The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • National security and its enemies

    National security and its enemies

    The greatest threat to the security of the Nigerian nation is the Nigerian state. This formulation is so paradoxical and oxymoronic that it can only be offered in times of extreme stress or when everything is out of joint and a nation has its back to the wall. This is because the principal reason for the existence of the state is to provide security for those who have surrendered their fundamental rights to its powerful will.

    But where it has been shown that a state is fundamentally incapable of providing security for its own people, in fact where it has been consistently proven that rather than provide security the state is indeed an enabler of insecurities, then it is time to look for another name for the organogram of brutality that parades itself as the post-colonial state in Nigeria and Africa.

    What we have at the moment is nothing but organised banditry disorganising the nation and the people for its own larcenous purposes, even as the rot threatens to overwhelm the missionary and messianic do-gooder at the helm of affairs. It is the stuff of a Shakespearean tragedy.

    The fact that the state is the greatest threat to the security architecture of the society opens the nation to several possibilities, all dire and none very appetizing. Such a state can never unify the people behind it for major national projects, and neither can the nation itself coalesce into organic coherence under its baleful watch. A nation without a dutiful state is a modern Roman coliseum where opposing gladiators collide every second.

    In such circumstances, those who offer the compelling argument that restructuring the nation is a way out of the sheer malevolence of the state dream in vain except in a situation of revolutionary turmoil and upheaval in which the moribund state becomes the target of a hostile take-over bid from the antagonistic and deeply contrary and contradictory forces it has spawned. The Nigerian state has to be confronted with the condition of its own lack of stateliness.

    In other words, and further concrete reasons that will be adduced below, it is the state itself that must first be restructured before we can even broach the possibility of restructuring the nation. A nation cannot be restructured by a state structured principally for extractive predation and for preying on the nation. Whether this radical surgery can be performed by the current hegemonic faction of the Nigerian ruling class and for the benefits of the captive people of Nigeria is part of the drama currently playing out.

    The Nigerian state is playing out its historical antecedents as a state of occupation designed principally to facilitate the processing of raw materials and labour for the metropolitan market. But there is a difference between colonial occupation and post-colonial preoccupation. Whereas colonial occupation provided security for the people, the preoccupation of the post-colonial state is how to steal the nation blind even as it aborts the national will and the possibility of a nation in itself becoming a nation for itself.

    In order to deepen the argument, we need to go back to the origin of the modern nation-state. Contrary to widespread myth, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 did not inaugurate the modern nation-state. As Philip Bobbitt recently argued so brilliantly, it merely restored sovereignty to the religion of the subsisting ruler of a territory after centuries of sectarian wars between and within religions. The dividend is encapsulated in the saying, he who rules let his religion prevail. (Cuius region, eiusreligio). Those who were not at peace with the religion of a particular rulerwere at liberty to move to the territory of their preferred ruler.

    In other words, the organising principle was identity by religion and not by nationality. It was the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 almost sixty five years later which consecrated territoriality or what we propose as delimited space as the organising fulcrum on which the power of the subsisting ruler revolves and around which the modern nation-state is organised.

    From then on the logic and imperative of ruling over a particular nation, whether it is pre-colonial, colonial or post-colonial, demand that it must be done with utmost seriousness and a sense of mission. Failure to do so, particularly in the context of people newly empowered with a radical consciousness of their rights, often results in revolutions, civil wars, outright liquidation of the ruling class and the phenomenon of asymmetrical warfare which often sucks in the ruling classes of several countries at the same time.

    Given this possibility, one is often perplexed and at a loss as to why the post-independence political elite of Nigeria persist in courting suicide or flirting with martyrdom. Let it be noted that physical protection is the most banal aspect of state provided security. There are more subtle and “softer” aspects of national security which impinge on the people and how a state is perceived. The state in Nigeria is underperforming in both aspects.

    This last Friday, yours sincerely had an urgent business at the international airport and was out before the cock crowed as they say. Even before Six O’clock in the morning, the entire area known Ikeja Business District was taken over by a serpentine fuel queue which snaked its way towards Agidingbioccasioning a nasty traffic snarl even that early in the morning.

    When yours sincerely, in a moment of genuine confusion,noted that the people must be such early risers to have generated such a monstrous queue so early in the morning, the person driving wondered why it had not occurred to one that most of them passed the night in their cars while waiting for the elusive black gold. Everywhere on the route to the airport, fuel queues clogged up roads and their arteries. If the patience of these people were to suddenly snap, one began to wonder.

    The fuel conundrum has now gone on for too long and one is beginning to notice some desperation and defiance in the crowds at the stations. While it is unfair and unjust to blame the current government for the misdemeanour and incompetence of past administrations, it is important to remind General Buhari that this was precisely why it took a pan-Nigerian commotion to bring him to office.

    The president and his economic team must now roll up their sleeves and begin to think out of the box. This is a national emergency.  Apart from making use of several idle and under-utilized refineries in friendly African countries, the government must induce and facilitate the establishment of local refineries in Nigeria however initially crude and unsophisticated. We can also approach friendly countries for fuel vouchers which will be redeemed when the situation normalizes.

    While President Buhari must be applauded for his efforts at staving off economic cannibals who profit from the misery of the Nigerian people, it is now unfortunately clear that the rigid and monolithic price regime can no longer be sustained in the short run. What is haunting the retired general is theuneven and unequal nature of economic production in mutually incompatible parts of Nigeria.

    The current fuel crisis and the virtual collapse of the power sector after trillions of naira had disappeared reinforce the notion that the Nigerian political class are incapable of grasping the concept of integrative prosperity and shared national wealth so crucial and critical to the security architecture of a nation.

    There can be no national security where a tiny fraction is stealing and seen to be stealing what belongs to an entire nation. There can be no national security where the state is unable to provide an enabling condition for the education of its teeming youth or is incapable of creating the conducive environment for their meaningful employment.

    There can be no national security where the living conditions are so harsh that people have to resort to extra-legal stratagems to get by on a daily basis.  Soft security which relies on the benevolence of a caring state and its ability to provide the goods and goodies for the populace is always superior to hard security which relies on state belligerence and the apparatus of coercion.

    The history of the modern world is littered with the example of various visionary men and women who firmly believe that lifting millions of the underprivileged from the trough of misery and despondency is the bedrock of national stability. The middle class is the buffer zone between needless poverty and heedless prosperity. Through their various empowerment schemes, Awolowo and his lieutenants created a modern Yoruba middle class which bypassed the old feudal aristocracy even as it energised the timeless peasantry with the possibility of self-reproduction on a higher social scale.

    It is rare to find any statesman in contemporary Nigerian politics waving this magical wand of social transformation. What we have in abundance are people waving the flag of class decadence and debauchery even as they further the disgrace and debasement of the very institution that has catapulted them to national prominence.

    This collective and individual assault on our vital national institutions by those who ought to know better is perhaps the greatest threat to national security. Even before the release of the Panama papers, it was clear thatthe senate president could only continue in office at the expense of further desecration of the integrity of the institution that has shot him into national prominence.

    The release of the Panama papers, amidst even more outlandish revelations of state scams, just about nailed his coffin. Yet at the time of writing this the chap has not seen it fit to save the senate from further embarrassment by falling on his own sword. How he hopes to survive after such damage to his person and institution and without bringing the whole edifice down remains a mystery.

    Yet what must worry Nigerians is not the collapse of the senate as a national institution but the apparent frailties of countervailing institutions. As at the time of writing this no ranking statesman, member of the Council of state, retired justice of the apex court or old military supremo has come out openly and forcefully to condemn the attempt by a single individual to defame and drag the entire political process into the peatbog of infamy.

    By contrast, the swift resignation of the Icelandic prime minister and the querulous unease of the British Prime minister to insinuations of corrupt enrichment show how a great and durable system rises to the occasion even where some of its vital institutions have been compromised. So far mum has been the word from Nigeria despite the outing of some of the most influential members of the old military oligarchy.

    But you cannot plant yam and expect to harvest cassava. It can now be seen why the state is its own greatest enemy in Nigeria. It is not entirely by accident that the greatest political trial of our time involves a ranking scion of the feudal oligarchy, influential military officer and former Adviser on National Security. If his notions of national security are anything to go by, then we must find another name for the current political arrangement in Nigeria.

  • Will the Dasuki and Saraki cases still be undecided one year from now? The call for a special anti-corruption tribunal by Justice Oguntade and others to the rescue!

