Category: Idowu Akinlotan

By Idowu Akinlotan

After many weeks of pussyfooting, President Muhammadu Buhari finally wielded the big stick against the Adams Oshiomhole-led National Working Committee (NWC) of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Either deliberately or inadvertently, the president managed in the same breath to throw in his lot with the governors engaged in a bruising and remorseless war against the faction determined to free the party from their grip.

The war had been going on for more than two years, beginning shortly after the party won office in 2015, and continuing till the axe landed. As this column posited many years back, the war could not end until one faction had been obliterated, or at least one faction achieved unquestionable dominance.

The progressive governors’ faction is led or inspired by Kebbi governor Abubakar Bagudu, Plateau governor Simon Lalong, Jigawa governor Badaru Abubakar, Ekiti governor Kayode Fayemi, and Kaduna governor Nasir el-Rufai. There are, of course, many more who are with them; but these five form the visible, insouciant face of that unrelenting faction.

There are some ministers whose medium to long-term interests coincide with this faction’s. One of them is former Rivers governor Rotimi Amaechi. Then there are also many powerful figures whose interests also align with this faction, but who do not publicly declare their interest. It was this faction that raised Victor Giadom, a former deputy national secretary, to instigate rebellion against Mr Oshiomhole. The rebellion has been successful, but it is likely to be short-lived.

The National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the APC that met on Thursday, supposedly at the instance of Mr Giadom, implementing a labyrinthine usurpation programme connived at by the courts, simply afforded President Buhari the opportunity to wield the big stick that he had obviously wished to wield long before now. The stick was planned to end the brutal struggles between factions in the party, but probably designed for much more. Among other things, it returned the levers of power to the hands of an indeterminate group of party leaders.

For various reasons, some stated others unstated, the presidency had been exasperated by the Oshiomhole-led NWC. The NWC had, in the view of the faction and probably the presidency too, carried on indifferently to the sentiments and sensibilities of many powerful party interests, some of those interests posturing for the presidential politics of 2023. In the process of executing the sacking of the NWC, the president and the faction rode roughshod over party rules concerning how meetings are convened, arguing implausibly and provocatively that the Thursday meeting was merely a continuation of a previously adjourned meeting. So much for law and order. The president also precluded members’ rights to litigate the orders he was making. But where were the moral guardians of the party when Mr Giadom frolicked in the courts?

When five representatives of the Progressive Governors’ Forum visited the president on Friday to thank him for wielding the big stick, it was clear who at long last had seized power. The governors did not of course represent all the progressive governors, but they brazenly appropriated all the progressive governors’ interests and made them coterminous with their own.

In the short run, there will be no dissension between the progressive governors, for the president has shown his hand. But by dealing their cards openly, the president and the five governors who lead and inspire their faction may have done so too early and may be courting disaster. It is true that they fear that the Oshiomhole faction, which was determined to subordinate everybody to party discipline and philosophy, could become too entrenched and too powerful to be subverted or infiltrated in the years before 2023. But the dynamics of power indicate that the governors’ faction will have to exert themselves to breaking point to sustain their artificial primacy.

The malleable Mr Giadom, a close ally of Mr Amaechi, was the faction’s casus belli. His services have now naturally been dispensed with. But while the rebellion he fomented lasted, clearly with the imprimatur of the leaders of the governors’ faction, the presidency looked on somnolently. Regardless of the composition or legality of the caretaker committee headed by the governor of Yobe State, Mai Mala Buni, or their leanings and loyalties as analysed by some political watchers, the party has clearly been retrieved from the hands of Mr Oshiomhole and his supporters and handed over to the governors.

The governors’ faction will now try to make hay while the sun shines. It is also possible  that, as some posit, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), a legacy arm of the APC during its founding, is implementing a separate agenda to entrench itself to the detriment of the other legacy arms of the party. But even this goal is unlikely to be sustained in the long run. The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), one of the frustrated legacy arms of the party, is the most ideological and the most organised. It has spawned more rebels than others in the APC, but win or lose in the power play, it is likely to wield the most potent influence in the medium to long-term.

Since 2015, the APC has been unable to get its act together. This is simply because there are too many conflicting and irreconcilable interests in the party jostling for dominance. It was left for the president, after the APC took office, to find a way of merging interests in the party along the leitmotif of sound principles, values and ideologies. That objective was obviously too complex for the president and his team to manage. The consequence is that the party has remained in a perpetual state of turmoil, always teetering on the brink of implosion.

When Mr Oshiomhole was embroiled in his deathly struggles with various factions in the party, and Mr Giadom was launching his raucous rebellion, the president should have stepped in, not by retrieving the baton and giving it to the governor’s faction, but by ensuring that party supremacy reigned with or without Mr Oshiomhole. Surely the president cannot pretend not to know the damaging influence wielded by the governors in all the political parties during the Goodluck Jonathan years. By failing to act when he should have acted, and even if he is right in the actions he has now taken, the president has clearly indicated that his interest is less likely to coincide with the interest of party supremacy. Whether he knows this or not is not clear. But the damage is done.

Sweeping away Mr Oshiomhole’s NWC will not bring an end to the war in the APC. The caretaker committee will be organising a national convention in six months, assuming it does not ask for extension. So the fierce struggle for the soul of the party has just begun. The Oshiomhole NWC may have sheathed their swords now, but their swords are still flaming. The other interests in the party, which have appeared to lose ground, will also continue to wield their own swords dangerously.

Both the president and the now dominant faction have only succeeded in postponing the battle. They have served notice that they will fight brutally, even biting in the clinches, and they will show no remorse in adopting any unscrupulous tactics or rallying behind any banner no matter how stained. They will try to give no quarter, but so too will their opponents. The victors must not have the illusion that the battle is over or that they have a clear advantage.

The Oshiomhole debacle was a great opportunity for the president to make up his mind on exactly what vision he had for the APC, particularly for the years ahead. It was an opportunity for him to redefine the party, merge all the competing interests, imbue the party with a brilliant and moralistic soul, and shape it for the decades to come, especially learning from the tragedy that befell the People’s Democratic Party after 16 years in office. That he was unable to seize that great advantage is an indication of the dearth of brilliant political aides in the presidency.

If he had such aides, they would have told him that it was possible to successfully carry out those visionary objectives of the party without massive displacements. Mr Oshiomhole was probably too strong-minded to help conceive and execute that great objective, but it is hard to see how dispensing with him altogether can now help the president to either formulate or execute that noble goal in the absence of an intellectual or ideological vacuum in the state house.

By returning party power to the governors who came to garland him last Friday, the president will now discover that he is back to the beginning. But herein is the dilemma. Does the president even recognise that he is back to the beginning? Does he know what else to do with or for the party going forward? Has he gauged the unmerited revival which the PDP seems to be enjoying, a revival that indirectly suggests that the political system was getting irritated with the APC?

In the months ahead, as the APC nears its extraordinary convention, the public will see whether the president and his advisers have given any thought to how to reconfigure the APC and shape it for the future. It will not matter whether the president manages to influence whoever takes over from Mr Oshiomhole and the sacked NWC members. It will not even matter which interest becomes dominant flowing from the extraordinary convention. What will matter is that the public is not so short-sighted that it cannot judge whether the APC is endowed or not, or whether it can propel the country to greatness in the years ahead.

The APC knows that not all its governors align with the progressive forum governors who visited the president last Friday. But whether the president knows this or not is unclear. They have sweet-talked him into believing that all the progressive governors are united in acknowledging and lauding his moves in the party, particularly his peremptory sacking of the NWC.

They have said nothing about the fact that the NEC meeting presided over by the president, unusually in the Council Chamber, did not afford any attendee the opportunity of debate or dissent. The president simply read the riot act; an indication that the outcome of the meeting was preconceived. On Friday, the president was probably carried away by the blandishments of the visiting governors who have managed to frame the struggle within the APC, not as a teething problem for ideological realignment, but as a struggle that fostered instability for which Mr Oshiomhole should be the sacrificial lamb.

Mr Oshiomhole was accused of fertilising the field for some powerful interests ahead of the 2023 presidential battles. Whether he is guilty of this or not, little proof has been offered. It was a brusque conclusion that was used to hang him. But there is another part of Mr Oshiomhole that not too many people have acknowledged, which is germane to the discussions, struggles and hopes of the APC. Whether he watered the ground for anybody or not, Mr Oshiomhole was active, proudly progressive, and called his soul his own, one reason the conservative and staid John Odigie-Oyegun loathed him. Mr Oshiomhole was right in Edo; if he had not moved against Governor Godwin Obaseki, the Edo APC, rank and file, would have defied him. The state APC universally disliked Mr Obaseki, and for the governor, the feeling was implacably mutual.

Mr Oshiomhole was also right in how he handled the Imo and Ogun states primaries, among other primaries, in 2019. He tried to infuse in the members and departing governors a healthy respect for their party and members in 2019. He did not succeed all-round because he was trying to overthrow a nefarious and serpentine system that promoted mediocrity over mentorship. Judging from his politics and worldview, he would have liked to do something about Ondo State where Mr Akeredolu has also not enjoyed a robust relationship with the party in the state. But in order not to fight on too many fronts, an accusation that was glibly levelled against him, he has probably succumbed to wrong in many states, including Ondo, where he would have loved to shake things up. The former party chairman’s faults were not a product of his head, but of his highly emotive and often unguarded mind that leads him to dramatise his battles, exult over his successes, and was often not averse to finger-wagging at his enemies or mocking their defeats.

