The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Letter to President Buhari

A guide to PMB’s New Year Resolutions

Dear PMB,

This time last year when we witnessed the last Sunday of the year 2014, things were still somewhat fluid about who would lead our dear country, Nigeria. To the discerning few though, it was clear the then President, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, would not return because of his abysmal failure to lead the country aright, as well as his government’s unholy romance with corruption. Some of us said so directly; some others did indirectly. Some others were too blind to see the handwriting on the wall. One thing was clear though; many of those who felt the former president would find his way back did not credit him with much by way of performance. Rather, they hinged their optimism mainly on what they termed the ‘power of incumbency’. Some of us felt well, if incumbency was that powerful such that we would not be able to remove a non-performing leader, then there was no point holding elections. We jolly well would have told the former president to carry on.

Then came the 2015 elections in which you roundly defeated your predecessor and he had to concede defeat in March. But President Jonathan did not lose the election the day he conceded defeat; he lost it the day you were successfully chosen as the All Progressives Congress’ (APC) presidential candidate on December 23, last year. Some of us told the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) then to begin to pack its bag and baggage in readiness to vacate Aso Rock while the then president should join the unemployment queue. Former President Jonathan has since returned to his home town, Otuoke, in Bayelsa State, while your humble self has since May 29 taken his former position.

Since then, there have been a few things you did which Nigerians felt you should have done otherwise, or you should not have done at all. Mr President, some of your comments have not particularly gone down well with many Nigerians. One was your statement to the effect that even without you doing anything, there has been noticeable changes in the country. In other words, your ‘body language’ has been working wonders. This was true to a large extent, at least initially. But, whether in terms of power supply which dramatically improved on your assumption of office, or fuel supply which similarly witnessed relative stability after the initial hiccups then, things have nosedived in both sectors as I write. Electricity supply has returned to its epileptic past even as fuel queues have not only returned but have done so with an uncommon obstinacy. What these tell us is that ‘body language’ cannot last forever. It seems to have lost its potency and it can only continually get eroded as more and more people notice this weakness.

Although you have apologised to Nigerians for the fuel scarcity and they have accepted your apology (I guess I am speaking the minds of many of them), but beyond the apology is what happens next. How do we get out of the fuel scarcity conundrum? That is the main issue now as we prepare to usher in a new year.

Aside the temporal efficacy of your ‘body language’, the import of your statement, Mr. President, is that the country is on auto-pilot and this did not go down well with many people. Even if it was true that a few things knocked themselves into shape when you assumed office, one would have expected such statement to come from the people themselves. I am not even sure it is something to celebrate by your top aides. I may be wrong here, though. But certainly the statement ought not to have come from you directly.

Mr. President, we are beginning to see what your policy thrusts are. Your maiden budget of N6trillion appears ambitious, given the downturn in oil prices. Your government’s intention to downplay oil in the government’s revenue profile is good, at least on paper. Whether it is realistic is a different matter entirely; but it is worth giving a trial because that is where we should be going. There are some salient aspects of the budget which appear good on the surface; again, whether they are attainable is the issue. For instance, the proposed creation of about 500,000 jobs for teachers is good, just as the social safety net of N5,000 monthly proposed for the indigent elderly. One can only hope that these have been well thought-out so they do not end the way of the Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP) of the PDP which was alleviating poverty in reverse by pumping hefty sums of money into the pockets of the party’s wealthy chieftains.

Many Nigerians are also not happy that your government’s major policies are announced abroad. It was in Iran that you first announced that some past public officials who stole public funds have started returning part of the loot. You were also outside of the country when you said that Nigeria was broke and also that the Federal Government was considering negotiating with Boko Haram insurgents. The same thing applied to your announcement that you would appoint your ministers in September, 2015.

With regard to the anti-corruption war though, we are beginning to see some action, especially with the arraignment of some of the big suspects involved. It has been fascinating as it is revealing so far; but when we realise that the shared arms fund that has given us so much shock was only a fraction of what was stolen in the oil sector where Diezani Alison-Madueke held sway, then we can only see how callous some of our so-called leaders can be, given the millions that go hungry daily and the countless others that were dying and being displaced because some people had stolen the money that was supposed to be used to buy arms.

We are also hearing a lot of speculations about plea bargain. I guess with time, some people would start talking of state pardon, even as the case proper is yet to begin. For me, though, what is most important is the recovery of our common patrimony that was stolen. But that should not be a reason to start giving the impression that things have to be done differently only because those involved are big thieves. Will a poor man who stole a goat or cow have the opportunity of plea bargain if he returns that goat or cow? Although plea bargain is used in some parts of the world as a way to resolve disputes and save valuable time and money on litigation, it is not done the way we do it in Nigeria. So, the president has to be wary of the kind of plea bargain he would allow for the unconscionable looters. Justice must not only be done; it must be seen to have been done.

Dear Mr. President, it is not that you are not aware of some, if not all of these issues; but it is important to put them together in a way that they would attract your attention and enable you decide which of them you may want to rethink in the coming year. You may also be compiling a list of your New Year resolutions. This may as well serve as a guide.

Happy New Year in advance, sir.

December 27, 2015
From settlement to obtainment

When it comes to self expression, Nigerians are a colourful and creative lot. No other nation on earth, imagined or willed into existence by sheer colonial hubris, can match the Nigerian capacity for an inventive and colourful appraisal of the political pathologies that hobble the nation. It has been said of the Congo that there are at least a thousand words to describe corruption. But Nigeria trumps them all, if not in quantity but in the sheer brilliance and wit with which they come up with metaphors for their own affliction.

Before our very eyes, Nigeria has become the cancer ward of corruption. Political, economic and spiritual predators abound. In The Cancer Ward, Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, the great Russian writer, notes that no greater calamity can befall a doctor than for him to suffer an affliction in his own area of specialization. With individuals so it is with nation. Oil wealth has ruined Nigeria.

Anybody interested in how manna from nature can destroy an entire nation must study how the black gold originally procured from Oloibiri has impaled the Nigerian project. Gold from the Inca civilization destroyed Spain and hobbled its prospects as a world power for five centuries. When the Iberian nation finally roused from the nightmare of unearned riches, the world had moved on.

