The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • The trouble with Southwest politics

    You thought the treason bugaboo chorused some two weeks ago by the Buhari presidency against the likes of Omoyele Sowore was new? How quaintly you forget recent history, for Less than a decade ago, when the lure of democracy still captivated Nigerians, the inimitable Goodluck Jonathan and his government in fact screamed treason against a fairly trite remark made by ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar. Nigeria seems incapable of changing. Do you also think the Southwest’s political culture has morphed considerably since the Jonathan vacillations gave way to the Buhari rigidity? Think again, as you regale yourself with this 2010 piece.

    After the giddy excitement of reclaiming a significant part of territory lost to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the Southwest has cooled somewhat, the region’s progressives will have the onerous and frustrating task of determining what to do with domestic opposition. Apart from being strident, the opposition has become amorphous, violent, difficult to predict and place, and often recklessly coercive and subversive.

    As every fighter knows, the unmethodical opponent is usually the more difficult, though not impossible, to beat. At the ideological level, for instance, the PDP opposition in the Southwest is not easy to classify. Are they simply conservative, as they are sometimes inappropriately described, or are they acutely reactionary, as it seems more fitting to call them, though pejoratively? It must be noted that neither they nor the progressives in the region have agreed on how to describe the opposition PDP. You could fight a conservative or progressive by holding him to his belief and ideology, no matter how nuanced; but how do you fight someone so formless as to be nothing in its something?

    This amorphousness benefits only the opposition, particularly in the testy short run. Ignore the Ikorodu Constituency II upset in which the PDP trounced the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate. It neither typifies the nature of politics in the state, let alone in the region, nor does it conform to the lofty but unsupportable expectations of the PDP that a major shift in Southwest politics was afoot. If anything, it shows clearly the difficulty the progressives will encounter more frequently in the coming months and years as they interface with a formless opposition.

    Southwest politics is sometimes regarded as the most sophisticated in Nigeria. I do not know where this erroneous generalisation comes from, but I suspect it has to do with the progressivism of the region and the uncritical classification of progressivism as morally superior to conservatism. The Ikorodu upset indicates a general lack of sophistication in Nigerian and regional politics, which progressives must come to terms with very quickly rather than dismiss as inconsequential or aberrant. True, protest votes overcame party loyalty by a small margin to elect the PDP candidate, but much more than the imposition of candidate that led to the upset is the fact that two tendencies fought for recognition within the ACN, and the party leadership was unable to read the signs of the times.

    The Southwest may be generally progressive, and its champions may justifiably bask in the knowledge that they represent a superior moral argument, but the region culturally and historically has an underlying antinomian tendency that breaks out periodically with such a force as to alter political equations significantly. It was demonstrated in both the First and Second Republics in a manner that surprised the leaders of the progressive movement who had taken for granted the dichotomy between the two tendencies in the region. Indeed, they were more shocked by the fluidity of movement by key politicians particularly from the progressive camp to the other side.

    A keener study of Southwest politics is, however, in fact beginning to show that what appears to be a generally progressive region is nothing but an unimpressive mask for a few dominant progressive personalities. This is as true for the Awolowo era as it is true of the Tinubu era. This previously unknown fact partly explains why the region is often so vulnerable to the machinations of reactionary politics and politicians as well as the shifting values and ideas of the time. It must be acknowledged by leaders of the progressives that at any point in time those who really believe in progressivism, even in a seemingly progressive region, will be few  in fact very few. Those few will triumph only when they can muster the implacable will to dominate the polity, though this is not often, for, as the life of Awolowo showed, the cards are often stacked against those few.

    But the Ikorodu upset, which many Nigerians and even Lagosians probably missed, is just an infinitesimal fraction of the trouble which leaders of the progressives will have to contend with in the coming years. Unlike in the First and Second Republics when bruised, battered and defeated    conservative or reactionary politicians retreated into their shells sometimes for a whole generation, today they have acquired the chutzpah of putting their chins up in defeat. They are unfazed by the immorality of their positions and arguments.

    Even much worse, they have learnt to argue vociferously that established vices are interchangeable with established virtues. This moral confusion is the most pressing danger to the body politic of the Southwest, one which will certainly complicate the struggle between progressives and the opposition. Thus it is quite easy for a Senator Iyiola Omisore, with all the liabilities of being swallowed in the controversy over the death of Chief Bola Ige, to sign a document alleging that the judiciary rigged the Osun election in favour of the ACN. This dangerous argument was first heard after the PDP lost Ekiti. At the time, Mr Segun Oni, who illegally occupied the governor’s office for more than three years, wailed that he lost the seat because the judiciary was compromised or because the ACN propaganda machinery was more effective. This moral turpitude, in the face of overwhelming evidence of electoral crimes, is unexampled anywhere.

    The new-found confidence to project terrible wrongs will become more entrenched in Southwest politics as the years go by. Naturally, it will make the job of progressive leaders harder, for they will be fighting on two fronts — against the mass of the people whose attitude to progressivism is take-it-or-leave-it, and against leaders of reactionary politics whose moral compass is malfunctioning. The sad and worrisome reality is that whether in Ekiti, Osun, Ogun or elsewhere, the likes of Omisore, Oni and Gbenga Daniel truly believe that PDP lost not to the ACN but to the judiciary.

    When a criminal caught red-handed continues to assert his innocence as he is marched into prison, then it is time to be wary. What this tendency portends for the Southwest is that violence is more likely to be embraced to settle the problem of blurred moral compasses. The North, notwithstanding the arguments of monolithic versus decentralised, is less likely to erupt in the kind of political violence we have become used to, for that region is fairly uniformly conservative. At any rate, its leadership, whether religious or traditional, is generally conservative, despite many pockets of progressivism. In such a climate it is not too difficult to moderate political and even social conflicts.

    In the east of the Niger, the dividing line between ideologies is less perceptible, even as cross-border movements across the divides go on smoothly and effortlessly. Going by the politics of the First, Second and Fourth Republics, the entire region does not seem to be as pretentiously ideological as the Southwest. The kind of conflict shaping up in the Southwest is less likely to crystallise in the East. However, whatever conflicts break out there can always be smothered by appeals to the ties that bind their people.

    In the Southwest, the Obasanjos, Omisores, Onis, Daniels, Oyinlolas and others are spawning a brood of unrepentant reactionary politicians proud of their beliefs, confident in their power, and ready to trade tackles. They will continue to get new converts, and the kind of defections expected from the PDP by progressives may either never materialise on the scale hoped for or they may take much longer in coming. If there would be an outbreak of violence on a scale that could threaten national stability, it is more likely to come from the Southwest rather than the East or North. Perhaps if a closer study of Southwest politics had been undertaken in the 1950s, it should not have been difficult to predict where the troubles that would sunder Nigeria would come from.

    Like Awolowo, the new progressives in the Southwest must understand that at any time only a few of them would be relevant. They can dominate the polity by the force of their ideology, for the region is more receptive to it than any other region, but they must never imagine that among those claiming to be leaders of the progressives the ideology is universally embraced.

    They must also reconcile themselves to the plain fact that the region will continue to fluctuate in its embrace of progressivism and conservatism/reaction. Other distracting variables and personalities will seasonally emerge to precipitate conflicts, reaction, conservatism and even anarchism. The kind of sophisticated politicking Awolowo and his likes envisaged can only emerge after strong institutions to mediate political conflicts are set up and begin to flourish. More and more, the kind of universal progressivism that was experienced in the Second Republic will become rarer and rarer.

    • First published December 26, 2010

  • Still on Atiku’s ‘treasonable’ comments

    My editor forwarded a number of very strong comments on my article on President Goodluck Jonathan’s response to Atiku Abubakar’s so-called treasonable comment. Most were derisive of the position I took, and others even snorted at my description of the president’s comment as undemocratic. I respect their views, and, as I always say, I have an obligation to defend their right to make any comment they think fit.

