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Category: Sunday

  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (6) Conclusion: epic corruption and Buhari’s Nigeria – please think counterintuitively!

    Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (6) Conclusion: epic corruption and Buhari’s Nigeria – please think counterintuitively!

    In this concluding piece in a series that began in this column a month ago, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a little detail that might escape notice if I didn’t draw attention to it and, indeed, make a brief elaboration on it. What is this little detail? It is the fact that throughout the previous five essays in the series, I have been repeatedly using the phrase, “Buhari’s Nigeria”. Ordinarily, the import of this phrase would be merely literal or indeed factitious: we are in the period of Muhammadu Buhari’s incumbency as the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria. This incumbency will, at the very least, last for four years if, as we all hope, he lives and enjoys good health well beyond the current mid-septuagenarian stage of his personal and existential life cycle. Indeed already, very strong and unmistakable signals are being sent out by the president’s inner circle of supporters that he intends to run for reelection in 2019. If he does and he wins, he would have been in office for eight years. This reality, this possibility has definitely been on my mind as I have repeatedly used that phrase, “Buhari’s Nigeria” in this series. But the matter goes much deeper than that!

    In the matter of an all-out nationwide war on corruption, we are in “Buhari’s Nigeria” because, quite simply but also profoundly, Muhammadu Buhari is like no other previous head of state of our country, with the single exception of Murtala Ramat Muhammad. Without exception, all Nigerian heads of states have declared both their abhorrence of corruption and their determination to curb it substantially, if not root it out completely. But again, with the exceptions only of Muhammad and Buhari, none of the other heads of states ever had any iota of credibility as would-be warriors against corruption, least of all Olusegun Obasanjo who, paradoxically, has been the most self-righteous head of state of our country. Thus, only Muhammad and Buhari stand out as credible, inspired and inspiring anti-corruption warriors. But in the matter of the phrase under discussion here and its implications and ramifications for the topic of this series, there are significant differences between the two men. What are these differences?

    First, Muhammad’s rule was far too short to have qualified for a comparable phrase like “Murtala Mohammed’s Nigeria”. In other words, as decisive as Muhammad was, his assassination fatefully prevented him from leaving a lasting legacy on the moral character or ethos of our country beyond wisps of anguished nostalgia for and about his brief time in office. Secondly and far more portentously, Muhammad actually never made a formal declaration of war on corruption; in place of a loud and formal declaration, he chose action, concrete, decisive and absolutely unambiguous action. To put it mildly, Buhari, both as military dictator and as elected head of state, has been long, very long, on the formal declaration and short, indecisive and ambiguous on the action front. Thirdly and most significant of all, where Muhammad carried his war against corruption right into the heart of the festering swamps of corruption in his own constituency of the military top brass, Buhari has been remarkably unable and/or unwilling to carry his war on corruption to the inner chambers of the opportunists, cynics and turncoats within his administration and party. Indeed, to all Nigerians who fervently pin their hopes for a Nigeria substantially rid of life- and nation-destroying plague of Augean corruption, it has been very confounding to register the silence, the inaction of Buhari on allegations of rank corruption within his administration, in particular the allegations against the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal. As a matter of fact, SGF Lawal’s case provides a good opportunity to critically examine what lies ahead of us in the president’s war on corruption if, as every patriot wishes, it is a war that will be won decisively. What do I have in mind in making this observation?

    The phrase “Buhari’s Nigeria” surely embraces the men and women, the officials and the well-wishers, in short the world of the president’s own administration and party, doesn’t it? This question is pertinent because so far at least, neither Buhari nor a single member of his corps of spokespersons has given any indication that the president intends to include his administration and his party as a theatre of operations in the war against corruption. As a matter of fact, please note, dear reader and compatriot, that exposures of super-scale corruption within Buhari’s administration and the ruling APC have come without Buhari’s knowledge, prompting or blessing. To this observation, add the fact that SGF’s Babachir Lawal’s accusers are not embittered and disgruntled PDP desperados; they are chieftains of the APC Senate leadership caucus who themselves stand accused of corrupt greed and graft of the highest order. By the simple logic of addition as an objective mathematical process, what you get from this additive moral algorithm is the bracing recognition that as far as the president’s war on corruption is concerned, “Buhari’s Nigeria” is the rest of us minus his administration and his party. We cannot and must not accept this extreme circumscription of where “Buhari’s Nigeria” begins and ends in the war against corruption. Let me put this in very simple and very concrete terms: if the war on corruption is now, at this moment in time in Buhari’s Nigeria, we cannot and must not accept a “postponement” of the battles against corruption in the president’s own administration and party to some future date after Buhari’s reelection in 2019 or after he is his succeeded by another declarant of a war against corruption a few years from now.

    For readers who might tend to see this last observation or assertion by me as a sort of desperate ultimatum, I hasten to say that it is not an ultimatum at all. I am not by temperament averse to giving ultimatums if and when I find them necessary and full of possibilities. However, an ultimatum, any ultimatum, is as good as the moral force and physical action available to back it up. Unfortunately, I look around me today and I do not see any group of Nigerians, of the Left or the Right, the camp progressives or of conservatives, that has the moral capital and the mobilizable physical action necessary to force the issue at this critical juncture in the war on corruption. I am not absolutely sure of the veracity this particular observation and indeed, there is a part of me that hopes that I am wrong, at least as far as the camp of progressives and civic-minded patriots are concerned. But I ask myself the following question: Which group today will ask of President Buhari that he must not keep silent in the case of SGF Lawal, that he must show that he is concerned by, and will do something about the greed, the graft, the obscene self-engorgement of the APC-led National Assembly on the harvests of our national assets and resources – and Buhari will listen and act?

    But there is something wrong with this question, something that goes to the heart of all that I have been writing and reflecting about in this series. Permit me to express it as carefully as possible, with all the nuances that the thought requires. This thought is captured in a phrase that is logically and semantically counterpoised to the phrase “Buhari’s Nigeria”. It is – Nigeria’s Buhari. “Nigeria’s Buhari”? Yes. But what does this new phrase mean?

    Buhari, especially in his intentions, his propensities and predilections about power is as Nigerian as the rest of us. Unquestionably, there is a very personal, idiosyncratic and perhaps even quirky dimension to his use of and disposition towards power. I am not sure of this, but I personally see the president’s silence on the case of SGF Lawal as the reflection of an obdurate mule-headedness that wrongfully and myopically thinks that to be forced by one’s opponents to get rid of a member of one’s inner or “kitchen cabinet” is to be weak – even if the dismissal of the errant official is the right thing to do. But fundamentally, Buhari is as much a product of his class, of his generation and of the constellation of ideological and symbolic forces in dominance in Nigeria today as say, Olusegun Obasanjo, Theophilus Danjuma, E.K. Clark, and Donald Duke. In effect this means that in order to break with or from the normal or instinctive ways of thinking and acting of the class and the constellation of forces from and to which Buhari speaks and acts, we must at the very least think counterintuitively to the set ways and perspectives of this class, this alignment of interests, biases and worldviews to which Muhammadu Buhari belongs.

    Why have not Nigerian lawyers risen up in their hundreds, if not in their thousands, to protest and rise up against the bastions of nation-wrecking corruption in their profession? Why do we have only a single, lone whistleblower in the National Assembly and not dozens of outraged, patriotic lawmakers sickened by the endless graft and corruption in the salaries, bonuses and allowances of the rest of the throng of self-authorized looters among our legislators? Why do we not hear thousands upon thousands of lecturers, professors and even students themselves say loud and clear for the nation and the whole world to hear that if the potential employers of the products of our tertiary educational institutions are sick and tired of having “unemployables” foisted on them, so also are the teachers, professors and students themselves sick and tired of being forced to produce “unemployables”?  And why do we not have multitudes of Christians and Moslems clerics and congregants marching, demonstrating and protesting against the idolatry of money and wealth that defines and dominates Nigerian religiosity today in Buhari’s Nigeria? Why, why and why? Because these are counterintuitive responses to the terrible plague of corruption in our country, that’s why!

    When you see danger, you run away from it, not towards it. That is the intuitive, expected response. But to run towards the danger, to think that the best way to deal with it is to actually move to it and engage it, that is the counterintuitive response. In our institutions of higher learning, teaching, learning and research are grossly underfunded, thanks in large measure to the sovereign reign of corruption in our country. But isn’t life itself, especially the lives of the vast majority, greatly underfunded? And if our national assets and resources are being relentlessly looted, isn’t it because the lives of the tens of millions are also being looted?

