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Category: Idowu Akinlotan

Plateau killings and herdsmen sophistries

PRESIDENTIAL spokesmen Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu have made very futile efforts to convince Nigerians that the killings in Benue, Nasarawa, Plateau and Taraba States are neither religious nor ethnic, but simply a clash between farmers and herdsmen. They angrily insist that the crisis has some political undertones which can be resolved if politicians play politics well and eschew injustice and bigotry. Both spokesmen know that their theories have not convinced anyone. Furthermore, they know that their theories are at variance with those of other top government officials, including the president himself, the Defence minister, the Agriculture minister, Army chief, and the Police Inspector General, some of whom have spoken either derisively of Benue’s and Taraba’s anti-open grazing laws or with an air of summary defeatism about porous borders and influx of foreign arms and mercenaries.

It is fair to say that the Buhari presidency has neither a unified understanding of the crisis nor, understandably, a coherent solution. It is, therefore, doomed to contradict itself, pussyfoot or engage in handwringing. Indeed, after the recent massacre of more than 200 people in the Barkin Ladi local government area of Plateau State, the president has spoken astonishingly of putting pressure on his security chiefs, with whom, on at least one occasion, he had met for over five hours, and calling for prayers, assured that his call would connect with the futile religiosity of Nigerians. It took long for many analysts to acknowledge that herdsmen were behind most of the attacks. The government and its military had tried to sell the idea that some agent provocateurs, some of them Christian mercenaries, were to blame. They have also tried to insist that politicians and all sorts of sponsors and indigenous ethnic champions were behind the attacks.

Indeed, the more herdsmen associations claim responsibility for the attacks, sometimes providing the immediate causes for the killings, the more the government has sought explanations elsewhere. There are grazing land pressures, they argue, without providing an answer for why that must inevitably end in destruction of farmlands. There is climate change crisis, without suggesting what long-term solutions the government intends to apply to mitigate its effect. All they insisted on at first was that farming communities must host herdsmen, open grazing routes, and establish ranches. The impracticability of their suggestions does not strike them. And for a long time, no one in government acknowledged that lands were being seized by herdsmen. But Benue and Plateau chiefs have now given a list of communities forcibly taken over by the herdsmen. And finally, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has obliquely acknowledged that such expropriated lands would be returned.

Plateau does not have a law banning open grazing, and so too Nasarawa. But both have been subjected to horrendous attacks, like Benue, Kaduna and Taraba. To justify the attacks, herdsmen associations have complained of cattle rustling and killing of herdsmen. However, they have not been able to defend why they must inflict reprisals on the innocent, or show that their victims got their just dessert.

But perhaps the most shocking thing about the attacks is the reaction of the president and his security team. The president talks of putting pressure on his security chiefs, while governors suggest that he replace them. The president is not persuaded that the insularity of his team is a problem. Even worse, he has persuaded only a few Nigerians that he does not see Nigeria’s problem from the prism of his ethnic stock, an allegation he tried to dampen by joking about his ethnicity during his condolence visit to Jos. Sadly, his tame reaction to the killings has virtually negated the enthusiasm and lift his party got from staging a successful convention. Even the MKO Abiola and June 12 honours have diminished in importance and value.

Rampaging herdsmen see themselves besieged, fearful that they could be subjugated or even ‘cleansed’ from Nigeria. President Buhari who should wisely address these legitimate fears and peer into the future by enunciating and implementing modern cattle breeding and dairy farming practices to eliminate conflict and obviate the need for more grazing lands, has unfortunately been paralysed by his own fears and confused loyalties. If he does not turn things around in the next three to four months, if he cannot show convincingly that he is first and foremost a Nigerian and a president who must protect everyone without fear or favour, his presidency may be irretrievably lost. Neither his rejuvenated party, nor the June 12 honours, nor a belated general or kitchen cabinet reshuffle, nor yet any sweet words he might say would deflect the electoral cataclysm bearing down on him.

July 1, 2018
APC pulls Buhari’s chestnuts from the fire

Ting the butcher’s knife into the hated back of the party. The nPDP was of course at first irresolute and even tentative in their approach to the coHE post-convention celebrations that suffused the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) indicate clearly that party leaders were amazed by how unexpectedly they managed to deliver a successful national elective convention. The John Odigie-Oyegun-led executive had feared the worst, arguing that the frictions in the party could prove fatal for the APC, especially in an election year over which the terrifying spectre of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo loomed. Chief Odigie-Oyegun’s supporters, many of them from the Southwest, bought his arguments and fanned discord with all sorts of legal and political jiggery-pokery. While President Muhammadu Buhari stoically insisted on an elective convention, and went further to indicate his preferences, few party leaders and members were sure how their party’s unseaworthy ship would fare in the raging tempest engineered principally by the president himself, or whether it would even berth at all.

Nigerians sickened by the Buhari presidency’s sectional and controversial management of national and security resources, not to say the president’s sanctimonious approach to leadership and governance, secretly hoped the APC convention would miscarry very badly. The general elections are around the corner, and, for those who detest the president and his party, it would not be a bad idea for the ruling party to go into those elections fragmented, weakened and irritable, and therefore prone to mistakes. They see the APC’s anti-graft campaign as an unassailable electoral asset, and the president’s counterinsurgency record as incontestable. Regardless of the president’s poor economic management ability, his other achievements were so temptingly predisposing to electoral victory that only a fractured party could negate them. Indeed, this group, long bewitched by the president’s vaunted and self-acclaimed honesty and integrity, hoped that a destroyed APC would provide them the absolution needed to, with clear conscience, repudiate the party at the next polls.

A third group exists that half expected the APC to botch its convention, that is, apart from Chief Odigie-Oyegun and his supporters who had hoped that the party would be forced to embrace tenure extension should the convention miscarry. That group is the new Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP), a constituent part of the APC supposedly headed by Senate President Bukola Saraki and, to some extent, Speaker Yakubu Dogara. Not only would an inconclusive party convention gift the nPDP a veritable reason to push for the dismemberment of the APC, it was expected that it would energise them in pushnvention. This is because they knew the in-coming chairman of the party, Adams Oshiomhole, a former Edo State governor, to have a mind of his own and could thus theoretically stand up to the party’s big wigs. More, they also knew him to be generally pro-establishment, despite his superficial progressivism, and a dealmaker full of oratorical prowess and bombast gained from his labour union days. If the new chairman proves as conciliatory as he often sounded, and conservative and pro-establishment as his worldview indicates, the nPDP will be willing to stay a little longer in the party until they sense President Buhari’s weakness and perhaps inevitable defeat.

Finally, the opposition party itself, the lumbering and blundering PDP, hoped and prayed that the APC would implode as a result of a disputed convention. After its defeat in 2015, the PDP had wilted so badly that neither its leaders nor the rest of the country could identify it any longer as a political party. It had shrunk from its confident and arrogant past, and had become lean, famished and disoriented. Unable to embark on the disciplined reforms needed to renew its image and energy, and not being firmly ideologically or even ethically anchored, it has watched with dismay and bewilderment its ranks depleted on a daily basis. Dr Obasanjo had abandoned the listing ship, and everyone who was anybody, especially those who feared prosecution for corrupt enrichment, began to pour libation at the APC shrine. Therefore, lacking the intellect to arrest the drift, and too enervated by its years of dissolute living and politics, the PDP began to feel that its last hope was an imploded APC. That implosion, sadly for them, has failed to materialise.

It is doubtful whether President Buhari or APC leaders were certain that their party would survive the January 23, 2018 convention, despite their boastful and colourful claims. Once the party won election in 2015, the president immaturely and amateurishly abandoned the party and handed over the reins of power to a cabal, or as some argue, to cabals. He gave party leaders the cold shoulder, treated the party contemptuously, concocted dismal policies that contained no party or even intellectual input, turned to the North for selection of his key aides, and insinuated ethnic exceptionalism so galling that the Southeast felt deeply alienated, the Southwest felt nonplussed, and the Middle Belt felt betrayed. It was not until the 2019 polls loomed, and his health took on fresh unction, that the president suddenly remembered he needed a party to return to office. But he and his aides, not to say chastened and despondent party leaders, were not sure things had not been left too late.

