The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Depressing tales from Zaria judicial panel

    Just as the country was grappling with the horrifying stories of mass killings and mass burial following the December 12-14 clash in Zaria, Kaduna State, between soldiers and members of the Shiite sect, the United States Department of State has reportedly released a damning report of what it described as the unchecked brutality of Nigeria’s law enforcement and security agencies. At the same time, Amnesty International (AI)  was also yet to let up on pressure to get the Muhammadu Buhari government face up squarely to the 2014 massacre of hundreds of suspected Boko Haram insurgents, some of them believed to be innocent, near Maiduguri by Nigerian soldiers and militia. The Maiduguri incident is yet to receive the kind of official attention the Zaria clash is receiving. Overall, few question the appropriateness of the damning US report.

    In the case of the Zaria killings, government and religious officials have testified before the Justice Muhammad Lawal Garba judicial panel that 347 corpses were taken in two batches from the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital (156 corpses) and Nigerian Army Depot (191 corpses) and buried in a mass grave in the Mando area of Zaria. According to the officials — Secretary to the State Government, Balarabe Lawal, and Director General of the Kaduna State Interfaith Agency, Namadi Musa — the 347 corpses were given mass burial following a magistrate’s warrant. A surgeon at the hospital described how military men invaded the hospital, drove away staff from the mortuary, and carried out an operation hospital staff could not decipher.

    The panel is still sitting, and more stories from all sides to the conflict are expected. Though the Army at first suggested that only seven persons were killed during the clash, at the panel they indicated they had no idea what the casualty figure was. The Shiites are not represented at the inquiry, having withdrawn because of the continued detention of their leader, Sheikh Yaqoob el-Zakzaky, but perhaps enough facts and figures of what transpired on those bloody days may yet be revealed to help the panel reach a fair conclusion in consonance with its terms of reference. But it is noted that shortly after the clash, the federal and state governments appeared unwholesomely to have taken sides. Both President Muhammadu Buhari and Governor Nasir el-Rufai pointed at the unruliness of the Shiites, their defiance of the Chief of Army Staff’s convoy, and the aggravation they had caused in Zaria among their neighbours as justification for the soldiers’ heavy-handed intervention. They said nothing about why it had to take a massacre to curb the Shiites’ obstreperousness.

    No one can yet reach a conclusion about what transpired on those two or three bloody December days in Zaria last year. The panel must be encouraged to carry out its investigative task fearlessly and scrupulously. They must remember that the world has become a global village where nothing can be hidden for too long. As a serving judicial officer, Justice Garba has a reputation to uphold. He has no reason to pander to anyone’s whims: not the government, not the army, not the Shiites. Though this column had encouraged the Shiites to appear before the panel, Justice Garba should not let their absence influence his report.

    Already, the Shiites have lodged a petition before the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the Nigerian Army for crimes against humanity. Amnesty International has also taken interest in the killings. The Shiite excursion to the ICC is led by the non-profit United Kingdom-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) group, which is presenting the case of the Nigerian Shiites before the ICC. The civil society organisation, which had no access to official Kaduna State figures, had backed its presentation with facts suggesting that 216 of the Movement’s members were known to have been killed in the invasion, 219 were still in detention, and 480 were missing. Indeed, it now appears they even underestimated the number of people killed, implying that the situation is much worse than they believed.

    The testimonies before the Justice Garba panel have begun to go into the specifics of names involved in the Zaria tragedy, especially the mass burial. There can be no cover-up. If the panel wants to do a thorough job, it will be able to establish why a magistrate would give warrant for mass burial in the circumstances it did, which military officers and policemen participated in the mass burial, which officers gave the command to invade the Shiite headquarters, and which soldiers participated in the shootings. No matter how anyone looks at the Zaria killings, it is a thoroughly bad case that promises to cause a lot of upheavals in the nation’s political and security establishments.

    Though the panel has not ended sitting, and no one should be tempted to prejudge its conclusions, it must be observed that the failure of the Buhari presidency to quickly institute far-reaching changes in Nigeria’s security paradigm will encourage and reinforce the brutal and anachronistic methods of security and law enforcement in Nigeria, a culture now exposing the country to huge embarrassment everywhere and predisposing it to horrendous security practices and extrajudicial killings far worse than anything ever witnessed. The world is changing around Nigeria; it would be foolish of the country to remain ossified in the past.

  • Matters Miscellaneous

    Of course, I appreciate that the Speaker has tactically emasculated the reps through their standing orders, and Senate President Bukola Saraki through Senate committee appointments, they should know that the next election is not eternity – they will have to more than justify a re-election.

    No Nigerian, aged 25-30 years and can read newspapers, would ever forget that Professor Olatunji Dare it is, who owns the patent to the title of this article. He used it to great effect in his Guardian days, trying to catch a whiff of the ‘zillions’ of events, some of them macabre but most certainly outrageous, cascading daily in the country  especially during the long  military era, now aptly dubbed the years of the locust. We are obviously back to those days and given a group of unreflecting northern legislators who seem bent on bringing back those years of a repugnant Hausa-Fulani hegemony, Nigerians from other parts of the country must let them know that what we will not eat, we will not as much as sniff. Apparently buoyed by the return of a northerner as Head of State, I haven’t the slightest doubt they are out to demonstrate their usual arrogance once again. Hear what Hon. Abdulmumin Jibrin, Chairman, House Committee on Appropriation, told Nigerians on why the North-dominated leadership of the National Assembly threw out the one project that was sure to open up the deep South and create jobs for our educated, but unemployed, youth in their thousands: “It is true that there are projects allocated to my constituency just like other members did. Just because I’m the chairman of the appropriation committee, my constituents should not get projects? Are my constituents not Nigerians? “Every member has one project or the other in his constituency, so I don’t think I did anything wrong by having some projects in my constituency”. Their preferred projects, in place of the rail project, included such mundane state and local government projects that it is a surprise they forgot to include their ancestral shrines. They included such things as tricycles, town halls, classrooms; solar street lights, rehabilitation and construction of roads in Kiru/Bebeji, pedestrian bridges, boreholes etc. This 40 -year-old, PhD degree holder, who allocated a princely sum of N4.169 billion naira to his constituency from cancelling the Calabar-Lagos Rail project, should be asked how much his entire geo-political zone contributes to Nigeria’s GDP.  It is worse that Speaker Dogara, who ideally should give an example of even-handed leadership, allotted N3billion to his own constituency. Jibrin, the ethnic champion, did not stop there. Knowing that cancelling that rail project, while simultaneously increasing the allocation to a project in the North from N80B to N92Billion,  was a geo-political  conspiracy that had to be defended with the last drop of their blood, if necessary, The Guardian quoted him as sending out a text message  intended to rally his conniving troops. The text message allegedly read, inter alia: “to all Hon Chairmen and Deputy Chairmen of Standing Committees: As you are aware, we have transmitted details of budget 2016. After consultation with the leadership of both Chambers, the reports of all standing Committees were sustained in the details. Though all items submitted by Committees were retained, you will see additional inputs that were necessary to be accommodated via little cuts. You are therefore enjoined to be prepared to justify reports both in media and elsewhere; in case, the executive arm disagrees. We are already justifying your reports, but you must join in doing so, especially in the media…’ Now, if these people would do this to a project meant for the most productive parts of this country –South-South, with its oil and Lagos, accounting for more than 60 percent of Value Added Tax, to which the North contributes only a miniscule portion, what would they not do to other areas not known to bring that much to the table. It would have been great if this was done for love of their communities. But as Nigerians have come to know of our politicians, it is intended to cream off billions so that they too can build their own hilltop palaces.  If Yar Adua and Jonathan allowed it, Nigerians will be highly disappointed in President Buhari if this kleptomania continues in an era of change. Any threat of impeachment, as the Senate is beginning to do  through innuendos, they will have Nigerians to contend with.Increasingly, one gets the impression that Southern legislators have forgotten their primary purpose in the National Assembly, i.e to be the ears and eyes of their people. Of course, I appreciate that the Speaker has tactically emasculated the reps through their standing orders, and Senate President Bukola Saraki through Senate committee appointments, they should know that the next election is not eternity – they will have to more than justify a re-election.

