The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • PDP buoyed by APC’s shortcomings

    PDP buoyed by APC’s shortcomings

    BOTH the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are fortunate to have and reinforce each other’s failings. Even though one defeated the other in 2015 to win the presidency, thereby presupposing the possession of superior partisan and management skills by the victor, neither of them has so far been able to outpace or outthink the other. The APC, despite facing a weakened and demoralised opposition, is paralysed by its own contradictions and schisms; and the PDP, never once inspiring even in its heyday, is in total disarray. Yet, the PDP is truly a lucky party for a reason. By its sheer incompetence and profligate wastage of the goodwill that swept it into office in 2015, the APC has given the opposition party a very long rope of indeterminate length, not to hang itself, but to gratify its penchant for acrimony, conflict and confusion.

    Having ruled like a potentate for all of 16 years virtually unchallenged, and having satisfied every political and financial craving possible, it is understandable why the PDP has been unable to manage the sever electoral loss it suffered some two years ago. Just as the APC is discovering, the PDP was really never a political party, despite its boastful size. Once it suffered defeat of the magnitude that confronted and shamed it two years ago, it simply wilted. It wilted in mind, it wilted in body, and it wilted in confidence. There was no part of the party that remained standing, no party received any nurture, any oxygen. It became hopelessly barren and sterile. Two years of confusion and acrimony, not to say many months of desperate peace moves and insincere and futile placations, have only brought the party closer to complete disintegration.

    Last Thursday’s clearly concrete attempt by former president Goodluck Jonathan was touted as probably the most practical effort to reconcile party leaders and pave way for some sort of tentative resolution pending a convention. All the bigwigs were there. Dr Jonathan, as seemed sensible, presided over the meeting. He was accoutred, as everyone knows, with his distinct self-effacing, if sometimes tremulous, geniality. He had never been a brute, and despite his sometimes bucolic simplicity, has moved farther away from the irritating coarseness that dog the politics of many of his contemporaries and even competitors. If anyone should be able to weld together the squabbling leaders of the party, surely, Dr Jonathan had to be that person.

    Former Kaduna State governor, Ahmed Makarfi, was also there, taciturn, mercurial but unflinching and resolutely disputatious and unrelenting. The slightly built and dark-skinned former governor and senator speaks better and unhurried English than his beefy and gregarious lone opponent for the party’s leadership, but he is paradoxically not as eloquent. No one ever opposed a cause as fiercely as he does, but no one ever brought into that cause a silence so magnificent and dulcet as a lamb’s bleating and a dove’s agreeable coo. It was impossible for the former Borno State governor and senator, Ali Modu Sheriff, not to be at the meeting. He came late, having arrived, as he said, from a foreign trip. But he was there in his rambunctious best, a man who matches his gregariousness with a ferocious rage and an eternal unwillingness to back down from, or shirk, a fight. Disallowed from speaking after Dr Jonathan made his opening remarks, and arguing that as the chairman of the party he had pre-eminence, he called their bluff and staged a walkout. He did not disappoint, for he had a reputation as a quintessential political pugilist.

    The peace efforts will of course continue, perhaps a little slower than party leaders hoped, until the Supreme Court delivers the final judgement. Party leaders say they prefer a political rather than juridical solution. There is no basis for that preference. If the Supreme Court should rule in favour of the Senator Makarfi-led faction, which already has the majority of members and leaders, Senator Sheriff’s supporters will fall in line with the main trunk, maybe grudgingly, even insultingly, but fall in line they will. But if the Supreme Court were to rule in favour of Senator Sheriff, the other faction would almost certainly not fall in line, and would probably break away to form a new coalition. Their opposition to Senator Sheriff has in fact almost become a religious and doctrinal dualism in which good must happily and messianically fight evil and the two become irreconcilable and immiscible. Party leaders seem apprised of this dangerous scenario and want to avert apocalypse as much as possible. They can’t. Apocalypse will come, for there is apparently no reconciling Senators Sheriff and Makarfi, notwithstanding the best efforts of party leaders like Dr Jonathan.

    While APC leaders live in denial, subconsciously holding up the abstraction of President Muhammadu Buhari’s goodwill as a tradable commodity in the next elections, PDP leaders enthusiastically believe that once a reconciliation is achieved in their party, they will be poised to beat the ruling party. The APC is doubtless vulnerable, indeed very vulnerable, and party leaders may entertain the hope that by the end of this year or the beginning of next year, they should be able to remedy the self-inflicted damage done to their party’s ideological base and structural cohesion. But the PDP now understands that unity in the APC is a chimera, and that the party is rudderless and resting on an ideological vacuum. They understand that the forces and coalition that helped the ruling party win the last general elections now exist and operate in perfect dissonance with one another, with the president himself perching gingerly at the top of the party, above the din, and unconcerned and nonplussed.

    In some ways, geopolitical permutations give the PDP a fighting chance in the coming polls, and they are fortunate that the APC is so frazzled by conflict and dissension to be able to deliver the needed death blow to the opposition. Indeed, if the PDP is still visible today, it is simply because the APC is enamoured of incompetence and suicidal inclination. To win, as this column has repeatedly argued, the PDP must come to terms with the damage it inflicted on the country during its 16 years in office. Unfortunately, the PDP has both abjured penance and disdained absolution. On a daily basis, evidence of the mindboggling thievery the party practiced over 16 years is still being uncovered. That thievery, incompetent management of national resources and poor planning are still being blamed for the country’s economic woes and the alienation a vast majority of the population now endure gloomily.

    Surely, if the PDP is to get any hearing at all from the electorate, it will have to do more than offer penance, reconcile its warring factions, and prepare to take advantage of the hopeless and multipronged battles going on within the ruling party. Reconciliation may be the most urgent task in the PDP at the moment, but purging its ranks of those who mismanaged and destroyed the economy is even more pressing. How they hope to accomplish these desirables when it is precisely the same wrecking crew of gentlemen that still controls the party is hard to tell. If they push new faces forward to help manage the affairs of their party more coherently than the APC manages its own, if they can overcome the improbability of cobbling together a party platform that makes ideological and moral sense, and if they can organise primaries that produce brave new candidates and ambitious future leaders, perhaps they will stand a chance. To do these great tasks, however, they will have to engender a new momentum and party structure that transcend the deleterious machinations and influences of politicians like Ayo Fayose, the Ekiti State governor, and Nyesome Wike, the Rivers State governor.

