. The leaders told him that the people had become restive and were poised for vengeance, and they were afraid they could no longer restrain them. Go and restrain them, Mr Mandela said testily, “That is why you are their leaders.” The leaders were afraid they could lose their credibility with the angry followers, and worse, that Madiba himself could end up losing his leadership. It was a risky decision, but Mr Mandela was convinced, partly based on his lifelong philosophy, that vengeance was not an option. Last Sunday’s Southwest All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders meeting in Lagos and their rejection of the region’s budding secessionist temper, sometimes carefully and elegantly couched in self-determination/sovereignty terms, reminds observers of how Mr Mandela doused the tension in South Africa after his release.

The Southwest leaders – for that is what they really are despite being largely APC – led by Bisi Akande, Bola Tinubu and Gen Alani Akinrinade, among others, displayed uncommon courage to swim against the tide in Yorubaland. Despite the careful rhetoric of Professor Banji Akintoye, historian and leader of a major Yoruba group, Ilana Omo Yoruba, and the rather impulsive actions and exertions of Sunday Igboho, not to say the cagey manoeuvres of Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) leader Gani Adams, the refrain in Yorubaland consequent upon the atrocities of Fulani herdsmen was for separation. The country had become a retrogressive force for the Yoruba, and the common man on the street was too angry to care about any patriotic feeling for Nigeria. To, therefore, go against the grain was a delicate and risky decision by the Southwest APC leaders.

There is no question that the leaders’ decision not to back secession is right. They may not be as representative as their party and status imply; and they may even be presumptuous to posture as speaking for the entire Yoruba, but few can deny that they are actually the most regarded and representative of the Yoruba and Southwest leaders. Prof Akintoye himself alluded to the fact of their unassailable leadership when he wrote a preemptive letter urging them to exemplify the Yoruba cause and project it in such a way that they would not lose their legitimacy. Said he a day or two before last Sunday’s meeting of the APC leaders: “Of the six states of the Yoruba southwest your party controls five of the state Governorships and State Assemblies. In this party also are most Yoruba high officials in the Nigerian federal government. Therefore the APC is the party that is in charge of the Yoruba wellbeing and future today. In the interest of our Yoruba nation and your own political future you cannot and must not continue to keep quiet while the Yoruba nation is seriously endangered by Fulani marauders, militia and terrorists that have invaded the Yoruba homeland for over five years raping, maiming, killing, kidnapping, destroying their farms and other means of livelihood and generally brutalizing your people.”

The APC leaders themselves have no illusion whom they represent or speak for. They know that while Prof Akintoye is a respected moral force in Yorubaland, he does not have the political savvy to galvanise the Yoruba for the cause he espouses so flamboyantly. They also know that both Messrs Igboho and Adams, regardless of their popularity, do not have the moral, intellectual and political force to organize the rebellion they romanticise. More importantly, the APC leaders have obviously sampled the opinion of traditional chiefs whom Mr Igboho, more than anybody else, deprecates, and were certain that they were undecided about secession. Finally, though they seemed to restrict their identity to the APC, but in fact speak for the whole Southwest, their intuition tells them that the failings, atrocities, parochialism and prejudices of the Buhari government do not reflect or wholly represent the convictions and perspectives of the core North whom President so unreflectingly favours. In addition, the APC leaders know that the little time left for the Buhari presidency is not beyond toleration to the extent of risking rebellion. They do not diminish the grievances of the Southwest – indeed no right-thinking person does – but they are acutely aware of the danger of sleepwalking into rebellion or secession.

When the altruistic Prof Akintoye and the voluble Mr Igboho began their crusades, the Southwest gave them favourable hearing because of the rightness and resonation of their cause. But as time wore on and Mr Igboho began his tirades against traditional institutions and religious icons, many south-westerners began to exchange wary glances and cringe. If anyone claimed to be fighting the Yoruba cause, they reasoned, surely he would be fully aware of the democratic principles and the lofty libertarian ideals that inspire and anchor their civilization and canonised their culture. It was, therefore, antithetical for a self-acclaimed freedom fighter to insist that any opposition to his ideas or ways of doing things was treason to the Yoruba cause. Yes, the Southwest has a good cause to resent the nihilism of herdsmen and other freelance criminals running rampant in their region, and they may not be too immodest to suggest that they would fair far better on their own than under the constricting and negating environment of Nigeria. But they also resent any freedom fighter who attempts to impose a fascist diktat on them. They flourish in opposition, and recognise its value; they would not be stampeded into goose-stepping behind megalomaniacs.