    The above warning becomes more germane when Nigerians get to know of the so-called “ National Grazing Reserve Bill”, about which my friend of over half a century, the inimitable Tola Adeniyi,  wrote a sparkling article titled:’Grazing Bill an insult to Nigerians’, this past week.

    According to Tola, “the National Assembly is about to pass a Bill that is set to kill whatever is left of our so-called over-centralised federal System. The Bill, if passed, will be the greatest rape on our democracy and the biggest insult on our collective sensitivity as a people and as a country”. Continuing, he wrote: ”The Fulani National Grazing Reserve”, is presently before the National Assembly. The bill has successfully scaled through second reading in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. For it to become law is for it to pass through the third reading. “The bill seeks to provide for the establishment of national grazing reserves and stock routes. It is sponsored by Senator Zainab Kure. “It proposes to establish a National Grazing Reserve Commission (NGRC) for the country. The NGRC will be charged with the responsibility of using funds received from the Federal Government to forcefully acquire farmlands from Nigerians in all the 36 States of the country, develop same at government expense through the provision of bore holes, water reservoirs, etc; for the exclusive use of nomadic cattle rearers.  The issue here is very clear wrote Tola. Fulani Herdsmen are cattle farmers. They could as well keep their cattle in ranches. They could devise whatever means like their counterparts in Argentina, Australia and the rest of the civilized world to do their animal husbandry. The men and boys roaming the streets, roads and bushes driving cattle are not the owners of these animals. They are just employees. The owners of these cows like Generals Obasanjo, Nyako, Abdulsalami Abubakar and our president Buhari are big time farmers. They are businessmen. It is immoral to ask tax payers to finance the operations of these businesses. Cattle owners must provide capital through bank loans or whatever means to create their grazing lands in their localities…” Commenting on this elsewhere, I wrote, “If this bill passes, and we in the South sleep walk and allow it, then any Zainab Kure can wake up tomorrow and present a bill to the effect that Nigeria is an Islamic country”.

    What is more important, however, is that President Muhammadu Buhari must, post haste, let  Nigerians and the world know that he is no party to this seeming, aggressive but incipient  recrudescence and rehash of the dead and buried Hausa-Fulani hegemony of yore. One way of doing this, which the Zainab Kure in-your face ploy is not, and will never be, is to propose a meaningful way out of the Fulani herdsmen’s  needless killing of Nigerians in their own farms and homesteads.  Multi-millionaire Cattle owners, who are believed to provide them with arms more sophisticated than what our policemen carry, should provide the wherewithal to do their businesses and stop the  marauding  Fulani killers they have let loose all over Nigeria. It is worse that DSS operatives are now investigating those who killed 3 of them whereas they kill in hundreds, without a whimper from the security agencies.

    The DSS should be told that no Nigerian is superior to another.

    Far from being an ethnic bigot I can, at 70, proudly describe myself as a realist of the first order. We either have a country or we don’t. No part of this country should see the other as subservient to the other in anyway. Indeed, were it so, it would be the other way round. I would like to see a northerner who supported and publicised candidate Buhari more than I did. If there is any, I challenge him or her to let us come out with the facts.

     Enough is enough.

  • Saraki: end of a gambit

    Saraki: end of a gambit

    Not our dream Number Three Citizen 

    Senate President Bukola Saraki is fast becoming the proverbial tortoise of our time; with his name mentioned in every story ignoble, and his hand suspected to be too deep into the cookie jar. Right now, the country’s number three citizen has a date with the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), where he is to defend himself against allegations of false declaration of assets and fraud, having failed in his bid to nullify the trial, ostensibly on grounds that it was a breach of his fundamental human rights. Fundamental human rights my foot! Saraki had no basis going to the Federal High Court which ruled against him on Friday without even going to the merit of the case in the first place, since the Court of Appeal had already decided before Saraki’s voyage to the Federal High Court that he should face his trial at the CCT. One wonders why the court could not fine him for wasting its valuable time.

    Obviously, Dr Saraki has forgotten that times are changing. That was the same way many personalities in the country in the past evaded trial for crimes they committed, by using subterfuge and technicalities to frustrate the legal system, albeit with the active connivance of some people in the judiciary. Saraki could have had his way in the past, even if it meant the courts giving conflicting orders. Our big people don’t mind pulling down the roof over everybody’s head just to evade sanctions for their iniquitous ways. This is one of the very few countries where people will spend years in court arguing preliminary issues while the substantive matter is left to linger. This is one of the few countries where people will waste the court’s time arguing about technicalities instead of pleading guilty or not, to allow the court proceed from there. For God’s sake, how does appearance before the CCT, duly established by law to try Saraki’s kind of crime, amount to infringement of his fundamental human rights? The way our personalities lay claim to fundamental human rights, one is tempted to think it is their exclusive preserve because hardly do you see an ordinary citizen talk about such rights when arraigned.

    While we await Saraki’s speedy trial at the CCT, it is pertinent to mention that this is just one of the many troubles he has to contend with. As if to add salt to his injury, the Panama Papers scandal broke, right in the midst of the mess the number three citizen has put himself. This is one thing that tells me his time is up and his colleagues who probably have ‘obtained’ and are shamelessly rooting for him come rain come shine had better have a rethink, lest they be caught on the wrong side of the divide. I believe Saraki is merely bidding time as senate president because we had a similar experience in President Goodluck Jonathan’s time when his then Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, was enmeshed in the bullet-proof car scandal. At about the same time, a Ghanaian minister who was only dreaming of having one million dollars in her account was fired for not coming against such dream, at a time Dr Jonathan was still thinking about what to do to Oduah. She was eventually forced out of the cabinet after public pressure.

    According to the Panama Papers’ report, Saraki’s family has at least four assets tucked away in secret offshore territories, which the senate president did not declare to the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) as required by Nigerian laws, especially since he was said to have bought one of the property for three million pounds when he was Kwara State governor. These are damning allegations that must have compounded Dr Saraki’s woes, coming especially at this point in time.

    This is a scandal that has, in less than two weeks (it broke on April 3, 2016) already left casualties in some other countries. Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmumdur Gunnlaugsson, resigned his office barely two days after the scandal broke. Yet, his wife was the one directly involved; not himself, and he was not under any obligation to declare his wife’s assets. The man simply collapsed under the weight of public opinion. “He (Gunnlaugsson) told us to believe in Iceland,” Sigmundur Halldorsson, a 49-year-old Reykjavik-born Web developer, said by telephone. “But at the same time he decided Iceland wasn’t a very good place to keep his money.” Can you smell the ‘Nigerian flavour’ in this statement?

