IT was essentially a dispute between the present and past Rivers State governors over the importation and clearance of two helicopters specified as armoured plated. But no thanks to the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), a simple and direct transaction instantly became a very complicated matter. Two years into his first term in office, former governor of Rivers, Rotimi Amaechi, reportedly ordered for two new Bell helicopters to help the state combat insecurity, particularly the menace of rampant militancy. He sought the federal government’s financial involvement and approval. Both were given, with Mr Amaechi and his successor, Nyesom Wike, agreeing that documents showed that the Goodluck Jonathan presidency even underwrote a part of the expenses. For some reasons, the helicopters were not cleared during the tenure of Mr Amaechi. And when Mr Wike attempted to clear the goods, more complications were introduced until in exasperation he conceded the helicopters to the federal government.
At every stage of the transaction and consequent misunderstanding, there were letters and documents to substantiate the efforts made by the importers to ship in and clear their consignments, and the stonewalling by the federal government that erected road blocks against the consummation of the deal. How this very open transaction became shackled in a tangled skein is perhaps known only to the Customs. The documents concerning the transaction were neither lost nor misplaced, nor yet the language complicated; but some days ago the Customs woke up with a start and announced to a wary and gullible public that unknown importers attempted to ship in two armoured helicopters. The news instantly evoked images of nefarious militants or insurrectionists planning to levy war on the government or country. The Acting Public Relations Officer, NCS, Joseph Attah, told the press that no one had come forward to claim the helicopters, and that the items were therefore seized and given to the Nigerian Air Force. “Investigation into the seized aircraft is still ongoing,” he had said. “You know that when something is seized by customs and that item is something that can be auctioned, then it is auctioned. But in this case, the helicopter is something that is useful to the nation and so, it was given to the air force. But despite the fact that it has been handed over to the air force, we are still conducting our investigations.”
It turned out that the Customs were economical with the truth. Both the past and present Rivers State governors owned up to the transaction, and had in fact never denied it. They quoted documents, some of them replies from the federal government and its agencies, including the Customs itself. The only disagreement between Mr Amaechi and Mr Wike concerns the politics of the helicopters and the motives behind stalling its clearance. So, why did the Customs avoid the truth? Even the simple act of ceding ownership or control of the helicopters to the air force was given a twist by the Customs. The media should not be satisfied with their evasions. They should pin them down to know what motivated them into telling such dangerous untruths. The fear, indeed, now is discovering how many more untruths the government and its agencies have told, and what dangerous and complex manipulations they are capable of, against individuals and against the opposition.
Despite the disagreement between the former and present Rivers State governors, and notwithstanding their desperate attempt to politicise everything between them and their parties, and irrespective of whether purchasing helicopters was a sound decision or not, the state government behaved more honourably than the Customs and the federal government in the whole affair. It must be commended. The public, it seems, can live with a state or a government guilty of bad judgement. What they cannot tolerate and must never reconcile themselves to is a powerful and demagogic government determined to mislead and misdirect its people.
Yet, it is not enough that Mr Wike has offered the government the use of the helicopters, perhaps in an effort to prove his own and his state’s altruism. State funds were committed into purchasing the aircraft; now that the federal government has given them to the air force, not impounded them, as the Customs untruthfully claimed, Rivers State must be compensated for its great loss. Fairness and justice demand this.
Category: Idowu Akinlotan
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Rivers State’s fishy helicopter business
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When the North met
LAST Monday, when the 19 governors of the northern states met with their traditional rulers in Kaduna, few observers needed to guess what the agenda would be. The Boko Haram menace may be receding in memory though its wounds are still fresh and in some isolated cases still festering, but in its place, the Southern Kaduna killings have begun to occupy prime media spaces everywhere. The northern elite, for that is what they really are, whether political or traditional, met amidst much flourish to begin the task of exploring hidden and open factors disposing their states to such unrestrained and unfathomable bloodletting. They appeared to recognise that such an exploration could not be done in a day or even days. The enterprise will take them time, and their success will depend on how honest and scrupulous they are in plumbing the depths of violence in a geographical space the chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum, Borno State’s Governor Kashim Shettima, continues to describe as the Northern Region.
Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, was their host, though of course Kaduna city is understandably recognised as the political capital of the North. Perhaps, too, the Southern Kaduna killings, which the governor has badly mismanaged, was the immediate reason for the meeting. However, it is hard to say to what extent the northern leaders would tell themselves the unblemished truth about why their region is in such an uproar, why its youth are restive, and why and how regional leaders have shirked their political, cultural and religious responsibilities. Had they been capable of telling themselves the truth, had they developed the temper for discourses unfettered by sometimes religious and sometimes feudal restraints, had they approached the changing dynamics of the modern era with the openness and calculation the times needed, and had they acquired the principled introspection required to deconstruct and learn from the Boko Haram revolt, perhaps Kaduna would not be boiling. But if it boiled, the challenge would not mystify or frustrate their collective gifts and aspirations.
Governor Shettima and the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammed Sa’ad Abubakar III, were the principal voices at the meeting. The Borno governor was eloquent, and the Sultan was passionate, but neither rose, nor attempted to rise, to the stature of the region’s First Republic leaders. While the governor struggled to situate the restiveness in the region within the context of its socio-economic disparities, even announcing the establishment of a regional economic programme under the leadership of Tanimu Yakubu Kurfi, the Sultan sought symptomatic relief in his denunciation of hate speeches which he presumed to be the triggers for violence. Elements of everything they have identified are embedded in the crisis bedevilling the region, but it is doubtful whether the regional leaders have made a persuasive case, or whether they even have the dispassion and discipline to make any case whatsoever.