It, therefore, shocked all the groups aforesaid, including media professionals who had written longingly of the coming implosion, that the APC not only organised a great convention, but did it almost flawlessly. The party has managed ingloriously to build a cult of personality around their president, and fawned over him to no end. This was to prove helpful. It enabled the governors, most of them tin-pot messiahs in their own states, to engage party leaders in the most disingenuous give-and-take ever orchestrated, and allowed them to hammer out many deals that dissipated the anger and friction unnerving the party. The result is a great convention, an elated president, bemused and exultant party leaders, and an intrepid and sometimes didactic chairman. They could not wish for a better outcome, and the country must fittingly celebrate with them. Even the nPDP has spoken with muted relief. And the PDP has grunted reluctant admiration.

But in the same way that wars are not won by evacuations, as World War II British prime minister Winston Churchill once said at the opening stages of that terrible war, great and successful conventions do not deliver victory in elections. The APC is predictably euphoric about its great convention, and they deserve praise for organising it; but nothing makes the next elections a certainty for them. It will take more than the gifted rhetorician, Mr Oshiomhole, to placate the nPDP which had been so alienated by the president and his aides that no one is sure whether any medicine can still remedy the damage. Mr Oshiomhole is undoubtedly a gifted dealmaker, but there is no record that any of the deals he has ever made possessed an enriching philosophical content needed to imbue it with longevity or permanence.

Worse, the APC touts itself as a progressive party. This is nothing more than a dream. There is nothing progressive about it other than its manifesto. Most of their governors are as conservative or even reactionary as those of the PDP, and are as sometimes comical and maniacal. The moment they took office, they discountenanced their manifesto, thumbed their noses at those who voted them into office, pursued dubious economic and political policies, and completely ignored the need for social re-engineering, not to talk of even whispering about restructuring, or as they put it elegantly in their manifesto, true federalism, whatever that means. The APC was supposed to be a pathfinder for ideological politics; instead, they have simply immersed themselves in an ideological vacuum. Having succeeded a party that interacted awkwardly with the rule of law, and were brutalised by the PDP when they were in opposition, the APC was expected to be perhaps Africa’s best exponent of constitutional rule. That expectation has proved a chimera.

But much more damning, as leader of the party, and having tried thrice to be president, succeeding only at the fourth try, President Buhari needed to enthrone an inclusive and transformational government, one that would, unlike his predecessors, lay a solid foundation for democracy. Not only has he failed to do these, he has remained remorseless, is unable to see how cabalistic politics hurts Nigeria, and appears to find it difficult to extricate himself from the cultural strictures that has prejudiced his politics and made it impossible for him to win the presidency before now. The APC has managed by a successful convention to pull the president’s chestnuts from the fire; Nigerians want to see whether he can be trusted to build on the euphoria of that successful convention. But already, by his idiosyncratic approach to the appalling genocide orchestrated by herdsmen in retaliation for what they allege are egregious cattle rustling crimes, the president has pussyfooted dangerously over the matter.

The APC cannot do magic. They have delivered a great convention by every yardstick. They have managed to appoint an energetic and more impassioned chairman. And they seem poised to forge a united, even if ideologically vacuous, front for the next general elections. Before the Plateau Killings (See Box) of June 23-25, 2018, the APC seemed the party to trust, albeit reluctantly, especially in the face of a PDP that has been unwilling to come to terms with the drastic actions needed for its rejuvenation. If the exhilaration that accompanied the APC convention is not to be wasted, President Buhari will have to make a very radical u-turn to retool his security council to mirror the country’s diversity, dismantle the cabals holding his presidency hostage, entrust his party with the responsibility of forging the philosophical mix by which the country must be governed, shed his cultural cocoon to see the country in a more practical and diversified light, and reshuffle his cabinet to infuse brilliant technocrats and advisers able to dream farther and deeper than even the Chinese and other Asian Tigers had done. But would the president not consider these as self-immolation?

July 1, 2018
Those June 12 honours

ABOUT two weeks after President Muhammadu Buhari conferred national honours on the late MKO Abiola, winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential poll, and his undeserving running mate, Babagana Kingibe, and surprisingly and unusually the late Gani Fawehinmi, lawyer and activist, the controversy swirling around that unexpected act has not abated. The legal conundrum surrounding the honours has not gained traction. It stands on very shaky grounds, morally and legally. But the political conundrum surrounding the honours has persisted, in large part fostered by the presidency itself; a conundrum designed not to offer a closure, despite its vaunted and emotive claims, but apparently to gain unstated certain advantages. Refer to this column of two Sundays ago for all the arguments and dilemmas the honours brought upon the country.

What is important today is the investiture itself, and why it seems the Buhari presidency appears unable to draw the right inferences and lessons from the investiture ceremony. The president voiced the right emotions that appealed to his audience. He spoke uncharacteristically of the wounds inflicted by the annulment, regardless of the terrible wrong his own military government did to the politicians he arrested when he took power in 1984, described MKO as having the higher vote in the 1993 poll and suggesting contradictorily that he was on the way to winning, and then finally, after feats of emotive statements, offered the nation’s apology to the Abiola family, counselled the country to stand firm for the sanctity of free elections, and swore that perversion of justice would no longer be countenanced.

The apology resonated with the audience, as it should, though it would have made more sense to offer it after the appropriate underlying actions had been taken to right the many wrongs that undermined that year’s polls. As suggested in this place two weeks ago, it was pointless looking a gift horse in the mouth. After all, President Buhari’s predecessors had the opportunity to do something about the June 12 affair but adamantly refused to lift a finger. By somewhat coming to terms with June 12, apologising to the Abiola family, and honouring the winner of that poll, President Buhari richly deserves praise, even if qualified.

But as he sat there during the investiture, compelled to listen to the admonitions of those invited to make comments on the occasion, President Buhari would be inured to criticism should he pretend not to understand that those who spoke that day damned his decision to come to terms with June with faint praise. Indeed, given nearly everyone’s knowledge of the politics and person, perhaps, too, the worldview, of the president, the faint praise nearly outweighed the honours themselves. The speakers’ observations and admonitions indicate somewhat embarrassingly the dissonance between the president’s action and his innate convictions. There the president was, speaking about ensuring that justice was no longer perverted; but justice is a very wide concept, which he has still managed to extra-judicially excuse in the case of some of the people he has caused to be locked up. In short the honours question his motives and his convictions, both of which he tried futilely to paint in absolutely fascinating colours.

Speaking on the occasion, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka wondered how the president found it easily reconcilable to admire and laud the cruel dictator Sani Abacha and in the same breath also honour MKO. Former Senate President Iyorchia Ayu was even more direct as he questioned the Buhari presidency’s indefensible attitude to the opposition. He wondered whether equating the opposition with the enemy of the government was not indirectly lending credence to the conclusion by many analysts that the president was vengeful and unforgiving. He advised the president to watch out for his advisers who see enemy in place of opposition. Human rights activist and lawyer Femi Falana counselled the president to put a leash on his security forces who indiscriminately violate the rights of citizens.

These admonitions are unflattering portrait of President Buhari’s politics and person. They will not be heeded. The occasion would have been strictly limited to appreciating the honours done MKO and others had the president not indicated by his politics and utterances that he was neither deeply persuaded about the concept of democracy nor attuned to the rubrics of justice. Those who spoke see a chasm between the laudable honours the president inspired two Tuesdays ago and his politics that sometimes descends to a dreadful level. And they probably feared that the June 12 honours — especially because they were not as encompassing as everyone expected and were apparently rushed — were indicative of intentions less noble than they sound, or baser than they imply.

It no longer matters what anybody thinks of the honours. The Abiola family has accepted both the honours and the apology wholeheartedly. The human rights community seems ecstatic, and Nigerians as a whole appear prepared to give the president the benefit of the doubt. Even the legal argument produced to vitiate the importance and sanctity of the honours have been discarded. And all the political arguments offered against the honours have miscarried, including the suggestion that the president designed the honours to woo the Southwest for the 2019 polls. Indeed, on the whole, many Nigerians already persuaded by the president’s anti-graft war now see his coming to terms with June 12 as a huge plus that encourages them to be willing to give him a chance to, as they say, right the many wrongs that have overtaken the country.