The declaration by the Southwest APC leaders has obviously put a dampener on any secessionist bid. It is this declaration that the rest of the country will hold as legitimate. Many freedom fighters, some of them promoting cultural atavism, will still continue to roam the Southwest, especially as herdsmen persist in their folly in league with a conniving federal government. But beyond their garish postulations of utopia, they will be unable to do more than rouse the poor and angry into frenzy. Of course this can still be dangerous, for as Prof Akintoye disguisedly warned, the APC leaders must be careful not to operate too far away from their followers. The leaders, in short, must seek ways of restraining a lethargic federal government that seems to have lost both focus and moral compass, a government unbelievably ignorant of the consequences of their acts of omission, a government many now believe is acting deliberately hegemonic when it once again spurned the opportunity to appoint, say, a Southeast general as Chief of Army Staff as successor to the late Gen Ibrahim Attahiru. The Southwest APC leaders will have to find ways of convincing the region that what is happening in Abuja is an aberration, not a deliberate ethnic and religious plan to subjugate the rest of the country. The leaders must also heed the advice of former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who warned of the consequences of leaders losing touch with their base.

Neither the APC leaders nor the region’s freedom fighters can downplay the factors that have led to this mass alienation and rebellion. But, unfortunately, there is little anyone can do to educate a federal government that is determined to stick to its obnoxious politics. All anyone can do now is to see how best to arrest the damage and hope that the frustrations peaking in various parts of Nigeria would not soon trigger a major conflagration. No one trusts the federal government anymore; Southwest APC leaders must, therefore, calibrate the amount of trust, which their people still have in them, available to invest in the bad project in Abuja, a project that has caused so much distress for everyone who contributed immensely to engendering the change of 2015.

 

Chadian, Malian imbroglio

LAST August, Colonel Assimi Goita overthrew the Malian government of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in a coup d’etat. The coupists were, however, forced to partially relinquish power to a transitional government headed by Bah Ndaw, with a mandate to organise fresh elections in February next year. But last Tuesday, after a cabinet shake-up that saw the ouster of two of the August coupists – ex-Defence Minister Sadio Camara and ex-Security Minister Colonel Modibo Kone – Col Goita struck again, ousting both the transitional president and prime minister. The putschists promised last week to keep the election date sacrosanct. There is nothing to indicate they will. If a cabinet reshuffle can force them to carry out a coup, what will stop them from extending the election date or succeeding themselves?

Even though impoverished Mali still contends with rebel pressures from the North, and the civil populace, which partly accounted for last year’s coup, continues its restiveness, the Malian coup plotters may have mustered the boldness to carry out their coup because of the tepid response of ECOWAS and the global community to the coup in Chad after the late President Idriss Deby Itno was killed in battle. (He was probably murdered). Having benefited tremendously from the resoluteness of the Chadian military under Gen. Itno in the battle against ISWAP and Boko Haram militants, Nigeria has been understandably but indefensibly tolerant of the coup in Chad. President Muhammadu Buhari has promised to support Gen Itno’s son, Mahamat, who took over in a swift coup last month, until elections are held in 18 months time. There is no proof that the date will be sacrosanct, nor that Deby the younger, a general himself, would not transmute into civil leadership.

Overall, it is a proof of the low quality of governance in the region that many of these Sahelian states are troubled and unstable, and have for decades been unable to wean themselves off the support and exploitation of France, their former colonial power. These countries have flirted with religion, and have run corrupt and incompetent governments. Now they must also contend with implacable Islamist foes determined to overthrow the reigning order and institute theocracies in the region. By refusing to reject and punish the Chadian coup, using all sorts of arguments and subterfuges, they must also contend with the distinct possibility of increasing instability.

 

Afe Babalola, Sagay right on constitutional review

SADLY, many Nigerians have reconciled themselves to the ongoing jamboree on constitutional review. They think that with some amendments here and there, some devolution of power, perhaps state police thrown into the mix, all would be well, and the country would regain the peace it frittered away in the past few years. Unfortunately, they are all chasing a chimera. As indicated in this place last week, the 1999 constitution is incurably defective, and the anchors upon which it ought to stand, including philosophical underpinnings, are unfortunately inexistent. This is not the first time an attempt is being made to remedy the 1979 constitution which inspired the 1999 constitution, and if the ongoing desultory review is anything to go by, it will not be the last. It requires excess of folly to stick to a building whose foundation is incurably defective, believing that replacing the windows or the doors would make it habitable.

