The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Funny Food Business

    Don’t eat what you can’t spell, or translate to good plain Nigerian English

    Cultural fusion in this global village is enlarging my food vocabulary, as newspapers try to open my eyes to the merits of different dishes from every part of the world. But, frankly speaking unless a dictionary is published alongside such dishes, there is very little communication between me and those pages.

          What am I, for instance, to understand by ‘Scalloped Potatoes’? To me, scalloping is what my tailor does to increase her fees, make my dress look as if the scales of a fish have been stuck on it and make me look like a near-strangulated mermaid in it. ‘Shrimp Scamp’ is what I called my children in their growing years when they perpetually got between people’s legs! And I would be grateful for a few potatoes, but ‘Potato au gratin’? I really don’t know. When I come across ‘Mackerel Quiche’, I want to say, quick, give me a Japanese geisha, tinned or not; ‘Chili Concarne’, I think, sounds like chili pepper wrapped in a few leaves of hemp; and I have no idea what ‘Ratatouille’ could possibly stand for: rat fried in olive oil, do you think? After reading those pages, I have many times thrown my hands up in frustration and wondered aloud: What is wrong with good ol’ Amala?

         My children say – and frankly speaking, I don’t believe a word of it – that whenever I sit down to a dish of Amala, I become something else. You know what Amala is, don’t you? It is that dark, sticky substance that looks like moulded black tar but tastes heavenly. When I’m eating it, my children say that my ears automatically close and I can’t hear a word from them again; every pore in my body becomes a spring from which sweat pours like the Niagara Falls; and I eat in deep concentration, all the while quivering while the food lasts.

          Now, I ask you, how can anyone positively believe all that? I love Amala, that’s true; I don’t like to be interrupted when I’m eating it, that’s true; Amala does tend to open the pores, making one sweat like mad, that’s also true; besides, I need to keep my eyes on my food because those watching me just might throw it out since it is not salad. But sir, I do not quiver: the cocaine content of Amala is not as high as that of coffee!

        I have grown very distrustful of anyone who would prefer a bowl of salad to a bowl of Amala. I think someone should sit such people down and ask them what their problem is. I have done that to my family several times but I have to confess that they leave me baffled. But I am not giving up; the gospel of Amala is too strong to keep under. Just ask Mr. Alaani Aderibigbe, who makes and sells the stuff for a living as reported by New Age a little while back. His story is so heartening for me in my crusade of getting proper respect for Amala that I have dubbed him the brave heart. Anyone who marches where angels do not even tread must have some confidence.

            Anyway, even Mr. Alani must grant that Amala does have a superior in Pounded Yam, which appears to have found its own incontestable niche in the people’s consciousness as the Nigerian food. You know what Pounded Yam is, don’t you? It is that white, gooey substance made from yams that have been pounded to death, and to which many sweats and other substances have been added in the process of pounding, but who cares! Many Nigerians swear by it, as their devotion is fast approaching a religion. Someone related how he had been so surprised to find a university professor, who had just returned to the country from abroad, at one of the road-side food centres eating pounded yam. When he asked why he had not gone to a restaurant, the returnee was said to have replied that a restaurant was not the right place to eat pounded yam because he would not enjoy it there. Besides, it is only at a road-side food centre that you can get the original pounded yam, mixed with sweat and a lot of women talking over it to give it the right flavour.

        Many food centres or ‘bukaterias’ that offer PY run timetables that keep the food and temper requirements of each patron in mind, for they know that if the food is not ready at a stipulated time, Mama Put will get more queries than the most disobedient civil servant. And when the patrons begin to stream in, many are donning white shirt, tie and jacket; the last two being promptly discarded while the shirt sleeve is rolled up. Don’t be deceived, for at normal times, those patrons parade as academics or managers or workmen of all descriptions. No sooner is everyone served than hands begin to travel up and down from plate to mouth, backs bent uncomfortably over rather low tables, neck ties rolled aside, noses streaming, eyes glazed, throats clearing intermittently, and jaws snapping powerfully. But don’t be alarmed; you’re only watching ‘Jaws 4: The Odyssey of the Poundo’.

        We are lucky in this part of the world though; restaurant and ‘bukateria’ menus are in English. In some parts of the English speaking world, it is all you can do to read the menu and you wonder if the kitchen is not manned by people from mars; the menu is often not in any language. This accounts for non-English phrases like ‘scalloped potatoes’, ‘shrimp scamps’, and ‘onion tarts’. Shame on those onions! Our menus here are often recited by waiters from memory as, other than the two powerful Nigerian dishes, no other foods command any mention, because by the time one runs the whole gamut of Nigerian dishes anyway, one comes across a wall of paucity and predictability.

          Sometimes, I wonder if the food editors who are trying to increase our choices ever try the recipes they bring forward on themselves before attempting to tempt my throat with them. Believe me, I tried one recipe once but the results did not even faintly resemble the perfect picture displayed on the page. It was a kind of bread and I believed I followed the steps to the letter, despite my two left hands in such matters. What came out of the oven felt like a cross between rubber slippers and dried cow’s hide to the taste! However, everyone in the house was compelled to eat it so that when next I declare that I want to repeat the performance, I am sure to be paid not to do it. The only one who wanted to dodge my bread was instantly reproved by the head of the house:  ‘What makes you think you’re so special that you can’t eat this bread? You will suffer through it like the rest of us!’ It’s a little like the boy who told his father that he did not want to go to church anymore because church was boring. His father replied: ‘Yes, that is the reason everyone goes; so you will go to church and be bored like everyone else’.

       I came away from my experiment with one or two lessons. Don’t eat what you can’t spell, or translate to good plain Nigerian English. Secondly, if a dish requires too many steps and measurements in its preparation, don’t try it. Trust me; one step is likely to have been skipped over by the writer: and that is, how to make it look as perfect as its picture! Both of these lessons confirm to me why Amala and Pounded Yam remain so attractive for Nigerians: they are already translated (even Amala, honest!), they are easy to spell, they do not require too many steps, and they also taste better than rat fried in olive oil. Happy World Foods Day.

    • Today, October 16, is World Foods Day; so I have updated this article, first written in 2006, on the subject.
  • Politics and Buhari’s ministers

    Politics and Buhari’s ministers

    On the surface, President Muhammadu Buhari’s 21 ministerial nominees are a study in technocracy and brilliance.  Some of them were governors who achieved renown; and others are either famous for the projects they undertook or the policies and programmes they enunciated. In all, the nominees look set to add value to the Buhari presidency. But there is no wow factor in the list, and no surprise. Most of them are quite known to us and to the president himself. Why did the president then have to wait for four full months to reveal this largely familiar list? Was it a reflection of the pawky caution and methodicalness many observers attribute to him, and which he himself boasted of? Or was it a reflection of his newly acquired habit of hesitations and tentativeness, that is, assuming we accurately read his actions and administrative style as a fast-paced revolutionary when he was head of state for some 20 months in the early 80s?

    The weight of evidence so far suggests that President Buhari is more indecisive than he is cautious. The two attributes are not the same. There is no one on the list of 21 whom he could not have engaged in a month, or with a little more diligence, even before he assumed office. All of them may not be politically exposed to all parts of the country, but there is none who is not exposed one way or the other to at least a small part of the country. Had the president not demonstrated clear reservations about the usefulness of federal ministers, reservations loudly expressed at international fora and which he wished he could get away with, it seems he could have secured their services in weeks rather than in painfully tortuous months.

    The ministerial list was an anticlimax, not to say a paradox. Only last month in France, the president had denigrated the office of minister.  But before then and even after, he had announced he was assembling the best team, and probably the best brains, to add value to his government and to join hands with him in redeeming, developing and remoulding the country. Could ministers whom he snorted were only a little better than noisemakers rise to the lofty height of reformers or an army of change agents executing his party’s change mantra? There cannot be a direct or simple answer. It must be assumed, however, that being a closet satirist and humorist, President Buhari merely likened ministers to noisemakers as part of his increasingly famous predilection for self-deprecating commentaries.

