The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • APC’s illegalities and Oshiomhole’s snide remarks

    APC’s illegalities and Oshiomhole’s snide remarks

    By Idowu Akinlotan

    Only the chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Caretaker and Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee, Mai Mala Buni, who is also Yobe State governor, can say why he was not struck by the irony of describing his party as full of infighting. In less than six months, no thanks to schemers running riot in the APC, it has turned into a party full of intrigues. Embroiled in intrigues and plots designed to secure advantages for 2023, the party marches with indecent haste from one illegality to another. The dissolution of the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) in June followed the meeting of the National Executive Committee (NEC) controversially called by Victor Giadom, the Rotimi Amaechi protégé who declared himself, citing court orders, as acting chairman of the party in place of the late Abiola Ajimobi, a former Oyo State governor.

    A little over a week later, President Muhammadu Buhari, bowing to the wishes of a faction of the party, and conniving at their plots, assented to the dissolution of the NWC on the grounds that the party was imploding over court cases and internal wrangling. There was no constitutional basis in the party for the president’s assent, but everyone in the party lined up behind him regardless of the confidence about 18 NWC members out of 21 still had in the leadership of Adams Oshiomhole, the then national chairman. Though NWC members were reluctant to challenge the dissolution of the NWC in court, until a former National Vice Chairman, Hilliard Eta, summoned the courage, the move by the president and other plotters in June was suspect and controversial. The dissolution produced the Buni-led caretaker committee, which was given six months to plan a national convention.

    Governor Buni has not only expanded the brief of the caretaker committee, for which six months became inadequate, he has also supervised and inspired intense intrigues to redefine and realign the whole party structure in the country in order to regiment it along certain predetermined lines and in favour of certain interests, some of them arch enemies of the former chairman. The plots and regimentation led to the NEC decision last week to extend the Buni-led caretaker committee’s tenure by another six months and the sack and reconstitution of the entire elected party executives at the state, local government and ward levels. Cautioned by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on the illegality of the wholesale dissolution of the executive committees, the party ingeniously converted the sack into a rechristening, immediately reabsorbing and turning the sacked party executives into caretaker executives. In their view, the elected executives have after all lost nothing. This is an ingenious lie. There is no way to compare an elected, tenured and substantive executive with a caretaker executive whose tenure would end in six months. The uncertainty into which the caretaker executives have been placed can certainly not be mitigated by the Buni-led caretaker committee’s assertion that they would be allowed to contest for party offices after their caretaker period lapses.

    Surely there is a limit to plots and intrigues. Expect fireworks in the coming weeks. The plot to cause massive personnel change at the state, LG and ward levels, despite the feeble and unconvincing explanations by the caretaker committee’s secretary, James Akpanudoedehe, is probably contrived to strengthen the hands of a few and probably vengeful party leaders while correspondingly weakening others. Unfortunately, it has been impossible to avoid collateral damage to the party, and has rendered internal cohesion more difficult, alienated many party leaders and members, and prepared the ground for fractious and debilitating congresses and conventions in the near future. These are unforced errors that have lifted the party from the more manageable infighting alluded to by Mr Buni to deep-seated intrigues which are more difficult to manage and placate because of the attendant bitterness and acrimony.

    Mr Eta, a former national vice chairman, has headed to the courts to seek redress for the original dissolution of the party’s NWC in June. For his trouble, he was last week expelled by the party for indiscipline. If the judiciary is as independent as it claimed and continues to posture, it is hard seeing Mr Eta come to grief. More crucially and even far less disputatiously, should any of the state, LG and ward executives unlawfully transmuted into ad hoc caretakers take the party NEC’s decision to court, and should they receive fair hearing by an independent judiciary, it is hard to see them lose. Once the aggrieved go to court, the party should prepare for the worst-case scenario. The dominoes may fall. In any case, whether the recent decisions of the party are challenged or not, the party may, in frenzied search for absolutism, have entangled itself in a skein of intrigues and web of lies from which it is hard to see them recover. One illegality to another since June, and for which the party faced no serious challenge, has led to overconfidence and mistakes. No party conducts itself with such reckless abandon and hopes to flourish and outlast competition.

    Considering the hopeless knot in which the party is now entangled, the ever effervescent Mr Oshiomhole gleefully remarked last week that it was beneath him to plot a return to the party as chairman even if Mr Eta’s lawsuit were to succeed. The former party chairman is right. It is a disservice to ask anyone with enough sense and circumspection to willfully embark on a useless and indefinable journey. The next six months of Mr Buni’s extended assignment will be fraught with dangers and difficulties. Whoever becomes national chairman after the next six months will preside over a shrunken and weakened party, a weakening occasioned by willful disrespect for party rules and constitution. On top of the mismanagement of the country, the APC will in the next few years struggle to convince the country to vote for its candidates, especially at the national level. How they hope to succeed when they have not inspiringly managed their party or the country will be the nightmarish challenge the next APC chairman will face, whether he is a man who can call his soul his own, or whether he is the grovelling product of a disingenuous compromise by scheming and dissembling party leaders.

    In his statement last Monday, Mr Oshiomhole couched his argument about a so-called return to the party leadership with unrestrained snideness. Said he: “In reporting the legal action taken by a member of the dissolved National Working Committee (NWC) of the All Progressives Congress (APC), some attributions have been made to the effect that the plaintiff is an ‘ally of Oshiomhole’ or an ‘associate of Oshiomhole’. This is despite the fact that the court documents are clear on who the plaintiff really is. For the avoidance of doubt, the 21-member National Working Committee (NWC) under my leadership largely worked cohesively and harmoniously. The only exceptions were the three members used by forces desperate to take control of the party. They contrived a crisis and abused the judicial process to undermine the constitution and integrity of the party. The majority of 18 members worked as a team and not as allies or loyalists of anybody. When the National Executive Committee (NEC) in its wisdom dissolved the NWC, I immediately announced publicly that I accepted the decision, regardless of its legality or otherwise, as it affected my position as national chairman. I was the only one at the press conference where I made the announcement. The reason, of course, was that some of my colleagues in the dissolved NWC obviously didn’t share my position not to contest the dissolution in court.”

    Not done, and still breathing nuanced imprecates against his detractors, Mr Oshiomhole added: “Since I could only accept responsibility for my own decision, I instructed my lawyers to withdraw the suits challenging my purported suspension from office by the proxies of those bent on removing me as chairman. It is, therefore, the height of mischief to insinuate, as it is being done in some quarters, that I would publicly accept the decision and later surreptitiously seek to contest it in court. That chapter of my political life is closed. Even if another NEC decision or a court order reverses the dissolution, I will, with utmost humility, decline to return as APC National Chairman. I am proud of the accomplishments of the NWC under my leadership and I am grateful to the principled 18 members who worked as a team committed to the cause of the party.”

    Observe very well how he sniggered about ‘contrived crisis’ that ‘undermined judicial process’. Hear him also speak derisively about the Edo ‘proxies’ who plotted his suspension. Then contemplate how he poignantly described his colleagues in the NWC whom he said worked nobly and professionally, not as ‘allies or loyalists’. And what fitting manner to end his brutal put-down of the plots and personalities that dethroned him from the party chairmanship than to hear him speak grandly of the 18 NWC members who worked with him ‘cohesively and harmoniously’ compared with the ‘three members who were used by desperate forces to take control of the party’. Mr Oshiomhole seems even thrilled to relinquish his former office, and is clearly wary of returning to an organization seething with intrigues. He was forced to pass the nuisance on to new hands; and he is glad to do so and be rid of the menace. He will not countenance a return to a situation that gave him nightmares, and from which he frankly sees no escape for probably the most indomitable of party chairmen.