While the ongoing review captivates the public, it is reassuring that many eminent Nigerians, some of them constitutional experts, have begun to redirect attention and thoughts towards a better alternative. Hopefully, by a miracle, the redirection will grow until a critical mass of opinion would force the country to jettison the current barren exercise. Legal icons Afe Babalola, founder of the Afe Babalola University Ado Ekiti (ABUAD), Itse Sagay, chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), and Ondo State governor Rotimi Akeredolu have, among other eminent Nigerians, reviewed the Nigerian constitution and suggested that it would be wasteful and futile to persist in trying to make an incurably defective document manageable. They suggest a return to the 1963 Republican Constitution, with some amendments that take cognisance of current realities. They are thoughtful. Even though this column stopped short of recommending the 1963 Constitution last week, it had never been in doubt that both the 1979 and 1999 constitutions were completely incapable of taking care of the cultural, political and civilisational differences at the root of the national discord bleeding Nigeria to the bones.

Whether Nigerians like it or not, and regardless of their suspicions about the 1963 Constitution and their infatuation with the 1999 constitution, they will sooner or later realize that the First Republic best approximates their yearnings, accommodates their differences, and offers them great opportunities for self-fulfillment. In any case, there are not many people who insist that the 1999 constitution is not a fraud, or that that fraud can be remedied by constitutional tinkering. Though Nigerian leaders since 1999 fell short of the mark of great leadership, and were on the whole so incompetent that it is a miracle the country is still standing, the far greater problem is the constitution itself. It is irresponsibly costly to operate, suicidally and self-destructively unitary, plunders the wealth of a part to satisfy the abominable cravings of other parts, and condemns every part to the same trajectory and level of development. It is impossible for the ongoing review – especially seeing that previous reviews miscarried very badly – to satisfy the demand for change, fairness and equity. Worse, the ongoing review will not placate the grievances of the disaffected or soothe the wounds of those injured by the incompetence of leaders and the discriminatory practices of decades.

Already, judging from the shocking statements of some leading public officials, it is clear that the end result of the ongoing review, if it is concluded safely, would be badly redacted. The officials, starting from the presidency, are resolutely unconvinced about the need for fundamental changes. They want only superficial changes, and are frustratingly unable to undertake a rigorous examination of the causes of instability and poverty in the country. Without reason and substantiation, they think that guns and bombs would pacify dissenters, and with the restoration of hypothetical peace, a modicum of constitutional alterations would produce utopia. They misadvise themselves about the danger to national cohesion constituted by a defective constitution, and downplay the egregious folly of the Aguiyi Ironsi government which triggered the dangerous unitarism ravaging and bleeding the country. Worse, officials think that the shoe can never be on the other foot one day, or that they could be hypothetically hoisted with their own petard of injustice which has been left to fester.

The federal government is unpersuaded about the need for any drastic change. They prefer the status quo and have quibbled considerably over even elementary disagreements. They are scared stiff of any call for national conference or national dialogue, believing boyishly that a dialogue would be a pretext to declare a vote of no confidence in the president. By foreclosing dialogue or conference, and reluctantly embracing constitutional review whose processes and principles they neither understand nor are able to interpret, they predispose the country to far worse instability. It is the tragedy of contemporary Nigeria that all the signs given the country’s leaders since 1999 have been grossly misconstrued. That folly still persists; and there is no telling where it would lead a country that continues to sustain its intransigence against reality.

By Idowu Akinlotan

On the same day the Southern governors met in Asaba, Delta State, to decide on open grazing, restructuring and a number of other pressing national issues, Information minister Lai Mohammed was appealing to the media to tone down their rhetoric on the same pressing national problems. He was clear that, unlike before, the federal government was going to act on the 10-point resolutions reached at the April 8, 2021 town hall meeting on national security held in Kaduna. Among the resolutions were the “urgent need for political restructuring and not separation”, judicial devolution, free primary education, and state police. It is not clear by what authority Mr Mohammed spoke, despite being the Information minister. But judging from the brusque manner Senate President Ahmed Lawan dismissed the issue of restructuring when he responded to the decision of the southern governors on the same subject, and the incredibly revelatory interview Attorney General of the Federation Abubakar Malami gave to Channels Television last Wednesday on both restructuring and open grazing, Mr Mohammed might as well be barking up the wrong tree.

If any Nigerian is confused about what the ultimate opinion of the administration on restructuring is – leave the vexing issue of open grazing out of the mix for now, despite its centrality to national discourse – they only need to examine the sophism of the senate president and the attorney general. The current administration will do nothing significant about restructuring, not even if the issue were couched in more agreeable and less frightening terms and language. Clearly they see it as a first step to the balkanisation of the country or at least a whittling down of certain privileges that concern a section of the ruling elite. It will, therefore, take a conjunction of weighty social, political and economic events to compel the administration to recognise the indispensability of restructuring in defusing the pent-up tensions and agitations wracking the country from North to South. Until that conjunction forces the hands of the government, officials like Sen Lawan and Mr Malami will continue to either procrastinate or prevaricate.

