THE Eighteenth Brumaire of Luis Napoleon from which this piece derived its title and inspiration is one of the great classics of historical expositions. Written in 1852 as a response to the slow-motion unravelling of the French Revolution, The Eighteenth Brumaire is a sustained piece of polemical brilliance; a tour de force of imaginative perspicuity. Karl Marx was obviously at the height of his intellectual power. Superb insights and witty observations leap from its scornful and sardonic pages like tracer bullets.
The great German philosopher makes two valid points which are very germane to the issues at hand in Nigeria at this moment. Appropriating Hegel’s earlier observation that historical occurrences and personages tend to come twice, Marx added that the first time it is usually a tragedy while the repeat appearance often yields a farce. Building on this tantalizing insight, Marx goes on to contend that even if the same historical personages happen on the same stage after an interval of time, it is as poor parodies of their former selves.
In other words, Luis Napoleon was not just a grim caricature of his illustrious uncle, this was how the illustrious uncle himself would have appeared at that material time, a fumbling caricature of his old self, a pathetic pastiche of the real thing. In an interesting and absorbing gloss on this perplexing historical drama, Terry Eagleton has noted that Louis Bonaparte was not just a regressive caricature of his more illustrious uncle, the distinguished uncle was also offering himself as a parlous parody of his former self through his less talented nephew. The gifted family had scraped the bottom of the barrel.
Echoes of Nigeria’s recent history? Let us not jump ahead of the script. There are important lessons for Nigerians and their elected president to learn from this reappearance of historical personages on the political scene. Today, in his second coming, President Buhari is confronted by an awful mess. The task is even more Herculean than his first coming. It is a revolutionary situation without revolutionary enablers.
It is obvious from his body language and its abiding militarism, his caustic disdain for shabby politicking that President Buhari would like to cut through the crap and bring immediate restitution to a Nigerian populace braying for the blood of their tormentors. But given the fact that the retired general is a product of democratic consensus, there is no way he can do this without sawing off the tree branch on which he himself is perched perilously and precariously.
It is a situation that calls for much caution and greater tact. There can be no doubt that if it is to survive this perilous conjuncture, Nigeria needs a wholesale redemptive cleansing. Yet with a compromised judiciary, a section of the political elite screaming from the rooftop and a National Assembly populated by retrogressive elements from the ancien regime, there is going to be a lot of caterwauling and hollering in the land. It is impossible to imagine a civilian regime with this level of daring and pluck. The general is alive, long live the president!!!!!.
Category: Sunday
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Between the General and the President
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Tariff without representation
It is now incumbent on Fashola to ensure improved power supply, having made Nigerians cough up more for it
Come February 1, electricity consumers in the country will have to cough up more money in line with the approval given for increases in tariffs granted the Electricity Distribution Companies (DISCOs) by the Federal Government.
With the new tariff structure, residential consumers (R2) will pay on the average 48 per cent more than what they are currently paying. Consumers under the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company who are paying N19.96 as energy charge currently will pay N29.56, representing an increase of 48.1 per cent; those under the Eko Disco will now pay N28.75 instead of N18.75, representing 53.3 per cent increase.
Those under Ikeja, Kaduna and Benin Discos, who are paying N14.96, N20.66 and N18.46 for a unit of electricity, will from February 1 pay N22.96, N31.71, and N27.72, respectively. These represent 53.5 per cent, 53.5 per cent and 49.62 per cent rise for the three Discos, respectively. Commercial consumers (C2) under the Ibadan and Enugu Discos, who are paying N26.79 and N29.05 for a unit of energy, will from February 1 pay N38.87 and N42.4, respectively. These represent 45.1 per cent and 45.9 per cent increase in the respective rates.
Asking consumers to pay more for goods or services would ordinarily not be an issue in view of the many vicissitudes that the country’s economy has witnessed in recent times. One is here talking about the crash of the naira and all that. But we know that market forces work in mysterious ways in Nigeria. In the days of the defunct National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) and its successor, the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), electricity tariffs were fixed arbitrarily. What consumers paid was a function of so many things, including whether the meter reader liked your face or not; and this is also a function of how far you could go in greasing their palms. If you were not the ‘hospitable’ type, you were at the mercy of the meter reader who slammed you with whatever amount he liked. They called it crazy or estimated bill. The meter reader had no business reading your meter. Indeed, some of them would tell those of us who could confront them that they had revenue targets (but not power supply targets) that they must meet, else they would be in trouble themselves.
To show the absurdity in that era, I will cite one or two personal examples. The first was an occasion when, from Good Friday of a particular year our light did not blink for 21 consecutive days. Yet, when the then NEPA people brought their bill, I was asked to pay the usual amount that had been ‘gazetted’ into their system in my name. There was another occasion that a ‘molue’ fell one electricity pole in my area, which was a stone’s throw from the NEPA undertaking there leading to power disruption for nine straight days. I was still slammed the usual estimated bill. This, largely, was what the present owners of the Discos inherited and it seems quite okay by them. It was only after the reality dawned on them that the former President Goodluck Jonathan is out that they also realised that an abrupt end had to come for their disco party. The truth is that because of the unearned money that these companies are making from hapless Nigerian consumers, they are not in a hurry to let go of the ancien regime of tariff. They had thought that the music would continue, with former President Jonathan in control.
Normally, increased tariff should translate to improved efficiency. That is, other things being equal. But Nigeria is a peculiar country. Other things can never be equal in a situation where there are about four broad categories of electricity consumers and not all of them are paying for electricity. The first are those consumers whose meters are in good condition; the second are those with meters that are faulty; the third are those consumers without meters but the power firms are aware of and therefore give them some form of bills monthly. The fourth category is those that are not on the power firms’ records because they tapped electricity illegally. One would naturally assume that those with working meters would have their meters read. This is wrong assumption because many meter readers back then (and even now) as I said never read meters; they already had their minds on what to bill consumers. Only a few of them did and still do their work conscientiously.
Now, if meter readers are not under compulsion to read even meters that are working, why would they want to listen to those with faulty meters, begging that the meters be replaced so they can have a fair idea of electricity they consume? If a meter is not working, does the solution lie in guesswork? The power firms simply ignore demands for meters that are not in good condition because the idea is not necessarily to bill consumers for what they consume but to make money off the consumers, even if illegally. As for the category of those that the power firms know are connected to the national grid but do not have meters, what they pay is either determined arbitrarily as ever from the offices or the meter reader uses his discretion to determine their bills, depending on their ‘standing’ with him.
So, for me, where to start is not necessarily in raising tariffs. This is putting the cart before the horse. The first thing is for each Disco to have a proper enumeration of its customers, bringing into the net those who had tapped electricity illegally. As things stand, they cannot in all conscience say they have done that. And until this is done, some other people would continue to subsidise the electricity consumed by such people.
It is going to be easy to make people who entered into a business genuinely to make profit to shape up. But not so for companies that never thought the days of impunity of the Jonathan era would end so suddenly. Quote me, they would soon start asking for another tariff review unless they first change their business module, and then bring in people who are using electricity illegally because they can never recoup their money the way things are, not to talk of make profit. It was former President Olusegun Obasanjo who should have asked the then NEPA how it did it, when in the early years of his administration NEPA said it had succeeded in raising revenue from less than N2billion monthly to about N6billion at a time power supply had ebbed considerably.
If you are wondering where I got my headline from, it was graciously supplied by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) boss, Sam Amadi, when he told reporters the process through which the new tariff structure passed before it was approved. “We have gone to the Discos, gotten feedback, gone to government and gotten feedback”. So, where did they put the electricity consumers in all of these? I know the Discos themselves had tried to carry consumers along but failed because no rational thinking electricity consumer would make himself available for suicide by agreeing with them on tariff increase, given the numerous failed promises in the past on electricity supply.
