The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Intrepid lawyer Clement Akinboye Osho Babatola at 80

    His reliability and intrepidity, not forgetting his forensic skills, come from a long line of the highly regarded Patriarch of the much respected Babatola dynasty of Ado – Ekiti, his father, High Chief Daniel Osho Babatola, Omowaiye II, Ejigbo of Ado-Ekiti, the late Baba Egbe Ibukun, and Balogun of Emmanuel Anglican Church (now Cathedral Church of Immanuel), Ado-Ekiti.

    All the aforementioned  traits ran through his Uncle, the  inimitable Chief (Dr) Joel Ehinafe Babatola, renowned educator, community leader, elder statesman, accomplished orator, and a formidable politician who served, meritoriously, as minister in the

     Chief Obafemi Awolowo – led government of Western Nigeria.

    To the glory of God, the man we celebrate here today, Clement Akinboye Osho Babatola, Principal Partner, Akin Babatola & co, Omowaiye Chambers, even though barely knew his father who joined the Saints Triumphant when he was just 8, and his mother,  Madam Hadiza Akanke Babatola, an Ijebu woman, whose only child he was, also passed on when he was 11, happily turned a glorious 80 year – old on 20 September, 2023.

    Aba Osho,(Osho being the name given to all male children of the Babatola family) having lost  his parents very early, not unexpectedly, had it tough, growing up. But as he narrated his life story to me, with joy and gratitude to God, he could not but emphasise that the great bond subsisting within the larger Babatola family ensured that he lacked nothing.

    So even if growing up was tough, it certainly wasn’t rough. He has two of his uncles to thank for this, namely: Pa J. E Babatola, the renowned Ekiti politician who, incidentally, was the very first politician I saw on the rostrum, at a political campaign.

    And I shall never, ever forget that day. My natal town falls within Iworoko – Are -Afao – Igbemo – Ekiti which was then electorally designated EKITI CENTRAL RURAL.

    Before school closed the previous day, our Headmaster at the United Primary School, Are & Afao – Ekiti,  the ever sartorial, immaculate and dazzlingly handsome Mr Akeredolu, from whom Aketi (His Excellency,  my dear aburo who I pray the good Lord fully restores to perfect health and governor of Ondo state) inherited his genes and good looks) had told us to come to school early the following day because we were going to all line up in the town to welcome a very important person – VIP he called him.

    We did as were told on a day nobody in the town would forget in a hurry but what I remember the most about the day was the song everybody sang so hilariously.

    Please recall that those were the days when Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was insisting he just must be the Premier of Western Region as if there were no Yoruba politicians. Zik would not allow a Yoruba politician emerge the NCNC premiership candidate even in the Western Region, but he, a ranking outsider. 

    It is the same mindset which drove Peter Obi into insisting that only Igbos served as Labour party officials and candidates during the last election, almost everywhere in the country, except where no Igbo was available.

    The song, which made the day unforgetable for me personally, was a warning to the effect that we should not allow strangers come and take over our land.

    It went as follows, with due apologies to all my non – Ekiti speaking readers: In mo mo j’Igbo gba le ra o.

    Egeee (chorus)

    Oni oni la ku ni ku egeee (chorus).

    Of course, NCNC lost woefully in the elections in Ekiti.

    Back then to Chief Akinboye Babatola who was destined, despite all odds, to reach the very top both in the private sector, where he retired as Chief Legal officer of a bank, and in the legal profession, where he is, today, the Principal Partner of his own thriving legal practice.

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    All this was through the grace of God and the remarkable interventions of two of his uncles, namely: Chief (Dr.) Joel Ehinafe Babatola, Colonel Samuel Afolabi Babatola and his  wife, Mrs. Taiwo Babatola (Née Lawson) all of who saw to his education from when his father passed, through elementary school and all the way to the University. Equally very helpful to him were the duo of his maternal Uncle, Chief Akanbi Fagbehingbe and Mrs. Victoria Bolatito Agbede.

    Chief Babatola had a very unstable elementary school education as his guardian, being a teacher, was being frequently transfered from one place to another.

    As a result, he attended, between 1948 and 1958,  the following six different primary schools, all within a spate of 10 years:

    Emmanuel Anglican School, Oke Bareke, Ado-Ekiti.  Christ Apostolic Church School, IJebu-Ode, Christ Apostolic Church School, Ekotedo, Ibadan. Baptist Day School, Afao, Ikere-Ekiti,  St. Luke’s Anglican School, Uro, Ikere-Ekiti, and Baptist Day School, Oke-Ado, Ibadan, in that order.

    Fortunately, his secondary school education was, however, far less traumatic; even though he lost a whole year when he left Ebenezer Secondary School, Iberekodo, Abeokuta, after one year because it was not an approved school, to start afresh at Ekiti Parapo College, Ido-Ekiti in 1959.

    For his Higher School Certificate (HSC), he attended Ibadan Grammar School, Ibadan, between 1966-1967 and the University of Ife, Ile Ife  from 1967-1970.

    He followed up with the Nigerian Law School in 1970-1971, and Queen Mary College, University of London, between 1976-1977.

    A highly regarded elder,  Chief Babatola had a checkered working experience serving both  in the public and private sectors. While with the  Lagos state government between ’73 and ’78, he served as member: the Pools Betting Committee, Lotteries Commission and the Newspaper Registration Committee. He was also Assistant Secretary to the Lagos State Committee on the Exercise of Prerogative of Mercy as well as Legal Adviser to the Board of Inland Revenue. He also later served as Inspector of Customary Courts.

    At the Federal Ministry of Communication, Post and Telecommunication department, Marina, Lagos, he served as an Investigation Officer.

    In the private sector he was recruited as Credit Assistant by Savannah Bank of Nigeria Limited in 1978 and retired there as the Chief Legal Officer in 1985. Since 1985, Chief Babatola has been the Principal Partner in the Law Firm of Akin Babatola & Co, Omowaiye Chambers, which he registered the same year. 

    A very sociable and easy mixer, Chief Babatola is a Member, and Past President, of the Rotary Club of Lagos Metropolitan,

    Member, Lagos Country Club, Ikeja, Member, and Vice-Chairman, Ibadan Grammar School Old Students’ Association, 61/67 class set, Member and Past President, Ado-Ekiti Dynamic Club, Lagos, and Chairman, Oregun Community Development Association (CDA) 1977 to 1979. He is equally very active in church activities.

    A member of the Anglican Communion, he was born, baptized and registered, at birth, as member, Egbe Ibukun, when his father was the Baba Egbe.

    He is a Parishioner of the Archbishop Vining Memorial Church Cathedral, GRA Ikeja, and is Member/Past President, Christian Unity Band of Nigeria at the same church.

    He is a member of Egbe Ibukun of the Cathedral of Immanuel (Anglican Communion) Ado-Ekiti, and was honoured with the chieftaincy title of Akuajo of Saint James Anglican Church, Oke Oniyo, Ado-Ekiti, by the Lord Bishop of Ekiti Diocese, The Rt. Revd. Clement Akinbola in 1993.

    Chief Babatola loves traveling, reading, listening to good music and watching television. In the course of his travels, he has visited:

    The Basilica in Rome, The Basilica in Paris, and Brazil for the real carnival. He has also visited Disneyland in the USA.

    Chief Babatola is happily married and blessed with children.

    ATIKU A SORE, SERIAL LOSER

    Some readers believed I cut Atiku too much of a slack in my article last week.

    Below, one of them, Dr Biodun Adu, a UK – based consultant Gyaenacologist wrote:

    “Atiku will be remembered  as a sore, serial loser and  an unequalled political prostitute  and fake cry baby.

    Nigerians can not be deceived and saw through him, not once but six times.

    Good riddance to a thoroughly bad rubbish”.

  • Money, Money, Money

    Money, Money, Money

    It is not difficult to imagine that as man began to accumulate wealth and property, the need to devise a means of keeping track of one’s property became increasingly pressing. It was well and good to have fifty head of cattle but what were they worth? Maybe using cattle as an example in this case is not ideal because even now,  some peoples around the world measure their wealth in cattle and are doing very well. It is for this reason that in certain parts of Africa, bride price is paid in cattle. For example in Zimbabwe where the rate of inflatioin has climbed above 300%, enterprising people are setting up cow banks in which trading is in cows rather than the local currency which over the years has become a sick joke. As long as the cattle are properly looked after, they appreciate in value and because the investment appreciated through reproduction, a hedge against devaluation is built up over the years and since it can be a life long investment the appreciation over the years can become quite considerable making an investment in cattle rearing a worthwhile proposition. The next time you come across a herd of cattle unconcernedly and rather contentedly cropping grass  by the road side, or sadly on somebody’s farm,  what you are looking at is a bank on the hoof. The difficulty in investing in such a bank is the lack of transferability of such funds into other accounts to buy something as mundane as a newspaper as you can easily do with paper money.

