The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Wike riddle: Atiku runs with the hare, hunts with the hound

    Wike riddle: Atiku runs with the hare, hunts with the hound

    After three undistinguished campaign rallies the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has slowly begun to face the uncomfortable reality that his ambition may miscarry very badly if nothing is done to unite his party behind him. Since he won the ticket to fly the flag of his party in the 2023 presidential contest, he has vacillated on the subject of getting his party chairman Iyorchia Ayu to relinquish his position to a southerner. Weeks ago, however, he twice indicated he might after all be open to reconciliation with the five aggrieved governors of Rivers (Mr Wike), Abia (Okezie Ikpeazu), Enugu (Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi), Benue (Samuel Ortom, who is the titular leader), and Oyo (Seyi Makinde). But no one really knows how his mind works, or whether he really understands the precariousness of his position. His seeming readiness – don’t count on it, though – to dialogue with the famous five has, however, coincided with the reticence and inconspicuousness of Dr Ayu, prompting apprehension in the All Progressives Congress (APC) camp that the dissension in the PDP might end soon. That hope may in fact be forlorn.

    Weeks after weeks, Alhaji Atiku had tried to placate the five governors, including sending emissaries to plead with them to accept Dr Ayu as their chairman until after the presidential election. The five governors have remained adamant. If the top hierarchy of the party could not be representative now, the five reasoned, there was no proof that anything would change should the party lose the presidential poll. Alhaji Atiku and Dr Ayu gave their words. The five governors thought those words meant nothing in the face of existing and unameliorated injustice. They fear, and indeed everything suggests, that the party would lose the poll simply by ceding the presidential ticket to the North after eight years of the northern Muhammadu Buhari presidency. The five, together with other stakeholders in the party, had fought to engender inclusiveness and rotation in the presidential race, but Alhaji Atiku, with a few irredentists in the party, had stolen the southern governors’ thunder. That theft, the famous five argue, is both intentional and contemptuous of the South.

    But back to the campaigns. Party hierarchs were dissatisfied with the tone and tenor of the three or so major PDP presidential campaign rallies held so far. The hiatus that has followed, with no immediate follow-up rallies, may have been a subtle acknowledgement that the party has simply not got the campaign off to a brilliant and deafening start. The dispiritedness is followed by a noticeable shortage of campaign funds. The party boasts of 11 governors, five of whom are at daggers drawn with the candidate. Of the remaining six, it is probably only Delta State, which produced the running mate, that is fairly financially loaded, assuming state funds can be creatively and disingenuously funneled into financing the campaign. The standard-bearer himself, some unverified sources suggest, is reluctant to open his private treasury for a race he is increasingly unsure he could win. But sooner or later, Alhaji Atiku and his strategists will have to break the stalemate, if they can decipher what that stalemate looks and feels like.

    Last week, it was all but sure that the PDP candidate had moved on, at least by his own admission, and the aggrieved five had all but sought out alternative berths. However, reports have begun to fly about that a lot of pressure was being brought to bear upon Alhaji Atiku to compromise. The party, it was said, had empowered Taraba State governor Darius Ishaku and other loyalists of Mr Wike to broker peace. It is not clear how they would succeed where other high-powered peacemakers had failed. But the candidate also made a flying visit to former military head of state Ibrahim Babangida probably to co-opt him into the peace search. Gen Babangida is of course always flattered by the attention, in the same way former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s ego had been massaged by other presidential aspirants. Neither possesses anything properly describable as electoral value, not Gen Babangida, and not ex-president Obasanjo. But their constant hectoring of active politicians has seemed to imbue them with a gravitas that may not easily lend itself to political quantification. It is that gravitas, that indescribable political capital, that the active politicians and candidates desperately seek.

    No one is sure a peace deal could or would be struck between Alhaji Atiku and the aggrieved governors. The animosities are too deep, too complex and too ossified to be smothered by any saccharine deal. On the surface, the antagonists mouth a preference for rapprochement because the ‘civil war’ in the party has presented them unpalatable conundrums. The governors need the party to prosecute their state and governorship campaigns, and the presidential standard-bearer also needs the states to join in funding the party at the national level to achieve any degree of success. The antagonists’ ambitions and goals would be thwarted should the internecine war persist. And they would also come to grief in the short and long run should failure in 2023 jeopardise their very existence.

    If a peace deal is to be struck, that is if it is not already too late, it would require the aggrieved five governors trusting the vacillating Alhaji Atiku against their better judgements. They have seen him at close quarters, and have taken the measure of his politics. They know him to be unstable in his ways, promising one thing today and reneging the very next day, if not the very next hour. They have been frozen into stupor by his glacial indifference to the strategic things that matter in both the party and the campaigns, and have also been inundated by his broken promises. To trust him now would expose them to unimaginable political harm, especially should he win. If he could not be compelled to honour his word when he had yet to wear the crown, why would he honour it after the crown had hypothetically settled around his ears?

    Nevertheless, the combatants have now seriously begun to mouth reconciliation. Should any form of reconciliation be achieved, and some sort of tentative unity of forces be strung, it would be nearly clear that the aggrieved governors would pull their financial punches, unsure what to make of their Janus-faced presidential candidate. It may please Alhaji Atiku to run with the hare and hunt with the hound, but sooner rather than later, his true self would be unveiled, and what his antagonists will see might be terribly off-putting.

     

    Nigeria’s multidimensional poor

    Last Thursday, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) disclosed that some 133 million Nigerians experience multidimensional poverty. That is a whopping 63 percent of the country. Worrisomely too, 86m of them live in the North, while 47m live in the South, 72 percent in rural areas, and 42 percent in urban areas, and about 68 percent of whom are children. Damning statistics. Analysed state by state, the sad picture is both revealing and troubling.

    The NBS gives an indication of the index used in calculating multidimensional poverty. It references food insecurity, nutrition, access to healthcare, school attendance, sanitation, water, cooking fuel, unemployment, underemployment, among other indices. So, why not simply say 133m Nigerians are living in poverty or are poor? Undoubtedly, insecurity has been one of the main drivers of poverty in Nigeria. President Muhammadu Buhari, whose representative unveiled the report, promised last week that he would leave Nigeria safer at his exit from office. He will of course be expected to do a comparative presentation between what he met and what he would leave after office.

    More relevantly, regardless of what the situation was before 2015, questions will be asked why insecurity and poverty were left unattended, so to speak, for about seven years before concerted efforts began to stanch the flow of blood. Now, embarrassingly for the APC, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has begun to make an issue out of the NBS report. The APC, the opposition gloats, is bequeathing poverty and insecurity to Nigerians. In the face of a damning NBS report, it would be interesting to see how the usually creative APC would respond.

  • And a fleeting encounter with the Sultan…..

    And a fleeting encounter with the Sultan…..

    To Fountain University in Oshogbo this early morning of last Wednesday for the dedication of an impressive, thirty-two room guest lodge built in honour of the late revered jurist, Pa Bolarinwa Babalakin by his children ably led by Dr Bolanle Olawale Babalakin, aka B.O.B, lawyer and billionaire industrialist.

    There was nostalgic excitement in the air this Wednesday of early November. The weather was cool and clement. An early harmattan haze has descended on the entire landscape inducing an equable European climate. Unlike the tropical torpor and lassitude associated with rainy weather, the harmattan chill often produces an agreeable exhilaration of the spirit and heady expectations.

    This morning as one leaves the mammoth Babalakin resort in Gbongan and headed in the direction of the state capital, the birds were singing and the crickets were chirping endlessly. The acute nostrils could pick the fragrance and aromatic smell of fresh, unadulterated palm wine chilled to perfection by the cold weather. The effect on the palate of this wonderful liquor is superior to the best champagne anywhere in the world.

    The wheel of civilization may grind slowly but it grinds nevertheless. Sixty years earlier, the whole place was a massive virgin forest where people hunted rodents, antelopes and the odd warthog. Snooper was reliably informed that a huge deer could be occasionally sighted foraging at the outer perimeters of the resort.

    Since all politics is increasingly becoming local and localized, yours sincerely was decked out in the regalia and full paraphernalia of a titled chief of the area. The postcolonial intellectual has succumbed to rural reintegration and has gone completely local and probably loco to the bargain. It is only when you are in Lagos that you hide the elongated bead just in case the unruly boys decide to use it to hang one.

    One had picked a quiet spot at the back of the makeshift gallery away from the ululation and star-gazing. The chairman of the occasion was none other than his Royal Eminence, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Mohammad Sa’ad Abubakar. He had sat quietly among a retinue of aides and friends shorn of royal pomp and pageantry.

    Not having met the Sokoto caliph before, yours sincerely suddenly decided it was not a bad idea to extend cordialities. Snooper had made his way to the front in a brisk and purpose-filled manner that brooked no opposition from the posse of state honchos.

    “ Your Royal Eminence”, yours sincerely saluted the Sultan having  exchanged brisk formalities with Professor Ishaq Oloyede, the JAMB registrar.

    “Your eminence, this is…..(Name and title withheld)”, the professor offered by way of introduction to the Sultan who seemed deeply intrigued by the interloper.

    “Ho, the famous…..(Details withheld)? I read a lot of his writing.” the scion of Usmanu Dan Fodiyo noted with a deadpan visage. The former military officer is obviously a consummate power player, and a man of Spartan self-discipline to boot. Snooper has also known the revered ruler since his military days. But it would appear an impolite return serve to say so. So we allowed the ball to roll by. Here is wishing the sultan many more years on the throne of his ancestors.

