By Idowu Akinlotan

When Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai received the freed College of Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka, students, reporters noticed his disinterestedness, almost as if his original plan was thwarted by the unexpected success of the Sheikh Ahmad Gumi/ ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo initiative. No one could put his finger on what the matter was, or why the feisty and voluble governor suddenly became taciturn as the emaciated and harassed students met him. There were of course guesses, including one that suggested he had wished for an uncompromising stand, even if it led to a tragic outcome. Alas, this was true, and it may be a psychological portrait of the essential el-Rufai as a hard, unfeeling and unyielding technocrat and politician.

Last week, speaking in a webinar organised by the Africa Leadership Group and hosted by the Pastor of Trinity House Church, Ituah Ighodalo, Mallam el-Rufai explained that his government and the military were not indifferent to the plight of the 37 Forestry Mechanisation students abducted by bandits in March. In fact, he gloated, unmindful of the tragedy many observers would read into the decision he and the military had agreed on, that a military rescue plan had been drawn up, but was aborted at the last moment when the bandits shifted base. That plan speaks volumes of the workings of the mind of Mallam el-Rufai, and the cavalier and unprofessional manner decisions are taken in Nigeria during crises. That the governor publicly reiterated the decision after having nearly two months of elbow room to reconsider it also indicates the poor judgement that occluded his mind as a decision maker and distorted his thinking.

Here is how Mallam el-Rufai painted the picture of their plan to rescue the students: “Two days after the abduction of the Afaka young people, I was assured by the air force and the army that they knew where the kidnappers were with the students and they had encircled them. We were going to attack them. We would lose a few students, but we would kill all the bandits and we would recover some of the students. That was our plan. That was the plan of the air force and the army. But they slipped through the cordon of the army. That is why they were not attacked. We know it is risky, we know in the process we may lose some of the abductees, but it is a price we have to pay. This is war, there will always be collateral damage in war, and we will rather do that than pay money because paying money has not solved the problem anywhere in the world.”

Twice in that short statement the governor acknowledged that had the plan been actuated, some students would have died. It takes extreme callousness to contemplate such a course of action, simply because the government loathes ransom payment, and also because, in his constricted view, paying money does not solve the problem of kidnapping anywhere in the world. Of course the public is not ignorant of the nuisance of paying ransom to secure the release of abducted family members; but to suggest so offhandedly that some of the students would die during a rescue attempt that already factored their death into the equation demonstrates not only intuitive savagery but gross incompetence. There are times when collateral deaths attend the best intentioned rescue efforts, but to glibly suggest that Kaduna State was prepared for that tragic cost in order to underscore a twisted policy smacks of irresponsibility and poor leadership.

The governor’s deceptively rosy optimism is exacerbated by his calculations that in the rescue effort, all the bandits would be killed and only some students would suffer collateral damage. How can he tell that all the bandits would be killed? Is there any way that even the smartest of smart bombs can tell the difference between students and bandits in their savannah redoubts? Of course every statistician, but the governor and his military comrades, knows that bandits and abducted students stand equal chance of being obliterated by the bombs. Mallam el-Rufai is naturally glib, and both his speech and politics manifest the same tragic flaws common with superficial thinkers who repose excessive confidence in their oratorical fecundity than their depth. Like the federal government that is paralysed by the objectionable trade in humans which ransom payment connote, the Kaduna governor is also rooted to one spot over the same conundrum. Yet, they have not devised any security plan to preempt banditry and abduction, and would rather remain impervious to the constitutional imperative of attending to the welfare and security of the people.

No one doubts Mallam el-Rufai’s confession that the government in conjunction with the air force had planned to bomb the bandits and their captives, regardless of the collateral damage. Thankfully, the governor is often too frank to dissemble. Just as he confessed to his ethnic exceptionalism in the webinar, but excuses it on the grounds of some alien culture intrinsic to the Fulani, he has also been truthful about some of his excesses, moral failings, and abominable instincts that bars him from flinching at needless collateral damage. The governor’s failings and the military’s collusion at bombardment leave observers puzzled as to how decisions are taken in Nigeria during crises. The country is familiar with the nonsense about RUGA as a livestock production strategy, and the equally condemnable genocidal policy implied in the land for peace policy as enunciated by presidential spokesman Femi Adesina; but who could have imagined that the military and a state governor could sit down, in the face of abductions underpinned by the silly and sentimental policy of ‘neither ransom nor anything else’, to confect a policy of indiscriminate bombardment against bandits still holding their captives.

How many more sterile policies have been devised by Nigerian leaders who have no pretext to be called leaders? men whose hearts have been calloused by rigid prejudices and parochialisms, men who see great and complex issues from narrow vision and would not countenance other points of view represented by other ethnic groups and religious perspectives, men who see their failings as strengths, and their imperial voices as unchallengeable. Mallam el-Rufai did not say whether the federal government signed off on the nefarious plan to bomb the bandits and their captives, but if Information minister Lai Mohammed’s exculpatory talk of abduction being strictly a state problem is anything to go by, they had probably assented to the plan and would gladly wash their hands off it if it backfired. Overall, it is remarkable but alarming that the Kaduna governor voiced the plan publicly. He was perhaps under pressure to prove he was concerned about the abductions more than he had let out; but to disclose that brutal bombardment plan after the students had been released tells the public and the families of the 27 young men and women that they had a close shave with death at the instance of a reckless politician and military who knew no better and whose moral and ethical compasses are too cracked to be of any use. No wonder the Boko Haram war is prolonged; and no wonder the country has not found answers to its economic, social and political conundrums.

Some of the present crops of leaders will leave office in about two years if the next polls hold. It will be good riddance to disastrous leadership. But there is no proof that the electorate will muster the competence to elect sounder leaders whose judgement will not be perverse in times of crisis. As the foolish talk about returning the military to some very public roles in the polity suggests, it will take a herculean effort to wean the people off their dangerous hallucinations. Their response to the huge and unsustainable cost of governance is to cut workers’ humiliatingly low wages or even retrench them; their response to the unfolding economic disaster bearing down on the country is to do nothing; their response to increasing militarisation of the polity by ethnic militias and self-determination groups is to wield the big axe and bomb advocates, without doing anything to tackle the underlying causes; and their response to campaigns to redo the unitary constitution masquerading as a federal constitution is to denounce federalists as separatists and conjure a fake unity-not-negotiable mantra. With such unimaginative leaders lacking in depth and the capacity to draw upon the country’s best to resolve its multitudinous problems, why would they not want to bomb abductors and their captives? And why would the country not teeter on the edge of the abyss in their hands, even as they can’t read the signs?

 

Orchestrated alarm of coup and subversion

Barely a day after the Department of State Service (DSS) last Sunday raised the alarm that ‘misguided elements’ were out to ‘wreak havoc on the government, sovereignty and corporate existence of Nigeria’, the military also weighed in to warn of the consequences of such plots. As the Defence Headquarters put it, “… misguided politicians who nurse the inordinate ambition to rule this country outside the ballot box (should) banish such thoughts as the military under the current leadership remains resolute in the defence of Nigeria’s democracy and its growth.’ It adds that it wishes “to remind all military personnel that it is treasonable to even contemplate this illegality.” Then on Wednesday, marching in lockstep with the DSS and the military, the presidency added its intimidating voice to warn against any plot to unseat the government.

The presidency’s misgiving, obviously synchronised with the alarms raised by the other agencies, was probably triggered by the decision of Afe Babalola, educationist, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and proprietor of Afe Babalola University Ado Ekiti (ABUAD), to host a national conference christened Summit of Hope, to which he had made an initial commitment of N50m. The educationist’s intention seems to everyone a laudable and patriotic addition to the many rational voices calling for a dialogue on Nigeria’s existential crisis, believing that there is no problem that cannot be discussed or resolved by reason. The presidency thinks otherwise. In a statement issued by presidential spokesman Femi Adesina, any conference at this time was ignoble and designed to pass a vote of no confidence in the president. His logic is far-fetched, but the Buhari presidency has never been deterred by illogic nor by its own extravagant and consistent attempts to muzzle free speech.