    Will the Dasuki and Saraki cases still be undecided one year from now? The call for a special anti-corruption tribunal by Justice Oguntade and others to the rescue!

    [An open letter to AGF Malami]

    Honourable Minister:

    If you read the open letter that I wrote to CJN Mahmud Mohammed in this column last week, you will immediately recognize that, in a slightly different formulation, the question that is the first part of the title of this open letter to you is the same question that I posed to the CJN at the very end of this column last week. As a matter of fact, permit me to quote the question in the exact formulation in which I directed it to the CJN last week: “To take the cases of Dasuki and Saraki as the most (in)famous of all the cases in the law courts right now, will these cases still be undecided a year, two, three or four years from now, your lordship?” Why am I directing basically the same question to YOU?

    Honourable Minister, you and CJN Mohammed are the most important judicial officers in the land; consequently, what will happen one way or another in the resolution of the war on corruption in our law courts will depend on what you and the sitting CJN do or don’t do. Right now, it does not appear that both of you see eye to eye and are willing to cooperate to ensure that justice is done in the high profile corruption cases. As I said in my letter to the CJN last week, his lordship has recently been making statements of displeasure at what he considers interference with the independence of the judiciary and the rule of the law, statements that were clearly directed at you and President Buhari. This probably arose from the fact that your good self and the President have also been making statements expressing great concern that some highly influential forces in the Bar and the Bench are hell-bent to sabotage the government’s prosecution of alleged looters in our law courts. Indeed, as I am sure you are well aware, there is now a clear division in the bar of public opinion between commentators and pundits who side with you and the President and those who take the side of the CJN.This development is at the heart of the reason why I am writing this open letter to you in the same manner in which I wrote that open letter to the CJN last week, indeed addressing the same basic question to both of you. Before taking up this central issue, permit me to make a comment that might startle you and many of those reading this piece.

    Honourable Minister, President Buhari is not a lawyer, he is not a member of the legal profession. You are. Apart from his political experience as a ruler – military and now civilian – the President’sreal profession, his true vocation is that of a soldier. The kind of “war” he was professionally trained for is military warfare, not legal skirmishes and battles. This is why when as a military ruler he launched a “war” on corruption, the tactics, the means that he used were militaristic. Parenthetically, let me observe here that for the most part they were fairly effective and most Nigerians at the time greatly applauded both the tactics and the results.But even then, with all his popularity at the time, Buhari had opponents that deeply resented his use of those militaristic tactics and means to wage his “war” on corruption. It is precisely this kind of commentators and pundits that arecurrently rising up in arms against the President, now that he is an elected, civilian president who has taken off his military fatigues and donned his babariga. Absolutely without any evidence for their claims, some of these pundits have gone as far as to see a creeping move toward totalitarian destruction of the rule of law in the President’s justified anger at the obstacles being mounted against the successful prosecution of alleged looters in the law courts. On his part, the President has been completely indifferent to such charges – as well he should since, in my opinion, they are completely baseless if not indeed mischievous and cynically opportunistic. At any rate, this is where YOU, Honourable Minister, come in, as both the Attorney General of the Federation and the President’s chief legal adviser.

    Here, I must be completely frank with you, Honourable Minister, inexpressing my disappointment at the fact that if the President himself has not cared to give clear explanations for his disdain, his anger with forces intent on sabotaging the war against corruption in our law courts, why have YOU been silent, why haven’t you explained carefully to the nation and the world what exactly is going on? More specifically, why haven’t you taken issue with the near total disregard for the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, 2015 (ACJA) by most of the magistrates and judges presiding over the trials of the alleged looters? You are the chief law officer of the land, Honourable Minister; it should be of great concern to YOU of all people that the effective law of the land in the administration of criminal justice is being massively disregarded in the law courts trying the alleged looters. Permit me to give a short illustration of what I am saying here.

    Clause 306 and clause 396 of ACJA are pretty clear and unambiguous in the manner in which they have effectively done away with the use of frivolous and obfuscatory injunctions and stay of proceedings to unduly prolong the trials of the alleged looters. Indeed, taken as a whole and applied as required by law, ACJA has reduced the length of the trial of any and all criminal cases in our country to less than one year, inclusive of appeals all the way to the high court. [Let us note here, for the benefit of the cynical journalistic defenders of the human and legal rights of the looters, that this time span is consistent with standard practice in most countries of the world] Already, we are in the tenth month of the life of Buhari’s administration and NONE of the cases in court is anywhere close to resolution one way or another. This the basis of my question to you and the CJN: a year, two years, three or four years from now, will the legal battles over Dasukigate still be in the courts, given the fact that if the provisions of ACJA were being applied some of these cases would be near resolution by now? And so I repeat, Honourable Minister: why the hell have you been so silent, so unimaginably indecisive in the face of the widespread disregard for ACJA in the law courts?

    As I am not unaware or unmindful of the tone of this open letter, let me explain its cause to you, Honourable Minister. Moreover, this is something that every person reading this piece should carefully consider: even if ACJA was being faithfully and diligently applied in the law courts, the backlog of cases going back to more than a decade and half is so vast that many cases would still be around years from now. Add to this the fact that the anti-graft agencies are uncovering new cases every day and dragging new defendants to the courts all the time. For a judiciary that is already overwhelmingly predisposed to prolongations and deferments of cases, this is like a bonanza, a perfect alibi. All they have to say is, can’t you see that we are helpless before the sheer weight of the multitude of cases piling up to the high heavens? And indeed, the magistrates, the judges and the born-again fundamentalist defenders of the legal and human rights of looters have precisely been saying this, shouting it to the rooftops of our national public opinion edifice.However, what remains buried beneath this cacophony is the extraordinary fact that a recommendation actually exists in the recent legal history of our country that a special anti-corruption tribunal beset up exclusively to try the sort of prosecutions that the anti-graft agencies are taking to the regular law courts almost on a daily basis now. What does this mean?

    As I have pointed out before on the pages of this column, in the Jonathan National Conference of 2014 (JNC 2014), the Committee on Law, Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Reforms headed by Justice Adesola George Oguntade, a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, made a recommendation that only a special tribunal separate from the regular law courts could successfully meet the legal, administrative, human and moral challenges that corruption poses both to our judiciary and our country. Let it be known that the recommendation had the unanimous support of all the members of the committee. I draw your attention, Honourable Minister, as well as the attention of everyone reading this piece to the fact that Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, President of the Nigerian Bar Association, 2006-2008, a highly respected senior advocate and generally regarded as a progressive and enlightened legal luminary among our most influential lawyers, was a member of that committee that made this unanimous recommendation. I mention this fact because Olisa Agbakoba is saying completely different things today about what is happening or not happening in the law courts in the trials of the looters. I think, indeed, I suggest that the question should be put to Agbakoba now whether or not he is still in favour of the urgent need to set up this special anti-corruption tribunal. But far beyond the individual case of Mr. Agbakoba, Honourable Minister, YOU also have to let the nation know where YOU stand on the matter of this recommendation. For let this be clearly understood: if it is not implemented, not even full and vigorous implementation of ACJA can ensure that a year, two years, three or four years from now many cases will not still be lingering in the law courts.

    I end on a positive, hopeful note, Honourable Minister. Six months from now, in a future issue of this column, I will write you an open letter again, confident that things will be much different then. For me, three crucial things are at stake in the current war against corruption in our law courts. First: the stolen loot MUST be recovered and what is recovered must be transformed into economic and social dividends that will bring significant relief to the hardship and suffering of the vast majority of the looted and the downtrodden of our society. Secondly, the guilty must be punished in accordance with scale of their crimes. When the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, wrote his famous novel, Crime and Punishment, the crime went with the punishment and vice versa; for if the crime is dissociated from the punishment, the society will lag for a long, long time in a state of moral and spiritual darkness. Thirdly, our judiciary needs deep and wide-ranging reforms; the historic occasion of the ongoing legal battles against the alleged looters in our law courts provides a unique foundational moment for these reforms. You and CJN Mohammed have a large, collaborative role to play in this reform agenda.

    Yours in the service of the nation and its looted majority,

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • In pursuit of true happiness

    Remember, it is not what you don’t have that kills you; it’s what you have

    Today, reader, we are going to wax philosophical because the year is now at an end and as they say, we are not going to pass this way again. This means that we must take stock of what has gone before in order to make what is going to come richer. You will agree that this year has presented very interesting events to the pleasure of some and the consternation of most. After looking through these events, I have been saddened to note that the significant thread that runs through them is this problem of money. Just name any scandal in the year and you will find that at the heart of it is money, running into billions of Naira at year’s beginning and dollars at the year’s close. Clearly, as Hamlet needlessly observed to no one in particular, ‘something is rotten in the state of Nigeria’. More worrisome still, the malodorous content always seemed to stink around or even over the central government.

