IN four days, the tenure of the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Mahmud Mohammed, will end. That tenure began two years ago in November 2014 without any indication of the turmoil that would engulf and nearly consume it in the closing weeks of his tenure. Judicial insiders will remember how keenly the outgoing CJN defended judicial independence, guarding it against encroachment from the executive arm especially, almost to the point of seeming to be indifferent to the salient issues of corruption buffeting the judiciary. What the public may not know, however, is that even before the turmoil of the past few weeks, the CJN had laid the framework for a new ethical regime for the judiciary. But the framework came out only after the huge scandal that ensnared two Supreme Court justices, among some other judges, came into the open. Nor do most Nigerians, judges and lawyers know what transpired behind closed doors as the CJN battled the president over the latter’s attitude to the judiciary. Perhaps Justice Mohammed will tell his story much later.
By cruel fate, what many will remember Justice Mohammed’s tenure for is the dramatic manner seven judges became victims of what the secret service described in flowery language as a sting operation. In one dramatic moment, the Supreme Court, once revered by all, was dragged in the mud over allegations of crass commercialisation of justice. Those few dreadful days exposed the Supreme Court like never before, showing some of the justices to be poor in judgement and erudition. Those feverish days, too, showed that the judiciary had been left to rot for too long.
The 70-year-old Taraba State-born Justice Mohammed has kept a very dignified and quiet demeanour throughout the turbulent closing weeks of his tenure. He will continue to be respected for his fierce defence of the judiciary, especially the brave manner he stood up to a rampaging and indiscrete executive arm. But there is no doubt he is bowing out in a blaze of controversy, with his dream of a strong and ethical judiciary all but shattered, and his retirement blighted by regrets of a lost paradise. It is left to his successor, expectedly Justice Walter Nkanu Onnoghen, to pick up the pieces of a judiciary torn to shreds by internal failure, external humiliation and public distrust.
Category: Sunday
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CJN Mohammed departs in a blaze of controversy
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Win or lose, Trump sullies America’s reputation
WIN or lose, Donald Trump, candidate of the Republican Party in this year’s presidential election, will cast a long shadow over the global reputation of the United States of America. The erratic, brash and braggart billionaire businessman has affected the U.S. so deeply that the world is puzzled whether they ever knew that country as well as they thought or the media projected. Few gave Mr Trump any chance of blitzing his way through the Republican primaries. By a combination of bluster, invectives, nonconformism, clever deployment of disinformation, and sheer braggadocio, he did what many thought he couldn’t. He bested the opposition within the Republican Party and, as the perfect political iconoclast of this election, virtually took the party’s ideologues and apparatchiks to the cleaners. Should he win, the U.S., not to talk of his party, would be changed, possibly forever, in ways even Americans themselves would find astonishing.
Mr Trump’s progress has been phenomenal. He started as a rank outsider, and has remained and frolicked in that position. For much of the campaign, he alienated Republican leaders, defied the establishment whether in politics or business, scorned Washington, and provoked into fury key political demographics like women and minorities. Yet, his appeal has not only been sustained, it has even flourished. Until about two weeks ago, he was virtually fighting alone, and was trailing in the polls. Now he has shocked pundits by outperforming his Democratic Party opponent, Hillary Clinton, in proportion to the efforts, resources, personnel and support put into the race. In contrast, Mrs Clinton has had the entire Democratic Party machine behind her, the support of all living U.S. ex-presidents, a disproportionate number of former intelligence chiefs, the creme de la creme of the entertainment and sport industries, the intelligentsia, and nearly all world leaders minus Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Yet, the race is an astonishing dead heat.
But the 2016 presidential election is more a reflection of the real America than a barometer of the persons and values of the candidates. The two candidates are a study in stark contrast, so the choice of who to vote for ought not to be as complicated as the general impression of the two candidates’ repugnant manners. A vote for Mr Trump will be clearly an endorsement of divisiveness, hate and bigotry, and a nostalgic attempt to retain the political and cultural demographics of a bygone era. On the other hand, a vote for Mrs Clinton will be an endorsement of the steadying sameness of the conventional but stultifying politics that has dominated and shaped American life for a long time, and the paradoxical safety which that politics represents. The world probably wants that predictability and safety. But, apparently, a huge number of Americans long for something else: some sort of revolution, some sort of change, perhaps a beguiling insularity and nationalism.
It is, however, significant that at a time when increasingly unstable global politics needs a strong, perceptive and dependable U.S. to provide leadership, no matter how imperfect, the American voter appears to be inured to the shifting dynamics of an unstable unipolar world, an aggressive Russia attempting to rebuild a bipolar world, a fracturing Europe confused about the future, and much of the rest of the world agitated, unstable or impoverished. In short, world leadership may be up for grabs, and it is precisely at this inauspicious time that America is unsure which direction to head: Mr Trump’s eclecticism, erraticism and lack of profundity; or Mrs Clinton’s reflectiveness, depth and global perspective. That they find themselves in this quandary is a testament to the shifting tectonics of American politics which the winner will have to grapple with in the years to come. The outcome of that internal struggle, like next Tuesday’s election, is by no means certain. -
Dollar don cost and the mother of all stagflations
As the current recession bites harder turning former princes into paupers and the old Nigerian middle class into a beggarly rump, snooper,out of sheer panic and fear of economic annihilation, has developed a strange habit. It is called phantom shopping. Without any particular thing to buy, yours sincerely makes it a duty to do a round of several leading supermarkets just to see how things are holding up.
Needless to add that it has been depressing spectacle in the past few weeks. Prices of everything fluctuate wildly and without any apparent reason or rhyme. Often, the same item goes through several upward revisions within the course of one week. Such is the haste that new prices are often clumsily glued on old ones. It all reminds one of Weimar Republic before the Hitler Revolution. The universal refrain is that “dollar don cost ooo”.
Snooper put this question to an economist of note who should know.
“Why is it that even the price of vegetables has skyrocketed in the market?”snooper demanded.
“They need dollar to buy fertilisers”, the man retorted.
“And what about wild fruits growing freely in the forests?” snooper railed.
“They need dollar to fuel and repair the vehicles to transport them.” the man snapped.
