The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • APC unites Southeast and South-South against itself

    APC unites Southeast and South-South against itself

    Unknown to the All Progressives Congress (APC), and notwithstanding some of the defections fattening the party in many unlikely parts of the country, it is confronting one of the worst dilemmas any ruling party has ever faced in Nigeria. In the  2015 polls, the Southeast and South-South preferred ex-president Goodluck Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It didn’t matter that the former president performed very poorly in office, with a record so appalling that his supporters in both regions declared their support for him and the then ruling party in brazen disregard of crippling economic and social indicators. They had little interest in the APC candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, and they showed it by their voting preferences. Now, the alienation is set to be more perfectly entrenched by the resolve of the APC government to confront the social, economic and political ills that have plagued the country  in the past few years. Should President Buhari flag in his zeal to confront the ills, his campaigns are in danger of coming unstuck. But should he continue, as he seems set to do, the two regions will remain hostile to him in future polls.

    President Buhari is engaged in two major campaigns: security operations to stabilise the country, and anti-graft war to clean up and remake the country’s financial ethos. The exigencies of the moment make the two campaigns inescapable, just as they also pit him remorselessly against the dominant ethos and truculent elites of the two regions. The president will find himself confronting probably a similar dilemma as Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill confronted during World War II. To win the war, argued Sir Winston, they would need the help and even leadership of the United States. But that help, the British statesman acknowledged, would come at a huge price of the diminution of Britain’s global power and influence. In the end, Sir Winston concluded that to win the war was more desirable than sustaining her global influence and ego. Can President Buhari find a way to prosecute his campaigns without losing the support of the Southeast and South-South? The chances are slim, for both regions never liked him to begin with.

    The president’s security operations in the regions involve curtailing the rising influence and activities of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) headed by the detained Nnamdi Kanu, and curbing pipeline vandalism and any form of economic sabotage triggered by restive Niger Delta militants. It is not an option for President Buhari to ignore the activities of IPOB and the older Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB). As the president suggested during his maiden media chat, what kind of president would he be if he failed to respond firmly to the provocations of those who test his resolve? However, that response and the manner it is currently managed, not to talk of the statements he and other security agents have made, have ensured that the animosity to the Buhari government will continue relentlessly until the next polls. Similarly, the government has responded very strongly to resurgent pipeline vandalism, with some unsubstantiated allegations that Chief Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, might have inspired the sabotage. Again, it is unreasonable to expect the President Buhari to ignore the sabotage.

    But by declaring Tompolo wanted and launching a manhunt for him, notwithstanding the opinions and feelings of the Niger Delta elders who seem to project an inscrutable form of social and economic ideology, the stage seems set for irreconcilability. Mr. Tompolo straddles the allegations of economic sabotage and financial crimes, for which the EFCC has declared him wanted. Whether he is eventually apprehended or not, the sense of entitlement long projected by the region will become angrily ossified and carried over to the next polls. As the youths of the Southeast and South-South appear to be projecting common grounds for disaffection, the wider danger is that regional elders, who have lost both influence and money, may also be weighing their options. In their opinion, many regional political titans who braved regional ridicule and opposition in order to associate with the ruling party did not get the kind of cabinet positions they believed would have enhanced their prestige. They recall the president’s sharing formula in which he talked of giving more to states that voted en masse for him than those that gave him little. And they remember how in his media chat he wondered impatiently what else the Southeast wanted in terms of cabinet positions.

    Paradoxically, as more revelations of the crazy stealing that went on under the Jonathan presidency are published, the two regions will become more antagonistic because of the implication for their son, Dr Jonathan, and his many acolytes who are bound to suffer collateral damage. As the piece above shows, PDP’s retention of some ‘rich’ states will offer them a base from which to consolidate their regional opposition to President Buhari’s APC. They will become increasingly defiant, and they will have hope that the tentative and famished alliance that has kept the APC going in the Southwest would soon unravel. They will pray for 2017 to come quickly, hoping that if they can survive the anti-graft probe and the security operations in the Niger Delta and on the streets of the Southeast, they will be able to rally their forces together to unhorse the ruling party or at least give it a bloody nose.

    Unfortunately for the APC, it has been unable to achieve unity and sense of purpose since it gained power in 22 states and Abuja. Its emotive, immature and shambolic approach to the judicial reverses it suffered in the past few days has exposed the party’s lack of steely core and nationalist ideology. It seems to think that the Southeast and South-South may not present any pressing danger to its electoral dominance. But from all indications, the APC may not be able to sustain its total dominance of the North in 2019, when there was only one northern candidate for the presidential election, and must acknowledge that it gained victory in the Southwest by the skin of its teeth. If it wants to retain power in the next polls, it must, much more than the PDP, reform and reinvent itself.

  • Rule of law’s many controversies

    Rule of law’s many controversies

    This piece is partly a response to Biodun Jeyifo’s enjoyable contribution to the debate on President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-graft war, especially the methods by which the All Progressives Congress (APC) government seeks to give vent to the public’s frustrations with endemic corruption. More debates are needed, particularly if they can be rendered as seminally as Prof. Jeyifo has done. He did not agree with what seemed to him to be Palladium’s devotion to ‘extreme formalism’ in the face of the brazen subterfuges by many judicial officers, and, among a few other reservations, he is alarmed by what he describes as the columnist’s ‘utter indifference to the revolutionary possibilities of the popular demand for justice by Nigerians in their tens of millions in their support of Buhari’s declared war against corruption. “ Undoubtedly, in the weeks ahead, many more analysts, both pragmatic and theoretical, will weigh in on the debate one way or the other until ample clarity has been beamed on the topic and perhaps the Buhari presidency compelled to understand that underneath the surface of the anti-graft war is a powerful undertow of complex forces and phenomena destined to shape not only this war but other social and economic crusades of the day.

    Today’s column is also partly a response to Olakunle Ambibola’s piece on the same topic of President Buhari’s anti-graft war in which he dismissed what he all but described as Palladium’s methodological finickiness. Mr. Abimbola took refuge in Classics, particularly Greek Classics, using the examples of the Grecian trio of Draco, Solon and Pericles. President Buhari, he asserts, must have recourse to strong tactics, perhaps like the Greek legislator Draco, to fight corruption until sometime in the future tamer tactics, like those of Solon, are required in the struggle for a just society. Inspired by his own constant punning of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (rendered as Leisure of the Theory Class), Mr Abimbola is also uncomfortable with what he describes as Palladium’s esoteric passion for theory and formalism.

    Finally, this piece is partly a response to a host of Palladium readers who wonder what on earth the columnist is talking about in his rule of law essays in the face of clear and unambiguous danger to the republic constituted by a camorra of rampaging treasury looters. Some of the readers, Palladium is told, have wondered whether the columnist had not been bought. But how can anyone buy when no one is selling? In what seemed like a trilogy on the anti-corruption war, Palladium had berated the public’s lack of understanding of the issues surrounding the war, as much as he also took critical and unwavering exception to the Buhari presidency’s methods. Prof. Jeyifo, it appears, gave Palladium a slap on the wrist for all but declaring the public ignorant, given the manner the public wholeheartedly embraced the president’s methods, an embrace dictated by their pains, and pains for which they apparently needed a cathartic release.

    This column will not be goaded into declaring summarily what the order of precedence should be between the theoretical adherence to rule of law and the practicality of bringing corrupt people to justice, as many of Palladium’s critics want. The fact is that while this column has repeatedly declared that the anti-graft war is a just and noble one, he has also vehemently denounced the collateral subversion of the rule of law. Both should not be mutually exclusive. As Prof. Jeyifo agrees, there are better and smarter ways to fight the war than to give the impression that if creative manipulation of the rule of law became ineluctable, the end perhaps would mitigate the obnoxiousness of the means. Palladium insists, even if he remains the only one left to do so, that the anti-graft war can be fought without undermining the rule of law. This is not a theory, nor is it formalistic. If Palladium appears to set store by the rule of law over the mechanics of the fight against corruption, it is simply because the Buhari presidency has approached the war with a much vaster misunderstanding of the concept of the rule of law than it has obviously appreciated the direct and beguiling benefits of the anti-graft war itself.

    The first clear indication that the Buhari presidency intended to abridge the rule of law, despite its protestations to the contrary, was given during his maiden media chat. Until he gave that often quoted answer, most Nigerians, including this column, had no inkling anything was amiss, nor that if anything was amiss, that it was inspired by the presidency. The president had been asked why former National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki, a retired army colonel, was admitted to bail thrice, but the government would not release him. Had he answered with tact, few would have suspected the presidency had anything to do with the matter. Instead, the president launched into a diatribe against the colonel and the Goodluck Jonathan government which allegedly orchestrated the stealing of public funds on a gargantuan scale. The president’s answer effectively bifurcated the war between the majority victims of the stealing and the minority perpetrators of the looting. It was an obfuscation and dichotomy Palladium felt an urgency to address, for in his view fighting graft is embedded in the rule of law. The rule of law is so vital to everything, the columnist says, that no amount of crime nor the personality of the suspects should tamper with it. That position appears theoretical and formalistic. In reality it is anything but these.

