Category: Idowu Akinlotan

By Idowu Akinlotan

Month after month, the killings in Southern Kaduna have continued relentlessly. The problem began years ago, predating the current state government, and there has been no let-up since then. There are occasional flare-ups that propel the gory issue to the front pages of newspapers, otherwise the bloodletting has been consistent, low on the Richter scale, and uncontrollable. Southern Kaduna indigenes, speaking through their umbrella bodies, Southern Kaduna Elders Forum (SOKAF) and Southern Kaduna Peoples Union (SOKAPU), insist herdsmen and Fulani irredentists plan and execute the attacks as a deliberate plot to dispossess the indigenes of their lands. Herdsmen, and latterly the state government under Nasir el-Rufai, argue that reprisal attacks are the dominant leitmotif of the violence in that part of the state.

Gradually, however, Mallam el-Rufai, perhaps not aware of just how surely but imperceptibly he has shifted position on the issue, has told the media that banditry, from which Kaduna State is not insulated in the North, and tit-for-tat attacks are responsible for the problem. Before now, he had suggested that herdsmen avenging the killing of their people and cattle authored the reprisal attacks. He had once intervened, he said glibly and condescendingly, negotiated with the aggrieved herdsmen, and paid them for their losses to keep the peace. That peace has, however, been very difficult to keep, a logjam that should have led the governor to get to the bottom of the crisis and find lasting solutions, assuming he was committed to peace as he wails.

Both the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the indigenes of Southern Kaduna are unconvinced that the governor is impartial in the crisis. They think he has acted, spoken and intervened in a manner that suggests he has taken sides. Unfortunately, as this column frequently noted, the governor has not always acted dispassionately in the crisis. There is nothing to show he will or can be different. Too many graphic details of killings in the area put the lie to the governor’s conclusions, and cast grave doubt on his impartiality. It is unlikely the state as a whole relishes the killings, but they will have to look beyond Mallam el-Rufai for a solution. The governor does not have the neutrality or leadership quality, or even the temperament, to stanch the flow of blood and restore peace to that troubled area of the state.

Appalled by the governor’s self-righteousness and intemperate language, SOKAF last week asked President Muhammadu Buhari to call him to order “to live up to the tenets of his office as the state’s chief security officer”. Without saying it, the elders probably see how Governor Aminu Masari of Katsina State has approached the problem of banditry in his state, and believe that even if the Southern Kaduna crisis were triggered by banditry, the response of Mallam el-Rufai was still one-sided, if not laid-back. Southern Kaduna elders were reasonable to appeal to higher authorities to call the Kaduna governor to order, but it is unlikely the feds will do anything different from the governor, seeing how their analysis of the crisis has tallied with that of the governor.

In a tendentious statement issued by presidential spokesman Garba Shehu, the presidency has judged the crisis to be one of reprisal attacks, a problem, they insist, that “is more complex than many people are willing to admit”. With that mindset, and given the influence Mallam el-Rufai is thought to wield over the presidency, Southern Kaduna should prepare for a long-drawn crisis and hope that in a country where leadership has proved to be distant and dismally poor, they can survive till someone with depth and neutrality take a closer look at the problem and find just means of restoring peace. Last week’s show-of-force by security agents, a tactless approach to a serious and fundamental problem, was presaged by unduly optimistic statements made by military officers endorsing the governor’s perspective and conclusions. It is, therefore, not pessimistic to think that the Southern Kaduna killings will remain protracted; it is indeed realism to encourage the leaders of that besieged area to moderate their expectations.

By Idowu Akinlotan

 

IT is doubtful whether anyone in the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and the Niger Delta Affairs ministry can paint an accurate picture of the contract and financial bazaar unnerving and overwhelming the two institutions. The forensic audit team put together to unearth the sordid facts relating to the sleaze will give it their best shot; but even they will likely end up tilting at windmills. The House of Representatives is also probing the bazaar, but the drama that has suffused the probe, especially the fainting spells and brickbats enacted before the public by both the minister, Godswill Akpabio, and boss of the commission, Keme Pondei, has made Nigerians increasingly sceptical that something clarifying and cathartic will emerge from the effort to sanitise the distressed public institutions.

Already the disclosures and counterattacks in the media and legislative hearings have forced a tentative stalemate. The stalemate began when former boss of the NDDC, Joi Nunieh, crossed swords with Senator Akpabio, complete with unearthing sleazy financial deals and malfeasances, and tantalising the public with ancillary stories and allegations of a lovesick and lovelorn minister as well as a vixenish and duplicitous woman passing off as a prude. As if these were not damning enough, no one is even sure what figures of financial malfeasance everyone is talking about. Is it N81bn that has been squirreled away into some rat holes, or is it trillions of naira, or the more modest — by Nigerian standards — N41bn? What is indisputable, however, is that smaller billions of naira, some of them a little more than one billion, and others a little bigger than two or three billions, have been proved to have been taken brazenly from both approved and unapproved budgets of the commission.

While Nigerians were still trying to decipher just what was taken away unlawfully from the NDDC till and by whom, they were cruelly called upon to also determine who was telling the truth between the national lawmakers probing the bazaar and the ministry and commission officials called to testify before the committee of the lower house. It got worse. It turned out, according to Sen Akpabio, that a significant portion of the deals scarifying the objectives and building blocks of the commission was actually authored by the legislature purporting to probe the putrid deals. In testifying before the committee, the voluble Mr Akpabio who seldom gives quarter to his adversaries, as Ms Nunieh probably knows by now, was both cynical and ruthless in his accusations. But stung to the quick, and regardless of one recusal or the other, the combative lower chamber has fought back to reclaim their pride. They asked the glib Mr Akpabio to name names or recant. He has recanted in terms that are so feeble as to pass for reiteration.

