The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Rule of law’s many controversies

    Rule of law’s many controversies

    This piece is partly a response to Biodun Jeyifo’s enjoyable contribution to the debate on President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-graft war, especially the methods by which the All Progressives Congress (APC) government seeks to give vent to the public’s frustrations with endemic corruption. More debates are needed, particularly if they can be rendered as seminally as Prof. Jeyifo has done. He did not agree with what seemed to him to be Palladium’s devotion to ‘extreme formalism’ in the face of the brazen subterfuges by many judicial officers, and, among a few other reservations, he is alarmed by what he describes as the columnist’s ‘utter indifference to the revolutionary possibilities of the popular demand for justice by Nigerians in their tens of millions in their support of Buhari’s declared war against corruption. “ Undoubtedly, in the weeks ahead, many more analysts, both pragmatic and theoretical, will weigh in on the debate one way or the other until ample clarity has been beamed on the topic and perhaps the Buhari presidency compelled to understand that underneath the surface of the anti-graft war is a powerful undertow of complex forces and phenomena destined to shape not only this war but other social and economic crusades of the day.

    Today’s column is also partly a response to Olakunle Ambibola’s piece on the same topic of President Buhari’s anti-graft war in which he dismissed what he all but described as Palladium’s methodological finickiness. Mr. Abimbola took refuge in Classics, particularly Greek Classics, using the examples of the Grecian trio of Draco, Solon and Pericles. President Buhari, he asserts, must have recourse to strong tactics, perhaps like the Greek legislator Draco, to fight corruption until sometime in the future tamer tactics, like those of Solon, are required in the struggle for a just society. Inspired by his own constant punning of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (rendered as Leisure of the Theory Class), Mr Abimbola is also uncomfortable with what he describes as Palladium’s esoteric passion for theory and formalism.

    Finally, this piece is partly a response to a host of Palladium readers who wonder what on earth the columnist is talking about in his rule of law essays in the face of clear and unambiguous danger to the republic constituted by a camorra of rampaging treasury looters. Some of the readers, Palladium is told, have wondered whether the columnist had not been bought. But how can anyone buy when no one is selling? In what seemed like a trilogy on the anti-corruption war, Palladium had berated the public’s lack of understanding of the issues surrounding the war, as much as he also took critical and unwavering exception to the Buhari presidency’s methods. Prof. Jeyifo, it appears, gave Palladium a slap on the wrist for all but declaring the public ignorant, given the manner the public wholeheartedly embraced the president’s methods, an embrace dictated by their pains, and pains for which they apparently needed a cathartic release.

    This column will not be goaded into declaring summarily what the order of precedence should be between the theoretical adherence to rule of law and the practicality of bringing corrupt people to justice, as many of Palladium’s critics want. The fact is that while this column has repeatedly declared that the anti-graft war is a just and noble one, he has also vehemently denounced the collateral subversion of the rule of law. Both should not be mutually exclusive. As Prof. Jeyifo agrees, there are better and smarter ways to fight the war than to give the impression that if creative manipulation of the rule of law became ineluctable, the end perhaps would mitigate the obnoxiousness of the means. Palladium insists, even if he remains the only one left to do so, that the anti-graft war can be fought without undermining the rule of law. This is not a theory, nor is it formalistic. If Palladium appears to set store by the rule of law over the mechanics of the fight against corruption, it is simply because the Buhari presidency has approached the war with a much vaster misunderstanding of the concept of the rule of law than it has obviously appreciated the direct and beguiling benefits of the anti-graft war itself.

    The first clear indication that the Buhari presidency intended to abridge the rule of law, despite its protestations to the contrary, was given during his maiden media chat. Until he gave that often quoted answer, most Nigerians, including this column, had no inkling anything was amiss, nor that if anything was amiss, that it was inspired by the presidency. The president had been asked why former National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki, a retired army colonel, was admitted to bail thrice, but the government would not release him. Had he answered with tact, few would have suspected the presidency had anything to do with the matter. Instead, the president launched into a diatribe against the colonel and the Goodluck Jonathan government which allegedly orchestrated the stealing of public funds on a gargantuan scale. The president’s answer effectively bifurcated the war between the majority victims of the stealing and the minority perpetrators of the looting. It was an obfuscation and dichotomy Palladium felt an urgency to address, for in his view fighting graft is embedded in the rule of law. The rule of law is so vital to everything, the columnist says, that no amount of crime nor the personality of the suspects should tamper with it. That position appears theoretical and formalistic. In reality it is anything but these.

    History is replete with examples of the consequences of undermining the rule of law. That same history is replete with the grandness and greatness of powerful historical figures who, at great pains to themselves, families and interests, kept faith with the rule of law. It is this reading of history, a subject held in contempt by many Nigerians, and in particular by their leaders, that has spawned a vast misunderstanding of many a great concept and destroyed societies and empires. Palladium does not think the president and his aides, let alone a majority of Nigerians, understand the centrality of the rule of law. The concept is real and practical; it is not subject to negotiation, and must not be swamped by emotions. It is hard and unyielding. It is the foundation upon which a great society rests; it is the rubric by which the society stands and runs; and its is the panoply that shields it from impunity and arbitrariness. Beyond the constitutional and legal provisions that form the rampart of the rule of law, the concept has its metaphysical properties, which a society and its leaders violate at their peril.

    If the president understands the connotations of the rule of law, he will recognise that as the chief custodian of the constitution, he personifies the country’s grundnorm: as if he wrote it, as if it is his whole being, as if it is his immutable word that cannot be dishonoured without dishnouring himself. Those who criticise his methods — not the goal of fighting corruption — are helping him to prosecute a just cause in a just way. The critics are helping him to see the future beyond the prosecution of one war, as huge and important as that war is. The critics are asking him to read history and interpret it well and be inspired by it. The critics want him to succeed, and they want the country cleansed of corruption so that Nigeria can stand tall and strong. But the critics will not compromise with him whenever he adopts the wrong methods simply because the war is so important that the survival of the society depends on ‘winning’ the war. What is the use of winning a war when a greater injury is done to the soul and spirit of the country? Everything begins from the spirit.

    Palladium does not have the illusion that anything he writes on how the anti-graft war must be prosecuted in a lawful manner will cut ice with majority of Nigerians. They are satisfied condemning the detainees and suspects even before they are brought to trial and their side of the story heard. They forget that when American troops captured the Iraqi strongman, Saddam Hussein, they ensured he was brought to justice, unlike the fate that befell Muammer Gaddafi in Libya. They fail to recall the story in Acts 22 involving Paul the Apostle who was humiliated before trial, and who asked his tormentors whether it was lawful to scourge a Roman citizen before he was properly tried and condemned. Apostle Paul reminds everyone of the concept of citizenship, a concept either held in abeyance in these parts or often suspended at will by the government, police, army and other security agencies, as exampled by the Army/Shiites clash in Zaria recently, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention and various manifestations of assault and battery executed by law enforcement agents. Every society defines citizenship in its own special way. No one may suspend that definition because a citizen has committed crime.

