The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • PDP gets a lifeline

    PDP gets a lifeline

    If the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had lost the election lawsuits over the two oil-rich states of Akwa Ibom and Rivers, they would have found it difficult to shoulder on. The All Progressives Congress (APC), despite grumbling over their unexpected losses in the ‘rich states’, could survive economically and politically. The opposition party, apparently feeling saddled with some 13 ‘ordinary’ states, most of them without too much electoral significance, would on the other hand have been filled with dread of how to approach the 2019 polls with weakened hands. They have all of the South-South states minus Edo, and all but two of the Southeast states, but they would have derived little comfort in that regional contiguousness if fortune had not also recently smiled on them. Their plight in the north of the Rivers Niger and Benue is even much worse. They were thrown out of the Northeast almost entirely but for Gombe and Taraba, and they do not fare better in the Northwest except for the oasis of Kebbi. In the North-Central, they are non-existent.

    Until the Supreme Court gave judgement in the Rivers and Akwa Ibom election disputes, the PDP was actually in danger of fizzling out. The tribunal and the Appeal Court had earlier given judgement in both cases in favour of the APC, and it seemed nothing on earth short of judicial robbery could reverse the trend. Had the PDP ended up losing the two oil-rich states, they would have been left with not only 11 ‘ordinary’ states, but the ruling party would have got a significant toehold in the South-South and diffused the political contiguousness which the opposition was beginning to revel in and eager to leverage on. There was of course a sense in which the APC felt it had the advantage in Akwa Ibom and Rivers, especially in the judicial sense. It didn’t seem the election was held at all in many parts of the two states, and where they were held, they were thought to have been conducted in an atmosphere of unremitting violence. That the APC lost at the apex court is not because the public didn’t get a general sense of non-compliance with electoral rules, but because the party couldn’t prove its case.

    The PDP victory in the two South-South states will go on to help the opposition party consolidate in that region. They will perform much better in the coming rerun elections than they would otherwise be capable of had they lost at the apex court. They will now have the resources to entice voters, defy the ruling APC in Abuja and weaken the resolve of those who were, until the Supreme Court judgement, fired up to bury the PDP. Having successfully fought the Bayelsa poll, and now feeling the siege has been lifted, they will give the APC more than a passing headache in the coming Edo and Ondo governorship elections. The APC may get its candidature politics right this time in Ondo, but no one can guarantee they will get it right in Edo. Henceforth, everywhere the APC makes a mistake in choosing its candidates, the PDP will loom over them like a spectre to inflict the most damage.

    The PDP has been given a lifeline, as it were, by the Supreme Court. They may not deserve it, but there is little legal arguments anyone can summon to controvert the apex court decisions on all the states where judgements have been given. At any rate, it is futile, even for those seeking some kind of unprecedented probe of the judgements. It is now left for the embattled opposition party to utilise the lifeline in an appropriate manner, assuming they have the will and the discipline. Nothing is certain, however. The lifeline will help them to find an ideology (whether culture-based or politics-based) around which to coalesce their partisan political undertaking. Though their son, ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, ruled the country poorly, somehow they still feel a sense of loyalty to him. Together with the Southeast, as the boxed article below indicates, the South-South’s cultural and political elders may attempt to redress their alienation by huddling together for self-preservation.

    The PDP is fortunate that the APC is unable to deliver the killer blow. The ruling party does not appear to have the cohesion and raison d’etre needed to fuse together its legacy parties and position their party at the core of Nigeria’s ambitions. They have also been unable to mobilise the country behind them, and have advanced no strategy to woo the Southeast and the South-South. Ideologically, even the Southwest, which was dragged screaming and kicking into the APC column, has felt somewhat distant and uncomfortable. But for the PDP to exploit these weaknesses, they will have to do the unimaginable. The country needs a vibrant opposition party, as this column has argued repeatedly in his dismissal of APC’s hubris and awkwardness. That need for a virile opposition will, however, have to be nurtured by the PDP itself. They still live in denial of the effects of the anti-graft war on their party and leadership. Too many of their leaders were sucked into the vortex of corruption under Dr Jonathan. Rather than purge that leadership and enthrone credible and charismatic replacements, they have dithered and given the impression they would hang in there and challenge the anti-graft agencies in court. No such challenge can be successful. The scale of the stealing is unbearably and unthinkably huge. If it is to stand any chance of making impact in the coming polls, the PDP must urgently begin the process of atonement, reform, reorganisation and recreation.

    This column does not submit to the dismissive characterisation of the PDP as an irredeemably hopeless or dying party. The party can be reformed if those who soiled their hands in corrupt practices, some of whom are yet to be unmasked, are sidelined and defanged. Many of their leaders are also fickle. The party needs to winnow its leadership to get rid of the tainted. Then they must think futuristically of the kind of alliances and amalgamation they would need to make a significant impact in the years ahead. At the moment, no such leaders are in sight in the party, and the ongoing efforts to secure a new Board of Trustees (BoT) and emplace a new party executive may not be more than a stop-gap measure, given their pussyfooting and handwringing. If it is any consolation to the PDP, they must also understand that the APC itself is work in progress. The ruling party is still an unstable amalgam, and its leaders, not to say its members in government from top to bottom, are really not democrats or ideologues, or even visionaries. They subscribe to nearly the same political opportunism and proclivity for institution-bashing as the PDP, if not worse.

    The PDP fears that the APC’s anti-graft war may consume opposition leaders. They are right. That is precisely why the party needs new leaders. They have also suggested that the anti-graft war is selective. There is little evidence to support that defensive posturing. What the opposition should fear is that public support for President Buhari’s anti-graft war may in fact translate into good governance and abundant life for the people. That possibility exists, though it is by no means certain. But even if the new government were to rule well, it still does not make it invincible. There are many causes around which a revamped PDP can coalesce. One of these is the current government’s paranoid view of the judiciary, in which lawyers and judges are sweepingly dismissed as pro-corruption agents and saboteurs. The country needs the opposition to remind everyone of many things, among them how the Jonathan government treated the judiciary with much more restraint and better understanding than how former soldier and ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo abused the courts, albeit without attaining the excesses of the present government.

  • Taxation and dis-alienation of citizens (1)

    Taxation and dis-alienation of citizens (1)

    A more optimistic view of the call on residents and companies to pay taxes is for citizens to see this as inevitable return of their sovereignty to them by those who had distracted citizens from their primary political responsibility in the past.

