The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Zaria killings and el-Rufai’s impetuousness

    Zaria killings and el-Rufai’s impetuousness

    In their response to the bloody Shi’ites/Army clash in Zaria on December 12, the Northern Governors’ Forum led by Borno State governor Kashim Settima expressed confidence in the way Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State handled the crisis. They were hasty in their pronouncement. The 19-member forum, all of whom were anxious to prevent a reenactment of the kind of religious cum socio-economic revolt that morphed into the intractable Boko Haram insurgency, praised all the steps taken by el-Rufai in responding to the clash. But rising from the meeting, and perhaps emboldened by the vote of confidence passed in him by his colleagues, the Kaduna State governor indicated that the Shi’ite leader, Ibraheem Yaqub el-Zakzaky would be prosecuted.

    Then, in a statewide broadcast in which he announced his decision to set up a judicial panel to investigate the clash, Mallam el-Rufai addressed some of the issues that triggered the horrific Zaria killings. Incredibly and insensitively, he attributed all the triggers to the serial malfeasances of the Shi’ites. He accused them of forcibly appropriating the lands of their neighbours, attempting to take over mosques they had not built, and building without permits at their Hussainiya headquarters. He appeared unwilling or impatient to let the judicial panel probe the remote and immediate causes of the clash, and to come to independent assessments and conclusions. Indeed, as a spokesman of the Shi’ites said, the governor had appeared to take sides, and had indicated which of the two parties was guilty.

    There is hardly any commentary on the clash that has not accused the Shi’ites of strong-arm tactics, of disrespecting, flouting and circumscribing the law and the constitution, and of provoking and inconveniencing their neighbours, far and near, within or outside their city base. These infractions cannot be glossed over, and must of course be comprehensively addressed by the judicial panel. But it was not only unwise of Mallam el-Rufai to have made the kind of insensitive broadcast attributed to him, he was even more shockingly insensitive to the scale of the tragedy that had befallen Zaria in particular, and the state as a whole. If he knew he had all the facts of the clash and possessed the courage to declaim on the crisis as peremptorily as he did, and did not need a panel to probe it, he should have gone the whole hog to talk of the casualties sustained essentially by one party to the clash.

    The Northern Governors’ Forum should have avoided passing a vote of confidence in the Kaduna State governor. They had responded well to the crisis by summoning a meeting to address the matter in Kaduna. And they did well to fear the worst. But they should have limited their involvement to empathisisng with the state and the victims, and warning of the need to avoid a replay of the Boko Haram crisis. Unfortunately, both the governor and his sympathising colleagues failed to address the two most crucial parts of the crisis — the need for justice; and the need to divorce the provocation by Shi’ites from the content and character of the army’s response. On these two aspects hang the future of Nigeria and the integrity of its constitution.

    Mallam el-Rufai’s broadcast should have been more nuanced. He needed rightly to be worried about the Shi’ite provocation, but to begin railing against the sect’s lack of building permits and their constant disagreements and frictions with neighbours seems to make the governor anxious to justify the mass killings. In the broadcast, the governor did not give indication he knew much about the concept of justice, its beauty, its many sides, and its contribution to stability and peace, let alone understand how to achieve that peace. The northern governors may have connived at his style, and underscored their anxiety not to worsen the crises in the North by their adulatory statements; but neither they nor the governor seemed to appreciate that the brutality that hallmarked Boko Haram and the conflagration it triggered were given fillip by injustice.

    Importantly, too, while the Shi’ites could not by any stretch of the imagination be absolved of blame, it was however more crucial to worry about the nature and temper of the army’s response. There will always be provocations and infractions; but the security agencies and other law enforcement bodies must respond according to the dictates of, and within the confines of, the provisions of the law and constitution. It is that kind of sane response that sets the civilised community apart from violent and anarchic groups. In the Boko Haram case, extra-judicial killings were initially the order of the day, with the army citing the extenuating reasons of the insurgents’ own cruel and barbarous standards. Against the Shi’ites, surely the country has learnt enough lessons not to countenance, in any circumstance, and no matter the intensity of provocations, a resort to self-help. No one is sure of the casualty figures. But estimates range from 60 or 70 to a couple of hundreds, some say as many as about 300. Neither Mallam el-Rufai nor the northern governors showed appropriate concern over such an alarming figure, nor what it portends for the region.

    Worse, even the presidency has been bewilderingly reduced to prevarications and whispers. It was of course not expected that they would condemn outright Malam el-Rufai’s faux pas or his intemperate reaction, but given the involvement of the army, which controversially went beyond the rules of engagement to reinforce its troops and launch fresh attacks against the Shi’ites, the presidency should have paid more than a passing interest.

    And so while it is incontestable that the Shi’ites habitually infringed on the rights and privacies of others and disrespected lawful authorities, it is even more damnably true that Mallam el-Rufai was insensitive and unwise in his broadcast, the northern governors curiously detached and ingratiating, and the presidency slow, unresponsive and unable to properly deconstruct the issues involved. Nigerians must have no doubt about what should be done. The Shi’ites must be made to answer for any law they break on a general basis. But in the case of the Zaria killings, in which unlawful and disproportionate force was applied, the judicial panel must separate the provocation from the response, and everyone, including the top brass of the army, found culpable must be made to face the law.