    The Ottoman ruler, Suleiman the Magnificent, a.k.a. el-Qanuni (the lawgiver) 1494-1566, codified Ottoman laws and applied them strictly, without exception and without fear or favour. His appreciation of laws was ennobled by his scholarliness, vast knowledge of various cultures, and personal discipline. Appreciating the huge and overarching importance of sustaining the rule of law without exception is not just a spiritual thing, it also derives from a ruler’s repository of knowledge and his metaphysical grasp of the intangibility of the law. This was why Augustus Caesar 63 BC-14 AD, adhering very strictly to the laws he made and exercising great self-denial, banished his own daughter and grand-daughter for adultery. It often costs the lawgiver a lot to keep the law. Those who understand this fact appreciate the deleterious effect of undermining it. The legal culture of the Medes and Persians, who conquered Babylon around 539 BC, offers a huge lesson to the world. Two biblical accounts in the Book of Daniel are instructive. In Chapter 3, certain Chaldeans accused three Jews of breaking a major religious decree promulgated by King Nebuchadnezzar. Enraged, the king summoned them for interrogation and found them guilty. The rule of law was preserved. Even then, he gave them a chance to show remorse, failing which they would be sentenced to be burnt alive. They refused to recant on religious grounds. If Palladium’s critics are still not persuaded that the rule of law was preserved in the distant past, then let them consider the utterances of the men who accused Prophet Daniel before King Darius, the Mede, in Daniel Chapter 6. Once they got King Darius to promulgate a decree precluding any prayers to any other gods for 30 days, a trap was set for Daniel. Summoned before the king for flouting the law, Daniel was tried and found guilty. Knowing how close he was to the king, the ministers and advisers reminded the king that the laws of the Medes and Persians could not be altered on account of friendship or for any other reason. Sentence was therefore passed and executed, and the rule of law preserved. There is a huge spiritual and transcendental symbolism to the rule of law.

    No public official in Nigeria is permitted to alter, by word of mouth or in writing, the constitution or the law at will. There is a procedure for doing so. And until amendments are done, the government and the security agencies must adhere to the rule of law. Indeed, the major problem Nigeria is facing today is that the government and its security agencies have very little regard for the law and absolutely no understanding of the concept of citizenship. Palladium attributes this to ignorance. So, while the political economy of corruption will make the anti-graft war harder, if not unwinnable, the lack of understanding of the concept of citizenship, the want of discipline in faithfully enforcing the law, and the periodic recourse to self-help have fostered a culture of impunity and arbitrariness all over the country to the point of destabilising the polity and engendering both a spirit of tentativeness in the people and a disconnect between the people and their government.

    This essay is not about examining the misshapen structure of the country as a factor in promoting corruption, though it is crucial, or about the political economy of corruption as a factor in complicating and mystifying the war; it is essentially a response to accusations that Palladium appears to revel in a formalistic or theoretical appreciation of the rule of law to the detriment of genuine and concrete efforts to arrest the terrible impact corruption is having on the society. But in the opinion of this columnist, the war cannot be won outside the rule of law. And for those who insist the Buhari presidency has kept to the rule of law, they do not give an accurate picture of the war. However, perhaps responding to criticism, the government has begun to observe the laws, awkwardly and perhaps half-heartedly it is clear, but nonetheless undoubtedly. The Buhari government must recognise it has no alternative. It should mortify Nigerians that the old Roman, Ottoman and Greek Empires observed the rule of law far more responsibly than Nigeria of the 21st Century.

    Indeed, there may be some revolutionary possibilities in the demand for justice by Nigerians, but if both the demand and supply for justice are not regulated and mediated within the ambit of the rule of law, it could end up creating more problems than they would solve, as history also shows. Anyone who has read Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837) will not fail to be numbed by how so quickly the spirit of nationalism and patriotism could so easily transmogrify into something more perverse, sanguinary and ghoulish. Glance through the proceedings of the French National Assembly of the time, and of the Committee of Public Safety, and of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and consider how the children of the revolution ended up consumed by the revolution. A society must be careful how it searches for enduring change, in those heady moments when it leaps temptingly and idealistically beyond the boundaries of the law into a cataclysmic void.

    Nigerian laws diligently applied, despite the artifices of looters and their legal accomplices, are adequate to police the corruption war. But if they are not, and the government can find a way to avoid the pitfall of making new, retroactive laws, then let them amend the law and the constitution. Early last month, Prof. Jeyifo wondered why President Buhari got himself needlessly entangled in the Dasuki bail affair when he could have prepared the grounds for his government to sensibly and judicially tackle the prosecution of looters. The professor explored three options, to wit, the Justice Oguntade committee (2014 National Conference) option; the operationalisation of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act; and sustaining the status quo. But whether one of these alternatives, or the Grecian options inappropriately adumbrated by Mr. Abimbola as capable of inspiring Nigeria, no one can dispute the fact that no leader is at liberty to operate outside the country’s laws if he is not to engender the chaos that followed the French Revolution as well as insidiously weaken the fabrics that both knit the society together and sustain the integrity of the social contract.

  • Mini-states in a mangled federation

    Mini-states in a mangled federation

    To expect that the inability of states to function (like their counterparts in other federal systems) as centres of growth and development will be over if more money is released to states from the federation account is to look at the small picture and to take a short-term view of the solution.

    Today’s essay had appeared in large parts on this page before. It is being re-published to add to the discourse of state creation, beyond Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s premising of support for creation of Ijebu State on siting the capital in Ikenne, on account of the town being the birthplace of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Re-presenting this piece has also been influenced by President Buhari’s observable concern in his recent media chat about the fact that there are 36 states in 2015, in contrast to just 19 states when he exited as military dictator. 

    Future studies, the discipline that is involved in rigorous analytics with a view to predict the future of things, was already in existence by the time succession of military dictators created Nigeria’s states from the four regions in existence in 1966. But this discipline was not available in Nigerian universities. Even if it were, there is no evidence that the military rulers who came to power to redesign Nigeria in the interest of their godfathers, sponsors, or civilian collaborators would have countenanced any group trying to predict the future of the policies and decrees created by soldiers in power. It now appears that the chicken has come home to roost. Using existing data to predict what may or can happen has found a home in the nation’s political conversation.

    Senator Adetunbi’s recent revelations on the floor of Senate that most of the nation’s states are prone to bankruptcy or insolvency would not have surprised futurists if they were available in the Nigeria of military dictatorship. The results of the meeting of Nigeria Governors’ Forum cited by Senator Adetunbi should not even amaze ordinary students of public affairs today. What should astound citizens is the solution being proffered for the problem of a basket of unviable states in a nation that depends largely on exportation of non-renewable fossil energy. The solution being offered by members of Nigeria Governors’ Forum is similar in imagination to the one that led to creation of 36 states: throwing available but unsustainable funds at problems or creating irrational solutions and finding problems for and from such solutions later.

    States are, justifiably, asking for more allocations from the federation account. It is subnational governments that are closer to the people and are in a better position than the central government to embark on pro-growth and development projects. It is also state governors that receive directly the effects of citizens’ frustration from lack of social services and employment. With allocation of over 70%   of federal government’s budget to recurrent items, the chances that states can do any better than they are doing at present are slim, unless the basis of revenue allocation is reviewed in favour of the states, regardless of the fortune of oil in the international market.

    But giving more money to the states, though very necessary, is not a long-term solution to the problem of a profusion of mini states. Even if the trustees of the federal government agree (an uphill task) to bring down its own share of national resources to 42% from 52%, the solution to financial weakness in most of the states of the federation would not have been solved.  It is important for all involved to note that the trustees of the federal government are as much about power as their counterparts in the states are. For them to release more than 10% of what accrues to the federal government is to commit political suicide. What is needed for long-term solution is to re-think the way the government is governed and restructure the country’s federal system.

    The legacy handed over to civilians in 1999 by the military is not sustainable, regardless of whether the price of petroleum bounces back to $106 per barrel. The states are too many and too fragmented to be able to generate substantial internal revenue of their own. It is instructive that in the days of just four regions (four states, if you will), none of the states was insolvent, even when only 50% of revenue from oil accrued to the federation account. To expect that the inability of states to function (like their counterparts in other federal systems) as centres of growth and development will be over if more money is released to states from the federation account is to look at the small picture and to take a short-term view of the solution.

    It is the philosophy of basing creation of states on the manna from non-renewable petroleum that needs to be looked at critically by both federal and state governments. Several communities are clamouring for states and they are likely to continue to do so, even if they are confronted with the hard facts of gradual decline of the age of petroleum. The imagination that easy money from oil should serve as rationale for creation of states is also at work in the demand by governors for more funds from the federation account: that more money from non-renewable fossil energy will automatically stop insolvency.