    History is replete with examples of the consequences of undermining the rule of law. That same history is replete with the grandness and greatness of powerful historical figures who, at great pains to themselves, families and interests, kept faith with the rule of law. It is this reading of history, a subject held in contempt by many Nigerians, and in particular by their leaders, that has spawned a vast misunderstanding of many a great concept and destroyed societies and empires. Palladium does not think the president and his aides, let alone a majority of Nigerians, understand the centrality of the rule of law. The concept is real and practical; it is not subject to negotiation, and must not be swamped by emotions. It is hard and unyielding. It is the foundation upon which a great society rests; it is the rubric by which the society stands and runs; and its is the panoply that shields it from impunity and arbitrariness. Beyond the constitutional and legal provisions that form the rampart of the rule of law, the concept has its metaphysical properties, which a society and its leaders violate at their peril.

    If the president understands the connotations of the rule of law, he will recognise that as the chief custodian of the constitution, he personifies the country’s grundnorm: as if he wrote it, as if it is his whole being, as if it is his immutable word that cannot be dishonoured without dishnouring himself. Those who criticise his methods — not the goal of fighting corruption — are helping him to prosecute a just cause in a just way. The critics are helping him to see the future beyond the prosecution of one war, as huge and important as that war is. The critics are asking him to read history and interpret it well and be inspired by it. The critics want him to succeed, and they want the country cleansed of corruption so that Nigeria can stand tall and strong. But the critics will not compromise with him whenever he adopts the wrong methods simply because the war is so important that the survival of the society depends on ‘winning’ the war. What is the use of winning a war when a greater injury is done to the soul and spirit of the country? Everything begins from the spirit.

    Palladium does not have the illusion that anything he writes on how the anti-graft war must be prosecuted in a lawful manner will cut ice with majority of Nigerians. They are satisfied condemning the detainees and suspects even before they are brought to trial and their side of the story heard. They forget that when American troops captured the Iraqi strongman, Saddam Hussein, they ensured he was brought to justice, unlike the fate that befell Muammer Gaddafi in Libya. They fail to recall the story in Acts 22 involving Paul the Apostle who was humiliated before trial, and who asked his tormentors whether it was lawful to scourge a Roman citizen before he was properly tried and condemned. Apostle Paul reminds everyone of the concept of citizenship, a concept either held in abeyance in these parts or often suspended at will by the government, police, army and other security agencies, as exampled by the Army/Shiites clash in Zaria recently, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention and various manifestations of assault and battery executed by law enforcement agents. Every society defines citizenship in its own special way. No one may suspend that definition because a citizen has committed crime.

    The Ottoman ruler, Suleiman the Magnificent, a.k.a. el-Qanuni (the lawgiver) 1494-1566, codified Ottoman laws and applied them strictly, without exception and without fear or favour. His appreciation of laws was ennobled by his scholarliness, vast knowledge of various cultures, and personal discipline. Appreciating the huge and overarching importance of sustaining the rule of law without exception is not just a spiritual thing, it also derives from a ruler’s repository of knowledge and his metaphysical grasp of the intangibility of the law. This was why Augustus Caesar 63 BC-14 AD, adhering very strictly to the laws he made and exercising great self-denial, banished his own daughter and grand-daughter for adultery. It often costs the lawgiver a lot to keep the law. Those who understand this fact appreciate the deleterious effect of undermining it. The legal culture of the Medes and Persians, who conquered Babylon around 539 BC, offers a huge lesson to the world. Two biblical accounts in the Book of Daniel are instructive. In Chapter 3, certain Chaldeans accused three Jews of breaking a major religious decree promulgated by King Nebuchadnezzar. Enraged, the king summoned them for interrogation and found them guilty. The rule of law was preserved. Even then, he gave them a chance to show remorse, failing which they would be sentenced to be burnt alive. They refused to recant on religious grounds. If Palladium’s critics are still not persuaded that the rule of law was preserved in the distant past, then let them consider the utterances of the men who accused Prophet Daniel before King Darius, the Mede, in Daniel Chapter 6. Once they got King Darius to promulgate a decree precluding any prayers to any other gods for 30 days, a trap was set for Daniel. Summoned before the king for flouting the law, Daniel was tried and found guilty. Knowing how close he was to the king, the ministers and advisers reminded the king that the laws of the Medes and Persians could not be altered on account of friendship or for any other reason. Sentence was therefore passed and executed, and the rule of law preserved. There is a huge spiritual and transcendental symbolism to the rule of law.

    No public official in Nigeria is permitted to alter, by word of mouth or in writing, the constitution or the law at will. There is a procedure for doing so. And until amendments are done, the government and the security agencies must adhere to the rule of law. Indeed, the major problem Nigeria is facing today is that the government and its security agencies have very little regard for the law and absolutely no understanding of the concept of citizenship. Palladium attributes this to ignorance. So, while the political economy of corruption will make the anti-graft war harder, if not unwinnable, the lack of understanding of the concept of citizenship, the want of discipline in faithfully enforcing the law, and the periodic recourse to self-help have fostered a culture of impunity and arbitrariness all over the country to the point of destabilising the polity and engendering both a spirit of tentativeness in the people and a disconnect between the people and their government.

    This essay is not about examining the misshapen structure of the country as a factor in promoting corruption, though it is crucial, or about the political economy of corruption as a factor in complicating and mystifying the war; it is essentially a response to accusations that Palladium appears to revel in a formalistic or theoretical appreciation of the rule of law to the detriment of genuine and concrete efforts to arrest the terrible impact corruption is having on the society. But in the opinion of this columnist, the war cannot be won outside the rule of law. And for those who insist the Buhari presidency has kept to the rule of law, they do not give an accurate picture of the war. However, perhaps responding to criticism, the government has begun to observe the laws, awkwardly and perhaps half-heartedly it is clear, but nonetheless undoubtedly. The Buhari government must recognise it has no alternative. It should mortify Nigerians that the old Roman, Ottoman and Greek Empires observed the rule of law far more responsibly than Nigeria of the 21st Century.

    Indeed, there may be some revolutionary possibilities in the demand for justice by Nigerians, but if both the demand and supply for justice are not regulated and mediated within the ambit of the rule of law, it could end up creating more problems than they would solve, as history also shows. Anyone who has read Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837) will not fail to be numbed by how so quickly the spirit of nationalism and patriotism could so easily transmogrify into something more perverse, sanguinary and ghoulish. Glance through the proceedings of the French National Assembly of the time, and of the Committee of Public Safety, and of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and consider how the children of the revolution ended up consumed by the revolution. A society must be careful how it searches for enduring change, in those heady moments when it leaps temptingly and idealistically beyond the boundaries of the law into a cataclysmic void.

    Nigerian laws diligently applied, despite the artifices of looters and their legal accomplices, are adequate to police the corruption war. But if they are not, and the government can find a way to avoid the pitfall of making new, retroactive laws, then let them amend the law and the constitution. Early last month, Prof. Jeyifo wondered why President Buhari got himself needlessly entangled in the Dasuki bail affair when he could have prepared the grounds for his government to sensibly and judicially tackle the prosecution of looters. The professor explored three options, to wit, the Justice Oguntade committee (2014 National Conference) option; the operationalisation of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act; and sustaining the status quo. But whether one of these alternatives, or the Grecian options inappropriately adumbrated by Mr. Abimbola as capable of inspiring Nigeria, no one can dispute the fact that no leader is at liberty to operate outside the country’s laws if he is not to engender the chaos that followed the French Revolution as well as insidiously weaken the fabrics that both knit the society together and sustain the integrity of the social contract.

  • Kogi makes wrong history

    Kogi makes wrong history

    Less than two weeks ago, Kogi State bit the wrong bullet when, with the help of the electoral body and other political titans, they prepared to inaugurate Yahaya Bello as the governor.  Apparently, this was child’s play. On inauguration day, Kogites exceeded themselves when they achieved the undistinguished honour of making the wrong history. On January 27, Alhaji Bello became the first Nigerian and the first governor to be sworn in without a deputy. It was an inevitable culmination of serial lawlessness never before seen or experienced in these parts, a corruption so insidious and far worse than the embezzlement of a trillion naira, that it beggars belief it can find accommodation anywhere in government.