What is not in doubt is that a bazaar took place, and that many top Nigerians, including national lawmakers and the police, helped themselves to the soup pot almost without restraint. The details of the bazaar are disgraceful and despair inducing. For instance, in pursuing Ms Nunieh into the dead of the night, the police have insisted that they had a petition to work with for which they needed the harried former NDDC boss to help them unravel details. They were not ruffled by the fact that they seemed to have taken sides, nor explained why they invaded her residence everyone else slept. Many more people will take sides, for no one knows where the trails lead. In fact, a hasty panel has recommended the scrapping of the Interim Management Committee of the commission in order, as they suppose, to allow unhindered investigations into the affairs of the agency.

It is also clear that the Niger Delta has been short-changed. Both the ministry dedicated to their affairs and the NDDC were designed to ameliorate their deplorable social and economic conditions. But both have failed spectacularly, not because they were irredeemably defective in their structures, but because the country’s superstructure and its woefully incompetent and expensive system of government both make the tragedy inevitable. The NDDC is not the only marker for the national fiasco confronting and numbing Nigerians. After all, that institution is Nigerian and run by Nigerians. Virtually every institution and organisation, particularly those saddled with the responsibility of ameliorating the conditions of poor Nigerians and empowered with tons of cash, have been profaned by their administrators in collusion with the top elite. There is no exception.

It is a poor reading of the problem to put the fault down solely to those appointed to manage the affairs of infrastructural development and poverty alleviation institutions, regardless of the connivance of higher-ups in every stratum and arm of government. The bazaars did not begin yesterday, and for all anyone cares, will not end tomorrow until Nigerian leaders read their country’s developmental problems correctly and take firm and progressive steps to curb them. But there is little chance that a correct reading of the problematic issues will happen soon. There was some initial enthusiasm that with the change of guards in 2015, new leaders with keen, altruistic minds and sense of history would take charge, men hungry for name and a place in history. That hope was sadly betrayed as soon as the crown settled around their ears. It was necessary that they define the problem first, then design a new philosophy of government and governance, away from the prebendal and primordial past, and finally go at the issues hammer and tongs.

Instead, Nigerians were shocked to be confronted by the cruellest return to the ethnic and religious cleavages of the past, one in which policies were designed to promote exceptionalism. Opportunities were, therefore, missed, and appointees were promoted and made untouchable on account of their connections and even births. When situations compelled a revisit of the country’s agrarian policies years back, the review prompted warped policies that protect and promote a few against the interests of the many. Whole villages in Plateau and Benue have been wiped out, resettled and even renamed, but the government has feigned disinterest or ignorance. Government is a sacred trust, so scared as to transcend even religion. But it has been impossible for those who find themselves in government designing national policies and implementing national paradigms to divorce themselves from their ethnic and religious roots. Witness, for instance, the grand conspiracy bathing Southern Kaduna in blood, and the quibbling heroics of the state’s self-righteous and cocksure governor Nasir el-Rufai. The federal government is not getting it right, so too are the states.

Many analysts subscribe to the dubiety that once you expose and jail those who misuse public funds the country would be sanitised. This is far-fetched, as indeed Nigerians are gradually and helplessly reconciling themselves to, especially given the allegations of graft levelled against the Justice minister and even some heads of the anti-graft agencies. The problem is hydra-headed and much deeper than previously imagined. Neither the Muhammadu Buhari government nor its predecessors, including the somewhat patriotic and assiduous Olusegun Obasanjo government, has produced a governing philosophy for the country. Nigeria, put simply, does not have a raison d’être. Its core, despite plagiarising and crudely grafting the United States constitution upon itself, is hollow through and through. Its leaders have not given the country a reason to be together, and have, despite decades of frictions and wars, done very little to work on those reasons. The country’s ambition is low, and its leaders desperately mediocre.

It is, therefore, not surprising that without a concise and inspiring philosophy of government, and regardless of its cut-and-paste constitution, its national government, state governments, lawmakers, and sundry appointees have absolutely no emotional connections with the country, and no sense of obligation to its great and noble causes. Put different people in the NDDC, even scrap it and replace it with another similar organ, or put it under the presidency, the outcome, as is evident from the disorder and looting rampant in other institutions dedicated to lifting the poor from hopelessness, will remain the same. The whole NDDC probe exercise is a waste of time. Why don’t they probe NNPC? It is clear now that few people in government owe Nigeria any obligation. They will continue to purloin its wealth and rape it over and over again. Is this pessimism? Certainly not. Can propaganda help induce some form of patriotism in citizens? Arrant rubbish. They tried many national orientation programmes in the past, and failed miserably. It should be clear by now that something cannot be built on nothing.