    Not too long from now, the PDP will know whether it can survive as a party or not, and whether victory in court will not be pyrrhic after all. Dr Jonathan will continue his peace efforts, and if luck is on his side, achieve reconciliation. But there is no one in the PDP capable of imbuing the party with the ideology, sense of direction, and renewal needed to reposition the party and turn it into a winning machine. They have about a year to fool around, quite fortunate that their mediocre management of defeat and consequent fallout within the party is not as galling and catastrophic as the APC’s bewildering management of electoral success. The PDP may have about a year to do the unimaginable and reconcile, and purge its ranks and reposition the party; but for the APC, given the infighting in the party and the hijack of its victories by alien forces both inimical to and resentful of the party’s philosophy and structure, and given the unspeakable aloofness and lugubriousness of its leaders, it is hard to see them coming together in two to three years to fight as one man, let alone in the one year in which victory or defeat in the next general elections will be forged.

  • Beyond Justice Ademola’s legal victory

    Beyond Justice Ademola’s legal victory

    DESPITE the hope the Muhammadu Buhari presidency gives of a successful anti-corruption crusade, nothing indicates that when trained historians write the history of this period, the president will receive kind treatment. The presidency does not work seamlessly at the moment, and possibly cannot in the near future. Whether President Buhari’s supporters like it or not, many of his crusades may yet peter out. The latest symptom of this dysfunction is the exculpation of Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court, Abuja. He had been charged with corruptly enriching himself, and prosecuted by the Attorney General of the Federation’s office following the ‘sting operation’ carried out by the Department of State Service (DSS) last October. The government says it will appeal the judgement. This column has no intention of commenting on the judgement, whether it has merit or lacks merit.

    What is more relevant is the aftermath. When the DSS raided the residences of seven judges, among which was Justice Ademola’s, last year, and celebrated the feat, thus triggering a media trial, a few judicial officers warned that the public would be disappointed when the judges are discharged one after the other because of the ineptitude of the investigations. This outcome, they said, would be because the DSS did not observe all the care necessary to get a conviction. The DSS seemed satisfied to get a media trial. Even the EFCC managed to let the public know that it was appalled by the manner the DSS carried out the raids, warning that the Service was neither trained for that kind of job nor careful enough to secure evidence in such a way as to get a conviction. Responding, the DSS sneered at the EFCC, wondering whether any other agency other than the secretive DSS could have carried out a ‘sting operation’ it described as highly successful.

    It is indeed remarkable that the government could not get a conviction in any of the 18 counts for which Justice Ademola was charged. It is significant; and the Attorney General’s office should have known whether the government stood a chance or not before heading to court. No one is sure the government will fare any better in the Appeal Court, regardless of what Nigerians excited by the news of the raids last year feel.

    A second observation involves the former National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd.), who has been arraigned in court again before Justice Ahmed Mohammed of the Federal High Court in Abuja for virtually the same offences as the ones for which he was being tried earlier. Justice Mohammed has affirmed the bail earlier granted the former NSA. Indeed, three Nigerian courts and ECOWAS Court had since 2015 admitted the ex-NSA to bail. The Buhari presidency simply ignored the courts, preferring instead to swamp the media with stories of corruption involving the retired colonel. Nigerians have duly obliged the presidency by condemning the accused and asking for his head, limbs and torso.

    In both the Justice Ademola case and the former NSA trial, the Buhari presidency has not shown cohesion and the methodicalness associated with positive change. This is the danger, not whether both men are suspected to be guilty of the charges filed against them. The presidency has no concrete and substantial idea of what to do with the constitution and the laws of the land. It has little control over assertive and self-willed agencies of government, many of which are headed by powerful individuals who show contempt for the constitution. Many powerful individuals in the Buhari presidency are in fact working at cross-purposes, sometimes even undermining one another, as the EFCC and DSS have shown time and again.

    Nearly two years after President Buhari was sworn in, there is nothing to indicate the presidency will become harmonious and cohesive in its operations. With a slow, if not paralysed, presidential core, and agencies busy setting their own different programmes and goals, there will be more disobedience of court orders, more reverses in cases being prosecuted by the government, less economic pace and progress, and absolute lack of preparedness for a great and glorious future for a united country.