The months ahead are not too good for the APC. The caretaker committee will obviously try to do the best they can, but enough bad seeds have been sown in the party to injure not only its present but to jeopardise its future. Miracles are sometimes possible in party politics, and so it must not be discounted that by some celestial sleight of hand the president and his advisers may be touched by the fingers of heaven and may decide to appreciate that a successful move in the present may not always augur well for the future. Perhaps, in the months or even years ahead, the APC may rediscover the principles by which great political parties are founded and sustained. There is little to hope that in the case of the APC that outcome is feasible; in fact, if anything, the party seems ineluctably fated to flounder.

Last week, the party came upon a moment that needed the president’s impartiality and deftness. Instead, in a military fashion and posing as a law and order president, he threw away the baby with the bath water. His move may amount to “peace in our time”, but the war is still unwon. Whether they will fight and placate one another within the party, and not fall on their own swords as seems perfectly possible, will depend on whether the backroom deals that are certain to proceed from last week’s capital blunder will amount to anything.

Surely, the APC cannot pretend not to know that the PDP is waiting in the wings. In 2015, the party launched brilliantly into the country’s murky political waters like a dreadnought; it was billed as the answer to its political and existential troubles. It was hoped that it would champion real change, break the country’s unwieldy and unworkable structure, and remould and reengineer the society. It chose, sadly, to limit itself to mundane, self-centred and counterproductive struggles.

Before 2015, many people thought that President Buhari, despite his limitations and stultified background, would help realign Nigeria for national and continental greatness. But, almost right from the beginning, he chose to start on the wrong foot. He has a new Chief of Staff, Ibrahim Gambari, a professor of International Relations, to help him marshal a structure that could think for the presidency in a way that the encumbered Abba Kyari did not. Whether Prof Gambari will perform that role or be allowed to do so remains to be seen. But the intellectual poverty that stares the country in the face shows why radical and progressive change in the presidency, let alone the country, may in fact be forlorn hope.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Last week’s proposed reopening of worship centres in some states, particularly Lagos, has been once again abandoned. This time, religious leaders in the affected states reportedly acquiesced to the decision.

With the notable exception of a few well-known religious leaders, the acquiescence has been almost total. A debate has, however, ensued in churches in particular as to the reasonableness or doctrinal basis of acquiescing to keep the doors of churches shut against congregational worship.

Opinions are divided, but skewed in favour of postponing the reopening. On the one hand, some have wondered whether the church was not hiding under the injunction to obey all authorities in order to excuse the observable absence of power in the church, power being their distinguishing hallmark.

Everything about the church speaks to power over the elements, including plagues symbolised by viruses.

On the other hand, church leaders have sought to play safe. They point at a South Korean church, Shincheonji Church of Jesus, which kept its doors open during the early weeks of the pandemic and inadvertently served as a conduit for spreading the coronavirus disease.

At a point, some 60 percent of the about  4,000 infected nationally attended the church. Church leaders in Nigeria had also heard about Gerald Glenn, the pastor of New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Virginia, USA, who boasted that God was bigger than the virus but soon succumbed to the dreaded plague.

Rather than be blamed for helping to spread the virus, the church have been of double mind about reopening their doors.

But what if infection rate of the virus does not sufficiently reduce to a level considered safe in the next few months? Would they still keep their doors shut when every other sector has reopened?

By Friday night, Nigeria had tested (still a paltry figure) 108,548 people for coronavirus. Some 18,480 people tested positive, an ungainly 17.02 percent infection rate or a frightening 2 out of every 10 people tested.

When added to the fact that the testing rate is still very low in Nigeria, what would happen if testing is ramped up? The death rate is also high, and too many high-profile Nigerians are succumbing to the plague.

In the midst of all this, it may appear a sound decision for churches to keep their doors shut rather than be blamed for being a careless and tithe-hungry vector of the disease.

But this precisely is where the problem lies. The church is all about power: power over death, power over disease, including plagues, power over failure, and power over poverty, among other things.

They have an illustrious history of those they celebrate as God’s generals who bravely withstood plagues and all kinds of negative forces and triumphed.

Indeed the torch passed on by the early church illuminated the dark crevices of sin, chaos, hopelessness and helplessness, and the consequent victory they achieved over those elements form a significant part of their hagiography.

Those who grumble against the eager acquiescence of church leaders to keep church doors shut ask where the power has gone, and why modern church leaders could not produce one Elijah to declare over the virus and defeat it in the face of angry howls of pessimism and scaremongering; one Daniel and his brethren to ask to be given the chance to defeat the virus though the virus be as numerous as the sand by the seashore and as vicious as the atom bomb; and one Moses to do the unthinkable by parting the Red Sea of the virus as churchgoers pass through their open doors, etc.

The church has done the safest, most blameless and most secular thing by agreeing to keep their doors shut. But they cannot have their cake and eat it.

Without signs and wonders, few will believe them. In the virus, they had the most blatant challenge in this modern era to demonstrate that they do not just hold a form of godliness but deny its power.

They have instead chosen to play safe. Good. It has probably kept millions alive and the reputation of the church generally unaffected.

But after the demise of the virus, they must have the humility to re-examine their systematic theology and ask themselves whether their bible colleges have not replaced the fiery school of the Spirit.

The virus is already weakening in most countries. It will soon disappear, if not completely, at least sufficiently enough to make humanity resume their normal existence.

However, many more plagues will still come; and the church must ask themselves the soul-searching question of how many more plague moments they will humble themselves before, taking their gaze away from the essence of their faith, and cowering behind shut doors and windows to repudiate the history that saw them withstanding the mouths of lions, pots of boiling oil, fiery furnaces, and the ponderous persecuting frenzy of the Roman Empire. Perhaps they have turned those inspiring stories into cunningly devised fables and persuasive words of human wisdom.

By Idowu Akinlotan

By Friday evening, Governor Godwin Obaseki and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had become euphoric about their chances in September’s Edo governorship poll.

The former opposition party, now the ruling party in the state, had rapturously received the governor for whom they were willing to pull out all the stops to get and make him their standard-bearer.

His certificate troubles notwithstanding, and regardless of the party’s preparation to go through his credentials with a fine-tooth comb, all opposition to his winning the primary will likely be crushed.

The party was initially thought to be wary of his membership and chances, though they desired him, but by yesterday any misgivings about his joining their party, and perhaps too his winning, had all but disappeared.

They love him, cherish the addition of Edo State into the PDP column to make a clean sweep of the South-South — and the Southeast by a whisker — and are willing, nay enthusiastic, to subordinate everything to his governorship airs and spread palm fronds under his dainty feet.

Contrasting the infectious air in the Edo PDP is the baleful atmosphere pervading the former ruling party in the state, the APC.

The APC is not only in turmoil in the state, broken openly into two camps as it were, it is also riven by dissension at the national level, racked by legal troubles, destabilised by ambitious Young Turks, and left high and dry by a distant presidency still trying to learn the ropes of establishing a nexus between the government and the ruling party.

Its chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, has more migraine enough to kill the most stoical of leaders. Some of his problems may be self-inflicted, but it is increasingly clear that had he even been very amenable, soft-spoken, accommodating and ecclesiastically friendly to everyone, he would still find the troubles that afflict him unavoidable.

The reason lies with the propelling logic of the party. The party does not enjoy strong and Machiavellian leadership from the president; consequently, there are many power centres looking dreamily at 2023.

To get to that magical year and stay alive politically and stand the chance of flourishing would require bending the party in one’s direction. That, sadly, is what drives that party.

When Mr Oshiomhole won his bruising battle against the Young Turks in his party in March, this column warned him to expect another flare-up, possibly many flare-ups, for the war could not end until one group was truly and definitively crushed.

This column reminded the APC chairman that the March revolt was not a final clash. The Edo conundrum is just one more slight but discomfiting engagement before the really bloody revolt in the future.

Mr Oshiomhole and his backers still have the advantage, and are still ahead in the race against their rivals, but that advantage is becoming more fragile as month chases month.

So far, the APC chairman is a very lucky and plucky man. His heart is still holding on, being made of a far sturdier constitution than the average politician.

Few men menaced by such internal intrigues hold on as long as he has managed in the past few months.

And, no, his union days do not fully explain why he seems indestructible, even if it explains his insatiable appetite for making enemies and fighting them to the hilt.

It is not only Mr Oshiomhole whose political future rests on winning the Edo poll. His enemies, whether they like it or not, and notwithstanding 2023, will be doomed should the party lose the September poll.

He will of course be the first casualty, but his opponents will also discover just what it means to win a pyrrhic victory.

Since he became chairman, the practical Mr Oshiomhole has sought to imbue the APC with some sort of ideology. Men with union background are naturally revolutionary or radical.

They may not be clearly and distinctly ideological, but they tend at least not to be conservative or gradualist.

It is not surprising that the chairman prefers a party that stands for something out of the ordinary, a party that does not shirk a fight, a party that is as pugnacious and determined as he often postures.

But Mr Oshiomhole has been resisted within the party, not exactly for what he stands for, despite the ambiguousness that swaddle him, but whom his enemies think he stands for.

Since he became chairman and sought to impose discipline, principles and order on the party, he has lost nearly as many states as he has gained.

Even those he won had been eked out of defeat, while those he lost, when not done by the agency of the courts, had been emphatic.

He will continue to be blamed for losing Zamfara, Bayelsa and Bauchi States. In any case, far beyond his winnings and losses, until Mr Oshiomhole vanquishes his enemies, they will fight him to the death for what he stands for as much as what he does not stand for.

They blame him singularly for Edo that has now gone PDP. And no matter what he says about his skirmishes with Mr Obaseki, he could not be vindicated.

What matters, his critics say, is that Edo has left APC, and only one man deserves to be blamed: Mr Oshiomhole. In a way, he has boxed himself into a corner, and he is left with only one choice: win Edo.