    Nigerian laws expect infractions, including very severe and horrendous breaches; but they also recommend that punishment must be aligned with legal and constitutional provisions in order not to promote anarchy. The Zaria killings must be made a test case, notwithstanding the aloofness of the presidency, the connivance of the northern governors, and the churlishness of Mallam el-Rufai. Public focus on the judicial panel must be intense and unrelenting. If the panelists do not have the character, wisdom and temperament to ensure justice, the public, both local and international, must force the reconstitution of a new panel until justice has been done and seen to be done. The scale and one-sidedness of the killings demand nothing less, for it may be any other group’s turn tomorrow in the hands of nervous and excited security agents flouting and dishonouring the constitution under the guise of punishing crime and promoting peace and order.

  • PDP assails Buhari’s curious budget

    PDP assails Buhari’s curious budget

    With declining oil production, low and still falling crude oil prices, fewer buyers for Nigeria’s oil, and a determination to borrow almost two trillion naira of the six trillion naira it has budgeted for next year, it is no surprise that the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), appears peeved that the President Muahammadu Buhari government seems smug about both the 2016 Budget and the economy as a whole. The opposition of course has a right to pick holes in the budget. But it is not obvious that they have performed that role with depth or finesse. Yet, of all the issues needing the diligent attention of the opposition, budget tops the scale. It offers the opposition the opportunity to, as it were, present their own budget, to expertly take the government’s budget apart, block by block, piece by piece.

    The Buhari government has, for instance, indicated that ‘for now’ it would not countenance any increase in the pump price of fuel; but it has made no provision for fuel subsidy in 2016, instantly indicating to the perceptive that removing fuel subsidy, whether in one fell swoop or in phases, is a decision already made. What the ruling party waits for is the proper timing early next year to effect the removal. Whether this bald fact escaped the opposition is not clear. It should by now have presented a coherent policy on the subsidy matter, prepared a consistent and coherent alternative to President Buhari’s economic plans, or what seems like an economic plan, wondered how far-reaching 500,000 jobs would be when tens of thousands are losing their jobs every week, assess the undue optimism of the $38 oil price benchmark, and carefully propounded a social and political charter for Nigerians — alternative policies the public can see and connect with.

    Instead of a studious approach to criticising the Buhari economic agenda, the spontaneous Olisa Metuh, the PDP’s publicity secretary, has issued a statement sweepingly dismissing the Buhari budget “…as a big fraud and executive conspiracy tailored towards mortgaging the future of the nation.” The party seems more bothered about the decision of President Buhari to borrow almost two trillion naira to finance the deficit. The PDP did not give indication its statement is a tentative first reaction until a more comprehensive one is made, though if it were, the statement should have been worded differently and expertly nuanced. The party did not suggest, though it is expected of them, that they would still issue a more comprehensive response to the budget proposals. Even its tentative response, assuming that is what it was, was shallow, immature, and amateurish.

    The PDP is today so dispirited that it lacks cohesion and focus to take on the weak-kneed All Progressives Congress (APC). Its main protagonist is the uncouth and paranoid Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State. The party does not have a philosopher, organiser, defender, and exemplar. If it were possible to produce an alternative to the PDP, the country would be glad to embrace that option, for it is not compulsory, given its poverty of ideas and other shortcomings, that it should be the leading opposition party. Sadly, at the moment, the PDP is still the country’s best bet to engage and discomfit the ruling party. It still has what could pass as a country-wide structure, and it controls a few states. It must be encouraged to reform and restructure in order to present itself as a credible opposition party.

    So far, it has performed very poorly and behaved even more egregiously. It has not given indication it has an alternative political charter for the country; nor does it seem capable of even analysing Buhari’s economic agenda and budget, let alone providing an alternative framework. The PDP should be reminded that the APC did not blunder its way into electoral victory in March, nor climbed upon a concatenation of chanced events and freak political accidents to record the triumph it achieved in the last polls. In the same way, the PDP must not expect that the country, by a string of strange coincidences, would turn around somewhere down the road to embrace the party.

    Fortunately for the PDP, all is not lost. The APC is still at war with itself, and while the Buhari presidency pursues the anti-graft war with single-minded resolve, it has not managed to inspire the public, nor shown that its methods and programmes are fundamentally different from those of the PDP, nor yet given indication that it has become formidable, well organised, inspired and eruditely visionary. For the PDP to offer an alternative, it has to do profoundly much better than the APC by out-thinking, out-structuring, and out-inspiring the ruling party. But at the rate the PDP is atrophying, it will need something close to magic to unnerve the ruling party, not to talk of offering Nigerians the sound alternative they need.

  • Kogi’s sponsored elders

    In Kogi State, they are not content with letting bad enough alone. After nurturing what they like to happily describe as an inconclusive November 21 governorship election, and exhibiting betrayal and opportunism in making unlawful claims, they have now resorted to producing elders and stakeholders, especially from Okunland, to pressure Kogites to accept illegitimacy. The duo of Dino Melaye, a senator, and Clarence Olafemi, a former Speaker of the State House of Assembly and also one-time acting governor, began that crazy and infamous embrace of distorted reality.

    Now, sundry stakeholders and so-called elders groups are coming together by the week to either pressure James Abiodun Faleke, running mate to the late Abubakar Audu in the last and disputed governorship poll, into embracing the illusory Yahaya Bello ticket, considering how both INEC and the APC had made the latter the inheritor of the victorious Audu/Faleke ticket, or to get the party to appoint a new deputy to Alhaji Bello. The problem is not just the appalling sense of justice being displayed by these so-called elders, but the fact that many faceless and disreputable groups now masquerade as elders purporting to speak for the Yoruba Okun of Kogi State. They indicate how easy it is to build a castle to injustice not only in Kogi but in Nigeria as a whole.