  • Elite consensus in Nigeria: Prospects and problems

    Elite consensus in Nigeria: Prospects and problems

    Afenifere, the apex socio-cultural organization of the Yoruba people and one time dominant and hegemonic political force, has found itself in the biggest quandary of its storied life. The current crisis threatens its existence in such a direct and lethal manner that it makes the earlier combustions to pale into utter insignificance.

    No, no !! This is not a political obituary of Afenifere. One retains too much affection and reverence for the surviving titans of the organization to be caught conducting a coroner’s inquest into the political translation of such luminaries of the struggle. It may well be due to cultural conditioning. Actually, one had wanted to steer clear of the Afenifere controversy out of the fear of further inflaming passions.

    But in the past three weeks or so, several compatriots and friends who believe that one knows much more than he is letting on have been asking  for clarification and possible illumination on the issue. A younger associate and a titled Egba chief, after reading a recent column by this writer, actually went as far as accusing one of fiddling like Nero while the Yoruba nation burns.

    Let us get this out of the way. It is up to the revered Afenifere grandees to determine whether as a group, Afenifere still has the capacity to offer a visionary pathway for the Yoruba race in the turbulent world of Nigeria’s postcolonial politics and whether it still retains the residual strength to mediate intra-elite competition and deal with the sub-ethnic sensitivities of a turbulent race in which sub-ethnic identities sometimes overshadow organic ethnic character.

    These were the foundational problems that Obafemi Awolowo grappled with and he rode them out brilliantly until something had to give. But Awo returned to pick up the pieces. Whatever their answers to these posers, yours sincerely and the entire Yoruba race owe a lot to those grand old men. They stood by their people in the gravest hour of peril in the hands of the Nigerian postcolonial state.

    It will be foolish and churlish whatever the extant political disagreement about strategy and modus operandi, to start speculating about the political demise of these brave and heroic old men in public. In Yoruba political culture, there is a protocol and procedure for the retirement of elders. There is something particularly nasty and unedifying about younger men openly defiling and defaming the reputation of older heroes simply because of politics.

    Finding the golden mean among a combustible people and the most civil procedure for conducting political disagreement have their grave political perils and moments of acute mental agony. The following personal example is for the sake of illumination.

    In 1998 shortly after his release from jail, the former Nigerian leader, Olusegun Obasanjo, journeyed to London to honour some pressing international engagements. One had been invited from Birmingham as part of his entourage.

    At a civic reception for him later, Obasanjo was confronted by an irate crowd who openly accused him of already hobnobbing with the enemies of the Yoruba race. Most vociferous and militant was a young Yoruba activist who darkly warned the retired general of the dire consequences of betraying his people this time around.

    Obasanjo was so livid and affronted by the young man’s temerity that he threatened to terminate proceeding. A retired Ghanaian colonel started pacing up and down the hall threatening to shoot everybody at sight if that was the way Nigerians treat African heroes. He could not understand how an Obasanjo who is treated like a deity in many African countries could be the object of such curt discourtesy among his own compatriots.

    A tense silence ensued with the retired general insisting that before proceedings could resume, the young man must perform the ritual of traditional obeisance to him and the Yoruba activist rejecting the idea out of hand. Yours sincerely had to deploy all his leverage as an intellectual and activist to get the chap to relent. Thereafter, the interactive session proceeded on an even keel.

    A few weeks after this incident, yours sincerely and his friend, Dr Biyi Oyefule, arrived at the tail-end of a NADECO meeting in New York presided over by Chief Anthony Enahoro with Pa Abraham Adesanya in attendance all the way from Nigeria. One had hardly sat down when one of the leaders in attendance pounced, accusing one of being Obasanjo’s campaign manager.

    When he was asked the basis for this unfortunate allegation, he had informed the audience that he was told I was the one who ordered the fellow who was rude to the retired general to comply. In swift response, yours sincerely had responded that as a Yoruba person from a good home, one would have acted in likewise manner if he (the NADECO chieftain) was the subject of such public contretemps.

    Both General Alani Akinrinade and Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu leapt to one’s defence. General Akinrinade observed  that the allegation was incompatible with one’s recent journalistic and political exploits. In the case of the soon to be Lagos State Governor-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, he had added the personal touch that we were both lying on adjacent sofas in his London house before one got up to answer General Obasanjo’s invitation.

    But the greatest political irony of the unfortunate flare up was lost on the NADECO notable of Yoruba extraction and since he is still alive, one will be revealing it for the first time on this page. Unknown to him, two days earlier somewhere in Brixton in South London one was almost roughed up by some implacable Obasanjo partisans for stoutly defending the selfsame NADECO chieftain over the allegation that he was the one who sent OPC stalwarts to disrupt the retired general’s interactive engagement.

    As it was in 1999 and probably earlier, so it is in 2022 with the path of the genuine apostle of intra-elite mediation and inter-elite political brokerage strewn with dangerous landmines, misdirected hostilities and occasional fatality.

    In fractured countries where elites have boxed themselves into the corner of “pillarised” and irreconcilable differences, it is the go-between and in-between who are in greater danger in contrast to those who exhibit the assurance of weighty ignorance and whose blinkered vision of a society permanently at war with itself furnishes them with the paradoxical clarity that comes with insurmountable prejudice.

    Yet to nudge a nation, or any nation for that matter forward, there is no alternative to elite consensus. Even in virtually homogeneous nations, elite consensus often acts a conductor for sweeping reforms and a thorough going overhaul of the social and economic categories of such societies. No one now remembers that early twentieth century Norway was a deeply conservative, semi-feudal society with entrenched class and cultural polarities.

    But the aristocrats, noblemen and plebeians came together and agreed that this was no way to run a society fit for purpose in a rapidly industrializing modern world. The result was sweeping reforms and a conscious effort to overcome divisions based on class and religious differentiations. Of course along the lines, there would be trade-offs and buy-in such as the retention of a modernized and reformed monarchical system and concession to some aristocratic privileges.

    Today, Norway is at the cutting edge of modernity and modernization; gender-friendly, more prosperous and rancour-freer than some of the older democracies of the western world. The deepening equality and re-ordering of social forces have liberated the creative genius of the people and has led to a society in which everybody feels like a stake-holder. Sometimes, you do not need a violent revolution to move a society forward but a revolution of the mind driven by visionary necessity.

    The multi-ethnic and multi-religious nations of postcolonial Africa have suffered grievously from the lack of elite consensus. It has led to stultified economic development and the phenomenon of elections as warfare.

    This combustible combo has led to civil wars in Algeria, Egypt, the two Congos, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and others. Somalia, despite its ethnic homogeneity, has been stateless for more than a quarter of a century and both Rwanda and Burundi have seen political disputes among elites degenerate to a genocidal maelstrom.

    Nigeria has had its fair share of economic and political meltdown arising from lack of elite consensus. The lack of elite consensus often leads to elite disruption of the electoral process as seen in active political gaming, economic sabotage, unremitting dissemination of disinformation and the deliberate delegitimizing of political transition even before elections are held.

    The Afenifere of 2022 is no longer the Afenifere of 1999 which held the entire Yoruba race in political thralldom as a result of its heroic derring-do at the behest of the Yoruba people. It has suffered serial fracturing and many injuries. When Chief Ayo Adebanjo ordered his people to vote for a particular candidate, there is no evidence that he is aiming at elite consensus even among his own fractious people.

    The suspicion is that it is a strategy of elite disruption for the purpose of an electoral deadlock. In the current circumstances, it is an unenforceable writ dead on arrival. Unlike Awo, his idol, and at the formative stage of Afenifere, there is no evidence of wide consultation or of attempts to take on board the already inflamed sub-ethnic sensitivities among the various elite strata of his Yoruba people. These sensitivities are there, whether we like it or not.

    In any case, despite the hype and hoopla about a Southern Middle Belt Forum, any attempt to forge an elite consensus without involving the hegemonic core northern bloc is a strategic non-starter. The Yoruba people will not be led to start a war for which they are ill-prepared. Awo himself was politically smart enough to realize quite early that the Yoruba people are often smarter than their leaders and will never be led by the nose.

    The Afenifere/Action Group did not gain complete dominion over the Yoruba people until the radical reforms of the Action Group began to kick in. Even at that, there were implacable naysayers.  This is a very dire moment for the country and there is nothing the current Afenifere is bringing onboard comparable to Awo’s brilliant innovation except a history of unforced errors and of collusion and complicity with the forces of reaction since 2003.

    No organization can retain hegemonic domination over a people if it does not continue to mirror and adequately respond to their dynamic aspirations. Let us round up current proceeding. In the October 1999 edition of Africa Today, yours sincerely wrote that having been invested with presidential power, Obasanjo should be expected to teach Afenifere a terminal lesson in political power play for the humiliation he had endured in their hand.

    True enough, Obasanjo did not waste further time. He had the political momentum on his side. He had unleashed an artillery bombardment on the organization and its party, relentlessly poaching from its rank and destabilizing it at the most profound psychological level. At a point, Afenifere became so punch-drunk and disoriented that it reminds one of a dazed boxer who went and sat on the lap of his opponent after some punitive pummeling.

    Twenty three years after and as things stand at the moment, it is an irony of post-military politics in Nigeria that the fate of Afenifere lies in the hands of arguably the two most outstanding Yoruba products of military politics and a militarized polity in postcolonial Nigeria: the one a proven military general, the other a political generalissimo of uncommon mettle; the one an outsider who has become an Afenifere insider, the other a former insider who is looking on from the outside; the one a master of political camouflage, the other an uncanny strategist and master of political blitzkrieg.