    In the supplementary election of December 5, 2015, Alhaji Bello also made history when, with the help of shadowy presidency officials and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), he became the first governorship candidate to run for office without a running mate. The constitution opposed it, and nothing in the Electoral Act supported that strange and crazy move, but neither the meddlesome Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, nor the brilliant minds at INEC frowned at the insurrection against the law. It was an expediency they could tolerate, nay, even accommodate, and apparently, help to sustain.

    But Kogi State was not done making history. To the state, if it would make history, it had better be one that would not be rivalled for centuries to come. Alhaji Bello ran for office without a running mate, won, in the eyes of INEC, without a running mate, and was inaugurated without a deputy governor. Had the tomfoolery stopped there, perhaps all would not be lost. Instead, the inauguration itself achieved a series of firsts. None of the powerful men in the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abuja and in government who knew about the constitutional subversion that took place in the state had the courage to attend the inauguration. Their consciences suddenly came to life, and they recognised the danger of being tarred with the disgrace and criminality of that electoral insurrection. The story of the plotters will be told one day, for they are not as shadowy as some think.

    On Kogi’s governorship inauguration day only two governors attended and, with as much sombreness as they could manage, gave bland speeches enjoining Kogites to help Alhaji Bello make a success of his tenure. The two governors of Benue and Nasarawa attended the inauguration because they are Kogi’s neighbours. They showed no enthusiasm, and they said nothing stirring. Who knows what was agitating their minds? The two governors were as far as Alhaji Bello could go in attracting dignitaries to his inauguration. President Muhammadu Buhari was not there, however, and shockingly did not send a representative, though he is party leader of the APC that won the Kogi poll. He had refused to campaign for his party when the late Abubakar Audu, a Rabiu Kwankwaso acolyte, was candidate of the APC. Even after the victory, the president would still refuse to attend. Why?

    Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was also absent at the inauguration. He had campaigned for Prince Audu, but was generally silent in the dangerous and convoluted aftermath of the death of the APC candidate, when all hell in plotting was let loose upon the beleaguered and fragile state. Professor Osinbajo is a lawyer, and he knows what the law and the constitution say, and he has given indication he has a conscience he would neither sell nor allow anyone to price. He also did not send a representative. It is a sad day not only for Kogi, but for Nigeria, when the number one and number two citizens would boycott such a significant occasion involving their party’s victory and celebration, and would not even send representatives.

    Alas, Kogi was still not done making history. Both the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, who are leading members of the APC, also avoided the event like a plague. They knew in their hearts that both the election of Alhaji Bello and his inauguration without a deputy were a mindless corruption of the laws and the constitution. Irrespective of where they stood in the fray privately, they knew, as men who lead others to make laws for the country, that it would be foolish to openly identify with the perversion that took place on January 27. Indeed the only notable representation that took place on that day was the announcement that the wife of the Nasarawa State governor represented the wife of the president. Mrs Almakura did not make that announcement herself, and this column could not independently verify the supposed claim of representation. Other than this unverified representation, there was nothing of significance worth remembering in terms of attendance. There was no presidency official, no federal cabinet member, no top national lawmaker, no charismatic governor anywhere other than those that duty and geography compelled to attend, and no man of means, of intellect and of character. Notwithstanding the small noise here and there in the stadium, the event could pass for a funeral, perhaps a fairly well-attended funeral.

    If all the people who plotted the so-called change in Kogi did not have the courage to attend, but left the unassertive chairman of the party, Odigie Oyegun, to carry the can and manage the obsequies, what other thing of significance took place at the inauguration? Plenty. Senator Dino Melaye, who virtually took over the master of ceremony job from the two persons assigned that responsibility, indulged his customary buffoonery to the hilt again. He is loud, obtruding, voluble and syncretistic. He did not disappoint in demonstrating his unmitigated coarseness. It is a mystery how such an offensive man moved in the circles of APC leadership, not to talk of being elected, or imposed himself, as senator. For Senator Melaye, everything was reduced to hilarity, and as far as his infantile mind was concerned, the constitutional subversion that produced Alhaji Bello and the mockery of the law that saw him inaugurated as governor without a deputy were the handiwork of God. While the plotters and other invited dignitaries discretely stayed away from the inauguration, Senator Melaye saw the occasion as an opportunity to showcase his eloquence and celebrate his lack of character.

    Then there is of course the 41-year-old governor himself, a man who prides himself on his youthful age and on the opportunism that gave him the unmerited office of governor. It was bad enough that his inauguration address lacked grace, finesse, sense and power; it was worse that he struggled to read his own speech with any sense of coherence and modest expertise. He tripped over the words, appeared frequently disconcerted, and dared not look up from the papers in front of him. What ailed him? His tormented conscience, knowing he was occupying a stolen office, or his lack of familiarity with the written word, even for a graduate of accounting and business administration? The only thing applauded in the governor’s mediocre speech was when he quoted President Buhari’s “I belong to everybody, and I belong to nobody” adaptation of the late politician Sunday Awoniyi’s speech. The stadium was otherwise generally quiet, at least not inspired into whoops of joy or ecstasy by either the governor’s sheer presence or his speech. Everyone, including the governor, knows that the whole contraption will not last. It is a charade and a corruption of the electoral process.

    It is remarkable that few top Nigerians, distinguished legal minds, and opinion moulders, have said anything about the terrible constitutional affront that took place in Kogi in the last two months. Perhaps they see the crisis as internal to the APC, and one involving a faction fighting another. They are wrong and short-sighted. What is even worse is the fact that top APC leaders could lend their weight to the electoral and constitutional perversion engineered by, and in, their party. How they do not see that the injustice enacted in their party would still haunt them in the future, possibly destroy their party, or even trigger far-reaching implications that could doom democracy, is hard to understand. APC leaders may not see the dangers ahead, but without a shred of doubt, the Kogi crisis will not end until justice has been done. They should pray that the courts, which are being battered everywhere by the people and the government, should put an end to the political, ethnic and sectarian rascality going on in Kogi. The alternative is too grim to contemplate, both for the APC which will never be the same again because of the demons it has unleashed, and the country which has lacked the patriots and men of courage and principle to embrace and nurture what is right and lawful.

  • Lai Mohammed takes umbrage, shocks the public

    Lai Mohammed takes umbrage, shocks the public

    The standard reply to every critic of the Buhari presidency’s method of fighting corruption is that corruption is fighting back. The Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, reiterated this fact last week when he took on the critics, describing them as blackmailers, hack writers, sophists, and sponsored corruption orchestra. In plain language, there can be no criticism of their methods, and anyone who offers one is either corrupt or has been hired by corrupt people to fight their dirty war. The same anomalous understanding of what it means to run a pluralist society is found among supporters of the government who naively equate dissent from those questionable methods as in fact support for corruption as a whole. If you are not for them, take note, you are against them, for there can be no middle ground.

    But who is blackmailing whom? Those who say the constitution and the laws of the land have dictated, indeed circumscribed, how the war should be fought? Or those who insist the weight of the financial crimes is so heavy that that in itself legitimises every means, orthodox or not, moral or invidious, in fighting it. Is it those who warn that the laws could not be subverted without doing damage to the body politic, and thus setting dangerous precedents; or those who insist that if extraordinary means were not used, there would be no society to administer with elegant, so-called sacrosanct laws? It is this kind of dangerous dualism encased in hysteria that hallmarks military regimes, ruins civilizations, creates an atmosphere of repression and intolerance, and diminishes the person and humanity of the citizen.

    It is also a clever manipulation of the anti-corruption narrative. In the opinion of the Buhari presidency, as emphasised by Alhaji Mohammed, you could not oppose their methods without being in support of corruption. This column has no patience with that sort of vile argument. There is no law anywhere in the world that is perfect; they are constantly being improved, as criminals exploit loopholes in them. But until the law is tightened through legitimate amendments, no one, not the presidency, and no crime, not even murder, must be used as reason to flout the constitution. On this, there can be no meeting point between this column and the Information minister, nor with the fainthearted who perch on the fence, afraid to be cast as pro-corruption. The laws, even as they are at the moment, can knock corruption into a cocked hat. But they can be made better, more brutally efficient, and more discouraging to criminals.

    Hear the Information minister: “Well, I can tell you today that corruption is already fighting back, and it is fighting hard and dirty. Sponsored articles have started appearing in the newspapers and in the social media while ‘Talking Heads’ have started making the rounds in the electronic media, all deriding the fight against corruption as well as this Administration. Not stopping there, they have been creating distractions by sponsoring articles in both local and international media to deride the administration’s policies generally, tag the President a budding dictator and even write off his 2016 budget. We know that the sole purpose of these attacks is to distract attention from the war on corruption.

