The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • In the war against corruption effective prosecutions not probes are the ultimate weapons

    In the war against corruption effective prosecutions not probes are the ultimate weapons

    I start my column this week with two separate but related questions and their answers, together with the known, documented effects of the answers. First question: what does a probe of probable or suspected cases of looting of government revenues or assets achieve? Answer: if successful, it will reveal the identities, the names of the culprits, together with the sums they might have stolen. Known and documented effects: in most cases no effect is achieved; there are no punishments, and no refund of stolen loot. Second question: what will vigorous and effective prosecution of identified and named culprits of looting of government or public funds and assets achieve? Answer: it will recover vast amounts of stolen loot; it will send culprits to long terms of imprisonment; and it will serve as a warning, a deterrent to others that corruption will be met with the full force of the law in our country. Known and documented effects: None, precisely because vigorous and effective prosecutions of criminal looters have been virtually absent in our law courts for at least the last decade and a half; our country is a looters’ paradise, the most redoubtable in the whole world.

    The causative background to this series of questions and answers is the controversy currently raging over the announcement of President Buhari that his administration’s probe of corruption in our country will be limited to only the administration of his immediate predecessor in office, Goodluck Jonathan. I am not uninterested in the controversy, but I confess that it is of very mild interest to me. If I had to take a clear and unambiguous position on the issue, it will be that Buhari ought not to limit the probe to the Jonathan administration, that all the administrations since the return to civilian rule in 1999 should be probed. This is because, absolutely without any exception, looting with impunity was a constant and invariant phenomenon as much in the Obasanjo and Yar’ Adua administrations as in the Jonathan government. For this reason, Buhari is playing into hands of those who, for their own self-interested reasons, have been making loud and acrimonious noises that the new administration’s intended probe is nothing but a witch-hunt directed solely at the Jonathan administration. And now having stated my own views on the matter, I wish to say with as much emphasis as I can muster that this controversy is a diversion away from the most serious area of the war against corruption and its ramifications for the survival of our country. This area is none other than vigorous and effective prosecution of criminal cases against our high and mighty class of “untouchable” looters. Permit me to make a few comments in support of this observation, this claim.

    It is an understatement to say that probes relating to official corruption are not lacking in Nigeria for indeed, there are few places on the planet with as many probes and investigations of corruption as in our country. Indeed, if probes had any positive connection to the war on corruption, Nigeria would have emerged more than a decade ago as one of the countries in the world with the lowest levels of official or governmental corruption. As a matter of historical fact, the tradition goes all the way back before 1999 to the period of military dictatorships. So endemic, so constant but so utterly of little or no use is the legal-administrative culture of probes into corruption in our country that there have been even probes to probe probes! In my recollection, the most recent of such uniquely Nigerian and endlessly redundant “probes-to-probe-probes” is the well known scandal-within-a-scandal involving the Hon Farouk Lawan. As readers of this piece may recall, in the probe into the oil subsidy mega scam of 2011 by a Committee of the House of Representatives that Lawan chaired, he was caught in a bribery setup that then attracted a probe of Lawan and his Committee by a Sub-Committee of the same House of Representatives. In that notorious case, neither the person being probed who bribed Lawan nor Lawan himself paid any significant price for the revelations of both the initial probe and the subsequent probe-to-probe-the-probe.

    Given this inglorious history of probes in the war against corruption in our country, the reader may wonder why so much discursive energy and political capital are invested in calls for probing either only the Jonathan administration or all the administrations since 1999. Is it because probes and their revelations act as a sort of shaming ritual against our “lootocrats”? Perhaps. On this account, deep down in the Nigerian collective psyche and popular imagination is the conviction that the law in general and most of our very senior lawyers, and a great number of our magistrates and judges are there to protect the lootocrats. On this account, the thinking is that at least if, thanks to the prevailing judicial system, you can’t jail them and you can’t make them pay back what they have looted, you can at least shame them by revealing through probes who they are and how much they have looted. If this underlying logic holds true, it means that ours is a society that has already lost the entire war against corruption even before the first battle – in the law courts – has been fought and lost. And there is also the fact that our looters are completely beyond shame; indeed to the contrary, they normatively wear their “shame” like a badge of honor, unfortunately with the connivance of the popular masses, the looted and the disenfranchised.