The problem with many analyses about the country’s objective conditions is that analysts make many prior assumptions about the state (nation) and proceed from that universal predicate to examine the state’s many dysfunctions. Thus, they make the assumption that a poor region like the Northeast ravaged by, say, religious revolt will respond to economic stimuli and other forms of interventions like any other poor state elsewhere, say in Europe or the United States. That classical, textbook one-solution-fits-all approach exemplified by the Breton Woods institutions neither works well, nor even when they do, last long. One of the key missing links in the North — other parts of Nigeria are not exempted from this malaise — is that after Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, no one has been able to envision anything for the region. And so while the concept of a region continues to exist and even thrive in the subconscious of the average northern leader, its foundational and driving vision has been lost in the moraines of their undisciplined approach to life and politics.
Unlike many other leading countries in the world, Nigeria does not have a unifying vision for the country. In the 1950s, regional leaders managed with varying degrees of success to enunciate regional visions. Those visions determined and shaped the kind of societies they wanted to establish and under what rules and laws they wished to build their economies and peoples. The visions circumscribed religious beliefs and practices, propelled education and healthcare services, and imbued both the peoples and leaders of the various regions with self-confidence, again with varying degrees of success. It was that vision, whether written or not, that carved the obtrusive northernisation policy of the eponymous Sardauna, helped him to run an inclusive northern government that saw Christians and Muslims rise to top positions, shaped his utterances, and allowed him to preside over a merit-driven, multicultural system that gave fillip to the region’s developmental quest.
No one in the North today has the depth of understanding that the Sardauna had, nor his discipline. They not only misunderstood the revolt that ravaged the Northeast; indeed, they even fostered and misinterpreted it in its early years, exulting in Boko Haram’s promotion of injustice against other faiths, and revelling in the ethnic cum religious bigotry that is stymieing the growth, development and peace of the region. That lack of vision manifests in by-passing Christians and ethnic minorities on line for promotion whether in the judiciary or elsewhere, and somehow even justifying murder as an astonished and disgusted country witnessed in Kano last year. The North is overdue for soul-searching, for renewal, and for recreation along the lines of its founders whose sense of justice, fairness and equity the present regional leaders can’t match.
The North is of course not alone in abjuring vision as a guiding principle of nation-building and development, but it is an exemplar. The hot and emotive talk by the governors and traditional rulers last Monday in Kaduna will remain nothing but gaseous talk until they go back to their roots and rediscover their own essence. Last Monday, after indulging in virtually futile rhetoric, the northern leaders seemed to have gone away with the impression that once the socio-economic indicators of the region were enhanced, peace and development would be restored. They are terribly mistaken. Let them first rediscover their roots, exhume their founding vision of a noble, just and tolerant society, if possible envision afresh a society that does not discriminate against any group or faith, and let them recognise and adapt to the changing global dynamics against which they have frittered away opportunities and resources.
Northern leaders must stop pretending that their region is accommodating to all. It used to be; it is no longer so. As the controversial regulation enacted by the authorities of the Yar’Adua University in Katsina State banning any other faith group on the campus other than Muslim Students Society indicate, because they said no Christian group had asked for registration; as the deliberately botched trial of those accused of openly murdering a 74-year-old Igbo woman, Bridget Agbahime, in Kano last June shows; and as the dangerous display of ethnic exceptionalism by Fulani herdsmen and their political supporters also shows in kaduna thereby inspiring murderous rampage in Southern Kaduna and other parts of the country, northern leaders have their work cut out for them.
Instead of living in denial, let them acknowledge that they have deviated badly from their foundations. Let them acknowledge the biases and bigotries that have been introduced into the body politic by known and shadowy figures. Let them recognise that they cannot gift the country what they do not have. One of the reasons Nigerian leaders since 1966 have been so unsuccessful is because their governments were not anchored on any great vision or ideology. The same malady afflicts the Buhari presidency even now. That same malady, of not standing for anything deep, noble and inspiring, is what would make last Monday’s gathering of northern leaders in Kaduna a waste of time. They will not be the first to so gather, nor will they be the last. As long as they deny reality, as long as they continue to subscribe to the inequities and injustices that engender revolt in their region, no meeting they summon, nor how long and intensive it might be, can create the peace they vaguely conjure.
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Buhari, Magu and David Lawal versus Senate
PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari reserves the right to nominate anyone for any post, and to stick with his nominees even when they are at first rejected by the Senate. In exercising this right, the president last week asked the Senate to reconsider its decision not to confirm the nominee for the post of Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu. Now re-designated as acting chairman, Mr Magu, as this column wrote when he was first turned down, deserves a reconsideration on account of his assiduousness, passion and even efficiency, notwithstanding his sometimes abrasive and unsophisticated approach to the job. The important point is that since the days of the former chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, no one has done the job with as much commitment, if not suicidal zeal. And in any case, those on whom Mr Magu is expected to train his anti-graft guns, are themselves uncouth, ruthless and unconscionable.