    “It is saddening that some otherwise credible voices have unwittingly allowed themselves to be railroaded into the bandwagon of pro-corruption orchestra. They engage in sophistry to try to rally Nigerians against the anti-corruption battle…

    “This  Administration will neither be distracted nor intimidated by anyone into abandoning or weakening the fight against corruption, which is a war of survival for our nation. No amount of media or other attacks will stop the fight. The pseudo-analysts and hack writers will labour in vain in their quest to stop the train of this anti-corruption fight…What are we even talking about? Is the human rights of the 55 persons more important than human rights of 170 million Nigerians? But again, let me make it clear that we do not disobey court orders”.

    It is not clear how the Information minister, himself a lawyer, could draw a distinction between the rights of even one person and that of the rest of Nigeria. But he did. Worse, without offering proof, he is saying very clearly that every critic of how the anti-graft war is being prosecuted has been bought. When the critics put their lives and money on the line to support the APC and the Buhari candidature last year, were they bought by the APC? When they fought Goodluck Jonathan, were they directed by the APC? Alhaji Mohammed must stop his propagandist approach to defending the government in such a manner that Dr Jonathan would begin to look like the better democrat. He insults writers, and demeans them. It will be a poor country indeed when and where everyone heads in one direction, bowled over by the government’s methods and policies, whether those methods are right or wrong.

    The Information minister must understand that fighting corruption is a noble and necessary task. But to prevent impunity and excesses, the laws of the land have indicated how that war must be waged. What the public wants to hear is the government’s proof that it has kept to the ambit of the law, not unsubstantiated accusations about whose conscience has been bought or sold, and certainly not scary figures deployed and interpreted to whip the public into lynch mob readiness. Imagine if the Jonathan government had equated APC’s criticism of how the anti-terror war was being fought in 2014 with support for terrorists. The Buhari presidency is not infallible. If he does not have people around him to restrain him, as many now fear, critics will do the job, even at the risk of being stigmatised.

     

  • Abubakar Malami’s inquisitorial tendency

    Abubakar Malami’s inquisitorial tendency

    Given the terrible harm and retrogression corruption has brought upon Nigeria, it is no surprise that President Muhammadu Buhari is fixated on combating it, almost to the large scale exclusion of other great policies needed to restructure and reposition the polity.  He has shown determination and grit in fighting the malaise, and he has swooped on it with the frenzied passion of a crusader running out of time. He is right to be very urgent about the problem. But the greater question is whether the president has the appropriate solution. So far, in fact, there has been no solution in the real sense of the word. Those alleged to be corrupt are being named and shamed, even to the point of subverting the rule of law. But because the people have massed behind him, the president reposes greater confidence and trust in his own methods. There has also been no mention of the political economy of corruption, which is even more crucial to combating the menace. But this, too, apparently requires some depth and holistic approach, and exasperatingly far too much patience than the president and his fervent supporters are willing to accommodate.

    What is indisputable is that the president and many of his aides see the anti-corruption war simply and singularly in terms of law and order. Any other perspective is to them a luxury of theorising. The vast majority of Nigerians agree with the president. They see no exotic theory in the harmful impact of corruption; so why bother about the theory of its origins. During last year’s All Nigeria Judges Conference, President Buhari should have taken the opportunity to offer very profound thoughts on the judicial arm , the problem it faces, the remedies to those problems, and other transcendental and original perspectives on the rule of law and the defence of human rights vis-a-vis the challenges of governing and policing a complex and developing society. Instead, he spoke in his usual reprobationary language about the judiciary performing below public expectation, and the need for that arm of government to redeem its ‘faltering’ image.

    Among other complaints, the President Buhari singled out  “allegations of judicial corruption…dilatory tactics by lawyers sometimes with the apparent collusion of judges to stall trials indefinitely thereby denying the state and the accused persons of a judicial verdict…and negative perception arising from long delays in the trial process that have damaged the international reputation of the Nigerian judiciary, even among its international peers.” But these are just symptoms of the very fundamental problems plaguing the judiciary. While the Buhari presidency has upped its criticisms against the judiciary, with Abubakar Malami, the Attorney General of the Federation making strident and inquisitorial remarks, nothing concrete has been done to tackle the problems from the root.  Little will be done, it seems, because the government’s understanding of the problem is restricted to law and order, and nothing in-between.

    The Attorney General’s prognosis is a curious, hubristic misperception of judges and the judiciary. It requires extensive quotation to appreciate the full import of his opinion. Said he:  “As we may be aware, this administration promised Nigerians that it will promptly address the challenges facing our nation in the three areas of corruption, economy and security. Let no one be in doubt, the legitimate expectation of Nigerians in this regard shall be met. In this regard therefore, I am reiterating that the fight against corruption shall be total and will not exclude judicial officers, who are found wanting. After all, it is beyond doubt that a corrupt judge cannot meaningfully contribute to the fight against corruption. In reality, it cannot be over-emphasised that systemic corruption and impunity are prevalent in Nigeria, and that they cut across all sectors of the society, unfortunately, including the judiciary – an institution that is universally believed to be the hope of the common man. Ideally, the judiciary in a democratic state ought to be accountable less to public opinion and more to public interest. It should discharge its constitutional roles by being principled, independent and impartial.”

    This unflattering view from the chief law officer of Nigeria is further reiteration of the misconception both of the judiciary as an arm of government and the fundamentals of corruption. Mr. Malami is a young legal officer who apparently lacks an understanding of the weight of the judiciary’s place and role in the polity. That arm of  government does not exist, despite its numerous imperfections, to be kicked about by the executive arm. It is a co-equal arm, one that is self-regulating, self-administering, and, had the executive at the states level not been short-sighted and obstinate about holding on to the judicial purse strings, would have been self-financing in the truest sense. Paragraph 21 (b)and (d) of the Third Schedule to the Constitution puts the onus of doing all that Mr. Malami spoke about on the National Judicial Council. Without making it obvious, and as an indication of a sublime understanding of the place of the judiciary in the sustenance of democracy, both the president and Mr. Malami should have spoken of this third arm of government in terms that do not give the impression of its subordination to the executive for either disciplinary or political reasons.

    The danger of the executive arm speaking openly and pejoratively about the judiciary is that it increasingly encourages commentators — most of them ignorant of how the fulcrums upon which a society is balanced must be positioned — to unleash venomous and destablising attacks on that generally silent arm of government. Emotions are being whipped up against the judiciary, and there are already careless talks about the need to get the judiciary to key to President Buhari’s programmes, especially the anti-corruption war. Even granted there is corruption in the judiciary, it would be a surprise for judicial officers and legal minds anywhere, whether at the executive, legislative or judicial arm, to forswear their high education and begin to talk of keying to anything. Surely, of all the professions, judicial minds know a lot about ideological posturing, not to talk of constitutional and procedural finesse. It is not the job of the judiciary to key to anything; their job is to ensure justice is served to the extent of the consistencies of behaviours, activities, programmes and policies with the laws of the country and its constitution.

    The private opinions of Judges are often kept private, except when they deliver judgements that are perhaps shaped or coloured by their ideological and experiential leanings. The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) sometimes rises in the defence of the independence of the judiciary, independence that is sadly being subtly eroded by the exaggerated impressions and careless summations of the executive arm. While it is true that corruption is present in the judiciary, just as it is also present in both the executive and the legislature arms, the solution is not to single out the judiciary for lampooning. Corruption in Nigeria is society-wide. It cannot be tackled simply by condemning one group or individual. In the case of the judiciary, it is even more dangerous to single them out, as the Buhari presidency seems to be doing, for blame for the slow pace of justice delivery or perversion of justice.

    President Buhari’s summation on corruption in the judiciary is truly baffling. Has he asked himself why there is corruption in the judiciary and elsewhere? Has he taken a look at that arm of government’s funding over the years? Has he looked into the virtually collapsed infrastructure in the judiciary? Indeed, has he taken a comprehensive look at the justice system, right from when a suspect is arrested to the last stage of imprisonment in order to enable him design an amelioration programme? It is baffling that he talked about the slow pace of justice delivery without reflecting on the staff strength of the judiciary. And both he and Mr. Malami talked sanctimoniously about the outrage over judges’ corruption as if the judiciary is isolated from Nigeria’s other publics; as if corruption in the judiciary, because of its moral and religious undertones and implications, is somehow more reprehensible than corruption elsewhere.

    What both the president and Mr. Malami are doing to the judiciary is even more damaging than the corruption they conclude has hobbled justice delivery. Mr. Malami, from his outrageous meddlesomeness in the Kogi governorship impasse, is clearly more politically partisan than first thought, or than is good for his own office and reputation. He should be offering unimpeachable advice about law and justice to the president and his cabinet, and standing watch over the sanctity and rectitude of the country’s laws and constitution. If he chooses to be derelict in his responsibilities, the president, who is the country’s overall leader, has the biggest responsibility of all to ensure that the country works. He should speak loftily of his programmes and reveal his appreciation of the elements of corruption beyond inquisition and policy ad hocism; he should let the country know where he stands ideologically, and how that would impact on his policies and programmes; he should give the country a glimpse of his vision for Nigeria and how it can be realised; and, among other things, also suggest the behavioural changes at the sublime level that should form the building blocks of the character of the Nigerian. Let him do these with the right savvy.