  • 2019: The next president

    2019: The next president

    EVEN before President Muhammadu Buhari is through with his first term, and before he finds his footing or regains his composure in the middle of a debilitating illness, some politicians, opinion moulders and ethnic sycophants have suggested that he should run for a second term and they would back him. Few politicians inside and outside the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) have summoned the courage and boldness to indicate their readiness to contest against him for the leadership of Nigeria. Their reluctance is not based on the president’s performance, which even some of his most ardent supporters have agreed is not stellar, nor is it based on their low self-esteem as politicians, mobilisers and thinkers, nor whether he can be beaten in the race or not, especially given his mounting vulnerabilities. They simply don’t want to draw his ire.
    There are of course the hardy perennials like former Vice President Atiku Abubakar who would run for the presidency even if Aso Villa were locked in iron cage and the whole country declared with one voice that a vacancy did not exist. And there are the ambitious former Governor of Kano State, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, and the theatrical but eloquent Imo State governor, Rochas Okorocha, who both cast wary eyes on the presidency, obsessed with their desire to lead the country some day. There are many more like Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, Emir of Kano Lamido Sanusi Lamido, and former Jigawa State governor, Sule Lamido, fidgeting on the sidelines, standing on needle pricks, an emptiness gnawing at their inside in their eagerness to throw their hats in the presidential ring.
    But on the whole, not many politicians will openly and recklessly announce their interest in the presidency for reasons ranging from Nigeria’s stifling political culture and ethnic struggles to a curious understanding of the zoning arrangement existing within and across ethnic and political lines. Indeed, for some politicians, except victory can be assured and they are promised there would be no recriminations for their hastiness, they would nurse their ambitions privately and brood over their chances in their closets. In the coming months, therefore — and no one is sure just how many months those coming months are — President Buhari can rest assured no topnotcher in his party would do anything rash. But that is only until the dam bursts. For he will inevitably have opposition within his party, and many top class politicians will finally dare his rage to throw their hats in the ring. The reasons for such brashness are not far-fetched.
    President Buhari was the man needed to confront the Boko Haram menace with some vigour and purposefulness. He was also the ascetic needed to curb the mad disrespect contractors and politicians had for the country’s treasury. And he was the man needed to give some oomph to an economy that had been laid waste by his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. He has had qualified success in the three objectives, but it was not because he attacked them with anything properly describable as a scientific or philosophical approach. The ‘national diseases’ were in any case already nearing the end of their tethers, like all pathogens in an epidemic, given the shameless and avaricious manner they attacked the country’s dignity. Anyone with modest skills and resolve could have had a fair chance against the ‘diseases’. President Buhari was that man, and the country must respect him for the role he has played.
    Even if his illness had not hobbled him — and he will get increasingly languid in the months ahead principally on account of his age — his idea of leadership, economics, justice, religion and politics, among other things, has become so antiquated that it is not possible for him to prepare a nation of one million people for the 21st or 22nd century, not to talk of a complex, competing and distrustful nation of 180 million people. If zoning and grassroots support prove incapable of restricting him to a one-term presidency, his lack of vigour and the weakness and premature expiration of his ideas appear set to limit his 2019 ambitions. His supporters and those who see him as a steadying pair of hands in the affairs of Nigeria would want him for a second term, but he will be unable to campaign round one geopolitical zone, let alone round the whole country. Despite his supporters’ best sentiments, the reality is brutally and mercilessly circumscribing.
    By next year, President Buhari will be forced to determine whether he wants to brave the odds or not. He will procrastinate as much as he can, but eventually he will have to grapple with the unsavoury decision of going ahead to contest for a second term despite the strain on him, or calling it quits. He will probably want to anoint a successor, as most of his predecessors had done to the country’s dismay and injury. But more and more, given the damage the constricting nature of his presidency has engendered, even that luxury of anointing someone may elude him. Indeed, if he does not now seize the initiative to make amends for the unfairness and parochialism his government has instituted, if he does not immediately begin to assemble a pan-Nigerian and technocratic group whose ideas and world view transcend the country’s ethnic and religious divides, circumstances and agile politicians may seize the initiative from him. The succession war would as a result be brutal, intense and fratricidal, if not in the final analysis even regicidal.
    Nature designed the Buhari presidency for a one-term reign. In fact since 1999, in order for the country to regain its balance and bearing, nature had designed every presidency thus far as a one-term presidency. Ex-president Olusegun forced the hands of nature and abused its providential gift by seeking a second term. The consequences are still evident. Former president Umaru Yar’Adua was a decent man by every yardstick, but he was no match for the complexities and rigour the modern era demanded. He would also have forced nature’s hands had nature itself not anticipated and thwarted him. Dr Jonathan’s presidency gave the country assurance that political calculations and nature itself offer guarantees and universal access to the presidency. Beyond that, the Jonathan presidency was of little use. There is nothing in the Buhari presidency to indicate its tenure can be lengthened. And just in case anyone, whether cabal or not, should think otherwise, nature itself has fortuitously introduced its own irrepressible guarantees through the president’s age and physiological challenges.
    Since 1999, there has not been one presidency that gave hope of a presidential lodge filled with thinkers and nationalists. Chief Obasanjo was self-important and narcissistic; Mallam Yar’Adua was impressionable and lethargic; Dr Jonathan was hesitant and provincial; and now President Buhari is unmistakeably distracted and insular. The consequences were terrifyingly real: the instability and effete foundation that distorted and convulsed the parliament under Chief Obasanjo; the dithering, machinations and cabalistic tendencies that undermined the presidency under Mallam Yar’Adua; the sybaritic and directionless leadership that stupefied Dr Jonathan’s presidency and political party; and the slow, parochial and embarrassingly lopsided appointments that have virtually negated President Buhari’s otherwise fine attributes and interventionist presidency.
    It is too early to determine who will or should contest for the presidency in 2019. Indeed, it is even unnecessary to entertain such speculations. What is more important is to determine who the next president will be and what he must do to restore the country to the path of sanity, stability, growth and inclusiveness. The next president will of course have to campaign vigorously round the country, not once, not twice. He must be full of vigour and brimful with ideas. He must be exposed, well travelled and educated. If he wants to be deeply religious, whether Christian or Muslim, the electorate should compel him to opt for clerical duties and leave the presidency for someone with enough joie de vivre, someone whose love of life and the arts instantly transforms him into a philosopher of sorts, someone not averse to modernity, connoisseurship and their trappings of delicate soirees and occasional but subtly managed glances at one or more décolletage. No, of course, Chief Obasanjo’s presidency was gross and undisciplined, Dr Jonathan’s presidency was coarse and bohemian, and Malam Yar’Adua’s and Buhari’s presidencies were boring, pretentious and artificial.
    More importantly, 2019 should produce a president who has something concrete to give, something deep, profound and fundamental, something the rest of the country can learn from and recount to future generations. Nobody in the mould of Nigeria’s presidents since 1999 fits that bill. The next president must be able to inspire the entirely ludicrous National Assembly whose buffooneries appear to get worse as the theatrical Bukola Saraki and his zany, Dino Melaye, target the country’s midriff rather than its cortex. The next president must really and evidently have an original, discernible and scientific idea of how Nigeria should be restructured and ruled. If that aspiring president has not read Deng Xiaoping, Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Shigeru Yoshida, Charles de Gaulle, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nelson Mandela, Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan, Gamel Abdel Nasser, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and Julius and Augustus Caesar, he has no business offering himself for the presidency of Nigeria.
    In addition, it would be shocking and distressing if that aspirant is unable to prove he has repeatedly immersed himself in the histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism in Africa, Oyo/Benin/Kanem-Bornu Empires, Sokoto Caliphate, the many Kingdoms in the central and southern parts of Nigeria, and the biographies of first generation Nigerian leaders like Nnamdi Azikwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, among others. If the aspirant has not read all the books mentioned above, what on earth would he know about leadership, where Nigeria got it wrong, and where the country should be headed? How could he form the right perspectives nationally and internationally? Indeed, what would he know about the role and importance of the legislature and judiciary beyond the reprehensible circus being enacted by lawmakers in Abuja and the states?
    Chief Obasanjo was not prepared for civil leadership; nor were his successors, Mallam Yar’Adua, Dr Jonathan, and President Buhari. They undoubtedly made modest contributions to Nigeria, but they gave nothing visionary, substantial or futuristic. The next president must be put to the test to determine what he knows, what his thoughts are, how his mind works, what the country must do, and where it should go. For about 18 years, the country adopted the zoning nonsense and ethnic and religious considerations to elect their presidents. It is time to put a halt to a method that is ruining the country and destroying the future of its peoples. Those nonsensical considerations have even reached such an offensive point that some people now insist President Buhari must complete eight years in office or the region he hails from must complete the remaining four years should he decline to run again.
    Despite the best efforts of past leaders, most of whom were not even fit to rule local governments, Nigeria has become more disunited. Repeated ethnic clashes and religious conflicts offer proof. Rather than bury their heads in the sand, Nigerians should bravely and intelligently confront the maladies that afflict their awkward and ungainly federation. One of such maladies is electing thoughtless leaders simply because of their tribes or religions, and installing unserious and comical lawmakers in parliament because of what they stand for in their valueless communities. In 2019, the country must unite to put an end to the madness. Nigeria needs a great legislature and a thinking and just president. No one should commit the mistake of campaigning for the destruction of the legislature, judiciary or executive. Instead, the right people who would ennoble these institutions should be voted into office.
    In 2014, this columnist wrote effusively, perhaps more than most people, to support the candidacy of President Buhari. He won, and he has done a few commendable things. In 2019, this column will not in any circumstance lend support to President Buhari should he choose to run. It is out of the question, regardless of whether he runs and wins or not. It is time to seek out a great, deep and thoughtful nationalist; someone not encumbered by tribe, religion or class; someone who knows what to do with the arts, sciences and education as a whole; someone who understands where the country feels the pain and what balm to apply; someone who understands how to repair the damage done to the legislature and the judiciary; someone who thinks high and lofty. Anything other than pursuing this noble enterprise is treason against the country.

