The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Super Tucano aircrafts will neither fully restore nor sustain security in Nigeria

    Super Tucano aircrafts will neither fully restore nor sustain security in Nigeria

    “Not less than 888 people have been killed and 2,553 kidnapped, while 720 persons were injured in the state between January and September 2021” – Samuel Aruwan, Kaduna state Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs.

    Bear in mind, dear reader, that Kaduna state is not the epicentre of insecurity in Northern Nigeria. This, therefore, tells you the emptiness of some Presidential spokespersons telling us that security in Nigeria is better under the Buhari administration than during the government it succeeded..

    It is great news that the Super Tucano aircrafts are finally here in Nigeria but let it be said that as recently demonstrated by the Taliban’s in Afghanistan, weaponry, alone, cannot be the sole determinant of victory in wars. Otherwise, the U.S would not have not have been dealt the heavy blow it got in that country. To, therefore, think that the acquisition of the American fighter jets is the end of our insecurity problem in Nigeria, much as they are welcome, will be a grand illusion.

    The A-29 Super Tucano light-attack aircrafts are reputed to be capable of performing intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and precision air-to-ground strikes. They also offer improved targeting capabilities which should enable Nigeria to more effectively confront the fight against Boko Haram and the ISIS West Africa branch.

    But that is as far as they go as Nigeria would have to confront her own internal demons since the factors propelling the hydra- headed insecurity in the country are substantially different from their standard variants which include youth unemployment, regional imbalance, over population. Political instability etc.

    Even where these still play a role here in Nigeria, our major causes of insecurity are fundamental, and sometimes result from leadership failure, things no amount of weaponry would solve since there will always be a long line of recruits for insurgency.

    Let us look at these at some detail.

    EDUCATION: While the Northcentral which has always been an integral part of the North is today one of the most educated parts of the country- thanks to the statesmanship of the Sadauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello – not so the Northwest where, because of feudalism, Western education was seen either as unnecessary or even taboo. That was at the same time Awo and Zik were furiously expanding the frontiers of education in their regions that the difference between the different parts today, is as clear as that between day and night. Today, the Northwest is an area where insecurity has taken permanent habitation with hordes of people either being kidnapped or killed, out rightly, on a daily basis with hardly a thing being done to reverse the trend.  That Aruwan is not tired of his morbid announcements surprises not a few. There is nothing to suggest that Northern governors see this as a problem whereas their Southern colleagues would no longer be able to sleep easy were things as dire in their respective states as they are in Zamfara, Kaduna, or Katsina.   Take the Almajarai issue as an example. While the governor of Sokoto was busy erecting fundamental changes in the practice, establishing schools where he made attendance compulsory and for which reason a law was passed criminalising parents for their children’s nonattendance, others were furiously deporting Almajiris from their states of residence to their putative states of origin as if the poor kids remember who  their actual parents are, having left home too early. Some of these leaders would rather take new wives or marry off their children in some outlandish festivals while those other elements, in society, keener on empire building, took the opportunity of the lockdown, with which it coincided, even though interstate movements were officially banned, to move these luckless urchins, in trucks, to southern forests and communities with security agencies paying no attention,  and now busy raping, kidnapping for millions of naira and killing; the reason Dr Akinwumi Adesina, President, African development bank, at a recent lecture, described them as the supermarket  for all manner of insurgency recruitment. This glaring leadership failure, particularly in an area where population is growing in geometric proportions, will never be ameliorated by any number of Tucano aircrafts.

    Leadership failure as a causative factor of insecurity in Nigeria goes far beyond the subnational level. Indeed, for me, it actually manifests much more poignantly at the national level. Whereas cluelessness had been the problem with President Jonathan, a cluelessness that was aggravated by his inherent fear of the North with regards to his reelection hopes, and analogous to Obasanjo’s inability to pro- actively deal with Sharia at its introduction, President Buhari has no such alibi. Here was a trusted, retired military general, who had fought to keep Nigeria one, coming not merely to ask for our votes for the highest office in the land, but promising to rid us of our insecurity, fight corruption which he said would kill Nigeria if left untamed, as well as reposition our collapsing economy. A man of incandescent integrity, and former military Head of state, Nigerians had no qualms, electing him both in 2015 and 2019. At the same time, on these pages, I heartily canvassed his candidature, to the  highest heavens, believing he would be our best President ever.

    But what did we get?

    Let me, for once, play the devil’s advocate and capture, in some detail, what the do- nothing PDP had the temerity to say of this government, solely for reasons of the President’s totally unexpected failures; most of them self-inflicted.

    Asked what are the things the PDP failed to do during its 16 years stranglehold over Nigeria but which the APC has succeeded in doing, Kola Ologbondiyan, the party’s spokesperson answered:

    “The absolute truth is that in the last five years, President Muhammadu Buhari has failed woefully to fulfil any of the promises he made to Nigerians. The economy is in shambles. He promised to fight from the front against kidnapping, insurgency and banditry but as we speak today, we have the worst form of all these”. “Rather than take care of the poor who they beguiled and lied to, the almajiris are being rendered more homeless and abandoned in the middle of nowhere. They are being deported within their own country, being moved from one place to the other as if these luckless children, victims of religion, know their actual parents. Concluding, he said PDP has thrown a challenge to the Buhari administration, not once, or even twice, to tell Nigerians which of the promises they made to Nigerians they have fulfilled in five years”.

    I would ask the same question.

    For security, the litmus test for me, aside the daily festivals of killings in all parts of the country, is the fact that in the past 19 months, I have not had the temerity to venture out of my location, to anywhere by road, no matter how short. For the economic revival the President promised what we see is the free fall of the Naira against the dollar, to a level no Nigerian could have imagined a mere four years ago nor is the anti-corruption war anything to jubilate about since Attorney- General Malami maneuvered himself into becoming the sole determiner of who can be tried, no matter the alleged offence. Some people would not only wonder, but ignorantly conclude that I am remarketing the APC, to which I belong, but that would be farthest from the truth. I write the way I do, with elections fast approaching, in the faintest hope that people concerned would change and not allow the party to snatch defeat from victory come ’23. As for the governorship election in my home state in ‘22, I cannot be happier, or more confident because, as they say, all politics is local. State of security in the country permitting then, I shall be as active on the campaigns as I have always been –  like for 2 straight weeks in 2018 when I was about the oldest person on the hustings, bar my friend, the Deputy governorship candidate.  But whether on ground at the campaigns, or on these pages –God being my helper – I will readily and happily campaign for the APC governorship candidate, carrying him aloft on my shoulder, metaphorically speaking, on the basis of Governor Kayode Fayemi’s performance and the candidate’s own competence, the latter being, what I know, will be one of the key determinants of whoever emerges as candidate. As I mentioned earlier, I draw all this attention to the shortcomings of the Buhari administration hoping we can still change the perception of the party in many places; not just opposition circles.

    So why do I think that the Tucano aircrafts will not be a solution in itself?

    The answers, as I have written about severally, will point mostly to the President’s personal failings, some of which ought to have since been corrected if he had advisers who would tell him things he needs to know, and not merely things they believe he wants to hear. I have once described this on these pages as one of the downsides of nepotism. First is the impression out there that the President rules for the North, as if he subscribes to the FUNAM philosophy that Nigeria is a captured country where Fulanis are only waiting to declare a caliphate with Sharia AS THE LAW. law. Unfortunately, in that same North, there are areas – Benue, Southern Kaduna, for example, where people are being treated worse than aliens. This is the same impression one gets from his policy initiatives: RUGA, Open grazing, Cow colony and National Water Resources bill – all of them Fulani-centric. This too goes for his appointments where he would, most probably, not bat an eyelid, giving 18 out of 20 consequential appointments to the North, all probably going to Muslims (both the Chairman and the Executive Secretary of the Federal Character Commission are from the North). It also happened in the recent elevation to higher bench in the Judiciary. If the North, with no known oil resources in commercial quantity practically dominates the NNPC, it goes without saying that President Buhari will do the same at the National Water Resources commission, if created.

    This is what has resulted in the unprecedented level of separatist agitations we see all over the country. These are all insecurity -inducing factors no military hardware can resolve. It is apposite to also mention that it is now public knowledge that the U.S forbids the aircrafts being deployed against bandits unless they are declared terrorists. Even where banditry has become about the most troublesome of our security issues, I can hardly see President Buhari do that.

     

  • #EndSARS’ anniversary and beyond: please claim and expand your great moral victory!

    #EndSARS’ anniversary and beyond: please claim and expand your great moral victory!

    As I write these words in the early hours of Friday, October 22, 2021, the first anniversary of the #EndSARS nationwide youths and citizens protests and demonstrations has come and gone. Deliberately, beyond a few headliners that I have seen, I have kept away from reading press reports and commentaries on the anniversary. This is because I wanted my observations and reflections in this piece to be mine, exclusively. By this, I am not restricting myself only to my own views, my own perspectives. #EndSARS was and is too big, too important for that and I will read up as widely as I can on press and media discussions of the anniversary after I have revealed my thoughts in this piece. This, in my view, is all the more necessary because I am basing my reflections in this piece on the basic opinion that I had last year of #EndSARS when I wrote a few columns on the protests and demonstrations. What was this opinion? The opinion was, unequivocally, the view that despite the loss of lives, despite the unexpected and unanticipated hijacking of the tremendous momentum of the demonstrations by govt goons and quasi-official thugs, #EndSARS achieved a great moral victory which redounded throughout the country and the world.

    I insist that any account, any retrospective on #EndSARS must start from this acknowledgement that it scored a great moral victory over the government and the forces that felt so threatened by it that they immediately set about crushing it and thereafter doing everything possible to confuse the nation and the world concerning what the protests were about and what those who organized them had as their objectives. For instance, let us keep in mind and never forget that #EndSARS was a nationwide phenomenon; at a time when, not without justification, so much is being made of how very divisive and sectionalist politics has become in our country, #EndSARS was insistently and powerfully all-Nigerian. And it was organized and “led” by the youths themselves. I place these brackets around the word, “led” because, as most people know, there were no “leaders” as such in #EndSARS. Coordinators, yes; inspirers, yes; and spontaneous or incidental spokespersons, yes. But as in many other countries in our contemporary global experience of popular revolts, uprisings and demonstrations, #EndSARS belongs to movements that political scientists and media pundits have characterized as “leaderless”. Does this “leaderlessness” arise from the fact that many of the “spokespersons” and “coordinators” were/are women? Yes, if by this we are giving an indication that there was a brilliantly non-sectarian feminism about how #EndSARS conducted its campaigns against police violence against women as compared to their brutality against men.