    Like Gunnlaugsson, there is no evidence yet to prove that British Prime Minister David Cameron has broken any British law. He said he had declared the properties bequeathed to him by his father and that he had duly paid taxes on them. Still, he has had to make four explanations in five days, just to convince his people of his innocence in the scandal. Also, Spain’s industry minister José Manuel Soria who resigned on Friday became the latest casualty of the Panama Papers data leak. Indeed, Soria resigned both his parliamentary seat and his post as minister of industry, energy and tourism in the country’s caretaker government. He also quit his role as regional president of the ruling centre-right Popular party in the Canary Islands, which he represented in parliament. Spain’s acting finance minister, Cristóbal Montoro, drove the message vividly home at a press conference several hours after Mr Soria’s resignation: “No one who’s operated in tax havens can be in the government”. Soria was himself remorseful; he said he had taken his decision to quit “considering the obvious damage that this situation is causing the government of Spain, the Popular party, my fellow activists and voters”. This was after what he termed “the lack of precise information about events that occurred more than 20 years ago”. In Dr Jonathan’s era, it would have been dismissed as a mere ‘family affair’!

    Is it not paradoxically shameful that it is about this time that Saraki’s ‘loyalists’ are digging in; looking for ways to subvert our legal process?  It is only in Nigeria that those named are too big and powerful for the government to squeal about.  It is just unfortunate that people cannot see when the time is up. There must be a purpose why the Panama Papers’ scandal broke at this point in time, and the senate president and his co-travellers would do well to begin to see the handwriting on the wall. Even if Saraki is the proverbial cat with nine lives; he must have exhausted all the lives by now, given the enormity of the scandals surrounding him and his name, now and ever before. The world may be about to see the inglorious end of a political dream, if not by legal means but by the sheer weight of the (im) moral burden. We cannot afford to carry on with a number three citizen with the kind of moral luggage that Dr Saraki logs. If this is the kind of senate we have, there is nothing wrong in asking Nigerians to troop to the place to flush out those who are buying and selling there. It is shameful. They should not get away with the satanic intension to amend either the CCB or the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) laws. We should give them the Iceland treatment if they insist on having their way.

    Dr Saraki’s antecedents are not particularly ennobling to make us comfortable with him as our number three citizen. Even the way he became senate president, to use Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s expression, had ‘K-leg’, with the intrigues and accompanying acrimony in the party that produced him. The police are even raising issues with the senate rules that produced him as senate president. It is becoming clear that those who backed him to the senate presidency had their mission; and that mission is anti-people as we are beginning to see, given their attempt to pull wool over the face of Nigerians with their mad rush to amend the two critical laws that could see their principal get justice fast; when all else had failed. This is desperation writ large; and that has defined Dr Saraki’s political ambition all these years. The brazen manner he and his co-travellers are going about it tells us that shame was out of stock when many of them were preparing to come to the world.

  • Lessons, as corruption fights back

    The complaints about Buhari’s travels; his slowness to take action; his unusual reticence about issues that require proper verification; his attempts to take loans to fund the 2016 budget; etc., may be acting like the character of Achebe’s fiction who finds refuge in cynicism, when what is needed is forthrightness 

    The people had become even more cynical than their leaders and were apathetic into the bargain….Let them eat, ‘was the people’s opinion…It may be your turn to eat tomorrow.—Chinua Achebe in A Man of the People

    Serious-minded people would have to be foolhardy or over sanguine to expect corruption not to fight back with vigour in a country that has luxuriated in venality for decades. There was no time to learn lessons from General Buhari’s war against corruption thirty years ago: he was quickly removed from the scene before he could gather his weapons to prosecute the war.  Now as a civilian president, who has sworn to make the fight against corruption the core of his manifesto, he and official and unofficial members of his army against corruption should start learning lessons from the ongoing war to protect the country’s commonwealth.

    One year is not too short for political officers, technocrats, and party leaders who believe that corruption is inimical to the progress of the society to know that President Buhari cannot fight this big war by himself. Some cynics are already saying that Buhari is a one-man army against corruption. It was understandable to attempt to fight corruption with one loyal assistant that Tunde Idiagbon was in 1984 under a military system. In a democratic system, the political and social environment allows for plural voices including the voice of those the regime of change has set out to discipline: venal men and women in political and bureaucratic power.

    Clearly, the forces against the war on corruption are strong and well organised to deflect attention from the importance of such war or pooh-pooh the efforts that go into the various battles so far. Many people calling for speed on the economic front are forgetting why the economy is in its current parlous state: looting of the treasury by those charged to protect it in the past. Those who use social media to give President Buhari such appellations as Baba Go-Slow, Deaf and Dumb, Johnnie Walker, etc., are more interested in distracting him from the real problem that had caused all the economic problems they want Buhari to solve in a jiffy. Almost invariably, most of such critics of Buhari speak on behalf of: a few people that may have looted the nation’s purse for personal use or to create overseas savings for their children. It is reassuring that Mr. President has chosen to ignore those critics; otherwise, he would not be able to achieve anything about fighting corruption, an area that is certain to make many politicians and civil servants who have benefited from the governance style of the past uncomfortable.

    Contrary to popular expectation in a government dominated by members of the party of change, there seem to be members of the ruling party who are ready to shout down those bent on expunging corruption from the country’s public service. Otherwise, the majority in both houses of the National Assembly should have created a better working condition for the president’s fight against enemies of the state who have pretended for long to be servants of the state.

    Ironically, there are ordinary citizens, like the ones captured in Achebe’s A Man of the People. In a fictive counterpart of Nigeria mired in political and bureaucratic corruption in its infancy in the 1960s, Achebe’s narrator, cautioned those calling for morality in public service: “Let them eat…It may be your turn to eat tomorrow.” The complaints about Buhari’s travels; his slowness to take action; his unusual reticence about issues that require proper verification; his attempts to take loans to fund the 2016 budget; etc., may be acting like the character of Achebe’s fiction who finds refuge in cynicism, when what is needed is forthrightness. The subtext to many of the complaints being heard about Buhari, including those from the main opposition party reads more like finding ways to demonise the main man behind the war against corruption.

    Despite efforts by opposition members and some misguided ruling party members to make the fight against corruption look like overkill, the president and agents of change in his ruling party should listen to public opinion on the imperative to wage the war against decades of bad governance that has brought the country to its knees to the point of having to look for loans to repair its economy. Citizens are getting the impression that the government is more interested in catching just agents of stupendous corruption. Without doubt, identifying, prosecuting, and punishing big men and women who, to borrow Achebe’s phrase in A Man of the People, “have stolen enough for the owner not to notice” will help to serve as deterrence to would-be corrupt men and women in our public service. But the war on corruption needs to be taken to areas where the amount looted may not be humongous enough to be given names with the suffix of gate, such as Dasukigate, Badehgate, Amosugate, Oronsayegate, etc.

    For example, in what looks like a minor crime: the existence of ghost workers, citizens need to be reassured that the mania of having ghosts at every level of government is given the attention it deserves. Discovering existence of ghost workers is not new in the polity. Every government since the return to civil rule had found ghosts in our MDAs and had announced the removal of such ghosts from the payroll. No government has been able to give the names of those involved in hiring and paying ghosts. It is remarkable that the new minister of finance has not wasted time in dealing with this menace. But citizens need to be assured that those responsible for hiring ghost workers, paying them, and even giving them tenure-track appointments are identified by name and position. It may not be possible to identify the ghosts themselves (since ghosts have no identity), but it should not be hard for the current government to identify those who receive the salaries paid into the bank accounts of ghosts and those who assisted in opening checking or saving accounts for ghosts and paying money into such accounts. Once identified, such people should be made to return the money paid into such illegal accounts, before arraigning them in what may be an interminable court process.