    Money as we know it did not always exist. It had to be invented to enhance commerce, the movement of goods and services within and between communities. In the simplest form trade developed between neighbouring people who needed to satisfy their mutual needs by exchanging goods among themselves. For example people in riverine areas exchanged their fish for the agricultural produce of their neighbours who lived some distance away from any substantial body of water. Some other examples are a lot weightier than fish, yams and other products, because of their scarcity, assume the quality of currency. There was a time when salt was so precious that it was an important article of trade. It had a scarcity value that transcended it’s utility value and the people who had access to salt guarded this resource as jealously as they could because it was worth more than it’s weight in gold. The humble pepper was at one time a very important article of trade and served as currency in some parts of the world. As a matter of fact, the Europeans had, after their exposure to spices including pepper during their Crusader misadventures were so desperate for a reliable source for their fux that they sailed west in their quest to find a route to the spice fields of the East, mainly India. This need had arisen because their route to the Orient had been blocked by the Ottomans.They sailed west in order to get to India and came to the New World. Believing that they had arrived at their destination, they called the people they encountered, Indians! Not long after, the Spanish under the leadership of the Italian, Christopher Columbus landed in the New World. Vasco da Gama sailing under the Portuguese flag sailed all the way to India round the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa to correct the earlier error of sailing west in search of India. This ushered in the era of European exploitation of Africa, an era which has spread to the present. All because the Europeans were desperate to lay their hands on the spices of India. They went in search of spices but found gold all along the way striping every territory along the way of any gold that could be found under their sub-soil.

    Gold has been the most trusted repository of wealth in the world and in all probability it will always be. At the slightest hint of economic distress, there is a precipitous rush to acquire this precious metal if only as a hedge against damaging inflation. So great has been the lure of gold that it has been the reason for the greatest crimes against mankind throughout the history of the world. On the other hand, it has, in equal measure been the greatest spur to human development. For example, the greatest impetuous to American development was provided by the discovery of gold in California in 1849. This led to the development of the railway from the east coast to the West and later on the opening of the Panama canal which allowed ships to go through the isthmus of Panama rather than go through the perils awaiting them in the Straits of Magellan at the tip of South America. The story of gold cannot be complete without the mention of the effect of this metal on the peoples of South Africa since it’s discovery in the area of Johannesburg (City of gold) in 1886. All the crimes which the White people in that country have committed against Blacks from that time on has been caused by this discovery. All the development associated with South Africa has also been achieved on the back of this precious metal as well as it the diamonds mined in Kimberly.

    Ironically, gold is useless for all practical purposes except as a reserve commodity for storing wealth. Even for this purpose gold has not exercised this function since the Americans under the presidency of Richard Nixon took the USA off the gold standard. In other words, there is nothing holding up the dollar and as much of it can be printed as the controlling authorities decide but what this means is a continuous depression in the value of the dollar. The consequence of this for the global economy can only be imagined but it is all bad. It is for this reason that the global economy has not recovered fully from the effects of the crash of 2008 when the financial institutions responsible for the administration of global finance crashed spectacularly and governments had to bail them out. It does not look as if the world has learnt anything from that crash and is waiting for an inevitable repeat in the future which could be quite near.

    Gold has, more than any other metal with the possible exception of silver been associated with currency as far back as the dynasties that ruled Egypt so many centuries ago. Before and since then some rather exotic substances have been used as currency in many different parts of the world. Long before the coming of the Europeans to the Americas and their incessant and tireless foraging for gold, the indigenous peoples of that continent had used various things as currency. This is in spite of the abundance of gold and silver deep under their feet. Those precious metals were used for the manufacture of exquisite jewelry and other decorative items which dazzled the first Europeans who in any way had come so far away from home in search of Eldorado, the mythical city of gold. They did not find Eldorado but found gold which they straight away looted and carted off to Spain to strengthen their own currency.

    The Aztecs and Mayans who had built impressive, centrally administered political units in different parts of Central and South America used various things as currency in spite of their access to large quantities of gold. There was a time when in some parts of their continent feathers, admittedly, very beautiful feathers plucked from the quetzal bird was the repository of the wealth of the people.

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    Cocoa was so highly priced in that region that it was also used as currency. This commodity which later on became the source of both public and private wealth in certain parts of Nigeria (echoes of Cocoa House) was generated by the Mayans and the beans obtained from the fruit was considered as a gift to mankind from Quetzacoatl, the god of wisdom, making these seeds sacred. Only the best seeds were used as currency, and the smaller ones were consumed as a beverage or fermented into alcohol. Cocoa beans, in spite of several difficulties including the guarantee of supplies as well as perishability were used as currency in Mesoamerica for more than a millennium.

    At the time that the Spaniards were eviscerating the ancient empires of Mesoamerica, the Portuguese were doing the same thing in Africa. Those two European powers were extracting so much wealth from their respective areas of influence that, to reduce the possibility of conflict between them, the Pope, at that time, the de facto ruler of Western Europe divided the world into two halves and awarded the Americas to Spain whilst Africa was handed over to the Portuguese. The Spanish wasted no time in wasting the indigenes in their area of the New World and began to replace them with Africans captured mainly from the Portuguese half of the world. Since the Papal Bull of demarcation prevented the Spanish from operating in Africa, they issued contracts called the Asiento to other Europeans, notably the English, the Danes and the Dutch for the supply of African slaves to Spanish territories in the New World thereby imbuing African bodies with the property of currency since they could be used to purchase goods and services.

    The direct use of people as currency was not very convenient and so the slave trade led to the development of a special currency which was called the manilla. This was a horseshoe shaped trinket which was struck mainly in Britain, more specially Birmingham, Netherlands (Amsterdam) and Denmark. The different varieties of manillas which were used over several hundred years were struck from; copper, brass, an alloy of copper and zinc and bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Interestingly, recent studies have shown that the famous Benin bronzes were cast with manillas  struck in Germany and are actually composed of brass. Apparently, the manillas were melted by the Benin artists to produce those exquisite works of art for which Benin is even now, justly famous. For four hundred years manillas were exchanged for slaves in Africa and shipped under the most appalling conditions imaginable to the New World and into a short lifetime of unremitting toil and suffering. Their unpaid labour laid the foundation for the American economy which is now by far, the largest in the world. Apart from a few works of art which were looted anyway and carried of the Europe Africa got nothing, absolutely nothing from the the horrors of the slave trade.

    Manillas did not fade away at the end of the slave trade as the commodity traded just shifted from people to palm oil. The Europeans produced the mantillas used in trading with Africa and just as it was with the Roman dinar, the manilla lost weight steadily over five hundred years but surprisingly, it continued to be a widely used currency in many parts of West Africa until it was decommissioned by the British as recently as 1949.

  • Our Punch years

    Forty-seven years ago on November 1, 1976, the first edition of The Punch Daily rolled off the press and since then the paper has not ceased publishing except on those days and months when the military administration banned the publication. The Sunday edition of the paper was launched three years earlier.

    That the paper has continued to publish and remain the most widely read newspaper in the country, while others launched after it are no longer in circulation is a tribute to the vision and commitment of the founding fathers and staff through the years.

    When I joined the newspaper in May 1987, the company was recovering from some crisis and was battling to pay the few staff that had survived being sacked like some others.

    The situation however improved and I ended up working for about 13 years without being owned any salary or entitlements.

    From being a young graduate I served in various capacities and acquired various experiences that have shaped my fulfilling media career to date. Being assigned to be a Ogun state correspondent as my first posting seemed initially daunting but the years I spent in Abeokuta turned out to be a great learning experience that sharpened my reporting skills.

    While I was covering politics I had the opportunity of travelling around the country and appreciating the diversity of our culture and people. The Punch was also where I had the first opportunity to travel abroad for a three-month training in the United Kingdom.

    My Punch years remain memorable and I am grateful for the opportunity to work in the company along with many colleagues who have become accomplished in various endeavours.