Despite the Donald Trump aberration in the US, America knows what it wants, first with itself as propounded by the framers of its constitution, and then for itself as it fortuitously discovered after World War I. Since the chairmanship of Mao Zedong, China has had both a keen sense of history and an even keener sense of manifest destiny. Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Britain, France, among others — and for reasons explored several times on this column — know what they want and can define themselves within the context of themselves and their histories as well as their regions. They may not always demonstrate it expertly, but Ghana, Egypt and Libya had also at one time or the other also demonstrated some competitiveness, under Kwame Nkrumah, Gamel Abdel Nasser, and Muammer Ghaddafi respectively. But what does Nigeria want? And has it defined itself, let alone know what it wants? Why is she shocked by the killings in Kaduna and the gibberish of its governor, the land grab in the Middle Belt, the alienation of the Southeast, the rape of the Niger Delta, the subversion of the judiciary and legislature, the politics of exclusion and intrigues in respect of the presidency, the wholesale looting of high-budget institutions, the promotion of ethnic exceptionalism and religious bigotry by cynical national manipulators who have very little or no leadership quality?

But the question is not whether the current government will do something about these issues or rise to the noble heights expected of it, but whether the next presidency will find ways of merging a newly curated national political structure with a high-quality governing philosophy. The current government cannot produce the needed magic, for it is too steeped in the past to even try. The danger is whether, like its predecessors, this government will also not try to birth a successor moulded in its own ineffective and disabling image.

Nigerians should enjoy the NDDC probe theatre for all it is worth and while it lasts, as a side attraction that produces mirth and relief from the humdrum of eking out a daily existence in an unforgiving country. If they can, let them look at the politics of 2023 as probably the last chance to produce a president who, while not necessarily being a saint, possesses the visionary depth and power of imagination to remould Nigeria and imbue it with a sense of purpose, and with a regional and continental manifest destiny.

In the name of God, the killings and institutional subversion going on should drive all Nigerians to abandon the nativism that has served them very badly, and to embrace the higher ideals that deflate their divisions. Maintaining the present course will set the country up for inevitable fragmentation; for no country can so recklessly and foolishly fly in the face of providence, as Nigeria has done for decades, without attracting grave and irreparable consequences.

 

 

By Idowu Akinlotan

 

PREDICTABLY, the death of Ismaila Isa Funtua, the 78-year-old eminent and distinguished newspaper publisher and self-confessed member of the cabal believed to wield tremendous influence over the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, has attracted saccharine obituaries from nearly every part of Nigeria. The presidency has cooed over him, and former military head of state Ibrahim Babangida has also gushed. So too has ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo. Mallam Isa deserves all the praise, for he identified very closely with and advanced the interest of the media in Nigeria. But he is not alone in that select group, nor the most accomplished and revered.

But he remained controversial, particularly in the past few years, for allegedly wielding so much unhealthy influence over the Buhari presidency and profiting from it. No one is perfect, and the Nigerian Press Organisation (NPO), owners of the newly renovated Nigerian Institute of Journalism (NIJ) House on Victoria Island reserves the right to do whatever they please with their building. They have, therefore, renamed the building as Mallam Ismaila Isa House. Here is how they justified the renaming: “For his untiring contributions to the development of Journalism and Freedom of the Press in Nigeria and around the world, it is the privilege of the Nigerian Press Organisation  Newspapers’ Proprietors Association of Nigeria ( NPAN), Nigerian Guild of Editors ( NGE) and The Nigerian Union of Journalists ( NUJ)  to name the newly rebuilt Nigerian Institute of Journalism House, Adeyemo Alakija Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, as ISMAILA ISA HOUSE to honour the life and times of Mallam Ismaila Isa Funtua, OFR, Mni, who died on Monday, July 20, 2020 after a life of dedicated service to Nigeria that spanned politics, business and media. His contributions to the development of journalism is innumerable: including, but not limited to his co-founding of Democrat Newspapers; presidency of the NPAN at a time of national crises, and later a life patron; services to the international Press Institute where he served on the global board; contributions to journalism education as Chairman of the Governing Council of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism…”

Mallam Isa died on Monday, and the renaming was announced on Thursday. He was one of their own, and a special one for that matter. But the speed with which he was immortalised ignored or downplayed the controversies around his person and business, and makes nonsense of the undergirding ethics, moral fibre and propelling principles by which the media rightly claims superiority over financial power and political hegemony. Even for a media umbrella group such as the NPO, the renaming was sickeningly hasty.

The NPO has not indicated when they held the virtual conference that sanctioned the said renaming, nor have the component parts of the organisation revealed when they held their own meetings to agree to the proposition, let alone empower the NPO to embark on its naming ceremony. But even if they can prove, with minutes of meetings, that they all unanimously agreed to the renaming, it still wouldn’t make it right. Mallam Isa was one of their own, yes, but the hasty immortalisation is curious, faulty, indecent and disrespectful of the Nigerian media they pretend to honour and safeguard. They should have allowed for more time for the controversies around the late gentleman to settle, and for a sensible assessment of his time and contributions to the media and the nation to be properly contextualised.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Despite its best efforts to keep up appearances, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is in far worse shape than its leaders publicly acknowledge. Party leaders fear that it will take them time to get over the ripple effects of the sack of the Adams Oshiomhole-led National Working Committee (NWC), for too many things were done before and during the sack that are certain to create their own aftershocks.

Now the perceptive among them must also entertain the premonition that the composition of the Ondo governorship primary election committee may in fact symptomise the damage already done to the soul of the party, far more than the careless handling of its NWC dissolution. A few days to the Ondo governorship primary, the Mai Mala Buni-led caretaker convention committee announced that Kogi State governor, Yahaya Bello, would chair the contentious Ondo primary. Mr Bello? And without any chance to object?