    At bottom, too, perhaps the president was never really comfortable with a packed and charged group of polemicists and ideologues — only that we never really noticed when he was military head of state. From his disparaging remarks on ministers and his laudatory appraisal of the pivotal role played by permanent secretaries, perhaps the president feels more comfortable with the top civil servants and what many withering years of bureaucratic attrition has turned them into — an assortment of ideologically disemboweled group of yes-men and dutiful conformists more anxious to keep their jobs than offer sometimes radically dissenting opinions. By the time the president finalises his list of ministerial nominees, the nation will be able to pass a firmer and more accurate judgement on the cabinet and the mindset of the man who assembled them. Preliminary assessment, however, suggests that in assembling his ministers, President Buhari was stimulated by indecision and other sentiments than by carefulness or methodicalness.

    Whether by design or accident, however, the president seems to have unleashed quite a few forces destined to shape his government now and in the future, as well as determine just how re-electable he will be a few years from now. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Southwest. When the president made his first set of appointments, and it was widely judged as embarrassingly skewed in favour of the North, this column pointed out that he was inadvertently empowering a faction of the Southwest elite who bitterly opposed his election. That bitter faction had campaigned that the pro-Buhari faction was unwisely, slavishly and recklessly mortgaging the future of the South and, in particular, the Southwest. Though they lost the argument, and the Southwest embraced change, the narrowness of the first set of Buhari appointments, not to say the lack of ethnic diversity in the president’s kitchen cabinet, seemed to have armed the anti-Buhari faction of the Southwest political elite to voice their concerns to popular southern acclaim.

    For those who understand the nuances involved in the selection of the 21 ministerial nominees, the list seems capable of further fracturing the Southwest’s dominant and therefore triumphant elite. Here is why. It is well known that the Southwest’s political elite is divided into pro- and anti-Buhari tendencies. But what is not well known is the fact that even the pro-Buhari Southwest political elite is further divided into two stealthily conflicting groups. One group is radical, daring, pushy and enterprisingly and confidently ‘internationalist’, and the other is more amenable to President Buhari’s ways, less adventurous and questioning, somewhat isolationist, and anxious to serve without provoking tremors or ruffling too many feathers. The president prefers the latter and has included them in his first set of nominees. They may be intelligent and technocratic, but they will not rock the boat or dissent vigorously. Nor will they have masterful control over the Southwest, a control that was just beginning to accrete.

    As far as the first list is concerned, the president may have unwittingly empowered the anti-Buhari forces of the Southwest. This could yet prove fatal to both the president’s second term ambition and the country’s stability. Given the immense and, in some respects, unpopular concessions made by the Southwest to the Buhari project, the region’s radical elite needed to have something more substantial to show for all their efforts. In the event, the legislative leadership elections robbed them of that leverage, and in the ministerial appointments the radical internationalists of the Southwest’s pro-Buhari political elite may again have been left holding the short end of the stick. This could leave the Buhari presidency bereft of powerful defenders in the continuing national contest for political space and control. It may not be obvious, but the ultimatum given to President Buhari over the rampage of suspected Fulani herdsmen, and the hint of self-determination given by Yoruba leaders last Thursday, may be a reflection of the budding alienation being felt by the Yoruba, an alienation that seems to be underscored by the shortcomings of the legislative leadership elections, the skewed Buhari appointments, and the structure and temper of the ministerial list.

    What is even more evident from the ministerial list is the general indication of absence of political strategies. The first tentative step towards re-election is often laid by ministerial and other presidency appointments. In both the presidency appointments and the cabinet list, there has been no deft political touch, one capable of rousing the country’s constituencies and herding them into the Buhari column. And by unreasonably delaying the list for four months, it enabled the anti-Buhari elements in many states to regain their composure and begin plotting the downfall of many of the nominees or thoroughly destabilise them. Though the problem is worse in the Southwest due to its peculiar and sometimes incomprehensible divisions and factions; the absence of political strategies and calculations in the list is no less noticeable in other parts of the country, especially the rest of the South. The ruling All Progressives Congress is riven by bitter dissent and conflicts, and the president has not demonstrated the courage or sagacity to tackle it aggressively. He has dilly-dallied over the Senator Bukola Saraki rebellion, while his wife, Aisha, even delegates responsibilities to Saraki’s wife, Toyin, who is under EFCC investigations. And while he has handled the anti-Boko Haram and anti-graft wars with aplomb, the other parts of the country have neither seen him nor felt his touch in the real sense of the word.

    President Buhari does not have as much time as he thinks he has. Worse, he appears to be laying suspect foundations for his re-election, or even behaving as if he is uninterested. If he is truly uninterested in re-election, surely his party, which has made a hash of intra-party politics, cannot be uninterested. Nigerians must not only see and feel the politics in President Buhari’s cabinet, just as they want to see and feel his performance, they must also have assurance that the man they voted into office possesses the highest qualities and strength of character of a patriot, nationalist and tactician. So far neither the cabinet list nor his appointments have shown any of those attributes.

  • Unity Summit: another theatrics in Yoruba politics (1)

    Unity Summit: another theatrics in Yoruba politics (1)

    “Yoruba may pull out of Nigerian Union, Gen. Adebayo, others speak at Ibadan summit” -Irohin Oodua, October 9, 2015

    “Ekiti is my priority. I call on all the House of Representatives members and senators that went to Abuja from here, some people petitioned the National Assembly stating how Fayemi sank Ekiti into heavy debts, I have told the members not to do that,…” he said. “It is God that judges people, not us. You must support him there. They should not go to the Senate and oppose Kayode Fayemi, no, they must never do that. An Ekiti man is an Ekiti man. I appeal to everybody, you must support him.“– Fayose, October 9, 2015

    The Yoruba have never been found wanting in relation to raising or complicating Nigeria’s political discourse. Chief Obafemi Awolowo wrote years before Nigeria’s independence that the best way to organise Nigeria and make it prosper and peaceful is to construct a fully federal union to house all its diverse nationalities.  Rain or shine, Awolowo stood till the end of his life by his theory that the best model for a multi-national state is federalism.  Awolowo’s vision is as much in circulation today as it has ever been. During the Biafran war, the Yoruba was pivotal to the mantra of “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done.”

    After the civil war, the Yoruba also called incessantly for establishment of a social democratic model of government in Nigeria. During the Jonathan presidency, some Yoruba politicians and activists joined Jonathan to convene and populate an election-eve national dialogue on how to re-invent Nigeria while other Yoruba shouted about Jonathan’s marginalisation of the Yoruba region. Many Yoruba people took active part in the recent enthronement of a federal government that, in the words of President Buhari during his commiseration with the children of Mama H.I.D. Awolowo, is committed to realise the kind of government preferred by Chief Awolowo for all Nigerians.

    Whatever anybody wants to say about the Yoruba, no one can say that it is a nationality with citizens who are bereft of ideas in terms of making the Nigerian federation viable through a democratic process. While other regions of the country were pushing the country in the direction of unfettered feudalism or mindless unitarism from the period of colonialism to the end of military dictatorship, most Yoruba politicians and intellectuals chose to make strong cases for restoration of federalism in the country. The news report by Irohin Oodua on a summit of some Yoruba nationalist groups in Ibadan last Thursday illustrates one of the few efforts by some opinion leaders in the region to confuse Yoruba people about how to make Nigeria work and thrive for all its diverse nationalities.

    As expected, the meeting of experienced Yoruba politicians and activists has brought back to focus many of the challenges facing the Yoruba in the context of the Nigerian federation: the harassment of Awolowo in the administration of Alhaji Tafawa Balewa’s Northern People’s Congress; the annulment and detention till the end of his life of Chief M.K.O. Abiola for winning the presidential election under the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida; recurrent harassment of Yoruba farmers by Bororo Fulani herdsmen; and the recent abduction of one of the most senior Yoruba men to serve the Nigerian federation, Chief Olu Falae, by unidentified Fulani herdsmen, to name a few. Also as expected, the communique at the end of the meeting had some gaps and silences that can cause confusion for Yoruba men and women that did not collaborate with Jonathan’s PDP government. For example, no mention was made of the marginalisation of Yoruba people during the regime of the immediate past president of the country, Goodluck Jonathan.