    The great challenge now is to shift the indisputably great public interest in the success of the war against corruption away from calls for or against probes to why it is that the battles are nearly always lost in our law courts and what we need to do to end the control of the law by the looters and their advocates. In making this particular observation, I ask the reader to please reflect on the fact that only a very tiny segment of civil society organizations and individuals, trade unions and professional associations, and students’ bodies and voluntary organizations pay careful and sustained attention to what goes on in our law courts with regard to how the high and mighty of the land who have looted and continue to loot our public coffers control senior lawyers, judges and magistrates. As I write these words, there are dozens, indeed scores of cases tied up in our law courts more or less permanently against successful prosecution. In the few cases where accused culprits are actually tried and found guilty, the “punishments” are so light as to be laughable in their ineffectiveness, either as punishment or as deterrent. I cite just a few of these. One: John Yakubu Yusuf who admitted to stealing more than 2 billion naira from Police Pension Funds; he was given only two years jail sentence but with an option of a fine of N750,000 naira which he paid and then walked away a free man. Two: the Judge who gave him this “handshake” of a sentence, Justice Abubakar Talba, was found compromised by the National Judicial Council (NJC). What punishment did the NJC give him? One year suspension from duties without pay! Three: a certain Justice Okechukwu Okeke of the Federal High Court who, in his appearance before the NJC, had no convincing defense against the numerous petitions against his judgments; he was not sanctioned at all but was let off the hook because his retirement was close at hand!

    I am not of course saying stop all probes; far from it. Probes have their uses, especially if and when they are complemented by vigorous and effective prosecutions. What I am saying is that beyond the calls for probes, please pay far greater attention to what is going on in the law courts! The names of the most active and notorious senior lawyers, magistrates and judges who provide cover and protection to the lootocrats should be publicized. Tear away the cloak of judicial respectability and personal anonymity from their “illustrious” careers! Don’t scapegoat them in place of the lootocrats themselves, but unmask the hidden symbiosis between the two groups! Above all else, pay attention to the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 and fight with all your moral energy and political imagination to make sure that the provisions of this new Act are enforced in our law courts.

    Naturally, the reader will wonder: what exactly is the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 about? Well, here I must confess that I have myself just come into knowledge of both its clearly revolutionary implications and the tremendous obstacles that we may expect from the forces both inside and outside our judicial system who benefit from the status quo that favors looters. For this reason, rather than give a summary or outline of the provisions and implications of this Act, I intend next week to invite one or two members of the judiciary to share the space of this column with me in discussion and explication of the Act. For now, let me close the present discussion with the following “last words”.

    One of the truly amazing ironies of the war against corruption in our country in the law courts is the fact that our looters have been far more widely successfully prosecuted outside the country than in Nigeria. In some really unbelievable cases, individuals who had been unsuccessfully prosecuted in Nigerian courts have been victoriously prosecuted abroad for the same crimes! This pattern has brought much ridicule and infamy to our judicial order in the court of international juridical onion. Right now, at this present historical moment when so many countries in the world have promised to help the new administration recover the untold loot hidden away in foreign countries and bank vaults, the very least we can begin to do is prosecute our looters vigorously and successfully at home. Charity, they say, begins at home. So does justice for the millions of the looted and impoverished in the land.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • On the Northern Question: two exemplary positions

    On the Northern Question: two exemplary positions

    If you ignore the National Question, it will not ignore you. This is because nations are never a settled, unquestionable affair; they are forever in question. As we have seen with some of the world’s oldest nations, particularly Spain, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, the Philippines and many Latin American countries,  affronted nationalities are questioning the very basis and essence of the nation, often in scary armed critiques and bloody confrontations.

    But as we have seen in the many brutal and bloody civil wars in post-colonial Africa, particularly in Nigeria, the two Congos, Central African Republic, Somalia, Mozambique, Angola and now the two Sudan, National Questions are never settled by force but by exemplary statesmanship and visionary pacting which address the fears and grievances of political elites.

    Often, many of these elite formations use the National Question as a mask and platform for bitter power struggles and deep state intrigues, or as rearguard rallies after electoral shellacking. That is neither here nor there. It is in the nature of politics and politicians to complicate and problematize the National Question, particularly in the absence of a genuine nationalist elite formation and its overriding ethos.

    The creation of a nation particularly by colonial fiat does not and cannot come with the creation of nationals. That task is left to visionary nationalist elite groups. An Italian patriot famously snorted after the Garibaldi unification by sword: “Now that we have created Italy, it is time to create Italians!”  Many African nations were created by the colonial overlords with enemy nationals deeply embedded, making the task of genuine nation-building a forlorn Sisyphean quest.

    In postcolonial Africa, particularly multi-national Nigeria, these nascent colonial creations continue to roil in crisis and contradictions with mutually incompatible nationalities in a war of all against all. Like a stubborn and unwavering limpet stuck to a rock, the nationality question is deeply embedded in the National Question, implicated and furiously implicating. The tsetse fly does not kill a cow, but it can make life very uncomfortable and worthless indeed.

    This is not a question of tribe or tongue. Either as a regional bloc or as individual entities, most Nigerian nationalities are permanently engaged in a driven quest for self-validation or self-determination which often erupts as an armed critique of the state or the nation itself or a determined bid to bend or break the nation to their private will. But in the absence of a powerfully driven and historically motivated national elite formation, it is like trying to feel your way out of a funeral sack; it often feels like being buried alive.