    We must dwell sufficiently on this issue of the many dimensions of the great moral victory of #EndSARS. To do this, we must realize how fortunate we are that the protests and demonstrations lasted for almost two weeks before the attempts of the government to hijack #EndSARS, distort its objectives, sow disunity among its ranks and confuse it with the work of hoodlums began to have the impact that ultimately placed #EndSARS in the defensive and irresolute state from which it has yet to reemerge into the great clarity that it had in the beginning. This is absolutely critical: even with the robustness, flamboyance and gaiety of its beginning protests and demonstrations, #EndSARS was remarkable in the depth and clarity of its views on the causes and expressions of police brutality in particular and, more generally, the corruption and criminality of the security apparatus in our country, especially with relevance to the everyday experiences of the majority of Nigerians. But once the government and the security forces began to deliberately force #EndSARS to show that it had no connections with hoodlums and the forces they represent, once the government saw that it could sow disunity in the ranks of  the movement through the mobilization of regional and ethnic irridentism, EndSARS went into a moral and discursive tailspin from which it is still struggling to emerge. This is why we were very fortunate as a society that before that happened, before the government got to work and effectively forced it into a defensive and irresolute moral and discursive space, #EndSARS showed us that it, and not the government, possessed the truth and the clarity that we needed in order to be able to deal with the pervasiveness of official and unofficial violence and insecurity in our society.

    If, compared with its beginnings, the idea of a great moral victory that it can still reclaim and inhabit seems too farfetched against the background of the current uncertain level of the “popularity” of the #EndSARS movement, it might help us see better if we recall the number of prominent public intellectuals and dignitaries at home and abroad that gave their support and expressed their solidarity with #EndSARS when it burst on the local and global scenes last year: Wole Soyinka; Chimamanda Adichie; Femi Falana; Niyi Osundare; Edwin Madunagu; The Secretary General of the U.N., Antonio Guterres; The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby; then Candidate, now President Biden; the European Union; Former President Clinton. But there’s a rub in invoking this particular factor and it is this: whatever access to truth and clarity that #EndSARS can validly make,  this cannot be operationalized as a popularity contest. What #EndSARS needs to do is give Nigerians and the world a strong, secure and convincing sense of its awareness that people believed in its message, its vision. To do that, #EndSARS must give the impression that the government not only never took this access to truth and clarity from it , it could indeed never have taken that away from it, no matter how hard the government has tried and continues to try.

    If there are those who (will) think that these words of mine amount to no more than empty braggadocio, I counter with the argument that as long as #EndSARS and its supporters still believe – and believe very strongly – in the validity of their vision of the injustice and inhumanity of the violence that the Nigerian government of Mohammadu Buhari and its agencies perpetrate on most of its citizens, so long will #EndSARS remain a very relevant factor in our country’s affairs. Permit me to express this in idea in concrete or practical terms. Right now, in the context of the movement’s first anniversary, spokespersons and supporters of #EndSARS have been calling on both the federal government and relevant state governments to implement agreements reached with them with regard to compensations, reparations and, more generally, restitution. This is all well and good. But it would be a grave misconception for #EndSARS to think of its role now and in the future as only or primarily as that of a negotiator or a supplicant. Indeed, nothing would please the government, federal or state, more than to reduce #EndSARS to the fully administered status of a supplicant or negotiator, one of the hundreds of such negotiators and supplicants whose management is one of the “portfolios” of governance in a modern state. Well then, if not a supplicant or negotiator, could #EndSARS aspire to become a political party? No! A pressure group? No! A self-interest advocacy formation? No! A movement? Yes! Why a movement? Well, in my closing thoughts in this discussion, permit me to offer some ideas on why it is primarily as a movement whose potential impact on our society has barely begun that #EndSARS can hope to fulfil its immense promise of a better, more humane, more just and more peaceable Nigeria.

    Compatriots, do let me know if I am overstating the following celebratory view of the impact of the first few days or entire first week of the irruption of #EndSARS on our consciousness: It was an extraordinary breakout, not of violence, not of thuggery, not of looting, not of shakara but of a demonstration for non-violence and peace that deployed peace and non-violence as strategies! Music and laughter! Dancing and singing! Food and drinks, not for gorging and imbibing to the point of throwing up and getting heartsick but in hopes of uniting with earth’s promise of unlimited replenishment if we live together in amity and solidarity. Far away in America, I felt like being there and would have rushed home at the time if I was not in the second of several hospitalizations that I had in the period. We always read only of the outbreak of war, but here was an outbreak of peace in a land in which warmongering, actual and manufactured, is always threatening to overrun the human and social parameters of the land. Yes, we had seen something similar to this in the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, but this seemed bigger and more infectious than anything that I saw in television reports and newsreels in the streets of Egypt, Tunisia or Morocco. It even seemed more joyous, more Dionysian than the dancing and the festivities that erupted in the streets of Soweto with the end of apartheid in 1994.

    In its beginnings lie the vision that made #EndSARS the movement which it became, a festive and joyous phenomenon which was utterly serious in its affirmation of peace and life and its confrontation with the merchants of violence and death, especially those in government. In the modern world, non-violent peaceful demonstrations and protests have had hugely successful and honorable vocations as movements. In other words, #EndSARS comes to us in the wake of an easily recognized tradition that has been tried in many other lands and climes – India, the United States, South Africa, the Arab world. In virtually all of these instances, the movements went through confounding trials, appearing and disappearing, thriving and floundering, but never losing their unique imprimatur of the union of peace and life through the deployment of music and dance as instruments or strategies and tactics of peaceful protest.  Since music, dance and singing have often been used as instruments of warlike electioneering campaigns in our society, it would seem that #EndSARS probably drew inspiration from this particular cultural source or tradition. But endemic police brutality and miasmic state violence against a whole citizenry entail things that are much greater than the programs and policies of electioneering political parties. In other words, facing sadistic and murderous “kill and go” policemen is not the same thing as facing the hired thugs and hoodlums of politicians and state governors. Thus, if #EndSARS and its supporters and followers hope to stick to their non-violent peaceful protests and demonstrations – as they should – they must profoundly think through the strategic and tactical implications of their non-violence vision.

    In order not to end these reflections in any undue or unhelpful complexities, I will conclude on an issue that calls for the clearest, the most unambiguous perspectives. Thus, I wish to end on what has been identified as the extraordinarily tough implications of the choice of non-violence as strategy and tactics for many social justice movements in the modern world. It seems to me that right now, #EndSARS is going through an acute instance of this perennial challenge that all non-violent movements have always, sooner or later, confronted. In this case, the government of Muhammadu Buhari or elements within it – which amounts to the same thing – unleashed both uniformed “kill and go” operatives and hired thugs and “area boys” on #EndSARS demonstrators and protesters who were dancing, singing and celebrating their rejection of police brutality and governmental disdain for the lives and livelihoods of the citizenry. In almost all cases in modern history, when non-violent activists and protesters confront brutal force, the impulse is, first, to rethink if not reject non-violent tactics and strategies; and then to readopt and finesse those same non-violent strategies and tactics. It seems to me that #EndSARS has no other choice than this historic one.

    But first, it must claim and expand its great moral victory last year.

  • PDP reaches tentative truce

    PDP reaches tentative truce

    On the day northern chieftains of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) addressed the press over their choice for the party’s chairmanship, they gave the impression of finally securing tentative peace in a party embroiled in internecine warfare among the party’s leaders. Ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar was stony-faced, and Sokoto State governor Aminu Tambuwal exuded quiet animation. They must both hope that the peace and consensus they brokered for days last week through debates and compromises will survive the thrashing and chastening of suspended chairman Uche Secondus. The suspended chairman’s newfound legal activism reveals a personal conviction and determination in him never thought possible with his staid and sleepy style of leadership. If the peace holds, former senate president Iyorchia Ayu will chair the PDP after the national convention, and the presidential ticket will remain open to all regions. But nothing, not even the tentative date of the convention slated for late October, is cast in stone in a party frothing with intrigues and revenge.

    Adamawa State governor and chairman of the convention planning committee, Umar Fintiri, read the communiqué on the consensus, while party chieftains Mr Atiku and Mr Tambuwal looked on. For the former vice president, who will be 75 years old at the next presidential poll, this is his last chance to meet the destiny he feels is inexorably his. He had endured inordinate physical and financial punishment at the last poll, and had undertaken a costly and futile legal push to reclaim a mandate he believed was stolen from him by the victorious All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate Muhammadu Buhari. For a man so stoical in his beliefs, if not his politics, reverses merely encourage him to redouble his efforts. He will hope to outspend and outmanoeuvre his opponents in the party, gingerly tiptoe around the delicate egos of pugnacious party leaders like Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, and placate his co-contestants, chiefly former senate president Bukola Saraki, ex-governor Sule Lamido, and a few Young Turks exasperated by the staying power of the old guard.

    Like the APC, the PDP is obsessed with fiddling with party dynamics to secure the party ticket and win the presidential poll. Dr Ayu is a brilliant, methodical and principled politician and leader. But at 69, and not having managed to position himself in visible public posts since the debacle of the short-lived Third Republic, he literally had to be exhumed by scheming party leaders from the recesses in which he was mummifying, to satisfy peculiar calculations and interests. Analysts do him a lot of injustice to suggest that party leaders settled for him because he would quietly give up the chairmanship should a northern candidate emerge as the PDP presidential standard-bearer. Dr Ayu is more principled than that, perhaps more than he believes of himself. He is from the North Central, and party leaders from the North who are eager to preserve the legitimacy of their aspiration would not feel threatened or bothered by a chairman from the Middle Belt. Hence the glacial look on the face of Mr Atiku during Mr Fintiri’s address, the puzzling smirk on the face of Mr Tambuwal, and the distant, ashen stare of Dr Saraki. What is more, Dr Ayu is fiercely competitive, sharp-witted and farsighted. He will do anything to strengthen the spine of a party that has lost its mind and its will to compete.