    At present, most of the states, apart from Lagos and a few of those that receive special allocations for being oil producers, are basically centres of administration rather than development. Most states cannot provide potable water for their citizens; they cannot provide safe roads; they cannot promote healthful living for their citizens; they cannot create jobs for their youths; they dare not for lack of resources challenge federal monopoly of ineffectual security of life and limb; they cannot provide functional education for their youths and functional literacy for their teeming illiterate adults; they cannot provide support for non-state agencies interested in providing food security; etc. If all of these activities were to be added (as they should) to the menu of programmes that states should provide, the risk of bankruptcy or insolvency would have quintupled, even if trustees of federal power release 10% or more of what they currently hold to 36 state bureaucracies.

    While it may serve the purpose of not further demoralising an already demoralised citizenry, the claims by any state that it is not bankrupt or insolvent must not be used beyond that purpose. The financial problem of most of the states is not primarily the fault of most governors (apart from those that have turned corruption into a vocation or engaged in using the funds transferred to them for ostentatious projects). Governors have inherited states that came into being, not because they were considered economically viable by their creators, but simply because state creators believed that creating states that live on handouts from the central government is the most assured way to keep the country united. In other words, today’s civilian governors have inherited states that were created to live on subsidy. It is not the demand of workers for a minimum wage of 18,000 naira per month that is the cause of insolvency; it is only an illustration of financial anaemia of the states that have been created as administrative zones.

    What is needed most at present is not for communities to be putting pressure on the government for creation of new states. As the Yoruba often say: “There are moments when there is time for discussing new ideas just as there are moments when there is no idea to discuss, just as there are  moments when there is time for both ideas and time to push them.” A season in which Nigeria is poised to borrow up to 33% of its annual budget is not an appropriate time to ask for or endorse calls for further proliferation of states in the country. If anything, this is a good time to call for right-sizing of states through redesigning of the country’s architecture of governance.

  • Palladium versus the AGF: must ‘theory’ pit respect for the rule of law against justice for a looted and deeply wronged nation and its peoples? (2)

    Palladium versus the AGF: must ‘theory’ pit respect for the rule of law against justice for a looted and deeply wronged nation and its peoples? (2)

    I concluded the discussion in last week’s column on the universal demand in our country that looters must not go unpunished; that the loot must be recovered and used to alleviate the hardship and suffering of the masses of our peoples throughout the country; and that in the name of all that is worthy of contributing to the collective moral progress of our society, the looting must stop. I make this composite demand central to this concluding piece to the series that began last week because it completely got lost in the fog of the overwhelming formalism of Akinlotan’s ‘theory’ that places its own intellectual center of gravity in the abstract principle of respect for the rule of law. Moreover, I am especially mindful of the fact that Akinlotan deploys this principle of respect for the rule of law in a manner pits it against the demand for justice. For this reason, I now wish to show in this concluding piece that I am not against respect for the rule of law; as a matter of fact, it is my contention that outside the self-enclosed theoretical universe of Akinlotan’s formalism, the rule of law, when it works at its best, works with and in furtherance of justice. Permit me to explain what I mean by this assertion.

    Formally and ideationally, bothterms, the rule of law and justice, are abstract concepts and it is only in the context of the struggles that take place in the real world that any hope of bringing them concretely andproductively together can succeed. At the present time, the demand for justice by the masses of Nigerians in their tens of millions is the most powerful force that we have for making this coming together of respect for the rule of law and justice possible – but only as long as we don’t frustrate or negate the demand for justice with deliberate, ill-motivated appeals to the abstract principle of respect for the rule of law. In other words, nothing is more damaging to respect for the rule of law than consistent frustration of the demand for justice. Let us not mince words here: Nigerians in their tens of millions have come to a collective state of mind in which they see invocations of respect for the rule of law as nothing but a legalistic fraudulence that allows looters and their lawyers to get away with their predatoriness. In other words, while it would be taking their frustration too far to say that they are against the rule of law, all the same the Nigerian public has become dangerously hostile to abstract invocations of respect for the rule of law. This is why for the most part, they are overwhelmingly in support of Buhari’s disregard of the court rulings that granted bail to Dasuki and the other co-accused. This arises from the simple fact that for more than two decades now, Nigerians have seen looters go scot-free and their lawyers grow immensely wealthy on their share of the loot, a hellish harvest of loot that runs into billions of dollars and trillions of naira.

    The supreme task before Buhari and the judicial order in our country at the present time is how to productively bring respect for the rule of law and justice back together. This, by the way, is not peculiar to Nigeria; it is a perennial challenge to all the national and international judicial orders in the world. If there is a Nigerian exceptionalism in this universal principle, it is the chasm that has opened up and widened immeasurably in the last two decades in our country between, on the one hand, respect for the rule of law and,on the other hand, justice. Let me specify concretely what this means and how it operates: merely and simply on the basis of respect for the rule of law in our country,the trial of accused looterstypically lasts for years and years and years in a more or less permanent deferment of consideration of the actual substance of the accusation; indeed, in the majority of cases, the substance of the alleged crime is never considered. This absurdity is possible at all because Nigeria is the only country on the planet in which interlocutory injunctions and stay of proceedings are applied to criminal cases; in all the other countries of the world, they are applied only and exclusively to civil cases.

    Akinlotan’s ‘theory’ completely ignores this Nigerian judicial exceptionalism in its lopsided, formalistic but passionate advocacy for respect for the rule of law. This is what I address in this concluding piece, but before I come to it,I deem it necessary to briefly explain why I insist on using the terms “looters” and “looting”, terms that Akinlotan never uses, terms that I suspect he would perhaps dismiss as being objectionable as rabble-rousing calls to jungle justice.

    In Nigerian status quo legalese, the preferred term for looters is “politically sensitive Nigerians accused of…”. In other words, the terms, looters and looting, are studiously avoided, perhaps so as not to seem to be prejudging the accused guilty before they have been tried. Well, fortunately, we are not all lawyers, at least not yet!For this reason, we don’t all have to use the morally sanitized language of “politically sensitive Nigerians accused of”. More seriously, I draw the attention of the reader to the extraordinary fact that rarely has anyone accused of looting our public coffers ever actually mounted his or her defense on the basis of a denial of the occurrence of the alleged crime. The universal defense tactic is simply and consistently to permanently postpone consideration of the substance of the alleged crime. And in the few instances when the substance of the crime is considered, the trial magistrates or judges have nearly always found the accused guilty – and then gone on to impose fines that are an insult to rationality and fairness with regard to the infinitesimally small relationship that they bear to the vastness of the amount looted. In sum then, looting and looters in our country operate with an aggressiveness, an impunity that is without equal in any other part of the world. For this reason, the very least we can do is return the compliment and call them by the vey appellation that they flaunt in our faces through their defense strategy and tactics – looters!

    It is time to come to the heart of my observations and reflections in this piece. I repeat: the supreme challenge now in the ongoing war against corruption in our law courts is to obtain justice and restitution for a looted and deeply wronged nation and its peoples, both of which have for so long been denied in our criminal justice system, a feat for which we have a notoriety that is global. As I have repeated so many times in this column, looting that is so filled with impunity, that is so systemic is nothing but looting that is a mode of social cannibalism. If it did nothing else, Dasukigate brought this cannibalistic face of the looting frenzy of a segment of the political elites of our country to the foreground of public, national and international awareness. On account of this horrendous fact, only in Nigeria could any judge have granted Sambo Dasuki bail for this crime.