It is, however, unlikely that the June 12 honours will have any significant impact on President Buhari’s electoral chances, even in the Southwest. The standard of education may be low in Nigeria, and the public may consequently be unable to properly disentangle the politics and person of the president from his pronouncements and policies, not to talk of correctly gauging the impact he might have on the country in the medium to long run; yet, except the opposition badly plays their hand and allows ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo to inspire and lead them, the outcome of the 2019 polls will by no means be certain.

No one who spoke on the occasion of the June 12 honours, especially those not encumbered by APC’s partisan considerations, believes that President Buhari is capable of properly placing the MKO Abiola affair within its proper democratic and human rights context. They know the president to be uncomfortable with the trappings of democracy, is awkward in his approach to human rights issues and controversies, is instinctively autocratic and monarchical, takes a short-term and dim view of societal engineering, and cannot function well as a leader in a liberal and highly heterogeneous environment that demands consensus building, compromises, and disciplined obedience to the constitution. That they, however, lauded him for awarding the June 12 honours does not mean they think focus will be shifted away from his politics, person and motives in their assessment of the politics of 2019.

It is expected that the APC will survive the scare surrounding its convention, and even the internal wrangling weakening the party. The party will likely emerge stronger regardless of any defections. The party will experience tighter control, and with the restless Adams Oshiomhole at the helm, it will run like a political party. But it will continue to harbour its fair share of charlatans, pander whimsically to the president’s tastes and preferences, fidget around its conservative ideology, and in line with the worldview of the president continue to cajole the opposition. The June 12 honours could not change the APC, even if it meant to, nor coax the president into becoming a finer and more democratic politician and thinker, assuming those who inspired the awards thought that possible. What is important to everyone, particularly the Abiola family, is that what was done two Tuesdays ago cannot be undone by any future president. It can only be improved upon to find a fitting and more rational closure.

If the president was unable to distil the nuanced messages contained in the admonitions many speakers gave him during the investiture, his enlightened aides should offer him as many analyses of the speeches as possible. Even though the prospect of his conversion is distant, they can help him become a better politician and far more insightful leader, one with an eye on the country’s future and his own legacy. If not, hopefully, the opposition would get its bearing right, produce aspirants and highly competitive candidates who see Nigeria from the right patriotic and inclusive lights, not from cracked ethnic and religious prisms. Nothing is certain about 2019, and neither the June 12 honours nor the APC convention could answer which way the country is heading. That answer will be postponed a little further down the road, perhaps close to the next set of elections.

June 24, 2018
PDP presenting ineffective opposition

THE APC is having a field day running Nigeria as it pleases. No opposition party is snapping at its heels; no legal challenges are mounted against its misconceived social policies and constitutional infractions; no propaganda is orchestrated against its strong-arm and autocratic measures; and no sensible and credible alternatives to the ruling party’s weak and often contradictory economic plans are presented to the public. It is almost like Nigeria is under a one-party rule, with the ruling party intensifying its propaganda tactics, seeking out strong opposition parties and leaders to harry and destroy, and accusing critics of demonstrating a lack of patriotism, or plotting against the state, or even promoting the agenda of those who looted the country.

Discouraged and fearful, the opposition has pulled its punches and muffled its criticisms. Yet, the ruling party has remained evidently vulnerable in many ways than the PDP was careless, profligate and errant in all of its 16 ugly years in office. Two reasons chiefly account for this tragedy. One is that the mild-mannered and urbane Uche Secondus, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chairman, has not quite risen to the challenge of understanding the deeply antagonistic and conflicted, and hence desperate and aggressive, nature of the APC. Until he gets the full measure of the ruling party, an organisation that must not be placated or complimented, he cannot find the antidote to their high-strung politics.

Two is the saddening fact that the leading opposition party lost office in a hail of scandals from which it is yet to recover. Unable to purge its ranks of those who authored its appalling style of misrule, and too timid to find replacements for its grasping former stalwarts, the party has fretted anxiously on the national political sidelines, unsure whether it could ever place a foot right, whined considerably about the ruling party’s lack of self-respect, and launched half-hearted assaults to overthrow the Babylonian indecencies and raucousness of the APC.

The PDP remains the leading opposition party, despite the frenzied effort by ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo to raise a disingenuous political armada against the APC. Unfortunately for the PDP, the man who should have been its substantive chairman, the mercurial and intransigent former Kaduna State governor Ahmed Makarfi, took office as a caretaker chairman and had to relinquish the position to Mr Secondus who appears better suited for an interim role. It is possible Mr Secondus possesses rare administrative and even rhetorical gifts; the problem is that whatever endowments he has have helped both him and his party to accomplish very little, barely making a dent on the almost impregnable armour of the self-assured and boastful APC.

It is not clear how the PDP would overcome its debilitating paralysis. They probably hope that eventually their presidential candidate, whoever he is, will help to ennoble them and reinvigorate the party as it wars against the APC behemoth. This hope is not totally misplaced, for most political observers know that empires and great countries are ennobled by their statesmen rather than the other way round. But in the case of the PDP, there is nothing to indicate that this hope is not a crazy gambit. For, after all, its leading aspirants at the moment all have one chink or the other in their futile armours, including the highly cosmopolitan but frequently underrated former vice president Atiku Abubakar, and the aforesaid mercurial aurochs, Senator Makarfi.

The APC is highly vulnerable, as this column has warned over the months. They have an Achilles heel that is more susceptible to attack than the one that undid the eponymous mythical Greek. They also have very little understanding of economic or political issues, exhibit deep contempt for the constitution and the rule of law, fight anti-graft war lopsidedly, amateurishly and sanctimoniously, and have no vision for the future, absolutely none beyond its proselytising rhetoric. If these weaknesses are not enough for any party and propagandist to turn into a fearsome brew against the APC, then the PDP really needs a coach to tutor them on how to poach the irrepressible Lai Mohammed from the Buhari cabinet. No, Alhaji Mohammed, the highly effective Information minister, is not surplus to requirement; he is simply the only man and conjurer who can bring water out of a rock, constitution be damned.

June 24, 2018
Policy options on political corruption reform

THE creation of a functional and balance human system is largely dependent on in-built mechanisms and processes that serve as necessary architectural framework for self regulations. These instilled checks and balances avert exploitations, despotism and totalitarianism while aligning all branches and units with the projections of corporate benefits to all stakeholders as well as the promoters and strengthening institutions value foundation.

This was the spirit behind the paper titled ; “Constitutional Foundations of Political Corruption in Nigeria and a Reform Strategy” presented by a foremost political scientist, Professor Rotimi Suberu of Bennington College, USA, at the June 12 seminar of the Ibadan School For Government and Public Policy (ISGPP). This piece majorly summarizes the key substance of that paper and the inputs of a high-end cream of scholars present.

Professor Suberu whose intellectual contributions, especially to federalism research and scholarship, have attracted global attention and recognition is a renowned expert in Nigerian politics and government. This former University of Ibadan don chose his topic well. The seminar argued that though corruption is not a new word in the Nigeria’s socio-economic and political lexicon, it has mostly been viewed with fiscal lens. It interrogated the issue of political corruption and established that this brand of corruption manifests through the manipulation and exploitation of political institutions, deliberate weakening and violation of their value foundation, in a nation where the essence of everything, including the meaning of eternity; where we would all be at the end of time is politicized. It affirmed that political corruption has violated public trust and the social contract that underpin our democratic existence as a nation

Nigeria’s distasteful entanglement with corruption has been variously documented and almost legendary. The public domain is awash with reports, research, literatures and findings that connected the country with this malaise. Nigeria has been labeled and derided as one the most corrupt nations in the world. There are indexes that have registered Nigeria as an unsuitable clime for investment because of institutional corruption and decadence. The World Bank in a recent report said that “the percentage of firms likely to encounter corruption by public officials in Nigeria is more than double the average for sub-Saharan Africa” and in the Transparency International (TI) index for 2017, Nigeria was ranked 148 out of 180 countries.

Corruption has festered in the country because of the over dependence on crude oil and this has continued to stifle the fiscal creativity in the leadership, weakening the fiscal social contract and distorting political leadership by making them rent-seeking, predatory elites, almost allergic to reforms and lacking the self motivated incentives to “build strong institutions that might interfere with their ability to allocate rents.” Beyond this, successive governments have not displayed the political will, commitment, boldness or resoluteness, which are all key in fighting corruption. Corruption is legitimized by popular expectations and norms supporting the appropriation of resources and opportunities in the public sector, for the benefit, not only of individual public office holders but also of members of their sectional or political support groups. Corruption thus becomes a social equilibrium, a collective action problem in which both agents (political office holders) and principals (the citizenry) are implicated.