    But much more than the cold-blooded calculations of PDP leaders that led to the emergence of Dr Ayu, the party is preoccupied with uniting and forging ahead determinedly to the next polls. Whether the nature of the peace it is cobbling will be sufficient to snatch power from the tremulous hands of the ruling party is a different thing altogether. Having been humiliated by party leaders and badly misused and insulted in the closing months of his reign, Mr Secondus is determined to rob the party of peace or sanity. At his ouster last month, he had barely three months left in his mandate. He could not understand the desperation to unhorse him. He spurned every effort to conciliate him, and has gone to court, first to reclaim his chairmanship position, and then to prevent the party from organizing a convention. Nigerian courts are notoriously slow, and sometimes incompetent and malleable. Should he get the justice he thinks he deserves, and at a time when it has meaning and relevance to his cause, the PDP will be undone. Mr Secondus wants to be party chairman at the next convention, and a contestant if possible. If he gets anything at all, he is unlikely to get both. If the PDP house of cards is not to collapse before the threatening waves instigated by the vengeful suspended chairman, party leaders will have to redouble their efforts to placate him. That would cost a pretty penny. Unfortunately, no one in the party wants to bell the cat, let alone altruistically spend huge sums for a venture of no direct benefit to them or any consequence to their presidential ambitions. They will prefer to keep their financial powder dry for now.

    In their zeal to resolve intraparty squabbles, PDP leaders have taken their eyes off the more important and weightier matter of the mood of the nation. They intrigue for a northern candidate for the next presidential poll just as the APC has waffled over the same subject. But while the ruling party has seemed for now to bow to reality, the PDP, by a strange alchemy, ignores the undergirding principle of rotation, insisting nebulously and against every known fact in Nigerian history that a northern candidate could win based essentially on northern voters. Not only is that lie not borne out by facts, there is no way to acquire the unity necessary to deliver those votes intact regardless of, or across, party lines. So, for all practical purposes, the PDP has made up its mind to field a northern candidate. In doing this, they are helpless. Two reasons account for this.

    First, the mood of the country, complicated by President Buhari’s alienating policies and politics, has led to a profound shift in national loyalties. This shift takes cognisance of the unwritten agreement in both parties to rotate the presidency between the North and the South in order to preserve and nurture national unity and give everybody a sense of belonging. Had the current administration not bifurcated politics so severely that primordial feelings have become dominant, perhaps the country would be edging near a civic culture blind to ethnic and religious identities. But more than six years of political sclerosis, not to say the subversion of the judiciary and projection of the justice system to serve regional and religious interests, have engendered a feeling of alienation and marginalization which only rotation can temporarily salve. The PDP seems appallingly indifferent to these realities.

    Second, for unclear reasons, the PDP has simply not produced southern presidential aspirants of enough heft and significance in the past few years, no, not the voluble Mr Wike, nor the impressionable Seyi Makinde, the Oyo State governor. Mr Wike has raucously heaved himself onto the national stage, but even he must be mortified by how badly he falls short of the demand for presidential gravitas. Without the backing of presidential office, a paperweight PDP candidate from the South stands no chance of making a significant impression on voters. And with their ranks depleted by defections, not to talk of their lacking propagandists like Information Minister Lai Mohammed, the PDP ship seems to be listing, fazed and rattled by every teeny shot across the bow. The party now seems fated to produce a northern candidate, and their shot at the presidency appears more threatened than ever. Southern maverick politician and ex-military governor of Ondo State, Bode George, argues that the PDP could lose the next presidential poll by zoning the chairmanship to the North. He is right about the loss, but wrong about why. The fact is that their incompetent politics has fated them to possible defeat.

    This incompetence manifests in their lack of sound and radical leadership since their defeat in 2015. They needed to come to terms with their humiliating defeat; instead, they approached the return match in 2019 with a feeling of entitlement, believing that the cultic following of the underperforming President Buhari would make him beatable. They also needed to purge their ranks and remake their platform, away from the extreme right to which President Buhari was taking the APC. They did neither; instead, they doubled down on their truant ways, and produced the rugged but uncharismatic duo of Mr Atiku and ex-governor Peter Obi of Anambra State. The PDP ticket in 2023 may be even less inspiring. Can they remedy the problem in the less than two years left before the next polls? It will be difficult, for they are not even aware of the danger staring at them. The party is not in winning mode, and no one in the party, leaders and followers alike, possesses the character, virtue and savvy to remake a geriatric party whose brains and limbs are atrophying at a rate faster than the country can measure. The APC has tried to roll back Nigerian democracy, and has governed cruelly, ignorantly and incompetently, leaving a mesmerising gap for a smart and ambitious party to exploit. It is tragic that the PDP has not been that party. Yes, it will probably achieve peace in its core and flanks; but it is increasingly looking like a sterile peace designed to achieve nothing in the foreseeable future.

     

    Lai, Malami on banditry and terrorism

    IN late September, the Senate passed a resolution asking President Muhammadu Buhari to declare bandits as terrorists to allow unfettered use of maximum force to destroy them. It is bewildering that it should require a legislative resolution to prompt the government to do its job. The government has characteristically ignored the resolution, despite the massive destruction to lives and property orchestrated by bandits. It has also ignored insinuations that its terrorism policy is anchored on ethnicity. Sequel to the Senate resolution, Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai reminded Nigerians that in 2017, when banditry was at its infancy and had not become the nightmare it is today, he had written a letter to the Buhari administration to declare bandits as terrorists in order to allow for maximum force to be deployed for their elimination. Both the Senate and Mallam el-Rufai want bandits to be bombed to smithereens.

    There should be no debate on whether to declare bandits as terrorists or view them as criminals. In any case, quite apart from how the administration views bandits, what is even more important is to ensure they do not menace the country and push it to the precipice of chaos and fragmentation. Instead of appreciating the consequences of dithering over banditry, the administration has become bogged down in the semantics of terrorism. Banditry has become polemical, enabling Information minister Lai Mohammed to deploy sophistry to combat it on television channels and pages of newspapers. Early in October, on a Nigerian Television Authority discussion programme, Mr Mohammed poured scorn on any attempt to differentiate between bandits and terrorists. He had said: “I think we have been dancing around nomenclature; a criminal is a criminal whether it is a bandit or terrorist and the same measure is being meted out to them. That is why we find it ridiculous, the accusation that the federal government is softer on bandits than the separatists and other criminals. This is a fallacy, a fake news and misinformation rolled into one; and this is the kind of divisive rhetoric being promoted by some naysayers. It is senseless for the military to treat bandits, who are killing soldiers and policemen, with kid-gloves. The method of the military in fighting criminality on the land and air would not allow for any distinction between bandits and other criminals.” Well said.

    But barely two weeks later, Mr Mohammed has shifted ground, embraced sophistry, denounced his own nomenclatural distinctions, and began to assail public sensibility with the delicate differences he tried to dredge up in early October. Hear him: “The difference between IPOB, Boko Haram on one side and bandits is that, while IPOB and Boko Haram are driven by ideology; a belief that they don’t want to be part Nigeria, bandits have no flag. Bandits are simple criminals. There’s no difference between bandits and other criminals other than their ferocity. Bandits have never said they don’t believe in Nigeria, they are just pure criminals.” Aha, so it’s the flag. A criminal can escape terroristic label if he waves the flag, sings the national anthem, and recites the pledge. No wonder EndSars protesters last year mistook the flag for a flak jacket. It is stupefying that Mr Mohammed is not struck by his dishonest arguments and ambiguities.

    Last Friday, the quivering and wavering Justice Minister and Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, did his damnedest to link Messrs Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu with terrorism. His arguments were specious in the extreme, and tenuous to boot, such as publishing the two gentlemen’s banking transactions even before their self-determination campaigns began, while his jaded ploy of trying them in the media has also begun in earnest. He remains unfazed by the contradiction implied in both his lethargic response to the list of financiers of terrorism supplied to the Nigerian government by the United Arab Emirate authorities and his rash conclusions about the terroristic links of self-determination groups. He got the administration to declare IPOB a terrorist organization even before they killed anyone, and there is no record that Mr Igboho either killed anyone or sanctioned murder. And for an administration which pussyfooted for years before treating Boko Haram militants as terrorists, and is yet to acknowledge the terrorism of bandits, there can be no better argument about the dishonest, ethnic and religious bases of its policies.

    Messrs Mohammed and Malami, not to say the administration itself, embarrass the country with their inconsistencies, definitions, and rationalizations. They clearly do not see the country as one, despite their vaunted and pretentious claims, and have no idea what damage they are doing to the unity and stability of Nigeria. Is it just primordial sentiment or simply incompetence? It is hard to tell. But Mr Malami’s last Friday press conference on Messrs Igboho and Kanu may have finally convinced all rational Nigerians as well as the global community that there is little left for anyone to hope for change in Nigeria. The chaos being promoted by jaundiced officials beggars belief and possibly defies redemption. That they cannot connect their ham-fisted approach to banditry and their initial reluctance to properly categorise insurgency to the disaster unfolding upon the country is itself monumentally tragic. How can they be so blind?

  • Kudos, TVC Women’s Network

    Kudos, TVC Women’s Network

    YOU don’t participate in the Female Reporters Leadership Project (FRLP) by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism and remain the reporter you were before being selected if you fully imbibe the key lessons from the various presentations and admonition.

    The yearly fellowship for female journalists since 2017 is an intentional programme to equip female journalists with the skills, finesse, support and tools to take bold steps that will help position them for the highest leadership positions in their various media houses considering the wide gender imbalance in the leadership of media organisations in the country.

    Virtually all fellows of the programme have not only lived up to expectations considering the amazing career progress they have made and the leadership projects they have implemented and continue to do long after the training and coaching they received.

    Many have taken to heart the Executive Director/Chief Executive Officer of WSCIJ, Mrs Motunrayo Alaka’s challenge that leadership positions may not always be available, but there are endless leadership opportunities.

    On October 16, the TVC (Television Continental) Women Network led by Sharon Ijasan of the 2018 batch showed exemplary leadership with the finals of the National Female Debate Championship for secondary school girls held in Lagos.