  • APC needs to discover democracy

    APC needs to discover democracy

    IN their continuing but increasingly difficult battle to compel members of the executive arm to answer legislative summons, the senate has warned of an insidious threat to democracy. Few take the warnings seriously. The most visible and recent defiance of the senate was in fact enacted last week by both the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir David Lawal, and the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS), Col Hameed Ali (retd.). Last week’s show of defiance was not the first time members of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration would treat the National Assembly contemptuously. It is unlikely to be the last. Mr Lawal was summoned in respect of the management style of the Presidential Initiative on the Northeast, while Mr Ali was expected to appear in uniform to answer questions relating to a new harebrained order on retroactive duties vehicle owners were expected to pay.

    The senate is right to observe that there is a threat to democracy, and that that threat is coming from the executive. But there is not just one threat to democracy, nor that the executive solely personifies that threat. By their indolence and sometimes criminal collusion, state legislative assemblies also constitute a threat to democracy. And by their excesses, incompetence, and corruption, the National Assembly also shares part of the blame for democracy’s insane wobble in Nigeria. In fact, for 16 unbroken and dizzying years, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) engendered a malformed democracy and proceeded to brazenly maltreat it.

    The PDP’s inability to build a great democracy for Nigeria, despite their long years in office, was not the main reason they lost the 2015 presidential election. Without the menace of Boko Haram that blighted the Northeast, pervasive corruption that turned the economy inside out, and the impotence and paralysis shown by the Goodluck Jonathan government after over 200 Chibok schoolgirls were abducted from their school in Borno State in 2014, the PDP would probably have retained the presidency. What the PDP did or didn’t do with democracy was the least of the concerns of the electorate in 2015. With the Chibok schoolgirls affair now stalemated, and the economy only now managing to show some signs of life, and Boko Haram largely contained, the country is likely to turn its attention to other more esoteric and idealistic matters in 2019. But it is precisely those other matters that the APC has been unable to comprehend, let alone conceptualise or act upon.

    The PDP might have failed in 16 years to conceptualise democracy, and in fact spent the better part of its unmerited years in office subverting its principles, but in less than two maddening years of hubris and indifference, the APC has shown spectacular dimwittedness towards democracy and has done its damnedest to scuttle it. If the new ruling party is not to face a day of reckoning in 2019, it must engraft into its sterile and stubborn DNA a love for and understanding of democracy. Should they be able to do it, it would help them come to terms with the appalling and alienating sectionalism they have enthroned, and give them the impetus to envision a rich blend of democracy from which Africa can draw inspiration.

    Sadly for the APC, the party appears to be divided into four main blocks, and may thus find it difficult to achieve its purpose in government. To strive to the noble ideals necessary for them to retain power beyond 2019, they must reconcile the four blocks, harness their strengths, and turn them into a winning team of visionaries and empire builders. The first block is made up of the president and his inner circle, an amalgam of a hobbled leader tenuously holding together a group of aides pejoratively labelled as political and power hijackers, a block whose ideas of governance are at variance with modernity and reality, and whose philosophies bear no resemblance to anything edifying. Rather than encircle and isolate the other three blocks, given the enormous power at their disposal, the president’s block appears to have been confined into a narrow, schizoid group of scheming and angry provincialists.

    The second block comprises national lawmakers just discovering identities, strengths, ideas, and potentials. Many of them were birthed in and by the PDP, and saw democracy merely as a convenient vehicle to appropriate power and wealth. In the APC, they have struggled to mould themselves into persons and forces that war against their primordial natural selves. By chance, they are discovering that the democratic vacuum created by the APC has offered them the opportunity to write their mission and vision into the void, no matter how ephemeral. They are, to their own surprise and unease, metamorphosing into unaccustomed and unconvincing champions of democracy and the rule of law. The third block is made up of the party itself and those like Odigie Oyegun who run it on a day-to-day basis. They are not controlled by the presidency, which has no idea what to do with the party and the officials, nor by lawmakers who are locked in combat with the courts, the party, the society and the executive. In fact, the APC is the closest thing to an abstraction.

    The fourth block is made up of the frustrated idealists in the party, men and women who see the party in the mould of a mass movement comparable to any in the developed world, people who see the party as an organisation dedicated to championing true democracy, the rule of law, and the rights of the people, a party inspired by the true ethics of fundamental change to cobble together an economic miracle that would attract the envy of Asia, China and the West. Apparently these idealists spent too much time dreaming and envisioning things to pay attention to the frothing rudimentary foundations upon which to grow the political and civic culture of their illustrious imaginations.

    It will take a miracle for the Buhari presidency to weld these disparate and often warring groups together and turn them into a powerful force unleashed into the future. For, at the moment, neither the president nor anyone in his inner circle possesses the quality, vision and understanding to find the formula to manage and reconcile the party’s disparate groups. Until that is done, for this is fundamental to the change they mouth so glibly, the APC will be unable to see democracy as the fulcrum upon which to balance the new society of its dreams. Without this vision of democracy, they will be unable to appreciate the concept of federalism, not to talk of building a country that transcends ethnic and religious divides. Far worse, they will also be unable to appreciate the deeper significance of nurturing a great and independent judiciary where court judgements are sacrosanct, a brilliant and self-confident legislature whose powers, resolutions and laws become integrated into the Grundnorm, and an executive and presidency whose aides and ministers are true nationalists incapable of being swayed by ethnic exceptionalism, religious bigotry, and political intolerance.

    As they are currently constituted, the APC’s building blocks are at war with themselves. The presidency is seething with intrigues and plots, its innards poised to rupture; the National Assembly is under pressure, its leaders facing judicial and political battles that leave them little room to think grandly and nobly; and the party leaders, whether loyal or disaffected, are consumed by mistrust and regret so much so that the inspiring and invigorating ideas that should propel the party into greatness and a place in history have been spurned or buried. But if they have not written themselves off as many have done, including this column, the starting point for them is to develop a great and uplifting idea of democracy. It is not clear which among its four blocks is capable of triggering this revolution; but except they do it, there is no future for them, as the vainglorious PDP found out about two years ago after trying for sixteen years to build something on nothing, and mistaking the building for the scaffold.