“So why are they not paying us in dollar? “ snooper insisted.
“Ha, that is for labour to demand. Are you in America?” the man demanded.
Last weekend, snooper experienced the mother of all stagflations in an Ikeja supermarket when a packet of cigarillos hitherto marked at one thousand five hundred naira suddenly jumped to eight thousand. Even as a modestly and moderately paid lecturer three decades earlier, snooper could occasionally afford this. There must be a mistake somewhere, snooper thought as he pointed the attention of the Lebanese owner to the anomaly.
“Na him price, no mistake”, the affable rogue retorted.
“ I see”, snooper grunted.
“You see. One big man just buy ten now now”, the man crowed.
“I am not in that premier league yet”, snooper noted with heavy sarcasm.
“Ha baba, but many Nigerians dey premier league, we dey watch them everyday”, the scion of Maronite merchants drawled without any hint of irony. On that note, yours sincerely quickly excused himself. Dollar come finis dullard. It is called economic hara-kiri.
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What manner of men are Nigerian leaders?
If military governments, dominated mostly by Northerners couldn’t make it happen, what abracadabra would these civilians use to inflict a fulsome Sharia over all Nigerians, Christians and animists alike?
In thinking about how unlucky Nigeria has been with regards to its leadership, political and otherwise, I am easily reminded of her jealous British conquerors who, close to reluctantly granting her a flag independence, were reported to have sent a delegation to God to complain about how unfair He was to have so richly blessed the country with, not only abundant mineral resources, even in its very arid parts, but for also ensuring it has a near total absence of natural disasters. They were further reported to have pointed God’s attention to places like the Philippines which, with only some gold and copper, lose thousands of her citizens annually to typhoons and other natural disasters while Nigeria boasts of all kinds of minerals, amongst them, crude oil, though that was long before it turned to oil doom.To further convince God of their charge, they observed that He did not even spare the United States of America, which by the way, Americans themselves named after Him as ‘God’s own country’, with its plethora of disasters; an example being Hurricane Matthew, that dangerous and destructive Category 4 storm which recently devastated large swathes of Florida and the Carolinas after killing not less than 280 in poor Haiti. On, and on they were reportedly going until God smiled broadly at them and asked them to wait a minute. Declared the Almighty, according to the story: “but can’t you see the type of leaders I gave them”? On hearing this, and after doing a quick recap of the Nigerian story, the Brits were said to have apologised and departed heaven.
Apocryphal as it may sound, only a story like the above can rationally explain what Nigerians have been going through in the hands of its so-called leaders – both military and civilians, elected and rigged-in. They are now so giddy, after so rapaciously looting the entire Nigerian enterprise that as the following short stories will show, they could, very soon, calmly incinerate it in a major ethno-religious conflagration.
CURRENT ATTEMPTS TO EXPAND CRIMINAL ASPECTS OF THE SHARIA NATIONWIDE
Following the grotesque machinations of our ‘leaders’ in the House of Representatives – forget meanwhile about Hon Jibrin – the following Whatsapp message, heavily précis-ed for space purposes, is what is trending in respect of the above topic:
“Coverage of live proceedings of the House of Representatives as covered by NTA2 on 27th October,2016 revealed that the bill for the extension of the criminal aspects of Islamic Sharia law to be applied throughout the 36 states of Nigeria and the FCT passed the second reading today, and though there are many Christians in the House, the Speaker inclusive, not a single one of them raised an objection. According to the Speaker, the bill will now move to committee level where it will be discussed before the House would take a final decision. Though the 9 pm NTA Network News reported other proceedings of the House for that day, this one, like the Grazing Reserve bill before it, was completely blocked.
What this means is that the bill to amend the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to make provision for the full implementation of Sharia Criminal law in both the Federal and states’ legal system has passed the second reading in the House of Representatives and no one is telling Nigerians anything about it. It is a no brainer to say that with the number of Northern members in the House, passing the bill is already a fait accompli. It also shows that Speaker Dogara’s May, 2016 claim that the report was the handiwork of people suffering from a ‘crass ignorance’ of the legislative process, is pure bunkum. Indeed, Bishop Matthew Kukah warned against this subterranean move only this past week.
I need not do a rehash of all the efforts by the North to have this accomplished since the second Republic resulting, in the end, to the commonsensical agreement to have only the Sharia Personal Law allowed but certainly not the criminal aspects in the country’s constitution How, in seeking to make it applicable all over Nigeria, are these people different from Boko Haram elements whose chief motivating factor is to be ruled completely on the basis of the Sharia? Are these people, by any means, aware of countries like Lebanon, even Sudan which for decades have known no peace? If military governments, dominated mostly by Northerners couldn’t make it happen, what abracadabra would these civilians use to inflict a fulsome Sharia over all Nigerians, Christians and animists alike?
I sincerely hope that President Muhammadu Buhari, a patriot of no mean order, will quickly move in to rein in those in the House of Representatives who will think nothing of incinerating Nigeria. I need not repeat that we presently have more than enough problems on our hands with Boko Haram and those down in the creeks, avenging electoral defeat, both of which have aggravated our economic problems.
BISHOP MATTHEW KUKAH AND MAIKARFI PDP CHIEFTAINS VISIT EFCC DETAINEES
Not many Nigerians would be surprised that the topmost echelon of the beleaguered Senator Makarfi wing of a rudderless PDP, intent on drawing attention away from their self-inflicted problem in Ondo State – they are the ones who, originally, went to beg Senator Modu Sheriff to come to Macedonia to help them – this past week went visiting the latest batch of their members detained in the EFCC cell in Abuja. Were these people self -respecting, they should have waited till those they claim are being maliciously detained have proved their innocence before going to celebrate them, even if they had to wear Aso ebi like their Lagos cousins did a while ago for one of their prized assets in the Southwest. But if one can pardon their gaffe, being Nigerian politicians, how do you begin to rationally explain the visit of Matthew Kukah, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, to those being held on charges of partaking in the squandering of huge sums of money; funds specifically appropriated for equipping the Nigerian armed forces involved in a duel to the death with a Boko Haram army that was armed with highly sophisticated arms smuggled in from Libya and other Maghreb countries? Had the Bishop sought advice, his attention would most probably have been drawn to the tens of thousands of soldiers, women and children who lost their lives as a consequence of that heinous misapplication not to mention the over two million Internally Displaced Persons some of who are being casually sexually abused on top of many other difficulties they experience on a daily basis.