Administration officials probably see restructuring only in terms of its dynamics as a political issue from which certain interest groups struggle to gain some advantage. More complicated, and rather disingenuous, is the incomprehensible fact that both the senate president and Mr Malami view the subject from the narrow perspective of the southern governors’ resolutions. But the administration and complaisant officials who support the inert approach of the administration to this most salient of issues need to muster the rigour to see the issue of restructuring from the wider context of the crises that spin from it, and from the even more critical issue of the kind of country they envision for themselves and future generations. Since the collapse of the First Republic, there has not been a political arrangement, either under the military or elected government, which conduced to peace, unity and development. The country has oscillated between crises. Sen Lawan and Mr Malami may not be tired of the oscillations, but they can rest assured that most Nigerians would like to have an arrangement that does not make politics a zero-sum game.

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) made the issue of restructuring a campaign and even ideological matter. They posed as progressives when they sought the consent of Nigerians to gain office, and they made the subject a priority in their manifesto. They suggested that restructuring would help infuse drive and purpose to a country that had become lethargic and listless under the bungling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It is not clear whether most of those taken in by the APC manifesto and who eventually voted for the party understood what the APC promised or what the implications of restructuring would be. But they voted for the party, overthrew the ancien regime, and invested so much hope in a party and president they hoped understood the gravity of the country’s crisis and knew exactly what should be done to attenuate it. Six years down the line, there are no clear indications that the subject of restructuring was not an errant addition to the party manifesto by an audacious idealist and redactor. And six years after, the party has remained as conservative as ever, even to the point of sounding reactionary. First they denied ever promising restructuring until someone pointed it out to them in their party documents. Thereafter, they have dedicated themselves to fighting the idea and labeling its proponents as disgruntled.

Restructuring is, however, all about vision. The country’s political structure was a problem before independence, but was partially resolved after acrimonious debate. Then came the even more destructive and disruptive military interregnums, and there has been no peace since. It will take a visionary and idealist to acknowledge rather than deny the need to find a consensus on which structure best suits Nigeria. So far, no such visionary has been found. In fact in the past few years, there has been a consistent effort to undermine any consensus, and advocates of restructuring have been painted as malcontents and separatists. The current system of government is unwieldy and abhorrently expensive, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has been done to streamline the structure and costs. The economy is unable to sustain the current structure thereby promoting inefficiency, and increasingly Nigerians and their governments have been compelled to choose. Yet, the administration and leading lawmakers have stuck adamantly to the status quo. They seem resigned to fate, and with bated breath await the coming explosion.

Despite the administration’s antagonism, the campaign for restructuring is unlikely to abate. As the consequences of the country’s misshapen structure disrupts peace and imperil unity and development, the campaigns will get more strident. There was a time when the campaign polarised the country along North-South divide. Apart from the shrinking of an amorphous North – there was never a homogenous South – the societal disruptions the country has had to contend with in the past few years have convinced the thoughtful that something simply has to be done to rectify the wobbly national political structure. Why the administration remains skeptical and even antagonistic to the idea, despite the imminence of an implosion, is hard to understand. However, given the best efforts of consensus builders, there will never be a time when the whole country will rally unanimously behind restructuring. It won’t happen. But there will at some inevitable point be a critical mass of pro-restructuring advocates to encourage dialogue and resolution.

That dialogue, unfortunately, will be hamstrung by unexpected difficulties and challenges. Nigeria is so riven by ethnic and religious divisions that finding those who will expertly champion the restructuring agenda will be hard to find. Finding them will require a unique national consensus. Such champions do not exist in the legislature, as the reactionary comments of their principal officers and the trivialities and obsessions of lawmakers who sponsor legislative mundanity have indicated. The populace can also not channel and manage the dialogue. Building a consensus around the criteria and parameters for the dialogue will be an arduous task. Though there is not much to show that the current administration has a full grasp of the problem or a fair understanding of what the solution should be, it is hard to downplay the role of the executive in championing the cause of restructuring. To start with, therefore, the executive must not only understand the issues at stake regarding restructuring, administration officials, particularly the president or those to whom he has unconstitutionally delegated his powers and thoughts, must be convinced that continuing on the present course is both self-defeating and destructive.