Mr Adesina’s statement on behalf of the presidency encapsulates the views of the military and DSS. All three are united in muffling free speech, shoring up the flagging popularity of President Muhammadu Buhari, and intimidating the populace against any form of political adventurism. The presidential spokesman couches the statement with his characteristic elegance. Said he: “Further unimpeachable evidence shows that these disruptive elements are now recruiting the leadership of some ethnic groups and politicians round the country, with the intention of convening some sort of conference where a vote of no confidence would be passed on the President, thus throwing the land into further turmoil. The caterwauling, in recent times, by these elements, is to prepare the grounds adequately for their ignoble intentions, which are designed to cause further grief for the country. The agent provocateurs hope to achieve through artifice and sleight of hands what they failed to get through the ballot box in the 2019 elections.”

At least Mr Adesina concedes that the country is already in turmoil, only that the conferees would be amplifying it. How he manages to second-guess the outcome of a conference that has not held, including their passing a vote of no confidence in the president, must be the greatest political clairvoyance of the moment. Then he writes grandiloquently but inappropriately of ‘caterwauling’ by critics, their ‘ignoble’ intentions, their promotion of ‘further grief’, of ‘agent provocateurs’, of ‘artifices’, and of ‘sleights of hand’. If grammar were to be a canon, there is no way critics and conferees would survive Mr Adesina’s lexical volleys. But when he is not abusive, he can also be didactic, even sometimes preachy. He adds: “Nigerians have opted for democratic rule, and the only accepted way to change a democratically elected government is through elections, which hold at prescribed times in the country. Any other way is patently illegal, and even treasonable. Of course, such would attract the necessary consequences. These discredited individuals and groups are also in cahoots with external forces to cause maximum damage in their own country. But the Presidency, already vested with mandate and authority by Nigerians till 2023, pledges to keep the country together, even if some unruly feathers would be ruffled in the process.”

If the country ignores his name-calling, since he sees the potential conferees as ‘discredited individuals’, they should be able to take him on in his assumption that the eminent legal titans behind the conference do not know a thing about democracy and elections. They will also be mindful of the spokesman’s dark hints to ruffle ‘unruly feathers’, perhaps after he and his employers have found a constructive corollary to Section 37 of the Criminal Code of Nigeria. Indeed the apprehension of the presidency over the conference call typifies its long-standing abhorrence for intellectual contributions to how the Nigerian government is run. Their morbid dread of exotic and sometimes complex ideas explains why the administration has for the past six years been destitute of initiatives that answer to the country’s multifarious problems. The administration has made no serious attempt to tap the country’s brain power in dealing with its economic and security issues, and it has completely abandoned any effort to find the political formula by which the country can be sensibly governed.

Much worse, now, the administration has begun to fear a coup d’etat. This is an irrational and embarrassing fear, notwithstanding Robert Clarke’s recondite call for the president to transfer power to his Defence chief in order to allow the military reinvigorate the country. Mr Clarke, a lawyer, is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and a committed patriot. But is there still anyone in Nigeria who is persuaded about coups? Are soldiers not a part of the country, and products of the same cesspool of abominable practices, spendthriftiness and misrule? For decades, they took a promising country at par with China, South Korea, Singapore, etc and destroyed and bankrupted it. By what magic would anyone think the military could on a blessed tomorrow do better than civil authorities, respect the people’s rights, develop and implement economic and developmental models to raise standard of living, restore peace in the country, and enthrone justice, equity and fair play? The spectre of a coup is simply the administration’s bugaboo to alarm the gullible and find a pretext to embark on extra-judicial adventures against the people and the constitution. If anyone is thinking of a coup, it is the administration; for Nigerians know that the military, which has made heavy weather of the counter-insurgency war and remained generally unaccountable to the constitution, is even more discredited and disreputable than the civilian administration in office, as incompetent as the latter has been from the outset.

By Idowu Akinlotan

 

Newspapers speculatively reported last week that President Muhammadu Buhari was poised to take firm and radical measures to stem insecurity and stanch the flow of blood all over the country. Few Nigerians trust his government’s understanding of the crises bedeviling Nigeria, let alone repose confidence in his often one-sided measures. Responding years ago to Indigenous People of Biafra militia exuberance, the president abandoned the factors predisposing IPOB to rebellion and simply deployed troops in the Southeast to brutally pacify the increasingly restive region. The region has known no peace since then, and the problems engendering revolt have been left severely unattended. There are indications that the security meetings called by the president late last week, which are expected to be rounded up in the coming week, will lead to the adoption of radical measures. Perhaps. But if the past is any guide, those radical measures are unlikely to deal with the root causes of the insecurity crisis threatening to push the country into war.

A hint of what the administration thinks about the insecurity ravaging the country came last Wednesday from Yemi Osinbajo, Nigeria’s cerebral vice president, when he met with Anambra’s All Progressives Congress (APC) governorship aspirants. He warned of the possibility of another civil war if the elite failed to arrest the deteriorating security situation. It is not clear how expansively he would want the word ‘elite’ to be interpreted, but he is unlikely to want it to encompass the government, not to talk of himself. Indeed, he said little to give Nigerians the impression that the administration he serves understands the issues involved. He preoccupied himself with alarming the country to the spectre of war and blaming the elite for their conspiracy of silence and cowardice in the face of grave provocations. Said Prof Osinbajo: “The thing about this kind of conflict in this part of the world is that it is usually a war without end. Everyone who thinks he has some monies stored up somewhere will eventually run out of money. Everyone who thinks he can go and hide somewhere, won’t even find a place to hide; at the end, everyone will suffer. Even if you don’t suffer, parents, children, young and old people and relations will suffer…”

Prof Osinbajo’s view of the crisis is impeachable. He said absolutely nothing about a fact known to everyone, including foreign governments, that the Buhari administration, by its lack of capacity and altruism, not to say complicity and incompetence, is largely to blame for the mess in which the country finds itself. The problem is not the reticence of the elite, except he means the elite in the Federal Executive Council who have mastered the art of silence, groveling and complicity. The problem is not even IPOB or any other militia in the Middle Belt, Southwest or Southeast. These are merely symptomatic manifestations of much deeper and larger problems, some of them ethnic, religious, and economic. President Buhari inherited a country facing essentially socio-economic and religious revolt in the Northeast. Rather than limit the spread of the revolt, he enabled the crisis to spread throughout the country by his indulgent use of power and poor understanding of the dynamics that underpin, sustain and nourish a heterogeneous society.

The vice president is a lawyer who probably has a fair understanding of how modern, pluralistic and liberal societies are run. The suspicion is that he put his understanding and honest opinion aside in order to pander to the excesses of the administration which he serves but from which he has been ostracized and treated with disdain. That administration has now run rings round itself, and the incompetent and power hungry cabals that inspire it and has profited from its callousness, indifference and largesse, have run the country aground. They need help, but they are too detached and too proud to ask. Instead, they are promoting abysmal narratives of elite silence and, like presidential spokesman Garba Shehu said last week in his bad-mannered response to the Governor Samuel Ortom provocation, of elite and governorship politicization of security issues.

Nigeria is now perched on the precipice of chaos, if not war. This position was predictable since the Buhari administration began enthroning and promoting sectional and exclusionary politics and policies. At every turn, the administration sought advantage, first for the Fulani, prompting ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo to warn of dangers ahead; and second for Moslem interests, again prompting many Nigerians to warn against subterranean jihadist leanings; and then third for cabalistic and special interests that became coterminous with regional ambitions and a few public (military) officials’ interests. These advantages were bound to cause disaffection and alienation. Indeed, apart from dismantling the ramparts undergirding the rule of law, the Buhari administration has also promoted injustice, deployed public policy such as RUGA parochially for pastoralists without consideration for other people, blamed herders’ killing spree on uncooperative host communities, openly and irreverently backed so-called repentant closet terrorists and jihadists, virtually and deliberately emasculated the Igbo and couldn’t give a damn, harboured and empowered incompetent cabinet members, vaccinated the ruling APC against sense and patriotism, attempted to seize inland bodies of water for jaundiced reasons, resisted the restructuring of the country and reduction of cost of governance, denounced its friends who could give it sensible advise, and saw itself imperially as one which must be obeyed or hell would be brought upon critics and dissenters.