    Our various experiences have been documented in a soon-to-be-published book titled Our Punch Years: Reminiscences and Insider Accounts of former editors and Staff of Nigeria’s Most Widely Read Newspaper at 50.

    Considering the rich history of the newspaper, which other journalists and organizations can learn from, it occurred to me that it would be nice to read what the experience of the former staff. In my call for contributions I asked about: What company was back in their days. What they learned and benefited from, The good times and not too pleasant ones, Lessons that have helped former staff in their career after exiting, The intrigues, politics and fun and Secrets of the success of The Punch.

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    The contributions by 37 other colleagues are very insightful and revealing for anyone curious about knowing what makes The Punch what it is.

    Veteran journalist CEO/Editor -In- Chief of Diamond Publication Limited, Mr Lanre Idowu who wrote the foreword gave an insight into what to read in the book. 

    “In various essays, they tell the story of The Punch with pride, regret, and a tinge of anger, but overall, with a generosity of spirit that The Punch occupies a hallowed place in their media journey and development as human beings.

    “From their accounts, the reader gleans nuggets of useful information on the recruitment processes at The Punch, the culture of the newsroom and the news management process, the joy and pain of journalism, the evolution of media technology, management obsession with excellence and its zero tolerance for mistakes in the quest to build a brand identity, and the attendant worrisome concerns about commensurate reward and punishment.”

    Recalling his Punch years, Chief Innocent Adikwu who was the third editor of The Punch and former Editor of the Sunday Punch wrote: “My days in Punch were fulfilling. When I joined the newspaper as a sub-editor in 1976 I didn’t expect to get the topmost positions in the midst of the Southerners who have a rich history of excellence and dominance in journalism.  At the Punch there was unflinching pursuit of excellence and any performance that enhanced the quality of the newspaper was rewarded regardless of tribe, religion and political leaning of the journalist.”

  • Supreme Court verdict: What next for PDP, LP?

    Supreme Court verdict: What next for PDP, LP?

    Those who wish to assess the validity of the Supreme Court judgement in the petitions filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi are wasting their time. The final court, like the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) before it, gave judgement unanimously in favour of President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC). There is nothing the assessors can say and no logic they can adduce to convince the petitioners and their supporters that justice was not both bought and miscarried, whether it relates to the issue of 25 percent of the Federal Capital City (FCT) votes, the issue of IReV, or the incredulous attempt to introduce fresh evidence. The Supreme Court justices, all seven of them, and the PEPC justices, all five of them, were unanimous in their decisions. The justiciability of the suits has ended, but the politics surrounding them has not.

    Apart from the law of the cases, which is fairly uncomplicated for any sensible person and lawyer, there are two other issues Nigerians must pay attention to: the fresh momentum the decided cases must now afford President Tinubu himself and his administration, and the political futures of Alhaji Atiku, a former vice president, and Mr Obi, a former Anambra State governor. The Supreme Court verdict has now unshackled the president to launch freely and fiercely, within the constraints of the law, into his renewed hope agenda. He will no longer be distracted by the suits, nor does he need to pay more than a cursory attention to the ‘fishing expeditions’ in the United States embarked upon mainly by Alhaji Atiku who was determined to introduce wholly extraneous matters into the petitions, partly to confuse and intimidate the justices, and also to fertilise the conditions for a successful incitement of the populace. The president must of course pay attention to the opposition, and hopefully the opposition will offer sound and practicable alternatives to the administration’s policies and programmes, but he will now do so with much more confidence and even-handedness. With the conclusion of the cases, the president should hopefully be less prone to gaffes and missteps, most of them uncharacteristic of him and the legend associated with his name and politics.

    Probably the first casualty from the dismissed PDP and LP petitions is the dissipation of the synergy that had given fillip to the relationship and politics of Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi. For about eight giddy months after their shocking losses in February, both candidates had collaborated in their shared grief and malice: grief over their career-shattering losses, and malice against a winner they least expected to win and whom they roundly loathed. They had addressed so-called world press conferences and made statements festooned with sarcasms and cynicisms. But at every turn, and after their media excursions, their plots and plans had fallen flat. Nature, rather than any deliberate response by President Tinubu, had thwarted the losing candidates’ efforts and put their noses out of joint. Even Alhaji Atiku’s expeditions to the United States to dredge out inconsistencies and contradictions in President Tinubu’s educational background amounted to nothing in the end. Apart from his feeble suit, Mr Obi had also limited himself to essentially issuing tame allegations and baiting the president with tendentious statements.

    The PDP and LP candidates may have synergised their plots and incited the public against President Tinubu’s election victory, but strangely, the cooperation did not extend to their lawyers’ handling of their petitions. It is unlikely their counsels did not know the tenuity of their cases, nor the nigh impossibility of getting the election annulled. There is even doubt that the candidates themselves did not know that their petitions would both fail on points of law and in the court of public opinion to which they had recklessly and punitively resorted. The lawyers and the candidates most probably knew they were heading nowhere, if the ordinary man on the street already guessed that outcome even before the cases were decided. They, however, did their utmost, not to win in court, for that was impossible, but to confound the justices and furnish a revolution. In the end, the justices kept their wits and dispensed justice; and the revolution the opposition candidates had craved also fell through.

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    Alhaji Atiku will be 81 at the next election cycle. He will not run for president again. Nay, he cannot run for office anymore. However, it will take him much longer than he envisages to purge himself of the gall of losing the presidential election for a record sixth time. There are whispers he will continue to snap at the heels of the president, both now and in the next election cycle, should God spare his life, anything to get his own back at a man and ‘upstart’, who ran him ragged and denied him the glory many soothsayers had predicted for him. It is not certain whether his broken heart will sustain him for much longer, but even if it does, there could be so many intervening variables that would make any consequential effort from him nugatory. Having been ridiculed with what in effect amounts to his frequent cathartic Dubai trips following election losses, Alhaji Atiku will make a point of breezing in and out of Nigeria, throwing the cats among the pigeons as he snickers through press statements and occasional legal suits, and attempting half-heartedly to plot revenge against those within and without his party who undid him last February.

    But far beyond Alhaji Atiku, who is at the moment at a crossroads, is the fate of the befuddled and castrated PDP. Since the party lost the 2015 presidential election, it had remained concussed, unable to regain the animation and frenzy that saw it go from one conquest to another. The party is fortunate not to have a close contender in the opposition ranks, certainly not the eclectic LP. For about eight years or so, it had gone through three election cycles and failed miserably on each occasion, with each loss sending it keeling towards the abyss. Rather than pause, catch its breath, and reform and restructure its operations, it had instead preferred to put new wine in old wineskin and sew a new cloth on an old one. Then it chose to careen from one hired chairman to another, and ultimately, after many foolish dalliances, let itself be cuckolded by Alhaji Atiku, a serial and unprincipled political defector wholly destitute of principles and ideology. Until the PDP grapples with its existential crisis and embarks on wholesale reform and restructuring, it will continue to list dangerously, consuming and destroying ambitions, and demeaning the value of opposition politics in Nigeria.

    The more curious political prognostication concerns the wayfaring Mr Obi who deployed the all-purpose LP political vehicle to prosecute his ambition. In his response last week to Mr Obi and the LP’s loss at the Supreme Court, factional chairman Julius Abure feigns the importance of his party as the main opposition party which he was determined to build and sustain into the next elections. He was less categorical about what role Mr Obi would play in that build-up. But there is nothing in their loss, nor in their politics, nor yet in their amorphous ideology, to indicate that both Mr Obi and his borrowed party, not to say their social media fantasists, would retain relevance into the next election cycle. Mr Obi’s attention span is severely limited by his proclivity for commerce and, judging from his history of knee-jerk pragmatism, his disdain for hard and demanding loyalty to great causes and principles. He will balance his practical wealth needs with the sacrifice needed to sustain esoteric principles and ideals. It is not difficult to guess how he would decide when faced with such cruel and withering choices.

    For the LP as a party, surviving into the next election, given the pedantry of its leaders and the orphanage to which its founders have sentenced it, will be a game of Russian roulette. Nothing is ever certain for a political flirt who embraces whoredom as passionately as she opts for concubinage. The party will always be available as an election platform for the highest bidder. Like the PDP, the LP will probably continue to survive, perhaps with mixed fortunes from time to time, especially when the political atmosphere is clement. Mr Obi may remain in the LP for a little longer; but with the possibility of religious politics receding into the background, and unable to raise the kind of humongous funds as he did before the last polls, both the party and its presidential candidate could either contemplate parting of ways or face the even tougher fate of becoming irrelevant.  