The Nigerian constitution is modeled on the American constitution. But not only is it a caricature of that model and an undisciplined and fraudulent plagiarism of its intentions, it also has no understanding or appreciation of the principles that underpinned the drafting of the American document or the cultural rubric that holds it together. Fifty-five delegates wrote the United States constitution in 1787 by amending the Articles of Confederation (1781-89). The US constitution came out of rancorous debates and the experience of the country under confederation. But in the end, it limited the power of the government, secured the rights of citizens, provided for the separation of powers, and finally ensured a ‘delicate balance between authority and liberty’. The Nigerian constitution, whose defects many optimists believe amendments would rectify, has produced monarchs as presidents, ignored the attendant principle of economic federalism, and was deviously enacted only after elections had been held in 1999 and winners sworn in. Like its predecessors, the current administration does not understand the principles and philosophies that should underpin the document; hence the ease with which it is transmogrified and exploited for ethnic and religious ends. Crucially too, the US constitution was influenced by the English Bill of Rights (1689) and the Magna Carta, while James Madison, one of the four men who drafted the document and was the most learned, had the most input. It also drew inspiration from Aristotle, Plato’s student who taught Alexander the Great to conceive and rule an empire. No such ennobling foundation can be traced to the Nigerian constitution; and worse, through its many trajectories under the military, it became bastardised and emptied of any philosophical content and soul.

In brief, too, the Japanese post-war constitution (1947), which is anchored on three principles advanced by Gen Douglas MacArthur, borrowed heavily from the Meiji Constitution (1867-1912) and has not been amended in more than 70 years, even as it contains only about 5,000 words compared to the average constitution with 21,000 words. The constitution was authored by two American lawyers under the guidance of Gen MacArthur, and it satisfied the condition laid down at the Potsdam Declaration to the effect that “The Japanese government shall remove all obstacles to the revival of and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established”. For France, though Michel Debre drafted the French Fifth Republic constitution (1958), it was mainly inspired by Charles de Gaulle, and it has kept the country constitutionally stable since then. One of the anchors of the French constitution is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was in turn inspired by the Enlightenment philosophers. Compared to these constitutions, what does the Nigerian constitution believe in, and to what extent do the country’s leaders have an emotional connection with, and intellectual understanding of, its pivotal principles?

It is not out of place to conclude that the responses of Sen Lawan and AGF Malami approximate the administration’s inflexible attitude towards the subject of restructuring, with both of them equating it, by an improbable and vexatious logic, to restructuring and constitutional adherence at state level. Mr Malami even went further, in his reaction to the southern ban on open grazing, to suggest that northern governors could conceivably place a ban on spare parts dealers, in other words targeting the Igbo. The administration clearly has no interest in restructuring, but even if it does, because it has no emotional or intellectual connection with it, and can consequently not drive it, the country should expect very tough times ahead. Coupled with the ferment all over the country, the imperiousness of herdsmen with whom the government appears to be in league, the unfinished war with Boko Haram/ISWAP, and the determination of the government to overreach itself in tackling the separatist agitations in the Southeast and South-South, Nigeria should brace itself for something far worse than the country possesses the ingenuity to manage.

 

NLC, el-Rufai and fascist response in Kaduna

 

 

The eternally combative but often misdirected Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, was for much of last week at daggers drawn with the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) over the retrenchment of some 7,000 workers. The NLC organised a five-day warning strike in Kaduna to compel the governor to follow the law in downsizing or rightsizing the state’s civil service workforce. The strike began on Monday but lasted only three days after heated exchange, lies and threats, among other incendiary reactions. Some governors tried to calm frayed nerves during the strike by appealing to both sides for restraint, but the scoffing Mallam el-Rufai whined that he expected a more unequivocal support from his colleagues. His sense of entitlement obviously runs deeper and berths wider than initially thought. And whether the NLC leadership took fright when sponsored thugs attacked their rallies or not, their hasty retreat to Abuja, citing the intervention of an alarmed Labour and Employment ministry, gives room for doubt about their fortitude.

Mallam el-Rufai’s handling of the strike was poor and undignified. His fierce and self-righteous reaction to the strike rested on two main premises: first, that the NLC engaged in lawlessness and economic sabotage by shutting down the operations of key sectors of the Kaduna economy; and second, that the state’s workforce of some 100,000 was taking a disproportionate 90 percent of Kaduna’s resources, leaving little for development. The governor did not explain what resources he was talking about, whether the usual monthly allocation from Abuja or a combination of IGR and allocation. However, having spelt out the premises of his argument, the governor simply concluded that there was no other way except his own way, a reflection not only of the contempt in which he holds all his opponents, including the NLC, but also of how he presides over his administration and conducts his politics with messianic fervor. Nigerians know the position of the NLC/TUC, which they announced before embarking on the strike. They insist Kaduna was still set to retrench another 11,000, apart from the 7,000 in dispute, and had so far failed to follow the Labour Act, particularly Section 20 which deals with redundancy.