When announcing the (then) impending tariff hike, the MInister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola had appealed for understanding from electricity consumers. To the extent that Nigerians are not protesting the new order, at least not loudly, it can be taken that they have accepted his plea for understanding, but it is incumbent on the minister to extract efficiency from the power firms. Otherwise, he would have succeeded in allowing Discos that never prepared to do business in the kind of environment they now find themselves to further con hapless Nigerians. Worse, he would have succeeded in also eroding the goodwill on the crest of which President Muhammadu Buhari rode to power.
Lest I forget, the minister also made the usual comparison between the electricity sector and the telecoms sector to buttress his point about the advantage of privatisation. I disagree. They are two different things. If as a consumer I am dissatisfied with a particular telecoms provider, I can switch to another even without losing my number. I mean I can simply port. It is not so with the electricity sector where consumers are inexorably tied to the DISCO in their area.
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The Marxist scholar as avatar
To the prim and proper University of Ibadan and its iconic Theatre department this last Tuesday for the seventieth birthday celebration of Biodun Jeyifo, notable theatre Arts critic, dramatic theorist and outstanding public intellectual who now plies his trade at Harvard University. It was a gathering of some of the greatest literary and critical minds the country has produced and in keeping with Jeyifo’s known aversion for the pomp and pomposities of power, not a single siren violated this remarkable gathering of eggheads at the founding shrine of Nigeria’s homo sapiens.
An icy fog held Ibadan in its savage grips. The dry winds were at their most ferocious. Harmattan-draped and sporting a monstrous grey beard like an ancient Yoruba medium, the city of a hundred hills wore a mournful post-Christmas visage. A major miscue had sent one in the direction of Kakanfo Inn before learning that the event had been shifted to the university theatre.
There was plenty of drama. Before one got to the venue, J.P Clark, chairman of the occasion and the man whose imaginative prowess gave this land of ancient warriors its most alluring poetic encapsulation, had literally seized the day and the stage, summarily banishing Yemi Ogunbiyi, the master of ceremony, to the outer margins of the Travelling Theatre. It was a command performance from the autumnal but brisk and bouncy poet-dramatist. As if to remind one of ancient literary feuds, Clark ribbed into BJ for once consigning him to oblivion in a moment of youthful indiscretion.
Upon entering the coven, snooper was briskly accosted by two members of the Jeyifous clan who must have shared some bachelorhood pranks with yours sincerely as a youthful cub journalist at the Nigerian Tribune at Adeoyo at the turn of the seventies. The riotous inquisitions would commence at the Togonu-Bickersteths homestead at the tip of the Seventh Day Road, heading towards the Oginnis and from there to the Ogunkoyas passing through the Jeyifous and finally to Ajasco the master tailor who constructed tight-fitting James Brown shirts with playful precision. Where is Yomi Jeyifous, a snooper crony, whose famous dishes in faraway Houston were a culinary delight any day?
Yet despite the hilarity and bonhomie, this was also a sober and sombre occasion. One can sense the passing of a great era of great men and women, the very best that Nigeria has thrown up in the arena of cultural production. If this glittering spectacle was a moveable literary feast, it was also in a sense one of the last snapshots of the greatest era of literature and literary scholarship that Nigeria has witnessed. The devastation of the Nigerian society by unlettered thugs has also made a short shrift of its cultural production. It will take another generation and proactive social engineering for the wounds to properly heal.
On the high table were some of the titans who made this feat of cultural production possible. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, the notable Feminist critic who was the first person to bag a First Class degree from the old department; Dan Izevbaye, the humble and self-effacing master literary critic who was also the guest lecturer.
There was also a surprisingly witty and entertaining Dr Lekan Aare who would later be described by Soyinka as one of those naturally brilliant people –including the fabled Omololu Olunloyo—-who did not have to exert themselves to excel. Sitting quietly somewhere in the hall in his customary urbane self-possession was Professor Ayo Banjo, the notable linguist and scholar. Lurking somewhere in the hall with tigerish forbearance was Kongi himself before he erupted on the stage to pay generous compliments to the celebrant.
As his student and later as his colleague, snooper has had time and many occasions to cross intellectual swords with BJ particularly over his overly rigid doctrinaire Marxism. On one particularly infamous occasion, yours sincerely attempted to turn the table against BJ by questioning the validity of his very question. “The question itself begs the question, which is as much as to say that it writhes under the tyranny of its own redundancy”.
In less humane and generous climes, this would have been a sure manual for academic suicide. It is a measure of BJ’s generosity of spirit that he often acknowledges the contribution of his former students turned scholarly adversaries to his own intellectual development. Here is wishing Professor Biodun Jeyifo many more years of productive intellectual engagements.
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Why History appears to repeat itself
A constant reality check is not only good and beneficial to individuals it is also medicinal and therapeutic for nations, people and human societies. A reality check involves asking yourself how and why you got to where you have found yourself and where you may be heading for. For a nation, however organic or clumsily glued together by colonial interlopers, this collective reflection or retrospection is an important determinant of the next course of action or phase of history.
As the now infamous Arms Bazaar, otherwise known as Dasukigate, threatens to overwhelm every sector of the Nigerian political society with the humongous slime of sheer sleaze, the political landscape is also echoing to loud grumbles about retired General Buhari’s authoritarian excesses, the constant political faux pas arising from the anti-democratic implacability of his reflexes, his abiding distaste for corrupt consensus, his grumpy discomfort before the klieg lights and fabled inattention to finicky details.
A feeling of déjà vu has enveloped the land. We have surely traversed this route before. Why does history repeat itself so often? As it was during his first coming when the retired general’s strengths of granite integrity, incorruptibility, nationalism and genuine compassion for the poor were on glorious parade, the peccadilloes that would undermine and eventually hobble his regime are also beginning to rear their head.
The problem this time around is that if Nigeria misses the road and route of redemption, we might as well say goodbye to the nation as a corporeal entity. Whether we like him or not; whether we applaud his sterling nationalism or dismiss the half-baked and startlingly incoherent nature of his recent economic measures, it should be obvious to anybody who can see the apocalypse beyond that the president and the trajectory of his presidency are central to Nigeria’s immediate destiny.
Unlike thirty years ago when the nation was still convulsed by the Nigerian equivalent of a military Russian roulette and when the then Major General Buhari could be elbowed aside by disaffected colleagues, that option is no longer historically available. For the moment, given the creeping resurgence of elite-fueled ethno-regional disaffection, the pan-Nigerian consensus which produced the electoral miracle of 2015 is no longer feasible. This is why it is imperative to critically, honestly, intelligently and intellectually engage the Buhari administration and nudge it towards a higher national telos.
It has been said that people make history but not under the circumstances of their choice. There was nothing nearly inevitable or even divine about the second coming of the retired general from Daura. If this dose of historical and dialectical materialism can curb or curtail messianic pretensions, it is also important to concede that given the structural configuration of the nation, the range of ethical , regional and religious constraints that impinge on political realities at that point in time also narrowed down the choices and made the emergence of Buhari a virtual inevitability.
If the nation had developed properly since his first coming and if it had advanced according to the logically ordained path of rational societies, there would have been no need to go back to a man who tasted power three long decades earlier. But there was unfinished business in the air. Nigerians were simply tired of the ineptitude and outlandish corruption of the ousted regime and its under-achieving progenitors.
They had correctly surmised that if they didn’t see off the Jonathan crowd and its area fathers, they might see off the nation itself. Anybody thrown up in the circumstances in all their structural contingencies waving the flag of discipline and frugality was bound to be the automatic frontrunner. Such was the power and potency of change and its possibilities for a broken people.
But it was not going to be just anybody indeed. Nigerians remember the first coming of the general with great nostalgia. There were also many who remember what they consider its grievous infractions. Yet hobbled by the trauma of misgovernance and corruption, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians were willing to overlook the youthful excesses of a man they have come to regard as a well-meaning patriot.
It is noteworthy that while Buhari had long been regarded as the avenging messiah by the teeming northern masses, it was not until 2014 or thereabouts that this adulating worship and mystical regard assumed a pan-Nigerian urgency and stridency. All efforts by the Nigerian ruling mafia to cut him to size or prune down his political influence simply boomeranged.
