The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Falae, 2019 and SDP presidential candidate

    IN a fairly extensive interview he had with the Sunday Punch last week, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Olu Falae, indicated unambiguously that the Social Democratic Party (SDP) would pick its presidential candidate from the North. Because his response was curt, considering that he offered no expatiation, no one can say for certain whether he ever gave that all-important issue of presidential candidacy any deep thought. He probably did not. Neither the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) nor the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), it seems, would dare abandon conventional wisdom to more pragmatically pick a candidate from outside the northern zones for the 2019 presidential poll.

    The APC has all but conceded the ticket to President Muhammadu Buhari, regardless of whether they thought him an achiever or not, a unifier or separationist, a builder or a wrecker. Indeed, even before any of the leading parties had picked their candidates, it was widely suggested that no party could afford to break the mould or chart a difficult and isolated path. And given the fanatical support the president has been able to galvanise in some parts of the North, not to say the unstated rotational or zoning arrangement peculiarly designed by Nigerians to entrench dubious political inclusiveness, many pundits have surmised that the president’s popularity either makes him the man to beat or makes him even unassailable.

    If the lessons of last year’s French election that destroyed the old political guard in France and brought Emmanuel Macron and his newfangled party, En Marche, into office ever occurred to pundits, they countered by suggesting that neither Nigeria itself nor Nigerian voters demonstrate the sophistication required to midwife and replicate such a revolutionary political shift. In the foreseeable future, the unconstitutional political arrangement of zoning will be respected until an iconoclast comes out. Despite his progressive credentials, indeed his self-confessed progressivism, Chief Falae will not be that iconoclast, nor will he promote that jarring break from a tradition many forget is dated to this Fourth Republic.

    Zoning the presidency may be hugely expedient, even a tool of fostering political inclusiveness, but it is much more fundamentally a reactionary political measure. Some fringe parties may spurn the measure, but by and large the rest of the country will embrace it with the uncritical ardour that has consistently hobbled Nigerian elections. Many analysts in fact suggested a few years ago that had the PDP respected its own informal zoning arrangement and presented a northern candidate to battle candidate Buhari for the presidency, the APC would have lost. It is probably true, at least on the surface. Deep down, however, had Goodluck Jonathan found a way to embrace the Southwest and corral its support through series of concessions, the APC amalgamation would not have occurred, and candidate Buhari would have come to grief once more. The superior argument is that Dr Jonathan, by a combination of careless politics during his full four-year first term, actually paved the way for his own defeat.

    Zoning is not the super formula it is cracked up to be. But whether any party or political juggernaut will see zoning for the tenuous facade it really is in respect of the 2019 presidential election is not quite certain at the moment, given that political forces and arrangements are still coalescing. Notwithstanding this, both the APC and its presumed candidate, President Buhari, are beatable in the 2019 presidential poll. It will not only require courage and a rare form of intuitive political iconoclasm to weld together the forces needed to overthrow the APC, it will also require a masterful handling and deployment of critical campaign issues and imperatives. Chief Falae has signalled that his party will not be taking that risk. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, despite serious objections to his ideas and obtrusion, has inspired a coalition of disenchanted Nigerians and politicians to take on the Buhari behemoth. Whether that new coalition, now to be anchored by the nondescript African Democratic Congress (ADC), will be capable of taking the risk of breaking the mould remains to be seen.

    The issues that will dominate the 2019 presidential poll are very clear. And they are substantial enough, if well deployed, to vitiate the dominance of the APC. The ruling party is neither united nor even run as a political party. The president’s record on the economy is a mixed grill, partly incompetent and partly chaotic, with both forces combining to keep the populace impoverished, despondent and gasping for breath. The security situation, particularly in the Middle Belt where herdsmen have wreaked havoc on the local, farming population, is still dire, regardless of the achievements of the military in the Northeast. The government’s human rights record, not to say the desultory anti-corruption war that is neither a war nor even a campaign, gives the impression that it is coerced, that it is tentative and therefore deceptive. In the coming months, and despite improved oil earnings, these issues will keep their vibrancy and relevance.

    What the 2019 presidential poll calls for is not the staid complacency of Falae’s SDP, or the cautious obeisance the Obasanjo coalition might wish to pay to the political status quo, nor still the libation any precocious party might want to pour on the altar of expediency and conventional wisdom. There is an urgent and crying need for a politics of difference, a daring and soaring envisioning of the real change capable of remoulding Nigeria and rekindling the flickering hope of a great African behemoth wise enough and strong enough to lead the charge against global biases, racism and inequality. The APC has become fairly predictable despite its internal turmoil. The PDP, on the other hand, hopes for a miracle, and has consequently become too enervated to lift an urgent and radical finger against the status quo.

    Yet, contrary to Chief Falae’s uncritical acceptance of the prevailing dynamics of Nigeria’s presidential permutations, it is actually feasible to find a rallying point against both the ruling party and its presumed candidate. That rallying point, a candidate of uncommon gifts and boldness running on the platform of a party willing to bet everything on the throw of a dice, will move beyond issues likely to influence the defining 2019 poll. He will instead see the opportunity presented by the dichotomies introduced into the country’s body politic by President Buhari himself. In more than three years of bizarre politics, the president has almost fully alienated the Southeast and the South-South. Both the Southwest and the North-Central are certain to give him nightmares, for they are very likely going to exhibit discriminating voting patterns in their local and presidential elections.

    Nothing guarantees that President Buhari will sweep more than the two zones of Northeast and Northwest fairly comfortably. He will have to fight for the North-Central and Southwest, with no assurances whatsoever that his fanatical following in the Northwest and Northeast can automatically translate into a sweep of the disputed zones. Indeed, if the elections were called today, the president is likely to face crunching moments in the North-Central and Southwest. This is one of the reasons the presidency is fighting to undermine and fracture the parliament and crush Senate President Bukola Saraki. The effort to reorder the elections, now stalemated, is widely thought to be capable of delivering a serious blow to the president’s re-election chances in the two difficult zones. Indeed, it should have occurred to Dr Saraki that the attacks spearheaded against him by the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Ibrahim Idris is simply a part of the presidency’s political calculations for 2019.

    In considering whether to offer President Buhari a second term, the country must take a peep into his second term and the fate of the country after that. They must convince themselves that going by his record in his first term, his approach to human rights and democracy, his capacity to run a modern economy, he deserves a second opportunity. Likewise, his opponents must examine whether they can beat him by simply producing a northern candidate like the president, or whether they should not take advantage of the alienation in the Southeast and South-South, the anomie in most parts of the North-Central, which the president has neither provided answers to nor even empathised with, and the united front presented against him by the country’s elders who are afraid that the president could be driving the country into an apocalyptic abyss.

    It is untrue that all things considered, the president could be running away with victory on account of the absence of a viable opposition candidate. The problem is not so much the absence of a viable candidate from the North to run against the president. The problem is that virtually everyone has uncritically embraced the existing political paradigm of zoning, thus limiting the range of possibilities that could be harnessed against the president’s candidature. It is not inescapable or compulsory that the opposition candidate must come from the North. The mould can be broken, and the time to break it may be now. The dynamics of Nigeria’s presidential politics has been so altered that no ethnic group or zone, or a group of zones, can hold the country to ransom.