But apart from being messianic, irrational, self-righteous and appallingly dictatorial in his misrule of Kaduna, Mallam el-Rufai has totally precluded any other way of handling the state’s financial crisis. There is no doubt that the civil service consumes a huge proportion of the state’s resources, but has he wondered whether it would not be far better, given the nexus between insecurity and poverty/unemployment, to grow the resource base of the state, make the civil service more productive and efficient, re-engineer the state’s finances, assemble knowledgeable experts on the state’s economy, and run Kaduna in such a way that it would no longer rely on the pampering and ill-conceived system of allocating funds to states and local governments?

Nigerians and Kadunans know that the partially successful NLC strike has simply exposed and amplified the governor’s incompetence, poor judgement, irrationality and dictatorship, a depressing reminder of the fascist governments of the 1930s and 40s. It is sad that the state lied against a few nurses whom the governor’s spokesman accused of causing the death of a toddler. It is sadder still that the governor purported to have dismissed all nurses below Grade Level 14. But it is reassuring that the essential el-Rufai is now obvious to all Nigerians who will now be on their guard in ensuring that his toxic politics and personality receive no oxygen to foul and demean the country’s politics in the years ahead.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Nigeria’s restive Southeast is right to be bothered by the postings to military formations in their region that seem to indicate that the federal government has an axe to grind with them. Last week, they listed the postings, including names of officers, and wondered whether it was not a pretext for something more sinister, like a general clampdown far more excessive and provocative than the hundreds of checkpoints that riddle and suffocate their region. Someone even controversially listed some 11 security and presidential officials from the core North who exclusively met in the nation’s Security Council to deliberate on how to solve the south-eastern question. Other regions were, however, represented in the meeting, including Vice President Yemi Osinbajo; but it is a testimony to the anxiety and tension bifurcating the country that someone tried to insinuate a sinister agenda into the presidency’s countermeasures.

The burning of police stations, murder of policemen and soldiers at checkpoints, and the rambunctious exhibitionism of IPOB’s Eastern Nigeria Security Network (ESN), particularly in the past few weeks, seem to have persuaded the federal government to propose new but so far undisclosed security measures to deal with the problem. Consequently, the region now fears a brutal clampdown that would project and reinforce the alleged ethnic antipathy President Muhammadu Buhari and his administration supposedly show towards the Igbo. This is the impression the administration’s attitude towards them has created; and perhaps it does not matter whether they are right or wrong. For instance they have groaned under innumerable checkpoints in the region far in excess of the ones in banditry and insurgency-prone regions. They think it is deliberate; as indeed the EndSars dynamics and its aftermath showed when it emerged that police operations in some northern states were, and probably still are, less severe than experienced in the Southeast.

Violently confronting law enforcement paraphernalia in the Southeast inevitably attracts a fierce response from the government. But how that response is calibrated will demonstrate the sophistication and depth of the government, including how adept they are at administering a complex and multiethnic society, and how exquisite their vision of a united and prosperous country really is. The National Security Council resolutions that authorised new but undisclosed measures against the violence in the Southeast are a product of the perspectives of the security officers and administrative officials who attended the meeting. While it is true that not only Hausa/Fulani officers attended the meeting, the Southeast believes the meeting was still skewed in favour of the former, and that its resolutions were an indication of the worldview of the core North and a reflection of its poor appreciation of the Igbo worldview. The Southeast, not to say other regions, also fear that the administration has not presented a great track record of analytical capacity to help produce fair, concise, coherent and visionary solutions to contemporary challenges dangerously morphing into ethnic and religious dissent.

The rather flamboyant but fiery rhetoric of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, may in fact have triggered and reinforced the Buhari administration’s attitude to the crisis in the Southeast. Mr Kanu has a sharper tongue, more charismatic and resonating rhetoric, more presence, and more daring than the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) from which his group broke off. He is probably more superficial than the MASSOB leader, Ralph Uwazuruike, and even more grandiloquent and egotistical, but he has captured the imagination of the disaffected in the region, and has spoken to their base and nostalgic notions of Biafra. Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe speaks of the nuanced and intellectual Biafra of the mind; but Mr Kanu speaks sadly more piercingly of the more tangible and gratifying Biafra of the physical. It takes humongous campaigns to persuade the oppressed and deeply marginalized people of the Southeast to follow the much better perspective and narrative of Sen Abaribe.