  • Pat Utomi’s fascination with revolution

    Pat Utomi’s fascination with revolution

    Pat Utomi, a political economist and Convener of the Big Tent, has been fascinated with revolutions for a very long time. Every time he is frustrated, he advocates revolution. In this election cycle, he berthed at the Labour Party (LP) port, working with and currying votes for the LP presidential candidate, Peter Obi. With Mr Obi’s resounding losses both at the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) in September and the Supreme Court last Thursday, Prof Utomi is expected to become more strident in his quest for revolution. As recent as late last month, he still called for a revolution, insisting that social upheaval was knocking at the door. He spoke exultantly and blithely about revolution almost as if he could constrain it in a test tube, once it began, virtually certain that it would respect his imagined boundaries.

    But for every revolution that seemed to have delivered a favorable outcome, there have been two or more that miscarried, with attendant loss of lives on a scale that is unimaginable. Those advocating revolution must take care to ensure that such a fraught solution to social and political crisis can deliver on its promises and sustain the idealism of their fancies. The French and Russian revolutions, probably the most ballyhooed of revolutions, certainly never assumed the utopia they were cracked up to be. Prof. Utomi uses the revolution concept interchangeably with national transformation, as he in fact did in 2019 when he commented on social activist Omoyele Sowore’s quest for revolution. The two concepts were virtually the same, the eminent professor chimed, citing the case of South Korea that had to engage at a point in a reset of its national template. If any country needed a revolution, the professor suggested four years ago, it was Nigeria.

    In February and March 2011, Prof. Utomi was even more bellicose, indicating that his characteristic impatience with Nigeria’s political slothfulness predated his largely unprincipled and probably ethnic-induced excursion into Mr Obi’s LP. Let us crash this democracy, he had bellowed. As he put it: “We have a fundamental problem. We have to bring this system down completely and rebuild.” Astounded, his interviewer had asked him if he could elucidate on his pithy comment. “Destroy it,” he said fiercely. Unsure whether he heard the professor right, the gobsmacked interviewer probed further whether the professor was talking about destroying the democratic system. Prof. Utomi doubled down. “Crash the whole thing. It is not working for Nigeria; it will not work for Nigeria,” he said, lips quivering with anger. The current political situation, not to say the failure of his lionised presidential candidate, Mr Obi, and the severity of the humiliating losses in the courts must have sent the eminent political economist into a rage.

    His most recent call last month for revolution was spiced with allusions and illustrations from diverse parts of the world. His excursionary mention of Brazil, Somalia and notable social scientists and development economists all culminated in the intemperate assertion that the Nigerian system had become so crooked as to be unworthy of being patched up or saved. As he said, “My problem is not whether the Nigerian revolution is imminent; it is knocking on the door. The burden on my soul is that it could be the dawning of Robert Kaplan’s Coming Anarchy that may be a chauffeur-driven passage on the road to Somalia.” Earlier, in the same piece, he had concluded dismally: “…But today…I watch a legitimacy drought-stricken Abuja rush to do what it perceives as the desire of Paris and Washington DC against the interest of the people of Nigeria and Niger.” Here, he was of course referencing current political realities and frustrations which he thought ought to have produced only one outcome, to wit: “…In most countries, the angry poor would have poured into the streets, but this is Nigeria.”

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    It has probably not occurred to him that his history of political diatribe lends itself to only one possible conclusion: that once he fails to get what he wants, he prefers to throw away the baby with the bathwater. It is curious that he does not seem bothered that his extreme and repeated responses to Nigeria’s existential crises pigeonholes him, a notable intellectual supposedly gifted with a wider vista than the ordinary commentator, into the same cocoon as the hysterical Oby Ezekwesili, Chimamanda Adichie, Charles Oputa, aka Charly Boy, and a host of others. His intellectual vista is much wider, and he has cultivated the friendship of far more enlightened and liberal social scientists enough to lead him to better and deeper understanding of how societies work or unravel. But in his association with Mr Obi inside the stifling LP vehicle they borrowed to prosecute their political agenda, the professor has been dismissive, unyielding, acerbic and obviously annihilative. Yet, Mr Obi was for much of his campaign before the elections pedantic, unideological, incoherent, divisive, and in a disturbing sense even theocratic. Had the LP candidate won the presidential race last February, it is unclear Prof. Utomi would be so apocalyptic. There is ultimately something self-serving, if not quite naïve, and something rather regional and insular about the professor who pretends to be cosmopolitan and academic.

    Whether national transformation or revolution, Prof. Utomi’s advocacy does not appear as altruistic and nationalistic as he seems to suggest. Much worse, he and others like him calling for a revolution and inciting the public on all sides simply don’t know what they are wishing. The Roman Empire could not sustain its power for more than a 1,000 years, that is discounting Byzantium; nor did Greece, Medo-Persia, the Chaldeans and the Babylonians last for eternity. Even Marxism, whether of the Russian, Chinese or Yugoslavian variety, has all but petered out. Cuba’s socialism has lost steam. Yet these were well founded ideological systems that had a purpose and drive. Prof. Utomi’s call for revolution is not based on any ideological foundations, nor has he suggested any structured and systematic template to guide an understanding of the kind of society he visualises. What is clear is that he wants some general improvement in how institutions and structures are run in Nigeria. What is not clear is why anyone who has studied European history up to the modern era, including their revolutions of 1848, would believe that a civic culture could only be birthed by a revolution, not to talk of one promoted so discordantly by Prof Utomi?      

  • What next for Atiku Abubakar?

    What next for Atiku Abubakar?

    I wrote as follows in the article ‘Godwin Emefiele: Not Until I have Been Disgraced’ of 19 March, 2023:”I was privileged to have been both student, and later, staff of the University of Ife, Ile – Ife, when Ola Rotimi (13 April 1938 – 18 August 2000), unarguably one of Nigeria’s most outstanding playwrights and theatre directors dominated, and popularised, theatre at the Source (i e Ile – Ife).

    In one of his plays, the Tortoise, a slow, ugly and absolutely crafty character, was seen preparing to go on a journey and was asked if he must. “If you must go, when will you return”. Without the slightest hint of shame, he answered:”Not until I am disgraced”.

    As Lasisi Olagunju once put it, “the Tortoise is that character who fights on both sides, plunging the world around him into needless wars and anguish. Seeing himself as a charmer who cannot fail, he was without any moderation in consumption or in his assumptions.”

    In the referenced article,  it was the disgraced CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, I likened to the tortoise.

    Unfortunately, everything considered, not much appears to distinguish Emefiele from former Vice President, Wazirin Atiku Abubakar.They are both proud, arrogant, coy and believe themselves to be wiser than every other Nigerian; the reason why, against the CBN Act which expressly stipulates that a CBN governor SHALL devote his whole time to the work of that office, and shall not take any part – time job, Emefiele was garrulous enough he did everything to contest for the Presidency of Nigeria in furtherance of which he was reported, by the Peoples Gazette, to have taken delivery of  several campaign cars branded with his pictures, adorning traditional outfits of the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria, just as Atiku, because he is rich and powerful, believes he owns Nigeria.

    It was from that mindset, he not only boasted before the Northern Elders Forum that he alone qualifies to be the sole Presidential election candidate because he is from the North.

    What he would not tell Nigerians, however, is that he is being driven by some 50- year old marabout’s prophecy that, whether by hook or crook,  he would be President of Nigeria.

    We can only hope he will be wiser now that the Supreme court has finally ruled, ascribing nil probative value to his Chicago exploits, (which must have cost him a pretty penny) and affirming the PETC decision on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s election.

    But will he be statesmanly enough to pick up his phone, call President Tinubu and congratulate him, having actually promised Nigerians to do precisely that if he (Tinubu) won up to the Supreme court?

    Only time will tell but I will not even as much ask that of Peter Obi, whose group, led by his despicable lick spittle, one Julius Abure, has already regressed into their usual despoilation of everybody or agency of government who/ which does not buy into their pitiable story – these people with no discernible path, whatever, to victory in the Presidential election. I hope they heard the warning to their ilk by the Supreme court because these ones won’t learn or desist from excoriating the judiciary until some of them pay a steep price for their foolishness.

