The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Obiano and Southeast bask in electoral euphoria

    Obiano and Southeast bask in electoral euphoria

    GOVERNOR Willie Obiano’s victory in last Saturday’s Anambra State governorship poll was even more emphatic than pundits had anticipated. By all accounts, he was projected to win, but by a slimmer margin than the final count indicated. Shockingly, he won by a landslide, taking every local government and embarrassing and numbing his opponents to supine acquiescence. Despite his mollifying victory speech, he will probably read more meaning into the landslide than is really plausible. He won alright, but he won, in many significant ways, despite himself.

    In an age when most state governments have irresponsibly failed to pay workers’ salaries, in some instances for more than a year, or paid a fraction of the wages, Mr Obiano’s faithful adherence to workers’ welfare was exemplary. It was naturally expected that the electorate would reward him. He might have been quite liberal in the application of the state’s financial resources, as stridently alleged by former governor Peter Obi, but the populace on whose behalf the governor claimed to act were quite unfazed by the applied arithmetic of the state’s finances. Workers were paid, some projects were ongoing, even if not world class, and the state’s economy was not paralysed. Every other thing paled into insignificance.

    But the poll victory, particularly its emphatic margin, was more an endorsement of the separate and proud identity of the Igbo people in the national political mix than an endorsement of the salient qualities of the somewhat inarticulate governor. The election came at a time when there was so much hysteria about the place of the Igbo in the national scheme of things, especially as propagated by the ingratiating Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) vis-a-vis the intimidating and antagonistic federal government of President Muhammadu Buhari and his security forces. For a party that identified with the late secessionist leader, Emeka Ojukwu, and which continues to proclaim and celebrate its Igbo identity, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) of Mr Obiano was bound to resonate with the electorate.

    It would be foolish to challenge a victory so clear, so determined, so indisputable. The internationalist governor of Imo State, the irrepressible Rochas Okorocha himself, suggested that no one could sensibly challenge a victory so uncomplicated. But whether he himself draws the right lessons from it is unclear, seeing how valiantly but futilely he struggled to drag the Igbo into the national political mainstream.  The Obiano victory does not suggest that the Igbo are unamenable to embracing the mainstream; it only suggests that after the Buhari presidency has so fouled the well of trust between the Southeast and the rest of Nigeria, the Igbo had in turn become defiant. That defiance, from which Mr Obiano has profited so immensely electorally, will most probably be carried into the next general elections.

    Ex-governor Obi shouted himself hoarse about Mr Obiano’s poor financial management ability. Though the governor and his team tried to rebut the allegations, the former governor was probably not too mistaken in his judgement of the governor’s capability. Mr Obiano has not been a financial exemplar, nor as visionary and charismatic as the feline-voiced Mr Obi and the indomitable and often excitable Chris Ngige, a former Anambra governor himself and now a minister in the Buhari cabinet. In fact, the governor was neither stirring in the governorship debate, which he had naturally expected to win to put a gloss on his administration, nor incomparable in his style of governance. Except his performance in his second term, which he has won with aplomb, is unequalled, it may be premature to write off the influence of Mr Obi in Anambra politics. However, the former governor misadvised himself and misread regional mood by coming out openly and frontally against the governor.

    The Anambra poll may signpost the future of Southeast politics. That region is not deluded to think that the Buhari presidency loves it, and it is doubtful whether the presidency can substantially redress the problem of mutual antagonism between Abuja and that region by embarking on furious projects funding and execution. The Igbo perceive the federal dislike passionately, and they seem desperate to requite it, believing that President Buhari’s conversion and conviction are only skin deep. If the APC is not to find extreme difficulty in winning the Southeast and South-South in the next elections, and struggle in the Southwest and probably in parts of the Middle Belt, the Buhari presidency will have to do a major rethink of its politics in the light of the Anambra poll result.

    Mr Obiano should interpret his victory sensibly and with restraint, for it may not carry as much good news as he thinks. Mr Obi should also re-examine his politics and methods all over again, and wonder whether he had not overreached himself and exaggerated his own influence. But above all, the Buhari presidency has the most unpleasant self-examination to carry out. With the doors shut against it in the Southeast and South-South, as it seems, and the windows also shut against it in the Southwest, it must ponder whether it had ruled like democrats or behaved like military autocrats, or whether it really understood Nigeria or it had been chasing a chimera all along.

  • El-Rufai’s activism and Kaduna teachers

    El-Rufai’s activism and Kaduna teachers

    FOR the first time in over two years, Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, has finally happened upon a popular cause befitting his populism. After compelling primary school teachers to take a proficiency test designed for Primary Four pupils, and seeing more than two-thirds of them fail, he has given the order to recruit about 25,000 teachers to replace some 21,780 of them who flunked the test. Unable to bring himself to describe the failed teachers as sacked, he has hovered precariously and undecidedly between using the word ‘replacement’ to qualify what he intends to do with them, and merely suggesting that they would be removed from the payroll. Except to him, few, especially the teachers themselves and their activist unions, were left puzzled by what their fate would be in a matter of weeks.

    The support for Mallam el-Rufai’s measure to sanitise the teaching profession at the elementary level has been both uproarious and intoxicating. Even the normally even-tempered and quick-witted Shehu Sani (Senate–Kaduna Central) has been wrong-footed by the populist and often unreflective governor. Sen Sani had argued that by deciding to sack the about 22,00 teachers, the governor was cruelly using politics to settle scores and anticipate and scheme for the next elections. The senator is himself an activist. It is not surprising that he threw in his lot with the labour unions and teachers, for he often reads far deeper insights into policies and measures than the ordinary man on the street, and in most instances, even far more than the governor himself. But on this matter, the public is unforgiving. In their opinion, the governor is courageously tackling a sordid malady that predated him, one his predecessors had treated with kid gloves.

    The premise of the governor’s populist fury is simple and engaging. Teachers who could not pass Primary Four tests have no business teaching anyone. With education in Kaduna floundering, and with the state’s students performing woefully in national examinations, there would be no room for any sentiment in applying drastic remedies to what has seemed to be a cancerous problem. Even the suspicion and argument that the governor got his analysis wrong by failing to see the state’s education problem as systemic rather than isolated, has seemed distant. It did not help that many analysts have lathered the problem with the sentimental rhetoric that suggests that no parent would like his children to be taught by the near illiterates who for many years passed themselves off as teachers in the grandest and avuncular sense.

    It is hard to see the labour unions winning either the argument or the fight. They are fighting a lost cause. Nor is there a cat in hell’s chance that Sen Sani will have the upper hand in the fight to retain the about 22,000 teachers. They are a bad case, and can hardly be retained under any guise or argument. Indeed, the labour unions, particularly the teachers’ union, have no reason to stick to their guns. The 25,000 teachers that will be recruited, the so-called replacement specialists, will not only inexorably become union members, they will swell the ranks of the powerful club of teaching activists with their superior education and skills, and with their winsome credentials and swag. It’s a win-win for the unions, government and education sector, not to say the poor, bedraggled parents who had long resigned themselves to fate and pondered whether any of their children attending those misfit schools could ever successfully run the gauntlet of bad teachers, cruel and merciless national examinations and increasingly competitive socio-economic systems.

    Mallam el-Rufai can be forced to step down on some issues. It is hard to see him climbing down on this. Sen Sani should have picked his fight well. On this matter of the impending sack of teachers, the governor cannot lose, and the senator cannot win. The unions will be worsted, and the senator will have egg on his face. If they think they can ambush the governor in the coming polls, they and all their 22,000-strong sacked teachers, they will meet the 25,000 newly recruited teachers who give their loyalty first and foremost, as the senator feared, to Mallam el-Rufai. Ex-United States president George H. Bush might have won Gulf War I in 1991 and lost the following year’s presidential election; there is no way Mallam el-Rufai can be harmed by the sacked teachers case. His enemies should pick different causes and implements to bludgeon the governor, for he is not beyond being beaten.