    It is worth mentioning that the summit focused on the recent abduction of recent Falae, a worthy son of the Yoruba region and one of the unforgettable brain boxes for the federal government in the past and a former presidential candidate. It is also reassuring that the summit has called on the federal government to do the right thing: “Summit asks the federal government to ensure immediate arrest and prosecution of the abductors of Chief Falae and all perpetrators of the violent crimes which have been reported at different police stations in Yoruba land arising from cattle rearing activities.”What is capable of confusing average citizens in the Yoruba region is the decision of the summit to conflate recommendations of the 2014 Jonathan conference and the demand of Yoruba people  since 1966 for a sustainable federal system:”Realising that the crisis that we are witnessing presently over the actions of the Fulani herdsmen is a function of the refusal of Nigeria to practice true federalism which would guarantee significant autonomy to the constituent units, Summit demands an immediate restructuring of Nigeria with the implementation of the report of 2014 National Conference as a starting point”.

    Without doubt, the crises that the Yoruba have faced in their development efforts are serious enough to require meeting of opinion leaders of any political affiliation. But the crises enumerated at the summit may not constitute a sufficient condition for pulling out of the union, should the new federal government fail to re-federalise Nigeria in consonance with the recommendations of the Jonathan conference. If re-federalisation Nigeria is high on the agenda of the many Jonathan conference veterans at the summit, this may be a good time for them to start a sincere dialogue with the Yoruba nation by placing their recommendations side by side with other suggestions from non-delegates for consideration by the people. This will be an effective way to mobilise Yoruba people on the issue of re-federalisation of the union. Should Yoruba people not have a voice in what kind of federalism they want? Must they be pulled into a federal system that may not include fiscal federalism but just devolution of administrative services and further balkanisation of the six states in the Yoruba region?

    Every Yoruba patriot, indeed, every lover of justice, should be incensed by the abduction of Chief Falae. No self-respecting nation should keep quiet over the humiliation of its vertical minds, of which Chief Falae has been of its few poster children. But it may be counterproductive to lump the matter of abduction of Chief Falae by suspected Fulani nomads and the implementation of recommendations of Jonathan’s conference together. In his own remarks since his release, Chief Falae himself has called for justice, without tying his travails to non-implementation of Jonathan’s conference in which he served as leader of Yoruba delegates.

    To bring the first in the series on theatrics in Yoruba politics to a close (for lack of space), let us raise a few issues that need to be addressed by the groups at the summit and other Yoruba opinion leaders and groups that did not participate at the summit.

    At present, the Yoruba region seems to be saddled with two forms of leadership: elected leaders at the end of the 2015 presidential and state elections and unelected leaders produced largely by various groups that attended the Thursday summit and many others that chose to stay away or were not even invited to the summit. Which group was the summit addressing: those whose party won in the elections of 2015 or those who lost? When the summit made the following brave statement: “If we do not see any step in this direction within a reasonable time, the Yoruba may reconsider their place in a union that cannot protect them and would not allow them to protect themselves and use all legitimate and peaceful means to attain self-determination,” on whose behalf or authority did the summit give the deadline? At what point are members of the socio-cultural groups at the summit going to join other Yoruba federalist groups, such as the Yoruba Assembly, Afenifere Renewal Group, Atayese, and hundreds of self-determination groups in the region to present re-federalisation as a non-partisan or supra-partisan project in the Yoruba region?

    If the groups at the summit are in opposition to most of the governments in the Yoruba region, at what point are they going to call for rapprochement with elected governments of Yoruba states not in attendance at the summit? Do Yoruba citizens have a stake in the kind of federalism the Ibadan summit has called for? If so, what process does the summit have in place for mobilizing citizens in the region for the fight for immediate re-federalisation or secession from the Nigerian union? These are graver issues than any group’s obsession with recommendations from the 2014 Jonathan conference. From the experience of  other countries: the United States of America, United Arab Emirate, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ethiopia, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and South Africa, federalism is not achieved via periodic meetings of veterans of one conference at which federalism was discussed. Federalism results from a long-term process of consultation and negotiation between citizens and their democratically elected leaders.

    To be continued

  • Edwin Clark jumps ship extravagantly

    Edwin Clark jumps ship extravagantly

    For the more than five years or so that Goodluck Jonathan was president, Edwin Clark, a former Information minister and Ijaw man from Delta State, stood vexatiously and provocatively behind him. His response in those happy days to those who deplored the president’s weakness, indulgence and overtly regional, if not outrightly ethnic, bias was that as hosts of the mainstay of the economy, oil, the South-South possessed a leverage on the nation’s politics that could not be gainsaid. If the South-South’s crude oil was good enough for the country, argued Chief Clark with unfathomable syllogism, then Dr Jonathan should be good enough for the country. And if he fell short of anyone’s expectations or standards, then the country should accommodate and endure him until he finished his term in office. That term, Chief Clark defined, was not one term of four years but two terms of eight years. In those exciting days too, Chief Clark, who already saw himself as an elder statesman, held court in Abuja, acting like a self-appointed ambassador plenipotentiary for both Dr Jonathan and the South-South.

    As the 2015 general elections approached, Chief Clark became more vociferous and incendiary. He gave the impression that if things did not favour Dr Jonathan, whom he described as his godson, he was prepared to go down with the ship, and if the ship began to sink, he would even refuse to follow the rats to the deck. Chief Clark prospered as his glib and prolific talk about the inalienable rights and manifest destiny of his beloved region intensified. He advised that for our mental health, we should take Dr Jonathan as he was, with all his warts. Noisome militants in the region also began to whoop for war, warning portentously of apocalypse should the country repudiate Dr Jonathan. Scores of visitors flocked the Abuja residence of Chief Clark, paid obeisance, and flattered and massaged his ego. They curried his favour and pined for a word on their behalf to the court of Dr Jonathan. Those were giddy days.

    Less than six months after Dr Jonathan came to grief, Chief Clark has reportedly modified his views on the former president. He lacked political will to fight corruption, said the elder statesman of his eminent compatriot. Chief Clark also insinuated that the former president was precipitate in conceding electoral defeat last March. Since he conceded defeat, there was nothing else anyone could do, he groaned. It was fruitless fighting for someone who ran for office, lost and conceded, he added. Chief Clark then added the clincher: “I no longer belong to the PDP. I won’t go to the APC either, but I will continue to talk as an elder statesman and leader of this country. I have left politics. If anyone comes to me to say he’s running for any elective position in the PDP or the APC, I won’t support you. I’m not a member of the PDP anymore.”

    Two things are clear. Chief Clark is leaving politics a frustrated man, and his frustration is anchored on both the electoral loss incurred by Dr Jonathan and the former president’s weaknesses and hasty concession of defeat. Second, knowing full well how badly it would rankle with Nigerians and even sound opportunistic should he join the new ruling party, the elder statesman has quit the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). No matter how hidden his motives are, his withdrawal from the PDP and his harsh and pejorative description of Dr Jonathan’s leadership ability so soon after the PDP’s electoral debacle gave Chief Clark out as less than altruistic. He knew he could not defect to the All Progressives Congress (APC) and still keep what is left of his reputation, and he was also reluctant to still be regarded as one of the backbones of the PDP, a party that has fallen badly on hard times. So he has opted to stay disingenuously detached. If he could gain nothing by being in the PDP, let him at least not lose anything by being seen by the APC as that unrepentant PDP avatar.

