The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

Govt meets Southern Kaduna mayhem with sophistry

AFTER waiting endlessly for the hyperbolic governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, to pacify the rampaging and vengeful herdsmen he acknowledged were his Fulani compatriots from within and without the country, the federal government has finally and sulkily embarked on remedial measures to bring peace to the pillaged villages of Southern Kaduna. Brigades of the military and squadrons of the police are being deployed in the area, and disarmament is reportedly ongoing. It took months of intense killings and pillaging for the government to finally stir itself, and only after locals had started to organise self-defence.

But despite the horrendous scale of the destruction in Southern Kaduna, and the apparently targeted attacks against the area’s ethnic minority and Christian communities, the government is offended that anyone could attempt to lather the conflict with ethnic and religious colouration. The Interior minister, Abdulrahman Danbazzau, a retired army general and in fact former Chief of Army Staff, who had all along been anonymous in the conflict, finally found his voice to condemn those he growled were looking for excuses to ‘create divisions along ethnic and religious fault lines for their own selfish interest.’ He came to this and other conclusions without sitting down with religious leaders and chiefs of the affected areas or carrying out a fact-finding mission himself. All he was concerned with was sermonising about ‘true religious leaders not fanning hatred.’ A thoroughly disenchanted and displeased Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has replied him, citing evidence and figures.

After first describing the attackers as foreigners, some of the northern leaders in a position to do something about the conflict, including both the Interior minister and the state governor, have finally buckled under pressure to describe the attackers as ‘common criminals’. This is at least an improvement over months ago when the attackers were described as foreigners on revenge mission. Perhaps not to be misquoted or misinterpreted, President Muhammadu Buhari has kept discretely quiet, with his aides hurling the dictum ‘action speaks louder than words’ at the public. Southern Kaduna will hope, as the CAN leaders say, that the 16 villages occupied by the ‘foreign invaders’ will be retrieved from them by resolute and impartial security officers and the locals resettled back in their land.

By prevaricating for so long over the attacks in Southern Kaduna, the government allowed the problem to fester and attain definite ethnic and sectarian shapes. Now, to reshape the conflict into a purely criminal matter, as the government disingenuously prefers, will be difficult in the short to medium run. In a conflict where the president says nothing except in press releases, nor does he visit victims or scorched settlements, where the Inspector-General of Police angrily disputes casualty figures without providing alternative statistics and even misquoting the Rwanda genocide figures, where the Interior minister pours scorn and diatribe against those who see tribalism and sectarianism in the crisis, and where the state governor has made many unwise and reckless statements in the past few months, it is not surprising that indigenes of the area and many who sympathise with their plight accuse all the four government officials of hiding behind religious and ethnic sentiments to manage the crisis in a slipshod manner.

It is not difficult to see why the Southern Kaduna crisis will be a campaign issue in 2019, especially given the appalling and belated responses of the federal and state governments. They will remind the federal government that it looked the other way as a 74-year-old woman, Bridget Agbahime, was murdered for religious reasons by identified people while the suspects are blatantly and provocatively discharged through actions orchestrated by the Kano Justice ministry. They will wonder why government officials keep talking about patriotism when little or nothing has been done to instil confidence in anyone, whatever their religion or ethnicity, that Nigeria means so much more than each person’s petty prejudices.

January 8, 2017
Boko Haram and premature celebration

WITH the capture of Ground Zero, the elegant name given to a part of the previously impenetrable Sambisa forest where Boko Haram was bivouacked, President Muhammadu Buhari has fittingly congratulated Nigerians and the military for the defeat of the sect. The death toll, not to talk of the displacement of north-easterners, was excessive and almost unbearable. The economic wastage the insurgency induced was also telling. In all ramifications, including the huge sacrifice made by troops who fought the militants, the insurgency was a tragedy of excessive proportions. With the almost mystical and even forbidden Sambisa forest breached and Ground Zero scorched, it was at last time for considerable backslapping among government officials and shouting of loud hoorays among troops. Even then, the celebration may be premature.
It took former president Goodluck Jonathan an inordinate amount of time to convince himself of the nature of the revolt in the Northeast, and the kind of resolve needed to tackle it. He initially mistook the Boko Haram menace for a political tool by the opposition to embarrass and hobble his government. This was why when he finally mustered the will to visit Maiduguri, the political epicentre of the revolt, he talked down on the elite whom he accused of engineering the catastrophe, and imperiously warned that his government would exact a terrible price for one more soldier killed. By the time he understood what was happening and began to assemble the military hardware needed to fight the rebellion, it was too late to salvage his crumbling political capital.
President Buhari, therefore, deserves commendation for making the defeat of Boko Haram a part of his campaign promises, and fulfilling the promise less than two years after he took office. The missing Chibok schoolgirls have, however, still not been found. The military, which fled from virtually every skirmish with Boko Haram in the heat of the rebellion, has also largely redeemed its battered image, an image that was denuded by both cowardice and extrajudicial killings. While these commendations are not misplaced, and it is proper that many top Nigerians across party lines are celebrating the decimation of the sect, it is also clear that the revolt is not truly ended. Boko Haram is no longer a fighting force, and does not hold any territory, but it is still capable of doing a lot of damage, a lot indeed. The military may have vanquished the sect, but it is now time for the intelligence services to step in vigorously to finally deal the sect a demoralising and extirpative blow.
However, overall, the celebration and the backslapping have so far not taken cognisance of the right lessons from the withering and bloody seven-year insurgency. Without the right lessons, the country may be doomed to repeat the crisis in one form or the other, and in one other place or another. There is nothing indeed to indicate that the government is even interested in learning the right lessons, lessons that should include the socio-economic reasons for the revolt and the political and religious factors that gave it fillip. First, the Northeast itself. For many decades, the political leaders of the region recklessly abused the trust reposed in them as they emptied their states’ treasuries and subjected their people to harrowing deprivations. Poverty naturally breeds large-scale disenchantment and provides a ready army of foot soldiers and cannon fodders for revolt. In addition, the Northeast elite, like other elites in the country, lacked the discipline and common sense to embrace and enforce the secularism guaranteed by the constitution. They misguidedly flirted with theocracy, oppressed and discriminated against religious and ethnic minorities, and dangerously whetted the appetites of messianic adventurers who became naturally and ravenously insatiable. The consequent explosion was inevitable.
A second lesson concerns the government’s incompetent response to crises. Boko Haram had its beginnings in 2002. Between that time and 2009 when an all-out war seemed to have broken out, the law enforcement and intelligence communities were either inured to their responsibilities or they treated the burgeoning crisis with disdain and absolute lack of foresight. And when in 2009, the matter came to a head, the security establishment was even found more wanting. First they quelled the disturbance with heavy firepower and arrested the leader of the sect, Mohammed Yusuf. But no sooner soldiers handed him over to the police than he was extrajudicially murdered in July 2009 on the supposition that he and those murdered with him attempted to escape.
It took a huge outcry from the public and protesting Boko Haram elements for the government to stir itself to arrest the extrajudicial killers in March, 2010. It then took more than one year before the suspects were charged in court in June 2011. But it turned out that investigators were reluctant to do anything about the police suspects for the simple reason that the government itself is at bottom not opposed to self-help or subverting the rule of law. That same atrocious behaviour has continued to this day. Following clumsy investigations and deliberately botched prosecution, the five suspects — ACP John Abang, ACP M. A. Akeera, CSP Mohammed Ahmadu, ASP Madu Buba, and Sergeant Adamu Gado — were discharged by Justice Evoh Chukwu in December 2015. The six prosecution witnesses, said the judge, gave worthless evidence, and even the Investigating Police Officer (IPO) did not visit the scene of crime.
It was not difficult to understand why the investigations came up short. The sentiment among police officers at the time was decidedly against prosecuting the five suspects. According to the officers, the Boko Haram attack on police barracks in Maiduguri in 2009 cost the lives of 29 officers and 37 family members, some of whom were slaughtered like rams. They also alleged that in 2007 when police first arrested the sect leader, Uztaz Yusuf, in 2007, the National Security Adviser (NSA) at the time was said to have requested for him to be surrendered to his office for a repeat investigation. Thereafter, he was released. By extrajudicially murdering him, the policemen seemed to suggest that whoever his backers were would be unable to prise him loose from detention a second time. Amnesty International considers this sentiment to be rife among Nigeria’s law enforcement agencies.
The Buhari presidency has talked of rebuilding the Northeast and stamping out corruption that engenders socio-economic revolts in the first instance. On their own, these measures are sensible. But they do not address the flawed disposition of this government, as well as others before it, to treating symptoms of crises rather than their root causes. As Kaduna State is demonstrating in Southern Kaduna and against Shiites, the attitude of many state governments, and indeed the federal government itself, to dissent and favoured lawbreakers is selective, indulgent and disruptive. For the hundreds of people murdered by religious zealots during the many Maitatsine riots in the North in the 1980s, how many rioters were prosecuted and found guilty of capital crimes? The government’s attitude to secularism is abysmal, sectional and deeply provocative. Until this attitude is rectified — and there is nothing to show that it will be rectified soon — periodic revolts would continue inexorably until a cataclysmic end is achieved.
Boko Haram may have been decimated, but the factors that predisposed the country to that ferocious insurgency continue to see the dangerously below the surface. Whether as it concerns the Buhari presidency or the governments before it, there is no sophistication in governance, no adequate or sensible concept of the principles of justice and how the criminal justice system should work, no equity or fairness as the vision of the leadership elite is distorted by favouritism and ethnic exceptionalism, no respect whatsoever for the secularism provided for by the constitution, and no brilliance in tackling developmental issues. Indeed, to worsen the matter, governments in these parts view national security as coterminous with private security, with officials eager to ingratiate themselves with presidents and governors and engage in degrading abnegation, both of their persons and their beliefs.
If the Buhari government and the governments of the Northeast can be persuaded to engage in deep soul-searching, they will recognise the need to examine the lessons the Boko Haram insurgency has afforded them. They are, however, unlikely to engage in such philosophical exercises. They are more preoccupied with mop up operations, and are eager to bask in the euphoria of defeating the sect, rebuilding cities and villages ravaged by war, and holding firmly to antiquated views of leadership and governance. Boko Haram crisis was not inevitable. The government’s incompetent response to the sect’s provocations made it inevitable. Many more crises, some more severe than Boko Haram, are waiting to manifest should the government continue to pursue divisive and prejudiced public policies. It is impossible not to imagine that the template (economic, political, judicial, legislative, ethnic and religious) in use at the moment will not predispose the country to far more convulsive challenges that will strike at the country’s existential roots.