    There is no room for failure over FIRS’s attainment of its 2016 target of N4.97 trillion to the Federal Government. This is not a joke. We need everybody to do his/her beat to ensure that everybody contributes (sic) to the achievement of the target. The nation will depend on FIRS to fund the budget. We need the money to stabilise the economy.–Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, Finance Minister
    The subjects of every state ought to contribute to the support of the government, as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities: that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. In the observation or neglect of this maxim consists what is called the equality or inequality of taxation. -Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations
    A democracy requires accountability and accountability requires transparency. -Barack Obama

    Nigeria has been for too long a state run on the model of landlordism by those charged with rent collection from petroleum, who generally relish treating Nigerians not as citizens but as tenants. This philosophy of governance and of citizen-state relations had not always been so. Towards the end of the colonial era, taxation at the instance of colonial administrators and later of pre-Independence political leaders applied the principle of social contract with citizens, by assuring them in their rhetoric and praxis that the taxes citizens paid would address their social needs. This was why resistance to tax by citizens, especially in Western and Eastern regions weakened until when citizens joyfully paid their taxes, particularly during Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s unmistakable use of tax funds for social programmes that citizens could identify with. Now that Nigeria has been forced by collapse of oil price to return to funding of governance through taxes from citizens and non-citizens, as it is done in most self-sustaining countries of the world, this column will return to addressing previous themes covered on this page in the past: complementary responsibility of the taker and giver of taxes in a democracy.

    In the years before the onset of military rule in 1966, especially after the civil war when the principal source of funding for the government was rent collection from sale of petroleum, it was money collected directly and indirectly from citizens, residents, and companies that drove governance. For example, most of the infrastructure and institutions created in the four regions before the 1970s derived from funds collected directly and indirectly from the people and the economic activities they engaged in.  However, continued surge in revenue from petroleum not only encouraged military rulers to create a bloated central government in terms of functions and revenue; it also drove the policy of proliferation of states and of intended or unintended alienation of citizens from governments. Military rulers (and later civilians) of the central government in particular had the courage to delete the support of citizens from consideration, once they felt there were sufficient funds from petroleum sale to create whatever appealed to the fancies of rulers-be they military or civilian between 1975 and 2015.

    Military rulers who came to power by force of arms or civilian governments rigged into power found encouragement in the assured and growing revenue from petroleum to distance citizens from the state. This policy over time kept citizens away from scrutinising how they were governed, thus saving political and bureaucratic leaders from accountability.  Military rulers were content with citizen apathy generated by alienation, as this situation made it easier for rulers to manage civil society organisations and the media that had the courage to hold rulers to account periodically.  Corruption of some members of the media and sponsoring by rulers of civil society organisations to counter those that were genuinely pro-citizens’ interests gained ground during decades of military rule. The result of such policy on the part of government, especially the central government, is estrangement or withdrawal or separation of a person’s or group’s affections from an object or group such as those in charge of governance.

    Such alienation erodes or represses citizens’ political efficacy that should have allowed them to exercise their sovereignty. Instead, a polity committed to alienating citizens created a culture in which citizens largely, in the words of Dan Hind in The Return of the Public, “accept government’s authority almost to the point of autocracy.” It has taken the election of 2015 and the ascendancy of Mohammed Buhari as president to know the dangerous implications of decades of separation between those who governed the country and those that were governed. Suddenly, citizens now get to see the difference between discussion of corruption in the media as abstract ideas and the details of corrupt acts by those charged as politicians or civil servants to serve as minders of the state.

    It is possible that if the price of petroleum had not slumped, partisan traditional and social media could still have been able to urge the public to move on and forget the past, in order to mask the details of corruption in the polity. But the coming at the same time of an austere anti-corruption president and the loss of value of petroleum in the international market has unearthed the venality of crass political and bureaucratic corruption in the country. This has also compelled those newly charged to govern the country decades after consolidation of the culture of corruption to come back to citizens for collaboration with government through putting the onus of funding the country on citizens, residents, and their businesses. The return to the public by the Finance Minister when she said, “We need everybody to do his/her beat to ensure that everybody contributes (sic) to the achievement of the target” of raising 4.97 trillion from tax to fund a the 6+ trillion budget and to stabilise the economy knowingly or unknowingly calls on citizens to take their country back from banditry of decades-long irresponsible and unresponsive governance.

    It is conceivable that many citizens who did not feel pressured for decades to pay taxes religiously because of the culture of parasitism made possible by assured flow of revenue from petroleum and stratagems on the part of military and civilian rulers to save themselves from public scrutiny are likely to feel inconvenienced by government’s demand for prompt payment of taxes to fund governance. This may be a pessimistic view of the new reality by such citizens. A more optimistic view of the call on residents and companies to pay taxes is for citizens to see this as inevitable return of their sovereignty to them by those who had distracted citizens from their primary political responsibility in the past.

    Putting as many corrupt citizens in jail after proper trial; strengthening regulatory regimes to discourage corruption, and teaching young people in all schools about the value of honesty may not end corruption, without the readiness of citizens to invoke their power to read the riot act to politicians and civil servants that abuse their office. Such readiness will be stimulated and sustained once citizens provide the bulk of funds put in the care of politicians and civil servants. If citizens want to eat the omelette of good governance, they have to be prepared to break the eggs of reading riot acts to those who rob them of their commonwealth, by enthusiastically re-claiming their ownership of the state. Citizens’ readiness to invoke their sovereignty during and after elections is now required, more than ever before, to end a culture in which representatives of citizens as members of the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of government act as if they are sole owners of the republic.

     

    To be continued

  • Lagos must defend its own

    Lagos must defend its own

    Attacks on law enforcers is bad for law enforcement and should be frowned at by the govt

    If the Lagos State Government is truly desirous of making commercial bus drivers and their conductors, as well as thugs and other miscreants in the state imbibe sanity as a way of life, then it must be prepared to make those who attack its officials on duty pay for their actions. I say this, especially with last Monday’s attack on men of the state’s task force on environment and special offences at the Oshodi area, in mind. Some commercial bus drivers were said to be picking passengers right in the middle of the road and their vehicles were impounded only for the drivers and touts in the area to descend on the government officials.

    According to Ismaila Shamsudeen, an eyewitness: “The drivers parked in the middle of the road; while their conductors called out to passengers. The smart ones among them sped off on sighting the task force, while others fled, abandoning their vehicles to avoid being arrested. But they did not expect that their vehicles would be impounded. Before we knew it, the whole place was thrown into chaos, as hoodlums capitalised on the opportunity and started attacking anyone in sight. One of the task force officials was stabbed while another sustained minor injury. At a point, the policemen fired some shots into the air to scare the hoodlums.”

    This is a daily occurrence in Lagos, particularly at the Oshodi area, Mile 12 axis, Ikorodu and a few other places. The state government owes its workers some protection; particularly those saddled with the onerous responsibility of enforcing its laws so as to protect the law-abiding from people who prefer the Hobbesian state of nature to the ordered life that is the hallmark of civilisation. Without doubt, some of the officials sometimes go beyond bounds in the course of duty. Indeed, some of them are glorified touts in government uniform. But, whenever there is a crisis, the government must be interested in it because it has wider implications for law enforcement and peaceful coexistence in the state. It should therefore set up a machinery to ascertain what happened with a view to identifying who did what and why the hoodlums chopped off two fingers of a member of the task force, after stabbing him and attacking some of his colleagues for trying to enforce discipline on the road. Otherwise, the hands of criminals would be strengthened while the morale of the law enforcers would be dampened.