    Alhaji Atiku, you will recall, rehashed a popular statement warning of violent change if peaceful change was disallowed. In the article, I had argued that Atiku reserved the right to make that statement, and that it was not treasonable as the president angrily concluded. The responses sent to my editor denounced my support for ‘treason’, described my premises as illogical and prejudiced from beginning to the end, and finally dismissed my competence to write in such temper. One other critic even wondered why I was opposed to a minority emerging as president.

    I still think the president overreacted to Atiku’s statement, and that that reaction was certainly not the sort we should expect from the nation’s number one office, which should by now be used to all manner of provocations. First, I looked at the nexus between violent and peaceful change, and doubtless found the logic sound, as indeed most of those who have heard it over the decades rightly think. If peaceful change is denied, you do not need any clairvoyant to foretell the consequences.

    If the responders would look at the statement again, I am sure they will find it an elementary truism. Second, I looked at the context of the statement, and I tried to situate it within the frustrations emanating from the clash of propaganda between the rival camps of Jonathan and Atiku. I suggested that Atiku was becoming frustrated that Jonathan’s advertisement campaigns were more effective, and all but hinting that if the party primaries were held immediately, Jonathan would breast the tape first. One of the responses wondered what the advertisements had to do with the treasonable statement.

    Third, I suggested that the presidency in Nigeria was too imperious to allow democracy to flourish, particularly free speech. I still think this is true, and I would rather support the ordinary citizen underdog than give the president the benefit of the doubt. Nigerian leaders always behave as if they own us and must dictate to us. In a democracy, they must be made to understand that free speech, no matter how harshly rendered, must never become, in their imperial eyes, treason.

    What I did not say, but which I assumed everyone understood, was that Atiku made the statement within the context of the PDP, not within the context of a national political combat. Of what use would his statement be if he faced, say, Muhammadu Buhari? In any case, if anyone had the right to make the statement within the context of the PDP, it was even Jonathan, the aspirant advocating change in a situation where a northern aspirant was resisting change.

    I think most commentators did not calmly analyse the Atiku statement and they allowed themselves to be carried away by the feeling that the oligarchic North was as usual trying to lord it over the rest of the country. We must make up our minds what kind of country and democracy we want.

    We are not too young a country or democracy to allow free speech, even if rendered in strong words. Much more than the rest of us, it is the leadership that must come to terms with our opinions, anger and resolve, whether couched elegantly or inelegantly. An appropriate humorous response from Jonathan, the frontrunner, would have put Atiku on the defensive. 

  • Zoning, rotation and their politics

    IT is a testament to the controversiality of his person and worldview that a prologue Governor Nasir el-Rufai contributed to a book written by Salihu Lukman, Director-General of the Progressives Governors’ Forum (PGF), has arrested the attention of Nigerians perhaps far in excess of the book, “Power of Possibilities and Politics of Change in Nigeria”, itself. The author probably desired it, knowing full well that Mallam el-Rufai, even in his mildest disposition, is both a bundle of contradictions and an indifferent instigator of rage and controversy. When invited to such occasions, the governor knows by instinct what is required of him, and he does not usually disappoint.

    In the prologue, a part of which has drawn the most flak, the Kaduna governor calls for an end to rotational leadership which he and most Nigerians often label as zoning. Zoning is a far more gentle and sanitised form of rotation; for while the latter tends to spread appointments, often to qualified people, the latter binds the society helplessly and sometimes fatefully to unqualified persons. The history of Nigeria amplifies this point very inelegantly. But for the purpose of examining Mallam el-Rufai’s suggestion, it is necessary to be restricted to the words he used, even though everyone knows what he really means.

    The governor argues in the said prologue that because Nigeria now has a surfeit of qualified people everywhere, the time has come to abandon the zoning of political offices based on regions. Here is how he put it: “Even with our success in the 2015 elections, there is room for improvement. Barriers to political equality, such as our seemingly entrenched though informal rule for zoning candidacies according to regions of origin, need to be de-emphasised and ultimately abandoned in favour of an emphasis on qualification, competence and character.” Those who have since last week taken the Kaduna governor to task over his connotations presume him to be making indirect references to the next presidential election and, perhaps more accurately, attempting to justify beforehand his ambition to run for the highest office in the country.

    If zoning is not abandoned, Mallam el-Rufai, who is from the same region as the current president, will be unqualified to run on the platform of one of the biggest political parties. He is of course free to run, as indeed his expedient role model, President Muhammadu Buhari, did in all his four attempts to win the presidency since 2003. There are no constitutional impediments barring the governor from vying for the presidency; as the governor acknowledged in his prologue, there are only expedient political arrangements that seem to bar segments of aspirants from time to time. But those who second-guess Mallam el-Rufai are not wide off the mark. They know by experience that the governor is highly ambitious and has not disguised his interest in running for president. His detractors may see his ambition as outsized ego at work, considering that there is no visible connection between his endowments and accomplishments with the exalted office of the presidency, but the governor knows that even the incumbent is far less qualified than he is, whether educationally or temperamentally. Assuming, as some say, that Mallam el-Rufai meant his controversial prologue as a means of testing the waters, nothing will deter him or moderate his long-standing quest for glory.

    This column has consistently joined issues with the subject of rotational presidency, arguing that it is limiting, puerile and restrictive. To that extent it is at one with the Kaduna governor in denouncing its usefulness as a tool to help Nigeria resolve its existential contradictions. But zoning has surprisingly seemed to be effective both in mediating the ambitions of Nigeria’s main ethnic behemoths in their insane zeal to win the presidency and in moderating their cataclysmic urge to bring the roof down on everyone whenever their ambitions were spurned. Even with the zoning statagem in place at the political party level, the crowd of aspirants has sometimes been unruly and unmanageable. It is unlikely that Mallam el-Rufai does not know this. But he appears to sense that if he would stand any chance at all of running for the presidency in 2023, his quest must begin in the closing months of his unremarkable and hugely controversial and partisan governorship.

    There is very little this column, el-Rufai or anyone for that matter can do to undermine zoning in the foreseeable future. Zoning may be inane and counterproductive, having enthroned a slew of fifth-rate politicians as presidents since 1999, starting with the inimitable ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo himself; but it has worked fairly well at least in proportion to the inability of Nigerians to know better. It will take a very bold and irreverent political party to repudiate zoning. In 2014, the All Progressives Congress (APC) knew that their presidential candidate was a suspect nationalist, an anti-intellectual, and unconvincing administrator, but they wanted someone who could beat the then president Goodluck Jonathan, whose ruling party at the time, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was brimful with campaign cash. The APC knew, both by experience and by instinct, that no one could conceivably beat something with nothing. Candidate Buhari, the inscrutable, laconic and inflexible former head of state and retired army general was their best bet.

    By 2015, power had been out of the hands of the North for nearly six years, and had Dr Jonathan won, it would amount to about 10 miserable, exilic years. By 2023, power would be out of the hands of the South for eight years. Should another ‘northerner’ win some four years to come, power could be out of the hands of ‘southerners’ for sixteen years. It is fruitless even for a political purist like this column to argue in favour of such an iniquitous arrangement simply because there are no guarantees zoning could produce a competent president. What even makes the zoning arrangement unfortunately more attractive for its proponents is the implacable promotion of sectionalism by the Buhari presidency, a presidency that appears to abhor inclusive politics, and one that intentionally or otherwise seems to promote the idea of ethnic superiority. One four-year term of the Buhari presidency has made more Nigerians than previously thought to regret the nature and temper of this presidency. Two terms of that same presidency would choke them to death. To argue for a third term, that is beyond 2023, and possibly a fourth term, would be sheer lunacy.