    I repeat: it is a great challenge to Buhari and the judicial order in our country at the present time to bring respect for the rule of law into a fruitful and transformative relationship with justice. Akinlotan seems to set one against the other, i.e. the rule of law on one side and justice on the other side and never shall the two ever meet. As this reading does not tally with the Akinlotan whose columnis one of the few sites among the multiple locations of our country’s elite commentariat I regularly visit with intellectual pleasure, I would like to think that there is a slippage here that is not characteristic of his best and most insightful writing.  Indeed, there is a slight indication in Akinlotan’s piece in his column of Sunday, January 31, that lends credence to this intuition of mine. This is in the section of that piece wherein Akinlotan gives advice on how Buhari and his AGF might take the high ground of sublimity toward the reform of our judicial system by not coopting the statutory responsibilities on the National Judicial Council (NJC) but working patriotically with that body. This is all well and good, but the question that arises from it is this: where has the NJC been all these years and decades when the looters more or less seized near absolute control of the Nigerian criminal justice system?

    Beyond Akinlotan’s formalism and philosophical idealism, we must look to those aspects of the judicial orderin the real world of the Nigerian predatory republic wherein we can find strong and incontrovertible evidence of a predisposition, an orientation toward reform. In my own estimation, there are two principal locations of such residual reform-minded forces that could really make a difference. The first is the amalgam of persons and platforms within the Nigerian Bar and Bench who are profoundly opposed to the prevailing status quo that overwhelmingly works in the interest of looters in our criminal justice system. It was this group that worked tirelessly in the Jonathan National Conference of 2014 to produce the unanimous recommendation of the Judicial Reform Committee of that National Conference for setting up a special anti-corruption tribunal to try all cases of looting in our country. The second is the very group that Akinlotan completely leaves out of account – the Nigerian masses. Throughout the history of modern movements for the reform of judicial systems to make them work, not only or even primarily for the rich and the powerful but for everybody, when the important cases are being decided in the law courts of the land, the people in their hundreds of thousands are always massed outside the law courts to show their justices and the whole world that they have a stake in what is being decided in the high and low reaches of the Bench. Colonial Nigeria and Kenya; apartheid South Africa; segregated, Jim Crow America: we have seen it many, many times before. Why not now, I ask, in Buhari and the APC’s Nigeria in this epic war against corruption in our law courts?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                                      bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Ekiti: ghost that won’t just go

    Ekiti: ghost that won’t just go

    Sordid tales about how an election was rigged

    With the disclosure by the former Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Ekiti State, Dr Tope Aluko, about how the June 21, 2014 governorship election was rigged in favour of the incumbent governor, Ayodele Fayose, there appears to be no doubt that the election was a mere formality; the powers-that-be had already concluded plans to install their own as governor long before the election. One other thing that is not in doubt is the heavy monetisation of the process, obviously from the public till. Aluko is not only the former state PDP scribe, he was also said to be a close ally of Governor Fayose when the going was good. So, he is in a position to know; forget the motive.

    The question now is: could it be that those who unleashed soldiers and thugs on the state then were not sure they could defeat the incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi, hence, the recourse to strong arm tactics to the ridiculous extent that they went? This was despite the shortcomings, real or perceived, of the then governor. Or, could it be that they just wanted to bare their fangs as a sign of things to come in the (then coming) 2015 General Elections?

    When Colonel Sagir Koli first disclosed that such things happened in Ekiti State, the then President Goodluck Jonathan denied.  “There was no formal petition before them, but because of the general interest, they wanted to have him (Koli) interviewed to know where this was coming from. If someone comes up with a spurious allegation that has no substance and the person disappears, of course, what do you want me to do? Definitely, anytime we get him, he’ll have to substantiate his allegations. There is a lot of false stories being circulated and it is very sad”, the former president had said. Now, could the former president be telling lies or was it just that people merely took advantage of his weakness, ignorance and naivety (or all of the above) to commit blue murder on his behalf?

    Just like Jonathan, Governor Fayose had dismissed the weighty allegations as the ranting of a man disgruntled by his refusal to make him chief of staff and that it is all part of the grand plan of the All Progressive Congress (APC) to get through the back door the governorship that it failed to get through due process. Fayose was not forthcoming as to whether what Aluko said actually took place or not. One wonders how far this nation can go with such off-hand dismissal as a figment of some people’s imagination events that really took place. But that is one of the values that we parade in the country: people who cannot be faithful over little things we elevate to even higher responsibilities. We are already paying for such indiscretion and we will pay even higher price in future if we do not sanction those culpable in such matters.

    It is gratifying though that the military has sanctioned its own implicated in the inglorious affair. But, would the military have punished its men implicated in the rigging plot if the story was some tales by moonlight or scenes from some Hollywood films? The revelations have named, but apart from the military’s, no other culprit has been shamed. Yet, people must be shamed if we are to make progress in our electoral process. One of the main problems with us is our failure to punish big criminals. Some people will tell you that the country has more than enough laws to deal with any situation but that we hardly punish people in spite of the existence of these laws. I agree. If the Muhammadu Buhari presidency is able to successfully prosecute and get some of the big thieves who had dipped their hands into our national treasury illegally jailed, it would be the first time we would be sending the appropriate signal that this country will no longer be a haven for thieves, whoever they might be and irrespective of where they come from or their creed.

    The country has an Electoral Law that prescribes sanctions for people who pervert the democratic process as we witnessed in Ekiti. Unfortunately, we hardly prosecute them. Before the Ekiti incident, we have had many similar instances of people committing electoral heist without being sanctioned. This is even when such incidents were recorded and we could identify them either running away with snatched ballot boxes or intimidating voters or members of the opposition parties at the polling booths. We just read those things in the newspapers or watch them live on television, cry foul; and that is all. If we had been punishing people for electoral crimes, those who blatantly engaged in the Ekiti show of shame could have thought twice before allowing themselves to be used for such illegal purposes.

    We must go beyond the entertainment provided by the narrations of what happened during that election by getting all those involved arrested and prosecuted. In like manner, whatever inspired Dr Aluko to say it all is immaterial. Whether it was guilty conscience, or because of Fayose’s refusal to honour his alleged pact to make him (Aluko) his chief of staff should not carry any weight now. It is not even important if he did to curry the favour of the Buhari administration. The issue is that, by his (Aluko’s) action, and given the fact that he had earlier testified before the election petition tribunal that looked into the conduct of the election that it was free and fair, what he is now saying is contrary to that. To that extent therefore, his case is different from Colonel Koli’s who fled after revealing the secret plot even when President Jonathan was still in power. No one should therefore be surprised that the Fayose government has dragged him to court which has ordered his arrest and prosecution for alleged perjury.

    A lesson from all these is that people joined together by treachery will also be put asunder by treachery. If the actors had been told that what they had regarded as top secret then would end up being subject of discussion in the public space, they would have disagreed. Now, we are being treated to a movie that we did not pay for.

    With the Ekiti case, the law has once again been proven to be an ass indeed. Otherwise, with all these stunning revelations, first by Colonel Koli, and now, Dr Aluko, there appears to be sufficient grounds to revisit that election, at least from the layman’s point of view. Unfortunately, Governor Fayose’s governorship has been signed, sealed, delivered and confirmed even by the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court. In a sense therefore, nothing untoward happened, at least in the eye of the law.

    But can that be the case in the face of these damning revelations? Even if the incumbent would still have won in a truly free and fair election, could the circumstances surrounding that election have guaranteed a level-playing field for all the candidates? Food for thought!

  • Enough of this rule of law bugbear

    Enough of this rule of law bugbear

      I am at a loss as to what philosophical underpinning would make any critic of  Buhari’s anti-corruption war equate the Nigerian concept of rule of law to what it is in civilised jurisdictions and turn it into a bugbear against the anti-corruption war. 