What he said on the occasion drew one of the best comments I have ever seen on contemporary political events. Writing on the Ekitipanupo web portal on the visit, a member recently commented: “Bishop Mathew Kukah may be right to assert that the incarceration of the trio of Rueben Abati, Femi Fani Kayode and Obanikoro is divinely ordained. Did the scriptures not say “behold I come quickly and my reward is with me; to recompense every man in accordance to his work”? Did the holy book not instruct us on the ways of the wicked and that “the way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble”. Do we therefore need further proof that their captivity is divine?
Apart from the above can we ask why Bishop Kukah chose to visit the trio? Are they the only people being detained? The answer, of course, is NO. Then, why these three? “God is patient, indeed, otherwise, there are some ‘men of God’ that God ought to have dealt with publicly and miraculously if only to serve as a warning to those that use His Holy Name profanely”
I can, however, surmise the reasons for the visit: given Bishop Kukah’s love for President Jonathan and the government he ran, one in which stealing was no corruption, not many Nigerians would be surprised that the bishop visited to solidarise with top guns of the ancien regime with whom he must have socialised during his trips to the Villa then. And by the way, what better method to cast in stone, that balderdash of the Buhari government’s anti-corruption war being a selective endeavour targeted at the opposition, than for a high profile clergy to visit some ‘selectively’ detained members of the opposition?
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Sacked? Don’t be stuck
With the global economic recession and technological disruption in professional practices, news of retrenchment, downsizing, rightsizing and whatever employers decide to call it, is very common these days.
That many employees are going to be separated from their jobs sooner or later is so certain giving the economic challenges companies are facing to sustain their operations. What employees are not sure of is when the inevitable decision will be taken and they will be asked to leave.
I was therefore not surprised when I heard of the news of the termination of the contracts of the employees of Royal Media Services (RMS), Kenya, involving a colleague, Terryanne Chebet, Citizen TV news anchor. The massive termination of appointments according to the company was due to the changes witnessed in the broadcasting industry.
Just some weeks back, I, Terryanne and other journalists from Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya participating in the ALI Media fellowship sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies were in New York discussing the future of the media in Africa.
It is really sad that a brilliant and experienced broadcaster who has just completed an international media fellowship will suddenly have her contract terminated for whatever reason. Just when the company and station’s audience should be benefiting from what she must have learnt from the fellowship, she has been asked to leave.
Terryanne is one of many employees worldwide who have been excused from the job they have diligently done for years due to the various disruptions the global economy is going through. Under the present circumstance, it doesn’t matter how good some workers are. They simply have to go to keep their company afloat. In some dire situations, some companies have had to shut down and send everyone packing without adequate severance package.
However, what gladdens my heart in Terryanne’s case, which is what I once wrote about in this column, is her ability to quickly recover from the shock of her sudden exit. With the present global recession, every employee must not to be taken by surprise when the inevitable happens. They must be ready to move on with their careers in whatever way they can instead of getting stuck.
Within days of leaving her former place of work, she got an opportunity to speak to entrepreneurs at Cytonn Foundation training as founder of Keyara Organics, a company started in 2014.
She spoke on personal branding and its essence in entrepreneurship at the programme organised by one of the biggest investment companies in Kenya. Terryanne’s Instagram’s post on the speaking opportunity captures the kind of attitude everyone who suddenly finds himself or herself out of paid employment.
“So refreshing to jump onto this train. I’m learning with great humility, that God does open other doors and I must be bold enough to find and knock on them. If you are where I am, don’t stay down… find a light and run towards it,” she wrote.
Like another Kenyan colleague said, when you find yourself at the cliff of life, like when you suddenly lose your job, you can either choose to fly or fall. The secret of surviving the present uncertain economic times is to be prepared for the worst case scenario – sack your employer or be prepared to be sacked.
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A tribalism of the hunter-gatherer age in the American elections – what could thispossibly mean?
Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. Walter Benjamin, German Marxist philosopher
Last week, I wrote in this column that until the end of the American presidential campaigns of 2016 next week on November 8, I would focus on the strange similarities that I have been noticingin these campaigns with the Nigerian presidential elections of 2015. This week, I am afraid thatI will have to widen my frame of comparison way before the campaigns of Jonathan and Buhari in 2015and go all the way back to the Nigerian regional and federal elections of 1964. In my opinion – and the opinions of many other commentators and historians of the period – the elections of that year in Nigeria rank above every other election before and since then as the worst, the most divisive, the most bitter and violent in our country’s political history.
Of course, the majority among the readers of this piece were either not yet born then. Of the relatively few that were already born,they were too young to have been in a position to retain the lasting memory of those portentous campaigns of 1964 that members of my generation carry with us to this day. All the same, such readers can perhaps get a sense of theextreme ugliness and nastiness of thecampaigns in that season of anomy in a declaration made on radio and television byChief Remi Fani-Kayode, aka “Fanny Power”, Deputy Premier of the Western Region, on the last day of campaigns before the day of the elections. Fani-Kayode was a charismatic but sinister strongman of politics who was generally known to deliberately cultivate and encourage public perception of his image as a fascist, malevolent politician. He was also the Deputy Leader of the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP, aka “Demo”), the ruling party in the Western region. Here is Fanny Power’s infamous declaration: “Bee se tiwa, bee si se tiwa, Demo a wole” (Whether you are for us or against us in your votes, Demo will win”).More than fifty years later and in the richest, most powerful and scientifically advanced nation on the planet, Donald Trump, his surrogates and diehard supporters have been saying and doing things worse than our own nefarious Fanny Power and his henchmen in those terrible days in Nigeria. What relevance does this observation have for the current campaign season in the United States?