All these find perfect breeding ground in the weak formal political institutions and constitutional frameworks including ‘presidentialism’, federalism/decentralization, low-quality democracies, and electoral systems as well the design of oversight institutions among others.

Conversely, and taking inspiration from a strand of a multiplex and deeply nuanced institutionalists’ perspective which dominated discourse at the ISGPP seminar, the act can be balanced out by the creation of viable institutions that can drive the necessary social, political and economic changes. Such institutions would provide the necessary framework to complement political economy, political leadership, and political culture. These strategic institutions draw their strength from the constitution and they are instrumental in shaping political and economic development. It is instructive to note that these institutions can be subverted for political capital depending on how they are designed. Formal political institutions can reduce or extend the scope for political leadership abuse, reinforce negative or positive political culture norms, and exacerbate or mitigate problematic economic incentives.

There are some schools of thoughts that say positive socio-political outcomes like prosperity and democratization are driven not so much by initial structural conditions, such as demography or culture, but by inclusive institutions and rules that effectively constrain and broadly distribute or divide power. The widespread third wave of democratization in Africa since the 1990s has witnessed the growing formalization and institutionalization of power including but not limited to courts, parliaments, elections, and constitutional reforms, as distinct from informal personal and patrimonial politics. The recent electoral reforms in Nigeria including the enhancement of the financial and operational autonomy of the electoral administration transformed and improved the quality of Nigerian elections in 2011 and 2015.

It is established that public participation in designing, deliberating and ratifying a constitution can help advance processes of democratization and nation-building. The 1999 constitution which is the rule book for our democracy is often derided as an imposed document. The constitution as amended is still fraught with loopholes and grey areas. These include excessive discretionary powers for chief executives of different tiers of government. There is also evident weak political insulation for anti-corruption and oversight agencies. Also, the constitution provides weak transparency frameworks as well as a fundamentally flawed, patronage-promoting, fiscal federalism

According to sections 4 and 148 of the constitution, the President has broad “discretionary” powers to veto legislation, including constitutional amendments already approved by a supermajority of national and state legislatures. The stark reality, going by the conclusions of the seminar, is that these broad powers are prone to corruption and have been used, on occasions, to delay or frustrate anti-corruption reforms, for example, the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and 4th Constitution Alteration Bill. According to Suberu, the sweeping powers of the president extend into political, economic and even social sectors. “He may assign responsibility for any business of the government of the federation.” He is empowered to appoint members of federal executive commissions under the 3rd Schedule of the Constitution, including key oversight agencies like the Code of Conduct Bureau, Police Service Commission, Federal Character Commission, and Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission. He enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution while in office. Many of these powers are replicated or amplified at the sub-national level, where, according to Richard Joseph, governors function like “provincial chiefs in a decentralized patrimonial order”. The most detrimental executive powers from the perspective of anticorruption reform involve the appointment and control of key oversight agencies. In the words of elder statesman and foremost constitutional Law expert, Ben Nwabueze “The fact that an incumbent president is, as a practical matter, free from the sanctions of the fight against corruption and abuse of office is the reason why it has made and can make hardly any appreciable and lasting impact on the incidence of corruption in the country”

The President’s executive authority over the prime anti-corruption agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) includes the power to remove a member of the commission ‘at any time’. This is more or less replicated in the chief executive’s relations with other oversight agencies, including the Fiscal Responsibility Commission and newly constituted National Council on Public Procurement. The consequences of these unilateral powers, the seminar avers, include presidential impunity, intimidation and victimization of crusaders. It also affects the credibility, neutrality, and integrity of anti-corruption investigations and prosecutions. The result of this is the absence of professionalism and institutional underdevelopment. In July 2017, EGMONT Group, by consensus, suspended the EFCC’s National Financial Investigation Unit (NFIU) for its lack of professionalism and independence.

Most other agencies are stifled by these executive manacles inhibiting their professionalism, transparency and independence. The result is that almost all the agencies including but not limited to the Code of Conduct Bureau, NEITI and Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Allocation Commission (RMFAC), have become toothless bulldogs that cannot even bark talk less of biting.

The epic scale of political corruption underscores a fragile sense of Nigerian nationhood and political community that has been exacerbated, rather than mitigated, by the process of constitution-making. Someone once said, “Nigerian constitution-making has been top-down, sectarian, manipulative, elitist, arrogant, non-participatory, non-inclusive, and non-transparent.” The fragile sense of Nigerian national identity and political community has deeper roots in the arbitrary, coercive, exploitative, and manipulative manner in which the British constructed Nigeria. But Nigerian elites have failed to use post-colonial political transitions/constitution-making processes to construct a robust, inclusive, integrative and compact national constitutional.

Though the seminar acknowledged the value of the bit of authoritarianism inherent in presidentialism with weak check and balances usually associated with the celebrated Singapore Lee Kuan Yew outlier case, it argued in favour of a solution framework that curbs the discretionary powers of political executives. This, it says, is more realistic to curb presidential powers than to promote parliamentarianism and semi-presidentialism (de facto hyper-presidential). These would include the review of the executive’s constitutional powers and privileges, including immunity and veto prerogatives. There must be a check on the executive’s powers to allocate economic rents and patronage by prohibiting security votes, eliminating redundant, duplicative agencies, and reforming petroleum governance among others. At the sub national level, autonomous democratic local governance must be promoted. The weakness of this line of analysis is that it focused more heavily on the executive arm without its justaposition with the excesses of the legislature and the judiciary.

Furthermore, the seminar argued that the most important thing in tackling political corruption would be the insulation of oversight agencies against executive control. It therefore favoured the creation of a National Oversight Council (comprising nominees of non-partisan national civic associations such as journalists, students, academics, and women, with the president as a member) to assume responsibility for appointing, supervising, and determining the funding of oversight agencies.

The seminar made wide-ranging recommendations. The headship of anti-corruption agencies should be an independent civil society luminary with a non renewable term. A constitutional amendment or legislation to grant public access to officials’ assets declarations should be put in place. This will build upon the initial enthusiasm generated by government’s whistle blower policy; alleviate some of the burden on the bureau charged with verifying disclosures; and give the public a direct stake in fighting corruption.

The oversight responsibility for the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act should be transferred to a depoliticized and autonomous office of Attorney-General, which should be separated from the political office of Minister of Justice.

There is also an urgent and strategic need to restructure the system of unconditional federal revenue distribution into a conditional grants scheme in order to make Sub National Governments (SNG) accountable, transparent, responsible, and efficient in their use of devolved revenues. A good way to begin a conditional grants scheme is to institutionalize, through legislation and constitutional amendment, some of the conditions for federal bailouts in the currently unimplemented federal government fiscal sustainability plan for states: timely publication of reports of audited finances and budget implementation performance, compliance with international public sector accounting standards, improvement of independently generated revenues, implementation of centralized single treasury account, limitations on personnel expenditure as a share of total budgeted revenue, privatization or concession of inefficient state-owned enterprises, implementation of Fiscal Responsibility Act, and the development and maintenance of a credit rating.

There is also the need to introduce genuine participatory constitutionalism as opposed to imposed constitutionalism which will use the constitution-making process to repair the fragile sense of ethnicity-transcending national community underpinning the massive private/sectional plunder of public resources.

There is near-universal consensus of seminar participants that the existing corrupt governance system is unsustainable as our federation is dysfunctional and not delivering on public goods to the generality of the people. However, Nigeria’s recent success in improving electoral integrity suggests that it can undertake further constitutional change to reduce corruption, advance good governance, and enhance national stability.

Dr. Olaopa is

Executive Vice Chairman,

Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP);

Email: tolaopa2003@gmail.com

June 17, 2018
MKO Abiola: Buhari wrong-foots Obj, everybody

EX-PRESIDENT Olusegun Obasanjo had all his eight years in office to come to terms with the matter of June 12, a label that has come to signify the annulment of the 1993 presidential election won handsomely by the late Moshood kashimawo Olawale Abiola, more endearingly known as MKO. Dr Obasanjo spurned the opportunity, indeed treated it with all the disdain he could muster in words and body language. Ex-president Goodluck Jonathan also had the chance to revisit that historic wrong and cause a redress of cathartic proportions to be made. He half-heartedly made an effort that rubbed the Southwest the wrong way when he tried to rename the University of Lagos in honour of the symbol of June 12. Sensibly, even though some critics still think it was prompted by ethnic politics, the Southwest looked his gift horse in the mouth and denounced him for lacking historical insight.