    A party that does not have a political or governing philosophy cannot be expected to produce a national philosophy; and without a national philosophy, no country can aspire to greatness. Something can never be built on nothing. If the current woes of the PDP do not demonstrate this fact vividly, then compare Vladimir Putin’s more purposeful Russia with Donald Trump’s regressive and ambivalent United States. Also examine Mao Zedong’s imperial and Deng Xiaoping’s reformist China, Kim Il-sung’s grandiloquent North Korea, and the forceful and captivating concepts of Pax Romana, Pax Brittanica, and Pax Americana. Nigeria since its 1960 birth has not shown purpose. Under the directionless PDP, it could not. And under the distracted and dreamy APC, it has become even more hesitant and confused. Yet until the ruling party discovers the beauty of democracy and the loftiness of a governing philosophy, its efforts will end in futility.

  • Futile scapegoating of Amnesty International

    Futile scapegoating of Amnesty International

    ABUJA, the federal capital, swarms with all sorts of idle nongovernmental organisations and self-appointed civil society groups, many of them mendicant and available for hire, and others almost wholly dependent on one ill-motivated sponsor or the other. Of all the causes deserving of attention in Nigeria, it is shocking that any group would preoccupy itself with the objective of driving Amnesty International (AI), a global human rights watchdog, away from Nigeria on the excuse that it maligns the reputation of Nigerian law enforcement and security organisations. That is precisely what the group, Global Peace and Rescue Initiative (GOPRI), did last week when it invaded the premises of Amnesty in Abuja and gave its workers 24 hours to quit Nigeria.

    GOPRI’s Executive Director, Melvin Ejeh, explains its unctuous mission this way: “If in the next 24 hours, AI does not shut down its operations in Nigeria and leave the country, the organisation as well as other Nigerians would begin a five-day #Occupy Amnesty International# protest…Let us warn at this point that there will be no interval of respite if AI fails to leave Nigeria at the end of the five days as we will activate other more profound options to make the organisation leave Nigeria. We therefore use this opportunity to call on Nigerians to join the movement to get this evil out of our land before it plunges us into real war.” There is no significant record of GOPRI’s involvement in worthy causes, let alone the vital and indispensable cause of supporting and promoting democracy. Yet it hopes to attract the attention and support of Nigerians in laying siege to Amnesty offices in Abuja. No one will lend his capital to that asinine undertaking.

    Amnesty International often takes the government of Nigeria to task on its poor human rights record, either as perpetrated by the police in regular law enforcement activities or by the military in their battle against insurgency in the Northeast. With facts and figures, and in reports after reports corroborated by Nigerians, many of them victims of torture and extrajudicial measures, Amnesty has consistently exposed the serial malfeasances of the security agencies. Instinctively, however, the security agencies always deny the reports, condemn the activities of Amnesty, and denounce their research methods. But in all the jousting between the two opposing groups, Amnesty has always been the more convincing.

    Neither GOPRI nor any of Amnesty’s detractors, nor even the belaboured security agencies, have successfully refuted Amnesty’s findings. They may accuse it of being maliciously motivated, or of being sweeping in their conclusions, but no one has substantially found Amnesty guilty of fabrication or exaggeration. The International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law has condemned GOPRI’s invasion of Amnesty’s Abuja office, and perhaps many more Nigerians will be deeply distressed by the invasion, but such attacks will continue as long as the government is insincere in promoting democracy and entrenching democratic principles. The police, for instance, seemed to connive at the GOPRI protest, and there are indications that security agencies had in the past colluded with nondescript civil society groups to wage media war against Amnesty.

    Nigeria is not the only country to receive the critical attention of Amnesty. Some developed countries had at various times come under the human rights group’s censorious gaze. Rather than fritter away energy attempting to repudiate Amnesty’s findings, especially when their reports are substantiated by victimised Nigerians, Nigerian governments should more appropriately develop a framework for promoting and defending democratic principles and the rule of law. It is hard to see Nigeria successfully faulting Amnesty in anything when security agents openly brutalise citizens, extra-judicially murder or torture suspects, brazenly defy court judgements, and routinely abridge the people’s rights. The embarrassing conclusion is that the Nigerian government has no understanding of citizenship, not to talk of democracy, rule of law, and modern law enforcement practices.

    The government has been unable to recognise these virtues and values. Until it overcomes that failing, a failing that is even more noticeable in the so-called change government led by the All Progressives Congress (APC), party leaders will be tilting at windmills to think by forcing Amnesty out of Nigeria, the country’s abysmally poor human rights records can be improved or erased from public glare. There will always be many misguided groups like GOPRI dedicated to maligning Amnesty and other pro-democracy and pro-human rights groups; Nigerians should resist them, and the government will do itself a world of good by not entertaining the illusion that the answer to its failings is to collude with or connive at unprincipled organisations whose objectives are anything but patriotic or noble.