    Anti-corruption agents in all MDAs and federal institutions should pay attention to illegal use of public funds. I sent my assistant to buy me some roasted plantain a few days ago. The paper in which the Booli was wrapped contained information that should be of interest to those in the ruling party who are serious about stemming or ending corruption in public life. The wrapping paper contained important information about a federal college of education in the Southwest. It reads like minutes of the council of the college in question. The college had bought bags of rice at Christmas time many years ago for local chiefs, ranging from the Kabiyesi of the town to major and minor chiefs. Some of the funds given to a federal college of education to improve teaching and learning had been used to buy bags of rice for traditional chiefs to eat. If this culture exists (as it must) in other tertiary institutions owned by federal and state governments, resources that could have been used to expand the frontier of knowledge in the country must be used habitually to maintain the stomach infrastructure of parasites in different parts of the country.

    Citizens should not leave the fight against corruption to President Buhari and his supporters. It is not just a Buhari/APC war; it is the war of men and women of conscience in our society. More than anything else, it is the stridency of public opinion that can assist the fight against corruption in the land. Like the war against Boko Haram’s terrorists, intelligence is of the essence in the war against thieves of state.

  • The sky is falling on our heads, and Nigeria is sleeping

    Nigeria has nothing going for her, that’s why she should declare a state of emergency on her sleep, not go on snoring. Sleep is her enemy.

    The world celebrated world sleep day late last month and I quite forgot about it. I believe that my sleep has not been the same since that time, somehow. I find that I can no longer take my normal forty winks, only thirty-nine or so (sniff, sniff).

          Nigeria has not deserved the sleep she has been getting since she allowed 276 of her children to be carted away unceremoniously from a Chibok school in northern Nigeria by some unconscionable people bearing ill-gotten arms. Indeed, she does not deserve any sleep. Actually, there are many reasons we all in this country do not deserve to sleep for a long while yet.

          To start with, we have nothing going for us in Nigeria. There is no electricity for good three-quarters of the day in most houses. In many others, there is no electricity for good three-quarters of the year. Oh sorry, you already knew that. Most homes in Nigeria, rural or urban, have never seen pipe-borne water. Ok, you also knew that. Now tell me what you don’t know so that I can tell it to you.

           Let’s see. Just this morning, I heard that the senate was going to ‘rush’ the bill that would clip the wings of the CCB/CCT just because one of its own is standing trial before the said body. Now, don’t tell me you knew that too?! All right, did you know that the country is broke and her economy is in shambles, people are feeding on other people like cannibals? Did you know that the ground is sinking under us and the sky is falling over our heads? Did you know that Nigeria has nothing going for her? Oh dear, you knew all that too. Well, if you knew all these things, THEN WHY ARE YOU STILL SLEEPING?

           Did you also know, as the media have reminded us lately, that the Chibok Girls have spent about two years in captivity? Those poor little darlings have spent that number of days in that eerie-like existence disconnected from their normal lives and families in the same number of days you have spent wining, dining, living, sleeping and pretending to work. And your beat has gone on; theirs not so much.

           Nigeria has nothing going for her, that’s why she should declare a state of emergency on her sleep, not go on snoring. Sleep is her enemy. Listen, if you remember your Hamlet, you would also recollect that he lost his own forty winks when he got talking with a ghost. And he never regained it either, the sleep that is, not the ghost. The ghost told him the kind of home truths that you and I would not like to hear. It also told him what to do – go on a vengeance mission. For a long time after those girls had been declared ‘taken’, there seemed to be no official vengeance mission. Seriously?! There is no nation on earth with the variety and amount of problems that this country has that can afford to carry on sleeping the way we do.

            The problem with this country is a cultural thing. You and I seem to have adopted a culture whereby we see official positions as privileges rather than as responsibilities. If positions are held as responsibilities, there must be an accounting for; the holder must give an account of his/her stewardship. If they are held as privileges on the contrary, the holder is not obliged to give anyone any account of his/her stewardship, as long as he/she lets the largesse gets round the immediate group.

            People have been quick to assert that the government is not doing enough to bring back these girls. If we’re talking about the Jonathan government, perhaps yes; but with this government, I am a little slower to make this assertion. The reason is clear to all except perhaps the unrealistic. This government is fighting too many battles, including the battle against the people. Even on the fuel issue, its battle is more against saboteurs. The people may desire things to change, they just do not want anyone changing their own ways because they are too used to taking the line of least resistance.

            The sad thing is that Nigeria grew up with very little governmental intervention in the lives of the people; this is why there is so much chaos and confusion in the land. Everyone has taken the position that the law must work and bend for them. This has been the case since the first republic. For example, whoever can ‘get to’ the law first owns a case, not necessarily the victim.

              This is why it is possible for anyone to gather together a group of rudderless people, feed them, clothe them and then tell them what to do. After all, whoever pays the piper still dictates the tune. Whoever feeds anyone is entitled to a large modicum of obedience from him/her. This is exactly what Yusuf did in Borno State and El-Zakzaky in Zaria. These people came into the lives of thousands and thousands of little children who were going through life rudderless, with no governmental intervention. Naturally, you are too glad to find any piece of wood to hold on to when you are sinking. So also these children; they held on to these men and their doctrines for dear life as the only governments they knew. How were we or they to know they would become brainwashed to start boko haram wars or defy the national army?

               This country has lost her sleep and it cannot be regained without a fight. People will not be loyal to any country that cannot identify with them and their needs. Patriotism can only come when the country steps up to address their problems. Then, they have something to protect.

               The best way to start the fight is to accept that desperate situations require desperate measures. In this desperate situation, Buhari should put all of us to work. There should be no exemptions of clergy, laity, ex-this, ex-that, village head, town head, city head, house head; every single one of us should become producers of one thing or the other. Many countries have experienced this kind of hardship. Many of them have realised that going round the world to beg for alms will amount to nothing but enslavement and mortgaging of the future of the country and coming generations. Working from within, and on the little resources they were able to muster, they rallied. I believe it should be possible to rise again from our ashes. India did it; China did it; Singapore, Indonesia, and many others have done it; Nigeria can too. A situation where the country grovels round the world to obtain loans and distribute to states for effecting changes, but which a few so-called ‘god-fathers’ end up ‘sitting on’ to hatch and spend on frivolities, should no longer hold.

            Unfortunately, it is the people who are reluctant to follow the leadership because they are set in their corruption-strewn, kick-back laden and lazy ways. For instance, for the national assembly to seek to clip the wings of CCB/CCT just because one of them is before that body to answer to some charges amounts to evasion and shifting of the goal post. It is not in good taste, not the gentlemanly thing to do and it is a contemptible sleight of corruption.

           There is work to do; therefore the time has come for the country to wake up from this slumber. The president is working; we too must stop sleeping and start working. I declare that we should all work not only to sniff out those Chibok girls but to produce what we need so that the sky will not fall on our heads.

  • El-Rufai needs politics, not activism

    El-Rufai needs politics, not activism

    Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State has deliberately and complacently, if not self-righteously, marched briskly into another controversy. The politician and technocrat seems built for controversy than for anything else. This time he has got himself embroiled in a religious dispute over whether the state can legislate religious practice, particularly by licensing preaching. He has therefore forwarded an executive bill to the state legislature setting out among other guidelines how preachers may be licensed and the conditions under which they can preach. The bill is expected to replace a military edict on the same subject promulgated in 1984. But confronted by a horde of anti-regulation sceptics, the governor has simply shrugged his shoulders and soldiered on. The bill is not new anyway, he says, because it had existed under a different guise under a past military government.