    An analysis of the last poll illustrates this point very vividly.  If the most pressing problem today is how to find someone who believes in Nigeria, someone who does not promote ethnic exceptionalism, someone who genuinely believes in democracy and the rule of law and has propounded coherent views on the subjects, someone conversant with complex, modern economies, someone who has definite and uplifting ideas about the country and its people, someone who is impatient with holding Nigeria hostage to stultifying traditions and formulae when other countries are moving forward by leaps and bounds, then the country must find a courageous man or group bold enough to instinctively seize the moment, renounce the jaded idea of zoning, capitalise on the worsening situation on the ground, and champion the real change Nigeria needs.

     

  • Oshiomhole frets noisily in the wings

    IF anyone was capable of creating the unusual situation of figuratively and incrementally burying the national chairman of a political party alive, and supplanting him to widespread acclaim, it had to be the spirited former governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole. Weeks before he published his 29-paragraph campaign treatise, and many weeks after he received unequivocal public endorsement from President Muhammadu Buhari, the former governor began to act, speak, and breathe like he had already assumed the chairmanship of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). On the other hand, the reigning chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, disembowelled by a fierce gale of opposition from within the party, and particularly from the presidency, had also begun to speak more softly, warily, detachedly and almost totally dispiritedly. It was clear to every political observer that the sceptre of authority had left him, and it was only a shadow of himself that saw to the organisation and execution of the party’s rancorous congresses in the past three weeks or so.

    It will now take the equivalence of a force majeure to deny Mr Oshiomhole the prized position of APC chairman. By June 23, except the earth shifts from its orbit, the former Edo State governor will be crowned chairman. He looks forward to it excitedly; and most APC leaders anxiously wait for that day. They see him as the deus ex machina to fix all of the party’s failings and fault lines. If it requires him defying the force of gravity, Mr Oshiomhole will do so in order to take the position and prove that he can do wonders with it. He has in fact assured many of the party’s querulous members and leaders that once he assumes office, the discord in the party and their complaints will be resolved.

    Mr Oshiomhole had, according to some sources, expected that he would benefit from an anticipated cabinet reshuffle soon after the president returned from his extended medical trip to the United Kingdom last year. What he and others didn’t know is that the president is not only ideologically conservative, he is also conservative about persons around him. The expected cabinet reshuffle has still not taken place, and will probably not take place until after the elections. Mr Oshiomhole is therefore fortunate to have found himself the fitting job of APC chairman. He had rhapsodised the president’s qualities on the sidelines for months, apparently without being prompted, but of course with an eye on the ultimate party prize or a cabinet position; he will now robustly compose his dithyrambs with more verve, legitimacy and freedom. As a born unionist, a quality he continues to remind everyone about, he will doubtless see himself born for this special purpose. He pontificates on the art of dealmaking; he has even now begun to speak of the APC ideologically, a party he says comprises the country’s leading social democrats, complete with definitions of what he means by social democracy.

    For a brief moment two Saturdays ago, it seemed as if the acrimony observed during the party’s congresses would stymie the convention. The chances of that happening now, APC members agree in unison, are not only remote, it is pure heresy. The convention will be held, regardless of any declaration of force majeure, Mr Odigie-Oyegun will kiss the throne goodbye, and Mr Oshiomhole will be crowned. Once the crown settles around his ears, he will leap and prance and pontificate. He will cause excitement inside and outside the party, and woe betide the party’s official spokesman who will not yield ground, for Mr Oshiomhole will speak with flourish, sometimes even didactically, on behalf of the party. Where Mr Odgie-Oyegun kept sepulchral silence on many contentious party issues, Mr Oshiomhole will shout from the rooftops, cocksure of everything. Without doubt, both the APC and the country are in for a swell time.

    Had he been asked or made to wait for one appointment or the other until after President Buhari probably wins re-election, a prospect only God can determine, Mr Oshiomhole would have had to consent with much trepidation. Now 66 years old, twice elected governor, famous for trade unionism, and eager for a new assignment, the former governor must be glad that he will be busy in the coming months presiding over a contentious party in an election year, and avoiding the damning fate of mummifying in the anonymous vacuum to which many of his former colleague governors are groaning. He has spoken elegantly about resuscitating the party’s data base, “repositioning the party for a united Nigeria” — whatever that means — promoting internal democracy, inspiring party supremacy in the classical sense, and instituting internal conflict management mechanism. In short, Mr Oshiomhole has an impressive manifesto to recommend to party faithful. But even if he does not have, the chairmanship had since late last year been reserved for a man of his peculiar talents.

    But he will need more than a beautiful manifesto in a party whose fault lines have ossified, whose president embraces a narrow form of pragmatism, whose direction is determined by a few shadowy power oligarchs, and which has absolutely no deep and abiding understanding of democracy or the role of the parliament. Perhaps, Mr Oshiomhole is luckier than anyone thinks. The battles in his party are nearing a horrifying and crunching denouement, with many of the party’s combatants, including the president himself against the parliament, Nasir el-Rufai against the state’s senators, Rochas Okorocha against Imo’s inventive and rambunctious rebels, etc. The outcomes may not promote and entrench democracy, but who has really ever heard the party pontificate on democracy or draw a line between private political goals and noble, patriotic sentiments?

  • Obasanjo ups the ante on Buhari

    EX-PRESIDENT Olusegun Obasanjo is reputed to be among the luckiest Nigerians alive, certainly the luckiest to have ruled Nigeria. But whether he believes in the concept of luck or not, he will hope that by whatever name it is called, that luck will hold up very well against the divine mandate President Muhammadu Buhari’s men have clothed the Katsina-born general’s presidency. Dr Obasanjo may have hoped that by now, the blistering statement he issued in January against President Buhari’s re-election should have gained traction, panicking the president’s supporters and ranks, and creating a momentum of indescribable optimism strong enough to indicate how the political smorgasbord would look like in 2019. So far, neither the panic nor the momentum, nor anything akin to a serious movement, has manifested.

    Instead, Aso Villa has kept up its smugness, its initial diffidence in fact giving way to more assertive and sarcastic remarks against the person, plans and hopes of the Owu, Abeokuta-born general. Perhaps aware that little traction had been gained in the past three months or so in the plot to savage the president’s re-election chances, Dr Obasanjo has decided to up the ante and, as he predicted when he launched his caustic memo against the president, pass the baton to others to perform the gruelling and thankless day-to-day task of motivating Nigerians to rise against the Buhari presidency. On Thursday, after another bitter round of savage attacks on the person of the president and his political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), the former president announced that his Coalition for Nigeria Movement (CNM) would be fusing into the African Democratic Congress (ADC), a hitherto unknown political party founded and led since 2006 by Ralph Nwosu.

    Theoretically, there is nothing that says the newly inspired ADC cannot unhorse President Buhari and his APC. After all, the elections are still more than nine months away, and the implosion in the APC long foretold by those who sneer at the APC from within and without is just gathering steam. If the implosion in the ruling party is of such amperage as the one that took apart the former ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2014, there is no telling what kind of quaking and movement would be let loose. Dr Obasanjo hopes that by some quaint magic that powerful earthquake would shake the Nigerian political scene, and he believes he has positioned himself on the cusp of it to take advantage of whatever new deal is in the making, and claim credit for the society’s re-engineering and renewal.