    No one can of course defend corruption in any form, let alone in the judiciary, nor anywhere for that matter. But it is portentous  when a disproportionate focus, borne out of ignorance of what constitutes corruption, is put on the judiciary. The president and Mr. Malami were either elected or appointed because it was thought they had a more than average understanding of how the laws of the land and the constitution could best be protected and defended. They should justify the confidence reposed in them rather than interminably bellyache over problems they are expected to solve with sublime skill and élan.

  • Kogi bites the wrong bullet on inauguration

    Kogi bites the wrong bullet on inauguration

    The headline of this piece is used guardedly in the sense that the ordinary Kogite is understandably not part of the charade of Wednesday’s inauguration of Yahaya Bello as the new Governor of Kogi State. As far as a large faction of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is concerned, both at the national and state levels, it is a pleasant duty to get Alhaji Bello, alias Fairplus, inaugurated as governor. The plot to make him inherit a victory that was not vacant, nor his, was hatched not by the governor-elect himself, but by a handful of men in Abuja who seemed to know more than the rest of Nigeria how the future would look like. Alhaji Bello is merely a pawn; he will remain a pawn until the courts put paid to his pretentiousness.

    But on inauguration day, Wednesday, the new governor will give a speech eulogising democracy and promising the starving and tormented indigenes of the state salvation from want, oppression, mediocrity and stagnation orchestrated by the departing Governor Idris Wada. The new governor will not talk about justice, fairness and equity, nor make any allusion to the distinguishing properties of personal character and integrity. Not being a deep person, nor yet a man of great character, he will be silent on the characteristics of a patriot. Alhaji Bello will muddle through on inauguration day with commonplace triteness and piffle.

    The injustice perpetrated in Kogi State will remain an albatross around the necks of the APC and the electoral body, INEC. INEC did not need to get a brief or advice from the Attorney General. They nonetheless stifled their conscience and embraced the Justice minister’s illogic. A big faction in the APC did not need to play politics with the Kogi election by plotting an electoral stalemate in a display of brazen power play within the party. But they did, for in their opinion, the consequences of the injustice of today  are tolerable to the humiliation and diminution they claim they would suffer should Kogi fall under the wing of someone outside their inner circle.

    After the courts will have done justice and reversed the nonsense hatched in the state in last year’s Kogi governorship election, the APC will still be left with its fratricidal factions, and the wounds caused by the machinations in the party will take a long time to heal. The injury is deep and gangrenous. It is clear that those who thought the APC was the harbinger of a truly national and liberal politics are gravely mistaken. The party has not overcome the bitter, divisive and parochial politics of the past, the kind that undermined previous republics and set one schizoid ethnic group against another. It is to the eternal dishonour of Kogi State that on its land were fired the first shots in the futile war projected to limit the growth, spread and endurance of the APC as a national party, in creed and ideology.

  • Increasingly controversial anti-graft war

    Increasingly controversial anti-graft war

    The facts are truly and depressingly worrisome. First was the $2.1bn arms scandal allegedly directed by the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), which has sucked in so many people, especially top Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leaders, and many companies, local and international, in all sectors of the economy. While the dust was yet to settle, the focus has shifted to arms procurement directed by top officers in the Nigerian Air Force (NAF). A report by the Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment set up to look into how and at what prices NAF procured arms between 2007 and 2015 has established that another $2bn and more was also spent in very questionable circumstances with little result. President Muhammadu Buhari has, therefore, ordered a probe of the 17 top officers and 21 firms involved in the scandal. The list includes former Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, and two former Air Marshals.

    The audit committee gave a horrendous account of military equipment purportedly bought but were either not supplied, were obsolete, or were already mothballed. In virtually all the procurement, said the audit committee, the prices were horrifyingly inflated. The impression the report gave — and the public will remember that the ONSA scandal was not any different — was a military establishment gone absolutely raving mad with corruption. The EFCC has now taken over both the ONSA case and the NAF bazaar. Many officers will be hauled in for interrogation in the coming days, and after a while they will have their day in court. But far beyond the coming trials and the sickening amount involved is the fact that in the case of the NAF procurement, the audit committee was actually able to establish some links between the purchase of obsolete equipment and the death of air force officers in crashed helicopters.

    The scale of the thievery perpetrated by those put in a position of trust, especially military officers who had a professional duty to ensure their men had access to fighting tools in order to fight and win, has led many commentators to insist that whatever constitutional rights of suspects were being allegedly violated should be overlooked as collateral damage in the great and transcendental war to save the nation. As they put it, national interest must always be prioritised above private interest. Lawyers are duplicitous and venal, they suggest, and the character of judges, sadly, cannot be certified. The government, they conclude, is therefore justified to take some extraordinary measures to protect national interest. The public must remember, they further suggest, that the thievery that attended arms procurement led to the prolongation of the Boko Haram war, and the death of many fine soldiers sent to war either improperly kitted or with poor and inadequate weapons.

    This sentiment, which its protagonists insist is absolutely justified, is shared by President Buhari himself. In his maiden media chat, he was so openly outraged by an interviewer’s suggestion that he seemed to place his desire to punish suspects outside legal and constitutional provisions that he wondered why anyone would talk of bail in the light of the gravity of the offences the suspects committed. This sentiment, this outrage, is now almost so universal in the country that a few Nigerians, including this columnist, are beginning to worry that a national hysteria may be brewing capable of perpetrating a worse crime against the law and constitution in the name of fighting corruption. Corruption should be fought, and fought until justice is served for the millions, including fighting men, who have lost their lives because of the stealing by a few, because of the abuse of public trust by a few. But there is need for caution.

    Of all those horrified by the scale of thievery, and of all those baying for blood, the president has the highest responsibility to ensure that public revenge is moderated and mediated according to the law and constitution. He has not discharged this responsibility in line with the oath he took. He is attempting to fight the corrupt outside the provisions of the law. It is true the law is inadequate. But until he can sponsor changes in the law, he is not at liberty to fight as he pleases, nor does he have the freedom to pronounce or think the suspects guilty until the courts have said so. Importantly too, he must be extra careful, notwithstanding his outrage, not to create a groundswell of lynch mentality upon which suspects would meet their doom, and the judiciary would be ridiculed and undermined. Should he and millions of his frenzied supporters create an atmosphere reminiscent of the United States McCarthy witch-hunt and the Chinese cultural revolution, they will open up the country to anarchy much worse than the financial scandal orchestrated by looters.

    The president is not careful enough. And his refusal to exercise care in prosecuting a great cause is manifesting in ugly colours apparently because he does not have impressive understanding of the kind of society he wants to help create. He has no social charter, no political philosophy, and no nuanced understanding of the dangers constituted by impunity, whether soft or brazen. The president must be told that while he is engaged in a good cause to fight corruption, which he rightly argues is a great national interest cause, he undermines that national interest by inadvertently subverting the courts and the judiciary, and giving the general impression that suspects can be lynched figuratively on the pages of newspapers or literally on the streets, in prisons and in EFCC custody. He must not have any illusion how national interest is defined. He has a responsibility to define it as the constitution has done, and be faithful to that definition.

    From the alarming positions taken by many commentators, some of them eminent lawyers, the foundations for anarchy, self-help and legal and constitutional expediencies are being sown. They are wrong, and the president is wrong. A good cause can be damaged by the manner it is prosecuted, as even common sense teaches. The standards the society must uphold — and the president is the battering ram in the hands of the society — must transcend that of the suspects and other criminals. The society cannot be bigger or more civilised than the standards it embraces. Nothing on earth, therefore, justifies what the Buhari government is trying to do to the law and the constitution. For justice must not just be done, it must be seen to be done.

    President Buhari must listen not only to those baying mindlessly for blood because in their opinion the Nigerian justice system appears inadequate to take care of the huge scale of malfeasance perpetrated by suspects. He must listen very carefully also to those who say he has a greater and more binding responsibility to fight his causes within the ambits of the law. The society is bigger than its thieves, more civilised than they are, and for the sake of coming generations, the president who is the chief custodian of the country’s laws and emblem of all that is good and noble about Nigeria, must ensure that at no time will the society descend to the brutish, reckless, self-help levels embraced by thieves who have nothing to lose, not even their names or dignity.