    While he waved and sang frantically and often irrationally for Dr Jonathan and the PDP in the good old days, this column suspected Chief Clark did not do so out of conviction. He did his calculations well, knew which side his bread was buttered, and half expected that the gravy train would continue for many years to come. Once things came to a dramatic and explosive end, the sensible and calculating Chief Clark knew it was time to move on. He pretends to follow the beaten path of former president Olusegun Obasanjo, but the former president himself absconded from politics on less than noble grounds, a victim of vaulting ambition and abject miscalculation. But whether out of altruism or mischief, the grand old man of South-South politics has taken a bow. Perhaps it is final. He wants to be called an elder statesman like Chief Obasanjo, as if that were possible by fiat or by age. Yet, neither he nor Chief Obasanjo has earned that appellation. Instead, they are recognised as the old men of Nigerian politics. If they truly wish to be statesmen, they will have to earn it — if it is not already too late; if they are not too ossified and too incorrigible to mend their ways.

  • All the president’s men: an open letter to Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity (1)

    All the president’s men: an open letter to Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President, Media and Publicity (1)

    I have been with them throughout our trying terms; what then is the reward of such dedication and suffering? They did not defect because of positions; they did not involve themselves in the pursuit of personal gains, and they accepted their fate throughout our trying moments. President Buhari, BBC Hausa Program, Tuesday, October 6, 2015

    Dear Mr. Garba Shehu:

    Greetings! I confess that for the most part, I am directing this open letter to you rather opportunistically because it will attract more attention than if I had written it as a regular piece in this weekly column. But having said that, I should also state that I do have another reason in directing this piece of writing to you and this is the fact that I have found many of your press briefings on affairs in the Presidency very articulate. Indeed, this is such a strong element in my mind as I write this letter that I wish to inform you and the readers of this column that, rightly or wrongly, I have come to rely more on the things that you say about affairs in the Presidency than the things that Femi Adesina, Special Assistant to the President (Media and Publicity) says.

    Of course, you do occupy a more senior position than Adesina in the Presidency, but this is not the reason why to me, the things that you say carry more weight than Adesina’s press briefings. After all, we all know that, sadly, in our country seniority does not always mean superiority of mind and morality; as a matter of fact, it unfortunately often means the exact opposite. The things you say carry more weight because where Adesina tends to stick to the more mundane and routine aspects of what is going on in the Presidency, you tend mostly to come on the scene on the big issues, the critical factors vital to the success of President Buhari and his administration. Moreover, more than Adesina, in your press and media briefings you seem to speak with an authoritativeness that indicates that you have the President’s ear, his full confidence. Indeed, to me the contrast between you and Adesina is like the contrast between Doyin Okupe and Reuben Abati when both men worked with and for Goodluck Jonathan: Okupe was blunt and literal-minded; Abati was suave and articulate even when, on a countless number of occasions, he was defending palpably indefensible actions and policies of his boss, Goodluck Jonathan

    If you have read the book, All the President’s Men, by Ben Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal that was made into a highly commercially successful film bearing the same title as the book, you might think that the title of this open letter to you is intended to insinuate an allusion in the reader’s mind to that book and the film based on it. As we know, the Watergate scandal revealed a depth of abuse and corruption of power by Richard Nixon that was so monumental that it led to his downfall and that is what both the book and the film titled All the President’s Men is about.  I hastily and vigorously refute any intention in this piece to project onto President Buhari what Watergate meant for President Nixon – heavens forbid!  I wish the President well; and God knows that our country deserves a break after the disastrous reign of the PDP especially in its last stage under Goodluck Jonathan. So rather than a reprise of Nixon’s downfall for our current President, what I have in mind by invoking the phrase “all the President’s men” as the title of this piece can be highlighted by two outstanding features of President Buhari’s ministerial and non-ministerial appointments since he took office on May 29, 2015: first, overwhelmingly, most of his appointees have been men; second, also overwhelmingly, most of his appointees have been men who, in one way or another, have been loyal to him, particularly in the long years of what one could describe as time spent in the political wilderness after his overthrow as military ruler in 1985 through the twelve years from 2003 to 2015 when he ran for the presidency four times before finally succeeding in the most recent of these elections. It is in this sense and this sense only that in this piece, I talk of “all the President’s men”: few or no women at all; and men who have been with Buhari through thick and thin. In other words, a distinct gender bias and an equally distinct over-personalization of the power of incumbency with special regard to ministerial and non-ministerial appointments, these are the issues that I wish to discuss and reflect upon in this open letter to you, Mr. Shehu.

    It is perhaps necessary for me to state that in focusing on these two particular issues, I am not unaware of other issues that have been raised and widely discussed with regard to President Buhari’s exercise of his power to make appointments for key positions in his administration. Indeed, about three to four issues have been very prominent, so much so that they have almost completely eclipsed the two issues that I have chosen to emphasize in this piece. These include the unprecedented delay in making his ministerial appointments; allegations of a palpable “Northern” bias in the non-ministerial appointments; a much publicized disinclination on the part of the President to make appointments from states or geopolitical zones that voted heavily against him in the presidential elections; and alleged intra-party squabbles within the ruling party, the APC, over which chieftains or ‘heavyweights’ were snubbed and which were ‘rewarded’ by the President in making his ministerial appointments. In shifting the focus in this piece away from this particular set of issues, I wish to give no indication whatsoever that they are not important. They are important and indeed, no administration, military or civilian, in the country’s political history has so far ever managed to escape allegations of being tainted by one or all of these charges in one form or another.

    In drawing attention to this important fact of our political history, I do not wish to imply that all that can be said about this set of issues have been said and I have nothing more to add. No, I do have one or two things to add and I shall do so very briefly here, for whatever such additional commentary is worth. Thus, I must say to you and through you to the President that I was deeply surprised and disappointed that a few months ago, he, the President, openly and rather vehemently asked why anyone should expect him to look to states and regions that voted against him in dispensing presidential favors, either through appointments to public offices or the citing of federal projects. This was extremely far from a statesmanlike statement and moreover, it was politically very myopic for one would have thought that the President and his advisers would have realized that it is in the long-term interest of himself and the ruling party to enlarge their actual and potential electoral plurality by being large-hearted and non-punitive toward the states and zones that did not vote for Buhari and the APC in the recent electoral cycle. In this regard, the Southeast geopolitical zone constitutes a very special case. In line with this assertion, I ask: how in the world could a ruling party that claims to be truly progressive and forward looking adopt a stance of permanent adversarial opposition to the peoples and interests of one the three major power blocs in the country simply because in one electoral cycle this major geopolitical zone voted against the President?

    In asking this question, Mr. Shehu, I wish to draw your attention to one intricate and easily overlooked aspect of that widely publicized statement of the President in which he asked how anyone could dare to contest his right to reward states and zones that voted for him while sticking it to those that did not vote for him. As reported in many newspapers, the President did not say states and zones that did not vote for his party, the APC; quite specifically, he said states and zones that did not vote for him. It would have been bad enough if in that statement he had based himself on the party; however, it is a thousand times worse that his displeasure, his angst, pertained exclusively and unambiguously to himself, Muhammadu Buhari.

    In a slightly different but related register, this same over-personalization of the politics of governance was very, very strong in the explanation that the President gave for accusations of a Northern bias in his appointments to the major non-ministerial posts in his administration. For months, this particular accusation had been rife in the press and other media outlets, so much so that when an “explanation” of sorts came this week through an interview with the President on the BBC Hausa Service, it was something of a relief that he was at last responding to something that had bothered many Nigerians including some of his supporters. But what an explanation, what an explanation! Northern bias was not his motivation, the President said; the appointees were only incidentally Northern; more substantively and subliminally, these appointees were men who had stayed with him loyally through the long years when he walked and toiled in the political wilderness. The epigraph to this letter, Mr. Shehu, is a direct quote from the translated version of that interview on BBC Hausa Service program this past Tuesday.