I will answer this question completely unambiguously. The “victory” of Fani-Kayode and the NNDP and their allies in the 1964 elections were so bad for the country that our then young and fledgling democracy rapidly crashed, eventually leading to the military coup of January 1965 and the counter-coup of July that year and, ultimately, the Nigeria-Biafra civil war of 1967-70. If Donald Trump wins next week, it is of course highly unlikely that coups and another civil war will break out in America. However, it is highly probable that with a Trump victory next week, liberal democracy in the United States and perhaps in the entire Western world would have suffered its greatest threat from fascism and rampaging right-wing mob rule since the rise to power of Hitler, Mussolini and Francisco Franco in the 1930s and early 1940s in Western Europe. On what basis am I making this observation, this dire prediction?
Quite simply, my argument here rests on the following rather very straightforward though quite startling fact: the “tribalism” of Trump and his supporters comes from an age in human cultural evolution that goes back all the way to the transitional time between hunter-gatherers as the dominant social formation in all the regions of the world and the emergence of tribal societies based on agriculture. In contrast, the “tribalism” of Fanny Power and “Demo” in 1964 harked back to the internecine tribal wars in precolonial Nigeria of the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of years after the hunter-gatherer stage of evolutionary history. Moreover, it is pertinent to note here that Fanny Power, “Demo” and their allies in the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) were not the only tribalistic political agents and forces in Nigeria in the volatile electoral campaigns of 1964. Indeed, every single party and most politicians in Nigeria then openly used tribal mobilization as a means of either forming alliances throughout the country and/or consolidating dominance on the “home” front. The practice has continued to the present period; however, it is now deliberately and rather ostentatiously understated or even hidden. By contrast, in the early 1960s in the run-up to the 1964 elections, tribalism was all out in the open and rather very raw. S.L. Akintola, aka SLA, the “Demo” party leader, and Fanny Power, his deputy, were thus only the first among equals in the length to which they openly expressed and deployed raw, ethnic stereotypes as the staple of their electioneering campaigns. In other words, what most of the other political parties and politicians said covertly, away from the glare of newspaper headlines and radio and television broadcasts, Akintola and Fanny Power said openly and with maximum venom. Trump and his supporters have been doing the same thing throughout the current campaign season in America, but on a more unrestrained, even more grandiose scale in their militant and total promotion of the interests of what they perceive as the White tribe. What does this mean?
Please note, dear reader, that I did not say the interests of Whites in general in the immediately preceding sentence; I said, quite specifically, the White tribe. This is because not all Whites belong in the White tribe; indeed, going not by any statistical or census figures, but anecdotally, I would argue that the majority of Whites in America at this moment in history do not see themselves, and are not perceived by others, as White tribalists. As in all kinds of tribalism beyond the hunter-gatherer stage of human social and economic history, White tribalism is a construction and a project of tribalists who exclude from their ranks Whites who do see the world as they do. Note also, dear reader, that I am not using the terms “race” and”racism” in this discussion; I am using the terms “tribe” and “tribalism”.Without going too deeply into etymological nuances around these terms, let us simply say here that while “race” and “racism” are very widely used in America, “tribe” and “tribalism” are hardly ever encountered. This is nothing short of a grand irony because White tribalism and tribalists are abundantly in evidence in the American social and political landscape in groups that go by names and appellations such as White Aryan Resistance, The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, White League, White Order of Thule, and White Volksfront. For a long time now since the end of legal racial segregation in the United States, such groups have existed in the far-right margins of society and polity in America. Occasionally, they have bubbled up from the depths of their marginalization and made distinct appearances in the electoral rowdiness of the Republican Party. That is until the advent of Donald Trump as the official presidential candidate of the party which has seen them move from the margins to the centre. Permit me to briefly explain what this entails.
Apart from the extremity of his personal individual moral and temperamental flaws, the one thingabove all others with which Trump has astounded everybody in America is the openness with which he stirs up among Whites hatred, fear and phobia of Black people, foreigners, and Moslems. And women. And Whites who do not share his hatred and phobias. In this respect, it is almost impossible to separate the hatreds and phobias of the candidate from the hatreds and phobias of his surrogates and supporters: which is feeding and/or fueling the other? A quite needless question: the one feeds, and is in turn fed by the other. Indeed, this past week, at the debate among the shortlisted candidates for the open Senatorial seat in the state of Louisiana, Donald Duke, the notorious former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, claimed that people are wrong to say that he and others like him are thronging to the campaign of Donald Trump when, in Duke’s opinion, it was Trump whose presidential bid has been so astonishingly successful precisely because his campaign, in both its open and secret code words, has drawn a lot from White nationalists, i.e. “tribalists” like himself.On this account, “Make America Great Again”, that is the ultimate slogan of the Trump campaign is really a code term for “make America great as it was when it was dominated by Whites and for Whites”.
In bringing this piece to a conclusion, let us return to the “tribalism” of Akintola and Fanny Power in those fateful days of the 1964 elections in Nigeria. In some of the extremely vitriolic and abusive things that Trump now says about Hillary Clinton, I for one hear distinct echoes of what S. L. Akintola and his flamboyant deputy, Fanny Power, used to say about Obafemi Awolowo whom both men hated withgreat passion. Unquestionably, Awolowo saw himself as a Yoruba leader; but from that baseline and on the basis of a welfarist or social-democratic ideology, he went out in search of progressive alliances among other major and smaller ethnic groupsthroughout the country. Nothing annoyed and threatened SLA and Fanny Power more than Awolowo’s alliance with the NCNC which they saw exclusively as an Igbo-dominated political machine. SLA in particular coined and spouted unthinkably derisory things about Awolowo, Igbos and socialism, precisely in the same manner that Trump and his surrogates are saying unprintable things about Blacks, Mexicans, Moslems, women and socialists, things that can only be found in the verbal swamps of Facebook and Tweeters, things that prior to this electoral season in America, had never been openly said by a candidate running for the highest post in the land on the platform of one of the two major political parties.