    *Sans President Buhari’s timely  bailout of states, this young man  – he is forever  seen  playing poodle to  the oldest  men  in town – must be asked to explain how restructuring – necessary as it is for Nigeria – would have instantaneously paid states’ outstanding wages and salaries as well as pensions and bank loans, all of which ran into trillions of naira largely because Jonathan, their paymaster, and his Petroleum Minister,  decided not to pay billions of dollars of oil money into the federation account as  constitutionally prescribed,  thereby denying each state billions.  In what must pass for a classic joke, so reminiscent of these nay sayers, he had written: “This is exactly what the Federal Government is doing to the states all in a desperate bid to keep the Abuja “command and control centre” when it has become all too obvious that the panacea is to restructure the country and create new corridors of prosperity that would give a new lease of life to the federating units”.  Now, how  in the short run does their panacea  ‘create these new corridors of prosperity’, mere sounding bites,  that would have helped in defraying  the humongous outstanding salaries  and pensions  stacked against state governments which  had  resulted directly  from  their paymaster’s  ‘sleeping on duty’,  abandoning  critical issues of state to the  mesmerising  Amazons holding  him hostage?  If restructuring were  such an instant  fix, a financial silver bullet,  why did  the man for whom they  -old as well as young – slaved  at the confab fail  to lift a finger in  using his enormous executive powers  to  sign  into  life, those portions he could very easily have, and make the rest a campaign issue  for  his  PDP,  like Buhari and the APC  made anti corruption?  Why did it become Afenifere’s business to salvage this silver bullet? This is how these empty heads specialise in  empty sloganeering and effete grandstanding  neither  of which  has the slightest possibility of advancing the cause of the hoi polloi, the flotsam and jetsam of  our society.  They must be told  that effecting  a  meaningful change in an economy in which  their  guardians are shamelessly  implicated in sharing hundreds of millions of  funds intended  for  equipping  our fighting forces  cannot be a tea party by any means.  –  Being the column’s response to an insolent reaction to : RE: PASTOR BAKARE’S ROADMAP.  

    Weeks before the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, attempted  to put them out of commission, many otherwise respected opinion moulders had  become unreflecting “confederates and sympathisers” – to quote  Olatunji Dare – of the  beneficiaries of Dasukigate. No thanks to these acolytes, to quote him further, Nigerians are beginning to “observe a curious reversal in the epochal case that started out as The Federal Republic of Nigeria V Obtainers Unlimited and Others but is now shaping up as Obtainers Unlimited and Others V The Federal Republic of Nigeria”.  I am at a loss as to what philosophical underpinning would make any critic of  Buhari’s anti-corruption war equate the Nigerian concept of rule of law to what it is in civilised jurisdictions and turn it into a bugbear against the anti-corruption war. Any serious observer of what passes muster as justice in Nigeria cannot claim ignorance of the following negativities: (a) ours  is one  where  a  high profile  accused  is unduly protected  by the granting  of perpetual injunctions as Justice Ibrahim Buba  did in EFCC V Peter  Odili case. A four year appeal against that ruling has not  seen  the light of day (b) where it is common knowledge that many  judges, as  young  lawyers, passed through the chambers of  many of  today’s elite SANs to whom they are forever beholden (c) where it is rumoured that  some  senior lawyers and some retired judges  serve as  couriers  for gratification to judges in high profile cases (d It is also obvious that these  politically exposed , accused  persons,  are so rich they can, overnight, turn poor judges to instant millionaires in any currency.

    Given  these  obvious  differences between the practice of  rule of law in Nigeria  and what obtains in places like the U.S and U.K, with the Ibori case as a glaring example of how cases are frustrated in Nigeria,  it will be dishonest of anybody, knowing how very easily  the cause of justice can be vitiated  here,  to continue to  give precedence to  rule of law and order  over  and above  dealing appropriately with those who stole  the nation blind.  Granting of bails  is about  the easiest of  cases that can be manipulated in favour of a high profile accused and it is on this very subject  that  the  presidency  has had the  most unremitting strictures and  put down from those who write like they haven’t the slightest  respect for that office.  I  think it would be  the height of naivety to suggest that a man whose campaign had a dominant dose of war on corruption  would  now, in office,  allow himself  be derailed by the  undeserved  antagonism  of  these sundry confederates. This must be why a normally taciturn President Buhari could not help crying to Nigerians that his anti corruption war will only succeed if the Nigerian judiciary would buy into it and help save the country.

    Should anybody consider  some of these  observations  on our judiciary outlandish,  harsh or unfounded, I would like to call their attention to  these  two  samples  of  our judicial decadence:  Not too long ago in Anambra state, an election tribunal  headed by Justice  Usman Bwala –  we also  know him in Ekiti – was  disbanded by  the President of the Court of Appeal over  allegations that its members were involved in extensive corruption. Also, the Vanguard newspaper of 15 May, 2007 reported as follows: “THE Lagos State Government, through the state’s Judicial Service Commission has terminated the appointment of three Judges and 22 magistrates in Lagos on account of corrupt practices, while SEVERAL other judges and magistrates have been relieved of their duties in similar manner”. Such reports are legion just as many lawyers had been caught up in serial acts of malfeasance and some Senior Advocates had, in fact, been disrobed on account of corruption.

    Is this the Nigerian Law and Order under which they want President Buhari to subsume his  timely, even divine,  war against the greatest cankerworm eating up this country, failing which,  they will spare nothing in turning it into an incubus  against a just war?

    Nigerians say NO.

    Fair enough, the Nigerian constitution, as the country’s grund norm, deserves to be respected, even if it lies against itself with its “We the People”, opening stanza. But was any Nigerian poor involved in its making? Wasn’t its  draft –  put together by many Nigerians – summarily turned over  to a ‘one man committee’  in  the  Abacha government  to deal  with  as he pleased?  Isn’t it, at best, an elitist document pandering to the interests of the elite and haven’t Nigerians, since 1999, seen enough of the venality of our National Assembly members charged with making our laws?

    Concerning those granted bail but not allowed to enjoy it because they have myriads of cases hanging on their necks, where is EFCC’s former chairman today?  Wasn’t he listlessly granted bail by a court to go overseas for medical treatment?  Have we seen him ever since to face trial?  I think the best advice to all the accused is for them to have their day in court and rapidly prove their innocence.  As for those PDP loudmouths shouting ‘selective’, they should go and reposition the rump of their largest rally in Africa, win the next presidential election,  and ‘selectively’ try  officials of this  government  if  they  too  steal.  Of course, Nigerians  know that PMB is not JEG who looked on  whilst minions under him went  gaga, sharing our patrimony and allowing a rag tag Boko Haram to mutate to what the US has described as one of the most ferocious terrorist groups  ever.  It is  reassuring, indeed,  that Buhari’s anti-corruption war, warts and all, has been given a thumbs up by  both Mr Justice Mohammed Uwais,  a former Chief Justice of Nigeria,  and an international diplomat, Professor Ibrahim Gambari, neither of who can be accused of not knowing what  he is saying.

     

  • Of goggled gods and N900m cars

    This child would not have had the temerity to affront the ears and eyes of Nigerians with this N900m obscenity if his parent had taken him aside and taught him properly: shshsh, let us keep our stolen monies secret in these days of EFCC!

    Last week, the story broke that the twenty-five year-old son of a former minister had bought himself a princely N900m racing car! So, obviously, Pa Olusegun Obasanjo’s list of emperors consisting only of ex- and present governors needs a review; we must add ex- and present ministers, ex- and present senators, ex-presidents, ex- and present godfathers, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, etc.

    I was quite startled sometime ago when I watched a TV news report about a governor in the south east of the country. The news is now forgotten, but I can never forget the self-presentation style of the governor. He arrived in a huge jeep alongside of which some of his aides were running until it came to a stop. Then he alighted from the said jeep, like a goggled god come to walk on mortal ground among mortal men, swinging a cane. I swear it looked to me like he was prepared to use that cane on any of his aides should they forget to clean the sole of his shoes as he took each step.