    The next set of suspects the EFCC will bring to trial must show that the agency and the president have learnt from their mistakes. But if they will not change because of the overwhelming support they are receiving from the public, if they look more at the magnitude of the crime than the danger of undermining the constitution, if they keep arguing with scant regard for the laws of the land that public or national interest overrides private interest, they must also know that those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. Indeed, the Buhari presidency must take caution now, for there is no telling what he would do, or how dangerously he would whip up emotions once the searchlight is beamed to other sectors of the economy and the true scale of the stealing perpetrated in the past decade or so comes to light.

  • Polemics of 1966 coup, civil war and current agitations

    January 15, 1966 will remain a watershed in Nigerian history, even if the lessons it teaches fall on deaf ears. Five majors had on that day executed a coup planned to, in the opinion of the coupists, wipe off the cream of Nigeria’s decadent leadership. The coup miscarried, leading to the wiping off of a large section of the then Northern Nigeria military and political leadership, a significant but nonetheless small part of Western Nigeria leadership, and a yet smaller and insignificant part of Eastern Nigeria leadership. The cruel interplay of forces led to the stigmatisation of the coup as an Igbo plot to forcefully and malevolently take over Nigeria while castrating the North. Fifty years later, lessons have appeared not to have been learnt, and various schismatic groups in Nigeria still hunker down in their ethnic and religious enclaves in ways that are either apparent or unapparent.

    A few days before that famous anniversary, polemicists from the north to the south, east and west organised a welter of symposia and workshops to mark the occasion and enable a reflection of the convulsive events that triggered the coup, countercoup and civil war. The almost universal view in the South is that the coup was justified, the execution faulty, and the objectives patriotic. Evidence have been led to show that the leaders of the coup actually intended to hand over the reins of power to Obafemi Awolowo, first Premier of Western Region who was at the time incarcerated. The five majors who planned the coup attested to this fact. They hinged their altruism on the fact that Chief Awolowo was a tested and courageous leader, excellent bureaucrat and administrator, and great and principled nationalist.

    For seeming to justify the reasons for the coup, and arguing that the coup was neither an Igbo coup nor a plan to achieve political power by the perpetrators, many southern commentators are pilloried by northern polemicists who suggest that a fruitless attempt to rewrite history was afoot. At a gathering to mark the anniversary of the coup and the end of the civil war, northern leaders, including Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, and Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, last week suggested that though they opposed reopening of old wounds, they took exception to an attempt to rewrite the history of those terrible events of January 1966, and the equally fruitless effort to rubbish the legacy of one of the principal victims of the coup, former Premier of the Northern Region, Ahmadu Bello, the eponymous Sardauna of Sokoto. The polemicists do not agree that misrule by especially the Sardauna, Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, and others in the ruling coalition of the time inspired the coup.

    “It is important that we keep history truthful and even if we forgive and forget, we must never allow history to be rewritten because what is happening in Nigeria today is a new narrative,” warned Emir Sanusi II. He added: “Sardauna was not a victim, Tafawa Balewa was not a victim and neither were they the cause of the problem. We cannot accept this. We do not want people to reopen old wounds because everyone has been hurt, everyone has been offended, everyone has lost people, everyone has been marginalized, everyone has tasted power, everyone has produced good and corrupt leaders. No one has monopoly of power or corruption or oppression. So, why don’t we, as one country learn from our history because history cannot be forgotten.” Governor el-Rufai on his own said the northern governors associated themselves with the views of the Emir of Kano, suggesting that any attempt to discredit those whose legacies the North still enjoys would be resisted. “The governors agree fully with the sentiment and statement expressed by the Emir of Kano. As northern governors, we want peace in Nigeria, we want unity in our diversity and we want development in Nigeria.”

    It is clear that opinions on the coup may never be reconciled. The North, by and large, still detests the coup; and the South, especially the eastern part, views the coup nostalgically, even romantically. It is also apparent that the country’s elites are still ensconced in their various ethnic cocoons. They will not break out of those cocoons anytime soon, nor will they soften their ossified views of the period. Not only have lessons not been learnt, there is very little conscious effort being made to engage a dispassionate study of the issues that led to the highly disruptive events of that year. It is even all the more certain that 50 years after the coup, Nigeria has not produced a truly national leader, not one, to weld the various groups in the country together, weaken primordial ethnic and religious attachments, and inspire through brilliant and targeted policies and actions a unified country where ‘tribes and tongues’ would not inhibit standing in ‘brotherhood’.

    The implication is that five decades after, sentiments of ethnic exceptionalism, sense of entitlement, and acrimonious sectarianism are not only rife among the country’s leaders, these vices also remain encased in a stupendously unworkable political structure supervised or enforced by security agents whose unprofessional, atavistic behaviour is worse than the British colonialists bequeathed. The country papered over the cracks exposed, not really caused, by the 1966 coup. It also glossed over the huge structural dissonance that continues to undermine peace and stability in the county and weaken and distort the bureaucracy. And, more destructively, there was no closure to the coup and countercoup crises, nor to the civil war. This is why northern and southern leaders stay comfortably unembarrassed in their sanctimonious and self-made cocoons, venturing out only to strike bargains and alliances for prebendal reasons. And this is why even ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, with all his years in office, is unruffled by his little appreciation of many national phenomena, including the civil war in which he was a notable actor. He pronounces the concept of Biafra dead, when the ideas that inspired, shaped and sustained it have remained fresh and gallingly relevant. Nigeria is undone by its ignorant, parochial and self-centred leaders.

    The issues thrown up by the 1966 coup, countercoup and civil war are not so intractable that a brilliant, selfless and purposeful leader cannot unravel. No Nigerian leader has attempted to grapple with those issues, and regional leaders are too embroiled in the January 15 controversy, and love their people and their religions too much, to do a dispassionate deconstruction of the complex phenomena that unhinged the nation nearly 50 years ago. Perhaps one day, before it is too late, that leader will come, that deus ex machina.

  • Dispirited PDP and opposition crisis

    Dispirited PDP and opposition crisis

    With dozens of its chieftains arrested or questioned by anti-graft agencies and the secret service, and many more being readied for scalding or sundry and subtle judicial pressures, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is desperately clutching at straws to mitigate the political and spiritual cataclysm it feared would be its lot if it lost the 2015 general elections. The party lost the elections badly to the All Progressives Congress (APC) virtually at every conceivable level, and what it feared the most, apocalypse engendered by the unyielding and ascetic Muhammadu Buhari, has come upon it with unremitting vengeance. Party members are in disarray, and party leadership, never inspiring or altruistic at the best of times, has wilted so completely that no one can point at anyone of intellectual substance or moral mettle left in the party’s top echelon.

    Ex-president Goodluck Jonathan led the party to defeat, after clumsily presiding over the affairs of the country for over five years. By retiring to his home state of Bayelsa, and in fact his hometown of Otuoke, in quiet but undignified solitude, he gave indication he had figuratively fallen on his sword. In the foreseeable future he will offer no leadership or even admonition of any kind to his besieged party. Olisa Metuh, the party’s national publicity secretary was an incompetent publicist and political voyeur who aped the APC’s Lai Mohammed without the latter’s passion. Even then, he was perhaps the only somewhat sensible voice the party boasted of in the dizzying aftermath of the election. Now that he has been defanged by the anti-graft agency, the EFCC, for allegedly receiving misappropriated public money, his voice will probably become muffled.

    Uche Secondus was at best a provocative politician given to much frills than substance, before the courts ousted him as acting national chairman of the party through the litigious Ahmed Gulak, a PDP chieftain and former special adviser to Dr Jonathan. As soon as the acting crown settled around his ears, he launched into an exaggerated and elaborate farce not too dissimilar from what he concocted as “Total Chairman” in his leadership of the party in Rivers State. Other than the founding chairman of DAAR Communications, Raymond Dokpesi, whose woes have paradoxically enlivened his personal disposition and emboldened his politics to take on the government, and the Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, whose rampant and ferocious uncouthness has led him to far more incivilities than his naturally mean manners are suited for, there are no other recognisable names manning the PDP barricades against the Buhari presidency.

    But what the PDP needs is not the erection or manning of barricades, nor the clumsy and appalling political menagerie of self-styled and self-appointed saviours like the untutored Mr. Fayose, the melodramatic Mr. Metuh and the cantankerous Mr. Fani-Kayode. The PDP may be incompetent to appreciate why the country needs it, considering how unerringly it sells itself short and embarks relentlessly on the path of self-destruction, but the country, mercifully,  recognises why it needs the PDP. None of the myriad other opposition parties can hold the candle to the PDP. They are small, opportunistic, poorly led, lacking in concrete ideology, short-termist, and eager to enter into pecuniary deals, as the Dasukigate scandal is showing, with courtesan zeal. While the PDP ideology is perversely indefinable, being more eclectic than conservative, and more parochial than humanistic, it managed to harness its modest strengths to control some 10 states (which may shrink further) and a very sizable number of National Assembly seats. In the short run, the PDP, is the closest thing to anything describable as opposition. It will have to be succored and propped up to perform the vital function of aggregating and channeling public reservations and angst against many of APC’s highfalutin and cocksure panaceas.