January 1, 2017
Religion, politics and Nigeria’s future

ON this Christmas, when many newspaper readers feel disinclined to do anything challenging, including reading hard stuff, it is fitting to write on something racy and breezy, something that will not addle the brain or task the distressed minds of the people during a biting recession. Everyone cares about Nigeria’s future, so this column will make reference to it, no matter how cursorily. Nigerians are deeply political; they live and breathe it, even if sometimes misguided. The column will bring it in. Religion is also truly the opium of Nigerians; what would they do or be without it? Therefore, weaving the three issues together in a joyous manner to remind Nigerians who they are and where they are in time should briefly arrest their attention in this dark period of recession, paranoia and apprehension.

This column may draw flak by suggesting that Nigeria’s problem is chiefly leadership. But hard as it has tried to re-examine that apparently controversial thesis in order to accommodate the counterargument that change indeed could also begin with the followers, not just the leaders, it has been hard to find substance to the counter-thesis. Every Nigerian government has engaged in the delusion that a re-orientation campaign could offer the magical propagandist shot to ginger the people into patriotic fervour. That that campaign has repeatedly failed in the past few decades has not deterred every succeeding government from obsessing with that chimera. The ongoing ‘Change Begins with Me’ campaign will of course naturally fail, but it will not stop the next government from chasing shadows, even if conjured.

The problem, it seems, is that Nigerian leaders, not to say the people themselves, have no vision of their country’s future. They prefer expediency to structured work. Much worse, both leaders and the led have probably one of the world’s most perverted conceptions of religion, one so skewed and abhorrent it is hard to imagine anything worse. And to add to this stultifying nonsense, they all lack a coherent and sensible ideology of politics. But this column’s preoccupation today is leadership, a factor that continues to undo the country and endanger the future of Nigerians in particular and the black man in general. Former United States president Richard Nixon once proffered the view that, “All the really strong leaders I have known have been highly intelligent, highly disciplined, hard workers, supremely self-confident, driven by a dream, driving others. All have looked beyond the horizon. Some have seen more clearly than others.”

Highly intelligent, highly disciplined, President Nixon had said thoughtfully. He is right. The reader should, in fact, cast his mind way back to the First Republic and then zoom down to the current Fourth Republic, without excluding or excusing the corrupting intervening military governments. Who among Nigeria’s past leaders fits the bill? Why does anyone expect something to be built on nothing? While for ethnic reasons many Nigerians excuse the appalling failure of their kinsmen in power, and even come to their defence sometimes, the reality is that none of them, Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa/Fulani, has faintly approximated the Nixonian conception of leadership. Not one, and not even now. It is pointless trying to encourage any of them, for no leader can give what he does not have.

President Nixon was even more unsparing. He says in his book, ‘Leaders’: “The would-be leader without the judgement or perception to make the right decisions fails for lack of vision. The one who knows the right thing but cannot achieve it fails because he is ineffectual. The great leader needs both the vision and the capacity to achieve what is right. He hires managers to help him do so, but only he can set the direction and provide the motive force.” Going further to describe management as prose, and leadership as poetry, President Nixon adds, “The leader necessarily deals to a large extent in symbols, in images, and in the sort of galvanising idea that becomes a force of history…The manager thinks of today and tomorrow. The leader must think of the day after tomorrow. A manager represents a process. The leader represents a direction of history…”

This column has always argued that a leader without a fiery and transcendent intellect cannot hope to achieve anything substantial or enduring. He must have a brilliant and instinctive grasp of the complex and interwoven issues his country wrestles with, and a comprehensive appreciation of the other far-reaching issues shaping the world — indeed, an understanding of the spirit of the age. It is only then he can work on those issues and shape or reshape them to fit his vision. What ails Nigerian leaders is their debilitating inability to comprehend the intriguing and sometimes mystifying issues of the day, their lack of discipline, and often their inability to extricate themselves from the primordial issues with which they have become willingly entangled. In short, they have no sense of history, and no sense of where their country should be in the coming decades viz-a-viz other countries. This column posits that no one should attempt to lead a country without first engaging in a deep study of the forces and issues that shaped the character, policies and worldviews of Alexander the Great, Deng Xiaoping, Julius and Augustus Caesar, Winston Churchill, Genghis Khan and Charles de Gaulle, among many others.

Two qualities are indispensable to a leader. One, the leader himself must possess that innate and intrinsic passion to affect deep and fundamental changes in the society, if not the world. To possess this attribute is to also prequalify himself intellectually and have the ability to appreciate and deconstruct complex issues almost effortlessly. Second, is the need to develop this great and essential attribute by equipping himself with wide-ranging studies of leaders throughout history. China’s Deng did not just happen upon the building blocks of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’, a mixture of ‘socialist ideology with pragmatic market economy’ by chance. Once he developed the idea, he was prepared to suffer for it, and in fact did.

The point, however, is that whether it pertains to elected governments or military regimes, Nigeria has lacked leaders, not just the right leaders, all of them fifth-rate. When they are not megalomaniacal, they are demagogic. But nothing undermines a country’s destiny more than to be ruled by demagogues devoid of intellect. Consider one or two of Nigeria’s heads of state and presidents. After the death of Gen Sani Abacha, some military generals got together and without a vision of Nigeria and deep understanding of its future and how to guarantee and energise that future, decided to impose Olusegun Obasanjo on the country. The consequences of that imposition are evident in his misshapen policies, his anti-democratic and monarchical measures that saw him deposing governors and enthroning presidents at will, and his braggart attempt at self-perpetuation. His heedless approach to policy and governance, though far better than his successors’ and predecessors’, ensured that after him, Nigeria simply went back to the starting block, bruised, battered and disillusioned.

