The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • The return of Pbýrý

    Does anybody rememberthe Yoruba concept of cerebral fever as the nearest thing to hellish damnation? Does anybody remember something called eburu? This is probably not stuff for youngsters or those below the age of sixty. Eburu is the Yoruba word for the hallucinatory condition of high fever and even higher temperature as small pox reaches its critical stages and the infection enters the hallowed chambers of the brains.

    Small pox is no longer a mortal threat to the Black race, thanks to advances in western science but it was a sure bet killer in those days.But as the heat wave pounds everybody into submission, you begin to wonder whether eburu and small pox have staged a return coup. This past week, two of the elderly columnists on The Nation stable have had cause to complain about the intolerable heat. Snooper now joins them as the situation becomes quite critical and a whiff scary. The bones of an ancient must rumble at the mention of the death of peers.

    Two days ago in the dead of the night, snooper, having been dislodged by the scalding heat from the bedroom, was wandering half-naked along the corridor when yours sincerely stumbled on a fully naked Okon on the corridor mumbling some insensate nonsense about some executions of corrupt politicians that had just taken place at the Bar Beach. With his eyes almost popping out in disorientation, it was the stuff of electrifying drama.

    “Dem don finis dem corrupt people, dem people shoot dem,  no be dem soldiers job dis time. Blood come dey everywhere, demblood river come dey flow like dem new river”, the mad fellow mumbled disjointedly as he fixed one with a lunatic glassy stare.

    “Okon!!!” snooper screamed at the boy in alarm. “It is the heat. You are tired and exhausted and suffering from malaria. Go to bed and I will call the doctor in the morning.”

    “Dem shoot doctor too and dem shoot deputy doctor. All dem nurse dem come vamoose. He get one man who deytalk  for television as if him mama be oyinbo woman. Dem shoot him mouth and all him teeth comot”, the crazy fellow continued.

    “Okon, there is no such thing. You are suffering from exhaustion. Please return to your room now”, snooper shouted as one tried to grapple with the crazy boy. It was quite a sight, naked servant and half-naked master.

    It was at this point that the heat wave triggered off the fire alarm. The reader can imagine the rest.Something will have to be done about this heat wave before it kills off everybody. Having survived many human disasters, this may well turn out to be the natural calamity that everyone had dreaded.

    But help may be on the way from the usual sources. As it happened during the colonial era when it was only timely medical advances from the west which saved Africa from a slow-motion lynching by small pox and other pestilential scourges, so is history repeating itself this late into the post-colonial epoch. Surely, if a people continue to rely on their colonial conquerors for their physical wellbeing, then this post-colonial prattle is just a load of cow dung. It is the heat, stupid.

     

  • The beautiful, the ridiculous & the sublime

    The only lesson the people are learning is that it is all right to seek only the things of the self and let the country, and others, be damned

    My favourite magazine last week featured a story of a new kind of computer printer that prints 3-D inanimate objects. Imagine that! All you need to own various objects like toys in your home is that printer called The Cube, your own imagination and a cartridge that spews plastic instead of ink, and hey presto!, you’re lost in the very depths of your own toy and object factory. You can print practically anything you want. Now, don’t get me started on just what I can do with that kind of machine, because that is one beauty I’ve been longing to see in my lifetime for many reasons. Let’s see why now.

    To start with, I have long had a hankering after serving plates that do not break or require too much care. Now, with a machine like The Cube, I will not only make my own plates, I can make them in shapes, sizes and colours I want. Should I desire to satisfy my palate for a large-sized plate of my favourite dish of good ol’ Amala on a particular day, I would first take my time to design the shape of the container; then I would choose the colour of the day, maybe marigold yellow with a hint of a rainbow mix rimming the edges. Then, I would make the food. With the combination of food and plate simmering in front of me, I can now sing, ‘I’m in heaven… This is the heaven…’ as one morsel follows another down the dark, dark tunnel. Then, when I remember that I can choose another plate design and colour for the next day’s menu, another song will issue forth, ‘It doesn’t get better than this…No, no, it doesn’t get better than this…’ Ah, that sure is the life! Hopefully, with enough coaxing, the machine will be able to print my lunch one day.

    Oh yes, I have also wanted to own something that I can stuff down people’s throats when they are saying what I particularly do not want to hear. Now, with that machine, all I have to do is look at the shape of the mouth of the speaker and design the appropriate object to fit it – round, square, triangular or slit. No problem. When someone around me is complaining about the fact that money is scarce in the town and so the housekeeping money is going to be… I quickly shut the mouth before the word is uttered. When someone in the vicinity of where I am standing is trying to tell me that the country is broke, would I mind a salary… I quickly shut the mouth before the unutterable word is uttered. Beautiful. Now, all I have to pray for is that someday, a machine will be invented that will print people, so that I can surround myself with only my kind of people who will only say things I want to hear.

    Now, I have always wanted a machine that can print me a new dress every day. According to the article that started all this wish list, someone is already thinking like me. There are designers out there, it said, who have printed a pair of shoes and a dress, using different printers. Now, that is music to my ears. No more can my tailor and cobbler be rude to me. No more will I have to grin and swallow their insults of ‘come back tomorrow…’ while the waters are roiling deep inside me worse than the Atlantic Ocean in a storm. Now, all I need to do is dream up a look for the day, and command the machine. Then, when I get to the end of the road and find that the look does not really work for me in broad day light as it did in my head, I can go back home and make the necessary adjustments. I command my machine. The only thing that would be left would be for that beautiful machine to print money for me…

    You’re right, we need money to design and build the machines that will make my dreams come true. Don’t I know it? But, seriously, where do you think the money to fund the technological drive in this country will come from when we are busy funding ridiculous projects? Once, I read in the papers that the then Senator Abe of Rivers State had been flown abroad for medical attention after being allegedly shot by the police with rubber bullets! I ask you, I tell you! It’s people like these – the one who shot him, him that was shot and agreed to be flown out of the country, and the one who funded the ridiculous trip – these are the ones who are standing in the way of making my machine dreams come true. They are the Dream Terminators! Honestly, I sometimes feel as if all our money is going into funding the expensive hobby the country is engaged in right now, politics. It’s a little like the head of a family who persists in finding the cure for hunger by locking himself in the kitchen conducting one experiment after the other. The rest of the family can be left to feel like orphans for all he cares. (Actually, he can feel like a childless father for all they care if he would just get out of the kitchen so they can feed).

    Anyway, I just hope this politics will not be the death of this country – through laughter. Take another news report I read the other day. In the last dispensation, the Speaker of the House of Reps was said to have read out a letter written by the chairman of DPP to the house complaining that one of its members had defected to another party. The problem was not so much the defection; obviously that did not rankle. What pained the chairman was the fact that the said member had disobeyed instructions. He had defected to APC instead of PDP as he had been directed to do! I mean, did a group of grown-up MEN seriously want us to believe that they sat down, deliberated and came up with this no-brainer? Unbelievable. It just proves two things. The first is what many people have said before: that this country has NO POLITICAL CLASS. We do not have men and women brimming with ideas, dreams and visions of how to rescue this country from certain doom and self-destruction. All the country has thrown up so far are CLASS 2004, `08, ’11 OR `14 OF CLOWNS AND MARAUDERS.

    The only problem is that while we are laughing, like Nero, Nigeria may burn. In the face of complete helplessness, however, what are we to do but hold on to our dreams? We have sublime notions of what good governance is like: politicians, not clowns, directing the affairs of the country; leaders keeping their pulses on the prices of garri, beans, oil and rent in the market so that when all else fail, the people can eat and sleep; leaders knowing the state of the national institutions under their care because they also use them – hospitals, schools, transportation systems, roads, recreation grounds, etc. Like I said, these are sublime dreams but it’s not as if they are not attainable. They are, if the leaders would just put their backs into the job and teach the people how to do it too. As of now though, the only lesson the people are learning is that it is all right to seek only the things of the self and let the country, and others, be damned.