In a way, it is an insult to the hunter-gatherer societies of the past to compare their “tribalism” with the “White tribalism” of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, circa 2016, CE. This is partly because, in a strict sociological sense, tribalism had not yet emerged at the hunter-gatherer stage of our social evolution as a species; it emerged after the great, epoch-changing agricultural revolutions in diverse regions of the world, together with the associated emergence of non-laboring chieftains and rulers at the top of the social hierarchy. I have deliberately but, I hope, productively “insulted” the hunter-gatherer societies of the past and the present by foisting on them a “tribalism” they did not and do not have, because I wanted to draw attention to and expose the extreme anomaly and anachronism of the reemergence, before our eyes, of White tribalism in America of the 21st century. I end with a prediction of what will happen next Tuesday on November 8, 2016, when Americans go to the polls to elect the country’s 45th President. Hillary Clinton will win. I am neither a prophet nor a soothsayer. I make this prediction on the basis of the following rational calculation: the only way that Trump can win is through the defeat of Clinton’s coalition that is made up of Whites who reject Trump’s tribalism, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Moslems and new immigrants. It is not an impossible challenge for the Trump team; only, it depends on Whites returning in overwhelming numbers to the long period when, in the name of White supremacy and segregation, White tribalism was both the law of the land and the social ethos of America in its formative years as a modern, democratic republic. I simply cannot see that happening next Tuesday. I may be wrong, but I most definitely hope not!
- Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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Not ready yet
Made-in-Nigeria campaign still a mirage
Nigerians have been told by successive administrations in the past four decades to embrace made-in-Nigeria goods. Yet, here we are, still battling to extricate ourselves from our lust for imported items. There is nothing under the sun that we do not import. We import toothpicks, needles, pins, lanterns, shoes, groundnut oil, rice, wheat, sugar, fish, furniture, wines, champagne, exotic cars, frozen turkey and chicken, name it!
But it is clear that most of our politicians and government officials who pontificate on the need for us to curb our insatiable appetite for imported goods themselves are only being hypocritical. For them, we should take a cue from what they say and not necessarily what they do. From their hair cream to their underwear, to the shoes, everything is imported. Yet, they keep telling the rest of us to buy made-in-Nigeria products. Even those of them who say Nehru, Lee Kuan Yew, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, etc. are their role models hardly live by the examples of these models.
Well, the Muhammadu Buhari government has started singing the same tune. In its own case, it seems to have no choice because we do not have enough foreign exchange to settle our import bills due to the fall in the price of crude oil, the country’s mainstay.
But just how hypocritical our leaders can be with regards to home-made goods can be found in two examples. One was that of a former Nigerian president who was said to be eating Kellogs Corn Flakes at a time he told Nigerians to buy Nigerian. What happened to Dangote Corn Flakes and other local brands? That is good only for the other Nigerians? Perhaps the more shocking is that of the few car manufacturing plants in the country that our leaders spurn their brands. Imagine this: Senate President Bukola Saraki had, while receiving a delegation from the Innoson Motor Manufacturing Company, Nnewi, led by Chief Innocent Chukwuma, the chairman and founder of the company, in his office in February, said all arms of government have a duty to ensure the success of indigenous manufacturers as a way of rebuilding the economy and putting Nigerian youth to work. Saraki added that government should use legislative actions and policy initiatives to protect the local industries as a deliberate way of reviving the economy.
“That is why this eighth Senate is determined to amend the Procurement Law to ensure that government agencies patronise Made-in-Nigeria products. I am sure the House of Representatives is in support of this. It is our joint responsibility to ensure that you succeed. If you are successful, a lot more small and medium scale enterprises will draw inspiration from you and they will become successful,” Saraki said. It was as if Mr Alfred Nwosu of Innoson Group read the senate president’s mind. He thanked Dr Saraki for granting the team audience within 48 hours that they contacted him and praised his views on made-in-Nigeria products, but added: “What we need is the support, encouragement and inspiration from decision makers like you.” This is the crux of the matter, for, when Dr Saraki was later to get vehicles for himself, his deputy and other senators, they did not get those vehicles from the local manufacturers. They imported them. So, who’s fooling whom?
May be the local vehicle manufacturers have to return to the drawing board and work towards adding bullet-proof cars and jeeps to whatever they are doing because most of our political leaders are now afraid of their shadows such that they cannot feel safe in conventional cars. They buy bullet-proof cars for themselves, their spouses, their first to the last child, their favourite pets and what have you! They all deserve tight security that only bullet-proof cars can provide. And this is understandable. Leaders who are expanding while the led are shrinking have every cause to be afraid, even when no one is pursuing them yet. Dr Saraki might have driven one of the Innoson cars during the firm’s team’s visit to his office, but if the cars are not bullet-proof, they can’t fly with the high and mighty. The conventional cars should be marketed to the other Nigerians who just need functional cars to move from one place to another, not to our distinguished senators!
But Dr Saraki is not alone; that is, by and large, the way most of our government officials and policy makers run the buy made-in-Nigeria campaign.
This time around, the Federal Government might have re-launched the made-in-Nigeria campaign; the military appears one institution that has imbibed the message, even more than the government itself. The Nigerian Army has placed orders for 50,000 shoes from local shoe makers in Aba, Abia State. It is a matter for regret that until now, and despite the pious statements by successive leaders that we should be patronising made-in-Nigeria products, our soldiers still depend on imported shoes. From what Abia State Governor Victor Ikpeazu disclosed, however, all that might be about to change. Other arms of the military, the police, even the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and other paramilitary agencies of government are soon to join the military in sourcing their boots locally. We can only imagine how much the country would be saving if all these institutions begin to get their boots and other accoutrements here at home. A few months back, the Nigerian Air Force signed a pact with the same Innoson for the supply of spare parts for its jets.
Clearly then, the problem is not necessarily with us but in our leadership. The problem is so obvious for even Dino Melaye, Kogi-born senator of the Federal Republic, to see. Melaye told his audience at Nasarawa State University while speaking on ‘The Way Forward Nigeria’ that the country’s leaders, including himself, have failed. Or, how else do we explain the case of a country that spends about a trillion naira annually on importation of food, especially, rice, wheat, sugar and fish. Prof. Baba Abubakar, Executive Secretary, Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria, ARCN, disclosed this at a sensitisation seminar on Genetically Modified Organisms, GMOs, and Agricultural Biotechnology, organised for staff of Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development by Biotechnology Development Agency, in collaboration with other OFAB and National Bio-safety Management Agency, in Abuja in August.