    Dear reader and compatriot, set your gaze far beyond Buhari’s Nigeria. Think, think counterintuitively of Nigeria’s Buhari, as if life itself depends on it because, actually, it does.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Nigeria 2016: Annus horribilis

    President Buhari has many reasons to urgently change course in some critical areas

    “The scale of embezzlement in Nigeria is astonishing. Politicians,  judges, senators, former governors and first ladies, bankers, etc, have all been swept off in recent months in an unprecedented anti-corruption drive. Seven judges, including two Supreme Court judges, have been arrested on corruption allegations. A sacked head of the military is being tried on charges of stealing $3.1 million from the Nigerian air force to buy houses just as the former national security adviser is on trial on charges of diverting millions of dollars meant for the military.” – a foreign commentator on Nigeria

    I do not own the patent to the above title. Rather it belongs to Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth 11 who, at a royal wedding described 1992 as “annus horribilis, meaning a horrible year. Sans August 1983 when I almost saw death during the atrocious Ondo State governorship election. I have never, in life had as much internal turmoil as I experienced in the year of our Lord, two thousand and sixteen. In the giddy days immediately following the victory of candidate Muhammadu Buhari of the APC, this column, on which I had written my fingers sore canvassing his candidature, went on a literal overdrive, proposing an agenda for the president-elect. So cocksure was I that one or two of the items on my menu list would have a look-in given their importance to the country’s revival, and wellbeing. After all, candidate Buhari, alongside his party, has waoh-ed Nigerians with his change mantra which has seen an all-powerful sitting president, a-washed with U. S dollars – which they had spent like the United States was about decreeing the currency out of existence – eating the humble pie of ignominious defeat.

    I must, however, quickly say that the turmoil I felt was not out of material insufficiency – for God has been faithful – but resulted from the almost total loss of the mental and psychological investment one had put in the Muhammadu Buhari presidency. I have written serially on these pages, telling Nigerians that his coming was going to be a complete rebirth, a regeneration of sorts, from the total banality we had experienced under the somnambulist Dr Goodluck Jonathan. So literally drunk on a Buhari administration was I that I wrote as follows in: ‘President Muhammadu Buhari: This Simply Gladdens The Heart’.  All the way from Houston, Texas in the Sunday 1 June, 2015 edition of this paper, I wrote: “It is heartening that a man I had, Nostradamus-like, long seen as about the only Nigerian who can wipe away our tears, and restore Nigeria to its rightful place, was inaugurated, this past week, as president of the Federal Republic.  I have always believed that this day will come and I need cite only two examples. In ‘The South West: Between Buhari and Yar’ Adua’, 21 January, 2007, I wrote: “It is therefore our good fortune that Gen. Buhari (Rtd) has not taken the Yoruba for granted. He has come soliciting the support of the critical segments in the Southwest, promising to do that one thing that is dear to us – Restructure the country”. Then on 26th September 2014, in ‘Periscoping The Ideal APC Presidential Candidate (2)”, I  also wrote : “… despite all the attempts  to  dress him  in the robes of a Taliban, General Buhari, a  Spartan soldier/politician,  has more than demonstrated the ability to lift Nigeria far beyond its present morass.  And I make bold to say that Nigeria, in its current dire straits, needs Buhari more than he needs Nigeria”.  I am mighty proud that this man of destiny, this unusual Nigerian who was not only an Oil minister, Chairman, Petroleum Trust Fund, but also a Head of State, yet had no single petrol (gas) station, finally made it.”

    Earlier on, I had yielded this column to Houston-based Segun Badipe, a nuclear medical scientist, who also weighed in on the Buhari phenomenon, suggesting the following: ‘On the political front, he must go after all the treasury looters. This is sure to enjoy tremendous political support from Nigerians since they understand the connection between the excesses of the PDP and the political problems currently facing the country. It is unfortunate that the judiciary has been thoroughly bastardised. The president-elect must very quickly flush out corrupt judges as it would otherwise be difficult to get convictions against corrupt politicians and their associates. On the economic front, there is a lot that can be done to give people hope. Nigeria is about the only country I know where politicians don’t feel any remorse for not delivering on campaign promises. There are obviously no quick fixes for the power problem but I would suggest that the government proceeds rapidly with the rehabilitation of moribund or uncompleted projects that can increase deliverables in the short run. In this way, the government can increase available electricity to something around 6000 megawatts in no time, at all.

    ‘Insecurity, as exemplified by the Boko Haram menace, is a major problem that must be tackled head-on as failure to defeat it will be a huge hindrance to the country’s security and economic development. Finally, the monster of it all – corruption, for which the president-elect must device novel instruments to deal with. Using agencies like the EFCC or ICPC is hardly more than asking the ruling class to prosecute members of their own class. The president must, necessarily think out of the box, and do something truly revolutionary. He could come up with an amnesty programme whereby those who willingly confess to acts of corruption could, after making full restitution, be allowed to keep some of the recovered loot but strictly for their basic sustenance. He should also institute a whistle blower programme. This is a low cost technique the essence of which is for persons intimately familiar with details of some corrupt acts to squeal on the perpetrators with a fraction of the recovered loot going to them in compensation. The whistle blower will assist the country recover the proceeds while such fraudsters are made to reap the full weight of their malfeasance.  They must, however, have legal protection.’

    The president must be congratulated on his achievements on both the security and corruption fronts. Boko Haram has been massively degraded just as corruption, though fighting back, is beginning to lose out.  Some allegedly corrupt judges are already being made to face the law.

    Unfortunately, and this is the sad part, the president has failed woefully in co-herring the country. He has shown, beyond any scintilla of doubt, that he is more disposed to governing on behalf of the north, especially the Fulani, as I will show, and this is absolutely dispiriting. President Buhari’s kitchen cabinet, so clearly demonstrative of his generally parochial, insular and ethnic-dictated appointments, has been so disappointing it is difficult to describe. I have personally come to the conclusion that whilst the president said he was busy thinking of those to appoint ministers, he most probably had a think tank working on which Fulani to appoint to the most sensitive positions in government and those, whose names were omitted, appear to have since been recruited, sleeping in their houses as the First Lady patriotically told Nigerians in her BBC interview. The result is that today, apart from a fully north -dominated national security apparatti, we also have some unelected, past masters in divisive geo-political contestations of the First and Second Republics, only a breath away from the president, taking decisions behind the shadows; amongst them, an uncle of the president who was a key member of the Kaduna Mafia, as well as a former spook and diplomat, who once held a very top position in the government of the federation. These men, I believe, are the ones who advised the president’s unbending opposition to restructuring despite it being on his party’s manifesto. His absolutely lukewarm attitude to the murderous Fulani herdsmen which has accounted for tens of thousands dead must equally be attributed to the same ethnic motivations. All these have made one incredibly sad in a particularly bad year in the country. President Buhari has many reasons to urgently change course in some critical areas. No part of Nigeria is more important than the other.

    Let me conclude by wishing Nigerians a much better 2017.

  • Commercialising the armed forces: a disgusting idea 1

    The army’s participation in cattle farming in every part of the country is being guaranteed to be free of the tension fomented by nomadic herdsmen.

    In addition to producing military supplies, various military institutions in Egypt own 35 factories that produce vehicles, chemicals, mineral water, cement, consumer goods, and various types of food including pasta, bread, and olive oil. These military organisations, namely the Arab Organisation for Industrialisation, the Ministry of Military Production, and the National Service Products Organisation, were also named on lists circulating in Egypt in 2011 as owners of service-industry companies, restaurants, gas stations, and construction services. The military-owned enterprises not only enjoyed privileges in the form of subsidies and tax exemptions but were also above the rules and regulations applicable to other privately owned companies…. There have also been claims from a number of Egyptian activists that laborers for these construction services were drawn from conscripted military ranks.[6]Mahmoud Jaraba in Series on ‘Civilianising the State in Middle-East and Asia Pacific Regions.

    Before going into the piece for today, this column wishes to congratulate the Nigerian military for doing the country proud with respect to the menace of Boko Haram. We hail the army for succeeding to penetrate Sambisa Forest, a forest that had acquired in the last five years a mythological character for being a forest with the thickness uncharacteristic of desert and savannah belts. We raise our glasses to the military for dislodging the terrorists that had used the forest as an enclave from which it has destabilised the country for years. We note that the military has acted in a way to recall in the minds of citizens the efficiency for which it was known when it participated in bringing peace to many countries of the world in the past. We extend felicitations to President Buhari who, after the end to the magic of Sambisa Forest, is likely to have more time and inner peace to face the problem of recession and economic reform to shift the economy from dependence on oil to producing and adding values.

    Today’s focus is on the recent announcement by the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, made on his behalf by the Chief of Army Logistics, Major General Patrick Akem, on what has been named Barrack Investment Initiative Project. According to General Buratai, the Barrack Investment Initiative Project (BIIP) is part of a larger strategy for the military to become a direct investor in cattle farming: “To take it to the next level, we want to adopt a system where the cattle are not just free ranging, coming from Sokoto to Port Harcourt, thereby making their meat tough to eat, the products will soon be coming from our own farms and ranches.” General Buratai provided more detail on the Army’s initiative: “The intention of the Nigerian Army was not just to secure the country, but to contribute in growing the economy of the nation… We want to tell our wives that they can live beyond the salaries of their husbands, so we are trying to empower the women in the barracks to be able to form co-operatives, so as to access loans and to a large extent be able to fend for themselves and their families, even without the salaries of their husbands.” He concluded by assuring his audience that “he had created the BIIP as a platform that affords army family members the opportunity of raising up (sic) fishing ponds, vegetable gardens, fruits, livestock, chicken and their eggs.”