Somehow, too, some Nigerian leaders of northern origin, though they espouse sham religiosity, have at various times worked to undermine Nigeria’s secularity, either by covertly pushing the country into the cauldron of religious politics and organisations of the Middle East, or by building a mosque in Aso Villa without a concomitant consideration for a Christian chapel. This column believes that neither a mosque nor a chapel should have been erected at the Villa. But once one was done, it was necessary to erect the other. (The leaders must hope that the day will never come when a shrine for traditional worshippers will be required). Shamefully, it has had to take a Christian president to erect a chapel, demonstrating the smallness of the minds of his predecessors and successors alike, and the disgusting exploitation and misuse of religion. The regime of religious discrimination in the North, mixed with lethal socio-economic factors, inevitably produced an incandescent brew of violence and conflicts that still rages in the region. Till today, short-sighted national and regional leaders still do not appreciate the cause and effect of the multiple religious upheavals convulsing the North and insidiously spreading to other parts of the country.

If more than two millennial ago, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (c. 605 BC – c. 562 BC) could cast the net wide for the recruitment of the next generation of leaders and advisers for the empire, including inducting gifted slaves into the empire’s leadership cadre, it is shocking that President Muhammadu Buhari has constricted his leadership recruitment to his kinsmen, narrowed his definition of democracy, routinely subverted the constitution and the law in the name of desperate and urgent national causes, and fixed his government’s lodestar by a strange and simplistic dualism of good and evil, and wrong and right, which even his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, as bad as he was, had trouble embracing. That reprehensible dualism is today alienating a large section of the nation, from the Southeast which is groaning under obnoxious and oppressive measures inspired by Abuja, to the Middle Belt ravaged by herdsmen as the federal government pretends to some concerns, to the militarised states of the South-South which seem to draw the contempt of the federal government, and to the Southwest which is deliberately being divided in order to be ruled in the classical realpolitik sense.

If Nigeria is to survive, and if democracy is to endure, the country needs to produce the right leaders in 2019. Not the kind of demagogic and supremacist leader Kaduna State projects in Governor Nasir el-Rufai, a man who has unwittingly divided his state along Fulani versus others, Christian versus Muslim, and Muslim sect versus Muslim sect. Given the way Mallam el-Rufai is governing his state, it is clear who he is and what he is capable of, not to talk of the content of his tunnel vision. Not President Buhari who inherited a distressed and mismanaged country suffocating under Dr Jonathan’s parochial and short-sighted measures and policies. Given the way the president has selected his aides, he has unfortunately only managed to widen the cracks, both religious and ethnic, and suggested disingenuously that he would have advanced much more rapidly had the constitution not erected impediments in his path. And not anyone Chief Obasanjo might anoint, for the self-centred ex-president himself has inchoate knowledge of what leadership is all about, and no idea what a wholesome and inspiring vision for the country should be.

If Nigeria is to gain vibrancy, if divisions are to be healed, if true leadership is to be enthroned in place of paranoia and sectionalism, and if ethnic and religious strife is to be subjugated, Nigeria must carefully examine those who offer themselves for election in 2019. They must vote right. But can they? This column is unsure, for the Nigerian voter has not always demonstrated the detachment and wisdom necessary to put the right people in office, the kind of detachment that downplays ethnic and religious bigotry. So, then, the first challenge is for those who nurse 2019 ambitions to begin selling themselves and their ideas to the country’s six geopolitical zones, recruiting friends and supporters, and interacting with the business, political and religious elites from all parts of the country. They must demonstrate by learning, eloquence and vision that their conception of Nigeria is different from the archaic and schizoid one bandied about by past and present leaders. By personal discipline, character, intuition, intellect and overarching appreciation of the issues of the future and of the moment, not to talk of the demand of office, the would-be Nigerian leader must be able to conceptualise a country able to provide leadership in constitution and law for the rest of Africa, a country destined for prominence and preeminence.

Above all, the aspiring leader must eschew the disgraceful subservience past Nigerian leaders demand from their subordinates, a subservience that makes aides, heads of institutions, including the security agencies, to measure performance in terms of how much they grovel before the president and please him, a subservience that puts premium on loyalty to the president than loyalty to the country and constitution. It reflects badly on a president when state security agencies attempt to bar or circumscribe discourse and dissent, when they simply ignore the constitutional provisions on fundamental rights and threaten and humiliate the opposition, when aides themselves read the lips and mind of the president before joining debates at executive meetings. There is an absolute need for a new grade and cadre of leadership, for on these hang the future of the country, not on economic policies or job statistics.

To adopt the sentiment of President Nixon, Nigeria ‘requires leadership of the highest order.’ If in 2019 the country misses this great leadership, the real change and restructuring needed, the inspiring peep into the future without which the country will continue to grope and stumble, and the infusion of great men and women of character and self-confidence prepared to join hands with a truly democratic and far-sighted leader, will be lacking. It is not certain that getting leadership of the highest order can be postponed for much longer without paying a huge and unsustainable price. One thing is, however, certain: the status quo is no longer tenable and does not even make sense.

December 25, 2016
Magu comes to grief

AS his confirmation screening before the Senate drew near, Ibrahim Magu, boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), worked tirelessly, lobbied furiously, spoke conciliatorily, and waited with bated breath to see what fate had in store for him. He had done his best; he could do no more. In the end, more than six months after his name was forwarded by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to the Senate, Mr Magu came to grief in a dramatic, almost predictable fashion. His kinsman in the Senate, Senator Ali Ndume, fought bravely to get him confirmed. The Senate would have none of it. Based on security reports authored by the Department of State Service (DSS), growled the Senate, Mr Magu was too compromised to be effective in that sensitive beat. The fate of the anti-graft boss was thus sealed in an executive session without him saying a word in his own defence.

Theoretically, Mr Magu’s name can be represented by President Muhammadu Buhari once certain remedies are introduced. But given the circumstances leading to the anti-graft czar’s rejection at the hands of exultant and sniggering senators late last week, the president is unlikely to bother. It speaks volumes that the president himself did not forward the name of Mr Magu when there was no complication or any technicality barring him from doing so. He left that controversial and thankless job to Professor Osinbajo. The president could also have lobbied fiercely to get Mr Magu confirmed, especially given the fact that the country was abuzz with plans by powerful interests inside and outside the Senate to scuttle the confirmation. The president chose to be aloof, hiding behind the magisterial sentiment of letting institutions do their work professionally.

Shortly before his Senate debacle, Mr Magu must have sensed that he was virtually alone in the task of securing confirmation. True, he had a few top legislators and officials behind and beside him, but it was nothing compared to the forces his enemies had mustered. And enemies he had aplenty. This column, strangely, was not one of them. It had shown reservations about how the anti-graft boss performed his functions, and on one or two occasions written harshly about his coarse methods, some of which taunted the rule of law, mocked common sense, and frayed national sensibilities. But it suggested that the passion Mr Magu brought to the job, not to say his apparent patriotic glow, should earn him the confirmation. On another occasion, the column suggested exasperatingly that though Mr Magu’s confirmation was a foregone conclusion, the Senate should grill him intensively and extract a promise to abide by the rule of law.

It is, therefore, regrettable that Mr Magu has been dealt a devastating blow. He is unlikely to be represented to the Senate, and he is unlikely to continue working in the EFCC. There is no one to save him, though he would have been a rather competent czar of the organisation. Though his enemies were plentiful and adequately mobilised and motivated, what did him in was not whether he ran the EFCC competently or not, or whether they loved him in the Senate or not. He was unhorsed by the same forces that prop up the Buhari government he serves. He was done in from within, not from without. He belonged to the wrong camp, even though ineluctable fate made it impossible for him to belong to the right camp; and there was, alas, nothing he could do to remedy that unsavoury fact.

Top officials of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), including its chairman, Professor Itse Sagay, prefer to blame the legislature for Mr Magu’s woes. They are wrong. If Mr Magu had not first been smothered in the president’s kitchen cabinet, the Senate would have had a hard time burying him. Mr Magu doubtless had few friends in the legislature — given the lawmakers’ reckless proclivity for corruption and fondness for unethical shortcuts — and even fewer friends anywhere else, considering how corruption had eaten deep into the national fabric. But his nemesis should be located squarely in the president’s kitchen cabinet where the anti-graft boss was a loathed outsider. Many civil society groups have also suggested that Mr Magu came a most appalling cropper because corruption was fighting back. This silly refrain masks terrible undercurrents in the seat of government, much of which even now remains a deep mystery.