    It is from this prism that many Nigerians will view the 2023 campaigns, which Mallam el-Rufai seemed to make oblique reference to in his contentious prologue. President Buhari had the goodwill and the ample opportunity to lay a solid foundation for Nigerian democracy. But like his predecessors, he also appears blissfully unaware of the historic duty the presidency has placed in his trembling hands. Ex-president Obasanjo knew very little about democracy, but he still managed to retain some respect for that noble concept. Dr Jonathan knew far more about democracy, but he lacked the discipline to imbue it with the right structural foundation and permanence. Years later, it would take less than one term for President Buhari to almost annihilate democracy. Worse, in the same period, and committing excesses much worse than all his predecessors combined, the president has also managed to divide Nigeria in ways that his successor(s) will battle hard and long to remedy without any guarantee of success.

    The consensus of opinion among the ‘North’s’ vocal elite, including even the presidency at the moment, is that may the ‘best’ man win in 2023. It is not certain that President Buhari possesses as much moral and political conviction as any of his predecessors, and that he would recognise the unfairness and insensitivity of abandoning the expedient political arrangement of zoning. But even in his best of moments, he is unlikely to come down unequivocally in favour of zoning in 2023, not to talk of identifying and promoting someone of great stature and heft from the South. As hard as some northern politicians may try, the attempt to abandon zoning will not only fail to work, it may even backfire. By 2023, Mallam el-Rufai will have fully unravelled. Sturdier, less fanatical and far more sensible northerners will seek out like-minded politicians from other parts of the country to promote the ideal Nigeria, one far removed from the insularity and mediocrity that have paralysed the system and brought it dangerously close to the precipice. Indeed, those like-minded politicians will hope that given the unworkable structure of the country and the ineptitude of its rulers, they will still have a country by the next election cycle.

    When 2023 comes into view, Nigerians have a responsibility to seek out and embrace a new paradigm of seeking out and electing competent and effective leaders. It is not enough to just covet the presidency as Chief Obasanjo and President Buhari fanatically did, and it is certainly not enough to moralise about what ethical tones the presidency should set for the rest of the country. Nigerians must seek out those who are modern enough, democratic largely, and capable of galvanising the populace along great, far-reaching and noble causes. The Yoruba know from their history that to produce a president would require the aspirant to have the capacity to reach out to the rest of the country while balancing regional interests; the Igbo must also imbibe this culture if an aspirant from the Southeast is to stand any chance; and it is almost certain that no future northern aspirant without this liberal and inclusive quality will stand a chance. The world is changing. If Nigerians can rise boldly to effect the radical changes necessary to remake their failing country, if the various contending groups in the country recognise that they must give up much of themselves in order to get a sensible little of the collective, perhaps the country may not unravel after all as it now seems fated to do if not now, then sometime in the future.

  • Reviewing revenue allocation formula?

    THE Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), Mr Elias Mbam, recently told the media in Abuja that the government would set up a committee to review the current  revenue allocation formula. Currently, the Federal government gets 52.68 percent, states, 26.72 percent, and Local governments 20.60 percent. The committee will work with the December 2014 review earlier done by the Commission. But the outcome is unlikely to be fundamentally different from the current formula, regardless of the new economic realities the government has reluctantly acknowledged.

    It is strange just how Nigeria continues to dig itself into a futile hole, running a warped federal system, and enthroning inefficient and inherently defective political and economic structures. The present system is untenable and unworkable. Surely it is not too hard for the government to understand what it means to practice federalism. Their ignorance must be contrived and malevolent. What Nigeria needs is not a reviewed revenue allocation formula but real political and economic federalism, deep structural changes. Let states or regions make their money and pay tax to the centre. It is time to banish the cruel and unhealthy monthly circus to Abuja.

  • The unexpected return of El-Zakzaky

    AFTER a putrid bout of mutually antagonistic propaganda, the Shi’a leader, Ibraheem El-Zakzaky of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), has angrily returned to Nigeria from India where he went for medical treatment for injuries sustained when soldiers invaded his premises in Zaria in 2015. He had received court leave nearly two weeks ago to travel out for treatment despite the peevish objections with which the Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, hedged the approval. But for the few days he was in India, though unable to achieve his aim, the government never ceased to harry the Shi’a leader with all sorts of propaganda. He was portrayed as a scheming, unruly and ungrateful person. The sheikh could hardly respond, for the government had a far better and greater mastery of the media and propaganda.

    The Shiites must respond to the government’s allegations that he was both pretending and scheming. Did El-Zakzaky angle for asylum by any stretch? Did he ask to be checked into a five-star hotel instead of hospital? Did he ask for his passport to be handed over to him, perhaps preparatory to fleeing? What is, however, clear is that he is back in the Department of State Service (DSS) custody, has not, together with his wife, Zeenat, received any treatment for his ailments, and the tension and restiveness in the vocal and intransigent Shi’a community are back with Nigerians. Strangely, most Nigerians have sensibly refused to commit themselves to one side or the other in the great Shi’a debacle. It makes sense. No one is sure of anything.

    Read Also: The Nigerian military, El-Zakzaky

    Even though this government has not shown by example or by word that it deserves to have any prisoner, having consistently maltreated them most horribly, it must recognise that once it holds anyone in custody, especially someone not sentenced to death, it must spare no resources in ensuring their wellbeing. Both the federal and Kaduna State governments do not give the impression that they understand the rule of law or democracy. They operate more like feudal overlords. Sheikh El-Zakzaky has not been found guilty, as objectionable and abhorrent as some Nigerians might view his sect and his methods. Until the courts find him guilty of giving the order to kill one soldier, and the same court and government exonerate soldiers who murdered 347 Shiite members, the state has an obligation to commit itself to giving the Shi’a leader adequate medical treatment.

    The whole issue is deeply exasperating. What is wrong with his request to have his own doctors treat him, when overindulged government officials at public expense fly abroad to meet the best doctors state money can buy? State officials must be wary of the precedents they are setting today, one in which their prisoners are routinely denied basic rights, while they themselves might on a hypothetical tomorrow fall into the hands of merciless succeeding governments. Sheikh El-Zakzaky has lost about three sons to state brutality, and is now, together with his wife, broken in body, his mind faring only a little better. If state and federal rulers must go to such brutal and extraordinary lengths to compel conformity, and continue to prove their incompetence in managing deviancy, they have no business occupying Government Houses. They may not care now, but history is replete with examples of rulers who live to regret their folly after they vacate office and fall into the hands of their enemies.

  • Confronting mixed portents

    It has become clear more than ever that Nigerian democracy exists only in the imagination of  its lovers. It never quite formed well since 1999, nor was it really guided and guarded by the right democratic and political sentries, and was consequently in constant danger of unravelling; but in the few weeks this column was on break, it watched from afar how this government inspired a rampage in the country, redefining and misinterpreting terms, baring its fangs, instituting undisguised parochialism, and preparing to redirect the country far away from the original ideas proposed and propagated by the country’s founding fathers to build a democracy and a country united by common objectives. Democracy in Nigeria was never in danger of breathing well or flourishing; but now, only a flicker of it still exists.

    In his first term, President Muhammadu Buhari blamed every other factor, person and institution for his inability to proceed with the speed and depth needed to remake and reinvigorate Nigeria. He groaned that the legislature had been hijacked, the judiciary was too corrupt and inefficient to shake off years of stasis, and the rest of the country reeked of so much corruption that if he had not been hamstrung by democratic tenets and constitutional restraints he would have filled the prisons to overflow. In short, everyone else or thing was responsible for the general stagnation the country suffered as a result of his government’s paralysis. And so, rather than seek to engage the people, policies, politics and politicians of the country, as the constitution envisages, he made only a half-hearted attempt in that direction, and then very quickly gave up. His temper was unalterably opposed to what democracy presupposes. He didn’t say it clearly, but for his second term he quietly schemed to take over the entire system in order, as he and his aides think, to have unfettered access to all the powers the constitution vouchsafed to citizens, regions and institutions.