Yes, the selfsame Governor Bello, probably the most anti-democratic governor in Nigeria today, and the one who holds science in contempt. Many things are wrong with the decision by the APC to hand over the conduct of the Ondo primary to a governor unworthy of his office and democracy. First, he is an interested party in the primary, being a friend of one of the contestants, Governor Rotimi Akeredolu.

It is inconceivable that the APC leaders are ignorant of that fact. Perhaps, it was even intentional, for the men who control the party today are the same band of politicians who fomented rebellion against Mr Oshiomhole and overthrew him with the help of the presidency and the courts. Both the rebellion and the coup were unrelated to any ideological struggles within the party. The same coterie of politicians probably stage-managed the appointment of Mr Bello to make double sure that their agenda does not miscarry.

Second, even if there was no preconceived agenda, the APC ought to be mindful of the image of their party and needed to absolutely disallow someone with dubious democratic and leadership credentials from conducting a primary, any primary election for that matter. Mr Bello does not just exhibit contempt for democracy, he loves intrigues and adores realpolitik.

He has no ideology, sneers at democratic processes, possesses very elastic conscience, believes everybody has a price which he is more than willing to pay, and has perfected the posture of a politician not averse to electoral violence. He is himself a product of the most violent and disorderly governorship election in recent years — the November 2019 Kogi governorship election, which the courts implied they needed the Hubble space telescope to confirm. It is a measure of the detachment of APC leaders, not to say the emptiness of their values and principles, that they disregarded the violent conduct of the Kogi governorship poll to make the beneficiary of that poll the chairman of the Ondo primary election.

If the APC leaders could not be dissuaded by the friendship between Mr Akeredolu and Mr Bello, nor be disturbed by the Kogi governor’s antecedents, what else might convince them that it would be damaging, if not entirely futile, to press ahead with the Ondo primary as they conceived it last week? Could their principles and ideology not prick their consciences? The party of course does not represent everything about Nigeria, certainly not the country’s culture, nor its conscience, nor its politics, nor its principles.

But because they are the ruling party, surely they must feel a little sense of shame to ride roughshod over the country by their flagrant and reckless display of political shenanigans. Perhaps not. However, they are at liberty to throw in their lot with Mr Akeredolu and to do everything to engineer his victory, regardless of oposition. In the circumstance, they have decided to do just that, to ennoble Mr Akeredolu’s candidacy and to consolidate on the game plan conceived by a group of governors in the party for the next few years.

Mr Akeredolu’s backers are more obsessed with giving him the ticket than concerned about his record or democratic and leadership credentials. Their concern is not with the 12 or so other contestants, a few of whom, though still largely untested, appear to possess far more capacity and greater leadership skills and temperament than the governor.

A party with far more principles and vision than the APC would have ensured a level playing field for the contestants, including direct primaries in a state that has become combustive because of the disappointment with the performance of the governor. Instead, the group of plotters, not to say the caretaker committee itself, has become prematurely fixated on other issues pertaining to the politics of 2023. Every pawn on the chessboard is viewed suspiciously, and is liable to be moved not with the ethical care and concern associated with politics and governance but with the rapacity and insouciance associated with sports.

These tendencies — indeed more accurately, this bifurcation — were intrinsic with the APC at birth. They have predictably worsened, and may yet trigger an explosion either before or after the November national convention, as the plots surrounding the Ondo governorship primary are presaging. But neither the splits nor the tendencies were inevitable.

It was okay to have a group of politicians coming together to snatch power from the clumsy hands of predecessors; but once that objective was achieved, the next task was to forge a common identity from the party’s disparate cultural backgrounds and ideologies. Instead, the splits have ossified, and competing ideologies and leaders have arisen to stymie the party’s future and give form and substance to its worst instincts. Unfortunately, these problems will follow the party to the convention and probably dog its future, if indeed a future can be guaranteed.

Many APC members now fear that their party is gradually morphing imperceptibly into the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) arm of the party, the APC faction that produced the president. Party leaders pretend not to recognise the continued existence, and probably even vitality, of the various arms that supposedly fused into the APC. Despite the pretence and denial, however, the factions exist.

But instead of fostering unity, the dominant thinking in the party is to obliterate the other arms in favour of one as a way of ensuring the party’s survival. On the surface, that is a noble and even desirable goal. But forging one party out of the crucible is not the same as obliterating the others by chicanery and brute force. In the foreseeable future, however, that obscurantist goal would be pursued to the detriment of forging one great party out of many.

There is no turning back from the decision to have Mr Bello conduct the Ondo primary. The decision is explicable either by the plot to engineer a special outcome with 2023 in view or by the desire to compulsorily eliminate the identity disparities that seem to stand in the way of party unity. It is surprising that party leaders fail to appreciate that what in fact differentiate the legacy parties which fused into the APC go beyond mere identity to include their founding ideologies, platforms and visions.

If party leaders had focused on hammering a common denominator out of these attributes, the effort would probably have produced a stronger, less fractious, more inspired and truly cohesive party. But unable to pursue these goals circumspectly, they have watched their party embroiled in needless and energy-sapping struggles, and will almost certainly go into the convention disunited, wary of one another, and, as the Edo governorship poll seems to be foretelling, eager to supplant and undermine one another.