All things considered, therefore, it is not surprising that President Buhari is sticking to Mr Magu. Last week’s presidential remonstrance to the Senate may be lacking in finesse and logic, not to say administrative acumen, but there are indications he may just pull it off. The plot against the EFCC boss, it was clear from the beginning, was never profound, never strictly legal, and never quite legislatively moral. Had the antagonism against Mr Magu rested purely on his work, especially the content of his ideas, perhaps he could be exposed as lacking in a structured approach to the work, and shown to be all sound and fury. Instead, at the point of his denunciation, when Mr Magu seemed to have united his enemies against himself, it was obvious that the plot reeked of a conspiracy between fulminating members of the president’s kitchen cabinet and many cynical lawmakers seized by either fear or loathing.
But in sticking with Mr Magu, the president once again illustrated sharply the confusion and amateurishness that pervade the presidency. In the letter sent to the Senate and read by its president, Bukola Saraki, President Buhari clearly glossed over the anomalous manner the secret service undermined his appointee. It is true that institutions ought to be free to do their work, especially when that work promotes and undergirds the constitution. But in respect of Mr Magu’s nomination, that work ought to have been done silently and behind closed doors. That work ought to have helped the president to come to a clean and clear decision on who his nominee would be. However, the secret service did its job in such a manner that it seemed to have served as a counterpoise to the president’s decision and a reflection of the disharmony that has crept into the inner workings of the presidency.
What the public expected of the president in his letter to the Senate was to address the secret service’s report frontally, get the agency to formally withdraw the report it earlier forwarded to the Senate, and plausibly defend its volte face on the grounds of superior information, not executive pressure. It has sadly taken the Senate to point out this elementary fact to the public and the presidency. The presidency may already be lobbying the Senate to approve Mr Magu’s appointment, but there is no way both the presidency and the Senate would not need to first resolve the matter of the secret service’s unfavourable report on Mr Magu. They can’t sweep it under the carpet.
The chaotic workings of the presidency manifested even more vividly in the subterranean clearance unilaterally granted the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal. Not only were the allegations levelled against him in the Senate referred by the presidency to the wrong persons for investigation, even the exoneration itself bore the hallmarks of tameness and favouritism. It is possible Mr David Lawal is innocent of the accusations and suppositions levelled against him; but those who probed him, including the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, did nothing to clear the SGF of wrongdoing. For, at the centre of the whole brouhaha is the issue of conflict of interest, not whether he had resigned or not from the companies that secured the contract from the ad hoc agency under his supervision.
It is not clear how the Senate would react to the SGF matter. They will probably resist all blandishments the presidency might bring, even if the executive arm manages to win the support of Senator Saraki. It will therefore require inordinate pressure to save him, the kind of pressure that comes with horrendous and costly compromises, the kind of pressure President Buhari by his personal constitution and aloofness and inner solitude is poorly equipped to give. The whole world, figuratively speaking, supports Mr Magu. The initial resolve of the Senate to reject his nomination may therefore be unable to withstand the pressure that will be brought to bear when eventually the anti-graft boss is presented for screening. Indeed, what is at stake here is not so much whether the Senate finally does the president’s bidding concerning Mr Magu and Mr David Lawal, but the obvious and frustrating fact that the presidency does appear to walk with unsteady gait, reeling from one faux pas to another, unsure whether its modest accomplishments so far have not been the fortuitous outcome of kindergarten application of policies and ideas.
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President’s medical vacation
UNNERVED by unfounded speculations about President Buhari’s death during his medical vacation abroad, his aides back in Nigeria anxiously migrated from the honest admission of his trip being designed for rest and medical check-up to the fairly fictional story of the president embarking purely on vacation. The problem, it seems, are two-fold. First, the president served notice of a 10-day vacation beginning from January 23 and lasting, apparently minus weekends, till February 6. However, the president flew out on January 19, days before the vacation date indicated in his letter to the Senate. That seemingly harmless breach sent signals about the president’s lack of wellness and urgent need for medical help. It was also clear he and his aides should have been more open about his medical condition.
Second, some critics have suggested that he has had enough time since he assumed office in 2015 to equip one hospital or two to make medical tourism needless for him and other public officials. They are right. His foreign medical trips remain a constant vote of no confidence in Nigeria’s healthcare facilities. And even if the excuse is that he needed to rest, the critics also suggest that in the spirit of these frugal times, he could have done it within his country’s borders. Again, they are right. The president has a responsibility to modernise healthcare and tourism facilities in Nigeria. But the truth is that given the president’s apparent intense medical needs, he sees these suggestions as luxuries he cannot contemplate. It is in moments such as when desperate medical anxieties confront a man that leaders see the futility of making policies excluding public officials from seeking the best medical help money can buy anywhere in the world.
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El-Zakzaky: federal subversion of the law
MORE than one year after he was detained without charge, and obviously more than 45 days after a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja ordered his release, the bruised and battered Shi’a leader, Ibraheem El-Zakzaky, is still in detention. The reason is that the government in Abuja believes it is above the law. Worse, it has contempt for the law; that is why it refused to appeal. The court, presided over by Justice Gabriel Kolawole, had on December 2, 2016 ordered the release of the Shi’a leader and his wife in 45 days, the provision of an accommodation for the couple, and payment of N50m compensation to them. It is not clear what part of the judgement the federal government was unable to comprehend, for the order of the court was rendered in English and in a style that did not admit of any ambiguity. After all, the government put up a spirited but futile defence in court.
But days after the release of the Shi’a leader and his wife was due, the government has neither released the couple nor said anything. It is turning out that the Muhammadu Buhari presidency is both the law and the constitution. Any other thing, including the written Nigerian constitution, is obviously impotent in the estimation of the government and a rude, unpatriotic distraction. Rather than obey the court judgement on the Shi’a leader, certain faceless sources have sponsored publications intended to suggest that other more pressing reasons not placed before the court during adjudication are sufficiently powerful enough to make the government defy the court and the constitution. In sum, the Buhari presidency has served notice that it reserves the right to determine when, how and why any accused person would be released from jail.