    But by far more intriguing is the president’s role in the entire brouhaha, including questions about just how far his decisions can be detached from the brazen legal subterfuges orchestrated by his politically meddlesome and controversial Justice minister, Abubakar Malami. The role played by the beguiled president in the dissolution of the Oshiomhole-led NWC last June was indefensible but explicable on the grounds of the simplistic scenarios presented before him by trusted aides. Trusting and malleable, he had no farsighted view of what the APC should be or how it could help midwife a new country and polity. He was, therefore, susceptible to the many private and selfish interpretations of politics engineered by his depleting kitchen cabinet. Last week’s dissolution of all the other executives of the party at the lower levels also has far-reaching legal and political implications, in some cases, so overwhelming that they were bound to change both the complexion and worldview of the party. How these implications escaped the president can only be attributable to either his customary aloofness or his general unknowingness of national political and ideological issues in a complex society.

    This is dangerous. If the president is struggling with navigating the maze of intractable party affairs, how many other national issues can he be trusted to decipher, at least enough to come to some sound decisions and judgement? It is already known that he is not an inspirational leader; but to compound his weaknesses and failings by an abject unawareness of complex national issues and conflicts exposes the country to divisive, self-centred and antagonistic forces. His party was unable to constitute its Board of Trustees, and for five years or more, he himself has been incapable of managing the factional interests that undergird the party and give it life and energy. Indeed, many analysts see a general abdication on his part. In that case, can these problems be remedied in the next few years, at least sufficiently enough to harness the APC’s potential for its own growth and stability, and to provide national leadership? Few still think the party or even the president possesses the vision to do great things, assume the level of a statesman, or lead the country to greatness. Now, Nigerians are deeply worried that sustaining even the national status quo, as measured and mediocre as that status quo is, may prove befuddling to the president.

    The APC was right from the beginning never able to master the engineering sense to run a modern and cohesive party. Having achieved spectacular victory months after its founding, it soon began to reel from crisis to crisis under John Odgie-Oyegun, its second chairman, became castrated by the governors as they arrogantly threw the party into concubinage, while its essence and goals were demeaned by fratricidal and implacable conflicts. When it looked like the impetuous Mr Oshiomhole would snatch the party back from the jaws of arbitrariness, powerful forces within the party, many of them governors, resisted the change, took forceful control of the party, and turned it into a morally hollow and boiling cauldron of intrigues. The future is bleak for the party. Having nailed their colours to the mast, they scornfully refuse to see what others are alarmed about. The party has little respect for its guiding and founding principles, and has abandoned its ideology for a potpourri of practical but elementary system of governance and leadership. There is very little holding it together. It is an orphan. If lawsuits do not put its nose out of joint in the months ahead, it will stay orphaned until the convention exposes its festering wounds probably now gone past healing. Banditry, insurgency, population explosion, economic crisis, and poor leadership have put a question mark on Elections 2023. But if against all odds 2023 comes, it will require yet greater odds, so arithmetically inaccessible as to be difficult to compute, to help the party cross the finishing line.

  • Fed Govt, police misrepresent EndSARS

    Fed Govt, police misrepresent EndSARS

    By Idowu Akinlotan

    Almost in quick succession, the federal government betrayed its shifting but unflattering perception of the #EndSARS protest by taking three actions last week. First, through a legal action allegedly inspired by the Force Police legal unit and filed on behalf of the police by a senior legal practitioner, O.M. Atoyebi, the law enforcement agency sought to stop the various judicial panels probing the misdeeds of the disbanded special anti-robbery squad (SARS). The suit, filed last Wednesday, was withdrawn on Friday after widespread public outrage. No statement was issued to explain why the outrageous suit was ever contemplated, whether by the police in their official capacity, or by rogue elements within the police. Second, unnamed sources in the intelligence community reportedly disclosed last week that should fresh EndSARS protests take place, the government would interpret it as an attempt to cause regime change. Such protests, especially if violent, would be put down forcefully, said the unnamed sources.

    Third, after catching its breath, the federal government, through the Information minister, Lai Mohammed, last Friday suggested that law enforcement agents had been scared off their jobs by adversarial and one-sided reports of the EndSARS protest procured almost overwhelmingly by the unpredictable and feral social media. He opened a window into how the government conceived the protest, a window that seemed to eschew the causative effect of police impunity and gross governmental incompetence in the outbreak of the protest. The minister was more preoccupied with what others did to promote the protest and its attendant violence than what the government didn’t do to forestall both the protest itself and the follow-up violence.

    Start with the Information minister’s diagnosis. Not only was it one-sided, almost in equal proportion to the deprecated social media reports and analyses of the protest, it was predictably silent on widely held views of why the protest began in the first instance. He should be reminded. Complaints against SARS had inundated the media for more than two or three years before the October conflagration. Neither the government, which he serves, nor the police whom he fawns over with empathetic glee took firm or remedial measures to address public grievances and the anguish of victims. It is widely believed that the administration of which he is a member lacks the representativeness and competence to rule a heterogeneous society like Nigeria. Since 2015 when a desensitized, apolitical and amoral cabal reportedly hijacked the administration, with of course the complicit aloofness of the president, the country became a fiefdom to which liberal values had become an anathema. They were thus unable to appreciate the danger inherent in untreated public grievances against police excesses.

    It is true, as the minister suggested, that fake news had become a major and growing concern, and the social media was correspondingly being abused. It is incontrovertible that mainstream media abdicated their responsibility to the social media in reporting events faithfully and accurately, particularly at the Lekki venue of the EndSARS protest in Lagos. There is also no explanation for how the media downplayed the killing of security agents, inadvertently fostering distorted news of the protest in Nigeria by foreign media. But the minister cannot pretend to be unaware of the incompetence of the administration in handling the protest and responding to the breakdown of law and order subsequently. Cabals can hijack an administration, but let them at least be competent hijackers. Before Abba Kyari, former Chief of Staff to the president, died from Covid-19 complications, he was the public and servile face of the cabal. His administrative and political acumen was questionable, despite his personal brilliance. His quaint position seems to have been inherited by Abubakar Malami, the Justice minister who is even more lacking in administrative suavity, more fanatical about hegemonic policies and methods, and is far less accessible and universalist than his predecessor. It was not surprising, therefore, that a comparatively tame challenge, such as the EndSARS protest presented, could quickly snowball into a tempestuous rage of young and dispossessed citizens, with both the before and after badly and incompetently handled. The incompetence is not deliberate; it is intrinsic.

    Next, the police. It is inconceivable that anyone could file a lawsuit on behalf of the police without their approval. They may investigate their legal unit as much as they want, but it will not mitigate their complicity and poor judgement. They may go on to expose a few sacrificial lambs, but the public is convinced that the lawsuit is premeditated and designed, as some say, to lessen the opprobrium to which the police are being consigned as a result of the disclosures emanating from the judicial panels. Undoubtedly, the revelations from the judicial panels have been gut-wrenching and depressing. The impunity alleged against SARS is unspeakable and damning. But rather than seek to stifle the stench, should the police not engage in deep introspection to find out, through a parallel panel, how service rules became so badly degraded in the Police Force, and why senior officers turned deaf ears to the groanings of the victims of SARS? It is a reflection of the incompetence and immorality of senior police officers that such abuses were perpetrated in plain view and lasted for so long. Had the Buhari administration the capacity to govern, there would have been a major shake-up in the Police Force years ago.

    Finally, the regime change analysts. Convinced that the EndSARS protest quickly transformed into a regime change ploy, sources close to the intelligence and security communities of the government have reiterated that any further protests will be treated as treason. The Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, and the Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, have both warned that some elements and groups appeared bent on regime change. It would be resisted, they chorused. The ogre SARS became was of course not birthed under the leadership of the present IGP; but if he had the competence and depth needed to run the police, he would have arrested the drift to chaos orchestrated by the rogue anti-robbery section of the police. And there would have been no EndSARS protest.

    Lt.-Gen. Buratai, like the IGP, is unable to comprehend the Nigerian Constitution. He sees himself as the chief protector of the administration, and has warned, probably for the third or fourth time, against any attempt to plot a coup d’etat. But if anyone is plotting a coup, it is an indication that the army chief, like his predecessors, has been spectacularly remiss in managing the affairs of the army to produce fine officers who can think through problems. A coup, given the mess political leaders have made of the country, would worsen the problem. Soldiers, as Nigerian history has also shown, are products of the society like policemen. They do not transcend the filth in the society, and are as corrupt and susceptible to the centrifugal tendencies tearing the society apart. They subvert the constitution with impunity, impose unrealistic and fragile law and order regimens on the society, feather their own nests with even more impunity, are more archaic than generally realized, and are now so badly led and poorly equipped that they cannot even exterminate fewer than four or five thousand insurgents. No officer worth his education and training would countenance a coup. And no sensible politician would encourage such idiocy when the Buhari administration, as incompetent as it is, has just a few years to go.