Anybody interested in studying the modern Nigerian disaster must first spare a thought for a scientific survey of the evolution of the language of corruption in Nigeria, as distinct from the corruption of language. This is a challenge to our intrepid scholars, if they are not already overwhelmed by the struggle for sustenance, or the struggle for obtainance, as the case may be. As the phenomenon of corruption develops its own masks, Nigerians have also become quite agile in decoding its amoebic possibilities.

In the aborted The Third Republic, the prevailing lingo of corruption was settlement. To be settled was to be economically pacified. Go and settle with them suddenly became go and settle them. To be thus settled means you had forsworn all rights to further obtainment. Around the airports and other commercial nerve centres, just settle us became the war-cry. Suddenly and with great linguistic mischief and felicity, this ordinary folk nuance forced its way into royal military parlance. Nigeria would never be the same again.

It was at this point that the late Admiral of the Fleet (and the fleecing), Augustus Akabueze Aikhomu, introduced a new linguistic conundrum to existing perplexities. With great verve and veracity, the late admiral sought to distinguish between misapplication of funds and misappropriation of funds. Settlement is not and cannot be deemed to be stealing. Please note that the culprit in question was a certain Maina and the scoundrel in question is manna from oil.

In the Fourth Republic, Goodluck Jonathan introduced a worthy dimension to the conundrum when he famously noted that stealing is not corruption. It was a short epistemic leap to the reality that obtaining is not stealing. It has turned out a radical game changer for omnibus larceny and a free for all bazaar of impudence and impunity.

From that point on, the most sensitive office in the land, the Office of the National Security Adviser, became a humungous cash-dispensing machine; a huge economic almshouse. By the time they finished with us, the national exchequer itself has virtually disappeared with the nation fiscally broke and her back broken. Yet there is a weird logic to it all. In the parlance of state larceny and elite degeneration, obtaining is the mother of all settlements and the father of all misapplications of funds. Jonathan should be praised for the elegant simplification of a complex equation.

But all this will also pass, and that is if the nation itself does not pass into the oblivion of the terminally diseased. Pity the nation without institutional memory. How many people remember that in the First Republic, there was an even a more colourful word for the misappropriation? It was known as gazumping. Traceable to the inimitable K O Mbadiwe in its lexical misappropriation, gazumping occurs when a seller accepts a higher offer for a property than that to which he had orally committed himself. It is another name for a legal swindle.

Now, see how far we have journeyed. In the First Republic, corruption had to wear a mask. Nowadays, it doesn’t. The masquerade without a mask, is the master of the masquerade with a mask, according to a character from the Bulletin of the Living Dead. Meanwhile, the nation roils on the death bed of oil while gasping for breath from the foul and suffocating stench of its own diseased innards.

December 27, 2015
The Beach of Dead Whales
It was while swimming off the sandy beach at Tarkwa Bay that a group of boys first beheld what looked like a monster creature thrashing about the turbulent seas. It was a huge monster, which looked like a jumbo fish, a sea-dwelling animal and an amphibious prehistoric bird all rolled into one. It was luminously black and its lustrous hide glowered in the brilliant sunset creating the effects of an optical illusion. It was a whale.

As the strange creature dived and banked in the shallow waters in obvious distress, the boys abandoned their tethered canoe and took to their heels. The ripples were powerful and strong enough to throw a big ship off course. At night and still trembling under his mother’s murky bed sheet, one of the boys told the matriarch about the strange sighting. She hushed him up. “You fool, when I told you to finish the malaria potion you refused. Now, it has returned”, the harassed woman screamed at a delinquent son.

No one has sighted or seen a whale in these climes before. There was not even a name for it either in antiquity or contemporary parlance. The odd stray shark has been sighted in adjacent waters. Occasionally, the carcass of the solitary sea lion or off-message seal has been washed ashore. Once in a long while, a mammoth version of the barracuda has been known to tangle with the fishing trawl. And awed by its massive size, the local people named the hippopotamus the water elephant.

Still, no word on or about the real thing: the whale. Up till that historic moment, its existence belonged in the realm of intrepid dreaming or the malarial imagination. But since the whale is a migratory mammal, it is quite possible that it had learnt to give these shores a wide berth because it was hunted to extinction in an earlier epoch.

On the other hand, since scientific legend has it that the whale once lived on land but went back to water when the going got too rough, ancient caution might have led it to avoid the old killing shores of West Africa. Even for savage mammals, the fear of these shores is the beginning of wisdom.

All this became the stuff of airy speculations as citizens of the crazed megalopolis woke up that rain-soaked morning to find the troubling reality of a beached whale as their august guest. By mid-morning, a huge crowd had gathered to take a look at the mammoth monstrosity.

No one had seen anything like this before. Those who thought the elephant was the ultimate creation could not believe their eyes. What was this thing that was more massive than ten huge elephants combined? But the monster simply ignored everybody occasionally emitting a rumbling sound that drove the fear of the lord into the crowd.

By the next morning, the stranded behemoth had been joined by two other mammoth whales. This was no ordinary coincidence. Something new was happening in this turbulent part of Africa. No one had seen a whale before not to talk of three jumbo whales at the same time. A huge portion of the rehabilitated Maroko beach was now occupied by beached whales.

Upon hearing the news of the strange visitants which spread like wild bushfire in the harmattan, the entire interior of the country emptied into an already besieged mega city. Very soon, things took on the colour and atmosphere of a beach carnival of the oppressed and the unfortunate. The people were having a whale of a time. For many upcountry vagrants and joyless hobos, it was their first chance to see the city in its glittering opulence matched only by the feral nastiness of its slums and its decaying infrastructure. It was like Havana before the Cuban revolution.

In fairness to the government of Alhaji Mallam Mansa Musa, it quickly assembled a team of experts to study the strange visitation. In view of the urgency of the situation, they were given one year to submit their report, with a provision for multiple extensions in case they wanted to travel abroad. These chaps were notable scientists and consultant oceanographers who had seen action off the coast of New Zealand and on the island of Okinawa.