    It is a political battle of will and wits that started in 1999 and is now winging its way to a shattering denouement. Afenifere may well be part of the collateral damage. We live in interesting times.

  • Predicting presidential pendulum (Part 3)

    Predicting presidential pendulum (Part 3)

    “Elections, unfortunately, can only determine who has the most support among the candidates and not who is the most competent of them all. We have no way of knowing who will do well. Performance is not determined by campaign poetry or the ability to make an authoritative PowerPoint presentation. Competence is not determined by popular vote. Nowhere in the world is an election guaranteed to elect the best candidate. Rather, elections determine the candidate or the party with the most support. We need to let this fact sink in well.” – Simon Kolawole @ Thisday @ 13th November 2022.

     

    Aftermath of the primary elections in the parties in the run off to the June 18 gubernatorial election in Ekiti State, this columnist had a significant encounter with an experienced grassroot politician. In my shuttling between Lagos and Ekiti, my home state, to conduct ethnographic research study of the people, politics and politicking, my path crossed with this politician as I engaged him in dissecting issues of concern as to who would likely emerge as the man in the saddle come 16th of October 2022 as the de jure Governor of Ekiti State. He did not mince words as he posited proudly that BAO (Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji) of APC would convincingly win and be elected as the helmsman in Ekiti in the 18th June election. Then, I confronted him, as an analyst cum social and public affairs commentator on the rising profile of Engr. Segun Oni, the gubernatorial candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). It is instructive to pontificate that as at the time of my engaging this politician, Segun Oni’s popularity was raving and roaring in the social media and airwaves all over in Ekiti and beyond. In fact, a leading chieftain of his party once proudly posited: “we are the only one campaigning, others had gone under …” So, it seemed! However, unknown to him, the APC as this columnist was reliably informed by one of its key leaders strategically engaged in silent but salient campaigns to outsmart the opposition. Back to my encounter with this grassroot politician. He responded by saying something that succinctly sunk into my memory even as I am writing this piece. To him: “Segun Oni has the crowd whilst we (APC) have the people.” It was as the results were trickling in the aftermath of the 18th June election that the import of that seemingly terse but tantalizing statement started making meaning to the discerning minds including this columnist. In essence, in the lexicon of Nigeria’s polity, politics and politicking, crowd and people are not synonymous. Putting it simply and squarely, the crowd has no electoral value when it comes to election while your “own people”, as a candidate vying for an elective post, will side and stand with you on the day of election. In my engagement with this versatile grassroot politician, he made another poignant but powerful statement that etched in my memory as well: “making noise is not synonymous with music.”, interpreted in Yoruba common parlance as: “ariwo ko ni music.” Ace columnist, Simon Kolawole riveted home some salient and succinct stand and stake of this grassroot politician when he posited in his column thus: “Elections, unfortunately, can only determine who has the most support among the candidates and not who is the most competent of them all … Competence is not determined by popular vote. Nowhere in the world is an election guaranteed to elect the best candidate. Rather, elections determine the candidate or the party with the most support. We need to let this fact sink in well.” – Simon Kolawole, Thisday, Sunday, 13th November 2022.

    Politicians, Parties and People

    As the 2023 presidential election beckons, certain core, crucial and critical conditions will determine the outcome or dictate the direction of the swinging of the pendulum. As succinctly and saliently stated in a previous article in this column, the race towards the February 2023 election, about three months from now, is between three parties and three politicians. The people (followers) are the deciders. The three parties alphabetically listed are: All Progressives Congress (APC), Labour Party (LP), and People Democratic Party (PDP). This columnist does not see the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) going far into the marathonic presidential race. In fact, in the long run, NNPP and the flagbearer may later step down for one of the leading contenders as the race to Aso Rock hots up early in 2023. In contrast, the politicians to watch out for in the hotly contested race are: Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC; former Governor Peter Obi, the flag bearer of the LP; and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the PDP. Putting it into context, a keen observer could perceive the jostling and juggling for the people’s attention from these parties and politicians flying their flags. Is it then baffling and bewildering that some of their supporters had gone low in character assassination, campaign of calumny and mudslinging in order to gain attraction and attention of the people? It is high time the National Assembly (NASS) crafted a law with strong punitive measures against purveyors and originators of fake news! It is disheartening and degrading for an up-and-coming television station, Arise News, to be in the news for the wrong reason. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) refuted any purported plan to investigate Tinubu with the intention of disqualifying him for the race. Arise News, in a seemingly pedestrian, petty, puerile and partisan posture, was vociferous in announcing to the whole world of this unverified “news”! Regrettably, the management issued a rebuttal and requested for forgiveness from Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The latter is yet to personally speak whether the public apology as done was accepted or not. If I were in the camp of Asiwaju, there would have been two options I would have proffered to serve as deterrent to erring junk journalists in future. One: approach a court of competent jurisdiction to sue Arise News. Two: charge the station to desist forthwith from airing anything on the APC’s flagbearer’s personality, pedigree and political moves except news that have been verified from appropriate sources till the election of February 2023 is over. The conundrum cum confusion that DAAR Communications, owners of African Independent Television (AIT), entered into that almost sounded the death knell of the organization in 2015/2016 ought to teach other media outfits the need to tread warily and watchfully. DAAR Communication had to seek out of court settlement whilst begging for forgiveness seeing the N150 billion suit dangling on its head as the sword of Damocles! In his characteristic magnanimity, Asiwaju Tinubu forgave the organization and moved on.

    In essence, there are three politicians standing out for election: Atiku Abubakar, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and Peter Obi. In a way, and to some extent, some people, not the motley crowd, will base their choices partly on the profiles, pedigrees, personalities, past performances and politics of these individuals. In essence, the choices made by some come February 2023 will hang on one or two or all of these identified traits and preferences. Firstly, with the former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, he was the erstwhile No. 2 personality in the two terms of former President Olusegun Obasanjo that took oversight of the economy especially the controversial privatization scheme that Chief Olusegun Obasanjo did not have palpable palatable perspectives on in his treatise: “My Watch.” This columnist would not want to digress into the denigrating remarks of Chief Obasanjo which the handlers of the PDP candidate has not bothered to address and which are widely published. They need to go this route for the people to side and support the candidate of PDP. As for the LP candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, there were 8 points of concerns raised by someone and published online. These eight points rubbished the purported refined personality, profile and pedigree of Obi. The Obidient movement, as Peter Obi’s adherents and admirers loved to be called, should interrogate and interface their leader on these publicised apparent aberrations. Elder statesman, Dr. Femi Orebe, in his column in the Nation (Sunday, 13th November 2022), referring to this, stated inter alia: “… Peter Obi, of the “Pandora Papers fame, loves to present himself as an advocate of good governance and transparency. “In speeches and in print” wrote Premium Times, he reels out his numerous business affiliations and accomplishments.” It is high time he addressed these seeming accusations. Lastly, Bola Ahmed Tinubu was the erstwhile Governor of Lagos State for 8 years from 1999 to 2007 in which virtually all socio economic and political indices revved up. Significantly, the internally generated revenue (IGR) was raised from N600 million per month to about N7 billion per month. Is Bola Ahmed Tinubu a saint? Definitely not! He, as a human being, has his own shortcomings or frailties. There are cases of controversial age disparity, confusing educational background and mysterious wealth that his opponents could not understand the source. In the next edition of this series, I would share a story along that line. However, at one point or the other, he towers above the other contenders in personally responding to these allegations or accusations, and in most cases, his handlers have been swift in responding to anyone who raises dust on these and other issues. In actual fact, some of the things being raked up in nailing Tinubu were as archaic and atavistic as events that occurred in 2003! Imagine the accusation of drug dealing against his (Tinubu’s) person which he himself, as it was breaking online, was unperturbed as he referred to it as an issue “as dead as dodo.” Funny indeed, but factual in content and context! What is dodo in Yoruba? It is sliced-fried plantain!!

    Conclusively, as Nigeria inches closer to the February 2023 presidential elections, in the word of ace columnist, Simon Kolawole, the pendulum will swing in the direction of the outstanding aspirant, on any of the platforms that the people have sympathy and support for within the cranny and context of the country called Nigeria. The people (followers) are the deciders; albeit majority may not match their choices with the competence or character or credibility of the candidates. This is one irony of democracy! Follow me in the next edition of the series as we fixate on the people and platforms. Will the pendulum swing in relation to the platforms – parties?  Thank you for your continuing interest in the column as you read, reflect and share with others whilst awaiting your genuine and germane feedback.

    John Ekundayo, Ph.D. – Harvard-Certified Leadership Strategist, and also a Development Consultant, can be reached via 08155262360 (SMS only) and drjmoekundayo@hotmail.com

  • It’s not all about PVCs

    It’s not all about PVCs

    After the Osun and Ekiti off-cycle governorship elections seemed to have gone off like clockwork a few months back, Nigerians were understandably thrilled into investing that otherwise simple electoral process with something close to divine infallibility. Voters concluded, and a triumphal Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) reinforced the point, that the Permanent Voters Card (PVC) had started to make votes count, of course greatly assisted by the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). Civil society groups rhapsodized PVCs, and even religious bodies expected to observe strict neutrality in deference to the variegated political persuasions of worshippers, threateningly talked about the sanctity of the cards and hinted darkly of the outcomes they were determined to midwife against anyone who dared them. And when the ruling All Progressives Congress elected to present a same-faith presidential ticket, the cry for PVCs reached a crescendo.