    I readily admit that at a certain level of basic human sentiments and emotions, the quote from that BBC interview that serves as the epigraph to this piece is very moving, very touching in the President’s rather simple and innocent belief that his listeners everywhere will readily agree that it is a right and honorable thing to acknowledge and reward friends and supporters who had been unwavering in their loyalty in the darkest periods of one man’s travails. But the Presidency is an institution; for far too long our country’s governance has been bedeviled by extreme over-personalization. For me as a member of the nation’s “commentariat”, I had thought that we had reached a pinnacle in this phenomenon of the extreme individualization of the institution of the presidency during the two terms of Olusegun Obasanjo. Now along comes Muhammadu Buhari with a variant of the same phenomenon that seems even more problematic that OBJ’s incarnation of power as an instrument, an extension of the self’s driving passions and desires. In next week’s continuation of the series, I will focus on the gendered and neo-feudal expressions of our current President’s version of the phenomenon. Don’t worry, Mr. Shehu, my critique will be constructive, though honest and bracing. I want the President to succeed for his success will in the end be more than a personal triumph; it will be a welcome break from the impasse, the political, economic and social calamities that now stalk the length and the breadth of the land.

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyfo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Re: If corruption is so rotten, how come we all seem to enjoy its company? – Matthew Kukah

    Re: If corruption is so rotten, how come we all seem to enjoy its company? – Matthew Kukah

    Without a scintilla of doubt, Bishop Kukah got a well deserved shellacking from his club’s misbegotten trip to the Villa to plead the cause of those who stole Nigeria blind

    A time was, when you were literally awestruck, reading Bishop Hassan Matthew Kukah, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto’s many epistles to the Nigerian people. He was master of impeccable language and unassailable logic, but no more. So annoying was his contribution on the above topic at the Platform, an event organised by the Covenant Centre, Lagos, October 1, 2015, to mark Nigeria’s 55th independence anniversary, that you could wager those were not words. Indeed, so distressing was his jeremiad that on the ekitipanupo web portal, it was summarily dismissed as nothing more than sour grapes. For instance, I wrote: “Bishop Kukah is many things in this speech: a cleric, a pragmatist but mostly somebody out with a jeremiad having seen his preferred candidate lost an election. Like the Afenifere people, he is still distraught; almost inconsolable. In nearly all of the premises on which he erected his thesis, are the very facts, or inferences, to dismantle them.”  Another commentator wrote: “It was individuals like Kukah and Oritsejafor who encouraged Jonathan to carry on as if he were exclusively the president of the Christians. The consequence, of course, was the defeat of their candidate at the election. Bishop Kukah should just keep his sophistry to his chest.”

    Obviously eager to pour cold water on Nigerians’ enthusiasm about, and support for President Muhammadu Buhari, and probably still suffused with the ancient papal bull of indulgence, he hit the ground running when in his very first sentence he railed: ‘…perhaps, out of deep frustration, Nigerians have raised up messiahs, hoping and praying that they would take away their sins and sufferings and usher in a new dawn. But, in almost all instances, our joys have turned into ashes. For over 50 years, we have celebrated every military or civilian regime only to lose patience and fall into depression. Under the civilian administrations, we have often summoned the military to come to our rescue.”

    I wouldn’t know if Bishop Kukah personally called for a military putsch, but I am over 50 and neither I, nor any of my friends, bona fide Nigerians, ever did. So here is the Bishop’s first illogical conclusion. Easily committing the second, he, again, contends that describing President Buhari as a ‘morally ramrod Muslim, God-fearing, a disciplined officer, a patriot, and an incorruptible man over which, to use his words, ‘he is now adorned with a messianic regalia’,  is nothing but sentiments even though he claimed not only superior familiarity, but friendship  of over 20 years with the president.

     Apparently still smarting from his friend’s defeat, Bishop Kukah could not see Nigerians’ happiness as arising from Buhari’s well known  history of disdain for corruption in which his friends, incidentally, luxuriated, as we are now learning of Diezani and co’s escapades in NNPC. Equally joy evoking is the fact that, in spite of the antics of all the Orubebe’s of this world, President Buhari emerged from a very transparent election, an eventuality that has escaped Nigeria for decades.

    Bishop Kukah’s most egregious error was building his thesis on the way and manner in which military dictators, the very incubators and purveyors of corruption in Nigeria, behaved while in office. Said Kukah: “I will try to look back at how the so-called fight against corruption has been deployed by successive military regimes as a means of seducing us into compliance. My concern is whether we shall continue to fall for the same tricks given that, after over 50 years we are nowhere near achieving success in our fight against corruption.” This he said, even when he knew only too well that Buhari was toppled by fifth columnists within the army because they were denied the opportunity to steal as they had hoped when they staged their coup in which it is generally known Buhari did not participate. That they could not ravage the national treasury, as they did post Buhari, was simply because of the man’s aversion to corruption. I am completely at a loss as to why, knowing all that happened after the coup that ousted Buhari, Bishop Kukah could not purge himself of his anti-Buhari sentiments and, for once, own up to the fact that here is a man certainly not cut from the same cloth as our other military heads of state, some of who would later be richer than some countries on the West African coast.  It is no less surprising that this public intellectual could conflate a peoples’ happiness with words like hysteria, euphoria and amnesia, words he romanced, ad nauseam, probably because he loved the uproarious hoopla that must have greeted his verbalising them. These are words, if he does not yet know, that cannot remotely describe  the peoples’ joy and relief as Buhari thumped the sitting president in that historic election. Left to Bishop Kukah, Jonathan should have won, no matter what. After all, didn’t he tell Buhari to let him be even if he had stolen the CBN itself?

    We need not bother, therefore, whatever his definition of those his alluring words.

    Without a scintilla of doubt, Bishop Kukah got a well deserved shellacking from his club’s misbegotten trip to the Villa to plead the cause of those who stole Nigeria blind. It will therefore not be a surprise if he feels a level of disorientation arising from the massive rejection by a people that used to literally worship at his feet. As a result,  Bishop Kukah’s disdain for Buhari has increased as we find in his following  words: “Personally, with some trepidation, I have some sense of de javu manifested in the blind, hysterical and euphoric outpouring of emotions welcoming the return of President Buhari and the belief that he has come to take our sins away. The sense that, somehow, we should simply fold our hands and wait – (I don’t know who told him that) – because, like a scene out of Jim-will-fix-it in the British television programme, we should hand our future to one man who knows it all. We are becoming victims of what our famous daughter, Chimamanda, has referred to, in a most powerful essay, as the danger of the Single Story. In her words, the single story is built on stereotypes and, the trouble with stereotypes is not that they are false, but that they are incomplete. Building on this, Nigerians have imbibed the notion of the single story that we are being defined as corrupt. Thus, the idea of a fight, a war against corruption has often taken a life of its own in our collective narrative of the problems of our country.”

    Judging from his vituperations above, this Bishop obviously does not believe there is anything like corruption in Nigeria. Nor that it should be wrestled to ground. Should we then believe that he enjoys corruption? If, as asserted by the respected Ambassador Dapo Fafowora in his column in The Nation of Thursday,  October 8, 2015, corruption accounts for over 40 percent of public expenditure in Nigeria and yet Bishop Kukah doubts its existence, wont it be correct to say Nigerians do not know this man at all? This says a lot for all the so-called men of God who milled around former President Jonathan worshipping at both the president and his wife’s feet all in the desire to be found at the corridor of power. It also explains the humongous amount of money the former president allegedly bribed the clergy with and how outrageously the Christian Association of Nigeria became an arm of the Peoples’ Democratic Party going into the election. Credit must, however, go to the Catholic Church whose bishops, as a collective, dissociated themselves from the supercilious peccadilloes of some of its colleagues. Nigerians must wait and watch, as Bishop Matthew Kukah continues to unravel, possibly to his utter demystification.

  • Okon salutes Gamaliel Onosode

    Okon salutes Gamaliel Onosode

    A day after he escaped public lynching as his latest scam exploded in his face, Okon was in high spirit and fine fettle indeed. It turned out that the crazy boy and the old crook, Baba Lekki, had opened an online processing provider called Internet Roaster Services for ministerial wannabes asking all ministerial prospectives to forward their vitae to the Special Assistant to the Special Adviser on Ministerial Recruitment with a small processing fees of 100k. Applications came in drove and Okon smiled to the bank.