  • Portents of Zaria killings

    Portents of Zaria killings

    If spokesmen of the Nigerian Army are credible, fewer than 10 people died in the skirmishes between the army and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, otherwise more popularly called Shi’ites, in the December 12 clash in Zaria. If spokesmen of the Shi’ites are also credible, hundreds, if not thousands, died in the clash, including a wife of their leader Sheikh Ibraheem Yaqub el-Zakzaky, and one of his sons. Recently, the Shi’ites have leaned more to the ‘hundreds’ figure, and are uncertain whether their injured leader is not dead. They have promised to compile names and photographs of those they said were killed in the clash. The country waits for them to do so. But if hospital authorities have been quoted correctly, some 61 or so bodies were deposited in the morgue. The Shi’ites said they were not armed with guns when the clash, which they described as a premeditated attack, began. The army insists the Shi’ites were not only armed, but that they attempted to assassinate the Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai, on his way to a function in Zaria. For now, the army is yet to give a figure of its own wounded and dead.

    After initially rejoicing that the pesky Shi’ites had been taught a lesson or two in civic responsibility, Zarians, the rest of Nigeria, Iran and the world at large have been horrified by the scale of the slaughter. Iran, the self-styled guardian of the world’s Shi’a community, has taken umbrage and called for an independent probe. The Nigerian government at first ignored the slaughter, misjudged the problem, and when it woke up, reacted tamely. But whether it can handle the impending fallout remains to be seen. The army itself, after venting its spleen on the audacious Shi’ites, quickly attempted to control the fallout from the clash by publicising its own version of the clash, announcing a casualty figure that did not reflect the scale of the trouble, and rushed preemptively ad disingenuously to the Human Rights Commission to lodge a complaint against the Muslim Brotherhood. The public was both miffed by and distrusting of the army’s reactions.

    Since its tough and irreverent beginnings in the 1980s, few have felt comfortable with el-Zakzaky’s Shi’a community, whether in the Sokoto redoubt from where they were flushed out some seven or eight years ago after a misunderstanding, or in and around their commodious Hussaniyya headquarters in Zaria, or other places in Kaduna State and elsewhere. They have a tendency to overwhelm law enforcement agents, block roads in the process of worship and teachings, muzzle those around their neighbourhoods, engage in generally disruptive long-distance treks, and are indifferent to the pains and complaints of other road users. Their actions and disregard for secular authorities naturally bring them in conflict with other road users and the government.  Repeated clashes have led to terrible losses, but the Shi’ites have hugged martyrdom eagerly thereby causing and fueling exasperation among security agents. In Zaria where the army maintains a major presence, the clashes, it seemed, were inevitable.

    Sheikh el-Zakzaky has had repeated brushes with the law. But his adroit leadership has seen membership increase phenomenally, with many intellectuals, brilliant students and graduates flocking into the group. Last year’s clashes were especially bloody, and might have presaged this year’s. On that occasion, the Sheikh lost three of his sons and 32 other members to rampaging soldiers, indicating that he led by example and neither he nor his group shirked a fight. But they always insisted killing others was not part of their philosophy, and that they did not carry guns.

    From all the accounts of the clash, it is unlikely that the army would be given the benefit of the doubt. The Shi’ites acknowledged blocking the road that leads to their headquarters, but not the main thoroughfare which the Chief of Army Staff’s convoy passed. They insisted a detachment of soldiers laid siege to their headquarters and fired into the air. And finally, they said even after the COAS had passed, a reinforcement of troops came to vandalise their premises and kill scores of their members. They poured contempt on the video clip the army is circulating, insisting that it was a clip of a clash somewhere else the day before the army/Shi’ites clash. Given their antecedents in the counterinsurgency war so far, and the reputation for extra-judicial killings perpetrated by troops in the early years of the war in the Northeast, the world is naturally unwilling to give the army the benefit of the doubt in the Zaria clash. They see the December 12 killings as a massacre, and consider the army undisciplined, vengeful and unwilling to accept responsibility for its actions.

    The Kaduna State government has rightly instituted a judicial panel of inquiry into the clash. The public expects the panel to be fair and just in its findings and conclusions. In 2009, the country and justice system failed the equally troublesome Boko Haram sect, then a foundling organisation calling itself the Nigerian Taliban. The repercussions to the Northeast and the entire country is so staggeringly obvious that it is shocking no lessons have been learnt. In 2009, both the police and the military believed that any serious problem could be solved with force. That solution has proved both elusive and pigheaded. Sadly, both the police and the military think the Shi’a problem will respond well to the use of force. It will not. The group’s brazen and provocative stance and doctrine need carefully calibrated political and law enforcement measures to tackle. Mindless slaughter of the scale witnessed against Boko Haram members in 2008-09, and probably now against the Shi’ites, whether the authorities lie about it or not, will only compound the problem.

    The army has prevaricated over whether Sheikh el-Zakzaky and his wife and son are alive or not. All the army says is that the Sheikh is no longer in their custody. It will be ominous should he be dead, for the public remembers to their dismay how the extra-judicial killing of the first Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf radicalised the Northeast sect beyond any palliative and worsened the revolt. It will be foolish if the army had given vent to their frustrations, as many now fear, and killed el-Zakzaky. After all, there is no guarantee that his successor, as was the case with Boko Haram, would not be more radical, assertive and brutal. Nigerians will hope another gate of hell has not been opened in the bowels of the North.