    When barely two months after he assumed office in 2015 Mallam el-Rufai banned street begging, which he described as humiliating, he had run full tilt into a political storm that robbed him of his carefully cultivated image as an empathetic, pro-people politician. Street begging was not a profession, he had argued with unfeeling, superior airs and undisguised sarcasm. But his opponents tell him it is a socio-economic, if not even cultural, reality that can neither be wished away nor legislated into oblivion. It is the same brusqueness that backfired in the case of the beggars that Mallam el-Rufai is applying, perhaps tactlessly, to the case of the unqualified teachers. Begging was a systemic problem in Kaduna when the governor confronted it, just as the failed teachers phenomenon is systemic. Both require not just boldness and courage, which virtues the governor has in abundance, but holistic and overarching approaches and solutions. The governor’s style, as exemplified by the malaises undermining economic and political developments in Kaduna, suggests he is finding it difficult to adequately and analytically appreciate the import of the problems, let alone conceive the right remedies.

    Begging and failed teachers are undoubtedly a problem, among many other problems, for Kaduna. But the question Mallam el-Rufai does not ask himself is what kind of problems they are, and whether his solutions suit and soothe the crises he seems perfectly placed idiosyncratically to worsen by his natural inflexibility, insensitivity and sometimes arrogance. Mallam el-Rufai is of course not always right even when he is populist and superficial, as his approach to the herdsmen attacks and regulation of religions in the state show. Indeed, he may have an instinctive grasp of the problems that confront the state, even if the complex composition of their cores escape him; but he often weakens his cause by his insufferable style and sweeping, superficial generalisations. Quite characteristically, his problem is that his activism nearly always gets the better of him.

    Mallam el-Rufai will win the failed teachers argument, and it will show him as a firm, courageous and quick-witted governor. But it will not show him as a manager of men, as an inspiration, as a methodical leader and politician, and as a caring and visionary leader more intent on changing the circumstances of the people than on winning arguments and wrong-footing opponents. The governor’s idiosyncrasies are cast in granite. He is too old and has repeatedly profited from his constant resort to disingenuousness and opportunism to be amenable to change. He will continue to use the morass that envelopes Kaduna as a pretext for harsh and sometimes cruel measures. He will refuse to be persuaded to recognise that the Kaduna teachers’ conundrum can be resolved more systemically, far more rewardingly, and with far less costs than he has abrasively and emotionally embraced and sold.

    The Kaduna teachers’ issue is in fact a rather simple problem that could have been resolved without the melodrama with which Mallam el-Rufai has encased it. The publicity rankled, including the public display of teachers’ spectacular test failures, as much as the governor’s loud asseverations of his unassailable position and polemical superiority. He could of course bring to public knowledge the problems the state was confronting in the education sector, and seek the people’s understanding. Next he could seek the accommodation and understanding of the unions, reassuring them that the government would not undermine their cohesion. Then he could begin quietly weeding out, in phases, the undesirable elements in the teaching profession. The controversy was never about whether those who couldn’t teach should be replaced. They must be. The controversy was how the governor hoped, perhaps with minimum pain, to deliver the change that would benefit the education sector, transfer the soon-to-be-unemployed into other productive jobs, and comprehensively reform the entire state administrative structure, not just in education, that promotes mediocrity and stultifies development.

    In his response to Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, who mocked the governor for planning to retrench about 22,000 teachers, Mallam el-Rufai talked disingenuously of replacement in place of sack. It was obvious the immensely emotional Kaduna governor had not spared time to ponder the anomaly and consequences of sacking so many people regardless of their lack of qualification and wrongful recruitment into the public service. Whether he likes it or not, and despite his vindication and massive public support, he will have to re-examine his methods and plans all over again. Even if the exercise would not cost him votes, he must still take a second look at the issue, for it is certain to affect his legacy in ways he has probably not anticipated. The controversy goes beyond the teachers conundrum; it touches on his style of governance, a style that affects everything, both present and future, a style that has made him to be execrated even by those who mentored him but now speak of him in very unflattering terms.

    Mallam el-Rufai is immensely gifted, intellectual and bold, and he has a knack for seeking out for attention the grave issues that convulse the society, whether nationally or his beloved Kaduna. But seeing how cocksure of everything he has become over the years, and how infallible he places himself in the scheme of things, it must apparently be a conspiracy engineered by the heavens to attenuate his gifts by imbuing him with a fondness for romanticization, melodrama and offensive display of brusqueness unparalleled even in those on whose agile but unyielding backs he climbed unworthily into prominence.

  • PDP and APC’s presidential endorsements

    PDP and APC’s presidential endorsements

    When two Tuesdays ago the power elite of the All Progressives Congress (APC) all but endorsed the unstated second term ambition of President Muhammadu Buhari, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) were put in a quandary about the course and content of their own presidential ambition. The APC’s position did not come as a surprise, despite doubts about the unanimity of that hurried and ambiguous endorsement. This column, like many other analysts, had suggested that the president would be almost unanimously endorsed at the right time, but only after a perfunctory show of opposition within the party. Alas, the column exaggerated the political ethics of the ruling party, and set great store by its ability to adhere to due process. After a short propaganda blitz and a hastily conducted presidential charm offensive barely lasting a week or two, APC governors and party hierarchs have seemed to reconcile themselves to the president’s second term ambition.

    But it is not the APC’s depressing approach to politics that should concern anyone today; the paramount national concern should be the response of the dithering PDP. Until the APC gets its fingers burnt, the party is unlikely to learn the right lessons about internal party democracy devoid of subterranean influence peddling and muscling. On the other hand, having got its fingers seared, if not completely cut off, by its serial misapplication and abuse of the constitution and the rule of law over 16 years of formidable display of power and egregious blunders, the PDP should not need a reminder how not to play politics or take the electorate for granted. The APC is hard of hearing; the next few weeks, and its reading of and reaction to the APC’s abrasive moves, will determine whether the PDP’s decade-long deafness has been mitigated by its two-year despondency out of power.

    The PDP is in a desperate position. It did not expect the socially awkward and politically inflexible President Buhari to moderate his rigidity and begin to court alienated party faithful. But flattered by his attention and puzzled by his newfound gentility, the ruling party has begun to warm up enthusiastically to the president. The PDP had counted on the seething discontent within the ruling party to unleash a massive and steady stream of exiles to help the opposition assemble a corps of cantankerous, formidable and goal-oriented party activists. Unfortunately, that stream is now unlikely to be activated, at least not on the scale and angles counted upon by PDP leaders when they began to frolic with their Euclidean axioms early this year. Then they also hoped that either his health or the economy would be immune to all the palliatives known to man or to any government. Instead, and as if by a celestial conspiracy, both the economy and the president’s health have responded quite well to every shot administered in their arms.

    Now at a crossroads, the PDP appears to be contemplating very limited options in responding to the APC’s brusque and early presidential choice. For, undoubtedly, except the earth shifts from its orbit, President Buhari will before the end of next year be anointed as the ruling party’s presidential candidate. As this column suggested some two weeks ago, there would be no one of courage or charisma in the party able to successfully unhorse the president, nor to even oppose him with the troubling effervescence and pluckiness expected of a vibrant party. So, the PDP must now somehow find the Achilles’ heel of a ruling party so steeped in the martial classics of politics that it has managed, at the risk of slow and ungainly movement — even no movement at all — to cover that heel with impenetrable armour.

    The pressure on the PDP is inordinate. It had expected that true to his amorphous political ethics the president would resist playing presidential politics, not to say covet the party’s anointing, before the middle of next year. Instead, the wily but sometimes underestimated Presidential Buhari has stolen the PDP’s thunder by kick-starting presidential politics early in the day and presenting his party with a fait accompli. Their instincts tell them that the APC will engage in the democratic pirouettes of nominations and primaries, but they also know that the outcome is as certain as it is incontestable. They know, this time by common sense rather than instincts, that they must produce their own deus ex machina to counter the terrifying advantages of the ruling party, advantages accentuated by a president who is neither queasy about using or even misusing his powers, nor weighed down by the philosophical considerations that pervade and fetter the application of democracy and the rule of law.

    The PDP will, therefore, likely rest its response and challenge to the APC on two major planks: encourage rebellion in the ruling party; and seek a unanimous and countervailing candidate of their own. The planks may be inadequate, but the opposition will hope they work, for the party is painfully short of sensible and practical options. Fortunately for the PDP, the APC has really never looked like a political party, either in theory or practice, operation or in inspiration. It has seemed more often like a clumsy menagerie of grumbling and quarrelsome individuals bonded together by the single and feral desire to corner power and influence. Moments after they took office, they turned on one another and began tearing themselves to pieces. And for more than two years, they have neither administered their party like a political association with a common purpose and ideology nor infused their government, the society and the economy with the change ethos they lavishly and furiously sang about before the polls.