    After months of conceptualising, planning and finally holding the event along with doing their daily assignments, the team showed the leadership stuff they have and everyone, including the Chief Executive Officer of TVC, Andrew Hanlon, Wife of the Lagos Governor, Dr Ibijoke Sanwoolu and other dignitaries commended the initiative of empowering the female students.

    We all talk about empowering the girl child and indeed the debate is a very practical opportunity for the students to speak up on national and issues that affect them which they did at the various stages across the six geo-political zones of the country before winners emerged.

    The debate is indeed in a class of its own with N1 million overall winner’s prize, N600,000 for first runner up and N400,000 for the second runner up. The fourth and Place participant also got N200,000 each.

    I’m not sure how many educational competitions in the country have such monetary prizes which is a way of making the youths look beyond entertainment programmes to be rewarded for their knowledge.

    We need more educational competitions like the National Female Debate Championship with substantial prize awards and mentoring opportunities to empower students to excel in their studies and not be distracted by various vices in society.

    As they say, it seems impossible until it’s done. Instead of waiting to be in government or having one political position or the other, we all can leaders at whatever level we find ourselves.

    Mrs Alaka was around to witness one of the major outcomes of years of empowering the female reporters to be the leaders they should be in their media houses and she could not hide her excitement about how glad she was when she spoke.

    Take a bow, Sharon Ijasan. Well done to you and your team.

    As a mentor on the FRLP, I’m very proud of you and all the fellows for shattering the glass ceilings in every way you can.

    Thank you for the privilege of being one of the judges for this prestigious award.

  • Adewale Adeeyo: Exit of a good man

    Adewale Adeeyo: Exit of a good man

    I had only last week hinted of my intention to suspend this column throughout my short vacation which began on Wednesday. At least one would get a much deserved rest from what looks like a weekly monologue. Monologue because most of the commentators on Nigerian affairs have a way of repeating ourselves, because the issues have for donkey years remained the same. Water, light, food, house, as Fela sang. Wetin do them? E no dey! Today, insecurity has joined the list of Nigeria’s ever-increasing maladies. Yet, year in, year out, trillions are earmarked to be spent on the provision of these infrastructure and more. Yet, the changing never changing.

    But, as they say, man proposes, God disposes. I had to reverse myself with a terrible incident that occurred on October 15.

    I am talking of the sudden demise of Dr Adewale Adesoji Adeeyo.

    I came in contact with Dr Adeeyo at the defunct The Anchor newspaper. As a matter of fact, he developed some interest in me as soon as I was introduced to him as a former editor of The Punch. One thing that struck me was the fact that he did not carry religion on his head. I remember when he started the newspaper in 2000, both the managing director and his deputy were Christians. I guess many of us in the establishment were Christians as well. As far as he was concerned, what he wanted was the best team that would make the newspaper fly.

    Another evidence of this was the retreat that the newspaper held in its less than two years of existence. This is uncommon in the newspaper industry in Nigeria where many of the newspapers are grossly underfunded. Indeed, many newspaper proprietors want quality products but not many are willing to invest in routine essentials, not to talk of organising retreat. Perhaps this is even far-flung. How many of them pay salaries that one can write home about or that can really take one home?

    I remember eminent Nigerian journalists and others, including Mr Felix Adenaike, former Managing Director of Tribune, were on hand to deliver papers on how to give the paper a cutting edge, both in terms of its editorial contents and marketing, including advertisements. A colleague, Mr Olakunle Abimbola and I compiled the report at the end of the retreat. Abimbola handled the Marketing aspect while I was in charge of the Editorial. An incident that I cannot easily forget at the retreat was Mr Adeeyo’s palpable anger when another colleague, Abdulrahman Black (now of blessed memory), suggested raising of advert commission to 40 per cent. This made eminent sense, especially for a new newspaper. But, to a carpenter, everything looks like a nail. To a publisher, parting with 40 per cent of advert revenue to people who have no investment in the business is like throwing money into the lagoon. So, Mr Adeeyo protested and he appeared not in the mood for further argument on the matter. For Black, the publisher’s insistence on less than 40 per cent commission must have been a major setback because he was one of the members of the staff who brought most of the adverts that the paper had in its short period of existence. I think the publisher eventually bowed to superior argument on the matter. That was Wale Adeeyo for you.

    I cannot close the matter on the Akodo retreat without mentioning the unexpected role that Adeeyo gave me toward the end of the two or three-day event. I remember he just called me and said I should handle all the expenses incurred at the retreat. I looked for one or two excuses but he insisted that that was what he wanted. And that was exactly what happened because I was one of the last persons to leave the retreat venue as a result of this emergency assignment which made it mandatory for me to vet every bill incurred at the event. The publisher later issued cheques to defray the expenses.

    Saying that Dr Adeeyo was really passionate about The Anchor is stating the obvious. I remember a particular occasion when he breezed in as I was compiling the topics for our weekly Editorial Board meeting and he asked to see the list. I gave it to him, and the question he asked me was why The Anchor did not feature prominently on the list like some of the other papers. I cannot remember the answer I gave but his observation made the difference between him as publisher and I as a journalist. Henceforth, however, I ensured that our own newspaper then made the list, alongside other major newspapers.

    It is unfortunate that The Anchor could not make it; that the paper died young despite all the efforts geared towards making it survive. I know if it had lived a little longer, the story would have been different. And I say this with all sense of modesty. If Adeeyo was passionate about journalism, this should surprise no one. He was a skillful writer himself. As Siyan Oyeweso noted in a tribute to him last year, he was a “very skillful writer, passionate journalist and social critic, Adeeyo ensured that as the publisher and chairman of The Anchor Newspaper, the newspaper abides strictly with all sense of modesty to the ethical standard of journalistic profession. At inception, The Anchor made use of modern technology equipment and more than 200 graduates of cutting-edge professionals were employed to produce an outstanding Nigerian newspaper. The Anchor newspaper in its one and half years secured a place at the Headquarters of the United Nations and was featured in the in-house magazine of the United Nations, New York. It also got a personal letter of commendation from the United Nation’s Secretary General, Koffi Anan during its short stint.”

    To further buttress the point that The Anchor could have made it if only it had survived a little longer; there was this day some of us were in the office and someone just walked in with some  pages of advertisements from one of the major commercial banks (one of the first three indeed) for placement in the newspaper the next day. The paper, unfortunately, was then on its way out of existence; it was with a very heavy heart that we told the man that the paper was being rested. It is not all the time that such major advertisers find their way to newspaper offices, to place adverts. They must have seen something in the publication to warrant their patronage. I still can’t describe how I felt that day. This was because many of us in the system were emotionally attached to the paper and the publisher.

    But this emotional attachment did not fall from the sky. It was more the result of Adeeyo’s amiable personality, simplicity, compassion and general sense of humanity. It is a combination of all of these that still endeared him to many of us (his former employees at The Anchor), such that about two decades after the newspaper folded up, we were still somehow meeting ourselves at his Oduduwa Crescent residence in G.R.A, Ikeja, Lagos, every Sallah (Ileya). It was usually an occasion to recall fond nemories, unwind, wine and dine, and sometimes had a lot of fried meat to take away, sometimes with choice wines for those who so desired. It was also an opportunity to meet different personalities with whom we exchanged ideas about the state of the nation. COVID-19 robbed us of that opportunity last year even as his prolonged illness did not permit him to host us this year. Even about two years ago, we were complaining bitterly about the parlous situation of things in the country. Indeed, if The Anchor had been alive, it would have been among those newspapers championing the calls for federalism in the country. Adeeyo, as I said earlier, was himself a social crusader.

    When a man is generous, as Adeeyo was, we have to commend his wife. It is not all women that support such generosity on the part of their husbands. But you see the wife joining the stewards to attend to guests on festive occasions. She is not the kind of wife that would be frowning as guests devoured the delicacies, the cow parts and all; and washed them down with their choice drinks before bidding the family good night. That she hosted from the bottom of her heart was palpable. One can only pray that God would give her, the children and the other members of the family the fortitude to bear this great loss.

    But Adeeyo was not only generous, he was also an epitome of compassion. I can remember approaching him once since The Anchor folded up over two decades ago and he wasted no time to rise to the occasion. I am also aware of many others that went to him severally for one favour or the other and they came back rejoicing. He was that kind of person. He never allowed that kind of opportunity where he could help to pass by without helping. One thing that made people feel free to approach him in times of trouble was his simplicity. There are many people who are better endowed than him but are just not approachable. It is as if they have fire on their heads. Even if you suggest to people in need that they should try discuss it with them, many of such people would tell you if those are the only people that could deliver them, they would rather the challenge kill them than seek help from such people. Adeeyo’s simplicity was such that some of us who were reasonably close to him knew so much about him than we should ordinarily know. Yet, we are not related.

    He was such a brilliant man that he felt comfortable to discuss any topic under the sun, even if he would readily admit he was not an expert in some. Although we did not see in the last one year, a thing that really surprised me too because I thought we saw last only yesterday, given that he would always send Jumaat greetings to us every Friday until he became sick and was no longer in a position to do that.

    Born in Kadjebi-Accra, Gold Coast, now Ghana on August 27, 1948, Adeeyo started his primary education at the Western Region of Nigeria Academy, the Children’s Home School, Molete, Ibadan. He later attended Adeola Odutola Comprehensive High School (Olu-Iwa College), Ijebu-Ode (1962 to 1964) and completed his secondary education at Ibadan Grammar School, Molete, Ibadan, with distinction in 1966. He did his Higher School Certificate (HSC) programme in the same school. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Political Science from the State University of New York in Albany, the United States of America in 1975 and bagged his Master of Arts in International Relations and Public Administration from the same university in 1976.

    He started his professional career as a Public Affairs Representative of Ciba-Geigy Corporation in the United States between 1976 and 1979. On returning to Nigeria in 1979, he secured employment at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Ikoyi, Lagos, as Senior Public Affairs Officer. In 1982, he founded Vintage Enterprises Ltd.

    He had also served in various private and public capacities, including Director, WEMA Bank Plc, (1992 and 1996). He was till his death Chairman, Board of Directors of Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN). Indeed, it is in this respect that I have learnt a personal lesson not to leave till tomorrow what can be done today: Adeeyo offered a friend of mine and myself a golden opportunity which we did not utilise till his death. He was also Chairman of Board of Directors of Cocoa Processing Industry, Ede, and a member, Governing Council of Adeleke University, Ede.