    I have quoted copiously from General Buratai’s explanation of an initiative that looks so simple and attractive in a country under economic pressure birthed by recession and fall in the price of petroleum, for a purpose. And this is to share the complex ramifications of a brazen initiative by the Armed Forces to militarise the country’s economy in the context of a teenage democratic system, born just seventeen years after decades of military rule, and at a time that the country is seeking to consolidate a constitution that seeks to subsume the armed forces under the authority of  an elected government and diversify its economy in a way that saves government and its institutions from the vagaries of market economy through privatisation, which includes government selling off its own business-related investments.

    It is therefore befuddling that the military has crafted a new strategy that is designed to give it a role in the economy at a time that the citizenry is having a sigh of relief about its withdrawal from the nation’s politics. It is also confusing that General Buratai’s announcement of Barrack Investment Initiative Project was made a few months after a controversial bill to establish cattle grazing reserves in every part of the country was presented and then withdrawn from the senate. Sponsored by one Sadiq Ibrahim, the stated objective of the now withdrawn bill was to prevent conflicts between pastoralists and arable farmers on the one hand and foster the development of cattle ranching in Nigeria on the other hand. The army’s participation in cattle farming in every part of the country is being guaranteed to be free of the tension fomented by nomadic herdsmen.  But it is preposterous for any branch of government or profession to claim more sophistication than other groups, more so in the absence of any empirical research on conduct of the military when it was in control of political power. More importantly, the real worry is that the military may be starting a process of creating a parallel economy in competition with civilians and the possibility of such competition growing to become a parallel government in the fashion of Egypt and Pakistan.

    Admittedly, the desire of the armed forces of Nigeria to become a major player in the country’s economy is not new in Africa. The model described by General Buratai is a proto-form for what exists today in the Middle-East and Asian countries, especially Egypt, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. For instance, the epigraph at the beginning of this piece from Mahmoud Jaraba pertains to the danger of competition between a military-industrial complex and a subjugated civil economy in Egypt, where the military is involved in every aspect of production of goods and services. Similarly, the size of Pakistan’s economy controlled by the country’s armed forces was put at about $30 billion in 2014. Like the Egyptian model, Pakistan’s military is involved in a wide range of economic activities: Stud and Dairy Farms, Restaurant Management, Shoe and Woollen Production, General Insurance, Fertilizer of Production, Distillery, Wind Energy, Cement, Meat, Seeds, Bread and Cake, Banking, Telecom Service, Operation of grocery stores, etc. Egypt and Pakistan started this model in a rudimentary way like the one announced by General Buratai in respect of “raising up fish pond, vegetable gardens, fruits, livestock, chicken and their eggs.”

    An issue that is often overlooked in the literature on militarisation of the economy in Egypt and Pakistan is how much this model has developed the economy and democracy in these countries and other countries in the Middle-East and Asia. One thing that is unmistakable is the fact that both Egypt and Pakistan are two of the largest receivers of aid from Western countries of Europe and North America, despite the participation of their well-trained military in the economy of both countries. These two countries also experience democratic hiccups at the instance of powerful military men with substantial control of the economy in addition to full power of coercion made possible by taxpayers in the civil society.

    Subsequent discussions will focus on the following: constitutionality of a military competing in the private sector and with citizens, primary owners of the country’s sovereignty; implications of a commercial(ised) military for unfettered democratic governance and the federal government’s ongoing economic reform of the private sector; effect of divided attention of the military between securing the nation and participating in wealth creation; sources of the capital for creation of wealth by the armed forces; threat to civil society and economy by the armed forces in competition with the private sector; erosion of democratic government’s authority over a part of the executive branch of government that engages in business; ethicality of a public institution taking a loan from private banks or using taxpayer’s funds to engage in business,  the danger of importing Egyptian and Pakistani models to a multi-ethnic federal democracy; etc.  HAPPY NEW YEAR!

     

    To be continued

  • Religion, politics and Nigeria’s future

    Religion, politics and Nigeria’s future

    ON this Christmas, when many newspaper readers feel disinclined to do anything challenging, including reading hard stuff, it is fitting to write on something racy and breezy, something that will not addle the brain or task the distressed minds of the people during a biting recession. Everyone cares about Nigeria’s future, so this column will make reference to it, no matter how cursorily. Nigerians are deeply political; they live and breathe it, even if sometimes misguided. The column will bring it in. Religion is also truly the opium of Nigerians; what would they do or be without it? Therefore, weaving the three issues together in a joyous manner to remind Nigerians who they are and where they are in time should briefly arrest their attention in this dark period of recession, paranoia and apprehension.

    This column may draw flak by suggesting that Nigeria’s problem is chiefly leadership. But hard as it has tried to re-examine that apparently controversial thesis in order to accommodate the counterargument that change indeed could also begin with the followers, not just the leaders, it has been hard to find substance to the counter-thesis. Every Nigerian government has engaged in the delusion that a re-orientation campaign could offer the magical propagandist shot to ginger the people into patriotic fervour. That that campaign has repeatedly failed in the past few decades has not deterred every succeeding government from obsessing with that chimera. The ongoing ‘Change Begins with Me’ campaign will of course naturally fail, but it will not stop the next government from chasing shadows, even if conjured.

    The problem, it seems, is that Nigerian leaders, not to say the people themselves, have no vision of their country’s future. They prefer expediency to structured work. Much worse, both leaders and the led have probably one of the world’s most perverted conceptions of religion, one so skewed and abhorrent it is hard to imagine anything worse. And to add to this stultifying nonsense, they all lack a coherent and sensible ideology of politics. But this column’s preoccupation today is leadership, a factor that continues to undo the country and endanger the future of Nigerians in particular and the black man in general. Former United States president Richard Nixon once proffered the view that, “All the really strong leaders I have known have been highly intelligent, highly disciplined, hard workers, supremely self-confident, driven by a dream, driving others. All have looked beyond the horizon. Some have seen more clearly than others.”

    Highly intelligent, highly disciplined, President Nixon had said thoughtfully. He is right. The reader should, in fact, cast his mind way back to the First Republic and then zoom down to the current Fourth Republic, without excluding or excusing the corrupting intervening military governments. Who among Nigeria’s past leaders fits the bill? Why does anyone expect something to be built on nothing? While for ethnic reasons many Nigerians excuse the appalling failure of their kinsmen in power, and even come to their defence sometimes, the reality is that none of them, Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa/Fulani, has faintly approximated the Nixonian conception of leadership. Not one, and not even now. It is pointless trying to encourage any of them, for no leader can give what he does not have.

    President Nixon was even more unsparing. He says in his book, ‘Leaders’: “The would-be leader without the judgement or perception to make the right decisions fails for lack of vision. The one who knows the right thing but cannot achieve it fails because he is ineffectual. The great leader needs both the vision and the capacity to achieve what is right. He hires managers to help him do so, but only he can set the direction and provide the motive force.” Going further to describe management as prose, and leadership as poetry, President Nixon adds, “The leader necessarily deals to a large extent in symbols, in images, and in the sort of galvanising idea that becomes a force of history…The manager thinks of today and tomorrow. The leader must think of the day after tomorrow. A manager represents a process. The leader represents a direction of history…”

    This column has always argued that a leader without a fiery and transcendent intellect cannot hope to achieve anything substantial or enduring. He must have a brilliant and  instinctive grasp of the complex and interwoven issues his country wrestles with, and a comprehensive appreciation of the other far-reaching issues shaping the world — indeed, an understanding of the spirit of the age. It is only then he can work on those issues and shape or reshape them to fit his vision. What ails Nigerian leaders is their debilitating inability to comprehend the intriguing and sometimes mystifying issues of the day, their lack of discipline, and often their inability to extricate themselves from the primordial issues with which they have become willingly entangled. In short, they have no sense of history, and no sense of where their country should be in the coming decades viz-a-viz other countries. This column posits that no one should attempt to lead a country without first engaging in a deep study of the forces and issues that shaped the character, policies and worldviews of Alexander the Great, Deng Xiaoping, Julius and Augustus Caesar, Winston Churchill, Genghis Khan and Charles de Gaulle, among many others.