    When he announced the fusion with the ADC last week, he managed in the same breath to dismissively characterise the APC and the PDP as both irredeemable and incompetent. The APC had an ineffective leader, a president stuck in the Middle Ages, he fumed; and the penitent PDP was incapable of summoning the will and discipline to purge its ranks of deadwood as well as instituting a new direction for Nigeria. The ADC, he then added triumphantly with a little hint of excessive boyish optimism, is virtually untainted and could help chart a new direction for the country. He is probably right about the irredeemability of the two parties, and in particular about the APC’s lack of capacity, direction, resolve and modern approach to governance, and also about the PDP’s moral turpitude. But his ADC is still so impressionably young and inexperienced that it would require a fairly modern and literate electorate to appreciate its potentials, let alone embrace it in 2019.

    It was also clear last week that Dr Obasanjo was unwilling to get into bed with the PDP for any reason, and was mysteriously quite unable to hammer out a deal of any kind with the enthusiastic but equally disenchanted Nigerian Intervention Movement (NIM) led by the legal luminary, Olisa Agbakoba, and the politician, Abdujalil Tafawa-Balewa. There is no strong reason for the former president not to be able to work with the PDP, seeing that many of his former political associates, regardless of their failings, are still PDP members. It is true that former vice president Abubakar Atiku has returned to the party, and a number of strapping and iconoclastic Young Turks now call the shots in the country’s second largest party. But if Dr Obasanjo is wary of associating with the PDP, the reasons are probably not fully located within the former ruling party, but in himself.

    Indeed, by pursuing a completely new direction to the political remaking of Nigeria, Dr Obasanjo may be taking his biggest risk ever. For a man who has ridden on the crest of luck since he began to live on public funds, being worsted by President Buhari in 2019 is to sentence him to a black hole of silence, diminution and anonymity such as he, a veritable narcissist, has never experienced. When the APC created the amalgam that scalded the PDP in 2015, its leaders were less finicky about the ethical composition of the new party’s constituent parts. As recent events have shown (See Box), the party in 2014 neither attempted to crown a leader, fearing the dire implication of such a premature step, nor even tried to share the spoils of office, perhaps aware that the controversy it would whip up would be unmanageable. They thought they were mature enough to do the right things after victory. They were grossly mistaken.

    However, by opting for a completely new beginning, Dr Obasanjo is simply being true to himself. He is afflicted with the itch to run things, craves a following but never follows anyone, and possesses a forceful and mercurial personality that is sadly not underpinned by a consistent and coherent body of ethics or principles. He was from the very beginning unlikely to create a movement in which he would struggle with other powerful and knowledgeable individuals to shape the party and chart its philosophical direction. Since he lacks the discipline and depth needed to build new and great entities, he thrives more when he inherits a machine already built by gifted pioneers. He has inspired a movement against President Buhari’s re-election; he will hope that the movement survives and thrives. But for now, he will leave the hard work of setting the movement on a firm foundation, even if it has to be the foundation of an existing political party, to others. He will be satisfied pulling the strings from the distant background. However, whether the movement and the ADC will amount to anything in the months ahead will not be immediately clear until the self-destructive APC takes giant steps into the abyss.

    No one knows the ADC, nor cares who its leaders are. With Dr Obasanjo’s men now planted in its leadership, all that matters is that it will be the temporary anchor for the former president’s fight against President Buhari. Against the APC, it will stand no chance, though the ruling party is poorly led, is cabalistic, and is unprincipled and beatable. But if the magic Dr Obasanjo has grown used to expecting all his life should occur and the APC begins to wilt in a way that shakes the confidence of its panjandrums, panic could set in and its leadership could fracture very easily. That leadership has always, since 2015, been in danger of fracturing anyway. Those who still keep faith with the APC do so despite knowing the party to be substantially incapable of reforming itself. For as long as the archconservative President Buhari sits regally at the head of the party waving his populist talisman, neither the cabal nor the party’s conservative, if not even reactionary, principles would be tinkered with.

    It will require events and measures of tectonic proportions for those who keep the APC afloat to bolt from its stable. It is anybody’s guess whether those events would occur. But party leaders know instinctively that the Buhari presidency is less queasy about the rule of law than its predecessors, and more heavy-handed than all of them combined. To bolt from the APC stable, as it is speculated of Senate President Bukola Saraki and others, is to court grave risks. Those inclined to bolt will, therefore, be wary of how they do it and when. If they bolt, and it is substantial enough, the APC will be unlikely to recover. But whether the country, despite its desperation to embrace a new party and a new deal, will knowingly walk into the embrace of the undisciplined and sanctimonious Dr Obasanjo is hard to fathom. They blame him for the madness that has overtaken the country, a madness he wholly scripted and inspired, a madness that oversaw the elections of the lethargic Umaru Yar’Adua, the overwhelmed Goodluck Jonathan, and after a few convoluted events, the coming of the patrician and messianic President Buhari himself.

    If by October or November the APC stable doors are still firmly locked, a prospect that is increasingly in doubt given the severity of the alienation the president himself has authored and supervised, both Dr Obasanjo and his ADC coalition must begin to contemplate the bitter repercussions of their rashness. The former president is famously believed to be inured to insults and every form of indignity humans can offer one another; but faced with an unusually vengeful President Buhari and the catalysing instigation of the detached cabal around him, no one can say for sure that Dr Obasanjo will be as sanguine as he always pretends to be. He began his public career on a high note, reaping where he did not sow, and prospering at the public expense; he will be loth, at over 80 years of age, to end that enviable career at the bitter receiving end of the fury of a president whose capacity for leadership and intellectual exercises he scorns very deeply.

  • APC congresses, nPDP and prophecies foretold

    NO one was surprised by the acrimony that visited many of the ward congresses and Ekiti governorship primary organised by the All Progressives Congress (APC) last weekend. Under the scheming national chairman of the party, John Odigie-Oyegun, and the sometimes lugubrious President Buhari, party leaders have spent the better part of three years paying little or no attention to building and entrenching their party. Once they won the general elections, they threw away their party manifesto, dismantled the platform upon which they won the polls, fought like mad to grab whatever each leader could grab, and abandoned the party to nobody and to everybody, alias cabal. Having sowed the wind for three years, it is unlikely they are shocked to be reaping the whirlwind. Indeed, if anything, they must be shocked that they are still standing at all.

    President Buhari is strictly and philosophically speaking not a politician. He remains at bottom  a military man, going by his constant sulking about the limiting influence of democratic strictures, particularly the parliament and the rule of law. That he did not pay attention to building the APC and forging a united and impregnable party out of its skeletal framework was, therefore, expected. He reposed more faith in a narrow clique of kith and kin with whom he felt conversant and comfortable than look to the party in order to broaden its base and widen its appeal. Obsessed with percentages, he looked for ways to compensate, by ginger ratios, those he felt showed him more loyalty than even those who worked hardest for the party’s unexpected victory in 2015.

    It is often said that the APC’s legacy parties are the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), and a faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). Little mention is normally made of the significant influence and role of the faction of the PDP that joined hands with others to wrest control from Dr Jonathan. Yet the nPDP played a major role in that election, but, as they complained last week in a letter they wrote in April, they were yet to receive commensurate compensation or attention. In the letter, which some APC leaders regard as nPDP’s casus belli, the complainants gave a week’s notice to the party to initiate dialogue and give assurances that the party would become more inclusive and operate like a real political party. They did not spell out what they would do if their warnings were left unheeded. In turn, schizoid party leaders have suggested that the nPDP was untrustworthy and had made destructive plans in anticipation of their migration to another party.