    Fortunately, this column, after watching the president and his aides for only a few weeks after his assumption of office, realised where the problem was located and never really believed that a second term, which he was set to win in 2019, would bring about the change and drive the country so desperately needed to renew and rediscover itself. It took the president nearly six months in 2015 to constitute a cabinet; now it is taking him about three months to constitute another cabinet that is at bottom not substantially different in personnel and philosophy from his first cabinet. The judiciary was inept and corrupt, he moaned; now he has taken it over completely, not by reforming it or nudging it to produce and promote exemplary jurists into positions of power and influence, nor by coaxing it into a deeply philosophical institution capable of defining and redefining judicial concepts, principles and precedents capable of inspiring other jurisdictions, but by herding it into a body of judicial officers loyal to him and his government and inoculated against the virtues of knowledge and independent thinking.

    The legislature was overpaid, overfed and irredeemably corrupt, the president and his supporters concluded dismissively. That the 8th National Assembly put some semblance of check on the humongous powers the president had accumulated to his office far beyond the intendment of the constitution only served to provoke him the more and to widen the distance between him and the lawmakers. The lawmakers of the 9th Assembly are of course no less overpaid or overfed, nor significantly better intellectually or ethically than their predecessors, but it is at least satisfying to the president that they are substantially loyal, if not even grovelling. They showed their limited mettle — in character, intellect and courage — in the screening of President Buhari’s proposed cabinet. Former Justice minister and attorney general, Abubakar Malami, stuck to the heresy of subordinating the constitution and the people’s rights to the amorphous national security interests of the government, not the nation; and no senator was bright enough to take him to task, to redirect his calloused attention to the ennobling virtues Nigeria’s defective constitution promised.

    Furthermore, the senators listened with great bemusement the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Tanko Muhammad, trip over himself in explaining and defending the judgement given by the Supreme Court in the Osun governorship case. Deploying technical and technicality interchangeably, and it seems blithely, the CJN gave the frightening impression just what kind of justice the oppressed would get in the courts from now on, or just what landmines legal practitioners with some depth would step on if they as much as display a scintilla of the reconditeness of their illustrious predecessors. But who cares? Not the senate, which has served notice where their loyalties lie; nor the president who has at last got the kind of judiciary and legislature he dreams of — institutions displaying the same speciousness only the executive had mustered in the past four years.

    The complete takeover of all institutions and every sector of the society by the executive undoubtedly portends turbulence and acrimony ahead. Already, the Buhari presidency has casually hurled heavy and dangerous labels at critics and opponents. The legislature seems too preoccupied with trivia to pay attention to the careful and orchestrated denudation of the rights of the people. And with the judiciary broken and weakened and remoulded, it would be a miracle for the oppressed to get justice, and for a bold judge to defy the ongoing rampage to dispense justice in its truest sense. It is curious and disheartening for a government that couldn’t classify violent herdsmen as terrorists to so facilely define Omoyele Sowore and his motley assemblage of uninspiring protesters as terrorists, and their protests as treason — this in a country of highly educated people, with some of them boasting great pedigrees of activism. Well, did the same government, which took a mild and sectional view of Boko Haram, not also without compunction describe the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) as a terrorist organisation? Having succeeded with these blatant and brazen missteps, there is no telling who next would be accused of treason, or opponent and groups classified as terrorists, or which courts would accent to the government’s distressing and notorious classifications with as much carefreeness as the government would prompt them.

    The constitution gave the executive as much powers as they would need to run the affairs of the country properly and firmly. Neither the president nor governors, however, seemed satisfied with what they have, considering how very monarchical they have become. Governors take over their states totally, taking no prisoners and brooking no opposition. The presidency has done worse. With the complete takeover of the parliament and the judiciary, those left out of the president’s circle are going to read infamy into many of the government’s policies and programmes. They will be puzzled by the president’s insistence on selecting his security chiefs from one part of the country, with all the attendant stultification and paralysis that connotes. They will see his lack of resolve on the herdsmen crisis and the consequent insecurity overwhelming the country as proof of his sectionalist agenda. And they will inevitably interpret the government’s Rural Grazing Areas (RUGA) policy and the budgetary outlay for it as an indication of a dangerous Fulani agenda, an agenda underpinned by further steps such as the befuddling Water Bill suspected to be poised for resuscitation in the parliament. And they will regard the now comatose herdsmen radio station as final proof that in fact a concerted plan to promote and entrench Fulani exceptionalism exists.

    If the president had problems with the 8th NASS and the Walter Onnoghen-led judiciary, it is not because a more astute president could not work with them; it is in fact more a reflection of the weaknesses and limitations of the Buhari presidency itself. A statesman demonstrates his competence and depth by his ability to work with opponents, mollify their anger when it arises, coax a consensus out of parliaments and squabbling ethnic groups, and show devotion to high and noble principles and values. But by capturing the other arms of government, the stage is now set for impunity and other forms of lawlessness. When this column took the government to task a few years back over its abrasive anti-corruption war, it was because it saw that the president and his supporters did not appreciate the delicate nuances that festooned that war. The column feared that a dangerous foundation of impunity was being laid for the country, where the end would justify the means. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

    Impunity has overwhelmed the country. There will be more arrests in the months ahead, more terrorist label casually flung around, otherwise harmless dissent equated with treason, intimidated courts give perverse judgements in cases involving government, National Assembly will make tame and futile statements, soldiers and policemen will train their guns on each other and on other unarmed citizens, presidential spokesmen will sneer at the people and speak roughly to the public, states will bargain with bandits, and supporters of the president, many of them averse to introspection, will continue to make extenuating and exculpatory statements to justify the government’s subversion of the constitution. Law and order has virtually broken down in the country, and the only panacea the government thinks of is the deployment of more soldiers in the streets and checkpoints.

    The Buhari presidency has learnt absolutely nothing from history, including recent Nigerian history. Under the president’s nose, ex-president Goodluck Jonathan is pining away in regret over his many missed opportunities to lay a solid foundation for democracy and help entrench it in such a manner that the parliament and the judiciary would operate independently as the constitution envisages, and the executive would not deploy overbearing power against citizens and the opposition. Dr Jonathan left office in 2015 and has been at the receiving end of poor and oppressive government policies and actions in which the opposition has found it difficult to operate in the classical sense or win elections, or even live peacefully under the rule of law.

    Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo had the best chance to set democracy firmly on the right course. He lost that great opportunity to make Nigeria a wonderland of democracy and rule of law, and has himself become either obsessed at trying to right the many wrongs he inspired while in office or has become a victim of the breakdown of law and order. He is not safe. No one is. It was clear neither Dr Jonathan nor Chief Obasanjo possessed the depth of understanding needed to help entrench democracy. Worse, they did not also have the discipline. President Buhari, as indifferent as he is to criticism, is tarred with the same brush. Having birthed the worst environment for democracy and the rule of law, and having pushed the country to the precipice of total collapse of the rule of law, he will also live out of office railing against his successors who will invariably hound him and his men, for they have done enough to deserve being hounded. What is more, they will get no reprieve from a parliament or a judiciary they have done their worst to castrate so brutally.

    Many critics have warned of creeping fascism, a phrase this column first used in late 2015 when it observed the transmutation of the government from democratic to authoritarian. Others have warned that democracy might be lost altogether. Both sets of critics are right. But the diagnosis is a little more nuanced. What is afoot is the Buhari presidency’s alarming lurch towards the Chinasation, Pakistanisation and Russianisation of Nigerian democracy. That this is incompatible with the borrowed presidential system of government is a mere inconvenience to the Nigerian government. Worse of all is the fact that these ‘inasations’ are being authored by a group of shadowy characters in the government, echo chambers who in addition to promoting primordial interests incompatible with national interest have seemed to convince themselves that Nigerian democracy does not have to reflect the principles and values that undergird the constitution they have so gracelessly borrowed and inexpertly implemented.