  • Welcoming Buhari’s social protection initiative

    Welcoming Buhari’s social protection initiative

    The new social assistance programme will also enrich social contract between the state and the citizenry and create a culture of accountability and trust between governments and citizens

    Nigeria must put the welfare of its citizens at the core of its development policy—a people-centered development…It is time that we followed the examples of Brazil and India by introducing a system of direct social security payments to the poor by creating a phased social Insurance Scheme to assist certain groups in the population with social welfare payments through a phased programme, starting with young people under 30 and unemployed and senior citizens over 70.—APC 2015 Manifesto

    With the announcement of the legislature’s approval of the 2016 budget which, despite rumours to the contrary, includes the 500 billion provision for social assistance to vulnerable citizens, millions of citizens are likely to be excited about welcoming the beginning of a comprehensive welfare state under a government that campaigned on the manifesto of change. It is also salutary that President Buhari has decided to stick to his campaign promise, despite the parlous state of the economy and the purse of the nation. The commencement of this kind of change in government-citizen relations occurs at an appropriate time for citizens and pressure groups to add their voices to the development of a multi-phase social protection programme.

    Social security is a major policy and if given a good chance to develop, it will eliminate the pains arising from destitution for citizens in our society. The new social assistance programme will also enrich social contract between the state and the citizenry and create a culture of accountability and trust between governments and citizens. While the citizens must be ready to adjust to changes that are dictated by teething problems in the implementation of this major milestone, apart from introduction of free education in the 1950s, the government ought to study existing practices in the country and other parts of the world to see what may work best for the Nigerian context, without confusing the Buhari/APC philosophy of inevitability of a citizen-centred polity with problems of process/delivery of free meals in school in a country noticeably hobbled by transportation challenges.

    The experience of Osun and Kaduna states come to mind as models to improve upon by those charged with implementation of a national free school meals policy. As governors Aregbesola and El Rufai have said, the free school meals scheme is a win-win policy. It encourages children to come to school; encourages farmers and others in the food chain to stay in business; and provides jobs for caterers, mostly women at a time that gender parity in the country is starkly behind that of many countries in the West African region.

    This is a policy that requires involvement of professional home economists and nutritionists at all times. For example, the experience of Kaduna State regarding school children disappearing immediately after their meals, thus subverting the goal of the programme as a conditional social assistance to improve and increase literacy must be avoided. Schools must provide drinking water with meals, rather than expecting parents to send water to school with their children. Apart from relying on local food items, children must be made to see the programme as an opportunity to make them appreciate principles and practice of good nutrition and healthy eating. This programme offers a good opportunity for children to drink more local juice and milk and eat more local vegetables than starch and sugared soft drinks for healthy physical growth and mental development.

    By choosing to start social assistance for the young and unemployed at a time that the nation’s economy is not buoyant, President Buhari has made a courageous effort to end the culture of excuses that made leaders in the past dismiss pressure from citizens for social assistance initiative on the ground that the country lacked resources, even in the years of oil boom. Starting this programme at a time that the country is being forced to move from parasitism to productivity is a very courageous thing to do, to reduce excruciating poverty in the land. It is also remarkable that the presidency has chosen to make the policy of cash payment to the unemployed conditional: tying cash transfers to participation in agricultural skills acquisition for young beneficiaries. This policy option, which many advanced countries are still struggling to adopt, will send the right signal to citizens that the country has no plan to nurture citizens who lack  achievement orientation or sense of personal responsibility for their lives.

    For the programme of cash payment to the most vulnerable citizens, it is important that adequate preparation is made to ensure that potential beneficiaries are properly screened. There is no better time than now for the government to establish a fool-proof national identification system. Eligibility criteria ought to include provision of verifiable residential address for each applicant, family income profile, and registration with agricultural skills centres in their state of residence. Both federal and state governments must be committed to providing up-to-date population count and full integration of data systems, to avoid double or triple dipping.

    It is reassuring that President Buhari decided that the central government will collaborate with states in the provision of free school meals and conditional social security payment to citizens. The experience of matching funds under the Universal Basic Education Scheme should tell us what to avoid in the new scheme. Since the federal government receives a larger share than other levels of governments, it should carry up to 75% of the budget for both programmes. But no state should be allowed to avoid requesting for federal funds on the ground that it is unable to provide its counterpart funding, as it happened several times under Jonathan. Local governments should be involved in the implementation of this policy, especially in the area of means testing of candidates. Leaving decision of who is eligible for cash payment solely to bureaucrats in Abuja is fraught with more danger than involving subnational units to screen individuals at the grassroots level. In addition, the federal government must deploy auditors regularly to see that the money provided to states for free school meals is being spent according to the wishes of the government. Our country already has a bad reputation for giving pension payments to ghosts.

    Almost at the risk of sounding hyperbolic about a programme in its infancy, beginning a nation-wide free school meals and monthly social assistance payment to very poor unemployed citizens represents an effort by the APC federal government to move the country from a plutocracy fuelled by elite kleptocracy to a pro-equality and anti-poverty democratic state. This policy is not one that should be left as executive action; it needs to become a constitutional matter, if it is to be a part of the country’s political culture beyond the present administration.

    Furthermore, Buhari’s social assistance scheme is similar in many ways to the National Health Service in the United Kingdom and the Social Security Administration in the United States of America. Nigeria’s experiment should not be left in the hands of the traditional civil service. This service ought to be housed in an agency that is saddled with no function other than promoting, protecting, and delivering a service that sets out to initiate a citizen-centred government in a political system that has been known for relishing giving excuses to discourage citizens to get any benefit from the government. An agency devoted to managing social assistance programmes in a country of about 200 million people should be driven by data powered by cutting-edge Information Technology infrastructure, and driven by IT-savvy public servants, rather than in the hands of technophobic or technology-averse bureaucrats.

  • Palladium, do you live on Mars? Our judiciary is ‘a laughing stock around the civilized world’!

    Palladium, do you live on Mars? Our judiciary is ‘a laughing stock around the civilized world’!

    Should President Buhari continue in his present course of fighting brutally by hitting below the belt and biting in the clichés on the excuse that the mill of justice grinds too slowly, he will not only have defined his presidency, he will have defined Nigeria and made her the laughing stock of the civilized world, far worse than the corruption he speaks so loathingly about.
    Palladium, The Nation on Sunday, March 20, 2016

    My fellow columnist in this newspaper, “Palladium” (Idowu Akinlotan), must be the only columnist in our country today who apparently does not know that when it comes to the trial of alleged looters, our judicial system is one of the most disreputable national criminal justice systems on the planet; it is indeed, in Palladium’s own words, “the laughing stock of the civilized world”. Every well informed, literate reader of Nigerian newspapers knows that high-profile Nigerian looters are a hundred times far more likely to be successfully prosecuted abroad than in Nigeria itself. But again, Akinlotan is blissfully, even militantly unaware of this fact. Finally, everyone but Akinlotan knows that trials of alleged high profile looters in Nigerian courts are typically so endlessly prolonged that most of them are either never concluded or lapse into a state of suspended animation while the looters walk away free, their loot intact in their domestic and foreign bank accounts. Now, I know that Akinlotan does not live on planet Mars; he lives in Nigeria and is indeed almost unmatched by any other newspaper columnist in the country in his grasp of personalities, details and intricacies of political affairs in our country. So: why is Akinlotan so blissfully ignorant of the well-known fact that the Nigerian judiciary is, at home and abroad, a laughing stock when it comes to the trial of alleged high profile looters?

    This was the question that I kept asking myself as I read and reread Palladium’s column last week.Now, most readers of Akinlotan’s column know that in the last couple of months, he has been persistent, he has been relentless, he has been outspoken in his criticisms of the President, the AGF and the EFCC in their handling of the prosecution of the alleged looters in the law courts. Indeed, Akinlotan has included the masses of ordinary Nigerians in his tirades against the President, the AGF and the EFCC. On the whole, his criticisms have rested on two basic claims. One: that the guilt of the alleged looters having already been decided before their trial, the President, the AGF and the masses are more than ready to ignore or perhaps trample to the dust all the standard protocols of fair judicial trial like the independence of the judiciary, the authority and dignity of trial magistrates and judges, and the right of the accused to a fair hearing. Two: in his criticisms of the manner in which the President and his AGF have been prosecuting the alleged looters, Akinlotan asserts that the new administration is doing irreparable damage to the rule of law in our country, so much so that, in Akinlotan’s view, there is a distinct, creeping move toward a dictatorship in which after the trial of the alleged looters might have been forcibly “won” by the President, the judiciary would have been so crippled that we, the Nigerian people, will have no rule of law left to protect and enforce our many civic and political rights. As a matter of fact, on the basis of this second point, Akinlotan has consistently argued over the last few months that Buhari is doing far more damage to the judiciary than anything that corruption and the looters have done to Nigeria and our judicial order.