    Osun and Ekiti polls were of course not the first time free and fair elections would be held in Nigeria. But they were the first to be regarded as free and fair under the secret ballot regimen, a fact that excites a large segment of the population to so many possibilities. The PVCs have rightly become weapons to be deployed for noble objectives. But until they are sensibly, futuristically and purposefully deployed for great causes, they are futile, if not entirely, useless weapons. While the Ekiti and Osun novelties may have energised and canonised PVCs, the country must begin to be anxious about what ends the cards and the votes might be deployed. Even more, like a loaded gun in the hands of vengeful sociopaths, PVCs can indeed be used to frustrate the destiny of a nation and produce untold tragedies.

    In the frenetic drive towards the fateful presidential election in 2023, it may be time to begin to wonder just what kind of weapon PVCs would be in the hands of undiscriminating voters. Given the sullied discourse over the elections, particularly as exampled by the campaigns for the presidential poll, a patriot must begin to be truly worried. Electorates all over the world have not always used their votes for the right causes, regardless of their education, sophistication, religion, and exposure. In many countries, votes had been deployed for despicable far-right nationalism, which is often thinly veiled racism or xenophobia, and for other shortsighted and distorted causes that regrettably ‘disqualifies competent candidates’. No segment of society is immune.

    Last week’s United States midterm elections exemplify and perhaps amplify this gross dissonance between voter card and its use. The polls were widely expected to humiliate the Democratic Party for a number of reasons ranging from the health of the economy, to immigration, political and social issues such as abortion, and the legitimisation of sexual preferences. Shortly before the polls, the Democrats seemed to have lost their voice, having shouted themselves hoarse that the Republican Party was a threat to American democracy and liberal values. With the heretic ex-president Donald Trump egging the Republicans on and lighting fuses under many Democratic candidates’ bids, not to talk of the histrionics of many so-called election deniers who had stigmatised the Democrats as election riggers, all seemed set for a one-sided outcome, with the cards stacked against President Joe Biden. In the end that red (Republican) wave, as it was called, did not materialise, certainly not on the scale initially projected, and nothing near delivering clarity to the election issues that beclouded the campaigns.

    The US midterms illustrate one vital fact, that beyond the right to vote and votes being made to count are the more crucial issues of voter education and the eschewal of subtle bigotry (whether of race, ethnicity or religion or gender). Probably because of their capacity to appreciate issues, American voters, despite their backgrounds, outlooks and preferences, have more regularly voted with understanding but also sometimes failed to resist the hysteria of presidential candidates like Mr Trump. The midterms may have helped to dampen the chances of his second coming, but in the short run he will be a critical factor in the mobilisation of the Republican base. It is a conundrum the party must contend with in the coming years.

    It is not known what percentage of the electorate is constituted by the truly enlightened who have access to consequential information and can make up their minds based on their education, unencumbered by religious or cultural prejudices. At first view, they seem to dominate discourse, but no one can really tell what their number is or how truly influential they are. However, disproportionate to their number, they have dominated 2023 election discourse and have skewed arguments in a direction at variance with their education and societal standing. Americans often seem to look beyond the idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes of candidates presenting themselves for elections, because on the average, having had a fair understanding of the manifest destiny of the USA, voters do not look for saints but leaders who would continue to deliver on the issues of economic wealth and dominance and be able to project American power to the far ends of the world. In Nigeria, many of those who pontificate on the 2023 polls have very little instinctive grasp of the kind of leader Nigeria needs at this time. The four leading candidates for the 2023 polls are so dissimilar and differentially endowed that the contest ought to have been over even before the campaigns began. But surprisingly, religious and ethnic tensions have considerably obfuscated, trivialised and simplified the choices before Nigerians.

    PVCs are not a magic wand. Indeed, they cannot be. In the hands of bitter polemicists and ethnic and religious baiters, they are a loaded gun which misguided patriots are sadly prone to misusing. They do not know what the issues are, how to identify a true and transformative leader, and the kind of man the country needs at this point when the average leader would simply not be enough. Applying the modalities of selecting popes, priests and imams to the onerous and far-reaching exercise of getting a leader with courage and foresight to lead Nigeria into the 21st Century will prove inimical, dangerous and counterproductive. What may save the day, however, is the likelihood of a majority of voters possessing the instinctive capacity to identify the right leader. They may be helped a little by local cognoscenti who double as vote herders; but in the end such disparaged voters may save the day. To be elected, a candidate must, therefore, be one who keeps his nose to the grindstone, and like a predator with a keen sense of smell, must know how to cultivate votes in sufficient quantity to make a winning difference.

    Making votes count, through the instrumentality of PVCs, is admirable. But voting the right way is even more admirable. It must not be taken for granted that everyone with PVC would vote right. As the fatuous arguments of many supposedly enlightened Nigerians show, it is dangerous to presume a majority of voters would do the right thing. Nigeria is at a crossroads; it needs to vote a builder and conciliator, someone who understands the issues at stake and has the depth and courage and network to tackle them after building a national consensus. There are issues that remain fractious and unattainable, some of which are even geopolitically specific and sensitive. But as long as Nigeria remains one, it would be tragic, if not impossible and idealistic, to attempt to hold down one zone or another simply because those difficult issues have not been resolved. Every country is a work in progress, including the developed economies. No country has successfully answered for all time the questions that beset and sometimes befuddle it. So, the quest must continue. That is why empires rise and fall.

    Read Also: 193,000 PVCs yet-to-be collected in Kwara, says INEC

    In placing enormous confidence in PVCs, Nigerians must nevertheless moderate their expectations. They should recollect that Adolf Hitler won a plebiscite vote in August 1934 to become President of Germany. Because of his leadership, over 50m people – some say about 75m – died during the world war he inspired. Vladimir Putin was also elected president in 2000 because Russians were nostalgic about the Russian Empire (Soviet Union); but see the needless wars he also inspired: first the Second Chechen War in 1999 shortly after Boris Yeltsin named him prime minister, then the Georgian Campaign of 2003, and now Russo-Ukrainian War preceded by the Crimean land grab. It is unclear whether the mere act of brandishing PVCs can detect the extreme naivety and leadership amateurishness of a candidate or the horrifying unreliability of another, or even how quickly a new president harbouring ancient grudges and pet prejudices can transform into a monster. What is clear, however, is that Nigeria’s election discourse does not show that key segments of the electorate have a fair and utilitarian grasp of the value of their PVCs beyond their nominal relevance as game changers.

     

     

    NMA, psychiatric test and party candidates

    The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) president, Uche Ojinmah, has advocated psychiatric tests for presidential candidates. He is chasing shadows. No one will listen to him: not the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), nor the political parties which completed the process of electing their standard-bearers months ago, nor yet the current president who in 2014 would have failed a neurological test. More crucially, neither the Constitution nor the Electoral Act makes it obligatory. But the NMA can drive the psychiatric test campaign for the future, if anyone will lend the medical union a listening ear. This column can hazard one guess: neither now nor in the foreseeable future, campaign or no campaign, will the suggestion resonate with anyone.

    Dr Ojinmah spoke with The Punch last week on what he hoped the test would establish once it became obligatory. According to him, “Simple medical check-ups such as chest X-ray, cardiac echocardiography, abdominal ultrasound scan, urinalysis, kidney function test, liver function test, blood pressure and blood glucose assessment will give one a comprehensive view of the state of the body system. Sadly, people applying for top level jobs like Chief Medical Director or Medical Director in our public service are made to undergo these tests while those contesting for executive and legislative posts don’t. We also want them to undergo psychiatric evaluation. These shall exhaustively evaluate the people vying for the ultimate job in Nigeria.” Clearly, the NMA president expects that a healthy president or governor, as the case may be, would likely make a successful president or governor. He didn’t say it, but he implied it. In his view, since the tests are obligatory for medical directors, who do not even occupy critical or consequential positions in the country, it should be compulsory for aspiring political office holders whose actions and sometimes excesses have enormous implications for the wellbeing of the people.

    The constitution sensibly refused to make such a test obligatory. All it provides for is that once in office, the office holder must stay reasonably fit until he is found, through due process, unable to function in the capacity for which he was elected. The reason the constitution makes only provisions for deciding on the incapacitation of presidents, et al, is that a fit man today can become incapacitated six months or one year down the line. The NMA president surely cannot be saying that a healthy man today will necessarily outlive an unhealthy but not incapacitated man tomorrow. He is right, however, to worry about the health of elected office holders, given the experiences of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, who for much of his presidency was plagued by ill health, and the current president Muhammadu Buhari who has embarked on more medical tourism than any living Nigerian president. But it is not clear whether the way to respond to that concern is to subject aspiring office holders to such tests, whether at the party level or at any other level.

    One of the most impactful United States presidents was John F. Kennedy. Before and after assumption of office, he was debilitated by gastrointestinal disorder of the first rank. Yet, that problem neither incapacitated him nor vitiated his presidency. Russia’s Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin both suffer from neurological problems, but their presidencies chalked up remarkable achievements, with the former defeating Nazism with aplomb during World War II, and the latter imbuing Russia with purpose and élan after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact. Their neurological problems had no bearing on their judgements. No psychiatric test could have shown either man to be a suspect psychopath: the former inspiring the murder of about two million Russians/Soviets to entrench Bolshevism, and the latter sponsoring the targeted murder of dissenters and bombing the daylight out of countries he waged war against. On his second coming as British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill was plagued by ill health, including stroke from which he recovered to some extent. Before his first coming, he suffered from manic-depression (probably bipolar disorder), an illness that dogged him from middle age.