The onus of fostering real unity in the party rested squarely on the president. He shirked the responsibility, and has not given any indication that anytime soon, he would wake up to the competing realities in both his party and the polity to once and for all grapple with the issues and factors that divide and endanger the party. In all likelihood, the party will continue along its present course, intrigue for advantage, eschew principles, appoint or elect party leaders and officials based on primordial and inane considerations, and fight themselves to the bitter end until surviving groups surrender or are vanquished. It is incontrovertible that the ascendant group in the party today is willing to employ the most divisive and most corrosive method to demolish its opposition. This is why no one sees any difference between the APC and its predecessor, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which ruled for 16 years before succumbing to internal and fratricidal bloodletting.

It was grossly wrong of the party to have saddled the Kogi governor with the important task of conducting the Ondo governorship primary election. Because he will not be the only one to carry out the assignment, the job will be concluded. But the fallout from the primary will linger into the main election in October. The APC has no justification to do what it has done in Ondo, particularly showing its hands too early, and giving the impression that other contestants were just making up the numbers. It was also wrong of the party to make direct or indirect primary optional at the states.

Direct primary would have done more than any method to help the party nominate its most acceptable candidate. Indeed, why should a popular governor or aspirant be afraid of direct primary? On Monday, barring any last minute change, Ondo will use the indirect method, and it will be a miracle if Mr Akeredolu is unhorsed. Should he get the ticket, the public will not be sure that irrespective of the governor’s record, the APC will be averse to strong-arm tactics in procuring a victory in October.

It is now almost certain that the high hopes many Nigerians have for the APC to champion change and ethical politics will be disappointed. By all yardsticks — ideology, morality, governance, democracy, social and political re-engineering — the APC is unlikely to lift the country’s spirits.

It won’t do it on Monday in Ondo, and something radical and transcendental will have to occur before it lifts the gloom oppressing the people in its November national convention. Assigning a role to the worst exemplification of democracy in Nigeria, Gov Bello, assures the country that whether it wins or loses elections, the APC, like the PDP, cannot give what it does not have.

By Idowu Akinlotan

On the surface, the arrest, detention and grilling of former Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) chairman, Ibrahim Magu, should underscore President Muhammadu Buhari’s commitment to the war against corruption and emboldened respect for the rule of law. Orchestrated almost wholly by the Justice minister and Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, the detention and grilling of the EFCC boss represent his firmer control of the agencies constitutionally subordinated to his office. For about four years, Messrs Malami and Magu looked daggers at each other, with the latter reluctant to submit to the former. The EFCC at its founding had adopted the culture of being independent of the AGF’s office, preferring to be either independent or encouraged by the presidency to be pretentious. The EFCC’s mode of operation is likely to change henceforth, but so its vigorous devil-may-care spirit.

The surface currents observable in the Magu debacle are significantly different from its undertow, a counterforce flowing beneath the surface, speaking more loudly to many years of running the presidency incompetently or confusedly. Three points illustrate this confusion. First, Mr Magu was clumsily arrested, with no security agency admitting it carried out the act. It is inconceivable that he would be asked to report to the presidency and he would decline. Instead, he was confronted in the streets and taken straight to be grilled by a panel, detained for days without the opportunity to arm himself with necessary facts to refute or rebut the allegations against him, and kept in isolation days on end. Worse, it took days for the government to announce an interim successor. Why could he not be replaced immediately through a sack or redeployment letter, and a successor announced in his place? Was it so complicated for the president to sack an officer he appointed, especially someone whose nomination was not confirmed by the senate?

Contrary to the impression which Mr Magu’s sack was meant to create, his fate did not point at long last to a refinement of the presidency’s mode of operation, but the reinforcement of its unsuccessful battle to restore order and elegance to a modern, 21st century presidency. It is ironic that Mr Malami and his office, which both suffer credibility issues in administering the country’s laws and safeguarding its criminal justice system, should be the inspiration behind the Magu sack. If for five years the AGF could not rein in the EFCC, it is not only Mr Malami’s lack of fidelity to the laws of the land that is to blame, but principally the presidency’s dithering and detachment. The AGF had complained loudly, fought Mr Magu openly, and at the risk of plunging the presidency into chaos joined forces with other shadowy persons in the corridors of power to prosecute his wars against the EFCC. Mr Malami now has the upper hand, as indeed the constitution has all along envisaged. But whether this will last, especially in the face of his reprehensible and atrocious interpretation and administration of the laws of the land, or whether it is even in the interest of the country that Mr Malami should retain the upper hand given his own track records and the deplorable state of the anti-corruption war, is a different thing altogether.

Secondly, there is yet much worse on the loose, a situation that makes it difficult to absolve the presidency, Mr Malami or Mr Magu. The EFCC boss is embroiled in some kind of struggle with Mr Malami because neither the presidency nor the AGF nor yet the EFCC has a clue how the anti-corruption war should be prosecuted. In addition, none of the three bodies has had the discipline to even make it work, especially given the chaotic frontlines of the war. The problem, however, goes far back in time, indeed to the very beginning when ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo established the commission. It was necessary to imbue the agency with the right and practicable philosophical foundations, whether in terms of its structure and operational procedures or in terms of its objectives. Chief Obasanjo was a committed and hard working leader, but he lacked the philosophical graces to imbue anything to anyone or agency. Unfortunately too, the EFCC’s first chairman, the young and uppity Nuhu Ribadu, was too impressionable and heady to set the right precedents for the young organisation.