It has taken President Muhammadu Buhari, probably the most unlikely person ever, to acknowledge the sacrifices made by MKO, and, encapsulating the yearnings of Nigerians, to order a national restitution. In a press statement unprecedentedly signed by him in a manner reminiscent of American presidents signing executive orders and executive actions, President Buhari spoke directly about the June 12, 1993 presidential poll, acknowledged it as the freest and fairest, embraced its symbolism for Democracy Day celebration instead of the arbitrary May 29, and awarded the highest national honour of GCFR to MKO.

Since the announcement last Wednesday, the country has been in a lather. Even though it has come a little belatedly, and is hedged by a number of unwritten and unspoken caveats, the country has unreservedly embraced the gesture, seeing that it comes from a president ill at ease with democratic principles. The move has been acknowledged as a masterstroke in an election year, a sop to the critical and insatiable Southwest which was poised to jump APC ship, and a sensible and indisputable righting of a historic wrong. Indeed, no one, not even this column, can grumble against President Buhari for addressing a major injustice all his three predecessors had either ignored or handled with open or subtle mischief. The president must be cautiously commended for deeming it fit to do what he has done even against the run of his personal democratic play.

Of President Buhari’s three predecessors in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, Dr Jonathan probably meant well the most in attempting to redress the wrong of more than two decades. In his customary circumvention of rules and laws, he had ordered the renaming of the University of Lagos in honour of MKO. He did not take account of the fact that south-westerners are a people besotted to a deep sense of history, who recognise institutions, symbols, places and meanings. They wondered why Dr Jonathan would omit the National Stadium in Abuja, for instance, and come down to the Southwest to look for something to honour MKO. They proudly looked Dr Jonathan’s gift horse in the mouth, fearing that the university renaming was more like a grudging local measure to placate a quarrelsome and complaining people. The attempt thus failed.

But Dr Obasanjo never attempted anything. He neither situated his election within the context and purview of the June 12, 1993 presidential poll senselessly annulled by Gen Ibrahim Babangida nor recognised that had MKO not sacrificed his life, and had the late politician traded his mandate in the crass mercantilist style Dr Obasanjo himself is accustomed to, the Fourth Republic would probably not have materialised, and certainly the country would not have felt obligated in 1999 to cede the highest office in the land to a Yoruba politician. Worse, in words and deeds, Dr Obasanjo did his utmost to belittle the contributions MKO made directly and indirectly to the restoration of civil rule. If the ex-president attempts to criticise President Buhari’s restitution, whether inspired by 2019 election politics or not, the country will laugh him to scorn.

While President Buhari deserves praise for recognising MKO’s sacrifices and honouring the late politician, it is not out of place to examine his method and rationalisation. Was it done to position the president and his party for the 2019 polls? Probably. But even if that was the purpose, and there is reasonable suspicion that he intended that outcome, it is neither illegal nor illogical. Every politician reserves the right to scheme within the ambit of the law to win elections. However, the president’s press statement leaves too many gaps that cast doubt on his intentions. He may have partly addressed the grave injustice of 1993, but he does not do it with the conviction, character and judgement of a democrat, or of someone who truly understands the concepts of democracy and justice, two virtues involved in and assailed by the annulment.

The president anchored the press statement awkwardly on which date best approximates the symbol of democracy, May 29 or June 12, rather than on the historical significance of the 1993 annulment viz-a-viz the concept of justice and the huge sacrifices the winner of that election made to entrench democracy. And while the president acknowledged that “millions expressed their democratic will” in an election he described as “the freest, fairest and most peaceful since independence”, it is still shocking that he spoke of MKO as the “presumed winner” of that election using the lexical gymnastic beloved of Nigerian leaders too fearful to come to terms with their obnoxious past. The president may have decided to honour MKO, but there is doubt that he fully comprehends the nitty-gritty of that annulment, what it means for Nigeria as a country, the concept of justice with which he has wrestled since assuming office, and the future of democracy itself.

Everything in the president’s statement points to its peremptoriness, regardless of its laudable objective, as if by some undisclosed epiphany he suddenly realised that such a decision would put him in good political standing both with south-westerners and the rest of the country. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, in the statement that exhibits a deep conviction about anything, including the elementary fact of which date best symbolises Democracy Day in Nigeria. It was necessary to revisit the election, examine why and how the country’s leaders, including those not in government at the time, abetted that injustice, get the results officially released and published, declare the winner as winner not the presumed winner, and announce measures as far as is humanly possible to ensure that such subversion of popular will never occurs again. It is only after these have been done that the president’s statement would have acquired inspiring meaning far beyond the symbolisms he seeks to enunciate and promote.

The president may have partially redressed a terrible wrong; he, however, did not sound convincing. By not revisiting the polling results upon which he apparently predicated his decision and the honours, it is not surprising that he stopped short of declaring MKO president. Someone else will have to do that sometime in the future. But stopping halfway lends credence to those who suspect that his decision on the June 12 affair was essentially triggered by political motives. For, other than the honours, every other thing was about June 12 as a day, Democracy Day, not MKO Day. Furthermore, there is really no leg upon which his decision on MKO stands, which perhaps explains why he said nothing about the concepts of democracy and justice. But perhaps the little said, the better for the president, so that he is not entrapped by his own words.

Yet, the MKO affair is both about Chief Abiola himself and the country that voted overwhelmingly for him. Both he and the country need justice today as much as they demonstrated their love for democracy in 1993. The president should have acknowledged those needs in his statement. Yet, had he done that, had he meant the decision far more significantly than its political connotations, he would have faced the puzzle of fighting to right a moral wrong done in 1993 when he is busy, by his approach to the Dasuki and Shiite affairs, perpetrating other egregious wrongs. No, there is absolutely no conviction and no depth in the decisions the president indicated in his press statement on the MKO affair. The decisions hang in the air, when they need to be anchored on the weightier issues of justice and democracy, and the lessons of history.

The idea of the honours and holiday is good, but it is vitiated by its lack of substance, by its affectations, by the reluctance of the president to go far back and much deeper into the substantial issues that created the crisis. The result is that these issues have still not been addressed, despite the honours, and the country cannot claim to have come to terms with its sordid electoral past, a past which led to the death of the winner of that election, and a death neither acknowledged for the immensity of the personal sacrifice MKO made, nor memorialised by a grateful nation newly sworn to uphold the ideals that undergird June 12. June 12, 1993 was not just about MKO, it was also about voting across party, religious and ethnic lines and divisions, which few Nigerians ever thought possible. By singling out MKO and his running mate for honours, and expediently throwing in the legal titan and human rights activist, Gani Fawehinmi, President Buhari not only glossed over the real essence of June 12, he also underscored the hastiness, if not emptiness, with which his presidency approached the matter.

No one is sure whether Chief Fawehinmi would have accepted the honour. His family seems to think he would have. Perhaps there is no need to encourage the argument, since, in any case, it is posthumous. Like the late sage Obafemi Awolowo, Chief Fawehinmi was one of a kind: finicky about the law, ethical in his doings, humanistic as a person, and to a great extent also political and judgemental. People like that are a rare gift to their generations, and it is pointless second-guessing them in their absence. Babagana Kingibe is thrilled by the president’s gesture despite not emerging from the annulment crisis in those giddy early 1990s smelling of roses. He had been less principled and sturdy in fighting for the June 12 mandate, of which he was an integral and victorious part; indeed, he had been reticent about it not only then, but even now.

There is also doubt about how the Southwest will react to the president’s immortalisation of June 12, especially in terms of the 2019 elections. The Southwest had felt alienated by the president’s and his party’s reluctance to embark on the restructuring so crucial to the sustenance of the country’s unity, development and democracy. Worse, by its slowness in reacting to the killings in the Middle Belt, the federal government gave the impression to many in the Southwest that it nursed some hidden sectional agenda. Shocked and angry, and seeing the president ensnare himself in many unsavoury Freudian slips, some voices in the Southwest had begun agitating for a different, more responsive leadership wherever it could be found.