They had worked with merchant whalers and other offshore buccaneers. They measured the bulk and breadth of the bulbous invaders and came to the conclusion that by regular standards, these were no regular whales. They recommended that they must be towed back to the ocean depths without any further ado.

But there was an immediate problem. In the history of the country and throughout its length and breadth, there was no, and there has never been, such a towing contraption. Up till that point, the nation had lived on miracles and survived by miraculous reprieves. Ever since its birth, the nation has flirted with suicide, often getting to the brink of an apocalypse before being dramatically delivered by the god of the Blackman.

In 1992 September when the cream of the nation’s middle ranking military officers perished in one of the most infamous aeronautical scandals of the century, the traumatised citizenry had to wait for a whole twelve hours before help came from a German company based in the country. By then it was too late for the boys.

It was not the impact of the crash in the shallow marshes of Ejigbo that killed the boys. Most of them actually survived the headlong dive. The survivors died of strangulation and asphyxiation. Throughout the night, the inhabitants of outlying slums heard the wails and cries of the brave chaps as they thrashed about and struggled to wrench themselves free of the iron coffin.

It was like being buried alive. When they were eventually brought out, many of them had the residue of the first aid treatment they had applied to themselves in the sulphurous entombment. The nation had lost the cream of its future generals and marshals.

Oh boy, did the corpses of those illustrious chaps stink. On the day of burial, the whole of Abuja stank to high heavens like the abandoned abattoir that the nation has become. What are we going to tell the children of Major Sam Mesaba Ogbeha, a first class officer and gentleman, or the newly promoted gentle giant, Colonel Taiwo Ogunjobi and many others?

None of the ranking echelons in the military high command saw it fit to resign at this epochal disgrace of the black being. They were too consumed by the vicious power play that was to lead the nation to the brink of disintegration.

Meanwhile on the beach, things took a more dramatic turn. More whales turned up as if in a historic reunion of distressed mammals. The whales were piled so hard and high that the entire coastline took on a dark, deathly hue. An observer from the nation’s last surviving military helicopter, in a strange turn of imagery, described the scene as resembling a huge offshore warehouse of whale waiting to discharge its cargo.

Something began to give. While some of the whales lay still in terminal lassitude, others plunged their head deeper in the sand in fretful distress. All began discharging some gory substance. Then the very first one, now driven into the main road by the bulbous pile, let forth a frightful bellow and lay still. It was dead. Others quickly followed and the entire beach soon became a tangled mass of dead and dying whales.

Many people, now convinced that the whales were a harmless mass of protoplasm climbed the skyscraper of soft, appealing meat, frolicking and sliding at will. Then one man brought out a jack knife and with the cry of “na better meat” heaved out a huge slab from the dead whale. It was like a divine signal. Thousands of hungry and famished humanity descended on dead and dying whales with all manner of crude instruments. In a moment, the entire beach became a huge abattoir foaming with blood and gore.

As the news of this biblical bounty spread to the interior, many descended on the beach to have their share of the national whale. Salivating with apostolic relish, the nation’s leading spiritual merchant described the whalefest as “manna from heaven”. Urging his despairing congregation to take full advantage, it was God’s way of showing that he would never abandon his own, the man of God added.

Then divine disaster struck, and for a nation that has lived at the edge of the abyss, it was massive and merciless. In the tropics, things flourish and perish very quickly. Obeying the iron tropical law, the whales began to decompose very rapidly. By the following evening, the entire coast had been taken over by a suffocating smell of decay and decomposition. Worse still, many who had taken the strange meat started vomiting and dying after a violent seizure.

Disoriented by the septic stench, the entire populace started fleeing in all direction. As the pestilence took hold, the remaining institutions collapsed and the politicians, soldiers, clergymen, traditional rulers and judges took to their heels, heading for the airports or the interior. Unfortunately for them, a human sandstorm of refugees had taken over all the airports, while dead whales had taken over the seaports.

In three brisk days, it was all over. The entire land lay still and quiet like a vast sepulchre. But this is not the silence of lambs. Born a human disaster and fed by a series of man-made disasters, it has taken a natural disaster to overwhelm the nation. A plague has seen off another plague. When politics and science fail, nature triumphs. That is the only iron law of human evolution. The early morning sun shone brilliantly. It is a beautiful day on the Marina Quayside.
- First published in July,2010.
December 27, 2015
PDP assails Buhari’s curious budget

With declining oil production, low and still falling crude oil prices, fewer buyers for Nigeria’s oil, and a determination to borrow almost two trillion naira of the six trillion naira it has budgeted for next year, it is no surprise that the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), appears peeved that the President Muahammadu Buhari government seems smug about both the 2016 Budget and the economy as a whole. The opposition of course has a right to pick holes in the budget. But it is not obvious that they have performed that role with depth or finesse. Yet, of all the issues needing the diligent attention of the opposition, budget tops the scale. It offers the opposition the opportunity to, as it were, present their own budget, to expertly take the government’s budget apart, block by block, piece by piece.

The Buhari government has, for instance, indicated that ‘for now’ it would not countenance any increase in the pump price of fuel; but it has made no provision for fuel subsidy in 2016, instantly indicating to the perceptive that removing fuel subsidy, whether in one fell swoop or in phases, is a decision already made. What the ruling party waits for is the proper timing early next year to effect the removal. Whether this bald fact escaped the opposition is not clear. It should by now have presented a coherent policy on the subsidy matter, prepared a consistent and coherent alternative to President Buhari’s economic plans, or what seems like an economic plan, wondered how far-reaching 500,000 jobs would be when tens of thousands are losing their jobs every week, assess the undue optimism of the $38 oil price benchmark, and carefully propounded a social and political charter for Nigerians — alternative policies the public can see and connect with.

Instead of a studious approach to criticising the Buhari economic agenda, the spontaneous Olisa Metuh, the PDP’s publicity secretary, has issued a statement sweepingly dismissing the Buhari budget “…as a big fraud and executive conspiracy tailored towards mortgaging the future of the nation.” The party seems more bothered about the decision of President Buhari to borrow almost two trillion naira to finance the deficit. The PDP did not give indication its statement is a tentative first reaction until a more comprehensive one is made, though if it were, the statement should have been worded differently and expertly nuanced. The party did not suggest, though it is expected of them, that they would still issue a more comprehensive response to the budget proposals. Even its tentative response, assuming that is what it was, was shallow, immature, and amateurish.