    The federal government’s response to the crisis was poor and shambolic. It didn’t move fast enough. It must now begin to ask how the army is deployed, or whether the army now has a life of its own. After the initial skirmish with the Shi’ites and the COAS had left, the inquiry must find answers to who gave orders for the army to mobilise reinforcement to invade the Shi’ites headquarters, and whether that order was still within the purview of the rules of engagement. Hopefully, the judicial panel will answer all questions relating to the clash and help the slow federal government guard against future occurrences. While the troubles of the Shi’ites are well known and must be tackled appropriately, it is difficult to absolve the army of blame. Troubling days are definitely ahead.

  • Dasukigate and controversial media payments

    Of all the fiery elements of Dasukigate, the scandalous arms deal and financial bazaar superintended but not necessarily wholly inspired by the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), three controversial payments concerned the media and have fuelled animated discussions all over the country, some of them sensible, but most misplaced, confused and emotional. The arithmetic of the arms deal and slush funds payments is still being worked out, and no single, final sum has yet been produced. But as far as the media is concerned, three payments stick out like a sore thumb.

    The first, over N2bn, was made out in favour of chairman emeritus of Africa Independent Television (AIT), Raymond Dokpesi, ostensibly for publicity of indeterminate scope. The second, over N500m, was made out in favour of Nduka Obaigbena, publisher of ThisDay newspaper, ostensibly to compensate him for the damage done by Boko Haram to the ThisDay office in Abuja in 2012. The third, some N120m, was meant for media houses whose operations were disrupted by the army in 2014, but channeled through the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN) and Mr Obaigbena in particular. The Nation newspaper bore the brunt of that attack and disruption.

    It is pointless debating the payments to leaders of the then ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), whether the funds were meant for politics, to buy consciences, or to appease or settle militants. For the purpose of this piece, the main focus will be the payments to media proprietors and media houses, in particular the latter. Both Chief Dokpesi and Mr. Obaigbena insist the sizable payments made to them were perfectly legitimate. Few believe them.  Indeed, their long-suffering media establishments will be shocked and embarrassed by the size of the payments. In addition to the general controversy regarding how the NSA became the former ruling party’s and the ex-president’s bursar, not to talk of the needless and infinite distractions the money and the payments constituted to the onerous work of the security adviser, questions have been asked about the processes as well as the objectives of the payments.

    Both Chief Dokpesi and Mr Obaigbena cannot plausibly argue that the payments did not influence their editorial judgements. The AIT was unabashedly pro-PDP, going in many instances beyond the bounds of propriety and decency to malign the reputation of ex-president Goodluck Jonathan’s opponents and impugning their character. The television station broadcast scurrilous campaigns with enthusiasm and reckless abandon. However, the television station retained the right to support  whomsoever it wishes, but given the huge payments involved, critics suggest that its editorial decision was consequently no longer independently made, contrary to the ethics of the profession. Chief Dokpesi will find it hard, if not impossible, to absolve himself of blame.

    Media watchers noticed that before and during the campaigns, ThisDay was also unapologetic about its support for the PDP and Dr Jonathan. It is suggested that that choice was also influenced not by altruistic reasons but by pecuniary considerations. There is nothing wrong with being partisan, or if not partisan, at least supporting a party for ideological or certain other reasons. What is reprehensible theoretically is how the decision to support one against the other is reached, whether by logic and reason, or by financial inducement. The onus is on both Chief Dokpesi and Mr. Obaigbena to prove they were not induced to flagrantly breach media ethics. First impression, however, suggests they compromised.

    Questions have also been asked, in the case of Mr. Obaigbena, how without a contract he was able to get over half a billion naira in payments. He has suggested that the federal government’s needless rescue of the United Nations, whose Abuja building was partially destroyed by Boko Haram, set a precedence for the payment he asked for and received from the Jonathan government. He is not persuasive. But by far the most damning piece of evidence was the N120m paid to harassed media houses through Mr. Obaigbena’s personal company rather than through NPAN.

    Consequently, what should have been a perfectly legitimate transaction between two parties seeking non-litigious way out of a dispute became embroiled in controversy. Indeed, the discussions have become so obfuscated that extraneous matters are creeping in and wholly misdirected and illogical inferences are being drawn. First, it is suggested that it was immoral of the affected newspapers to have collected any payment whatsoever from the government, and that anything outside of a transparent court process would be open to subversion or corruption of media ethics. This is pure nonsense. In the first instance, out-of-court settlements are a part of Nigeria’s jurisprudence. In fact, far better is alternative dispute resolution than a costly and time-consuming court process.

    Two, it is also suggested that it was immoral to collect payment from funds set aside to buy arms or prosecute counterinsurgency. But how on earth were media houses to know the sources of the payments they were beneficiaries of? Is it not silly to query sources of payments from a government? Indeed, is it not foolish and paralysing to question the account from which a company is making a payment after a transaction had been sealed? Critics are simply being wise after the fact. Some media houses had a dispute with the federal government, a settlement was reached outside of court, and payments made. It is foolish to worry about where the government is sourcing the money. Media houses which preferred to go to court were free to do so; and those which opted to settle out of court were also free to. None is ethically superior to the other. It is strange to begin to draw ethical lessons from exercising one’s lawful options.