Without doubt, we have always known long before now that there is little that is wrong with the Nigerian character; many of them who have found their way out of the country have excelled in their fields of endeavour. Even when the average Nigerian is not doing well, it is usually because of failure of leadership. Look at the case of Dr Oluyinka Olutoye who has a date with President Barack Obama for the feat he recorded in medicine by delivering a baby born twice. Reports say Olutoye and Dr. Darrell Cass, his surgeon partner made the headlines after carrying out an operation on a 23-week-old baby suffering from a tumour known as sacrococcygeal teratoma. “The operation was successfully carried out and the baby was returned to his mother’s womb. Surprisingly, the baby healed and continued to grow until she was born again at 36 weeks.”
If Olutoye were to be in Nigeria, some government officials who are not known to have added any value to our lives despite being in government since thy kingdom come would have messed him up if he dared ask for tools to perform. Because Olutoye did the feat in a place where such efforts are recognised, even our own President Buhari has also expressed his readiness to host him. But, beyond this symbolic gesture, the president should be interested in how we can bring back these great Nigerians home to replicate some of the feats they are doing abroad at home. Indeed, this should be another chapter in the made-in-Nigeria campaign. The way we treat their contemporaries at home, and governments’ attitude to the development of our healthcare and other infrastructure will go a long way in whether we will succeed or fail in this mission.
But we must have learnt our lessons by now; that, beyond making speeches about buying made-in-Nigeria items, we must take practical steps to achieve the objective. It is tragic enough that we got this far with imported products, the greater tragedy would come if we fail to retrace our steps, especially if oil prices suddenly bounce back and, we return to our old habits. Nigeria is not the first country to experience what we are experiencing; the difference whether we will get out of it soon and permanently will be in our seriousness and resoluteness never to find ourselves in this mess again. We must return to the era when a particular brand of vehicle was prescribed for public officials if the made-in-Nigeria campaign is to succeed. For us too, it should be what we cannot produce, we do not need. Anyone who is too big to use Nigerian products has a choice to stay out of government.
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‘Cows without milk’: the urgency of knowledge over cultural economy (2)
Even when infrastructures for creation of a knowledge economy were built, emphasis was usually on political distribution of such infrastructure, rather than on its capacity to produce desired results.
In the first part of this article last week, we borrowed the phrase ‘Cows without milk’ from the Minister of Agriculture, to capture the contradictions in a national system that is underachieving, principally because it underperforms in areas crucial to the country’s existence or wellbeing. We argued that the insistence by policymakers at different levels to justify cattle grazing as a model for production of meat and milk for more than 170 million citizens is driven by a blind trust in the power of tradition, in contrast to successful models of animal production across the globe. We concluded the piece by calling for a national mindset that is ready to privilege elements of knowledge economy over preference for an economy driven by pre-colonial agricultural practice, thus asking for discontinuance with grazing of cattle and adoption of the ranch model. The concept of nourishing cows that cannot produce milk because of undernourishment is also being used in this piece to examine the consequences of resistance to change in respect of the most important foundation for creation of a knowledge economy.
More specifically, today’s column focuses on the need by those charged with governance of Africa’s largest country to make adequate efforts to provide the right conditions for development of a knowledge economy. For a very long time, the country’s polity and economy have been driven by cultural preference(s). If it was not the need for one cultural group to dominate the rest, it was the need for elite members of various cultural groups to compete over amassing wealth at the expense of the country. Even when infrastructures for creation of a knowledge economy were built, emphasis was usually on political distribution of such infrastructure, rather than on its capacity to produce desired results. In most cases, such foundations are incapable of producing desired outcomes. Explanations for such failure usually provided by policymakers and minders have been that the governments are doing their best, given limited funds available to them. But one year of consistent exposure of cases of corruption by people in government just in the last few years has demonstrated that it was desire for self-enrichment at the expense of the people, rather than inadequate revenue, that has prevented rulers from making the right investment in building proper infrastructure for national development through the power of knowledge.
The consequence of this approach to governance is that countries with which Nigeria obtained independence around the same time: Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and United Arab Emirate, just name a few, are today countries Nigeria looks up to as superiors and to which it runs to seek investors. Now that oil, the commodity that made development efforts irrelevant to the country’s political leaders and corruption, the consequence of a polity driven by rent collection is experiencing loss of revenue, there is need for governments to think outside the box in a consistent manner in order to move the country towards becoming a knowledge economy.
By knowledge economy, we mean more than the popular usage of the concept to represent advances in communication technology, especially the capacity of the internet to transmit information at a phenomenal speed. We mean production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to a speedy pace of scientific and technological advance and the capacity of such advancement to eclipse older and less efficient productive methods. The most important component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capacities and outputs than on physical exertion and inputs including depending on sheer existence of natural resources. In other words, knowledge economy refers to creating structures and conditions for increasing productivity and facilitating production of goods and services needed for human beings to thrive.
The basic infrastructure for creating scientific, technological, and entrepreneurial or managerial expertise to achieve such increase in productivity is education. Although the policy-related rhetoric of the current government repeats some of the rhetoric of previous governments on the way forward for the country, the attitude of the federal government to corruption and freeing state resources in the pockets of looters suggests more desire for real change than in the past. Although universities are the key drivers of the knowledge economy in other parts of the world, bringing into being creative individuals that can produce a knowledge economy is much larger than creation and proliferation of universities. In fact, such possibility starts with pre-school or early childhood education, which is largely ignored in the country’s practice of public education.
One right step has already been made by the current government in respect of public education: commitment to provide free meals for primary school children. But a similar commitment needs to be given to funding of pre-school education for children between three and five years of age. Research is already indicating that investment in three years of early childhood education may bring more benefits than three years of free tuition in universities for such children. All the countries that dominate the globe’s knowledge economy today invest not less than average of 18% of their annual budget on education that includes provision of pre-school education. In addition, current primary/secondary curriculum that replaces the one inherited from colonial times has been poorly implemented to the extent that very little visible progress has been gained from the 6-3-3-4 system. The emphasis on comprehensive education that was to define the new curriculum disappeared without being noticed or mourned by anybody. Our country was rolled back to the examination-driven system that emphasises credentialing more than creative learning. Consequently, under-performance of the education sector has been reduced to the number of children who obtain five credits in WAEC or NECO. Instructively, some educational psychologists have been drawing attention to the difference between cause and effect of any problem.