    It is possible that in the middle of the EndSARS protest some people romanticized a revolutionary overthrow of the ancien regime, evoking images of Ghana, Cuba and other countries which have passed through similar trajectories. The youths who led the protest disavowed such goals and swore innocence of the plot. But given the manner they managed the protest, and their reluctance to accept responsibility for the farcical end of their protest, not to talk of how aspects of their protest were run, infiltrated and deployed, they do not give assurance of their readiness to assume the quality leadership they so passionately castigate the elders for lacking. On the whole, rather than continue to place undue emphasis on the plot to actualize regime change, the government and the security agencies should concern themselves more with managing the post-EndSARS period more adroitly. So far, they have been lax in handling the end of the protests as they were also inept in managing the problem when violence and disorder raged.

    There are two urgent steps the Buhari administration can take to tackle the ripple effect of the EndSARS protest, apart from the judicial panels already emplaced and the other promises of reform pledged to protesters. First, the president needs to urgently reconcile the factioned ruling party in order to tap its best brains for national progress and growth. The All Progressives Congress (APC) has not lived up to expectation, particularly in exploiting its diversity and harnessing its ideological promise of progressivism. That ideology may be flimsy, and even sometimes fatuous, but it represents a significant hope of giving direction and purpose to the country. Sadly, there is little indication that the president appreciates what his party stands for, or the discipline and sense of being the party can gift the country. Worse, the party is engaged in deep fratricidal conflicts thus making its combatants see the future only through the dangerous and sensational dualism of young and idealistic politicians.

    Second, and even more urgently, the administration needs a revolutionary approach to restructuring the political and economic frameworks of the country. It is frightening to know that the government often sees the country’s crisis as one of indiscipline rather than the deeper and finer issues relating to the country’s structural integrity. EndSARS is nothing but a minor manifestation of the monstrous structural imbalances afflicting the country, imbalances that stifle growth and development, and produce the distortions that suffuse the polity with religious and ethnic conflicts. Alarmingly, the economy, even in the best of times, is not growing as fast as population, nor is it being modernised; and there are no coherent and enforceable population policies to aid planning and management of resources. Disaster is looming, made worse by incompetent leaders produced through faulty and compromised electoral processes.

    The judicial panels probing SARS impunity will come up with some far-reaching recommendations, depending of course on the tenacity of the affected state; but far-reaching remedies are unlikely to be applied to produce a reformed and modern police establishment. The country’s decrepit structure and woolly-minded leaders will not permit the kind of fundamental change envisaged by the EndSARS protesters. Indeed, judging from statements by the army chief, police boss, Information minister, not to say the silence and aloofness from the presidency, nor the convoluted ethnic and religious fractures in the country, it is already obvious that the protest has been misconceived by the government. There will be cosmetic changes, but hopes and expectations will eventually be dashed. Will the protest recur? It is unlikely to break out on the scale it did in October, when the intelligence community, despite their protestations, were caught napping. The government in some instances deployed hoodlums to break up the protest; next time, they will deploy ethnic and religious factions. In fact bandits and insurgents, much more than civilized and organized protests, are more likely to succeed in demolishing the system.

    The government appears to resent the EndSARS protest, partly because it does not understand the import of the revolt or its exquisite nuances. Yes, the protest had its drawbacks; but the government needs to reserve its energies and resentment for the far worse and more sinister problem of large-scale breakdown of law and order likely to be inspired and superintended by nihilistic bandits and insurgents. There won’t be a coup; there won’t be a fresh or huge EndSARS protest; few will be interested in regime change outside the ballot box; those who latched on to the protest to activate their own private agenda will be disillusioned; and more than two-thirds of the geopolitical zones appear to want a complete change of structure before 2023. The country is already fracturing deep down in its tectonic plates than is likely to manifest in the observations of public officials and security agents. The fracturing is continuing apace, and relentlessly too. There is no stopping the fracturing because officials are looking for the wrong reasons in the wrong places. Indeed, watching officials ineptly declaim on the EndSARS protest in the past one week reminds a patriot of the shortsightedness and political gravity that undid the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and scores of empires, nearly all of which were more disciplined and more purposeful than Nigeria.  An eerie sense of inevitability, not to talk of irreconcilable contradictions, seems to be descending on the country like a pall of thick and unabated foreboding.

  • Worsening politicization of judicial appointments

    Worsening politicization of judicial appointments

    Idowu Akinlotan

     

     

    In recent years, the National Judicial Council (NJC) has had to put its foot down to compel states to adhere to the rules guiding judicial appointments. It has not always had as much success at the federal level as it has had at state level, and is probably not unaware of the depth of politicization wreaking havoc in the third arm of government, but it has admirably stuck to the rules and very often made the right calls. In the matter of the controversial appointment of the Chief Judge of Gombe State, in which the name of Justice Beatrice Iliya was omitted from the list forwarded to the NJC, the NJC has insisted the right thing be done and the list redrawn. The rules are clear about how the list should be drawn. Why did Gombe defy the rule? Ethnicity, religion, gender? The state is not speaking up, nor, reassuringly, is the NJC interested in excuses.

    Clearly, at many levels of government, the wrong, immature, visionless and prejudiced politicians have found themselves in office without possessing the requisite character and qualifications for high or public office. They have thus not found it difficult to undermine or pervert the rules, defy the constitution, and promote injustice, often against gender and minorities. Gombe is not alone in undermining the independence of the judiciary, though a few northern states have by their open biases given a clear indication as to how religion, gender and ethnicity are motivating their unjust and unconstitutional actions and appointments. One of the rules guiding judicial appointments states that the most senior judge in the state judiciary should be included in any succession consideration, but governors in some of these states have often preferred candidates of their choice.

    Some six or seven years ago, Rivers State also politicized the appointment of its chief judge by shunning the rules and dictating the governor’s preference. The ensuing controversy, which lasted more than two years, was only ended in 2015 when a new governor reverted to the rules and okayed the appointment of the most senior judge, Justice Daisy W. Okocha. Uninterested in learning any lesson from the Rivers debacle, Cross River State early this year also declined to recommend Justice Akon Ikpeme for appointment as chief judge despite her satisfying the criteria set by the NJC. Kebbi State’s subversion of judicial independence was even more telling. In nearly two years of maneuvering beginning from 2017 when Justice Bala Mairiga retired as chief judge, the state government forestalled the confirmation of Justice Elizabeth Karatu, the next most senior judge, as the chief judge on the grounds of certificate alteration. She retired soon after, insisting that she was discriminated against on grounds of religion, thereby paving the way for the appointment of another judge, Justice Suleiman Ambursa.

    Other states have found cleverer ways of doing the same shameful thing by backing the promotion to the Court of Appeal of a disfavoured candidate in order to free the candidate of their choice to lawfully become the state chief judge. Despite the best intentions and resistance of the NJC, the trend of subversion is likely to continue. This is because the Buhari administration itself has not set a good and inspiring example, given the way it surreptitiously calculates who should occupy what seat in the judiciary and when. It took a lot of manoeuvering for Justice John Tsoho to be confirmed Chief Judge of the Federal High Court. It also took a lot of pressures for Justice Monica Dongban-Mensem to be confirmed President of the Court of Appeal, not to talk of Justice Walter Onnoghen himself for the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) position. Was their religion the issue, in contrast to Justice Mohammad Tanko’s smooth confirmation? It is not clear to what extent the pressures have strengthened or weakened the hands of the justices. And after unlawfully unseating Justice Onnoghen, few were surprised that the Buhari administration delayed the appointment of some justices to the Supreme Court until a favoured candidate was brazenly and crudely positioned for the CJN job in future.