    Nigerians must live in apprehension of an uncertain future from now on. If the shadowy characters influencing the direction of government manage to keep this country that has become groggy from their machinations in one piece till 2023, they will do everything in their power to concoct a post-2023 system that fits their cracked worldview. Already, the careful observer can see and feel in the president’s cabinet appointments the entrenchment of a worldview and post-2023 Nigeria that are dangerously inimical to the future and wellbeing of the country. The shadowy characters will neutralise as many powerful interests as possible, and use ambitious individuals who are too blinded by the present jostling to see the divide and rule traps being set for them. All things considered, and despite the loud protestations of leading All Progressives Congress (APC) chieftains, not to say the feeble complaints of the weakened Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leaders, neither democracy nor the economy, nor yet the rule of law and individual rights, will fare better in the months and years ahead. The clouds of repression are gathering; Nigerians must hope that the lights do not go out completely over their country where moving from one point to another and staying alive from day to day have become a terrible and bone-crushing ordeal.

  • APC finally makes a clean sweep

    AFTER a first term punctuated by controversies, confusion and hesitations, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is finally primed to kick-start its second term at the helm of Nigerian affairs fairly more confidently and more resolutely. In the parliament, its preferred principal officers have been elected with pluralities they can boast about: a crushing 79 to 28 in favour of their candidate, Ahmed Lawan; and an anticlimactic but no less satisfying victory of 281 votes for the favoured Femi Gbajabiamila to 76 votes for Umar Bago. The victories were emphatic, prompting the feisty and elated party chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, to describe that comprehensive victory as the party’s finest hour. He often indulges in hyperbole in the heat of battle, or in the first flush of victory; this time, it must be conceded to him, he has more than enough reason to luxuriate in the uncharacteristic victory he and his men plotted and secured.

    If this was the APC’s finest hour, despite winning a presidential election just a few months ago, it must be that for a man many have described as candid and polemical, his Freudian slip may be an indication of his true assessment of the prevailing electoral realities. More crucially, for a man against whom party insurrectionists had recently brought out the knives, this may be the first undiluted victory he would mastermind against the run of play. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had regained its strength, as demonstrated by its electoral performance in the states, and is thus not incapable of still springing surprises to wrest control of the parliament. A few weeks ago, party rebels, inspired by the cheerless former chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, were determined to cut Mr Oshiomhole to size, and had begun to stir up trouble for him. It was in the midst of these troubles that the former labour unionist, helped no doubt by party leaders, turned what looked like a difficult and anxious situation into a sweeping victory.

    Mr Oshiomhole can now exult as much as he wants, and Senator Lawan and Honourable Gbajabiamila can finally exhale after so many tortuous years of hankering after the principal legislative positions. They have finally won the big prizes. The victory may be tempered by the inexplicable election of the rabble-rousing Delta State senator Ovie Omo-Agege and the rather undisguised involvement of the president — after he had sworn himself to dignified neutrality — in pushing the candidacies of the two leading APC lawmakers, but at least they now seem to have a clean slate upon which to write their agenda, prepare their legacies, and lay a solid foundation for 2023. Now completely shorn of excuses, considering that they still have 20 APC states in their kitty and dominate the legislature implacably, their competence or otherwise in governing the country, not to say their ideology, will be far easier to evaluate than they imagine.

    Their predecessor in office, the PDP, ruled for a meagre 16 years and floundered badly. Apart from leaving the treasury doors ajar for all manner of journeymen to gorge themselves on Nigeria’s wealth, they were nevertheless a fairly cohesive and inclusive political party, a party that no czar seemed to dominate, a party unencumbered by principles and ethics, a party so ideologically fluid within the conservative spectrum that it made no one to suffer pangs of conscience. The APC, particularly the president, if not Mr Oshiomhole himself, has sometimes given the impression that its rules and regulations are interchangeable with the most exacting of liturgies. The PDP, on the other hand, was loosely run, made no pretence to holiness, but was fairly effective. The APC was until now never really run as a political organisation, but it has consistently aspired to be run like a disciplined body. If it can find the balance between the permissiveness of the PDP and the choking regimentation inspired by the president, the party may yet have a lasting impact on the country.

    Imposing discipline in the APC is, however, a tall order. The party is fortunate to have Mr Oshiomhole who is naturally imperious and well suited to leftist regimentation. Assuming he can be restrained from turning party members into a goose-stepping army of pragmatists, with Cuban and North Korean overtones, he can be trusted to persevere in instituting the jarring changes indispensable to the running and survival of the party. He will have to contend with members of the Governors Forum who are themselves uncomfortable with taking orders from anyone but themselves, and he will have to battle the cabal who will keep whispering paranoia into the president’s ears. But if he can stay the course, if he can master the art of giving and taking, sometimes punishing and sometimes placating the enemy, he stands a good chance of beating his party’s drawn swords into ploughshares. Nothing guarantees success in that difficult endeavour, for those who appear to be holding the short end of the stick today appear determined to give the party chairman the fight of his life.

    Now that the APC controls the legislature very firmly, it will be clear whether their problem was a National Assembly (NASS) subverted and compromised by former Senate President Bukola Saraki and to a lesser extent by former Speaker Yakubu Dogara. The president’s awkward approach to lawmaking and his even more gauche approach to socially relating with opponents and critics led him to experience a difficult relationship with the legislature. Sen Saraki might be a difficult and pompous lawmaker, a politician who was grasping, didactic and contemptuous of both his inferiors and betters, but he was not impossible to mould by a brilliant and diplomatic president, nor difficult to relate with or control by those described in urban parlance as his Kryptonites. Hon Dogara was more level-headed and not as obsessed with position as Sen Saraki. Noblesse oblige, however, made him join forces with the former senate president in the 8th NASS.

    With their total control of NASS, neither the APC as a party nor the president has any more excuse for sloppy budgeting and lawmaking. The legislature will not ennoble an executive that proved in the last four years to be peculiarly tardy, plebeian and complaisant. The president has promised to assemble a better team, and perhaps too a kitchen cabinet that passes muster. If he lives up to his promise, he will complement the 9th NASS, assuming that the new lawmakers can also rise to the stature of their boasts and the expectations of a wary populace. As expected, the new NASS will try to find its feet in how to relate with the executive and justify the yearnings of the electorate. The principal officers have hungered for their positions for so long; they must now decide just what their approach to lawmaking will be: whether it will follow the constitution or pander to the caprices of the executive.

    Indeed, the most difficult task the 9th NASS will face in the months and years ahead is whether they can truly be independent of the executive without being unduly confrontational. The party is exulting over its control of the parliament, having fought tooth and nail to enthrone its favoured sons as principal officers. Whether those sons can look their mentors and sponsors in the face and tell them to go stuff the constitution down their throats is another thing entirely. The grovelling Sen Omo-Agege, who was alleged to have masterminded the snatching of the mace from the Senate last March, has been elected deputy senate president. He is naturally subservient. No one is sure how both Sen Lawan and Hon Gbajabiamila will stand when the chips are down, whether they will call their souls their own or produce a masterful display of legislative competence, independence and wizardry. There are whispers suggesting they may not be what they are cracked up to be. Time will, however, tell. After all, who knew Chief Odigie-Oyegun would genuflect before governors and party leaders when he was party chairman? And who knew the moralising ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo would seek third term?

    Soon, despite seizing control of the executive and the legislature, and after, in the opinion of many, virtually taking control of the judiciary in ways that may be inimical to the rule of law, the APC may finally discover that all its gains can be negated by a lack of ideology. Mr Oshiomhole is pragmatic; the president is conservative, perhaps an archconservative; most of the party’s governors and lawmakers are either safely ideologically noncommittal or at best welfarist; and the rest, party leaders and members alike, are apostles of ad hocism, sometimes hunting with the hound or running with the hare depending on the expediency of the moment. With such fluidity, how does the party hope to weld together a disciplined political party eager to pursue great ideals or die for something? For the past 20 years, Nigeria’s ruling parties have been lax in everything, including their policies, extremely eclectic in their methods, and aggressively practical. Ideologies exert pressures on them in ways they are unwilling to endure, let alone implement. Without an inner core made of steel, where will the party find the fulcrum upon which to balance their government and their legacies?