    The motive for generating the bill is sound. Kaduna State has a reputation for religious volatility, a disturbing reputation forged more than three decades ago and sustained by episodic bloodletting on a scale rivalled only by the ongoing Boko Haram insurgency. If the state ever witnessed ethnic disturbances, it was only because it had first manifested as religious schisms perpetrated through Nigeria’s ethnic fault lines. And if there is some peace and quietude at the moment, it is simply to the extent that the volcano has not reached its eruption temperature. Indigenes of Kaduna have learnt to live with the fear of indiscriminate flare-ups, even as they have gradually and quietly resigned themselves to segregated living. So, it is not out of place for the crusading Mallam el-Rufai to attempt what he sees through his often utopian prism as a permanent solution.

    The bill, now more widely referred to as Gov. el-Rufai’s preaching bill, pitches constitutionalists against peaceniks, with the latter, because of their distaste for armed conflict, seeing nothing wrong in enforcing controls on religious groups in the state. No one can accurately determine at the moment which group is gaining the upper hand, the peaceniks or constitutionalists. And it is not clear whether even among the state’s or country’s religions the bill is popular. On the surface, however, some argue, the bill appears to target extremist Muslim preachers. But underneath, warn some Christian leaders, the bill targets and stymies the evangelical underpinnings of Jesus Christ’s mandate to his followers. For many constitutionalists, the bill is so fraught with problems that it is virtually dead on arrival. According to them, the bill stands on very shaky constitutional grounds, though no one can guess how the state’s lawmakers view the bill: whether with wary eyes, or with indifference, or with approving glances. To say the bill is controversial is, therefore, an understatement.

    What is certain is that while Gov. el-Rufai has modified the 1984 military-inspired edict on the same subject, he has not appeared to examine why it failed and was abandoned. Mechanically speaking, both Christianity and Islam have been accommodated in the preaching bill in terms of ensuring representation, not necessarily fairness, in licensing preachers. However, no matter how well they are structured and sensibly constituted, the registration panels, which shut out other religions but the largest two, may find some difficulties in capturing, acknowledging and sanctioning the various doctrinal differences acceptable to the state. Indeed, left to the Christian panel , for instance, it is hard to see them in the 15th or 16th century approving Martin Luther’s radical and reformist ministry had he applied for a licence. More, had Jesus Christ lived in Mallam el-Rufai’s Kaduna, not only would he spurn the licensing requirement, his application would most certainly be turned down if he sought one.

    There are incontestable moral grounds for the bill. As many other countries battling terrorism have shown, it may indeed be reckless to pretend that some regulations are not necessary to put a lid on extremism. They are. The problem is how it should be done, and whether they should even come as laws which stand the risk of conflicting with the constitution. The many bitter religious cum ethnic battles Kaduna State has fought — perhaps more than any other state — may offer sound pretext for regulation. For a state that appears eternally poised on the edge of religious conflagration, the governor may indeed be right and sensible to look and think proactively in anticipating religious conflicts and proffering solutions to either pre-empt or respond to them firmly.

    However, it is doubtful whether the solution lies in more regulation or lawmaking. The 1984 edict fell into abeyance for reasons the governor should not find too difficult to fathom. Chief among the reasons is that anywhere in the world, it is extremely difficult to regulate religion outside the laws and the constitution, especially in a democracy with a liberal constitution. Even in authoritarian climes, the regulation of religions eventually collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Should the Kaduna State House of Assembly pass the preaching bill, there is little doubt that enforcement, insensitively and unwisely conferred on Sharia and Customary courts, would be so controversial and problematic that it would be challenged successfully in higher courts. There is also little doubt that once enforcement appears skewed, that itself would raise an avalanche of complaints and allegations of bias against the governor, his team and the enforcers. The preaching bill, notwithstanding the laudable task it hopes to undertake, is really a needless piece of legislation whose drawbacks cannot be mitigated by the governor’s boldness or altruism.

    What is even worse is that the governor himself lacks the tact to sell the bill. Whether during his service at the federal level as Minister of the Federal Capital City (FCT) or as governor, Mallam el-Rufai has not been able to transcend his messianic disposition. He speaks combatively with a disturbing cocksureness that grates on the nerves of those who disagree with him. Very often his cost-benefit analyses are skewed in favour of the benefit side, and his manner of implementation peremptory and unfeeling. He regards himself a technocrat, and the country agrees with him. But he is now a politician who must manage his technocratic ways with the suavity of a principled politician. Mallam el-Rufai has not been able to do this. In fact, for a governor who adjudged the Shiites guilty of crime even before investigations had been carried out into the December 2015 Zaria clash between the Nigerian Army and some members of the Islamic Movement, it is difficult to imagine he can be trusted to show strict as opposed to benevolent neutrality when religions clash, or when those who oppose his rules and regulations test the might of the state.

    So far, whether on the matter of this preaching bill or the bulldozing of properties, or that of relating with his critics such as Senator Shehu Sani, Mallam el-Rufai has neither spoken nor acted as a politician or a democrat. Reacting to those who opposed the preaching bill, he had said: “But what I found out is that the elite have one weapon, and that is religion, and it is sad. But, unfortunately for them, they have not studied me. If anyone had studied my career at FCT, he would have known that playing religious card would fail all the time, because the moment you play that card, I know you are an adversary that needs to be put down and I will not look back until I am done with you.” Yet, he rode on the wings of the change momentum during the 2015 elections and won, partly because of the popular disenchantment with the Goodluck Jonathan government. He will be sailing near the wind to think he has secured the right to talk down to the people and force laws on them before he has been able to persuade them.

    Some of his bills, including the preaching bill, may be sensible in a few parts, and the motives pure, but he needs the wisdom of a sage and the patience of a true liberal and tested politician to govern a complex and eternally agitated state like Kaduna. He should go on to cap these attributes, should he prove capable of acquiring them, with the verbal forbearance of many of his northern role models. Given his general proclivity and the abrasive manner he ran the FCT with the connivance of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, he will need extraordinary and herculean effort to reclaim himself from his former set ways. That prospect is sadly a little far-fetched.

    Rather than initiate bills seeking to regulate contentious religious matters, the governor should explore other means of managing religious disagreements and containing extremism in the state. The 1984 edict did not work under the military; there is no reason to think an improved law based on that edict will work now or in the near future. Mallam el-Rufai has done little to persuade the state of the necessity for and relevance of the preaching bill; his reputation as a gadfly and his impetuousness stand in the way of sound and modernising politicking. He needs to change first before changing Kaduna. His task, as he acknowledges, is made doubly difficult by the prevailing economic crisis. He should, therefore, find no difficulty in understanding that the mood of the moment does not favour his flighty lawmaking adventures, nor does the edginess of the people condone the imperiousness of his messianic predilection. Since he has begun to recognise that managing FCT was a cakewalk compared with governing a state, he should be optimistic that that epiphany may yet help transform him into a more robust politician than the militician he had schooled himself to become since the Obasanjo presidency.

  • Fuel and light

    Fuel and light

    These are nuts Buhari must crack

    “Waaater, lightii, foooodu, houseee, wetin do them; you mean you no know? I go tell you …” That was the legendary Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in one of his albums in (I guess) the 80s. The thing wey do dem when Fela sang that song still dey do them today. That is whay I laugh whenever they say the National Council of State wants to meet to deliberate on (to use their expression) “how to move Nigeria forward”. Were they not the same people that brought us to our sorry pass? But, can Buhari make the difference? Can he make Fela reverse himself in his grave? Time will tell.