    In 1999, he established a foundation called ‘Balance’ with the aim of providing scholarship to some students of Babcock University, Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State.

    Adeeyo became an ‘elder’ so early in life: he was a member of Ogun State Elders Council from 1991 to 1998 when he was barely 50 years. His meritorious service in that capacity must have commended him for a similar appointment as member of Lagos State Government Elders Caucus in 1999. For a non-indigene of both states, the appointments spoke volumes about what he had to offer. It also attests to the two states’ bias for quality service irrespective of where it can be found.

    In recognition of his invaluable services, Adeeyo was conferred the honour of the Officer of the Order of Niger (OON) in 2001.

    Rest in peace, Dr Adewale Adesoji Adeeyo.

  • Institution building in post-military Nigeria: The example of the Fifth Senate

    Institution building in post-military Nigeria: The example of the Fifth Senate

    Standing Strong, (Legislative Reforms, Third Term and Other Issues of the 5th Senate),  is an engrossing and veritable chronicle of the happenings in the fifth Senate of the Fourth Republic between April 5th 2005 and June 2007, particularly the infamous episode that has come to be known as the Third Term fiasco.

    Standing Strong is an apt metaphor for the storied events that took place in and out of the hallowed chambers of the senate in those tension-soaked moments when a wrong decision could have critically and crucially affected the fate and fortunes of the nation; when an avoidable human error of judgement could have pushed it along the road to democratic Golgotha. The events demonstrate how the combination of character failure and institutional frailties could seal the fate of a nation and its fragile democracy forever.

    Taking a look at the hulking frame of the senator, one can surmise that at seventy three, he is a man of tough physical coordination, extraordinary mental conditioning and remarkable psychological scaffolding. Built like an American soccer player which he actually was, it is obvious that he can hold his own in any political commotion or state house melee.

    According to this book, it was only once in his adult life that he felt the overpowering urge to give rein to physical exertion. That was when his home governor peremptorily ordered him to step down for the governor’s preferred candidate as Senate President after cornering him in the State House. Luckily, his greater sense of restraint and reason prevailed. Ken Nnamani did not allow a second entrapment to take place.

    Nigerians owe a debt of gratitude to the distinguished senator for writing about his experience in politics and for beaming an illuminating searchlight on our political process and the intrigues and processing of power in a postcolonial nation coming out of protracted military rule. It is a rich compendium, full of facts and figures and threshed through with compelling analysis and weighted reflections.

    Diligently researched, painstakingly put together and impressively referenced, this book is a scholar’s delight. Like a practised hunter for the truth, the author approaches his quarry from different directions overwhelming it with sheer weight of incontrovertible evidence. This is a seminal intervention in the country’s political process and this reviewer make bold to say that this memoir is destined to become a classic of its genre.

    Mr Chairman, unfortunately it has been said that the best way to hide something from a Black person is to put it in a book. Many have dismissed this as a racist slur and a typical example of the perpetual attempt by the west to denigrate the Black person as an uncivilized and sub-human type. Yet there is incontrovertible evidence of a dearth and decline of reading all over Africa and particularly in Nigeria.

    It may well be that there is a nexus between material and economic retrogression and intellectual and literary retardation. Nigeria has not always been a famished land of contending ideas and contrasting visions. In order to grow our malnourished political culture and illuminate our path, our star political actors should be encouraged to put their experience in writing. This opens a window of opportunity for the public to examine, analyse and interrogate history as a dynamic process of conflicting and countervailing actions in which private motivations clash with public motives.

    Read Also: Standing Strong: And Ken Nnamani bares it all (1)

    In this regard, we must applaud the recent efforts of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, General Godwin Alabi-Isama, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nasir el-Rufai, Chief Olu Akindele, Pa Ajayi and now Ken Nnamani. They join a galaxy which boasts of Azikiwe, Awolowo, Bola Ige, M.D Yusuff, Hilary Njoku, Alexander Madiebo and several others.

    The thing about not talking and documenting your public record is that nobody will know whether a particular course of action is right or wrong and whether there might be extenuating or mitigating circumstances for what is otherwise considered to be injurious to public order or national cohesion.

    By presenting us with a diligent record of his experience as the 5th Senate President during a particularly stressful period of post-military rule, Nnamani has shown us how postcolonial nations transiting to modernity can suffer a traumatic amputation of process leading to authoritarian personalist rule. It can be a close-run thing indeed.

    Senator Ken Nnamani is a rarity among contemporary Nigerian political class, a politician with a second address. He came to politics from a background of big time business and transnational deal making. This background enables him to view politics as a mere vocation for the pursuit of public good rather than a zero sum game in which no weapon is too profane to be deployed in a war of all against all.

    As a matter of fact, it was his kind gestures and acts of philanthropy which made his rural Amechi-Uwani community to call upon him to run for higher office. Among other things, he had singlehandedly championed a rural electrification project which made it possible for his agrarian people to enjoy electricity for the first time in their life.

    Appropriately, the memoir opens by beaming a searchlight on the rural community which fostered such a strong ethos of communal striving at the behest of one’s society in an impressionistic lad growing up. Kenechukwu Nnamani Chugwu was born on the 2nd day of November 1948 to unlettered but relatively prosperous parents who set much store by honesty, integrity and hard work.

    His father, Nnamani Chugwu, was a sharp-witted farmer and businessman who traded in coral beads while doubling as a traditional healer and later a Native Authority Official in the colonial government. Throughout his life, Nnamani, or Nna as he was popularly called, rued his inability to read and write which he felt short-changed him in his dealing with the colonial masters and which made advancement in the system for a man of his natural abilities impossible.

    For example, he was often asked to thumbprint documents he could not read or understand. He therefore made up his mind that this must never be the lot of his children. He was determined to educate them to their heart’s content.

    Kenechukwu, his second child but first son, showed early promise as a student and the sky appeared to be the limit for him. He was also manifesting uncommon leadership traits which did not escape the attention of his teachers who rewarded him with positions of authority among his among his peers.

    The Amechi-Uwani community of the future senator’s upbringing was a rural paradise; an idyllic haven in which everyone was contented with their lot and in which the occasional communal dispute was settled before they degenerated into bitter animosities by the elders and titled chiefs of which the elder Nnamani was one having taken the revered Ozo title.

    With boyish rapture, Ken Nnamani himself describes his native community as “a land of flourishing flora and fauna in the days of my birth. The rustic nature of the land was something to cherish. The serenity of the countryside was a beauty to behold and a joy to experience. The innocence of the times could only be imagined today. It was a rural life that thrived on the sense of the community”, p4.

    It was an agrarian Elysium, an organic community straight out of Chinua Achebe’s fabled Umuofia community in Things Fall Apart. Yet despite the rural bliss, the contradiction could not escape Nnamani. The heart of the Enugu municipal township was less than two miles away. The modern city and its rapidly exploding modernization were relentlessly encroaching on the Amechi countryside fuelling discontent and misery among the people without bringing the joy and fruits of modernity.

    With their old way of life gradually destroyed and their mores uprooted without any tangible and viable replacement, the people were left holding the wrong end of the stick. It was a classic case of aborted modernity which was to repeat itself almost everywhere in the country and elsewhere in postcolonial Africa.

    This tragedy of modernization without commensurate development and industrialization was to become a lifelong obsession of the future senator and would eventually influence the terms and parameters of his missionary incursion into politics. It was a rallying call to action.

    After secondary school which he passed with stellar grades, Ken Nnamani and his doting father were faced with the choice of where to complete his higher school education. With the educational facilities of the old east still struggling with the ravages of the civil war and its after effect, the father shrewdly settled for Ibadan Grammar School as the destination of choice.

    It was a most fortuitous choice. The two years spent in Ibadan fostered in the chap from Amechi countryside a cosmopolitan spirit and a sense of pan-Nigerian possibilities which have stood him in good stead in his eventual foray into national politics. After Ibadan and with the University of Nigeria, Nsukka still in fossilized ruins as a result of the civil war, it was decided that the budding young man stood to benefit more from an American education and the stature of a global citizen it confers on the recipient. And so off to Ohio University in Athens the young man departed in 1974.

    The unseen hands which often play a prominent role in shaping a person’s subsequent destiny appeared to have dealt their customary cards once again. Right from his youth, Ken Nnamani had been an ardent admirer of American politics and in particular the capacity of its storied legislative titans to shape the course of history and the destiny of their society in a positive bi-partisan manner.

    The sojourn in America and subsequent appointment as a top executive of the Du Pont Conglomerate, a multinational business consortium, seem to have reinforced Nnamani’s abiding passion for American politics, particularly the heroic idealism and capacity for ameliorative law-making of its legislative avatars.

    As if preparing himself for a future tour of duty in his own country, it is worthy of note that Nnamani spent most of his summer holidays observing proceedings on the Capitol Hill and most probably nodding with approval as the duelling got underway. It was a good training ground for a future president of the Nigerian Senate.

    This was the Capitol Hill of senatorial immortals such as William Fulbright, Henry Cabot Lodge, Chuck Hagel and John McCain. One of them, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, famously exploded that he would rather be right than be president and our own Ken Nnamani quotes approvingly. The impassioned observer would soon become a maker of history in his own right.

    This was the rich and intriguing background that was to throw up Ken Nnamani as the President of Nigeria’s fifth Senate on the 5th day of April, 2005. Never in the history of Nigeria’s post-Independence legislature has a man assumed higher office with a fiercer sense of urgency and the need to do what is right and proper for his nation. It was bound to lead to a collision of altars.

    Before the man from the Amechi countryside, there had been four senate presidents who had left office in sullied and uninviting circumstances all within a spate of six years. Two of them had been fingered for corrupt practices and one for certificate and name-racketeering. It was not an illustrious record. The Nigerian legislature had become the butt of savage jokes and caustic dismissals. After the last president of the Senate, Adolphus Wabara, fell on his own famously self-predicted “banana peels”, it was the turn of the son of Nnamani Chugwu to bite the bullet.

    But it was not a smooth passage, considering opposition from his own state governor, Dr Chimaroke Nnamani, who twice prevailed on him to perish the thought of running for the office of the Senate President. The governor succeeded on the first occasion but the establishment anointed candidate, Ike Nkeremadu, fell to the internal power play.