    It will however be difficult for the PDP to function as an opposition party without a brilliant, civil, foresighted and credible leadership. Often in other countries, the loss of an election is sufficient reason to discard party leadership and purge the party of deadwoods, so that fresh ideas, new faces unconstrained by the trauma of defeat, and catalysing party values and principles can be distilled and channeled to present new and more energetic challenges to the ruling party. The PDP has stubbornly retained its traumatised leaders and kept its old and discredited faces, most of them hobbled by the collateral damage from President Buhari’s anti-graft war. The party’s leaders, who should really be protem leaders, have done nothing about the structure, ideology and programmes of their party. And they have reacted in sterile and predictable ways to the onslaught of the ruling party. They have been unable to deconstruct the APC’s plans and programmes, including the budget, not to say react effectively to the ruling party’s copious mistakes and hubristic assault on human rights and legal provisions. Indeed, to all intents and purposes, the country is under one-party rule, a one-party rule worsened by the absence of dissent within the APC itself.

    There are fears the PDP will be unable to redeem itself or regain lost grounds on account of the many troubles its leaders have become embroiled in. A parallel is drawn with the APC’s inauspicious beginnings. Formed in 2013, its gait unsteady, and its structure an amalgam of tentativeness and unrealistic and overstretched ambitions, the APC looked anything but ready to snatch power from the entrenched behemoth, the PDP. Even after it presented its road map in 2014 about a year after its formation, the APC still looked and sounded unready for high office. A little over two years down the line, however, not only did the APC sweep into office, it did so magnificently, overwhelmingly and overpoweringly. If the APC could achieve such lofty goals in approximately two years, what could the dispirited PDP, properly restructured and led, and with 16 years rule in the bag, not achieve in four years? Reports of its death or speculations of its dying may, therefore, be greatly exaggerated. In any case, the country desires a powerful opposition; President Buhari himself, sometimes messianic and at other times overassuming and abrasive, needs a strong opposition; and democracy itself needs the opposition to breathe, exhale and moult.

    The problem the PDP may have, apart from the excruciating leadership pains it now suffers from, is whether it can have a committed person to marshal the party’s strength, deploy his private resources, equip himself with a transcendental vision of the new PDP, display enormous courage by risking his life and business, all in the service of renewing the party and repositioning it for the great fight ahead. That leader will have to manifest a great understanding of the philosophical nexus between party and country so encompassing that it must possess both a continental and global relevance and application. It is doubtful whether the APC could have been formed let alone record its surprising achievements had Bola Ahmed Tinubu not defied the PDP as governor, plotted a resurgent and ‘internationalist’ Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), inspired the coalition that led to the formation of the APC, mercurially welded it together despite its fissiparous tendency, and revolutionarily led the fight to dethrone the wealthy, entrenched and ruthless PDP, all the while risking his life and business with one single throw of the dice. It was a gamble that paid off, but it was gamble bravely and intelligently taken.

    The PDP prides itself in consensus building and collective decision-making, and its beginnings actually gave hint of those fine attributes. But under the practical and military-minded ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, the party quickly morphed into a malignant and subliminal dictatorship so awe-inspiring that challenging him was like courting death. Since the Obasanjo years, successive presidents impractically doubling as party leaders had reinforced that culture of implacable rule. Beneath that culture, however, was another sub-culture of sycophancy that turned presidential aides, advisers and cabinet ministers into a choral group of yes-men and praise singers. To therefore expect that suddenly the PDP can forswear its past habits and indulgent beginnings in favour of enthroning disciplined and structured rule by a collective may be far-fetched.

    Unfortunately for the PDP, and notwithstanding the boastful and reckless efforts of politicians like Mr. Fayose, the loquacious Femi Fani-Kayode, and the pretentious Chief Dokpesi, there is no one of substance in the party to serve as an inspiration and rallying point. Years of attrition triggered by Chief Obasanjo’s scorched earth policies had led to the exit of great minds from the party. Solomon Lar is dead; Audu Ogbeh is in the APC, and Atiku Abubakar is perhaps the closest to any living being of a stateless politician in the sense that his attachments to any political party are always tenuous at best and expedient at worst. In the demeaning final analysis, Chief Obasanjo himself publicly and ceremoniously shredded his PDP party card and promoted himself without substantiation to the rank of a statesman. Had he remained in the PDP, though he lacks vision, he could perhaps serve as a rallying point. And had former vice president Atiku stayed put in the PDP, not only would his political advancement be steady and assured, he would today be the party’s natural leader. But if both Chief Obasanjo and Alhaji Atiku were to plot their way back into the soulless and distressed PDP, the searing heat and stress of their reentry, like spacecrafts experience during atmospheric reentry, would accentuate the party’s troubles.

    While it is true that the PDP’s main problem is to find a leader capable of reviving the party and restoring it on a path of growth and stability, the countervailing opportunities for a credible opposition party more than make up for the headaches the PDP and its teflon leaders will be experiencing. Whether anyone agrees or not, the Buhari presidency is directly or indirectly decimating the PDP. Had PDP leaders fallen on their sword after the great defeat of last year, and new leaders produced, the misfortune of the disgraced leaders would not be intertwined with that of the party. The Buhari presidency may be riding high at the moment, latching and leveraging on the anti-corruption war as it were, yet, the president has demonstrated lack of democratic credentials and insufficient vision on such a disconcerting scale that they offer a credible, cohesive and focused opposition party reasons to campaign for relevance and even much more.

    In President Buhari’s first media chat, he also showed his worrisome understanding of the inalienable rights granted Nigerians by their constitution. The president believes some of those rights can be negotiated or be made to suffer diminution on account of the severity or gravity of the offences committed by a citizen. A sensible opposition party can turn this into a major campaign issue, notwithstanding the popular sentiments against the so-called treasury looters. In addition, the president also showed an incomplete understanding of Nigeria’s national military doctrine vis-a-vis the constitutional imperatives guaranteeing the safety, security and well-being of both law-abiding and lawbreaking citizens. His unflattering approach to the Shiites/Army clash of early December is an example. Added to a welter of poor and contradictory economic policies strangulating business and society, the president’s unsure approach to the rights of citizens and the independence of the judiciary should give the opposition ammunition to stake a powerful and credible claim in 2019 and the few important elections before then. So far, however, nothing has come from the PDP.

    Can a new opposition party that knows its onions flourish between now and 2019? It is not certain, even if it could build on the foundation of attracting or luring dissenters from both the PDP and APC. The APC came at an opportune time, when the PDP was in the throes of a grave sickness, and many foundling parties embracing lofty ideas and ambitions were itching for war, whether fratricidal or regicidal. The objective conditions on the ground today, probably as a result of President Buhari’s politics and anti-graft war, make it a very testy and uncertain proposition to form a great opposition party. But should the PDP disintegrate, and other minor parties prove too weak to stand in the gap, then the moment may be ripe, and as the English say, needs must when the devil drives.

    To cut the time short and save the nation plenty of trouble and expenses, the PDP must be encouraged to stand up to be counted, and fight. It must purge its ranks and leadership and produce a great revolutionary. It must rid itself of the usurpers and self-appointed spokesmen claiming to represent its ideals. It must restructure and renew itself. And it must, with a set of new leaders and purposeful recruitment of new members, offer needed social, political and economic alternatives to the fairly capricious and untested Buhari presidency. The problems are pressing; the solution must also be urgent.

  • Incredibly revelatory media chat

    Incredibly revelatory media chat

    If eloquence or elocution was all that is needed to prove one’s bona fides or demonstrate competence, President Muhammadu Buhari would prove a woeful failure. In his maiden media chat last week, he struggled to communicate, and worse, even struggled to form his thoughts. He did not have problem with his tenses, nor if he did should that worry us. At least the country understood their president, and from his responses, the president in turn claimed and indeed appeared to understand his countrymen, especially how sometimes difficult they can be. It was his first media chat, and doubtless his coaches must have worked on him, schooling him on difficult and anticipated questions, and gently admonishing the ramrod straight retired army general to rein in his emotions, soften his taciturnity, and crack some jokes. His coaches will now need to do more, and if need be, ensure he can tell the difference between excise and exercise, for one has to do with customs and the other military drill.