The Obasanjo/Buhari war is still burning fiercely, threatening to make the ship of state keel over. The former president has spoken of threats to his life, and warned darkly of the Buhari presidency’s hidden dictatorial bent. If the disagreement and disaffection become exacerbated, if the rogue security elements in the Buhari presidency continue their predatory actions against the liberties and wellbeing of the people, if the attrition triggered by herdsmen in the Middle Belt is not curbed, and if the animosities of those who have taken exception to the Buhari government’s abrasive and sectional policies are not mollified, it is doubtful whether the liberal Southwest will get carried away by the morsel of June 12 honours.

President Buhari’s June 12 pronouncement, as reassuring as it is, is a bolt from the blue, a silhouette of what June 12 activists had campaigned and hoped for. It, however, marks at least some tentative steps in the direction of fully coming to terms with the injustices promoted by that gruesome past. Nevertheless, it falls far short of acknowledging, let alone resolving, the most fundamental issues raised by the annulment and the turbulent political evolution that has put Nigeria at sixes and sevens. President Buhari may have wrong-footed his opponents, as he has done in the past two years or so, including Afenifere which has damned the recognition of June 12 and awards with faint praise, but it is doubtful whether in the march towards 2019, the June 12 pronouncement and honours are enough to influence and alter perspectives, electoral potentials and outcomes in the coming months.

June 10, 2018
Garba Shehu rolls out the artillery

AFTER waiting many months for ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s volcanic rage against his successors to turn dormant, the Muhammadu Buhari presidency has in frustration finally decided to answer back. In a statement issued last week by a presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, the former president is painted as a hater of constitutional rule whose admonitions on democracy should be scorned. Mallam Shehu did not use expletives or any word that could be interpreted as discourteous, but the statement retained enough weight and significance to probably shake the confidence of Dr Obasanjo, assuming the often imperturbable ex-president could be easily ruffled by anything. Dr Obasanjo has not replied Mallam Shehu, and it is not even certain that any response, if it ever comes, would cut ice with the people, considering the characterisation of the former president as an anti-democratic leader.

In many brutal statements authored or ordered by him against his enemies and anyone he chose not to fancy, Dr Obasanjo indicated he had managed to surround himself with many young and daring iconoclasts, unblushing regicides eager to decapitate or defang a king. Now, President Buhari himself, after enduring abuse for many months from the former president, has also shown his capacity to draw a hedge of strident giant slayers around his beleaguered presidency, men and women adept at Internet abuse, and others like Mallam Shehu who by a cocktail of truths and falsehoods have developed the talent for skewering oligarchs and hierarchs. Dr Obasanjo has been used to drawing blood and flak in equal measure over his pungent and unsparing attacks against his enemies, and sometimes even his friends. It is not surprising that President Buhari’s men, having also now tasted blood, Dr Obasanjo’s, have found it is not as sacrilegious and distasteful as they had been led to imagine, and are now inspired to go beyond seeking the former president’s head to desiring his torso and his legacy, or anything else he prizes.

The president himself has found his voice in attacking Dr Obasanjo, a voice that previously did not rise above whispers, but is now echoing boldly, brilliantly and spectrally across baleful divides and impossible terrains. Facts and fictions have become greatly obfuscated in the process; but as the president’s charge of $16bn power projects spending indicated some two weeks ago, the presidency seems determined to haul anything at opponents the Buhari government last Friday suggested were so enriched and loaded that they made him despair. Since the swords have left their sheaths, the country must brace up for merciless cuts and thrusts between the two main combatants. Other former presidents averse to President Buhari’s leadership and style have spoken in metaphors and vernacular idioms. But for Dr Obasanjo, a man so inured to pain and abuse, he sees no value in speaking in parables that fly over the heads of his enemies. He always wants them to see his blows coming, to imagine and deconstruct their ferocity, and to die many times before death comes. As much as he can help it, and as the elections draw near, he will injure with his words as he will wound with his gaze, skewer when the time is right, and disembowel for effect.

But as brutal as he is, and as fearsome as his reputation has become, Dr Obasanjo will find it difficult to respond to Mallam Shehu’s adumbration of the ex-president’s anti-democratic measures and tactics between 1999 and 2007. Hear the president’s spokesman on how Dr Obasanjo unlawfully unhorsed some governors: “A five-man legislature met at 6:00 a.m. and ‘impeached’ Governor Dariye in Plateau; 18 members out of 32 removed Governor Ladoja of Oyo from office; in Anambra, APGA’s Governor Obi was equally impeached at 5:00 a.m. by members who did not meet the two-thirds required by the constitution. His offence was that he refused to inflate the state’s budget. The lawmakers had reportedly met with representatives of the President in Asaba, Delta State and then accompanied to Awka by heavy security provided by the police Mobile Unit. The PDP President at that time had reportedly told Obi to forget re-election in 2007 if he did not join the PDP because he (the President) would not support a non-PDP member.”

Mallam Shehu continues: “In Ekiti, Governor Fayose in his first term faced allegations of financial corruption and murder. Following the failure to heed the instruction of the Presidency to impeach only Fayose and spare the deputy, Madam Olujimi, now a senator, the PDP President declared that there was a breakdown of law and order in the state and declared a state of emergency. He appointed Brig-Gen. Adetunji Olurin (rtd) as the sole administrator of the state on October 19, 2006. In an earlier incident in Anambra, it took an insider collaboration to thwart the unseating of Governor Ngige by a powerful thug sponsored by the PDP administration.” Then, to paint a rich contrast, Mallam Shehu gloats: “Thank God for Buhari, none of these absurdities has happened under his watch, but the PDP is indicating their boredom with his meticulous observance of the constitution by calling for a return to the old order.”

Mallam Shehu strains credulity by contrasting President Buhari’s rule of law record with Dr Obasanjo’s abominable standard. The president may not have sunk to Dr Obasanjo’s depths by removing governors, and may even abhor the former president’s tactics, but he is less gifted in enunciating democracy, let alone projecting it. He has defied court orders and disdainfully refused to say why or entertain questions on the matter. And whereas the former president has sometimes spoken glowingly, even if facetiously, of democracy and adhered scrupulously to the idea of national fairness and equity, the president has on the other hand said nothing about democracy, exhibited extreme discomfort with the concept, groaned that constitutional strictures immobilise him from the alacrity and bad-temperedness that pockmarked his rule as a military head of state, and has ruled, spoken, and behaved as a military leader far more imperial and regal than when he first took office in December 1983.

It was needless for Mallam Shehu to compare President Buhari’s record with any of his predecessors’. It is sufficient to attack Dr Obasanjo who has done and said enough to arm his opponents for decades to come. The former president’s foibles are so stark that no one needs any research to identify his weaknesses and failings both as a private citizen and family man on the one hand, and as a public figure with all his sanctimoniousness and abject lack of grace and fidelity to political morality on the other hand. There will still be many more chances to take Dr Obasanjo to the cleaners, whether with facts or fallacies, as Mallam Shehu is becoming adept. Let the presidential spokesman, however, abstain from comparing anybody’s record with that of President Buhari, for the president at bottom has no inspiring record worth being deployed for one comparison or the other.

Dr Obasanjo has opened himself to attacks of all kinds. But his enemies will be dismayed to find that he can hold his own very admirably. The reason, it is suspected, is genetic. As his wife indicated in her hugely censorious book full of coruscating domestic anecdotes, Dr Obasanjo is incapable of shame, possesses very lax principles and few virtues, and pursues his enemies with a vengeance and relentlessness that are both unearthly and incomprehensible. Mallam Shehu and other hired hands can write all they want, Dr Obasanjo will simply shrug off the abuse and pursue his quarry, much like the boxer Joe Frazier pushing his way through a fusillade of Muhammad Ali blows. He will not flinch at an upper cut, whether from the president or his spokesmen, and he will barely twitch at a blow to the medulla oblongata. He is as solid as they come, pugnacious, quarrelsome and impolite. When he has no answer to an abuse, he will simply turn his attention elsewhere.