The Buhari administration has carelessly pushed the country to the brink of war; it must not try to deflect blame. Its panaceas can of course not be trusted, but there is no proof that it will not rely mainly on the use of force, as its jaded orthodoxies suggest. Now, incredibly, the president is seeking outside help, begging for the relocation to Africa of the United States military Africa Command based in Stuttgart, Germany. It does not suggest which non-NATO African country should host the US military command without compromising that country’s sovereignty and voice. The administration does not even know that by asking for this kind of help, it was signposting its obnoxious reliance on force to solve the atrocious conditions it engendered by its misgovernance of the country.

There will be no solution to the insecurity crisis and the tilt to war until the Buhari administration conducts a realistic and sensible analysis of the problems promoting disaffection in the country, until it recognizes that it is largely responsible for these problems by its exclusionary policies and politics, until it appreciates that declaring a state of emergency in insecurity would be ineffective because it already has control of security forces and spends national wealth on security carelessly, sometimes without appropriation. Now it has reached a saturation point such that pacifying thousands of armed bandits and secessionists would be nigh impossible. In addition, blaming the collapse of Libya and the shrunken Lake Chad for the security challenges the country is facing simply indicates the lack of rigour in the Buhari administration, a lack of rigour that became inevitable when it sectionalized the country’s security architecture and prohibited the robust exchange of ideas needed to inspire policies and streamline ideas requisite to the restoration of peace, development and unity.

If Nigerian leaders were competent, they would have anticipated the collapse of Libya, planned against the dispersal of Libyan militants and mercenaries, mitigated the effect of Lake Chad drying up, encouraged pastoralists to ranch their cattle rather than compel Nigerians to genuflect before grazing policy and herdsmen, run an inclusive government that does not alienate the Igbo, and coaxed their administration towards secularism as well as found ways to control and denounce religious extremists instead of cuddling them and excusing their torrid past. Now the administration is faced with the prospect of chaos; and unable to comprehend the sacred responsibility of ruling 200 million people of diverse cultures and religions, they are panicking before the whole world, asking for help to control the harmful effects of parochial policies they are unwilling to change. But they can’t have their cake and eat it.

 

 

 

Poor governance bathes Kaduna in blood and bluster

 

 

GOVERNOR Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State possesses a great sense of anticipation, but he seldom accepts responsibility for his failings. Last week he displayed both attributes in ways that left his state flustered and every observer stunned by the sorry state Kaduna has found itself in the past few weeks. There is hardly anyone, not least grieving parents whose children are either still in the hands of bandit abductors or have been murdered by their captors, who is not dismayed by the flippant and cavalier manner the governor has handled bandit attacks on institutions. The dismay reached its peak in the abduction of Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka, Kaduna when the governor laid down his policy on kidnapping. He would neither negotiate with bandits nor pay ransom over any abduction; and if anyone did, either on his own behalf or on government’s behalf, such a negotiator and ransom payer would be prosecuted.

A few days later, after he was assailed for what his critics described as his callousness – and this is where his sense of anticipation comes in – he explained that were his wife or children to be abducted, he would wish them safe journey to paradise, but would never negotiate. His strange view was echoed by his wife who gleefully went on social media to talk about her successful trip to her farm, mocking bandits and reiterating and rhapsodising her husband’s policy of non-negotiation with kidnappers. This vulgarization of serious public policy not only shocked the public, it also anticipatively attempted to take the sting out of any future revelation of what the governor might have said or stood for in similar circumstances in the past. As it turned out, a few days after enunciating his hard-line policy on negotiating with bandits, whom he said should be crushed mercilessly, video recordings of the governor’s view on the subject surfaced on social media and immediately went viral.

Mallam el-Rufai’s response to the video was predictably combative and contemptuous of his critics. If his critics expected him to be chastened when confronted by his inconsistencies and absolute lack of principles, they were grossly mistaken. The governor met their sneers with derision of his own, for as everyone now knows, except perhaps his critics, he has a ready-made answer for everything, simple or complex, easy to understand or deeply puzzling. Recalling the 2014 video, critics naively believed, would shake the confidence of Mallam el-Rufai, and depict him as an empathetic politician deeply offended by ex-president Goodluck Jonathan’s tardy handling of the 2014 Boko Haram abduction of 276 Chibok schoolgirls.

In the video, Mallam el-Rufai had denounced Dr Jonathan as follows: “If one of these girls was Jonathan’s daughter, the story would have been different. The only reason why these girls are still in captivity is because they are not the daughter of any important Nigerian, and we know it. If you say we are politicising terrorism, go and rescue the girls so that I will not have the basis to politicise it… I am in support of every option, when you have lives of citizens at risk, you should not have any option off the table. You should reflect and listen.” It is this exampled logic that the Kaduna governor puzzlingly walked back. Only he could have managed such dexterous flip-flop without wincing in embarrassment. The logic, it seemed to everyone, was unassailable. Had Dr Jonathan’s daughter been among the captives, perhaps truly she and her classmates would not have lasted in captivity beyond a few days. But walking back his brilliant perspectives requires the most audacious inconsistency, a failing many people associate with the phlegmatic Kaduna governor.

Mallam el-Rufai’s critics underestimate him. He can argue both sides unflinchingly, plausibly, without embarrassment, enamoured of his own flippancy. When the video surfaced last week, he glibly retorted: “It is prudent to review one’s position when the facts change. A path proposed in 2014 cannot be taken as the immutable answer to a serious problem which has since evolved. Negotiations have not stopped the criminals. We seek to solve today’s problem with tools fit for them. Amidst the violence unleashed by criminals on the people of Kaduna State, some commentators have responded by blaming KDSG for asserting that the duty of the state is to uphold the law and not to reward hoodlums for violating the lives, property and liberties of citizens…”

The problem with this response is not that the facts have changed, as indeed they have, but that what he was really responding to are the principles undergirding the way a government or parent should respond to abduction. It is true that ransom payment has encouraged kidnapping, and made it to proliferate and fester. And it is also true that families and governments confronting abduction are in a quandary how to handle the delicate matter. But every time abduction occurs, families are more likely to feel more desperate and ready to negotiate and pay ransom than Nigeria’s impersonal governments. It is always far easier to decline negotiation when your family is not involved, as the governor has indifferently shown. He knows that there is no way to test the validity of his statement until it happens to him; though being inventive and full of sophistry, he will always have a plausible response to every conundrum, especially when he is cornered. Clearly, Mallam el-Rufai is not an administrator or a politician capable of empathy. His critics describe him as cruel, a description he ignores with contempt.

However, he and his supporters miss the point about the whole abduction saga, a point he elegantly illustrated with unexampled logic in 2014 when the shoe was on the other foot. He suggested then that the government should rescue the abducted if it didn’t want anyone politicizing the issue. He is right. By extrapolation, he was also saying that the first duty of a government should be to secure the people and attend to their welfare. The Forestry students attend a federal school; the federal government, which controls the security services, has kept spectrally quiet. The school is located in Kaduna; but apart from making a song and dance of the self-perpetuating logic of ransom fuelling terrorism and banditry, Mallam el-Rufai and his government have been impotent and clueless, even foolish to threaten to prosecute grieving and anguished parents whose children the state has been unable to protect or rescue.

Mallam el-Rufai may refuse to admit it, but like many other governors, his poor judgement, lack of empathy, inconsistency, and general lack of principles and character are shaping his legacy and turning his state into a killing field and lawless terrain. He is not in control of the security services, for which the federal government stands indicted; but he must accept responsibility for his offensive statements and poor handling of a crisis which a sound administrator and humanistic politician would have made more tolerable and less egregious.

 

Palladium

About the same time the Zamfara governor was imprecating the South on behalf of what he says are persecuted northerners in the South, 17 northern groups, including the respected Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), three Fridays ago, declared that they would support restructuring in a qualified way but would not be stampeded or blackmailed into taking a decision on rotational presidency. A day earlier, at the same time the Zamfara governor was threatening retaliation against southerners in the North, the ACF met and issued a statement condemning the killings but denouncing retaliation as a useful public policy tool to which the Matawallen Maradun had angrily elevated it. The 17 northern groups left enough food for thought for proponents of restructuring, suggesting that though it was desirable, it was nevertheless a convoluted idea whose outcome no one could definitively determine. And by refusing to be ‘stampeded or blackmailed’ on rotational presidency, the groups suggest that that they are yet to see any injustice or unfairness in retaining the presidency in the North going forward, a supposition that is implied in an item in their communiqué which speaks of the strategic advantage the North holds over the South in the establishment and location of business interests.