    Some party leaders have suggested that the nPDP group should wait for ex-Edo State governor Adams Oshiomhole to assume the party leadership in June in order to get a redress for the injuries they claim to have suffered. It is not clear whether they will wait, or whether they think anything can come out of the effort. If the nPDP has not left by now, it is simply because they fear the punitive measures a government that exhibits contempt for the rule of law could bring upon them. They will stay for a little while, it seems, but they are unlikely to be in doubt about the party’s lack of capacity to remake itself and operate along inclusive lines. They know by experience that the president is the party’s lodestar, and everything virtually revolves around him. More, they know that his insularity would limit the flexibility of the next chairman and constrict the concessions they might get. They know that given the nature and capacity of the president and those he trusts, the party is unlikely ever to inspire anyone, let alone be remoulded into a great, modern party.

    The acrimonious congresses, the aloofness demonstrated by the incumbent chairman, the dictatorship of antidemocratic governors widening the schisms in the party, and the strangulating control exercised by a shadowy group of individuals in Abuja, are not likely to bode well for the party. For a party that should have mastered the art of internal democracy, but whose leaders preferred to scheme for tenure elongation on the grounds that congresses would widen the schism in the party, there is nothing to indicate that sooner or later it would not implode. Indeed, that it has not imploded is perhaps due paradoxically to the influence and misplacement of priorities of President Buhari himself. Even if the party survives to win the 2019 polls, it already contains the seed of its own destruction far more poignantly than the PDP ever possessed in its crazy 16 years in power. Party leaders will prop up the APC for as long as they can; but in the end, except they can find a saviour, it will collapse. The signs were evident in their congresses; and though they may paper over the cracks, and even ensure a smooth transition to the Oshiomhole chairmanship, the party is too fractious, too undisciplined, too superficial, too callous to one another, and too badly led to endure for as long as some of their members fantasise.

  • Senate, IGP Idris and rule of law

    THE last two weeks have been galling for the National Assembly, Nigeria’s most critical symbol of democracy. Twice the Senate invited the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to answer questions on the ongoing killings in parts of the country and the Dino Melaye affair, particularly the apparent mistreatment of the Kogi West senator. But twice the IGP declined to honour the invitation, citing a number of extraneous excuses. Both the invitation and the shunning of the invitation have implications for Nigerian democracy.

    Mr Idris was first invited to interact with the Senate on April 26. Since he declined the invitation with a belated excuse issued verbally, the lawmakers rescheduled the invitation for May 2. Hoping perhaps to deflect the consequences of shunning the invitation, and expecting that he could whip up public sentiment in his favour and against a parliament to which many Nigerians had either become indifferent or revolted, the IGP caused to be issued on April 30 a public effrontery setting out why he ignored the lawmakers. The statement itself was a study in public affront.

    After setting out why he thought he acted within his powers to delegate his second-in-command to attend to the Senate’s queries, Mr Idris, through the Force public relations officer, Jimoh Moshood, threw down the gauntlet: “The Nigeria Police Force is a law abiding organization and holds the Senate and its leadership in high esteem. However the Force wishes to impress on the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria not to personalise or trivialise the criminal offenses (Criminal Conspiracy and Unlawful Possession of Prohibited Firearms and other sundry offenses) indicting Sen. Dino Melaye from confessions of two (2) suspected kidnappers and Armed Robbers namely: Kabiru Saidu a.k.a Osama and Nuhu Salisu a.k.a Small in Lokoja on the 19th of March, 2018. Considering all the above, the Senate should allow the rule of law and justice to prevail in this matter.”

    It is not clear how the IGP thought the police were a law-abiding organisation, having just declined the parliament’s invitation, not once but twice. Nor, going by his extremely intemperate observation about police duties and organisational structure, is it any clearer whether policemen as law enforcement agents actually understand the law. Worse, by impudently impressing it on the Senate not to “personalise or trivialise” the Sen Melaye affair, it seemed abundantly clear just what the police thought of the highest lawmaking body in Nigeria. It is doubtful indeed whether in penning their saucy rebuke of the Senate the police have either a deep or at least commonsensical understanding of the role of a parliament in a democracy.

    Like many Nigerians, the police have chosen unwisely and ignorantly to view the Senate as an institution to be coterminous with its generally unflattering reputation. Widely viewed as rapacious — a point ‘impressed’ on Nigerians by both ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, and now Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi — self-centred, combative and insolent, the Senate is believed by many Nigerians to be incapable of putting even one foot right. In addition, given the controversial manner in which the principal officers of the 8th Senate took office, many Nigerians generalise the Senate to be lacking in legitimacy. And finally, considering the unearthly earnings the senators have managed to appropriate for themselves in the midst of widespread poverty and infrastructural collapse, quite a significant number of Nigerians, it seems, will be happy to see the parliament sacked or defanged.

    Though they are capable of far worse behaviour, not to say abominable dereliction of duty, the police may themselves be cashing in on this public disenchantment with the parliament to justify their rudeness to the lawmaking body. But if anybody or organisation should disrespect the parliament, the police, by nature and duty, should be the last to engage in such abhorrence. What the attitude of the IGP and the imperious statement he issued have shown is that Nigeria is witnessing deep fissures in the body politic. Mr Idris could not have behaved so atrociously or author that very disrespectful April 30 statement without some support from higher quarters. It is possible the trip with the president to Bauchi had been planned before the Senate invitation reached him. But if he had respect for the parliament, he would have mentioned the summons to the president. And if the president knew the value of the parliament and rightly esteemed and situated the institution within the context of democracy and national stability, he would have ordered the IGP to honour the invitation. It is inconceivable that the IGP kept silent about the invitation, and that the president was himself unaware of the widely reported invitation to an officer who had once been egregiously insubordinate to him.

    But not only were there no indications that both the president and the IGP handled the matter deftly, there was no mention by the police boss that he showed any consideration whatsoever in the discharge of his duties or his attitude to the parliament. In any case, when the Senate sensibly extended the invitation by another one week, perhaps to give the IGP enough rope to hang himself, Mr Idris took off to Kaduna State to attend, as he suggested implausibly, to the worsening security situation in Birnin Gwari. It was clear he had no intention of honouring the Senate invitation, or at least not as soon as he received it. There is also no doubt that Mr Idris has very little understanding of the place of a parliament in a democracy, especially in Nigeria’s tottering democracy to which the Senate, despite its obvious and galling weaknesses, has been more responsive than the police has shown depth, imagination and ethicalness in law enforcement.

    Even if their invitation to Mr Idris was ‘personal’ and ‘trivial’, the Senate still reserves the right to ask to meet with the police over the evident mistreatment, if not persecution, the supposedly loathsome Sen Melaye had received at the hands of the police. It may not occur to the police and to those who still find it difficult to divorce the person from the issue, but the unprofessional manner the IGP has handled the Melaye affair, especially the widely held suspicion that the police were acting at the behest of the Kogi State governor with whom the senator was locked in political battle, required the attention of fellow lawmakers. Sen Melaye is still a senator, and the mistreatment and indignity he has suffered rub off on the image of the Senate. There was nothing in what the police presented to the public to suggest that adequate investigations had been done in the mater to warrant the brutal but figurative execution of the image and person of the senator. The Senate rightly showed concern, regardless of Sen Melaye’s foibles.