To be sure, virtually all the APC presidential frontrunners would have made good presidential materials. Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, in a more liberal conjuncture given his affability, his fabulous wealth, courtly cosmopolitan outlook, urban ubiquity and pan-Nigerian elite networking would have given the job a decent shot. But since this was a national referendum on the PDP years of misrule, anybody remotely or directly connected to that empire of filth is automatically disqualified from further consideration.
It was very curious indeed that the PDP power mongers tried their vicious best to shoot down Buhari’s candidacy and to promote an alternative so as to miscue the APC strategists. But the APC machine sprang the trap by plumping for Buhari. Given the epic mess they knew they were leaving behind in the light of current revelations, one can now understand the source of their anxieties. One can also understand why they persist in heating up the polity.
But to whom much is given, much is also expected. We have laid bare the material and historical circumstances behind President Mohammadu Buhari’s current ascendancy so that the retired general does not labour under any mystical illusions about the real historical forces behind his current dominance of the Nigerian political landscape and the game-changing possibilities of his second tenure.
History may appear to repeat itself but it is not always under the same conditions and historical possibilities. You cannot step into same river twice. 2015 is not quite 1983. While all well-meaning Nigerians must support and applaud his fierce zeal and the anti-corruption drive, it is now time for the Buhari administration to convince Nigerians that changing is not synonymous with shortchanging. The retired general may have to take a pause and a reality check of the circumscribed circumstances of his second coming.
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Chief Makanjuola Esan, SAN JP: The multi-award winning Senior Advocate of Nigeria at 80
He would later read Law at The Great Ife i.e the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, where he graduated in June ’71 winning the Justice Olu Ayoola Prize for best all-round performance in the Faculty of Law.
I consider it a great privilege that I have been able, through this column, to celebrate a number of Nigeria’s highly iconic elders and achievers; gentlemen -the next should, hopefully, be a female – who have , even while still on this side of the divide, left their steps on the sands of time and who, for their positive contributions to humanity, will doubtless, have their names etched on the right side of history. Among them, but not in any order of importance, are Chiefs Deji Fasuan, Dele Falegan, my primary school teacher, the late Chief Festus Olorunsola Fajana, Professors Oladipo Olujimi Akinkugbe, Banji Akintoye and Jide Osuntokun as well as administrators like Dr Deji Adegbite, Chief Olorunfunmi Bashorun and the mentor, per excellence, Prince Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi. As I once wrote in connection with these exemplars, I did not set out to sing panegyrics to them, rather I decided to put in the public space, the little bit space would permit about how they have, in their respective ways, impacted society in the hope that many others will be encouraged, even invigorated, to do their own bit while still able. Take a long hard look at these individuals, you would not only fail to see a super rich – that is, in monetary terms -(but) you will certainly not find among them, even if they had nine lives, any capable of lining up to partake of those stupendous ONSA funds. It is not, and would never, be in their character.
They are gentlemen, in the real sense of the word, and therefore, deserve to be celebrated.
In the company of these very contented achievers is the highly self-effacing and multi-award -winning father of lawyers – three of his children and two daughters-in-law are learned – the redoubtable Chief Makanjuola Esan, SAN, JP.
Born, January 10, 1936 at Afao Ekiti, in the Ifelodun Local Government area of Ekiti State – the reader should recall that Are-Ekiti, my place of birth and Afao are twin towns – and attended St. David’s Anglican Primary School, Afao-Ekiti, Are- Afao United School and Christ Apostolic Central School, Ado-Ekiti from where he proceeded to Christ’s school, Ado-Ekiti, in January 1950. It must be stated here, however, that the young Makanjuola left Are-Afao United School because, as a result of their brilliance, he and a classmate, Mr. Awodigede, were specially invited by the then doyen of Ekiti Primary Schools’ headmasters, the inimitable Mr. A.A. Abiodun, whose well-known credo all over the division was ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, to come and complete their standards 5 & 6 at Ado-Ekiti. Being ever so brilliant, Chief Esan spent only a year as he passed the entrance examination to Christ’s School in Standard 5, confirming, as has long become the norm, that a minimum of at least six, out of ten such brilliant Ekiti pupils, would end up going to Christ’s School. In confirmation of this, using the Are-Afao United School as an example, after Chief Esan, the next set had their best students – Gabriel Adeoba (later Prof Remi Olaofe), Ezekiel Ogunlade, Adedara Adesuyi and Samuel Abiola all going to Christ’s School with the first – Gabriel – actually gaining admission from Standard five. Two years later, Olu Olowojebutu was to prove so spectacularly brilliant that he was made to skip Class 1 at Christ’s School.
For his tertiary education, Chief Esan attended the famous Fourah-Bay College, Freetown, Sierra-Leone, where he was actively involved in student union politics, was elected into the students’ union executive council during the ’64-’65 session and, though studying Economics, was appointed the Minister for Justice. He would later read Law at The Great Ife, i.e the University of Ife, Ile-Ife, where he graduated in June ’71 winning the Justice Olu Ayoola Prize for best all-round performance in the Faculty of Law. The columnist had, incidentally, won the corresponding Prize at the Faculty of Arts for the session. Chief Esan subsequently attended the Nigerian Law School and was called to Bar as a Solicitor and Advocate of the Supreme Court of Nigeria in 1978. He was elevated to the prestigious rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) in April, 1995, the first Christ School alumnus to be so honoured.
Beginning his working career as a teacher, Oga has traversed several segments of the Nigerian polity: trained as a Local Government Secretary and was Treasurer to a local government council; trained in labour matters and later taught the subject to many Nigerian labour leaders. On completing his course at Fourah-Bay in ’65, he joined the University of Ibadan where he served variously as Executive Officer, Higher Executive Officer, Administrative Officer and as Assistant Registrar and Senior Assistant Registrar. Here again, at the bubbling, absolutely proactive University of Ibadan registry, under the leadership of the impeccable Mr. (as he was then known) S.J. Okudu, my path pleasantly crossed Chief Esan’s. He retired voluntarily in 1978 to join one of the most reputable Law chambers in the country: the Law firm of Afe Babalola and co, where he was until 1992. In January 1993, he established his Law Firm of Makanjuola Esan and co with its head office in Ibadan and a branch office at Ado-Ekiti. When the University of Ibadan Law Faculty started its Masters degree programme during the 2001/2002 session, Chief Esan, together with the likes of Chief Richard Akinjide, a renowned legal luminary, was invited to teach Criminal Law and Procedure. This he did pro bono, even though remuneration, usually in the form of a per diem, was attached to the position. Between 94-96, and 1996-1997, he served as the Honourable Commissioner for Justice in Ondo and Ekiti states respectively.
The ‘Baffday Boy’ has a long list of extra curricula activities to his credit. Among these: he was at various times, the Secretary, Ekiti Federation of Boys and Girls clubs, Secretary Ekiti. Boy Scouts Local Association, Assistant Scout Commissioner (Legal Duties) Oyo-State, 1979-1983, Scout Commissioner, Ondo and Ekiti States, 1994-1998 and Patron of the Boys Brigade. He represented Ekiti in Football and Athletics between 58-63 and was a member of both the Western Region Amateur Football Association and its Athletics counterpart
Put simply, Chief Esan has had a deluge of honours: academic, professional, from the church, cultural, local and international, name it. Amongst these are the following:
- Faculty Prize, aka the Mr Justice Olu Ayoola Prize for the best overall performance in the Faculty of Law, University of Ife, June, ’71.
- Recipient of the lifetime Achievement award by the Ibadan Branch of the Nigerian Bar Association at 60.
- Recipient of Christ’s School Great Alumni Award by the Ibadan Branch of the Christ’s School Alumni Association.
- Recipient of the Maiden Merit Award of the Ifeoluwa Archdeaconry of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion with headquarters at Are-Ekiti, on 20th December, 2009.