    Now, one of the hallmarks of this material age we live in is the fact that we tend to fill our lives with dross. You know what those are, don’t you? They are perishable items like vegetables, electronics, people, ambitions or even values. Someone once complained that in the mad rush for success now, people have completely lost sight of the real thing. This means that real people like you and me now regularly sacrifice other people literally to obtain our goals. The story is told of how groups of mountain climbers on their ways to mountain summits regularly climbed over the bodies of other climbers too weak or fatigued to continue their climbs. Heaven forbid that they should think of the alternative: stopping to help, which was often considered too costly as it would mean delaying or cancelling their own ambitions. In your typical Nigerian ambition, therefore, human life has been devalued, ritualised or even wasted to reach the goal: get money.

    Now, things are so bad it makes you wonder if anyone knows the real meaning of life anymore. Most have imbibed and internalised the dictum, ‘get abundance that you may have more abundance’. Whenever your average Nigerian can, he/she aims for abundance and more abundance. This is why it is possible for an individual to construct compartmentalised, ceiling-high shelves where different currencies and denominations sit day in, day out, worshipped by the stealer. That’s right; that individual (and others like him) is your fellow Nigerian. Pity your poor workman who finds he has to work in houses where such altars have been constructed for money. Just ask one around you. He will tell you stories of how the obsessed money gatherers daily run their eyes and hands and feet over and through them in ecstasies of worship.

    Yet, when it has come right down to it, money illicitly and indecently gathered has never been of help to the gatherer. Think about it. Most of such monies are useful for purchasing a lifestyle that is not particularly useful – partying, procuring under-aged minors of both sexes for sexual gratification, purchasing Items of Self Destruction (ISD) such as private jets or Items to be Wasted (ITBW) such as houses and islands because those may not even be remembered again after purchase. It is incredible the number of people who have silently gone down into the grave just after piling up such monumental heaps of money meant for the general populace. Even as you read this, dear reader, I believe you can think of one or two examples.

    Whenever I have wanted to teach myself a lesson, I have always remembered the story told of M.K.O. Abiola who was said to have pleaded with the doctors to do everything in their power to save his ailing first wife, ‘no matter what it would cost’. When the doctors tried and could not, he was said to have hissed and exclaimed, ‘SHAME ON MONEY!’ You see, he had the money and the power, but that money had no purchasing power. Listen, if you want to know the purchasing power of your money, get stranded on the road in the night with no fuel in your car and with you miles away from anywhere. All you will be holding is an empty gallon and a lot of money in your purse. Then instruct that money to get you some fuel. Alternatively, you might find yourself running around the town at night, going from one pharmacy to another, in search of a rare drug for a relative who is sick in the hospital. Someone who had that experience related that he kept pleading with each pharmacy in turn, ‘I have plenty of money here and I’m ready to pay any amount; please just sell me the drug’, but they did not have it.

    It is therefore very perplexing that Nigerians appear to make owning money an end. Some people explain this off as a cultural problem but I disagree. There is no Nigerian culture that licences the owning of money or properties which cannot be accounted for. Indeed, every known Nigerian culture not only frowns at, but even punishes, any illegitimate acquisition of properties. Rather, I think that the faulty physical strapping together of three disparate groups and the absence of a tested, well-formulated foundation (economic, political, moral, etc.) by the founding fathers of Nigeria are responsible for the dissociative life style we are witnessing. Add to that the fact that people have no credible reference points in terms of, say, leadership: for example, China has Mao Tse Tung; Britain has Churchill, France has de Gaulle, etc. In this way, you could say Nigeria constitutes a rudderless ship.

    All hope is not lost. Rather than pursue money, Nigeria must join the rest of the world in pursuing things that have more eternal values. As the old year ends and another begins, each one of us must travel right back inside him or her and find those things which make for greater personal and altruistic happiness and pursue them. There are three things we can thus work on emphasising.

    First, we can work on emphasising the miracles that happen each day. Miracles still happen for you and me, they often come at no cost; for no amount of money can be put on the air that you and I draw every moment; our ability to leave home every morning and return at the end of the day; or a helping hand from a neighbour at a right time. More importantly, let us emphasise being miracle workers for someone: rescue a stranded one, bring hope to a depressed and hopeless person, share what little you have with someone else – you will be surprised what you get in return. The second is to work on emphasising moderation in everything. Eat in moderation; live in moderation; own things in moderation. I always say that no one can own the whole world – God already does, so why compete with him? Remember, if you want a slim waist, share your food.

    Thirdly, work for the interconnectedness of people. Believe it or not, the world is woven around people. We all exist to meet each other’s needs. Hoarding all the resources of everyone else therefore is futile. Sooner or later, nature will balance itself out, with or without you, by forcefully taking what you will not release and giving it out to others. The story is told of an old man who called his children together and showed them the multiple houses and plots of land he owned. Horrified, the children berated him for his selfishness. ‘Don’t you have poor relatives you can give them to?’ they asked. Remember, it is not what you don’t have that kills you; it’s what you have. True happiness is sharing what you have with others.

    ***Reader, I am repeating this article as my response to the hidden assets leaks.

  • Baba Lekki tackles Panama palaver

    Ever since the release of the Panama papers and the exposure of the global web of corruption, Okon has been huffing and puffing while threatening to bring the entire political system of the civilized world to perdition for unseemly corruption. He has been running wild and subversive commentary about our local rulers and snooper was just about to declare a fatwa on the mad boy when his mentor suddenly materialized smelling like a walnut spirit.

    “Baba, I know say Oyinbodey corrupt too, but dis one pass me. Oyinbo man come thief money finis oo”, the mad boy chortled obviously delighted to see Baba Lekki.

    “Okon, nadat one demdey call osegudugudumeje, yayamefa”, the old crook crooned.

    “Baba wetindey wrong with demOwu baba sef? He come dey jump up and down and dey dance with anybody and anything. Even pole sef he fit dance with. Wetindey worry am? Sebidem Panama people never offload him own file?” the crazy boy crowed.

    “No be Panama, naHarlibutondey worry dat one”, Baba Lekki whispered with relish.

    “Baba you mean say dem don remove Ali dem button again for Agege?” Okon shouted.

    “Okon you are a fool”, Baba Lekki began with hooting laughter. “He get as dat one be. But Panama na dangerous business for Kukuruku boy oo. Dem don name one ogbologbo soldier who no sabi fear or fear bullet. So Panama napanumoooo”, the old crook concluded.

    “Baba, wetinbepanumoagain for Yoruba?”Okon demanded.

    “Panumomeans shut your mouth. But he get better word and dat one napatanmo” the old man squeaked.

    “Baba, you don come again? Wetin be patama?” Okon demanded.

    “He mean say shut your legs. Na one Yoruba plant like dat. When dem Yoruba wizards command am him go begin to fold up. So Okon shut your legs oo”, Baba Lekki whimpered.

    “Baba what if I no shut dem leg?” Okon queried.

    “Then dem go shoot your blokos, period”, Baba Lekki snarled.

    “ Haba, baba make dem no do dat one. Na de only thin I get be dat one. Na imdey make Lagos women fear man. But baba, wetindem Yoruba dey callpana-pana?”

    “Ha ha that’s it. You finally got it.” the old crook screamed and jumped up in excitement.”Pana-panana fire brigade. So na fire brigade approach demdey use. Dem go kill fire here and fire go start again over there until demfire quenchdem fireman.”

  • Earn what you’re really worth

    If you don’t agree that what the headline of this piece says is possible, you are not alone. Even the author of the book with this title, Brian Tracy, was shocked and angry when he first heard of the idea.

    He argued vigorously that it is not true. I can imagine some readers dismissing the concept as one of those wishful thinking of motivation speakers and authors.

    Just like what many Nigerians currently going through hard times will think, Tracy said he blamed his low income on “my parents, my education, my boss, my company, my industry, my competition, and the economy.

    “Then I looked around me, and realised that there were hundreds and even thousands of people who had the same problems and limitations I did but who were earning far more than I was and living much better lives,” Tracy, a high school dropout  who has since become a world renowned consultant, trainer and personal development specialist, wrote.