    There are scores of world leaders and statesmen who suffered from various illnesses before or after they assumed office. These diseases did not lessen their accomplishments. And there are dozens more who went into office hale and hearty only to either underachieve or become spectacular failures. Dr Ojinmah’s proposition is almost wholly untenable. Would he for instance not prefer US president Joe Biden, who is stable and predictable, to Donald Trump’s eccentricism and bigotry? Yet Mr Trump was fitter than Sen Biden when they campaigned for office more than two years ago. Political parties sometimes face the dilemma of having to reject a fitter aspirant whose intellectual capacity and innovativeness they doubt in preference for a less fit aspirant whose leadership capacity and charisma they trust. When that happens, parties normally hope they can convey the same confidence to the electorate. Often they manage to pull it off, as the case of President Buhari showed in 2015. What really ails President Buhari, it must be emphasised, is not his constant battle with illness but his deficient statesmanship and intellectual depth.

    If there are countries which make sound health indispensable for political aspiration, they cannot be many. More, they are unlikely to be among the greats. The electorates of great countries, often more informed than the global average, are imbued with an instinctive understanding of the factors that conduce to great leadership. Good health is close to the bottom of the scale. They focus on the ideas and character. What any serious country needs to do in electing their leader is to get their political parties and the electorate to judge the fitness or otherwise of candidates using a balance of factors instead of restricting themselves to the idealistic and impracticable requirement of ‘sound’ health. A country is not a gymnasium. Its needs are so complex that they cannot be summed up in one factor or variable.

  • Hushpuppi’s fair-weather clerics

    Hushpuppi’s fair-weather clerics

    Ramos Abbas’ (a.k.a. Hushpuppi) sentencing to 11 years and three months’ imprisonment for money laundering, business email compromise and allied crimes,

    by the United States District Court which sat at the Central District of California on November 7, was expected. Justice Otis Wright II who delivered the judgment also ordered Hushpuppi, described as “one of the most prolific money launderers in the world” by the Assistant Director in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Los Angeles Office, Don Alway, to pay $1.7m in restitution to two fraud victims. The judgment drew the curtain on Hushpuppi’s trial that started after his arrest in June 2020 in his Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) hotel apartment. He was extradited to the United States on July 3, 2020.

    We should commend the United States and the UAE for their collaboration which facilitated the trial and conviction. This is quite unlike our experience in Nigeria where such celebrated cases would have dragged on interminably.

    We may argue till thy kingdom come whether the sentencing is commensurate with the crime committed by the Instagram celebrity; the point is that he is going to spend at least the next nine years behind bars, as the two years he had spent in incarceration during his trial would  be subtracted from the 11 years and three months that he has been sentenced to. The court apparently noted certain factors in sentencing him. These included the prosecutors’ claim that Hushpuppi behaved well in prison. For instance, he was adjudged to be one of the best cleaners in prison. As a matter of fact, “his report card for Central Valley workshop for prisoners showed that, between July 2021 when he enrolled and November 2021 when he completed work, Hushpuppi put up “very good” in attitude, quality of work, dependability and productivity.”

    Moreover, Hushpuppi had in a final appeal to Judge Wright in September 19, ahead of his scheduled sentencing, written a personal letter to the court narrating his source of wealth, criminal adventure and regrets. Indeed, he pleaded with his family members for dragging their name in the mud and even commended the FBI for doing a thorough job in bringing him to justice.

    If the judge was swayed by anything, it must have been these positive recommendations from the prosecutors and the remorse personal shown by the Instagram celebrity rather than the three letters that emanated from Nigeria. One was written by his wife Regina Manneh, and the remaining by two imams, all pleading for light sentencing. The imams are Rasaq Olopede, the Imam of Imisi-Oluwa Mosque in Lagos, who described Hushpuppi as “a frequent donator” to his  mosque. The other imam, Hudu Abdulrasak of Madrasatul Ahlul-Bait Islamiya, Maiduguri, Borno State, also paid tributes to Hushpuppi for his philanthropic gestures to orphans and widows.

    I do not know what would have informed the decision of these people to write those letters in the first place. Not even the wife could be forgiven for pleading for light sentence for her husband unless she can prove that she did not know that her husband was an international fraudster who had made about two million people cry at one time or another through his nefarious activities. Agreed, when the going was good, they enjoyed the illicit proceeds together. But now that the long arm of the law has finally caught up with her husband, what someone who is truly penitent should do is remain silent in the circumstance or beg God for forgiveness. I would not grudge her if she had been praying silently or even gone to churches and mosques to look for some ‘powerful’ pastors or imams or even marabouts, who could get her husband off the hook. I have no doubt that Hushpuppi himself would have had people that he would be consulting so that he would never be caught, not to talk of being prosecuted. Many criminals in this part of the world have such people on their payroll that they spoil with money and other material attractions to do things that would make them invincible or bullet-proof whenever they are being trailed by law enforcement agents. But, as the saying goes, ‘all days for the thief, one day for the owner’. A day would always come when such charms or whatever they did for them would fail. That day, monkey would go to market never to return. Hushpuppi went to the market never to return when his cup was full. Now, he has got his due comeuppance: 11 years and three months behind bars. Was his wife not aware that her husband’s activities must have depressed not a few, or even led to the death of some of his victims?

    Even if we pardon Hushpuppi’s wife for remembering the good time she had with her husband and therefore could not imagine him not being by her side for a whole 11 years, what do we say of the imams who joined her in pleading for leniency for her husband?

    This should be the main worry for us as Nigerians. As the saying goes, “when gold rusts, what would iron do”? An imam is supposed to be a reputable man in the Islamic hierarchy. He therefore should be an embodiment of everything good. Are the two imams pleading for leniency for Hushpuppi saying they are not aware of the crimes he committed? Are they also not aware of the trauma his activities had caused his victims? So, tell me, if somebody made others to weep, or his activities sent many to untimely graves outright, why should anyone be pleading for leniency for such a person? After all he was not sentenced to death or life. So, were the imams’ actions on this matter informed by ignorance or illiteracy, or both? Or even greed or selfishness? Hushpuppi dominated the media, social and conventional, for so  long a time that no one can honestly claim he or she was not aware that the man was an international criminal.

    Read Also: Hushpuppi will become pastor after jail term – Maduagwu

    But hold it! Something kept whispering into my ears when I was drafting this piece that these imams would not be the only people in their category who would not want Hushpuppi jailed. I want to believe that some ‘men of God’, that is to say, pastors or prophets must have deployed every weapon in their arsenal and firing from all cylinders to get Hushpuppi off the hook. As a matter of fact, some of them, across the board (Christians, Muslims, traditional religionists, etc) might also have conned Regina and her husband to part with huge sums of money to enable them do something that would make the U.S. court free him or at least give him the slap-on-the-wrist type of judgment that we are familiar with in this part of the world.

    But his conviction is indication that nothing, no prayer, fasting or spiritual concoctions can stop an agenda whose time has come. I suspect that sometime in the future when Hushpuppi is privileged to tell us his odyssey in crime, we would be privileged to hear some of this sordid details at no charges at all. The kind of advertisement or privileged information that we would not pay a dime to know.

    What I am trying to say is that, yes, imams happen to be our focus today because they are the ones whose activities and connections with Hushpuppi were reported. Things as terrible or even more terrible than this happen in many churches as well. Some years ago, a particular Pentecostal church was in the news for receiving millions as tithe from a very junior staff in a reputable hotel. Rather than quietly return the money after it was discovered that the tither stole it, the church was still arguing in a most annoying manner just to keep the stolen fund. Yet, this church was not the type

    of church that would feel any negative impact if that money was returned to its owner. I mean that church is not a church of straw but a church of means. But the greed to retain the stolen money was palpable.

    We have read stories of men of God who have armed robbers, ritualists, kidnappers and other criminals as clients. As a matter of fact, some of them confessed to rendering one form of service or the other that would ensure their clients keep making other people weep and go scot-free. We can go on and on.

    But what was the fraction of what Hushpuppi gave the imams in question (and others who are not bold enough to make their relationship with him public), to what he stole from his luckless victims? This is a point many people forget or choose to ignore when taking money, whether from criminals or politicians who want to buy votes. People would steal billions and hundreds of other people would be fighting themselves over a few millions thrown at them by the politician or the criminal. And we would be hailing them for their subversive generosity.

    Perhaps, in spite of everything, there is still something positive to say about Imams Olopede and Abdulrasak. Unlike many of their colleagues, they at least stood by their own even in a time of tribulation. So, they have demonstrated, like the pigeon, that they would not wine and dine with their owner only to deny him in times of trouble. Verily, verily I say unto you, the two imams could not have been the only clerics that Hushpuppi helped. Where are the others?

    All said, for Hushpuppi, the game is up. This is the biggest lesson for those who had been admiring him as a role model, particularly our youths who think that all that glitters is gold. The fact that he even had to tell the world that he regretted his actions and apologised to his family members are all enough to convince such admirers that crime does not pay and that, no matter how long it takes, the arms of the law are never too short to catch up with any criminal.

    However, now that we have had yet another evidence of how not to take lightly crimes such as Hushpuppi’s, we wait to see how long it would take Nigeria to dispose of the case of our once celebrated super cop, Abba Kyari. The one that we suspect to be bird of the same feather with Hushpuppi.

  • 2023: Presidential candidates and the essence of history

    2023: Presidential candidates and the essence of history

    I sincerely hope that my esteemed readers are not wondering at the seeming incongruity of the title of this article, asking: presidential candidates and the essence of history.