  • Magu twice unlucky

    Magu twice unlucky

    THE Senate’s choreographed rejection of Ibrahim Magu, boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), last week is both a pointer to the disharmony and infighting in the Muhammadu Buhari presidency and a reflection of the president’s awkward administrative style. The rejection was expected, the second in three months. Weeks before Mr Magu presented himself before the Senate a second time, it was widely rumoured that there was no way he would be confirmed. It had little to do with the Department of State Service (DSS) report that accused him of gross wrongdoing, a report seemingly defanged by the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, who probed the matter. The DSS report worked from the answer to the question. The rejection also had little to do with Mr Magu’s competence and style. His style was no less aggressive than that of one of his predecessors, Nuhu Ribadu. In competence, he was in fact a relief to most Nigerians who feared that the anti-graft body had been inoculated against efficiency.
    Mr Magu is not the most eloquent of men, and his personal style, a little idiosyncratic, and a little affected, grated very badly on the nerves of polished people. He tended to be too abrasive and excited, and he seemed to sneer and even sometimes growl at the rule of law. But he has since refined his act, brought his boundless enthusiasm to bear on a national malady that probably needed even more than he was accused of bringing to the job, and cultivated an excusable air of a law enforcement czar that at once elicited awe and provoked resentment. Even those who rejected him a second time last week knew he was the right man for the job. They knew they were putting down a public officer who seemed to have prepared for this job all his life. They knew it would be difficult to find someone imbued with his kind of commitment, if not honesty. But the conspirators had too much to lose to care.
    It is true that the conspiracy to shoot down Mr Magu’s confirmation transcended the Senate and reached far into the recesses of Aso Villa, drawing on every aggrieved journeyman with an axe to grind or a loot to cover. It is true, too, that had the DSS not stood pat on its original report damning Mr Magu and dismissing him as a liability to the government and its anti-corruption campaign, the senate would have found it immeasurably difficult to unhorse him. But it is also true that the confusion and contradictions in the presidency, not to say the president’s awkwardness and indecision, provided the fertile ground for Mr Magu’s rejection. However, that confusion and awkwardness are not just a product of administrative incompetence or of the natural and inherent vacillations to which Aso Villa is apparently besotted; they are more fittingly a reflection of the Buhari presidency’s lack of philosophical and ideological underpinnings.
    Yes, the president is regarded as honest, practical and as hard working as his troublesome health would permit. And there is no doubt that the abundant goodwill that propelled him into high office has not been dissipated by both his goofs and gaffes, and by his excesses and constant defiance of the law and constitution. For a deeply traditional society sometimes burdened by sham religiosity, it is also curious that his celebrated tiff with his wife has not seemed to diminish his attraction to the ordinary Nigerian. Yet, these attributes, as helpful as they are to the president as a person and to his presidency which is already fraying at the edges, do not countervail the worrisome fact that the Buhari presidency is enervated by the soullessness and brittleness of its own core.
    Ordinarily the DSS should exhibit independent judgement and conduct its operations without partisan flavour. But in Nigeria, it has not been so; and in the case of the DSS report on Mr Magu, it was not any independence of judgement that inspired the damning report seized upon by the senate to do the acting EFCC chairman in. Not only did the DSS produce a first report against Mr Magu shortly before he was to appear for confirmation as President Buhari’s nominee, a report in which analysts picked gaping holes, the agency, on request, again produced a second report that reiterated and reinforced the first. It is not clear where they got the courage to undermine the president’s resolve, assuming the president was as resolved on the matter as Nigerians think. And if the president knew better than to fight the senate over Mr Magu, especially given the rising profile of the senate president and the understanding he and the senate would be expected to show for an ailing president, why nominate the anti-graft boss a second time and risk another humiliation?
    This column suggested in December that in a contest between the DSS and Mr Magu, and notwithstanding who had the sympathy of Nigerians, the DSS would always triumph. It has to do with the nature of their work and the fact that the secret service stood better chance of having the ear of the president. The EFCC’s brief does not go beyond financial crimes, a narrow though important part of national life. The DSS on the other hand has a wider, national and gravely important responsibility for the security of the nation and even safety of the president himself. It was unlikely, this column argued, for the DSS to eat its word on Mr Magu or be abandoned by the president. Unfortunately, too, Mr Magu is not the most restrained of men. Sensing how opposed to him the DSS was, he unadvisedly gave free rein to his emotions on the secret service, an organisation with a long memory and vengeful spirit.
    Those who suggest that Mr Magu can remain in office indefinitely as acting chairman of the EFCC are neither interpreting the letter of the law properly in respect of that office nor interpreting the spirit or intendment of the law expertly. If a nominee needs legislative confirmation to occupy an office and function in it, but is rejected twice, it is impossible to keep him in that office by any conceivable legislative, executive or administrative sleight of hand. A public officer needing confirmation can act only before he is put through the mill of confirmation. Some have also suggested that the president can either keep him as acting chairman ad infinitum or nominate him a third time after possibly clearing all the obstacles to his confirmation. The president has too much sense to risk a third humiliation. He will not attempt it, for he knows that for reasons best known to the senate, Mr Magu’s goose was twice cooked and is now overdone or even burnt.
    President Buhari is too vulnerable now to risk a blowout or an interminable struggle with the senate or House of Representatives. His health is evidently not too robust, and in the brief period Vice President Yemi Osinbajo acted for him, his style and grasp of leadership issues and principles were exposed as jaded, needlessly combative, and retrogressive. He faces domestic troubles, and the coalition that brought him to power has begun to unravel. Worse, even those like the Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai whose thoughtless demagoguery elevated them to the status of demigods have become nervous and are penning combustive and contumacious letters. The president, if he is perceptive, may begin to realise that the North, his main political bulwark, is breaking out in a fever of machinations ahead of 2019. They pray he should complete his first term; but even the most optimistic of them are unable to see him beyond that term.
    If he is to have a peaceful reign, the president will have to mollify the rage of the voluble, disaffected, unprincipled but calculating Mallam el-Rufai whom the cabal has obviously shut out of the president’s inner circle, conciliate the National Assembly, a fractious and irreverent body of men and women bonded by their common obsession for the good life, devolve some powers and responsibilities to his much younger and intellectual deputy, and learn to speak with a little more empathy and affection for the country that gave him a second chance in office. It is not a man so hobbled by political and physiological circumstances that will nominate Mr Magu a third time. He has no special reason to; indeed, he has no special interest in the matter. He will look for a much cleverer and more reticent man who will wait for confirmation before unsheathing his sword or unleashing his acerbity.
    It is regrettable to see Mr Magu go. He has his heart in the right place and would have made a great impression on nearly everybody. But the greater concern now is to help the president manage the imminent fission in his presidency. Aso Villa has become a bed of intrigues plotted by ambitious aides with a keen, clairvoyant sense of the political tomorrow. If they are not to dismember the president’s first term even before the bell is properly rung for the next campaigns, a kitchen and general cabinet reshuffle may be ineluctable. President Buhari cannot begin to learn at 74 the ameliorating tactics of worming his way into the forgiven and accommodating hearts of the people. But, given a second chance at life after being ‘so sick’, he should find those who can help him carry out his objectives and package a much stronger and resonating message for the country.