The PDP is today so dispirited that it lacks cohesion and focus to take on the weak-kneed All Progressives Congress (APC). Its main protagonist is the uncouth and paranoid Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State. The party does not have a philosopher, organiser, defender, and exemplar. If it were possible to produce an alternative to the PDP, the country would be glad to embrace that option, for it is not compulsory, given its poverty of ideas and other shortcomings, that it should be the leading opposition party. Sadly, at the moment, the PDP is still the country’s best bet to engage and discomfit the ruling party. It still has what could pass as a country-wide structure, and it controls a few states. It must be encouraged to reform and restructure in order to present itself as a credible opposition party.

So far, it has performed very poorly and behaved even more egregiously. It has not given indication it has an alternative political charter for the country; nor does it seem capable of even analysing Buhari’s economic agenda and budget, let alone providing an alternative framework. The PDP should be reminded that the APC did not blunder its way into electoral victory in March, nor climbed upon a concatenation of chanced events and freak political accidents to record the triumph it achieved in the last polls. In the same way, the PDP must not expect that the country, by a string of strange coincidences, would turn around somewhere down the road to embrace the party.

Fortunately for the PDP, all is not lost. The APC is still at war with itself, and while the Buhari presidency pursues the anti-graft war with single-minded resolve, it has not managed to inspire the public, nor shown that its methods and programmes are fundamentally different from those of the PDP, nor yet given indication that it has become formidable, well organised, inspired and eruditely visionary. For the PDP to offer an alternative, it has to do profoundly much better than the APC by out-thinking, out-structuring, and out-inspiring the ruling party. But at the rate the PDP is atrophying, it will need something close to magic to unnerve the ruling party, not to talk of offering Nigerians the sound alternative they need.

December 27, 2015
Kogi’s sponsored elders

In Kogi State, they are not content with letting bad enough alone. After nurturing what they like to happily describe as an inconclusive November 21 governorship election, and exhibiting betrayal and opportunism in making unlawful claims, they have now resorted to producing elders and stakeholders, especially from Okunland, to pressure Kogites to accept illegitimacy. The duo of Dino Melaye, a senator, and Clarence Olafemi, a former Speaker of the State House of Assembly and also one-time acting governor, began that crazy and infamous embrace of distorted reality.

Now, sundry stakeholders and so-called elders groups are coming together by the week to either pressure James Abiodun Faleke, running mate to the late Abubakar Audu in the last and disputed governorship poll, into embracing the illusory Yahaya Bello ticket, considering how both INEC and the APC had made the latter the inheritor of the victorious Audu/Faleke ticket, or to get the party to appoint a new deputy to Alhaji Bello. The problem is not just the appalling sense of justice being displayed by these so-called elders, but the fact that many faceless and disreputable groups now masquerade as elders purporting to speak for the Yoruba Okun of Kogi State. They indicate how easy it is to build a castle to injustice not only in Kogi but in Nigeria as a whole.

December 27, 2015
In pursuit of true happiness

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

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

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

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

      Whenever I have wanted to teach myself a lesson, I have always remembered the story told of M.K.O. Abiola who was said to have pleaded with the doctors to do everything in their power to save his ailing first wife, ‘no matter what it would cost’. When the doctors tried and could not, he was said to have hissed and exclaimed, ‘SHAME ON MONEY!’ You see, he had the money and the power, but that money had no purchasing power.

      Listen, if you want to know the purchasing power of your money, get stranded on the road in the night with no fuel in your car and with you miles away from anywhere. All you will be holding is an empty gallon and a lot of money in your purse. Then instruct that money to get you some fuel. Alternatively, you might find yourself running around the town at night, going from one pharmacy to another, in search of a rare drug for a relative who is sick in the hospital. Someone who had that experience related that he kept pleading with each pharmacy in turn, ‘I have plenty of money here and I’m ready to pay any amount; please just sell me the drug’, but they did not have it.

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

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

First, we can work on emphasising the miracles that happen each day. Miracles still happen and for you and me, they often come at no cost; for no amount of money can be put on the air that you and I draw every moment; our ability to leave home every morning and return at the end of the day; or a helping hand from a neighbour at a right time. More importantly, let us emphasise being miracle workers for someone: rescue a stranded one, bring hope to a depressed and hopeless person, share what little you have with someone else – you will be surprised what you get in return.

The second is to work on emphasising moderation in everything. Eat in moderation; live in moderation; do bathroom singing in moderation; run after the world in moderation. I always say that no one can own the whole world – God already does, so why compete with him?

Thirdly, work for the interconnectedness of people. Believe it or not, the world is woven around people. We all exist to meet each other’s needs. Hoarding all the resources of everyone else therefore is futile. Sooner or later, nature will balance itself out, with or without you, by forcefully taking what you will not release and giving it out to others.

      The story is told of an old man who called his children together and showed them the multiple houses and plots of land he owned. Horrified, the children berated him for his selfishness. ‘Don’t you have poor relatives you can give them to?’ they asked. Remember, it is not what you don’t have that kills you; it’s what you have. True happiness is sharing what you have with others.

December 27, 2015
The Devil’s December

(Adedibu’s Doctrine revisited)

It is as if the devil himself decided to pay an unscheduled visit to Nigeria this outgoing December. It has been the Bazaar of Beelzebub himself. The god of Mammon has demanded a walk-on part in the ongoing drama of the children of Barabbas. State larceny has never been more egregious and confounding in the entire history of the nation. The fragile foundation of the nation is itself threatened by the outlandish revelations. This is what happens when a criminal elite captures the levers of power and uses them for the sole purpose of stealing the nation blind.

No word, or artist however powerfully endowed, can quite capture the scale and magnitude of the heist. The Nigerian Exchequer has been taken to the cleaners. Nothing in history can quite match this in its sheer psychotic daring and mindless bravura. The scale of the heist is mindboggling even by African standards of kleptocracy.