    A day after the ministerial list was unfolded, an irate crowd laid a siege to the house demanding a refund of their money. It was a sad day for the Nigerian political elite as Okon and Baba Lekki beheld them with withering contempt. One distraught applicant brought out a locally made pistol and fired warning shots in the air. As the smoke cleared, the mad boy burst into a satanic grin as he eyed the distressed man with utter disdain.

    “So wetin you say be dem problem? And why you dey fire your  Awka Shakabula like dat? Dem Buhari man say list never complete”, Okon sneered.

    “Just shut up and bring the money”, the man screamed.

    “Which money? Abi no be dem K.O  Mbadiwe say if you want greatness you must to finance greatness?” a drunken Baba Lekki interjected.

    “Baba tell am say internet na enter net . Abi him see where fishing net dey return fish he don catch?”, Okon snorted with relish.

    “Bia, if you Yoruba 419 people no behave, I go blow your yeye head”, the irate man thundered.

    “ If one is going to be threatened by an animal with horns, it is not going to be a snail”, Baba Lekki drawled and then thrust out his chest in a gesture of daring defiance. With this hint of a metaphysical collision, the crowd began disappearing one by one with the angry man screaming, “Chei dis na dem ogbologbo people, dem ngbati crook don finish man again”.

    Flush with unexpected victory, it was a triumphant Okon who appeared the following day resplendent in the resource control costume of the new Creek Croesus.

    “Ha Oga, I wan quickly reach dem Baba Gamaliel Onosode him house make man sign dem Condomless register”, the mad fellow said with a self-important flourish.

    “Congratulations” snooper sniggered with cynical hilarity.

    “Oga, why you dey congratulate man? Na the person who don kaput you go congratulate. At least him own suffer don end. Suffer suffer too much for Obodo”, Okon replied.

    “So what are you putting in the register?”, snooper demanded.

    “Ha I go tell baba make him go well, but make him no come back as Mr Integrity becos integrity no be juju against hunger. But if him come back like dat, suffer go whack am proper proper and hunger go remove him cap and him fine fine trouser go dey drop below him ankle for public”, the crazy boy noted with sadistic mirth as snooper quickly shut the door after the two crackpots.

     

  • The strangeness of democratic change

    The strangeness of democratic change

    God bless Honore de Balzac, wherever he may be at this moment. The great French novelist lived the impossible contradictions of post-revolutionary France as if he was himself a character in a great novel. In order to chronicle for posterity the tormenting improbabilities of his beloved nation with as much fidelity and accuracy as possible, Balzac simply appointed himself a honorary secretary of the society. From this vantage observatory and ringside listening post, Balzac began churning out great historical novels.

    But so consumed was the great man by this moveable feast of superior reality that at the end of his life, Balzac was no longer able to separate reality from fiction. On his death bed, Balzac was heard screaming for his favourite physician to come and attend to him. “ Call me Banchioc!! Only Banchioc can save me now!” But there was a minor problem. Banchioc indeed was not a life or living doctor. He was actually one of Balzac’s own greatest fictional creations.

    As we are beginning to understand in Nigeria, the notion of democratic change may well be a violent oxymoron; an impossible misnomer.  So it is that almost five months after the historic election that swept off the ancien regime, the change project is beginning to look like some compelling fiction. And what an absolutely magical yarn it is turning out to be. With its strange twists and turns, the change mantra is beginning to strike one as the work of a fabulist of cosmic talents.

    Take just one sampler. A fortnight ago and in the wake of the widespread revulsion and national recrimination that accompanied his arraignment on allegations bordering on criminal self-enrichment, you would have thought that Bukola Saraki was a goner. Political obituarists—yours sincerely honorably included—were already oiling and inking their felt pens and rubbing their hands in relish about the prospects of the young man honorably falling on his own sword.

    But two weeks later, the selfsame Saraki ,supported by a whopping eighty one senators including about thirty five dissidents from his own party, is not only defending in depth and strength but has gone on the political offensive to the bargain sending the fear of the Lord into prospective ministers and the ministration of change itself. Some of the prospective ministers and fiercest zealots of the change ministry are reported to be lobbying the rogue senators. Welcome to the last tango in Paris.

    Despite the mantra of change, or most probably because “revolutions” must also revolve, one or two of the ministerial wannabes are said to have sent in some friendly fliers of a fiscal nature to the hard and hardened honorables. It is turning out to be an ethical maelstrom and in a rare triumph of pragmatic politics over gung-ho principles, President Buhari himself has had to write a most cajoling and faintly anodyne letter to the Senate President, a fellow he almost certainly holds in furious contempt. And this is discounting a famous photo-op in which the two protagonists can be seen grinning from ear to ear. It doesn’t get more fabulously galling.

    But we must not despair. This is what you get when change comes on the wings of democratic evolution rather than on the cusp of a violent revolution. It is often a messy and chaotic affair, unlike the neat decapitations associated with revolutionary convulsions. For those who see change as a radical rupture with the past; a new beginning with immediate effect and a turbulent and tumultuous regime change occasioning much violence, tears and gnashing of teeth, the shabby stalemate in the Nigerian Senate and the occasional rousing of the regnant forces of reaction and retrogression is a sad tale of change ambushed.

    But given the current balance of force, a storming of the anti-democratic Bastille or what we had proposed as the Nigerian Senatorial Shogunate is out of the question. As we warned much earlier, the President cannot afford to treat the emerging threat to change from the senate with kids’ gloves. But now that he has been forced to eat the humble pie, he and his handlers will have to go back to the drawing board to deal with what promises to be a grueling duel of political and psychological stamina.

    Despite the rearguard rallying of reactionary forces, the momentum, the balance of moral power and punitive initiatives still reside with President Buhari and the forces of change. Change is not always accompanied by a violent discontinuity with the past but by a slow almost imperceptible shift of attitude and perception; a gradual awakening of conscience and consciousness as impossible contradictions congregate and aggregate and  as they are refined and finessed out leading to their subsequent degrading or sublation as the case may be.

    Once again, Nigeria is roiling in acute and tormenting political contradictions in all their absorbing over determination. In modern philosophical parlance, an over determined totality is a situation in which structured contradictions refuse to obey the simple Hegelian cause and effect resolution. It is a situation in which so many contradictions jostle for ascendancy at the same time leading to a riotous congregation of multiple causes and multiple effects all tending towards mutual cancelation or the mutual ruination which presages a new order.

    After the Jonathan debacle and the ruinous sixteen years of PDP misrule, it is obvious that Nigeria cannot go back to the old order. But given the stalemate in the senate, the gradual disintegration of the regional caucuses of the ascendant party and the absence of an overriding pan-Nigerian ethos to rein in centrifugal forces, it is obvious that for now the forces of change also lack the ideological wherewithal, the critical mass capacity and the acute mental endowment to inaugurate a new order.

    Despite the much vaunted political sophistication of the Yoruba political elite, it is a recurring decimal of their history and Nigeria’s history that after every successful mobilization for a federal cause, the wheels always come unstuck as rebellions over largesse and who gets what erupt against the ascendant central authority.

    Dissidents and political dissenters revolting against what they consider insensitive and unfeeling leadership make a pitch for the federal umbrella. From the impregnable fortress, they begin to cock a snook at the political machine that threw them up. As it was in 1993 and 1999, so it is beginning to feel in 2015. In an improper federation, there must be something about federal largesse which makes it such a potent political poison for Yoruba elite.

    This is the grey zone of political liminality in which we have found ourselves and many things can go wrong from here. It will be a dire tragedy for Nigeria if the nascent forces of change unleashed by the last presidential elections are summarily liquidated by forces of reaction preying upon so many national contradictions and the inability or unwillingness of the president to see the total picture of a fractured and fragmented polity.