  • Senate, Hameed Ali and bureaucratic laxity

    Senate, Hameed Ali and bureaucratic laxity

    COL Hameed Ali (retd.), Comptroller General (CG) of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), is probably not the most suave public officer of your imagination, but he is always in the news, often noticeably but in an ironic way. In the last two weeks or so, especially after he ordered his men to retroactively check vehicles for payment of duties, he has not ceased to dominate the front pages. Alarmed that he and his men failed to see the treacherous pitfalls involved in that impulsive policy, the senate requested for his presence to clarify a policy they felt was both poorly timed, ill-advised and impracticable. He sniggered at the legislature. Then the senators got really angry and ordered him to present himself in his customs uniform, perhaps knowing his predilection for defying anything he finds disagreeable. He snubbed them with a rhetorical flourish advertised on national television, a demeanour that further incensed the legislators.
    Finally, if the reports are believable, the president had to intervene to get the CG to honour the senate’s invitation and to do it respectfully. However, he still failed to don the customs uniform, because in his view neither the law nor the work he does, nor yet the position he occupies, makes the wearing of uniform obligatory. He, therefore, won’t give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. He has been ordered to return next week in uniform. Mr Ali is heady and self-opinionated, and so no one knows whether he will comply or not. As for the policy that triggered the furore, the NCS has since suspended it, arguing that it was misinterpreted and misconceived. His appearance at the Senate will be nothing but routine once he wears the uniform, for the senators do not possess the depth and gravitas to deconstruct the CG’s defiance with all the philosophical rigour it deserves.
    Mr Ali is not the first to defy and indirectly lampoon the senate. The constitution has given the legislature tremendous powers, but the lawmakers themselves have been perennially unable to rise to the stature the constitution elevated them. So, if they do not clean up their act, Mr Ali’s defiance will not be the last. The National Assembly does not boast of many competent lawmakers, and their principal officers, committees and their members and chairpersons, and other officers of the legislature have combined to sink the reputation of the legislature with their collective levity and triviality. This is what presidential aides, ministers, and heads of departments and agencies see before thumbing their noses at the legislature.
    Unfortunately, government officials themselves do not possess the diplomatic acumen and general restraint to act nobly and deferentially towards the legislature. Nigerian leaders and public officers do not handle power and responsibility well. They are conceited, greedy and badly disposed to the restraining provisions of the law and constitution. With better training, and a deeper understanding of the workings of a modern government, not to say an appreciation of their own constitutional and bureaucratic limitations, public officers and legislators may become constrained to acting more responsibly and perhaps more intelligently towards their legislature and one another.
    Mr Ali was impolite and unreasonable, and the policy he staked his reputation on was even more impracticable. The senate did not ask him to wear the customs uniform everyday; had he worn it on the one occasion they asked him to, especially considering he was appointed from outside the service, it would not have taken anything away from him. He unwisely allowed the matter to become a controversy from which he seems reluctant to back down, knowing full well that it would be anathema for the senate to climb down from their high horse after staking their immense power and reputation on an order that would cost them their credibility but cost Mr Ali little or nothing.

  • A curious birthday

    A curious birthday

    BIRTHDAYS and burials present peculiar challenges to those saddled with the luckless responsibility of making the orations in honour of the celebrators. The lot fell on Audu Ogbeh last week to exhibit his rhetorical flourish at the State House when Acting President Yemi Osinbajo turned 60. He quibbled as he fished for the right, harmless, balanced words, aware, it seems, that the censorious shadow of the ailing or convalescing President Muhammadu Buhari loomed very large over everyone. For a forthright man not given to humbug, and despite the fewness of his words and the brevity of his remarks, Chief Ogbeh nonetheless punctuated his speech with pauses that reflected the quandary he was in. Other than the feral social media which dispensed with caution as it lauded Prof Osinbajo for standing in the gap for President Buhari with aplomb, every other person, Chief Ogbeh apparently not exempted, measured his words or hemmed and hawed.

    The brethren that concocted ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s birthday panegyrics were, however, not similarly incommoded. They had no reason to be timid. Absolutely none. After all, the octogenarian they were celebrating was himself a model of immodesty, a military general and mutative politician whose feistiness neither his women nor his well-known ailment, nor yet his pretentious intellectualism, has been able to curtail. After the words were composed and unleashed, it was a miracle the rambunctious general left the celebrations with his head intact. Former prelate of the Methodist Church, Nigeria, Sunday Mbang, led the furious assault. “This is a man I have known for a very long time,” cooed the priest. “I fell in love with him when I discovered that he held morning devotion every morning in Aso Rock when he became the civilian President.” The former prelate was just warming up. “The morning devotion was attended by his family members and other people. That was why he succeeded in government. God never allowed them to impeach him.” Yes, who does not know that Chief Obasanjo is the luckiest Nigerian alive or dead? Then this: “Obasanjo is the best President Nigeria has ever had. I have no apology to anybody about it. He also built a chapel inside Aso Rock within three months after getting there.”

    Prof Osinbajo was no less effusive. Speaking during the commissioning of the ex-president’s presidential library, the acting president declared: “Obasanjo is (therefore) a gift in various ways being so intricately tied to the history of Nigeria.” And describing and lauding his pan-Africanist vision, the acting president warned that Nigeria could misrepresent the general if their appreciation of his relevance was not appropriately extrapolated to the wider world. “…We diminish his vision if we do not recognize his place as a global statesman even that is evident from the representatives of the world that are present here today…Very few human beings have a chance of making history and fewer still have a good fortune of making history, writing it as you go along and living longer to even establish a library and write history in your own words.” Chief Obasanjo represents many things to many people, and he undoubtedly deserves the praise he got on his birthday for the great accomplishments he had ingeniously gleaned from so modest a personal endowment as nature had gifted him and so sterile a leadership character as he contrived for himself by his deliberate foibles.

    But no one among those who spoke glowingly about him attempted to contextualise his accomplishments, perhaps because doing so would have diminished the joyous occasion and spoiled the fun. No harm, it seems, is done when at a burial or birthday, the subject’s faults are concealed. It was, therefore, appropriate that the lyricists contracted to sing the general’s praise turned a blind eye to his faults. Even this column, as critical as he often is, would on such an occasion also have surfed the waves, had he been asked to speak on Chief Obasanjo during his birthday, and seized upon his fine points and expanded upon them. Discretion, they say, is the better part of valour. But from the safe distance of a column, it is inconceivable that anyone should gloss over the general’s absolute lack of fidelity to life’s eternal verities.

    Contexts help put things in perspective. Rev Mbang describes Chief Obasanjo as the best ever Nigerian president. That assessment must never be made or taken in isolation, for the use of the word ‘best’ masks the pathetic quality of Nigeria’s leaders. It is okay to appreciate Chief Obasanjo’s firmness and the fact that his presidency and even military regime achieved significant leaps in economic development. But the panegyrist must be careful to observe that Chief Obasanjo’s successors, without exception, proved spectacularly inappropriate for and inadequate to the task of leadership. The reason is not that the system was incapable of throwing up the right people; the fact is that on the two occasions he presided over Nigeria, Chief Obasanjo actively and malevolently schemed his successors into office. Had he maintained strict and benevolent neutrality over the politics of his successors, his political sagacity would have been unquestionable. And like other Nigerian leaders and many governors, Chief Obasanjo left no governing or political ideology or philosophy behind for anyone to chart a direction or find compass. He was simply an administrator, and not even a systematic or scientific one, just a fairly solid leader among many misfits. He had the presence of mind to create institutions, and make them thrive under his rule, but he never had the discipline to imbue them with the character and independence they needed to thrive after his time in office. In short, Chief Obasanjo was not an ideas man as the former Methodist Church prelate sought to imply, nor one whose legacy was designed to last for ages; and no one should paint him as farsighted.