    But whether the rebellious within the APC will break out in open rebellion is not quite clear. They will of course not mind the encouragement from the PDP, and will appreciate the prophecies of their kept seers nudging them on to navigate the treacherous rapids and tangled skein of Nigerian politics. However, given the extreme caution associated with many top Nigerian politicians, they will wonder whether it makes any sense to stare down the barrel of a gun in the hands of a former army general who is not afraid to use weapons, indeed who exhibits a brutal delight in using them. Their past knowledge of staring down the barrel of a gun in the hands of the more democratic but less resolute ex-president Goodluck Jonathan will be of no use.

    For instance, it is widely speculated, though without concrete proof, that both Senate President Bukola Saraki and ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar are aggrieved and not too disinclined from leaving the ruling party. Assuming analysts can defend the illogic of these top APC politicians leaving certainty for uncertainty, they must still try to rationalise why Dr Saraki would jeopardise his plum legislative office in the light of what former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, endured when he defected from the former ruling party in October 2014. If he remains in the APC, Alhaji Atiku will certainly not get the party’s presidential ticket for the 2019 poll; but he is at least still respected in the party, and all the battles against him and his economic and political interests appear to be fought with pulled punches. Should he defect, particularly to the PDP, and assuming he does not get dizzy from his Tarzan-like leaps and foraging between political parties which he has mastered over the years, there is still no proof he will be offered the presidential ticket. Indeed, it is hugely unlikely.

    It will in fact take a major turn for the worse in the APC, including a complete abandonment of the unconvincing rapprochement embarked upon by President Buhari, to provoke the kind of exodus being read into the politics and manoeuvres of both Dr Saraki and the former vice president. There are many disgruntled politicians and leaders waiting in the wings in the APC, poised to take a fateful leap in the dark. But after suffering in silence for so long, and after being half-heartedly courted by the president’s  yes-men, the disaffected APC politicians may be in no mood for further punishment and ostracism. They may be tempted to stay put in the party and push and jostle for either influence or position. Their options are sadly severely limited.

    As for their plan to counter the APC’s political fluidity by seeking a less acrimonious primary to elect their standard-bearer, they face even far worse options and outcomes. With their chances of emerging as the presidential candidate on the APC platform eliminated by the president’s physical and political rejuvenation, aspirants within the ruling party will likely swallow hard and keep their peace. But with the same presidential chances wide open within the PDP, it is hard to see the candidature fight waged with pizzicato calm. They will fight like big cats, and they will fight bitterly and possibly to the death. Before the middle of next year, anyone in the APC who still harbours presidential ambition, and who cannot wait till 2023, will have defected. They will carry with them the same maddening urgency that drove them away from the ruling party.

    There is a third plank the PDP has obstinately refused to consider, and it is a plank without which any other plank or calculation is bound to miscarry. What the PDP really needs to do is not to scheme so frenetically and desperately for the presidency as it is doing, but to thoroughly reform itself, rejig its ideological and existential platforms, atone for its malodorous politics and unethical financial shenanigans which nearly bankrupted the country, and discover brilliant, charismatic and untainted politicians whom it must forcefully thrust forward as a breath of fresh air. Instead, as the battle for the party’s national chairman position indicates, the old and tainted politicians of decades past still have the party by the jugular and are unwilling to loosen their hold on the party. President Buhari and his APC can be beaten fair and square, and should in fact be made to sweat for every stray vote likely to come their way in 2019. But until the PDP comes to terms with its dismal and enervating past, a past filled with unpleasant and inconsequential achievements and dark forebodings, it is hard to see them beating something with nothing.

    The consolation to the PDP, as hated as it appears to be, is that the APC is merely a half, if not less, of that mythical ‘something’ on account of the many policy and appointment miscarriages enacted by the Buhari presidency. If the PDP can take and use nearly all the remedial steps suggested to it, and in addition make an issue out of President Buhari’s inability to run an inclusive government or propound inclusive ideas and policies for all parts of the country, there is a chance they might make political hay. After all, the president is only now acknowledging, albeit very grudgingly, that he would be minded to take a second look at his lopsided appointments, visit the Southeast which he had all but ostracised as a secessionist enclave, and encourage those who see him as a sectional, sectarian leader to look closely and dispassionately again. There is in fact enough issues for a revitalised and sanitised PDP to successfully campaign on, if it can summon the discipline and thinking.

    Every patriot must encourage the PDP to do what is right, clean up its act, and offer the country a sound and vigorous opposition as well as cobble together a great and uplifting political alternative to guarantee and defend democracy and the rule of law. The Buhari presidency has been run with messianic fervour as though it is a theocracy that brooks no opposition, and his ministers and aides have spoken in the most appalling and caste-like pejoratives about the PDP especially. Unlike his aides, however, the president seems to have met his epiphanic moments in both his dreams of a second term and his uncharacteristic overtures to politicians he had previously disdained. If the PDP is not to come to grief in 2019, if they are not to futilely hope that the APC would implode and hand the presidency over to them on a platter, then it is important they seek out their own moments of self-discovery, at least sometime early next year, where the future is transfigured before them, not in the spooky silhouettes their mediocrity has accustomed them to view life and interpret politics, but in the transcendental images their founding fathers, particularly the G-34, were enamoured of and had envisioned for them.

     

     

     

     

  • Igbo and the magical year 2023

    Igbo and the magical year 2023

    By some general and unexplainable consensus, the Igbo have begun to campaign for the presidency of Nigeria to be vouchsafed to them in 2023. In furtherance of this great scheme, many of their leading political lights suggest that support for President Muhammadu Buhari’s second term could help the cause. Those whose natural politics predispose them to oppose the president, perhaps on account of his seeming animosity to the Southeast, are already being pressured to drop their reservations against him. Both the Igbo socio-cultural group, Ohanaeze, and the eternally imprudent but self-assured Imo State governor, Rochas Okorocha, have seemed to make their peace with a Buhari second term. There is some logic to their new preferences, even if there is no morality to the options they now sell as indispensable.

    Any southerner who wishes to run for the presidency in 2023 is unlikely to embrace the candidacy of a northerner who is running for the first time in 2019 and could seek a second term should the political environment in 2023 prove amenable. A Buhari candidature may gall the Southeast, especially considering his unremitting pursuit of Igbo separatist groups and his unyielding alienation of their kinsmen from his inner circle and the security and paramilitary organisations, but they serve notice of their willingness to swallow hard and embrace him, knowing full well which side their bread is buttered. It is not obvious that such a new political conviction is unanimous among the Igbo, or whether they will not hedge their bets by turning over their states to either the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) or the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in state and local elections, but whenever the mist clears and the Igbo are discovered to have forked left in the presidential poll, no mystery must be accorded their expediency.

    The argument for Igbo presidency in 2023 is, however, built on shaky foundations. It is indisputable that both the North or the Hausa/Fulani and the Southwest or the Yoruba have each produced a president since the start of the Fourth Republic. The Southeast is yet to produce one. In a country erected on an ungainly ethnic tripod, the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo arrogate to themselves a presidential relay race they must run, win and dominate. This dismal dogma is at the bottom of the perversion of Nigerian politics and society where, instead of competence, other factors such as ethnicity and religion predominate. Even then, a close look at the election or selection of all Fourth Republic presidents indicates that zoning or ethnicity played only a peripheral role.

    Both the nomination and election of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo cannot be divorced from the electoral victory and unfortunate death of MKO Abiola in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Chief Abiola had won the nomination of his Social Democratic Party (SDP) in competition with Hausa/Fulani and Kanuri aspirants, among others. And when he won the presidency, it was in a straight and fierce electoral combat with Bashir Tofa, a Kano State indigene whose Kanawa people spurned his candidacy. Had Chief Abiola not died in very controversial circumstances in military detention after his victory was annulled by the Ibrahim Babangida military government, it is unlikely anyone would have thought to compensate the Yoruba. What were involved in the emergence of Chief Obasanjo as president, and the countervailing candidature of Olu Falae, a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, in the other major party were the principle of replacing the dead with the living, and the matter of placating or subduing the pangs of conscience.