    Overall, notwithstanding his problematic elocution, President Buhari came across as honest, down to earth, dependable, and someone Nigerians can trust with their money — absolutely. But to trust him with their lives, Nigerians will have to school him on the constitution afresh and extract promises of his fidelity to the laws of the land. For now, he sees both the constitution and the law as hindrances and handles them with the expedience of his military antecedents. Former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan spoke clearer and more fluently, and had better, wider and more complex grasp of issues; howbeit the former was imperious with his guttural voice and elocution, and the latter, with his clipped speech and tremulous voice, suffered from persecution complex.

    This is President Buhari’s first chat. Despite his age, education and inflexible approach to issues, he is expected to improve considerably and in many ways. But in some other critical ways, Nigerians must not expect any improvement, because there won’t and can’t be any. The president rightly drew a parallel between his first coming as a military head of state, when he railroaded suspected thieves to jail and put the burden of proof on them, and his latest coming as an elected president, when the burden of proof lies with his government. Yet, he sounded plaintive, and could barely hide his irritation with the procedural handicaps the rule of law imposed on him. Worse, when asked why he seemed impervious to the bail granted some of his quarries, perhaps particularly former National Security Adviser (NSA) Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd.), the president bristled at the question, one of the two times he nearly lost his composure during the chat, and drew attention to the severity of the allegations and evidence against the retired colonel. At that point, and for him, the issue was no longer the law. It surprisingly bothered him little that he could be accused, very reasonably it seems, of pursuing vendetta against the former NSA.

    It is hard to say why President Buhari’s approach to the rule of law has changed very little since his military days. He won the presidential election without apologising for the execution of three drug suspects in 1985, one of whom was clearly a victim of judicial murder. But he accepted responsibility and claimed that if elected, he would subject himself to the laws of the land; for as he put it, he had sworn to uphold the constitution. Yet, he is not discomfited by his peremptory conclusion that suspects would jump bail if granted. How did he come to that conclusion? Why could he not prove that conclusion before the courts that thrice granted the former NSA bail? And if the courts turned down his request, why would he think the courts were unctuous and ingratiating with criminals or complicit in perverting justice to society?

    The problem, it is obvious, is not just the former NSA and whatever issues he had with the president dating back to the 1985 coup d’etat. The problem is that from President Buhari’s responses, he seems in fact fundamentally disposed to autocratic, messianic and sanctimonious leadership. He seizes upon the egregious felonies of the suspects undergoing trial or interrogation to whip up emotions among the outraged public. Whether as it concerns Col. Dasuki (retd.) or the killing of obstreperous Shiites in Zaria, or yet the matter of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, the president has an anachronistic approach to law and order. He gave no room to the delicate and magnificent nuances of law and order and the rule of law. It was enough for him that the offences the three people and groups were charged with were shocking and scandalous. It made no sense to him that much more than the danger to the republic constituted by the offences, he stood the even more coruscating risk of coming across as someone who viewed the law from the point of expediency. All that mattered to him, he implied, was the frightening scale of the offences, not the letter nor the spirit of the law.

    Mr Kanu, he described contemptuously as “the one you are calling Kanu”. The Shiites, he suggested, were not even liked by their neighbours; and what kind of government, he asked rhetorically, would he be running as president who swore to uphold the constitution should he permit any group to run a government within a government? And Col. Dasuki (retd.), he said emotively, received humongous sums arbitrarily from the former president and seemed likely to jump bail. In short, President Buhari’s jurisprudence spans a very limited gamut: the moment he forms an unfavourable opinion of you, you can neither be right nor be entitled to the adjudicatory nicety and sufferance of the law. President Buhari may have been elected; but every pore in his body oozes military rule and a constricted, myopic body of archaic and redundant laws.

    Nothing was more shocking than his response to the Shiite crisis. Admittedly the president came across as honest as anyone can be. So, it was obvious he didn’t like the Shiites, and he only hid conveniently behind the concept of federalism to await Kaduna State reaction to the Zaria killings in order to formulate his own. Notwithstanding, he was in fact dismissive of any concerns about the infringement of the rights of Shiites, simply because he had formed his calcified opinion of their troublesomeness. But even armed robbers have rights under the law, let alone unorthodox sects whose doctrines and manners appeared to grate badly on their neighbours. When asked what he would do about the problem, he did not understand it as an opportunity to propound a robust understanding of the rights of man, of the complexities of modern life vis-a-vis religious differences, and of whether the existing laws were capable of tackling some of the newer and more profound challenges of the modern era. To him, it was a straitjacket issue of law and order.

    In addition, from all indications, he trusted the army’s account, even citing the obfuscatory explanation of the General Officer Commanding (GOC) I Division of the Nigerian Army, Kaduna as proof that the Shiites fomented trouble and carried arms. Many aspects of the story pointed in the direction of both the barbarous use of excessive force, poor judgement, and unlawful deployment of the army. But on the Shiite matter, the president’s democratic instinct, if he has any and if it will survive to the end of his tenure, was clearly and enthusiastically subordinated to his military instinct, which abounds in his sinews and marrows, and will be interred with his bones. He will admit of no dispassion in such matters. More, he has virtually made up his mind on who the villains are, like the impetuous Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, when all the country asks of him are some open-mindedness and a keen awareness of the inalienable rights the constitution vouchsafes even to the most truculent and unorthodox persons or groups.  It was both justificatory and expiatory for the president and Kaduna governor that Zarians and neighbours of the Shiites rejoiced at the terrible and excessive blows rained on the group.

    President Buhari may mean well for the country, especially on the matter of fighting corruption and indiscipline. But his maiden media chat shows a man still sadly trapped in the past, a man moving along haphazardly into the future along a single track. He must be prevailed upon urgently to reform and mend his ways if democracy is to survive, let alone flourish. Had Chief Obasanjo laid the right foundation for democracy, neither Dr Jonathan nor Gen. Buhari would have had the opportunity, given their tenuous bona fides and inchoate ideas of democracy, to even present themselves for election. But Dr Jonathan came and built anarchically on Chief Obasanjo’s appalling foundation, and President Buhari has completely done away with the foundation and is erecting an edifice without a conceptually sound and coherent foundation.

    This makes President Buhari’s presidency more difficult to be optimistic about. There will be plenty of noise and thunder, but there will be little about his government by way of long-lasting legacy. Twice his interviewers asked what his economic vision was and what vision he hoped the civil service could key into, especially given the seeming creation of Babatunde Fashola’s super ministry. The president offered none other than to say that once insecurity was tackled and corruption forced into abatement, the country would heave a sigh of relief. But it was necessary for him to concisely state his vision, and that vision needed to be all-encompassing, breathtakingly covering politics, economics and society. Some have said the interviewers were incompetent and unable to press the president for sound and succinct answers. Yes, one interviewer was unnecessary wordy, but on the whole they discharged their responsibilities admirably. In fact, the president’s responses were much less insightful than both the questions asked and the issues raised. The anchor did exceptionally well, and given the president’s constant resort to mundaneness, it became irresistible to conclude that in complexity and nuances, the questions far transcended the answers. It even seemed at a point that the interviewers were exasperated.

    At the end of the chat, the president appeared exultant, even daring to lecture everyone on aspects of journalism the country must look forward to. He will doubtless go away with the feeling he carried himself well, did not lose his cool, expressed himself simply though not profoundly, and suffered no major embarrassment. It is not clear what his handlers will tell him, whether they will diplomatically tell him there is room for improvement, or whether they will encourage him to watch a replay of the chat in the privacy of his office, where his conscience will have the freedom to do a forthright self-appraisal. If he manages to reflect on the chat, he will discover he was not prepared for any question on the abducted Chibok girls, whose number he even forgot, and that he also gave the impression his government was doing practically nothing to rescue them.

    He will also discover he often lost his train of thoughts, was inattentive to details in many areas, displayed little knowledge of anything, including the economy, subsidy and devaluation, and offered little hope of a great future in which Nigeria will transform into a modern society of sound laws, great structure, and great leaders and statesmen. Should he notch up his reflectiveness a bit, he will be appalled by his answer on the Kanu IPOB matter, his insensitivity to the Shiite tragedy, and the missed chance to assure Nigerians that he had truly become a democrat who understood the rule of law, the implacable principle of bail, and the doctrine of separation of powers.

    But President Buhari will also console himself with the ironic comments of observers following his maiden chat showing he was not overrated by the public. He was meant as a battering ram against the follies and foibles of Dr Jonathan, and lightning arrestor to the former president’s permissiveness. If his team is capable, let them now sit down with the president to coach him on what should be done to transform the country and produce and bequeath a lasting legacy. They will of course not be able to turn him into a philosopher-king, but they can at least make him a little bit more reflective, sensitive, and obedient to the constitution. They can help him tone down his military mannerism, and make him a little more democratic. And they can also encourage him to really lay a solid foundation for Nigerian democracy, a thought obviously not among his priorities at the moment. The country will be able to judge from his next chat and his responses whether there is little room to hope or a wide gulf to despair.