    It is also suggested that now that it is evident the federal government’s payment was made through a disputed and inappropriate account, the beneficiaries should return the money and apologise to the military, especially the dead who lost their lives in operations against Boko Haram due to poor equipment. This is another sentimental buncombe. Let the government initiate moves to reclaim the money paid to the affected media houses; and let the media houses in turn sue the government for the full value of the disruptions to their operations. If the current government can’t draw a line in its anti-corruption war, then let them insist on full judicial processes and be prepared for huge judgement debts.

    The Nation newspaper was a part of the settlement midwifed by NPAN. It collected nine million naira. It should not apologise, for it neither did anything wrong nor influenced or exploited Mr Obaigbena’s unorthodox financial dealings. Of the few newspapers that opposed the Jonathan government and fought its predatory habits, none was as vehement as this newspaper, wholly on ideological and principled grounds. This was why it bore the brunt of the military’s clampdown on newspapers. Anyone who thinks this newspaper’s soul was bought with nine million naira must have contempt for this newspaper and what they think it is worth, and must also suffer from amnesia, choosing to forget the unrivalled role this paper played in the defeat suffered by Dr Jonathan and the victory the APC and President Buhari achieved early this year.

  • APC’s limited options

    APC’s limited options

    By 2019, a plebiscite will decide just how well and how far the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has interpreted and approximated the yearnings of those who voted them into office. If the party has a foreboding of what that plebiscite would reveal, it has not let out that guarded secret. Instead, it has seemed to infuse its intra-party politics with energy of a different sort. The party’s vision of 2019, especially as indicated by the intrigues over the Kogi State governorship poll, is one of positioning and jostling for prominence and dominance. In 2015, the party was swept into office on the ashes of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In the next general elections, the electorate will judge the party on its policies, on its principles, on its ability to mobilise, inspire and empower the voters, and on the morality and character of its leaders.

    The yardsticks by which the party will be judged will reflect its cohesiveness, ideology and purpose in a modern, complex, changing and challenging world. Here the party will be sorely taxed. It will have to convince the public that its basic assumptions and its inherent ability as a party are not only appropriate and well thought-out, but that its leading lights, its philosophers, and its prefects have an instinctive understanding of what the party represents and are able to translate that representation into the country’s national and geopolitical ambitions. At the time President Muhammadu Buhari made his statement of belonging to everybody and to nobody, a statement that delivered more literary effects than it spoke to logic or even rudimentary philosophy, it was worrisome that at the top echelon of the party, the connotative effect of the president’s seemingly innocuous play on words was lost on everyone.

    Thus devoid of the right foundations, the immiscible coalition that gave the country the APC has tended to work at cross-purposes, its ideology representing nothing more than a pastiche of simple and pragmatic ideas of governance and administration, and a concoction of rigid and amateurish delineation of rights and wrongs. The manner of their coming together to form the APC and the road map they presented to Nigerians were initially thought to adequately represent the party’s foundations and ambition. The decay in the PDP may have made it possible for the APC to snatch power; but it is unlikely that the process of winning the presidency will in itself be sufficient for the party to sustain its hold on power, stabilise its disparate parts and expand its influence. The dissonance in the party over the Kogi governorship debacle, for instance, showed clearly that the party’s pretence to unity, purpose and ideology was insufficient to atone for its wobbly structure and unregulated internal dynamics, or to insulate it from the danger of imploding or fragmenting sometime in the future.

    Without discipline and ideology, the party’s limitations and fault lines may become accentuated, and its hope of redemption through the social and ethical crusades embraced by its leadership may become a chimera. Rather than distill from the party’s road map a coherent and consistent progressive ideology on their assumption of office, party leaders turned on themselves in a complex and fierce struggle for the soul of the party. For a new party, this struggle may not necessarily be inimical to its journey of self-discovery; but there must be guarantees the final outcome would produce the relevant skills, ideas and methods necessary to solidify the party and sharpen its domestic and international ideologies. So far, the party has birthed more trouble than it can manage. Moreover, the president has not shown a clear understanding of the nuanced components of national greatness beyond his crusades against insurgency and corruption, and he has hidden behind these crusades to explain his lack of attention to the other urgent aspects of national life.

    In addition, the president’s tactical flaws have spawned a brood of vipers within the party, ambitious politicians obsessed with 2019 and positioning themselves bitterly to take advantage of the existing vacuum. The vacuum was created by the indefensible idea that the president belonged to everybody and to nobody despite being a product of a political party who could not have won the presidency without the compromises and consensuses on culture and religion midwifed by his party. Repudiating the foundation that produced him merely created a vacuum that is being creatively and aggressively manipulated and exploited. To worsen an already fractious and rancid state of affairs, the president’s body language may indicate he is not altogether averse to encouraging and nurturing a new and amenable elite, especially in the Southwest, as this column remarked when the president finally assembled his cabinet. Such Machiavellian tactics didn’t work in the 1960s; it stands little chance of working even now for a number of historical and cultural reasons that those outside the Southwest may find somewhat puzzling.