    It was easy for President Buhari to blame Sen Saraki and Hon Dogara for the confusion and retrogression of the past four years. His diagnosis is of course wrong, for the blame lies squarely with him. It was also easy for APC members to blame their lack of cohesion on fifth columnists and an indecisive chairman. Now, the party has a chairman who knows what he wants and how to get it. But that is only if they let him, and if he proves capable of moderating his verbal aggression and learning from his own mistakes. The jury is out on whether the party can restore the cohesion that helped them overthrow the 16-year tyranny of the PDP.

    If the president can somehow put together a great ministerial team and kitchen cabinet, if Mr Oshiomhole can nudge his party into crystallising an ideology out of their amorphous and sometimes infantile worldviews and projecting the right leadership that gives that ideology life and meaning, and if party members themselves have the common sense to unite around a great and common long-term cause, perhaps their takeover of the legislature on the terms they claim to be comfortable with, not to say the restoration of the Buhari monarchy that gives the party the latitude it desires, may yet avail the party and the country much. But here again the jury is still out, for as everyone knows, greatness is not necessarily hewed out of flowing with the river but often flowing against it.

     

    • Palladium will be away for a few weeks

  • Gov Bello V. Judiciary: Industrial court puts a spanner in the works

    IN a landmark but little celebrated judgement delivered days ago by the National Industrial Court, the Kogi State government was ruled out of order on two counts: withholding the amounts standing to the credit of the state judiciary in the consolidated revenue fund, and attempting to control and direct the staff of Kogi State judiciary. The state government had stopped the salaries and allowances of judicial workers since July last year. But according to Justice E.N. Agbakoba, the state government had clearly violated the provisions of the constitution, especially Section 121 (3) and Paragraph 2 (1) Item C Part II of the Third Schedule. The judge therefore ordered that the state government should pay the judiciary N1.529bn in 30 days.

    Governor Yahaya Bello unlawfully withheld the funds due to the state judiciary because he said they resisted his staff biometric and audit exercise and what he called pay parade. The judiciary had insisted he had no such powers to impose any such rules or methods on them, let alone withhold their allocation. To compel the government to comply with the constitution, the Kogi State chapter of the Judiciary Staff Union of Nigeria (JUSUN) went to court last March to seek an interpretation of where the governor’s powers began and ended on that vexed issue. The court has finally determined who acted unlawfully. But whether the state government can risk the ire of the courts by failing to pay the huge sum it claimed to have only withheld but not spent is another thing entirely.

    In both his 2019 budget speech and the New Year’s Day address, Mr Bello tried to sway the public behind his government by announcing that the judicial workers were only punishing themselves over their salaries and allowances lying idle in the bank. He claimed he had not touched the money, but that he only embargoed it. Not only does he not have the authority to withhold anything, it turns out, according to the courts, that he does not even have the authority to dictate to judicial workers or regulate their deployment or work. For a governor fighting for re-election, his abominable treatment of civil servants and judiciary workers is certain to be very problematic.

    Not too long ago, the National Judicial Council (NJC) sent a panel to Kogi State to mediate in the misunderstanding between the governor on the one hand and the chief judge, Nasir Ajanah, and judiciary workers on the other hand. The NJC, however, dithered. Indeed, before the governor told the visiting NJC panel that he could not work with the state’s chief judge, he had tried to instigate the House of Assembly to remove him. That effort came to nought on the altar of a High Court judgement in the state. But rather than point out the illegality of the governor’s action, the visiting NJC panel tried to placate him and even handled his contemptuous treatment of the judiciary with kid gloves. It has taken a resolute Industrial Court and a courageous and brilliant Kogi High Court to expose the impeachable actions of Mr Bello.

    Mr Bello has managed to pay one month out of the about 12 months salaries and allowances owed judiciary workers; and he took one month to find the money after the NJC admonished him to pay. Yet he claims not to have touched their allocation. The Industrial Court has determined that he has violated provisions of the constitution, and it has ordered him to make amends within 30 days. It remains to be seen whether he will comply or persist in his acts of impunity. He believes he will win his party’s primaries, and then go on to win a landslide in November’s governorship election. Perhaps he has started to believe he is a magician, no longer a politician. For a governor so completely lawless and so inept, a governor who owes civil servants years of salaries and openly lies about it, it beggars belief that he thinks so highly of himself. Yet he ought to consider himself extremely lucky to have ridden on the back of a governorship mandate he neither worked for nor deserved, either by virtue of his education or by dint of character. Re-election? That’ll be the day!

     

  • Vacillating over state police

    THE controversy over state police has puzzled and engaged many Nigerians for the past one year or more. Last Monday, when a presidential panel on the reform of the Police Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) submitted its report, it almost seemed like President Muhammadu Buhari had endorsed the establishment of state and local government police. But he had not. Commissioned in 2018, the panel took nearly one year to complete its task. Because it was described as a presidential panel, and erroneously presuming that whatever it does or says must have the president’s imprimatur, excited newsmen published the purported new state police deal as if it was a done deal. Miffed by the equivalence, the presidency quickly disabused the minds of the public, insisting that the report was only a body of recommendations meant for another panel to peruse, dissect and possibly glean something concrete from it.

    In fact, an examination of the presidential panel report shows that the state police suggestion was a by-product of the more critical issue of police (SARS) brutality that was threatening to undermine democracy and good governance. But having become the main issue, it is clear that the president and his team, not to talk of the rest of Nigeria, must grapple frankly with the idea of state and local government policing. Insecurity has become a major problem threatening to scuttle democracy and engulf the country in flames. Fewer Nigerians have confidence that the government has any idea left on how to tackle it, save perhaps state police. But whether the White Paper panel will embrace the idea of state police wholeheartedly or seek for caveats to vitiate or circumscribe it, while giving the impression it is for it, remains to be seen. The country will wait with bated breath to see what the new panel will decide, or whether the government, after dithering endlessly, will accept a recommendation for state police.

    The news suggesting that President Buhari is for state police is, therefore, false. So far, he has not even decided what he wants. There is indeed no proof that he wants state and local government police, nor any constitutional amendment that will attenuate the monarchical powers he and his predecessors inaccurately assumed the constitution gave them. The White Paper panel cannot also be trusted to inspire the revolutionary and constitutional changes needed to tackle the confusion and insecurity enveloping the country. But even if the new panel, which may not be as representative as the first panel, shocks everybody by producing fresh, powerful and progressive recommendations, the states themselves have prepared many booby traps to scuttle the agenda. According to the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) chairman, Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State, the states are not unanimous in supporting the idea of devolved policing.

    The governors had met with President Buhari on Friday to deliberate on a number of issues among which was the topic of state police. No consensus was reached, said Dr Fayemi, because the states were not equally financially endowed, and indeed had different dispositions to the idea. For an idea that many thought was virtually sealed and delivered once the first panel submitted its recommendations, it is beginning to look so far-fetched now that it may be irretrievable. It would be remarkable were the president, who has often come across as an archconservative, capable of engaging in dramatic turnarounds and embracing revolutionary ideas of governance beyond his ethical battles for administrative reforms.