He will note that unlike the PDP that gives indication it will be united behind Mr Obaseki, there is nothing to show that the APC at the national and state levels will be united behind him.

In fact some of the camps within his party would relish his defeat in order to prove a point. He will also have to note quaintly and read between the lines the stiff advertorial published by the Benin royal palace on the Obaseki affair, and recognise that he has a lot on his plate, some of that lot very unpalatable.

It may, however, be too early to say who will win the poll in September. Until the parties conclude their primaries and the candidates are known, any permutation would be vague and inconclusive.

Political parties may have their attractions, but the campaigns too tell a story or two regarding the direction of the votes, as the Edo PDP itself knows from experience in 2016.

The quarrelsome Mr Obaseki may have left the APC a little unpopular, but some observers of the Edo imbroglio seem persuaded that Mr Oshiomhole coveted the godfather title more than usual and breathed down the neck of the governor.

That narrative hides many unpleasant facts, but it is popular and plausible. The campaigns will start soon, and endorsements will began to flow and traverse the political divides.

Before the end of August, it should not only be possible to predict the winner, it would be necessary to give an endorsement.

Nobody should, however, lose sleep over the defection of Mr Obaseki. Both parties have practised and executed the art of defection with unearthly aplomb.

The defections have generally followed the path of expediency, and are often devoid of principles and ideology. The APC does not have dyed-in-the-wool godfathers anymore than the PDP boasts of staunch patron saints.

From Rivers to Bayelsa, from Sokoto to Kaduna, and indeed virtually all states, governors have flaunted extraordinary airs, dealt with their opponents tyrannically, and generally worked to enthrone successors, if not a president, as Mr Wike attempted last year.

The two leading parties are, therefore, two sides of the same coin. When they defect, few politicians give the impression that anything other than convenience and self-centred bargains motivate them.

And so it will take a little longer for political parties in these parts to embrace principles and ideology. The raptures top PDP leaders exuded when they received Mr Obaseki are simply a sign that they expect the governor’s defection to strengthen their hands in 2023, probably far better than it would augur the enfeebled hands of the APC whose bitter wrangling is clouding their present and endangering their future.

When the APC was formed in 2013, its leading members and supporters  probably never thought the party stood any chance of winning the presidency some two years down the line.

The idea seemed so far-fetched, even surreal. It was thus a fairy tale that the strapping young party won the presidency and took more states than its opponent in a spectacular fashion.

Since 2015, however, the party has struggled to manage its success, sustain internal cohesion, and keep the peace among its bitter and warring factions.

It has been torn apart by internal envy and dissension, and its ideological platform either twisted or turned into a joke.

The PDP, which never had a sound and inspiring foundation, nor sanctioned a rebuilding programme after its 2015 debacle, had marched along a similar and self-destructive trajectory .

It came to grief in 2015, 34 years shy of the 60 years of dominance it had craved so obscenely. It is unlikely that both parties have learnt anything from their past experiences.

In the weeks ahead, it will be clear whether the September Edo poll will tell the country more about the disaffection within the APC and the future of the party, or whether it will serve as the barometer to measure PDP’s revival. The educated guess is that whoever wins the toss is unlikely to profit from its gain or counsel.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Days after armed robbers invaded the agrarian town of Isanlu, East Yagba Local Government Area of Kogi State, killing seven policemen and a civilian, the authorities have not visited the town or spoken about what lessons they have learnt to review the country’s security architecture and law enforcement strategies. Maybe the death toll was not high enough. About 10 months after Taraba State kidnap kingpin Hamisu Bala, alias Wadume , was arrested, escaped through the help of soldiers, and was rearrested, the government has just managed to charge him and six other accomplices in court. He was first arraigned in January, but his alleged military accomplices were absent. Two months later, another arraignment was attempted, still the soldiers were not produced in court, forcing the presiding judge, Justice Binta Nyako, to order the military authorities to produce them.

Some 10 months later, the soldiers have still not been produced despite the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) taking over the case. Ten months? In a country with law and order? Does it take more than a month for the military to process the alleged military accomplices and release them to civil authorities? Do the deaths of some three policemen, when a team of soldiers confronted police officers and forcibly released Mr Bala, not mean anything to the authorities? The government is going ahead with the prosecution of the seven almost as if the gravity of the case is lost on everybody. If the federal government can’t get 10 indicted soldiers to face the law for murder, how can the country trust them to be even-handed? The AGF must of course hope that the military will eventually release the soldiers to be prosecuted in order to save the government embarrassment.

Neither the Isanlu robbery nor the shoddy and perfunctory prosecution of kidnap kingpins and their military accomplices should ever be handled so cavalierly in a country with a functioning, even democratic government. After the robbers invaded Isanlu and killed seven policemen, civil authority in the town simply collapsed. There was no sense of who should take charge. Onlookers flooded the crime scene, particularly the police station, took photographs and video recordings of the slain cops, and uploaded them on social media. The pictures were gory and in bad taste, while uploaded videos of the crime scene were even more repulsive. In death, the slain cops were robbed of their dignity, as they have often been robbed of their dignity alive.

The AGF and Nigeria’s military brass may be functionaries of the same government, but the former has a huger responsibility than the latter to uphold the rule of law. If he cannot get the soldiers produced in court at the next sitting, he should engineer a stalemate. He must make a statement on whether the country operates two sets of laws — one for the weak and another for the powerful. It is reprehensible that a case as straightforward as the Wadume case, which is being prosecuted before the whole world, should get so entangled in a maze spun by powerful men and connived at by weak officials. Where indeed is government?

It is also urgent that the federal and state governments must use the Isanlu robbery case as a springboard for introducing reforms both in law enforcement and civil leadership in small towns underrepresented by policemen and understaffed by civil officials. The aftermath of the robbery was important enough for the Inspector-General of Police and the state Commissioner of Police to visit the town, pay condolence calls on grieving widows and widowers, and get first-hand information on how to respond to similar attacks in the future. For sure, too, the governor ought to have visited Isanlu a few days after the robbery. It is not clear whether they have done so, or planned to do so sometime later.

By Idowu Akinlotan

After his disqualification from contesting the June 22 All Progressives Congress (APC) primary, Governor Godwin Obaseki was rumoured last Friday to be contemplating defecting to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). His supporters hoped last week that if he defected he would pick the party’s nomination. He will take some days to weigh his options. But if he goes ahead, there are no guarantees his new party would gift him the nomination. Despite trying his best to shape the narratives of his troubles with the APC as a quarrel between himself and the party’s national chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, who wants unfettered access to the state’s treasury and loves to act as the state’s and governor’s godfather, Mr Obaseki has played very complex and puzzling politics that would make any party presenting him as candidate in September a gamble.

Outside Edo State, Mr Obaseki has a lot of sympathies. His main enemy, Mr Oshiomhole, is not liked by too many people for his feistiness, abrasiveness, coarseness and effrontery. In Edo, however, opinion on the former governor is mixed, with a large percentage ready to tolerate his boyish jokes and rural candour than stomach Mr Obaseki’s gloomy and aloof dictatorship. Nothing is likely to shake the opinion outsiders have of Mr Obaseki as the underdog in the contest, the technocratic governor determined to safeguard the patrimony of Edo and deal a permanent blow to the godfather concept. Inside Edo, however, from an optimistic beginning when Mr Obaseki was regarded as a breath of fresh and somewhat polished air, in contrast to Mr Oshiomhole’s offensive lack of polish, the state has gradually begun to reassess their views of the two politicians at a time when the governor’s politics and outlook are beginning to unravel.

Mr Obaseki is an unprincipled person and politician. He was at liberty to oppose Mr Oshiomhole as much as he likes, and had the right to attempt to redefine and reconfigure Edo politics along modern, inspiring lines. He was free to guard the state’s treasury and, if he chose, limit the influence of one man over the affairs and politics of the state. But he needed not only wisdom to carry out those noble goals, he also needed exquisite politics, taking care in the process not to tyrannise the state or impose a worse form of coarseness. For the two or three years in which he fought Mr Oshiomhole and obviously the state APC, he displayed no scintilla of principles or wisdom. He blew hot and cold, fighting one day without rhyme or reason, and trying to make peace the next day without compunction. Most of the fights were not only absolutely needless, they also indicated his awful sense of timing.

In the weeks before the screening of spirants that led to his disqualification, he had attempted to coax a peace deal from his embattled chairman, rallying many sympathetic APC governors behind him, and visiting the leaders of the party, including the president. The unprincipled show of desperation was touching and troubling. Fight to the death if you must, especially if you believe in your cause, and be prepared to lose honourably if it came to that. Not Mr Obaseki who tried to run with the hare and hunt with the hound.

The governors rallied for him alright as he wished, and party leaders were sensitive enough not to ruffle his feathers or spurn his blandishments. But it was clear even then that neither the leaders nor his fellow governors could save him. He had nailed his colours to the mast as far back as late last year, and particularly in March when he openly associated with the dubious effort to overthrow Mr Oshiomhole. If it did not occur to him what dangers he courted because he had become an insurable optimist, it was plain to his fellow governors and party leaders that planning but failing to dethrone a party chairman in an election year was both unforgivable and a clear signal for bloody revenge.