    It is simplistic to deduce that the nomination of ex-president Umaru Yar’Adua as PDP candidate for the 2007 presidential election followed a North-South zoning arrangement. Not only was the nomination essentially a brusque, personal and aggrandizing policy of the departing Chief Obasanjo, it was not even the official policy of the PDP, considering the number and calibre of southerners who indicated interest in the position that year. More crucially, when in 2003 Chief Obasanjo intrigued for a second term, the opposition he faced transcended the North-South divide. In 2007, he also schemed desperately for a third term, regardless of the PDP’s so-called zoning arrangement. The Southeast must critically engage the zoning logic to find out whether it is consistent and reliable, and whether they can rest their ambitions on that superficial and tenuous arrangement. As the Goodluck Jonathan candidacy suggested, any zoning and rotational arrangement for the presidency was really unrealistic, inconsistent and undependable. The Southeast must find some other arguments and arrangements to justify their legitimate interest in producing a president for Nigeria. They must recall that President Buhari shunned all rotational and zoning arrangements and made nonsense of conventional wisdom to run in 2003, 2007, 2011 and then finally 2015.

    In fact, a study of Nigeria’s political culture suggests that beyond the first term, and only barely, no one, let alone a political party, respects rotational presidency. Ex-vice president Abubakar Atiku did not respect the arrangement, and needed not; President Buhari simply ignored it, and can’t now argue for it if any politician should choose to contemptuously dismiss that needless conventional wisdom; and a host of other aspirants from other parties have simply and sensibly played politics as if no arrangement of any kind exists. The Southeast must play their politics irrespective of whatever arrangements and rotations are thought to exist. The fallacies peddled by Governor Okorocha to justify his constant flip-flops, which fallacies are now strangely and unfortunately redacted by the more balanced and reflective Ohanaeze leaders, must not be allowed to stifle and distort the Southeast’s political ambitions.

    The Igbo must proceed from the standpoint of two immutable truths. First, if any rotational arrangement exists at all, it does not exist beyond a president’s first term. Political history illustrates and underpins this. Second, and more importantly, the Southeast must not allow itself to be seduced into the false orthodoxy of putting more emphasis on political arrangements rather than producing a candidate of immense gifts, charisma and crossover appeal. The Southeast may find this self-evident truth to be repulsive, but there will not come a time, at least not soon, when the country and all political parties will unanimously agree to an Igbo candidate and a Southeast presidency.  Chief Obasanjo mooted the idea during a visit to Enugu not too long ago, but the former president is not known for his philosophical depth or overarching appreciation of history.

    The country is always ripe for a president from any part of Nigeria, if that part can produce a man of immense talents, perhaps of soaring oratory, or perhaps of solid intuition and character. The Ohaneze is much better led than all the Southeast states combined, certainly much more profound than the meretricious Mr Okorocha whose histrionics stupefies even his friends as much as it animates his opponents into virulent enmity. It will be sad for the eminent Igbo socio-cultural group, despite its profundity and depth, to now begin to ape the political and soapbox flummery of Mr Okorocha in the argument and suppositions about Igbo presidency.

    No one can of course rule out an Igbo man winning the presidency in 2023. But the candidature and victory of that Igbo man must not be predicated on either support for President Buhari’s second term or any other silly ratiocination and political calculation dishonestly peddled by those who wish to herd the Igbo into one unprincipled and intellectually motionless whole. If Chief Abiola won fair and square in 1993, even beating his opponent in his backyard and supposed place of strength, it was not because he was a Yoruba man. It was because he had crossover appeal, an appeal carefully sculpted through decades of philanthropy, secularist deportment, love of the good life, and genuine affection for fellow human beings. He was dismissed as frivolous and carefree, but those who voted for him saw a human being much more engaging and human than his boring and ineffectual opponent.

    It is sensible for the Igbo to rule themselves out of the 2019 calculations. There is nothing to show that they or anyone from among them has built himself into a formidable politician worthy of the presidency. It is not because their sons and daughters lack the intellectual wherewithal; it is simply because they have focused on the wrong calculations, waiting, it seems, for a time when the whole country would rise as one man and gift them the ultimate prize. That time won’t come. The Igbo people must instead begin the arduous task of seeking out a few from among them who combine the oratory of the great Nnamdi Azikwe, the administrative acumen of the incomparable Obafemi Awolowo, and the raw charisma of Gamji, Sir Ahmadu Bello. At least let that Igbo man come a little close to this intoxicating hybrid.

    It is puzzling that John Nnia Nwodo, the 65-year-old Ohanaeze president-general, has chosen to lead the more constrictive socio-cultural Igbo group rather than offer himself for something more national, uplifting and inspiring. His honesty, lawyerly intellect, calmness, and firmness during the uproarious months in which the Indigenous People of Biafra’s Nnamdi Kanu overwhelmed the Southeast with his Niagara of insane outbursts and laid the country to waste with puerile idiocies, are quite remarkable and noteworthy. He refused to succumb to the easy temptation to deny and denounce his people simply in order to conform to conventional wisdom; and yet managed not to come across as implacable, extremist and irrational. Why such a man of few words, great speeches, and gentle but firm disposition would appear to rule himself out of contention is hard to fathom.

    Of all the Igbo politicians that have fascinated this column, Chris Ngige comes across as probably the most colourful. Though a product of the misbegotten electoral machine run by the vacuous Chris Uba, the petite politician with a defiant mien and penetrating gaze has the mind of a giant. His talents may be altogether misapplied by President Buhari, who has tucked him away in the nondescript corner of the unchallenging Labour ministry, and his political morality may even come across as offensively realpolitik, Dr Ngige was nonetheless a suave and charismatic state administrator with an uncommon and absolutely endearing populist inclination. In addition, he is a risk-taker and iconoclast, despite the constant vulgarisation and debauchery of the two terms. But whether he has the depth, largeness of heart, and breathtaking vision to move the country to the 22nd century is not clear.

    Between Pat Utomi and Charles Soludo, two Igbo intellectuals and professors that run rampant on newspaper pages, the Southeast must encourage one of them to reach for the stars and claim the high ground. Prof Utomi has more friends and admirers across the country, and, as a political economist, possesses the copious knowledge and background needed to re-engineer the country. But Prof Soludo appears to be the highest risk-taker in that region, a fastidious economist not mystified by any of the prevailing economic theories and even dogmas of the age, a man so completely at home with praxis as he is brimful of ideas that raised and positioned great countries. And he is probably the most eloquent, guttural speaker around. His political accomplishments may be piddling, but if he can immerse himself in the backgrounds and cultures of Nigeria’s great politicians and learn the ropes smartly and quickly, he might yet amount to something far beyond his own private expectations, especially in a country famished for great presidents.

    It is of course not the place of this column to appoint a top politician for the Southeast to present for the presidency. Nor is it really the place of the Igbo to indicate that choice almost as if he would represent them rather than represent and aggregate the values and virtues the country years for, values and virtues no Nigerian leader since independence has managed to project. The onus is, therefore, on that man of destiny from the Southeast to reconcile himself with his Igboness, but disable that cultural restraint from constricting his worldview, and prepare himself consciously, deliberately and with considerable aplomb for the position of national leadership with a vision that is both continental and transcendental.

    If the Igbo can’t find that miracle worker soon, they will be disappointed again in 2023, even if they can coax the rest of the country and one or two political parties into ceding the plum presidential candidature to the region. Since the constitution does not recognise rotational presidency, and the parties will not meet to develop a consensus on that subject, nor will the electorate unite simply to massage the ego of any ethnic group, the Igbo must quit their false rationalisations, take their fate in their hands, and assist one of their own to develop the needed crossover appeal without which a winning coalition could not coalesce. Next year, let an Igbo man test the waters by running for the presidency and by ignoring the piffle about rotation and zoning. Let him see how a presidential race is run; and let him project himself sensibly, elegantly and professorially into the race a second time in 2023, with enough verve, ideas and charisma to make the country swoon over him. Let the Igbo do anything but recede into plaintive and self-pitying complaints and defeatism.

     

     

     

  • Buhari keen on second term

    Buhari keen on second term

    No top politician who has spoken about President Muhammadu Buhari’s second term ambition has been unequivocal. Some of them talk of him with their customary tentativeness, quibbling about “if he chooses to contest”, groaning about his “right of first refusal”, and pretentiously and defiantly chorusing about the ticket being “open to all”. There is hardly any All Progressives Congress (APC) leader who has not spoken on the subject, with many of them struggling to hide or suppress their sarcasm and disbelief. But a few have been really passionate about the prospect of a second term for the 74-year-old president, regardless of the fact that he will be nearly 76 years old when he campaigns a second time, and about 80 years old when he completes a second term.