    Theoretically, the president may like to embrace state police, if it would rid him of the insecurity headache he has battled with for some time; and he may in fact genuinely see it as the panacea to the country’s mounting insecurity. If he does, and if state police becomes institutionalised, it would still not mean that the idea has the capacity to solve the country’s security nightmares. Nor would it mean that the country’s warped federalism would be instantly remedied, whether incrementally, as some hope, or substantially, as a few fantasise. State police is a sound recommendation by all yardsticks. But it is nothing more than tokenism in a sea of grave and mortal wrongs done to the administrative and political structure of the country. Dr Fayemi says some states fear the financial implication of the idea. Of course if policing of the country were to be devolved, the amount budgeted by the federal government in running the police must be distributed to the states. In fact, the fear expressed by the states over their lean resources is the chief reason state police would be inadequate to tackle the security nightmare facing the country. Some of them are not convinced; they think it is just a question of money.

    If the presidency finally — but obviously reluctantly — comes round to the idea of state police, it is because they hope it would solve insecurity or at least considerably ameliorate it. It could also be because they are desperate and are at their wit’s end. It would, however, be a piecemeal and eclectic approach to solving a problem that has remained very constitutionally structural and fundamental. The 1999 constitution is defective and presumptuous. It unwisely obliterates ethnic nationalities and the cultural and social differences that underscore their development and existence. There was little federal about it, and nothing that conduces to long-term stability and growth. States were needlessly created by the military in their years in government, and local governments proliferated in such a skewed and vexatious manner that administrative atomisation bred and still continues to breed discontent and rivalry among states and ethnic nationalities. Just creating state police, as great a palliative as it is, will not straighten the constitutional crookedness that has upended the country or dissipate the anger between tribes smouldering below the turbulent surface.

    It is shocking and disturbing that any governor could dare to suggest that his state lacks the financial resources to run a state police. Does state policing not start with possessing a healthy idea of what federalism entails, and how a country must be restructured to deliver on that great promise of a developed and highly modern society envisioned by the patriarchs? If governors have no clue how deep and interwoven into the country’s fabric the problem is, how can they be trusted to find a viable and inspiring solution? Nigerians already fear that their governors and political leaders lack the discipline, democratic conviction and temperament to run state police. Assuming they are honest that they really want state police, the problem of running it is probably compounded by their fear of financial inadequacy. For years, the wrong leadership crowd at both federal and state levels had ruled Nigeria. Now, the exhibition of mediocrity is much worse, as many states like Zamfara and Kogi have directly and obscenely showed.

    Accustomed to handouts, the disgraceful practice of marching every month to the federal capital to receive their statutory allocations, they are neither challenged to conceive novel financial management measures to raise revenue nor do they have the faintest notion of what a federal constitution and state autonomy should sound and look like. If states are constitutionally made self-sufficient, and do not rely on any allocation from any external source, they could never create the myriads of local governments they have burdened themselves with, or fritter away the resources of their states. Isolating state policing from the vast expanse of structural monstrosities hobbling Nigeria will remain counterproductive. Yes, perhaps it is a small step forward. But it is only a step forward because the Buhari presidency, like its predecessors, lacks the vision and courage to comprehensively do what is right. State police is tokenistic and incapable of addressing the long-term problems of Nigeria.

    At the moment, no one knows how a majority of governors will vote on the issue of state police. But Nigerians must be careful not to count on them. They have begun to vacillate. Many of them seem satisfied with the prevailing unitary system that robs Peter’s Value Added Tax from the breweries to Pay teetotaller Paul, and are willing to strangulate and impose on the local governments as heartily as the federal government is imposing on them. At bottom, they care little about federalism or even devolution, and they argue that after all, there is no consensus on what restructuring means. They fear they may not be able to find the funds to run their state police, if federal policing is devolved to the states. Therefore, given their orientation, their grasping habit of accreting powers to themselves, and their imperial approach to leadership which is unlikely to change anytime soon, they may find ingenious ways to repress and suffocate the local governments under them. Half measure, as good as it may appear, is simply not good enough. This is evidenced by the struggle between states and local governments over the financial autonomy of the latter.

    Both states and LGs have a joint account into which the statutory allocations to the LGs are paid. In theory, the states are nothing more than conduits to channel LG allocations to their final destinations. In practice, however, the funds rarely reach the right destinations, and are often mishandled by the states. To arrest this anomaly, the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), a unit domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), has ordered that from June, no state government must touch the 20.62 percent share of the federal allocation meant for the LGs. Fearing that this would make the LGs independent of the states, the governors are warming up for a fight with the NFUI, and have accused the organisation of overreaching itself. In addition, some states which have already created local council development areas (LCDAs) will look for ways of sharing the allocations between the LGs and LCDAs as appropriate. The affected states may find a way around this obstacle, but with NFUI breathing down the necks of banks and state accountants, and the governors threatening to go to court, it is not certain how the knot would be untied.

    The NFUI/governors disagreement will continue for a while, and it is one more indication of the embarrassing tokenism Nigerian leaders are deploying to tackle deep-seated and fundamental problems. From state police to financial autonomy for LGs, this piecemeal approach will not only fail, it may ultimately doom the republic. Taken in isolation, state policing is a great idea, and financial autonomy for LGs a wonderful measure to curb states lunatic binge on funds. But these are not the only awkward manifestations of Nigeria’s diseased federal constitution. Since the country is shying away from the salient issue of restructuring, but prefers to fiddle only with minor aspects of it, hoping that a huge problem would answer to the command of the smallest of rudders, they must hope that the day will not come when circumstances would seize the initiative from them.

    Nigeria is a unitary country with really little democratic achievements to boast of except winning and losing elections. It does not even compare well with the Chinese one-party democratic system. The Nigerian presidency is far too powerful and too incompetent for the good of the country, especially as the recent humiliation of the legislature and judiciary has indicated. Even in the states, governors exercise overbearing authority over the legislature, having lobotomised them, and over the judiciary in so many clever but harmful ways. The rights of the people are routinely trampled upon by disgracefully incompetent, poorly funded and repressive law enforcement and security agencies. But by some miracle, rather than engineer a comprehensive constitutional remake, the government continues to hope that peace and stability would be the result of its half-hearted, awkward and totalitarian exhibitions. Half measure will not work, and the security collapse and maladministration will continue to worsen until an implosion is threatened. It is impossible to expect otherwise, even with state police and financially autonomous LGs.

     

     

     

     

  • Knives out for Oshiomhole already?

    IT is too early to determine whether the plot to oust the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole, will acquire enough momentum to keep it revving. Not only is it too early trying to determine the integrity of the plot, the plot itself is coming too early in the day. Triggered by Lawan Shuaibu, APC deputy national chairman (North), through a letter calling for Mr Oshiomhole’s resignation, the plot is widely expected to miscarry in its first trimester. Sen Shuaibu, who is from Zamfara State that is convulsed with intra-party crisis and enervated by sweeping legal cum electoral losses, is merely the titular arrowhead of the conspiracy to force the party chairman out. Mr Oshiomhole is accused of high-handedness, blamed for the loss of Zamfara State to the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2019 elections, and denounced for alienating some aggrieved governors, a few of whom the chairman caused to be suspended for anti-party activities.

    Going by the changes — not reforms — instituted by Mr Oshimhole in the party, the APC is expected to remain somewhat agitated in the foreseeable future. The old ways of doing things have proved very ephemeral and destabilising. Instituting new ways will, therefore, engender natural resistance and acrimony, especially if the new ways are driven by the chairman’s unionist approach to running things, not to say his idiosyncratic brittleness and impatience. The party may still get round to instituting reforms and restructuring its mode of operation; but for now, it has its hands full trying to discipline, manage and pacify quarrelsome and intransigent members and leaders. Mr Oshiomhole is in the thick of the fight. But meanwhile, the APC will stick to identifying and emplacing cosmetic changes and, if top members still prove a handful, carrying out major cosmetic surgeries, often without anaesthesia, forswearing the deep restructuring indispensable for building an enduring party organisation.

