Category: Sunday

Happy new year to our compatriots. But whether it is a happy new dawn is another matter. There are certain years you just wish to forget, that you are in a hurry to banish forever to the abyss of unpardonable betrayal; years that you just wish to bury in the debris of human trauma. These are years when human misery and suffering take a new dimension; when the national spirit takes a terrible bashing and you begin to wonder when last in history so many people have had to sacrifice their life just for a country to survive.
2016 was such a year. Never in history has the economy taken such a dramatic nose-dive, like a plane in adverse weather but without a hands-on pilot. Never has the collective suffering and misery of Nigerians been more pronounced. Not in recent history have we witnessed such a declining loss of face in the union and the nation.
It was the year centrifugal forces fastened on the jugular of the nation. Boko Haram declined only to give way to equally vicious sectarian groups. And all this in a country whose demographic balance of power is rapidly shifting in favour of youth; a very young country indeed. Are we not preparing ourselves for an explosive confrontation in the nearest future?
In retrospect 2016 was the year of what is destined to be known as the Ibrahim Magu syndrome, when the state snared itself in a sting operation, when predators fighting over the carcass of a prey found themselves dragged to the murky bed of a muddied river. At the end of the day, the fight to rid the nation of corruption became tactically stalemated and ethically compromised.
In a sense, then, 2016 was the year of the locusts. But we must learn the correct lesson in a land where all kinds of predators abound. The problem was not the locusts. Locusts have always existed and will always exist. The problem is how to fight locusts in a scientific and holistic manner. In The Year of the Locust, the brave and heroic protagonist, against wiser counsel and judgement and without being fortified, chose to go out alone to fight an invasion of locusts. The next day his eaten out and hollowed out frame was discovered just outside the village.
In keeping with its tradition, this column will suspend all intellectual hostilities this morning to felicitate and commiserate with our long-suffering compatriots in these hard times. Only a political sadist will seek to pile further hardships by engaging in unnecessary recriminations and wrangling about what has gone wrong. It is not easy to govern a fractious and temperamentally brittle multi-ethnic nation wracked by religious, regional, cultural and economic polarities. Perhaps we needed to get to this point just to discover that.
But at all times, democratic governance requires honesty of purpose, uncluttered visionary imagination and integrity of execution in order to deal with the problems of a nation as it encounters new and unforeseen challenges in the relentless march of history. This is the problem confronting the government of General Mohammadu Buhari at this particular and perilous point in Nigeria’s history. The government needs a more hands-on approach if it is to make a dent in Nigeria’s multifarious problems. This government has suffered grievously from a languid and laidback ponderousness in confronting the manifest problems facing the country.
Given the dire situation of the country, it is quite understandable if some individuals, groups and sections want out of the iron cage of contraries. But this is not the way to go. Nigeria’s problems are collectively created and must be collectively solved. There is nothing out there and in our collective failings as a people that atomistic states and atomised nationhood created out of the current diseased amalgam will prove to be paradise on earth.
But having said that, it also not a helpful way forward to begin to heckle and hound those who feel traumatized by the injuries of colonial and post-colonial Nigeria. It can be legitimately argued that some of these injuries are often imposed by the collective hubris of trying to impose a sectional or ethnic solution to the Nigerian problem. But they can also arise out of ethnic scapegoating when nationalities with mutually unintelligible cultures are boxed together by colonial fate in a steel fortress where they claw at each other to death.
Hopefully, and if General Buhari is not to set himself up for political failure the second time around, the fog of messianic delusions and effete one-upmanship will clear and he will begin to do the needy. By the end of the year, it will be clear whether the Daura born general is the man Nigeria needs and requires at this particular juncture or whether it is a damp squib all over again.
To this end, and in order to help the government recover the initiative in this season of charity and goodwill, this column will isolate three urgent areas of recuperative possibilities requiring the urgent attention of the government and in no particular order. Not even the most adamant admirer of President Buhari will fail to notice that towards the end of the outgone year, the government had succumbed to a somnambulist paralysis and the unsteady assurance of a sleepwalker.