Forced by circumstances to operate without the right philosophic foundation and operational depth, the EFCC has over the years stumbled from one mistake or childish fantasy to another, and between inspiring achievements and depressing failures. From Mr Ribadu to Mr Magu, the EFCC vacillated between obeying the law one day and disobeying it another day, with both contradictory and sometimes anomalous positions justified on the grounds of patriotism and the need to rid the country of corruption. Because the commission lacked or repudiated the right philosophy, it was unable to appreciate that subverting the law was even worse than invading the national treasury, with both vices regarded as appalling manifestations of the different faces of corruption. The EFCC also sometimes involved itself brazenly and without compunction in politics, such as participating in the impeachment — more accurately deposition — of governors and state parliaments, again justifying these on the grounds of saving the country from the grip of thieves.

It was obviously too much to ask the Buhari presidency to appreciate these dangerous underpinnings in the EFCC, not to talk of enunciating wholesale reforms to help build up the anti-graft agency into a reliable and durable institution. Consequently, since 2015, the malady in the EFCC has continued apace, only this time more chaotically. The AGF has fought the EFCC, just as cabals and powerful interests have sundered the presidency and rendered it a house divided against itself. Mr Magu, as difficult as he was as the EFCC boss, and as intemperate as many see him, was not the problem with the EFCC. It is indeed embarrassing that the AGF has seemed to elevate his problem with Mr Magu into a national issue deserving comments and impassioned arguments. The problem of the agency is structural and systemic, a problem that can absolutely not be divorced from the shambolic nature of the Nigerian presidency. The conclusion indeed is that though Nigeria operates the American presidential system, almost to the last letter of the US constitution, it lacks the latter’s philosophical and abstract constitutional constructs. Chief Obasanjo could not inspire the needed change as the first president of the Fourth Republic, and his successors Goodluck Jonathan and President Buhari could also not transcend the mundaneness and soulless reproduction of the Nigerian constitution to birth a great future for the country and its institutions. Since its founding, the EFCC, through its four chairmen, has operated the same rule book. The next chairman will not and cannot be different.

Thirdly, apart from the systemic problems confronting the combustible troika of EFCC, AGF and presidency, no one has addressed the simple and provocative fact that the anti-corruption war has remained unscientific and pedestrian. The country mistakes loot recovery for anti-graft war, the scaffolding for the building. Or perhaps Nigerians superimpose their mistaken perceptions on the obnoxious realities of the EFCC. Nigeria runs an unrealistic and untenable federal structure where mediocrity is rewarded, cultural differences are foolishly abrogated in the name of unity, and states and local governments, not to say agencies, are encouraged to leech on one another, gratify the predatory instincts of their managers and chief executives, and discourage or diminish creativity and initiative. The country has become one huge pell-mell of discordant and broken ideas, weak institutions and white elephant projects. Its political structure is also absolutely unworkable; it has become a money-guzzling machine dedicated to the worst forms of idleness, sense of entitlement and hedonism. The EFCC can do nothing to affect these systemic problems, let alone save itself from the hands of its grandiose and extravagant managers and self-serving Justice ministry supervisors.

If the country wants to fight corruption, it must first set the right structural foundation. Run a lean, one-chamber national legislature, redraw the states into self-sufficient entities, eliminate virtually all the allowances legislators take, reconstitute the civil service, pay sensible wages, reform the judiciary, merge and rationalise agencies, recompose the police along state lines and put federal checks in place to start with, reform the electoral system, and above all reform the financial system to track cash flows and make transactions on housing and other consumables affordable and feasible. This calls for nothing short of a revolution. But it is either this revolution is carried out or the country will continue to stumble along in its meaningless anti-graft war and squabbling EFCC and Justice ministry officials. Given his many countervailing legal interpretations, many of them unsolicited, Mr Malami simply does not have the credibility or depth to inspire anything, not to talk of effecting positive changes in the EFCC; nor did Mr Magu, like his predecessors, have the depth and temper to run the EFCC. Taking sides with one or the other is tilting at windmills.

 

 

 

But perhaps a sublime change is finally afoot in the presidency. The upper hand Mr Malami has just seized viz-a-viz the EFCC may in fact be a reflection of either the re-establishment or imposition of a new order in the presidency. Previously, a chaotic system of contrapuntal exercise of powers reigned supreme in the presidency, with cabals and anti-cabals carving out impregnable fortresses for themselves and their minions, and open epistolary battles rearing their heads now and again. Today, the National Security Adviser (NSA) is reasserting himself and his office, and the AGF is also following suit. The presidency has obviously become more decisive, and it will increasingly assert itself in future disputes between appointees. But that it has become more decisive does not mean it has correspondingly become wise. So far, its understanding of decisiveness is limited to simplistically taken sides with one side in all the disputes it has become involved in. Faced with petty and contrived crises in the National Working Committee (NWC) of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the presidency simply cut the Gordian knot by siding with the rebels. Faced with the battle between the NSA and military chiefs, the presidency has seemed to side with the former. And faced with the struggle between the EFCC and the AGF, the presidency has obviously and perhaps heedlessly sided with the latter.