Years before the putsch against Mr Oshiomhole, the Edo governor had fought and alienated the state’s APC leaders and rank and file, and had tried to achieve a needless and artificial dominance of the state. In the process, he tried measures and methods that even the maligned Mr Oshiomhole would have flinched from. He demolished his opponents’ houses, barred or disrupted the political rallies of his opponents within the party, decapitated grassroots party mobilisers, suspended party leaders, intimidated many others, including Mr Oshiomhole himself, blocked entrances to houses, ordered the party chairman to seek approval before visiting Edo, shut out from inauguration 14 state legislators in favour of his 10, and gleefully and paranoiacally subscribed to such measures that neither accorded with commonsense nor aligned with democratic principles. Nothing resembling democracy or anything inspiring came forth from Mr Obaseki. On top of all this, he constantly blew hot and cold, taking umbrage at the slightest provocation. No, Mr Oshiomhole was not his problem, regardless of how convincingly he shaped the narratives against the national chairman for the consumption of non-Edo people. He was his own worst enemy.

Unfortunately for Mr Obaseki, gradually the Edo people were growing weary of his antics and his vituperations. Soon, they were tired altogether. The enemies he had inspired against himself were no longer just members of the APC but also members of the PDP, and even independents. At first they did not mind the governor taking on Mr Oshiomhole, but they wished he would do it within the ambits of the law and common sense.

They were uncertain of how he should take on those whose snouts were permanently locked on the state treasury through union activities, but not too long after, they were beginning to be unsure whether he did not nurse some other ulterior motives in that ungainly and unequal battle. They also initially thought he had the undiluted support of the Benin monarchy, but soon, their doubts began to assume high voltage. Then when he finally exceeded himself and took on virtually everybody, they were fed up with his irrational wars and malignant, incandescent rage.

It is not clear at what point Mr Obaseki was deemed to have crossed the Rubicon, the point where it was no longer possible for him to placate his party chairman, where even the Edo APC was no longer willing to suffer his intolerable antics gladly. But whatever point it was, it became evident that both Mr Oshiomhole and the state APC knew that the misunderstanding with the governor had become an existential issue needing drastic action against the governor. At that point, except for a few hardy supporters, most people inside and outside Edo had turned their backs on him.

They were only waiting for him to be buried, whether at the screening or primary election level. There was no way they would let him stand for the main election on their platform. Fortunately for his enemies, Nigeria’s election jurisprudence had been so sculpted that political parties began to hold the ace disproportionately against any aspirant. It took a naive optimist like Mr Obaseki to blithely walk to Golgotha and calmly lay his head on the guillotine. He had fought a war he could not conceivably win, despite time and chance presenting him the opportunity to shape the theatre of the war and fight to win it.

More than a year before the screening debacle, Mr Obaseki had been confronted with the Akinwumi Ambode parallel, in which the former Lagos governor was denied a second term by his outraged and incensed party. Mr Obaseki vigorously denied that any such obnoxious and insulting parallel existed in Edo. He and his supporters sneered that Lagos was Lagos, and Edo was different, and that there was no way to replicate it in Edo. Right from the beginning of his self-inflicted troubles, the governor had shown little interest in wisdom profitably directing his actions. Despite known that politics is an algorithm of complex calculations, he had spoken so many vicious words and daggers, and had followed up by giving effect to them. The easier option for Mr Obaseki was to stay within the APC and fight for his place in the sun, restrainedly and with an eye on the future. Instead, he fought brutally and recklessly. Given his antecedents, he is unlikely to now give in to wisdom or find a way to cut his losses.

In 2019, Mr Ambode had the option of defecting to the PDP to stand a fighting chance of winning re-election. He was not smart in courting his party base in Lagos in his first term, but he was smart enough to know that the romance between Lagos and the progressives could never be accurately gauged. It sometimes seemed that Lagos was a tossup during elections, but to many politicians, the state often behaved like a husband and wife fighting a cold war. It’s unsafe to get between them. It is unclear whether Mr Obaseki knew in the early years of his war with his party and party leaders that a future hypothetical defection to another party would be costly. However, he is said to be contemplating it. Between last Friday when the APC screening committee delivered their bombshell and Monday, it remains to be seen how he would do his calculations, whether he will apply wisdom or deploy his unreliable instincts.

He will defect if the PDP promises him the ticket. But the opposition party is already hedging its bets. They fear that the certificate crises that brought Mr Obaseki to grief in the APC could, in the light of many judicial pronouncements, create more problem for the PDP than they are trying to solve. The PDP no longer has the fiery Osagie Ize-Iyamu whose gaffe about a birthday in 2016 cost him the governorship election of that year. He will likely be the APC’s standard-bearer later this year. He is as politically consummate as Mr Oshiomhole, and should he win the poll in September, he will probably be quite a handful for the APC leaders. But that bridge is still far-off.

Should Mr Obaseki cross to the PDP and secure nomination, he will not only face the APC grassroots whom he had alienated and who are spoiling for war, he will have to see whether the tenor of his technocratic gifts match the querulous and aggressive base of the unforgiving and desperate foot soldiers of the APC, not to say the vicious federal might which the ruling party has conscripted into a zombie force. The Edo governor is, in short, facing very risky calculations and difficult weeks ahead. He stood a chance of defeating Mr Oshiomhole before the screening; now his chances, whether in the APC or PDP, whether in the PDP primary or the governorship election itself, are very slim and receding very quickly.

Except Mr Oshiomhole says something nasty and costly, and the APC candidate in the September poll makes a very bad gaffe, the chances of defeating them are not very bright, notwithstanding the apocalyptic conclusions of those who wished them obliteration. The APC national chairman’s speeches may lack grace and refinement, but he remains gregarious and down-to-earth, virtues that somewhat excuse his failings and make him a less repugnant figure.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Other than the response prompted by President Muhammadu Buhari’s social media aide, Lauretta Onochie, the scathing May 31 open letter to the president authored by Abubakar Umar, a retired colonel, has gone largely unheeded by government.

The outspoken Mr Umar had warned the president that his lopsided appointments, lack of political inclusiveness, and orchestrated favouritism were likely to doom his presidency and destroy his legacy.

The president’s social media aides, however, insisted that the appointments in question were well distributed, with the Southwest getting the largest share.

But the devil is in the detail. Even though Mr Umar did not spell which areas of appointments he was referencing, but was probably referring to key and top-level positions as well as those in the security services, the president’s social media team was it seems analysing general appointments, most of them in non-critical sectors.

The blistering May 31 open letter was not the first time Mr Umar would take the Buhari presidency to task. It is unlikely to be the last.

Having resigned his military commission on principle in 1993, he has kept scrupulously away from government largesse or handouts in order to retain his independence in taking issue with Nigerian leaders and government policies.

He has imposed Spartan discipline on himself enough to lead even his worst critics to admit that though his opinions may rankle very badly, they could not be dismissed.

He had taken issue with other past governments, including the Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida government that adopted him as a favoured military officer, and he is expected to continue to do so with future governments.

He has also avoided partisan politics except at the peripheral level to push certain non-populist ideals, but has demonstrated uncanny progressivism which many self-confessed flamboyant and voluble politicians find very challenging, if not shaming.

Sometimes, the impact of Mr Umar’s views is not so much because of his chutzpah, which is undoubtedly admirable, or the substance of his topic, which is always timely and consistent, but because of his privileged person and background which stand in stark contrast to the radical issues he addresses.

He spoke out on the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, and neither waffled nor minced words. And he also spoke out on the grave and sometimes bitter issues that traversed all governments from Gen Sani Abacha and onwards, and since Gen Babangida left office.

No presidency since 1999 has not elicited his fiery comments or contributions, and his comments have been mostly well received, though sometimes also heavily criticised. His contributions retain their vigour partly because they are infrequently made and go against the grain.

His May 31 letter to President Buhari will rank as one of the most critical and pungent he has ever written to any president.

Not only did he address a few taboos such as religious and ethnic exceptionalism, around which many northern commentators have disagreeably tiptoed over the past five years, he also valiantly took on the president’s skewed and exclusionist politics and appointments.

Both are of course intertwined, but Mr Umar addresses them separately, illustrating them with examples, and calling attention to their damaging effect on the polity and the legacy of the president himself.

It is difficult to controvert him, for he has not written anything unusual or radical or mendacious. But as expected, and as a rule, neither truth nor accuracy deters the president’s social media team in penning their responses.

Mr Umar doesn’t need to illustrate his letter with his bona fides to remind everyone, particularly the president, that he is an objective critic with a jealously guarded history of making sound and unbiased contributions to national development. He, however, does, probably so that presidency hounds would take less umbrage.

And just so that the president would appreciate the letter more, Mr Umar set the appropriate tone for his letter, making references to the highly nuanced idea of legacy and greatness. Said he: …At the expiration of your eight-year tenure in 2023, your achievements will not be measured solely by the physical infrastructure your administration built. An enduring legacy would be based on those intangible things like how much you uplifted the spirit and moral tone of the nation.

How well have you secured the nation from ourselves and from external enemies? At this time and in the light of all that have happened since you took office, any conversation with you Mr President cannot gloss over the chaos that has overtaken appointments into government offices in your administration.

All those who wish you and the country well must mince no words in warning you that Nigeria has become dangerously polarized and risk sliding into crisis on account of your administration’s lopsided appointments which continue to give undue preference to some sections of the country over others.”

It would be tragic if the president does not know the implications of his actions. There is, however, nothing he has said that gives an indication he understands all the nuances undergirding great leadership and presidency, a great presidency the country would remember for ages.

Nor has any of his aides, including his voluble and cantankerous image makers, ever admitted that they had a responsibility to coax the president into enunciating ideas and executing programmes that project far into the future.

Everything about the Buhari presidency has been short-termist, insular, and simplistically dualistic. These flaws of the Buhari presidency are very well known, but it has taken reiteration by Mr Umar to remind the country and the presidency that the president has but a little time to make amends. Will he?