The office of the National Security Adviser has been turned into a mammoth cash-vending machine with the holder of that office himself nothing more than a voucher-issuing ledger clerk. Not even Franz Kafka, the fabled master of dark bureaucratic comedy, would have imagined this outlandish reality. But this is not horror fiction. It has actually been happening in Nigeria. Welcome to the Penal Colony where actual reality has become unrealistic.

We must tremble at the implications of this mindless scam for the very notions of national security. A state that cannot secure itself against the fiscal depredations of a predatory elite is a very vulnerable state indeed. This is a nation whose ultimate implosion is maximally guaranteed since it is internally hobbled by elite greed and gluttony rather than by external adversity. Unless a nationalist elite class is forcibly created in these climes, Nigeria is sentenced to the fate of permanent penal colonies.

It is therefore not enough to insist that those who are responsible for this monumental scam be brought to speedy and expeditious justice. After jailing them and confiscating their ill-gotten loot, the current administration must also take a look at the institutional fragility that has made this possible in the first instance. Jonathan and his compliant National Security Adviser are probably not the only culprits. They have merely driven the logic of a nation built on shaky foundations to its ultimate perdition.

If he is to make any dent on the nation’s multifarious problems, it should now be obvious to President Mohammadu Buhari that corruption per se is not the nation’s problem but the very system that has made such obscene corruption a troubling and inevitable reality of our national existence. The gung-ho courage and incorruptibility he has so far demonstrated will help. But they are not nearly enough when it comes to the intellectual courage and conceptual wherewithal required to dismantle the rent-seeking nature of the post-colonial state in Nigeria and replace it with a new state architecture.

There is a perfectly satisfying and even uncanny logic about the turn of events and the strange patchwork of alliances that have brought the retired general to the Nigerian presidency at this very time in the life of the nation. No other Nigerian leader of his type and generation is better positioned historically, experientially and psychologically to deal with the Aegean stable without flinching, and without shying away from the testy implications for his own ascendancy and the untidy affiliations that have brought him to the presidency.

This past week a security gnome from the Jonathan camp has hinted rather darkly that the office of National Security Adviser also handles the overhead costs for retired heads of state and regular largesse to needy friendly countries. If Buhari were to probe deeper, it is going to be a nation-destabilizing Pandora Box indeed with the multitude braying for blood. But like a fatally afflicted patient that has shied away from radical surgery for so long, the moment of truth has finally arrived for Nigeria.

In the light of the ongoing revelations, perhaps it is time to revisit the Adedibu Doctrine of State Security if only for the light it throws on the absurdities of the Nigerian state, and the way forward. In a fabled confrontation with the then governor of Oyo state, Rasheed Adewolu Ladoja, the late primogenitor of amala politics had clairvoyantly warned the naïve fellow that since state security is no more than the containment of elite destabilization and disaffection, Ladoja should turn over a huge chunk of his security vote to him since he was already doing that with aplomb. Ladoja’s refusal led to mayhem and his eventual impeachment.

The greatest security problem amalgamated Nigeria has faced is elite destabilization. It has led to a civil war, coups, religious upheavals, electoral heists and the current separatist agitations. It is a momentous irony that Sambo Dasuki, a prince of the last empire in Nigeria, continued to dispense from his vending machine long after the presidential election ought to have put him out of business. It speaks to a shambolic state structure.

Mohammadu Buhari has his work cut out for him. This nation-disabling ailment must be tackled with a combination of drastic proactive measures and radical structural surgery. At the very least and from now on, security votes must be publicly appropriated and sternly audited. Erring culprits must be swiftly brought to justice.

This morning, we bring you a piece published five years ago which reads like the chronicle of state implosion foretold.

December 20, 2015
Dasukigate: beyond the outrage and apart from the legal battle, what is to be done?

When Colonel Sambo Dasuki assumed duty in June 2012, he approached me for assistance, based on my background as a social scientist, and my previous involvement in government. It is also public knowledge that I have considerable knowledge of Nigerian politics and skills about competitive political organization. This is why in 1999, General Olusegun Obasanjo appointed me as Director-General of his campaign. Similarly, in 2007, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar turned to me to assist him in the same capacity. Not surprisingly, I was approached in 2014 if I could coordinate former President Jonathan’s 2015 campaign. I politely declined by offering advisory services.

Dr. Iyorchia Ayu (former Federal Minister of Education and PDP Chieftain)

This past week, several newspapers finally called it “Dasukigate”. This was the series of incidents in which vast sums of money in local and foreign currencies that Colonel Sambo Dasuki, the former National Security Adviser (NSA) to the former President Goodluck Jonathan had taken out of our national coffers had been diverted to the accounts of himself and diverse political and business associates of his. As nearly everyone knows, as a term “Dasukigate”owes its etymological origins to the infamous Watergate political scandal that forced the American president, Richard Nixon, to resign from office in 1974 in order to avoid the politically worse fate of impeachment. Since “Watergate”, in America itself and other parts of the world, there have been other “Gates”. On our own shores, the most recent one before “Dasukigate” was “Ekitigate” that erupted into our shocked national consciousness during the Ekiti State governorship elections of June 2014. In that particular incarnation of the scandalous “Gate” tradition, Ayodele Fayose and other chieftains of the PDP were secretly audio-taped in conversation with an Army General and other security agents as they plotted to use the machinery of the state to forcibly ensure Fayose’s victory at the polls. Thus, “Dasukigate” draws its meaning from a globally and locally well-known tradition that entails the perpetration of high crimes and misdemeanors that are so severe that they pose grave threats to the constitutional, political and moral order.