    Many of us are familiar with what life was like in Oshodi before the immediate past administration in the state began to sanitise the place. Mercifully, the incumbent Governor Akinwunmi Ambode has continued the process by demolishing some of the other hideouts of the criminals in the Oshodi area and also ensured that traffic continues to flow unhindered there. This cannot go down well with those who used those places for their nefarious activities and also caused the chaotic traffic situation through which they exploited hapless citizens.

    When people say corruption will always fight back; we tend to see it in the context of big people denied their easy way of making money. No; corruption comes in various shapes and sizes, with those involved taking advantage as far as their muscle could carry them. People who make money from commercial bus drivers illegally will always want to create artificial traffic jam because that is how they can make money. Of course it pays for the commercial bus drivers too to jump the queue in motor parks because that is the way they think they can make more trips and more money.

    The truth of the matter is that indiscipline (corruption) tastes so sweet in the mouths of some people; indeed, it is as if they are eating jollof rice or fried rice whenever they commit crimes or behave in an undisciplined manner. So, to ask such people to toe the path of sanity is like starving them of their delicacy. You literally have to whip them into line.

    Although leaders of the transporters’ unions usually say they train the drivers and conductors on how to behave responsibly and in a civilised manner behind the wheels, this does not reflect in the attitude of many of them. In corporate parlance, many of them would have been written off as “un-trainable” if after such trainings they still continue in their old habits. What kind of people will receive training only to continue to drive with only their singlet on? What manner of people will receive training only to look for broken bottles or any dangerous object to fight at the slightest provocation?

    People who have been to some of our neighbouring countries say it is not so with their commercial bus drivers and conductors. So, why would our own be different? Governor Ambode has a duty to make these people see the light. Those of them who cannot fit into the life in a civilised environment should relocate. They know which direction to go, even in the south west here, where such uncivilised and uncultured people are treated to red carpet reception.

    If criminals remain anonymous, then part of the reasons for the setting up of mobile courts in the state would have been defeated. It is also good for the government to realise that these courts are going to be manned by human beings. To that extent, therefore, their activities must be closely monitored. Just as the government must police its law enforcers to guard against arbitrariness, abuses and overzealousness, so must it ensure that the courts are not abused. If our regular courts could be manipulated, fears that such smaller courts could be are not misplaced. We should not see situations whereby ‘perpetual injunctions’ against further arrests would be given in the mobile courts to suspects as is the case in some regular courts.

    One would have been sympathetic to the cause of the ‘area boys’ but for the fact that many of them are into it not for lack of jobs. Many buses in the state operate without conductors because very few people see such jobs as rewarding nowadays. It is not the best, but the fact is that, these days some graduates are doing menial jobs just to make ends meet; what then will be the reason for stark illiterates to see some jobs as too low for them?

  • The anger, incoherence and impotence of a “concern citizen”: the raw underbelly of the war on corruption

    The anger, incoherence and impotence of a “concern citizen”: the raw underbelly of the war on corruption

    Absolutely unedited and uncensored, here is the text of one reader’s response to my reflections on the need to bring the rule of law into a fruitful union with justice in last week’s piece in this column. The only thing I have done to the text as received is to bracket it from the brief comment that I shall make on it by placing it in italics in its entirety. Here it goes:

    Prof as we used to call you guys with too much english knowledge in my days at 9ja Uni ive been reading with rapt attentions 4 some weeks now your dialogue about president buhari’s method in Fighting the anti graft war .Haba! Prof yoruba adage says ina esusu kijoni lemeji meaning once bitten ttwice shy why can’t you these grammar people 4 once consider that itvis you this so call elite that are destroying and using your so call classroom and pen knowledge to continously making this God blessed nation called Nigeria becoming a laughing stock to comity of nations . Why on earth are you ppl always talk of rule of law and human right in defence of those that need not to be prosecuted but stone to death haba! Prof you ppl hv now rven gone yo the extend of quoting the word of God lopsidedly in other to buttress your so call heartless heart please permit me as i really don’t want to personalise this write up but i cry for my beloved Nigeria whenever i read most of you people write ups sir where was the rule of law when God killed all the stiffnecked israelites and refused to let them get to the promised land bcos of their bresking God’s law where wss rule of law when God removed and eventually destroyed the first king of israel Saul when he broke God’s commandments have yiu all forgotten what happenrd to the guy that try to right the ark of God when King David was taking it from obededium house and were been instructed by God yhat nobody should torch it under any circumstances ive million and one example sir in the same bible you people started quoting arbitrarily to support those heartless animals called looters  to me they aren’t looters but murderers . Haba prof! Some people in a country that has no light no pipeborne water no hospital no no jobs for the semi demi illetrates that our so call glorified nursery schools called university are year in year out graduating with their only paper certificate shared 2.1 billion dollars among less than 100 people and you people are still talking and debatinga about whether their fundamental human right  or rule of law was or wssn’t follow. Sir with all respect in that America yiu are sir have you not hear of guetsmala bay prison in cuba? Thank Godvive lived there fir several years , in England am here right now have yiu not read about our MP some 2 or 3 years ago that went to jail for ordinary misapproptiating less thsn 5000 pounds? Not stealing o just may be claiming some ridicuolous 2000pounds over yheir imprest or for their mortgage thats agsinst the law of the land. Sir for all my years hrre in uk i never saw one article written to support them for being a good crook is only in Nigeria you see all sort of educated misnormals wasting english language if i may borrow from one of my olden days proffessor here in england he always wonder why we nigeria always waste english by speaking or writting in big grammar i remember then jokingly i usedvto tell him that people used such big english to defend  themself after embezzling public funds but today i think am right.Sir with all respect you peoplecshould remember that thats hiw you started condeming the same buhari in 1984 as head of state until you playrd into the hands of the real sabotouers and never allow yhr man to lay us a good foundation in Nigeria all is now history brother but unfortunately 33years after you people have started again with your big english and rule of law snd humam unright orvwhatever yiu call it but to before warn is to be fore harm  .God bless . Pst Dele  from London

    The anger, the rage of the writer of the text is all too palpable. The text was set to ME by email and I am addressed by my professional title, “Prof”, but the real addressee is a plural group identified as “yiu ppl” (you people). To the writer, we are all heartless people defending looters who are not “ppl” but animals that should be “stone to death”. Now anyone with even minimal literacy skills that read my pieces on the looters would have immediately understood that I was far from defending them, but this is of absolutely no importance to our raving interlocutor; I am guilty, I am one of the “heartless” “ppl” only because the term “rule of law” appeared in my robustly anti-looters pieces. The writer also finds me guilty of defending the looters for using “big enlish” but this a lesser charge or even a merely additional crime to the unconscionable evil of using the term “rule of law” in my writings on this matter, a matter that is of life and death importance for our absolutely irate compatriot. I ask Palladium especially but everyone else reading these words to please take note: the fury of the person who sent this text to me is so deep that it is almost elemental; moreover, it is shared by tens of millions of Nigerians at home and abroad.