    At a personal level, I should be gloating, seeing that the Supreme court’s Lord Justices’ position on almost every ground of the appeals  mirrored my views as I have severally expressed them on these pages. In deed, I was spot on, on all grounds, bar only my position in the article:’We Told Them So: Peter Obi Is Not A Presidential Candidate Known To Law’ of 30 July, 2023, as the Supreme court affirmed the PETC position that party candidature is strictly a party matter whereas I have canvassed the view that a candidate is unqualified if his name is not on his party’s register forwarded to INEC, 30 days before the party’s primaries.

    How close my views were to the Lord Justices’ again leads me to a very unfavourable view of many of Nigerian lawyers.

    For instance, how absolutely  unreasonable is it, that a lawyer, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) for that matter, would  again bring to the Supreme court, a matter on which the apex court had previously decided as in the qualification of the  APC Vice – Presidential candidate to contest the Presidential election; a matter on which the Apex court had pronounced many months  ago.

    Happily, the Supreme court did justice to the matter the manner in which it summarily dismissed it in the Obi case.

    I am not sure, however, that some lawyers know what is called shame.

    Read Also: Why won’t VP Atiku Abubakar just quietly sing his political nunc dimittis and go home?

    This is the more reason I suggested in an earlier article that the petitioners should ask for a refund of the fees they paid, especially, to their lead lawyers.

    All the above not withstanding, all I want to do in this article is plead with our dear former Vice- President, Atiku Abubakar, ‘lati fowo wo nu, as we say in these parts, meaning that he should let bygone be bygone.

    As an eminent statesman who has put many years into the service of the country, part of it as comrades – in – Arms with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, I would like to plead with him to now sheathe his sword.

    He should know that he really doesn’t have to be President to contribute his very best towards the healing which is now a sine qua non for our highly troubled country.

     I plead with him to cast a quick glance at former President Goodluck Jonathan who, today is one of the most respected former African Heads of state. If Jonathan can be that respected worldwide, Atiku, without a shadow of doubt, can emerge as an outstanding African leader.

    He has obviously fought the good fight, and hasn’t the slightest reason to feel any shame. He should, therefore, effortlessly be able to retire into a hugely deserved, and respected, quietude.

    To Mr Peter Obi, I also offer these words in the hope that he will stop seeing himself as half a dozen of IPOB because he won 90+ per cent of Igbo votes.

    Nigeria consists of much more than Igbos whose geo-political zone, the Southeast,  has the least number of registered voters in the country. To be anything politically of any worth outside Igbo land, therefore, Obi or any Igbo politician, must learn to work with people outside the Southeast.

    As both Governor Soludo and Senator Abaribe have had reasons to say, Nigerians are not about to donate the presidency to Igbos if they remain as politically insular as they currently are.

    Come the next election, Obi should refrain from fielding only Igbos everywhere in the country as Labour party candidates for elections when he knows that no Igbo state would allow a non- indigene to contest even for the post of a mere Councillor. 

    That done, not only Peter Obi, but all Igbo elders, must do the very hard work of weaning Igbo youths off the social media where all they do is abuse Nigerians from other parts of the country.

    As things stand today, it is unlikely that an Igbo politician can win a Presidential election even if all Igbo states vote 100 per cent for him or her, and that, of course, should not be a Peter Obi who has not done anything tangible, nationally, besides weaponising religion and ethnicity as his route to winning a national election.

    It will never happen.

    Finally, my sympathy goes to those television stations and their anchors – Nigerians know them – who would, henceforth, have nothing else to daily salivate  upon.

    Time has come for all Nigerians to come together, eschew all forms of animosity, and rally round the government of President Bola Tinubu to tackle our current problems which are mostly the consequences of the abdication of governance in our country in the very recent past.

  • Money-what we want

    Money-what we want

    I always thought that the song, Money (that’s what I want) was first recorded by the Beatles who after all had a lot of monster hits in the sixties, a period which has been described as the swinging sixties, a period which swung, sometimes with the violence of a revolution. The situation in the sixties led to profound changes to the world in so many diverse ways that a new world was formed and the Beatles collectively and as individuals played a large part in bringing this new world into being. Yes, they were partly responsible for the new sounds of popular music but they were not the authors of the music they played. The real sources being black musicians, notably Little Richard and Chuck Berry, who because they were black could not be given the recognition that their talent deserved at that time. It is therefore excusable for me to ascribe the authorship of Money to the Beatles rather than the team of Janie Bradford and  Berry Gordy,  founder of Tamla Records which later on became Tamla Motown, the first globally successful black owned record label. As this is not an article about popular music, I will move on from it in the hope that an article about popular music will follow in due course.

    This article is about money but it is good to start with the big song about money because it says a great deal about the subject. After the riveting opening riff, the singer informs us that ‘everything good in life is free but you can tell that to the birds and bees so, give me money, that’s what I want!’ Actually, the song would have lacked the punch which knocked everyone out at the time but for the fact that the desire for money was, is and would always be as all consuming as it is universal.

    Money exists both in the abstract and in the shocking reality as people spend as much if not more time thinking about money as in wondering what to do to make money, lots of money with which to execute any number of personal projects. For most people their thoughts hardly go beyond this point as they can only make enough money for the bare necessities of life; food, some form of shelter and the settlement of pressing family matters. These, the vast majority, especially in the so called developing countries including Nigeria live from hand to mouth, living a life that is circumscribed by their numerous wants. For such people there cannot be any brightness to lighten the gloom of their existence as they can only dream of what they can do with money if only they had some to spend.

    On the other side of the coin are those whose relationship with money goes beyond just thinking about it. They are the ones who can think of what to do with the money at their disposal. It matters little or nothing how they have come to have the money jingling in their pockets as long as those pockets are full. Indeed, the whole point of this exercise is to speculate about the ways and means of keeping those pockets full.

    At the mundane level of everyday spending of money, for most people, it is all about notes and coins which are exchanged for goods and services. These are as physical as the nose on your face. The pieces of printed paper we now use as money these days are value free as they are nothing more than promissory notes which cannot deliver on their promise to exchange them for a stated amount of gold as was the case until all governments of the world conspired against their citizens by refusing to back their currency with a stated weight of gold. Each note is only worth what it can buy in the market and as countries fall deeper and deeper into debt, the value of that promissory note in your pocket decreases everyday. In the presence of inevitable inflationary pressure, that value decreases until all that is left is a worthless piece of paper. As the loss of value is cranked up, the government speeds up the process of printing money and the normal business of buying and selling becomes well nigh impossible.

    History tells us, or at least those of us who care to listen, that no polity no matter how strong it is economically can survive any sustained inflationary pressure and the devaluation of its currency for any length of time and for some currencies, a terminal stage is lurking just around the next corner, especially when there are debts to liquidate. We can allow the current fate of the Naira  to wander into our minds at this point in time.

    In addition to a flag and a national anthem, every country has a currency associated with it. Except of course those Francophone countries in West Africa which suffer under the lash of some bastard currency associated with France. For all that, it has to be said that some currencies are more equal than others. Some currencies are actually worthless and not worth the paper they are printed on but even then, they are still very much in demand as in spite of their troubled state, they remain legal tender.

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    Talking about the value of currencies today, the American dollar is supreme and for those with problems about having money in their pocket, there is the secondary and massive problem of laying hands on the almighty dollar. A couple of hundred dollars in your pocket in certain parts of the world can lift you out of poverty, at least for a little while. The American dollar remains in the bracket of the almighty compared with any other currencies on earth. This is because the dollar is used for no less than 88% of all transactions in the global market place. For example, oil is priced and paid for in dollars and given the volume of oil traded everyday the oversized value attached to the dollar should simply be left to those with an overactive imagination. The fate of the dollar is important to all of us and for those that are genuinely rich, their wealth is quoted in those dollars. You have truly arrived on the global scene when you have a few million dollars to your name but in a world in which you have a few thousand dollar billionaires, the mere millionaire is in serious danger of being simply trampled under the well shod feet of those sitting on a pile of billions of dollars.