    Given the abhorrent politicization of the judiciary, it is a miracle that a semblance of justice still issues from the courts. The independence of the judiciary has unfortunately been considerably compromised, and will continue to be so compromised in the foreseeable future for political, religious and ethnic reasons. In addition, the dispensation of justice itself will continue to be badly hamstrung mostly by the appointment of incompetent and subservient judges flawed by character defects. With the continuing subjection of the executive branch to the mediocrity principle due to a faulty political system and perverted electoral process, and the inundation of the legislature by incompetent lawmakers almost universally weakened by and suffering from character defects, and a judiciary contaminated by an equally diseased and shortsighted executive branch, it should surprise no one that the country is tearing itself apart. No one in high office, it is clear, is keeping his senses. No one has been to the mountaintop to see beyond the immediate, to see into the day after tomorrow.

     

  • Ministerial gaffes multiply

    Ministerial gaffes multiply

    Idowu Akinlotan

     

    Apart from the reservations many Nigerians have about the competence and patriotism of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, they must in addition also endure the awkward manner some cabinet members defend and project a government that has been under attack since its inauguration in 2015. There was of course the embarrassment of not appointing a cabinet early enough, with the president likening ministers to noisemakers. There was also the vexatious matter of the president skewing his appointments, particularly security positions, in favour of the core North, but these were also defended by his supporters as his presidential prerogative. And there was his adamant resolve to discriminate appointments in favour of those who voted for him and against those who rebuffed him; but in the end, he has had to depend on the eyes and ears of shadowy individuals who crystallized and championed his private instincts. Between those early days in office and today, the Buhari administration has done and said so many more things to rile the public and cause intense controversy.

    But nothing in the Buhari presidency matches the impertinent gaffes of some of the president’s ministers, gaffes that typify and embody the soul of the administration, gaffes likely to form an important part of the discussions of the legacy of the administration. Not only do ministers make these gaffes, they defend them in a way that makes it hard to determine whether they are just being sycophantic or are genuinely persuaded by what they see and say. President Buhari’s spokesmen have become famous for their gaffes, have been relentless in making them, and are abusive and remorseless in their statements. But that is expected of spokesmen. Ministers are, however, expected to be a little more elevated in what they say, what they think, and how they express themselves. Sadly, instead, they have been unrestrained, crude, no less abusive than presidential spokesmen; and though they are conscious of being tagged sycophantic, nevertheless gush over inanities with the undignified ardour of mercenaries.

    Some 10 days ago, reports indicated that Nigeria would soon start importing petroleum products from the less endowed Niger Republic, yes the same neighbouring country with which the Buhari administration has become infatuated, perhaps even obsessed. Last week, aware that the government of which he is oil minister of state was being derided for its insularity, ethnic parochialism and opaque economic justifications, Timipre Sylva decried the criticism and suggested that in fact Nigerians should be proud of looking outwards. Really? And proud? Why, yes of course. As he put it on a Channels TV: “I don’t see that as an embarrassment at all. As a country, Nigeria is a big market, we need products, even if all our refineries were functioning, we will still need extra products. Niger Republic produces oil and they are landlocked as a country. They have a refinery that produces in excess of what they require as a country and they offered to sell to us in Nigeria because this is a bigger market. In the spirit of regional cooperation, regional trade development, we decided to buy from them. I don’t see anything wrong with that. If your neighbour is producing something that is required in your country and you buy from him, why is that a big problem? So, we agreed with Niger to buy the excess of what they don’t require in Niger because this is a big market. Nigerians should be proud that we are doing that to encourage sub-regional trade because we have been talking about sub-regional trade for a long time and this is how it should be between neighbouring countries. Niger should import from us what we have, and we should be able to import from Niger what they have. Let us encourage intra-regional trade, and this is one good example of trading within West Africa.”

    Mr Sylva’s ministerial drivel is unsurpassable. The fact is that Nigeria hardly refines any petroleum product today, underlining the fact that public criticism was meant to draw attention to the incompetence of the leaders and the slothfulness of the country as a whole. If small Niger Republic could operate a refinery, reasoned the critics, why could big Nigeria not do the same or perform far better? But the point was lost on the glib and infatuated Mr Sylva. He enthuses over what he sees as Nigeria embracing “regional cooperation and regional trade development”, completely glossing over the fact that Nigeria killed its refineries without really exploiting the economies of scale in crude oil refining at the sub-regional level. Hopefully, they will have opened the borders futilely shut for more than one needless year before they kick-start their oil trade. Nor does Mr Sylva appear to grasp the subtle hint that the public frets at the new national penchant for cuddling northern neighbours to the detriment of other neighbours, a style that suffuses this administration’s scanty and desultory economic policy.

    Mr Sylva is unlikely to be embarrassed by anything, at least not by anything in a government that glamorizes everything Niger Republic. After all, he met a policy already glamorized by other ministers before him, not to talk of by the president himself. Apart from importing oil from Niger Republic, the Nigerian government will also be constructing a $1.96bn rail line to that country, and building two roads worth some N30bn from Sokoto and Jigawa States to the same northern neighbour. The Transport minister, Rotimi Amaechi, who should more properly be described as Minister of Railways, defends the rail project as necessary for economic reasons. Presidential spokesman Garba Shehu reiterates the argument in support of the rail project. According to him, “Nigeria isn’t building rail line into Niger Republic, but only to the designated border point. An agreement between Nigeria and Niger in 2015, coordinated by the Nigeria-Niger Joint Commission for Cooperation has a plan for ‘Kano-Katsina-Maradi Corridor Master Plan, (K2M)’ as it is called. Going by this, the two nations would each build a rail track to meet at the border town of Maradi. Nigerian delegates to that meeting comprised officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National Boundaries Commission, Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Water Resources as well as those of Kano and Katsina states. The objective of the rail is the harnessing of raw materials, mineral resources, and agricultural produce. When completed, it will serve domestic industries, and play the role of a viable transportation backbone to the West African sub-region, starting with the neighbouring Niger Republic, for their export and import logistic chain.”

    Senior administration officials are obviously unaware of the emphasis they put on economic relations between Nigeria and Niger Republic, clearly to the detriment of other neighbouring countries and Nigerian cities and regions. Maradi, to start with, may in this administration’s consideration be the next most important city after Kano and Katsina, but it is not directly located on the border with Nigeria as Mr Shehu tries to suggest. This city of less than 300,000 people is certainly not as economically significant as, say, Cotonou, nor as Port Harcourt, Enugu, Jos and many others. It is undoubtedly culturally significant to Katsina, given their shared histories, but not economically important. The opportunity cost of the road and rail projects to Niger Republic is huge and indefensible. There are more significant road and rail projects within Nigeria that would yield more economic value than the projects swamping Niger Republic which is just a little more populous than Lagos State.

    If any gaffe exceeds Mr Sylva’s petroleum products import remarks, it is Mr Amaechi’s Transportation University gaffe. In December last year, the minister happily embraced being described as a sycophant for siting the Transportation University in Daura, the president’s hometown. The incongruousness of the decision did not occur to him, as he insisted that Daura is a Nigerian city anyway. Hear him: “When we sited the wagon factory at Kajola, Ogun State, there was no noise. If by siting this university in Daura, people will call me a sycophant, I would not mind being called a sycophant. Is Daura not in Nigeria? Daura is not in Chad or in Mali. Daura is in Nigeria. What is wrong in siting the university in Daura? Daura is in Nigeria, it is not in any other part of the world. It is not in Niger Republic, Biafra or Mali, it is in Nigeria. So, what is wrong in siting the University of Transportation in Daura? I have no regret siting this university where I have sited it; it is not because I want to get any gain.”