In conformity with the tradition from which it draws its name, “Dasukigate” has not disappointed at all in the scale of outrage it has inspired as Nigerians and the whole world have been treated to unbelievable tales of impunity in rapine, cynicism and brigandage. Moneys were taken out of the Central Bank as if it was a mere ATM machine. In one operation, 34 million U.S. dollars were carted to Col. Dasuki in eleven “Ghana-Must-Go” bags, never mind the fact that only narco-terrorist drug barons carry such humungous sums of money around in cash. And as Dasuki and his associates shared the moneys amongst themselves, all regulations and protocols around the withdrawal and use of funds by agencies of the Federal Administration were routinely flouted. Apparently, no receipts were issued for moneys paid out by Dasuki and his administrative support staff, leading to allegations and counter-allegations of how much each beneficiary received and for what purported services. The statement credited to Dr. Iyorchia Ayu, former Federal Minister of Education and a PDP chieftain, is one example of an attempt by one of Dasuki’s beneficiaries to set the records straight, Ayu vigorously claiming that contrary to the former NSA boss, he was paid for something other than procurement of arms. More on Ayu and his protestations later in this piece.

Perhaps the most unbelievable and unconscionable of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of Dasukigate was the diversion of moneys intended for purchase of arms and armaments for the army in its counter-insurgency war with Boko Haram to things like paying for Dasuki’s purchase of real estate property in Dubai and paying a friend’s private hospital complex for “offering prayers” for the success of President Jonathan’s re-election bid.

My central concern in this piece is a desperate hope that as much as outrage is a logical and natural response to Dasukigate, we will to get beyond it to ask what next, what is to be done. In this, I do not wish at all to diminish the emotional validity and the moral and psychological value of outrage. An individual, a people that has lost the capacity to feel and express justifiable outrage is a lost individual, a hopelessly lost people. In the particular case of Dasukigate, outrage is perhaps even not strong enough to express the scale and the consequences of the criminality in the act of a National Security Adviser who diverts monies intended for procurement of arms for counter-insurgency military operations against Boko Haram to the private coffers of himself and his cronies. Beyond feeling and expressing outrage for such an act, the English language has a word and it is –restitution.

Beyond outrage then and in pursuit of restitution, I argue that what is to be done is to take the path of the pursuit of restitution. Let me be absolutely clear on this point, this contention: we, the Nigerian people, must massively but critically assist the Buhari administration in this and other battles in the overall war against corruption in Nigeria. I am moved to make this assertion because, at least to my knowledge and information, there has been no single act of public protest or demonstration in support of the administration’s war against corruption. The impression one gets is that we, the Nigerian people, are leaving it all to Buhari and his administration to wage the war on our behalf and wage it well. This is especially troubling given the fact that the main theatre of the war is the law courts, the same law courts, the same criminal justice system that so far at least, has been overwhelmingly on the side of looters against the interests of the Nigerian governments and peoples. Even more pertinent here is the fact that Dasukigate is actually far more common an occurrence in Nigeria in its present mode of the organization of political governance than we care to admit. For if in essence the criminality of Dasukigate involves stacking the odds against the Nigerian army, state and people in the counter-insurgency war against Boko Haram, hasn’t countless other acts of looters stacked the odds against our health care delivery system, our educational system including the primary, secondary and tertiary levels, and our system of roads, highways and public transportation? What sphere of life for the country and our peoples have not been hopelessly compromised by the looters?

Dasukigate is, I argue, more properly grasped and understood as only one more expression of “Naijagate”: a political order bequeathed to the new administration of Muhammadu Buhari by the former ruling party, the PDP, a considerable segment of whose top political bigwigs is now in the new ruling party, the APC. I crave the reader’s indulgence to dwell a little on this assertion that far bigger than Dasukigate and thus containing it within the vastness of its moral and political bankruptcy is “Naijagate” itself. Permit me to use the case of Dr. Iyorchia Ayu and his declaration of professional expertise, probity and honor in the epigraph to this piece to explain this term, “Naijagate”. Please bear in mind, dear reader, that this “Naijagate” is what I have in mind in asserting that we, the Nigerian people, must not leave the everything in the hands of the Buhari administration in the war against corruption but must become active in our own interests and especially the interests of the most oppressed masses of the Nigerian people.

The Iyorchia Ayu part in Dasukigate is easily exposed as the very height of the reflexive and cynical justification of extremely corrupt practices that has become commonplace among members of our political class. In this pattern, things that happen only in Nigeria and even then only among political elites and their cronies are boastfully touted as “universal” facts. Says Ayu: I was not paid 435 million naira for procurement of weapons; I was given the money for the consultancy work that I did for security and the PDP 2015 presidential campaign. And I got the money because I am, by professional reputation, a damned good social scientist”. Now, social scientists who are far better qualified and far more highly respected than Ayu cannot expect, even in the best of circumstances, to make 435 million naira in the entire course of their careers. But here is Ayu unself-consciously declaring that this is something he “deserved” as a social scientist! Meanwhile, in all probability, the “consultancy” work that Ayu did for Sambo Dasuki led to the former NSA’s most notorious act during the crises of the presidential elections of 2015 – the postponement of the elections for six weeks and its near cancellation as Dasuki took the matter to the United Kingdom and the world at large to argue that the elections be postponed indefinitely and an interim government of national unity be formed.

Unfortunately, the case of Ayu is the norm; it is not an exception, not an aberration in the political order bequeathed by the PDP to the APC. At the heart of this political order is a predatory savagery that is characteristic of capitalism in its worst form, a capitalism in which, typically, the wealth of the nation is transmogrified to the poverty of the nation. By itself alone without the active and vigorous support of the masses of the Nigerian peoples, the Buhari administration will never vanquish this predatory, ‘barawo’ capitalist order. In practical terms, if the people are not out in their hundreds of thousands, in their tens of millions demonstrating and marching in support of this all-out war on the ramparts and bastions of corruption in our country; if the war is fought only at the law courts; if it is left only to the fitful, slow and so far indecisive political will of the Buhari administration: outrage will continue to be the only harvest of the war against this new phase of the perpetual war on corruption in our country. Please remember, compatriots, beyond outrage there is or ought to be restitution.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

December 20, 2015
Portents of Zaria killings

If spokesmen of the Nigerian Army are credible, fewer than 10 people died in the skirmishes between the army and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, otherwise more popularly called Shi’ites, in the December 12 clash in Zaria. If spokesmen of the Shi’ites are also credible, hundreds, if not thousands, died in the clash, including a wife of their leader Sheikh Ibraheem Yaqub el-Zakzaky, and one of his sons. Recently, the Shi’ites have leaned more to the ‘hundreds’ figure, and are uncertain whether their injured leader is not dead. They have promised to compile names and photographs of those they said were killed in the clash. The country waits for them to do so. But if hospital authorities have been quoted correctly, some 61 or so bodies were deposited in the morgue. The Shi’ites said they were not armed with guns when the clash, which they described as a premeditated attack, began. The army insists the Shi’ites were not only armed, but that they attempted to assassinate the Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai, on his way to a function in Zaria. For now, the army is yet to give a figure of its own wounded and dead.