    But beyond the anger, there are the incoherence and, above all else, the impotence. These are the things that I wish to reflect upon in this short commentary. The incoherence is of course at its most obvious in the complete absence of punctuation in the text; but it is not this technical register of incoherence itself that I wish to draw the reader’s attention to. Rather, it is the emotional and mental incoherence that the ‘punctuational’ incoherence produces that worries me. I call this order of emotional and mental incoherence strategic and tactical: merely by spotting the term, “rule of law” in ANY writing whatsoever, the writer of the irate text lost the ability to distinguish between “opponents” and “defenders” of looters, an inability, in other words, of the capacity to distinguish between potential allies and actual powerful backers of the looters, especially in the judiciary. I confess that this not only worries me tremendously, but it also frightens me, so much so that I have had to dig deep into my intuitions regarding what we can learn from experiences from all over the world in periods of volatile social ferment such as the one Nigeria now faces in this war on corruption and looters. This observation leads me to the last issue that I wish to reflect upon in this piece. I wish to express this as carefully as I can since it is at the core of all my reflections in this piece.

    In all parts of the world in periods when extremely volatile mass resentment against deep and wide social injustice is rampant, the strategic incoherence that makes it impossible for the millions of the aggrieved to distinguish between their potential allies and their real enemies reflects a deep sense of powerlessness, a political impotence in which raving incoherently against the prevailing order of things replaces the necessity for individual and mass action against the prevailing (dis)order, injustice and misrule. I suggest that this is the source of the kind of emotional and mental incoherence of the writer of the raging diatribe against anyone talking of the rule of law when, to him or her, the looters should all be “stone to death”. Let me be very clear about this point: to the writer of the irate text, Buhari and his administration will do the work that is necessary to bring the looters to justice; anyone and everyone seeming to question Buhari’s war, his tactics or lack of tactics, is an enemy. And so from the UK or from Kontangora, the cries go up: leave Buhari alone to do what must be done for us, for Nigeria! But when has it ever happened in the history of revolutionary periods that without the intervention of the masses themselves acting through their own organizations and as individuals, when has it ever happened that badly needed change and reforms come exclusively from the ruler(s)?

    In conclusion, let me say that this point about the necessity of mass action to bring the looters to justice and recover the loot from them is a point, a declaration that I have made again and again in this column in the last few months. I shall keep making it as long as the delusion remains that Buhari alone will deliver justice. Thus this is a call for action, a peaceful but determined intervention of our peoples for justice and restitution. One would have thought that as a ruling party that places so much propaganda value on “change” the APC itself would have called for this mass intervention in support of its intentions – if they are genuine. I end with a call to the writer of the diatribe against “yiu ppl” using “big english” to forget us and march, protest, and demonstrate for restitution of the stolen loot and punitive justice against the looters. If and when he or she does that, some of us using “big english” will join him or her. And we will prevail, Insha Allah!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                 

    jeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

     

  • This budget: Heads must just roll

    This budget: Heads must just roll

    Why on earth are Jonathan’s appointees sitting pretty as head of critical agencies of state when he knew that their track record during the campaigns and presumed voting pattern during the election point unerringly to the fact that they neither believe in his candidacy nor his policies?

    In the first of my quartet of articles captioned: ‘Periscoping The Ideal Presidential Candidate For The APC’ through which I vigorously campaigned for the candidature of contestant Mohammadu Buhari as the party’s best foot forward, I asked interested Nigerians to weigh in with their own preferences. One of the earliest responders was a young man, Biodun, a graduate of Insurance Studies from the University of Lagos. He had nothing but the best words for contestant Buhari. However, he wrote me again this past week, almost a changed man, especially when news broke about how untidy President Buhari’s first budget had turned. He wrote:

    “President Muhammadu Buhari’s inability so far to look the greedy Nigerian politicians in the eye and failure to remove their itchy hands from the Nigerian treasury will most likely be his albatross; one to make his presidency as uneventful  as those of other presidents before him. Nearly all of us that laboured to have him elected had infectious enthusiasm about his coming to power, believing that the excessive perks politicians vote themselves annually would end through appropriate and prompt constitutional amendment at the instance of the executive. Nine months after, President Buhari has still chosen to look the other way. The huge crowds that turned up at his iconic political rallies all over the country have turned out the losers as the salaries and perks of these legislators remain as outrageous as ever with  constituency allowances without constituency offices, unending  purchases of exotic cars in the name of committee work, unearned severance packages for, among others, ex-governors who already got paid gratuities as well as life pensions with cars every two years, a house in any choice part of Nigeria etc.  For how long will President Buhari look askance? That is not to mention immunity and billions of security vote for governors when insecurity is one of our greatest problems in Nigeria. Local government autonomy too appears not to be any issue President Buhari wants to bother himself about, perhaps because he still won’t look the governors and their godfathers in the face. (The columnist, like the late Uncle Bola Ige, believes that Local Government issues should be a complete state matter with no interference, whatever, from the federal) The other day, Buhari complained that he has his reservations about Nigerian courts’ willingness to join him to make Nigeria a difficult place for corruption to thrive and promptly got a response from the Punch newspaper, counselling him to arrest and prosecute corrupt judges, siting examples from other countries. The truth is that he takes too long to act on anything. He is a well loved president, perhaps more than any other president Nigeria has had, but President Buhari is failing to live up to how the huge crowds of Nigerians that attended his political rallies want him to act. Maybe as a reminder to the president, Nigerians want him to do the following: remove the clause for 36 ministers from the constitution, grant local government autonomy, remove immunity and severance pay for politicians (and considerably reduce the pay for ex presidents and vice). The president should get involved in the processes of constitutional amendment and get all these done quickly for the good of. Nigeria.  All these outrageous politicians’ perks should end. Civil servants must take a minimum 30 per cent pay cut and politicians 80 per cent, while all sorts of pensions for politicians are abolished. Public office is a privilege, not a right. Nobody should fleece Nigeria in the name of being elected to public office. Concerning this shambolic 2016 budget, the least said the better.”

    And so ended the young man’s jeremiad.

    Unlike the colony of naysayers who are still bellyaching over President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s ouster, and therefore criticising the incumbent, the furore over President Buhari’s completely manipulated 2016 budget is a massive testimony to the efficacy as well as the effectiveness of his change mantra. This certainly is not the first time budgets in Nigeria are mercilessly padded and under any of the past PDP presidents of those 16 years of locust, the regime of the habitual letter writer inclusive, this same budget, warts and all, would have been passed with aplomb. Padding Nigerian budgets has always been the product of an evil collusion between members of the National Assembly committees and our evil, sorry civil servants, especially the permanent secretaries and the Budget Office but by far worse are the Director-Generals of MDAs. These loots are then creatively creamed off during the legislators’ meaningless, so-called oversight functions. As you read this, only a miniscule number of our National Assembly members would be worth less than a billion naira in net worth.  Yet they make the most noise, faking integrity. Two things must have happened in the instant case. The overriding ambition of the current leadership of the National Assembly which led them to mess up their party leadership, had resulted in a nebulous National Assembly where both the Senate President and his House counterpart as well as their PDP Deputy Senate President – an anomaly of the first order – as distinct from the arm of government they represent – behave like they are above their political party, the APC.  In the circumstance, only a fool will wager that they would, on any or on all issues, buy into Buhari’s agenda. Were this not a self-inflicted problem, one should have been moved to pity the APC which having sown the wind in many instances, would sure come to reap the whirl wind, the Kogi State self-immolation being a good example.