The North does not of course hold a comparative advantage in mediocre statements and politics, but some of their governors and ministers have made pungent and provocative statements that indicate their confusion and close-mindedness. They will be matched in the months ahead by southern exponents of restructuring who will sadly not have an answer, because they have prepared none, for the numerical aggressiveness of northern delegates to the cobbling of any restructuring deal. Too many people consequently feel empty, frustrated, entrapped and hopeless. This emptiness may illustrate why many southern activists are turning ineluctably towards self-determination rather than to restructuring, a turning northern leaders have just given hints may cost everyone, particularly the South, direly. But they exaggerate the consequences.

Since the coup d’etat and countercoup of 1966, core North politics has been coloured by a siege mentality that makes the region’s politicians see national dominance as an entitlement, sometimes interpreted as northern hegemony by southerners, but to northerners always more like a protective shield. Even the many intervening military regimes foisted on the country were largely inspired by the core North, but undergirded by Middle Belt officers until after the Gideon Orkar/Great Ovedje Ogboru coup saw the whittling down of their influence. By the time the Buhari administration arrived in 2015, both political and security power became unabashedly colonized by the core North, leading to feelings of alienation and marginalization in the South. There is a chance that such ruthless dominance will be a passing phase; perhaps it may even be construed as an indication of the desensitized nature of the current administration, and a reflection of the constricted worldview of the politicians and strategists who have hijacked it. Unhappily, however, this dominance, not to say the contorted views and arguments of administration officials, may have encouraged non-state actors like herdsmen to act as if that dominance reflected their prowess and manifest destiny which must never be challenged. But it is being challenged, and there is no telling how that challenge will end.

The northern political elite must find ways of eschewing the siege mentality induced by the politics of the first and second coup if peace and unity are to be restored. The country is in uproar, riddled by unstructured malfeasance and crimes in every part of the country. Administration rhetoric seems to suggest that the situation would be brought to heel soon; but there is little or nothing in the political and socio-economic dynamics of the country to underscore that optimism. Daily killings have assumed horrific dimensions, and there is near total breakdown of law and order, which unfortunately the administration believes can be controlled by the application of overwhelming force. This is an illusion. The resources to drive extended security operations do not exist; but even where a semblance seems available and is administered upon the country, it will inflict collateral damage on the social and economic wellbeing of the people, particularly the hordes of uneducated and disaffected northern masses. Rethinking the structure and operations of the country is the crying need of the moment. But the faulty thinking of the northern political elite, their newfound admiration for the unbridled privileges which the Buhari administration has conferred on them with appointments into key agencies, and the three arms of government and security positions, not to talk of the reluctance to entertain the genuine concerns of excluded parts of the country, may doom whatever martial remedies are being contemplated.

Worse, the northern political elite sees the current structure of the country as amenable to their needs and comforts, but they fail to appreciate that unless that structure is redone to greatly lessen the cost of governance and empower the various nationalities along the line of the independence constitution, the frictions will continue until they reach boiling and breaking points. Those points are upon the country already. Keeping the present structure unchanged, refusing to think expansively like nationalists, promoting religious dissension in the susceptible Southwest, and resisting accommodation with politicians of common ideology and patriotic interests will certainly doom the country. The era of keeping any nationality by force in an unhealthy union is long gone. There can be no military solution to the restlessness pervading the country, as the examples of the US/Afghan war, and before it, the Russo-Afghan war, not to talk of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, have shown.

If the crisis continues a little longer, the administration may toy with either the declaration of a state of emergency or emergency rule. This will, however, merely compound the crisis. With nearly all Nigeria’s neighbours – Niger, Chad, Cameroon, etc — unsettled by internal conflicts and bad leadership, the fear of imminent implosion is indeed palpable. The politics of the next general election will determine whether Nigeria will successfully navigate the landmines its leaders have carelessly strewn in its path. To suggest that the presidency will not rotate South, despite all the attendant drawbacks of the arrangement, as some northern politicians have overconfidently asserted, is courting disaster.

 

Concluded

By Idowu Akinlotan

Nearly two weeks after a section of the media began reporting the religious fanaticism of Communications and Digital Economy minister, Ali Pantami, the presidency at first kept curiously silent. To many disquieted Nigerians on social media, it was inconceivable that presidency officials were not aware of Dr Pantami’s past, and how that past would in time upset the present. It didn’t also make sense that the secret service did not avail both the government and the Senate, which screened him for a cabinet position in 2019, the correct state of mind and activities of the beleaguered minister. By keeping adamantly quiet for about two weeks as the controversy became bad-tempered, the presidency allowed speculations to run riot, including the suspicion that the influential Dr Pantami was probably central to many of the controversial and insular actions and policies of the government.

When eventually the administration responded last Thursday, they were combative, insinuative and threatening, with a part of their defence of the minister sounding like a panegyric, and other parts going ahead to insult and blackmail critics. The administration’s response was signed by one of the presidential spokesmen, Garba Shehu, complete with awful timelines that wrongly attributed Dr Pantami’s behavior and discourses to wrong dates, and with the wrong dates in turn leading the government to draw wrong conclusions regarding the motive and genuineness of the minister’s alleged reformation. To Mr Shehu, critics of Dr Pantami who insist he has no business remaining in office, belong to a ‘cancel’ culture, and were probably induced anyway. It is doubtful whether any other government can lose its moral compass so badly as the Buhari administration has. After praising Dr Pantami to the high heavens, and excoriating his critics as undiscerning and criminally inclined, Mr Shehu concludes: “In putting people first, the Minister and this administration have made enemies. There are those in the opposition who see success and want it halted by any means. And there is now well-reported information that alleges newspaper editors rebuffed an attempt to financially induce them to run a smear campaign against the minister by some ICT companies, many of which do indeed stand to lose financially through lower prices and greater consumer protections. The government is now investigating the veracity behind these claims of attempted inducement, and – should they be found to hold credence – police and judicial action must be expected.”

So, rather than investigate Dr Pantami, and satisfy the public that the minister is truly contrite and constitute no danger, overtly or covertly, to the republic, critics are the ones to be investigated. Surely, running an administration cannot be so complex that even third-rate officials can’t position the horse and the cart appropriately. Little is left for the minister to do after the administration has so disrespectfully lambasted his critics and exonerated him. However, in some ways, Dr Pantami is still fighting tooth and nail to hang on to office. He is loth to relinquish his position, perhaps not because he derives private gain from it, but probably because his stay in the cabinet and in the ministry confers certain unstated advantages to the controversial worldview he represents. It has always been the mantra of the administration that whenever there is opposition to its policies, it invariably represents corruption fighting back. Dr Pantami has adapted that refrain by suggesting that his peremptory policies in the Communications ministry were responsible for the attacks he is receiving. In fact, some of his supporters have argued that the opposition to Dr Pantami is religiously motivated, a red herring the embattled minister has done precious little to dispel.

Initially, Dr Pantami disputed most of the allegations against his person and motives. But confronted by a barrage of evidence, most of them unflattering, he has shifted his position and adopted a more conciliatory but hardly convincing posture. He blames the headiness of youth for his brashness and extremism over the years, a position he says his increasing maturity, particularly after he joined the Buhari administration, has led him to ameliorate. Dr Pantami is 48 years old. In 2010, when he was about 37, and long past the age of accountability, he was alleged to have presided over a Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI) meeting in the Bauchi Central Mosque where blistering attacks were leveled against Christians and fellow Nigerians opposed to their worldview, and treasonable plots were hatched to cause mayhem, execute jihad, assassinate a governor, procure arms, compromise security forces, engage in land seizures, liberate (religious cleansing) Kaduna, undermine the constitution, and disrupt and subvert Christianity. His supporters have, however, alleged the document to be fake. Refuters of the document insist Dr Pantami is not a member of JNI, let alone preside over the said meeting, and that he was not even in Nigeria at the time of the meeting. A Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) leader has also come out to debunk the communiqué, declaring it a forgery.