    For those with billions of dollars to their name, it is clear that they have solved the problem of how to make money which is what everybody wants but only a few can get. But the point has to be made that as dollar fortunes rise for some people, the amount of money at the disposal of other people dwindles in the same measure even though it might be extreme to say that the people at the tip of the money pyramid are simply sucking up the funds which the multitudes at the base of the pyramid need to make their lives halfway more meaningful. To put this in some form of perspective, the richest eighty-one individuals on earth hold onto themselves more wealth than half of the poorest people in the world. That is simply mind boggling but what is even more alarming is that the richest are daily becoming richer whilst the poor are sinking deeper into the deadly morass of impecuniosity or to put it more bluntly, extreme and degrading poverty. Whilst the very rich have the headache of what to do with their money, the poorest are wondering where their next meal is coming from. As it is with individuals, so it is with countries. The United States with less than five percent of global population consumes roughly 25% of global resources and is indebted to the tune of 33 trillion US dollars with the interest on this loan rising everyday. The debt owed to the rest of the world is growing because the US cannot generate the money needed to power her overblown economy through taxes and other fiscal means of raising money. This notwithstanding, the US continues to burn money on her extensive healthcare system which does not provide adequate cover to a large percentage of her citizens. As the baby boomers, those born in the ten year period after the end of World War II, the largest demographic group in the US leave the work force through retirement, the payment of social security to the elderly increases whilst their armed forces, flung over the world are eating up a substantial portion of available funds.

    The largest economy in the world is deep in debt and this must have a deleterious effect on global economy. This is bound to have an effect on the amount of money which will be found in pockets all around the world. What happens to the Dollar is the business of the rest of the world as this determines the value of whatever money you have in your pocket. The fate of the Roman currency, the dinar which was the arbitrating currency of the Roman empire some two thousand years ago is instructive in this regard.

    The dinar was a coin which we are told contained two grams of silver when it was first struck. Over the years as silver became progressively scarce, the weight of silver in the coin became less in the same manner, in the same way that paper currencies lose their value as governments print more money to cover up the loss of weight (value) of paper money. As time went on the dinar contained very little or no silver and the people needed a load of worthless dinar just to buy food to eat. Eventually, the empire, the mighty Roman empire could no longer deal with the inflationary pressure bearing down on it and this, as much, if not more than the Germanic tribes which sacked Rome was responsible for the collapse of the Roman empire in the west. It is therefore not idle to speculate that problems associated with the value of the dollar will not end well for the rest of us. After all, all that the Americans need do is print more dollars to take care of at least part of their humongous debt. This is easy to do since the dollar no longer comes with the promise of a gold backing and like the dinar before it, it is shedding weight. Our local predicament with the value, or rather, the lack of it, of the Naira is in spite of the fact that what we are up against is a depreciating dollar. The dollar has lost no less than 65% of its value since 1985 and yet you need more than 1,000 Naira to buy one miserable dollar today. This means that the dollar you buy today is a whole lot less valuable than the dollar as it was at the time we entered the dollar trap with the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) as prescribed by our creditors, the IMF and the World Bank. The Nigerian government of the day decided to get into bed with those terrible twins against the expressed wishes of the good people of Nigeria. The same people who are now suffering from the product of our unholy romance with the mythical market forces which we were told would put us on the path to prosperity.

  • Atiku: It’s all over

    Atiku: It’s all over

    • What an inglorious fall of a political titan!

    Barely two weeks ago, precisely on October 15, I wrote a piece titled “Atiku’s wild goose chase” in which I made it clear that the discerning would know that whatever the veteran presidential hopeful hoped to achieve by going to America in search of evidence to render President Bola Ahmed Tinubu jobless would end up being an exercise in futility. I am happy the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, on Thursday, October 26, confirmed that position with the unanimous decision of the judges who decided the appeals by both Atiku, the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and that of the Labour Party (LP), Mr Peter Obi, against the victory of Tinubu in last February’s presidential election. I can’t help but reproduce the piece today, now that it would appear the election and all matters pertaining to it are now over and we should therefore put politics aside and face governance.

    But that is in a country where politicians are rational. Not in our kind of situation where we are highly litigious, such that the armed robber caught with the goods he had stolen, the blood of his hapless victims still in his hands, would insist on going to court to prove that he is innocent. Otherwise, why would Obi who should have gone to church as a true Christian to offer thanksgiving for the feat he achieved in his very first attempt at the presidency, also want the court to declare him winner? It is not easy to come third in an election in which one had two powerful contestants. But we know the circumstances that made such feat possible for Obi.

    I agree with lawyers and those who believe there must be an end to litigation. But the Tinubu government would be making a big mistake if it goes to sleep with such belief. Those who pursued it to this point are not likely to relent. I see them continuing the battle by some other means. A word is enough for the wise.

    In the meantime, I reproduce, quite substantially, my piece of October 15, 2023, on Atiku’s voyage to the United States because that was a future article here today (read penultimate week). Even some of those who did not like my position, I mean Tinubu’s sworn critics, said my position was unassailable given the way the points were clinically marshalled. Please enjoy yourself as we celebrate what may be the end of Atiku’s quest for the highest office in the land. Excerpts.

    “I deliberately refrained from commenting on the allegation by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu forged the certificate of the Chicago State University (CSU) in the United States of America that he submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), until the deposition by the university, for obvious reasons. I could not have imagined that someone would go to the extent that Atiku went in search of what has now turned out to be so little.

    But the university has now spoken.

    CSU spoke in simple English language that should have put paid to the now needless saga.

    For me, the questions are: did Tinubu attend CSU? Yes, he did. Did he graduate from there? Again, the answer is yes. The university’s current registrar, Caleb Westberg confirmed that “He was awarded a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration with Honors on June 22, 1979. His major was accounting.”

    Is Bola Ahmed Tinubu the same person as Bola A. Tinubu whose name is on the certificate in question? Again, given the response by Westberg, the university said it believes that both are one and the same person.

    Indeed, part of the reasons I was initially hesitant to comment on the matter was because, as a graduate, if I misplace my certificate, I would expect a replacement from the university where I graduated. But CSU says it is not in the habit of replacing such certificate, being a purely ceremonial matter. But vendors are permitted to replace such certificate.

    So, what is the ‘shock find’ here?

    He may not be able to admit it publicly, but I have cause to believe that what Atiku got from that university couldn’t have been the reason he spent what must have been a fortune to pursue.

    Indeed, something keeps telling me that Atiku knows he has reached a dead end in his quest to prove that Tinubu either did not attend CSU or, if he did, he never graduated there. But, having raised the  hopes of most of the usually gullible Nigerians, Atiku cannot afford to tell them he returned virtually empty-handed from the U.S.A. Hence, his pretension to have gotten something weighty enough to present to the Supreme Court, to show that Tinubu committed forgery.

    Obviously, Atiku is fighting his last political battle.

     The many years of bad governance by largely those, in the Babangida years we referred to as ‘old breed’ politicians, may make Atiku and people in his age bracket not to be in contention again. Nigerians would have been tired of them and would be routing for something different. Whether the something different would be refreshingly so is however in the womb of time. I have said it before that President Tinubu may be the last of that generation to rule Nigeria if he disappoints Nigerians.

    So, we can see why Atiku is so desperate not to allow this last opportunity, as it were, slip pass him. We can understand why he is running from pillar to post in search of the presidential seat. Atiku is running against time and no amount of counselling can convince him to retrace his steps.

    Let no one make no mistake about it. What Atiku is doing now is merely a continuation of the politics of the 2023 election by some other means; a thing they started long before the polls. And he is not alone in this. He is only the face of the anti-Tinubu cabal. All the shenanigans they brought into play; the cashless economy and all…

    That Tinubu still won the election has remained a jigsaw puzzle to them, knowing full well the numerous landmines they put on his way.

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    It is in the bid to cover up their dirty tracks that many of those involved in the illegalities that were perpetrated during the Muhammadu Buhari years decided to do all that was humanly possible to ensure Tinubu did not win the election. Now that all their evil plans had crashed like a pack of cards, they are afraid of their shadows. So, the war must continue at some other levels.

    Be that as it may, the discerning would have observed that Atiku is not even talking more about the allegation that he was out-rigged in the election again. May be he has realised the dead-end that that has become. If three people from the same party went their different ways at election time, it would take a repeat of the Miracle of Dammam for any of them to win an election in which they had a formidable challenger. May be that has dawned on him, rather belatedly. His emphasis is now on CSU. In other words, it is technicality to the rescue. His miserable world press conference confirmed that much.

    And, to show how desperate Atiku and his silent orchestra have become, it is now if you miss the ball, don’t miss the leg.

    But this is not the first time that politicians in Nigeria would be exploiting the gullibility of Nigerians for selfish reasons.