For Nigeria to move beyond just living off oil rents, it certainly needs to diversify its economy, as President Buhari has said repeatedly. Such diversification requires a new focus on education at all levels. High quality teaching, provision of right conditions for learning, and substantial investment in research are crucial to a country that sets out to diversify its economy. Adopting a system that emphasises research should be an abiding aspect of all forms of policymaking. For too long, our civil service has lost enthusiasm about its function as an institution to deliver public service, largely because it had been for decades in the grips of political administrations that gave more value to self-enrichment from the public purse than to delivery of public good. Similarly, the country’s university system has been underfunded by administrations that pleaded lack of funds and yet produced billionaires who looted the nation’s treasury, as we have been made to see in the number of people seeking injunctions in court on charges of corruption.
The Buhari government must move away from the model of governing the country from reports of hurriedly organised summits, seminars, workshops, etc. Reviewing the country’s education and other areas of the country’s life needs more than three-day summit of so-called stakeholders. Such effort requires research by experts in our higher institutions and from other countries, to determine what needs to be done to change the culture of learning in the country. Compared to other countries at similar level of development, Nigeria is the least prepared to create a knowledge economy and yet the one with the greatest potential to do so.
At present, Nigeria has fewer bookshops and libraries per population than any other country that I know. The kind of literacy that can lead to production of creative individuals cannot come from the few existing libraries and from the attitude to reading by young people in the country. Most of what is read in the 12 years of schooling are textbooks. Curriculum review must not be driven by political agenda but by the desire to create an autonomous education system that can enhance creative learning at all levels. In other words, this is the right time for the governments to provide leadership for a new society and polity. But such leadership should not derive legitimacy from tradition but from full knowledge of issues at stake. We have to feed our cows well so that they can give us the milk we need to grow.
– Concluded
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Segun Oni’s blather
IF there is any doubt what the President Muhammadu Buhari thinks of his leadership style in relation to the rule of law and the war against corruption, Segun Oni, Deputy National Chairman (South) of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), dispels it. As a top leader of the party, he should know the goings-on in the party. More, he seems absolutely convinced of the rightness of their cause and the appropriateness of their methods. In his view, which he expressed enthusiastically to the press in Abuja recently, the rule of law is not only an inconvenience, it is also a hindrance that must be tinkered with or disposed of for a while.
His view, which will be examined below, tallies with that of the president himself, and it is a view that is gaining alarming currency in the government, especially among key agencies and ministries such as the Department of State Service (DSS), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and unusually the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF). It is also a view that is long-standing with the president and scarily coterminous with his 1984 view on the press. What is becoming clear is that the government is persuaded about jettisoning the rule of law for a time in order to give fillip to the anti-graft war. How to bury the rule of law for a season is their main worry. They have convinced themselves that the corruption war cannot be fought within the constricting ambit of the rule of law, and have thus begun a desultory attack on it as well as a selective and narrow deployment of its probosces.
The Buhari presidency senses that the tide of public opinion appears to have turned in their favour, and are therefore minded to take the extraordinary measures needed to project their forceful approach of sweeping the Augean stables. Already, their opponents and critics are being selectively hounded, and security agents have brushed aside protests and squeamishness from certain quarters to enforce their own interpretation of the law. Insidiously, the judiciary, which has admittedly affronted public trust for years, is being gradually made amenable to the government’s whims even as the nation watches the spectacle of haughty government officials characterising President Buhari’s administrative style as incontestably unique.
Mr Oni, a former Ekiti State governor, is even more open and assertive in declaring that the federal government is left with no other option but to brush aside the rule of law for a time. The rule of law, he declares magisterially, is inadequate for the tough demands of the moment. But he declines to say how long the suspension would last. Hear him: “If the rule of law is left to be what it is, nothing will be happening. If you leave this war in the hand of people who would not be able to prosecute it, it means we give up and God forbid that we should fail. People are talking about rule of law and so on. How much have we achieved by rule of law? Are they saying there is no corruption? If there is corruption, what has been achieved in terms of stopping it? Or we should now say we cannot stop it? Then we should institutionalise it. At one stage, there must be a stop. In Rawlings’ Ghana, he applied certain measures. God forbid that in Nigeria. Maybe we should leave things until people get so frustrated and resort to self-help. Things cannot continue the way they are because everybody knows the corrupt people, but everybody is keeping their voices low even when they know corrupt people.
“Don’t lawyers know corrupt judges? Don’t judges also know corrupt judges? If the system within the judiciary is unable to deal with this, so nobody should talk? People would get so frustrated that the people out there would come out in arms against the whole system and God forbid that. So, what we are trying to do now is to prevent the collapse of the whole system and people taking laws into their hands. If the National Judicial Council (NJC) had been able to deal with the issue of corruption decisively in such a way that people are very confident, I am sure this would probably not be necessary. But not much has been done and people are frustrated. The whole system is complaining; people are complaining. I want to see how Nigerian judges or lawyers could raise their hands and say, there is no corruption.
“Nobody has defended the system so far. Even the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) has not defended the system and say there is no corruption. What people are talking about is how we are going about it. Let them come up with alternative ways of achieving that. Once they tell us, we assure you we will fish out all corrupt people out of this system within six months. Give us this time, then there would be no need for any extra measures. But if we don’t have such assurance from anywhere, we have to continue to do what we believe is the right way to go about it. This is an extra-ordinary circumstance and people should see it as such. From the reaction so far, I think that people are happy that we are taking the fight to the doorstep of corruption.”
But is it really true that the anti-corruption war is incompatible with the rule of law? Only the Buhari presidency and its host of eager sycophants believe that nonsense. The first thing this coterie did was to frame the narrative in such a way that the corruption war and the rule of law are seen to be mutually exclusive. Pursuant to this unimaginative and narrow-minded view, those who warn of the consequences of flouting the rule of law are cast as opponents of the war. This is sheer disingenuousness. Mr Oni sheepishly and cynically asks how the rule of law can be reconciled with the anti-corruption war. Had he been a democrat in word or deed, the answer would not be as mystifying as he lets on.