    In his column last week, Palladium took these criticisms to a new high – or anew low, depending on whether one is in agreement with Akinlotan or one finds the intellectual – and now also factual – bases of his arguments and criticisms false, biased and tendentious, as I do.Titled “Justice Haliru’s welcome boldness”, Akinlotan went way beyond all his previous pieces on the war on corruption to claim, vigorously and passionately, that we are more or less already at that dreaded moment he had been warning all of us when the rule of law would have been so gutted that only its shadow would remain. Against the massive and perhaps even overwhelming evidence that one can easily bring to Akinlotan’s attention, he asserted that the whole of the Nigerian judiciary comprising the Bar and the Bench are quaking in fear and trepidation before the tyranny of the President, the EFCC, the DSS, the Army, etc., etc.It was against the backdrop of this alleged universal climate of fear hanging over the Nigerian judiciary in its entirety that Akinlotan praised Justice Haliru’s “boldness” in terms so superlative that the stature that Palladium bestowed on the judge was larger than life. Perhaps it is useful at this juncture to put this point across in Palladium’s own words:

    “Until Justice Haliru seized the bull by the horns, judges were in a panic to avoid the waspish tongue of the EFCC; and because of the bind Ricky Tarfa, a lawyer and senior advocate found himself, lawyers tiptoed around the anti-graft agency and spoke in whispers around its officers. In fact, for many months until now, it was perhaps only the Chief Justice of Nigerian (CJN), Mahmud Mohammed, who stood up to the presidency and the rampaging anti-graft agencies, warning against the wholesale condemnation of the judiciary”.

    Since there is no other delicate or sensitive way to put the matter, I assert here that the profile of a cowed and quaking judiciary that Palladium paints in this quotation is not only overblown, it is completely false. For instance, on the first day of the hearing of the Ricky Tarfa case, the accused was accompanied to the hearing by a horde of SANs so large, so aggressive and so demonstrative in their demeanor that the trial judge was compelled to remark that if this show of force was meant to intimidate him, he wanted the learned senior advocates to know that he was not intimidated. By the way, this is a case in which the accused is alleged to have transferred large sums of money to judges trying some looters with the express purpose of influencing them in the cases they were trying. Moreover, contrary to Palladium’s claims in our quotation from his column last week, the senior advocates of virtually all the accused looters are not shaking with fear and trepidation; they are militantly and confidently ignoring ACJA 2015 and staying put with the existing status quo of criminal justice administration in Nigeria that allows the endless prolongation of the trial of high profile looters, And for the most part, except in a few notable cases, they are getting the willing cooperation of the trial magistrates and judges. Here we might as a matter of fact invoke the case of Bukola Saraki and his lawyers: every time that they show in up court in the endlessly adjourned and resumed sessions, they appear with a large throng of supporters in an evident show of force that is obviously meant to show the trial judge, the country and the whole world that they are not intimidated, that they are not cowed. And haven’t the President of the Nigerian Bar Association and many other senior advocates made public statements intended to isolate members of the NBA opposed to the countless invocations of stay of proceedings in the trials of the looters? What is the factual source of Palladium’s portrait of universal fear and trembling in the Bar and the Bench?

    Factually, one of the most amazing claims of Palladium in his column last week is the claim that the problem of the Nigerian judiciary in matters pertaining to the trial of high profile looters pertains to only a “few corrupt judges and lawyers” (his own words). Please listen to the following expression of alarm by Akinlotan that Buhari’s manner of conducting his war against corruption in the law courts might cause a calamitous loss of faith in the judiciary among the Nigerian public: “How, in their enthusiasm to clean up the country, President Buhari and the anti-graft agencies became inured to the dangers of provoking incalculable damage to the judiciary and even instigating public loss of faith in that vital institution is hard to explain”. Was Palladium mentally asleep when he wrote words and sentences like these in his column last week? What can one say to an adult, literate and highly articulate Nigerian who does not know that for at least more than a decade now, there has been a widespread and profound public loss of faith in the Nigerian judiciary, whether one is talking of justice for low-level common felons who often languish in jail for long periods while awaiting trial or, more portentously, high profile looters who get away with mindboggling sums of loot on the basis of the impossibility of bringing their prosecution to a conclusion one way or another? And indeed, I ask again: does Palladium live on planet Mars?

    There are quite a number of other terribly negative facts about the Nigerian judiciary that are common knowledge but that astonishingly, Palladium feigns complete ignorance of them. One: it is well known that the Nigerian judiciary is the ONLY national judicial system in the world in which interlocutory injunctions to prolong trials are allowed in criminal cases; everywhere else in the world, they are allowed only in civil cases. Two: bail is normally regularly granted to high profile looters, no matter how humungous the amount of loot they have stolen. This also is well known: when they are granted bail, they are asked to surrender their passports; but after the case might have lasted for months or years, their passports are returned to them and they are then able to leave the country, thereby making the prolongation of their cases more possible. Three: by an overwhelming percentage, the number of trials of looters more or less permanently stalled in the law courts is far greater than the number of cases that have been resolved with conviction of the accused and the recovery of the stolen loot. Four: the corruption perpetrated by high profile looters in our country could never have assumed the impunity that has become world famous if it did not have the systemic backing of the Nigerian judicial order. If Palladium says he does not know or has never heard or read of these facts, I will ask him to tell it to the marines.

    In conclusion, let me say this: to Palladium, Justice Haliru and the CJN are heroes who are speaking out boldly and courageouslyagainst a creeping trend toward the Nigerian public’s total loss of faith in our judiciary. But to me and I dare say to most Nigerians, what Palladium regards as the heroism of Justice Haliru and the CJN is really more like hypocrisy. Where have Justice Haliru and CJN Mohammed been all the years and decades when the looters, their lawyers and compliant judges have seized control of the Nigerian judiciary? Why have Justice Haliru and the CJN not cried out and struggled for justice for the millions of Nigerians whose lives have been looted again and again? And why has this CJN in particular never expressed regret or shame that our judiciary is the laughing stock of the civilized world?

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                         bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Why APC lost Rivers

    Why APC lost Rivers

    President Muhammadu Buhari is conscious he has approximately three years left in office. Even more, he is aware he has so far not quite justified his election or the abundant goodwill and trust reposed in him by those who voted him last year. Addressing the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the All Progressives Congress (APC) last Thursday in Abuja, he promised real and substantial improvement in the circumstances and welfare of his people. He did not quite give a speech, for apparently, he was always hobbled by the gravity of formal occasions. What he gave instead were remarks that came across quite well, and in which he admitted his failings where he needed to, refused to excuse his mistakes, and promised to meet his longsuffering compatriots at their points of need on account of the more than three million naira the Treasury Single Account (TSA) had enabled his government to save.

    Before last week’s APC NEC meeting, President Buhari had given scores of formal and boring speeches, including his inauguration address,  and a couple of wisecracks, some of them, especially those given during his foreign trips, misspoken. In none of those speeches and brief remarks did he come across as a politician or conciliator. In one breath, he would speak candidly, forcefully and sometimes unreflectively of how fortune and fate in equal measure dealt him a cruel hand regarding the limiting effects of his age and the falling price of crude oil. And sometimes exhilarated, he would speak wistfully from the hangover of his regimented background, attempting to juxtapose his nostalgic past with what he feels is his unresponsive and frustrating present. On Thursday, however, he spoke as a politician and conciliator. If he can act his newfound speech and press the spirit of his rhetoric, who knows, he may yet save his presidency.