    A time there was when, in the Buhari years, it was claimed that the then president was not the original Buhari that we knew. That the original Buhari had died and what have you. Interestingly, many Nigerians believed this and still do. In fact, not only did they believe, they were helping to circulate that falsehood. Meaning virtually everyone could be conned? That was the implication of that falsehood. The original Buhari’s wife, Aisha, would have agreed to be under ruffling sheets in ‘the other room’ with a fake husband? The original Buhari’s children would have agreed to call a person that was swapped their authentic father? Buhari’s colleagues in the military, the international community and all could be successfully made to believe that the original Buhari was indeed dead! Come of it! But that is the level of ignorance in the country. Many Nigerians would always believe what they want to believe; they are not interested in evidence.

     Such is the ignorance that the (anti) social media spreads like bush fire.

    Obviously, the harsh situation in the country has contributed in no small measure to the Atiku crowd and anti-Tinubu sentiment. The government must therefore take decisive steps to reduce the hardship in the country.  Atiku does not deserve the kind of popularity he seems to be enjoying, especially in the permissive new media.

    This is a rolling stone without ideological conviction. In his inordinate ambition to rule Nigeria, nothing noble matters to him. He jumps in and out of political trains as soon as he discovers he cannot get the presidential ticket where he is. There must be something inherently wrong in the ambition of a man who wants to succeed his ethnic stock in a plural society like Nigeria. Atiku had made six attempts at the presidency and lost. If he tries a seventh time he will still lose if he remains his unstable or selfish self.

    All said, this is the time for lawyers to make money off politicians. I suspect Atiku’s lawyers are still the ones urging him on. When lawyers who are eager to make money off politicians meet incurable optimists that many of our politicians are, the result is the kind of desperation that is making Atiku run helter-skelter, having returned from America almost empty-handed, when he had hoped to bring in the joker to nail the Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency.”

    And, is there still someone out there who believes the Supreme Court’s decision has brought denouement to the matter? Count me out. Only that one cannot put a finger directly to the bile next time around.

    My candid advice to the Tinubu administration: watch and pray.

  • Alienation and elite dissonance in post-military Nigeria

    Alienation and elite dissonance in post-military Nigeria

    Almost ten months after the conduct of presidential election in Nigeria, the fireworks over who actually won the election even after the apex has delivered its “final” verdict over the matter continue to ricochet across the polity. This degree of rancor and bitterness over an election is unprecedented in the history of Nigeria, and it says a lot about the lack of elite amity in the nation.

    When and where presidential elections are not based on clear-cut ideological contestation among the contending parties and where electoral disputes are not anchored on subsisting pacted negotiations among the various factions of the political elite, things normally degenerate into a duel onto death.

      Consider for example the situation in 1979 when those marvelous UPN legislative gurus quickly settled in, or 1999 when Chief Falae was prevailed upon to withdraw his case just to guarantee the survival of the Fourth Republic. This would have been unusual in the current climate of mutual hostility accompanied by widespread hysteria. The usual elite dispute about allocation of resources and who gets what and when has degenerated into a zero-sum game where nothing matters anymore.

     The lack of elite consensus affects not just the climate before election, the atmospherics of the elections themselves and post-election ability of the new government to hit the ground running. Enemy nationals abound in Nigeria, as this column consistently affirms.

     They make life impossible for themselves as well as for others. They weaken further the resolve of weak governments and turn the nation into an anarchic and ungovernable entity. Faced with the possibility of economic and political extinction, the violated multitude look forward to delivery at any cost even where it means a deus ex machina.

      This is why ordinary people even in so called advanced societies often wink or connive at the possibility or actual emergence of despotic messianic tyrants. It is the German Weimar Republic on postcolonial wheels and it is what led to the emergence of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and General Frank Franco in bitterly divided Spain.

     Alienation from the state affects different sectors of the society in different ways. For the elite, it is a form of political and economic estrangement which can be negotiated at the shrine of booty sharing euphemistically called resource control. But when it is extended to the ordinary mass of the people, it is accompanied by a complete spiritual emasculation which leads to total severance from reality.

     More often than not, alienation of the general mass of the people from the state is so severe, the defamiliarization of the familiar so aggravating, that the victim suffers a complete severance from the notions and nature of the nation as it is constituted or habitable. The victim is so decoupled from the realities of national existence that he becomes a complete alien or a total stranger to his nation.

       Alienation is often more pronounced in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious nations. The contradictions are so palpable and gripping that they alter normal perception and turn the average individual into an enemy national who hates everything about his country. When and where such passive, sullen hostility turns into an active confrontation with the state and its lawful agents or heralds unrelenting destabilization, the ruling class must be on Tsunami watch.

      Fortuitously for Nigeria and many other postcolonial societies in Africa, elite yearnings for fundamental changes do not often equate to calls for the dismemberment of the nation even when some of the demands for change are couched in such volatile rhetoric. The political elite appear to be more interested in the overthrow and dismantling of the old hegemonic order.

    But as observable on the actual field of play and contrary to the myth of elite consensus, what is often required in fractious, ethnically polarized polities is not complete elite consensus which is an impossibility given the structure and configuration of such societies but substantial compliance which allows the dominant ruling group to drive through fundamental political and economic reforms that open the society to egalitarian transformation.

       Given the civil war experience and its lingering trauma, Nigerian political elite, except when they face the grave threat of being toppled from below by the rampaging mob of the disaffected and the furious hoi -polloi , are usually very wary of the rhetoric of dismemberment. The two extant attempts at mounting a full scale rebellion against the Nigerian state ended in dismal and desultory tragedies.

       In the case of Isaac Adaka Boro, eighteen months after his rag tag band of riverine rebels was put to rout by General Aguiyi-Ironsi , he was already donning the uniform of a Nigerian Army major when he was shot and killed by a lone Biafran soldier hiding in a disused shed around Bonny.

       Thereafter, his people nailed their flag to the hegemonic mast of northern political forces. In the case of Col Odumegwu-Ojukwu, thirteen years after fleeing Nigeria, he came back as a political agent of the same feudal bastion he had led his people against in a bloody campaign which devastated the old eastern region. All that was fiercely adamant and politically solid melted into thin air.

      Those who know the true character and ideological brittleness of the Nigerian political class and its capacity for healthy and unhealthy compromises often betray a strange equanimity and unflappable composure in moments of grave national crisis which can be quite confounding to agitated onlookers and political neophytes alike.

       In the wake of the tragic annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election and the ensuing national uproar, Dr Ibrahim Tahir, the late Talban Bauchi and Cambridge-trained conservative scholar to boot, cautioned those from the South West threatening fire and brimstone and the eventual dismemberment of the nation should the annulment subsist not to confuse their platform position with realpolitik. For good measure, the sharp-tongued, roly-poly intellectual dismissed the agitators as Oduduwa warmongers.

    Read Also: Supreme court ruling: Tinubu ‘ll now focus on Nigeria’s challenges – Adeleke

      Many of us, this writer included, felt so outraged by this blithe and blatant putdown that we concluded that the remarkable writer and maverick author of The Last Imam had finally succumbed to the excesses of his sybaritic self-indulgences. By platform position, he meant hard public posturing taken as the take off point for hard bargaining and concession-wringing.

    It was also around this time that Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, fiery ideologue and former governor of the old Kano State, famously declared that he was not in politics because of MKO Abiola.  Rimi’s comeuppance would come later as the equally wily and punitively proactive General Olusegun Obasanjo refused to make him Foreign Minister, plumping instead for the less fancied but equally ideologically unstable Sule Lamido.

      In an earlier nasty spat with Lamido, Chief James Ajibola Idowu Ige let it be known that he did not suffer fools gladly. Both men ended up as full ministers in Obasanjo’s cabinet. The point to note is that after almost five years of low intensity warfare, a consensus was cobbled out in which the north conceded the presidency to the South. That was after the death of both Abiola and General Abacha. It was a deal that required substantial elite compliance, despite a sizeable number of naysayers.

     It is to be noted that during the NADECO insurrection against the Nigerian military state, not for once did its Yoruba-dominated leadership advocate secession or the break-up of Nigeria. Dismemberment of the nation was not on the menu.

      Bola Ige, widely demonized in the northern press as a Yoruba supremacist in the Rwandan Hutu framework, saw himself as a Nigerian leader of Yoruba extraction waiting in the wing rather than as a ruler of a Yoruba secessionist enclave. Not for once did he advocate for the dissolution of the nation.                                                        

      In his widely read column in the Nigerian Tribune on Sunday, the fiery orator consistently declaimed that rather than advocate the breakup of the country, he longed to see the day when the shoe would be on the other foot for the hegemonic rulers who had held Nigeria to ransom since independence. That dawn of a new awareness produced a hybrid patchwork which left the man known as Cicero of Esa-Oke politically stranded and estranged from his colleagues.