So far, despite the lack of enunciation of the new measures, there is nothing to show that the federal government and the Security Council have a proper understanding of the crisis in the Southeast or of the causes of the lawlessness now suffusing the region. They will in all probability be predicating their countermeasures on the wrong understanding of the problem and, worse still, will undergird them with even wronger parameters. The burning of police stations and murder of security agents, assuming these can be put down to IPOB and ESN, mask and distort the crisis and are symptoms of much larger and deeper fractures, some of them harking back to decades of political and cultural animosities. A sensible and enterprising administration will assemble the right brains to examine the crisis, lay bare the dynamics of the problem, and suggest solutions. Nothing indicates that such tasking and rigorous exercises were done by the Security Council, or that emotions did not becloud their reasoning and judgement when they reportedly met thrice to look at the widespread breakdown of law and order. There is also nothing to suggest that the administration is not about to sleepwalk into another insurgency in the Southeast probably deadlier than the unresolved bloodletting in the Northeast.

It is not an exaggeration to doubt the capacity of this administration to understand and manage the ongoing crisis, and not out of place to even cast aspersion on them for bungling past crises. They persisted in supporting and propagating the merits of open grazing to the point of turning a blind eye to the mayhem, killings and land seizures that accompany it; they pontificated on and embraced the ideas of seizing states’ water bodies and other resources not granted to them by the constitution; they suborned law enforcement and security agencies to placate and excuse herdsmen who pillaged communities and flagrantly bore arms, until their host communities began to procure arms to defend themselves; and they have structured federal appointments in such a way as to burnish the credentials of core North technocrats and officials almost to the total exclusion and alienation of officials from other parts of the country. It is difficult to see how the current crisis in the Southeast or any other part of the country can be solved without addressing these deep-seated grievances and fundamental notions of the federal government as a bias and spiteful entity.

If this column is right, the acceptability of Mr Kanu and IPOB, even in the Southeast, is limited. Many south-easterners view him with distrust, see him as a tinpot megalomaniac, object to his scornfulness and supercilious air, suspect he is simply feathering his own nest, and fear that power in his febrile hands would be more misused than the worst dictator could attempt. But the federal response to the burning of police stations and murder of security officers has seemed to be sadly conditioned by Mr Kanu and IPOB’s theatrics, not to say the faceless unknown gunmen running rampant in the region. A better approach will be to sift the wheat from the chaff, and like true leaders and statesmen seeking to understand what the crisis in the Southeast is telling the nation and the government in particular, find ways to remedy the grievances, and put together conciliating policies devoid of guns and bombs.

If the administration is not too far gone to reflect on how badly it has itself contributed to the crisis in the Southeast, and if they will humble themselves to listen to the remonstrations of the Igbo, they may yet hear from their high horses and make amends. But if they will not hear, let them take care not to wilt before the bitter and withering lessons of history as they trigger insurgencies on two fronts when, like Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 in their invasions of Russia, they have not been able to pacify the first front.

 

Nigeria wrong on Chad

THE crisis bedeviling the formulation of Nigerian foreign policy came to the fore again last week during the visit of Chadian leader, Idris Deby the younger. His father, an elected president with military background, died in battle in April during a counterinsurgency operation. Immediately, his son, Lt.-Gen. Mahamat Idris Deby Itno, together with his men and close associates of his late father, seized power, suspended the constitution, executed a few officers, and began the process of consolidating power until the next polls slated for some 18 months away.

The constitution provides for the Speaker of the parliament to take over until the next elections. Gen Deby foreclosed that possibility by violating the constitution. France was at first hesitant, but being as duplicitous and meddlesome as ever, it finally connived at the unconstitutional subversion. Nigeria ought to know better despite the French-supported fait accompli, and regardless of if opposing the coup would have meant isolation. Instead, President Buhari gushed about the friendship between him and Deby senior, and has promised that Nigeria would help Chad through the transition. Who tells Nigeria that Deby junior would respect the 18-month timeline? Clearly, Nigeria no longer has a foreign policy, at least not one based on lofty and irreproachable principles. Nor obviously does it give a damn about democracy.

 

Pastor Adeboye and Sunday Igboho’s iconoclasm

The Yoruba self-determination activist, Sunday Igboho (real name Sunday Adeyemo), presents a frightful dilemma for the Yoruba people and everyone enamoured of his style in confronting and defeating the atrocities of violent and rapacious herdsmen, particularly in the Southwest. On the one hand, the cause of freedom which he emblematises resonates very well with farmers and travelers in the region who have suffered violence at the hands of rampaging herdsmen. On the other hand, his style, tactics and general irreverence make many people who acknowledge the nobility of his cause to wince. They winced all the more last week when in a Facebook video Mr Igboho trivialised and politicised the death of one of Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s sons, Oluwadamilare, a pastor. That trivialisation probably reflects Mr Igboho’s iconoclasm and poses a great dilemma to many Yoruba self-determination activists who yearn for a better and more balanced and reflective man to lead them, someone whom they can trust and believe in.