    Meaning what?

    Well, there should be no reason for that. Put simply, I am first, and foremost a historian, and was taught by the very best. It is a study of the past as a guide to the present and a pointer to the future. We shall be deploying it in our investigation into the past of some of the men who are angling to be president over us as if their past in public life is a tabula rasa to us. The leitmotif, for the article, therefore, derives from the outlandish display of hate, scaremongering and profiling, which two television networks, which for now shall remain nameless, have notoriously engaged in against the man they have tried their dam nest to ensnare and drag, to their stations as if their pay, if not their lives, depend on having Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the APC presidential candidate for breakfast.

    Yes, that exactly was what played out this past week. I am writing this on a Thursday, and in the past 48 hours, – that is, Wednesday and Thursday last week, if not more, it was like these gentlemen had nothing else to discuss besides him, co-opting all manner of opposition presidential spokespersons, to discuss a so – called conviction in the U.S, serially lampooning him in the process and, indeed, with one of the guests, a thoroughly callow and uncouth fellow, presenting like his hand was shaking. God be praised, one of the anchors had the presence of mind to call him to order. Also, after one them had been put through a learning curve by Festus Keyamo SAN, the APC campaign spokesperson, the very next morning, he ferreted out a junior lawyer, an Atiku campaign spokesperson he must have thought could dent Keyamo’s position. Not a chance. That spokesperson, in his unrelenting animus for Tinubu, reminds me of two Northern, self – proclaimed Christians, both of very puny political worth, who must have, at a point, dreamt of being Tinubu’s Vice Presidential candidate as he too, once romanticised being the APC spokesperson. Absolutely in character, his last word on the TV programme was that Tinubu will be disqualified as candidate. He probably remembered what President Obasanjo said of his principal’s belief that money can buy anything as that was after the anchor had reminded him of the following intervention which Keyamo had presented the previous day.

    In response to the Nigerian authorities’ enquiry from the U. S as to whether Tinubu was ever indicted for drug related offences in that country, they wrote back as follows in a letter dated February 4, 2003, Ref/No.011-234-1-261-0097 ext. 244 which was addressed to the then Inspector General of Police (IGP), Tafa Balogun, through the Administrative Secretary of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Lagos: “In relation to your letter dated February 3, 2003, reference number SR. 3000/IGPSEC/ABJ/VOL. 24/287, regarding Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a record check of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Crime Information Center (NCIC) was conducted.

    “The results of the checks were negative for any criminal arrest records, wants, or warrants for Bola Ahmed Tinubu (DOB 29 March, 1952). For information of your department, NCIC is a centralized information center that maintains the records of every criminal arrest and conviction within the United States and its territories. “If you have any questions regarding these matters, please contact me direct at 1-261-0195, ext. 319 or via facsimile at 1-262-0257.”

    Lest I forget, last week’s U. S midterm election has something to do with this article. Concerning the election which did not eventuate in the Maga expectations of a red wave but which, instead, saw former President Trump thoroughly demystified, instantly making Florida governor Ron Desantis who won his election by a whopping 19 points, the GOP’s man of the moment. CNN investigations into the senate election in Georgia found that character, e. g honesty, was key, in Senator Raphael Warnock leading the Republican candidate, Herschel Walker. Since our talk show hosts always claim to be so concerned with a candidate’s character, they must now, in the name of fairness, subject the narratives below, which have been in the public space undisputed for years by any of Atiku and Obi, to the same treatment. They should let Nigerians use them as a character gauge for their aspiring leaders.

    ATIKU ABUBAKAR

    “ Atiku Abubakar was the subject of a probe by a U S Senate investigations committee, chaired by Senator Carl Levin and the report detailed how Atiku Abubakar, while still the vice president of Nigeria between 2000 and 2008, used offshore companies to siphon millions of dollars to his fourth wife, Jennifer Douglass, in the United States. Specifically, the report said Jennifer Douglas helped him bring over $40 million, in suspect funds, into the United States through wire transfers sent by offshore corporations to U.S. bank accounts. In 2004, the then President Bush barred Atiku from being issued visa to the United States. Also, in a 2008 civil complaint, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission found that Ms. Douglas received over $2 million in bribe payments in 2001 and 2002, from Siemens AG, (remember the Siemens scandal?) While Ms. Douglas denies wrongdoing, Siemens pleaded guilty to U.S. criminal charges and settled civil charges related to bribery and told the Subcommittee that it sent the payments to one of her U.S. accounts. In 2007, Mr. Atiku was the subject of corruption allegations in Nigeria related to the Petroleum Technology Development Fund. Of the $40 million, $25 million was transferred into more than 30 U.S. bank accounts opened by Ms. Douglas. In addition, two of the offshore corporations transferred about $14 million, over five years, to American University in Washington, D.C., to pay for consulting services related to the development of a Nigerian university founded by Mr. Atiku Abubakar”. Remember Atiku, today, owns a university in Nigeria.

    Read Also: 2023: Political group declares support for Tinubu, Sanwo-Olu, Adewale

    With regards to Atiku’s incorruptibility, please bear in mind the following remarks by former President Obasanjo who he has now promised to recommend for the Nobel prize: “The Money Atiku Abubakar Stole when He was My Vice is Enough to Feed 300 Million People for 400 Years”. (My watch page 31)

    And, if Atiku had this ‘achievement’ = yes achievement – as Vice President, I urge Nigerians to, mentally, capture him as the Boss of Bosses, that is, the Commander –in – Chief.

    What would he not do?

    That s the million dollar question.

    PETER OBI

    -Peter Obi, of the “Pandora Papers fame, loves to present himself as an advocate of good governance and transparency. “In speeches and in print” wrote Premium Times, he reels out his numerous business affiliations and accomplishments”. “But beyond the facade of priggish speeches and appearances”, it wrote further, “an investigation by PREMIUM TIMES showed that Obi is not transparent in his affairs. The investigation is part of the global International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)-led Pandora Papers project. It exposed Obi as having a number of secret business dealings and relationships. These are businesses he clandestinely set up and operated overseas, including in notorious tax and secrecy havens, in ways that breached Nigerian laws”, especially in matters relating to tax evasion.

    And this:

    More secrets of Mr Peter Obi unveiled.

    By Igbo Kwenu.

    I poured diligently through Google but did not see Mr Obi’s repudiation of the following very serious allegations against him. They are 10, but for space constraint, some are left out.

    Igbo Kwenu, an Igbo socio-political group wrote:

    APGA cannot mourn the exit of Mr Peter Obi with all these secret findings surrounding him.

    1. Those who knew Peter Obi will attest to the fact that he has been a drug dealer beginning from his days as an undergraduate at UNN. He was hardly attending lectures and only managed to graduate with a third class in Philosophy after spending 12 years.
    2. His brother in-law, who incidentally is one of the hirelings used by him for his nefarious drug trafficking business, is currently languishing in jail in London.
    3. Obi should explain to Ndi Anambra the circumstances surrounding his father’s death which remains his best kept secret. Before then we can reveal that Obi’s father was drowned by Obi’s associates in the drug trade whom he short-changed in a business deal prompting the mafias to kill the old man who they drowned bounded hands and feet with bricks round his neck.
    4. Given the level of insecurity in Anambra state, ‘’Saint’’ Peter Obi should explain how he expends his security vote since it is on record that he collects over 470 million naira per month as security vote (220 million naira from Local Government and 250 million Naira from the state FAC accounts)
    5. Just as Peter Obi professes his Catholicism for political expediency, we ask him to summon the moral courage and explain to the Catholic faithful, his relationship with the Olumba Olumba Obu (OOO) Cult sect where his wife is a known member.
    6. Obi is yet to explain the mystery behind the 250 million naira that was found in the possession of his aides. He is yet to produce the contractor and publish the contractual agreement that stipulates that this very contractor will be paid in cash and also a reference to any other known precedents.
    7. Obi was elected governor on the platform of APGA and it is on record that he never convened an APGA meeting, thereby destroying the entire party structure. He should explain to party faithful and loyalists, why he destroyed the party.
    8. Obi should explain to Ndi Anambra what happened to the state local government federal allocations, and why Anambra under him, never had elected local government officials in place.

    In view of the foregoing, we demand his immediate resignation or face further disclosure of his criminal past and present.

    Signed Edwin Chukwujekwu

    Chairman

    Nonyelum Nwokoye

    Secretary

    For me, and for purposes of clarity, all these are mere allegations against Obi who should, however, now rise, majestically, in all his honesty, to deny them, because Google never forgets.

    But in the meantime, over to our brilliant tv anchors, who should now urgently take these up, as we cannot prevent them from performing their constitutionally prescribed responsibilities, as the fourth estate of the realm. But they should not forget to ask Peter Obi something about Chinenye Ezewuzie, the young Nigerian girl arrested for drug trafficking in Peru, who has confessed that she was “forced to carry the cocaine by an African drug gang headed by the former governor of Anambra state, Peter Obi.”

     

  • 2023: Predicting presidential pendulum? (Part 2)

    2023: Predicting presidential pendulum? (Part 2)

    “. . . of the 13 governors left in the PDP, five are working against the presidential ambition of Candidate Atiku Abubakar. The five are Nyesom Wike of Rivers, Samuel Ortom of Benue, Seyi Makinde of Oyo, Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia, and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu. The five may not necessarily be lying on the same bed facing the same way, but citing irreconcilable differences with the structure of the party’s north-centric leadership, they have announced themselves unalterably opposed to the ambition of Alhaji Atiku.” – Idowu Akinlotan, Nation (Sunday), 6th November 2022.