In both the NSA and AGF efforts to reassert themselves, the constitution is of course on their side. But beyond this, it was also necessary for the presidency to appreciate the dynamics of these struggles and to judge whether the officials fighting for dominance possess the moral and administrative qualifications to lead the charges. More, it was also expected that the presidency would take sides only when their position aligns with its philosophy of governance and perhaps the philosophy of their party and government. There is no indication that the presidency’s involvement in these struggles have not been generally ordinary and impulsive. However, there is at least a tangential break with the dreary and dithering past, a demonstration that the presidency now wishes to own its ideas and promptly take decisions. There must, however, be a corresponding deepening of the intellectual basis by which those decisions are taken.

Last week, the press was inundated by the grounds for suspending, detaining and interrogating Mr Magu. He is unlikely to be guilty of all the allegations levelled against him, not to talk of some other hitherto unknown allegations dredged up by many commentators. He is also unlikely to be vindicated. The president was at liberty to dispense with the services of the former EFCC boss, but that simple task was not accomplished with the finesse expected of the president’s office. And until the panel looking into the allegations against Mr Magu turns in its report, it will be unreasonable to give a conclusive opinion of how the obstreperous Mr Magu fared in office: whether he is as altruistic as he gives the impression, or whether he is an empty and sclerotic vessel gracelessly typified by the Nigerian public servant.

The presidency may have become somewhat and clumsily more decisive; it must now find the inspiration and discipline to refine its methods. Discrediting an official first in the media before giving him the boot, often through unconstitutional means, is reprehensible. The presidency must never give the impression that sacking an appointee has become so difficult that the government must inflict collateral pain on the public. They didn’t even need a justification to ease out Mr Magu, so why drag the public through an unseemly rigmarole? Before the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, was arbitrarily retired, they also dragged him and the rest of the country through deplorable propaganda and needless judicial controversy, a tactic that was to be replicated in the sacking of former APC chairman, Adams Oshiomhole. It is unkind to the affected officials and contemptuous of the country. It is even sadder that commentators lined up behind the two camps, the government and its harried appointees. This is needless. Except the constitution forbids it, and this presidency has not been known to be finicky about the constitution anyway, let it sack its appointees as it deems fit. But it has no incentive to do it in a way that sullies its image.

 

 

By Idowu Akinlotan

Since he vacated office in 2007, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo has been characteristically wise after the fact in assessing Nigerian presidents.

Falling out with his successors, not to say his predecessors, has not tamed his caustic views of how and why they failed to remake the country.

In the eyes of the former president, there are better ways to run Nigeria, as he illustrated when he gave the 2020 Sobo Sowemimo lecture at the Abeokuta Club on June 26.

And for the first time, he even seems to acknowledge that he made mistakes during his presidency, but that it would be pointless for critics to seize upon that fact to deny the need to remould Nigeria or gift it a new constitution.

The lecture was neither as controversial nor as pungent as would have served his purpose, but it was perhaps the first time he came nearest to going beyond criticising and making a hideous portrait of his compatriot presidents to recommending the way forward through a new constitution.

Chief Obasanjo has acquired some experience in disembowelling other presidents, even becoming adept at it, and has often used caustic language that leaves no one in doubt what he thinks of his subjects. He is, however, yet to mature as a prognosticator.

It will take time. Whether the rigorous process of becoming a dialectician will be gentle on him, or age will permit him the luxury of time, is hard to say.

At 83, he does not appear to have too much time, a fact that explains the stridency of his language and awful tone of his discourses.

Reading his letters and criticisms over the years since he left Aso Villa, it may be possible to plot a graph of his conversion from conservatism to an inchoate form of radicalism.

But it is not altogether clear even to himself that he has successfully made that transition, nor whether his new beliefs will accord with all the finer elements of radicalism.

He has always been eclectic, sometimes cavorting between disparate ideological positions, including being an African and a Nigerian nationalist; but as far as he sees it, his successors are not attentive to their environment, and must be taken to task.

In the Sowemimo lecture, Chief Obasanjo identifies a few elements that should help persuade the president and the current political establishment into remoulding the country, even mocking their unease with the word ‘restructuring’.

Most Nigerians will find his analyses and recommendations stupefying, particularly the messianic fulcrum upon which he and his generation simplistically rest their prognostication, but it is a fact that the former president has simply gorged on the unprovable and unworkable beliefs and sentiments of his generation.

Looking at Nigeria’s complex ethnic tapestry, and how despite challenges over the decades it has continued to defy the odds of wear and tear, he sighs that the country must be God’s creation.

To that extent, and in many annoying sentences, he presumes to describe Nigerian unity as inviolate, in the same way past and present governments, military or elected, see it.

Admitting that the national fabric is badly strained, he admonishes everyone to eschew ‘papering over the cracks’ because it would be counterproductive.

It is not clear why he thinks the constitutional change he advocates is not irreconcilable with his anachronistic presumptions of territorial inviolability.

He also offers his audience the interesting bon mot about Nigerians doing their best to avoid a break-up, why a break-up is undesirable, and why indifference in the face of national political and economic challenges is irresponsible.

He adds that since everyone is feeling the pinch, particularly with insecurity, they may be more amenable to less fractious efforts to fix the country.

He excoriates irredentists who speak of maintaining a messianic grip on the country, a mentality he argues, doomed and balkanised the former Republic of Sudan.

But he also suggests unambiguously that the present government is at its wit’s end in grappling with the challenges hobbling the country.

Deploying innuendoes, the former president says many other things about the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, describing it as unwisely ensconced in a dangerous cocoon and incompetent to handle the country’s affairs.