Mallam Shehu will of course exult at just how well he has connected to the head and body of Dr Obasanjo with the wounding accounts of how the former president demeaned the Nigerian constitution and nearly inoculated the whole country against its commands and provisions. There was no exaggeration in the presidential spokesman’s accounts. In any other country, Dr Obasanjo would indeed be a pariah, pushed into ignominy by his poor appreciation of democracy and his even more inept perception of the historic role nature conferred on him to help set the foundations for Nigerian democracy. But Dr Obasanjo, no matter his failings, is brimful of rustic gumption. He is smart enough to know that President Buhari is even a much worse democrat than he, and in three years has shown himself to possess more contempt for democracy than Dr Obasanjo exhibited in eight years.

President Buhari and his spokesmen and defenders will sustain their barrages against Dr Obasanjo. But trust the former president to be unswayed by the blows. He will intensify his assault on the president’s re-election bid. Already, the president is not quite as composed as he would like in the face of Dr Obasanjo’s indescribable smugness. But whether his discomfiting lack of patience is sufficient enough to nudge him a step further to unleash his investigative and prosecutorial hounds on the former president is not certain. To do that, even for a man so inflexible, so self-deprecating, and so indifferent to public opinion, the president will have to calculate whether he would not inadvertently and invariably open the gates of hell in a country so riven by crises and conflicts, some of them perhaps indirectly engendered by the president himself and hardened by his familiar administrative inattention and anachronisms.

June 3, 2018
Wale Aboderin, a chip off the old block

THOSE who have so far composed eulogies to the departed younger Aboderin, Gbadebowale, have done the job rather blithely, without the grimness often dreaded by eulogists anxious not to speak ill of the dead. The reason is not far-fetched. Mr Aboderin, who died last Wednesday at the age of 60, was, without exaggeration, a gentleman. This is why his passing will be the first obituary this column will ever write, necessitating an appeal to readers of this column to pardon this columnist for using, on this exceptional occasion, first-person narrative.

Sometime in 1998, the younger Aboderin requested to see me to discuss sundry issues on life and other matters. I met him seated on a short wooden bench under a big tree in front of his residence at Onipetesi, former Punch compound. Puzzled, considering we were not close, I nonetheless honoured the invitation. It was the first time I would meet him one-on-one, having previously discussed and socialised with him in company with other editors when his father, Olu Aboderin, was alive. He asked after my publication, the Quarterly Review of Politics, Economics, and Society, which debuted in 1997, and was published four times a year. It was tough going, I responded, wondering when he would cut to the chase on the real reason he asked to see me.

Apprised of the troubles I was going through publishing a 104-page magazine, he then asked whether that was why I was unable to renew my tenancy for the office space let out to me under his care. Yes, I retorted. Thereafter he launched into reminiscences of the time my father edited The Punch, how close his father was to my father, and how his father glowed that his paper had become a radical crusader again in the early 1980s. He reminded me that his father died before he could really appreciate my father. He then summed up that my inability to renew my tenancy was an opportunity for him to, in a manner of speaking, pay part of his father’s debt to my dad. I could retain possession of the office space for as long as I wanted, regardless of whether I could afford it or not, he offered. In the event, I kept the office for five years for free.

But my first encounter with him was when, in pupillage, he joined his father as the senior Aboderin met minds with The Punch’s senior editors. I was privileged to attend some of those discourses in an era when unenlightened military rule bifurcated the land and stifled the media. This was in the suffocating days of the Buhari/Idiagbon military government. Coming from a background of rather strict and formal relationship with my dad in my younger years, I remarked to myself that the younger Aboderin, seeing the way he snuggled near his dad, obviously had a very informal and almost convivial relationship with him. He seldom said a word in those meetings, nor did I, considering that I was barely a year old in the paper at the time.

As we were free-ranging over many issues that day in 1998 under the tree, he hinted that he was not in the most robust of health, and that in fact many of his adversaries wondered how he still managed to stay alive. He was going to disappoint them, he swore under his breath, and would live for much longer than they dared to hope. It would be superstitious to suggest that his philanthropy, kindness, and unaffected and unassuming interactions with other people were because he knew his time would be short. No. The truth is much deeper than that. Despite his firmness and stubbornness, virtues his father possessed in abundance when he published The Punch during its giddy and turbulent first decade, the younger Aboderin genuinely loved people like his dad, even if the love was not requited, loved the arts to bits like his dad and gave his all for it, was touched by people’s sufferings like his dad and was ready to give an arm and a leg, loved sports like his dad and put his money where his mouth was — in short loved and lived life to the fullest.

It should not matter to his wife and family whether the love and care he gave were requited or not. They must take consolation in the fact that he touched more people than he cared to remember, and will live in their hearts long after his departure. The family would of course have loved him to remain with them for another decade or two, for it would be truly satisfying and reassuring to have good-natured men live long, but they must consider that Wale made more impact on his generation far in excess of many who would need three or four lifetimes to make half the impact.

June 3, 2018
Buhari, Obasanjo and $16bn power projects

NO one can determine whether President Muhammadu Buhari will reflect on his statement suggesting that one of his predecessors in the presidency, more likely ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, boasted spending about $16bn on power projects without delivering power. If the president does, he will be convinced that he needs to eat his words, set the records straight, and look for other more plausible and sensible issues to play politics with. If he is reflective, he will be deeply mortified by how badly he got his figures wrong, how despite holding down the presidency for three years he had moaned around and ruminated on the wrong facts, and how really precariously he had drawn the wrong conclusions based on the wrong assumptions and facts.

Presidential aides have mercifully not attempted to rationalise the president’s latest gaffe. They can’t, no matter how hard they try. The president sometimes indulges in dry jokes, but this time, when he received on Tuesday the grinning and eager members of the Buhari Support Organisation led by the intransigent Customs boss, Hameed Ali, he was unequivocal about his disapproval of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s politics and criticisms. In fact the president’s statements, lips quivering, were so strident that reporters characteristically and unanimously presaged their reports of the visit with what the president fulminated against rather than what Col Ali (retd.) crooned over. No one can tell why and how the president got his facts so wrong.

Perhaps Col. Ali’s fawning conclusion about President Buhari’s politics and leadership, which he described as transparent and patriotic, was to blame. But inspired by the uplifting statements of the Customs boss, and probably persuaded that all the people rooting for him tell the truth about his endowments and politics, the president instantly launched into a tirade, wildly traducing Dr Obasanjo, the chief personification of his enmities. Here is what the president said: “You know more than I do on the condition of our roads. Some of them were not repaired since the PTF days. No matter what opinion you have about (late Gen. Sani) Abacha, I agreed to work with him and the PTF. We constructed road from here (Abuja) to Port Harcourt, to Onitsha, to Benin and so on. This was in addition to other things in education, medical care and so on. You know the rail was killed and one of the former Heads of State between that time was bragging that he spent $16bn, not naira, on power. Where is the power? Where is the power? And now we have to pay the debts. This year and last year’s budgets that I took to the National Assembly were the highest in capital projects: more than $1.3 tn. Let anybody come and confront me publicly in the National Assembly. What have they been doing? Some of them have been there for 10 years. What have they been doing?”

With those unsparing 168 words, and insisting that he was repeating in public what he wanted the public to know, President Buhari opened a can of worms that inadvertently questions his knowledge and familiarity with national issues, and also exposes some of his pet prejudices in garish colours. Quite apart from his subsequent adumbration of oil prices, which he also got badly wrong, the president inadvertently opened himself to searing criticisms. Dr Obasanjo’s aides had last month described those who surround the president as moronic, a description many analysts winced at; now they feel exuberant and justified to describe the president once again as ignorant and lacking in proper understanding of issues relating to the financing of the power projects. It is hard to fault them, even if their use of words flatters no one.

The president needlessly made reference to his Petroleum Task Force (PTF) days. He should have restrained himself. Not only was that programme very controversial, it made his detractors conclude that he had displayed so much bias in the citing and funding of PTF projects that he could not conceivably describe himself as a patriot and unifier. Statistics show that an ungainly and indefensible majority of the projects were cited in the North to the detriment of the South. Equally, his detractors suggested that as proof of his inattentiveness to details, he virtually surrendered the running of the PTF to his favourite but controversial and allegedly grasping consultant. The president needlessly woke this corpse up and imbued it with ghoulish life. Dr Obasanjo’s aides and friends are therefore beginning to recall the president’s unflattering record in the PTF.