It is indeed possible that Dr Pantami can find reasonable explanations for his extremist past, but it is uncertain he can use age to extenuate the long list of excesses alleged against him, including conniving at the murder in 2004 of a 400-level student of Abubakar Tafawa University, Sunday Achi, whose father, a professor, told the media his son was strangled in the mosque for blasphemy. Dr Pantami was reported to be the chief Imam of the university mosque at the time. The embattled minister cannot take refuge behind age. For instance, he argues that he had been opposed to terrorism for about 15 years. There is nothing to substantiate this, other than his word. His other extenuation is even flimsier. He says he has since recanted his fiery views — some of them as recent as his fiery 2006 public lecture — on terrorism and other forms of extremism, and is a changed man. There is doubt that he believes himself, seeing how he clutches at straws to stay above water. In fact, his critics have published statements he made when he was well over the age of 30 in which he fanatically supported terrorism and declaimed against other religions and worldviews. He might have begun preaching at 13, as he said, but he grew and matured into an unconscionable extremist in his 20s and 30s, a vice he cannot now begin to excuse on the grounds of age.

More revelations will likely expose and damage Dr Pantami, considering that the Buhari administration has unwisely and combatively decided to keep him in office. It is dispiriting that the administration is lending the nobility of the highest office in the land to a cause that is so sinister. It is also unfortunate that the government does not think it should investigate the alleged Bauchi JNI meeting which the minister was said to have presided over, even if the document and the meeting are at first sight fake. The document containing the minutes of the meeting is already in public space; investigators need to put the lie to it to convince everyone. The document needs to be interrogated because it makes sweeping and dangerous allegations. It horrifyingly sets out justification for constituting the Nigerian security agencies in the hands of one religion to the exclusion of others, in effect giving the impression that Dr Pantami is a philosopher for the religious takeover of Nigeria, and that he has also become the brain behind the political plots by some state governments to circumscribe the constitution against other religions and minority ethnic groups? It is simply not tenable to evade a thorough investigation even if the Bauchi meeting is believed to have been a forgery, and the minutes fictitious. All that the minister has said over the decades and the documents alleged against him have shown how unerringly modal his views have become for both the Buhari administration and state governments irrationally plotting the collapse of the nation’s secular structure.

There is enough in the allegations against Dr Pantami to cause him to be indicted and prosecuted. It sullies the administration’s already controversial and unflattering image that it is unable to appreciate the weight of the allegations against the minister, or the implications of keeping him, to a presidency long accused of Fulanisation and Islamisation. Despite its intransigence, the presidency does not have an option on whether to ignore the allegations or act. It has to act; and the sooner the better, even if Dr Pantami is their controversial conscience. The allegations cannot be swept under the carpet, and his conversion to a patriot and democrat cannot be assumed. If Dr Pantami has any honour left in him, especially as he has accepted responsibility for many of the bigoted statements attributed to him, he should resign, regardless of his claim of past exuberance, and regardless of the shocking lack of outrage by the administration. Few Nigerians think the Buhari administration has risen to the inspiring height of representing the whole country and running an inclusive government, or possessing the kind of honour found in countries that care about peace and unity. But despite this handicap, it must investigate Dr Pantami and bring him to book.

 

By Idowu Akinlotan

Even before the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) held its Southwest congress in Osogbo, the Osun State capital, to elect 22 party officers last Monday, Oyo State governor Seyi Makinde and former Ekiti State governor, the redoubtable Ayo Fayose, flexed muscles so loudly that for the first time in many months, the usually somnolent opposition party dominated the news and colonized the front pages of national newspapers. Despite the theatrics of Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike, and the quite but generally servile leadership and politics of party chairman Uche Secondus, the party previously barely got a significant mention in the news. No one could tell whether they did not secretly lust for Lai Mohammed, now Information minister, in his heyday as the caustic All Progressives Congress (APC) spokesman. Mercifully, Mr Fayose, no slouch when it comes to political drama and vituperation, resuscitated the party from its comatose position, realigned it with the drama and conflict of the past, and deftly positioned it competitively on the front pages.

So intense was Mr Fayose’s competitiveness and aggressiveness in his bid to be the real party juggernaut in the Southwest that he backed one of the candidates for the position of national vice-chairman of the Southwest PDP against Mr Makinde’s candidate. The tug of war escalated so dangerously that the congress had to be shifted to a neutral ground, away from Mr Makinde’s turf, Oyo State. Apprised of the shift, the Oyo governor angled for Lagos as venue, while Mr Fayose lobbied for Ogun State. It is not clear why they chose those states specifically. In the end, as the national APC has shown in their own bitter internal struggles, serving governors always have the upper hand. Mr Makinde’s candidate, the former Oyo State deputy governor Taofeek Arapaja, won the coveted position, for now enhancing the Oyo governor’s influence in the party.

Mr Fayose has been predictably irritable ever since. He has accused Mr Makinde of sponsoring thuggish groups to seize power. Knowing him for who he is, the former Ekiti governor will not give up his frenzied schemes to be reckoned with. He knows the political and material value of enhancing his influence ahead of 2023. But much more than that, he should congratulate himself, and his party should wink longingly at him for reviving and raising an awkward and lethargic party to renewed prominence. The party will need him in the years ahead. His influence may not secure him intraparty victories, but it has not waned significantly. Together with the equally tempestuous Mr Wike, Mr Fayose will conspire to make the country continue to reckon with the PDP, if not in policy, at least in theatrics. After all, the ruling APC has become all sound and fury itself, and its leading bombardiers, like Lai Mohammed, have become nothing more than royal and presidential fusiliers.

By Idowu Akinlotan

The Judiciary Staff Union of Nigeria (JUSUN) plans to hold a nationwide peaceful protest tomorrow in furtherance of their demand for the 36 states to implement financial autonomy for the judiciary. It is a symbolic exercise to give teeth to their strike which began on April 6. JUSUN’s cause is right, in fact unimpeachable. For decades, despite constitutional provisions guaranteeing financial autonomy to the judiciary, autonomy granted since the First Republic, state governments had found increasingly innovative and pernicious ways of subjugating and emasculating the judiciary. Years of financial strangulation, to all intents and purposes a brazen subversion of the constitution, have driven the judiciary to impotence, incapacitation and impoverishment. With the exception of governors who now find themselves prevaricating over unambiguous constitutional provisions, no Nigerian is opposed to JUSUN or their strike. So far, the strike has been tremendously effective, totally grounding the country’s groggy justice system, and is more effective than any the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has organized in the past two decades or so.

The Buhari presidency is not opposed to the financial emancipation of the judiciary, having issued Executive Order 10 of 2020 to compel the states to obey the constitution. Instead, alarmed and distraught that their quarry was being set free, governors coaxed the president to tarry a little on gazetting the order, thus stymieing the immediate implementation of the order. It is not clear why that anomalous stricture of gazettes had to be introduced, nor why it is needed especially in clear constitutional cases, but the governors seized upon that hiatus to go to court to litigate and forestall the Executive Order, as if the order was the issue, and not their violation of the constitution. The case is now before the Supreme Court. Pondering recently about the order and the governors’ stonewalling, the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Tanko Muhammad, told JUSUN leadership in his office last week that he could not beg the governors to give effect to the law. But it was not a case of begging anybody. Even if he must say something on the dispute – and it was totally inappropriate to do so – the CJN ought to have sounded unequivocal.

What wearies the governors is perhaps the concomitant amendment in the same Section 121 (3) of the 1999 constitution, which also gives the states legislature financial autonomy. Unprincipled, dictatorial and anti-democratic, governors see the autonomies granted the judiciary and legislature as a complete castration of their powers and imperial persons. For decades they had subjugated the other two arms of government. They fear that if the other arms no longer had to make recourse to the executives for their financial needs, they would look the governors in the eyes and check their excesses with great daring and gusto. The governors may have reservations about judicial (financial) autonomy, but what ails them more is the freedom which that financial autonomy would give the state lawmakers, freedoms that might conceivably include impeaching idiot, lawless governors.