    But whatever he does from now on cannot save his party from defeat and humiliation in Rivers State, and indeed in most other Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) states. He will in fact struggle to sustain his party’s hold on some controversial and borderline APC states, many of which he has neither shown commitment to nor displayed affection for. The rerun elections in Rivers were enveloped in violence, with many murdered before, during and after the polls. A party’s defeat may admittedly sometimes be explained in terms of who is the more disposed to violence between two leading political gladiators in any election. But in the case of Rivers, neither former governor Rotimi Amaechi, who is now Minister of Transport, nor APC chairman, Odigie Oyegun, conducted himself in such a manner as to engender victory for their party. However, ultimately, the responsibility for the party’s defeat in that state lies with the party leader, President Buhari.

    This column indicated immediately after the Supreme Court validated Nyesom Wike’s election as governor that the APC would have a tough job winning a substantial part of the rerun polls. Except perhaps to the APC, the reasons were clear. Mr. Amaechi may be popular in the state, and may even have governed well, but Riverians are not so stupid as not to recognise that voting for APC lawmakers would prolong and entrench the stalemate in the state and predispose it to more violence. In the opinion of this column, Mr. Wike had not always acted with the maturity and brilliance expected of a governor, but having been installed as governor, it was unlikely that the structure of Nigeria’s unitary and patronage-ridden economy would lead the state’s electorate to repudiate him. They longed for peace, but would not mind submitting to the more practical and debilitating purveyor of evil among their political leaders.

    In addition, rather than speak loftily, and perhaps dreamily, of the Rivers State of their vision, the APC chairman and other party officials had spoken deprecatingly and materialistically of the state as that oil-rich state, almost akin to how the president himself later described the Niger Delta as a lucrative part of Nigeria. Together with Mr. Amaechi’s impetuousness and Mr. Oyegun’s materialistic view of politics, it was impossible to imagine that Riverians would be enamoured of the APC, or feel indebted to its misbegotten principles and values. The president should do all in his power to bring to justice all those who fomented violence in Rivers State, including those who inspired it, but he should do nothing to interfere with the composition and inauguration of the state legislature. The civilised world may have reservations about how Mr. Wike conducted himself before and during the polls, but it is not enough to halt or abridge any of the processes leading to the inauguration of the House of Assembly if a quorum is formed.

    As crucial to APC’s defeat in Rivers as the widespread violence in the state was, and not ignoring the orientation and conduct of Messrs Oyegun and Amaechi, probably the most important other reason for the debacle is the president’s inattentiveness to politics, in substance and ornamentation. However, it seems the president may just be starting to appreciate politics, if his remarks at last Thursday’s APC NEC meeting in Abuja is anything to go by. He had misrepresented politics when he suggested in his inauguration address that he belonged to everybody and to nobody. He had at the time unbelievably given the impression he became president by dint of his own hard work, appeal and merit, and would therefore not be beholden to anybody. He couldn’t be more wrong. If it were left to him and merit alone, he would have retired from politics long before 2015.

    Not only does the president in fact belong to his party and individuals who broke their backs to ensure his victory, he needs them to sustain himself in office, entrench and protect his legacy, and run for a second term, if he desires one. But with a divided party and an apparently disenchanted following, it is not surprising that his party has fared badly in most of the elections that have taken place under his watch. It could get much worse, and not simply because of violence or the Independent National Electoral Commission’s inability to get its act together. The reasons are nuanced. First, since he assumed office, President Buhari has done precious little to instill confidence in the nations laws, constitution and processes. He has dithered badly on the rule of law in his anti-corruption campaign, thereby giving the opposition the impression he had no regard for due process and seemingly suggesting that the fittest could always take the trophy regardless of what the law says. In addition, he has behaved awkwardly and intimidatingly to the judiciary, again convincing Mr. Wike and others like him that whatever they needed should be taken by force, perhaps extrajudicially and remorselessly.

    Second, by repudiating and even denouncing the politics of accommodation and consensus, the president virtually told indigenes of the South-South and Southeast geopolitical zones that they should look elsewhere for affiliation and attention. He would not offer them sop on the scale he would give his avid supporters meat and delicacies, he had whined incredibly and paradoxically as a victor. Then he worsened an already bad situation by his unsympathetic approach to the Biafra idea vis-a-vis other rebellious groups in the North, and gave ministerial portfolios considered of little influence to the region. The implication is that with two swift blows to the head, the two regions swore to close ranks and shut down their politics against the APC. The president needed to woo his ‘enemies’; instead he harangued them. Thus APC lost Bayelsa and the rerun polls in Rivers and Akwa Ibom, and had any other poll been called for anywhere else in the two geopolitical zones, the party would have lost woefully. In the circumstance, the best the president can do leading his troops to the next polls is to mitigate the scale of his party’s defeat, for that defeat will surely come. The presidnt must also rue how the momentum the APC carried into the 2015 polls came barely a few months later to a wrenching and agonising stop.

    Third, in order to gain in stature and earn respect in hostile states, the president needed to act subliminally as a statesman in almost everything, from elections to judicial proceedings and respect for the laws of the land, and from inter-party politics to inter-ethnic relations. Instead, he seems to have foresworn that sublimeness. He should have acted decisively in arresting the political drift towards the unrelenting parochialism authored by his party in the Kogi governorship election; instead he has merely regretted the inconclusiveness of the poll, thereby giving the impression to the cognoscenti that he has no deep and abiding understanding of the principles of justice and equity. The president’s discomfort with the tenets of justice has emboldened politicians like Mr. Wike and Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, to embrace brinkmanship and flirt with dangerous and cataclysmic propositions. Messrs Wike and Fayose lack principles and political morality, but they will continue to dismiss President Buhari’s efforts as sanctimoniousness, and stiffen their increasingly contagious opposition to his ideas and policies.

    Fourth, it was necessary for the president to travel to Rivers before the polls, meet with the gladiators, admonish them on peace and impactful politicking, address a town hall meeting on the values and virtues that must underpin Nigerian politics, engage traditional rulers and the youths, and encourage law enforcement agents to be fair and impartial. Instead, he said nothing to a state like Rivers so unused to the amenities of elections, and mobilised no one who could help to prod the state in the right direction. He is right to vow retribution against those who killed and maimed in the Rivers rerun, but the damage is already done, both to the state as a whole, and to the APC’s image in particular.

    Fifth, unfortunately for President Buhari, he has not articulated any lofty idea of the economy, politics, and society. He has spent about one year in office, but it is doubtful whether he has any convert to any great cause, for a convert must embrace an idea or a man of ideas. Though his APC NEC remarks are full of sensible ideas, he nonetheless seems to think once the economy is revamped his job is done. Both the president and his party must begin to come to terms with a different and more sublime reality. They can lose elections even with a growing economy, defeated Boko Haram, and low crime rate. Worse, like the PDP has shown, APC’s legacies (as a party, and as a president) can be subverted and pulverised if they are unable to enthrone enduring and endearing philosophy of government and society. This was why ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and his successors were a disaster despite growing economy, and their legacies quickly denuded and bastardised. They did not imbue the nation with an identity and character worthy of remark and attention. If President Buhari wishes to attract the respect and reverence of the country, irrespective of political, ethnic and religious affiliations, he must go beyond reforms to treat the legislature, judiciary and other groups in the society with veneration, in the process carefully calibrating the urgent need to midwife reforms vis-a-vis the constitutional obligation of building and strengthening institutions.

    States and their leading politicians will not support President Buhari and the APC just because of who they are. They must first see the ruling party and its leaders as embodying inspiring ideas and principles before offering them the respect and support they covet. That Rivers State is PDP today does not mean it cannot be APC tomorrow. But before Riverians will pitch tent with APC they must see in the president and his party unusual and soaring qualities of depth and character, and of poise and carriage, something and everything beyond the mundane and mechanical. The president must learn to woo his enemies and opponents, nurture and retain his friends, exemplify great ideas and principles, build and sustain institutions, rise above his biases and prejudices, transcend his comfort zone, and situate his country firmly and regally not in the restricted confine of his own limited background but in the difficult, expansive, conflict-ridden and boisterous global context that continues to demean the black man and treat many African nations contemptuously.