The argument of the anonymous sponsors of the publications in the Sheikh El-Zakzaky case is simple but exasperatingly unpersuasive. Said the anonymous source defending the government’s defiance of the law: “The major constitutional policy objective of government as stated in section 14 (2) (b) is public and not individual security…The issue of the release of El-Zakzaky is not exclusively legal. It has security and public interest as against individual interest undertone. Public interest and national security implications must be factored into consideration in line with international practices that conventionally place national security and public interest above any other individual claim of right. The Federal Government of Nigeria is looking into the case with the public and security interest dimensions into consideration.”
It is not clear how ‘international practices’ supersedes the law and constitution of Nigeria, nor what public interest the source was referring to that transcended the rights of the individual enshrined in the same constitution disingenuously and mischievously quoted by the anonymous source to justify the arbitrary denial of a person’s rights. What is, however, clear is that by refusing to release the Shi’a leader and his wife, the government has deliberately decided to violate the law and desecrate the constitution. More, it has served notice that private considerations by government and its own insular interpretations of the law outside the courts of law are superior to any and every other consideration. In effect, the Nigerian has just been divested of his rights. If anyone thinks he has any rights henceforth, he must wait until he confronts the government to suffer disillusionment.
When this whole saga began in Zaria in December 2015, after elements of the Nigerian Army clashed with members of the Shi’a group called the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), the federal government repeatedly attempted to whip up public emotions against the group. In inquiry after inquiry, and from one court to the other, lawyers and witnesses of the government spoke of the Shiites in very uncomplimentary manner. They were a violent, surly and unruly neighbour to Zarians, said the government. They built without permits, said the Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai. They did not recognise any government, the governor added. And they were potentially more dangerous than the notorious Boko Haram sect, they summed up. None of these allegations against the sect held up in court, for the courts hardly judge anyone on intentions without proof.
Indeed, President Buhari and Governor el-Rufai anchor and justify their disposition towards the Shi’a group and its leaders based on the persuasion, sentiments and arguments of haters of the sect. They list a litany of grievances against the group, including the unruly execution of their obligatory marches, the mistreatment of neighbours, their imperiousness, and the adamantine resolve of the sect’s leaders to permit and even encourage their members’ excesses. Since the sect was uprooted from their Zaria redoubt in December 2015, said the neighbours gleefully, peace had descended on the community. According to the neighbours, the long list of excesses of the sect was possible because the Kaduna State Government was for many years absolutely remiss in controlling and checking the IMN. But when it finally chose to do something, following hard on the heels of the army’s crackdown on the sect, the state government went along with the rampaging soldiers regardless of the law. Sects and individuals often subvert the law as heartily as they wish, however, the law makes provision for reining in malfeasant persons and groups. The problem, it seems, is that neither the army nor the state government followed the law in finding a solution to the Shi’a excesses.
In fact, fearing that it could never secure a conviction against the sect’s leaders, and unable to defend its atrocious crackdown on the sect in court, including the more than one year detention of Sheikh El-Zakzaky and his wife without charging them in court, the government is now attempting to take refuge in the same constitution it has defied and desecrated. It is clear that the Buhari presidency operates outside the law when it suits it. It appears determined to keep the couple in detention for as long as it pleases, though it remarked snidely that El-Zakzaky’s wife was free to go if she was tired of caring for her battered husband. The government fails to realise that by cherry-picking what laws and judgements to obey, it is indirectly undermining both its own legitimacy and constitutional government, and invariably arming its enemies, many of whom have never had confidence in the president’s democratic credentials nor trusted Governor el-Rufai’s propagandist campaign that his messianic instincts tell him the worst of the sect.
At long last, the government has admitted what everyone has long suspected: that this government relishes and engages in self-help. Gradually, Nigerians are waking up to the fact that dictatorship may already be upon the country. Worse, the more astute rest of the world will gradually and deliberately begin the process of coming to the despairing conclusion that the Buhari presidency is averse to the rule of law. Coupled with the police invasion of the premises of the online medium, Premium Times, an invasion that appears to have neither rhyme nor reason, there are increasingly fewer people who think Nigerian democracy is in a safe pair of hands. (See box). -
Farce and incompetence in Bello’s Kogi
GOVERNOR Yahaya Bello, the so-called digital governor of Kogi State, spent the better part of one year and two successive panels screening the state’s workforce for ghost workers. After he brought the exercise he described as staff verification to an inglorious conclusion a few weeks ago, claiming with fanfare to have discovered over 18,000 ghost workers out of a little over 27,000 state staff roll, it was clear he was working to a predetermined answer. The verification exercise was riddled with contradictions and gross ineptitude, salary payment itself is still haphazard, deductions lack arithmetic and financial coherence, and the governor is engaged in a war of attrition with institutions and agencies for the purpose of getting as many workers as possible struck off the payroll, regardless of extant rules and laws.
For a government that claims to groan under a monthly wage bill of more than N5bn (they have dishonestly included LG staff salaries), and whose second verification panel claims to have saved the state government about N2.6bn every month, it is incredible that the state still finds it difficult to pay salaries as and when due, not to say pay all workers full salaries at the same time. Kogi obviously operates outside known mathematical laws. And despite the second panel claiming to remedy what the state government described as the first panel’s shoddy verification exercise, it is remarkable that there are still complaints galore among state workers, some of whom, estimated to be nearly half of the workforce, have not been paid for more than six months.