    It is clearly impossible to convince Mr Amaechi with logic. His mind is made up, like the other happy gaffe maker, Mr Sylva. Their gaffes epitomize the Buhari administration. They think narrow, and they think hegemonic. The compass means nothing to them to indicate direction. There was a time in the distant, healthy past when Nigerian leaders deliberately refused to site projects in their hometowns. Now they corner projects brazenly, defiantly and eagerly. Honour means nothing to them. If Mr Amaechi was unable to appreciate this delicate fact when he made verbose statements about his honour and character, he is hardly the person to blame. Subordinates always try to ingratiate themselves with their bosses and leaders. It is up to the leaders to see through the thick and dark façade. But when leaders themselves promote the scaffolding for the building, it is not shocking that subordinates will always try to flatter their bosses, including insulting the public and defying and sniggering at the country. But gaffes apart, Nigerians should wonder what other projects would be sited close to the borders to link Nigeria and Niger Republic, almost as if other neighbouring countries to the east and west hardly matter, and quite as if there are no priority projects to link Nigerian cities and regions with one another.

  • Protests: Nigerians can’t shake off neocolonial mindset

    Protests: Nigerians can’t shake off neocolonial mindset

    Idowu Akinlotan

     

     

    Despite 60 years of nominal independence, Nigerians still think and behave as a dependent people. The EndSARS crisis and its terrible aftermaths tragically demonstrate how Nigerians and their elite run their country as a dependency and seem determined to entrench themselves in mental servitude. Their children school abroad, and have become in culture, character and learning largely foreigners in their own country. Their politicians, professionals, including media workers, and many others desperately seek validation from foreign governments and institutions. And when the BBC and CNN in particular broadcast news and features, they are viewed as incontrovertible. Nigeria is of course not alone in this dependency syndrome; nearly all of Africa is fully dependent, with a few historical exceptions such as Egypt under Gamel Abdel Nasser, Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, and Ghana under the Osgyefo, Kwame Nkurumah. Asia has virtually freed itself; but Africa deliberately sinks further into dependency.

    There is no justification for the current state of affairs, nor for the culture of dependency Nigerians have entrenched, nor yet for their instinctive idolization of the white man as Africa’s law enforcement agency. Their lack of strategic thinking, their obstinate refusal to think of the long term, and their almost total lack of self-respect and self-worth all combine to rob them of their dignity. Their governments are globally recognized as indolent and permanently agitated, with Nigeria in particular a special disappointment. Their youths are thought to be different from the leaders and elders and are regarded as vibrant, but few seem to notice that they are cut from the same cloth. They are regarded as superficial, disposed to the West, incurably romantic, aggressive in a limiting and harmful way, opinionated, and generally eager to burn down a barn to rid it of vermin. Thus the EndSARS protest, not to say the provocative deployment of the social media, exposed the futility of Nigeria’s government and the fantasy of the youths.

    This column recently suggested that the mishandling of the protests exposed the utter purposelessness and abject failure of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency. Complacent for years, insular in nearly all its appointments, desultory in its developmental goals, insulated from reality, and embarrassingly lethargic in the face of urgent demands, the government was unprepared for the near cataclysm that the EndSARS protest became. For years, and despite the groaning of the people against an inept, poorly equipped, and in some cases sadistic police force, it watched helplessly as policemen were decimated and cannibalized. Police stations were sacked, and policemen driven away from their duty posts. The administration handled the matter most shoddily, encumbered by decades of incompetent law enforcement paradigms, and obsessed with the laid-back and parochial approach that is completely unresponsive to sophisticated and multidimensional security challenges.

    There is nothing the administration has done or said so far that gives the impression or even assurance that it understands the issues involved and what its responses should be. Having become fixated with taking indirect orders from the West, and having fallen in love with everything Western, the administration was too petrified to respond firmly and proactively to the protest as the occasion demanded. It was not until rioters exhausted themselves that the government began to stir itself from its complicit slumber. It made feeble declarations, voiced empty threats, railed disjointedly against the misuse of social media, and carried out even more half-hearted reprisals against the so-called leaders of the EndSARS movement. Years of lethargy and incompetence had saddled the country with weak and unskillful rulers, men who had no inkling what the historical antecedents of the challenges the country faced were, and how great leaders responded to them courageously, even to the point of staking their presidencies and leadership.

    No one should expect a change soon. Nigerians consistently elect wrong leaders, though, as Donald Trump is showing in the United States, such monstrosity is not exclusive to Africans or Nigerians. As pontificated on this column sometime ago, nothing suggests that an earthshaking and revolutionary change in electoral behavior would lead the country to the utopia of their childhood fantasy. Indeed, youths are seeing themselves as a counterpoise to the elders, and somehow, rather than abjure the heresy that wisdom and character are age-related, they have embraced the blatant exaggeration that they are better than the best. But too many demons have been let loose in the past few weeks. If 2023 comes– and it’s a big if, especially going by the unresponsiveness and ineptitude of the current administration — the country’s polarization and terrible dichotomies will likely complicate the elections, if not entirely produce another set of dupes obsessed with realpolitik and exceptionalism, men and women who play ducks and drakes with the affections and susceptibilities of the people.

    The damage to law enforcement is horrendous. It will take a brilliant intervention by a determined and knowing leader to return the Nigeria Police, which was destroyed by decades of poor national leadership, to its primacy in law enforcement. The damage to the country’s national security system is also unimaginable. Years of skewing its leadership and infrastructure to service one part of the country has almost completely eroded it of its integrity and sapped it of the strength and reputation it emerged with after the civil war. Leadership has failed the country very badly, a fact made obvious during and after the EndSARS protest. It is not certain that the administration has even done the hard introspection needed to appreciate the reasons for the distrust of the nation’s security apparatus, or for the mishandling of the protest, or why and how the country was just a hair’s breadth away from total collapse on the scale of Somalia, Liberia, DRC and Sierra Leone.

    Yet, Nigeria is not out of the woods. Both the government and the youths are still digging their heels in, while irresponsible and ignorant commentators have taken sides and are making inflammatory statements. The social media is awash with unrestrained falsehoods, to the joy of anarchists and groups with sometimes conflicting ulterior motives. False narratives of the EndSARS protest and the Lekki tollgate affair are rife, some of them carefully concocted and geared towards predetermined ends. Overall, most Nigerians happily justify their penchant for seeking the intervention of Western countries in their national affairs. Foreign sanctions are the only things Nigerian rulers fear, they surmise. This disgraceful reasoning prompted many groups to invite the International Criminal Court (ICC) into the Lekki affair, even before investigations had been concluded. Some other groups appeal to the European Union to wade in. Many more exult over the British Parliament debating the Nigerian crisis as well as applaud the 81 dons said to have written to the US president-elect Joe Biden to impose travel ban on indicted Nigerian officials.

    The cheapening of Nigeria is obviously not limited to the incompetence with which the internal affairs of Nigeria is handled, nor restricted to the poor reasoning with which commentators and intellectuals view Nigeria’s unraveling.  It extends farther into fatuity. No Western country, as fractured and amoral as most of them have been proved to be, including the US whose embarrassing Achilles’ heel has been exhibited before the whole world on a scale that makes African dictators choke with derision, welcomes foreign countries meddling in their domestic affairs. None of them. Indeed, to Africans, Western countries act as school prefects, punish or threaten vulnerable and sniveling Nigerian leaders with sanctions and travel bans, and extend the same indignity and discourteousness to innocent Nigerians. Nigerians have little self-worth, and it is irritating that they see no virtue in tackling their problems, as gargantuan as they may be, internally.

    Will this piece make any difference? To an incompetent government, this is just gaseous talk which their arrogance will hardly permit them to give attention. To the youths and other social media warriors who are uninterested in the investigative panels or even inconvenient truths, they have made up their minds what narratives to believe, regardless of where the evidence leads. In short the matter has been tried in the media, and only one side to the story is found to be plausible. Nothing anyone says, except of course the West, will matter. And as long as any findings contradict the guilty verdict they have presumed against the other side, it would not matter. Not only do the blatant and provocative narratives continue, the galling exposure of the country to external interventions also intensifies. There will be no end to this abnormality.