    I say, when I saw this scenario, I had to pinch myself to see if I was awake or asleep or in a democracy. I was awake alright; I was in a democracy alright; and the said governor, I found out, had been ‘elected’. Obviously, sometime after the election, there was a transmutation in the man from an elected state official to Dr. Frankenstein.

    Unfortunately, this metamorphosis seems to have occurred in all of our state officials. There is a virus that promptly bites them all, soon after being elected, and changes these men from simpering, begging and innocuous looking candidates to rich monsters of a sudden. Once elected, they begin to measure all men by the length of their own access to state treasury. Other men who do not have an access near or equal to their own such as you the tailor or carpenter or me the pen swordsman (or woman), are no longer worthy to touch their shoes. Only other rich men can touch their shoes.

    Just see the way they go around in long convoys led by whistling sirens loud enough to scatter every chicken and men on their routes. See the way they ride around in cars with glasses so dark you think you’re looking at Guinness. See their flowing agbadas bellowing in the wind so much the ground is swept clean after them. See their faces well ensconced in their dark, dark goggles … I better stop here before you accuse me of thinking they look handsome in those glasses. And you will be right.

    Seriously though, the ex-president once again got it right with that accusation about governors, ministers, senators, ex-presidents, councilmen etc., but actually, the situation is much worse. If they lived like emperors and did not corrupt the young, fragile and impressionable ones around them, life would be tolerable for us. We would ask these emperor-governors to keep snacking on their champagnes and sniffing their ‘smacks’ for breakfast while we, in our innocence, continue slurping our corn pap and sniffing their morals. It’s our God-given right.

    However, when these goggled gods begin to teach their young ones that it is all right to be a spendthrift, then we must complain. Take the story mentioned above involving a minister’s son who is said to have bought a Nine Hundred Million Naira Car! According to reports, the said son is just TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD! This means most importantly that his life is actually just beginning and he has decided to take it in this particular direction. This comes a bit shy of throwing stones at the sun. It’s madness.

    This young man proves what we have consistently maintained on this column: that there is nothing wrong with our young ones that twisting the parents’ heads around a bit will not fix. In short, the parents are the things wrong with the children in over ninety per cent of cases. This child would not have had the temerity to affront the ears and eyes of Nigerians with this N900m obscenity if his parent had taken him aside and taught him properly: shshsh, let us keep our stolen monies secret in these days of EFCC!

    Better still, I would have wished that the parents had taken him aside and taught him that with great privileges come great responsibilities. Too many emperor-governors/presidents, ministers and senators in Nigeria are teaching their young what ex-Head of State, Yakubu Gowon, is said to have taught Nigerians: that money is not our problem but how to spend it. Not long ago, we heard a young one had posted pictures of the interiors of his father’s house abroad on the internet. It was supposed to incite our envy and it did.

    Now, we have young ones frolicking around the world like lion cubs without manes spending in ignorance what does not belong to their fathers. In the process, of course, many of them have been killed, gaoled, or drugged out of their heads. Blame the parents.

    Parents have the responsibility of throwing their young ones into the arena of work. I’ve told you this story before but I’ll tell it again. A man watched as a baby bird fell out of a tree in his yard. Looking up, he saw the nest and returned the wee thing there. Within minutes, the baby was back on the ground. Once again, he picked it up and returned it. Again, he saw that the baby was on the ground. He then looked and saw Mama Bird hovering nearby. Then, he understood that the bird was being taught to fly. He then told his young one: Go get a job! A job before a reward is nature’s way.

    Our emperor-governors/presidents/minsters/senators, however, put money in their young ones’ hands before jobs. Presumably, the young man in our story has never been introduced to the world of work, yet he has been introduced into the world of such big spending many countries are hissing in envy. Now, how do you expect him to respect work? No one who has worked a day in his life will put down that sum on an article that can crash, be stolen or can kill.

    It is strange though that our ex-president is just mentioning that Nigerian governors are living very extravagant lives. It went on just as much in his time. There were rumours that some states’ structures built with state funds were converted to the governors’ personal ownership. There were rumours of governors who built state of the art hospitals outside the country with their states’ funds. There was another who was robbed of suitcases containing millions of Naira… Indeed, he would have better security reports of all that went on in his time than me…

    These stories we have been dealing with just show what we do with stolen money; and that our goggled gods are a little short on the maturity needed to wear the mantle of office. Without this necessary item, people will easily fall into pomposity, dark goggles, arrogance, indiscretions, mismanagement of office and children, etc. And they would not know the difference.

    The Nigerian story is really pathetic. Since independence, nearly everyone (not all certainly) sent to rescue the country has turned around to desecrate her. It’s a little like someone kitted out to spring someone out of prison, but who gets there and builds a stronger and tighter iron grill to barricade the fellow in. This is exactly what Nigeria’s goggled gods are doing: barricading the country behind poverty lines by giving their children the country’s money to purchase trivial, intangible and inconsequential N900m cars. May God help us!

  • Look, no hands?

    (The Beautification of Buba Jengele)

     Look no hands?  Folks, let us have some fun, or what Shakespeare famously describes as smiling at grief. Without any sense of humour, the Nigerian tragedy is enough to make one go completely gaga, screaming in a public place.  Look no hands is about the magical abracadabra which makes the hand to disappear at will. The origin is more mundane. An American chap on learning to ride a bicycle without putting his hands on the handle bar famously screamed at his mother: “Ma, look no hands!”

    In footballing parlance, the equivalent is known as “wingless wonders”, that is when you play without wingers. It is akin to a bird flying without visible wings. Sir Alf Ramsey and the all-conquering England team of 1966 know one or two things about that one. This was England’s response to the historic drubbing they received in the hands of the great Hungarian football team, “the magical Magyars”, in 1953.

    Still talking about football, when the impish and impudent Diego Amanda Maradona was asked which one of his two goals against England he preferred, the dubious first one and the second arguably the greatest goal ever scored, Maradona promptly plumped for the first one which he powered in with his hand. When he was asked why, the former pickpocket from the slums of Buenos Aires, retorted that it was akin to picking the pocket of the English. Like most Argentines, Maradona was still fighting the Falkland war and till date the island is still known as The Malvinas in Argentina.

    But this is not about the beautification of an Argentine area boy. It is about the beautification of a Nigerian former cattle rustler.  Buba Jengele? Do you still remember him ? He was the one who had his right hand hacked off on the order of the then Ayatollah of Zamfara, the Ayasani Ahmed Rufai Bakura, for stealing a cow. That was when the Sharia law was foisted on the state as a political riposte to what was perceived as resurgent southern domination under General Obasanjo.

    It was said that on his way to this horrid beautification, Jengele was all smiles, to the utter confoundment and consternation of the crowd chanting Allah akbar. When he was asked later about his profound inner peace despite his ordeal, Jegenle replied that he was happy because he thought the Nigerian state had finally figured out how to terminate his budding career as a cattle rustler.

    But revolutions do revolve and what goes around must come round.  On January 21, Yerima, the former Ayatollah of Zamfara, was himself docked at a Zamfara High Court on the allegation that he diverted one billion naira meant for the repair of the Gusau Dam in 2006. The crowd this time was so hostile, so bloodthirsty that the court needed police reinforcement. A hero has turned into zero. Winston Churchill once famously noted that the same crowd cheering him would also be applauding if he was being led to the gallows. Thus the whirligig of time brings its sweet revenge. Is the handless Buba Jengele still smiling somewhere? Snooper is only wondering aloud.

    As a postscript, it was said that at the height of the Sharia controversy, Sani Yerima paid a courtesy call on General Olusegun Obasanjo obviously to rub salt in the wounds. But the old Owu warrior was unfazed. He was said to have fastened a contemptuous stare on the Ayatollah’s bulging babanriga. With a sneer, Obasanjo was said to have wondered aloud why Yerima still had his right hand in place. As a wily repository of state secrets, the great fox obviously knew what he was talking about.  Now we too are in the know.