The governor, it seems, would prefer not to pay any worker at all. Seizing upon the screening panel’s recommendations, but without recourse to either its own terms of reference or the law, the state has asked professors in the state university and chief lecturers in the College of Education, and any other top civil servant, including chief nursing officers in state hospitals, to retire on account of salary and promotional stagnation that have lasted for eight years. In Kogi, the lecturers and directors do not have to reach retirement age, and neither the law nor any other rule matters. What matters is that Mr Bello is obsessed with cutting staff strength by hook or crook or simply not paying them at all using one pretext or the other. He prefers to splurge the state funds on other trifles. The famous roundabouts in Lokoja’s main street that conjured spiritual nightmares in his excitable imagination, and which he destroyed shortly after he assumed office, have remained abandoned. Instead, the restless traveller governor is erecting garish sentry posts on all the access roads to Government House, Lokoja.
Those who imposed this naïve and dangerously inept governor on Kogi can look back with sadistic pleasure at the consequences of their meddlesomeness. Kogi now groans under a power shift of other people’s making, a shift that is in essence humiliating and disruptive. With no development happening anywhere in the state, and with workers hungry, sick and oppressed, Kogites are in a quandary about what to do to survive the next three years until either God or the ballot box puts paid to the impressionable young governor’s clownishness and propaganda. -
Fed Govt v. Premium Times: reprising the past
WHAT began as an epistolary battle between the Nigerian Army and Premium Times, an online news medium, now looks set to snowball into the kind of troubling stalemate between the media and security agencies that harks back to the destructive years of military rule. The face-off began almost innocuously with the army writing Premium Times to publish a retraction of certain news item alleged to have made injurious assertions about the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai, and ongoing military operations in the Northeast against Boko Haram. Said the army: “The Nigerian Army has instituted a legal action against an online publication, the Premium Times, over its failure to retract and apologise over false, subversive and malicious publications against the person of the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai and the Nigerian Army. All efforts to make the medium make amend proved abortive. The medium however remained adamant and recalcitrant. Consequently, the Nigerian Army has briefed it’s lawyers to institute legal action against the medium.”
Premium Times, which boasts a few editors who were in the trenches during the inglorious Gen. Sani Abacha years, would not be intimidated. They promptly fired a reply asking and expecting the army to apologise for issuing threats over a disagreement that was justiciable. Said Premium Times rather provocatively but elegantly: “It really can be exasperating and disconcerting to see public officers condescendingly castigate journalists, many of whom are not only internationally acclaimed and celebrated but who also have up to forty years of practice as journalists under their belt…Sir, the Nigerian Army of which you spoke so glowingly is an heir to a military that unpatriotically subverted, many times, constitutional governance in Nigeria, plunged Nigeria into a three-year internecine civil war, committed unspeakable rights violations against the Nigerian people and thwarted the efforts of Nigerians to restore democratic governance to Nigeria.”
While the matter was still smouldering, the police, never an institution to let bad enough alone, invaded the premises of the Times to arrest the editor-in-chief, Dapo Olorunyomi, and a correspondent, Evelyn Okakwu, claiming that a report had been lodged with them by the army, the same army headed for the courts. Is anyone really in charge in Abuja, or have security agencies and other federal institutions turned rogue? No one of course says Premium Times is in infallible, or that the army is not just been unduly sensitive and skittish. But clearly the disagreement could be, and will be, resolved in court without hurting the law and the constitution.
The army is justified to worry about its image and any other thing that could hurt the prosecution of the war in the Northeast. But it is sad they came to the peremptory conclusion, without significant basis, that the Premium Times was aiding and abetting terrorism. This is the sort of cavalier conclusions that injure the entire system. It was apposite then that the Times should remind the army of its unenviable antecedents in the dark days of military rule. It would injure Nigerian democracy if the government refrain from cautioning the police for using Gestapo tactics against the press. The complainant itself took the right step by going to court in what is evidently a civil matter; and the online publication responded with admirable chutzpah all round; why are the police crying more than the bereaved? -
ASUU, Fed Govt and endless renegotiations
FORGIVE the pessimism, but there will be no end to dithering over education in Nigeria. The merry-go-round simply won’t stop. Those saddled with the responsibility of managing Nigeria’s education system have for decades shown neither the depth of understanding needed to make it work even at the rudimentary level nor the vision required to make it great, effective, productive or transcendental. This, like every other thing about Nigeria, is a peculiarly Nigerian mystery. Last week, after much pestering, including a one-week warning strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in November last year, the federal government has finally conceded to another effete round of renegotiating the 2009 Fed Govt/ASUU agreement.
For a federal government enamoured of reaching agreements it never hoped to keep, it is not so amazing that they have become both used to embarking on negotiations and inured to honouring agreements. The usual style is that after bellyaching over certain key provisions of the agreements, the government, half-winded and half-awake, eventually agrees to sign. The ASUU, which has become in one breath a glutton for punishment, and in another breath an incurable optimist, also eventually pens the agreements half-convinced that the serial truce breaker it had just negotiated with had no cat in hell’s chance of honouring anything, let alone a rigorous agreement requiring commitment and a huge budgetary outlay.