    More worryingly, it is strange that it has not occurred to those who defend the atrocious police approach to the affair that if a senator could be so manhandled on the basis of a shoddy and flimsy investigation, the rest of the country would be fair game for a law enforcement body more notorious for damning and implicating the innocent than exposing the guilty. The police handling of the Melaye affair, like the many negative portraitures of Nigerians by Nigerian leaders during their foreign trips, has done a lot of damage to the image of the country. If Nigerians lack the decency and common sense to treat one another fairly and decorously, they are merely exhibiting to the world just how poorly they esteem the human person.

    The IGP may lack the depth of understanding to handle the Senate invitation and the Melaye affair with the circumspection expected of his office, but the problem is even much worse than seems apparent. The executive, which should deter public appointees from insulting and affronting the parliament, has been unenthusiastic in playing the role of the best and most powerful defender of democracy. The reason is not far-fetched. The presidency and their supporters view the parliament with suspicion and fear bordering on disgust and disdain. Since the Senate has informally turned itself into probably the most potent opposition to the Buhari presidency, the government may be disinclined from taking any step to strengthen the parliament. This is short-sightedness at its worst. Past presidents took similar steps either to compromise the parliament or weaken it. Now, they probably regret their roles in fostering the parliament’s own failings, and exacerbating the existential crisis Nigerian democracy appears to be facing today.

    The Excess Crude Account (ECA) controversy in which about $500m was withdrawn without appropriation in February, a disturbing fact that came to public knowledge only last month, indicates just how gingerly democracy is perched on the edge of disaster or authoritarianism. But much more critically, it also indicates how superficially the executive branch appreciates the role of a parliament in a democracy, and how the parliament’s balancing role, even if led and inspired by intraparty and interparty opposition, is apt to be interpreted as disrespectful of the presidency or subversive of its agenda. Senate president Bukola Saraki, apart from the suspicion about where his loyalties lie, is considered as the personification of that hurtful opposition. But by being incapable of differentiating between the person and even image of Sen Saraki on the one hand, and the sanctity and independence of the parliament on the other hand, when in fact the parliament, more than the executive, is the truest representative of Nigerian democracy, the presidency creates the worrisome impression that at bottom it could not care less what happens to democracy. This summation is incontrovertible, for the Nigerian presidency under Muhammadu Buhari, has more or less given the impression it prefers to operate as a monarchy.

    By dealing with Sen Melaye as brutally as they have done, and by refusing to honour the Senate’s invitation, the police have disrespected the parliament and sneered at democracy. They may not like Senators Saraki and Melaye, and a vast majority of Nigerians may find the parliament greedy and grabbing, but they will be foolish to do the nauseous bidding of an executive branch that shows a proclivity for authoritarianism and finds merit in denuding the parliament of its power to check a government that alarmingly still justifies its unlawful ECA spending. It is in moments like these that the judicious wish Nigeria was running a parliamentary government, where a prime minister should think on his feet or be compelled to blanch at his own witlessness after making inane arguments.

    The Senate may already be feeling the pressures from the presidency and the colluding security agencies. Senators may even be groaning under their own failings and shortcomings. But they must not be discouraged from pressing on to the logical conclusion in tackling what is clearly budding fascism as exampled by the police. If the IGP could tell the Senate off with such brazen effrontery, asking them to eschew personal interest and triviality in the discharge of their duties, and if the police could lend themselves to the malevolent designs of a state government, there is no telling what they will do on some inauspicious tomorrow to a commoner. Now is the time to put a stop to the malady, for whether critics of the parliament like or not, democracy is clearly endangered.

  • El-Rufai’s hate speech signposts danger

    IT doesn’t seem like anything or anyone can curb the dangerous populism and messianic disposition of the Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai. He has always been controversial, loquacious, arrogant, undemocratic and impertinent. Now he is adding to his repertoire the more frightening attributes of populism and propagandism, probably as telling and destructive as those of any fascist regime. He is naturally opposed to the concept of democracy, and cannot understand that it is part of democracy to disagree peacefully with his friends as well as his enemies. Speaking during a rally at the Kaduna Township Stadium last Friday in preparation for the state’s local government poll, Mallam el-Rufai used the opportunity to assassinate the characters of the state’s three senators, Senators Shehu Sani, Suleiman Hunkuyi and Danjuma Leah. He accused them of blocking the states $350m loan request from the World Bank.

    Here is what he told the rally as reported by Cable online: “The senators from the state who worked against the World Bank loan are useless; they came out and said this loan should not be given. What is their reason for rejecting the loan? It is because they are haters of the masses in Kaduna state. If a road project is initiated in your town, they don’t want it to be completed. If we start renovating a hospital, they don’t want it to be completed. If five schools are renovated and 10 are remaining, they will not want the remaining 10 to be renovated. Today, there are no haters of the masses of Kaduna state like Shehu Sani, Suleiman Hunkuyi and Danjuma Laah, God will curse them. God will reward their wickedness against the masses. May God never bless them…Members of our state assembly who gave us their cooperation before the World Bank approved the loan to us, may God bless them and may God return them to their seats in 2019. But those ones that are cursed, if they come to Kaduna, shave their heads and beard. They have shown that they are bastards, they have no origin, therefore, it is important to tell them that they did not originate from this state…Their major concern is to amass money at the expense of their people. The electorate are at liberty to call their bluff, and this is the right time.”

    Nigerians are unlikely to find a worse hate speech anywhere. A governor could in theory turn his state into an oasis of democratic charm and fecundity in a vast desert of intolerance. It was erroneously thought that the eloquent and hugely polemical Mallam el-Rufai would be that man. How he was, therefore, not personally discomfited by the hateful and spiteful abuse he spewed out against the three Kaduna senators may not be unconnected with his other natural but repressed instinct for intolerance, an example of which he showed in Zaria in December 2015 when the State murdered 347 Shiites in cold blood.

    Nigerians must begin gradually to admit that three years ago, they unwisely entrusted their democracy to many closet fascists. These hardened and adamant fellows will brook no opposition, continue to exude contempt for press freedom and free speech, and imbibe the habits and manners of despots. Compared with the likes of Mallam el-Rufai, Nigerians now know that past governors were angels and democrats par excellence. The next general elections should, therefore, not just be an opportunity to cavort in the democratic fiesta of balloting; it should be a sober time of reclaiming democracy from the clenched fists and closed minds of Nigeria’s tin-pot messiahs, irredentists and conceited and despicable autocrats.

  • Mishandling Benue tragedy

    STRANGE but soft whispers have begun to be heard on the need to declare a state of emergency in Benue State, and perhaps a few other states convulsed by herdsmen killings. The whispers should be dismissed as hallucinations. Hardly a day passes by in the country’s Middle Belt and north-eastern states that horrendous killings are not reported. Lately, the killings have started to take on the colouration of religious cum ethnic attacks, far more worrisome than the previous colouration of herdsmen versus farmers, or more accurately herdsmen on farmers. Lately too, and as expected, the victim communities, having reached the end of their tethers, and faced with the Hobson’s choice of fighting the marauders or be killed, are slowly coming round to the necessity of taking up arms in self-defence.

    It is in the light of the resolve to arm themselves in self-defence that the whispers of emergency proclamation have been voiced. To proclaim emergency in Benue would be foolish indeed, a desperate resort whose end no one can predict. When ex-president Goodluck Jonathan was faced with insurgency in the Northeast, a crisis he and his aides unwisely read as a ploy to undemocratically unseat him, he also toyed with the dubious solution of emergency rule. This column recalls vigorously opposing that temptation. Dr Jonathan was asked what other military measures he planned to take which the law did not already afford him, but which only emergency rule would give him. Unable to answer this question, and sensibly aware that he indeed had all the needed constitutional leeway to battle the extremists in the Northeast without declaring emergency rule, the apparently fairly democratic Dr Jonathan sheathed his sword, proclaimed state of emergency, but in line with the silence of the constitution, took no further actions to upset the existing political arrangements in the affected states.