- Recipient of Merit Award by Saint David’s Anglican Church, Afao-Ekiti, in 2005.
- Received merit awards from the Christ Apostolic Church, Ibadan and Afao-Ekiti, 2012 and 2013 respectively.
A member of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and the body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria, Chief Esan, was a member of the body of Benchers, the highest decision making organ of the legal Profession, between 1994 and 1997.
In addition to serving as councilor between ’73 -76, the High Chief Oisa of Afao-Ekiti, Otun Bamofin of Ile-Oluji and the Bobasua of Iworoko also served as a member of the governing councils of both the Ondo State Polytechnic, 1984-1990, and the University of Ado-Ekiti, now Ekiti State University, from 1992-1993.
Chief Esan, whose life is totally dedicated to the service of God and humanity, is married to Chief (Mrs.) Florence Bayode Esan J.P, his better half of over half a century, and the marriage is blessed with children, grand children and great grand children.
Here’s wishing Chief Esan many more fruitful years in very robust health.
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America’s petroleum and Nigeria’s future (2)
Today’s article was first published in 2012. It is being republished today because many of the fears expressed in 2012 have now become real while some of the article’s optimism about willingness of Nigeria’s states to push demands for robust re-federalisation have not become popular, even after the negative effect of slump in oil revenue on the economy and politics of the country has become unmistakable. A political season in which President Buhari and APC as the ruling party are about to commence a regime of change in the country is a good time to join others to rub minds with guardians of the ruling party’s ideology and policy wonks saddled with transforming promises in the party’s manifesto into policies for immediate implementation, especially in respect of APC’s promise to return true federalism to the constitution and enhance the federalist spirit.
If after 50 years of underdevelopment of the country’s infrastructure despite decades of oil boom, America’s entry into the petroleum and gas market as exporter reduces Nigeria’s revenue from oil and gas, Nigeria may enter a critical phase that will call for new thinking on the part of leaders and citizens.
Last week’s conclusion asserts that America’s entry into the international petroleum market as a gas and petroleum exporter (as distinct from its many decades of being an importer) will force Nigerian political leaders and citizens to accept the end of miracles as the solution to national economic and social problems. In other words, the existence in the future of what does not exist now or of what exists now and may not exist in the future in the petroleum market will push trustees or guardians of Nigeria’s politics to accept that the best route to national development and sustainable democracy is an economic culture that encourages citizens to engage in production, the way it was all over Nigeria until 1966.
It is important for the country’s economic planners to replace platitudes with policies that can meaningfully diversify the country’s economy, without allowing current inflow of petrodollars to distract them from going back to the fundamental law of culture: no distribution before production. Since General Gowon was reported as saying that money was not Nigeria’s problems in the 1970s, Nigeria has been preoccupied with distribution without production. This is why it has not been easy for the country to invest in infrastructure that can fuel development: energy, rail, road, water, etc. Nigeria has been dependent on the 57% of revenue from oil that accrued from oil sale for several decades. This culture of Sadaka, Awuufu, Ifa or Saraa (culture of free loading) is best captured by the name of one of the country’s foremost agencies, Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, most graphically in the emphasis on assembling and making ready for use that mobilisation suggests.
If after 50 years of underdevelopment of the country’s infrastructure despite decades of oil boom, America’s entry into the petroleum and gas market as exporter reduces Nigeria’s revenue from oil and gas, Nigeria may enter a critical phase that will call for new thinking on the part of leaders and citizens. Many things that have been taken for granted since 1966 will call for review, especially the country’s political structure.
Once the flow of funds to the central government declines (as surely it will once the percentage of oil and gas it can sell to other countries goes down), existing states will aspire to become development centres, rather than distribution centres that they have been since military dictators initiated the culture of creating states and sustaining them with funds from the federation account. The existing 36 states and 774 local governments will certainly have difficulties meeting their monthly bills: salaries to civil servants and other sectors of public service in particular. Retrenchment or downsizing the public sector will become imperative at the beginning for most states. But leaders that are unlucky to be in office when revenue decline occurs will have to adopt the maxim: necessity is the mother of invention. Otherwise, they may be chased out of office by angry citizens, the way it happened in many Arab countries a few years back. They will have to move from the ingrained culture of profligacy and corruption made possible by cheap oil money to providing infrastructure and support for a productive private sector.
The sudden shift of attention from the federal government as the dispenser of funds to states and local governments to states and local governments as laboratories and factories for production will renew calls for restoration of functional federalism. No state will be prepared to pass gains from the sweat of its citizens to the federal government to share among states and local governments in the name of even development. States and local governments will have to compete with each other, just as they will also cooperate with each other in their efforts to respond to the new development challenges to be thrown up by decline in oil revenue.
States that are currently calling for people’s constitution, restructuring of the polity, and devolution of power will be more aggressive in their demands, more so when the easy monthly or quarterly allocation from the federation account ceases to be useful to sustain the appearance of governance and government that most states have enjoyed since 1975. As each state struggles to produce what its citizens consume, it will need to have full supervisory power over its economy and polity.
The mantra that only the federal police can keep Nigeria united will be challenged more forcefully by states that require efficient and dedicated police to enforce laws and sustain public order. States will resist the usual practice of collecting VAT and fees for driving licence and vehicle registration for the federal government to share among states on the basis of land mass and population estimate. States with ports will aggressively ask for compensation for port facilities in their states, rather than beg for special financial support or special status from the federal government. For example, the demand on the federal government to give Lagos a special status that will require additional funds from the federal government will be replaced by demands for a percentage of revenue from use of Lagos ports. Other states with port facilities, such as Delta, Cross River, and Rivers, will make similar demands for revenue sharing with the federal government from port revenue.
Regionalism or regional integration will become a common model of development across the country once the easy flow of revenue from petroleum and gas ceases or reduces considerably in the years beyond 2020. The current competition among states on exhibitionism in the use of public funds will give way to cooperation in design and execution of projects that can advance development in contiguous states. The reality of scarce resources that may result from revenue decline from the federation account funded largely from proceeds from oil and gas will stimulate the culture of prudence in states that do not want to go bankrupt. Citizens whose taxes become the largest source of revenue for the government will demand an end to low-class self-promotion of political leaders and their family in newspaper adverts at the expense of public funds.
The sections of the country that have sworn not to allow the country’s post-military federal government to devolve power to states will become more realistic about the imperative of restructuring, once the oil and gas revenue that has been lubricating the country’s chain of unity goes south. Such leaders will have no choice but to accept that it is only parasites without a sense of self-preservation that will depend on an emaciated host. Such states will loosen their grip on the federation and cooperate with those calling for true federalism, not out of altruistic interest but out of the need to have control over their own hard-earned resources in the years beyond today’s bountiful harvest from oil and gas.
However, the years of less revenue from fossil energy will strengthen the territorial unity of Nigeria. No state or region of the country (not even the Niger Delta) will feel strong enough to want to opt out of Nigeria. A country that has since 1966 seen itself as one united by oil will start to see itself as needing to stay together in order to grow out of poverty. But the country’s unity will cease to be nominal or symbolic; it will be one with a purpose. The country will morph into a site for what Ben Nwabueze once called ‘diversity in unity’. Proper fiscal federalism stridently called for by Senator Bola Tinubu during the Obasanjo regime will become a major aspect of the country’s architecture of governance.
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Buhari’s needless dilemma about Dasuki’s bail; or the cost of choosing the worst of the three options in the legal battle against corruption
As I write these words on Friday, January 8, 2016, the Buhari administration is, technically and legalistically speaking, in contempt of court for re-arresting Sambo Dasuki after the former National Security Adviser had been granted bail by an Abuja high court judge.