    But here is a note of warning. The promoted narratives on social media and to some extent traditional media about the EndSARS protest have split the country and raised suspicions within and among geopolitical zones about the agenda of the promoters. This split is worsening inter-ethnic conflicts, and it is a question of time before it begins to cause tremors in religious circles. Insecurity, already plummeting to a state of anarchy before now, is set to worsen and engulf the country. The government does not have a clue how to stanch the flow of blood. Different groups, including the government, appear to be promoting divergent, complex, sinister and even conflicting agenda. Many groups now temptingly view the possibility of a revolution outside the ballot box as indispensable, and are bracing for ground zero impact. They are poor students of history. In France the 1789 revolution was eventually hijacked, and its promoters put to the guillotine. The original intention and desire of the Russian revolutionaries were truncated by the Soviets, and more than a century later, the bloodshed that cost tens of millions of lives to promote a new economic system has been vitiated by the oligarchy-led capitalism of the modern era. There are scores of other examples.

    Just because there is social tension does not mean a revolution is inevitable. The Ghanaian John Jerry Rawlings example does not come recommended, and in any case has not made that country significantly better than other African countries, regardless of the romanticisation of the late president’s leadership.  Between 1848 and 1849, revolutions swept through many European countries. Britain, like Russia, was exempted, among other reasons, because it had a non-violent Chartist (mass movement driven by the working classes) that championed successful political reform culminating in the Great Reform Bill, and the earlier but fortuitous split of the Conservative Party from which emerged the Liberal Party. The ugly promotion of violence as a tool for intra-elite competition for power in Lagos last month, a paroxysm of rage that has still not been fully investigated let alone punished, was a disservice to the state and a testament to the childish optimism of retrograde politicians. In some alarming ways, that violence is being extrapolated as a solution for the country’s rotten and expensive political system. But as hated as the Buhari administration is, it will not fall without extraordinary and probably unmanageable consequences.

    Nigeria is doubtless facing a huge dilemma. If it does not undertake radical and substantial reforms now, it is uncertain that peace and stability could be midwifed, or that 2023 would be ushered in with a high degree of assurance. The problem indeed is that the current administration is faced with an even much huger dilemma of its own: utter lack of capacity, confusion in government, a largely sycophantic cabinet, disoriented kitchen cabinet withered by financial and administrative fecklessness, powermongering, and the pursuit of ethnic exceptionalism by a coterie of scheming politicians and ethnic and religious champions. It takes a reflective leader to spur the national resolve against the country’s existential challenges. Twice in the past few months, the National Assembly had tried to grab the initiative to do something about the paralysis. But they have been heckled by bigots and stymied by both the enormity of the problem and the resistance from a cantankerous and fractious populace.

    Far worse is the hopeless task of restraining Nigerians from externalizing their disagreements, a disposition that further denudes the little esteem in which the world holds them and portrays them as lacking in appreciation of their manifest destiny as the world’s largest concentration of black people. Nothing will stop them, however, not even shame. No country has the moral right to subject Nigeria to the kind of condescending scrutiny, let alone parliamentary debates, being contemplated or executed by the US and Britain. Imagine how the West would react to former president Goodluck Jonathan refusing to concede after his 2019 presidential election loss. But which African parliament has had the boldness to debate the US conundrum, not to say contemplate sanctions?  If anyone wants to impose travel ban on Nigerian leaders, let them go ahead. It is a shame that for such leaders, travel bans should be the moral and administrative impetus to reform and restructure their country. Could they not on their own assess the urgency of repairing the country’s broken political bridges and economic hedges?

    If 2023 comes, it is hoped that a critical mass would form to help inspire the desperately needed reforms in Nigeria. More, it is hoped that rather than dichotomise the electorate along age lines, both youths and elders would join hands, submit to reason, and vote into office visionaries made of steel and possessing character. It is not puritans they need, men whose sham religiosity is designed to impress by superficial artifices and gestures. What they need are brilliant and courageous men who can look any world power in the face, and understand why they are doing so, and are capable of changing, stabilising and unshackling the country’s developmental potential.

  • APC bent on self-destruction

    APC bent on self-destruction

    By Idowu Akinlotan

    It is doubtful whether any political party is as consumed with a passion for intrigues as the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Formed in 2013 from a coalition of three legacy political parties, individuals, parties themselves, and various tendencies have jostled for control or supremacy. The jostling has proved interminable. In June, its boisterous national chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, was overthrown, and a caretaker committee put in place to reconcile feuding members and organize a national convention in six months. In the president’s statement supporting the radical, and some say unconstitutional, change in June, he was careful to avoid a timeline. But it was generally understood that the Mai Mala Buni caretaker committee had a six-month mandate to complete its assignment.

    Now, it has turned out that a controversial extension is in the offing, especially with the added assignment of validating old and registering new members, a task not only self-assigned, but also sanctioned by the president. On the surface, the entire process is altruistic and even logical. But underneath reeks the intrigues that have dogged the party since its formation and pockmarked its early existence after its famous and unprecedented victory.

    What is clear is that a tendency within the party has the upper hand today. That tendency, constituted mainly by governors, will press its advantage, emasculate the other tendencies, reinforce its capture of the party organ, and intrigue for the 2023 presidential election. But that tendency shot itself in the foot when it abandoned the Edo APC governorship campaign in September. Amoral, indiscriminate and ruthless, it has little interest in any rapprochement, and will stop at nothing until its enemies are vanquished, pyrrhic victory or not. But no party, not even the extraordinary Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), got away with such murder. The APC will hope to buck the trend.

  • Nigeria’s debt binge migrates to Brazil

    Nigeria’s debt binge migrates to Brazil

    By Idowu Akinlotan

    There is little anyone can do to dissuade the Buhari administration from bingeing on loans. It continues to argue that Nigeria experiences a huge infrastructural deficit which it has set itself the task of bridging in the shortest possible time. It gorges on Chinese loans, and is now determined to go to Brazil for more. When the Goodluck Jonathan presidency ended, Nigeria’s external loan stock was just under $10bn. Now, it has risen to some $27bn, an increase of nearly $17bn, much of it secured in the first term of the Buhari administration. It is still early days in President Buhari’s second term. Given its propensity for loans, it is not certain just how high the stock would rise, especially given the culture of a government which seems to think it must bridge the country’s infrastructure gap in eight dizzying years. It is its idea of leaving a legacy.

    Though the country’s external debt to GDP remains under 10%, which is well below global benchmarks, the country nevertheless spends some $1.5bn to service the current debt level. Moreover, it appears determined to also borrow an additional $6.5bn from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), of course based on tough conditionalities. When Nigeria exited the Paris Club of creditors in 2005, the external debt stock was about $3.5bn. It has now grown by more than $24bn in a decade and a half. Worse, according to the Finance minister, Zainab Mohammed, the government wants to add an agriculture loan of $1.2bn from Brazil to build farms for food production. The idea was first announced by the Information minister, Lai Mohammed, and Agriculture minister, Sabo Nanono, back in June.

    The two ministers provided the details of what the loan would accomplish. As reported in the media at the time, particularly by Premium Times, the Brazil loan would do the following:

    1. The programme is worth $1.2 billion and will be implemented over a period of five to 10 years.
    2. Funding for the programme will come from the Development Bank of Brazil and Deutsche Bank, with insurance provided by Brazilian Guarantees and Fund Managements Agency and the Islamic Corporation for Insurance of Export Credit of the Islamic Development Bank, and coordinated by Getúlio Vargas Foundation.
    3. The programme will import the completely knocked down parts of about 5,000 tractors and numerous implements (for local assembly) annually for a period of 10 years.
    4. See to the establishment of 142 agro processing service centres for value addition, with one centre in each senatorial district.
    5. Establishment of 632 mechanisation service centres to support primary production in the 774 local government areas and the Federal Capital Territory. This will create 774 service centres nationwide to mechanise farming methods and process or add value to farm produce locally, leading to efficiency and eliminating post-harvest losses, thereby cutting down cost of food all year round, according to the Minister.
    6. Create about five million jobs and inject over $10 billion into the economy within 10 years.

    In theory, it sounds appealing. But deep down, it reflects the absence of a coherent and engaging economic policy. The Nigerian economy overall is in other words devoid of coherence and consistency. To the government there are no innovative ways of financing projects other than contracting loans, and most of the projects are islands to themselves. Running the economy and government has become a crippling and disorderly exercise quite incapable of lifting Nigerians from poverty. The result is that alienation has increased, and insecurity has become the bane of development. Indeed, since 2015, the government has been unable to meet its employment generation goals. Clearly, a major crisis may be brewing, especially when instead of regulating agriculture, the federal government has unwisely decided to also participate in food production under the pretext of increasing employment. The Brazil loan, like much of the Chinese loans to build Nigerian railway, is financially reckless and superfluous.