After initially rejoicing that the pesky Shi’ites had been taught a lesson or two in civic responsibility, Zarians, the rest of Nigeria, Iran and the world at large have been horrified by the scale of the slaughter. Iran, the self-styled guardian of the world’s Shi’a community, has taken umbrage and called for an independent probe. The Nigerian government at first ignored the slaughter, misjudged the problem, and when it woke up, reacted tamely. But whether it can handle the impending fallout remains to be seen. The army itself, after venting its spleen on the audacious Shi’ites, quickly attempted to control the fallout from the clash by publicising its own version of the clash, announcing a casualty figure that did not reflect the scale of the trouble, and rushed preemptively ad disingenuously to the Human Rights Commission to lodge a complaint against the Muslim Brotherhood. The public was both miffed by and distrusting of the army’s reactions.

Since its tough and irreverent beginnings in the 1980s, few have felt comfortable with el-Zakzaky’s Shi’a community, whether in the Sokoto redoubt from where they were flushed out some seven or eight years ago after a misunderstanding, or in and around their commodious Hussaniyya headquarters in Zaria, or other places in Kaduna State and elsewhere. They have a tendency to overwhelm law enforcement agents, block roads in the process of worship and teachings, muzzle those around their neighbourhoods, engage in generally disruptive long-distance treks, and are indifferent to the pains and complaints of other road users. Their actions and disregard for secular authorities naturally bring them in conflict with other road users and the government. Repeated clashes have led to terrible losses, but the Shi’ites have hugged martyrdom eagerly thereby causing and fueling exasperation among security agents. In Zaria where the army maintains a major presence, the clashes, it seemed, were inevitable.

Sheikh el-Zakzaky has had repeated brushes with the law. But his adroit leadership has seen membership increase phenomenally, with many intellectuals, brilliant students and graduates flocking into the group. Last year’s clashes were especially bloody, and might have presaged this year’s. On that occasion, the Sheikh lost three of his sons and 32 other members to rampaging soldiers, indicating that he led by example and neither he nor his group shirked a fight. But they always insisted killing others was not part of their philosophy, and that they did not carry guns.

From all the accounts of the clash, it is unlikely that the army would be given the benefit of the doubt. The Shi’ites acknowledged blocking the road that leads to their headquarters, but not the main thoroughfare which the Chief of Army Staff’s convoy passed. They insisted a detachment of soldiers laid siege to their headquarters and fired into the air. And finally, they said even after the COAS had passed, a reinforcement of troops came to vandalise their premises and kill scores of their members. They poured contempt on the video clip the army is circulating, insisting that it was a clip of a clash somewhere else the day before the army/Shi’ites clash. Given their antecedents in the counterinsurgency war so far, and the reputation for extra-judicial killings perpetrated by troops in the early years of the war in the Northeast, the world is naturally unwilling to give the army the benefit of the doubt in the Zaria clash. They see the December 12 killings as a massacre, and consider the army undisciplined, vengeful and unwilling to accept responsibility for its actions.

The Kaduna State government has rightly instituted a judicial panel of inquiry into the clash. The public expects the panel to be fair and just in its findings and conclusions. In 2009, the country and justice system failed the equally troublesome Boko Haram sect, then a foundling organisation calling itself the Nigerian Taliban. The repercussions to the Northeast and the entire country is so staggeringly obvious that it is shocking no lessons have been learnt. In 2009, both the police and the military believed that any serious problem could be solved with force. That solution has proved both elusive and pigheaded. Sadly, both the police and the military think the Shi’a problem will respond well to the use of force. It will not. The group’s brazen and provocative stance and doctrine need carefully calibrated political and law enforcement measures to tackle. Mindless slaughter of the scale witnessed against Boko Haram members in 2008-09, and probably now against the Shi’ites, whether the authorities lie about it or not, will only compound the problem.

The army has prevaricated over whether Sheikh el-Zakzaky and his wife and son are alive or not. All the army says is that the Sheikh is no longer in their custody. It will be ominous should he be dead, for the public remembers to their dismay how the extra-judicial killing of the first Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf radicalised the Northeast sect beyond any palliative and worsened the revolt. It will be foolish if the army had given vent to their frustrations, as many now fear, and killed el-Zakzaky. After all, there is no guarantee that his successor, as was the case with Boko Haram, would not be more radical, assertive and brutal. Nigerians will hope another gate of hell has not been opened in the bowels of the North.

The federal government’s response to the crisis was poor and shambolic. It didn’t move fast enough. It must now begin to ask how the army is deployed, or whether the army now has a life of its own. After the initial skirmish with the Shi’ites and the COAS had left, the inquiry must find answers to who gave orders for the army to mobilise reinforcement to invade the Shi’ites headquarters, and whether that order was still within the purview of the rules of engagement. Hopefully, the judicial panel will answer all questions relating to the clash and help the slow federal government guard against future occurrences. While the troubles of the Shi’ites are well known and must be tackled appropriately, it is difficult to absolve the army of blame. Troubling days are definitely ahead.

December 20, 2015
The North and Dasukigate

But talking of Nigerian courts is another kettle of fish entirely where it concerns the north which, incidentally, controls the judiciary a full hundred percent – the CJN, the President of the Court of Appeal, even the Attorney-General of the Federation are all from the north, one reason we are having a rash of calls for properly restructuring the country.