    If anyone rises up to oppose him in the ruling party, it will be a perfunctory exercise. It is not clear where the nonsense about ‘right of first refusal’ came from, why in the onerous exercise of determining the political leadership of a country of more than 180 million people anyone would transpose the infernal language of business contracts and investment decisions into politics. But Nigerians have seemed to accept it, and their sycophantic zeal has turned it into a popular political, religious and social culture. No one in the APC will dare oppose President Buhari should he enlist. The iconoclasts who tried to oppose his predecessors in 2003 and 2015 have yet to recover from the trauma visited on them.

    President Buhari himself knows that no politician in his party will find it easy to oppose him. The simple reason is that neither the president nor any of his three predecessors were democrats. They were all monarchs, and opposing monarchs is often on pain of complete political ostracism, or worse, death. More than his predecessors, President Buhari knows his monarchical powers are almost absolute, both in his cabinet where no one second-guesses him but prefer to venerate him, and in the larger society where his truculence passes him off as an aloof and remorseless autocrat.

    Of all the presidents who have ruled Nigeria since 1999, President Buhari has the most decipherable body language. His ascetic disposition makes that reading possible. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s bonhomie, not to say his innumerable dalliances, and his aggressive temper that alternated with relentless and bucolic earthiness gave him off as a president who was at once accessible and inaccessible. Ex-president Goodluck Jonathan was a cross between serious and unserious, a politician and president who was in equal measure pleasant and off-putting. Both Dr Jonathan and Chief Obasanjo sometimes sent mixed signals. Not President Buhari. Yes, he is an inscrutable man with a forced smile, but he nonetheless packs a radioactive body language that leaves his audience in no doubt how his mind works.

    President Buhari’s body language today shows he will seek a second term. He may see consensus building and compromises as humiliating and disembowelling, but even he is not averse to the political culture of giving something in exchange for something. (Notice how he has begun to mellow in some of his actions of late). APC national chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun may keep his fingers crossed on whether the president will seek a second term or retire, and former party chairman, Bisi Akande, may talk of the party’s candidacy being opened to all and sundry, but nearly everyone in the party now reads very clearly what the president’s body language is saying since he returned from his second major medical trip reinvigorated. His family and supporters even speak of his miraculous recovery with expectant tones.

    The president is undoubtedly stronger than he was last year. It shows on his face, and his friends, supporters and family are relieved that he seems to have been gifted an extension of life. They would not fret should he tomorrow throw his hat in the ring. He will, and he seems prepared to do it with considerable flourish. Mines and Steel minister, Kayode Fayemi, even thinks there may be no alternative to the president both within and outside the party. Some may still hide under the convenient excuse that the president has not yet disclose his ambition; but in a matter of months, especially with the inauguration of the Buhari Support Organisation (BOS), it will be unwise for any APC member, those who depend on government patronage, and anyone with anything to hide, to speak of the president’s second term ambition in tentative tones. By the opening of next year, the president will expect everyone to know where he is heading. It is a plus for anyone now to speak effusively of his second term, and to frame it in convincing and glorious language before the mad rush for endorsement breaks upon everybody.

    Though it is virtually settled that the president will seek a second term, it will be a tragedy not to oppose him both within and outside his party. His very advanced age and his unsettled health challenges are the least of the country’s problems. Neither qualifies him to take another shot at the presidency, for even if he is as fit as a fiddle now, it will still remain a subject of speculation how far his health can hold up. And at over 75 by the next polls, it is not clear what new ideas and energies he would hope to bring to a leadership he had twice flunked with considerable ease. President Buhari needs competition in his party and very healthy and powerful opposition outside his party in order for the country to convince itself that there are indeed no alternatives. No matter the sycophantic depth the country has sunk, it is unlikely they can come to the abysmal conclusion that good alternatives do not exist. They wouldn’t dare come to such conclusions.

    Even if he is in fine fettle, the president does not appear to have the energy to do for Nigeria in these times what the country desperately desires. By his own admission, not too long after he assumed office, he mourned his lack of sprightliness and wondered what he could have done with Nigeria had he taken power when his body lacked the creakiness that has begun to hobble it. Thus defeated first in the mind, it is impossible for his body, which should submit to the former, to transcend the limitations age has encrypted into his fundamental make-up. With real and substantial opposition both in and outside his party, it should not be difficult to prove that President Buhari has become an irrefutable anachronism, both in the effervescent matters of style and in the much more fundamental and stolid matters of substance.

    First among the many questions those who are pressing President Buhari into service must ask themselves is what his second term would look like when he spent his first term dismantling the selfless coalition that brought him to power, overthrowing the political mores and standards prescribed by the constitution he swore to defend, promoting ethnic exceptionalism so flagrantly that even some of his tribesmen blanched with horror, propounding no idea germane and fundamental to statehood and governance, becoming incurably fixated on himself to the almost total exclusion of others and other values, and promoting the worst forms of division like the country has never known. If in his first term, when he would need votes for a second term, he nevertheless turned on his friends, rode roughshod over the rule of law, carried out no reform in political financing, police and the judiciary, and oppressed and stigmatised those he considered deviants, including Shiites whom his troops massacred, and offered no single exposition on the higher elements of democracy, secularism, and social engineering, what should the country expect from his second term? — that he would simply experience an epiphanic release to remake the country along the lines of the world’s leading nations and statesmen?

    If current projections bear semblance to reality, President Buhari will probably receive the unanimous approbation of his party, and probably even go on to win the election should the childish characters in the opposition lack the courage and gumption to fight him with the aplomb feisty Nigerian politicians are accustomed to. Already most of his supporters within and outside the party lend him their ears for sentimental reasons. They are impervious to other arguments. Nigerians must hope that even within the APC, the president will welcome vigorous competition, fight for every inch of territory in that chaotic and misgoverned party, and then, despite his security agencies perfecting the art of haunting the president’s enemies, go on to provide a level playing field for every contestant as envisaged by the constitution. Judging from his weaknesses and all the countless things he has left undone, he can only win his party’s ticket by the skin of his teeth. And given his party’s shambolic nature, not to say the disaffection coursing through the ranks, as exemplified by Hameed Ali, the Customs boss who has suddenly found his voice, they will be unable to provide him the powerful vehicle with which to unhorse the opposition at a national election. After all, he abandoned the party as soon as he won the election, and rejected every attempt and formula at legitimately raising funds to run the party and prepare for the next polls.

    But the far bigger tragedy for Nigeria would be President Buhari winning the 2019 election. If he enacted the atrocious form of governance that has infuriated many Nigerians in his first term, it is unlikely that the second term would suddenly assume a better and more inspiring dimension. His supporters may point at a number of his achievements, but they will be reminded that even the worst government is always capable of at least a few remarkable feats. A second term for President Buhari would not eradicate his insularity, curb his ethnic exceptionalism, promote the rule of law and reform the judiciary, rejigger the police and modernise internal security system, heal the country’s divisions, and see him enunciating, re-engineering and implementing a new social ethos in which Nigerians can see themselves as one. Worse, except he dismantles the cabal upon which he relies absolutely and without whom he would be naked and vulnerable, Nigeria would be grossly unable to provide the leadership Africa and the black people of the world badly need.

    President Buhari may very well seek a second term and even unworthily claim the prize a second time should his party inexplicably come together and work hard while the opposition disintegrates into chaos and futility. But it is hard to see him provoking the revolution that will win over this column, for this column is not for turning. A casual study of revolutions tells history students that no revolution is promoted without a central, logically consistent and invigorating ideal. Nigerians would like to examine those great and unifying ideals their president might wish to propound and propagate beyond the assemblage of eager support groups and tepid and jaded statements passed off as profundities.

  • Justice Salami’s example of character and candour

    Justice Salami’s example of character and candour

    WHen he was appointed in late September as chairman of the 15-member committee to monitor financial crime and corruption cases, Justice Ayo Salami, who was controversially ousted as President of the Appeal Court by the Goodluck Jonathan presidency, was expected to accept the job. This column hoped he would decline the appointment for a number of reasons. And thank God, he has. First, the appointment was neither the exculpation he demanded and deserved nor did it atone for the lack of courage demonstrated by his colleagues who virtually abandoned him when the dispute waxed hot. Second, and more importantly, since the corruption cases were to be tried in special courts, Justice Salami and his committee, not to say the judges expected to preside over the special courts, would be tilting at windmills as long as the problems that confront the judiciary were not fundamentally addressed.