JUSUN and state lawmakers may repose confidence in Section 121 (3) of the constitution and its eventual implementation, but as the Buhari administration has shown by its awkward and prejudiced appointments into the bench in recent years, not to say its wholesale subversion of the entire judiciary after months of grumbling and badmouthing the third arm, there are obviously many ways to skin a judicial cat. With full panoply of anti-graft agencies at their beck and call, the executive knows how to transform the judiciary into puppets. Likewise, the governors know how to turn the heat on state lawmakers during election and reelection. There are obviously so many things still wrong with Nigerian democracy. However, once JUSUN forces the hands of the governors, and lawmakers and judges get their freedom — for with financial autonomy comes liberty — Nigeria may begin to incrementally advance in the practice of democracy. The tragedy, unfortunately, is that foot-dragging governors, some of whom may yet find their way into the National Assembly on a fortuitous tomorrow, have not embraced Section 121 (3) — as if they have a choice.

By  Idowu Akinlotan

 

WHEN ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo completed his two terms in office, there was no controversy surrounding which region would produce the next president. He was succeeded by the late Umaru Yar-Adua from the North in deference to an unwritten but commonsensical rule to sustain national peace and cohesion. If Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, had completed two terms, there would also have been no controversy regarding where his successor would come from. President Muhammadu Buhari will complete two terms in office in the next two years. But already, a provocative controversy is brewing over which region should produce his successor. Zoning, some northerners have begun to argue, is not a useful and adequate tool to elect a president. How they hope to sustain that argument and push it with any force or logic is hard to fathom, especially in the face of the audacity of criminal and land-grabbing herdsmen and the parochialism of the Buhari presidency, two issues that have made the South, not to say the extremely marginalised Southeast, chafe.

Some northern politicians around President Buhari are preparing to throw their hats into the ring. He cannot pretend not to know what his aides are up to. But so far, he has remained ghoulishly silent on what he thinks about rotational presidency, whether he thinks that given the peculiar and delicate circumstances of the country he should be succeeded by a northerner. However, no matter how hard the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the leading opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) try, President Buhari will not be succeeded by a northerner. The two leading parties are baiting each other on their intraparty zoning arrangements, which are expected to reflect how their minds work on 2023 presidential zoning permutations. However, their fancy footwork will end in disarray in the coming months as the reality of the existential troubles facing Nigeria manifest in bold relief.

The crisis which Nigeria’s political elite will contend with in the years ahead, assuming their incompetence, bigotry, and ethnic exceptionalism do not make it impossible for them to pull off a miracle in 2023, is how to mitigate the overwhelming damage done to the body politic by the insularity of the Buhari presidency. A southerner will emerge president if the election holds, but he will be hobbled by the dangerous and explosive precedents set by President Buhari in eight years as he went about making the core North a super race. Disentangling the country from the convoluted policies of tribe, religion and regionalism will task the ingenuity and resilience of the next president to no end. How successful he will be will depend on his national contacts and network, ability to forge compromises and consensuses, and intuition and charisma.

But already, the narrative has been distorted by many analysts who set naïve criteria for the next president. They have pictured the ideal candidate, and somehow, also, pictured the simplistic arithmetic and mechanics by which he will get magically elected into office. The reality is, however, much different. When the country teeters finally on the brink, the elite, now recklessly accustomed to pulling back in the nick of time and saving the day, may yet be able to pull the country’s chestnuts out of fire one more time. This time, it will not be the disingenuous doctrine of necessity; it will be just plain commonsensical avoidance of the inevitable cataclysm. Their shortsighted policies and incompetent and hypocritical members have pushed the country to the brink; they will have the responsibility of pulling it back, even if they have to make the most galling concessions as well as abandon their schizoid ethnic fantasies.

Last week, in Osogbo, Shehu Sani, the activist and former representative of Kaduna Central in the 8th Senate, had reason to warn Bola Tinubu, who is widely believed to be gunning for the presidency in 2023, to beware of the hypocrisy of the northern politician. In an earlier tweet, he had suggested to the former Lagos State governor and national leader of the APC to secure the services of a translator because the richly idiomatic Hausa may be telling him something different in Hausa contrary to what he thinks they are telling him in English. The senator further expounded this thesis in Osogbo when he said:  “Well, the person of Asiwaju is the one I know in the field of struggle…He should try to know the actual feeling on the ground as far as North is concerned because I know what Abiola went through. Abiola served the North more than any other businessman from the western part of Nigeria. He printed the Quran and shared it with many Muslims. He donated houses and empowered people; he supported academics and religious clerics. Abiola was one of those passionate about the unity of Nigeria because of the solidarity between the Southwest and the northern part of Nigeria. But how did he end up? They (northerners) conspired against him and sabotaged him and at the end of the day…”

Without saying it, Sen Sani implied that the reluctance of the ordinary northerner to rally behind the Tinubu banner for now may signpost what is probably a tectonic shift unwisely and shortsightedly triggered by President Buhari in making the North and herdsmen feel unassailably superior. If Asiwaju Tinubu cannot get northern leaders to rally their people behind his banner, his campaign might come to grief, the senator counseled. Sen Sani sometimes shoots from the hips, and keeps his fingers crossed on delicate political matters, particularly when those matters have been complicated and contaminated by base goals and emotions. As an activist, and despite his ordeal in the hands of law enforcement agencies, he can’t afford to be less. He is not afraid to call out northern politicians as hypocrites and conspirators, and President Buhari as inadequate for modern Nigeria and unfit as president.

But if the northern politician is a conspirator — and Sen Sani is probably right, though the monolithic North ceased to exist a long time ago — the Southwest politician is probably even more treacherous, often blinded by ambition and loth to exhibit any loyalty to their leaders and mentors on the grounds that their proud history forbids them from grovelling before anyone, saint or sinner. If Asiwaju Tinubu decides to contest regardless of the dynamics of his party and the pussyfooting of the presidency, he will have to contend with the egregious machinations of his mentees who disdain his paternalism. The former Lagos governor will not only need a Hausa translator, as Sen Sani says ruefully, he will also need an enigmatic code breaker to determine who in the Southwest he can trust, given the fact that the loudest, earliest and bitterest voices against his presidential ambition have come from his region of birth. It is in the nature of the Yoruba to loudly destroy their own contenders, unmindful that such a seemingly noble and innocuous exercise contrastingly promotes more unqualified and probably more vicious and irredentist contenders from other regions. But they are hardly bothered by such contradictions.

Sen Sani may not have directed attention at the Southeast and South-South in advising Asiwaju Tinubu, but there is hardly anyone who does not know that the deeply alienated Igbo have become indifferent to Nigeria as a country, not to talk of its skewed politics; while the minority region always sees merit in political quiescence to the conservative and often northern-led parties, a by-product of the fear of their more militant and domineering next-door neighbor. The whole political atmosphere may be hazy, and getting increasingly hazier by the day; but one thing is clear: there will be power shift to the South in 2023. The cost of keeping power domiciled in the North will be too expensive for anyone or group to bear, let alone for fragile Nigeria not to buckle under. And regardless of how the APC and PDP bait each other with 2023 in view, and notwithstanding the huffing and puffing of the Atikus and Malamis, they will come to the ineluctable conclusion that forbidding power shift is a price they cannot pay, and a tactics they cannot hope to sustain.

 

Kaduna kidnappings and el-Rufai’s brinkmanship

 

Kaduna State is globally competitive in the macabre sport of kidnapping and killings. They even have a Bermuda Triangle around Birnin Gwari where travellers hold their breath and tiptoe as they pass through. Hardly a day passes in the state without abductions or killings. The war between natives and settlers, sometimes disguised as war between farmers and herdsmen in Southern Kaduna, was still smouldering when the rage of abductions, a largely one-sided conflict, supplanted it. But whether smouldering war or supplanter war, Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State has not responded to either situation with the evenhandedness, depth and diplomacy expected of his office. In fact, his chaotic and peevish response to the state’s law enforcement challenges has made him one of Nigeria’s most ardent exponents of brinkmanship.