In the paragraph quoted from the open letter, Mr Umar also vigorously asserted that the president was risking revolt and disintegration by his adamantine resolve to sustain his lopsided appointments.

The retired colonel probably timed his open letter to help the president and his new chief of staff, Ibrahim Gambari, find the time and courage to open up the country and banish the provincialism which the government reeks of.

It is unlikely the retired colonel meant the letter solely to criticise the president. The idea, long sold by many supporters of this presidency, is that the insularity observed in the president might have been influenced by the famous cabal, particularly the late Abba Kyari, that virtually ran the presidency until a few weeks ago.

It will take a little sleuthing to determine just how far Mr Kyari and the cabal sidetracked the president and ran the country along their close-minded tradition. Mr Umar obviously expects some changes, and hopes the president can disprove the rumour around his person, ideas, and competence.

The retired colonel also made the tangential observation that Nigeria under President Buhari had become very insecure. The level of insecurity in Nigeria is undoubtedly disgraceful. No presidential social media team can sugarcoat this depressing fact.

The country has become very unsafe because the government lacks the initiative, objectivity and independence to deal with the problem.

It has kept tired security chiefs in office, dealt with herdsmen with kid gloves to the point of even abetting their crimes, looked the other way as the country is being torn apart, and appears reconciled to the inundating chaos, perhaps based on the assumption, as they have often reiterated, that the problems are a global reality.

Many critics have written Pro Gambari off, partly because of his antecedents. But he should try to put some spine in the back of the president to help him make a comprehensive reassessment of his security architecture and personnel as well as make sweeping changes reflective of the country’s ethnic pastiche.

Mr Umar called out the president on his lopsided appointments. This criticism was wounding enough. But he goes much further by calling out the president on his handling of issues and appointments pertaining to the judiciary.

This was an even more galling reminder of just how parochially and short-sightedly the presidency has handled the third arm of government.

“You may wish to recall that I had cause to appeal to you to confirm Justice Onnoghen as the substantive Chief Justice of Nigeria a few days before the expiration of his three months tenure of acting appointment to be replaced by a Muslim Northerner,” began Mr Umar as if nudging the president into a logical cul-de-sac.

“We were saved that embarrassment when his nomination was sent to the senate by the then acting President, Prof Yemi Osibanjo.

When he was finally confirmed a few days to the end of his tenure, he was removed after a few months and replaced by Justice Muhammed, a Muslim from the North.”

Not yet done, and delving into the main point, Mr Umar warned that refusing to confirm the Acting President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Monica Dongban Mensem, would spell doom for the government and portray the president as irretrievably prejudiced.

Said the retired colonel: “May I also invite the attention of Mr President to the pending matter of appointment of a Chief Judge of the Nigerian Court Appeal which appears to be generating public interest.

As it is, the most senior Judge, Justice Monica Dongban Mensem, a northern Christian, is serving out her second three-month term as acting Chief Judge without firm prospects that she will be confirmed substantive head.

I do not know Justice Mensem but those who do attest to her competence, honesty and humility. She appears eminently qualified for appointment as the substantive Chief Judge of the Court of Appeal as she is also said to be highly recommended by the National Judicial Council.

If she is not and is bypassed in favour of the next in line who happens to be another northern Muslim, that would be truly odd. In which case, even the largest contingent of PR gurus would struggle to rebut the charges that you, Mr. President, is either unwilling or incapable of acting on your pledge to belong to everyone  and to no one.

I hope you would see your way into pausing and reflecting on the very grave consequences of such failure not just to your legacy but also to the future of our great country.”

President Buhari does not like to be dictated to by the wrong person. But in the face of this well-known fact about the intrigues surrounding the confirmation of the President of the Court of Appeal, it is hard to see what elbow room the president has left to manoeuvre.

There is none. The untidy overthrow of Justice Walter Onnoghen, former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), using very clumsy judicial rigmarole and blatant coup remains a blight on the Buhari presidency.

Though the government threw the corruption red herring before the public, it could never dispel the suspicion that it acted based on ethnic and religious sentiments.

To go ahead, despite the presidency’s well-known ethnic biases, to treat Justice Mensem shabbily, as indeed it is already doing by causing many investigations against her, is to court so much disaffection that it is hard to see the president’s already dented image left unscathed.

Mr Umar has done the Buhari presidency a world of good. Since resigning his commission in 1993, he has nurtured his integrity as a public commentator, has remained independent of vested interests, has played politics peripherally in order to influence the direction of public policy and help restore integrity to governance, and has managed for the past 27 years or so not to be beholden to any religion or group.

President Buhari is encouraged by some of his supporters to disregard Mr Umar’s criticisms because of the role the latter played in the 1985 coup. That would be a mistake. Mr Umar has criticised every head of state and president since 1993. He is 70 years old now.

He will not stop, not with President Buhari no matter how truculent he is, and not with his successors no matter how benign they are. But the president can choose to ignore the advice.

That would, however, not make it any less poignant, for the advice not only resonates with most Nigerians and gives them shock therapy, it also takes on added amperage and urgency in the southern part of the country.

There are a number of governors who have bastardised leadership, encouraged divisions in their states, made a mockery of managing the affairs of their states, and are destined to be forgotten after their one or two terms in office.

There will always be bad and short-sighted leadership, in politics, business and even religion. Mr Umar is merely calling on President Buhari to make a difference. Under this presidency, the judiciary has been brazenly castrated, and injustice, especially its dispensation by wrongly appointed and incompetent judges, has multiplied on a scale that is truly colossal and bewildering.

Under this presidency, herdsmen have issued provocative statements and given teeth to those statements by maiming and murdering, and the government has seemed overtly collusive or conniving.

Under this presidency, bandits, kidnappers and all sorts of anarchic groups are roaming the streets almost unfettered, with the security agencies at their wits’ end. A numbing paralysis has overtaken the country and its government.

No answer is coming from anywhere. And above all, the divisions — both ethnic and religious — have multiplied and are catalysed by the government’s complicit actions. Mr Umar suggests that if President Buhari wants to safeguard his legacy, he must urgently reflect on these problems and do something about them.

He is a natural optimist — bold, gifted, persistent, patriotic and far more forward-looking than the average politician and leader.

He will of course hope that his optimism is not misplaced. He will hope that the president, perhaps nudged by his kitchen cabinet, aides, and well-wishers from outside government and politics, can yet summon the rare capacity and brilliance to reboot the country and enthrone the right values and ideas by which Nigeria can structurally remake itself and blossom far beyond the dreams and expectations of his critics.

By Idowu Akinlotan

 

President Muhammadu Buhari’s Executive Order 10 does not grant financial autonomy to the state legislature and judiciary; it only gives teeth to the amendment made to Section 121 (3) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended). The 8th Assembly actually granted the autonomy, clearly against the wish of governors.

Even now, the governors are still up in arms against the amendment, citing, not the provisions of the relevant amended section, but the presumption of the Executive Order 10 which curiously goes out of its way to impute what is not part of the amendment.

Even if the governors manage to get the president to reword the executive order, they are unlikely to defeat or significantly weaken the amended section.

In short, whether they like it or not, and no matter how much they may succeed in delaying the implementation of the financial autonomy law, the state legislature and judiciary have won a crucial victory in their fight for independence.

Section 121 (3) (as amended) is wisely designed to plug the loopholes encountered in the discharge of the functions of state parliaments and judiciaries.

That amendment has been passed and assented and may not be revisited anytime soon. The governors had more than a year to work out the modality of implementing it.

But they continued to sulk and dither, having lost the argument of retaining significant leverage over the other two arms of government.

Had they been forward-looking, they would have been the inspiration behind the amendment, knowing full well that even more than the executive, the parliament is the most recognisable and powerful face of democracy, requiring not only protection whatever the cost, but also independence, no matter the inconvenience.

They should also have known from experience that safeguarding democracy, particularly against arbitrariness for which they have also been victims, was necessary to ensure the independence of the judiciary.

The financial autonomy law makes double sure that the two arms of government are protected against the corrosive influence of governors.

Had the states sensibly taken the initiative to give teeth to the amendment, there would have been no need for any executive order.

More than a year after the law had been left unimplemented, the conference of speakers of State Houses of Assembly took it upon itself to lobby for its implementation.

Except the governors unwisely litigate Executive Order 10, against the will of the people, it seems guaranteed that the state parliaments and judiciaries will from this month now be directly funded from state consolidated funds untrammelled by the arbitrary use of power and influence of governors.

It is also expected that whatever powers the executive order has appropriated in excess of the relevant constitutional provision will be sorted out with the federal government.

It was misguided of the executive order to stipulate certain steps and punishment not provided in the amendment, and it was also misguided of the governors to have sat on the amendment as if that would wish the autonomy away.

Having seemed to have forced the issue now, the fear of delay appears to be over. It is indeed time for the other arms of government to function as both the spirit and the letter of the constitution envisaged.

However, the problem is not so much whether these other oppressed arms are financially autonomous or not. The problem of the Nigerian constitution, as imperfect as it is, is the lack of fealty to its provisions by all arms of government.

Being very enlightened, the people are conversant with the spirit and the letter of the constitution, but they have rarely demonstrated any allegiance to its provisions.

Even without the amendment, not to talk of the executive order, governors ought never to use the budgetary provisions of the other arms of government to punish them and coerce their obedience. But they do, often shamelessly.

It is nevertheless too early to rejoice. The federal government does not fight or oppose the financial autonomy of the other arms of government at the national level, but it has not stopped it from crudely subverting the parliament or sometimes laying siege to it, or even destructively cajoling and shackling the judiciary.