    Two qualities are indispensable to a leader. One, the leader himself must possess that innate and intrinsic passion to affect deep and fundamental changes in the society, if not the world. To possess this attribute is to also prequalify himself intellectually and have the ability to appreciate and deconstruct complex issues almost effortlessly. Second, is the need to develop this great and essential attribute by equipping himself with wide-ranging studies of leaders throughout history. China’s Deng did not just happen upon the building blocks of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’, a mixture of ‘socialist ideology with pragmatic market economy’ by chance. Once he developed the idea, he was prepared to suffer for it, and in fact did.

    The point, however, is that whether it pertains to elected governments or military regimes, Nigeria has lacked leaders, not just the right leaders, all of them fifth-rate. When they are not megalomaniacal, they are demagogic. But nothing undermines a country’s destiny more than to be ruled by demagogues devoid of intellect. Consider one or two of Nigeria’s heads of state and presidents. After the death of Gen Sani Abacha, some military generals got together and without a vision of Nigeria and deep understanding of its future and how to guarantee and energise that future, decided to impose Olusegun Obasanjo on the country. The consequences of that imposition are evident in his misshapen policies, his anti-democratic and monarchical measures that saw him deposing governors and enthroning presidents at will, and his braggart attempt at self-perpetuation. His heedless approach to policy and governance, though far better than his successors’ and predecessors’, ensured that after him, Nigeria simply went back to the starting block, bruised, battered and disillusioned.

    Somehow, too, some Nigerian leaders of northern origin, though they espouse sham religiosity, have at various times worked to undermine Nigeria’s secularity, either by covertly pushing the country into the cauldron of religious politics and organisations of the Middle East, or by building a mosque in Aso Villa without a concomitant consideration for a Christian chapel. This column believes that neither a mosque nor a chapel should have been erected at the Villa. But once one was done, it was necessary to erect the other. (The leaders must hope that the day will never come when a shrine for traditional worshippers will be required). Shamefully, it has had to take a Christian president to erect a chapel, demonstrating the smallness of the minds of his predecessors and successors alike, and the disgusting exploitation and misuse of religion. The regime of religious discrimination in the North, mixed with lethal socio-economic factors, inevitably produced an incandescent brew of violence and conflicts that still rages in the region. Till today, short-sighted national and regional leaders still do not appreciate the cause and effect of the multiple religious upheavals convulsing the North and insidiously spreading to other parts of the country.

    If more than two millennial ago, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (c. 605 BC – c. 562 BC) could cast the net wide for the recruitment of the next generation of leaders and advisers for the empire, including inducting gifted slaves into the empire’s leadership cadre, it is shocking that President Muhammadu Buhari has constricted his leadership recruitment to his kinsmen, narrowed his definition of democracy, routinely subverted the constitution and the law in the name of desperate and urgent national causes, and fixed his government’s lodestar by a strange and simplistic dualism of good and evil, and wrong and right, which even his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, as bad as he was, had trouble embracing. That reprehensible dualism is today alienating a large section of the nation, from the Southeast which is groaning under obnoxious and oppressive measures inspired by Abuja, to the Middle Belt ravaged by herdsmen as the federal government pretends to some concerns, to the militarised states of the South-South which seem to draw the contempt of the federal government, and to the Southwest which is deliberately being divided in order to be ruled in the classical realpolitik sense.

    If Nigeria is to survive, and if democracy is to endure, the country needs to produce the right leaders in 2019. Not the kind of demagogic and supremacist leader Kaduna State projects in Governor Nasir el-Rufai, a man who has unwittingly divided his state along Fulani versus others, Christian versus Muslim, and Muslim sect versus Muslim sect. Given the way Mallam el-Rufai is governing his state, it is clear who he is and what he is capable of, not to talk of the content of his tunnel vision. Not President Buhari who inherited a distressed and mismanaged country suffocating under Dr Jonathan’s parochial and short-sighted measures and policies. Given the way the president has selected his aides, he has unfortunately only managed to widen the cracks, both religious and ethnic, and suggested disingenuously that he would have advanced much more rapidly had the constitution not erected impediments in his path. And not anyone Chief Obasanjo might anoint, for the self-centred ex-president himself has inchoate knowledge of what leadership is all about, and no idea what a wholesome and inspiring vision for the country should be.

    If Nigeria is to gain vibrancy, if divisions are to be healed, if true leadership is to be enthroned in place of paranoia and sectionalism, and if ethnic and religious strife is to be subjugated, Nigeria must carefully examine those who offer themselves for election in 2019. They must vote right. But can they? This column is unsure, for the Nigerian voter has not always demonstrated the detachment and wisdom necessary to put the right people in office, the kind of detachment that downplays ethnic and religious bigotry. So, then, the first challenge is for those who nurse 2019 ambitions to begin selling themselves and their ideas to the country’s six geopolitical zones, recruiting friends and supporters, and interacting with the business, political and religious elites from all parts of the country. They must demonstrate by learning, eloquence and vision that their conception of Nigeria is different from the archaic and schizoid one bandied about by past and present leaders. By personal discipline, character, intuition, intellect and overarching appreciation of the issues of the future and of the moment, not to talk of the demand of office, the would-be Nigerian leader must be able to conceptualise a country able to provide leadership in constitution and law for the rest of Africa, a country destined for prominence and preeminence.

    Above all, the aspiring leader must eschew the disgraceful subservience past Nigerian leaders demand from their subordinates, a subservience that makes aides, heads of institutions, including the security agencies, to measure performance in terms of how much they grovel before the president and please him, a subservience that puts premium on loyalty to the president than loyalty to the country and constitution. It reflects badly on a president when state security agencies attempt to bar or circumscribe discourse and dissent, when they simply ignore the constitutional provisions on fundamental rights and threaten and humiliate the opposition, when aides themselves read the lips and mind of the president before joining debates at executive meetings. There is an absolute need for a new grade and cadre of leadership, for on these hang the future of the country, not on economic policies or job statistics.

    To adopt the sentiment of President Nixon, Nigeria ‘requires leadership of the highest order.’ If in 2019 the country misses this great leadership, the real change and restructuring needed, the inspiring peep into the future without which the country will continue to grope and stumble, and the infusion of great men and women of character and self-confidence prepared to join hands with a truly democratic and far-sighted leader, will be lacking. It is not certain that getting leadership of the highest order can be postponed for much longer without paying a huge and unsustainable price. One thing is, however, certain: the status quo is no longer tenable and does not even make sense.

  • Magu: On the way to demystifying President Buhari

    Magu: On the way to demystifying President Buhari

    All he needs do is feed Magu to the hounds baying for his blood for no other reason than his stinging effectiveness at the agency

    About the only thing that can be chalked  up for President Muhammadu Buhari to date, besides his having considerably humbled Boko Haram, is the anti-corruption war on which a huge portion of his integrity , personal and corporate, is built;  despite the considerable number of people stigmatising  it as being  selective . Thanks  largely to Ibrahim Magu, the  EFCC Acting Chairman , who not only exhumed the agency  from its  grave-like ineffectiveness of the Farida Waziri years, but as a  focused, uncompromising and principled crime fighter,  has returned it to the lofty heights Nuhu Ribadu left it,  naming and shaming many of those now  baying for  his blood. But if one may ask, is it the thinking in some high government quarters that the EFCC is a Northern Nigeria colony to be populated, both at the directorate and operational levels, by only northerners? Not only are Ribadu, Waziri, Lamorde and Magu from a single part of the country, all the others now being canvassed to take over if they succeed in seeing Magu’s back – Alli, current Customs boss, Biu, or those who may be roused from slumber in their houses, as alleged by the First Lady in her BBC interview, are all from the north. Without a scintilla of doubt, not many Nigerians are likely to believe that this state of affairs could still be happening almost two years into President Buhari’s administration. It is most unfair that, as I showed in my article: What informed President Buhari’s Security Architecture?, (The Nation on Sunday, ) a  single part of the country has this total dominance of the country’s security  apparatti and the earlier President Buhari effects some drastic changes to reflect balance and equity, the better for his legacy. Incidentally, what we see playing out today in the Magu case is the direct consequence of the insularity of his kitchen cabinet which has resulted in turf wars amongst members angling for power and access. Most of these persons have been with him either directly on the field, or in spirit, since his political odyssey of well over a decade.

    It has been common knowledge for quite a while that two opposing groups within the president’s inner circle are at each other’s throats regarding whether or not Magu should be confirmed as chair of the EFCC. That the president could not even forward his name to senate months after his nomination must have been indicative of which group had the upper hand. This situation subsisted until the president went on leave and the vice president, as acting president, was reported to have transmitted Magu’s name to senate but, unfortunately, without ensuring that the nominee was pre-cleared by the security as should have been the case.  That lacuna is what the Magu enemies, and they are many, are now exploiting, completely unmindful of the ripple effects of their action on a President Buhari whose roaring international reputation rests solely on his anti-corruption standing. Not in recent history have we seen a Nigerian Head of State this respected by President and Secretary of the United States of America as well as Heads of State of many influential European countries.