    Since the party is that confused in the National Assembly, a wounded PDP whose debauchery over the past 16 years, but especially in the last six years of   President Jonathan is being daily exhumed, though complicit in the usual yearly budget padding, must have been waiting to show to Nigerians that Buhari though might be a good corruption fighter, he is certainly not adept at administering the country. The idea is to make him look like a giant with clay feet.  You can hardly ever best their choice of the budget to attempt to desecrate a man so highly admired at home and internationally: a man US Secretary of State, John Kerry, would do anything to praise to high heavens at an in international forum as the world recently saw less than a month ago at the World Economic Forum. Unfortunately, however, there is a sense in which the president brought this on himself. Why on earth are Jonathan’s appointees sitting pretty as head of critical agencies of state when he knew that their track record during the campaigns and presumed voting pattern during the election point unerringly to the fact that they neither  believe in his candidacy nor his policies? No, as bona fide Nigerians, nobody is suggesting that they should be made to lose their jobs, but for Christ’s sake why were many of these people not moved to less sensitive posts?  No Nigerian, abreast of what happened under President Jonathan, can fake any ignorance of how the duo of the Finance Minister and the Secretary to the Government of the Federation ensured that not less than 75 per cent of the heads of the regulatory agencies came from their part/s of the country.  Since these persons then ran their posts as they deemed, what would they not do to open up Buhari as worse than Jonathan?

    As things stand, it is good the president has ordered an inquiry into the budget disaster but it has got to be a proper one. He must assign Nigerians of integrity to do this yeoman’s national service and whoever is found culpable must be tried for economic sabotage. The in-house old budget mafia must have leveraged on the newness to the system of both the finance minister, who they have been using their huge international connections to denigrate, as well as the budget minister, both of who Nigerians, fortunately, know to have performed very well at their past desks.

    In conclusion, if the Secretary to the Government of the Federation – not Head of Service – wants President Buhari to succeed, he must persuade the President to empanel a committee of civil service veterans on which all the geo- political zones are represented but peopled only by the likes of civil servants of impeccable integrity like Dr Goke Adegoroye and Dr Tunji Olaopa. These are the ones I know and trust, imbued as they are, with the Pa Simeon Adebo administrative DNA. There must be such men all over the country. Look for them to help this government.

     

  • APC unites Southeast and South-South against itself

    APC unites Southeast and South-South against itself

    Unknown to the All Progressives Congress (APC), and notwithstanding some of the defections fattening the party in many unlikely parts of the country, it is confronting one of the worst dilemmas any ruling party has ever faced in Nigeria. In the  2015 polls, the Southeast and South-South preferred ex-president Goodluck Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It didn’t matter that the former president performed very poorly in office, with a record so appalling that his supporters in both regions declared their support for him and the then ruling party in brazen disregard of crippling economic and social indicators. They had little interest in the APC candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, and they showed it by their voting preferences. Now, the alienation is set to be more perfectly entrenched by the resolve of the APC government to confront the social, economic and political ills that have plagued the country  in the past few years. Should President Buhari flag in his zeal to confront the ills, his campaigns are in danger of coming unstuck. But should he continue, as he seems set to do, the two regions will remain hostile to him in future polls.

    President Buhari is engaged in two major campaigns: security operations to stabilise the country, and anti-graft war to clean up and remake the country’s financial ethos. The exigencies of the moment make the two campaigns inescapable, just as they also pit him remorselessly against the dominant ethos and truculent elites of the two regions. The president will find himself confronting probably a similar dilemma as Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill confronted during World War II. To win the war, argued Sir Winston, they would need the help and even leadership of the United States. But that help, the British statesman acknowledged, would come at a huge price of the diminution of Britain’s global power and influence. In the end, Sir Winston concluded that to win the war was more desirable than sustaining her global influence and ego. Can President Buhari find a way to prosecute his campaigns without losing the support of the Southeast and South-South? The chances are slim, for both regions never liked him to begin with.

    The president’s security operations in the regions involve curtailing the rising influence and activities of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) headed by the detained Nnamdi Kanu, and curbing pipeline vandalism and any form of economic sabotage triggered by restive Niger Delta militants. It is not an option for President Buhari to ignore the activities of IPOB and the older Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB). As the president suggested during his maiden media chat, what kind of president would he be if he failed to respond firmly to the provocations of those who test his resolve? However, that response and the manner it is currently managed, not to talk of the statements he and other security agents have made, have ensured that the animosity to the Buhari government will continue relentlessly until the next polls. Similarly, the government has responded very strongly to resurgent pipeline vandalism, with some unsubstantiated allegations that Chief Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, might have inspired the sabotage. Again, it is unreasonable to expect the President Buhari to ignore the sabotage.

    But by declaring Tompolo wanted and launching a manhunt for him, notwithstanding the opinions and feelings of the Niger Delta elders who seem to project an inscrutable form of social and economic ideology, the stage seems set for irreconcilability. Mr. Tompolo straddles the allegations of economic sabotage and financial crimes, for which the EFCC has declared him wanted. Whether he is eventually apprehended or not, the sense of entitlement long projected by the region will become angrily ossified and carried over to the next polls. As the youths of the Southeast and South-South appear to be projecting common grounds for disaffection, the wider danger is that regional elders, who have lost both influence and money, may also be weighing their options. In their opinion, many regional political titans who braved regional ridicule and opposition in order to associate with the ruling party did not get the kind of cabinet positions they believed would have enhanced their prestige. They recall the president’s sharing formula in which he talked of giving more to states that voted en masse for him than those that gave him little. And they remember how in his media chat he wondered impatiently what else the Southeast wanted in terms of cabinet positions.

    Paradoxically, as more revelations of the crazy stealing that went on under the Jonathan presidency are published, the two regions will become more antagonistic because of the implication for their son, Dr Jonathan, and his many acolytes who are bound to suffer collateral damage. As the piece above shows, PDP’s retention of some ‘rich’ states will offer them a base from which to consolidate their regional opposition to President Buhari’s APC. They will become increasingly defiant, and they will have hope that the tentative and famished alliance that has kept the APC going in the Southwest would soon unravel. They will pray for 2017 to come quickly, hoping that if they can survive the anti-graft probe and the security operations in the Niger Delta and on the streets of the Southeast, they will be able to rally their forces together to unhorse the ruling party or at least give it a bloody nose.

    Unfortunately for the APC, it has been unable to achieve unity and sense of purpose since it gained power in 22 states and Abuja. Its emotive, immature and shambolic approach to the judicial reverses it suffered in the past few days has exposed the party’s lack of steely core and nationalist ideology. It seems to think that the Southeast and South-South may not present any pressing danger to its electoral dominance. But from all indications, the APC may not be able to sustain its total dominance of the North in 2019, when there was only one northern candidate for the presidential election, and must acknowledge that it gained victory in the Southwest by the skin of its teeth. If it wants to retain power in the next polls, it must, much more than the PDP, reform and reinvent itself.