    At times like the kind we find ourselves in the country when promise of change is turning to despair; when the economy seems getting out of control of the government, everyone needs inspiration to make the best of the worrisome situation.

    In my desperation to earn more income to meet, not only my personal and family needs, but numerous requests for assistance which I cannot cope with, the title of this book recently caught my attention and I have been trying to find out what the author has to say about why I am not earning what I think I am really worth after almost thirty years of graduating from the university.

    One of the criticisms of foreign motivational books is that they are based on what obtains in the developed nations where “everything works.” What I have found out reading Earn What You’re Really Worth and many others is that the principles of success and prosperity are universal.

    While we may have many limiting factors in our country, I am convinced that there are basic things everyone has to do not to remain poor or earn more than their present income. No matter how hard one tries, chances are that you may not achieve your goal, but you won’t remain where you used to be if you try hard enough.

    Two quotes from Tracy’s book summarise how to maximise one’s income, no matter the circumstance in any market whether in an underdeveloped, developing and developed country.

    “If you want to succeed and achieve everything possible that is possible for you, you are going to have to work smarter and more diligently than before. To move to the top of your field, you are going to have to start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later.”

    “Successful people are not necessarily those who make the right decisions all the time. The world belongs to those who reach out and grab it with both hands. It belongs to those who do something rather than just wish and hope, and plan and pray, and intend to do something someday, when everything is just right.”

    When the governments at various levels fail us like they always do, the option open to anyone who wants to earn what he or she is really worth is to decide to do what Tracy says: “Take complete control of your career and your income so you can survive and thrive in any economy.”

    The executive and legislature can continue to argue about the 2016 budget and decide when to start to implement it, my decision is that their action and inaction will not decide how much I will earn this year. I will earn what I am really worth and even surpass it.

     

  • Nigerian public/civil servants as malignant narcissists

    This impunity, this disrespect and total lack of shame on the part of our public/civil servants, is  reprehensible and could only have been the result  of the president’s in-explainable failure to dismiss from office, all those who were implicated in the initial budget padding

    “I often wonder if our country’s problems aren’t simply beyond the capacity of any civilised form of governance. The Nigerian citizenry, not just its politicians, has derailed just as norms had long been re-defined. I have since come to the conclusion that we need to divide the solution to corruption into two phases:
    Phase One – From Today onward.
    Phase Two – Everything before Today.
    There is no point setting today’s thieves after yesterday’s thieves. That will be fighting corruption of yesterday with today’s corrupt officials which will lead us nowhere.
    From Today Onward: all corrupt law enforcement officials, judges, police, customs, immigration, prosecutors, EFCC, ICPC, Civil Defence, FRSC, and the military should be executed in front of their ancestral homes within one week of the commission of the crime. If we need lessons on how to hold speedy trials and execution of criminals, we can invite the Chinese to share their experience with us.
    Over the years, teaching Economics of Corruption at the post graduate level, I have come to the conclusion that the only condition, that is both necessary and sufficient, for corruption to thrive is lawlessness. Once you eliminate corruption in the system that is supposed to enforce the law, corruption itself will be tamed.
    Think about it, you just read about a police man selling guns to armed robbers.” -Dr Hakeem Bakare.

    Let me, first and foremost, seek the readers’ indulgence to define narcissism as the ‘excessive love of oneself”, the very decease underpinning most of the massive systemic corruption enveloping Nigeria today; one in which public service thieves, and politicians, no longer steal in millions, but billions. Given what now passes muster as Public/Civil (Evil) servants in Nigeria, the likes of Chiefs Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji and Sunday Awoniyi, all of blessed memory,  must be squirming in their graves. The other day, Nigerians saw a contrite President Muhammadu Buhari apologise to Nigerians but not so with our  all-powerful,  self-loving public servants who continue to show nothing but disdain and  outright disrespect  for Nigerians. Were this not so, a member of the Senate Appropriation Committee would not have claimed, again, only this past week, that their committee discovered a FRESH (emphasis mine) padding of over N500 billion in the budgetary proposals for MDAs and Service Wide Votes in spite of the overwhelming hue and cry by Nigerians over the initial padding which probably ran into trillions. This impunity, this disrespect and total lack of shame on the part of our public/civil servants, is  reprehensible and could only have been the result  of the president’s in-explainable failure to dismiss from office, all those who were implicated in the initial budget padding. But nothing epitomises the Nigerian public servant more than the story below.

    That national budget embarrassment of a few weeks back pales into insignificance compared with the shenanigans allegedly going on at the Central Bank of Nigeria to properly situate which, I paraphrase Sam Omatseye in a recent lecture where he defined impunity as the impossibility of bringing the perpetrators of violations to account- whether in criminal, civil or administrative proceedings, arising from a failure by state to investigate violations and take appropriate measures in respect of the perpetrators.

    By the time readers are fully seized of the inherent illegalities in the matter under discussion, their only question would be: are these people above Nigerian laws? I don’t think anything would compare with the cheer effrontery of the Emefiele-led management of the Central Bank of Nigeria which, in its now well-known tradition of illegalities, allegedly surreptitiously recruited over 100 children and relations of the Nigerian high, and mighty, against all known employment protocols in the Nigerian public service. These are the children of  persons who had lived  literally all their  lives, or are even currently living large, on the country who, were they considerate, should have spared a thought for the children of  the poor and needy who remain unemployed many years after graduation. These are people in the same opportunistic class of those who EFCC alleged bought houses costing hundreds of millions of naira for their children who, in turn, rejected them for better ones. They did not insult Nigerians in this manner because their children could ever lack anything but simply because they have this stupid notion of entitlement over and above every other Nigerian.

    And, once again, nowhere do you find this nauseating attitude as much as amongst the northern elite who not only assume a superiority over and above other Nigerians but actually believe they can readily get away with murder, no matter how heinous. They pose like they are the most religious but probe deep to see how unfeeling they are towards the poor and down trodden, even in their very neighbourhood. It was this lack of empathy for the poor around them that led some disconcerted young men, especially in the Northeast,  to believe that education is ‘haram’ since going to acquire degrees did not make them any better than the ordinary almajiris. That is how we eventually ended up with Boko Haram with all the disequilibrium it has brought on Nigeria. In other words, the northern elite, by being so selfish, sowed the wind but Nigeria as a whole is today reaping the whirlwind, not only in the billions of dollars spent fighting terrorists, but  much more in the countless deaths and the millions of their own poor and needy now living as internally displaced persons. It is so unnerving that you hardly find these super rich coming to the aid of these victims of their actions, preferring instead, to make their care the sole responsibility of government.

    I urge readers keen on knowing the full story of CBN’s impunity, as well as its effete defence, to Google saharareporters.com to see who and who took advantage of  us, poor Nigerians,  and where a preponderance of them come from. You would discover that among them are those who are, indeed, richer than some states in the country; persons who can very well appoint these heirs over pampered children managing directors of companies the very day they graduated.

    The poor is treated this unfairly because we have a Central Bank Governor who, having permitted himself to be used  anyhow by the former government, is now only too willing to do just about anything to retain his high office. Those who Google the story should please look out for the serial illegalities committed against extant laws in Nigeria. Not only did the CBN allegedly tweak the employees’ names, turning their surnames into middle names, it completely turned a blind eye to the government’s federal character policy. By the way, what names are on these super brats’ certificates? Can a trained head of a personnel department, in any organisation whatever, let these anomalies pass? Worse still is the fact that although this sordid story has trended for over a month, with the name of the president’s niece opportunistically thrown in, mum has been the word from the presidency. It behoves his media aides, who cannot claim ignorance of the putrid story, to please urgently draw the president’s attention to what could be its putrefying consequences. The other day, the Minister of Education appointed 3 or 4 Vice-Chancellors from Kano; it should not be heard again that President Buhari’s niece is a beneficiary of this mother of illegalities. Nigerians believe too much in him to let that happen.  Indeed, niece or no niece, the president should immediately call the bluff of these social climbers and order the sack of all those so illegally employed and due comeuppance visited on all the implicated CBN staff. Those who wanted to take advantage of a country of 170 million people will have their conscience to contend with; that is assuming they still have.