     That the Senate, in its eagerness to rubbish a sworn enemy would not present to be as democratic as to allow Magu defend himself against whatever the spurious charges against him was not in any way surprising as it shows, in its deafening clarity, the animus some powerful forces in that chamber have always nursed against the no nonsense Magu about who even Ribadu, whose fear used to be the beginning of wisdom for the corrupt, had been very effusive in his praise. What we see in the senate is nothing short of corruption fighting back. In a decent or civilised society, half the number of former governors  in  that chamber would not be anywhere near it since they have corruption charges  hanging on their necks just like its president would be attending his trial at the CCT  as a former senator. Should it therefore lie within such a chamber to be making a pronouncement on a Magu whose head they preferred to shave in his absence? So certain is the Senate today that it is beginning to have the upper hand on the executive that since the president is doing everything to kill off budget padding, they have now proposed a bill, that has since passed the second reading, to appropriate 20 per cent of annual federal budget to constituency projects which they will personally implement so that what they were getting before illegally, they can now take through the front door.  I hope Nigerians now know that there is no political Messiah anywhere in this polity and that they will most probably remain virtual slaves unless they stand up to fight for themselves. It thus seems, essentially, that in Nigeria, the bulk no longer stops on the president’s table. Nauseating! Nigerians would one day have to storm that chamber former President Obasanjo has perspicaciously described as a den of unarmed robbers. It has come to that.

    It is not funny either that the president has chosen to refer this matter to the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, for investigation.  In the first place, the AGF’s intervention in the Kogi governorship electoral brouhaha was not particularly ennobling nor is his being a member of the president’s cabinet a matter for cheer. Worse, however, is the fact that it easily reminds one of those occasions when the late President Yar Adua referred matters of this nature to his National Security Adviser, a General Muktar. Not on a single occasion did Nigerians hear a whimper again about such matters. Muktar was the grave yard of any case referred to him for further investigation, a very sore one being the embarrassing manner INEC officials were bribed by the PDP in the 2010 governorship rerun election in Ekiti State. Had he not killed that matter, who knows whether we would have been spared the recent Rivers State electoral debauchery and beheadings. It has also been rumoured that Magu is tenaciously prosecuting some characters who the AGF did not as much as wish to be investigated at all. I doubt if that would make him a honest broker. The president should have handed the investigation over to a retired judge or a respected silk of unimpeachable integrity. It is not too late.

    Magu’s rumoured sins are legion. Amongst these: he is rumoured to have once insisted that the mother of a powerful legislator should personally come to his office to explain how she came about a huge sum of money. And within the president’s kitchen cabinet, the rumour is that he angered the more powerful caucus by hauling before the courts, a supposedly corrupt oil magnate they ordered him not to touch. The man’s offence is believed to include oil liftings not paid for, outright oil thefts and sundry illegal deals with a former oil minister now in total disgrace. It is no surprise too, that a former president of the Nigerian Bar Association has been shouting himself hoarse as to why Magu can no longer be confirmed. Given the EFCC’s shaming and naming of many senior lawyers in both the Malabu and Halliburton cases, I can only pity our man.

    Without a doubt, the war against corruption is President Buhari’s one unarguable success. But the president can very well help obliterate even that one. All he needs do is feed Magu to the hounds baying for his blood for no other reason than his stinging effectiveness at the agency. Once those hounds see Magu out, as is the practice, his enemies will quickly follow up by ousting from the agency, everybody who ever worked with Magu. Consequently, all on-going cases, whether at the stage of investigation or already in court would, ipso facto, be dead; files will develop legs and vamoose and where allowed to remain, at all, vital evidences would vaporise. Then the enemies of President Muhammadu Buhari, both internal and external, would have set in motion, the process of completely demystifying him to clear the way for their own 2019 ambitions.

  • Christmas in the time of Disunited Nations

    Christmas in the time of Disunited Nations

    It is Christmas morning. And what a year this outgoing 2016 is turning out to be? Innocent as it appeared in the beginning, and sweet and sugar-coated as it looks towards the very tail end, this year may well turn out to be one of those historic watersheds in the history of humanity. It was the year the impossible became the probable and the probable became the impossible. According to Sherlock Holmes, the great British detective, after you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains however improbable is the truth.

    How truth hurts! This was the year that a man called Donald Trump trumped both the American establishment and its electorate, wrong footing virtually everybody including Nobel laureates, cerebral celebrities and great historians, on his way to becoming the forty fifth president of the United States of America. Still hurting from the historic uppercut, Time magazine dubbed its own nation the Divided States of America.

    But not to worry. It is not only the Americans who have problems with the truth. Their colonial ancestors also do. This was the year of Brexit, when the Brits, after corralling the rest of the world into the nation-state paradigm, opted out of the European Union, a logical next step in the globalization of humanity. But the Scots and probably the Welsh would be having none of that. In a multi-national nation, self-determination is always a double-edged sword —— a development which has warmed the heart of several affronted nationalities boxed into colonial cages all over Africa. If you want out of a bigger union, others may want out even faster from the original imposition.

    This was the year the hell of Aleppo visited Moscow via Istanbul and the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey. Earlier the same year, Russia had helped to thwart a coup in Turkey through effective counter-American surveillance. Its agents had travelled overland to avoid detection by American listening devices. Stripped of its former plunk and economic buoyancy, Russia is reviving prospects of the return of the world to a bi-polar order with Donald Trump holding the trump card. America has elected an uppity and unpredictable novice to preside over its hegemonic misfortune. Talk of America wonder.

    All over the world, the nation-state paradigm appears embroiled in terminal crisis. The world is out of joints. Humanity is crying for a new mode of organization of global space as well as the management of human and natural resources. We are discovering to our peril that there is nothing sacrosanct or divinely ordained about the nation-state. It just happened to be the most viable method of organizing and structuring global space at a specific conjuncture of human history.

    As unforeseen global pathologies develop, that phase of human history now appears to be in terminal decline with terrifying and cataclysmic prospects as presaged in the human hell of Syria, the turmoil in Europe with the rise of fascist right-wing homophobic organizations, the political disorder of America and in many of the frazzled communities of Africa hobbled by poverty, biblical misery and various epidemics of dereliction.

    If gold can rust, what are baser metals supposed to do? The Republic of Congo and Burundi have descended into civil wars arising from the phenomenon of sit-tight rulers and the chaotic amalgam of pre-colonial nationalities. Yahya Jammeh is set to unleash mayhem on his fatherland. At the young and virile age of ninety two, Robert Mugabe has just been endorsed by his party for a fresh presidential term.

    Biya, Museveni, Kagame, Bashir and the old club of African strongmen seem to have been given a new lease of life. In Ghana the old Nkrumahist coalition, nurtured and sustained by the Rawlings revolution, but eventually mutating to a conservative, reactionary rally mouthing World Bank shibboleths, finally disintegrated before a determined assault spearheaded by old foes and intimate enemies.

    Nigeria did not disappoint, but neither does it inspire as the potential leader of Black Africa. Hobbled and stretched to snapping point by the worst economic crisis in its post-independence history, the entire country lies helpless and hapless, mercilessly drawn and daggered at the shrine of dysfunctional nationhood.

    Meanwhile, the economic implosion has shown itself to be no respecter of even the well-heeled. Tempers are flaring on the streets and nerves are frayed as the old middle class are welcomed back by the old underclass. The Boko Haram sect is effectively degraded but new centrifugal demons are on the rise: vicious herdsmen maim and murder at will; criminal gangs roam the major cities robbing with savage delight; ritual killers are on the prowl and kidnapping has now assumed a transnational efficiency. The Niger Delta is still on the boil depriving the nation of critical revenues needed to sustain minimal survival even as new separatist groups threaten the security of the country.

    President Buhari ought to be commended by the fair-minded for his hands on approach to questions of national security and the survival of the nation as one indivisible entity. Without his heavy-handed military-statist mind-set, it is arguable that the edifice would have long collapsed. But his performance in the economic and political theatres has been less than sterling. Ironically, it is this dereliction that is the gravest threat to national security as the economic and political war of all against all unfolds.

    Having insulated himself with an insular, polarizing and intellectually deficient kitchen cabinet which views the country from the distorted prism of ethnic, religious and regional particularities, it has been impossible for him to beam a powerful intellectual searchlight on the real problems confronting the nation.

    The cold warriors of old northern domination and the feudal hegemony of the First Republic and subsequent military despotism cannot see how far the country has come since then in terms of demographic shift in favour of the youths and changing national mood occasioned by changing political culture. General Buhari must be wondering what he has done to deserve the ill-mannered insults and savage excoriations from his compatriots. But if the government and its closet advisers do not open up to new realities of the nation in all its dynamic turbulence and turmoil, they face dire odds indeed.