    One of the reasons for the failure of outsiders to nurture a countervailing Yoruba elite is the inability of non-Yoruba politicians to appreciate the content and character of the disharmony existing within Southwest politics. They fail to recognise that the very logic that produced the dominant Southwest political elite is the same creative force that sustains, protects and propels them. It often takes much more than the artificial machination of outsiders to foist a new elite on the region. The region is overly suspicious, reflective, driven by an implacable code of honour, and is much more close-knit than its destructively ambitious and fractious elite suggest. If it were not so, the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo would not have survived the gang-up engineered against him by brilliant insiders, some of them his associates, and manipulative outsiders, many of them his sworn enemies.

    As the life and times of Chief Awolowo showed, any mercurial leader the region produces may find it difficult to escape the resentment of those mentored by him, if not their covert or overt revolt. It is an attitude distinctly southwestern, perhaps rooted in their culture, educational attainments and worldview, notwithstanding the great and laudatory fundamentals of their ethos. With a history so open and unambiguous, it is surprising that Nigerian leaders, and in this instance those who control the APC in Abuja, often misread political developments in the Southwest to attempt either a reconfiguration of the ruling party (NPC/NNDP versus AG/NCNC/NEPU in 1964) or the nurturing of a new political elite in the Southwest, as some are anticipating before 2019. What is undeniable is that resentment, revolt and bitterness are festering around the APC, and party leaders are not showing the imagination and flexibility to manage the fissures. If the problem persists  for the next year or two, the party will have reached the point of no return.

    Those who would have imbued the APC with a life force, helped to fine-tune and concretise its inchoate ideology, and engineered a daring rescue of the economy as well as foist a new and futuristic social and political order, have been considerably weakened by internal suspicion, rivalry and short-term permutations. It will become increasingly costlier to rectify the problem in the APC as the party ossifies in the months ahead. The party knows what to do to reclaim lost grounds; but it is unlikely to take what it feels are a humiliating reversal of its newly adopted methods. They will believe that notwithstanding the president’s inability to define and aggregate the party’s raison d’être and ambition, the new ministers’ individual efforts would somehow coalesce into a unified and effervescent whole. Such grandiose hopes are misplaced, for the cart cannot lead the horse any more than the body can function optimally without vision.

  • INEC’s first two elections

    INEC’s first two elections

    It is not a flattering recommendation that the first two elections conducted by INEC’s new management floundered very badly, caught as they were in the morass of violence, questionable calls, and between the government’s dithering and lack of urgency. Elections in Kogi and Bayelsa States were slated for November 21 and December 5 respectively; yet the INEC board was not constituted until October 21, a mere one month to the first poll. President Muhammadu Buhari appointed an acting chairperson in July, and waited for about three months before appointing a substantive head and six other INEC commissioners for the vital electoral body. Though INEC spokesman disclosed that the electoral umpire’s functions were not impaired, he seemed to be suggesting paradoxically that the positions of six commissioners and a chairman were superfluous. The near fiasco the Kogi and Bayelsa polls became put the lie to such confident talks.

    Significantly, both polls were conducted separately, and were heavily policed. Yet, they floundered. Given how badly the electoral body performed, could they be relied upon to handle a general election in which the security agencies would be stretched wafer thin? If it took the deployment of overwhelming number of soldiers and policemen to manage just one election at a time, it staggers the mind to wonder how many would be needed all over the country at once. It is established that the Buhari presidency romanticises slowness; INEC should on its own not canonise shambolic electoral organisation, especially poor judgement and abysmal legal advice, if the country is not to come to grief in subsequent polls.

     

  • Atmosphere of tentativeness in Kogi

    Atmosphere of tentativeness in Kogi

    Unfazed by the deliberate convolution scripted into the recent Kogi governorship election, Abiodun Faleke, running mate to the deceased All Progressives Congress (APC), Abubakar Audu, has stoically returned to the House of Representatives amidst cheers and approbation. He has put the Kogi conundrum in the hands of Nigeria’s eminent judges, assured that he and the state he strove to serve would get justice. In the hands of the media, reporters and columnists have judged the APC leadership derelict in their responsibilities, lax in political morality, and superficial in their understanding of the historical import of their actions, biases and prejudices. Were the matter to end in the media, both APC and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would stand condemned.

    The public, on the other hand, is ambivalent. They will flow and ebb with the tide of opinions on the subject. If APC’s Yahaya Bello, the anti-party politician and APC member peremptorily thrust forward to collect the diadem when the election was virtually concluded, then so be it. And if Hon Faleke, as morality, logic and common sense would dictate, then why not. Indeed, irrespective of the state’s ethnic configuration and the quaint arithmetic of the poll result, should circumstances dictate that Idris Wada, the governor and candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) be foisted on the state by INEC’s electoral sleight of hand, again, to the ambivalent public, why not.

    For Kogi, held in thrall by unprincipled party leaders, hesitant and scheming INEC, and ambitious and grabbing party candidates, everything is in flux, as tentative as it can be. No one typifies this tentativeness as much as the opportunistic Mr Bello, now governor-elect. He had inherited a vote of over 240,000 from the Audu/Faleke ticket on November 21 simply by the decree of APC leaders, and added a little over 6,000 of his own in the supplementary election of December 5. But asked how he intended to harmonise the fractious state and placate the aggrieved, the governor-elect suggested, “In a family, there is bound to be one misunderstanding or the other, but if I assume the responsibility as governor, I will ensure that all the aggrieved parties are brought together.”