Yet, on the surface, it is difficult to ignore the official reasons given for Mr Magu’s misery. He had had a running battle with top shots of the DSS, with the two security and anti-graft organisations at sixes and sevens. A day or two after the DSS enacted their spectacular raids on the residences of some eight top judges, including two Supreme Court justices, and reporters were wondering whether the service had not crossed into the domain of the anti-graft agency, a secret service spokesman sneeringly told the media that the EFCC was too tainted to organise the raids. It was not until last week that Nigerians received substantiation for that objurgatory dismissal. According to the DSS security report cited by the Senate to disqualify Mr Magu, the anti-graft boss lived a double life, tainted life of luxury, engaged in financial dalliance with corrupt people, and made himself liable to be bought and kept. They cited names, figures and facts. The Senate took so much perverse delight in the report that it was unwilling to even give Mr Magu a hearing. It appeared to everyone involved — the powerful DSS that had the ear of the president, and the Senate that had the legislative powers to vet Mr Magu — that the anti-graft boss had been abandoned to the wolves. The story of how Mr Magu united his enemies against himself may not have been fully told yet. Certainly, it goes beyond the fight against corruption or corruption fighting back.

Some eminent lawyers have asked the DSS report to be made public. The media has done that already. But neither the Senate nor the DSS, nor yet the presidency, will deign to answer questions from anyone on how and why they bumped off their chief enemy. The fight has been won and lost. On the whole, what is emerging is that corruption is much more entrenched than first believed. In addition, it is clear that the reason for the war between the forces arraigned on both sides of Mr Magu has little to do with extirpating corruption or finding a better replacement for the anti-graft boss. There is nothing altruistic about the turf war between the agencies; and there is little to give anyone hope that a better and more efficient person can be found to head the EFCC. After all, Mr Magu’s nemesis, the DSS, is itself being run more like a Gestapo than a constitutional, accountable organ designed to protect the nation from internal subversion.

But if anyone thinks that the anticipated departure of Mr Magu will bring about a rapprochement between the EFCC and DSS, that person is an incurable optimist. The bitter, snarling rivalry will continue. But more than any of the armed or security services, the DSS will always have the ear of the president. It will be closest to him, not just because the president has put his kinsman at its head, but because of the peculiar nature of the secret service and their indispensability to the president’s safety and his government’s security. For now, the DSS boss, the imperious Lawal Daura, and the Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, agree. Notwithstanding their own faults, their synergy will mean much to President Buhari whose government is now obviously and disturbingly riven by conflicts, rivalries and unhealthy competitions.

Mr Magu may have come to grief, and the country, including this column, may be sad to see him go, but it is doubtful whether in the light of the controversy swirling around the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal, there is anyone left who thinks an incorruptible person exists anywhere inside or outside the government, especially inside. (See Box) If the accommodation scandal attributed to Mr Magu and his acolytes is established to be a true reflection of the facts on the ground, then, truly, the people and the government must begin to despair.

Prof Sagay says no one can push Mr Magu out, and that if need be, he could continue in office in acting capacity. It is not clear whether the eminent professor made the statement after the publication of the DSS report. No constitution empowers anyone to stay in acting capacity interminably, for that would undermine the duty of the Senate to screen and confirm or reject a nominee. Except President Buhari experiences an epiphany and decides to back Mr Magu, the web spun around the anti-graft boss in the presidency is so tight that it is hard to see him breathing, let alone functioning. It is also hard indeed to see the president defying a conspiracy perfected between the DSS and the National Assembly. For if the president has experienced any epiphany at all, it is the realisation that most of those who surround him, not to say officials who are far removed from him, are embroiled in one corruption controversy or the other. If the president thinks himself a good man, he must by now be convinced that to find just one more person like him is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The Senate’s increasing assertiveness, if its less than altruistic side is peeled off, is a positive spinoff from the Magu controversy, and a natural consequence of the many months the presidency assailed key figures of the National Assembly either through the courts or by simply railing against them with unprintable epithets. The legislature is becoming more confident to check the excesses of the executive and vet their policies. Had the presidency been able to instigate a march on the legislature as it seemed dangerously poised to do in the giddy early days of the anti-corruption war, this salient and salutary role would have been buried under the canopy of sycophancy or lost altogether. Reassuringly, the legislature is now asserting itself, and may, despite its own greed and incompetence, inadvertently help to consolidate the principles and practice of democracy if Nigerians can somehow find the selflessness and discipline to elect the right lawmakers. But for Mr Magu, the war may already be lost.

December 18, 2016
The unseemly David Lawal controversy

IN calling for the suspension from office and prosecution of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal, the Senate has begun to revel in legislative activism on a scale that probably astounds the lawmaking body itself. The Senate accuses Mr Lawal of gross abuse of office, particularly regarding the role he and his proxies are alleged to have played in awarding, receiving and shoddily executing about N2.5bn Internally Displaced Persons-related contracts. He denies wrongdoing. But the chairman of the Senate ad hoc committee that investigated the hastily awarded contracts, Senator Shehu Sani, insisted that Mr Lawal, an engineer, used his position to enrich himself by awarding contracts to companies he had interest in. One of those companies was Rholavision Engineering Limited.

A livid Mr Lawal, however, shot back: “I can recognise a vendetta and witch-hunt when I see one; so, I am wondering if I should bother myself about it at all. You may wish to know that I was never invited to the hearing. Apparently, the Senate has an agenda best known to its leaders. Corruption is fighting to drag all good men down to its muddy, slimy level.” Considering the damage the DSS report on Mr Magu has done to the president’s team, the SGF will be under pressure to step aside or find ways very quickly of exonerating himself. That will, however, be difficult. Mr Lawal speaks obliquely of vendetta without indicating what offence his enemies allege against him or why he thinks that corruption is fighting back. Many officials of the Buhari presidency, including Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai, the Chief of Army Staff accused of buying houses abroad and living above his means, are under one pressure or the other to come clean on their assets and properties.

It is helpful that the Senate is taking a more active interest in holding the government accountable to the people. That activism is a product of the initial alienation the legislature suffered when President Buhari assumed office and began his effusive display of sanctimoniousness. But whether that activism and seeming altruism reflect a principled and intuitive understanding of the Senate’s role in entrenching democracy, or it was simply a desperate cry for accommodation in the Buhari presidency, is hard to say. Furthermore, now that the legislature is playing a more active role in government, who is to hold it in check, when, as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo said, the legislature itself is also reeking of corruption in a galling way?

It is not known how the SGF contract scandal will end, for it is still at its infancy. But it does appear that the initial disturbances and tremors in the Buhari government and the misunderstanding between various institutions and agencies represent nothing more than a ploy to create a situation of balance of terror or mutual assured destruction for the combatants. If democracy is to endure, the rule of law must not only prevail, institutions without exception and individuals in high places must be stringently held accountable. By an accident of fate rather than systematic deliberateness, the judiciary and the executive are now being held in some appreciable way accountable. The legislature must be made to follow suit, even as the public must slowly begin to understand that Nigerian democracy can neither mature overnight nor be sanitised comprehensively in one fell swoop. Under Chief Obasanjo’s prefectural brusqueness, institutions behaved fairly predictably and cooperated with one another, at least superficially. Now, thanks to a recalcitrant DSS, a more activist Senate, an insufferable EFCC led by the waspish Mr Magu, the alleged contract shenanigans of a beefy and accusatory SGF, and above all a disconnected, distracted and sometimes bemused President Buhari, the principles of natural selection are furiously nurturing an evolutionary soup from which, hopefully, if the economy permits, a better and brighter democratic tomorrow can emerge.