More astonishingly, the president made a snide remark about those who think the late dictator, Sani Abacha, was unworthy of national leadership. For a dictator who robbed Nigeria blind and who pillaged the commonwealth, it beggars belief that President Buhari would say “No matter what opinion you have about Abacha…”. In other words, the president is still not convinced that the cruel and hedonistic Gen Abacha was a national disaster and a mockery of what leadership is all about. It says something of the president’s values and worldview that he neither regrets taking appointment from Gen Abacha nor finds the late dictator’s attributes too revolting to associate with. This is truly shocking.

As proof that his animosities run very deep, and probably that he also nurses deep contempt for the National Assembly, he finds the presence of mind to throw a barb at them, including their predecessors. He questions their work and commitment, despises those who have lasted in those chambers for 10 years, and throws a challenge to them to come and confront him. Is it any wonder that the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Ibrahim Idris has shown irreverent and untrammelled disregard for the parliament? For a president who started out by denigrating ministers as noisemakers, and who for more than six months refused to put a cabinet in place, it is not surprising that he wishes to rule as a sole administrator daily bemoaning the restraining influence of the judiciary, the irritating polemics of his cabinet, and the questioning and sometimes censorious scrutiny of the parliament. It is that instinctive dictatorship that showed up in inelegant colours last Tuesday when he received the Customs boss, one of the many flippant public officials who idolise and lionise him.

But above all, nothing proved the tendentiousness of the president’s woolly conception of the national paradigm as his conviction that $16bn was spent on the power projects that delivered only darkness. He is president; and if he feels particularly piqued by what transpired in that sector, he had the leeway and the funds to authorise a quiet probe of what could be described as a national calamity. He did not. Instead, he bought into the unsubstantiated stories woven around the issue, chewed the cud on it for nearly a decade, and has regurgitated aspects of the controversy in a manner that diminishes the presidency. How many more unsubstantiated yarns has the president bought and nurtured over the years, especially in politics where he seems to think he has some natural endowments? The country is now only having a glimpse of these ‘endowments’ three years into his presidency.

Reports by this newspaper in the past few days showed that the facts and figures relating to the power projects were readily available for the president to peruse. Those facts show that nowhere near $16bn was spent on power projects in Nigeria. Indeed, under Dr Obasanjo, whom the president sarcastically dismissed, a little over three billion dollars was spent. Overall, says this newspaper in its investigations, not more than $8.5bn had been spent in 13 years, most of it after the Obasanjo presidency. Having thus armed the vitriolic Dr Obasanjo the more, President Buhari should prepare himself for a far worse verbal and possibly epistolary assault in the coming months, especially as the elections draw near.

It is doubtful whether presidential aides can be blamed for the president’s latest misfiring. He speaks off the cuff, and when he does that, he speaks candidly and animatedly, almost with boyish innocence and a carefreeness that shows how unmindful he is of where the chips may fall or what the truth is. His extempore remarks show the essential President Buhari, as opposed to the managed, carefully controlled and sculpted hibernator whose decades out of office were apparently spent hardening his many superficialities. If his aides cannot manage his extemporaneousness, how can they hope to manage him in the stressful and demanding presidential debates? He is not eloquent, regardless of his intermittent rustic humour, and he has no mastery of economic issues, not to talk of professing any deep and esoteric convictions of democracy and its concomitant virtues. Will he dodge the debates? And can he safely dodge them without suggesting that he feared to expose his limitations?

Many civil society organisations have called for a probe of the power projects spending, and even the EFCC has indicated it might look into it. They are wasting their time. The president got his facts wrong, and tried to ride piggyback on the emotions of the public to assail his fiercest critic. Unfortunately for him, he shot himself in the foot. State investigators should not waste public funds looking into what is not lost. It was said in the 1990s that Gen Abacha had a damning dossier on Gen Ibrahim Babangida, and that every successive president had one black book or the other on his predecessor. If he has nothing better to do, President Buhari is welcome to build one dossier or the other on Dr Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan. For, after all, Dr Obasanjo himself is said to have a dossier on the PTF. With all past Nigerian rulers holding a loaded gun to one another’s head, it is remarkable that the guns have not gun off even once. They should spare the country the charade. Hopefully, next year, the electorate would be smart enough to put the right people in office, except of course they are gluttons for punishment.

May 27, 2018
May 29: Democracy still badly threatened

THE Fourth Republic has lasted for about 19 years and endured longer than the last three republics, including the highly romanticised but doubtlessly more egalitarian and nostalgic First Republic. This longevity may have little to do with the people themselves, for they have changed little over the years despite the pains suffered at the hands of adventurist military rulers. The people have not always been model voters, having put so many undeserving leaders in office, but they will this time take consolation in the fact that at least a wobbly but imperial form of democracy seems to be taking root. Nigerians have not been model voters; but their leaders have even been worse models of leadership, refusing to take advantage of the opportunity to remodel and grow democracy into a formidable system.

There is no reason to make May 29 Democracy Day, seeing that June 12 is more fittingly available, and even October 1, the Independence Day, is also more sensibly appropriate. But until a perceptive and forward-looking leader takes office and effects the right changes, operationally and structurally, May 29 will continue to serve as the symbol of Nigerian democracy, albeit an inappropriate one. The Fourth Republic may be turbulent, its institutions inchoate, and its operatives awkward and self-centred, but for whatever it is worth, 19 years of civil rule may yet lead to some dramatic changes down the road. Indeed, except Dr Jonathan who attempted a half-hearted reform of the democratic process, no president since 1999 has shown any interest or even understanding of what should be done to entrench democracy.

Of the four presidents since 1999, Dr Obasanjo had the best opportunity to erect a solid foundation for democracy. Instead, he declined the historic opportunity, built on the conservatism and reactionary principles engendered by the 1999 constitution, subverted nearly all democratic institutions that war against his indulgent senses and elastic principles, and ruled almost as if he was still a military head of state. His successor, Umaru Yar’Adua, whom he foisted on the nation, did not indicate he had any revolutionary idea of how democracy could be fostered or what changes needed to be made to forge a nation and solidify constitutional rule. His brief reign was, however, too chaotic and ideologically uneventful to lend itself to something much grander. If Dr Jonathan appreciated the systemic weaknesses that undermined both the country and its constitution, he neither indicated it nor took steps to arrest the drift in the country and in his government.

After the radical and unprecedented repudiation of the Jonathan government, Nigerians half hoped that President Buhari, notwithstanding his idiosyncratic and characteristic aversion to new things and deep ideas, would show a keener appreciation of the forces tearing the country apart, forces that began their corrosive work upon the constitution shortly after the republic was founded. But almost right from the beginning of the Buhari presidency, the country was shocked to discover that the best about their new president was his pell-mell puritanical zeal to symptomatically address a problem so deep-seated and fundamental as corruption. Not only has he shown himself as the most conservative of the lot that have ruled Nigeria, he has displayed a loathing for ideological and constitutional change that no one ever thought possible. Worse, there are now doubts about his patriotism and secularism.

Dr Obasanjo, more out of habit than conviction, has spent the past few months trying to correct the harm his presidency and other presidencies that he cajoled the country into embracing, have done. His remorse is however skin deep, just as Dr Jonathan’s epiphanic appreciation of democracy fails to convince anyone. If President Buhari is not to leave office wishing he had done certain things in certain different ways, he will need to embrace the fundamental and structural changes the country needs to survive. But given his giddy and exultant submission to the vacuous Trumpism of the United States president, Donald Trump, not to talk of his insufferable liking for Gen Abacha, and his owning up to all his own retrogressive policies as a military ruler, there are doubts the Nigerian president possesses the capacity for the reflectiveness and introspection needed to conceive, enunciate and implement the stabilising restructuring the polity sorely needs.

Nigeria will likely stumble on with their imperfect democracy for a few more years, carried on the wing of the people’s undying love for freedom and self-rule. But eventually, the weight of the contradictions in the system would prove too heavy and burdensome for the fragile 1999 constitution and inept elected representatives to sustain. Sadly, none of Nigeria’s living ex-presidents or President Buhari himself sees the cataclysm coming. If they suspect the danger at all, they, more gallingly, lack the understanding of what to do. If only someone can impress it on President Buhari that the status quo is not an option.

May 27, 2018