I ask, as you begin to read this article, to pay more premium on its therapeutic purpose, rather than see the columnist as an unreconstructed ethnic jingoist, trying to further widen the gaps between our many ethnic groups. That said, why is it so easy for the average northerner, from what we have seen, time and again, and the one now unfolding, menacingly, before our very faces, to go after, and luxuriate, in unearned opulence, mostly funds from public sources to which they usually collectively like to assume a legitimate claim? Or who would forget the late Kano State governor, Barkin Zuwo, in a hurry? As at now, and still counting, the following northern ‘who is who’, have been implicated in the nauseatingly unravelling Dasukigate – and there must be many more from where these ones come from: Col Sambo Dasuki, former National Security Adviser, a former Minister of State, Finance, Bashir Yuguda, ex-Director of Finance, ONSA, Shuabu Salihu, former Sokoto State governor, Attahiru Bafarawa, for whom the PDP laid a red carpet as President Jonathan welcomed him into that party, a former Executive Director of NNPC, Aminu Babakusa, and the governor’s son, Sagir Attahiru. Not satisfied, they even brought in their companies to partake of the bazaar which, left to Dasuki, should all have gone to northerners like himself. And, of course, you still can bet your last dime that we are yet going to have the names of a retinue of Alhajis and Alhajas whose daily job is no tougher than merely visiting the office of the National Security Adviser to be loaded with unearned money while millions of Nigerians from other parts of the country slave away in the hot African sun, not knowing where the next meal would come from. These things happen when a people have no shame; just as it speaks to an excessive cronyism. For instance, all the ONSA staff mentioned in this shameless scam are from the north as if it were a family business. These things can only happen in a culture that worships money and would do just about anything to amass it, no matter how earned. There are, of course, still a good number of decent northerners who abhor this type of public shame even as we appreciate the fact that those named are innocent until proven guilty before the law. But talking of Nigerian courts is another kettle of fish entirely where it concerns the north which, incidentally, controls the judiciary a full hundred percent – the CJN, the President of the Court of Appeal, even the Attorney-General of the Federation are all from the north, one reason we are having a rash of calls for properly restructuring the country. One critical Institution of state the status quo in the judiciary has negatively impacted, over the years, is our electoral system. So bad was the unfair use to which some northern elements put it that on 9 May, 2010, in an article captioned: THE HAMMER VERDICT, (a play on the judge’s name), I wrote as follows: ” . . .the meeting was subsequently informed that the then President of the Court of Appeal -a Katsina man, -who empanelled the Election Tribunals in cahoots with the presidency, which another Katsina man heads – had taken the opportunity to plant malleable, and thoroughly pliable northern judges in the electoral tribunals holding in the South-West, even appointing them chairmen, to ensure that the Southwest remains tied to the apron strings of the feudal north. Consequent upon this, the three, then on-going tribunals in Ogun, Osun and Ekiti, all had three northern members, among them, naturally, the Chairman. Of the three tribunals, only the result of Osun is being awaited with the two already declared going in favour of the PDP. (As expected, Osun was later declared for the PDP only for both Ekiti and Osun results to be reversed at the Appeal Court). It is hoped that the ongoing ‘name and shame’, of otherwise respected northerners would teach appropriate lessons if they want Nigerians from other parts to accord the north its deserved respect.

The time to start that change of heart should be now that we are laying the building blocks of the new Nigeria we are now eagerly constructing under the sterling lead of General Muhammadu Buhari, incidentally a northerner, a Nigerian Army General, former Head of State, as well as former chairman, Petroleum Trust Fund, who not only does not own a petrol station, but would most probably not recognise an oil block if he sees one. You appreciate this rather unbelievable Nigerian ‘exemplarism’ when you remember that some of his former colleagues, even juniors, now live in hilltop mansions, in stinking opulence, far away from the Nigerian hoi polloi. Northern leaders, emirs, top political leaders, clerics, as well as their several socio-political organisations would be doing Nigeria a great favour if they would not attempt to pressure the president into allowing those complicit in this heist to have any soft landing whatever. The possibility has already been floated and although we think Nigerians know President Buhari well enough, there must be a limit to which he can stand up to such pressure, especially from the high and mighty, some of who he may personally have high regards for. It must, however, be poignantly told the president that if he collapses, and buckles to any such entreaties and he would have written off his place in history, which God forbids. Today, the world over, people remember Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, just as the world is celebrating Lee Kuan YEW, the man who took Singapore from the Third, to the First world; incidentally the title of his magnum opus. I personally believe that it is too late in the day for a spartan Muhammadu Buhari to have his integrity compromised. Which is why it was good to read from highly regarded northern leaders like Professor Ango Abdullahi, chairman, Northern Elders Forum, and Ibrahim Coomassie, his counterpart at the Arewa Consultative Forum, both expressing support for the president’s anti-corruption war and, emphatically disclaiming any intent to prevail on the president to soft pedal. Not a few Nigerians have poured cold water on these public disclaimers but, because of their own integrity, and the many ways these things can detract from the respect due the north, as I have dutifully tried to show in this piece, one can only hope that these leaders will not, themselves, fall into the tempting hands of the PDP people who would do anything to save their arses. The north must realise that those named are certainly not the type of ambassadors they should want to see as the face of the outstanding legacies of the Uthman Dan Fodio’s, the Ahmadu Bello’s or even the Tafawa Balewa’s. Although President Shehu Shagari was, in the NPN, surrounded by about the worst specimen of humanity, from all parts of the country, he served and left with his personal integrity intact. No self-respecting elder, who loves the north, should be seen interceding for these illegal bounty sharers.

To further persuade any would-be peace-makers – these men do not even deserve a plea bargain – they should understand that anybody benefiting financially from funds which should have been spent, equipping our fighting forces, could never have wanted to see an end to the murderous Boko Haram scourge. The result then is that these people are, one way or the other, vicariously responsible for the thousands of murders by Boko Haram, responsible for the fate of millions of our compatriots currently uprooted from their homes and living as internally displaced refugees in their own country. They should ponder the fate of thousands of widows and orphans who no longer have anybody to turn to as bread winner. We can only imagine what future awaits these compatriots of ours, victims of corrupt men in power, who would rather lay their ugly hands on monies that never belonged to them. They showed no mercy and should receive none. Nigeria needs money no doubt, but so do we need to teach our youth abiding moral lessons.

Whoever is found guilty must go to jail. They must have their comeuppance.

December 20, 2015