December 18, 2016
El-Rufai’s fiefdom

KADUNA State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, is probably Nigeria’s most controversial governor today, perhaps his state’s most controversial ever. Beside him, the ideological rigidity of Balarabe Musa, the state’s and Nigeria’s first impeached governor, was nothing but child’s play. Does Mallam el-Rufai think his penchant for controversies damage his reputation? Not at all. He revels in controversies. In fact, since he is incontrovertibly cocksure of everything, he thinks his combative and disputatious ways underline the high frequency at which his intellect operates and the high level at which he as a politician luxuriates, as well as reflect poorly on the abysmal level at which his opponents and traducers wallow. There is no disabusing his mind on these matters.
The Kaduna electorate did not examine Mallam el-Rufai very well before voting him in. There is of course nothing wrong with voting a somnolent politician into office, nor for that matter a megalomaniac. But it is crucially important for the political culture and economic development of a state that the electorate must know the worldview of their elected representatives. Now that he is their governor, and will be in office for a little more than two years more, they will have to manage him as much as they can and try to either curb his needless pugnacity or coax him into some form of conciliation. Mallam el-Rufai will not change, and indeed can never change. On the three salient issues agitating the otherwise cosmopolitan state, a state the governor is attempting to transform into a fiefdom, he thinks he is indisputably right and his critics are incontrovertibly and lawlessly wrong.
The three issues are his deafened ears to the Shiite crisis, as reflected in the notoriously redacted White Paper issued by his government last week; his malignant hatred for critics, as reflected in his animus against Shehu Sani, a Kaduna senator; and his mismanagement of the herdsmen/farmers clash which is transmuting through his clumsiness into ethnic and religious conflict. There are more issues manifesting even now, and there will be more before his controversial first term is over, for the governor is adept at turning a perfectly normal disagreement into a conflict of untold severity. Ignore his inability to sustain loyalty to a cause, to a mentor, and, contrary to what he says and thinks, even to the constitution. He is too anarchic and his mind a seething cauldron of misadventures to moderate his interactions with both the laws of the land, which he loves to quote out of context, and the people around him, whether his betters or his inferiors.
First, then, the Shiite crisis. Left to Mallam el-Rufai, Kaduna State should be organised into a community of goose-stepping cadres who wake up every morning, file to the governor’s door, and pay obeisance before the day’s work. Unfortunately for him the Shiites, particularly the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), happen to be cut from the same cloth as he — difficult, imposing, intellectually arrogant, contemptuous of other people’s ways and beliefs, and intractable. But unlike the governor, the IMN lacks the state coercive tools to influence the general adoption of their way of life. Unlike him, they have neither the state apparatus to inflict violence on others even near the scale their traducers have accused them of nor the arrogance to suggest openly and repeatedly that they could never be wrong. Even if, as the governor suggests, the Shiites secretly promote or nurse the romantic idea of Iranian-type revolution, and the state had a responsibility to nip it in the bud, it is questionable whether the el-Rufai approach is the best.
In any case, last December, hundreds of Shiites, some say nearly a thousand, were killed in what the state described as a clash between the IMN and soldiers. The cause and course of the clash, not to talk of the casualties estimated to be more than 347, have been well discussed in this place and elsewhere in the public domain. The most recent controversy, however, involves the White Paper recently published by the state. Put side-by-side with the fairly balanced report of the Justice Mohammed Lawal Garba-led judicial panel that looked into the Zaria disturbance, the White Paper is a poorly worded and arrogant piece of justification of brazen and horrendous crime. The judicial panel complained of lack of cooperation from the army to determine the scale of the slaughter. The White Paper ignored that lacuna and instead focused almost exclusively in damning the Shiites. Rather casually, it also suggested that the federal government could try to determine the culpability of soldiers in the massacre and take action. Among other things, the White Paper, quoting state burial law of 1991 and the Geneva Convention, also justified the hasty burial of victims in mass graves. This, in the 21st century.
Mallam el-Rufai is governor of the state and leader of both the law-abiding and lawbreaking indigenes of Kaduna State. A fuller reading of the documents on the Shiite crisis shows that the governor simply has no conception of government as a ramifying social contract, nor even a fair understanding of the burden of statesmanship on his puny shoulders. He had made up his mind about the Shiites and what to believe, and so, he simply ignored most of the recommendations in the judicial panel’s report and instead bore down on the panel’s recommendations that were averse to the IMN. There is little anyone can do or say to compel Mallam el-Rufai to have a wiser and nuanced appreciation of the crisis and what needs to be done to deliver justice. He does not care, partly because his judgement is very poor, and he lacks even a modicum of wisdom to navigate the delicate, difficult and sometimes treacherous terrains of delivering fairness and equity to nonconformist citizens. He is obsessed with maintaining the powers of the state, but sustains that power crudely and archaically. For someone so messianic and so conceited, it is not surprising that he thinks he can get away with the injustice his government has perpetrated and justified against the massacred members of IMN.
Mallam el-Rufai’s poor handling of the Shiite challenge is, however, not the beginning or the end of his attempt to create a fiefdom for himself. Even in the rather straightforward case of herdsmen/farmers clashes, the governor has behaved most incompetently and irresponsibly. He tries to give the impression of neutrality and fairness, but every step he takes or not take, and everything he says or not say, has implicated him as biased, parochial and full of ethnic hubris. There is no doubt whatsoever that he believes in Fulani exceptionalism, and has barely disguised his contempt for other groups. While responding to allegations of siding with Fulani herdsmen in their clash with farmers in Southern Kaduna and displaying nonchalance to the sufferings of minority ethnic groups, Mallam el-Rufai inadvertently disclosed that his government sought out the aggrieved herdsmen even outside the country’s borders and paid those among them who claimed to have suffered economic losses.
Though the governor’s aides have struggled to deny that any payment was made to those who invaded and murdered aggrieved farmers in Southern Kaduna, they have not been successful. There is no other way to interpret the governor’s statement on the matter. Hear him: “… Fulanis are in 14 African countries and they traverse this country with their cattle. So many of these people were killed (during the 2011 elections crisis), cattle lost and they organised themselves and came back to revenge… We took certain steps. We got a group of people that were going round trying to trace some of these people, trying to trace some of these people in Cameroon, Niger Republic and so on, to tell them that there is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging you to stop killing. In most of the communities, once that appeal was made to them, they said they had forgiven. There are one or two that asked for monetary compensation. They said they had forgiven the death of human beings, but wanted compensation for cattle. We said no problem, some we paid. As recently as two weeks ago, the team went to Niger Republic to attend one Fulani gathering that they do every year with a message from me.”
Not only does Mallam el-Rufai demonstrate his allegiance to a Fulani nation of his abstraction, he finds no difficulty at all in diminishing the place of the Nigerian constitution in his governorship, and scandalising the oath he took to protect the constitution. It is not surprising that by his attitude, statements and responses to the pains of the Southern Kaduna people, not to talk of Christians who distrust his intentions, he is not viewed as a neutral party in the conflicts raging in that part of his state. Again, the governor neither cares nor thinks he is wrong. He is always right — he of outsized ego and abrasive words. As his interminable quarrel with Senator Sani shows, Mallam el-Rufai does not demonstrate a good understanding of democratic principles, nor does he consider that as a governor, he needs to build consensus and bridges between peoples, and between his government and those living in the state, whether they voted for him or disliked him. It should alert him to possible dangers ahead that two of the state’s three senators object to the way he carries on — his intolerance and hubris especially. More people within and outside the state have also noted his unsuitability to the office he occupies, and it worries everyone but his fanatical supporters.
Sadly, it is pointless to advise Mallam el-Rufai, and this column will not venture one. He listens only to his own counsel, especially when it concerns his ego and people of differing and probably competing backgrounds to his fond prejudices. He will always double down on his own private ideals within his limited worldview. He will fight his opponents in order to vanquish them; he will disrespect anyone but himself; and he will attempt to create a fiefdom where he, his stock and sectarian ideals reign supreme. Those he cannot disrespect or vanquish, he will treat with contempt. And if God Himself were to question his strange and offending ways and beliefs, he would ask for the code governing the relationship between God and man to be reworded for his own benefit and exemption.