As interesting and pungent as Chief Obasanjo’s lecture was, it is important to take issue with one principle plank of his worldview: his constant misinterpretation of the role of God in national destinies.

Here is how he puts it: “The issue of Nigeria’s future as a result of our current security situation must not be taken non-seriously as I see it as a matter of life and death for our country which must not be toyed with.

I very much believe that God created Nigeria to lead the black race as the Americans lead the white race for now and the Chinese lead the brown or yellow race.

We must do everything to actualise the plan of God for Nigeria not minding the great crises of the past and gross under-performance, incompetence and failure of the present.

This makes me ask the question, ‘Is 1914 a mistake or the act of God through the instrumentality of man?’  I do not believe God makes a mistake and He has His hands in the affairs of any man or woman and in the affairs of any nation.

God is purposeful and His mystery may not be easily comprehensible.  Nigeria, to me, is a creation of God for justice, fairness and equity amongst its component parts.”

Like many other presidents before and after him, Chief Obasanjo’s public affairs notions are severely limited in scope and hamstrung by lack of intellectual discipline.

Since empires and states began, their borders and territories have changed and morphed from size to size over millennia.

Before 1914, Nigeria was unknown, being an agglomeration of various kingdoms and empires. There is nothing to suggest that, like the old Soviet Union, it will remain as it is currently constituted in the next 100 years, or that somewhere along the line, God’s plan and purpose cannot be fulfilled, either through a dismembered Nigeria or an even bigger Nigeria swallowing a few neighbours.

There were empire builders in the past; there will always be empire builders in the future. Could changes in territories limit the God Chief Obasanjo constantly insinuates into national borders and state formations? As a former soldier, is Chief Obasanjo unaware of the many wars fought in Africa, Europe, Asia or the Americas?

Have their borders and territories remained the same, let alone be inviolate for thousands of years? Rome fell, Greece fell, Babylon fell, and the European Union is in a state of flux. As the former president admits in his lecture, change is eternal.

Chief Obasanjo’s idea of national unity and territorial integrity is simplistic and unworthy of someone who presided over the affairs of the largest black nation on earth.

He speaks of nuances when he berated the Buhari presidency; it is alarming that probably the hugest historical nuance involving God and shifting borders escapes this former soldier and statesman.

But probably the most frightening of his prognosis is his assertion that  God designed Nigeria for a special reason.

According to him, Nigeria is meant to lead the black race just like the United States leads the white race, and China leads the yellow race. Strange indeed.

China didn’t always lead the yellow race; at one time, the Mongoloid Empire of Genghis Khan did. The US didn’t always lead the white race; before Pax Americana, there was Pax Britannica, and before Pax Britannica, there was Pax Romana.

It is exasperating when a leader purporting to inhabit the ambitions of black people cannot stretch historical analysis beyond a couple of hundred years.

It is even more pertinent to ask at what time it dawned on Chief Obasanjo that God designed Nigeria to lead the black race — when he ruled for eight years and had no conception of the structures needed to guarantee the stability and greatness of Nigeria; when he rode roughshod over the judiciary and humiliated the courts and insulted the Supreme Court; when his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), whose chairmen he dethroned at will, became a hideous antidemocratic monolith; when he mocked the states by deploying the EFCC to unconstitutionally orchestrate their governors’ impeachment?

With a smirk, Chief Obasanjo’s lecture insinuates the superiority of his government over other successive Nigerian governments.

He is unfortunately right. President Buhari’s conception of democracy is deeply controversial and does not speak boldly and logically of the intricacies involved in projecting Nigeria as leader of the black race.

At least Chief Obasanjo has belatedly spoken to that ambition, and probably has a good grasp of what he is talking about.

The Buhari presidency, as Chief Obasanjo gleefully suggests in his lecture, is too distracted by its own self-delusions to conceive and embrace that globally ramifying ambition.

Would the Buhari presidency experience an epiphany in the next three years? It is hard to say, for its instincts naturally war against that global ambition.

Chief Obasanjo has spoken and will probably continue to speak sensibly and soundly about how Nigeria could be better governed. His critics cannot, however, understand why he seemed to become wise only after leaving office.

Frustrated, they will continue to denounce his analyses and sneer at his panaceas. They think he is merely grandstanding.

They think he is so sanctimonious that at bottom he is not even persuaded by his own logic. They insist that the moral codes that undergird his private life have no relevance to the codes that enfold and animate his public life, and that his public statements fight and undermine his private beliefs.

They think he is in fact suffering from a split personality. Chief Obasanjo must groan under that burden and those contradictions until he departs.

He has said many fine things and given many fine suggestions; but by failing to heed his own counsel when he was president and even now, he cannot really explode the myth of his altruism. Like Cassandra, his foresight is fated to be scorned. He had his chance and blew it.

Worse, even years after he left office, his private morals have remained as controversial as his public morals. But it would be a double tragedy for the country to look at the disagreeable and ossified person of Chief Obasanjo to judge the relevance of his ideas and suggestions.

Indeed, as the former president suggested, Nigeria should aspire to lead the black race. It is a noble ambition, and the former president speaks grandly and admirably about it.

Yet there is nothing to suggest that because of its smaller size, Ghana cannot also possess that ambition, and run with it. After all, England and Greece touched the fingers of God with their outsized deeds of valour and cultures.