  • Republic’ll be ruined without fresh insight and deep innovations

    Republic’ll be ruined without fresh insight and deep innovations

    Idowu Akinlotan

     

    For the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, the EndSARS crisis was just the latest, but probably the strongest and most revealing, manifestation in a long list of crises inundating the country and befuddling the government itself. But like all the other problems the administration has tried to grapple with since it was first inaugurated in 2015, there has been no depth or imagination in tackling it. It is humbling. The EndSARS crisis, as destructive as it ended after it was hijacked, has not led the government into the kind of thoroughness and understanding required to state the problem fairly accurately and find appropriate or at least relevant solutions. The country is thus unlikely respond to it with the hindsight and foresight necessary to stave off a future reoccurrence.

    The same desultory response has been summoned to meet other pressing challenges confronting the country. The pressing challenges did not of course begin with the Buhari administration, but what is the need focusing on past administrations when the current administration has had more than six years to make a considerable impact on those challenges? The EndSARS crisis is just an exemplification of the criminal negligence and incompetence with which the leadership elite has approached governance. So far, the government has focused more on placating the youths, believing that refusing to engage with them for years was a major part of the crisis. Consequently, state governments and ministries have scheduled meetings and discussions with the youths, to hear them, and to resolve to consciously initiate their involvement in the economy and governance. The youths themselves have somehow given the impression that involving them in the affairs of the country should do the trick.

    Lost in the din of activities and noise is the main trigger of the youth revolt: police brutality, particularly by the anti-robbery squad. It is typical. Unlike scientists who are taught that a solution is as good as the precision with which the problem is framed, the Nigerian government has approached the EndSARS crisis, like it does all other crises, with all the speciousness and cavalierism it is capable of. There has, therefore, been no rational explanation from either the youths or government about the crisis, not to talk of finding the right solution. Somehow, both the youths and government think that involving the younger generation in governance and enacting various investment schemes which youths could take advantage of would forestall a future occurrence of EndSARS. Both groups, in short, encourage the artificial dichotomy built into the narration of the crisis — that youths are alienated from a system monopolized by elders. But this is an unrealistic argument.

    There are two major components of the EndSARS crisis: the protest against police brutality and impunity, which protesters needlessly expanded to include other grievances; and the violent but planned attacks on targeted institutions and organizations, some of them either publicly or privately owned. So far, nearly all the steps taken by the government to respond to the crisis have conflated the two components, diffused and diluted the panaceas, and created both an inaccurate narrative of the crisis as well as exposed it to misinformed solutions. Worse, both planks overlap dangerously at a point where the protesters themselves calculatingly misrepresented their protests on social media in order to promote a curious agenda. It is impossible to tackle the first plank of the crisis, that is, police failings, without a scientific understanding of the foundations of the crisis and its ramifying consequences. The right questions must be asked, and a clear understanding of the problem deduced in order to move forward.

    Replacing the anti-robbery squad is merely a change of name. Paying them higher wages is simply scratching the problem on the surface. And supervising the new organ more professionally is nothing but an unsustainable pledge. The problem with the police, including its anti-robbery squad, is fundamental, systemic and structural. The police cannot be isolated from the country or insulated from national chaos when the entire society is in dire need of radical and fundamental change. Even the constitution itself, weakened by too much borrowing from other cultures, and too ponderous and expensive to operate, does not conduce to the better society of the youths’ idealism and the leadership elite’s conservatism. Already, police operatives feel abandoned by their superiors, hated by the country, ignored by the government, and scared to return to their beats, having lost face with everyone it seemed, and bitter about being blamed for everything. Mutual recriminations are bound to continue between the people and their police. Alarmingly, what the country seems to be grappling with is not just a case of broken police force or even the malevolence of a divisive and sectional Buhari administration, but all-round incompetence by a government improperly staffed and poorly equipped to deliver good, modern and progressive governance.

    The government has also approached the second plank of the protest, that is, the violence and the looting, with the worst incompetence any administration can muster. Has the administration asked itself why the security system collapsed so suddenly thereby exposing the country to so much targeted and deliberate violence and lawlessness? The intelligence community failed the country; but why and how? More crucially, what is the administration doing to expose the brains behind the orchestrated violence, in order to stave off allegations that the government might be complicit? Weeks after the violence and looting, there has been no explanation about what happened and the identity of those behind the burning of Lagos and destruction of other parts of the country. The firmness and resolve that should encourage citizens about how seriously the government takes its responsibility of security have been lacking, and even the police, who lost more than 20 officers and scores of police stations looted and burnt, have felt abandoned.

    There is little doubt now that Nigeria has the misfortune of being governed by a very complacent, if not antiquated, elite who are wholly unsuitable for the demands of the modern era. The crying need of Nigeria is for a government which sees beyond the surface, analyses issues dispassionately, possesses the resolve to tackle complex challenges, and thinks and acts proactively. The political template operated by the country has obviously led to the election of the wrong persons into office, and there is nothing to suggest that cultural and religious biases would still not expose the country to miscarried elections and emergence of megalomaniacal candidates in the near future. This is why restructuring, which is still being foolishly resisted, is indispensable and inevitable. If nothing is done to restructure the country, a better outcome cannot be guaranteed, and peace and stability, not to talk of development, will remain elusive.

    Closely leashed with this second plank of the EndSARS crisis is the welter of problems afflicting the country, problems consistently misdiagnosed and attacked with the wrong remedies. Banditry, kidnapping, insurgency, and the general breakdown of security in nearly all parts of the country demand new approaches to these problems, approaches underscored by new thinking, better scientific appraisals, and clear-eyed appreciation of the psychology of both the rebels and the alienated subverting the system. Just as the administration has not done a comprehensive autopsy on the EndSARS crisis, including the violence that followed it and the terrible overlap that served as a bridge between the protesters and the sponsored thugs who brought the country to its knees for almost a week, there is no indication that the government feels the indispensability of carrying out a major diagnosis of the insecurity that has overtaken the country, not to talk of finding the appropriate solutions. This is one of the reasons insecurity and insurgency have lasted for so, and why ineffective solutions, particularly military response, have been deployed as a one-size -fits-all solution.

    Nigeria is being primed for a terrible blowout, and the government seems to be at a loss. The problem predates the COVID-19 lockdown and the economic crisis it triggered. The problem is not just about the obscene and unbearable weight of government, it is also about ethnicity, religion, unrestrained population growth, shrinking Lake Chad, and other deep and structural problems that require reflection, foresight, dispassion, courage and resilience. The bad news is that the anticipated explosion is not a question of whether it will happen; going by the indifference, impotence and incompetence of government, it is a question of when and by what means the explosion will occur. If the government fears the worst, it should speak out and reassure the public that it understands the looming crisis and knows what to do. But so far nothing indicates that the government knows what to do or that it even has the capacity, intellectual and administrative, to tackle the crisis as the republic is primed for disaster, a foretaste of which EndSARS provided.

  • Lessons from youth revolt

    Lessons from youth revolt

    By Idowu Akinlotan

    For Nigerian youths, the urge to set up a political party may be nothing more than a passing fancy. When it comes to the nitty-gritty, they will discover that the exotic interplay of digital media and convivial street protests pale into nothingness beside both the violence and hooliganism that inadvertently followed their street action and the bewildering intricacies of party formation and representation. Gradually, the youths may be learning the very first lesson from the EndSARS protest, to wit, that every revolt needs recognisable leaders who must take responsibility, give commands and determine the scope and timing of the revolt, and set parameters beyond which no one would be permitted to go. By failing on all these fronts, despite having a laudable cause, the youths may have unwittingly jeopardised the objectives of their protest, and strengthened the hands of the government and the law enforcement agencies whose sheer brutality, incompetence, dereliction of duty, and inept supervision of the security agencies triggered the revolt in the first instance.