The governor’s response to the abduction of 39 students of the Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka, Kaduna, is typical. Ten of the students have so far been released. But even before one of them regained his freedom, the governor had sworn that he would not negotiate with the bandits whom he accused of using ransom money to sustain terrorism and fuel insurgency. There was a link between the bandits and Boko Haram, he asserted vehemently. Satisfied that he told the truth, and indifferent to any other perspective on the abductions, including the pains of disconsolate and grieving parents, Mallam el-Rufai warned that anyone who negotiates with the bandits would be prosecuted. Neither the parents of the abducted students nor the rest of the country could believe the governor’s irascibility. And it did not seem anomalous to the governor himself that the contradictions in his threat mocked his person and ridiculed his office.

It is not the responsibility of parents to secure their children in school or even out of school. That is the function of government, both state and federal. The parents do not control the security agencies; they only pay school fees. Every abduction is, therefore, a reflection of the impotence and failure of government. Unable to secure the students, and forgetting that security is the responsibility of the state, which he represents, he has summoned the nerve to say he would not negotiate, and that anyone who negotiates would be dealt with. No statement, and no threat, can be more irresponsible. This is where his brinkmanship comes into play. He banks on the humanity of the bandits, not on his own callousness, to spare the innocent students in the absence of ransom payment. It is not clear what transpired in the release of the 10 students so far, whether any negotiation took place or whether anything was paid. But to recklessly endanger the lives of the students, fail to mount any rescue attempt because the state lacks the capacity to organize one, and forbid negotiations and ransom must depict Mallam el-Rufai as unremittingly obdurate.

Inconsolable parents have of course called his bluff and sworn to make contacts with the bandits. They dare him to arrest and prosecute them for displaying compassion and feeling for their children, sentiments which the governor is obviously incapable of exhibiting and has proudly said he lacks. And they hope that their effrontery on behalf of their children would touch and mend the scarified conscience of the governor whose offensive cocksureness over everything made him undeserving of a second term in 2019, and his party a third term in 2023. Mallam el-Rufai has long been known as averse to democracy, and is even more particularly intolerant of free speech. Now, sadly, they may just know him as a politician who missed his way into government, someone who has no leadership quality, let alone the capacity to preside over the affairs of a heterogeneous state like Kaduna. Even if all the students are released unhurt because the bandits blinked first, the governor would still rightfully be accused of reckless endangerment. He must not be allowed to exult over the matter, no matter the outcome. What if the bandits refused to blink?

Mallam el-Rufai is insincere and hypocritical. By his own admission in his first term — indicating a part of him that promotes Fulani exceptionalism — he negotiated with killer herdsmen who had an axe to grind with Southern Kaduna, and paid them to stave off their vengeance spree. What explains his volte-face today? His caprice, or his prejudicial lack of empathy? Some enterprising reporters traced his son, Abubakar Al-Siddique, to the Kaduna Capital School where the young lad was enrolled in 2019. It seemed he had withdrawn him, they speculated. If he had, it would not only be a reflection of double standards, it would also be an admission of failure to secure the state. Alas, for this also, he has an answer: should his son be kidnapped, he would pray for him to make heaven, he said cynically, but would not negotiate. Does he remember that Queen Elizabeth II did not spare her grandsons from Afghanistan just because of Taliban threats? And why is it that the governor confuses his responsibility with his private, religious inclinations? It is also instructive that his wife and First Lady, Hadiza, indicated on Twitter after a visit to her farm that her husband had warned her he would not pay a kobo should she be abducted. The devil is in the detail. The bandits, who know how to turn the screw, would of course not be as sparing as she makes light of the matter, and it would be left to the governor to determine whether he can endure the humiliation.

Some groups and individuals in and outside Kaduna support the governor’s decision not to negotiate, insisting that there would be no end to it. They are unfortunately right. However, even more powerful countries, including the United States and Israel, do negotiate with militant groups despite official position on the problem. But have Mallam el-Rufai’s supporters spoken as boldly on the responsibility of the state to protect Kaduna and its people from attacks as they have lined up behind his offensive intransigence? Is it not the failure of government to protect the people in the first instance that leads families to the option of negotiation? By all means, no one should negotiate with bandits, and they should be wiped out, as the governor said fiercely and indifferently, assuming that would stop the cancer as it has, in their imaginations, wiped out Boko Haram. But by all greater means, the state should protect its people. Not protecting the people and exposing them to the kind of killings bleeding Kaduna is a worse evil than negotiating with bandits.

By Idowu Akinlotan

For a few crazy weeks between February and March, the Southwest was in an uproar over the separatist predilections of a number of south-westerners, chief among whom was Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho, a 48-yeare-old charismatic Oyo State indigene whose determination to free the Yoruba from herdsmen attacks quickly metamorphosed, over a few months, to outright campaign for secession. But by late March, the tempo of his campaign and the fiery rhetoric associated with it had begun to wane, regardless of the sustained ardour of some of his associates. Noticing that his campaign against rampaging and murderous herdsmen in the forests of the Southwest was extremely popular, but failing to properly decipher what that popularity meant or how limited it was in scope, he brazenly declared Yoruba secession.

Had Mr Igboho judged the campaign well, and sensibly and accurately approximated the intentions of the Yoruba whom he claimed to represent, he would have restricted his campaign, limited it to neutralizing the murderous campaign of herdsmen in Yoruba forests, and restricted himself to publicizing the damage the chaos in the region was causing farmers. Instead, encouraged by the waffling of the new Afenifere leader, Ayo Adebanjo, and perhaps mystified by the complexity of the campaign for Yoruba self-determination by Banji Akintoye, a professor of History, Mr Igboho simply went ballistic and began to set dates for Yoruba secession from Nigeria. He was not discomfited by the lack of regional consensus on the matter, nor the coolness, bordering on indifference, of the Yoruba who could not make up their minds whether the provocations in Nigeria had reached boiling point needing their resolve to secede.

Mr Igboho has been pilloried in the media for his brashness and presumptuousness, but it is doubtful whether he is as malevolent as his traducers paint him. He has a passionate heart, and his intentions are nothing but noble, especially set against the intolerable audaciousness of rampaging herdsmen who have exposed the pathetic helplessness of many Southwest communities engaged in hand-wringing as their farms are turned into death traps and no-go areas. Even the governors of the region have dithered badly as they hemmed and hawed over the herdsmen raids. It was such spinelessness, not to talk of the cobbling together of a considerably attenuated Amotekun community policing organ, that produced Mr Igboho and his fiery associates. They were merely filling a vacuum left dangerously open by indecisive Southwest leaders and governors, especially in the face of more cohesive, outspoken and provocative core North leaders and governors.

The insults leveled against Mr Igboho are excessive and uncharitable. He represents a noble cause, to wit the defence of the region’s farms, people and lands, and he shows true grit in risking his life to walk his talk, which is more than can be said for many of his accusers. There is also no doubting the passion and commitment of Mr Igboho. His problem, however, is the same crisis and dilemma bedeviling the Southeast in their dealings with Nnamdi Kanu and his Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB). To lead a people to freedom, as Mr Igboho desires, must be premised first on their consensus, and then secondly on their conclusion that there was no other way to deal with a cause they had admittedly judged as hopeless. Not only are the Yoruba unconvinced that the case of herdsmen rampage is hopeless, they have so far been unable to come to an agreement that secession, if it comes to that, is a commensurate and proportionate response.

The Yoruba whom Mr Igboho claims to represent know that the unduly parochial and nepotistic President Muhammadu Buhari, whose connivance herdsmen seemed to have second-guessed and acted upon to cause havoc everywhere, has just about two years more in the presidency. They know that after him, there will likely be no one quite as insular as he, just as there perhaps was none before him. They know that President Buhari’s nepotism is probably innate and has harmed many in the North as it has unnerved many in the South. They hope that in the years to come, Nigeria will be led by sensible politicians who will not allow their presidency to be hijacked, and who will drive sensible bargains in their political parties as well as build bridges across ethnic divides, especially given how terribly harmful the Buhari administration’s methods have been. On account of this hope, the Yoruba were wary of Mr Igboho’s brusqueness as well as disinterest in compromise. Even Chief Adebanjo and Prof. Akintoye suspected that Mr Igboho had probably overreached himself, and they have, therefore, hedged their bets and quibbled about their self-determination desires for the Yoruba.