Consider the following. The 2001 agreement between ASUU and the federal government was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. It was, therefore, largely adapted in 2009 after two years of onerous and enervating negotiations and nearly an academic session of strike. Four years later, it was obvious that the government was either inattentive to the agreement it freely reached or it was entirely disinterested in what it gave the impression was a bothersome educational headache. Six months of strike thus followed in 2013, culminating in another round of renegotiation and agreement in December of that year. Alas, even that agreement was also dishonoured. To be sure, there were always gestures in the direction of the agreements, with some sops given to the lecturers, but the government has always been evilly careful not to do anything fundamental about education, as if the disagreements provide it a raison d’être.
If you thought that the pirouette of negotiations and agreements and renegotiations and breaches was all there was to the exasperating malady, you knew little about Nigerian officialdom. In 2009, the teams to the negotiation (ignore the word renegotiation) between ASUU and federal government were led by Bolanle Babalakin as Chairman, Committee of Pro-Chancellors, Gamaliel Onosode as the government’s own chairman of the renegotiation committee, and Ukachukwu Awuzie as president of ASUU. Some eight years down the line, with two Fed Govt/ASUU agreements bruised and battered, the federal government has turned round to make Dr Babalakin the leader of the government team. The muddle and insincerity can’t get much worse than that.
What was wrong with the 2009 agreement? And what ailed the 2013 redone agreement? It is understood why the government is not tired of negotiations. But why is ASUU enthusiastic about another round of what will likely turn out a wasteful exercise? The answers are simple. The only thing wrong with both the 2009 and 2013 agreements, despite the government squeezing water out of the ASUU stone, is not the agreements per se but the government’s claim that the kind of money needed to implement them was simply not available. The huge emoluments and allowances of public officials and their aides do not corroborate the government’s argument. As for ASUU, the only explanation for its enthusiasm is that it has since reconciled itself to eking out small gains from unlimited and often protracted negotiations. If snail walk is all it takes to make progress, it thinks, by all means, so be it.
The substance of the disagreement is plain enough for all to see. Education in Nigeria is in a shambles, completely broken down. To remedy the dire situation, ASUU has among other demands asked for government to progressively raise budgetary allocations to education from the piddling figures of today to some 26 percent of the budget; allocate half of that to the universities, including compelling states to make reasonable increases in their own allocations to state universities; and incentivise lecturers by paying them earned academic allowance now estimated to be about N128bn, among other very crucial demands. The government has on its own responded by leaving untouched virtually all the maladies afflicting the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education and instead preferred to set up new ones. It is true that less than a quarter of those qualified for admission to universities or polytechnics find placement in the few tertiary institutions available, but why add to the morass?
The new 16-man committee constituted to examine the 2009 agreement afresh gives the government and ASUU some hope that something agreeable to all stakeholders would be fashioned out. Nigerians will hope that everyone can be spared another needless break in the academic calendar, with students in particular desperate to graduate no matter how deplorable the quality of their degrees and diplomas. Cynics who distrust government motive will tune off naturally and expect the worst. The government will hope that the 2009 agreement can be reconfigured by a chastened negotiation team to conform with the new recessionary realism of the day.
This column takes a totally different view. It would be pleasantly surprised should the negotiation team break the mould and produce a workable, implementable agreement. In the opinion of this column, that implementable agreement is far-fetched. If the right thing could not be done when the money was available, even when the country had a former member of ASUU, Dr Jonathan, at the helm of affairs, it is unrealistic to expect anything better when the Education minister, given his action over the 13 new varsities whose vice chancellors were summarily sacked, and President Muhammadu Buhari, have shown a worrisome lack of depth in tertiary education affairs. Where the Education minister has been fairly narrow-minded, the president has shown a disturbing proclivity for designing and executing programmes in consonance with available funds. He does not envision ambitious educational reforms which should drive a frantic desire to source for funds.
In short, this column sees the renegotiation of the 2009 agreement as a pointer to the rudimentariness of the government’s education programme. It is a pointer to the president’s lack of education vision, and a far more annoying pointer to the ordinariness of the work going on in the Education ministry. Rather than focusing on renegotiating the 2009 agreement, should the Buhari presidency not have presented a lofty and breathtaking education vision for the country? Should that great vision not show the country what the goals of a revived education sector are, and how the funds necessary to drive the vision would be sourced, and perhaps what roles citizens are expected to play? After almost two years in office, should the government not be telling Nigerians the milestones it hopes to achieve, and how and, more importantly, why Nigerian schools would in the near future outclass those of West Africa and Africa, and thereafter compete favourably with the rest of the world?
It is of course not expected that ASUU would give up, for to give up is to finally bury education in Nigeria. Indeed, given the number of Nigerian academicians in foreign universities and research institutions, it is an indication that many have lost faith in Nigeria’s education sector. That faith will not be restored with the little amount voted for the sector each year. That faith will not be restored as long as the president has said precious little about where he hopes to take education in the next few years and what he hopes Nigeria can achieve technologically and scientifically with a revived education sector. The Dr Babalakin-led committee will of course hammer out palliatives to secure industrial peace in the universities. But the fundamental change Nigeria needs and the funds to drive it can only come from the president’s vision. Sadly, there is absolutely no indication that such real change is afoot. That kind of change can only come from the inside of the leader, a leader intent on daring great and mighty things, a leader who can see far into the future, not a leader cajoled by restive unions whose perspectives on the subject can sometimes prove too abstract for him. -
CAN, Obazee and the future of Financial Reporting Council
IN their first response to the sacking of Jim Obazee, until last week the executive secretary of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRC), the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) found it irresistible to gloat. The opinion of Musa Asake, a reverend and the General Secretary of CAN, on the matter is most pertinent, though it may represent nothing more than the initial response. Said he: “The sack of Jim (Obazee) is good riddance to bad rubbish. Anybody that wants to fight the church will find himself where he does not want. Jim got to the position by the grace of God, but set out to probe and destroy the church of God. I spoke with him several times on this issue but he wouldn’t listen. He was going to take the church to what is worse than Armageddon. Thank God the authorities have stepped in to right the wrong. He should have been fired a long time ago and we don’t know why he was left alone, but God’s time is always the best. That code should be thrown out completely because government should not interfere with the church. The church is a no-go zone for the government. Doing that has serious implications. If they attempt it, it will lead to confusion in the nation.”