Thus, the democratic and legal credentials of the administration in its prosecution of this case seem deeply compromised by the fact that the judge that granted bail to Dasuki explicitly ordered that he should not be re-arrested. Indeed, as revealed in a media chat that the President had in Abuja two weeks ago, Buhari seemed very much aware of the precarious situation of his administration on this matter of bail for Dasuki. Asked repeatedly at the media chat why Dasuki was re-arrested after the courts had not only granted him bail but had explicitly ordered that he should not be re-arrested, Buhari had no coherent answer to the questions posed to him. To the President, it is enough that it seems abundantly clear that Dasuki’s alleged crimes are not in the least “bail-able”.For this reason, the President was genuinely puzzled that anyone could expect his administration to stand by the decision to grant bail to Dasuki and his co-accused.
I think it is safe to assume that overwhelmingly, most Nigerians are with the President in keeping Dasuki in the custody of the EFCC in defiance of the bail granted him in the courts. However, the President and his supporters in this matter are in an extremely uneasy and perhaps indefensible position in the matter. For hovering over the matter is Buhari’s past as a military dictator who famously had maximum disdain for any legal, technical and factual obstacles to the achievement of his goals as a ruler. Indeed, to some commentators, the aura of the Buhari who promulgated the infamous Decree Numbers 2 and 4 of 1983 already fills the air. Decree Number 2 retroactively made crimes committed before its promulgation punishable, thereby rubbishing the universal legal principle that if an act was not a crime at the time it was committed, it cannot become a crime by any law that comes into being after the act took place. On its own part, Decree Number 4 of 1983 made any act or utterance that served to cause embarrassment to Buhari and any member of his military junta punishable, regardless of whether or not the act or utterance was true. It is with such decrees in mind that some commentators are beginning to wonder aloud that the Buhari who completely ignores and sets aside the bail granted to Dasuki by the courts seems ominously similar to the Buhari of Decrees Number 2 and 4 of 1983.
This is a very unhelpful development in the legal battles against corruption, the battles that are already in the courts and those that are looming on the horizon. At the very least, this development puts Buhari and his administration on the defensive: the looters, the barawos together with their lawyers, are now hypocritically parading themselves as the defenders of democracy and the rule of law while Buhari and his administration are being insidiously represented as purveyors of jungle justice and the logic of lynch mobs. Moreover, the courts whose decisions granting bail to the looters are being set aside are the same courts that normatively act in favour of looters, the same criminal justice system that, beyond the issue of the granting or withholding of bails, will decide the substantive cases against Dasuki and his co-defendants. Thus, it was and still is a grave error of strategy and tactics for Buhari and his administration to have played into the hands of this same criminal justice system which, alone on the planet, applies interlocutory injunctions and stays of proceedings to criminal cases precisely to make the trial of looters so interminably long as to effectively make their successful prosecution a rarity in the Nigerian judicial order. In other words, with a different choice of strategy and tactics by Buhari and his administration in the current legal battles, the question of the granting or withholding of bail for alleged looters – a relatively minor issue – would not have arisen at all. As a matter of fact and to get to the heart of this piece, the grave error of the President in this matter is that, wittingly or unwittingly, he and his staff chose the very worst of the three strategic options available to them in the legal front of the war against corruption. What are these options? And does Buhari know that these options exist? These are the trillion-naira questions the answers to which will prove fateful for a successful, transformative outcome for the current and future legal battles against corruption in our country.
Let us call the first option the revolutionary option. In the National Conference of 2014 set up by the Jonathan administration, there was a committee with the rather longish and clunky title of “Committee on Law, Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Reforms” whose Chairman was a retired Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice George Oguntade. This committee had some of the brightest and most progressive legal minds in the Bar and Bench in Nigeria among its members. For this reason, it was quite significant that by a unanimous decision, the Committee recommended the setting up of a Special Anti-Corruption Court or Tribunal intended specifically for trying all cases of the looting of the Nigerian state and peoples. A key aspect of the structure and purpose of this recommended revolutionary tribunal was the removal of all the technicalities and niceties that notoriously and interminably prolong the prosecution of looters in Nigeria. The report of the Justice Oguntade-chaired Committee of the National Conference of 2014 is not in a secret vault in the National Archives at Abuja. It is a published and disseminated document in the public domain and is thus ready for actualization. All that this would require is a bill in the National Assembly that the ruling party with its sizeable majority could easily pass into law; and once it is signed by President Buhari, it would become the law of the land with regard to the prosecution of looters. In my layman’s estimation, the whole process could take less than one month.
The second option, though not as revolutionary as the tribunal recommended by the National Conference Committee on Legal Reforms, has the distinct advantage of actually being the law of the land in the matter of the prosecution of looters in our country. This law is none other than the so-called Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) of 2015 that was signed into law by former President Goodluck Jonathan in May 2015. Since I have written much on ACJA in this column I shall be brief and succinct in what I say about it in the present discussion. Thus, the crucial thing to bear in mind is the fact that two particular clauses in ACJA – 306 and 396 –have removed all the things that prolong and frustrate the prosecution of looters in Nigeria. Indeed, ACJA, though by no means the ultimate or final solution to all the problems endemic to the administration of criminal justice in Nigeria, it covers some of the most basic and notorious elements of miscarriage of justice against poor people in our country. At any rate, it is nothing short of a mystery why the Buhari administration has, so far at least challenged the refusal of our law courts to operationalize the principles and provisions of ACJA.
The third and final option is best called the status quo option. This is because it has been in force in at least the last sixteen years in this country. Again since I have written much about this option in this column, I shall be brief in my remarks about it. In essence, it was designed to make the successful prosecution of looters in our country next to impossible, so much so that in the last one decade and half, every single unambiguously successful prosecution of Nigerian looters has taken place not in our country but outside in other national judicial systems. Moreover, the very structure of wealth accumulation and success in rising to the top of the legal profession in our country rest fundamentally in the prolongation of the life of this status quo in the administration of criminal (in)justice in Nigeria. In plain language, lawyers become very, very wealthy, they achieve the much coveted status of “Senior Advocate of Nigeria” (SAN) by the continuation, indeed the perpetuation of this status quo.
For me, there is a clear indication of the probability that the Buhari administration will not be revolutionary at all in its “change” agenda in the incredible fact that the administration seems clearly unwilling or unable to adopt and implement the recommendation for a special anti-corruption tribunal by the Committee on Legal Reforms of the National Conference of 2014. In other words, if there was fire in the belly of the President in his declared war against corruption, the first thing he and his party would have done is take up that recommendation and institute a special anti-corruption tribunal. Well, leaving talk of “revolution” aside, what of reform, what of ACJA? Why has the administration been silent on and rather indifferent to the non-enforcement of the provisions of ACJA by the law courts of the country all the way to the Supreme Court?
It is an incompetent or ill-prepared General that goes into a battle with a lack of knowledge or understanding of the kind of enemy that he faces. The matter of granting or withholding of bail is, relatively speaking, a very small matter in the range of items of “enemy action” that the President will face in the law courts as the legal battles against the looters unfold. I predict with near certitude that the President and his administration will face far more brazen and outrageous enemy action than the granting of bail from judges in the months and years ahead. Thus, the President has no other choice than to change his strategy and tactics. The minimum he can and should do in this respect is to give his attention and energies to the implementation of ACJA, although what the times call for, what the nation and the world would like to see is the setting up of that revolutionary tribunal that was recommended by the Justice Oguntade-chaired Committee on Legal Reforms of the National Conference of 2014.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
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Incredibly revelatory media chat
If eloquence or elocution was all that is needed to prove one’s bona fides or demonstrate competence, President Muhammadu Buhari would prove a woeful failure. In his maiden media chat last week, he struggled to communicate, and worse, even struggled to form his thoughts. He did not have problem with his tenses, nor if he did should that worry us. At least the country understood their president, and from his responses, the president in turn claimed and indeed appeared to understand his countrymen, especially how sometimes difficult they can be. It was his first media chat, and doubtless his coaches must have worked on him, schooling him on difficult and anticipated questions, and gently admonishing the ramrod straight retired army general to rein in his emotions, soften his taciturnity, and crack some jokes. His coaches will now need to do more, and if need be, ensure he can tell the difference between excise and exercise, for one has to do with customs and the other military drill.