  • My friend needs your ‘financial love’

    Today is Valentine Day, better known as Lovers’ Day. While many are consumed in the celebration of what the Greeks refer to as Eros love, which is ” a passionate and intense love that arouses romantic feelings, “I am opting to mark today’s celebration by drawing attention to the plight of a good friend of mine who is need of financial help to arrest his desperate health condition.

    Love is much more than the passionate feelings most take it for. It is also according to Wikipedia, the virtue representing human kindness, compassion and affection- “the unselfish and benevolent concern for the good of another.” Olamide Bakare, a recent Mass Communication graduate of the University of Lagos is in need of the love of Nigerians who want to fulfill that injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves.

    The 43 year-old has been diagnosed of Ankylosing spondylitis and Cervical spondylosis, an ailment which presently causes him severe pain in the neck (anterocollis), forward flexion of the head and neck, spine pain, hip flexor spasm, coupled with eye pain, which he says have become unbearable.

    Initially, he thought it was the stress and strains of his days in the university that triggered the pains, but upon consultation with an orthopaedist at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, diagnoses revealed the pains are not unconnected with the deteriorating Ankylosing spondylitis and Cervical spondylosis, which he had been diagnosed of years back and which medical experts say could lead to total loss of mobility in the affected areas, if urgent surgical correction is not done. This necessitated an intensive search for medical help out of the shore of the country.

    Fortunately, Artemis Hospital in Delhi, India came into the picture and they have offered to take in Bakare for treatment. The treatment, including bilateral total hip replacement and cervical artificial disc replacement would be done at the hospital, one of the best and most recently built hospitals in India, equipped with the latest and most sophisticated technology at a total cost of N5.5million

    This cost covers flight ticket for both the patient and escort, fees for recuperation at a guesthouse, drugs and miscellaneous.

    Going by Bakare’s financial status, he is unable to afford this huge expenses, hence his call on well-meaning Nigerians for help.

    Bakare lost both parents in the course of his travail and also lost contact with his immediate siblings, who literally abandoned him to his fate. But he did not lose hope. Despite the disheartening situation, he mustered the courage to live and even went as far as taking up menial jobs like laundry to eke a living.

    It is also partly due to this ailment that Bakare only just graduated last June (2015) at 43, 19 years after secondary school in 1991. But his wait may be said to be worth its while, as he came out with a promising Second-Class Upper degree.

    In the last couple of years, which coincided with his final years in the university, Bakare has been an advocate of good governance for Nigerians, especially the less privileged and the vulnerable group in society, using his writing skill to give voice to the voiceless in the society through many newspaper publications.

    Please join me in lending a hand to my friend in dire need of help? Your contribution should be send to his account: Bakare Olamide Zenith Bank Account number: 2088803768. He can also be reached via his mobile phone numbers: 08165258647, 08170295881.

  • A milestone…. of sorts

    Snooper does not like talking about the man behind the mask, that is, the pipe smoking gnome behind the weekly sorties. Howard Hughes, the reclusive American billionaire, once noted that too much self exposure and unwarranted self-revelation lead to self-demystification and the loss of mystique. (If you  believe the loony hermit actually said that, then you are in for a big ride).

    But there are some milestones in the life of an individual that are worth celebrating, if only for the illuminating light they throw on the trajectory of a society. How does it feel to be reading yourself for the first time in a national daily, and at a time when newspapers were few and far between? It is like eavesdropping on your own solitary ruminations or savouring the arrival of glorious dawn on a lonely beach.

    This week marks the forty fifth anniversary of the columnist’s first appearance in national print in an article published in the Nigerian Tribune on February 16th, 1971 when yours sincerely was a teenage reporter/ proof reader in that famous organization. Thank you, Chief Fola Oredoyin, the Chief sub-editor at the foreign desk at The Nigeria Tribune at that point in time, for publishing the piece. And thank you the dapper and unflappable Chief Olukayode Bakre, the editor of The Nigerian Tribune at that point in time, for fervently believing in and adoring a boy you considered a child prodigy.

    Titled “Powell and the coloured immigrants”, it was a blistering attack on Enoch Powell, the British politician whose racist comments on immigration stoked up the fire of a looming apocalypse in Britain as a result of the hordes of coloured immigrants sweeping through the island. The article took Powell to stiff task over his inflammatory remarks which divided and completely polarized the Conservative Party in particular and Great Britain in general.

    Enoch Powell was no empty rabble-rouser like the American Donald Trump. With his icy stare and donnish imperiousness, he was a master of the brilliant and devastating putdown. But he allowed the virus of hatred and racial bigotry to consume his own career.  Although a full Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in Australia at the precociously early age of twenty five, there was little to show that the ancient humanities actually humanized the Conservative M.P from the British Midlands.

    There were private whispers about his mental health.  For centuries after the revolution, Britain had tried to forge a national consensus based on liberality, tolerance and order, a tradition in which the gentleman is expected to wear his hat and opinion lightly, as Terry Eagleton, the Anglo-Irish Marxist hell-raiser , famously put it.

    But Powell  would have none of this one-nation High Tory fudge. He was as hard as he was uncompromising and as a result of his extreme right wing views, he was never to achieve the towering stature in British politics commensurate with his dazzling intellectual talents. In a feat of clairvoyance , Powell himself once famously noted that all political careers end in failure.

    A few weeks after the Powell article, snooper was dramatically catapulted over the head of several elderly veterans of close marking both on and off the galley proofs and grizzled warriors of state inspired mayhem to a sub-editorship in the daring and iconoclastic newspaper. This meant a ringside sneak preview of those hard-hitting Tribune editorials of mysterious provenance which promptly arrived at the editor’s desk without anybody knowing how and where they materialized from. It must remain a trade secret.

    It was one of these remarkable salvoes and editorial broadsides that would cause trouble a few weeks later. In protest against the confirmation and selection of the then Prince Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi as the new Alaafin of Oyo, the newspaper wrote a pungent hard-hitting editorial titled: We Shall be back to Square One. It was an incredibly daring and defiant thing to do, but then The Nigerian Tribune did not earn its celebrated spurs on the basis of pacifist advocacy.

    However, as it is nowadays, so it was in those days. State moles plying their furtive and sinister trade abound. A few minutes to midnight and as the newspaper was about to put to bed, Brigadier Robert Adeyinka Adebayo’s men came calling, sacking and ransacking everywhere as they impounded the impoundable and abducted the abductable. It was over in a few brisk minutes culminating in a disorderly rout and a disorganized retreat through Oke Sapati on to the Minor Seminary and from there to Oke Padi and the bowels of commercial Ibadan. The sword had made a short shrift of the pen, but only for the moment.

    Among the lucky survivors of that military siege was a young, intrepid and enterprising reporter who had earlier covered the Kunle Adepeju murder for the paper. Gabriel Ajayi’s sturdy limbs and power of acceleration foreshadowed a glorious military career that would be cruelly and callously terminated by military despotism.  Twenty four years after in 1995 just as Colonel Ajayi was being sentenced to death by Abacha’s phoney Tribunal simply for serving as secretary to a panel which asked for the de-annulment of the June 12 election, snooper was also heading for exile. Memories are made of these.