December 11, 2016
Trump, Nigeria and the Romney effect

UNITED States President-elect Donald Trump’s dilatory approach to picking his Secretary of State has had the unintended consequence of exposing the poor quality and character of many politicians. No one exemplifies this sorry fact than former U.S. presidential contender, Mitt Romney, who ran for the White House in 2012, but has briefly lobbied to be picked as the U.S. number one diplomat. The U.S. does not of course have a monopoly of such politicians, but it is remarkable that despite all he said about Mr Trump during the recent presidential campaigns, Mr Romney could offer himself for the Secretary of State position. Does he not have shame? Does he think it is patriotism?
Here are just two of the nasty statements Mr Romney made about Mr Trump: “Dishonesty is Donald Trump’s hallmark … His is not the temperament of a stable, thoughtful leader. His imagination must not be married to real power … Think of Donald Trump’s personal qualities, the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third grade theatrics. We have long referred to him as “The Donald.” He is the only person in America to whom we have added an article before his name. It wasn’t because he had attributes we admired …”
“Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat. His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.”
There is nothing to show that Mr Romney’s observations on Mr Trump were misplaced, or that on assumption of office, the president-elect would suddenly transform into a statesman. The essential Mr Trump manifested in the campaigns, and both he and his team think he will remain the same person many sensible and judicious people unflatteringly think him to be. If the chances of Mr Trump transforming into a better leader is slim, if the chances of offering America and the world what he does not have do not exist, why would Mr Romney seek to work under that phony? except that he himself is probably a phony. To Americans appalled by their presidential choice, and to the agitated world, Mr Romney would be a reassuring pick for Secretary of State. Yet, the fact is that most politicians do not have character, as the Kaduna State governor, Mallam el-Rufai, has shown in his attacks against his mentors.
All over the world, the quality of leadership has declined steeply. It is evident in Nigeria, where for the past 17 years or so, including even the present, only fifth-rate leaders have assumed office. It is a tragedy that the names being peddled for 2019 presidential election and beyond are also fifth-rate politicians whose charlatanism is so offensive that it makes the sensible to despair. Other than white racists, America must feel the tragedy of having the vacuous Mr Trump take office immediately after an intellectual and wit like Barack Obama. But that tragedy is commonplace in Nigeria, indeed second nature to them, as politicians crisscross political parties in search of either refuge from predictable government tyranny or the proverbial fleece of power, wherever it can be found.

December 11, 2016
Ondo poll as precursor

WHEN Governor Olusegun Mimiko won re-election in 2012 by a sizable and incontrovertible margin, pushing the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate, Rotimi Akeredolu, to third position, the factionalised Southwest political elite was flush with excitement. The vocal and pro-Mimiko faction hailed both the election and victory as a harbinger of new politics in the region, a redefinition and recasting of the fundamentals of Yoruba leadership politics and struggle. Some analysts even went as far as suggesting that Dr Mimiko would and should be the fulcrum upon which a new Southwest leadership and politics must balance. Since the re-election battle in Ondo in 2012 was cast as either pro- or anti-Bola Ahmed Tinubu struggle, and Mr Akeredolu, a senior advocate, was his badly beaten candidate, the very large pro-Mimiko forces nurtured the impression that Southwest politics had begun to change irreversibly.
It mattered little, as this column argued at the time, that Dr Mimiko and his Labour Party (LP) received votes from just 15.8 percent of the about 1.63m registered voters, and 41.7 percent of the 624,659 who actually voted. His two main opponents received a combined but bigger support of about 17.7 percent of the registered voters and 51.1 percent of those who actually voted. Worse for everyone who carelessly attempted to extrapolate the region’s political future from the 2012 votes, voter turnout was just about 38.1 percent. This column pointed out at the time that it was unscrupulous to make dangerous extrapolations, not to talk of assigning great futuristic roles to Dr Mimiko without the relevant statistical support. Much worse was the fact that in character, intuition and charisma, not to talk of administrative skills and vision, Dr Mimiko was not what he was cracked up to be. It turned out that four more years of Dr Mimiko neither brought him nearer the approximation his supporters projected of him nor the epoch-shaping and region-defining greatness the faction of the Yoruba elite read into his election.
Now, eight years after that thunderous misjudgement, another misdirected faction of the Southwest political elite and their northern and national allies led by President Muhammadu Buhari himself are making very ambitious, if not completely misleading, extrapolations from the just concluded 2016 Ondo governorship election. Quite apart from the fact that the same Mr Akeredolu, who was rejected in 2012 on the pretext of being Asiwaju Tinubu’s lackey, has now being canonised as the freedom fighter and rebel anchor of a new Southwest political movement, even the simple statistics that should guide an understanding of the election has been mischievously ignored or downplayed. To the pugnacious faction from the Southwest and their Abuja allies, it appeared sufficient that Asiwaju Tinubu had again been rejected.
The statistics of the election, however, lends itself to a different reading and interpretation. Voter turnout was again a dismal 34.6 percent, even though the number of registered voters remains roughly the same. In 2012, the register contained 1.63m names; in 2016, it is 1.69m. Out of the 2016 registered voters, Mr Akeredolu and his APC received about 14.5 percent support, and 41.9 percent of the 584,997 people that actually voted. His main opponents, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate Eyitayo Jegede and the Alliance for Democracy candidate Olusola Oke, received a combined 16.4 percent support from the registered voters and 47.4 percent of those who actually voted. Extrapolating from the figures for voter turnout and total registered voters, Mr Akeredolu’s performance and even acceptance in Ondo are not as inspiring and seismic as the Southwest faction and its Abuja allies think.
What matters to the Southwest/Abuja alliance is that Mr Akeredolu has won, from which they are determined to make their extrapolations and project into 2019, if not 2023. With Ondo safe in the APC column, the alliance, believed to be led in part by Asiwaju Tinubu’s former protégés — Babatunde Fashola, Kayode Fayemi and the fiercely independent Ibikunle Amosun — assumes that a leadership change in the Southwest could be in the offing. This column reflected this obtuse line of thinking when President Muhammadu Buhari began assembling his cabinet. Should the president plan to run for re-election in 2019, the alliance believes that perhaps only Lagos, not even Osun, would hold out. The peculiar politics of Edo State, which had just been won by the APC under the president’s leadership, and which under ex-governor Adams Oshiomohle had lusted after the Abuja alliance more than it looked westward, indicates that the entire former Western Region column would be hard put to repel the president’s blitzkrieg.
Though the Southwest face of the alliance continues to morph considerably, at least today, the faction’s leaders are fairly well known. Their differences with Asiwaju Tinubu may, however, not lend themselves to easy analysis. For Mr Amosun, for instance, his preference for Abuja may not be unconnected with his long-standing relationship with President Buhari, begun around the time when both were top leaders of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), and his idiosyncratically fierce desire to answer to no one. Whatever relationship he had with Asiwaju Tinubu was simply electoral expediency. Mr Fashola has been scarred by the difficult and frosty co-existence he had with Asiwaju Tinubu between 2007 and 2015, a frostiness that showed itself very early in his first term and ended in 2015 on a bitter and implacable note. Dr Fayemi’s animus is even foggier, considering the distance between Ekiti and Lagos and the fewer interactions he had with Asiwaju Tinubu, and also the dynamics of his re-election fiasco. But as it is, the former Ekiti governor has been even more brazen in aligning with sides and forces opposed to the former Lagos governor.
What is more crucial to understanding the Ondo poll and its future portents is not why a faction of the Southwest political elite opposes Asiwaju Tinubu so vehemently, but the indisputable fact that the region is factionalised in an eerie replay of the politics that undid the Western Region in the First Republic, defanged its political leaders, tore to tatters the reputation of top Yoruba politicians and professionals, and ultimately doomed the country to war. If it had occurred to the three identifiable leaders of the Southwest faction of the Abuja alliance that they were playing a familiar but somewhat complex role in the unfolding political dynamics of the region, they have not shown it at all. It seemed to them that supporting Mr Akeredolu in the November 26 poll was the perfectly simple and sensible thing to do. The governor-elect is of the APC after all, and APC appears in all ramifications to be progressive. More, even Asiwaju Tinubu himself supported the Ondo politician in 2012, and the lawyer-politician appears more illustrious than ex-aspirant Olusegun Abraham, the former Lagos governor’s preference.
With the exception of Afenifere chieftains Ayo Adebanjo and the late Olaniwun Ajayi, not many Southwest politicians, and certainly not the aforementioned Southwest faction of the Abuja alliance, have attempted to get a deep understanding of the forces the Ondo election result is unleashing. President Buhari, ceteris paribus, will run in 2019. The president and his private think tank, which incidentally does not include any of the Southwest faces of the alliance, need the Southwest to strengthen his electoral hand. But they need the region on their own terms, not the galling terms they believed they succumbed to in 2014-2015 when Asiwaju Tinubu called the shots. The president and his men are not accustomed to playing second fiddle, so they needed to rejig the party and play the game from a position of strength and power. Contradistinctively, except the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo, and Asiwaju Tinubu whose mercurial politics has made them unaccustomed to grovelling or surrendering to any ethnically-inspired talk of exceptionalism, most Southwest politicians, including Messrs Amosun, Fashola and Fayemi, seem completely inured to some of the underlying nuances of politics which the northern elite instinctively grasped back in the First Republic.
Asiwaju Tinubu is not without his faults, what with the imposition of candidates he appeared to have masterminded when he called the shots in the Action Congress (AC) and later the ACN. Then consider also his forceful and sometimes impatient ways and politics that grated on the nerves of many of his protégés. But he has remained more ideological than any of his peers. He has enunciated a great vision for Nigeria surpassing those of many developed democracies, but he has voiced his frustrations with the fecklessness of many elected leaders incompetently thrown up by the political process. In fact, it is precisely his attempt to reduce the margin of error in leadership recruitment that has brought him into conflict with many of his protégés and others far afield. Yet, it is significant to know that his opponents, whether in the Southwest or Abuja, have not disagreed with him on ideological grounds. The disagreements have been limited essentially to struggles over positions and influence. Indeed, the vacuity of the ruling party today, the brittleness of its inner core, and the errancy indicated by its half-digested political and economic paradigms are a result of sidelining the one person that seems to have an obsession with and passion for the great possibilities available to the country.
Both President Buhari and Asiwaju Tinubu have been decorous in managing their disagreements over the way the APC and the country are being run. That decorum showed in their responses to the Ondo poll wherein the latter congratulated the victor, Mr Akeredolu, and the former reiterated his conviction that Asiwaju Tinubu played the right, sensible politics in the election. No one believed them, not even this column. One byproduct of the 2012 Ondo election was that the true character and capacity of Mr Akeredolu came into the open rather quickly. That character and capacity were not inspiring, a factor that made this column to endorse Mr Oke whose chances of winning were slim without the unalloyed support of other disenchanted APC aspirants. Mr Akeredolu is neither a visionary nor an administrator, nor one with the depth and capaciousness of understanding and administration to pull Ondo into the ‘first’ Nigerian world as was done with Lagos. He is not alone in this. The Southwest has witnessed a steep and terrible decline in leadership and other economic and social indicators that should worry the region’s indigenes.
Apart from the underdevelopment of the region, it is not surprising that the governors and other political leaders appear unresponsive to the complex politicking shaping out in the country. A reflection of this decline is that some former and serving governors of the region are now labelled Buhari Boys. In the past, Southwest politicians would embrace labelling only if it was based on the tested and ennobling philosophy or ideology of a leader. President Buhari has neither demonstrated unusual administrative acumen nor projected any endearing philosophy or ideology with any constancy, coherence or passion. Whether the Oyo State governor, Abiola Ajimobi, recognised this fact and spurned the label and sat gingerly on the fence is not clear. But he is not pejoratively described as one of the Buhari Boys. The Osun governor, Rauf Aregbesola, will be relieved to know he is also excluded from the label, but he has opened himself unwisely to allegations of playing religious and vacillating politics. In addition, his covert support for Mr Oke during the APC primary managed to hand the controversial victory to Mr Akeredolu. More, the close relationship between him and the wavering and slightly iconoclastic and acerbic APC National Legal Adviser, Muiz Banire, a former Tinubu protégé and now opponent, has made it difficult to place the Osun governor and his politics.
The Southwest is, in short, no longer a bastion of ideological and exemplary politics, a fact that is worsened by the region’s ossifying and destructive fractiousness. The Ondo poll, though terribly misread, is, therefore, signposting a very uncertain time for the Southwest. The region was never a united political entity, and perhaps does not even need to be, despite possessing a rich ethnographic stimulus. But it should be worried that it seems dangerously poised to re-enact the sanguinary and destabilising politics of the First Republic going by the alliances shaping up on the two main sides of the political divide. In the First Republic, the region played regicidal politics and opened itself up for humiliation and exploitation. Under the Buhari presidency, the same politics is being replayed. Chiefs Adebanjo and Ajayi saw these portents and were desperate to avert it. But few are converted to their sagely point of view.
What is even much more niggling is the politics and fate of Asiwaju Tinubu himself. Despite denials and pretences, the fact is that President Buhari and his brain trust have exploited the naivety and grudges of leading Southwest politicians to checkmate and sideline the former Lagos governor and senator. The problem is less that he is sidelined than what the consequences of that sidelining portend for the region. The Southwest politicians now aligning with President Buhari without the binding principles of ideology and philosophy, perhaps in anticipation of the post-Buhari era, will of course come to grief if the history of the Southwest is anything to go by. The region will also continue its precipitous decline in nearly all socio-economic indicators, managing in the process to produce grovelling fifth-rate governors and legislators. For Asiwaju Tinubu, his confidence in his politics of openness, which had seen him embrace, align with and nurture politicians from everywhere irrespective of their ethnicity and religion, may have been badly shaken.
Against all odds, he fought to build a political party that embraced everyone without discrimination, while also deliberately seeking out promising talents. The handshake he extended across the Niger against the protests and warnings of his region has been undermined by both the northerners he thought possessed a similar pan-Nigerian ideal with him and south-westerners he thought he had mentored into public renown. His consolation should be that though the handshake has failed, and is unlikely to be rediscovered in the foreseeable future, he has, like Chief Awolowo, kept his wits and refused to subordinate his broader and tested ideals, both philosophical and ideological, to the political parochialism of those who intrigue for dominance rather than development and unity. In the long run, such confidence and pertinacity always pays. The only pity is that it is unlikely any south-westerner will again be eager to endorse or embrace the kind of pan-Nigerian ideal necessary to build a great and egalitarian Nigeria. President Buhari is content to preside over a country skewed and stewed in narrow flavours. He cannot have his cake and eat it too, having so egregiously defined and circumscribed his presidency in such a manner that many Nigerians from the South and even the Middle Belt suspect a supremacist agenda wafting in the air.