     

    There was ruckus and rumpus with  a particular ruling party in 2012. It was as if there were undercurrent subterranean moves for certain forces to take advantage ahead of the 2015 presidential election. Was it not too early in the day as the incumbent government was inaugurated on 29th May 2011? However, party stalwarts threw caution into the wind and went wild in polarizing the party. The party then was wearing a formidable national outlook – possibly a unique value proposition (UVP) for the ruling party differentiating and distinguishing it from the rest. Having tasted power for more than twelve years, the party chieftains apparently were power drunk thinking whimsically that no extant political party could muster the muscle to oust the party in any election considering its intimidating and inimitable strength cum structure nationally. It appeared so. However, unknown to the ‘proud’ party at the centre, certain sagacious and strategic politicians in the opposing parties were surreptitiously putting heads together. It was later known to the ruling party. Initially, the ruling party thought no accord between these ‘mushroom’ parties, consisting of ‘strange bedfellows’, could unseat or unsettle it. Pompously, the party poignantly posited its continuity on the throne for 60 uninterrupted years! These parties commence nocturnal rubbing of minds to see the possibility of not just forming an accord but merging. Merging? Then, it was unprecedented in the history of the country. Alas, to save space, a successful merger occurred that jostled and intimidated the ruling party! It was a merger of the two leading opposition parties plus a breakaway faction of another party. To add insult to injury and further dealt a fatal blow to the strength and structure of the ruling party, certain disgruntled and discontented members of the ruling party decided to be part of this unusual merger. This is just surmising the somersaulting of the then ruling People Democratic Party (PDP), now playing the role of the main opposition party for over seven years and still counting. The merger that occurred in February 2013 gave birth to the All Progressives Congress (APC). The APC won the presidential elections of 2015 and 2019 thus further weakening the soul of the PDP.

    PDP: PICK UP A FIGHT AGAINST FIVE!

    The number five is feasibly favourably to many people as some even consider it standing for grace. Definitely, everyone needs grace as it enables one to do what humanly seems impossible. However, this is apparently not the case with PDP as a party. It seems like PDP needs to confront and challenge the number five; definitely not favourably disposed to the main opposition party. Follow me. Recalling from the archives, in the month of November, 2013, five serving Governors of the PDP defected to the then newly formed APC: Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State; Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara State; Rabiu Kwankwaso of Kano State; Murtala Nyako of Adamawa State; and Aliyu Wamakko of Sokoto State. Parenthetically, on the 6th of November 2022, a group of five Governors, codenamed G-5, spearheaded by Governor Nyesom Wike, met in Makurdi, Benue State in a seeming show of disavowal against the party’s recalcitrant stand in retaining the Chairman of PDP, Senator Iyorchia Ayu. The G-5 Governors comprising of Nyesom Wike of Rivers, Samuel Ortom of Benue, Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu and Seyi Makinde of Oyo. Incidentally, Ayu is from Benue State: same with Ortom. One crucial condition given to the presidential candidate of the party, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, to support his candidacy is for Ayu to go whilst a new chairman should be elected from the southern part of the country in order for the party to have a real national outlook. The party felt otherwise with all entreaties to the five apparently defiant governors falling on deaf ears. Succinctly and saliently stated, Idowu Akinlotan captures the imbroglio in the main opposition party in his column in the Nation (Sunday), 6th November 2022, in which he stated inter alia: “. . . of the 13 governors left in the PDP, five are working against the presidential ambition of Candidate Atiku Abubakar. The five are Nyesom Wike of Rivers, Samuel Ortom of Benue, Seyi Makinde of Oyo, Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia, and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu. The five may not necessarily be lying on the same bed facing the same way, but citing irreconcilable differences with the structure of the party’s north-centric leadership, they have announced themselves unalterably opposed to the ambition of Alhaji Atiku.” The trio of Wike, Ortom and Makinde are strong politically in colour, content and context within their domain whilst the duo of Ikpeazu and Ugwuanyi, though traditionally located within the context and confines of PDP states, have strong followers that would ultimately fragment the votes intended for PDP to either APC or Labour Party (LP) in Abia and Enugu respectively. Seemingly, the die is cast!

    Read Also: 2023: Political group declares support for Tinubu, Sanwo-Olu, Adewale

    Angst Against Atiku Abubakar

    Presently, there is no local or international rating agency giving a winning edge to the candidacy of the PDP flag bearer in the February 2023 election. It is on record that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has more experience in contesting the presidency of Nigeria than any other candidates presented by any political party having contested in the primary elections five times. This will be his sixth attempt aspiring to be the presidential candidate of a party. He had been successful thrice to fly the flag of a party: 2007, he flew the flag of the defunct Action Congress (AC); he was the candidate of PDP in 2019; and for the 2023 election, he will be flying the flag of PDP again! Rhetorically, experience is supposed to be the best teacher as men are wont and wired to believe. The former VP, also referred as “the unifier” by his admirers and adherents, fell short of the sobriquet in his seeming sloppy showing at the Kaduna gathering of minds, cutting across the core and crucial northern socio – economic and political strata. The PDP flag bearer in currying the affection of the audience inserted dagger into the apparent thin fabric holding the regions together as pseudo republic when he poignantly posited: “I think what average northerner needs … somebody who is from the north … and who also understands other parts of Nigeria … and who has been able to build bridges across the rest of the country … this is what the northerners need … it does not need a Yoruba candidate or an Ibo candidate …this is what the northerners need … So, I believe I stand before you a pan-Nigerian of northern origin …” – Channels TV, 16th October 2022, available on YouTube. This smacks of ill preparation for the presidency of this multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic country, called Nigeria. It is not too late for the former VP and flag bearer of PDP to apologize rather than his handlers doing damage control alleging he was quoted out of context. Watching on Channels TV, the stand and stake of Atiku Abubakar was simply and squarely stated at the Kaduna epochal meeting. There is no gainsaying or grandstanding about it! Putting it straight, can any discerning mind now infer the reason the party, though expressly stated in its constitution, jettisoned the idea of rotating the presidency? It is expected that after an incumbent president has served two terms of eight years, and coming from the northern part of Nigeria, the presidency is expected to go to the south. This is the battle cry of the G-5 wanting the party to kowtow the path of fairness, equity and justice. Poser: is the PDP reflecting a truly national identity or brand with both the presidential candidate and chairman of the party emerging from the northern part of the country? In positing and positioning to win the February 2023 election, PDP is seemingly riding and racing against rolling and rugged road that may lead to nowhere whilst the manifesto of the party’s flag bearer has not really attracted much attention from the followers whether on the social, economic or political front. For PDP and its candidate: there is still a lot to be done within the main opposition party in presenting a common front as a house divided against itself cannot stand! Time, however, is running out!!

     

    • Ekundayo, Ph.D. – can be reached via 08155262360 (SMS only) and drjmoekundayo@hotmail.com

     

  • The Black Person’s Burden revisited

    The Black Person’s Burden revisited

    A fool and his intellectual capital are soonest parted.  As it was in the beginning, so it is proving to be at this late phase of western domination of the universe.  Dear readers, for a committed writer, there is nothing like intense and unrelenting self-interrogation. It leads to the clarity of mind that comes with continuous evaluation of situations and circumstances.

    When an earlier draft of this piece was written eight years ago, the situation of the colonial subject was not as dismal as it appears at this point. There was some ground for cautious optimism. Somehow, and against all the empirical odds, a Black renaissance seemed to be underway. The universe of the coloured appeared to be on the road to self-recovery and self-retrieval. Eight years later, it is beginning to feel like a damp squib.

    Once again, Europe is slowly succumbing to the resurgence of extreme right-wing fascist populism fuelled by an anti-immigration nationalism. Despite a miraculous reprieve from mid-term electoral evisceration by a manic right wing, America totters on the brink of recapture by an unhinged anti-democratic narcissist straight out of the manual of Latin American caudillos.

    But with Nigeria, the largest and most consequential black nation on earth, on the cusp of the most important presidential election in its post-military history, it is appropriate to dwell on the issue of intellectual slavery and the mental constitution of the colonial subject once again.

    The greatest wars, it must be remembered, take place in the territory of the human mind, and it is the unchallenged domination of this vital front by the western imagination that is responsible for its six-century domination over the rest of the world. Whoever wins the war of the mind is in a pole position to prevail over others.

    The immediate trigger of all this is a series of exchanges between this columnist and two of our friends who are avid Black nationalists and champions of the emancipation of the Black race anywhere in the world. These are people who have committed their God-given resources to the project of Black redemption.

    Read Also: Rema contributes to Black Panther 2 soundtrack

    One of them is a celebrated philanthropist and the owner of arguably the richest private collection of indigenous art anywhere on the continent. The other is an engaging intellectual and former professor in a foremost American institution who has dabbled into local politics as a local government chairman, a member of the House of Representative and a two-term senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    The collector of vintage art writes:  The human brain is the main dominance that God has given man over all other animals. Those of us without vision, knowledge, competence, critical and rational thinking abilities, are not the ones with such dominion over animals. Indeed, such humans are inarguably subservient to animals. Only those with superior mental, scientific, technological, engineering, mathematical, economic, financial, medical skills, competence and centuries of accumulated discoveries, in human existence, that have, and are, giving effect to God’s command of human dominance over animals. But in all sincerity, where have Black Africans played key roles in this historical accumulation of human dominance over animals? Where? YS.