  • Are we not burdened enough that we must yet add learning French to Nigeria’s problems?

    The resources that would otherwise have been used to enforce this decision can be better employed in developing writing systems for our many unwritten languages so that they will no longer die just because the speakers are dying. The speakers will bless us for this. France itself can assist in this venture.

    There is an estimate in scholarship that Nigeria presently houses over four hundred and fifty (450) indigenous languages within her linguistic walls, in addition to English and Arabic. It is also estimated that nearly, if not all, have an appreciable number of speakers, no matter how few they are. Once, one language in Nigeria was said to have only two (2) speakers left, if they have not emigrated to Australasia, or died.

    As of now, very few of these languages have been developed to the point of having literature written in them; and fewer still even have alphabets. Yet, scholars agree that it would be a crying shame to let any of these languages go into extinction because of the nation’s indifference. And what is the cause of that indifference, you might ask? We have plenty of languages to spare.

    This means that if we run out of languages within the country, we can always call on those of our neighbours. I guess this is why the Minister of State for Education felt confident enough to state not too long ago that Nigerians would soon be called upon to learn French even up to the tertiary level, if only for the sake of our neighbours. As if we did not have enough problems, no? Ha, ha!

    I have nothing against French. It’s a fine language, but is it for us? Just consider, out of these 450+ languages, Nigeria is presently using only a fraction of them for her internal and external affairs. With English lording it over everybody anyways, even those few find themselves with little or nothing to do. Well, for one thing, they just generally provide an alternative way of saying something already said in the official language; and for another, they provide a means for ethnic brothers to bond. For a third reason, they probably allow people to think in their native intelligences.

    Scholars have told us – bless these scholars for the things they keep telling us – that each language has its own logic and thought system. Therefore, learning more than one language means learning and having more than one thought system. As it is now, Nigerians, young and old, who speak their native tongues alongside English, have thought systems that can only be called convoluted. But I guess it builds bridges across the two languages. This is why the old woman in their village is the one doing them; you’re the one I’m greeting; and oh yes, you are well-swallowing of something (for eku igbeun kan mi). These just make you wonder how elastic a language can be, right, or whether it is gradually coming apart. Now, that is a point of interest to many of us. With so many languages to think in, are you surprised that Nigerians are not able to think straight?

    More importantly, don’t you think we have enough trouble already with the English that was forced on us? To add another language to Nigerians’ plate of repertoires is to add another thought system to the confusion. People will now not know whether to take the native thought through English first into French or vice versa or let them all meet at the crossroads. I think the latter will make for some very interesting utterances, such as you’re the one je suis greeting. That is Frenglish in Yoruba, no?

    Let’s see what the Nigerian language policy in education says. Part of it says that the Nigerian child is expected to learn one Nigerian language other than his/her own in primary school and another one in secondary school, all alongside English. This means that the average Nigerian child is expected to function effectively in four languages.

    This policy does not take into consideration the varying intelligences of children. True, there be some among them who can walk through eight languages without any hassles. On the contrary, many there be among them, if not most, who can hardly cope with one language; yet, as scholars have told us, languages are best acquired or learnt in childhood. If young, sharp children are having problems learning languages with internal structures that are not too far from their own language families, what chances will there be for them or their older generations in tertiary institutions to cope with more foreign languages?

    Language learning is sometimes accelerated when materials are accessible and well trained teachers are available. The reason why the Nigerian language policy in education has not been too strong on ground is not too difficult to guess: no funds. Teachers are not being trained – no funds; text books are not being written – no funds; teaching aids and audio-visual materials are not being developed – no funds; many Nigerian languages have no orthography – you guessed it, no funds! So, forgive me for asking, but where on earth will the funds come from to provide all these with regard to French?

    Come now, let us reason together. Two of the disadvantages of using English for national affairs have been pointed out. Foreign languages do not give the African that sense of identity a language normally should give; and the fact that they do not give that needed national security that a nation desperately needs. Native languages give both.

    True, this country cannot afford to go around translating every cough, sneeze and laughter of the president or myself (thank you so much for noticing that I also cough, sneeze and laugh) into 450+ languages; yet, many of our national affairs actually need to be kept secret, particularly from foreigners like you. Now, how on earth can we do that with all our records being legible in English? We plod on nevertheless for economic reasons, but not by now adding French. Why, that will definitely be making our records available to the…

    Just think too, how jealous other world powers will be if we adopt French as a third foreign language. I’m talking about countries like Germany, Japan, China, etc. They are going to want to know why the most populous black nation on earth is leaving them out of its schools. Have they not traded with us? They have. Have they not been good to us? They have. Have they not also colonised us economically if not politically? They have. After all, nearly everything we use now comes from China. So, we cannot go around learning a foreign language just because the owner countries are somewhere around us.

    English is very present in China, Japan, Germany, etc., yet the governments of those countries have not compelled their schools’ curricula to change on that account. Rather, they have given their citizens the freedom to learn whatever language they see the need to. Many Japanese and Chinese see the need to learn English, so they do it. That is not the country’s business.

    Rather than compel our young ones to divert their needed mental resources to learning yet another language, this country should encourage them to pay more attention to the contents of their syllabi as they stand. The focus should be to use the syllabi to bring the best out of every child and student, and help them to be maximally productive. One more language will not do this; it may even retard all progress.

    Most importantly, we are burdened enough. The resources that would otherwise have been used to enforce this decision can be better employed in developing writing systems for our many unwritten languages so that they will no longer die just because the speakers are dying. The speakers will bless us for this. France itself can assist in this venture.

  • On the rule of law

    On the rule of law

    (Why Gani Fawehinmi still matters)

    Suddenly and just exactly as it happened during retired General Buhari’s first sojourn, fierce arguments about the rule of law have returned to the front burner. The urgent and passionate tone of the debate, its relentlessly agonistic contention, suggests a society that has succumbed to intellectual trauma in addition to political and economic trauma.

    Despite the philosophy of Heraclitus and its notion of permanent flux, Nigeria appears mired in the same eddy pool just as it was over thirty years ago. But this may well be an optical illusion. The ground might have shifted under us while the nation has stalled, stuck with the same ruling class miscreants. What has happened this time around is that the Nigerian masses have also joined the debate. This is when the ruling class “game” is fatally threatened, and the entire chess board is in danger.

    Like its other accessories such as equality before the law and the right to vote and be voted for, the rule of law is one of the pious myths of modern liberal democracy. But these are factual myths, or truthful falsehoods if you like, that must be sustained at all costs if the ascendant classes must survive. All sustainable and self-sustaining ruling classes must be seen to pay not just lip service but actual service to the rule of law.

    There should be no equivocation about this. There is as yet no human society where there is complete equality before the law or the rule of law for that matter. In leading western societies, the quality of lawyers you are able to hire and their sheer gravitas often determine the process and outcome of the matter at hand. The evidence of legal weight trumps the weight of factual evidence.