     

  • The barrel of the law: the judiciary as subsoil for unregenerate primitive accumulation [An open letter to CJN Mahmud Mohammed]

    The barrel of the law: the judiciary as subsoil for unregenerate primitive accumulation [An open letter to CJN Mahmud Mohammed]

    Justice delayed is justice denied William Ewart Gladstone (attribution)
    Where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it. Chinua Achebe

    Your Lordship:

    With all protocols duly observed, let me go directly to the subject of this open letter to you: justice delayed is justice denied. I don’t have to tell you of all persons that this is one of the most universally known and venerated legal maxims in the world. The reason for this is quite simple, though it is also quite profound. A person, a community, a nation that is deeply wronged must obtain timely justice in the law courts; if this does not happen, if it takes too long or forever for the wronged or injured party to obtain justice, it is the same thing as having effectively been denied justice. In the worst possible scenario of this sort of miscarriage of justice, the wronged person may have died while waiting for justice. In that case, what use is the “justice” to her or him if and when it comes at last after his or her demise? Even in cases in which actual death is not involved, an injured party who is compelled to suffer delayed or deferred justice usually finds that the effects of the original wrong or injury magnify or fester, leading to all manner of afflictions and crises. Such is the case of our country with regard to the manner in which trials of high-level cases of corruption that involve the looting of our national treasury have become the most delayed, the most deferred among all national systems of administration of criminal cases of the planet. This has been the situation for at least the last decade and half in our country. But now, for the very first time and in a period when your lordship is the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) and Chairman of the National Judicial Council (NJC), this established order in our judicial system is being challenged as it had never hitherto been challenged. In this historic context, the question I am putting to you, the question the country and the whole world is putting to you is: where do YOU stand, what are YOU going to do to help to bring this shameful and endlessly unjust judicial order to an end peacefully before – heavens forbid -both the judicial order itself and the country are fatally damaged?

    I put this question to you, your lordship, because it appears to me from recent statements and actions credited to you that you do not seem to recognize that this unprecedented challenge is being made to the long tradition of ‘justice delayed and justice denied’ in our country.Not too long ago, you spoke forcefully against those who, in your opinion, were using the pretext of a few rotten apples in the basket of our judicial system to undermine the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, leaving no one in doubt that you had the President and the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) in mind. There is also this: as Chief Justice, you have participated in collective decisions of the Supreme Court that have ignored the provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA) that have done away with the application of interlocutory injunctions in criminal cases. In other words, the impression that you and the other Justices of the Supreme Court have given is that as far as you are concerned, ACJA does not exist and its provisions don’t matter. Moreover, following your lead, most of the country’s law courts have also adopted this indifference to ACJA, with only a few magistrates and judges breaking ranks with you to rather timidly apply the game- and rule-changing provisions of this landmark 2015 Act. This particular matter of indifference or perhaps even hostility to ACJA of the Supreme Court under your leadership is indeed so fundamental that I wish to use it as the basis of the most important points that I wish to make in this open letter to you.

    You know this, your lordship, but for the layman reading this piece, I need to explain that the main thing about ACJA is that it has considerably reduced the length of time that the trial of all criminal cases, especially the high profile ones, should take in our law courts. Under the relevant provisions of this law, both the original cases and their appeals all the way up to the Supreme Court, would take less than a year at the most. This is a big blow to the existing status quo in which there being no time limit to how long a case might last, cases often last indefinitely, sine die as a matter of fact. Now, as unbelievable, as strange as it might seem, this much is true about the root cause of why trials of high profile corruption cases involving billions of dollars and trillions of naira stolen from our national coffers often last for months, years and even decades: our country is the only one in the world in which interlocutory injunctions are applied to criminal cases; in all other countries on the planet, they are applied only to civil cases.The reason for this goes back again to the cardinal principle of ‘justice delayed is justice denied’: in civil cases, postponements and prolongation follow the dictate of the financial ability of plaintiff and defendant to keep the litigation alive; in criminal cases, everyone, including the society as a whole, loses when trials are prolonged beyond rhyme and reason. Apart from the national shame and embarrassment of being the only country in the world in which interlocutory injunctions are applied to criminal cases – routinely, excessively and frivolously – the real issue here is the question of what use this serves in the national and public affairs of our country.

    I have long reflected deeply on this question and this is my answer: the soldiers, when they were the rulers, had the barrel of the gun to enforce their looting of the coffers of the nation; the civilians, when they came to power in 1999 after a long military interregnum, invented “the barrel of the law” as the means of effecting their own looting, their own pillage, their own unregenerate primitive accumulation. The ubiquitous and almighty interlocutory injunction, together with the endless application of stay of proceedings, are the principal ammunitions of this barrel of the law. Thanks to the cynical deployment of these two armaments of the barrel of the law, substantive issues in the cases of high profile looters are hardly ever considered; the main business is an endless round of postponements and deferments. As a result, the courts at all levels are clogged with hundreds of cases, some of them going back to as far back as the year 2001! This in its own right has become an epiphenomenon, defined as a secondary phenomenon that makes the original phenomenon more confusing, more intractable. What do I mean by this?

    Concretely, everyone accused today and confronted with prosecution for corruption knows that with the backlog of hundreds and thousands of cases in the courts, he or she can use the interlocutory injunction and stay of proceedings with maximum effect, as long as he or she has the means to employ the services of the odious brood of the SANs (with the few exceptions noted). Thus, ultimately, the barrel of the law gives assurance to looters and their judicial backers that no matter how bitterly angry our peoples are in their tens of millions, looting and pillage will be backed by the force of the law and the great poverty and suffering of the many will stand side by side with the obscene and immoral wealth of the few. As Achebe puts it in the second epigraph to this letter, where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it. Permit me, your lordship, to make this important addition to Achebe’s luminous words: with the barrel of the gun, Nigerians knew how things stood; but with the barrel of the law, there is widespread confusion in the land, even among members of the Bar and the Bench that are opposed to the existing status quo and are deeply ashamed that their profession serves as an institutional refuge forsome of the worst anti-social, cannibalistic robbers on the face of the earth. You are in a unique position to clear up the mess, the confusion, that is if you are really and truly on the side of justice.

    The barrel of the law: your lordship, as I write these words, I have in mind many things happening in the administration of criminal justice in our country at the present time to indicate that once again, although billions of dollars and trillions of naira have been looted from our national coffers, the objective of the “law” is that not a kobo will be recovered and no one will be successfully prosecuted. I have in mind the flamboyant drama of Ricky Tarfa, SAN, accused of bribing judges to induce them to comply with the pre-ACJA status quo and charged to court; he arrives in court with about 90 SANs in a show of force meant to indicate that nothing has changed, ACJA or no ACJA.I think of the Chief Judge of the Federal Capital Territory(FCT), Abuja, who, in contravention of the provisions of ACJA, has ordered all the magistrates and judges under his jurisdiction to stop issuing remand orders demanded by the anti-graft agencies for indicted persons. I think of four judges concerning whom the EFCC amassed evidence of receiving bribes from two SANs and yet the NJC of which your lordship is the Chairman, has not seen it fit to suspend any of these indicted judges. I see the perpetual, endless delays and postponements being granted in the trials of Saraki, Metuh and Dasuki among others. At the present rate, many of these cases will still be in the law courts long after the tenure of Muhammadu Buhari, even if he gets a second term in office.

    Your lordship, when you were appointed CJN in 2014, many commentators within and outside the legal profession wondered whether you would follow in the footsteps of your predecessor in office, former Chief Justice Aloma Mariam Mukhtar, who initiated many badly needed reforms in the Nigerian judicial system. These included instilling discipline against corrupt and dishonest magistrates and judges; fighting for the fearlessness and independence of the judiciary against encroachments of external forces, with special reference to the Executive branch of government; and doing away with some of the age-old, cumbersome and outdated administrative practices of the Bench. You inherited that reform mantle of CJN Mukhtar and it remains to be seen whether or not you will effectively build upon those achievements of your predecessor. However, there is a level, a sphere of reform that Mukhtar did not see: the need to do away with the barrel of the law. ACJA was not signed into law in the time of Mukhtar; it was signed into law about a year after you became CJN. The country, the whole world is waiting to see if you will continue to act and speak as if this law is not the effective law of the land in the administration of criminal justice in our country. Let me put this as concretely as possible, so that there can be no question that my main points in this open letter can be missed. To take the cases of Dasuki and Saraki as the most (in)famous of all the cases in the law courts right now, will these cases still be undecided a year, two, three or four years from now, your lordship?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo       bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Jeyifo’s Martian and Marxist overtones

    Jeyifo’s Martian and Marxist overtones

    It is clear that on the matter of the rule of law and Nigerian Judiciary, there is unlikely to be a meeting point between Palladium and Biodun Jeyifo, a columnist with this newspaper and professor of comparative literature. For one, this column engages the Muhammadu Buhari presidency in a number of juridical sparring sessions, especially its many transgressions against the rule of law; but Prof. Jeyifo, having apparently made his peace with a substantial part of how the Buhari presidency is dealing with those alleged to have looted the treasury, prefers to joust with Palladium. The eminent professor speaks disapprovingly of Palladium’s ‘tirades’ against the Buhari presidency, but deploys tirades, even imputations, against this columnist with aplomb. More critically, Palladium argues that there can be no understanding or application of justice without or outside the rule of law. The professor, on the other hand, grudgingly concedes the relevance of the rule of law, but puts greater premium on end-product ‘justice’, even seeing “revolutionary possibilities of the popular demand for justice by Nigerians in their tens of millions” in the presidency’s modus operandi.