    If despite their towering statures and achievements great historical personages could lose elections, both President Buhari and the APC must acknowledge that their puny statures, poverty of noble and catalysing ideas, poor appreciation of and relationship with national institutions, and general and dangerous parochialisms, make them exceedingly vulnerable. Rather than blame the judiciary and violence for their electoral reverses, they should help Rivers back on its feet. The fault for the political morass in which Nigeria is immersed at the moment lies with the president and his party. The buck stops on their desks. To return to winning ways, the party and president should rise to the occasion by imbibing the skills and discipline necessary to deal with cantankerous foes like Messrs Fayose and Wike, and obstreperous and combative opposition party leaders like Ali Modu Sheriff.

    President Buhari’s remarks at the APC’s NEC meeting last week indicate he may have begun to understand what should be done. If the transformation is real, he owes the amelioration of his stiff and unattractive politics to his critics, not his sycophants. And if the transformation is to endure, he should seek out more critics who will coax him back to nobility and mould him into a statesmanlike stature, a sculpture of him that many, because of his stiffness and intransigence, have long described as an illusion and given up on.

  • Nasir el Rufai and secularity of the Nigerian-State

    Nasir el Rufai and secularity of the Nigerian-State

    El Rufai needs to be supported for plucking the courage to strengthen the principle of democratic citizenship in a multi-religious society, without sacrificing citizens’ right to promote the metaphysics that brings meaning to their private lives.

    The principle of separation of Church/Mosque which springs from the supposed secularity of the Nigerian constitution would be severely battered if this bill is pursued in the way it is.—Caritas International in Nigeria.

    Nasir el Rufai’s Executive Bill toward a law to replace the Kaduna State Religious Preaching Decree of 1984 is already raising tension in Kaduna State, but the noise that birthed the tension is more against rights of citizens in a republic than it is in favour of itinerant evangelisers of Islamic and Christian scriptures who want total freedom to bombard incessantly believers and non-believers with high unbearable noise volume.

    Of all the many progressive policies of el Rufai since he became governor: policy on free and compulsory primary education; unconditional release of allocations to local governments from joint state/local government account to enable local governments perform their statutory duties; and introduction of free meals in over 4,000 primary schools for over 1 million pupils, none has given him so much negative publicity as his proposed bill to regulate practice of religion in public space. In his bill to replace a 1984 military decree with a democratically enacted law, the governor seems to have attracted more criticism than his good intentions for the security, peace, and stability of Kaduna State in particular and by extension of the country in general deserves.

    Ironically, both spokespersons for Islam and Christianity in the state have been calling el Rufai names that include emperor and aspiring dictator, for making attempt to provide a non-threatening and safe public space for all citizens, a duty that is given to him and other governors and the president by the 1999 Constitution. In political parlance, there are two major types of states in the world: theocratic and secular. In a theocracy, there is a clear integration of political and religious organisation of life in the state. Two examples are The Vatican and Saudi Arabia. Secularism refers to a state in which the country’s political culture is neutral to political preferences of individual citizens. Examples can be found in the United States of America and Turkey. All other systems are variants of one or the other. Nigeria’s concept of multi-religious society is one of such hybrids. But existence of multiple faiths in a country does not automatically make it a theocracy.

    To all intents and purposes, Nigeria is viewed by the 1999 Constitution as a secular republic even though it may be a multi-religious society. In chapter IV of the constitution on Fundamental Human Rights, Sec38 (1) says: “Every person shall be entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom (either alone or in community with others, and in public or in private) to manifest and propagate his religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance. But Sec45(1) of the same chapter says: “Nothing in sections 37, 38, 39 40 and 41 of this Constitution shall invalidate any law that is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society in the interest of defence, public safety, public order, public morality or public health or for the purpose of protecting the rights and freedom of other persons.”

    While Sec 38(1) of the constitution recognizes the importance of religion in the Nigerian society, the Sec 45(1) recognises the right of the state to make laws to protect public space for citizens to thrive, regardless of their religious affiliation. The current constitution has, with combination of these two sections, avoided much of what some religious leaders call tension, that is fostered by elRufai’s bill. Like the United States of America, Nigeria starts all its formal state and official functions with the anthem, rather than with reciting the Bible or the Koran, in order to proclaim symbolically the separation of Church/Mosque and the State. Even where states have Sharia law, the country’s constitution remains superior to customary and religious law.

    Instead of praising el Rufai for his courage to promote order in Kaduna’s public space, the governor is being chastised by both Christians and Muslims for attempting to carry out his constitutional duty to make public space safe for all citizens regardless of the God they worship or how they worship him or her. The thrust of the criticism is not to improve the content of the bill but to push for its withdrawal. More specifically, el Rufai’s bill intends to achieve the following: restrict the playing of loud religious messages to the following places: inside one’s house; inside entrance porch; inside the Church; inside the Mosque; and any other designated place of worship and playing of loud messages that project beyond designated places beyond 8 p.m. It also requires that preachers be registered along with their churches or mosques and assigns statutory functions to an Inter-faith committee.

    Admittedly, requiring that preachers register after the organisations they work have been registered is superfluous. Faith institutions should have the freedom to appoint their functionaries without having to be slowed down by red tapes. Similarly, it does not make sense to have a cut-off of 8 p.m. for loud messages without indicating when such messages can start, knowing that they often start at 4 a.m. in many places across the state. In addition, the bill’s establishment of an Inter-faith committee instead of a Charity Commission that can regulate practice of faith in the public domain leaves too much of an important decision in the hands of a non-statutory body. It is better to assign such functions to a government agency that is guided by democratic rules in the performance of its functions, rather than by religious precepts and protocols. Apart from these, nothing else in this bill should make Muslims and Christians unhappy. The bill contains nothing that inhibits the practice of any of the so-called two major religions. On the contrary, it is subscribers to other religions in a multi-religious society, such as believers in traditional African religions, believers in Hindu, Buddha, Shinto, Orunmila, etc., that should cry foul about a legislation that has ignored or marginalised them.

    Decision making about public order in a non-theocratic state is starkly different from what obtains in private decision making. It is illogical to make laws about public space in a multi-religious society as if public space is synonymous with private space. Citizenship of a multi-religious country is what makes all persons in such society co-owners of public space. In a polity, as distinct from private spaces within it, public domain does not belong to any individual or group of individuals. It is a space that belongs to people of all religious views including atheists and agnostics, and there are many of such people in Kaduna State.

    While pastors are the professionals that manage private lives of citizens, it is politicians in a democracy that are mandated to manage the public conduct of citizens of all religious persuasions. In a country that has been destabilised for years by terrorism at the hands of religious extremists, it makes sense for courageous governors to make laws to prevent any form of blatant indoctrination and psychological terrorism or harassment of people of other religions that can arise from the conflation of the private space of religion and the public space of citizenship. By allowing religions to invade public space with their messages at will, as is being canvassed by critics of el Rufai, such policy disrespects the human rights of non-religious citizens in the same country, just as any government’s failure to recognise the right of men and women to express their religious belief in designated spaces for specific religions is a violation of their rights.

    The Kaduna governor’s bill is one that should be appreciated for the courage and vision it shows about the need to protect human rights of citizens in a country that simultaneously needs to allow religions to thrive and the political space that makes living in the society possible to be safe for all citizens regardless of their religious orientations. El Rufai needs to be supported for plucking the courage to strengthen the principle of democratic citizenship in a multi-religious society, without sacrificing citizens’ right to promote the metaphysics that brings meaning to their private lives.

  • How the Supreme Court inadvertently turned elections to war in Nigeria

    How the Supreme Court inadvertently turned elections to war in Nigeria

    But then what are the consequences of upholding the result of an election which the entire world saw was characterised by unprecedented violence, murders, beheadings, decapitation and incineration of human beings, even when the electoral law provides that such elections must be invalidated? 