    On the second occasion, Nnamani was having none of that nonsense. He called the bluff of the local emperor and went ahead to throw his hat in the ring. Such was the massive show of support for and solidarity with Nnamani that his opponent had no choice but to withdraw his bid on the floor of the senate.

    This was the situation and the circumstances of the senate when Ken Nnamani took over the mantle of leadership amidst a massive show of support that cut across ethnic and religious divide and the collective resolve of the senators not to succumb any further to executive intimidation and the authoritarian highhandedness of an imperial presidency that appeared to loom larger than the rest of the federation at that point in time.

    Mr Chairman sir, please permit the reviewer to make some useful and pertinent observations on how and why the nation and senate found themselves in that fix. Both the upper and lower chambers of the legislature appeared to have been blackmailed and browbeaten into a state of supine silence and stupendous stupor.

    The ruling party and the opposition parties have been thoroughly destabilised as a result of relentless adversarial onslaughts from the executive. Nothing appeared to be standing in the way of an authoritarian personalised presidency whose messianic highhandedness carried everything before it.

  • El-Rufai’s preaching regulatory council

    El-Rufai’s preaching regulatory council

    Last week, Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai inaugurated the first Interfaith Religious Preaching Regulatory Council. The council will, among other things, ensure that faith leaders and preachers do not practice their faiths in ways that create conflict among the people of the state or antagonize and inconvenience others. It will also determine who by training and education is qualified to preach without provoking crisis. Members of the council are Munnir Jaafaru (chairman), Comfort Bangoji, Sheik Kabir Qasim, Engr. Iliya Duniya, Sheik Ishaq Yunus, Rev. Dr. Simon Haruna, the state Attorney-General, the state Commissioner of Police, State Director, DSS, Director-General, Bureau of Interfaith, Commander, Kaduna State Vigilance Service, and the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Internal Security & Home Affairs.

    The inauguration follows the passing into law of a bill to regulate preaching in the state, pursuant to the legislative review of the Religious Preaching Edict of 1984. The state had tried to undertake the review work in 2016 but met with legal and political obstacles. The 2019 ruling by Justice Hajaratu Gwadah of the Kaduna State High Court that the state government had a right to regulate religious activities in the state but no right to screen and issue licence to religious preachers enabled the government to proceed. It is not clear how the council would determine who ‘by education and training’ could preach in the state when the 2019 court ruling bars the government from screening and issuing licence to preachers.

    If the government surmounts that legal and administrative grey area, and can disabuse the minds of Kaduna people that the composition of the council is not by default skewed against one religious group, especially in light of the antagonism of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to the law, it will nevertheless encounter far worse opposition regarding sermons that ‘provoke and inconvenience others’. Sermons by nature are subjective, often impassioned, and sometimes rightly and reasonably stray into politics or transgress religious boundaries. What does it take to instigate opponents of one religious group or even a sect into rage? Very little, especially in the tempestuous environment of northern Nigeria, as Hisbah (Sharia police) activities underscores to the chagrin of constitutionalists and civil liberty organisations.

    One reason CAN is opposed to the law is the history of the early church in which Spirit-filled Christians who did not necessarily have any formal training or education in theology became anointed to preach the gospel to the world. So who determines which Christian preacher has the education and training? By empanelling a council to grapple with some of those knotty questions, Mallam el-Rufai has seemed to kick the nuisance down the road, away from the table of the executive branch. It is uncertain that the council, headed by a Muslim, would appreciate all the nuances of Christian exegesis, notwithstanding the presence of some Christians on the board. The council will also have to grapple with the Sunni-Shiite divide to which many northern elite have themselves become susceptible or even partial.

    Mallam el-Rufai has demonstrated boldness in confronting delicate ethno-religious issues. He has not always been astute and discerning, nor futuristic and altruistic, but he has always been prepared both to denounce critics of his style as well as glibly abjure his convictions when he is put under sufficient pressure. He is also often unable to discern the difference between short term and long term gains. In the last governorship poll, he embraced a Muslim-Muslim ticket on the grounds that it would not matter to the outcome, and that the largely Christian Southern Kaduna would not vote for him should he take a Christian running mate. He was right as far as the electoral outcome was concerned; but that choice has further driven a wedge between him and Southern Kaduna, and made his opponents implacable.

    His boldness prompted his desire to review the 1984 preaching edict, which past governors had unsuccessfully grappled with. He believes it is a question of political will rather than a question of inherent contradictions and juridical obstacles. Coming less than two years to the expiration of his tenure, it can be surmised that the new law, not to say the council, will encounter a lot of normative pitfalls, chief among which will be how to define poisonous sermons. Kaduna’s sectarian conflicts became intractable not simply because sermons were inflammatory, but largely because no one brought troublemakers to book. Decades of Maitatsine conflicts attracted few or no prosecutions, thus conferring impunity on religious groups who desired to ‘cleanse’ the state and the larger region of ‘other’ religions. There were always laws to guide religious excesses; the problem was that they were never really enforced.

    Unfortunately, ‘s sanctimonious administrative style, which sometimes borders on the obsessively fanatical, portrays him as incapable of moderation. The state needs to put a lid on religious fanaticism and sermonic recklessness, but it is doubtful whether the panaceas suggested by the governor are relevant to the disease or capable of providing long-term solutions. His casual denial of some of his own solutions, when they backfire, is troubling; but much more troubling, and indicative of a terrible flaw in his personality and methods, was his inability to handle the Sunni-Shiite schism in his state without provoking the murderous assault on Ibraheem el-Zakzaky’s followers in 2015. Mallam el-Rufai is right to want to tackle the sermonic dissonance and rampage in Kaduna, and righter still to approach the matter with boldness, but he has both overstated the distressing and long-lasting problem of religion in the state as well as proffered the wrong remedies.

    Anambra poll and overwhelming force

    As predicted, the Muhammadu Buhari administration has opted for overwhelming force to police the November 6 Anambra governorship election. The state and the entire Southeast have witnessed recurrent violence in recent months, partly designed to frustrate any chance of elections. Speaking to the press after last Thursday’s National Security Council (NSC) meeting attended by the country’s security chiefs, the National Security Adviser (NSA), Babagana Monguno, said the president insisted that elections must hold as scheduled, and troublemakers kept at bay.

    Said he: “The president has directed that under no circumstances will anything be allowed to stop the elections from taking place successfully…The president has made it very clear that the armed forces, security agencies, and law enforcement agencies must make sure that the elections take place, if it means overwhelming the entire environment with the presence of security agencies.”

    Rampant attacks have been unleashed on the Southeast for more than a year, some of them targeting INEC and law enforcement offices in the zone. Anambra is merely the latest manifestation of the problem. Having been unable to combat the eruptions effectively, it was only natural that with elections looming in the state the federal government would take drastic measures. Whether the measures will succeed, however, is a different thing. The poll will hold, as the president has directed, but the turnout will be low. With civil disobedience looming in the zone and becoming coterminous with ancient grievances, voters are more likely to heed the disrupters, knowing full well that the nation’s security forces would be unable to protect them.

    Not only will the election’s legitimacy be questioned, regardless of whoever wins, the situation can only get worse with the administration’s half-baked solutions which rely almost exclusively on the use of force. A more rational approach would have been for the administration to adopt scientific means of extirpating the factors menacing peace in the region. To do this, the administration will have to climb down from its high horse. The chances of doing this are, however, remote. The country should simply brace up for the worst.

  • Anambra poll and Southeast gunmen

    Anambra poll and Southeast gunmen

    Anambra State is the latest epicenter of the muffled revolt and civil disobedience breaking out all over the Southeast. The shift of the eye of the storm from Imo State may have been triggered by next month’s Anambra governorship poll, which the gunmen hope to sabotage. On some apocalyptic tomorrow, the Southeast tectonic plate of revolt may yet shift to another state. But regardless of wherever the revolt manifests next, the federal government had been forewarned years ago that it was mismanaging the crisis in the zone when it took on the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). If the response to the revolt by the zone’s five governors is desultory and unintelligent, to the point that they seem to have lost legitimacy, that of the federal government has been even more chaotic and incompetent. Abuja’s only tactics is either to disparage the zone as a whole, a contemptuous approach the Muhammadu Buhari administration has belatedly withdrawn in favour of conciliation, or to deploy more force. None has worked, and the region is yet to be pacified.

    While the revolt is still raging, and gunmen are running rampant in Anambra, the federal government finds itself needing to superintend a governorship election. Its options are severely limited. It has been unable to conciliate the zone, and cannot conceivably do so in the few weeks before the poll. It cannot release IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu without losing face, assuming that the gunmen shooting up the Southeast are IPOB militants. Mr Kanu himself has never been a man of moderation; his release may simply give his revolutionary fervor added fillip. Abuja also tried to flatter the Southeast’s political elite when the president visited Imo State early last month and met minds with them. It has become obvious that the region’s political leaders have little or no influence on the region or its angry youths. As the Nigeria Police leadership in Abuja has given indication, the only option left for the federal government is to overwhelm the state with soldiers and policemen in order to make it difficult for the gunmen to breath or even have leg room on the day of balloting. The election will, therefore, hold; but as expected, turnout will be abysmally low, for the voters know which side their bread is poisoned. It is not clear which political party will gain from the expected low turnout, especially given the gale of defections that has obfuscated party loyalties. But whoever wins will have to contend with the problem of legitimacy, a small matter for disdainful Abuja, and a nightmare for voters who will have to stare down incensed gunmen.

    The revolt in the Southeast was not inevitable. President Buhari bears a huge part of the blame. After his victory in 2015, he should have moved steadily and firmly to reunite the country, including his most implacable foes, behind his administration. His age-old prejudices, reinforced by his insular kitchen cabinet and probably embossed on his worldview by the first and counter coups of 1966, prevented him from the conciliation and inclusiveness the country desperately needed after the nerveless Goodluck Jonathan years. Year after year, he equated the distemper among the Igbo as either a prelude to or a pretext for secession. And he kept reminding them of the price he and others paid during the civil war to keep the country united, a unity he now superciliously describes as non-negotiable. Alienated, marginalized, underrepresented, and comprehensively vilified, the region began to gravitate towards IPOB, the more militant expression of their disaffections. Mr Kanu, who was unwisely abducted back to Nigeria, has in a few years become the lightning rod for their anger, the embodiment of their pains and exemplification of their impotence. But he is a flawed champion of the Igbo: unpolished, grandiloquent, imperious, impetuous, and of poor judgement. He has led IPOB and somehow inspired the Southeast youths more charismatically than the staid and detached elders of the region, but he has promoted collateral ruination.