    But, if ever there is a time Nigeria should not be having the problem of fuel and light, it is now. The weather is rather harsh. Unfortunately, Nigerians have been living  without light and fuel, with the supply of  the latter becoming so unpredictable, especially in the last two months. In those days, food, water and shelter were classified as man’s basic needs.

    But man’s needs have transcended these basic three. In modern times, fuel and light have also assumed importance. Indeed, in many countries, they are taken for granted. But they have, unfortunately, become issues in a place like Nigeria due to lack of planning, lack of foresight on the part of successive governments, and corruption, especially in high places. All these have been compounded by the docility of Nigerians who have come to accept their fate in the hands of these irresponsible governments with philosophical equanimity.

    One particular aspect of the fuel crisis that is disturbing is seeing Nigerians carry generators, sometimes on their heads to filling stations. A caller on Lagos Traffic Radio made a vital point on Thursday during discussion on the ongoing fuel crisis. He asked if the person who banned sale of petrol in jerry cans has generator that uses petrol. It was a rhetorical (even if instructive) question that I am sure he himself did not expect the presenter of the programme to answer. But the point was well made because banning sale of petrol in jerry cans is not necessarily the issue. Without doubt, many of those buying petrol in jerry cans do so in order to resell at cut-throat prices just a few metres away from the filling station where they bought it.

    But many too do so in order to be able to power their generators at home or in their various offices or shops. Now, can we quantify the losses of artisans and people in offices who have been denied both electricity from the national grid and still cannot use their generators because government has banned sale of petrol in jerry cans (even when they are ready to buy the fuel at exorbitant prices)?

    We have not even talked about people who require petrol for their generators for relaxation, and more importantly to power their fans, to cushion the harsh effects of the hot weather. In a typical tropical climate like ours, it is no luxury for someone to make arrangement for his private electricity supply for such purposes when public power supply is unreliable. So, after a hectic day’s job, one would still get home to experience the frustration of not being able to power one’s generator because government has banned sale of petrol in jerry cans. It may not be the intention of the government to punish Nigerians by this ban. Unfortunately, that is what it has turned out to be, and that is why I said Nigerians are docile. In some other places, such frustration is enough to make people troop to the streets. Government that has failed in its minimum responsibility of providing fuel has now turned round to impose the maximum punishment on hapless people whose only misfortune is their inability to have good governance all these years. You need to be at the filling stations to hear uncomplimentary comments from people who keep vigil there to buy petrol.

    Rather than ban outright sale of petrol in jerry cans, what the government should do is limit the quantity of petrol any individual can buy in jerry cans, at least to make room for some of the other purposes I highlighted. It is not everyone that buys petrol in jerry can that wants to resell. Indeed, petrol attendants know those who buy and resell, and many of them would not hesitate to sell as many jerry cans for those people as they want because they know they would make a lot of money from them. I witnessed one such experience at the Mobil filling station near Pleasure Bus Stop on the Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway on Friday. After waiting to buy fuel from about 5.30 a.m. to past 12 in the afternoon, they did not start selling until around 9.00 a.m. They said they had to wait for their chairman who probably was still snoring at the time many of us had left our beds for his filling station. When they eventually started to sell petrol, they focused on people who came with as many as seven jerry cans of about 25 litres in their car boots and back seats!  This was after an ‘alfa’ (I did not know whether he was their employee) had announced to us all on their behalf that they would not sell fuel in jerry cans! This naturally led to self-induced chaos that made them stop selling fuel. I left the place frustrated after waiting in vain on queues that hardly moved.

    Moreover, rather than ban sale of petrol in jerry cans, why can’t security agents arrest those who buy and resell at the black market since they do that in the open, if the idea is to discourage the practice, rather than make everyone pay for the sins of an insignificant few?

    Yes, the argument that it is dangerous to have fuel in jerry cans is valid, but even when there is no fuel scarcity, people have always bought petrol in jerry cans because they must power their generators either at home or to run their businesses. The best way the government can show concern for the sanctity of lives in the country is by creatively and systematically thinking out of the box to solve the problems of power and energy. No one in his right senses would buy petrol in the black market if there is fuel at the filling stations. It is an eye sore seeing Nigerians carry generators to filling stations on their heads or on ‘okada’ ; indeed, it is a national shame and embarrassment that this is the situation in a major oil producing country.

    However, let nothing I have said be misconstrued as blaming the Muhammadu Buhari administration for the mess in the energy and power sectors. Just as I am not in league with especially the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) members who are asking the government to perform instead of fishing for excuses in the erstwhile ruling PDP. It is not their fault; that is the kind of thing you see in a country where values have gone to the dogs. Many of these people in a place like China would have been rotting away in their graves. The lucky ones among them would be eating dry beans and maize in the prison by now!

    My mission, however, is to let the government know the enormity of the energy and power conundrums. Light and fuel have become to us today what food, water and shelter were in the past. Even the GSM phones to some people are indispensable such that if they forget them at home, they are uncomfortable until they are able to lay their hands on them again. The seeming intractability of the crisis is something that many Nigerians do not find funny. That explains why some of them are beginning to ask, and so early in the day, whether they made the right choice during the last general elections. This is a statement induced by frustration and it is quite natural. It is intolerable that the power system would collapse twice in less than two weeks. If the Buhari government discovers that it was bequeathed a ‘one chance’ power sector, it should do away with it. The solution, as many of us have always argued, is not necessarily about raising tariffs. The government would also do well to realise that neither the scorching heat nor the sleeplessness occasioned by vigil-keeping at petrol stations is a friend of the body. And it should resolve that never again would such a thing repeat itself. No explanations would do, because there is no explanation that can sufficiently comfort the child whose mother was killed by a wolf.

  • Saraki swimming against an impossible tide

    Saraki swimming against an impossible tide

    Just as his trial for contravening some provisions of the Code of Conduct for public officers truly got underway at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) last week after months of legal obfuscation, Senate President Bukola Saraki ran full tilt into another storm whose ferocious eye was located in faraway Panama. Here in Nigeria, he is facing a 13-count charge for, among other things, false declaration of asset and anticipatory declaration of asset. In Panama, a data leak of over 11 million documents from the Panamanian law firm of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth largest provider of offshore services, has entangled many world leaders in financial scandals ranging from the operation of offshore ‘shell’ companies and tax havens. Senator Saraki is alleged to have squirreled away a fortune into offshore accounts of his family members through Mossack Fonseca. Just as he pleaded in the Code of Conduct trial, Dr Saraki says he is not guilty of any wrongdoing.

    Many countries around the world are opening investigations into the Mossack Fonseca leaks to determine the culpability of their implicated countrymen. The Panamanian law firm is believed to have opened over 240,000 offshore companies for its clients, some of them illegal. In addition, it is estimated that about eight percent of the world’s wealth (or $7.6trn) is hidden in tax havens. Once Nigeria begins its own investigations, Senator Saraki may be hauled in for questioning. He is in effect running the gauntlet of anti-corruption probes and trials, the end of which neither he nor his most avid supporters can foresee. These then are not the best of times for Dr. Saraki. He is, however, optimistic he will be vindicated at the end of his ordeal. He argues that he has not violated any of the provisions in the Code of Conduct for public officers, and that his family members, especially his wife, are of independent means sufficient for them to engage in business deals unrelated to him, including through shell companies.