    The gravest security threats to Nigeria are those who believe that a modern nation-state should be run and organized along the template of a feudal empire. They will have to contend with those nationals whose own cultural realities predispose them to a fierce, iconoclastic republicanism or eclectic modernization. There are lots of people hurting and looking for a fight out there.

    It will take a statesman of extraordinary political talents and penetrating intellectual gifts to forge a common national ground from these contending realities and mutually unintelligible cultural parameters. The only other option is an outright military conquest which forcibly suppresses all indigenous cultures, a prospect which will make contemporary Syria a paradise on earth.

    Yet it must be noted that in Nigeria, the failure of national integration is also leading to a failure of humanity and civilized conduct. There is a remorseless regression to primitive savagery in the nation. We say this with all sense of responsibility on a Christmas morning and the season of charity to all human-beings. Just take a look at the gory evidence in the papers and the social media.

    There is probably no other human community with this level of barely disguised hate and mutual loathing anywhere in the world. Why do we hate ourselves so much and yet appear at the church, the mosque and sites of traditional worship singing and dancing with rapture and razzmatazz? Colonial configuration of the nation might have exacerbated the problem but the enemy is within.

    All nations contend with various communities at different levels and stages of civilization but they do not consume themselves with the same savage enthusiasm as we are witnessing in Nigeria. Even in homogeneous communities, economic disparities and political differences often unleash the primitive savage lurking within.

    The Nigerian post-colonial state takes the lead in the mindless elimination of its own leading citizens. A country that has killed off four of its post-independence leaders and its only freely and fairest elected president cannot be a spring chicken when it comes to mindless bloodletting: Balewa, Ironsi, Mohammed, Abacha and Abiola. General Buhari himself was lucky to have survived a frenzied assassination bid.  Exactly fifteen years ago, Bola Ige, the nation’s chief law officer, was brutally dispatched in his bedroom. The killers are still at large.

    If we are to resurrect our departed icons murdered in cold blood, what an endless funeral procession of grief and misery it would be. Something tells one that to survive, Nigeria needs a complete make-over. We cannot continue to paper over cracks and dignify indignities. An exhaustive national dialogue appears inevitable at this point. Happy Christmas.

  • As we fulfill this year’s ritual of resolutions

    As we fulfill this year’s ritual of resolutions

    The governments—central and subnational—need citizens’ resolve to join hands with each level of government to get Nigeria on the path of political and economic progress.

    Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.—Oprah Winfrey
    Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘It will be happier.’—Alfred Lord Tennyson

    Not to disappoint my youthful readers who have asked for my views on 2016 Christmas in a year of biting recession, I will comment on making resolutions for the New Year, rather than on an important religious festival that requires insights of professional theologians some knowledge of economics. I will use my end-of-year piece to urge my readers to make resolutions that can make their rulers feel encouraged or compelled to do the right thing to improve their life chances, especially governments’ commitment to nation building for equality, equity, and justice.

    About two years ago, this page appealed to readers not to leave Nigeria out of their prayers for progress for individuals and the country, especially its polity and economy. There was no recession then, as petroleum was at the peak of its destiny as a cash cow that could pump enough money into the economy to excuse governments’ fiscal irresponsibility and infrastructure neglect. I am sure most of my readers voted for the regime of change now in power and whose fortune or misfortune it has been to clean the Augean Stables and at a time that recession has reduced by two-thirds the value of the naira in the pocket of each of us—big or small, elite or lowly, Christian or Muslim, Fulani or Yoruba. Nobody ever thought that it would be this soon to make New Year’s resolutions towards improving the wisdom of those governing us, after voting   into power the party we saw as having the promise to solve all of the country’s problems.

    During the days of Abacha, a Nigerian Juju musician released an album with the theme: Ijoba n se won to le se, omi lo po ju oka lo (the government is doing its best; it is just that water done pass gari). We cannot afford to be this ambivalent this time. The governments—central and subnational—need citizens’ resolve to join hands with each level of government to get Nigeria on the path of political and economic progress. Just as we do as individuals, let us urge those who rule us to make resolutions to do better in the New Year, since there seems to be no alternative for our dear country to realise its huge potential. Let us make a few resolutions that the space of this column can take.

    Resolution One: Let us stop begging our lawmakers to desist from allocating 20 per cent of the budget to dig boreholes in the rural areas to convince their constituents that they mean well for them. We should tell legislators in plain language that our villages need treated water, such as people in South Africa, Cote d’Ivoire, Botswana, etc., get in abundance once they pay the monthly charges. Let your lawmakers know that in countries blessed with leaders having consideration for younger generations, policies about water supply are influenced by principles of environmentally sustainable development. Plead with the executives not to give in to demands by legislators to become borehole contractors, warning further that too many boreholes in the country can wipe out the lives of millions of citizens should the boreholes later induce earthquakes. Choose not to keep silent in the face of irresponsible governance. Building boreholes by the legislature or the executive is a sign of irresponsible quick-fix solutions. It is already common knowledge that our country has the largest number of boreholes and generators, all enemies of the environment.

    Resolution Two: Call on your pastors, prophets, imams and marabouts to stop scheming about how to eclipse the secularity of the Nigerian State. Calling for Sharia or Ecclesiastic jurisprudence is an excuse to further divide Nigerians. The law that was used to create Nigeria from various nationalities, cultures, and political systems was neither Sharia nor Ecclesiastical. The country has witnessed enough to know that sectarian conflicts do more damage than good for a country—monolingual or multilingual. From what is happening around the globe including in Nigeria, any effort by one religious group to dominate another or harass adherents of other faiths on the excuse of inevitability of universalising principles of the religion of one is fraught with danger for all. Tell your lawmakers, the president, and governors that Nigeria has too many problems already without adding new sectarian ones to the list.

    Resolution Three: Call on your lawmakers to look at old laws, especially those that started as decrees under military dictatorship and review them with the aim of discarding those that have outlived their usefulness or making them comply with demands of the time. Many young citizens in the National Youth Service Corps have become victims of many crises in the country. Many have been killed or maimed by Boko Haram terrorists, many had died assisting in the conduct of elections by INEC; some had lost their lives at the hands of religious terrorists while others had died of infectious diseases during their service year. A letter to General Yakubu Gowon to thank him for introducing the NYSC scheme when he did will be in order from a cooperative of mothers and fathers for change. From all appearances, Nigerians from most walks of life apart from the political market for power are sufficiently united. The average Yoruba or Igbo buys Suya from Hausa or Fulani butchers just as the Fulani buys used motor parts from Igbo traders without feeling uncomfortable. Continuing with NYSC in the name of unity is not cost effective, more so now that every kobo should count. If rulers obsess over NYSC, they should transform it to an adult scheme for the least united demographic group in the country: politicians. Under its new form, those in power or planning to seek power should undergo one-year sensitivity training on ethnic, cultural, and religious otherness before being allowed to run for elections or nominated for political appointments.

    Resolution Four: Civil society organisations (not those that depend on funding from abroad) should appeal to President Buhari to stop his image makers from repeating the story that it was Jonathan that caused the problems facing Nigeria today. Nigerians already know this, and this was why they did not vote for Jonathan for a second term. There is something called Noise in communication theory, something that may sound nice without adding any value to the message. This claim has served its purpose and can only be perceived as noise two years into the post-Jonathan presidency. Citizens already know that whatever Jonathan did while in power could not pass for innovation. He met a political culture that was already mature in corruption and was designed to import everything under the sun with revenue from petroleum, including petrol. All the generator companies in the country were already in place to make nonsense of efforts to generate and distribute power to citizens before Jonathan came on the scene. So were illegal foreign accounts owned by practicing and retired politicians—military and civilian.

    Resolution Five: The government closest to each citizen is the local government. Resolve to get engaged with this level in the new year, by organising friends to host your local government chair for an evening of Asun (goat barbecue). At this evening of hedonism, present your local government chair with a list of what he has done and not done with funds allocated or released to him by the governor of his state. Assure your LG chair that the 20 persons hosting him to Asun are members of an NGO funded by 10,000 local stakeholders who are bent on calling for international audit of his administration. This will free up time for the EFCC to pursue massive thieves of state. But make sure you organise over 1,000 members of the LG in the first quarter of the year to carry placards demanding an audit.

    Like all New Year’s resolutions, none of this will go far if you lack the will to make it happen. The governments may be well meaning but, as a Yoruba proverb says: “Nobody knows how to walk without his head from moving back and forth.  And like human beings, governments need to be assisted to make self-improvement resolutions. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (4) Religion and the occult economy: religiosity working in tandem with epic corruption

    Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (4) Religion and the occult economy: religiosity working in tandem with epic corruption

    Religion is the opium of the people; it is the soul of a soulless world. Karl Marx  Jesu ko gbowo/Jesu ko gbowo/Jesu ko gbowo lowo enikan/Halleluiah! [Jesus demands no money/Jesus demands no money/Jesus demands no money of anyone, halleluiah!] Lines from a popular anti-capitalist evangelical hymn.