    Is it remotely possible that none of our eminent Justices of the Supreme Court has ever heard of the Electoral (Amendment) Bill 2015 which Femi Falana (SAN) said legalised the use of card readers at elections? According to Falana, prior to the amendment, section 52 of the Electoral Act had prohibited the INEC from the use of any form of electronic voting.

    But following the amendment of the provision, the INEC has been conferred with the power to determine the procedure to use for any election. Specifically, section 52 states that “voting at an election shall be in accordance with the procedure determined by the Independent National Electoral Commission.” With the amendment of the law the INEC was on terra firma when it determined to use the card reader machine for the accreditation of voters for the 2015 general election. As confirmation, Falana quoted a socially responsible Ogbuinya JCA who, in the case of APC v Kolawole Agbaje did not only pronounce but traced the genesis of the card reader when he said: “The evolution of the concept of smart card readers is a familiar one. It came to being during the last general election held in March and April, 2015 in Nigeria. On this core it is a nascent procedure injected into our infant and fledging electoral system to ensure credible and transparent election. Specifically, the erudite judge said,  “it is aimed to concretise our fragile process of accreditation – the keystone of any suffrage”. With the above as background, what are Nigerians expected to believe when Governor Wike, in a moment of unguarded enthusiasm, committed the unreflecting gaffe at a Thanksgiving service that he owes his victory at the Supreme Court to former Governor Odili who we all know has a not inconsiderable relationship with the apex court – who served as his legal consultant, telling him where to go and who to meet, all of which he dutifully did? Or when, in a yet unrebutted allegation, a non flippant Dr Dakuku Peterside claimed that Wike severally met with some members of the Supreme Court panel of Justices both here in Nigeria, and in faraway Dubai?

     In a well-written article in the Tuesday, 22 March, 2016 edition of this newspaper, Joseph Uwua, a legal expert, could not help describing Supreme Court judgments as a cobweb of intrigues; a conclusion he then proceeded to prove with copious references to past decisions of the apex court.

     If neither Uwua nor the columnist would have the temerity to accuse my Lord Justices of any underhand dealings in the Rivers governorship election case in which they reversed the decisions of the lower courts – it was a majority decision at the Appeal Court – matters of corruption in the Nigerian judiciary have been severally commented upon by those who should know. While the late Honourable Justice Kayode Esho, unarguably one of Nigeria’s most distinguished and honest judges ever, had cause to bemoan happenings at the election petitions tribunals through which he said some judges have become billionaires overnight, Aare Afe Babalola, SAN, another stellar and distinguished legal mind, and Chairman Chartered Institute of Arbitrators of Nigeria, could not hold back lamenting that “time was when a lawyer could predict the likely outcome of a case because of the facts, the law and the brilliance of the lawyers that handled the case. Today, things have changed and nobody can be sure. Nowadays, politicians would text the outcome of the judgment to their party men before the judgment is delivered and prepare them ahead of time for celebration”. Major -General Ishola Williams (Retd), Chairman of Transparency International (TI) Nigeria, a man widely believed to have the moral authority to speak on these things, not only corroborated these eminent legal authorities but went ahead to ask judges to challenge him if they can.

    I am personally prepared to accept that the Lord Justices acted without being in any way compromised, knowing full well they are serving God and humanity and would one day be called upon to account for their actions. But then what are the consequences of upholding the result of an election which the entire world saw was characterised by unprecedented violence, murders, beheadings, decapitation and incineration of human beings, even when the electoral law provides that such elections must be invalidated?

     What I am saying, in essence, is that with their decision, the Supreme Court has, unguardedly, endorsed violence as a legitimate tool in our elections. Elections in Nigeria have, ipso facto, been turned to a theatre of war. It is, indeed, a sad day, given the laudable achievements and mileage the INEC recorded under the sterling leadership of Professor

     Jega in making elections far less prone to violence. These are milestones which the decision has completely wiped out as we saw in the rerun election in the same state this past week. Elections have again regressed to the analogue jungle in which voters registers are easily compromised.  There are times I wonder if truly it is the law that is the ass when reflecting on many of the decisions in our courts, especially in election petition matters which the late Justice Esho said had turned many judges into instant billionaires. One also begins to wonder whether, unlike Ogbuinya JCA, some of these justices were somewhere extra-terrestrial, when the issues they are called upon to adjudicate, before God, happened. Who, in Nigeria, would not remember that Rivers State was suddenly transmogrified to a killing field ahead of, and during, the 2015 elections? Who, in this country can claim not to have heard how, in bright daylight, in Madam Patience Jonathan’s birthplace, the entire Dakuku campaign became fair game for thugs and militants who opened fire on that humongous body of humanity? Who could have forgotten how, acting on orders from above, security forces looked the other way as PDP thugs went on a killing spree, beheading, decapitating and torching the remains of APC members who they slaughtered in their tens and twenties? Okay, if legal aficionados would like to ask whether or not these issues were pleaded at the Supreme Court – and of course they were at the lower courts, shouldn’t we ask what constitutes the essence of law? Must it always, as in the instant case, be made to serve only the interests of the filthy rich, the influential and the connected?            The dangerous consequences of that decision came to full bloom at the rerun elections last week. Consequent upon that Supreme Court judgment it will be extremely difficult to see, anywhere, a more violent electoral jurisdiction than Nigeria. Ahead of the elections, Governor Wike had severally threatened to kill and maim, advising some people to write their wills before coming. So violent were the elections that even as you read this, more than a whole week after,  INEC has not been able to conclude the election process in about 8 Local Government Areas and as has become the norm in Rivers State, there were beheadings and killings aplenty, even of security personnel. I doubt if Governor Wike knows that all these do not ennoble him either as state governor or as the Chief Security Officer of the state.

     He was, no doubt, emboldened by the Supreme Court decision which turned a blind eye to the killings and all the violent crimes that occurred during the general elections in the state in 2015. All things considered, it is necessary that all levels of courts be mindful of the social consequences of their decisions because for law to be truly law, it must serve the public good.

  • Easter and the death of happiness

    Easter and the death of happiness

    Easter is the season of renewal and regeneration; of rebirth and resurrection. It is spring once again and hope springs eternally in the human breast. Often in human history, the gathering of the forces of transition and forcible change is preceded by great destruction whose leaping flames and fury leave nothing untouched in their wake.  Whenever human society drives itself into a historical cul de sac from which there is no escape, creative destruction must follow, leaving in its anarchic trail fearsome portents and unprecedented human suffering and escalating misery.

    This is the point at which Nigeria and Nigerians have arrived.  Happiness finally died in this land.This is probably the first Easter period in living memory when Nigerians have been most remarkably ill at ease, with despair and despondency etched on the face of living survivors.  The old order has finally destroyed itself and with it much of what we know as the old Nigeria with its certainties, its heroic possibilities and buoyant optimism. The biblical children of Lot cannot look back, lest they be turned into a sack of salt.

    Yet for the sake of historical therapy we must cast a glancing retrospective look at that past if only to see how we were and the tragedy that has befallen us. Let those who are old enough cast their mind back to the era preceding the civil war. The old Easter celebrations normally opened with great rejoicing and concluded with great dancing and singing at a place designated as Galilee by every town and village worth its salt. Epic meals of beans consumed, everybody went home happy, filled and fulfilled.

    By a remarkable happenstance of nature’s bounteous benevolence, the period also coincided with the seasonal arrival of the mango fruit. There were mango fruits everywhere, of all sizes and species, from the native to the foreign washed into maturity by the great rains that had finally arrived cooling everywhere as a serene bliss descended from heaven. There is nothing as invigorating and rejuvenating as the aromatic fragrance of fresh mangoes newly plucked.

    To be sure, even at that point in time this was not arich or wealthy nation by any standards. It was a country that had learnt to modify its taste and modulate its palate, eating and consuming only what accrued to it by the fruits of its own labour and the bounty of nature. Wealthy nations are not always the happiest societies on earth, otherwise America would not been perennially lagging behind, Holland, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries in the happiness index.