    Based on his CCT ordeal alone, many of his colleagues in the Senate were already anxious that his trial was becoming a needless distraction. Despite the show of support he has received from many senators, not to talk of the manner he has endeared himself to them, the Senate was beginning to look beyond him, and wondering who should step into his shoes. Now, with the complication from the MossacK Fonseca leaks, the noise against his stay in office may rise to a crescendo. It is unlikely to be a question of whether he would be replaced; it will more likely be a question of when.

    Dr. Saraki has suggested his ordeal is a fallout of crazy political intrigues. Even if it were so, he will find it difficult to argue that the 13-count charge he is facing at the CCT, which allege bad business dealings against him, is also political. Nor can he reasonably suggest that the Mossack Fonseca leaks were a consequence of political intrigues when many powerful world leaders have been mentioned in the same global tax havens scandal. Dr. Saraki has received fair hearing in the courts. And despite prolonging his trial, even unreasonably, the courts and the law enforcement agencies have accommodated him well beyond measure and treated him very fairly. He may be anxious about the implications of stepping aside because of fear it would make him very vulnerable. Notwithstanding this fear, his continued stay in the office of the Senate President may be doing more harm to that great office than he or his heedless supporters imagine.

    But whether he desperately clutches to his high office or not, he will remain vulnerable. That vulnerability was not caused by political intrigues, as he suggests, but by his own failings, bad choices and convoluted business dealings. In normal circumstances, Dr. Saraki would make a great Senate President. He is after all a great dealmaker, urbane and polished in many respects, and appears of good breeding, not to talk of his phenomenal memory in name recognition, especially of his colleagues. Unfortunately, the times are not normal, and his qualities, which are undoubtedly admirable, have been weakened by a long history of questionable business calls and a vicious and remorseless habit of destroying everything in his path, including familial icons, to advance his career. His failings have now caught up with him and overshadowed his fine attributes. There is nothing more he can do now or say later to remedy the tragic consequence of many years of desperate machinations. It is time to go. He must meet his ineluctable fate with the same plucky daring he summoned to reach the top.

     

  • Coincidences or the columnist as prompter?

    But it just gladdens the heart that after deeply and reasonably interrogating goings-on in the politics of the country, one is able to offer pragmatic advice on resolving apparent logjams with a view to smoothing the way forward, to those whose responsibility it is to make lives better for all of us.

    I am neither about to gloat nor claim to be a re-incarnation of the redoubtable Mohamed Heykal (23 September 1923 – 17 February 2016), the Egyptian journalist and editor of Al-Ahram who, for more than 50 years, was a highly informed commentator on Arab affairs, using his famed friendship with President Nasser and relationship with Sadat to so uncannily predict the two presidents on both Egyptian and Pan –Arab affairs. But it just gladdens the heart that after deeply and reasonably interrogating goings-on in the politics of the country, one is able to offer pragmatic advice on resolving apparent logjams with a view to smoothing the way forward, to those whose responsibility it is to make lives better for all of us. So has it been for this columnist and it matters nothing whether these were mere coincidences; that is, whether or not the political actors read, or did not read, the articles containing those pieces of advice. That the columnist’s thoughts coincided with the big man’s subsequent actions is more than enough satisfaction for one’s weekly efforts on these pages. One thing is sure though, even if they did not personally read the relevant article, the possibility exists that other persons could very well have mentioned it to them.

    In the article: RE: THIS BUDGET –WHY HEADS MUST ROLE, 2 February, 2016, which was  shortly after it became public knowledge that the 2016 budget had been mercilessly padded, the columnist wrote as follows:

    “Why on earth are Jonathan’s appointees sitting pretty as head of critical agencies of state when he (President Buhari) knew that their track record during the campaigns and presumed voting pattern during the election point unerringly to the fact that they neither believe in his candidacy nor his policies. No, as bona fide Nigerians, nobody is suggesting that they should lose their jobs but for Christ’s sake why were many of these people not moved to less sensitive posts?”

    It was certainly not  difficult for any hard-headed observer of events in our country to know that too many of those in key positions in government during the Jonathan  era owed primary allegiance to him or to the First Lady and, going by what transpired during the campaigns, it was obvious they wanted none of Buhari. It was therefore obvious that, remaining ensconced in those posts, there was nothing they would like more than for President Buhari to fail. This is eloquently attested to by the fact that some of the permanent secretaries he worked with at the commencement of his administration were so disloyal, and corrupt, they were aggressively illegally  lining their pockets and now have questions to answer from the EFCC. In the same vein, it was this disloyalty that largely accounted for the budget padding to show that nothing changed Buhari or not. Happily, the president reacted within 24 hours of that publication but not with just juggling positions. Rather, over 20 of such officials were shown the way out especially from the ancien regime’s propaganda redoubts of the NTA, FRCN, VON, NOA, NBC, and NAN.

    Again, in RE: THIS CHANGE IS KILLING US, March 20, 2016, seeing the total dysfunction within the ruling party and the government arising largely from the intra-party power contestations amongst the legacy parties, I wrote:”Their victory, I surmise should, ordinarily, have strengthened the bond amongst the merging political parties. Unfortunately, there  is a sprinkle of the likes of the ever ambitious Saraki’s and the Dogara’s who have since successfully widened their legislative power grab through political enticement i.e  – a carefully choreographed allotment of committees’ membership and posts. Ever scheming and conspiratorial, they gifted a defeated PDP, via the likes of Ekweremadu and Akpabio, such positions and inherent powers; it now looks like APC is, indeed, the opposition party. About the only way out for the APC, is for the president to know that he may belong to all, but not all belongs to him or love him. He must go back to those God used in bringing this dispensation about”.

    Shortly after these words were written, President Buhari was at the 8th Bola Tinubu Colloquium where he not only congratulated Tinubu on his birthday, but was particularly effusive in commending his role in the APC victory in the 2015 elections. Said President Buhari: “There are very few patriots, alive or departed, who can match the commitment, resilience and creativity that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has, over the past few decades, demonstrated in organising Nigeria’s public life for good.” In an earlier message, he had described Tinubu as a visionary leader, thanking him for creating a formidable opposition party which, within a short period time, ousted a party that had been in power for 16 years. These should give the lie to mischief makers who said Buhari’s ‘I belong to nobody’ statement at his inauguration was aimed at the Jagaban. More fundamentally though, they should go a long way in returning the party to the status ‘quo ante bellum’. The effect of this obvious reconciliation on party cohesion and overall governance  should be enough to see APC change from being a ‘party in government but not in power’, as a fellow columnist recently described it, to both a de jure and, de facto government.

    What would, however, pass for the mother of promptings was also in that same article of 20 March, 2016. Poignantly appreciating what disequilibrium an unsettled Southwest APC could cause in both the region and the nation at large, I  suggested that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the party’s ‘numero uno’ leader in the geo-political zone should, like Uncle Bola Ige had intended to do for the AD before he was cut down by enemies of the Yoruba race, do everything  within his power to smoothen all the rough edges within the party in the Southwest adding that as the lodestar and  undisputed pathfinder, he should commence the process of an all-encompassing rapprochement which would, amongst other things, give him a solid home front from which to launch frontally into the party on the national arena, helping to resolve issues in other parts of the country and getting prepared for whatever intra-party, geo-political contestations that may arise in the future.