December 4, 2016
Obasanjo adamantly self-righteous as ever

IN a devastating putdown last week and with his usual cruel frankness, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo gave what amounted to a mimic state of the nation address at a lecture in Lagos that pummelled four principal groups or persons in Nigeria, including President Muhammadu Buhari, the judiciary and the National Assembly. The former president was unsparing and unrepentantly direct. His motives, as usual, are controversial and probably impure; but whenever he can fathom his way through the stalactites and stalagmites of his cluttered thoughts, he manages to address issues that trouble the nation. Even then, though his diagnoses may sometimes be right, his prognoses are often either misplaced or self-serving. This contradiction is customary of self-righteous leaders.

On the economy, Chief Obasanjo had this to say in the paper he gave at the First Akintola Williams Annual Lecture in Lagos: “No administration can or should be comfortable with the excruciating pain of debilitating and crushing economy. Businesses are closing, jobs are being lost and people are suffering. I know that President Buhari has always expressed concern for the plight of the common people but that concern must be translated to workable and result-oriented socio-economic policy and programme that will turn the economy round at the shortest time possible…I believe that going for a huge loan under any guise is inadvisable and it will amount to going the line of soft option, which will come to haunt us in future. We immediately need loans to stabilise our foreign reserve and embark on some infrastructure development, but surely not $30 billion over a period of less than three years.”

Whether he was merely trying to curry national relevance or sustain it, Chief Obasanjo nonetheless spoke the truth to President Buhari on the economy. The president probably realises and feels the pains the people are going through, but he seems to have reposed all hope in securing a $30bn external loan to jump-start the faltering and gasping economy. But if Nigeria went through excruciating pains to exit a crippling $33bn loan secured by many governments over three decades, and had to pay a painful $12bn to get a relief of about $18bn, which many economists felt was insensitive and unwise given the size of the Nigerian economy, it is indeed hard to defend the reckless attempt to secure another $30bn loan, this time, in three years, in addition to the about $10bn already owed. There is no way to defend a $40bn debt.

The former president was even more vitriolic on the controversy surrounding the arrest of judges and the raids on their residences. Said he: “Three weeks before the first three judges were arrested for corruption, I was talking to a fairly senior retired public officer who put things this way, ‘The Judiciary is gone, the National Assembly is gone, the military is sunk and the civil service was gone before them; God save Nigeria’. I said a loud Amen. Three weeks later, the process of saving the Judiciary began. And if what I have gathered is anything to go by, there may be not less than two score of judicial officers that may have questions to answer. That will be salutary for the Judiciary and for the Nation. While one would not feel unconcerned for the method used, one should also ask if there was an alternative. A drastic action was needed to save the situation, albeit one would have preferred an alternative that would serve the same purpose, if there was one. In the absence of that alternative, we must all thank God for giving the President the wisdom, courage and audacity for giving the security agencies the leeway to act.”