    The government may have opened dialogue with the youths, but this conciliatory move has not forbidden the security agencies from witch-hunting the leaders of the protest, strangulating their finances, and taking sterner measures to ensure that further and subsequent protests either never get off the ground or miscarry very badly. The protest’s putative leaders are going to find out just how perilous it is to swim against the tide, a culture past protest leaders like Gani Fawehinmi, Tai Solarin and others embraced and braved to the death. One of the reasons the EndSARS protesters stayed on the streets far longer than necessary was their distrust of a government whose often glib commitment to agreements tend to end in fiasco. The youths were right. The government can hardly be trusted. But having lost the initiative to vandals in late October, it is now even harder for the youths to reconvene protesters, let alone imbue them with the substance and vigour needed to give their protest traction. They will begin to find out how difficult it is in the age of new media to lead a revolt incognito, and just how lonely it is when a cruel and incorrigible government has someone in its crosshairs. They must now also begin to explore other ways of influencing politics and elections going forward.

    By going after the protest’s leaders so pertinaciously, as the government is doing without scruples, Nigerian youths may see future protests, particularly the civilised kind, as futile and counterproductive. But since protest and dissent are integral to democracy and indeed any human organisation, they may in future take even more violent and sinister turn, given the abhorrent culture of intolerance and impunity being imposed by the government. The youths may be partly responsible for this dangerous and insidious turn of events, they were nevertheless not responsible for creating the conditions that necessitated the protests nor did they mastermind the violence that followed their revolt. The youths may not have shown maturity in organising and ending the protest, but the government has been even more culpable in failing to tackle the whole matter in the nuanced and proactive manner required of them. Indeed the strong-arm with which the government is now tackling the post-protest issues raised by the youths is tantamount to sending the wrong message of official indifference and intolerance. The protests raised pertinent socio-political and even existential issues; but the government has seemed to focus more on what officials see as the impertinence of the youths.

    By all considerations, the federal government handled the protest, like it manages the country, desultorily and incompetently. There is no indication in the flurry of the post-protest actions of the government that it has asked itself why the country’s security system collapsed so spectacularly both during the peaceful and bloody parts of the protest. And because it has not shown any capacity for the introspection that leads to admission of fault and the ineluctable corrections that produce better governance, no steps have been taken that gives the country confidence that future protests can be anticipated and handled far better than was seen in October. If this government is capable at all of learning any lesson from the EndSARS protest, it is that Nigeria’s security system is hopelessly inadequate, antiquated and unprofessional. Not only is it lacking in modern equipment, its fundamental and undergirding paradigms are deeply provocative and next to useless. The failure of the country’s security system manifested at two dangerous, systemic and interrelated levels.

    The first is the composition of the security system. In recent decades, particularly starting with the Gen Ibrahim Babangida military dictatorship, the country’s security system became skewed in favour of one ethnic group, particularly after the botched coup d’état masterminded by some Middle Belt officers. The Olusegun Obasanjo government may have arrested the terrible skewness, but soon it took on added and apocalyptic vim after the inauguration of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency. Since 2015, Nigeria’s security system became reposed in the hands of one ethnic group, became inaccessible to other ethnic groups, and was cataclysmically unable to represent or anticipate the opinions and perspectives of the other sections of the country. Thus distorted and dysfunctional, it neither understood the revolt brewing nor accurately gauged its import when it broke out. Panic was inevitable.

    With over 250 ethnic groups, some of them hosting cultures that are combustive and mutually exclusive, Nigeria needed a security system that was fairly representative, competent, deep and empathetic. It is doubtful whether the Buhari presidency understands how openly the government and the security agencies voice dictatorial and unrepresentative views of the country’s security challenges and panaceas. Until the government takes care of the skewness of the security system, there is little hope that it can appreciate the weaknesses and failings of the system in place. A few years back, the country was faced with the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) challenge. The government responded with uncommon brutality. A more representative security system would both have devised a better way of handling the challenge and concomitantly weaken it had the Southeast seen an Igbo man or two in the highest echelons of the nation’s security system.

    The security system also collapsed because it was poorly equipped to deal with the kind of challenge that manifested in widespread looting and vandalism. Suddenly the government seemed to appreciate the terrible alienation that suffused the country, and the woeful inadequacy of the military and the police to deal with hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers running riot all over the country as an army and at the same time. It is meaningless moralising on whether the looting reflected the country’s moral squalor or the lethargy and dysfunction in government. It was clear that the country teetered on the brink, and neither the government nor anyone else was competent to determine how far on the edge the country had sauntered. Nothing suggests that next time, an invisible restraining hand would materialise. The country was fortunate in October not to descend into chaos. Given its incompetent post-protest measures, the government has obviously done little reflection on the complex socio-economic and political issues that led to October’s conflagration.

    What is even worse is that the law enforcement agencies who directly triggered the protest have also learnt nothing. They lost about 22 officers and over 250 police stations burnt. But they seem to dissociate their initial criminal policing, particularly as perpetrated by their anti-robbery squad (SARS), from the inexcusable reprisal by frustrated and angry Nigerians. The two are deeply interwoven, and it requires the police and the security agencies to take the first significant and ameliorating step to reconcile with aggrieved citizens. Not the other way round. Instead, the police are busy mouthing their distaste for protests, a constitutional right that cannot be alienated. They are also threatening hail and fire, when they should be immersed in confidence building. Indeed, nothing indicates that the law enforcement agencies have learnt anything.

    There are indications that the government has started to hunt for those who deployed social media for sinister purposes. It is the right thing to do. No one should be allowed to hide under the guise of protests or the near anonymity of social media to perpetrate information violence or instigate hatred and violence. Fortunately, the perpetrators left their trails and signatures on the social media, trails the agents of government should follow to expose those who created conditions for the violence that convulsed the country in October. More importantly, those who looted and vandalised public and private properties should also be exposed and brought to book. Nothing excuses them, and their trails are also all over the social media. However, typical of this government, it appears set to embrace excessive measures, including regulating the social media and making provisions for disproportionate fines and punishment. It is enough that purveyors of fake news and hate speech be exposed and prosecuted. They should rightly be held accountable. But anything else is an overkill. And for a government whose incompetence and lackadaisical approach to governance has expanded the population of the poor and the frustrated, it is more urgent for them to assemble the right calibre of experts to look more dispassionately at the country’s problem, including the youth crisis and educational paralysis. One thing the government does not have is time, as the October protests, looting and vandalism show.

    Importantly too, in case the presidency is capable of mustering the will, it must now see how to include the ruling party, on which platform it won in 2015 and 2019, in running the country. The presidency has treated the party as a pariah, completely distancing the government from the party’s stabilising and galvanising capabilities. In turn, when the October protest broke, the party, already weakened and dismembered, and its voice made hoary and inaudible by years of neglect, played only a perfunctory role. After all, some of its members also participated in the rampant looting and vandalism that painted October as a red, sanguinary month.

  • Biden win: America returns to normality

    Biden win: America returns to normality

    By Idowu Akinlotan

    The world was exultant yesterday as Joe Biden of the Democratic Party won the United States presidential election defeating President Donald Trump of the Republican Party with about 290 Electoral College votes and a plurality of more than 74 million. The victory marks a return to normality, a reversal of the conflictive and divisive aberration that hallmarked the Trump presidency. Europe, Asia, Middle East, South America, indeed the whole world, will now heave a great sigh of relief. Even China and Russia would be tired of the lies, bluster, spontaneity, irrationality and eccentricity of Mr Trump, who was before 2016 and in the early months of his presidency their darling.

    But Africa, including Nigeria, will now have to sit up. Mr Trump had condescendingly described them in unprintable terms and then ignored them altogether. On the contrary, Mr Biden will pay attention to the continent, and insist on the propagation and defence of the traditional principles that undergird US relations with Africa’s reluctant and sometimes renegade democracies. Overall, it is a good time to be alive in the US. But Mr Biden will have to grapple, hopefully successfully, with the terrifying undertow of Trumpian politics that unsheathed the racial and supremacist side of America in the past four years.