    For the past few years, the judiciary has been poorly funded, with their allocations declining from N95bn in 2010 to N85bn in 2011, N75bn in 2012, N67bn in 2013, up a little to N73bn in 2014, dropping again to N70bn in 2016 against a budget proposal of about N143bn that year, and rising once more to N100bn in 2017. On top of this poor allocation, judges are themselves poorly paid and court buildings and equipment across most states are in disrepair. The judiciary has attempted to reform itself structurally and operationally; but it has been unable to pay its functionaries well and modernise its equipment. Consequently, the reforms have met with qualified success. Instead of the new APC government in Abuja holistically examining the factors militating against speedy dispensation of justice, it has preferred to assail judges and even intimidate them, regardless of the fact that overworked judges (one judge to 800 cases on average) are only a part of the criminal justice system chain that is yet to be reformed.

    Chief Justice Walter Onnoghen probably meant well by setting up special courts and constituting a special committee to monitor their activities. But in the face of poor allocation, low pay and crumbling infrastructure, the special courts will meet with insurmountable obstacles. Any monitoring is, therefore, bound to peter out into fatuity. Like Nigerian doctors in public hospitals, judges are overworked and underpaid. Until the problem is fundamentally tackled, the result will be incontestably poor.

    There are speculations that Justice Salami declined the appointment because he had reservations about some of the committee members with whom he was expected to work. He has not confirmed this. Instead, he has suggested that his worldview does not quite agree with the regnant philosophy of the judiciary to enable him work with a clear conscience. He was probably referring to the witch-hunt and betrayal that culminated in his principled but uncelebrated exit from the appellate court. Whatever the reasons for declining the appointment, Justice Salami has once again proved that he is a man of character with a keenly developed sense of justice in all its subliminal and metaphysical ramifications. The brilliant and fearless leadership he gave the appellate court harks back to the golden era of the judiciary in Nigeria.

    It is unlikely he is still embittered. But from now on, having signalled his unpreparedness to tolerate half measures, his colleagues will probably leave him severely alone. He won’t care, for men like him with so much chutzpah and candour have a fanatical sense of their own destinies to worry about the sentiments and rejections of friends or foes. Had there been scores like him in the upper echelons of the judiciary, they might have escaped last year’s public humiliation orchestrated by a disdainful government and its secret service.

  • Na’Abba’s theory of accidental leaders

    Na’Abba’s theory of accidental leaders

    Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Umar Na’Abba, two weekends ago reiterated what is universally acknowledged in these parts, that Nigerian presidents and heads of state assumed office unprepared for governance. Though he limited his conclusions to his observation of the period between 1999 and 2017, nothing in the country’s history contradicts the fact that since independence, no Nigerian leader had come into office prepared, not even President Muhammadu Buhari whose spokesmen solemnly insisted last week was different on account of the efforts he expended in the four times he struggled to get elected as president.

    Hon Na’Abba drew his conclusions while speaking in Abuja at the 2016/2017 Matriculation and Fellowship Endowment Ceremony of the National Institute for Legislative Studies (NILS)/University of Benin Postgraduate Programme. According to him, “It is a sad commentary on our political life that today recruitment into leadership has been subverted by a few politicians because they deny Nigerians opportunity to contest elections and achieve their aspirations through the systematic appropriation of political parties to themselves.” He goes on: “These politicians have stopped the growth of democracy. And it is true that unless democracy is allowed to grow, we cannot achieve the desired political growth, we cannot achieve the desired economic growth and we can also not achieve the desired social growth in our country. That is why we are still in political, economic and social doldrums. We have been having successive accidental leaders since 1999.”

    It is impossible for instance that ex-president Goodluck Jonathan would argue that he got into office prepared. Not only did he never expect to be governor of his home state, Bayelsa, considering how brusquely the governor to whom he was deputy, the late Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, was impeached in violation of the constitution, neither he nor anyone else ever expected that he had done enough to be later drafted as presidential running mate to the ailing and generally debilitated Umaru Yar’Adua, now deceased. Dr Jonathan took nothing into governance, brought nothing by way of substance and reflection out of it, and imported nothing extraordinary into the presidency when ex-president Yar’Adua died in office. There was no occasion where the schemer, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, who plotted the young man’s meteoric rise into prominence ever indicated that he helped Dr Jonathan along on account of his exemplary conduct, intelligence, intuition or good judgement.

    In completing President Yar’Adua’s first term, however, it was expected that Dr Jonathan would spend that one year and more bonus in office to acculturate to the presidency and seize some quality moments to reflect on the demands of high office and the histories and expectations of the peoples of Nigeria. His full term in office, which began in 2011 and was run awkwardly for the next four years, gave no indication whatsoever that his learning as a PhD holder was of any consideration. In fact every succeeding year between 2011 and 2015 saw him obscenely elevate ad hocism to dizzying heights, demonstrate none of the logical and philosophical exertions expected of someone educated to the highest tertiary level, and give no proof that even if he found himself thrust prematurely into the highest office by fate, he possessed the temper, inquisitiveness and quick-wittedness anyone who had ever truly written a dissertation and internalised its methodologies was capable of.

    The late ex-president Yar’Adua was too hobbled by poor health to lend his presidency to a fair analysis of what he was capable of. But it takes nothing away from Hon Na’Abba’s summation that even he too came into office unprepared. He had frugally run Katsina State, showed some sparks, and with genial and glacial expression nearly put the state to sleep. But that almost religiously and ethnically homogenous state is not as complex and as exacting as Nigeria with its more than 350 ethnic groups and mutually suspicious religious groups turned into major adversaries. He was a teacher of Chemistry, holding a Master’s degree in Analytical Chemistry, but there were no early indications that he would bring to bear a methodical mind on Nigeria’s seething groups and competing interests. He showed early in the day — and quite contrary to the expectations of Chief Obasanjo who foisted him on the nation — that he could call his soul his own. But beyond that, and as the laissez faire attitude he either instituted or sustained in Katsina and his lack of vibrancy and profundity, he didn’t seem at all prepared for high, complex office, nor for the expansiveness and competitiveness the Nigerian people are capable of.

    Some Nigerians are often tempted to view a few of the achievements of Chief Obasanjo, including his first time as military head of state, as proof that by and large he was prepared for office. But not only was he unprepared for office as head of state, he was even more unprepared as an elected president. No one who has carefully considered his so-called accomplishments, including his resolution of the $30bn debt crisis, can fail to be shocked by his inurement to sensible and far-sighted policies, whether as military head of state or elected president, nor by his unquestionable lack of capacity in laying a solid foundation for Nigeria’s fourth attempt at democracy. He was of course more tolerant of dissent than President Muhammadu Buhari, but he was still nevertheless generally intolerant, unsophisticated despite his massive exposure to other standards, values and civilisations, and quite unable to envision on a consistent and coherent basis a great society where justice is anchored on development, a re-engineered polity, and practice of democratic values. It was tragic in the end that he allowed self-interest and short-termism to trump the higher ideals of society.

    But might President Buhari be the sole exception to Hon Na’Abba’s theory of accidental presidents? Both Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu, the president’s spokesmen, argue that the All Progressives Congress (APC) manifesto, which in their view is being faithfully implemented, and the president’s three failed attempts at winning the presidency were strong indications that he was well prepared for office. Despite their shortcomings, Dr Jonathan, Mallam Yar’Adua, and Chief Obasanjo largely honoured their party’s manifesto and ideology. In fact, these somewhat reactionary ex-presidents even honoured their party’s conservative ideology more than President Buhari has given any indication of ideologically toeing the line of his progressive party’s position domestically and internationally.

    However, being president, as the president and his spokesmen should know, is obviously much more than simply implementing a party’s manifesto. More than two years after he assumed the presidency, it is enough time to know whether President Buhari was prepared, whether he had lofty views on democracy and the rule of law — which are clearly not incompatible with his party’s ideas and programmes — whether he had an idea of the cultures, proclivities and divisions of the peoples of Nigeria, and whether he was prepared to unify rather than divide. Nothing he has done or said so far, not even his so-called body language, nor any of his reactions to the country’s existential challenges, give any indications that he was prepared to govern a very complex society like Nigeria. Nothing, regardless of the valiant efforts of his spokesmen and their unconvincing reasoning and defence.