Overall, notwithstanding his problematic elocution, President Buhari came across as honest, down to earth, dependable, and someone Nigerians can trust with their money — absolutely. But to trust him with their lives, Nigerians will have to school him on the constitution afresh and extract promises of his fidelity to the laws of the land. For now, he sees both the constitution and the law as hindrances and handles them with the expedience of his military antecedents. Former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan spoke clearer and more fluently, and had better, wider and more complex grasp of issues; howbeit the former was imperious with his guttural voice and elocution, and the latter, with his clipped speech and tremulous voice, suffered from persecution complex.
This is President Buhari’s first chat. Despite his age, education and inflexible approach to issues, he is expected to improve considerably and in many ways. But in some other critical ways, Nigerians must not expect any improvement, because there won’t and can’t be any. The president rightly drew a parallel between his first coming as a military head of state, when he railroaded suspected thieves to jail and put the burden of proof on them, and his latest coming as an elected president, when the burden of proof lies with his government. Yet, he sounded plaintive, and could barely hide his irritation with the procedural handicaps the rule of law imposed on him. Worse, when asked why he seemed impervious to the bail granted some of his quarries, perhaps particularly former National Security Adviser (NSA) Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd.), the president bristled at the question, one of the two times he nearly lost his composure during the chat, and drew attention to the severity of the allegations and evidence against the retired colonel. At that point, and for him, the issue was no longer the law. It surprisingly bothered him little that he could be accused, very reasonably it seems, of pursuing vendetta against the former NSA.
It is hard to say why President Buhari’s approach to the rule of law has changed very little since his military days. He won the presidential election without apologising for the execution of three drug suspects in 1985, one of whom was clearly a victim of judicial murder. But he accepted responsibility and claimed that if elected, he would subject himself to the laws of the land; for as he put it, he had sworn to uphold the constitution. Yet, he is not discomfited by his peremptory conclusion that suspects would jump bail if granted. How did he come to that conclusion? Why could he not prove that conclusion before the courts that thrice granted the former NSA bail? And if the courts turned down his request, why would he think the courts were unctuous and ingratiating with criminals or complicit in perverting justice to society?
The problem, it is obvious, is not just the former NSA and whatever issues he had with the president dating back to the 1985 coup d’etat. The problem is that from President Buhari’s responses, he seems in fact fundamentally disposed to autocratic, messianic and sanctimonious leadership. He seizes upon the egregious felonies of the suspects undergoing trial or interrogation to whip up emotions among the outraged public. Whether as it concerns Col. Dasuki (retd.) or the killing of obstreperous Shiites in Zaria, or yet the matter of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, the president has an anachronistic approach to law and order. He gave no room to the delicate and magnificent nuances of law and order and the rule of law. It was enough for him that the offences the three people and groups were charged with were shocking and scandalous. It made no sense to him that much more than the danger to the republic constituted by the offences, he stood the even more coruscating risk of coming across as someone who viewed the law from the point of expediency. All that mattered to him, he implied, was the frightening scale of the offences, not the letter nor the spirit of the law.
Mr Kanu, he described contemptuously as “the one you are calling Kanu”. The Shiites, he suggested, were not even liked by their neighbours; and what kind of government, he asked rhetorically, would he be running as president who swore to uphold the constitution should he permit any group to run a government within a government? And Col. Dasuki (retd.), he said emotively, received humongous sums arbitrarily from the former president and seemed likely to jump bail. In short, President Buhari’s jurisprudence spans a very limited gamut: the moment he forms an unfavourable opinion of you, you can neither be right nor be entitled to the adjudicatory nicety and sufferance of the law. President Buhari may have been elected; but every pore in his body oozes military rule and a constricted, myopic body of archaic and redundant laws.
Nothing was more shocking than his response to the Shiite crisis. Admittedly the president came across as honest as anyone can be. So, it was obvious he didn’t like the Shiites, and he only hid conveniently behind the concept of federalism to await Kaduna State reaction to the Zaria killings in order to formulate his own. Notwithstanding, he was in fact dismissive of any concerns about the infringement of the rights of Shiites, simply because he had formed his calcified opinion of their troublesomeness. But even armed robbers have rights under the law, let alone unorthodox sects whose doctrines and manners appeared to grate badly on their neighbours. When asked what he would do about the problem, he did not understand it as an opportunity to propound a robust understanding of the rights of man, of the complexities of modern life vis-a-vis religious differences, and of whether the existing laws were capable of tackling some of the newer and more profound challenges of the modern era. To him, it was a straitjacket issue of law and order.
In addition, from all indications, he trusted the army’s account, even citing the obfuscatory explanation of the General Officer Commanding (GOC) I Division of the Nigerian Army, Kaduna as proof that the Shiites fomented trouble and carried arms. Many aspects of the story pointed in the direction of both the barbarous use of excessive force, poor judgement, and unlawful deployment of the army. But on the Shiite matter, the president’s democratic instinct, if he has any and if it will survive to the end of his tenure, was clearly and enthusiastically subordinated to his military instinct, which abounds in his sinews and marrows, and will be interred with his bones. He will admit of no dispassion in such matters. More, he has virtually made up his mind on who the villains are, like the impetuous Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State, when all the country asks of him are some open-mindedness and a keen awareness of the inalienable rights the constitution vouchsafes even to the most truculent and unorthodox persons or groups. It was both justificatory and expiatory for the president and Kaduna governor that Zarians and neighbours of the Shiites rejoiced at the terrible and excessive blows rained on the group.
President Buhari may mean well for the country, especially on the matter of fighting corruption and indiscipline. But his maiden media chat shows a man still sadly trapped in the past, a man moving along haphazardly into the future along a single track. He must be prevailed upon urgently to reform and mend his ways if democracy is to survive, let alone flourish. Had Chief Obasanjo laid the right foundation for democracy, neither Dr Jonathan nor Gen. Buhari would have had the opportunity, given their tenuous bona fides and inchoate ideas of democracy, to even present themselves for election. But Dr Jonathan came and built anarchically on Chief Obasanjo’s appalling foundation, and President Buhari has completely done away with the foundation and is erecting an edifice without a conceptually sound and coherent foundation.
This makes President Buhari’s presidency more difficult to be optimistic about. There will be plenty of noise and thunder, but there will be little about his government by way of long-lasting legacy. Twice his interviewers asked what his economic vision was and what vision he hoped the civil service could key into, especially given the seeming creation of Babatunde Fashola’s super ministry. The president offered none other than to say that once insecurity was tackled and corruption forced into abatement, the country would heave a sigh of relief. But it was necessary for him to concisely state his vision, and that vision needed to be all-encompassing, breathtakingly covering politics, economics and society. Some have said the interviewers were incompetent and unable to press the president for sound and succinct answers. Yes, one interviewer was unnecessary wordy, but on the whole they discharged their responsibilities admirably. In fact, the president’s responses were much less insightful than both the questions asked and the issues raised. The anchor did exceptionally well, and given the president’s constant resort to mundaneness, it became irresistible to conclude that in complexity and nuances, the questions far transcended the answers. It even seemed at a point that the interviewers were exasperated.
At the end of the chat, the president appeared exultant, even daring to lecture everyone on aspects of journalism the country must look forward to. He will doubtless go away with the feeling he carried himself well, did not lose his cool, expressed himself simply though not profoundly, and suffered no major embarrassment. It is not clear what his handlers will tell him, whether they will diplomatically tell him there is room for improvement, or whether they will encourage him to watch a replay of the chat in the privacy of his office, where his conscience will have the freedom to do a forthright self-appraisal. If he manages to reflect on the chat, he will discover he was not prepared for any question on the abducted Chibok girls, whose number he even forgot, and that he also gave the impression his government was doing practically nothing to rescue them.