The sacking of Mr Obazee was precipitated by the shocking decision of the highly respected Pastor Enoch Adeboye to step down as the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Nigeria. Pastor Adeboye hinged his decision on a provision guiding tenure limit in the FRC Act that made it imperative for him to take that course of action. He would still remain as head of the church worldwide, he explained. A day after Pastor Adeboye stepped down, the media was ablaze with speculations that other general overseers who had exceeded more than 20 years as heads of their churches would also soon step down. But it was obvious that passion was inflamed over the matter, with Mr Obazee unable to secure the kind of support needed to turn the tables against CAN leaders.
Even though the FRC Act exceeded itself by venturing into tenure politics in the church and other faith-based organisations, this column will not be drawn into making comments on the propriety or otherwise of the FRC Act or the decision by Pastor Adeboye to step down. What is intriguing, however, is the decision by CAN to, as it were, take ownership of the FRC Act as if the law affected only the church and other faith-based organisations. In fact, the law also affects the business community as much as anyone else. More crucially, even among faith-based organisations, the law also affects all Christian denominations and Islamic groups, many of which are at peace with the Act. It simply does not seem right, whatever its shortcomings, to regard the law as targeting either the church or a part of it, or even faith-based organisations alone. The controversy is unnecessary, especially after the matter had been thrashed out in the courts and in other fora where stakeholders met minds on the matter, and notwithstanding prevailing dissatisfaction with the outcomes of the meetings and legal cases.
CAN reserves the right to object to the law and probably see it as undue interference in its internal procedures. But the law deals with much more than the issue of tenure. The Christian body can even continue to assail the law, and if it likes read meaning into any or all of the actions of the FRC’s sacked chief executive, who is said to have been a former RCCG pastor with an axe to grind. But what CAN is not expected to do is to engage in the kind of gloating noticeable in its initial responses. The public will hope that when it finally releases its main response as promised, CAN will give a more sober assessment of the issue and offer an inspiring way forward. For after all, the law, as obnoxious as it may seem, actually offers church leaders an opportunity to return to its foundational and doctrinal past when apostolic leaders devolved financial and administrative responsibilities to others while paying watchful, intense and weighty attention to spiritual matters. That way, both on earth and in heaven, shorn of the everyday mundaneness of running the church, church leaders would live above suspicion and aspire to the more perfect stature they are expected to tremblingly work out. -
Awujale versus Obasanjo
IT has taken almost six years for the autobiographical book of the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Adetona, to attract the attention it richly deserves. No one is prepared to say how the new publicity happened, but sometime last week, someone sent an excerpt of the book to media houses containing an unflattering description of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo as a venal, vainglorious and grasping leader. The excerpt has caused an uproar. Chief Obasanjo is predictably peeved, but no one is coming to his defence. He apparently does not need one, for he himself is a one-man wrecking crew. Satisfied that the excerpt has received rapturous attention, the shadowy figures behind the first excerpt, or perhaps someone else altogether, has decided to draw public attention to other scathing parts of the book. Where the first excerpt deals with a duplicitous Chief Obasanjo, the second focuses on the political malfeasance of the equally grasping and venomous ex-military head of state, Ibrahim Babangida.
Oba Adetona’s recollections are detailed and riveting. Perhaps the evasive and epigram-loving Gen Babangida will respond sometime soon. However, the impatient and unreflective Chief Obasanjo could not wait. His response indeed evoked a mystery. For a book that is so well written and elegantly produced, it is a mystery that it has taken so long to foment a fitting buzz around it. While media professionals have proved to be consistently lazy in doing justice to good books, it is intriguing that Chief Obasanjo, who is so mercilessly skewered in the book, has not had the time to peruse the book, indeed study it. And when his attention was drawn to the said excerpt, as he put it condescendingly, it is shocking that he rushed to publish a response without getting a copy of the book to enable him pen a comprehensive and reflective response. It is vintage Obasanjo.
The book is undoubtedly frank and revealing. The now widely advertised famous excerpt in particular shows Chief Obasanjo as a dishonest, unfeeling and unprincipled opportunist. Neither his public service (1976-79; 1999-2007) nor his private image, both as a father and as an individual, disproves the conclusion so poignantly reached by the Awujale. It is, therefore, surprising that there are indications that some Yoruba elders might wish to intervene in what they describe improbably as a quarrel between the ex-president and the Ijebu monarch. There can be no reconciliation between the two, nor should there be, for both gentlemen are the products of very dissimilar backgrounds: one is principled and noble in his carriage and words; and the other has since his military days remained a rake and rambling man. What is there to reconcile? Indeed, how do you reconcile fire and water?