    Mr. Bello is sensible not to speak of justice, without which peace can neither be restored nor enthroned. He spoke, matter of fact, of a mechanical and abstract effort on his part to engineer peace and reconciliation, almost as if these goals float in the atmosphere, and can be plucked insouciantly. But more importantly, plagued by doubt, his conscience pricked, Mr. Bello betrayed his appreciation of the tentativeness unnerving the state when he talked of “if I assume the responsibility as governor.” It is not just doubts that plague him, it is clear his conscience is troubled. He is rightly judged by the public as grasping and opportunistic, but at least he has a conscience, it seems. Had APC leaders and INEC itself half as much reflectiveness and conscience as Mr. Bello, it is doubtful Kogi State would be enveloped by a spirit of tentativeness or confusion.

    APC leaders have suggested they would be minded to replace Hon Faleke as deputy governor-elect, should he continue to stick to his position. The public should ignore the party’s bravado. What ails them is not the implication of the conundrum they engineered in the state, or of any abiding interest in the cause of justice or even the welfare of the state. They are troubled by their frothing conscience. After all, the matter of selecting a running mate is definitely and constitutionally not the responsibility of the party, but that of the governorship candidate. The party’s leaders are worried that if Hon Faleke sticks to his guns, and Mr. Bello embraces realpolitik to pick an Igala running mate, it would foster the anomaly and injustice of having a governor and his deputy who were really not part of the process of winning the election. It is apparent APC leaders fear this injustice will haunt them to the very end of their days and, if iconoclastic posterity is anything to go by, be interred with their bones.

     

  • Upping the ante in IPOB/MASSOB crisis

    After the death of nine people, five of whom were members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) demanding the release of Nnamdi Kanu, one of their leaders, the police have begun to talk tough. Most of the dead were killed by soldiers forcefully removing barricades mounted by the protesters on the Niger Bridge in Onitsha. The police in fact lost one of their own. Shooting unarmed protesters of course has its own legal implication, and the shooting itself may yet be investigated, though justice may be delayed. Yet, the language issuing from the mouths of security agents is not different from the one coming from the protesters, only that the protesters have spoken violence and so far used none. Has the country learnt any lesson from the Boko Haram insurgency? Perhaps not.

    A few weeks ago, this column suggested that rather than threaten fire and brimstone, the federal government should design brilliant and ingenious way of engaging the IPOB/MASSOB protesters. But apparently no one is thinking for the government. Everyone is relying on force and talking of the need to crush the protesters. The column had warned that in the modern era, few secessionists embrace direct or conventional war. The vogue is asymmetric war. If the IPOB/MASSOB campaigners were to embrace violence, they would not opt for conventional tactics; and with an unmanageable insurgency in the Northeast, the crisis could easily become messy and bloody. The wise option for the government, as it was suggested in this place, is to find accommodation with IPOB/MASSOB on a realistic and sustainable basis.

    No matter the amount of force applied, the problem will not go away. It can only get worse. Whether Southeast leaders support or deny IPOB/MASSOB is hardly the point. And whether sometime in the future an Igbo man becomes president hardly also matters. After all, Boko Haram did not regard the presidency of the late ex-president Umaru Yar’Adua, nor has it responded to that of the ascetic President Buhari. The government must therefore challenge itself to come up with a solution. As an analyst said recently, the crisis threatening to fester in the Southeast is partly due to the fact that there was no closure to the Nigerian civil war. The issues that led to the war, which issues have led to periodic eruptions all over the country, have not been addressed in any systematic or scientific fashion. There is no sense of national identity, and no lodestar around which the various ethnic and religious groups can coalesce. Nor is the country structured in such way as to eliminate or considerably attenuate political, cultural and religious frictions. Until these are done, the problem will both endure and worsen.

    By shooting unarmed protesters, the first fateful step may already have been taken in aggravating the IPOB/MASSOB crisis. If the Buhari presidency is smart as his supporters say, it will pause for some deep reflections. Campaigning on the pages of newspapers or in the media against the promoters of Biafra will achieve nothing. Even if two-thirds of the Southeast should repudiate the Biafra idea, it would profit nothing. All it takes for this kind of crisis to assume apocalyptic proportions is just for a few dedicated martyrs to offer their lives and time to prosecute the cause. And all it takes for the matter to explode out of hand is for the government to falsely believe that it has the security apparatus to check the crisis. It does not have the resources, and it is already stretched thin by Boko Haram.

    The Buhari presidency must act now while it still has the initiative. He has been accused of not really having an economic vision; at least he has not given indication he has any beyond his anti-corruption war and his idiosyncratic asceticism. And he has also been accused of not having a vision for a new social order, a vision that comes only from inside of him. It can’t be administered from outside, and cannot be taught. Worse, now, he is been accused of not having a political vision, just as ex-president Goodluck Jonathan did not have one until in desperation he concocted one half-heartedly in the closing months of his presidency. Whether it can be taught or developed from within him, President Buhari has only a little time to enunciate a political vision for Nigeria. It is that vision that will inform how he responds to the Biafra crisis and other crises waiting in the wings to erupt like a volcano.

  • Betrayal of Kogi

    Betrayal of Kogi

    As this column was being written, Kogi State was heading to 91 polling units in 18 local government areas to vote in the December 5 controversial supplementary election ordered by a vacillating Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The electoral body had declared the November 21 governorship poll inconclusive on the grounds that the registered voters in the disputed polling units exceeded the difference between the ballots cast for former All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Abubakar Audu, and Idris Wada, governor and Peoples Democratic Party candidate. INEC ignored the more definitive statistics that the permanent voter cards collected in all those units were less than 38,000, implying that there was no arithmetical miracle by which the APC could have lost the election. Sources in INEC, however, indicate that in declaring the election inconclusive, the electoral body was simply fulfilling the letter of the law.