Nothing showed the appalling depths leadership has sunk to in Africa than Chief Obasanjo’s superficial reasoning on the judges’ controversy. He supported the treatment the justices were subjected to, he said grimly, but he felt bothered, only as an afterthought, that there could be an alternative to a measure he thought was drastic but needful. Here, as elsewhere during his presidency, his military instinct trumped his democratic instinct. His preference for a better alternative, which he seemed to think existed somewhere in his imagination, was nothing but a product of his boyish admiration for rhetoric. Almost as soon as he asked himself whether an alternative existed, he also answered that none existed, and that on the judges affair, God obviously imparted wisdom, courage and audacity to President Buhari for which Nigerians must be thankful. There was nothing about the “intellectualism, strategy and philosophy” he talks so glibly about when he later, in the same lecture, indulged in self-praise over his tenure. It was clear he lacked the intellectual depth for introspection, and the expansive knowledge, logic and discipline for reflection. He thought nothing of the cost to the judiciary of the president’s action, nor, as he was to argue later when he called for a purge of the legislature, of the dire impact of a grandstanding but morally defective executive imposing heavily on the other arms of government. The fact is that both Chief Obasanjo and President Buhari are not convinced democrats. There were indeed alternatives to the manner the president moved against the judges, but these do not fit into their constricted worldviews.

Chief Obasanjo was in his elements when he denounced the National Assembly. He had had a running battle with that arm of government when he was president, and they had scuttled his dream for tenure elongation or, as former vice president Atiku Abubakar said, life presidency. He never forgave them, and there was no foot they could place right after that. Hear him: “The National Assembly stinks and stinks to high heavens. It needs to be purged. With appropriate measures, the budget of the National Assembly can be brought down to less than 50% of what it is today…The National Assembly cabal of today is worse than any cabal that anybody may find anywhere in our national governance system at any time…The National Assembly is a den of corruption by a gang of unarmed robbers.”

The former president was deeply embroiled in the scandal the legislature became under his presidency. They were instinctively corrupt; but so was he. They were amoral; so was he. They placed themselves before country; so, too, did Chief Obasanjo in an even more demeaning and offensive manner, for he was incapable of placing anything, including his family and friends, before himself. He had no capacity for sacrifice of any kind, and it is baffling he demands it of others. Had Chief Obasanjo been altruistic and intellectual as he has tried to convey, he would have coaxed or cajoled the legislature into the path of rectitude and helped the country lay a solid foundation for democracy. Instead, he was locked in deathly struggle with them and engaged in needless and wasteful supremacy battle with an arm of government simple foresight would have led him to nurture. Quite apart from the unpresidential scurrility with which he dismisses the legislature, it is tragic he is lending his atrocious examples to President Buhari who himself always acts as if democracy and its restraints are inimical to common sense, peace and stability.

Finally, it is perhaps fitting that of the four notable things Chief Obasanjo drew attention to in his controversial lecture, he should end with a fulsome and exasperating acclamation of his presidency. He had noted, he said dryly, that President Buhari lumped all his predecessors together in one grand notorious heap. That should not be, he cautioned, for the period between 1999 and 2007 was the golden era. “The blanket adverse comments or castigation of all democratic administrations from 1999 by the present administration is uncharitable, fussy and (futile),” fumed Chief Obasanjo. “Politics apart, I strongly believe that there is a distinction between the three previous administrations that it would be unfair to lump them all together… Now that we have had change because the actors and the situation needed to be changed, let us move forward to have progress through a comprehensive economic policy and programme that is intellectually, strategically and philosophically based.”

He is right to counsel President Buhari to quit fussing over the past and get a move on. But for a man who, while he was president, launched a presidential appeal fund for his own private university and library, and raised billions, it is not certain what kind of examples and ethics he was recommending. The economy under him ran on the adrenalin of high oil prices, the kind President Buhari wistfully talked about some months ago as the economy began to plummet. As long as he has breath, ex-president Obasanjo will continue to buffet the country with his sanctimonious examples of a great yesteryear which he presided over. He will have to be tolerated, even if he is nearly always wrong or self-centred. He had done some good as president. Like his good fortune when heaven paved the way for him with the death of Gen Murtala Mohammed in 1976, and rising oil prices when he was elected president in 1999, his modest achievements and his extraordinary good luck will qualify him to continue ridiculing his betters with malignant glee and his inferiors with unsparing animosity.

November 27, 2016
Buhari and 2019 through the looking-glass

IN an interview he granted the Abuja-based Daily Trust newspaper, Buba Galadima, a leading member of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and former chieftain of President Muhammadu Buhari’s former party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), has suggested that the president could find himself isolated should he attempt to run for the presidency again in 2019. Alhaji Galadima was a notable force in the CPC before it collapsed into the APC. Today, all he has left are his voice, conviction, frankness and moral force as a politician. He, however, remains an elder in the APC, but a politician denied his due like many others.

What he said of the president’s re-election chances is not new, for the president’s wife, Aisha, had offered the same sentiments; but it was strong enough and constituted a disturbingly powerful reminder to elicit responses from the president’s aides. Garba Shehu, one of President Buhari’s aides, shot back defiantly, suggesting that the masses were still solidly behind the president. Alhaji Galadima, he said, was neither a popular voice within the party nor solid and electable enough a politician to make the observations he offered the press. On the former chieftain’s allegation that the APC was so poorly funded as to be unable to fund its activities, Mallam Shehu was silent. But in his fairly acrimonious response to Alhaji Galadima’s cynicism, he had managed to give indications that the president might not be averse to running again in 2019. The president’s wife had also refused to rule out her husband’s interest in re-election when she gave that fiery and unprecedented interview to the BBC in October.

It is safe to say today that there is nothing, nothing at all, to suggest that the president will not run for the presidency in 2019. All pointers indicate he will. His wife suspects as much. So, too, does Alhaji Galadima. What is more, there is not a soul in Nigeria who does not think President Buhari will run in 2019. What both his wife and Alhaji Galadima suggest, and perhaps every other person too minus his aides and ministers, is that the president has done very little to justify seeking re-election. He has done little to ensure his party, the APC, is both cohesive and well funded. He has blatantly refused to keep his former friends, not to talk of retaining the admiration of most of the strangers who gave their lives and money to install him as president. His policies have been misdirected and desultory, and the economy has nearly gone into a tailspin. He has not even inspired the country, in the face of a dwindling economy, with his democratic credentials, assuming he has any. All he has done is to widen his net of enemies and cause a huge uproar everywhere, a fact recently alluded to by a peevish ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo.

Chief Obasanjo had the chance to lay a solid foundation for democracy. He shirked that responsibility. His successor, Umaru Yar’Adua, was too hobbled by illness to show his hand. Goodluck Jonathan, who took over from the frugal but intellectual Alhaji Yar’Adua, was too ingratiating and undisciplined to cultivate a strong and ideological following. But he was still a democrat. Last year, President Buhari assumed office with a pan-Nigerian and pan-ideological mandate to begin the process of healing and unifying a country racked by graft and political division. Instead, he has unleashed the fiercest, narrowest and most divisive of measures never believed possible in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country still trying to overcome the guilt and pain of a civil war that seethes and festers below the surface.

But the president, as Mallam Shehu appears to suggest, will probably run for office again on the back of the populism he seems so certain will garner votes for him. He has enacted a populist but cosmetic purge of the judiciary, and he has been encouraged by a querulous and unreflective Chief Obasanjo to enact the same ‘magic’ in the legislature, not minding the absence of substance in his populism or rhyme in his methods. Like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and the atavistic Donald Trump of the U.S., the essential President Buhari is misanthropic and beyond salvage. He will want to rely on populist support and votes in 2019, and the masses do indeed pack a great and overwhelming knockout punch. But the same masses who are naturally hesitant and often inflated with regicidal delusions will rely supinely on the leading of the elite. Except the president can find a way to insinuate himself freshly into their confidence a second time and more persuasively, that elite, treated so contemptuously by him and alienated so thoroughly by his deferential and conspiratorial aides, will transfer their affections elsewhere. And there will be no stopping them, for without the APC, CPC, the elite and the press, all of which treat him with suspicion and cautious detachment, it is hard to imagine upon which revolutionary fervour or sorcerer’s broom the president could fly into office in 2019.

November 27, 2016