    Last Sunday, Prof. Jeyifo took on Palladium again, describing him as being even more strident in his criticism of the president and other anti-graft officials, and transporting him by means of his engaging metaphors to Mars. So, from lack of realism and eager embrace of idealism, legalism and formalism, Palladium has become, in the hands of Prof. Jeyifo, a habitue of Mars and a somnambulist who sleepwalks through analyses. Given what seems this column’s cocksureness in opposing the presidency’s methods of prosecuting alleged treasury thieves, and Prof. Jeyifo’s equally strident denunciation of Palladium, one of them would have challenged the other to a duel had they lived in the 16th, 17th or 18th century. The legalism ascribed to Palladium is, however, nothing but a reflection of this columnist’s view of the concepts of the rule of law and justice as coterminous and even indistinguishable, without the Marxist fervour that either courses through Prof. Jeyifo’s rejoinders or serve as clear overtones in his support for President Buhari’s anti-graft war.

    Prof. Jeyifo’s second rejoinder was prompted by Palladium’s laudatory piece on Justice Yusuf Haliru’s excoriation of both the Nigerian Army and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in their unconstitutional approach to fighting corruption. While the eminent justice’s order for the release of Col. Nicholas Ashinze has finally been obeyed, implying that both the courts and analysts like Palladium fought a good fight, Prof. Jeyifo avoided the central thesis of the article and proceeded to savage the piece with very unflattering words. No public commentator can fail to notice that President Buhari himself, obviously responding to criticisms, has improved in his appreciation of both the rule of law and justice. He no longer speaks disparagingly of his headache with the judiciary, and the anti-graft agencies themselves now seem reluctant to brusquely and dismissively characterise suspects in or outside their custody. It is indubitable that there is slight improvement  in the attitude of the government to the judiciary, an improvement that would have been impossible had the government listened to only those who rhapsodised their methods and cavalier statements.

    It is a puzzle that a debate is really raging when the facts of the case, stripped of emotions and bad-temperedness , are fairly clear and incontestable. It is not true as Prof. Jeyifo said that the Nigerian judiciary is the laughing stock of the civilized world. The developed democracies are in fact appalled by the government’s almost criminal lack of investment in the judiciary and the cause of justice. When they cavil against Africa’s strongmen, they speak subliminally to the role and indispensability of strong institutions. They are not so undiscriminating as not to know that African leaders actually undermine institutions and processes for various reasons, including that of seeing themselves as, and acting, above the law. Rather than single out the judiciary and laugh at it, they carefully deconstruct it and recognise why it has not functioned as optimally as it should, which facts and figures Prof. Jeyifo has appeared to gloss over.

    When President Buhari complains of the West’s slow judicial process, had his hosts been minded to interrogate him, they would have asked whether he had taken the pains to investigate why the process was slow in Nigeria, and what reforms he had instituted to quicken the pace of justice delivery. And if corruption is so endemic, has the government done a holistic study of the problem and presented the country with a plan of action to curb the malaise other than flirting with the knee-jerk response of herding alleged looters in one cauldron and shooting them to satisfy the public’s impatience and sanguinary doctrine of justice? Nigeria’s criminal justice system does not work as flawlessly and seamlessly as it should. Nigerians and their leaders have a responsibility to identify the problem areas, shorn of hysteria, and re-engineer the system to work well. Sweeping generalisations, stereotypes and wrongful assertions are unhelpful. If Prof. Jeyifo has the statistics to disprove Palladium’s assertion that only a few judges and lawyers are corrupting the justice system, let him present it. And let him also prove, beyond sneering at Palladium’s earthly citizenship, the loss of faith in the judiciary that he seems to think is “widespread and profound”.

    Every profession has its traitors. There are doctors who pervert the profession of medicine; journalists who commercialise news and opinions; lecturers who give marks in exchange for money or sex; pastors and clerics who take the name of God in vain, etc. Yet it would be inconsiderate and even insensitive to generalise the behaviour of the majority from the malfeasance of the minority. Corruption is a systemic thing; it does not begin and end as a symptom. A structured approach to tackling it rather than the churlish and infantile approach hitherto embraced by the government and its agents must be found. It is somewhat reassuring that so far, the government and its anti-graft agencies seem to be responding to criticisms, and are reshaping their mode of operation. They should go further to present a workable plan to curb the menace of corruption and deliver an ethical and efficient judiciary. No mob hysteria; no general and undiscriminating calumniation of judges and lawyers; and no subversion of the rule of law. It is time the government realised that homilies will not quicken the pace of justice delivery. It must work for it, and pay the price. There are no shortcuts.

    Palladium, however, needs to respond directly to at least three arguments Prof. Jeyifo made in his last piece, for they have the potential of misleading many readers. In fact they are the principal reasons for this rejoinder, the very last this column will write in response to the professor’s accusatory rejoinders. The three are: his inexpert linkage of extraneous matters to the granting of bail; the subject of interlocutory injunctions which needs expatiation; and his misdirected anger on the stalling of cases in courts, which he attributes to deliberate wickedness. First, the bail matter.

    Bail is basically a constitutional right in which the Nigerian criminal justice system allows an accused to be released and the court is assured of his or her appearance during all court dates. It is, therefore, not to be denied merely for the purpose of punishment. The right of an accused to bail is associated with the constitutional presumption of his innocence until proven guilty. In corruption cases, it is not the humongous nature of the amount involved, as Prof. Jeyifo insinuates, that determines whether or not bail should be granted. Until the law is amended to make corruption a capital offence, Nigerians may have to contend with the exercise of discretionary powers of courts to grant bail as provided for under the law and  Constitution. Once that discretion has been exercised one way or the other, it behoves the authorities concerned to give effect to it. Where they feel aggrieved, the civilized option is to take up the matter in higher courts.

    To refuse to release an accused who has been granted bail by a duly constituted court of law, without an appeal against such a decision, borders on the encroachment of the Executive on the judicial powers granted to the courts by the Constitution. It is an affront to the rule of law and indulgence in exercise of self-help. Such an action has no other interpretation than a show of intention to intimidate and preempt the decision of the court. It is also a subversion of proper administration of justice. Where the law rules, recourse to self-help or subtle acts of intimidation of courts by individuals and government ought to be abandoned.

    Second is the matter of interlocutory injunctions in criminal cases. Admittedly, there is no way an interlocutory injunction against the trial of an accused in a criminal case can be justified under any guise. But then, it is well known that the National Judicial Council, the supervising body of judges, has been unsparing in condemning and sanctioning erring judges. Perhaps it is time to focus on lawyers who bring such applications to court. Without an application, there can be no injunction. The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is the appropriate authority in this regard to put in place measures to check the unwholesome practice. However, it appears Prof. Jeyifo had the former governor of Rivers State, Peter Odili, in mind when he made the point. There is no doubt the case stands out because unlike others, the former governor was never arraigned.

    In March 2007, Dr. Odili obtained a curious Federal High Court injunction restraining the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) from investigating his tenure. Soon after he left office, he secured a “perpetual injunction” that permanently restrained the EFCC from “arresting, detaining and arraigning Odili on the basis of his tenure as governor.” Justice Ibrahim Buba of the Federal High Court, who made the order, added that the EFCC had no power to “in any manner, howsoever, investigate the account or financial affairs of a state government”. But what is perhaps very baffling, and Prof. Jeyifo should have known, is why the EFCC has not contested the ruling till date. It was learnt that an EFCC official claimed that through some unexplained error, the commission was never even aware that the 2008 injunction had been issued until the time to appeal it had expired. However, as a commentator said, “These professions of total ignorance are hard to fathom, considering that this was one of the EFCC’s most important cases.”