    Whether party leaders sense it or not, and regardless of the absence of a systematisation of the renewal efforts being undertaken in the party, the APC is involved in a struggle to determine which of two worldviews to embrace: party supremacy or governors supremacy. For many years, both the APC (and its progenitors) and the PDP had been shackled by powerful governors who virtually determined who breathed and who didn’t breathe in the party. Party chairmen were at their beck and call, and state and federal lawmakers were either disembowelled by the governors or rendered soulless. It led to terrible fights for influence and control between some governors and recalcitrant federal lawmakers who, after being defeated, were invariable exiled. In the end, agitated lawmakers were often bludgeoned to submission so openly that aspiring rebels lose appetite for revolt. The collateral damage of that waning appetite is that state assemblies, state judiciary and traditional chieftaincy institutions became completely shorn of courage.

    Worse, because governors called the shot in the party, even presidential primaries became hopelessly hamstrung, not to talk of state and national legislative primaries that became a farce. Local governments fared much worse, all of them, without exception, completely castrated. The Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF), until it was disgraced and degraded by its recent chairmen, chief among whom was the inscrutable poster boy for ineffectiveness, Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State, almost became the alternate presidency and national legislature. There word was law, and their whims became both practice and convention. When the NGF met in those giddy days, sometimes well into the night, media hounds had sleepless nights and worked hard to either plant spies inside the governors’ meeting halls or hire mind, body language and lip readers.

    Having acquired such enormous power and influence over the years, with presidents and powerful politicians and aspirants pandering to their every whim and grinning at their coarse jokes, Nigerian governors are characteristically loth to be so emasculated. The rebellious Sen Shuaibu, a political handyman, is predictably the instrument in the hands of aggrieved governors to give voice and face to the resentment seething below the surface, the first shot among many to come to weaken or distract Mr Oshiomhole from persisting in his radical and insouciant ways. Since the senator from Zamfara shot his first cannon through a lengthy letter brimming with diatribe and judgement, other fusillades have since erupted from the howitzers of party rank and file. If they can sense that the resolve of Mr Oshiomhole is weakening, or if his backers, especially the president, appears to be wavering, they will press home their advantage, corner their quarry, and finish him off without mercy.

    Mr Oshiomhole is, however, the natural embodiment of the second worldview, the chief proponent among those who argue that party supremacy is to be desired far above anything else, and must be restored. They see party supremacy as more enduring, less fickle, and far more promotive of party discipline and cohesiveness. The party chairman himself, being evidently desirous of accreting power to an office weakened and left forlorn by former chairman John Odigie-Oyegun, is a firm and enthusiastic supporter of party supremacy. So, it is far easier for him to champion the cause of APC recovering its soul and rediscovering its raison d’être. Some see him as a tool in the hands of a few party leaders, a pathfinder to foist party dictatorship and unspeakable cruelty by calculative politicians casting wary glances at 2023. But his detractors defame the person of so accomplished a unionist like Mr Oshiomhole, a man who is by nature and by self-training accustomed to fostering radical viewpoints and political pragmatism.

    Like many serious APC leaders and members, Mr Oshiomhole knew that running the APC like his predecessor did and sustaining the ghastly status quo was simply untenable. Change had to come, even if imperious governors and stubborn national lawmakers had to be dragged screaming and kicking into a new regime of party discipline. Chief Odigie-Oyegun was not in charge, especially in his last one year in office. He was held in thrall by governors whose capricious view of politics and party organisation had become so wayward that few Nigerians bothered to call APC a party. Under the former chairman, the party had no soul, and its listless, heaving body was fodder to every politician, including President Muhammadu Buhari who saw himself in contradistinctive glory with the party that put him in office. Indeed, under the former chairman, the party was derided and feckless, waiting for an implosion.

    In his provocative letter, Sen Shuaibu accuses Mr Oshiomhole of weakening the party and exposing it to needless electoral losses, even pointing out that the APC lost seven states to the PDP. But had Mr Oshiomhole not taken over, the losses, which were exaggerated by the senator, would have been more traumatising. The party would then have needed more unscrupulousness than it summoned in the last polls to either sustain its control, win a few more states, or even check its inevitable decline. Its net loss is of course less than Sen Shuaibu proclaimed from the rooftops. But more fundamentally, if the governors had had their way in line with the conservative arguments advocated by Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State, if the vacillating President Buhari had not been finally bowled over by legal and political arguments so close to elections he feared he could lose, and if the audacious Mr Oshiomhole had not himself been readily available and eager to give his candidacy a greater push than his backers intended, the quest for change would have floundered and a nauseous and unsustainable status quo would have prevailed.

    Moments after the uppity Mr Oshiomhole took over the party chairmanship, he began to propound political, legal and judicial theories about party discipline and supremacy. He was colourful where Chief Odigie-Oyegun was staid, and radical and rambunctious where his predecessor was overwhelmed with a sense of appeasement and compromise. The party was of course not reorganised, as there was no time for fundamental structural changes, but the new chairman infused the party with an infectious can-do spirit that instantly alarmed the woolly hairs in the party, sending signals to state regicides to rise and decapitate their tormentors. Backed by Mr Oshiomhole’s visceral and abrasive statements, most of them lacking rhyme and reason, the regicides took the battle to their hated governors and party chieftains. Indeed, for some tantalising weeks, it seemed as if the apocalypse the Akeredolu-Oyegun political alliance predicted would come to pass. Strangely, the party core held together, perhaps by the skin of its teeth, and the anticipated implosion didn’t happen.

    The Oshiomhole tendency is now tentatively on the ascendancy. This accounts for the troubles he is beginning to have. No one knows how long the party will hold together, or whether it can survive another scare like it experienced before the 2019 elections. For now, some measure of party discipline has been restored, with a few former governors, some of them powerful friends of the president, suspended for rebellion. Indeed, their open anti-party activities surprisingly led the president to walk the tightrope before and during the polls, fearing that if he sided with the party, as he should, it would lead to an open war. The president knew he could not side with his friends. He stood to lose much more. In the months and probably years ahead, Mr Oshiomhole will be tested in ways neither he nor his friends have ever imagined. The president will be called to finally side with one side. He will, however, dither as he is accustomed to. For now the phony war will rage on until, finally shorn of pretences, the combatants clamber out of their trenches, having expended their bullets, to fight brutally and sickeningly with bayonets. No one knows who will win, or whether the party will even survive the Buhari presidency. The PDP has retaken Zamfara not just because the APC lost the legal war through technicalities, as Itse Sagay, a law professor, argued, but because the party wrecked the state and, through its undisciplined approach to politics, opened up its underbelly to be slashed by the opposition. President Buhari will have to leave behind a disciplined party and, much more, a string of great achievements in order to stave off the Zamfara-type disaster. His best bet will be to stick with Mr Oshiomhole.

    But Mr Oshiomhole will also have to help himself. He seeks to enthrone discipline in the APC, but he is often undisciplined in his statements, some of them so amoral and uncouth that he seems to beg the question of his own nascent political philosophies and credentials as a radical and progressive. While his progressive ideology may be in doubt, his pragmatism is not. He is often impatient, carried away by bombast, and can sometimes be cruel and unfeeling to his opponents when a little diplomacy would help. He is lucky that the dividing line in the party between the good side and bad side seems neatly drawn, far better than it is in the opposing PDP. He can, therefore, train his guns on enemy positions far easier than if the lines had been ideologically and ethically blurred. But if his enemies are not encamped behind silhouetted lines, and are in plain sight, in the valley even, it does not absolve him of his customary tactless and impulsive approach to jousting. Mr Oshiomhole is sometimes hyperactive. He needs to calm down, and refine his words, tactics and manners. Above all, he must locate those within the party who can help him develop a great ideology for the party. It is clear that he must bruise his way into delivering a tight and disciplined party. But he must also think his way through delivering a party that is thoughtful and ideologically clear. That is the ultimate victory or revenge he can have against his proliferating enemies within the APC.