    Nigerians in 2011 and 2013 argued and believed that emergency rule, assuming it was instituted against the spirit and letter of the constitution, was designed both to fight Boko Haram and gain some electoral advantage. Should any proclamation of emergency be done now by the Buhari presidency, it would likely be a futile measure. So far, President Muhammadu Buhari has avoided mentioning that extreme measure, which the constitution makes no post-proclamation guidance for. Can the Buhari presidency be trusted with proclamation of emergency? Are his aides not already toying with the idea that proclamation of emergency would afford them more pertinent options to take objectionable steps? And would this somewhat hostile National Assembly even go along with emergency proclamation in an election year? As examples have shown since 2015, the Buhari presidency has not been incommoded by constitutional restraints from subverting constitutional rights. And since many of the security policies of the government have proceeded from very narrow considerations, thus constituting a reflection of the composition of the government’s security council, it is genuinely feared that a state of emergency could emanate from rationalisations that have not been thought through.

    A state of emergency proceeding from the breakdown of law and order in any state must be a result of the security system of that state being overwhelmed. In the case of Nigeria, whether in Benue or Zamfara or Taraba, the law enforcement and security apparatuses are firmly in the hands of the federal government, and have been deployed as the president deems fit. If despite his appointments and deployments, which many critics have taken exception to, the law still breaks down in any state, the fault is squarely the federal government’s. More, a proclamation of emergency will also tantamount to passing a vote of no confidence in the federal government itself. Instead of engaging in a fruitless and needless rigmarole, and assuming the Buhari presidency is capable of asking itself honest questions and telling itself searing truths, it should ask both why the law is breaking down in those communities and why the government has proved spectacularly impotent in the face of the herdsmen attacks.

    The answers to these puzzles lie in President Buhari’s worldview and policies. As many critics have suggested, his worldview is constricted by many controversial factors: his cultural background, his years of solitude and detachment from self-improvement courses and exposure to global trends in political discourses and economic management, and his inexplicable leadership style that narrows his selection of advisory staff and close aides, not to talk of virtually surrendering key decisions to them. Consequently, the turmoil in the Middle Belt and parts of the Northeast has elicited contradictory and conflicting policies and options from him. Unable to properly and dispassionately appreciate the real issues surrounding the herdsmen/farmers crisis, and having viewed the attendant bloody clashes between the groups from the cracked prism of self-preservation, he has been strangely immobilised from taking firm and drastic actions to quell the madness. Even much worse, his own analyses have sometimes conflicted with those of his aides and key security appointees.

    Until the president sorts himself and his security aides out, until he gets a firm grip on the nature of the problem, he will be unable to develop the right panacea. The problem is not as intractable as he has made it. The groups masterminding the horrendous attacks in those bloodied regions are not many. Elements in the military may connive at the attacks, and powerful forces may inspire a pusillanimous approach to dealing with arrested militia members, but at bottom, Nigeria possesses enough firepower to defang the troublemakers if the presidency can think straight, act with dispatch, and stiffen its resolve. But it has chosen to dither, surprisingly fishing for excuses to justify the attacks, spending more time whining or analysing the identities of the attackers, and engaging in handwringing.

    The president and his security appointees began their exposition of the crisis by suggesting that the attacks were a product of communal clashes; then they said herdsmen deprived of grazing land had to take land by force; then they said the attackers were fellow countrymen who must be accommodated; then the president himself suggested that the attacks were spinoffs and leftovers from the Libyan civil war; and now presidential aides looking for scapegoats are beginning to say that politicians might be inspiring and politicising the troubles; and of course the timeworn excuse is being offered suggesting that agents of disunity and those who want to stoke religious crisis might be responsible for the bloodletting. It is shameful that this disgraceful dissonance  does not strike the government as an indication of their dishonesty and incompetence. But after the outcry became too loud to be ignored, the government finally began contemplating the panacea of cattle ranching, beginning with five identified states, which, with authoritarian fiat, have been asked to provide land for ranches. Movement of cattle in the five states has also been banned.

    If the crisis has persisted for almost the entire duration of the Buhari presidency, it is probably because the government has struggled to deny reality or create its own reality. That denial has proved very costly, and may have tarred the Buhari presidency irreparably as one inspired by ethnocentric sentiments and one unmoved by the sufferings of the victims who are in fact being admonished not to let “agents of disunity” exploit their misfortune. Nigeria’s Catholic bishops and nearly the entire Christian community in Nigeria have expressed worry over the worsening situation, wondering whether the largely Christian Middle Belt was not being targeted by Fulani irredentists seeking to annex fertile grazing lands. Southern Kaduna farming communities have also alleged the same sinister motive.

    The government seems to be finally stirring itself to take a few practicable measures. However, its questionable diagnosis does not give hope that the right solutions will be eventually found and faithfully and patriotically implemented. They may make a dent on the problem; but few really think the Buhari presidency has the evenhandedness and level-headedness to find a lasting, equitable and just peace in that bloodied agrarian belt. Perhaps as they move closer to the next set of elections, and fear that an electoral revolt against the ruling APC could be afoot, they would reluctantly find the courage and common sense to do what is right, especially considering that what is right is not so far-fetched as they seem to have suggested all along. But even after peace is secured in those unsettled lands, the Buhari presidency will still be condemned for its insensitivity to the killings in the afflicted states, killings that have shamed Nigeria, portrayed the government as lacking the capacity to rule, and painted the country as bloodthirsty.

  • Dino Melaye, police and Kogi Govt

    LAST week’s tumultuous event of arrest, transportation, escape and re-arrest of Dino Melaye (APC Sen–Kogi West), is more likely to continue to meet with derision than the sober reflection it calls for in the light of the declining observance of the rule of law and mounting impunity in Nigeria. Sen Melaye, one of the most vocal and visible senators of the 8th Senate, has had a running battle with the Governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello, over sundry issues ranging from political disagreements to the excesses of the governor. The sequence of events culminated in the determination of the police to transport Sen Melaye to Kogi State, not to arraign him in court, for the case had been transferred to Abuja and he cannot be arraigned twice for the same offence, but to parade him with his alleged co-conspirators in what the police suggested was a case of gunrunning and plotting of assassinations.

    What made the drama more engrossing was not merely the fact of his status as a senator, which the police have treated most contemptuously in their presumed determination to make everybody equal before the law, but the length to which the law enforcement agency was willing to go, and the depth its officers were willing to sink, to gratify the tyrannical pleasures of the youthful but vacuous Kogi governor. Sen Melaye is facing a recall process obscenely and unusually enthusiastically midwifed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), but inspired undoubtedly by Mr Bello to rid Kogi of the peskiness of the grumbling senator, probably the only recognised and visible opposition to the do-nothing government in Lokoja. The recall is supposedly anchored on the frustrations of the Kogi West electorate who were reported to be embarrassed by the jesting and buffoonery of the senator as exemplified by his many musical skits, raucous displays at Senate plenaries, and general uncouthness.