    The third and final argument is what Prof. Jeyifo describes as stalling of court cases. It is unfair to put the blame of “stalling” of cases in courts solely at the doorsteps of judges. The criminal justice system is an organized but complex assemblage of institutions that work together as a whole. To understand why cases are “stalled” in courts, it is necessary to grasp the problems, working relationships and functions  of all the agencies involved in the criminal justice system: the police that detect and investigate crimes; the prosecuting authorities that produce witnesses; the court system that tries the offenders; and the prison system that takes custody of the offender during (where there is no bail) and after (where conviction is secured) trial. The James Ibori case, for example, is said to have illustrated a systemic failure of the criminal justice system.

    The problems of the Judiciary go far beyond  the picture painted by Prof. Jeyifo. There are more fundamental issues to be addressed if the Nigerian Judiciary is to meet up with the standards of other judiciaries in civilized nations. Successive governments have been clamouring for reforms of the judicial sector. Regrettably, none has taken the bull by the horns to do the needful. The Nigerian Judiciary is probably the only one in the world where Chief Judges go cap-in-hand to the governors of their states to beg for funds to run the affairs of the Judiciary. Nigeria is probably the only place where the Executive arm of government determines what fund goes to the Judiciary due to lack of fiscal autonomy. Indeed, the eminent professor cannot claim to be unaware of the consistent reduction in budgetary allocations to the Judiciary over the years. For instance, for Fiscal 2016, the judiciary asked for over N140bn, but got about N70bn, a little over one percent of the over N6trn budget. The allocation to the judiciary has been consistently declining for the past six years, falling from N95bn in 2010 to the current level.

    Nigerians are doubtless hurting from the effects of corruption, but the problem is so deep and so wide that neither the people nor their government has reason to compound it with emotive and often totally misdirected discourses. It is tempting to yearn for the methods and drastic remedies of totalitarian regimes, such as many Marxist countries implemented decades ago. In this day and age, and for a democratic country like Nigeria, those methods are counterproductive and only satisfy the lust for blood. Palladium is encouraged, but not impressed, by the Buhari presidency’s reassessment of its anti-graft measures and methods. The president should not be distracted from pursuing the right course of allowing the rule of law to prevail. As the 1894-1896 (Alfred) Dreyfus affair in France showed, and as Emile Zola, Prof. Jeyifo’s literary compatriot illustrated at the time, it is imperative for justice not to be miscarried simply because the people are in a murderous mood, looking for scapegoats to sacrifice for their miseries, and eager to accept a suspect’s guilt simply because the government has either said so or published that condemnation.

    Prof. Jeyifo, who sometimes writes on the rule of law in Nigeria as if he has the judiciary of another, probably Marxist, country in mind, is wrong to look for shortcuts in the anti-graft war, just as the president is embarrassingly wrong to decry the slow pace of justice delivery in Nigeria when he has done absolutely nothing to reform, restructure and fund the judiciary to quicken the pace of justice delivery. On this subject, Prof. Jeyifo was wrong yesterday, he is wrong today, and he will be wrong tomorrow, and Palladium will not be deterred from saying so even if, in the words of the German Protestant leader, Martin Luther, “there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs.” The rule of law is inviolate and inseparable from justice. Justice will be a cruel, arbitrary and abstract concept without the restraining moderation and organisational ethos of the rule of law. Indeed, it is political and spiritual indiscipline to subvert the rule of law, flout the constitution, and pick and choose according to the whims of the leader, the temper of the public, and the political and ‘revolutionary’ exigencies of the moment. This bare fact is incontestable anywhere, Mars or Earth, notwithstanding the distance between the two planets.

     

     

     

  • Unruly newspaper agents

    Unruly newspaper agents

    Time to cut them to size

    For about four days in the past week, newspaper houses, specifically The Nation, The Punch, Vanguard and The Sun had running battles with newspaper agents in Kakawa and Ikeja (Lagos), and Abuja, who in the height of ignorance did not know that where their own freedom to accept or not to accept newspapers to sell stops, the newspapers’ own begins. The agents refused to accept the newspapers and went to the ridiculous extent of beating up some sales representatives. They even confiscated copies of some newspapers. I have nothing against their decision to reject the newspapers if they feel their interest has not been well taken care of; but to go as far as beating up sales representatives or confiscating newspapers was definitely going out of bounds.

    The bone of contention is how much the agents should get with the increase in the cover prices of daily newspapers from N150.00 to N200.00, and weekend titles from N200.00 to N250.00. When the newspaper houses increased the cover price of their products, of course they took the agents into consideration.  They (agents) used to collect N50.00 per copy sold when the daily titles sold for N150.00 and N60.00 for the weekend titles then sold at N200. However, with the increase in price, they are now insisting on N70 commission per copy for the daily, and N87.50 for the weekend papers. Well, they can insist on anything, provided they do it within the ambits of the law. But to get violent and insist that it is  their will or nothing is definitely illegal.

    A letter written by the Lagos Island Zone of the Newspapers and Magazines Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NDAN) speaks volumes about their reasoning. It says, inter alia: “Contrary to this N130 and N162.50 please do not bring your products to our zones with effect from 28th March 2016”. What do they mean by “our zone”?  Although the letter is from just a chapter of the association, it could be assumed to be the average reasoning by the members, especially considering that the Lagos Island branch is supposed to be an elite branch. It must be stressed though that many agents in other places did not join the illegal action despite the invitation extended to them to do so.

    To the extent that no production process is complete until whatever is produced gets to the consumer, newspaper agents are crucial to the delivery of newspapers to the readers.  But that is in this part of the world. There is nothing like newspaper agents in many other countries; yet, newspapers still get to readers. Even here in Nigeria, The Punch fought them (newspaper agents) to a standstill a few years ago. Today, the newspaper is the better for it. What this tells us is that newspaper agents, just like any other group of persons or organisations, are not indispensable in the chain. Newspapers can therefore do without them when they want to be dysfunctional in their operations. It seems we have got to that bridge and we must cross it now.

    It is pertinent to mention that the newspapers increased their cover price due to the prevailing economic situation in the country with a very heavy heart, mindful of the economic hardship Nigerians are already going through. But matters were worsened by the falling exchange rate which saw the price of the most vital material in the industry, newsprint, skyrocket from about N180,000 per ton in December, last year, to about N320,000 in January. Prices of other essentials like ink, plates, etc have also jumped up, making it inevitable for the newspapers to raise their cover price to meet production costs as well as stay afloat. It was against this backdrop that the newspaper houses raised their cover price. This should be understandable in a country where even fruits and groundnut sellers increase the prices of their products simply because ‘dalla don cos’ (dollar is now costly).

    Regrettably, agents who incur little or no cost in newspaper business beyond the small offices that they rent are trying to dictate what newspaper houses should pay them as commission. In some cases, they do not even pay for the space which some state governments (e.g. Lagos) graciously gave to them simply on account of the attachment of their job to media houses, not in their personal recognition.  These are people who do not know how much newsprint cost, they have no idea of how much ink cost; they invest no kobo in printing press or pre-press machines which runs into millions of Naira. We know how many millions we spend to buy and maintain high capacity generators in our offices nationwide to make our papers available to readers on time. We know how much we spend on diesel monthly. We know how much we spend on freight; we know how much we pay as salaries; we know how much we spend maintaining three locations where we do simultaneous printing. Let these agents tell the world their investment in the business to now warrant dictating to newspaper houses how much commission they want to get.

    Meanwhile, they return as unsold copies of newspapers that they could not sell on a daily basis. So, what risk is involved in their operations? It is also common knowledge that some of them engage in unwholesome practices with some equally unscrupulous sales representatives in the newspaper houses who supply stolen copies of newspapers to the agents at rock-bottom prices and both of them share the illicit profit. What this does is to deny the newspapers of legitimate earnings because the official copies delivered to the agents are eventually returned as unsold.

    In these circumstances, one should expect the professional bodies in the industry, the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) and the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) to speak up against the tyranny of the newspaper agents and indeed cut them to size. The agents in Lagos who were invited by the Commissioner of Police Ajani Fatai Owoseni, following a petition by three of the newspapers said they wanted to discuss with the NPAN. Since when has that started? Was it the NPAN that had been dealing with them all these years? Where else in the world do newspaper agents seek to have audience with newspaper proprietors?