He will also discover he often lost his train of thoughts, was inattentive to details in many areas, displayed little knowledge of anything, including the economy, subsidy and devaluation, and offered little hope of a great future in which Nigeria will transform into a modern society of sound laws, great structure, and great leaders and statesmen. Should he notch up his reflectiveness a bit, he will be appalled by his answer on the Kanu IPOB matter, his insensitivity to the Shiite tragedy, and the missed chance to assure Nigerians that he had truly become a democrat who understood the rule of law, the implacable principle of bail, and the doctrine of separation of powers.
But President Buhari will also console himself with the ironic comments of observers following his maiden chat showing he was not overrated by the public. He was meant as a battering ram against the follies and foibles of Dr Jonathan, and lightning arrestor to the former president’s permissiveness. If his team is capable, let them now sit down with the president to coach him on what should be done to transform the country and produce and bequeath a lasting legacy. They will of course not be able to turn him into a philosopher-king, but they can at least make him a little bit more reflective, sensitive, and obedient to the constitution. They can help him tone down his military mannerism, and make him a little more democratic. And they can also encourage him to really lay a solid foundation for Nigerian democracy, a thought obviously not among his priorities at the moment. The country will be able to judge from his next chat and his responses whether there is little room to hope or a wide gulf to despair.
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Buhari’s “mission accomplished” embarrassment: some hard, bitter lessons ahead?
Nothing important happened today. Diary entry by King George 111 of England, July 4, 1776
The “mission accomplished” phrase in the title of this piece comes from perhaps the single most embarrassing statement not only of the presidency of George W. Bush, but of any modern United States presidency. On May 1, 2003, in an extraordinarily dramatic and triumphalist action, Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in a fighter jet flown by the president himself.Alighting with maximum swagger and bravado from the cockpit of the fighter jet, Bush proceeded to announce to scores of journalists gathered on the battleship that the United States had dealt a crushing defeat to Iraq and the war between that country and America was over. He then uttered the portentous phrase that would haunt him for the rest of his presidency and beyond: “mission accomplished”!
Of course, as Bush and the world would later find out, the Iraq war was far, far from over in May 2003. As a matter of fact, both the military and civilian casualties of the war increased exponentially after Bush’s “mission accomplished” declaration. Indeed, this far from May 1, 2003 in January 2016, the Iraq war continues in the guise of the war against ISIS, the arch-jihadist terrorist group that operates not only in Iraq itself but throughout the Middle and Near Eastern regions. Thus, as a highly charged and resonant phrase, “mission accomplished” has come to represent one of the most embarrassing displays of a total lack of judgment and insight at a critical historical moment by a ruler in modern history. In the aftermath of Bush’s “mission accomplished” declaration the world has seen hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Americans killed; hundreds of billions of dollars of American wealth diverted from vital social programs at home and genuine humanitarian causes abroad; and a seemingly endless quagmire of war, millions of displaced persons and permanent instability and insecurity in the Middle and Near East. Thus, underlying the phrase “mission accomplished” is a tragic irony that cautions us to be wary of the terrible price that the masses of ordinary humanity pay for the lack of foresight or insight or second sight of rulers.
Fortunately for our own Muhammadu Buhari, no similar phrase remains to haunt the embarrassment in the failure of the Nigerian president’s ringing prediction three months ago that by the end of December 2015, the Nigerian military would have completely wiped out the Boko Haram jihadists. This is not to deny the reality of embarrassment and loss of face to the presidency now that December 2015 has come and gone and Boko Haram is still very much around and wreaking havoc. Indeed, there is a further embarrassment to Buhari in the fact that at the end of December 2015 not only was Boko Haram still committing deadly mass homicides across the country’s Northeast region, Buhari was telling Nigerians and the world that his administration was willing to negotiate with leaders of the jihadists over the abducted Chibok girls if credible leaders of Boko Haram could be identified and authenticated. All these factors notwithstanding, Buhari can take some comfort in the fact that not too many people in Nigeria and the world at large took the president’s prediction seriously. In other words, while in May 2003 the world believed and took Bush’s “mission accomplished” declaration seriously, in December 2015, nobody is surprised that Buhari’s prediction bummed completely. As a matter of fact, Buhari himself seems wondrously unembarrassed by the failure of his prediction. How else can we explain his declaration earlier this week at the tail end of December that his administration was willing to begin negotiations with the leaders of Boko Haram, the same Boko Haram that was supposed to have been completely wiped out by now?
I suggest that even if very few people expected that Boko Haram and its insurgency would have become a thing of the past by the end of 2015, there are many lessons to learn from Buhari’s apparent lack of embarrassment that his prediction has not only proved wrong but has indeed been rubbished by Boko Haram itself. Unfortunately, these lessons are hard, bitter, and potentially tragic for the masses of ordinary Nigerians.Since I wish to be very clear on this particular point, I crave the reader’s indulgence in taking some time and space to give a profile of the essential point I am making in this piece about political rulers and their capacity to exercise sound judgment and insight in their confrontation with historical crises and the challenges that they pose to the society, the polity and the economy.
Now, Boko Haram happens to be only one among a slew of daunting crises that the Nigerian nation and peoples face at the present time, though of course it is one of the most urgent and horrific of these crises. If we take Buhari’s failed prediction about the end of Boko Haram as sort of symbolic or symptomatic, the possibility arises that the President and his administration might also be wrong or mistaken in their predictions or projections on when Nigerians “will smile”, will experience relief from the economic and social ravages that they face at the present time. For instance, in his war against corruption, Buhari has also famously ‘predicted’ victory long before any concrete and substantial results have been achieved and even as corruption is striking back with all its tentacles in the Nigerian judicial, legislative and administrative orders. Another example can be found in the war to curb the monumental waste and squandermania in governance and administration in Nigeria at all levels, federal, state and local. Again, Buhari has vowed to successfully carry out the badly needed reform and reorganization in this sector of our public finances. But once again, we find here that the projection of victory or success is, to say the least, very premature. One illustration of this is the fact that though the Ahmed Joda Transition Committee that the President himself set up recommended a drastic reduction in the size of the Federal Cabinet, Buhari ignored this recommendation and has put in place a cabinet that is actually larger than Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet. Please note, dear reader, that in all of these cases a lot of hardship and suffering of the Nigerian peoples is bound to happen if the projections and predictions of the President and his administration fail.
At this point in the discussion, it is necessary to state emphatically that these observations and reflections are cautionary, not predictive; they are speculative, not alarmist. In my considered opinion, President Buhari’s ‘predictions’ and projections – from Boko Haram to the war on corruption and from the reduction of the cost of governance to the reduction of the downstream cost of petroleum products to the Nigerian masses in their tens of millions – suffer from a vastly exaggerated view of what presidential will and pronouncements can achieve. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the present stalemate between the Presidency and the law courts over the granting of bail to Sambo Dasuki and his co-accused in the Dasukigate arms procurement scandal. Understandably, the President is very upset that the courts are granting bail to the former National Security Adviser and his co-accused, in an act that appears to Buhari to be in defiance of his will and pronouncements on the matter. While this columnist is strongly on the side of the President in the matter, it does strike me as very odd, very disappointing that the President did not anticipate and prepare himself and his administration for this unquestionable favoritism of our law courts toward looters.
Ours is a constitutional, democratic and elective presidential system and for this reason, there are considerable constitutional and institutional constraints on the sovereign power and authority of the presidency. But throughout the sixteen years of the rule of the PDP, presidential power in our country was practiced and dispensed as if its sovereignty was as all-pervasive, all-encompassing as that of a feudal monarch. Buhari especially but also his party, the APC, seem intent to continue the perpetuation of this pseudo-imperial presidency. Of course Buhari, at least so far, has given every indication that he intends to use this vast concentration of presidential authority to carry out much needed reforms that will redound to the benefit of the Nigerian peoples. But as we have seen in this piece, the realities that Buhari faces are much too complex for and resistant to the reductive simplicities of Nigerian presidential power and authority.