So, how many extraordinary constitutional amendments would be needed to ensure compliance with the spirit and letter of the constitution? The financial autonomy law and executive order may be the first tentative steps in the right direction, but make no mistake that the governors know a million ways by which to compromise the parliament and inoculate the judiciary against wisdom and courage.

By Idowu Akinlotan

Nearly three weeks ago, President Muhammadu Buhari appointed Kashim Ibrahim-Imam as chairman, Board of Trustees of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND). Unlike many other appointments, this one met with almost universal approbation, with a number of political leaders, particularly from the All Progressives Congress (APC), exulting openly over an appointment that was indistinguishably one out of many in recent weeks. In the years when the so-called presidency cabal dominated the news, and the late Abba Kyari was factually or fictionally the public but silent face of that shadowy group, few ever heard of the name of Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam, despite his family pedigree. Not anymore.

Former Osun State governor and one-time interim chairman of the APC, Bisi Akande, stirred memories last week when he applauded the appointment of the TETFUND chairman in terms that convinced even sceptics that the president probably did a notable thing. Despite the controversy about lack of adherence to federal character principle in the appointment, two things came out of Chief Akande’s statement, which also doubled as a tribute to Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam. First, according to the former Osun governor, the new TETFUND chairman played a key role in the merger of legacy parties that produced the APC in 2013. Despite being overlooked in appointments since the 2015 victory of the ruling party, he had remained loyal and committed to the party. This is an unusual attribute. For far less provocations, some as flimsy as losing nominations into elective offices or failing to secure a contract, major political leaders have jumped ship and denounced their former confederates.

Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam not only comes from a family of proud and consistent progressives, he has demonstrated that he is a chip off the old block. Before APC was formed, he had twice on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) platform tried to win the Borno governorship, in 2003 and 2007. On both occasions, he had lost to the combative but wealthy Ali Modu Sheriff. Chief Akande supplied a biography brief of the new TETFUND chairman and enthused about his steadiness, reliability, progressivism and generosity. The former Osun governor is neither frivolous in statesmanship nor casual in assessing someone’s character. He needed only to issue a statement lauding the president and congratulating Alahji Ibrahim-Imam. To go beyond that simple political duty to write a copious attestation of the appointee’s character, describing the appointment as deserving and even belated, is signal proof that there is something unusual about the Borno politician.

Second, and perhaps more critically, is Chief Akande’s insinuation that the schism that bifurcated the APC since it took office in Abuja would perhaps start to receive some mending. Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam had worked hard to get the APC going, and had been instrumental to the 2019 campaigns. For such a solid character and politician to be overlooked in the scheme of things, hinted Chief Akande, was a reflection of the disconnect that existed between the party and its elected leaders. Said the former Osun governor: “When Buhari’s government, perhaps inadvertently, gave Ibrahim-Imam no position, Tinubu requested me to talk to Buhari on Ibrahim-Imam’s behalf. I refused because I presumed that there must have been a dangerous disconnect between the APC and its government. Now that the President has approved a position for Ibrahim-Imam in government, I congratulate President Buhari. I congratulate Ibrahim-Imam. I also sincerely congratulate the APC. I hope that from now on, the party and the government can learn to work in sync.”

It is in such moments that the public gets a confirmation of some of the dangerous undercurrents coursing through the foundations and operations of the political party. The APC had often given the impression that it was united and focused, with some of its leading officials accusing the public and the media of sensationalism and meddlesomeness when they argue otherwise. In reality, not only was the party disunited, and its soul hijacked, as the media speculated and even the president’s household corroborated, it won re-election probably only because its leading lights felt the burden of starting all over again in another party was less appealing than sticking to their party, as hobbled by internal dissension as it evidently was in the years between 2015 and 2019. It may be too early to determine that the healing Chief Akande insinuated is irreversible, but it may have begun and is at least noticeable. At a time when the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has adamantly refused to control its apparatchiks or inspire itself and the public into a new, rejuvenated mould, the renewal of the APC along principled party lines must encourage the public to keep an open mind regarding the political future of the country and the health of its democracy.

Nigerians were not mistaken when they dismissed the APC as confused and divided, nor were they extreme when they described the Buhari presidency as having been hijacked by non-politicians and non-technocrats. Chief Akande wrote a tribute to Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam, but the tribute itself is even more a tribute to the former governor’s own astuteness and character. Because of the respect the president has for him, Chief Akande was asked to put in a word for the Borno politician due to the huge role he played in the formation of the APC and its subsequent electoral victories. Nobody in the party leadership could feign ignorance of that role, the nonplussed Chief Akande seemed to say; and to have to be prodded to ask Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam to lend his savvy and character to serve the country was superfluous. If the insularity and paralysis that suffused the governance of the country in the past years should relent further, as they seem to be doing in the past few weeks, there may yet be hope that as reviled as the Buhari presidency has been, some substantial good might yet come out of it to help build and cement its legacy.

But something else came out of the appointment of Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam, something else beyond energising a hitherto stale and stultified presidency, healing the schisms in the APC, and considerably narrowing the chasm that had exposed the party to all kinds of aggravations and discord. Without doubt, that something else concerns the character of the new appointee. In his public statement, Chief Akande describes and lauds the generosity of the Borno politician. Yes, he was generous in an unforced and impressive way, and he had gone out of his way to demonstrate his love for his fellow politicians, regardless of their tribe and background. Far more than these, however, are these extras: (a) that the joie de vivre that hallmarks partisan politics is sometimes lost on the public, and (b) that few Nigerians know the extent politicians go in establishing networks of political allies and friendships across the country.

Chief Akande illustrates the generosity of Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam in the persistence and expansiveness with which he sought to demonstrate his hospitality. The former Osun governor, in company with the national leader of the party, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, had just visited the former military head of state, Buhari, in the heady days of trying to concretise the party’s potential presidential candidacy. On their way to the airport, they had stopped over at the Ibrahim-Imam residence only to meet ‘three giant pots of pigeon’ delicacy waiting for them. The snag was that they were already full. Notwithstanding the apologies of his guests, the genial host sent the delicacies after them to Abuja. When Chief Akande recalled the commitment and generosity of the Borno politician, and rued the inability of the Buhari presidency to draft him to service, he was not suggesting that Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam needed a job or was poor, or that it mattered that he and Asiwaju Tinubu enjoyed the delicacy for days on end, or even that things couldn’t run without the Borno politician. No, all he was saying with his pigeon soup allegories is that they speak to something far deeper in politics and relationships than the quality or quantity of an unusual meal.

Politicians are animated not only by office, after they had won elections, but are also inspired by the friendships they strike along the way and the exuberant rigour and adrenalin surge they endure when they criss-cross the country to form alliances, sweat over party platforms and ideologies, and solicit for votes even in unlikely places — places where sometimes they are harassed, stoned, or wickedly rebuffed. It explains their constant and unending optimism even in the face of political defeat, their readiness to spend their last kobo in the pursuit of their avocation, to financially overreach themselves if necessary, and of course to make new friends, argue over policies and ideas, exert pressure on one another, scramble for offices, and address more than a dozen campaign stops in a day. Imagine then enduring such sufferings and contradictions only to watch dismally the prize snatched at the end of a tortuous and long process, and handed blithely to a complete stranger.

Whatever the achievements of the Buhari presidency in the first term, it had very little to do with the APC. When he deigned to look in the direction of the party, it was often to straighten out party dissenters and cajole a few recalcitrant party leaders; it was seldom to work with the party, or rally its foot soldiers, or elevate and implement its ideology, or involve party leaders in governance. Chief Akande alluded to this policy of exclusion and hoped that the appointment of Alhaji Ibrahim-Imam would mark the end of the disconnect between the party and the presidency. Even if President Buhari is unable to appreciate many other things, he is expected to know the value of being succeeded by an APC president. That will only happen if he unequivocally ends his politics of exclusion, open up the country to the inspiring side of the APC, spread the dividends of democracy far beyond insular lines, and work closely with his party to energise the base and leadership of his party. While it may be wrong to impose a candidate or person on the party or the country, he should be interested in what the post-Buhari presidency would look like, both in terms of personalities and in terms of ideology. He should not pretend that there are no problems. Chief Akande alluded to these problems as honestly and avuncularly as possible.

By Idowu Akinlotan

The excitement with coronavirus will soon end; and humanity will get on with the business of living and surviving. Apart from Ogun State governor Dapo Abiodun who is still waiting for the magic bullet to finish off the coronavirus disease before reopening his state, other governors and indeed other countries have begun to move on with their lives and economies, believing that the virus would coexist with humanity for the foreseeable future.

The virus, exotically named COVID-19 by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to differentiate it from other precedent coronavirus diseases, has caused quite a stir and alarm absolutely incommensurate with its strength. It reminds the world to intensify efforts to rein in underlying ailments like hypertension, diabetes, kidney problems and other comorbidities catalysing the virus into becoming the frightening ogre that has sent humanity scurrying behind closed cities. But those efforts won’t come quickly enough, nor prove irresistibly deterrent.

In the first few weeks of the berthing of the virus in Nigeria, and flowing from its ravages in China, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States, a previously complacent Nigeria whipped itself into a frenzy, began mindlessly aping the methods and measures of industrialised societies, spoke foreign scientific languages, and waited patiently for a cure or a vaccine that would either sound the death knell for the virus or knock it insensate. But despite all the aping and frenzying, the virus has continued its relentless march, with many Nigerians and their hospitals discovering their funny bones as they satirise the virus and pretend that against African immunity and the merciless rays of the sun, the virus was no match.