    Obviously, the chronic poverty in the industry, arising from its gross under-capitalisation is at work here. Indeed, this was what made N9million look like gold to the newspapers which quickly pocketed the money offered by the Jonathan administration for the military assault on the newspapers in the tail-end of that government, only to return it when they realised it was forbidden fruit. Yet, those of them doing well make more than N9million daily. Also, it is this under-capitalisation that has led some journalists to have two caps: on the one hand they are journalists, and, on the other, they are portfolio investors. Then there is also the problem of NPAN itself which, to me, looks more like an amalgam of strange bedfellows. It is curious that the association has not uttered a word for the four or so days the agents’ imbroglio with the newspapers lasted. It is more than curious that mum has been the word from the same NPAN that went into negotiation with government and got a paltry N9million for the heavy losses some of its members incurred during the raid on newspapers by soldiers. The unity in the association manifests more in its diversity; with the centripetal tendencies usually caving in to the centrifugal contradictions in critical moments as this.  It is probably only in the newspaper industry that you find proprietors silent when this kind of problem arises. It simply tells that the unity in the association is suspect.

    This is why, with or without NPAN, the affected newspapers should take their destiny in their hands. The Punch did not seek the support of NPAN when it fought the agents; if it did, it would not have achieved the success it did achieve then. Those who confiscated newspapers simply on account of this disagreement with newspaper houses must be made to pay for their illegality. Will Coca-Cola or Dangote Cement distributors tell those companies how much commission they must give them (distributors)? If the answer is no, then, newspaper agents have no business dictating to newspapers how much they should sell the products that they invested billions to produce. If they think the deal is no longer good for them, they should do what Coca-Cola or Dangote Cement distributors would do – look for something else to do.

     

  • The rebel aristocrat

    The rebel aristocrat

    He was probably the last of the Mohicans. Every now and then, the sheer turmoil and contradictions of Nigeria throws up a figure of arresting vitality to remind us of unfinished business. Olatunji Braithwaite, the distinguished Lagos lawyer who died last weekend aged eighty two, was such a person. For a man of immense personal bravery and punishing physical exertions, it was so appropriate that the legal gladiator should die in his gym and literally on the tread mill.

    There was always something of a high-born Roman nobleman about the Lagosian lawyer. His upper class credentials were impeccable. Well-born, well-bred and well-connected, he carried himself with aristocratic flair,panache and a hint of sartorial eccentricity which sat very well on a sprightly well-honed physique.

    If his public school diction betrayed his elitist and privileged background, his fiery rhetoric and the magnetic aura of his personality endeared him to the political mob and other denizens of the barricades. He belonged to a body of men— rebel aristocrats and gentleman gladiators all—- who viewed law principally as a weapon for the emancipation of the people rather than a social and political racket for protecting injustice and inequality.

    It is a long line of legal avatars stretching from Braithwaite through the youthful and much mourned BamideleAturu, GaniFawehinmi, AlaoAka-Basorun, thetempestuous KanmiIsola-Osobu to the founding patriarch himself, Sapara-Williams. It should be noted that bar one of them all these people were children of considerable privileges and scions of the emergent merchant elite in the hinterland or on the coast. Yet they did not flinch when it came to defending the rights of the underprivileged.

    For these men, the law is a noble instrument for advancing the cause of the ordinary citizen and for championing political and social justice. In any society, it is when the practice of law and its adjudication fall into the hands of the ignoble that the sanctity of the profession is breached and its sacred ethos desecrated.

    All of these men in their separate and individual manner, and within the limits and limitations of their god’s given talents, fought titanic battles against tyrants of all hue and turned the law courts into one vast coliseum of colliding gladiators. For them, everywhere there is injustice is a legal battlefield. They drew blood and blood was drawn from them. They bore the scars of their confrontations till they fell in battle. In at least one of them, there was more than enough hints and evidence of circuitous state execution.

    What could have drawn a young man from a privileged and pampered background like Tunji Braithwaite to this holy band of iconic legal warriors is a matter for historical conjecture. The late lawyer could have been a born rebel who was bound to revolt against the grosser absurdities of his class in any case. Or it may well be that as he grew up and was confronted by the inequities of Nigeria, he concluded that his life’s mission was to see to the amelioration of the dreadful condition of the Nigerian underclass.

    Whatever the source of the summons, the great man never wavered thereafter and despite the odd and occasional tactical adjustment, he would never be found speaking from both sides of the mouth where injustice and tyranny are concerned. The scandalously rich he viewed with courteous disapproval, the arriviste or new rich with bemused contempt and a whiff of condescension and the vulgarly opulent he ticked off a withering stare of revulsion.

    In human societies, ideological battles among and within the classes are always fought under a great occlusion in which all sides are beset by one illusion or the other about their real motives and the actual causus belli which lead them to fight under one ensign or the other. Some may think they are furthering the cause of their class when they are actually threatening its long term viability. Others may think they are deliberately undermining their class interests when they are actually and unconsciously cementing the long term viability of the same class.

    The same week that Braithwaite departed, more than three dozen of his silk-donning professional colleagues filed up in court to defend the rights to fair hearing of a celebrated political rustler and to forestall any attempts by the state to undermine the rule of law as it appears to them. To them, this may well be a selfless and patriotic duty.

    Braithwaite would never have been caught dead in such a company. Unknown to our SANs, by defending the indefensible, they are the ones actually undermining the rule of law and setting up their class for a violent confrontation with the seething mob lying in wait just outside the courts. When law fails, everything is lawful.

    Many of our top lawyersbeing parvenus and newly empowered upstarts from the lowest rungs of the society,  it should be obvious that securing the longer term interests and conditions of reproductions of their new class may well be beyond their ken.This is how the cunning of history plays itself out often leading to the destruction and mutual ruination of the contending classes and their various factions.

    Like all well-heeled and entrenched scions of the old propertied class, Braithwaite had no time or patience with the neo-rich rabble and the arrivistes. For him nobility must fulfil its obligation and if it cannot it must give way in order not to endanger the survival of the society as a whole and the greatest Black nation as an entity.

    It is this capacity to see farther than and much beyond circumscribed class interests which allows a man like Braithwaite to place emphasis on the survival of a nation as a whole rather than the perpetuation of narrow and unsustainable class interests. It is a noble tradition that harks back to the old burgher classes of Europe and the founding fathers of America.

    That he was able to grasp the critical connectionbetween the rule of law and social justice shows that Braithwaite was principally a man of ideas, an intellectual who also happened to have been a lawyer rather than a mere middleman of legal mumbo-jumbo. This critical shortage of intellectual acuity is the Achilles heel of many of our lawyers no matter how technically proficient and forensically brilliant they may be.

    African post-colonial ruling classes in general and the Nigerian political elite in particular have failed to grasp the concept of integrated prosperity and shared wealth for the entire society, a prerequisite for securing the security architecture of the nation. But rather than ameliorate the living condition of the people, they resort to stealing on an outlandish scale aided by all kinds of schemes and scams .This is what has turned the typical African nation into a permanent war camp; a hotbed of acrimonies andinsecurities.

    Tunji Braithwaite fought such governments to a standstill no matter their hue, whether it is military despotism or civilian autocracy.But towards the end of his life, he seemed to have given up on the nation as it is currently configured, dismissing it as a structural monstrosity that is going nowhere. This need to restructure the country might have led the great legal activist to some strangeand questionable political association at the twilight.

    But his ardour for public agitation was never diminished. It was not surprising that his very last gesture of public defiance came as a result of a principled opposition to the fuel subsidy scam. In January 2012, Braithwaite joined other patriots and elder statesmen led by Professor Ben Nwabueze to register their dismay about the subsidy hoax and the savage suppression of popular protests.

    This writer got his summons to the barricades via a text from the grand old man that came in around four in the morning even as one was preparing for another meeting at the Lagos State Secretariat later that morning. By 8: 15 am, one had established contact with the crowd of protesters at the park opposite the House of Assembly.

    Nwabueze, Braithwaite and others gave soul-stirring speeches as a detachment of fierce-looking policemen materialized asking the crowd to peacefully disband or be forcibly dispersed. A tense face off which seemed to have lasted for hours ensued as the singing and dancing crowd of merry protesters inched their way towards the Freedom Park. In the event, the police made good their threat by tear-gassing and manhandling everybody in sight including the octogenarian Nwabueze.

    This was Braithwaite’s finest hour in defence of political and civil liberties. It was as if the great man was saying goodbye to his beloved compatriots amidst the chaos of emptied canisters, streaming tears, crumpled old men and fallen women. The veteran of several brushes with authorities, survivor of cruel incarcerations, brutal detentions, civilian ambush and military ambuscade might have had enough. Four years later, he has joined his ancestors. May his noble soul rest in peace.