    Historical research has also shown that the journey to the frontiers of modernity and scientific advancement is not always accompanied by the maximum happiness of the maximum populace. It has been suggested that the happiest epoch in the history of England was the Elizabethan period, just as the Industrial Revolution took off and there was an explosion of literary, intellectual and musical genius in addition to the scientific awakening which powered the revolution.

    But as a great sage has observed one sure thing about the organic community is that it is always gone. In other words, there has never and will never be a wholly organic society. The whole idea of an organic community is a myth; a whipping device employed by each contemporary society to whip itself into line. In the journey of humanity to self-actualization, wars, strife and stress have always been a constant comrade and companion.

    But then, there are human societies and human societies, just as there are inorganic communities and inorganic communities. In July 1957, barely twelve years after a world war that devastated the country, Harold Macmillan proudly proclaimed to his grateful compatriots that they had never had it so good. The temperate, mild-mannered, pipe-smoking High Tory aristocrat knew what he was talking about. Great Britain had made remarkable strides to integrate the British community as a whole and to spread prosperity around, despite the phenomenon of institutionalised racism.

    How organic a community is can actually be ascertained by looking at the misery index and the happiness and contentment chart, that is by looking at how far a country has gone in containing and reining in fissiparous tendencies, how the state has mediated and moderated the cultural and religious disharmonies of the nation and the inevitable inter and intra-class hostilities. In other words, just take a look at the chart of how high a country has risen in guaranteeing the contentment and happiness of the people and in securing the maximum good of the maximum number.

    Viewed from this perspective, it can be seen why a country like America with its spectacular wealth will continue to lag behind in the happiness chart.  For the vast ever swelling continent-country, the thwarted and frustrated presidency of a Barack Obama represents the aborted impulse for racial and cultural harmony as well as economic integration of the multiracial underclass whereas the looming presidency of a Donald Trump, in its senseless and insensate hysteria and rabble-rousing intolerance, harks back to ante-bellum America and unfinished business.

    The greatest human society the world has seen may well be on the verge of another civil war, this time to be fought on the streets rather than in trenches. This was precisely why the founding fathers of America scoffed and sniffed at the very notion of untrammelled democracy as an invitation to the waiting mob just about to lay siege on the Capitol Hill. They hedged their bet accordingly.

    The same perspective can be extended to the core countries of Europe, particularly in the aftermath of the Belgian tragedy this past week.  When Harold Macmillan spoke, he probably spoke too soon.  The inability to envision a rapidly expanded and expanding multiracial and multicultural community in the wake of rampaging globalization has come to haunt Europe in a tragic manner. The barbarians have arrived at the barricades and the barbed wires. The Yeatsian gyre is ever widening and the world is no longer at ease.

    By virtue of amalgamation, Nigeria could never claim to be an organic nation. But it worked for some time. The idyllic commune of the sixties was not powered by wealth but by great vision. A nation needs not be stupendously wealthy if its leaders are rich in visionary imagination. Chief ObafemiAwolowo had just completed his five year revolutionary wonder which transformed the old west from an agrarian, backward, strife-ridden society to the first indigenous modern community in Black Africa.

    Driven by its fierce republican ethos and the zeal to succeed, the relentlessly competitive Igbo society was in hot pursuit. It must also be said that whatever the internal contradictions,the north, under the able and aristocratic Ahmadu Bello, was becoming even more cohesive and prosperous on a platform which gave premium to regional solidarity before anything else.

    Then oil came and distorted everything. The massive injection of oil rents into the Nigerian economy and the incursion of the military into governance marked the beginning of the end. By the turn of the seventies, Nigeria was so much awash with extractive wealth despite a ruinous civil warthat a former military supremo was knownto have noted that the problem of the nation was no longer money but how to spend it. If only a witty patriot had added that the problem of the nation was no longer money but how to misspend it!

    In the event, a new propertied class of oil barons, emergency contractors, currency racketeers and sundry speculators emerged on the scene with their own music and musicians. As a historical correlate to the forces at play and the dynamic of unimaginative and spendthrift state policies a vast multi-ethnic class of pauperized Nigerians also became noticeable a fraction of which turned into violent expropriation in order to achieve social, political and economic parity with their tormentors.

    Needless to add that as at this moment, many of these social miscreants are already firmly ensconced in the senate, the house, several gubernatorial mansions and even the upper echelons of federal governance.  They have even made an inroad into the spiritual realm. It is not by accident that the first set of armed robbers to be publicly executed in Nigeria boasted of many demobilized soldiers. Surely if war was hell, the hell could be extended to the general society. But rather than treating the disease, it was the symptom we went after.

    Today and almost half a century after, the problem of corruption, graft, armed robbery, kidnapping, abduction and state banditry has grown so exponentially that the nation is in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer humongous mess. After a fifty year wandering in the wilderness of self-inflicted pains, we have finally arrived at the end of the beginning in which a nation either moves forward or expires in the hands of merciless adversaries both internal and external.

    Surely, it will be absurd and preposterous to place the burden of a fifty- year national misadventure on the slender shoulders of a single individual however visionary or messianic. Since Nigeria is a victim of collective ruination, it will have to be salvaged collectively. We can certainly not go back wholesale to the regionalist past or to the rigidly over-centralized statist mantra of the military mind-set except as a temporary corrective measureto halt and arrest the rot.

    But the past can serve as an able guide to the future. Nigeria has not known any peace, real progress and integrated prosperity since 1966. Surely, this must tell us that something is drastically wrong with its current configuration. The country is in dire need of creative re-engineering to bring it at par with the dictates of a true modern nation-state and to liberate the diverse talents of its diverse people.

    No amount of fidgeting with the punitive and coercive apparatus of the state can redress this fundamental anomaly.  The Daura-born retired general must internalise the lessons of his first coming. This being Easter, the season of charity, those who have stolen Nigeria blind must also show remorse and pay restitution to the nation.

    This Easter marks the golden jubilee of the last Easter this writer spent in idyllic Nigeria. Many of our compatriots have even forgotten how to celebrate Easter. Fifty years is a long stretch in the life of an individual but a short span in the life of a nation. But how men and women get wasted and rolled over by this monstrous system, how many have perished without trace!!

    It is just as well then that a few weeks back those who rated Nigeria very high among the happiest societies in the world have now reversed themselves. They have sadly concluded that Nigeria must be one of the unhappiest societies on earth. Nothing can be more debilitating and injurious to a nation than unearned happiness and an unmerited feeling of wellbeing. “I hate people being happy when they should be unhappy”, Bernard Shaw famously thundered.

    The death of happiness is a good development. Perhaps with the realization that contemporary Nigeria is as close to hell as it is possible and as it has ever been conceived in the darkest spots of the human imagination, we can all roll up our sleeves and set to work. As the Nigerian tragedy has now firmly demonstrated, hard work does not kill a society, it is unearned and unmerited prosperity that does. Do we say happy Easter?

  • Baba savages his own dog

    When a dog bites a man, it is no news, but when an old man bites his former dog, that is the stuff of great news. Whilst we are still on the subject of Easter and the season of charity, it is meet and charitable to note that our good friend, the roly-poly prince of Remo, absconding medico, erstwhile doyen of presidential guard-dogs, master of mastiffs and rector among rottweilers is in fine fettle and ebullient spirit.

    So far, and to the detriment and eternal chagrin of implacable detractors, his name has refused to show upamong those who benefited from the arms bazaar and operation “ebamigbondoyigbe” even though we hear that Magu is still mulling his options. It will be recalled that the old bruiser of Owu once hurled unflattering epithets at the flamboyant prince on this delicate matter.

    But not to worry. Even a temporary respite fromGeneral Buhari is enough to trigger off frenzied animation and renewed volubility in the most lion-hearted of men. But as the Yoruba will say, a man named Folorunso must not tempt God’s elastic patience by climbing a palm tree with banana straws. It is strange that the feisty doyen of digbolugidogs, in his frenzy, should choose the old warrior as the object of promiscuous adulation.