    As if to rub it in, the cerebral politico rallies: I have spent  more than 8 days diligently studying A Suitable Prime Minister ( An earlier piece on Rishi Sunak’s political ascendancy in Britain). Alas, with knowledge comes sorrow. Yet I am hyper-allergic to the bliss of ignorance. Preoccupation with digging into the language, persons, places and other contents of A Suitable Prime Minister has me totally gripped. You would think I was required to do what is known as the Literature Review of a paradigm  among scientists. I must confess to envying the men and women of letters.

    Yours sincerely responds: Knowledge brings sorrow. But it also furnishes uncommon clarity. It is what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness. I salute your efforts not to be ignorantly blissful. But what I know makes me a profoundly unhappy person.

    Let us now attempt to bring the strands together. There is a consensus among anthropologists that slavery has always existed in human society. It is an offshoot of warfare.  Old Britain, for example, was a colony of the Roman Empire. People have always colonised and enslaved each other. But intellectual slavery, that is the mental colonisation or the deliberate and systematic inferiorisation of the other, has achieved its most potent form and formula with western imperialism and its variant of modernity.

  • Intellectual slavery and the colonial subject

    Intellectual slavery and the colonial subject

    Physical enslavement and actual colonisation can be savage and abusive of human dignity, but intellectual slavery, because it works insidiously at the level of the mind, is even more cruel and exacting. Once a people’s mind is conquered and enslaved, the dominion and domination naturally extend to other domains such as the political, the economic and even the spiritual. The mentally enslaved is thus comprehensively de-humanized, that is stripped of their humanity— which makes the work of the conqueror easier.

    So it is, then, that today, the Black person, unlike the Chinese and Indians, has no viable religion of his own, no economic system, no political institution, no traditional epic genre as Isidore Okpewho spent a life time refuting, no literature as they impishly and impudently told Wole Soyinka as a Knight’s fellow in Cambridge, no culture as they taught Chinua Achebe, and of course no history but a barbaric void as Lord Hugh Trevor-Roper grandly claimed.

    Having been a combatant in the global theatre of mental decolonisation for over four decades, yours sincerely is not often amused by the antics of the mentally colonised. But one must not fail to notice when some wicked ironies appear in the horizon to lift the universal gloom about the unhappy fate of the Black person.

    Let us illustrate. In 2014, just as the Black month of February was unfolding, there on television was a group of retired Nigerian rulers together with the incumbent stoutly defending the government decision to spend billions of naira to commemorate the centenary of the amalgamation of the protectorates of Nigeria. There is a lot to celebrate about the amalgamation, they all chorused as if on cue and without any sense of irony.

    It was a most beguiling and historic snapshot, particularly with the most combatively unenlightened among the lot railing and thundering with the usual combustible gusto.  There may be a lot to celebrate about Nigeria despite everything. But the amalgamation was not a Nigerian event.

    The “Dual Mandate” of Lord Lugard is a famous piece of fiction and a pious fraud since there is no evidence to show that the overrun nationalities ever gave their consent. It is a consecration of empire and imperial might, a testimony to its awesome power of colonial coercion and ability to territorialise and re-territorialise Africa at will.

    If this singular feat of human supremacy should be celebrated at all, it should be by relics of empire glorifying the might and power of their ancestors and not the descendants of those who were herded in like human cattle.

    The celebration and commemoration of one’s own enslavement is a classic instance of mental colonisation and the most depressing example of Afro-Saxony in recent political history. By the same token, the Japanese ought to commemorate the arrival of Commodore Perry on their shores, and the Chinese the seizure of Hong Kong.

    Yet as we have hinted, a lack of self-awareness and its ironic possibilities is a logical corollary of mental slavery. The Secretary to the Federal Government was widely quoted to have repeated Lord Lugard’s words with warm approval that Nigeria was “the product of a long and mature consideration”. As this columnist noted then, we would have liked to ask the burly and amiable, Anyim Pius Anyim, the then Secretary to the Federal Government,  if any of his ancestors was present at the deliberation.

    If the Nigerian officials had wanted to be fair to themselves and to history they ought to have gone a bit farther in time to the Berlin Conference which began in 1884 and effectively saw to the colonial partitioning of old Africa. It was in 1884 that Henry Morton Stanley, the footloose Welsh explorer who managed to fight on both sides of the American Civil War, arrived in Berlin clutching a raft of treaties with traditional African chiefs who had willingly signed away their possession in exchange for meretricious trash.

    Since this tradition of frittering away immense natural resources has continued in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, we must not be afraid of celebrating and lionizing our worthy ancestors. Where it comes to a celebration of self-dispossession, the Nigerian government must accord this date a priority over mere amalgamation.

    But there may be more mundane matters hiding under the grandiose nonsense. The goat eats where it is tethered, says a famous Cameroonian proverb.  Even if one cannot discount an element of deliberate mischief in all this, it is noteworthy that virtually all the newspapers reporting on the centenary extravaganza published a curious picture of Anyim with his mouth apparently salivating with intent. It could not have been at the prospects of the giant Ohaozara yam or rice from his native Ishiagwu.

    What will Equaino, Du Bois, Blyden, Martin Luther King,  Cheikh Anta Diop, Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Macaulay, Senghor, Sapara Williams and all the avatars of the great project of mental decolonisation say about this desecration of history by the ruling elite in Nigeria?  How will Frantz Fanon, the great psychiatrist of cultural deracination and political schizophrenia, describe the ruling class that presides over the current post-colonial anomie of Nigeria?

    It should be noted that while this capitulation to neo-colonial slavery was going on in Nigeria, two great sons of the Third World, one a Nigerian, the other an India and both Nobel laureates in different fields, were engaged in stellar decolonising projects.  Soyinka and Sen are two of a different kind, but both are united in their passion and affection for their respective countries and continent.

    Read Also: Colonialism, consequences and legacies

    While in a new book, Wole Soyinka was deepening and refining his time-honoured quest and engagement with the recovery and recuperation of a noble and heroic African past as a weapon for confronting the neo-colonial devastation of the continent, Amartya Sen was chairing a committee in India to revive Nalanda, the world’s oldest university, after an 800 year recess.

    Soyinka surely has his Marxist and neo-Marxist critics who accuse him of romanticizing Africa’s feudal and unedifying past. The debate and the fundamental flaw in this argument are beyond the purview of this column. But suffice it to note that the decolonizing project is more than a matter of life and death for its heroic protagonists. Exile, humiliation, torture and death have been their lot.

    The question is: why has it proved so costly proving to the rest of the world that all people are equal and that even if Africa is no longer at the cutting edge of civilisation, it was at least the cradle of current civilization as evolved?

    The reason is the size, scope and scale of ambition of western modernity. For the first time in the history of the world, we had a vision of modernisation which can only expand and grow by denying or suppressing everything that came before it and by obliterating all that is parallel and contemporaneous to it.

    Hence the costly struggle to re-establish the Egyptian foundation of western modernity and the momentous inspiration it derived from classical Islam. Once the link and the trail of human achievement are re-established, the myth of the primitive Africa savage is very hard to sustain indeed. And so by the same taken is the project of mental colonisation..

    In 1809, more than half a century before the outbreak of the American civil war, the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, sent a manuscript of a new work to Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and the third president of the United States. The book was a celebration and commemoration of essayists, writers and scientists of African extraction who had found their way to the west. It was titled, De La Litterature des Negress.

    As we have had cause to note in this column, despite his principled opposition to slavery, Jefferson’s view of the intellectual capacities of black people was notoriously truculent and characterised by savage dismissals. In an infamous passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson noted thus of the African American: “It appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites: in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous”.

    This remarkable diatribe was coming on the heels of the literary exploits  of the trio Equaino, Cuguano and Sancho, former slaves of African descent, who seized late eighteenth century literary London by the scruff of the neck and were feted in all the leading saloons of England’s capital for their astounding feats of imagination.

    Being very well-connected to the metropolitan circuits of the old world, Jefferson could not have been unaware of the literary triumphs of these exemplars. Perhaps it was a case of prejudice compounded by deliberate ignorance. Gregoire’s treatise could have been a well-aimed and profoundly clandestine attempt to help Jefferson modify or moderate his unhelpful worldview.

    But it was an uphill task. The same views resonate in the works of European intellectuals and philosophers such as David Hume, Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and even Karl Marx.

    As far as Marx was concerned, India and the African continent lost nothing in the wanton destruction  of their old culture by the European conquerors as it was a culture shot through with idiotic superstitions and morbid myths. Georg Lukacs, the great Hungarian Marxist aesthetician, described the subjugated communities of the Third World as akin to a colony of ants headed in the wrong direction which had to be forcibly turned back.

    Nowhere else in human history had there been such a systematic and concerted attempt to cast a whole race as inferior. It was a pan-Western project of mental colonisation in which conservative, liberal, reactionary and radical intellectuals shared a unified vision of the world based on collective mental conditioning and the assumption of the “natural” superiority of western modernity.

    The consequences of mental colonisation are still very much with us, despite the cessation of physical colonisation,. They can be seen in nation-states that are inferior and poor copies of the original, political institutions that are not up to scratch, political elites that are a miscegenated breed of thieving nuisance, economic systems that are uncritically and uncreatively borrowed without any thought for the local conditions and in borrowed religions that lack race-specific nutrients.

    It will take a new intellectual elite with a new dream of Africa and a new visionary conception of human redemption to free the Black race from the clutches of mental colonisation. Before this mental revolution, all political revolutions are null and void.