  • Advice for job seekers

    Advice for job seekers

    Getting a job after graduating from the University has never been easy based on my personal experience.

    Although, I have heard stories of undergraduates being recruited ahead of graduation and known lucky persons who got employed easily  due to one factor or the other, that was not my experience as far back as 1986 when I completed my national  youth service.

    I remember waiting for months before I got what I grudgingly accepted as my first job in a relatively unknown magazine I never imagine I could work for.

    In my desperation to get a job, I responded to a tiny advert of a publishing company in the defunct Daily Times seeking to employ writers and found out it was that of one Contractor Magazine.

    Although I was employed as a writer, I ended up serving as not just a writer but also as an advert executive, proof reader and the guy to send on errand for matters not in any way related with my editorial job.

    However while on duty for the magazine, I ran into a classmate who was already a company executive while we were in school who gave me a note to a Public Relations Manager to help me get a better job.

    I eventually met the PR Manager who had no job for me in his company but gave me a note to a deputy editor of the defunct Concord newspapers. Again there was no space to accommodate me in Concord though I was an intern in the newspaper house and had many publications, including front page stories to my credit.

    The editor gave me another note to the Editor of The Punch who I did not meet during the first week – I went to the office every day.

    The death of late elder statesman, Chief Obafemi Awolowo turned out to be an opportunity for me to get stories from his Apapa residence from from Ajegunle where I live to prove that I could write when I eventually met the editor.

    After writing a few more stories, I got employed as Ogun State Correspondent and was sent to Abeokuta in May 1987, almost a year after completing my youth service.

    My job seeking experience above is the story I usually tell job seekers who can’t understand why they find it difficult to a job early enough after their NYSC. Like I use to tell them, jobs have always been hard to get in the country.

    It is not a recent development though I agree it’s tougher now with the bad economic situation and large number of graduates compared with in 1987.

    While hoping that the situation will get better with policies that can ensure more employment opportunities, my counsel is that job seekers have to live with the harsh reality of the present times when too many people are chasing the few available jobs.

    Before some of them start thinking that they are jinxed or are victims of one spiritual attack or the other, the truth is that there are not enough jobs to go round thousands of graduates of the many government and private universities who need employment.

    I must have shocked some students of a Polytechnic when I told them that if their institution and many others don’t produce graduates for some years no one will miss them. However that is the sad truth of the situation we have on our hands as a country.

    So what options are open to the job seekers? They have to keep trying and not get tired easily or too soon. They need to know that getting the few jobs available will be very competitive and therefore have to be the best if they have no ‘godfather’.

    One difficult option they should keep in mind is that they may have to create new jobs themselves. They must be at their creative best at times like this and be ready to be their own boss to end their endless search for non existence job.

    Good luck.

  • An end to gluttony in the National Assembly?

    An end to gluttony in the National Assembly?

    Since inception, they have operated like a cult and in the sixteen years of the PDP, not even the loudest opposition member had the guts to openly disclose what he or she earns. 

    A glutton is one who eats voraciously and obsessively, and that precisely is what our National Assembly members have been doing since 1999, consuming everything in sight even while not putting in commensurate service to the nation that feeds their greed. But at last, it looks like a Daniel has come to judgment. If our luck as Nigerians hold pretty this time around, may be, just maybe, our legislators’ impunity-driven excesses and illegalities may soon come to an abrupt end – thanks to Olusegun Obasanjo and the unflattering slump in oil prices. Obasanjo, a two-term former Nigerian President whose legendary no-nonsense stance vis a vis the usually gluttonous National Assembly was ignominiously rubbished by his hand-picked duo of supine and clueless successors. No hard-headed observer of Nigerian affairs could have forgotten, in a hurry, how  President Obasanjo put the National Assembly on a leach and on the path of rectitude even as Speaker Ghali Naaba was literally fire-eating, threatening him with impeachment. Obasanjo brooded no nonsense but the National Assembly went gaga the minute the same Obasanjo handpicked two weak successors and inflicted them on the nation. As it would happen, both of them were more concerned with holding on to the reins of office, at whatever cost to the nation, and for this reason they had to romance the National Assembly. Their overriding selfishness was all the National Assembly needed to literally run amok, tearing into the national treasury as they pleased, and using, to quote Obasanjo in his recent letter to the legislative arm, “different disingenuous ways and devices to overturn the recommendations of the Revenue Mobilization, allocation and Fiscal Commission whose responsibility it is to fix emoluments for the three arms of government.” The result is that, today, what our legislators take home monthly, or quarterly, bears no correlation to the commission’s recommendations or to common sense in a cash-strapped economy like ours. They not only earn so disproportionately to everybody else, they ingeniously ensure that only a very small fraction of that humongous haul is taxable. What have we not written about their opaque ways? What else remains to be said of their collective insensitivity; their beyond shame predilections? I have personally written myself sore on this carefree arm of government. Thrice, I have called on Nigerians: students, market women and the country’s hoi polloi, to demonstrate their total disavowal of this insensitivity by storming what I called the ‘Bastille’, in reference to a similar incident in French history. In the article: Are Nigerians Condemned To This Profligate National Assembly? – The Nation, 17 January, 2016 – I wrote inter alia: “why are these politicians so conscienceless they would always agree on loots, irrespective of differences in their party affiliation or is the National Assembly a cultic coven where they swear to things besides the well being of Nigerians?

    They are known to sometimes tear at one another exchanging blows; but such scuffles never happen when it comes to money matters. In that instance, they are always ‘ad idem’, belonging momentarily, only to one party: the MONEY PARTY of Nigeria.

    That solidarity in financial matters is why Senator Dino Melaye and the House spokesman, Abdul-Razak Namdas, have been pooh-poohing Obasanjo’s timely warning. Whatever their reaction, Nigerians know only too well that each National Assembly session has traditionally been progressively more corrupt than the last, and that this present one is simply the worst in their greedy acquisitiveness. That is why many Nigerians regard the crisis in the oil sector as divine so that our gluttons can moderate their greed or get chased out by unemployed, hungry and angry Nigerians. Leo Ogor, for instance, is so enamoured with constitution amendment that he would like the executive to initiate another, easily forgetting that they are yet to successfully clear the allegation of massive corruption in the last one which came to nothing. If they can be so dismissive of the advice of  a two-term president of this  country what chance stands any other Nigerian trying to call them to work with an executive branch that is  trying its dam best to instill sanity into the country’s finances?

    Back then to Obasanjo’s letter which a serious National Assembly should have received with appreciation as Senate President Saraki’s reaction initially indicated. The former president began on a very sombre note: “I have reflected and expressed, outspokenly at times, my views on the practice in the National Assembly which detracts from distinguishness and honourability because it is shrouded in opaqueness and absolute lack of transparency and could not be regarded as normal, good and decent practice in a democracy that is supposed to be exemplary. I am, of course, referring to the issue of budgets and finances of the National Assembly”. To a more discerning people, words like these, coming from an Obasanjo should, ordinarily, have been taken with all seriousness.  But that will not be our National Assembly members who have since been pouring scorn on the one single Nigerian who can tell them the absolute truth given that if President Buhari did, he would be misunderstood. Going further, the man you cannot gag went straight to the kernel of his message: “The purpose of election into the Legislative Assembly, particularly at the national level, is to give service to the nation and not for the personal service and interest of members at the expense of the nation which seemed to have been the mentality, psychology, mindset and practice within the National Assembly since the beginning of this present democratic dispensation”. Then he asked: “Where is patriotism? Where is commitment? Where is service?”

    Thank you General. Nigerians are one with you in asking these questions. We can only hope we are not in a dialogue with the deaf. But he was not done as he went on to give them a lecture on the very essence of good governance: ”The beginning of good governance which is the responsibility of all arms and all the tiers of government is openness and transparency. It does not matter what else we try to do, as long as one arm of government shrouds its financial administration and management in opaqueness and practices rife with corruption, only very little, if anything at all, can be achieved in putting Nigeria on the path of sustainable and enduring democratic system, development and progress. Governance without transparency will be a mockery of democracy”.