The impression that Mr Oni and the Buhari presidency give is of a government that is at once distrustful of the rubrics of democracy and incapable of thinking its way through what their imaginations have erected as constitutional barriers to the anti-graft war. Democracy is a rigorous concept that needs discipline to practice, even when that discipline costs its adherents private and public benefits, including broken hearts, bruised egos and forfeited material objectives. For many African leaders, nay Third World leaders, there is nothing as frustrating as the often slow grind and imperious, lumbering rules and methods necessary to sustain democracy, when other quick and more immensely satisfying measures are cheaply available. Though Mr Oni is not the first top APC leader or anyone connected with the Buhari presidency to mention the Ghanaian example with romantic fondness, it is nonetheless very troubling that he is beguiled by the brutal and ultimately questionable method Jerry Rawlings embraced in ‘sanitising’ Ghanaian society.
It is urgent to raise a standard against such brutal methods, for the Buhari presidency, DSS, EFCC, AGF and now APC leaders, not to say many other Nigerians, are calling for the diminution of the rule of law and the enthronement of the rule of man, supposedly for a short time. It is not clear how they hope to get that harebrained idea passed into law, or why they repose so much confidence in President Buhari’s judgement. Will the scheme pass through a National Assembly that is already thoroughly frazzled by the immense extra-constitutional powers being wielded by the president? Or do its proponents hope to intimidate all the other arms of government to limit or abandon their opposition to the presidency’s obssession with self-help? Or perhaps, as the presidency continues to shrink the frontiers of the rule of law, and as he meets with the hosannas of an unquestioning but approving public, it proposes to incrementally chip away at the freedoms of the people. Whatever plans they are toying with, it is evident that somehow, the government will embrace the circumvention of the constitution in the anti-graft war if officials suspect they can get away with their stratagems.
It will hardly matter to the proponents of the daring measure, including the unreflective Mr Oni himself, that once the plot is actualised, it will be impossible to restrain those who might hijack or misuse it. It is all the more insulting for the former Ekiti State governor to insinuate that other than a temporary suspension of the rule of law, there is no other way to fight the war, or that if there is one which he sarcastically says he is not aware of, the public should disclose it. But they took an oath to protect and defend the constitution. If they can no longer guarantee fidelity to the constitution, they should relinquish office. Nigeria will not be blackmailed. For the umpteenth time, this column will reiterate to a government that bluntly refuses to listen or consider alternative options that corruption is a systemic problem that cannot be fought in fits and starts or by draconian and unmethodical style. How on earth is a completely broken down vehicle, to which Nigeria is likened by popular acclaim, repaired? Simply by replacing one tyre?
It is not only the entire criminal justice system that is broken, though the government often acts as if only a part of it is, the present economic, social and political structures are also completely and perversely broken. Worse, because they are absolutely and unmistakably intertwined — and this point must be emphasised over and over again — the government needs a holistic re-engineering of the system to fix the malaise. Damn the talk of force, and damn the idea of the suspension of the rule of law. The problem Nigeria is actually contending with is that there is little thinking and debate going on in government. Everybody is worked up and posturing. Everybody is reading the president’s lip and body language. And worse, there is hardly any genuine democrat in government, at least not in the APC nationally and in most of the states they govern.
Comparisons are odious, the English say, but it is a question of time before commentators begin to wonder in metaphors whether Egypt does not hold more fascination than the chimerical Promised Land the APC talks about tongue-in-cheek. For if they cannot wage a social crusade without mounting an assault on the constitution, how can they be trusted to inspire a Hammurabic code for Nigeria or restructure the polity without extinguishing life altogether. Readers of this column will remember that in endorsing Muhammadu Buhari for the presidency last year, it gave a qualified approval suggesting that he could be trusted with the country’s money, but not with its freedoms. It appears in retrospect that even that endorsement was lavish.
It is unlikely any student of history will not be alarmed by the All Progressives Congress (APC) government’s increasing desire for extra-legal measures to tackle what is believed to be Nigeria’s dire situation, especially the corruption malaise. Among many other examples, the historian will recall the terrible turmoil Germany experienced in the 1930s and how it was exploited by the Nazis to entrench fascism, of course with the ardent initial support of the business, political and military elites. He will recall that Germany groaned under the yoke of reparations consequent upon the Treaty of Versailles, general economic depression, and political impasse that was tending towards anarchy. The historian will also recall that by a careful mix of propaganda and stupendous economic revival, which some parts of the world hailed as the ‘Munich Miracle’, the Nazis rose to dominance and sustained that dominance by one of the most repressive propaganda, military and state police machineries ever. The lessons of history must not be lost on Nigeria.
Among legal practitioners, a group that ought to know better, the review of the Nigerian government’s ongoing war against corruption has been mixed. Focusing on certain aspects of the corruption war and farcically holding other factors constant, many legal minds have asked for the public to take an indulgent view, if not give total approbation, of the war. But some bold and circumspect others have been wary and have asked for extreme caution and restraint in the war, especially after the recent exposure of the brazen commercialisation of justice right up to the Supreme Court. In the media, the review has seemed to lean towards caution, but with some very vigorous exceptions who call for strong-arm tactics against what they describe as unyielding and highly-placed enemies of the state. The Buhari presidency itself has sometimes oscillated between extreme and strident measures one day and vague and reluctant concessions to the rule of law another day. But it has left no one in doubt where it generally leans.
This is no time to dilly-dally. Despite the blackmail suffered by those who denounce President Buhari’s brusque and militaristic style, it is time all men of goodwill stood up and emphasised to the government and its security agents and chorus men that birthing a new ethos could be done with aplomb by a careful calibration of measures that balance the preservation of the rule of law and democracy on the one hand, with a firm and unrelenting war against corruption and other malaises that undermine governance and progress on the other hand. It is simplistic to see these two main goals as mutually exclusive. They are not. If because of lack of depth they cannot find the paradigm that balances and accommodates these admirable goals, as Mr Oni has painfully shown by his diatribe against patriots, then they have no business remaining in office. Fortunately, the constitution leaves entry into office and exit quite enticingly open.