The Awujale autobiography reveals many things about many people. But for the purpose of this short essay, the excerpt in reference should suffice to address the topic of today. It is clear the Awujale is not a fan of Chief Obasanjo, that great and self-righteous narcissist. But whether the excerpt sets out to paint a realistic picture of the duplicitous and unprincipled former president contrary to the one he continues to project falsely, or it simply sheds light on the contrived misunderstanding between the business mogul, Mike Adenuga, and Chief Obasanjo and his Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is not immediately clear. What is clear, however, is that the picture painted of the Obasanjo persona is a terrible deconstruction of a man so morally perverse that it is a miracle he ruled for eight years, not to talk of finding his way out of the presidency in 2007.
The summary of the Awujale thesis is that Chief Obasanjo unreasonably harassed Mr Adenuga in order to get at the then Vice President Atiku Abubakar, with whom he was at daggers drawn, and that, as a condition to stop the witch-hunt, the ex-president opportunistically coaxed the donation of a massive library building out of the business mogul. The uncompleted building is stil on the university campus as evidence. Oba Adetona did not mince word. His account is detailed, restrained, elegant and convincing, complete with instances, locations and sometimes eyewitnesses. Chief Obasanjo was on the contrary truculent, abusive and, for effect, diversionary and deliberately insinuative. It would require a leap of faith to believe the ex-president’s account. There was no conviction behind his response, only chutzpah, and it was obvious he had been cornered. First, he said it was beneath him as president to sit down with Mr Adenuga before the press, suggesting that he had no reason to meet with the business mogul, not to talk of cajoling him to contribute a building block to the Bells University of Technology. Then, most fallaciously, he passed the buck for that cajolery to the genial Professor Julius Okogie, who was at the time the vice chancellor. Of course, no one would doubt that the letter asking for that humongous donation would be signed by the vice chancellor. But to suggest, no matter how remotely, that Chief Obasanjo did not know about the letter to Mr Adenuga and other generous contributors would be stretching credulity to its elastic limit.
It did not require the exposition of the Awujale to tell the public just how deceptive and intimidatory Chief Obasanjo is. But it helps that, using definite examples and mentioning names and instances in his autobiography, the Awujale has done the public the great service of disrobing the masquerade. It would be interesting to find out how the list of donors was drawn up, or whether it could have been done outside the inspiration and connivance of Chief Obasanjo as a bullying president. It requires someone of such quaint and contradictory moral perspective like Chief Obasanjo not to see the contradiction of receiving, assuming he did not solicit, help or donation from a businessman under investigation, if not persecution, by the EFCC. The fact underscored by the Awujale in the short excerpt is that Chief Obasanjo has never been loyal to anything or person, not to talk of loftier and more esoteric matters of ideas and ideology. Furthermore, suggests the excerpt, Chief Obasanjo broke every rule known to the Nigerian constitution, and every moral compass known to man. He got away with nihilism because he was so indecent as to be prepared to deploy every force and evil imagination known to law or even outside the law.
The case made against Chief Obasanjo in the Awujale autobiography is so revealing that it is not surprising the former president immediately opted for ancillary matters and other digressions alien to the book. But the ex-president’s response missed the mark so badly that he began to accuse the Awujale of having stakes in Mr Adenuga’s and Aliko Dangote’s business empires. He forgot that he became the subject of many allegations because he was president and faced accusation of conflict of interest when he asked for donations, directly or indirectly, and covetously established connections with other people’s businesses. Oba Adetona is right never to have trusted Chief Obasanjo, and even more principled by refusing to at first back the retired general for the presidency in 1999. The oba does not give the impression in the excerpt that his view of Chief Obasanjo has changed. Indeed, he is not disappointed.
Chief Obasanjo has done spectacularly well for himself. He is not known to wait until he has left office before feathering his nest, as a former super permanent secretary once recounted in a newspaper article of the moment a former military head of state, Murtala Mohammed, wanted to replace Chief Obasanjo as Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters. And as his first wife, Mama Iyabo, also corroborated, the ex-president is not guided by any moral restraint despite his sham and fulsome display of religiosity. Even some of his children, one of whom he betrayed spectacularly, are aghast at the monstrosities he seems so effortlessly capable of. Nuhu Ribadu, former boss of the EFCC may deny all he wants, but the facts available suggest that the ex-president manoeuvred EFCC to less than salutary duties. The impeachment of Governors Rashidi Ladoja of Oyo State, Joshua Dariye of Plateau State and Diepreye Alamieyeseigha of Bayelsa State prove how disreputably Chief Obasanjo bastardised the constitution and tore to shreds the moral and political fabrics of the republic.
Such a man, so burdened by the cumulative moral baggage mentioned in the Awujale excerpt, cannot find the conviction and logic to fault the poignant allegations against himself. Indeed, it is fitting that he made only half-hearted attempt to dispute the Awujale’s account of his serial betrayals. From all indications, Chief Obasanjo will go back and read the entire book in the hope he can find more materials to deploy as a tool of vilification against the Ijebu monarch. But the true hope is that having spent nearly all his adult years faking a moral credential he is not capable of sustaining, and having vilified and undermined his betters with a severity that is truly fanatical and farcical, at last, someone like Oba Adetona and books like that salient autobiography will finally put paid to the former general’s pretensions. History, it is clear, will judge him very badly. But the real catharsis for a long-suffering people, including some members of his family, forced to swallow his atrocities for the past few decades, will be when his self-confessed thick skin is breached and he is exposed and demystified.