More worrisomely, the Southwest flinched when Mr Igboho and his cohorts began to threaten and abuse those who either didn’t agree with their goals or hesitated about the goal of secession. An Oba was insulted as a quisling, and another threatened with death and arson. Southwest political leaders who differed from them were also derided in unprintable language. And when it became known that Mr Igboho himself was for a long time an enforcer for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), passions began to cool in many quarters, and some south-westerners began to wonder whether the whole gambit was not about some indirect kind of regime change in the Southwest.

But what really clinched the argument for the anti-Igboho campaign and doomed the secession bid was that the Yoruba immediately sensed from Mr Igboho’s rhetoric that, like IPOB’s Mr Kanu, he lacked the depth and judgement to take the Yoruba out of Nigeria. The separatists had not yet organized a successful secession, but they were already threatening to murder and destroy any opposition to their goals. Lacking in sophistication, and carrying the deadweight of poor education, it was not surprising that their loathsome methods could not match their noble objectives. Indeed, some have surmised that the separatists would be a disaster far in excess to what the Yoruba were experiencing in Nigeria. If the Yoruba must secede, they would want to be led by people whom they can trust, men of deep learning, sound judgement, ennobling democratic credentials, and incomparable personality – leaders in every way.

Mr Igboho and his associates may have doomed their campaign by their irrationality, temper and excesses, but the country must not think that is the end of the story. The atrocities which the Igboho group rail against have not abated, and the contradictions, insularity and chaos that fuelled their protest movement are still incandescent. If little or nothing is done to tackle these problems, it is a question of time before better and competent leaders begin to spearhead more dangerous and unstoppable rebellions, not just in the Southwest, but elsewhere. For as it is clear to everyone, the Buhari administration shares a big part of the blame for the centrifugal forces unleashed on the country, and the chaos and divisions that have inundated all the geopolitical zones. Mr Igboho is not the problem; he is just a misfit response to a problem whose complexities and many dimensions have proved to be beyond his ken.

The secession bids in the south are doubtless waning, but the Buhari administration, famous for its lack of judgement and inclusive governance, seem prepared to stoke them all over again, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The police have extended a needless invitation to Mr Igboho, a ploy the aspiring separatist leader has interpreted as a move to incarcerate and neutralize him. He has ardent followers, many of them angry and dispirited. At the moment, however, they are confused by the unwillingness of the Yoruba to rally behind what they think is a noble undertaking. By turning Mr Igboho into a cause célèbre, which is what the heedless police invitation is doing, it will give his edgy supporters a cause to fight, and a grudge to mind and possibly avenge should harm come to him.

Speaking at the Bola Tinubu colloquium last week, President Buhari had gloated over his participation in the civil war, and spoken even more glowingly of the indispensability of peace and unity. His mindset is that the Igbohos and Kanus who deviate from his position on unity instantly become public enemy, far more dangerous than the thousands of bandits and insurgents wreaking havoc on the Northwest and Northeast. But by cuddling murderous herdsmen, who are described as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists, the president has been adjudged by some Yoruba leaders as clearly a separatist leader himself. That conclusion permeates and energises the ranks of Mr Igboho’s supporters, and they may see the government’s bid to neutralize him as a call to arms.

It is of course possible that the bid to neutralize Mr Igboho may ultimately achieve some headway if the government speedily and ingeniously rolls out its arsenal. However, that will not be the end of a matter that has deep roots watered by the government’s perpetration of injustice. His sympathizers will neither abandon him nor betray the cause. They will probably intensify their rebellion, and possibly embrace more forceful methods of ventilating their grievances. The Yoruba who have largely been indifferent to Mr Igboho, and have seen him as a fringe actor, and his cause as inchoate and precipitate, may gradually but reluctantly rally to his side in spite of themselves. Mr Igboho by all accounts was already imploding; the Buhari administration is foolishly extending a lifeline to him, and worse, even canonizing him. This column had long doubted the capacity of the Buhari administration to govern and hold the country together. It receives poor advice from incompetent aides, and it proceeds undisguisedly as an administration dedicated to the cause of the core North and audacious herdsmen. Its approach to the Igboho saga is one more proof that the administration receives poor advice and has no pretext to be called a national government, despite mouthing the catchphrase of unity and peace.

It is hard to explain why the Buhari administration is reluctant to let sleeping dogs lie. Its policies and methods have provoked the country into disunity and extreme divisiveness. If it cannot resolve the country’s national question, but has indeed exacerbated it, it should not now compound it by noisily proclaiming its preference for strong-arm tactics against those protesting the government’s parochialism, preferential treatment to herdsmen who admit exacting vengeance on their enemies, and lack of inclusiveness. Mr Igboho is a symptom of a terrible underlying problem, much of it provoked by the Buhari administration. It would be disingenuous and dishonest to cast the aspiring separatist advocate as that underlying problem.

It is indeed hardly surprising that in his six eventful and cataclysmic years in office, President Buhari has said nothing and done little to show that he understands the complexities of Nigeria’s existential problem, not to talk of what obnoxious role his government has played in deepening the crisis that had been building for decades. Given his government’s attitude to the grievances coalescing around the undeserving and grandiloquent Mr Kanu in the Southeast, and his handling of the new Igboho conundrum, not to say his indulgent treatment of herdsmen and bandits, there is little confidence that the president will give the country a reasonable explanation for the troubles, nay war, exploding all over the nation.

By Idowu Akinlotan

President Muhammadu Buhari consistently misses the point about the factors that conduce to Nigerian unity whenever he responds to fissiparous tendencies and politics. Speaking at the 12th Bola Tinubu Colloquium on the theme “Our Common Wealth:  The Imperative of National Cohesion for Growth and Prosperity”, the president simply preferred admonitions rather than isolating and examining the factors that draw Nigerians apart. According to him, “Despite occasional inter-ethnic tensions in our national history, it seems to me that we have all agreed on one point , that notwithstanding our diversity or ethnicity, culture, language and religion, Nigerians are better, even stronger together…More importantly, I fought for the unity of Nigeria during the civil war – 1967 to 1970, and I saw first-hand the unspeakable horrors of war, not just from fellow soldiers from both sides but from civilians, innocent children, women and the elderly left behind.”

His narration of his war records, including an account of the horrors of war, has become jaded. Nigerians want to know why separatist movements are springing up everywhere, especially at a time when herdsmen are on rampage, and are unchecked. They want to know what his panaceas are. Perhaps soon, before his tenure is over, he will get round to giving the country his honest analysis. Hopefully, too, he will also explain why and how his policies, statements and style have provoked the separatists into fury, and why he futilely relies on arms rather than policies to checkmate separatism. It would be pessimistic to conclude that the president could not offer the desperately needed explanation. Sadly, that is probably the reality the country must contend with. If there is trouble anywhere, the president’s strategy is to declare war, never to seek peace, never to find the root causes of the problem, and never to administer the appropriate anodyne. When he was startled into the reality that the country was disintegrating before his very eyes, he directed that those wielding AK-47 be shot on sight. Bandits? Well, that they should be taken out, together with their sponsors.

The problems militating against peace and unity of the country are complex; but the president’s solutions are indescribably simplistic. If he were a surgeon, he would love amputation. Last week, the Zamfara State government explained the root cause of the banditry ravaging the state. It is a war between the Hausa and the Fulani, the government says, a war caused by the killing of a respected Fulani leader, Alhaji Ishe in 2013 by the Yansakai, a vigilante group rooted in the Hausa community. Now, says the government, the crisis has metamorphosed into all sorts of criminalities, including banditry and kidnapping. It adds that so far, some 2,619 people have been killed, over 100,000 displaced, 1,190 kidnapped, about 100 bandit camps established, some of them containing at least 300 militants, and bandits numbering more than 30,000 are roaming the bushes and wreaking havoc on the state.

Zamfara is just one of the states battling the banditry scourge. There are many more states in the Northwest, particularly Katsina and Kaduna, subjected to savage attacks, at the centre of which are Fulani and herdsmen. Does the Buhari administration have an answer to the scourge? Not exactly, except of course killing those wielding assault rifles and taking out sponsors of banditry, a knee-jerk response some Nigerians believe has been introduced to deal with the Igbohos and Kanus more than check herdsmen and bandits. Yes, some measure of force may be required, but it is important to first understand the crisis. That understanding was not forthcoming from the president at the colloquium.