    Prof Osinbajo’s portrayal of Chief Obasanjo was more nuanced, more vigorous, more intellectual. He described the ex-president as being ‘intricately tied to Nigerian history’, almost in a positive, salutary way. The statement is only partly true as far as its superficial meaning goes. But the acting president didn’t mean the statement to be casually interpreted. He meant it to be understood in all its subtleties to describe a man who appeared to have ensconced himself at the core of Nigerian life since the middle 1970s. The problem is not that anyone is undeservingly inhabiting that core and supposing himself grandiosely to own it, but that such a denizen should have the intellectual fortitude, judgement, charisma and character required to hold things together and disseminate a healthy influence over the country. It has in fact been the misfortune of Nigeria that she has taken dictations from those who are themselves destitute of the virtues and examples so desperately needed by the country to survive and flourish.

    At 80, Chief Obasanjo has done extremely well for himself, rising from near excruciating poverty and obscurity into fame, wealth and political acclaim. The country he ruled for about 11 years has on the contrary retrogressed very badly. Indeed, one of the enduring paradoxes of Nigeria is that the average life expectancy of her rulers has hovered around 75 and rising, while the ordinary Nigerian is blighted by a life expectancy of about 54 to which he has made only painful, costly and incremental progress over nearly two decades. This is indeed a testament to the tragic national disparity so wholly and gallingly exemplified and amplified by the life and mannerisms of Chief Obasanjo. Those who composed his panegyrics two Saturdays ago did him no service by not reminding him of his abominable clay feet. Instead they did the country grave injury by glossing over the deadly harm done her by incompetent and visionless rulers who have perfected the slickness of gaining power without sustaining a corresponding adherence to its concomitant responsibility.

  • Buhari’s selected calls and dramatic return

    Buhari’s selected calls and dramatic return

    GIVEN the number of public functionaries and well-heeled individuals President Muhammadu Buhari called on phone before dramatically returning to Nigeria Friday morning, it was no longer in doubt he was alive and certainly not dying as the social media gleefully speculated. He is alive and ‘convalescing’, and is now back. The same result of convincing Nigerians he was alive while in the United Kingdom could, however, have been achieved by a less tortuous process. But tortuous or not, virtually every Nigerian now knows the president is alive. They saw him disembark from the plane unaided. They may not know his actual state of health, or what really ails him, but they know he has returned and is convalescing. It is also a relief that presidential spokesmen who had at the beginning of the president’s indisposition bogged themselves down in a semantic quagmire over whether the president was on medical vacation or simply on vacation with ancillary attention to medical examination have settled the grammatical rift with the public.

    There is now a consensus that all the talk about the president being ‘hale and hearty’ is balderdash, and that the side talk about him retaining his humour and wit in the face of debilitation was stretching stories almost beyond their elastic limits. It is clear from his own admission that the president took gravely and unprecedentedly ill, travelled to the United Kingdom to attend to his health rather than for vacation, has received medical attention and may perhaps still continue to undergo treatment, and is convalescing. Even before the president’s return, his spokesmen had transited to using the word ‘convalescing’ rather than either vacationing or resting. It has taken a lot of grammatical struggle and semantic feints and dribbles to travel over this short distance, but at least the ship has berthed safely. The recuperation may be interrupted and the patient may even suffer relapse, but everyone agrees that the president is not dying but convalescing. Good for Nigeria. Good for President Buhari.

    It is, however, doubtful whether a consensus can be easily reached on President Buhari’s selected calls as was reached on how to describe his UK trip. At a point during his trip, he was apparently not enamoured of visits from Nigeria lest he should become a spectacle, an ogre even, given his waiflike features. After a few visits by top All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders and legislative leaders, the visits dried up. It made sense that the president turned to making calls instead of receiving visitors. Before his return, he had called quite a number of people, including one of his spokesmen, Femi Adesina, birthday celebrators like ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, and bereaved former heads of state and political leaders.

    Before the president’s return, the cynical and cantankerous Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, had also schemed for the president’s call. In his view, since he was one of the president’s worst critics, a call from the president carefully regurgitated by him would go a long way. He is right, except that Nigeria had long dispelled all doubts. Everybody believed that the president was alive and convalescing even before his return, and no amount of telephone calls could have undermined that belief. More crucially, a telephone call could not show just how sever the president’s ailment was, nor how fast and comprehensive his recuperation was.

    No one could guess how many more people the president would have called had he stayed a little longer in London. Perhaps he could have called a few more. But gradually the calls would have received less attention than when he first happened upon that stratagem. The calls were probably his own way of retaining and exerting some influence on the country’s politics and leadership, for absence in politics does not make the heart grow fonder: the heart in fact grows wearier. The president also knew that his ‘medical vacation’ had constitutional implications and even permutational and geopolitical significance. To avoid the consequent trapdoors, not to say the tangled skein of his indisposition and absence, the president intended through his calls to remind the country that he was still very much in the picture. But even that ploy would have been futile had he remained a convalescent for much longer than political necessities and 2019 uncertainties could bear. Obviously, the president would never have run out of dignitaries to call, for there were so many anxiously waiting to hear him, among them some of his sworn enemies. But the calls would have become sterile and jaded. Now that he is back, it opens new vistas of permutations. To douse any misgiving, however, he will have to do his best to be seen and heard virtually on a daily basis. Any other way would trigger unwholesome and distracting rumours that would try his patience, if not his health, to its exasperating limit.

  • Bishop Kukah’s ‘constant commotions’

    DESPITE coming under withering attacks over positions he sometimes takes on government and governance issues, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah, has the courage of his convictions. He has not been too impressed with the content and coherence of the policies of the All Progressives Congress (APC) government in Abuja, and he has said so unambiguously. He has also taken exceptions to the lack of speed and clarity with which President Muhammadu Buhari is tackling national issues, and he has voiced his opinion on the subject eloquently.

    In the years to come, Bishop Kukah will be acknowledged for the profundity of his contributions to national discourse and the search for peace, equality and justice. One of such contributions is the puzzle he recently raised about why Nigeria seems to be in ‘a state of constant commotions’. He made the statement while responding to a television interview two Saturdays ago. He had been asked a question on insecurity and the Southern Kaduna problem. This was his answer: “…Today it is Southern Kaduna, yesterday, it was something else, and tomorrow, it will be something completely different…We really have not been able to figure out what is wrong with Nigeria. Whether it is Biafra or some other things, how is it that this nation is in a state of constant commotions?”

    To the bold and eloquent bishop, the APC didn’t seem prepared for governance. For as he argued, it took the Buhari presidency an unduly long time to even constitute a cabinet. Acting President Yemi Osinbajo may have restored some order and empathy to governance, the unmistakable fact is that the APC has yet to show it has a governing ideology. Bishop Kukah is not convinced; so, too, is this column. The onus is on the Buhari presidency to first appreciate the question of Nigeria’s ‘constant commotions’ before venturing a solution.