      The political dissonance and elite disharmony turned Ige into a victim and prime casualty of elite pacting. People fight for a particular ideal only to find that what they had fought for was not what came to be. Rather than rule as a Yoruba hegemonist, Obasanjo ruled like a pan-Nigerian nationalist. Widely admired for his sharp intellect and organizational acumen, the former governor of Oyo State was equally resented for his nettling tongue and abrading candour.

      After a losing bid to become the presidential flag-bearer of his party, Ige teamed up with Obasanjo in a daring strategic gambit which split both his party and its cultural organization down the line. Neither fully recovered. But the die was cast for the sizzling and scintillating orator. An attempt to return to base proved a bridge too far. Ige was bumped off because the disruptive possibilities of his return to his political precincts were simply too enormous to bear for the new order and its orderlies.

      The past twenty four years have proved that in a fragile polity and multi-ethnic nation seething with rancor and mutual hostilities, elite consensus is never a done deal. It requires constant nurturing and constant repairs. Obasanjo himself was almost surprised around the corner by his deputy who became his mortal adversary. His attempt at tenure elongation met with a resounding shellacking which struck deep at the foundation of the post-military polity.

       The travails of Umaru Yar’Adua whom Obasanjo had imposed on the nation by fire and by force are quite instructive, particularly after the Katsina nobleman became hobbled and enfeebled by terminal illness. While the conservative phalanx rallied and railed at the prospects of being shortchanged, it required a doctrine of necessity to impose Jonathan on the polity. Five years later, the Ijaw man from Opia became toast when he attempted to overstay his welcome.

       The current conjuncture is equally rich in superb ironies. Only those with their historical binoculars misplaced or mislaid will call it the dawn of a new order of ethnic exceptionalism.  While the bold administrative reforms and the restructuring at the level of personnel have met with rapturous approval, many are also of the opinion that the brutal rightwing social engineering and neoliberal economic fundamentalism of the Bretton Woods institution is anathema to Awolowo’s socialist welfarism and the progressive egalitarian politics of the Yoruba people.

         It will be a monumental irony if the Yoruba, the most urbanized ethnic group and their seething cities become the first people to chafe and publicly take umbrage at their own stellar son. But if care is not taken, the disaffection and dehumanization of ordinary people may tip the scale in the direction of anarchy and generalized chaos.

      This is usually the playground of the mob and the graveyard of elite consensus. The post-Buhari polity with its fragile elite consensus and many enemy nationals trying to engineer the fiscal collapse of the country by putting undue pressure on the naira must be wary of the next few months.

    Now that the road is clear of electoral disputes, pressure will mount on the Tinubu administration to deal with the economic miscreants who have brought us to this sorry pass. It will no longer be possible to look the other way as tales of deliberate economic adversity against the nation escalate.

      As the inevitable reforms threaten the middle class with obliteration and the masses with pure extinction such as they have never known before, a way must be found not to give the impression that the government has sided with the tormentors of the people. One way of the doing this is to strengthen an agency like the EFCC in its offensive and crime-preventing capacity.

      The other is to make sure that all the outstanding cases of economic crimes against the nation are pursued with vigour and integrity. If the truth must be told, the crime fighting agencies have come to a sorry pass. The president should immediately constitute an Economic Advisory Council with the capacity to think out of the box and avail him of countervailing notions of economic growth and development.

     In ending, let us remind the framers of the new economic doctrine that no fractious, multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation has ever survived the kind of bitter economic pills advocated for Nigeria by the IMF and the Bretton Wood institutions. Something always gives in the end. Let it not be said that we have pulled economic defeat out of the jaws of political victory.

  • Chimamanda, Obi and Uwazuruike

    Chimamanda, Obi and Uwazuruike

    While the Supreme Court was finally laying to rest the illusion that Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) or Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) won the February 25, 2023 presidential election, novelist Chimamanda Adichie was in far away United States eulogising the LP candidate as the rightful winner of that fateful poll. Her infatuation with Mr Obi is irrepressible. It dates back to months before the election in which he, as the sole Igbo man of substance in the race, incarnated her rage against Nigeria and justified her obsessions. When he was announced as the second runner-up in the race, his loss was too heavy for her dainty heart to take. She lashed out at Nigeria, as is her custom, and vituperated everybody that crossed her path, be it President Bola Tinubu himself or, surprisingly, Prof. Wole Soyinka.

    As far as Chimamanda was concerned, there could not have been another winner except the man she idolised and lionised, Mr Obi. In her view, and regardless of what the facts say, including the Nigerian political dynamics which she abhors so much, the PDP candidate could never win.  A worse illusion is hard to find. Mr Obi made scant inroad into the core North, and only had a measurable presence in Lagos in the Southwest. Apart from the Southeast which proved insular in the last elections, and which he took by an unalterable and unchallengeable margin, he made only fair or passable showing in the South-South and North Central. He had preyed on Christian fears and harvested the votes of those superstitious about what the All Progressives Congress (APC) same-faith ticket portended. In the end, the Christian vote, which was balkanised in most regions, was insufficient to hurl him into office. But somehow, Mr Obi’s supporters, educated or illiterate, seemed to think he won the poll. Chimamanda was surprisingly and dismayingly numbered among those who hallucinated about that purported electoral victory. Has she read the opinion of Ralph Uwazuruike, the MASSOB leader who skewered Mr Obi as a dreamer who hoped to win a major election by motivational speaking and social media noise rather than by negotiation?

    Chimamanda’s latest vituperations against the Tinubu poll victory came during a lecture she delivered at Princeton University’s Africa World lecture series in the United States. There she affronted every rule of logic, and thumbed her nose at the facts of history. She was obsessed with Mr Obi, and that was all that mattered, not logic, not history, nor even common sense.  “I want to recognise the presence of a man I deeply respect and a man who I think is a beacon of hope not just for Nigeria but for Africa,” she began grandly, unperturbed by her exaggerations and tragic declension as a novelist and chronicler of human foibles and triumphs. “And he’s the man who many of us know won the election in Nigeria. He’s also an example of that very rare quality in politicians which is genuine humility. I mean there are many other things I’m enraged about…We had an election in February that was deeply flawed, and we have a person who we’ve been told is a winner who did not win the election and this has been shown over and over; there’s evidence for this…”

    While it is not clear where she got her risible notion of Mr Obi’s ‘genuine humility’, perhaps from his affected demeanour, two things vitiate her conclusions about the election in which her hero lost badly. Firstly, she admitted she had been enraged for far too long as a result of the political and perhaps cultural dynamics of Nigeria. In other words, her rage beclouded her reasoning. As her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, portrays, her unhappiness with Nigeria is enduring and traumatic. If she does not see a matter concerning Nigeria from that insular prism, she could not see at all. The last presidential poll qualifies for and justifies her rage. Secondly, at the US lecture, she spoke about ‘a person who we’ve been told is a winner who did not win the election and this has been shown over and over; there’s evidence for this’. Chimamanda proceeds from that disingenuous and lying point of being told something to forming ironclad conclusions. Who told her? The media, the courts, just who? And she spoke the horrendous untruth that ‘there’s evidence for this.’ Where on earth is the evidence? How could she lie so brazenly? If as a non-participant in the election she had the evidence, surely Mr Obi must possess tons of it. Yet, Mr Obi could not produce any, not from the polling booths through LP agents, not from BVAS, and indeed not from anywhere. Yes, Mr Obi made wild claims about the election, but he never claimed he won. All he wanted was for the courts to disqualify the APC candidate, Bola Tinubu.

    Chimamanda may be a novelist, a talented one at that, but so far she is not anything more than a fictionist. Her talents at conjuring things may be widely recognised; but it will take more skill, time and discipline to develop the capacity to document facts and history. She is of course at liberty to indulge her parochialism on the Southeast which she documents has suffered unbearable hurt from the rest of Nigeria, but she does not have the freedom to lie about issues, colour facts or project hatred and animosity indiscriminately. But perhaps she actually has the evidence to prove that the presidential election was stolen. Why did she withhold the evidence from his idol when he was perambulating around the courts with empty hands and sophistry?