The sentence that stands as the epigraph for this piece comes from European history at the precise moment when feudal monarchical rule was metamorphosing into the form of the modern bourgeois republican state. Apparently, George 111 could not or did not see this transformation taking place gradually but inevitably. Hence, on July 4, 1776, the very day that the American Declaration of Independence was made, the English king made the famous entry in his personal diary: “Nothing important happened today”.I locate Buhari at a midpoint between this diary entry of the English king and George W. Bush’s “mission accomplished” declaration. This is because Buhari is not as totally detached from historical realities as the 18th century English king, at the same time that he is not as aggrandizingly embroiled in the maelstrom of history as Bush. In other words, King George stood at the center of a power structure whose slow but inevitable decline posed little or no immediate danger to his person and his status; Bush occupied a location of global power in which America was yet to learn and absorb the limits of its global influence; Buhari occupies a conception and a practice of power in which decline at home and abroad considerably undercuts if not nullifies pretensions to sovereign presidentialism. Unfortunately for us, Boko Haram proved that it will take far more than a presidential pronouncement for the group to go out of existence, just as the law courts are proving that they are impervious to Buhari’s presidential will and pronouncements.
I doubt that Buhari will easily and quickly learn to see the limits of presidential power as not the end but the beginning of wisdom. I hope that I am wrong in making this assumption for if I am right, the President will find it hard to gather and deploy the popular energies needed to defeat forces like Boko Haram, the judicial redoubts of looters and the fortresses of waste and squandermania in our country. Are there hard and bitter lessons to learn ahead of us? Yes, but hopefully we will learn well from them.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvad.edu
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On statism and economic nationalism
It is a brand new year. There is a feeling of cautious even wary optimism abroad. At least in one significant respect, Nigerians have a bragging right and the license to beat their chest in accomplishment and self-satisfaction. The nation has survived 2015 in one piece. It is not a mean achievement. Like a historic and mysterious platform whistle blower, 2015 stood between the nation and further meaningless gallivanting. It was the year widely touted by international experts as the final terminus for a giant crawler.
It has been a close run affair. Nigeria plumbed the depths of horror and state evisceration. If the outlandish revelations currently making the round are anything to be believed, the post-colonial state in Nigeria had actually dissolved into a criminal cartel whose sole purpose has been extractive predation and the wholesale looting of national patrimony. It is worse than kleptocracy.
For a long time to come, the sociology of state larceny will be studied and probed for the insights offered into the criminal mindset of a dysfunctional political elite. It calls to further question, the ability of the Black person to nurture vibrant institutions that underwrite the modern state or to will into existence the stellar armature of a functioning nation.
As this column once noted, twice in his lifetime, President Mohammadu Buhari has been summoned by fate to preside over major ruling class implosions in the nation. But this time around, the rot has been compounded by ethnic, regional and religious animosities fuelled and powered by elite delinquency. The struggle for state control and the misappropriation of national resources has exacerbated the National Question. The retired general from Daura has his work cut out for him.
Fortunately, with his budget and the wide-ranging interview of a few days ago, the major economic and political templates of the Buhari administration now appear to the nation and his compatriots in bold relief. Politically, the retired general remains a strong statist hooked on the ameliorative and redemptive possibilities of a powerful, omniscient and omnipresent state, fearsome and forbidding enough to withstand and see off all countervailing and centrifugal forces in a titanic battle of will.
Given his military background with its harsh centralization, its distaste for disorder and rigid institutionalized hierarchy which sustain authority and stability, Buhari can be forgiven for his statist predilection. Indeed, it can be argued that in the post-empire world order, all the developing nations that have rapidly transited from the Third World to the First no matter their ideological hue have been powered by strong state institutions and the cult of the strong leader. Post-Tsarist Russia, post-feudal Russia, modern Cuba, Singapore, the Asian Tigers and Vietnam all come to mind.
It is in this sense, then, that Buhari’s current ameliorative and redemptive measures to instill sense and sanity into state institutions in Nigeria must be appreciated by his compatriots. The post-colonial state in Nigeria has become a huge joke: authoritarian but lacking in real authority; weighed down by sheer mass but without any meaningful substance; potent in stealing propensity but impotent in ruling possibility; bullying the cowed citizens while being bullied in turn by ragtag militias, it has been stripped of all its power and aura of legitimacy.
We can no longer afford to put the cart before the horse. Unlike the strong state and functioning national institutions inherited from the colonial masters, the post-colonial state in Nigeria is so badly weakened that it cannot withstand radical surgery without giving up the ghost. Before we can even broach the possibility of a radical restructuring of the nation, the shell-shocked state has to be reinvented with its fundamental raison d’être restored.
Experience has shown that when failed states break up, they merely produce more failed states. In Africa, Sudan and South Sudan, Congo and the farcical Republic of Katanga, are classic examples. On current form, even if Nigeria were to split into a hundred nations, it is hard to see how its dysfunctional and factionalized elite-formations with their primitive hunter-gatherer mindset can pass muster.
In the context of institutional collapse and virtual state failure, separatist and secessionist agitations by sections of a moribund political elite, as if nations are timeless toys in the hands of over-pampered juveniles, merely throw unflattering light on the original sin: the failure of Nigeria’s post-independence political elite at nation-building and their inability to nurture and sustain state-validating institutions.
Unlike the titans thrown up by the decolonizing project, it is hard to see how the current generation of Nigerian politicians can maintain a functioning and viable nation or state. A thousand Biafras, Oduduwa Republics, Arewa nations will merely reproduce the miseries and traumas of the captive people in a fresh territorial arrangement.
This fundamental political failure, the inability to succeed at genuine nation-building, also explains the fundamental economic failure of the nation and Buhari’s resurgent economic nationalism. In a sense, this can be seen as a return of the repressed and a throwback to the retired general’s first coming. The failure of deregulation, economic liberalization, market forces and the concomitant rolling back of the state and its vexatious interventions tells its own story. It is a story of state failure and the appalling inability of state actors to rein in a few non-state actors and their cannibal capitalism.
Let us be clear about one thing. Economic nationalism is another word for regulated state capitalism. No nation ever leaves its economy unprotected and at the mercy of pristine predators bent on bringing the country to its economic heels. This is not a debate about subsidy or its removal for in the final analysis there is no such thing. Subsidy is state rents and slush funds willingly paid to a rentier class for the sole purpose of influencing the outcome of elections and the destiny of the nation. Nigerians themselves broke the yoke in the watershed election of 2015.
It is strange that in view of the run on the naira occasioned by wholesale looting of our national patrimony and the consequent plummeting of the national exchange median, none of our IMF and World Bank economists is calling for the removal of further “subsidy” even as global prices of oil have fallen to below forty dollars per barrel. Perhaps when the naira plunges into five hundred to the single dollar, petroleum product will also “obtain” at five hundred naira per litre.
This is the economic canard and the subsidy trap of permanent peonage that General Buhari has perceptively seen through. By heroically refusing any further devaluation of the naira thereby making further subsidies official, the Nigerian president might have sprung the trap. Whatever the authoritarian excesses, Nigerians may soon have Buhari to thank for this.
Every sovereign nation has the sovereign right to determine which economic policies best suit its people and in specific circumstances. Let us not hear any orchestrated cry of economic illiteracy from western interlopers and their local agents. Singapore, China, Cuba and the Asian Tigers did not triumph by aping western economic policies.
In a perceptive review, retired Ambassador Dapo Fafowora has described President Buhari’s budget as “neo-Keynesian” and reflationary. This is at should be in the current circumstances. Looted funds do not reflate any economy. What reflates is money put in the pocket of the teeming poor and the economically disempowered. This is what Buhari has tried to do by the various empowerment schemes. When all the monies stolen from the exchequer are courageously called in, the naira and Nigeria will witness a new dawn.
This is not to say that there are no contradictions and complexities about political statism and economic nationalism in a country in which the various nationalities are at a stage or stages of unequal and uneven political and economic productions. Buhari will have to fine tune all this without appearing to punish the industrious and enterprising to please the indolent and the compulsively lazy. Let the debate begin. But let us give President Buhari some respite to mend this broken state. It is 2016, and it is morning yet on creation day.