    It will be recalled that Junaid Mohammed, the volcanic Russian-trained Kano medic, once swore that he personally witnessed baba in Aso Rock wielding the cane on the orotund buttocks of the rogue doctor with headmaster-like severity. Such was the traumatic cruelty of corporal punishment that the corpulent doyen started screaming in his native Remo dialect: “Oro baba oo, orobabaoo!”

    It was the inevitable Okon that drew baba’s sharp and severe putdown of the doyen to snooper’s attention last Friday.

    “Ha oga, baba don finish demyeye Yoruba doctor. Him say he be hippocrate. But the problem be say even if you put dem hippo animal for inside crate he fit bite and he fit make trouble”, Okon noted fearfully.

    “Didn’t baba give him corporal punishment before?” snooper wondered half aloud.

    “Oga dis one don pass corporal. Na general punishment make dem baba give dem doctor boy. He don teywey him dey do rubbish”, Okon charged angrily.

    “I see”, snooper noted with a hint of irritation.

    “But you see oga”, Okon began in a low tone. “Make demOwu baba be careful oooo. Young boy fit defeat old man for fight oo. He get one fight like dat I come see for television between dem big crocodile and demobonge python. You go think say dem crocodile go finis dem python kiakia like dat. But small time, dem python come roll over dem crocodile and he come dey squeeze am like dem Yoruba women dey do dem belle scarf when market don scatter. The crocodile comedey cry like small baby and he come kaput. As dem python come dey swallow am,naimOkon come pick race….”

    “OKon, get lost!” snooper screamed as he dismissed the crazy fellow.

  • A minister’s gospel truth

    A minister’s gospel truth

    Kachikwu says we should give him two months to expect fuel always; let’s oblige him to fulfill all righteousness

    For once, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) spoke the truth in a long time on the lingering fuel scarcity. But it almost immediately lost the credit through its denial of what is obvious. The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources who doubles as the corporation’s managing director, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, declared, rather categorically, that Nigerians may have to live with persistent fuel scarcity till May or thereabout. This is a radical departure from the lies and, at best, half truths that we have been hearing about the fuel situation. Although before now, discerning Nigerians have always known that there is more to the fuel scarcity that won’t just go away, than meets the eye, there is nothing as good as hearing the real reason from the man that should know and that knows; and who is also competent to speak on the issue. These are different matters altogether.

    One may not know and still be expected to speak as if he knows. There is a problem, here. Again, one may know (the truth) but may not be competent to say it as it is when he has not got the green light to say it, either expressly or through his master’s body language. Here, too, there is a problem. But there is nothing as good as hearing it undiluted from the one who should know and who actually knows and at the same time is in a position to speak on it. Succinctly put, there is nothing as good as hearing it from the horse’s mouth.

    Dr Kachikwu spoke on Wednesday after a closed-door meeting between President Muhammadu Buhari and the National President of Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), Igwe Achese, and President of Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN), Comrade Olabode Francis Johnson, at the Presidential Villa. The minister said part of the problem is that the NNPC had moved from a 50 per cent importer of products to basically a 100 per cent importer. He said it was quite a huge feat that the country even had the current amount of the product at the filling stations.

    Asked specifically when the fuel queues will disappear, Kachikwu said, “One of the trainings I did not receive is that of a magician, but I am working very hard to ensure some of these issues go away … We are going to put a new model to enable us to increase the pace and actually get majors as part of the crew of those to bring in more products so that the NNPC will sort of go back on the capacity of what it used to do and the majors will take over the balance of importation. I think if we do that, although I don’t want to put a time frame, but I will expect that over the next two months, we should see quite frankly a complete elimination of this (fuel queues).”

    The truth of the matter is that, for decades, NNPC spokespersons have usually fallen short of telling us the truth about the situation whenever we experience gruelling fuel scarcity. They regale us with how there is sufficient product to go round but for some marketers who are sabotaging the government’s efforts. They tell us how tankers of fuel are being diverted or smuggled out to neighbouring countries.  Even recently when the current fuel scarcity refused to go away and the trade unions in the oil industry said we should be prepared to live with the scarcity till March-end, the corporation’s reaction was to inundate us with the number of cargoes that were either waiting  at the ports loaded with petroleum products, etc., as if that was the answer to the scarcity, or as if the unions did not know what they were saying. It is not that sometimes, marketers do not play funny, their activities alone cannot account for the scarcity.

    Anyway, we now know better. If the unions had said we should expect a regular supply of petroleum products from month-end, the man who should know has come to clarify that we even have to wait longer for this to happen. NNPC’s spokespersons would do better if they do not try to amend the truth as they usually do  in crisis situations.

    By implication, what the minister is saying is that, if we’ve stopped taking our mats to banks to siddon or sleep pending when the tellers would attend to us, we should not throw away those mats yet because we might still need them in our filling stations, at least for the next two months in the first instance; that is ceteris paribus. This is neither to incite nor to indict anyone; it is just the grim truth that we must face after the colossal damage done to the country’s economy, the oil sector inclusive. I guess this is what the NNPC thought was embarrassing, hence, its attempt to do what it knows how to do best, by saying their boss was misinterpreted. I wonder why the corporation’s spokespersons, like the leopard, would never change their spots. They seem to forget that, as Pinoy Rap Radio says, “Tell a lie once and all your truths will become questionable.” They should even attempt to tell the truth once. When debunking the stories in the media on what the minister said, the corporation, unlike the minister, did not put a time frame to when the fuel queues will disappear. Rather, it talked of some weeks from now. What does this mean, compared to the minister’s assertion that “…I will expect that over the next two months, we should see quite frankly a complete elimination of this (fuel queues)”?

     Dr Kachikwu however touched a vital point which would be the second such points he would be touching since the administration came on board in May, last year. He spoke about strategic reserve. It is unfortunate that Nigeria has not given this a serious consideration for years. Towards this end, whatever is produced in the country’s  refineries will not be sold but kept in strategic reserves because, as he noted, the major problem is that there is no reserve anytime there is a gap in supply. I cannot remember since when I have been hearing about America’s oil reserves. Anyway, it is better late than never. This is a good idea because to do otherwise would continue to expose the country to the vagaries of the international oil market. We don’t have to start sneezing immediately  there is a slight challenge in the international oil market.

    The second major point that the minister made has to do with local refineries. Until early this month, the government appeared to have kept mum on this issue to the extent that one would not be wrong to say it seemed comfy with importation. “We are working with JV partners who can come into the refinery area; we have advertised recently for co-located refineries, asking for people to come and co-locate brand new refineries, coupled into our refinery premises and they can share pipelines and tankages.

    “We are working hard to see if we can complete the refineries we are trying to do with JV partners within the next 12 to 18 months. For the co-located refineries which are the new ones, we are targeting to see that we are able to complete those over a period of two to three years. If we do that, we will have excess capacity of refined products and we’ll begin to look at export market.”

    Naturally, Labour unions and manufacturers are agitated that two months is too long a time to make Nigerians stop spending eternity at filling stations. To an extent, they have a point. Those who have been bearing the brunt of the epileptic fuel supply, particularly since January when the present round began, have every cause to complain. It is unfortunate that Nigerians, whose country is a major crude oil producer, have to suffer this type of anguish. But the oil sector is not the only place where we, like the children of bad and irresponsible meat sellers, are forced to be grateful for having bones to eat.

    All said, Nigerians should give the minister benefit of the doubt if that would make the difference. Maybe I am of this opinion because I do not expect quick fix to many of the country’s challenges, given the monumental damage done to the economy before the advent of the present government. Matters have been complicated by the lack of foreign exchange occasioned by the fall in crude prices and massive corruption, the stories of which we are hearing without end till date. However, if the government keeps faith with its promise, things should begin to ease in the sector soon, especially if the local refineries are able to produce enough for the strategic reserve. We have lived from hand to mouth for too long, with regard to fuel supply. We need something to fall back on whenever there is crisis in the supply chain.

    My joy in all of these is that we are now having targets to hold the Muhammadu Buhari government accountable to in the oil sector. The government has given itself targets on when fuel queues will end, latest; it has also told us that new refineries are under way and that in about 18 months from now, we would start to feel their impact. This means we are no longer left to grope in the dark. I think this should suffice for now.