    In reality, however, Sen Melaye’s oppositional posturing and direct attacks had begun to grate on the nerves of Mr Bello, a governor labouring futilely under the yoke of his own lassitude and incompetence. Since he has managed to worm his way into some influence in Aso Villa and insinuated himself into the confidence of highly placed individuals in the same powerful precincts, Mr Bello has been able rather easily to put reins on the police and turn them every which way. When Sen Melaye’s alleged co-conspirators in the gunrunning saga broke jail late March, the state police commissioner, Ali Janga, was redeployed. But Mr Bello allegedly stood against his replacement, Sunday Ogbu. Dramatically, the fleeing suspects were intercepted days later, and Mr Janga was reinstated. The case itself, which Interpol had spurned with fitting contempt, describing it as politicised and undeserving of their attention, is shrouded in deliberate malfeasance.

    Worse, the recall process, which was at first entangled in a legal maze, is perhaps the most brazen effort in Nigerian history to thwart the will of the electorate, abuse the democratic process, and recast Kogi State in the most atrocious and execrable light. Whole communities and neighbourhoods were invested with fictitious names and signatures, and a spurious verification campaign undertaken to arrive at a preconceived goal. A resident in one of those neighbourhoods made a representation to this newspaper, indicating that their names and forged signatures appeared on the list without their consent. Mercifully, Kogi West voters have also spurned the verification exercise and repudiated the recall process, an indirect plebiscite on the loathed and unpopular governor. But tyranny is afoot in Kogi; and with the legislature inoculated against reason and courage, and the federal authorities pretending to observe the principles of federalism in their impassive connivance, there is no telling what the conspirators in Kogi can do.

    The legal case against Sen Melaye is clear, but it was billed to be heard in Abuja. The Senate, which has invited the pliant Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, might wish to know from him just what contempt he harboured against the Senate as an institution, and against Sen Melaye as a citizen deserving of fair treatment before he is convicted. They might also wish to know why he has sought to place the whole police establishment under the cruel, humiliating and treacherous whims of the Kogi governor. The Senate might wish, in addition, to invite the INEC boss a little later, regarding his work in Kogi West, to answer a few puzzling questions , for the anomalies and falsehood observed in the execution of the recall process are too obvious to be left in the hands of manipulators. The INEC boss should explain why those who submitted the petition with forged names and signatures should not be prosecuted, for after all, the authors of the petition are well known.

    It is tempting to dismiss Sen Melaye as simply being hoist with his own petard, and because of his theatrics, foul language and consistent buffoonery, see him as deserving of the adversity stripping him of whatever is left of his reputation and status as a senator of the Federal Republic. But that would be short-sighted. The senator may be unloved, but the constitution guarantees that he must be treated justly. What is more, though his constituents deplore his manners and would have loved to give him a piece of their resolute minds in the next elections, they did not instigate the recall process, and are clear who between the jester in Abuja and the tyrant in Lokoja they would wish to electorally destroy first. Sen Melaye’s melodrama hurts only the image of Kogi, and Kogi West senatorial district in particular; but Mr Bello’s savage leadership style, incompetence, and total disregard for the people’s welfare hurt their entire being and rob them of their dignity. There is no question who they loathe; nor is there any doubt in their minds who the troubler of the state is and who concocted the crises and controversies disabling Kogi.

  • IBB’s cautious prognostication

    MORE than two months after he embarrassingly vacillated over the simple but patriotic task of deprecating President Muhammadu Buhari uninspiring leadership style, former military head of state, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, has given Channels Television an interview in which he seems to demonstrate that he has found his voice and has given his courage, which sometimes appears inscrutably coded, free rein. In February, Gen Babangida had suggested in a statement issued by his long-standing spokesman, Kassim Afegbua, that President Buhari should probably step down in 2019 because his approach to leadership was anachronistic. “In 2019 and beyond,” said the former military leader unusually bravely, “we should come to a national consensus that we need new breed leadership with requisite capacity to manage our diversities and jump-start a process of launching the country on the super highway of technology-driven leadership in line with the dynamics of modern governance. It is short of saying enough of this analogue system. Let’s give way for digital leadership orientation with all the trappings of consultative, constructive, communicative, interactive, and utility-driven approach where everyone has a role to play in the process of enthroning accountability and transparency in governance.”

    But shortly after that bold and unprecedented call, a noncommittal statement presumably issued by him hemmed and hawed over President Buhari’s unstated second term ambition and all but repudiated the earlier statement. A disgusting melodrama consequently ensued, scripted and acted by the law enforcement and security agencies, purporting to defend constitutionalism and harassing Mr Afegbua. Days later, it was clear indeed that Gen Babangida neither sat on the fence nor wished his statement to be ambiguous. He had had it up to the gills with President Buhari’s non-inclusive leadership style and was willing to gamble everything he had done and achieved on one fanatical and engaging throw of the dice to find a replacement for the president in 2019.

    In the Channels interview broadcast on Monday night, however, the general was more self-assured, even if somewhat rambling, and his views quite forthright but lacking depth. He reinforced his thesis about new and younger leadership in 2019, spoke glowingly of Nigeria’s founding fathers, appeared in some parts to be self-deprecating, but overall seemed subliminally trenchant about finding someone with the right amalgam of principles and values as leader. The masks and gloves were off, and Gen Babangida had summoned the will eventually to call a spade a spade. He is thoroughly disliked, as he confessed in the interview, but seemed to recognise that the retrogression overwhelming Nigeria, not to say the unending flow of blood in many parts of the country, portended grave danger for Nigeria, if not balkanisation. Eschewing all other considerations — political, social or traditional — the former dictator has reiterated the need to salvage the situation before it gets out of hand.

    Gen Babangida raised two issues, among many others, that merit closer attention. First, he spoke of his reluctance to write his autobiography because he felt the public would not read it, having made up their minds that he could neither be truthful in the said memoires nor sensible and logical enough to offer sound evidence and arguments for his policies that miscarried badly during his years in power, particularly the June 12, 1993 elections that he annulled. Then, secondly, but much more nuanced, he indicated the leitmotif of his life to consist of his often cocksure views, his stubborn attachment to those views, and his gross inability to comprehend why Nigerians detest those views, and by inference, his person, regardless of his general affability and disguised humaneness.

    The general said enough in the Channels interview to suggest why it would be pointless to write an autobiography. Hear him: “If God spares my life, I will discuss about June 12 election because I still believe people don’t get what we were trying to put across. Nobody has ever sat down to say the two persons involved are friends, what went wrong? We tried to rationalise why we had to do what we did but nobody is prepared to listen to us. I have never seen anybody write anything on this to try to give people a different version altogether.” No one who heard him intone that position could fail to contemplate the bizarreness of his logic, nor understand his bewildering inability to come to terms with the issues surrounding June 12. June 12 was fated to be the apotheosis of his rule; that he turned it into probably the worst personal tragedy of any ruler in Africa is perhaps a tribute to the superficiality of his mind and his inscrutably cavalier approach to governance. It is indeed hard to understand why, despite his many years in power, and after meeting minds with some of the country’s finest appointees, he finds levity and gravity indistinguishable.