In the widely disseminated video, Mr Igboho not only refused to offer his condolences, because he concluded, without evidence, that the respected pastor opposed Yoruba self-determination, he also rained curses on all who would oppose the cause he stands for, asking God to kill their wives and sons. In other words, the Yoruba self-determination cause has become, for him, a sacred duty both to Mr Igboho’s amorphous group and to God Himself. It has become a duty for which, in deference to Mr Igboho, God is obligated to commit mass murder. With the curses he rained on all those opposed to him and what he represents, Mr Igboho also suggests that every Yoruba man is bound to support him on pain of death. The interpretation is that he seemed persuaded that the death of Pastor Oluwadamilare was due to Pastor Adeboye’s presumed opposition to Yoruba self-determination.

It is not just Mr Igboho’s presumptuousness that should worry the sensible and judicious, nor his poor logic and lack of reflectiveness; the Yoruba must also worry that they seem to repose extraordinary hope and confidence in the ability and judgement of a capricious man and activist. Though Mr Igboho tried to walk back his statement and curses, insisting that he did not mock the pastor over his son’s death, and even attempted to philosophise about death, no one believed him. The damage was already done. He recanted only because the backlash was total and unsparing, and perhaps fearing that he could lose the popular support he gorges on. He not only now comes across as unfeeling and irreverent in his purport to lead the Yoruba to secession, he also drives home the point many analysts, including this writer, have made about his immaturity, dictatorial inclinations, intolerance, and vaulting ambition which years of being a minor political enforcer has engendered in him.

Mr Igboho may be a man of courage, but he must ask himself, if he has the capacity, whether he is also a man of wisdom, or at least a man capable of even a modicum of reflection. He has found himself numbered among those whom the Yoruba cause means a lot, a man ready to stake all he has, including his life. His passion for the cause probably led some respected Yoruba leaders to repose confidence in him and to egg him on in his campaign for Yoruba self-determination. But Mr Igboho is incapable of self-reflection, and Yoruba leaders who accept him without constraining his volubility and abrasiveness must bear vicarious responsibility for his dangerous iconoclasm, an iconoclasm clearly not limited to his irreverence for elders and religious leaders. The leaders’ uncritical acceptance of Mr Igboho reflects more savagely on their maturity and idiosyncrasies than on the controversial character and intellectual deficiencies of the activist. Power – at least such as the little fame that has accompanied Mr Igboho’s actions in the past few months – in the hands of an untested man accustomed to years of political enforcement on the political and partisan fringes could become truly apocalyptic.

Pastor Adeboye has taken the death of his exceedingly gifted pastor son with considerable spiritual aplomb. It is partly because he understands far more than Mr Igboho, and others who think like the activist, that every parent is a custodian of his children, and that no one, not even the most anointed or gifted ecclesiast, could determine who lives or dies, who is healed or not healed, and who attains the peak of his calling in politics or in religion. Pastor Adeboye’s knowledge of spiritual matters has reflected admirably in his statements and demeanour since the passing of his son, and in his grief as a human being, which he has balanced between resignation and empathy. He has managed in the process to encourage the faint-hearted and those struggling in their faith in, and knowledge of, God. His fortitude has been tremendously helpful in demonstrating how to relate with God regardless of adversity. It takes a man of unfathomable spiritual depth to respond the way he has done, a response the impressionable Mr Igboho is clearly unable to muster, let alone understand.

It is suspected that many Yoruba leaders will henceforth be wary of Mr Igboho and his impetuousness. Though he recanted his views on Pastor Adeboye, the world now knows exactly who he is as a Yoruba activist, what he thinks of those around him, how his mind works, and what drives him. They will now suspect that his Yoruba self-determination cause simply masks a viler instinct for narcissism and tyranny, an instinct that is doubtless dangerous to himself and the cause(s) he claims to champion. It is the tragedy of self-determination campaigns that their many promoters are often motivated by ambition, greed, messianism, and dangerous behavioural flaws. It is, therefore, clearly not enough that a cause is right, noble or even sacred; it must also ineluctably be championed by people who exemplify exalted beliefs, by people who are psychologically balanced, able to deploy ethical tools to prosecute great causes, and in the face of opposition and provocations, maintain the sanguineness, foresightedness, level-headedness and composure that canonise their causes.