    No one will, however, dispute the fact that INEC fostered the stalemate and opened the doors to the controversy ravaging Kogi State. Why they did it, and whether they were externally influenced by those dead set against both Prince Audu and Hon Faleke for political and religious reasons will be hard to say at the moment. There are only indications that INEC was not surefooted, and that it appeared to have surrendered its independence to certain elements, including the Attorney General. If INEC behaved most uninspiringly, the presidency, which behaved most depressingly conspiratorial, is even worse. The presidency’s cavalier attitude towards the poll gives plenty of room to suspect its motives, especially the mala fide manner it distanced itself from the candidates and the poll. The first impression created was that the APC candidate, Prince Audu, was tainted, and as the PDP suggested and campaigned, it would be counterproductive for the president to identify with him. But not only was the corruption case yet to be proved, even the president himself was tainted with religious and ethnic fanaticism; yet a majority of Nigerians ignored the campaign and rallied to his side.

    Closely leashed to this is the presidency’s appalling misconception of party politics and supremacy. Even in the best of times, the Buhari presidency never quite showed a grasp of what a party is and what it stands for. Now, with the contempt demonstrated by the president for the Prince Audu ticket, it was not surprising that he declined to campaign for him before he died. The APC on the whole did not even mourn their standard-bearer in the truest sense of mourning. Not only were they eager to move on, they were joyous in betraying the Audu/Faleke ticket and rubbishing it on flimsy grounds. Some analysts have however accused the party of being influenced by religious and ethnic considerations, inadvertently corroborating the longtime argument of politicians like Femi Fani-Kayode who suggested that the party had an underlining religious and ethnic agenda.

    The betrayal has also permeated, for now, two of the state’s senatorial districts. Kogi Central, constituted mostly by the Ebira, and from among whom the APC picked Yahaya Bello as the substitute for Prince Audu, has ignored the cause of justice and rallied enthusiastically to the side of their son. Justice be damned, they seem to say; after all, they were not the ones who inspired the initial unjust manoeuvre by INEC, nor were they the ones who pushed a deliberately malevolent APC to rubbish the Audu/Faleke ticket, nor still were they the people who turned the president against the APC’s democratically chosen ticket for the November 21 poll. As far as they were concerned, they had no reason not to profit from the massive betrayal of the APC ticket and the wholesale repudiation of political ethics mindlessly engineered by certain APC bigwigs.

    Kogi West, Abiodun Faleke’s senatorial district, is also believed to be desperately asking their son to take the consolatory position of running mate in the APC ticket so that they would have something to show for their efforts. It does not apparently matter to them that they would be forsaking the principles and the cause of justice they have been known to fight for over the decades. Their elders unwisely fought for and embraced the idea of Kogi State only to end up holding the short end of the stick. Now, their children  are on the edge of repudiating the values their great ancestors fought for, their fortitude in the face of injustice and unfairness over the centuries, and the great and ennobling achievements they made as a people in the fields of culture, education, politics and even religion. It is expected that Mr Faleke will stand pat, even if he remains the last man standing, and that he will be prepared to lose the governorship seat rather than abjure the values and principles he has campaigned for, even if everyone around him, including his party, surrenders to infamy. He will not be part of the immorality of transferring the Audu/Faleke victory to the party’s favoured interloper.

    It is not clear how Kogi East, where Prince Audu hailed from, would have responded had the entire process been voided and fresh primaries ordered, especially considering how they had over the years resisted power shift. But for now, having apparently lost to their bitterest rival, the Ebira, and are about losing everything except the courts say otherwise, it is expected they will stay the course and stick to the Faleke inheritance.

    The most important lesson in the serial betrayal gnawing at the liver of Kogi State is that the APC was never really a party, and that whatever pretence it still has to being called one is only to the extent that a few people in the party, having hijacked the levers of party power, are now striving to foist certain primordial and parochial agenda on the rest. Intertwined with this is the fact that Nigeria is in crying need of true leaders, men and women who are neither beholden to religion, ethnic agenda or private and short-term political goals; men and women who take the long, expansive, larger and visionary view of politics and country; men and women who have a passion to break down the walls that divide Nigerians and forge a common purpose for the country; men and women who despite their own losses and disadvantaged positions would fight for justice whatever the cost, in the understanding that in the long run the society is hurt when leaders pursue or disguise private interests under national, altruistic interest.

    It is also dismaying that while the Kogi APC candidature controversy raged, the only voices heard were social and public commentators and legal experts, nearly all of whom have argued from the general lacunae in the electoral law and the constitution. There was not one statesman from the North or South heard. It was as if the disingenuously aloof and silent President Buhari was the country’s only surviving and senior statesman. No statesman reminded the country of the consequences of past injustice, and no one warns of present injustice. There was no moral voice, no voice of caution, no warning against the creeping ethnocentrism and sectarianism of some powerful APC leaders who have taken a position that negates the cause of justice and endangers the future of the ruling party. If care is not taken, the betrayal of Kogi may yet be the archetype of Nigerian politics, a symbol of what is to come, as the country falls deeper into the clutches of ruthless mafias.