    A few years ago, when a chieftain of the PDP who had been convicted for rank corruption came out of jail, a high-profile thanksgiving service was held in his honour at one of the most prestigious cathedrals in the city of Lagos. All the bigwigs of the then ruling party were present, as were socialites and prelates of the highest official and non-official pedigree. When news of the event hit the Nigerian public, all hell broke loose in outrage. The condemnation was so “universal” that Olusegun Obasanjo who had been at the event and, indeed, had read the lesson, publicly expressed his regret for having attended the service. If my memory serves me right, he went on to state that he had been tricked into attending the service. But try as hard as he could, Obasanjo could not erase from the public mind the thing that the event had powerfully animated for all who heard or read of it. What is this thing? It is the close and intimate association that most Nigerians perceive between wealth – particularly loot and pillage from public coffers – with religion. If this is the case, it would appear that our work in this last essay in our series is cut out for us. And so why don’t we simply declare that just as senior lawyers provide legal cover for those who get rich from looting our national assets and resources, so do senior clerics and prelates provide them with spiritual cover, thus making it easy for us to move ahead with full steam in this discussion? Unfortunately, things are not that easy and straightforward when it comes to religion and corruption in Nigeria, Buhari’s Nigeria. What does this mean?

    Dear reader, let us carefully consider the problem with the following proposition in which an equivalence is presumed between the judiciary and the clergy with regard to their separate and distinct relationships with corruption. Here is the proposition. If the judiciary makes it legally possible to loot the country’s assets and resources with impunity and in plain sight, we might add that the religious clergy makes it possible for the looters to find favour with God. That is what the high profile thanksgiving service for the convicted PDP chieftain was purported to have achieved. It is what the notorious case of a very well-known prelate who received tens of millions of naira stolen from the Sheraton Hotel in Lagos by one of its employees was supposed to have achieved: no matter how much, where and from whom you loot, you will find favour with God if you come to him.

    The problem with this proposition is that there is no equivalence between the two, none at all. To put the matter rather bluntly, there is a vast difference between, on the one hand, keeping looters not only from going to jail but also preventing the Nigerian state and people from recovering the loot and, on the other hand, finding divine favour with God. Of the many differences between the two, the most important for our discussion is the fact that the service that lawyers and judges provide for looters is codified, secular and measurable while the service rendered by the clergy is non-material, ineffable and infinitely resistant to ordinary logic, ethics and even pragmatics. Welcome to the imaginative universe of contemporary Nigerian religiosity, the spiritual and psychic abode of one of the most heartless and unrepentantly evil forms of corruption in the contemporary world!

    The alert reader would have noticed that I did not say “Nigerian religion” or “religion in Nigeria” in the immediately preceding sentence; I said “Nigerian religiosity”. This is quite deliberate. Linguistically speaking, the difference between “religion” and “religiosity” is like the difference between what is abstract and what is concrete, “religiosity” being the concrete forms and expressions that “religion” takes in any given local, national or regional community. More narrowly, religiosity is also used to describe expressions of religious belief that are so zealous, so excessive and often so hypocritical that they go far beyond recognizable norms throughout the world. On this premise, when Nigerians say that we are the most “religious” people on the planet, what they should instead be saying is that we are a nation and a people driven by a religiosity that has no equal on the planet. To this observation, add the fact that the line between “religion” and “religiosity” is not always clear and in fact often crisscross in confounding ways. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the subject of this series, mega-scale corruption. Permit me to carefully lay out the premises undergirding this central idea of the present discussion.

    It is now widely recognized that religion in the present epoch of global history has not only been commercialized beyond levels seen in all previous ages, but also that this commercialization of religion includes both milking the poor and “softening” them for exploitation and manipulation by ruthlessly opportunistic political elites. This generalized situation is best captured by the reciprocal link that now pervasively exists between “praying” and “preying”. Thus, for everybody but especially the poor, fasting, vigils, marathon prayer sessions all the time; simultaneously but only for the evangelists of wealth and opulence, there is the “preying” as they smile all the way to the banks. As a matter of fact, the operations are generally very sophisticated and are closely linked with the financial services industries of not only Nigeria and the West African sub-region but virtually the whole world. In other words, through this interpenetration of “praying” and “preying”, religion has simultaneously become a mode of doing business in the most ultra-modern, up-to-date manner in existence at the present time and an “occult economy” that radically defies rational logic and human-centered concerns and values. Unfortunately, we have space in the present discussion to capture both the outrage and the complexity of this state of affairs in only a couple of paragraphs.

    Since everywoman and everyman is equal before God, all or most of the people that flock to the churches and mosques to “pray”, either to consolidate what they (already) have or to get what they do not (yet) have come from all economic and social backgrounds. Thus, all the people, rich and poor, wealthy and in dire straits, are “praying”; all are supplicants and “clients” of the imams and prelates. As a consequence, there is so much “praying” going on, so much religiosity thriving everywhere in the land. New churches and mosques spring up much faster and in greater number than the factories and small and medium sized enterprises that open for business. Correspondingly, an infinitely greater number of man-hours are spent praying than working in productive employment since, as a matter of fact, the jobs seem always to be disappearing or are not opening quickly enough to absorb the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed. Moreover, no one can or is expected to complain about or resent the fact that churches and mosques are springing up everywhere or the fact that every day of the week and every hour of the day is now considered available for “praying”. The churches, the mosques, the prayer grounds and the “holy” spaces of spiritual retreat are bursting with record-breaking multitudes – that is all that counts. That, and the fact that the most successful churches and mosques are raking in monies at historically unprecedented levels.

    At a far more complex level, there is the growing and ever more decisive role of the miraculous – together with those deemed capable of harnessing its forces – in the political, economic, commercial and intellectual affairs of the nation. At the top of the grid are the men and women of God who command not only the attention but the devotion of all cadres of the political elites, from the head of state and executive state governors to ministers and chairmen and women of local authority administrations. Worthy of special note in this respect are the growing numbers of professors who are pastors and invest far more attention and energies to their spiritual calling than their professional intellectual obligations. As a matter of fact, this phenomenon itself that entails the capture of so many in our professoriate by this tidal wave of religiosity is a major problem that requires a series of essays in its own right. Seemingly innocuous but of great significance is the practice of naming and organizing business and commercial enterprises around religious themes, discourses and symbolism: “Amazing Grace Shopping Mall”; “God Is Great Pharmacy”; “Jesus Is King Hospital and Clinic”; “There Is No God But Allah Bakery”; “God of Suddenly Traders”; “Immaculate Conception Private Tutorial College”; “Prayer and Fasting Internet Café”. Why is there so much scamming, so much fraud, so much cheating in Nigerian business, politics and higher education in the very presence of this pervasive religiosity? Although this is a good question to ask, it is not the appropriate one to pose in the present context.

    I think it is more profitable in the present context – no pun intended! – to pose the sorts of questions that many ordinary Nigerians in their millions are beginning to pose with regard to the profoundly disturbing links between “praying” and “preying”. These are questions that reveal the crises of a religiosity that is inextricably tied with money-making on a colossal scale at a time of widespread poverty and hardship for the majority of the Nigerian talakawa masses. “Jesus demands no money/Jesus demands no money/Jesus demands no money of anyone, halleluiah!” So goes the second of the two epigraphs to this essay that comes from a powerful and popular hymnal critique of the extreme money-mindedness of contemporary Nigerian evangelical Christianity. Where does this critique come from?

    At the heart or the molten core of the occult economy of Nigerian religiosity is a growing rejection of the extreme idolatry of wealth, especially as manifested in the belief that supernatural forces that are good or evil can be, and are often invoked to either bring and sustain more wealth or avert poverty and hardship. For the most part, a great deal of the expressions and manifestations of this belief are benign: “God of Suddenly Traders”; “Prayer and Fasting Internet Café”. However, the occult economy also has its well-known extremely bizarre expressions, perhaps the most notorious of which is the trade in human body parts for the purpose of bringing or enhancing wealth by cultic ritualists and their clients among both the rich and the poor. Where do we place highly educated and influential prelates who, based on the belief that they have special access to the supernatural, have our political, economic, judicial and even academic elites in their pockets?

    “Religion is the opium of the people; it is the soul of a soulless world”. So goes the first epigraph to this essay. Concerning this famous quotation from Karl Marx, most people remember only the first, “opium” part, completely ignoring the second, “soul” or “conscience” part. Nowhere in the contemporary world has this second part been as completely buried as in Nigeria, Buhari’s Nigeria. In next week’s concluding essay in the series, we shall explore some ways in which we could begin to reinvent this forgotten tradition of religion with a humane, just and egalitarian conscience.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                          bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Ambode’s rice revolution

    Ambode’s rice revolution

    After a string of successes, LAKE Rice is a good way to end the year 

    Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State must have confounded many Lagosians with the superlative performance he has so far rendered this year. Not many gave him a chance at about this time last year, when he was barely six months in office. I recollect calling Steve Ayorinde, the state commissioner for information in November last year, to uniform him about an article on the online platform of a national newspaper which many people found offensive in that they considered it generous with praise for an administration that was ‘yet to take off’.