    Indeed, the tragedy of Nigeria is that those who prepare themselves mentally and ideologically to lead Nigeria rarely get the chance. Obafemi Awolowo is widely believed to have prepared himself, but was unable to take the plum post. In the past one decade or so, no one seemed as well prepared for the top job as Abubakar Atiku, former vice president, but the prize seems even farther away from him than ever. It was at first widely believed that President Buhari was indeed well prepared for the job, having attempted it three times. When finally he won the presidency, his months of dilly-dallying before he formed his cabinet, his disquieting view of the roles and functions of a cabinet, his even more disconcerting approach to democracy and rule of law, his cavalier treatment of those who repudiated him in 2015, and his strange indifference to the atrocities committed by herdsmen purporting to revenge attacks and soldiers claiming to impose law and order, do not sustain the proposition that he had definite, uplifting ideas of a prepared and equipped presidency.

    However, it is not certain that next year is enough time for Nigerians, who are themselves as much a part of the problem of leadership recruitment process as their failed leaders, to make amends. If they manage to do what is right next year as they prepare for the 2019 polls, it is unlikely they will agree to be dictated to, or fail to finally by one superhuman effort back only those who have definite ideas of running an inclusive government based on inspiring ideas and a firm understanding of the histories and cultures of Nigeria. Hopefully, 2019 will not turn out to be a chimera.

  • Austria, France and youth leadership myths

    Austria, France and youth leadership myths

    When on May 7 Emmanuel Macron, 39, was elected as the youngest president in France’s modern history, it was thought that it signalled a great generational shift not only in Europe but in the world. The election was even more significant considering that Mr Macron’s party, La Republique En Marche, and its ally, Democratic Movement (MoDem), took an absolute majority in the following month’s legislative poll with 350 seats out of 577. Even though the devil was in the detail in an election that was nearly not swung in Mr Macron’s favour, it was still significant that a young, fairly inexperienced man could head a nuclear-armed country, one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

    And with the election of Sebastian Kurz, 31, as Chancellor-designate in the October 20 Austrian legislative elections, where he took 62 seats in a 183-seat parliament, it appeared incontrovertible that the era of youths had opened. Mr Kurz’s Peoples Party will now likely and disquietingly form a governing coalition with the right-wing, anti-immigration Freedom Party which took 51 seats in the poll. To form a government, a party needs to have 92 seats. Both the Peoples Party and Freedom Party ran on anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism platforms, the junior coalition partner more stridently so. While Mr Macron is centrist, meaning that France has therefore gone centrist by repudiating Marine Le Pen’s right-wing, anti-immigration Front National, Mr Kurz is right wing. It is not clear, therefore, what would dispel the confusion in Europe after Britian’s Brexit, France’s repudiation of populism, and Austria’s alarming embrace of populism.

    But one indisputable fact is that many nations, including Nigeria, are beginning to see the elections of far younger politicians into leadership positions in Europe as a signal for some sort of political revolution. In an article on this page a few weeks ago, this columnist warned against barking up the wrong tree in analysing leadership from the age prism. The column had warned that such an analysis would amount to a sweeping generalisation not backed by history. Mr Macron, for instance, despite his brilliance and perspicacity, and regardless of attending the Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA), or Enarque as it is more fondly called, won only because of the conjunction of certain events including contesting against scandal-hit frontrunners, and ultimately facing the less popular and offensively right-wing and fanatical Ms Le Pen in the run-off.

    Before Nigerian youths run away with the mistaken impression that the Age of Youths had come, let them consider that both France and Austria, because of their highly developed institutions, can indeed run on autopilot. Voters are less likely to be fearful of candidate’s lack of exposure and experience in those countries as they are likely to be scared in Nigeria and many other African countries. In addition, in those other countries, voters are more educated and have mastered the art of peacefully throwing out incompetent leaders. Comparisons, say the British, are odious. Nigerian youths must therefore be guided by the strictures of their social, cultural and political environments in drawing parallels and making comparisons.

    More importantly, as the Nigerian political environment has shown, too many extraneous and even completely irrelevant considerations come into play in electing state actors. How to transcend these limitations should preoccupy the youths. For if as voters they are themselves unable to grow the right perspectives on issues germane to social cohesion and development, how can they determine which leaders have the bold visions and inspiring messages needed for their country’s transformation? Austria and France, and to some extent even the United States, can afford to be insular and isolationist in their politics; it is indefensible that Nigeria produces leaders who have no transcendental vision of the black man’s place in the world. Worse, because they are limited in exposure and scope, these leaders are unlikely to conceive deep economic, social and political paradigms for the country. The country is entrapped.

    But if the election of youths into leadership positions in Europe inspires Nigerian voters into closely scrutinising their aspiring political leaders in order to weed out those without the depth of understanding required to transform the society — those who rely almost exclusively on populist and religious- and ethnic-driven policies to capture the imagination of fanatical voters — then maybe, some good may still come out of the stories from far-flung countries. Altogether, the story for Nigeria is hardly inspiring. If the present poorly equipped actors in office decide to run again in 2019, then it will be less likely that Nigeria will not finally encounter the tragedy it has so fatefully escaped for many decades despite its worst efforts.

  • Ajimobi, Olubadan, Buhari and Southwest APC

    Ajimobi, Olubadan, Buhari and Southwest APC

    In his meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari last Tuesday, Governor Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo State served what looked like a specially brewed Ibadan chieftaincy storm in a tea cup before the inscrutable Nigerian president. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, the governor said he mentioned the chieftaincy crisis to the president and hinted at the concomitant security implications of the tug of war going on in the city. He was, however, silent on what responses he got from his passive host. He did not also tell reporters that the president asked about the matter first nor fretted over any security lapses. It was clear to reporters that intimating the president of what was afoot in Ibadan was the governor’s initiative.

    Hear him: “I mentioned the issue of security to the President. Recall that Oyo State has been in the news because of the issue of Olubadan Chieftaincy Declaration. So, I came to let him know that the Olubadan is my father. He is a younger brother to my own father and we have had a very long relationship, which has been a father-son relationship. I assured him (Buhari) that come rain, come shine, I will never depose the Olubadan because he is my father; a son does not depose his father. Though he has done so many things that can constitute the basis for his removal, I will never remove him. We have to continue to show respect. I also made him to realise that that particular chieftaincy declaration is being politicised. Politicians have hijacked it. Out of 11 council members, two of them are dead now and we have only nine left. It is only one that is not supporting it; and that one is a politician. He wants to run after I leave office.”

    Gov Ajimobi did not tell reporters why he needed to bother the president with the chieftaincy trivia he created, nor seemed to even appreciate the illogic in the justifications he gave reporters. It is even clearer that his sense of history may be a little troubling while his appreciation of the role of the Southwest in national affairs at a time of great and turbulent political events may also be off-key. If his account of the interaction he had with the president is accurate, then it is safe to conclude that the president did not ask him about the Ibadan chieftaincy matter, and, more tellingly, did not comment on it after the unsolicited briefing. If that does not tell the governor something, then he is even more imperceptive than the Nigerian judges, among them two Supreme Court justices, who published drivelling exculpatory accounts unworthy of a magistrate after their residences were raided last October by the secret service.

    Many months ago, this column had fussed that most Southwest governors were third-rate, not only in their demonstrable lack of assiduity in projects conception and implementation, but also more disconcertingly in their lack of understanding of the forces and dynamics shaping and skewing the so-called Nigerian federation. Gov Ajimobi, from his actions and reactions to the Ibadan chieftaincy issue and his depiction of same to the president, is obviously one of the gubernatorial archetypes in reference in the Southwest. The governors are less inclined to the philosophical underpinnings that shaped the governments of their predecessors, and, as their abysmal reactions to the Kogi electoral conundrum of November 2015 shows, are even less strategic in their thinking than their contemporaries, particularly from some states in the North.

    Gov Ajimobi may be close to the Olubadan throne, he has, however, not shown any understanding of the city’s proud history and heritage. First, the chieftaincy crisis was avoidable. But in addition, had he a sense of the historical significance of the role the city played in Yoruba history, despite its modern weaknesses and troubles, and notwithstanding the consequences of the Yoruba wars of the 19th century, he would have done everything to strengthen the institution rather than threaten it, not to talk of needlessly dragging the reputation of its monarch before the president in a futile show of self-importance. Has the governor asked himself how many other governors have toed his line and then proceeded to Abuja to report the monarchs of their great cities?