    That has been the cause of Nigerians’ greatest angst against the National Assembly. Since inception, they have operated like a cult and in the sixteen years of the PDP, not even the loudest opposition member had the guts to openly disclose what he or she earns. Indeed, not a few Nigerians actually believe that they are sworn to an oath. To dispute this, they must, today, let Nigerians know what they earn, to the very last penny. Otherwise we would brand them cultists and cheats.

    Enough is enough. In no other country of the world does this happen.

     

  • Alienation and the post-colonial nation

    Alienation and the post-colonial nation

    It was said of Karl Marx that it was historically important for him to leave his native Germany with its residual feudalism and rudimentary capitalism for a more advanced country before his seminal insights into the contradictions of nascent industrial capitalism could reach full maturity. Anybody attempting to study the contradictions of the post-colonial nation in all its riotous possibilities and impossibilities must come to Nigeria to see the real thing in its classic manifestation.

    With the ruling party in structural, organizational and ideological disarray, and with the reprobate rump of the old PDP fighting over its bloated remains, Nigeria faces severe institutional ruptures in every department of governance, be it executive, judicial or legislative.  It is a miracle how human beings manage to survive in such a normless environment. Yet they do, and apparently in fine fettle too. It is the psychic cost that is a tad prohibitive.

    But as it is with people, so it is with nations.  The state of disruptions and disequilibrium often reminds one of the victims of post- traumatic stress disorder. On the surface, they may appear normal and placid. But just below the surface is a seething confluence violent impulses that do not require elaborate firework to ignite. How many times have you seen well-dressed and otherwise respectable men and women suddenly come to blows on the streets?  It gets to everybody, this epic disorder.

    Although this organic crisis of the nation and statehood reached full maturity with military intervention, its fundamental causes actually predate military rule and go back to the very constitution of the colonial mirror-nation and the forcible disruption of the epistemic logic and parameters of traditional African societies.  A people can be militarily conquered, politically subjugated and economically destroyed and still manage to survive. But once a people surrender the cultural initiative, they are doomed forever.

    A lot has been written about the constitution of the colonial subject, but not much about the psychic disruptions and ruptures attending to the alienation of a nation. In human beings, alienation is a form of estrangement and detachment from societal mooring so severe that the subject becomes a virtual alien or stranger. In nations, alienation occurs when institutions created by human beings and for human beings come to assume a life of their own, tyrannizing over and terrorizing all at will.

    In an inorganic country like Nigeria which is particularly vulnerable because of its size and population, this secular disorder assumes some prodigal possibilities which can be very disturbing indeed. The state often surprises itself by its own capacity for brutality and aptitude for violent absurdity. Acting in concert with a pliant judiciary and a corrupt and compromised legislature, the executive becomes a fascist terror machine dispensing injustice like a vending machine.

    No one can deny that this was the way Nigeria was until recently when the retired general from Daura decided to re-impose a variant of the law and order state. We are not out of the wood yet and there still some vestigial remains of the old in the new. But there are objective tests of rationality that a society can be subjected to. Under Buhari, Nigeria, with all its imperfections, is beginning to look like a country all over again rather than a colonial plantation.

    You may not want to agree with everything the president does.  There is ample evidence that he may want to recreate the country along the lines of his own ascetic and frugal disposition which may bring him to momentous collision with genuinely productive forces itching to create legitimate wealth in a prodigiously endowed nation.

    While he is going after economic saboteurs who have decided to wage a covert war against the fatherland, the president should take care not to give the impression that he is also against and in fact quietly criminalizing genuine entrepreneurial ventures. How this contradiction is finessed out will determine the fate of the administration and ability to carry important sections and segments of the nation along.

    Buhari should take a cue from the noble and incomparable Abe Lincoln. An unenthusiastic theatre goer, the dour and reticent Lincoln was not the one to deny other people their pleasure. When he was asked to comment on the premiere of a new production, the old codger miserably and awkwardly blurted out: “Those who like this sort of things will find that this is the sort of things they like”. Exit gaunt and gangling Abe.

    The contradictions engendered by Buhari’s very ascendancy will take time to work out. But despite the stirring of the state, the situation is very dire indeed.  The legislature remains compromised and corrupt. Despite the loud warnings of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, it appears that a substantial section of the judiciary is yet to purge itself of questionable and criminal practice. And the farce that has just run its course in Kogi State suggests that there are still some important state actors who will hide under the chicanery of party supremacy to undermine party and justice. When will the spots of the leopard disappear?

    It is against this sombre background of pervasive rot and deepening legislative malaise that Obasanjo’s recent intervention must be situated.  In a sharp and characteristically vehement rebuke, the former president accused the two houses of wastefulness, corruption, shortsightedness and lack of compassion for millions of impoverished Nigerians.

    Those who have responded by abusing and summarily dismissing him have forgotten that Obasanjo has a legendary capacity for the proactive self-fulfilling prophecy. Something may actually be in the offing. Those who see very far on the political chessboard must know that something is about to give and very shortly too.  Despite the huffing and puffing of its leadership, the National Assembly is in reality the most vulnerable of the three branches of government to a determined externally induced putsch.

    Given the inability of the NASS, particularly the senate, to internally reform itself and reorder its own affairs along the path of rectitude and righteousness, it can be argued that it has become a veritable national nuisance and a major stumbling block in the reinvention of the Nigerian state spearheaded by General Buhari.  A case can then be made for the summary abrogation of the NASS in a radical restructuring of Nigeria or at the very least a drastic curtailment of its activities and strategic importance.

    But those who rounded on General Obasanjo  have their point and might have served  the purpose of unwittingly directing attention to the institutional calamity the retired general also helped to foster. National amnesia should not lead to general amnesty. The absence of institutional memory in Nigeria means that each time the existing order collapses, the real culprits often manage to evade sanctions only to emerge soon at the bully pulpits as affronted statesmen and outraged patriots.

    Obasanjo is engaged in characteristic cunning gamesmanship, and as many have pointed out, the rot at the National Assembly did not start with the current Eighth Assembly or yesterday either. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam.

    We recall historic heists such as the bazaar of bribery and open arm-twisting  which characterized earlier changes of leadership at both the senate and the House of Representative, particularly between years 2000 till 2006. One must also not forget the humongous inducements in Ghana must go bags which facilitated the horse-trading during the infamous Third Term bid which ended in weeping and wailing.  The political graveyard is filled with the bones of indisposable men indeed, to quote Charles de Gaulle.

    But as it has been famously noted, a man can make for himself a throne of bayonet, it remains to be seen whether he will be able to sit in it. What Obasanjo’s intervention has done is to unwittingly draw attention to the virtual collapse of the last traditional institution with which the old pre-colonial society mediated conflict: the conclave of elders and grizzled savants. With the disappearance of their authority and legitimacy, the pan-Nigerian cartel of elder statesmen who fouled themselves up in the last sixteen years or so must be ruing the day they succumbed to the perversity of earthly pleasure.

    Amidst the chaos of collapsing institutions, the clear and present danger facing the nation must now be spelt out without fear or favour. We have on our hand a crusading president stumped and swamped by a fractious and disorganized ruling party, a stunted civil society, a failed legislature and a compromised judiciary. The alienation of nation and post-colonial subject in Nigeria has now reached a critical stage.

    The regnant rump of reaction and retrogression has sniffed blood and corruption is fighting back on all fronts. This is not a battle a messianic presidency can win alone and all by itself. The earlier President Buhari understands this, the better for all of us. It is a battle for all critical sectors of the nation. Failure cannot be contemplated. Otherwise, we will not only be dealing with a failed state but a failed race.