    While there is no doubting the towering moral authority and ethical luminosity that the retired general from Daura has brought to the Nigerian presidency, there is also no doubt that unless this solitary messianism is harnessed to a grand visionary architecture, an overarching construct of a modern multi-national nation bristling with mutually incompatible nationalities and their historic idiosyncrasies, all may yet come to naught.

    For example in more homogeneous and organic nations, Buhari’s zero tolerance for corruption and the current national and international outing and ritual humiliation of those who have burglarized the national Exchequer ought to have driven the fear of the Lord into a grateful populace. In South Korea and other oriental countries with a national culture of shame, the mere allegations of sleaze are often enough to make a politician to commit suicide. In Nigeria, the manifestly corrupt stonewall and stall the judicial process while getting their ethnic cohorts to bring down the roof with the cries of witch hunting.

    Nobody has ever told us what is wrong with hunting down witches in the first instance. But in an ethnically, religiously and regionally fissured polity, one person’s witch is another person’s economic wizard and inquiries may turn into inquisitions. Once again, we are faced with the incompatibility of habitus of Nigerian nationalities and the fact that as currently constituted, Nigeria is made up of diverse people in different stages of political development and widely divergent modes of economic, political and spiritual production.

    It is like being trapped in a misarticulated lorry with wheels going in different directions. In the millennial friction and grinding immobility, everybody hurts including those who want to go forward, those who want to go backward, those who want to lurch sideway and those who want to remain rooted on the same spot.

    This is why Nigeria at this particular conjuncture resembles an open-ended historical fiction requiring the services of an exceptionally endowed power-artist to move it forward. While General Buhari’s drive to sanitize the polity and rid the nation of corruption is a national crusade that must be pursued, he ought to be reminded that national sanitization must not and cannot be an end in itself but an integral part of national rebirth and redemption.

    Suffering from the unitarist illusion that the whole nation can be whipped into conforming uniformity and homogenized sanctity all at once, the retired general does not seem to have spared a thought for the architectural fault lines which would make this simply impossible.  Neither have his addresses to the nation, miserable and laconic at best, shown that he understands the power of the spoken word to lift a battered people out of their emotional doldrums.

    Going forward, it is going to be a tough act indeed. While the forces of reaction try to bring him to heel and weaken his moral resolve, the president must avoid acts which bring him to direct collision and confrontation with the core constituency which holds the ace for rapid modernization of the country and the strategic scaffolding of the change project itself.

    It is also important at this critical point for this constituency to come to terms with the grim reality that given the relentless fanning and whipping up of ethnic hysteria in its backyard by those who lost out in the last election, its own survival depends on the survival of the Buhari administration no matter how fabulous and strange things may become. Political commonsense demands sober introspection and the awareness of human limitations in these perilous times.

  • WTD: wisdom is … empowerment through self-development

    Teachers must empower themselves by behaving professionally and seeking to be better each day in the impact they make on their learners

    For the fun of it, dear reader, I typed into the internet search engine ‘world’s wisest man’. It brought up King Solomon (belonging to the past) and a certain engineer Hobbs (belonging to the present). Among other things that qualify him was his recommendation that sex offenders be sent to Afghanistan as a distraction in order to get American soldiers out of there! Now, how’s that for wisdom?!

    Fayose in Ekiti State is nearly writing his way into another kind of Solomonic wisdom. The news gave it that he gave cars to teachers deemed outstanding in their performances. He also created the posts of headmasters-general and tutors-general, whatever those might mean. I don’t know, but you know Mr. Fayose is full of all kinds of wisdom. Of course, the recipients of those cars went home wreathed in smiles while teachers’ salaries and other emoluments remained unpaid.

    In spite of things like that, the teacher is expected to be full of all kinds of wisdom. You know him/her, don’t you? I once provided a cartoon depiction of (her) on this page that I had borrowed from the internet so I will not be repeating that here. It’s enough to know that s/he is that individual who is expected to impart knowledge into his/her wards by writing on the board and at the same time seeing everything the class is up to with the eyes situated at the back of her head. Uhn hun, s/he is that knowledgeable.

    Sometime ago, I listened in on a conversation that did not really concern me. (I can’t help it if my ears insist on picking things up). A child made a sentence in English that was a little off in its grammatical status and promptly, an adult asked, ‘what are they teaching you in that school paa pa?’ A little later, the same child was asked where Australia was, and he said Africa. Again came the retort, ‘what do they teach you in that school?’ I believe if I had stayed long enough, I would have heard that refrain used more times in the day if the child talked while eating, slept too well, did not sleep well, had fever, did not have fever, played too hard, did not play hard enough… In short, the school would have been blamed for whatever wisdom (or lack of it) the child displayed.

    No doubt, we are in the era of the one-stop school system; you know, like a one-stop store where you get everything from a cow to a car. This means that this country has now bred parents who expect the school system to cater for all the child’s developmental and intellectual needs. It’s a kind of cure-all, like food. You know how our grandmothers always believed that food was at the root of all our problems. If a child was too quiet, shove a slice of yam in his hand. If a child was running fever, give him a slice of bread. Even fainting fits could be fought with soaked gari. And if the child had nose-bleed, why, the boy does not have enough cereal in his system; make him a bowl of akamu. Seriously, those were the days when children were well fed.

    The proverb that says if hunters have learnt to shoot without missing, birds will learn without perching remains one of my favourite marching philosophies. It teaches me to raise my expectations of myself and also my goals at the same time, such as being able to fly without perching.. If the country has come to believe that the classroom should be a one-stop shop for the learner, then it is up to the teacher to go to his drawing board and see what s/he can do. The teacher must see behind that attitude that Nigeria is asking him/her to do more.

    I believe that there are two things s/he can do. One, s/he can agree that indeed, the classroom can be the child’s superstore of knowledge and stock up the blessed shelves. Then s/he must device ways of helping the child load up on his trolleys from every shelf on every level until the child cries ‘enough!’ I say blessed is that teacher who is able to do this: his pate will soon be bald, his muscles wasted and we will soon be looking for him on the scales.

    Alternatively, and I believe this is more reasonable, s/he can sit at the drawing board and share out the tasks between him/herself and the parent of the ward, no matter how literate or illiterate. If anyone can send a child to school, they should also be prepared to point out Australia to him/her on the map. The teacher must increase parental involvement in the education of the child. Parents must be made to have occasions to visit their children’s school: on days of bad behaviour, school plays, craft days, project showing days, family days, children’s lazy days … This is a way of keeping a child’s score card public and at every turn, the parent knows exactly what his child knows, should know or should not know. I think we have reached that point where parents should be given homework, no matter the level of their literacy.

    But, I despair of this ever happening, for several reasons. To start with, many teachers, headmasters and principals are afraid of the parents of their wards. After all, a child is as powerful as a parent who can get one fired from one’s job or beat one up or get one a better job. The teacher knows this; unfortunately the children also know this. So, badly behaved, unmotivated children soon become landlords in the classroom and the controlling cane changes hands invisibly. This unauthorised control gets worse if the teacher is having dishonourable intentions towards the child.

    Worse, our classrooms are so filled now that I hear many teachers don’t even give homework. Indeed, I hear many teachers don’t even bother to teach. They show up in school, spend the time chatting with other teachers, then go home. Naturally, the children get themselves other teachers: they are called peers, internet or gangs. Excellent teachers, those; incomparable – their lessons are endless, their methods brutal, and few are the children who do not learn fast under their tutelage.

    The one reason that scares me most is the fact that this country does not even see teaching as a respectable profession; consequently teachers do not see themselves as professionals. Professionalism begins with self-worth, self-valuation and self-esteem, all of which confer on the individual self-pride in what one does. In these days of unemployment, many young graduates who are teaching always never say they are teachers. They always say ‘they are managing somewhere until something comes up’.

    The teacher brings a great deal of impact on the personhood of a child by being his/her role model.  Scant are the individuals who can beat their chest and cry like Tarzan that one teacher or the other did not have a hand in the making of him or her, one way or another. Those individuals never passed through a school. I remember all my teachers and I think I have paid homage to them on these pages a few times. Truth is, I will not be with you today if my teachers did not inspire me, conventionally or unconventionally, to learn.