    The IPOB and its cousin Eastern Security Network (ESN) have learnt to dissociate themselves from the shooting rampage going on in the region, but few believe them. Everyone seems to be comfortable describing the gunmen as unknown gunmen, though they sometimes carry out their violence openly and in daytime, a testament to the impotence of the security agencies. Beyond holding the Anambra governorship poll next month, the region and the federal government must seek ways to placate the rebellious youths and mollify the seething Igbo as a whole. The federal government’s strong-arm methods have weakened the region’s political elite and strengthened the agitators; it is time they scientifically found the best way to stanch the flow of blood, rather than contribute to it, and defuse the anger and resentment shown by the Igbo. Force may win the battle; it will not win the war or secure the peace. The tactless Governor of Ebonyi State David Umahi has warned of the possibility of raising a counter-secession force to battle the gunmen who are presumably IPOB. His poor judgement demonstrates, together with the ways and manners of the disagreeable Willy Obiano of Anambra State, why the region’s youths have little respect for their political leaders.

    The Buhari administration has not been less inept in handling the Igbo crisis. Apart from its deliberate refusal to eschew its long-lasting prejudices against the region, the administration has shown no indication of what needs to be done or inclination to do anything. The longer it fails to grapple intelligently with the problem, the more the problem festers until it becomes the death of everyone, including the country as a whole. It cannot negotiate with Mr Kanu, for the young man is neither respected as a leader in the region, despite his claims and the fear of him and his fierce rhetoric, nor has he shown the foresight, restraint and judgement needed to legitmise the cause he represents or stake his claim as a leader. The administration will also be wasting time placating and smooth-talking the region’s political leaders. They are too feeble, incompetent and distant to make a difference. And since the administration cannot raise a new crop of leaders, as it tried disingenuously to do in the Southwest when it wished to shake off the leadership that helped midwife the APC victory in 2015, it must find sensible and innocuous ways to include the region’s reigning elite as well as resolve the grievances of the youths, be they unknown gunmen, IPOB or ESN.

    To do these, President Buhari could reshuffle his cabinet and his security team, appoint Igbo ministers in more visible portfolios, appoint a south-easterner as one of the service chiefs and another as head of a paramilitary agency, and also include one or two Igbo men as members of his kitchen cabinet. Surely he can still trust a few of them. Does it mean rebellion is the key to inclusion? No. Inclusiveness should be intrinsic to the presidency. No future president can afford to alienate a major ethnic group without consequence. Should the president become better attuned to Nigeria’s political dynamics, he will save his presidency, pacify the Southeast, pull the rug from under the feet of Mr Kanu and others like him, and recalibrate and balance the polity. The Southeast itself skewed the federation when it held the levers of power in the First Republic. That led to crisis and war. No sensible president would emulate that supremacist ideology. President Buhari may abjure inclusiveness, but he really does not need to be reminded that no region, regardless of the sophistry of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) spokesman, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, can win or has won the presidency alone. No region can also rule alone, as the president has tried unwisely and unsuccessfully to do without taking cognizance of history. President Buhari has about 18 or 19 months to go. It is up to him to go out in a blaze of glory or pine, like ex-president Obasanjo in 2006, for extra time to repair the enormous damage to the polity.

     

    Nnamani, Obasanjo’s third term, Osinbajo and Buhari

     

     

    Nigerian elites are full of intrigues. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, who said there was nothing he asked God that was not given him, plotted third term in 2006 and told barefaced lies that he didn’t, thereby dragging God into the fray. Ken Nnamani, ex-senate president in his new book “Standing Strong: Legislative Reforms, Third Term and Other Issues of the 5th Senate” gave an account of and attested to the insane and money-driven lobbying that went into driving that contemptible objective. It is hard to controvert the senator’s account, particularly how crestfallen Chief Obasanjo’s chief of staff, Abdullahi Mohammed, a retired major-general, was when the plot finally miscarried. But last year, ex-governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu, was adamant that the real hero of the third term debacle was the man Chief Obasanjo anchored the plot on, Ibrahim Mantu, who was at the time chairman of the senate constitution review committee. Sen Nnamani, said Mr Kalu, was double-faced, malleable, and could not be trusted as he was running with the hare and hunting with the hound.

    In November 2016, former vice president Atiku Abubakar also claimed credit for torpedoing Chief Obasanjo’s third term agenda, insisting that the former president sent the then attorney general Bayo Ojo and special adviser Jerry Gana to elicit his support. When he declined to support the agenda, he became the former president’s mortal enemy. “My offence was simply that I disagreed with him on the amendment of the Constitution to remove tenure or term limits or what was popularly called third term agenda,” sneered Alhaji Atiku. “In fact, Obasanjo sent the then Attorney General of the Federation, and Jerry Gana to my office to bring me the draft of the amendments to the constitution. After going through, I found out that tenure limits had been removed. In other words, he could be president for life. I now asked them, ‘if I send you to the President can you deliver this message’? And they said ‘yes’. I said ‘go and tell him I will not support it and I will fight it.” Many more people have claimed credit for an objective the supposed sole beneficiary, in his characteristic facetiousness, said never existed.

    It is unlikely that President Muhammadu Buhari nurses any third term agenda. Presiding over the affairs of complex Nigeria has become for him an ordeal so befuddling that he probably wishes, despite the perks and perquisites of office, would end sooner than later. But there will be stories about his presidency as soon as the crown settles around the ears of his successor, stories of opportunities missed, of deliberate and orchestrated religious and ethnic undertones and overtones, of reliance on cabals, and of the bitter in-fighting within his kitchen cabinet and among aides. Of course, there will also be stories about the reasons for Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’ volte-face which manifested in London last week when he described President Buhari in superlatives as ‘Nigeria’s most popular, only credible leader ever’. Phew. Prof Osinbajo is thought to be given to restraint of the deepest, most intellectual hue, a man who knows how to nuance his statements, and who can sniff humbug from 10 kilometres away. Surely he has not lost his canny ability to measure words, despite the rumours of his presidential aspiration.

    Well, his learned friend and fellow ecclesiast, Tunde Bakare, pastor of the Citadel Global Community Church in Lagos, has kept up his diatribe against the 1999 Constitution and the president. In his State of the Nation address relayed from his church last week, days before he visited the president and walked back some of his fiery denunciations, the pastor suggested that the president would be a failure if he failed to ‘tear down’ the constitution and anchor the renegotiation of Nigeria’s unity, which according to him was negotiated twice before and after independence. But what did Prof Osinbajo say to draw the ire of so many Nigerians? Hear him: “The president is possibly the most popular Nigerian politician that we ever had in generations. He is possibly the only person, who can go into a place or somewhere without bossing people to gather and they will come and listen to him speak. We need that level of credibility to be able to solve problems in our country. And I think because of his level of credibility, despite everything, he is still the only one that can call everyone, and even people, who do not necessarily agree with him know that he is a man of his words…Anybody, who looks at how Nigeria operates will recognise that we are better off in this system, and that is the truth. Yoruba are not better off on their own. Igbo are not better off on their own. The North is not better off on its own. We are better off as one nation…”

    Surely his hyperbole could not have been caused by the London air, nor his rumoured presidential bid, nor yet any kind of pressures on him. His words were those of a convinced, eager and satisfied subordinate. He had been ostracized after he famously booted out from office the fumbling legislative putschist, Lawal Daura, a former director general of the Department of State Service (DSS), whose men laid siege to the National Assembly during one of President Buhari’s medical trips to London in August 2018. The eminent professor is gradually worming his way back into the confidence of the president and his team, and may in fact have been cast as a potential dark horse for the 2023 race. But to rhapsodise the president in such giddy phrases, nearly all of them either questionable or wholly untrue, requires an excess of exuberance alien to the mental constitution of the law professor.

    Were President Buhari to be the most popular and credible Nigerian leader ever, the effect would have been felt in all areas of national life. In any case, to what services have those presidential virtues Prof Osinbajo giddily extolled been brought? In vain his London audience waited for the other shoe to drop, as the professor sang his panegyrics. The best they got, however, was a reluctant ‘despite everything’ (in the fourth sentence of the quotation above) harried and neutralized by another fulsome expression of deification. In 1958, France’s Charles de Gaulle made his acceptance of leadership conditional upon the rewrite and canonization of the Fifth Republic Constitution. The Nigerian president may lack such depths, foresight and patriotism, preferring instead to flirt around the thin frontiers of demagoguery, yet he has been assailed by a myriad of existential crises enough to convince even the most hardened reactionary that the country is either in death throes or experiencing birth pangs.

    All said, in the closing months of President Buhari’s second term, there will probably be no significant changes to the constitution despite the worst misgivings and encouragement of patriots. More, there will be no change in his style or ideas about nationhood. He is as fixed as the northern star, literally and figuratively. The vice president’s rhapsodies will in fact reinforce the president’s conviction about his invincibility and infallibility, not to say his conservatism and reaction, the twin ideological drivers that have pushed the country to the brink.

     

  • ENDSARS: Lest we forget

    ENDSARS: Lest we forget

    Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Mr Femi Falana was on September 30 the guest speaker at the University of Lagos Mass Communication Alumni Association Distinguished Lecture series during which he spoke on Communication strategy: Options for Youth Leadership, Reflections on ENDSARS.

    As one of the three discussants to the lecture, I noted that Falana expectedly did justice to the topic with insights on circumstances that led to the protest, government responses and prevailing situations which need to still be addressed to prevent a reoccurrence.

    Like Falana right stated, the use of new media played a major role in the strategy of the youths which the government is yet to fully acknowledge its dynamic nature. The Government should by now have realised that there is a limit to which it can control the dissemination of information as proven by the use of VPN despite the suspension of the operations of Twitter.

    In the present global village we live in, no government or country can be an island to itself and must be ready to engage its citizens based on good governance and listening to their demands.