    But since everybody has been programmed by institutional memory to buy into this, it is where the matter ends. Being a very costly matter to both sides revolutions are hardly ignited by isolated cases of injustice but by mass repression that has become intolerable.

    In every society, then, the ruling law is the law of the ruling classes. In other words, the rule of law is the law or the grundnorm on which the rule of the ascendant classes is anchored. But as history has taught us, this arrangement is neither eternal nor immutable. It cannot be equated with the wholesale brutalization of the people and the vandalization of the sacred ethos of the state through egregious greed and ruling class gluttony such as we have witnessed in Nigeria.

    When this happens, the veil of the illusion of equality before the law and the rule of law itself is torn off the visage of the howling masses and the braying mob. In such circumstances, and if it is to sustain its hegemonic grip over society, the ruling group must be prepared to pay maximum penalty. This is when harsh reality collides with optical illusion.

    The irony of it all is that in such circumstances, the ruling class can only survive if it pays maximum and rigorous adherence to the principle of equality of all before law, if it upholds the rule of law in such a way that it is not seen or perceived to give preferential treatment to perceived crooks and criminals simply because they are privileged members of the ruling clan.

    It is when the rule of law ossifies into the ruse of law that a strong signal is sent to the people to take the law into their own hands. Anarchy, we need to remind ourselves, is not the collapse of law and order but the collapse of lawlessness and disorder. In the current Nigerian circumstances, the strident advocacy for the rule of law where privileged law breakers may be concerned is a sign of paradoxical complicity with lawlessness and disorder.

    The modern world did not get to this point by sheer accident of history or through the graciousness and rational conduct of rulers and their accessories. It has taken momentous and bloody exertions. The human toll has been prohibitive. Much blood has been shed before it can be burnt into the consciousness of kings that there is nothing like divinely ordained rule and that the delusion of ascribing earthly authority to some celestial behemoth is sheer nonsensical bunkum.

    The French king who famously declared that he was the state might have said that in royal emphasis. But if only the deluded Louis X1Vcould see his luckless and hapless descendant who took very much the same route!  He was summarily decapitated along with his wife and the throne was abolished forever to the bargain.

    In England much earlier, Oliver Cromwell disbanded the House of Commons after putting the King to sword. For over three centuries, the Yoruba of Nigeria have been periodically chopping off the heads of their kings in a battle of will and wits that has shaped and defined the identity and libertarian politics of the people till date and their abhorrence for autocratic rule of any hue.

    Many of these bloody upheavals are determined by the trajectory of a people’s history and the nature of the nation itself. It has been said of Stalin that he drove barbarity out of Russia by sheer barbarity. The whimsical cruelty and sadistic pleasure in human suffering are regrettable but there can be no doubt that the Bolshevik Revolution propelled Russia from a backward feudal society mired in superstitious idiocies to a modern industrial nation in one single generation.

    You cannot have omelette without breaking eggs. As Nigeria confronts the demon of industrial corruption and official malfeasance which has hobbled the country and stalled its march to authentic nationhood, there are important lessons to take away from other societies that have managed the traumatic transition to modernity without much bloodshed and appalling suffering of the populace.

    We must thank God for small mercies. Just as the inchoate and incoherent nature of the Nigerian nation prevents elite cohesion and the complete homogenization of the Nigerian ruling class, the chaotic ethnic tapestry of the nation has also made it impossible for the Nigerian under-classes to act in pan-Nigerian concert when and where it matters most.

    But opportunities also abound in national contradictions. To the best of our knowledge, President Mohammadu Buhari is not a flaming revolutionary or a radical Leninist insurgent bent on completely smashing the old order. He is at best a Fulani aristocrat and conservative reformer genuinely appalled and rightly so by the appalling and degrading state of his country.  Rather than undermining him, it is tactically better for members of Nigeria’s fractious political elite to endure the bitter pills rammed down their throat by a sympathetic undertaker  than wait for the real thing in a situation of anomie and disorder.

    This is why it is regrettable that certain scions of the northern feudal oligarchy, unlike Buhari, cannot grasp the historical connection between the current thieving disorder, their princely complicity in the rot and the appalling corruption and collapse of order in the old Hausa empire which prompted their heroic forbears to rise in revolt in a bid to cleanse the entire system.

    This failure of moral imagination and the collapse of historical memory prompt one to recall Ganiyu Oyesola Fawehinmi, the late legal avatar and moral lodestar for his generation. How would Gani have conducted himself in the current ethical quagmire? In retrospect, it is now clear that Gani was clearly ahead of his time and his profession. In a gesture of defiance and contempt, Gani ignored the call of the legal profession to boycott the courts because of the infraction of human rights by the old Buhari administration.

    For this, he was to suffer professional persecution and the denial of his rights to legitimate promotion and preferment. He became a noble outcast and pariah. In response to this outrage, the radical Students Union of the Obafemi Awolowo University conferred on him the honorary title of Senior Advocate of the Masses.

    As a persecuted visionary of the profession, Gani was able to see through the legal chicanery which equates the rule of law with the observation of its formulaic tenets and formalistic tenors without paying any attention to contents and context. This legal game, so beloved of Nigeria’s juridical grandees, can only be sustained as long as the masses are kept firmly in check and under control. Once the masses sniff blood and the stench of incompetence, it is anybody’s game.

    In 1983, a section of the Nigerian under-classes rose in fury against the state. The situation was about to snowball into anarchy when the military stepped in. Thirty two years after in 2015, the Nigerian masses needed no such help from a military institution that has badly compromised itself and its professional ethos. In fury, Nigerians rose to dethrone a government that had outlived its usefulness and a ruling party that had exhausted its historical possibilities.

    This is what makes this particular conjuncture far more dangerous and threatening than 1983. But like the French Bourbons, the Nigerian ruling class has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Otherwise they should know when the game is up. Had he lived and with his visionary intuition, Gani Fawehinmi would have grasped the ritual nexus between the aborted catharsis of 1983 and the renewal of hope for redemption of 2016.

    As an absolute historical imperative, the repressed will always return in one form or the other. It is not by accident or sheer historical coincidence that the Fawehinmi example has spawned many avatars in the contemporary Nigerian bar who do not care a hoot about this “ rule of law” thing. The historical stakes have been dramatically raised. 2016 is not 1984. In the current frenzied climate, no group of lawyers will dare issue the kind of ultimatum their forebears slammed on the profession in 1984.

    Gani Fawehinmi must be smirking in his grave. In seeming frustration with his beloved country and compatriots, the legal luminary had left a double Parthian, the one public and the other private. Publicly, Gani averred that if a draconian and drastic military regime bent on savage reprisals were to happen on the scene in Nigeria, he would keep his mouth firmly shut and withdraw to his shell.

    Privately, he had noted that the only military intervention he would ever welcome in Nigeria again was if a tired and bedraggled young officer were to appear on television telling his compatriots that since he had spent the whole day killing, he was too tired and exhausted to address them.

    We are still ages away from these dire scenarios. But given the fact that Fawehinmi is a man of punitive clairvoyance, it may not be for long. All it will take is for the ruse of law to prevail over the rule of law.