    Mercifully, the story is different today. The Ambode administration has indeed come a long way and made a lot of difference between this time last year and now. Even the governor’s critics in different political parties have little or no negative comments about his administration.

    For Governor Ambode, the arrival in the local market, last week, of LAKE Rice, a product of good thinking that came from the collaboration between the Lagos State government and its Kebbi State counterpart is a good way to end a very productive year. The ingenuity of the deal can be found even in the name of the rice – LAKE – which was formed from the first two letters of the names of the two states (Lagos and Kebbi). Yoruba elders say, if one’s daughter is good; one should say so, even though one is not going to marry her (t’omo eni ba dara, ka wi; ka fi s’aya ko). It takes an administrative maestro to dream such dream.

    The decision of the two state governments to partner on the rice deal deserves commendation. Rice, which many old Nigerians would readily admit was eaten, at best on Sundays by the rich, and usually at festive periods by many more Nigerians in those days, has suddenly become a staple in the country. It is the toast of the kids, particularly the female ones. They do not mind eating rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This is hardly a problem, except to nutritionists who would tell you it is not balanced diet. Beyond that, the snag is that much as we have developed an insatiable appetite for rice, we did not see the need to cultivate it in sufficient quantities. According to Rice Millers, Importers and Distributors Association of Nigeria (RiMIDAN), about 5.5 million tons of rice is required in the country per annum. But we could only produce about 3.4 million tons in 2015, thereby creating a production gap of at least 2.1 million tons. The result is that we have had to be importing from Thailand and other places to make up for the shortfall, losing about $1billion annually in the process.

    This is crazy in that rice is what we have comparative advantage to produce. As a matter of fact, it is something we should be exporting and earning foreign exchange from. Recent developments in the country have proved this point. In so short a time, we have been harvesting rice from some parts of the country like never before.

    But it is not many administrations that will see the lacuna in rice supply in the country when Ambode and his Kebbi State counterpart, Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, saw it and decided to take advantage of it for the benefit of their respective people in particular, and Nigerians in general.

    If the present momentum of rice production is sustained, it is only a matter of time for the country to get over its craze for imported rice. One major complaint against our local rice is the stones that usually compete with the grains for attention. So, we need to pay attention to the problems that made imported rice the toast of Nigerians by thoroughly de-stoning the local brands of rice. This should not be a problem these days with the appropriate technological tools to do that.

    Then we also have to prepare for the bumper harvests that we would be having if we are able to sustain the present momentum because a time would come when the problem will no longer be about the inadequacy of rice but its glut. Lest we forget, Dangote Rice is also in the offing, it is only a matter of time for Nigerians to get to the Promised Land in rice production. As we know, whatever Dangote intervenes in, it is usually mega-intervention. Yet, one of our musicians said Dangote o lori meji (Dangote does not have two heads)! Says who?

    The situation with rice should not be allowed to be like that of fruits, tomatoes and pepper, etc. most of which get spoilt due to lack of storage facilities.  One major way to ensure that the stream does not break is for government to buy up whatever excess is left from the farmers and keep in silos so as to encourage them to remain in the business.

    The Lagos-Kebbi deal is particularly refreshing in that the two states recognise each other’s strengths and weaknesses and did not allow these to deter them from their lofty dream. Lagos has the market for rice; in real terms, it has an estimated consumption of over 798,000 metric tonnes of milled rice per year which is equivalent to 15.96 million of 50kg bags, with a value of N135 billion per annum, according to Governor Ambode. Moreover, if there is anything like handshake across the Niger, the Lagos-Kebbi initiative is it. It shows that we can find unity even in our diversity. The point is that hunger does not know tribe or religion. A hungry man, whether in Kebbi or Ebonyi, Lagos or Bayelsa, will almost always react hungrily.

    One question that has been agitating my mind is: if rice is this easy to produce, why did it take forex shortage and recession to make us realise that we must return to the rice farms? Anyway, that might be a belated question because, right now, what we should be talking about more is how to get out of the rice trap. Nigeria is held down by many traps; rice trap is only one of them. Given our experience, we should be exiting those traps one after the other, especially now that we are faced with forex crunch.

    However, much as efforts are being made towards heeding President Muhammadu Buhari’s call for diversification of the economy, to wean it of its dependency on oil, the Federal Government must, in addition to our roads, pay attention to water and rail transportation to make such efforts succeed. In the same vein, since it takes two to tango, Governor Bagudu too deserves praise for agreeing to the initiative because if he had not, we might not be talking of LAKE Rice today. We should look forward to more of such beneficial collaborations across the divide in the country. Poverty is diminished when hunger is taken out of the way.

    …Ebonyi Rice, too

    I was on a short vacation early this month when Ebonyi State Commissioner for Information, Senator Emmanuel Onwe, visited our office to market, as it were, Ebonyi Rice. What is baffling is that Ebonyi Rice, unlike LAKE Rice, is not new. I got to know that in the course of my research into today’s topic because I had wanted to group both brands as new. Thus, I would have misled my readers into thinking it is also a new brand of rice. But I got to know it has been around when I was told it is the same ‘Abakaliki rice’ that some of us know but are not sure whether we see it as a better product than the imported parboiled rice. As a matter of fact, as far back as last year, the state government had donated about 1,000 bags of it to the Nigerian Army for onward sending to the troops fighting Boko Haram insurgents. It is against this background of its obscurity that one would appreciate the visit of the commissioner to the media to let more Nigerians know that something like that exists.

    Ebonyi Rice as well as other local rice brands need such exposure now more than ever before. I have eaten it and I must confess it tastes nice, far better than the rubbish we gobble from Thailand and those other places, some of which had been preserved with suspect chemicals five-to-six years before arriving our shores. That is when we are not being giving ‘plastic’ to eat in place of rice.

  • Cicero remembered

    To the lush and appealing ambience of the much refurbished and renovated Airport Hotel, Ikeja for the fifteenth anniversary lecture of late James Ajibola Idowu Ige, statesman, poet, orator, Yoruba patriot and Nigerian nationalist. Fondly called Cicero by numerous friends and admirers as a result of his vast erudition and oratorical talents, the Esa Oke born lawyer and classicist was one of the most gifted politicians that Nigeria has thrown up. It felt like the day before but it has been fifteen years since he was killed in his own house

    The event was ably chaired by Senator Shehu Sanni, the feisty and indefatigable Kaduna State senator fresh from the last slugfest with the governor of his State, the equally feisty and implacable Nasir el-Rufai. It is a tribute to the organisers of this memorial lecture, particularly the tireless and indefatigable chap called Awa Bamiji, that they have kept faith with the memory and legacy of the late Cicero.

    But while the hall thronged with activists, well-wishers, admirers, family members and the odd traditional ruler, many of the political associates of the late political grandmaster were nowhere to be found. Some of them would later complain that they were not reached by the organisers. Such is the hypocritical and opportunistic nature of contemporary politics in Nigeria. Since the departure of Ige, there are new power blocs in view and new kids on the block. Life must go on.

    The life of this political titan reminds us of how politics at its highest and most refined form is a thankless job in Nigeria. The penchant for wasting her best and brightest recalls one of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines: “As flies are to wanton boys, so are we to the gods. They kill us for their sports.” The Nigerian political gods have been eliminating the most talented Nigerians for the cruel sports of sustaining their political dominance.

    As speaker after speaker took to the floor expressing their outrage over the mounting cases of unresolved murders linked to the state, you get a feeling that this murderous impunity cannot go on for much longer. Lateef Fagbemi, who gave the memorial lecture, Festus Keyamo who delivered a robust and brilliant legal summation, were particularly outstanding in their presentation. So were Yemisi Ransome-Kuti, Barrister Esan from the old Bola Ige chambers and Odia Ofeimun.

    As the afternoon wore off, the most touching and uplifting moment came when a younger member of the Ige clan was asked to read from his celebrated book about growing up in the north of the country. Titled, Kaduna Boy, it is a tour de force of reminiscences, remembrances, penetrating observations and brilliant ruminations.

    But with his characteristic Cicero gait of immense self-assurance, the younger Ige was the cynosure of all eyes. So impressed was snooper that during the book presentation he had to ask Muyiwa, the architect son of Cicero, who the boy was only to be told that he was his (Muyiwa’s) son and Cicero’s grandson. Thus do noble men die only to leave versions of themselves behind. A new generation of Iges has arrived on the stage.  Cicero would be smiling in his grave.