    It is also necessary to recon with the views of the youths and not dismiss them until they resort to protest that may degenerate to the kind of situation we had during the ENDSARS protests. Although the government had largely accepted their demands, there are indications that the police and security agencies have not sufficiently learned their lessons based on how some of them are behaving again.

    Listening to the youths also include allowing them to be innovative in the kind of work they want to do irrespective of what they studied in higher institutions.

    Read Also: #ENDSARS: One year after the mother of all protest

    Like Falana advised, youths should be interested in political and governance issues but should not do so based on ethnic and religious agenda of politicians. They must remain untied like they were during the protest.

    They however need to moderate their language and not engage in unnecessary name calling or ethnic profiling that can diminish the real essence of their demands. They should know enough of past struggles for good governance, acknowledge them and ensure a synergy between the old and new generation.

    Falana’s closing submission during his lecture is reproduced below:

    The ENDSARS youth movement demonstrated that the use of the media, especially ICT is not only fundamental to the success of governance, business, social relations and  protests, but also, that government can no longer shutdown the media space as it pleases.  On June 2, 2021 the government tried its hand on banning social media by suspending Twitter indefinitely. But it has been like trying to hold down the rainbow as Nigerians who wish, simply bypassed this by connecting to the Virtual Private Network, VPN.

    It also taught that in communication, there should be some verisimilitude in language even if it be propaganda, otherwise, it fails.

    Again, the protests showed that communication needs to be relevant to the recipient if it is to be impactful.

    It also taught that  it is not only the message that is important, the messenger also should  be; a person seen as untruthful or unworthy will not be believable even if he is telling the gospel truth.

    But one great truth the ENDSARS youth taught is that a focused, united and determined movement can exert the change they desire in society.

    The greatest lesson is that the youths did not allow the State to divide them along ethnic and religious lines. Therefore, the youths should frustrate the desperate moves by the political class to turn the 2023 election into a regional affair. Politicians should not be allowed to divert the attention of the Nigerian people from the crisis of underdevelopment confronting the nation.

    The politicians must be compelled to address the rejection of electronic voting, insecurity of life and property, poverty and unemployment, lack of access to education, health and other social services, infrastructural decay, control of the national economy by imperialism etc. Every political party should make a commitment to the observance of human rights and implementation of the fundamental objectives enshrined in Chapter two of the Nigerian Constitution.

    Finally, permit me to call on the youths, workers and other oppressed people to be involved in the affairs of the country.  Since a people united can never be defeated the youths and all patriotic forces should get organised to end police brutality, extrajudicial killing of innocent people by State agents, terrorists and gunmen.

  • Forget Water Resources Bill

    Forget Water Resources Bill

    Much as I would have loved to skip writing on anything pertaining to the Federal Government today and indeed, for some time, I discovered this is a difficult decision to observe. Indeed, the more I tried, the more I discovered I could not.

    In the first place, the Federal Government of Nigeria takes the lion’s share of the nation’s revenue; about 52.68%; the 36 states 26.72% and the local governments 20.6%. Thirteen percent goes to the oil-producing states. In this anomalous situation in a federation, the Federal Government is almost always going to be in the dock because it alone controls double the revenue that 36 states share among themselves while the 774 local governments take monthly less than half of what the central government takes. Yet, these are the two closest tiers of government to the grassroots. Even the Holy Bible makes it clear that to whom much is given, much is required. When we now begin to have less than proportionate returns from that behemoth that gulps the chunk of our money, the tendency is for us to beam the searchlight perpetually on it.

    Another reason why the Federal Government is always in focus is that, as the head, it is supposed to lead by example. But when we do not see much by way of good example that can be emulated from the head; or if the head has issues, then it becomes a problem. As a matter of fact, I always remember the joke that one of my friends used to crack a few years back about a good piece of advice but which cannot be put to use (imoran to da sugbon ti ko se mu lo)! There isn’t much to write home about successive Nigeria’s Federal Government; it is not just about the Muhammadu Buhari administration. All evidence pointing in the direction that it is unwieldy to manage. It needs to be relieved of some of the baggage.

    Unfortunately, rather than admit this fact of the need to rightsize, the Federal Government wants to retain its big-for-nothing stature. Just like the country’s appellation as the ‘giant of Africa’, a ‘high sounding nothing’, the government is satisfied with its leviathan status that is injurious to the country’s health and ultimate survival. It is because of its apparent incompetence that some sections of the country are clamouring for (true) federalism. They want a situation where constituent parts of the country can develop at their own pace. That is the way it is in several parts of the civilised world. And it is working for them.

    Rather than toe the path of reason and begin to shed weight, the Federal Government keeps digging in. It continues to flaunt its big-for-nothing status unabashedly and, like Oliver Twist, sniffing for more pie to dip its soiled fingers into. In spite of the glaring failure of government, especially at the centre in several sectors of our lives, the Federal Government still wants us to entrust it with even more duties. So, rather than heed the calls of the present, that is a return to true federalism, Nigeria’s central government is obedient only to those of the past: retention of an antiquated status quo that is anti-progress and holding some parts of the country down, against their quest for rapid development. And this despite the general acknowledgment globally of the fact that government is not a good manager of so many things it is in charge of. A good reason why governments are being excused from so many activities in other parts of the world these days, and with astounding results.

    It is this same hopeless mindset that is propelling the so-called Water Resources Bill. This is a bill that many parts of the country have rejected as dead even before its arrival because it still places our affairs in the hands of a central government that is still looking for more to chew even as it has not fully masticated what it has in its mouth.

    The matter was exhumed, once again, by the Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, on Tuesday. Adamu, who was represented by the Executive Director, National Integrated Water Resource Management Commission, Magashi Bashir, told journalists at the commission’s office in Abuja that, “Nigeria is losing about N6 billion to N9 billion yearly to the non-passage of the bill, which would have given legal teeth to the water sub-sector for optimal performance like other sectors.” Unless it is a National Assembly (NASS) of anything goes, this kind of argument is too weak to secure passage of the bill. How much is N6billion to a nation whose refineries are all as good as dead and is still pumping billions into their so-called turn-around maintenance (TAM)? What is six to nine billion naira to a nation that wants to spend twice that amount on Aso Rock Clinic, which is going to be used by a few people even as our teaching hospitals are crying for funds and our doctors are leaving for greener pastures abroad in droves because they cannot find fulfillment here? This is a clinic that even the president does not have need for, as he jets out on medical tourism whenever the need arises.

    The government would do well to start averting its mind to things that would place this country on the path of federalism rather than keep digging in on this retrogressive unitary system foisted on us by the military.

    Adamu said passing the Water Resources Bill into law would give “legal teeth to the water sub-sector for optimal performance like other sectors.” Did I hear him right? Which of the other sectors under the Federal Government is performing optimally? Let Adamu just point to one or two. If this (optimal performance) indeed were to be a parameter to getting the bill become law, then there is no way it can pass the litmus test. Unless the NASS would rely on the much-touted government’s ‘promissory note’ that we will begin to feel the impact of its programmes after it has left the scene.

    It is good that Adamu himself did not pretend not to know why the bill will continue to have issues on its way to becoming law: he urged Nigerians to “advance beyond ethnicity and ethnic politics to better regulate the water sector,” since the country would benefit from a properly managed sector in the event of the bill’s passage. The truth of the matter is that the incumbent government has fouled the air beyond deodorizing with its ethnocentric policies, appointments and postures in the last few years. So, if the bill has become a victim of perpetual distrust by a large section of the country, the fault is not in Nigerians but in the government that Adamu is serving.

    As far as many Nigerians are concerned, Water Resources Bill is Rural Grazing Area (RUGA) in another robe and many sections of the country are averse to anything like that.

    Let everybody manage their water resources. We do not need Water Resources Bill to give majority of Nigerians potable water wherever they may be in the country. Do we? And, for me, that is one of the main things any good water policy must achieve. This is beyond naira and kobo. Potable water to most Nigerians will save the country more than nine billion naira annually that governments would have to spend treating water-borne diseases.

    It is immaterial whether the eighth senate rejected or did not reject the bill. Whatever monetary value we may be losing to non-passage of the bill will pale into insignificance when juxtaposed against the troubles that will come with its passage because of the ethnic distrust that heralded its arrival. It is too late in the day for anyone to want to deodorise the putrid smell that the present government has put in the way of such policies or programmes.

    This country is facing the worst challenges of its life since the end of the civil war in 1970. Let the government think creatively for solutions beyond debt peonage and foisting of unwanted policies and programmes on hapless Nigerians.

    The late Fela-Anikulapo-Kuti said it all, “water, e no get enemy.” Let not the Federal Government look for enemies for it.

     

    Adusei the dreamer

     

    I thought Nigeria was the only country where one could pick death off the shelf almost for free. But the story of a Ghanaian who killed his friend over mere dreaming that the friend slept with his wife has proved me wrong. Kwadwo Adusei, 45, is now in police net for the crime that he committed at Wawaase in Afigya Kwabre South of Ashanti Region of Ghana. According to withinnigeria.com, Adusei lured his victim-friend, Kwesi Banahene, 48, to a bush where he reportedly stabbed him several times. His body was found a few days later when a search party was raised to look for him.

    Not satisfied, Adusei descended on his grandfather that he accused of making him impotent. Fortunately the old man survived the attack and is reportedly being treated in hospital.

    Although the report did not so state, a proper analysis of the incident would reveal Adusei killed his friend because of his impotence. He could not imagine his friend taking over his conjugal role. Poor Adusei could not imagine a situation where his own friend would be the one to ‘vandalise’ his wife in his lifetime. So, he had to despatch him to the great beyond before dream becomes deed. His excuse that he killed his friend because his dreams always come true would then appear an after-thought. .

    Whatever it is, his eyes would be clear now that his dream has landed him in soup. If death penalty is the wages of murder in Ghana, then he may never have the opportunity of dreaming such nasty dreams again. Even if he does, he won’t have the opportunity of committing such crime again, simply on account of being a Joseph.

    The story reminds me of yet another odd story that I commented on, I think sometimes in the late 1980s or early 90s. Aptly headlined “The right to cheat”, the story was about some Bangladeshi students who protested over their university authorities’ refusal to let them cheat during examination. They wanted ‘friends to help friends’ in examination halls!

    At the rate human rights are being expanded, it is surprising the world has not deemed it fit to accommodate such rights in our schools. After all, what are friends for?