    But he was not through with his deceptive self-abnegation. Still explaining why he would not dare write, he explains further: “People may not read it because it’s coming from a dictator. Yea, he cancelled June 12 and that will kill the thing about the book, but I will try…I hope one day, if God spares my life, I will discuss it (June 12 elections) because I still believe people don’t get what we were trying to put across.” Apart from failing to appreciate the gravity of the decision to annul the June 12 poll, it is remarkable that he thought that that futile and hurtful step could be mitigated by the sentimentality of his private relationship with the winner of that year’s presidential election, the late Moshood K. Abiola. Was he simply trying to validate his decision and make it less grievous for his troubled conscience? The suspicion among the discerning is that Gen Babangida is either too far gone in his betrayal of country to correctly judge his own infamy, or he is too shallow to comprehend the huge disaster which that fateful decision brought upon the country. In the interview, sadly, he came across ingeniously as both.

    Gen Babangida is a man of many parts. Having ruled for over eight years, and having taken the country on an emotional roller coaster through the thick of policy experimentations, it was not unexpected that he would at least grasp the silhouette of leadership dynamics. In the interview, he actually gave indication he did. He spoke very elegantly and even inspiringly about the qualifications he thought the next president should have. “I want to see a young man with the vision of Obafemi Awolowo,” he enthused. “I want to see a young man who has the charisma of Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello. I want to see a young man who has the eloquence, education, and powers of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe; and I want to see a young man who has convictions like General Olusegun Obasanjo, retd.” It is not clear why he hurled Dr Obasanjo into the equation; perhaps he merely indulged his own tendency to be ingratiating.

    If he knew these leadership qualities, or had some ideas what they were, it is strange that nine years in power did not make him any whit like any of the heroes he mentioned. The general is a student of power, but he has not given the impression that anything he learnt was of value to him in and out of office. He spoke of Awolowo’s vision, but he groped through office as a military dictator blinded by power, harried by self-doubt, promiscuous in policy experimentation, undisciplined, frivolous and eager to curry praise and sycophancy. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he read any of Chief Awolowo’s books, let alone imbibe and practice the discipline that energised the old man’s vision.

    There was nothing in the Channels interview, or in any other interview he has ever given, that shows he has learnt anything from the charismatic and eponymous Sardauna or from the gifted polemicist and rhetorician, Dr Azikiwe. To offer these great examples as some of the qualities Nigeria’s next president must imbibe suggests that he knows what he is talking about, and that the attributes have been tested and found fit for recommendation. He should have profited from his own wise counsel. It is a great failing that he didn’t. But that he didn’t, not to talk of being one of the most execrated former leaders ever on account of his failings and lack of discipline, should not encourage both the public and President Buhari to ignore the remonstrations of the elders. Gen Babangida stands pat with Chief Obasanjo and Gen T.Y. Danjuma, both of whom have denounced the abysmal methods and tactics of the Buhari presidency.

    It is not certain which other top Nigerian possesses enough stature to denounce the underperforming President Buhari. But those who have, particularly Dr Obasanjo and Gen Babangida, have staked their all on producing a new, perhaps younger, Nigerian leader in 2019. If they fail, the consequences will be brutal and swift, not only to the former leaders, who would be instantly ostracised, but to the country as a whole. It seems in fact that what is propelling the former leaders to stiffen their resolve and opposition to President Buhari is their conviction that the president is clearly not an alternative in 2019, and that should he return to office, the country’s future would be endangered. Had they themselves offered the country the leadership it needed, given the introspection they now insinuate to themselves, it would be inconceivable that President Buhari, whose disputed ability and worldview are unsuited to the modern world, not to talk of to a complex, heterogeneous and modernising Nigeria, would have stood for election and won.

  • Senate invasion and Omo-Agege’s audacity

    LAST Wednesday’s invasion of the Senate chambers by thugs suspected to be acting a script widely regarded as coterminous with the frustrations of the suspended Senator Ovie Omo-Agege (Delta Central) may indicate far more trouble for the 8th Senate than Nigerians and senators care to admit. But there was no question just how dangerous the invasion is for the country, the health of its democracy, and the stability of the Fourth Republic. Newspaper and television reports showed how the invasion by thugs coincided with the forceful return to the Senate chambers of the suspended senator. There are reports indicating that the invasion was orchestrated, and that security agencies connived at it. Senator Omo-Agege denies the allegations.

    There is, however, no doubt that the security agencies failed in their duty of protecting the senate chambers and the lawmakers. The attackers not only had easy access to the chambers, they also had easy exit. Indeed, both their entry and exit appeared facilitated. Worse, the attackers and Sen Omo-Agege have been unwholesomely linked to the Buhari presidency, implying that the senator was punished for supporting the president against the order of elections Electoral Act amendment, and that in response the servile security agencies looked the other way as the highest lawmaking body in the country came under attack. What if it had degenerated into killings, on top of the killings in other parts of the country?

    The government has promised investigations. They should do more than that. By arresting and briskly releasing the senator at the centre of the brouhaha, the security agencies did not demonstrate impartiality and professionalism. It is critical that the government must demonstrate that both its judgement and its relationship with the lawmaking body, even if legislators are hostile, will be guided by the highest democratic principles and values. The Buhari presidency has not always given the country the assurance that it can operate flawlessly and even-handedly in a hostile legislative and partisan environment. It will, therefore, be interesting watching how the invasion is finally resolved, whether the government will act with firmness and dispassion or whether it will pull its punches.

    There are also indications that all is not well with the leadership and management of the Senate itself, a crisis supposedly dating back to the election of principal officers in 2015 and the leadership style and orientation of the Senate leadership. Happily the next elections are around the corner, and hopefully the preoccupation with election battles will both assuage hard feelings and deflect the bitterness that has subsisted in the chambers. But importantly, Senate leaders, particularly the increasingly melancholic Senate President, Bukola Saraki, must find ways of mollifying the rage of opponents and caucuses whose ideas and principles he may find combative and hostile. It will be a poor Senate indeed whose members all agree with him.

    Sen Saraki must recognise differences, accommodate them, and as a leader channel them creatively with aplomb for the common democratic good of the society. On account of the invasion and the inchoate plot to unseat him, he may now be tempted to fight his ‘enemies’ to the finish. He should resist that temptation. Not only will that approach exacerbate the schisms in the Senate, it will induce paranoia in the leaders and combatants. He will gain nothing by a destabilised Senate, notwithstanding the suspicion that an increasingly intolerant and cabalistic presidency has of recent seemed more minded to throwing the cat among the pigeons in order to sow divisions in the National Assembly and rule them, especially in an election year.

    Sen Omo-Agege cannot hope to completely distance himself from the uproar that shook the Senate last Wednesday. He was nearly lachrymose before his suspension when he sought to assuage his colleagues’ unhappiness with him in the heat of the Electoral Act amendment controversy. Before his suspension and during the invasion of the Senate, the senator cut the pitiable figure of a legislator who is neither deep nor calm under pressure. He is a sorry specimen of a lawmaker. The presidency too has not been run fluidly with the best of patriotic intentions and savvy. It is important that in the next polls voters must scrutinise with far more sense and rigour those they want to elect to make laws for them or rule them from the State House. The quality of the present occupants of state legislative chambers and State Houses all over the country fall far short of the standard needed to nurture democracy, engender quality debates, and grow and modernise the economy.

    Nigeria’s security and law enforcement agencies, as the reprisal killings orchestrated in Benue State allegedly by aggrieved soldiers show, have become dangerously partial and unprofessional. If a change of attitude is not forced upon them, they will imperil the country. Wednesday’s invasion must not be swept under the carpet, regardless of how the combatants were and are still arrayed, for the world will be watching to see whether those who rule Nigeria have the sense to let justice be served in the strictest sense or not.