    Neither Nigerians nor the columnist had long to wait to see evidence of efforts in this direction. Ahead of the 2015 general elections, a thoroughly messy intra-party feud had arisen in the Ogun State wing of the APC occasioned by the very stiff competition for legislative seats especially at the National Assembly. The main protagonists were the state governor, Senator Ibikunle Amosun, and Aremo Segun Osoba, a former governor of the state and the acclaimed party leader in the state, each joined by his subalterns who were, in turn, big players in the party as senators, Reps etc. So bad was the crisis Osoba said not even God could resolve it and promptly left, with his supporters, for another party. You can then imagine the hard work Tinubu, the leader of the party in the Southwest, and others must have put into reconciling the two sides to see Aremo return jubilantly into the party from what he has since described as a sabbatical. Osoba is a lifelong progressive and, in his own words, would remain one for life. Despite that, nobody can doubt his being a highly principled politician. For him to have come back to the party, therefore, a lot of water must have passed under the bridge and without a scintilla of doubt, Asiwaju must have been central to the effort. Even if he did not initiate it, he must have subsequently coordinated the entire process with the assistance of other party leaders like Chief Bisi Akande, Otunba Niyi Adebayo, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, to mention but a few. However, his job of reconciliation, is only half done. Since there is no success without a successor, Asiwaju must now move rapidly, bottom up, to reconcile with all his estranged younger colleagues. He would need them, as much as they need him, going forward, in the man-eats-man jungle that Nigerian politics has become. Also, for development and for the region’s economic integration to proceed uninterrupted, the Southwest also needs such all-round peace within the progressive fold as the dominant political perspective, having effectively banished the Jonathanians to political Siberia.

    I cannot wait to see the Southwest progressive family return to its 2007 status of solid camaraderie.

  • Government and citizen relations: FRSC’s speed limiter

    Government and citizen relations: FRSC’s speed limiter

    That one of the functions of FRSC is to prevent or reduce accidents by enforcing speed limits does not make it the responsibility of citizens to buy devices to limit speed

    In general, the relationship between those in charge of governing the country at all levels and the citizens they govern appears to avoid the principle of social or political contract. Complying with the principle of democracy that expects citizens to yield their power to govern themselves to representatives and in the process expect those authorised by elections to govern the society to provide public order and welfare of citizens hardly lasts beyond election time in our country, especially in years before the era of change. Nowhere is the condescending attitude of government to citizens more evident in recent times than in the decision of Federal Road Safety Commission to impose purchase of speed limiter on citizens.

    Road safety touches everyone not just drivers of vehicles. And precisely because it affects everybody, there is no one single policy to cover it. Instead, the common sense approach is to look for a collection of means and policies which, while aimed at different groups, will together contribute to the overall goal of accident prevention on our roads. Sadly, speed delimiter is not one of them. There are numerous examples, including those of best practices across the world that Federal Road Safety Commission and other promoters of speed delimiters can copy or borrow.

    The history of FRSC is too well-known to be repeated here. One of the world’s most fertile minds, Wole Soyinka, encouraged the government of Babangida to support an agency capable of protecting road users from road abusers. The agency in its infancy was to provide services that the regular police force could not provide because of its own technological and moral deficit. At that time, as now, police on the highways created roadblocks to extort money from drivers in the name of checking their ‘road particulars.’ Under the military, the FRSC grew phenomenally to the point of becoming a major Internally Generated Revenue agency during the last sixteen years of post-military rule. First, under the guise of enhancing the unity of the country, it took over functions that belong to local governments in most federal democracies: issuance of driver’s licence, vehicle registration, and schools certified to issue certificates of completion of traffic rules and regulations course to applicants for driver’s licence.

    The latest of FRSC’s commercial ingenuity is the introduction of speed limiters that all vehicle owners must purchase to make it compulsory for them to drive within speed limit. The reasoning behind this new policy is rooted in the supposed empowerment of the commission by the National Road Transportation Regulation (NRTR) 2012, enacted to replace the FRSC Act of 2007. Without doubt, citizens and the media must have been asleep when this regulation was enacted. In addition, lawmakers sent to the National Assembly to represent the interests of voters must have failed to brief their constituencies adequately on such an important regulation. But that a law is already on the book does not mean that it can be used to embarrass citizens without just cause.

    The law that passes the responsibility of government to citizens and enjoins citizens to spend money to provide a service that their tax money was designed to provide needs to be reviewed. This regulation may be entrepreneurially wise, especially in view of FRSC’s boast that, if properly enforced, it can bring about N1 billion to the agency in the first instance. But in terms of democratic culture, it is a decision loaded against citizens who are being asked to pay for public order twice, through tax and through purchase of speed limiter.

    That one of the functions of FRSC is to prevent or reduce accidents by enforcing speed limits does not make it the responsibility of citizens to buy devices to limit speed. What is required of citizens in the context of social contract is for citizens to act as socially responsible members of the society by driving in compliance with the posted speed limit. Such discipline is acquired through civic education and proper training of aspiring drivers in road etiquette and proficiency in driving. On the other hand, it is the duty of FRSC to first provide visible speed limit signs along the roads and to enforce speed limit by taking other steps that societies that manufacture speed limiting-devices do to ensure road safety. In the first place, speed limiting devices do not prevent cars from moving beyond certain specified limits. If speed limiter works like magic, it will perhaps be more cost effective for FRSC to insist that vehicles that come to this country are built by manufacturers with engines that cannot go beyond a specified speed limit. Manufacturers of such devices recognise that speed limits vary from one neighbourhood to the other.  For example, where the speed limit is 25 kilometres, a vehicle that is set not to go beyond 100 kilometres can still do 75 kilometres in a 25 kilometre zone, if human discretion is disregarded, as it seems to have been done by fanatics of speed limiters in FRSC.

    Secondly, FRSC acts in a way to make citizens suspect that the desire to generate revenue is more important than investing in law enforcement by an agency charged with providing public order. If speed limiter is a magic wand, why would a government agency insist that there is a particular kind of such device that vehicle owners must buy? If different cars can be driven in the country, shouldn’t it be expected that speed limiters manufactured by various companies in different parts of the world can equally provide efficient service, like the vehicles imported to the country from all corners of the globe? What is the reason for FRSC’s insistence on a particular brand of speed limiter? Such insistence disrespects citizens’ right to choose the goods they want to spend their hard-earned money on.

    Thirdly, by insisting on the use of speed limiter to enforce speed limit laws, FRSC acts as if it wants to pass the buck. In other countries, law enforcement agencies procure the gadgets they need for making citizens obey traffic regulations. Speed limit signs are provided at strategic places for citizens to see. Radars are deployed to check drivers that exceed speed limit; traffic safety officers are deployed to stop such drivers and slap them with traffic violation fines that they are compelled to pay. Proper vehicle worthiness regulations are enforced by properly equipped agencies. In terms of cost effectiveness, one radar can identify millions of road users while each speed limiter functions only in respect of the vehicle that carries it. It may be better for the government to equip FRSC adequately to enforce speed limits without over stretching the budget of citizens in a country where each citizen is compelled to act as provider of municipal service—from providing electricity through generators to providing water through boreholes and providing maternity service to pregnant women through praying centres.

    As we enter the second year in the regime of change, the government needs to adopt a new orientation that mandates government ministries, departments, and agencies to imbibe the culture of social contract, in preference to pretending, as FRSC does, to have a good public order enforcement system. The basis of any democratic constitution is belief by citizens and their representatives in the principle of social contract; delegation of power by citizens to politicians through voting and support of the government through tax in exchange for provision of security, public order, and policies that enhance citizens’ welfare.