The mess surrounding the nomination, submission of the non-career ambassadorial list and the subsequent hazy withdrawal shows a manifest lack of seriousness and integrity of purpose at the highest level of decision making, particularly with foreign governments listening in and forming their own judgement about the state of the nation.
The list itself is shoddy and clearly an abuse of authority and trust at the highest level of governance. If job must be found for the boys and the girls—many of who are not even known as party members or sympathisers—there must surely be other ways of doing this rather than inflicting incompetent hustlers on foreign authorities and our missions abroad.
Up till this moment, baring the odd political journeymen and shifty-eyed but well-connected nonentity, Nigeria has excelled in its mission abroad and we would do well at this point not to compromise one of our few surviving institutions on the altar of politicking and agenda-driven partisanship.
The fact that as we speak, and contrary to assurances given by the Foreign Minister, the refurbished list has not been resubmitted, speaks to a failure at the highest level of party consultations. Is there still a party we can call the APC at the moment or a congregation of squabbling politicians in which the old CPC is trying to remould the party according to its old and unelectable political morbidities? The next few months will tell whether the fraught alliance can hold and ever be trusted again by Nigerians particularly in the South West of the nation.
The second point to note is that with the political defenestration of the ruthless and punitively proactive Ibrahim Magu, a central flaw has been exposed in the whole process of fighting corruption. The forensically talented Magu may have his faults of social misjudgement and political indiscretion but this is surely a messy and blatantly unwise way to get rid of him with two leading sensitive agencies of the government working at cross purposes. In the interest of justice, fair play and national perception, the least the government can do if it is not re-presenting Magu is also to quietly ease out the top echelon of the DSS who have brought such public opprobrium on the government.
The problem of the EFCC and the whole business of fighting corruption have nothing to do with Magu, but the very conceptual framework of the organization and its institutional bulwark. The EFCC is a laudable creation by General Obasanjo. But in order to fight corruption effectively, it needs a more powerfully holistic, integrative and intellectual framework at the cutting edge of global intelligence.
Ibrahim Magu may lack the intellectual sophistication and emotional detachment of the truly proficient anti-crime Tsar at the summit of the profession. But you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. This is what you get when you throw in an ordinary, dedicated and conscientious cop to fight a hydra-headed monster like corruption in Nigeria without the much needed philosophy of crime and punishment and the discriminating theoretical tools of the trade. The international community has since moved on from this prehistoric arrest and bail phenomenon reminiscent of apprehending Stone Age pilferers of community offerings. At the end of the day, nothing will happen. No lesson will be learnt because none has been taught.
Since we like to ape and imitate the west particularly America, it may be useful to note that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI and please note the stylishly bland and understated name) is manned at its topmost echelons by politically sophisticated and intellectually distinguished operatives who may not even be professionally trained cops but who are mentally equipped to deal with crime and corruption at their most devious and deviant.
So powerful and institutionally insulated is the FBI that it can withstand hints and even direct pressures from the presidency. It was said that after repeatedly failing in his bid to oust Edgar Hoover, President Lyndon Baines Johnson finally gave up with the parting shot: “It is better to have a son of a bitch inside pissing out than to have him outside pissing in.” The remote and relentlessly prowling Hoover was reputed to have had a number on everyone including secretly taping President Kennedy having a wild romp with Marilyn Munroe inside the White House.
Finally and to round off this advisory, President Buhari needs to do something about the public perception of what is known as his kitchen cabinet who are currently seen as being polarizing and divisive, negatively motivated and obsessed by the idea of regional and ethnic supremacy. They have caused the general much disaffection.
To be sure, there is nothing wrong in keeping a kitchen cabinet. Most rulers need people who share emotional, political, cultural and possibly spiritual latitude with them. But this should not be done at the expense of the wider cosmopolitan outlook and political outreach needed to govern a multi-ethnic nation of diverse worldviews as Nigeria. Here is wishing President Buhari and the nation a much better year.