    But Gov Ajimobi’s lack of historical consciousness and strategic thinking is replicated in nearly all parts of the Southwest where most of the governors swoon over the president. The region is in decline, and despite the best efforts of regionalists and the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN), its competitive edge has become considerably blunted. Worse, the region is now also deeply divided. It is not a hidden fact that crisis is brewing below the surface in the ongoing and bitter struggle for the soul of the region. There are at least three contending groups battling for supremacy. Rather than synergise efforts or reinforce one another, they appear set to fight to the death to entrench their positions and enthrone their worldview. The battles will be sporadic for some time, as one phony skirmish dovetails into another, until next year when there will probably be a conflagration.

    The contest for supremacy in the Southwest will be nasty. In June the little-known Yoruba Leadership and Peace Initiative group met in Ibadan to forge a common perspective and agenda for the region. Their communiqué made sense, but there was nothing extraordinary in it. It met naturaly with cold stare. In September, the Yoruba Summit group held a much bigger and well-attended rally in the same city. Its communiqué made waves and steered the region in the direction of regionalism and restructuring. Though controversial, the summit has seemed to noteworthily capture the imaginations of the region. Then last week, signposting the divisions inherent in the region, the All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders met in Ibadan to disavow restructuring and promote devolution of power.

    Analysts contend that the Yoruba thrive despite their divisions and even in political opposition. They may be right. But no one has yet proved that this great dispositional flaw has not at bottom clearly undermined regional progress and retarded their sophistication more than they imagine. Moreover, the decisions of the APC leaders’ meeting indicate that there are two tendencies within the group that met in Ibadan on Thursday, with one section evidently and remorselessly pro-Buhari and oriented towards Abuja on the plausible ground that the party is after all in government; and the other a bit hesitant, quizzical and feeling trapped between a rock and a hard place. The APC leaders are, however, finding it increasingly difficult to justify their exuberant support for President Buhari because of his appalling prejudices, insularity, anti-democratic tendencies, evident lack of restraint, and fair-mindedness.

    In the battle against the less openly partisan Yoruba Summit, the Southwest APC leaders may be fighting the most difficult battle of their lives. They may occupy the most visible political positions in the region, but they have not proved circumspect in reading the signs of the times, placing President Buhari’s divisive and militaristic policies accurately in the right context, and aggregating the deep existential yearnings of the region. The Yoruba Summit might contain many discredited leaders, some of them lapdogs of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and zanies of the Goodluck Jonathan era, but they are increasingly wrong-footing the Southwest APC leaders, some of whom lack the wisdom and foresight to offer strategic leadership within the context of a highly polarised nation. It is indeed alarming that Gov Ajimobi could say this after Thursday’s meeting: “Besides, we should realise that we owe a lot to the President and Commander-in-Chief, Muhammadu Buhari, whose major preoccupation, since assumption of power, has been how to meet the basic needs of the ordinary citizen and make life comfortable for him.” Surely, there must be a limit to the self-abnegating politics of Southwest governors.

    There is trouble ahead for the Southwest, just as Igbo leaders’ incompetence in channelling the demands and aspirations of the restive, maligned, and angry Southeast showed a few weeks ago. It is tragic that even when they acquire the right cause, sections of the Yoruba leadership still demonstrate the requisite lack of character, courage, dispassion and judgement needed to make their people thrive in Nigeria. And when they embrace the wrong cause, it is depressing how they bad-temperedly prosecute their battles. Manifesting the characteristics of the curse of liberalism in a country where the North is still partly theocratic and feudalistic and thereby largely cohesive, and where the Southeast is culturally monolithic, aggressive, republican and sometimes schizoid, the regicides of the Southwest may finally be prepared to undo themselves, just as their values and virtues are being denuded by external influences. Their worldview does not admit of the excesses and narrow-mindedness being displayed by the president. That a significant section of their elite still finds it comfortable to embrace and support him is more a function of their foolish and indefensible internal schisms than their cracked ideological compass.

    If they are wise, the Southwest APC leaders will not insist on maintaining cohesion within their depleted and jaded ranks just because the ‘other people’, as ex-governor Bisi Akande inelegantly put it last Thursday, had taken a countervailing position on restructuring. The APC men have a responsibility to actively rediscover the character and principles that formed the leitmotif of the politics of the Yoruba during their historical ascendancy. It was not foolish to support President Buhari against Dr Jonathan in 2015, given what is now known of the economic damage superintended by the latter; but it is monstrous to rhapsodise the president’s politics despite the incontestable fact that everything he stands for and every underhand politics he plays with monarchical airs war against not only the character and worldview of the Southwest but also against the very essence, both spiritual and physical, of the Yoruba.

    If the great minds of the North are not shocked and embarrassed by the sectional politics and distorted appointments of the Buhari presidency, it must not be the duty of Yoruba leaders across quarrelsome divides to defend his divisiveness and lack of ideological conviction, not to talk of propping him up in the hope that on some fortuitous tomorrow a president whose taciturnity extends to difficulty in verbalising appreciation and whose ethnic impressions are balanced on the fulcrum of exceptionalism can somehow commit the self-immolation needed to return the favour to the Southwest after he has had his political fill. If the Southwest must grovel in a manner their history has not accustomed them to, let them at least do it before someone who exudes inspiring political and philosophical achievements.

  • Sweeping the Kachikwu-Baru imroglio under the carpet

    As this column feared when the feud between the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, and the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Maikanti Baru, broke into the open, commentators and government officials were more likely to pay an unhealthy focus on the arithmetical details of the misunderstanding than on the more valuable and overarching issue of the president’s, and by implication the presidency’s, role in the scandal. This column warned that the temptation to introduce a red herring into the controversy must be resisted. Those warnings were spurned, and as the scandal peters out into what is evidently fatuity, hardly anyone is focusing on finding out what the president knew about the angry letter and when, and why he kept sepulchrally and perhaps disdainfully silent.

    The consensus now is that peace must be given a chance, and both Dr Kachikwu and Dr Baru must embrace each other for the good of the oil sector. It was unlikely even from the beginning that the president would say anything on the matter, for that isn’t the sort of challenge to his immutable worldview that triggers his fury. Now it is all but clear that he will say nothing. Nigerians learnt that he was angry behind closed doors, had looked into the matter, and was satisfied that no money was lost and no money was taken. It matters little that Dr Kachikwu did not talk of lost money or stolen money, but of processes that had become perverted, of complicity in high places, of dereliction of duty, and of gross insubordination — all culminating in sidelining him and rendering his office profoundly sinecure.

    More importantly for this column, and perhaps for many others too, is the minister’s clear reference to the manner he was shut out of the presidency — from any interactions with the president himself who is Minister of Petroleum Resources, and the reprehensible consequence for decision-making, appointments that have become unalterably lopsided, and the Camorra-like manner in which the ministry is run. This column had feared there would be little or no reference to those grave and substantial issues. Alas, there has been none. The NNPC boss said nothing about the controversial appointments in focus, the president said nothing about the supposed approvals for contracts whose names and details are woven in semantic fog, and little is being said about why Dr Kachikwu’s letter appeared lost in transit until someone had the presence of mind to whisper that though it was wrongly routed, the president still saw it and referred it for investigation, apparently interminably.

    The country is unlikely to hear much from the presidency henceforth about the letter and the furore it raised in the NNPC. A few chatter here and there, and now and again; but otherwise, nothing of substance until they figure out a way to rid themselves of the Kachikwu nuisance. The senate is investigating the matter. Here, too, there will be a lot of noise, some threat of fire and brimstone, and huge hoopla in the media, particularly in the feral social media whose steady diet is conspiracy theory. But otherwise, the public should expect a gradual but remorseless attenuation of the matter in a manner that enlivens the denizens of Aso Villa, all of whom are accomplished masterminds of palace intrigues and political shenanigans.

    This column will venture one more guess. The almost total manner the Buhari presidency has bewitched many Nigerians will preclude analysts from asking the right and grave questions about how the presidency is run and to what ultimate purpose. So far, to this column, there is nothing in the manner it is run, as the Kachikwu letter shows very clearly, that indicates altruism or patriotism. The disdain for the NNPC Act and the corporation’s handbook, the various controversial appointments, including surreally the NNPC Board itself, and the waspish filtering of naysayers from the corporation, all presage a very troubling time for Nigeria and for a commodity that should in the first instance be the exclusive preserve of the people of the oil rivers.