    This year, the WTD theme is ‘Empowering teachers, building sustainable societies’ and I think this could not be more apt. Teachers must empower themselves first by taking pride in what they do. To do that, they must seek self-development. Self-development leads to self-respect. They must seek to behave professionally and be better each day in the impact they make on their learners. That, to me, is true wisdom.

  • Leadership by vote of confidence

    Leadership by vote of confidence

    By a larger plurality, and for the second time in months, the Senate has passed a vote of confidence in Senate President Bukola Saraki over his apparent face-off with his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and perhaps the president himself, Muhammadu Buhari. After a six-week recess, the Senate resumed plenary last week, and immediately, some 83 senators rose in unison to endorse the leadership of Dr Saraki. The first vote of confidence by 81 senators in late July boasted two fewer senators in Dr Saraki’s wagon. Who knows, by the time a third vote of confidence is held, for it will certainly be held as long as the ruling party is in suspended animation, perhaps nearly all of the country’s 109 taunting senators would endorse their embattled leader. Last week’s larger plurality, according to reports, was predicated on the senators’ continuing dismay at what they describe as meddlesomeness of external forces in Senate affairs. The insinuation is not lost on anyone, for even Dr Saraki himself pointedly disclosed where his troubles were coming from.

    The vote of confidence was prompted by Dr Saraki’s arraignment for offences connected with false declaration of assets, which the animated prosecuting counsel said he needed just two days to establish beyond doubt. Neither the mere fact of charging Dr Saraki in court, nor the fear of proving the Senate President as untrustworthy, nor yet the possibility of presenting him with the moral conundrum of leading Nigeria’s highest lawmaking body on shaky ethical ground, was enough to temper the enthusiasm of the 83 senators from biting the bullet. For both the consenting senators and the Senate President himself, what assumed paramountcy were the motives behind arraigning Dr Saraki before Justice Danladi Umar of the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) and the independence of the legislature, not the substance and merit of the court case.

    In the view of Dr Saraki, the court case indicated nothing but persecution. He argues that by breaking ranks with his party over the zoning of legislative leadership positions, he was consequently being unfairly and needlessly harassed. But the legislature, he sermonised, must be independent of the executive arm if democracy was to flourish. It is not clear whether he believes himself. But from all indications, senators, at least the 83 who endorsed him, identify with Dr Saraki’s point of view, and regard the ethical dilemma facing the lofty and incomparable position of the Senate President as secondary to the battle for legislative independence with which they have canonised his defiance. Both in the tribunal and the resumed Senate plenary, Dr Saraki managed by sheer sophistry to frame the argument according to his liking and in his own ethically distorted worldview. Said he: “I wish to reiterate my remarks before the Tribunal, that I have no iota of doubt that I am on trial today because I am President of the Nigerian Senate, against the wishes of some powerful individuals outside this chambers. And to yield ground on this note, is to be complicit in the subversion of democracy and its core principles of separation of powers as enshrined in our constitution. This, in your wisdom, is what you have done by electing me to be the first among all of you who are my equals.”

    The monstrosity of Dr Saraki’s arguments find parallel only in the perverted logic of a man who excuses his life of crime on the grounds of parental neglect or societal and economic inequality. It is indeed possible that Dr Saraki has found himself before a tribunal today because he disagreed with his party and possibly even the president, though he has tried strenuously to dissociate the president from the court case. But for a senior lawmaker of Dr Saraki’s calibre to conflate party politics with the juridic circumstances of his alleged offence is to stretch logic and morality to their elastic limit. Unfortunately for everyone, particularly the senators, the two cases are not only distinct, the court case even takes precedence over the merit of his Senate leadership election and the so-called independence of the legislature. The court case, when it is over, will establish whether he is morally qualified to occupy the lofty position he claimed grandly and extravagantly that his colleagues bestowed upon him in June as primus inter pares.

    If senators refuse to be persuaded by the argument of those who insist on the court case proving or disproving Dr Saraki’s bona fides, it is either they lack the quality their election supposedly conferred on them, or that at bottom they are themselves facing gargantuan ethical conflicts, or even worse, that they lack the depth, strength of character and wisdom required to discriminate between complex and interwoven phenomena. Left to the chafing senators who undiscriminatingly endorsed Dr Saraki last week, had they been asked to examine the quandary former US president Richard Nixon found himself over Watergate in 1972-74, they would have blamed partisan politics for his woes rather than judge the matter on merit, and dismiss the erring president as ethically misled and unfit to hold the high office he was voted into. On Thursday, observers saw a thaw in the relationship between President Buhari and Dr Saraki during the celebration of the Independence Day anniversary at Aso Villa. Even if the smiles between the two indicated a thaw, it is unlikely to affect Dr Saraki’s court case, let alone lead the federal government to a withdrawal or amelioration of the case.

    Not only will the trial go on, irrespective of anyone’s sympathies for Dr Saraki regarding his dispute with party leaders, the case will be diligently prosecuted and justice, sans politics, served. It is incredible that Dr Saraki wishes the case against him to be settled politically, as many intermediaries suggest. Should it be settled politically, it will not only destroy the ethical foundation of President Buhari’s anti-graft war, it will pervert the cause of justice in Nigeria and establish an impregnable dichotomy between the haves and the have nots, and between the influential and the ordinary citizen. Worse, it will presuppose two forms of justice in the land. The cocooned Dr Saraki does not give the impression of a wise lawmaker or leader; this may be why he continues to conflate the issues before him. But it is even more shocking that none of the 83 senators who passed a vote of confidence in him was able to deconstruct Dr Saraki’s troubles and judge appropriately.

    Members of the House of Representatives are also reported to have unanimously mandated a willing Yakubu Dogara, the Speaker, to wade into the Dr Saraki/presidency/APC matter in order to find a political solution. They obviously see the trial as political. Perhaps too, some APC leaders believe the Saraki case should and could be settled amicably and politically. For Dr Saraki, however, the only way to settle the matter is to leave him to do what he pleases at the Senate, to enter into alliances that suit his purpose but hurt his party, and to frame the argument and its resolution along his peculiar politics and schizoid worldview.  Speaker Dogara faced a similar problem in the House of Representatives, but he managed to settle the misunderstanding with extensive concessions. However, neither the president nor APC can assume the liberty to settle the case politically before the CCT adjudicates the matter. The short-term and long-term consequences will be too grave. Indeed, irrespective of the outcome of the CCT case, and given the way Dr Saraki has framed the stalemate in the party as a dispute between him and one or two powerful APC leaders, neither the Senate for which he craves independence, nor the ruling party that sometimes seems to vacillate so mysteriously, will know peace with a political settlement.

    If the APC wishes to retain influence over its elected officials, if the values the president wishes to project are to endure and prosper, and if the legislature wishes to sustain a more realistic and lasting independence, they must not embrace the atrocious solution being foisted on them by Dr Saraki, his unreflective Senate supporters, and goody two-shoes House of Representatives sympathisers. Dr Saraki can continue to fight or arm-twist his party and party leaders, a right his position and privilege confer on him, and even plot to master the ruling party or outwit its leaders, as much as his ambition gives him wing, but the state, which transcends both him and his party, must resist being blackmailed into abandoning the CCT case. The public must also sensibly refuse to confuse the two issues. They are different, and no amount of intra-party squabble and interminable votes of confidence can expiate the infraction of the law federal prosecutors allege against the Senate President. Dr Saraki’s case is a bad one, notwithstanding the political intrigues he tries to insinuate into it, and it will in fact remain very bad irrespective of the sentimental blather lawmakers deploy to undermine public understanding of the issues. The 7th Senate was nothing to write home about in terms of the integrity, sanctity and dignity of lawmaking. The 8th Senate seems adamantly focused on going down that same or more monstrously vicious chute. The country should not indulge them even if the president were to relent.