Thus in Gombe State isolation centre, patients who tested positive to the virus found the strength to engage in protests, not once but twice, with the admiring and indulgent public defiantly joining them cheek by jowl. Other isolation centres have witnessed patients sending selfies of themselves savouring their culinary delights, or patients killing boredom by dancing the humdrum of the ward away, even mildly twerking their ample derriere.

Given enough time, and sure as day comes after night, these Nigerians will even develop coronavirus isolation ward fashion, complete with provocative display of décolletage. After all, their face masks already manifest their irreverent fashion. Nigerians are irrepressible, a fact quite lost on Gov Abiodun. His counterpart in Lagos, the quick learner, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has banished the idea of lockdowns and has jauntily leaped on the hilarious bandwagon raucously driven by his wonderful Lagos compatriots. He is not just thinking of opening worship centres, he is asking for flight resumption between Lagos and Abuja.

Only Mr Abiodun can explain the coronavirus arithmetic of locking down Ogun for four days and magically hoping the virus would not spread on the free days of Monday, Wednesday and Friday as indigenes circulate among themselves in markets and elsewhere. Left to Governor Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State, lockdown is an impertinent little rascal. Lagos, Ogun and FCT endured more than five weeks of lockdown without losing their sense of humour and perseverance. After just three weeks of lockdown, Kano had had more than its fill of lockdown and had begun to look for all kinds of artifices to escape its strangulating hold. States which swallowed the quinine of lockdown way after Ogun have since left that addictive pill to the gentle and undiscriminating palates of Mr Abiodun’s subjects. For the Ogun governor, the virus will disappear after the rate of infection has flattened or vaccines have been found.

Some 10 or 11 weeks after the virus made landfall in Nigeria, the country has finally grown weary of the upstart. The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) is of course not tired, and so too is the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, and both continue to give dire warnings of the disease’s resilience and resurgence, but few people are listening to their shrill cry. Mosques and churches are reopening — with the NCDC and PTF struggling to retain some form of control over the easing process — and the economy has all but reopened, especially in light of terrible anxieties about the poor shape of the world economy and the downward spiral of the mainstay of the Nigerian economy, crude oil. Not even death by the dozens every hour can force the economy to close again. Would an uproar follow another lockdown? Worse, there would be an uprising.

After the Nigerian presidency had had its fill of lockdown, but was still loth to let go completely, it instituted a curfew, apparently a linguistic pyrotechnic that seduced the Nigeria Police Force into making an ass of themselves before the whole world. They couldn’t tell the difference between lockdown and curfew, nor who an essential services worker was. Before the federal government exited the state-specific lockdown measure, it also imposed a lockdown on movement between states, which it called interstate lockdown.

But right from the first day, commuters and travellers defied the interstate measure, strolled to their motor parks as if the president didn’t understand English, boarded interstate transport vehicles, and both drivers and transporters proceeded blithely to bribe their way across five, 10, 15 states to get to their destinations. Some governors like Nyesom Wike of Rivers State shoute themselves hoarse against the flurry of covert movements, but it was no use. Nigerians were on the move, and it was an Mfecane that was precarious, adventurous and irresistible. If they could cross the mighty and turbulent Mediterranean Sea in dinghies and life rafts not stronger or better than Huckleberry Finn’s wigwam, crossing land borders manned by Nigerian policemen, yes, the same policemen, was cakewalk.

As the lockdown progressed, with everybody deceiving everybody, and NCDC and PTF speaking grammar and scientific jargons, especially with the Chinese lurking in the background, Nigeria’s ubiquitous travellers were on the move, crisscrossing states. No law mattered, and no governor or president made sense. If regular commercial vehicles were not immediately available, trucks and other articulated vehicles would do. If the cousins and nephews of the shrunken middle class travelled in buses and cars, some of them driven by, oh well, soldiers and policemen, the lumpen travelled as passengers with yams, vegetables and cows. This last group of travellers evoked the ghoulish phenomenon of almajirai invasion that has reverberated in the conspiracy theories of the South. While some elites were pondering the difference between almajirai and regular northern youths in search of golden fleece, southern governors roused their people into a panic, insisting that they could not be made to pay for the indiscriminate procreation of the North when the South, no slouch themselves when it comes to such amenities, zipped up.

And well, well, well. The 15 Chinese medical experts are still in Nigeria. Some said they were briefly lost, and others said they were only stranded. It is remarkable, however, that the 15 wise men from the East have kept spectrally quiet, afraid perhaps to commit themselves in their barely passable English. Now and again, some embassy staff or Chinese contractor building roads and rail lines, have spoken up laconically in defence of their experts. But even they have been careful not to commit themselves too enthusiastically, for they also do not trust their English enough.

So, who is speaking for them? Who are their spokesmen? Why, Nigerians of course. And not just ordinary Nigerians, but ministers and well-heeled citizens. They sometimes contradicted themselves, with the Health minister saying one thing, and the Information minister saying another thing, but who really cares? We can’t find the 15 experts, say one. They are not lost, they are only stranded after completing their assignments, say another minister. Babel fell millennials ago, but it is only because archaeologists have not come to Nigeria where remnants of that illustrious race still survive today in their pristine form at the cabinet level.

In one or two weeks, religious houses will reopen, and the economy will be revving full steam ahead in the hope that it can beat or mollify the looming global recession. The lockdown will either peter out or be left in the embrace of Governors Abiodun, Wike and possibly Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State. Everybody is moving on. Even the NCDC and PTF are growing weary, not of fighting the virus, but of defeating the ingenuity of Nigerians who badmouth isolation centres and ridicule the treatment regimen adopted by Nigeria. More and more, it is becoming clear that COVID-19 is fast becoming like HIV/AIDS, an inconvenience Nigerians and the rest of the world must learn to live with. Highly placed Nigerians wonder why if all the virus requires are good old antimalarials, why then embark on the hullaballoo of isolating, quarantining, decontaminating, masking, gloving, sanitising, and metred distancing panaceas? Haven’t they heard, that the virus is new, and that it requires novel forms of absolution? Yes, some states have elevated it into some sort of religion, and have attached new liturgies to it, states like Rivers, Kaduna, Cross River, Ogun, etc.

But who can forget Kogi. Boxing could deal a mortal blow to the virus, whooped its youthful and irreverent governor, the bombastic Yahaya Bello. The virus has been promoted beyond its capability, he joked. In any case, he added, if it exists anywhere, certainly not in Kogi. Testing for it is a waste of resources, he growled. Wicked virus, what frightened it about Kogi and Cross River States? It is present in the two states in one way or the other, said the pessimistic NCDC and PTF. No sirs, chorused Cross River and Kogi. Or do the federal agencies want to plant it by force in the two states, both governors asked derisively? Perhaps; just as it was planted by oil workers and airline pilots in Rivers according to the croaky-voiced and boisterous warrior, Mr Wike? In future, scientists will ponder what was with the soils of Kogi and Cross River to make them unamenable to the structure and dynamics of the coronavirus. Surely it can’t be the politics of the two states. When they find out the secret, they must recommend their formula to the world when COVID-21 or COVID-22 strikes, as surely they must.

A final word about the virus. There will never be an agreement about the rate of infection or the deaths that have accompanied the virus. There is no agreement that the test kits and reagents are reliable, and there is even no certainty that the virus had not berthed in Nigeria before it announced its extravagant arrival in Wuhan, China last year. There is no agreement that ventilators have not been a significant factor in the deaths of patients afflicted by the disease, regardless of the underlying conditions of the sick. And there is, as a matter of fact, no proof that all the thousands that died from the virus did not perish because of the mistaken treatment administered on them: poor and needless intubation, administration of drugs that caused blood clots or exacerbated the prior illnesses they were battling with, etc. As the table below in fact shows — illustrating that the disease is being handled better in some places — some countries have dismantled the virus more efficiently than the other, with some countries witnessing fewer deaths per capita of infected population.

There is, however, proof that in the weeks or months ahead, the virus will be so demystified that a man would ask his friend why he looked so groggy, and the friend would reply that he had a bout of coronavirus. Nothing more than catarrh or flu or sore throat, nothing to worry about, he would snort. Nothing to raise eyebrows or to provoke stigmatisation, let alone attract the garish and endless lockdowns so beloved of the federal government and some state governments. At least nothing requiring the ridiculous infectious diseases law being sponsored by Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila. A worker could also ask his colleague why he was delirious, and the sick would blame the same coronavirus, which he caught when he slept out. The inquisitive and persistent colleague would ask whether it was COVID-19 or COVID-21. And the response might even be that the doctor probably misdiagnosed it anyway, for it seemed in fact like COVID-16, way before the advent of contemporary malevolent test kits.

By Idowu Akinlotan

In 2015, Ibrahim Agboola Gambari, an economist and professor of international studies, was in the race to become newly elected President Muhammadu Buhari’s chief of staff. He missed the appointment narrowly. So he is no stranger to the president’s inner circle. Five years later, and 75 years of age, he has clinched the very demanding and contentious job of serving as the president’s clearing house, the Chief of Staff. One or two days before the appointment was announced, many analysts and commentators spoke out about the eminent professor, attesting to his character or lack of it, hoping perhaps the president would change his mind. He didn’t. Predictably, a loud and raucous controversy has broken out about the suitability of Prof Gambari for the job.

It hardly matters what anyone thinks now. The professor will occupy the office in the years to come, whether he is suitable or not. In all likelihood, he will stay in that office till the end of the Buhari presidency. Given his age, it will, however, likely be the last visible national appointment he will hold. He knows or senses this, and he will predictably give it his best shot, regardless of whether he or anyone thinks the office is essentially a demotion or promotion from his previous national and international assignments. As a tribute to his predecessor in that office, the late and somewhat controversial Abba Kyari, the office of the chief of staff has in the past few years become a hugely visible and influential one.

No one knows, not even the professor himself, whether he will project the office as influentially, spookily and controversially as Mr Kyari, but he has served notice, at least, that he will deploy the office with the same inscrutable anonymity his predecessor idiosyncratically and deliberately managed. Unlike Mr Kyari, however, whatever the professor does will be viewed from the cracked prism of the style and achievements of his predecessor. Worse, Prof. Gambari will not be starting on a clean slate like Mr Kyari, whose work was not assessed with regard to any other occupant of that sensitive office. There will always be the spectral shadow of the famous ‘benchmark’ referred to by Mamman Daura in his tribute to Mr kyari, against which he swore other chiefs of staff would be judged. Following hard on the heels of the late presidential aide, who was deemed to have raised the status of that office to dizzying heights, Prof Gambari should expect to be mercilessly and relentlessly dissected.

In short, as the president’s chief of staff, the eminent professor will labour under the crushing weights of his predecessor’s accomplishments as well as under his own foibles, many of which have been copiously discussed on various platforms in recent days, including the more sedate traditional media and the stupendously irreverent social media. If the professor manages to do his job well and comes out of the hullaballoo fairly unscathed, he will have proved himself nimble of feet as he is widely regarded as intellectually versatile. It is not clear why the president eventually settled for Mr Kyari in 2015, for the credentials of Prof Gambari were more intimidating; but in five years, it is sufficient for the public to note that the president had grown so fond of his late aide that he considered him nonpareil, the “very best of us”, as he elegantly gushed. It is a tough act to follow. How does one exceed or best the very best?

The presidential superlatives with which Mr Kyari was clothed at his death a few weeks ago was thought to be incomparable until his mentor and nephew to the president, Mr Daura, described the departed chief of staff as the benchmark by which future occupants of that office would be judged. Between the president’s superlatives and Mr Daura’s fulsomeness, it is hard to see anyone surviving the pressures exerted by the president’s hammer and Mr Daura’s anvil. Mr Kyari was not only intelligent, as the many tributes to him have indicated, his self-abnegation, language fluency and compatibility with the president, intellect, and master at balancing various interests, were critical both to his survival and his ascendancy. It will be futile for Prof Gambari to attempt to equal or rival the manners and work ethic of a predecessor who expired at 67. At 75, he should not try it, partly because the minds of the president and Mr Daura, and perhaps many other members of the so-called cabal that had and still have the ear of the president, are pretty much made up about their deceased protégé.

Expectations will be high. Many analysts, not to say presidential staff, will hope Prof Gambari will hit the ground running, and obviously running mostly in their directions. But the professor will need many weeks, regardless of his famed intellect, to find his feet and adjust to the demands of an office that has just witnessed the most radical and breathless transformation ever. The office of the chief of staff was imbued with presidential powers by President Buhari himself, a lower office where paradoxically and unconstitutionally the buck, yes, including military buck, stopped in Mr Kyari’s time. There were reasons for this, chief among which was the fact that the president was hobbled by both his fragile health and the extraordinary fact that the demands of a modern presidency, especially in a deeply fractured and heterogeneous society, were simply beyond the president’s ken.

It remains to be seen whether the power imbuement the office enjoyed was personal to Mr Kyari or temporarily institutional. If it was personal, will Prof Gambari enjoy the same access and confidence of the president? If it was to the office, could there be a few individuals who had endured the anomalous ways of Mr Kyari and would be unwilling to further tolerate the paradoxes that surrounded the former dispensation without making a pitch for the balkanisation of such humongous powers? Undoubtedly, there will be almost full devolution of powers to the office of the chief of staff. What is not clear is the shape of that devolution with regard to the new occupant of that very public office. The power play will manifest in the months ahead, once the new man gets into his stride.

The second weight under which Prof Gambari will labour in performing his duties is even more indisputable. It concerns the dismissive way many of his critics have summed his politics, character and style. Mr Kyari mounted the stool without much baggage, with little anyone could say about his person or politics beforehand; the eminent professor is mounting the stool with so much baggage, so much ill will, and so much contaminated politics. He has been described with saccharine prose by a few political heavy weights and friends of many years standing as an exemplary person and diplomat; but mostly, he has been excoriated by those whose trajectories crossed his, and many who had watched and suffered from what they describe as his appalling politics, indeed his galling realpolitik. To this last group, the professor will never be able to put a foot right.

Those who describe the professor’s appointment as fitting and deserved came to their conclusion partly because of his huge intellect, his impressive resume as a lecturer and high-profile diplomat, and his stamina in staying with the Buhari crowd for decades. It is inconceivable that such a resume would not have a positive spin off on the presidency. He is believed in the president’s circle, and perhaps beyond, to be a meticulous administrator with a lot of persuasive and winsome skills, a decisive person who would probably end the paralysis that dogged the work of his constantly edgy predecessor, a skilled negotiator who could help the president salve the wounds inflicted by opponents and critics, and a dependable loyalist who has said or done nothing to subvert or weaken the hegemonism that suffuses the Buhari presidency.

In contrast, Prof Gambari’s critics, armed with facts and figures, have been scathing and unsparing. They accuse him of being an apologist of dictatorship, having in the past wholeheartedly served some of Nigeria’s worst tyrants. They point at his dismissive characterisation of the environmental activist and writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was extra-judicially murdered by the Sani Abacha military government, noting that it struck at the heart of the professor’s love for dictatorship, not to say his indescribable sense of justice. They also accuse him of celebrating the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, and wonder how as chief of staff to an elected president he could reconcile the instincts that are certain to be at war within him. They see him as someone who is fundamentally and poorly disposed to democracy, despite his long service in the diplomatic field, particularly in the United Nations. But there is nothing they accuse him of that the president is not guilty of. In fact, both he and the president share the same sentiments about democracy, about Gen Abacha, and about law and order, with which they have an uneasy but coarse relationship. Activists and civil society groups may object to Prof Gambari’s other credentials, but to the president and all who participated in enthroning the new chief of staff, the appointee is a perfect fit.

While the professor can talk his way glibly out of the thicket he had knowingly or ambitiously danced his way into, it is much harder for him to escape the damning accusation of being Machiavellian during his rise to the top. His critics give incontrovertible examples of his lack of principles: how he destroyed others to climb to the top, how he manifested a peculiar dislike for the Yoruba people within the context of national struggle for power, and his love for intrigues, perfidy and deceit. He is unlikely to be tempted to respond to these accusations. He will hide behind the cloak of the culture of his new office — which requires it to be seen and not heard — to deflect the damning allegations against his person and beliefs. Indeed, it is useless trying to deny these allegations. Few question their veracity. And the president, in all probability, does not care. But having being appointed, and knowing his deficiencies, let him come to terms with them, with his history and with his morality. Rather than excuse them, let him resolve to be a better man than he had been in the past 74 years, if he can try.

His predecessor, as he must have known, was the bete noire of the Buhari presidency, to whom was attributed all the insularity, lawlessness, ethnic prejudice, and general paralysis of that government. Prof Gambari is thought to be a tad better. Let him prove that he is. The president may gradually devolve powers to him as the months grind on; the country must, however, hope he will have the broadmindedness to deploy it for the greater good of the country. He is an ideological hegemonist, not a cultural hegemonist, unlike the president who is widely criticised for being both. In the next three years or so, the professor will traverse the corridors of power, and will discover the immenseness of the power that inheres in the Nigerian presidency, power the president has been unable to inclusively channel for the good of the country. But let the professor tread carefully, not inebriated by the power of that office, but sobered by it. Mr Kyari disguised his fixation with power, showing different sides to those with whom he related over the years, friends and family alike. But Mr Kyari’s friends and those who know him well insist he was not as destitute of character as his successor, whom some of them don’t like.

Curiously, however, some optimists hope that the coming of Prof Gambari to the corridors of immense power may bode well for the Buhari presidency which many critics had written off. It is not clear what the basis of that optimism is. But having served President Buhari in the 1980s as external affairs minister, and having loved the people and ideas the president seemed superficially enamoured of, it is fairly certain that both the professor and the president are birds of identical plumage, and would neither rock the national boat severely nor introduce the needed radical reforms that war against their hybrid conservatism. The professor will make some impact no doubt, and he will do it in the near term, but the public will discover that the erudite professor’s weaknesses will be reinforced by the president’s failings, and his strengths amplified by the president’s absenteeism. A powerful chief of staff office is a recent construct made possible by the president’s instinctive and ideological lacunae. That state of things cannot last. A knowledgeable and determined president will quickly reduce the office to its prior administrative foundations rather than tolerate it wielding undue influence, let alone contemplate the nonsense about one chief of staff or another making his time in office the benchmark for future chiefs of staff.

Prof Gambari is sensible enough to know that there is a limit to what good can be done with that office in a cultural and political milieu that stifles innovation, entrenches conservatism if not reaction, and promotes hidden interests over national interest. He knows how well he must try to balance competing interests round the country, and perhaps in the ruling party itself, and help a distant president manage an economy that could yet go into a tailspin. In the next one or two years, activities geared towards political transition would also begin. The president will be at the centre of it all, and by implication, his chief of staff also. If the professor can ensure that the attention of the president remains undivided and does not wander in the direction of those who gratify or exploit his prejudices; if the professor can think more expansively than his critics thought him capable of; if despite the communication/language problem he is certain to have with the president, he can still manage to steer his principal in the direction of all that is noble and inspiring about the presidency, perhaps this government can be redeemed. But nothing is guaranteed. Despite all criticisms, a blank cheque is now open before the president and his chief of staff. Let them write what is true and noble on it; and let them cash it at the right time.