    For example, in the old west, despite the bravest visionary efforts of Obafemi Awolowo and his progressive successors to collar the region and drive it in the direction of western modernity and modernization, the lingering ideological efficacy of its old powerful feudal structure still continues to play lead violin with the Yoruba nationality forced to feel and probe its way towards modernity like a stalled caterpillar. This can be seen in the cultural politics surrounding the transition of the Ooni, the spiritual father of the Yoruba people.

    In the old east, the general conviction is that the Igbo nation has never been able to throw up a visionary and purposeful political elite to match and valorize the republican dynamism, entrepreneurial brilliance and outstanding creative gifts of the people.  The result has been perpetual perfidy and betrayals which in the tumult and turbulence of a dysfunctional nation often eventuate in unhealthy bitterness and tantrum-throwing which in turn jeopardize inter-elite harmony and cooperation.

    As for the Ijaw nationality and its failed hegemonic bid, discerning Ijaw nationalists will for long rue the postcolonial incubus which has foisted an inept and corrupt leadership on the ethnic group at its most critical hour of need. As General Obasanjo recently hostilely averred, this leadership lapse will haunt the ethnic formation for quite some time to come. But as Kafka once noted, “it is not that what you say is false, but it is so hostile”.

    Yet of all the regional blocs and nationalities in Nigeria, it is perhaps the north that has been most critically shortchanged and left holding the wrong end of the stick. Political success is the mother of economic and cultural failure.  Unlike other regions, colonial conquest and occupation met a ruling class which had by dint of its own internal conquest and occupation leavened by political guile and astute engineering imposed a measure of order, stability and cohesiveness on the entire region. If this superior feudal politicking has allowed the north to dictate the political terms in post-independence Nigeria, it has also left some hideous social contradictions in its wake.

    Colonial occupation met the north stoutly facing the Middle East and Islamic civilization for succor and political guidance. This is a fact of historical congruence and spiritual consanguinity which cannot be wished away. The problem is that after it was thrown out of Spain and after the debacle of the Ottoman Turks in modern day Serbia in the fifteenth century, Islamic modernity has been reeling relentlessly from the hammer of western modernity and modernization.

    As this relentless western modernity impinges on the north destabilizing and compromising its classical Islamic feudal political structure and economy even as it hammers away at its Wahhabist spiritual hegemony through the advent of western education and the menace of globalization, we have been witnessing a horrid reenactment of the Middle East horror in Sahelian Nigeria. It has even occasioned the rise and hegemony of a northern officers’ class reminiscent of the occupation of Egypt by slave soldiers of the Mamluk caste for almost five hundred years. Welcome to Boko Haram country.

    It is just as well, then, that the Boko Haram threat is about to be completely degraded by a rejuvenated and re-engineered Nigerian military. But unless the root political and economic causes of this scourge are addressed and in the light of relentless globalization which is an equal opportunity transmitter and transmission spacecraft for spiritual merchandise and Islamic radicalism, we may witness the advent of even more horrid and murderous mutants in the future.

    Luckily for Nigeria, There is a breath of fresh air and optimism blowing across the country which is kindled by President Mohammadu Buhari’s return to power and exemplary personal example. It is unfortunate that age is no longer on the retired general’s side. Buhari’s announcement of a multi-billion naira rehabilitation plan for the ravaged north east is a step in the right direction. This project must now include a holistic plan for the compulsory education of northern youths and the economic empowerment of its underclass which will wean its desperate peasantry and disoriented hoi polloi away from the sedulous and seductive lore of the paradisiacal paeans of Islamic militancy.

    What the north and by extension the rest of the nation need is a modernizing Ataturk who will take the entire country by the scruff of the neck and push its political, economic and spiritual structures into compulsory modernization. A primitive economic structure can only breed primitive corruption and mammoth greed associated with hunter-gatherers not sure of the next meal. One does not need to like Buhari’s face or stern visage to associate with what he is doing. This is Nigeria’s last chance. Whether his shameless traducers are willing to admit it or not,  Buhari has got many things right.

    Yet the National Question, like an old impertinent and unwanted guest, persists and subsists. It will not go away. Turkey was a culturally and religiously homogenous nation which made it relatively easy for Mustapha Kemal Ataturk to deal with rump of the Ottoman Empire he bravely carved out. But the modern world is no longer driven by arms and their bearers but by the force transcendental thinking.

    A modern Nigerian Ataturk must combine the visionary modernizing genius of the old Turkish hero with the cultural and intellectual nous and sensitivity which must allow him to see Nigeria as a multinational nation with nationalities in relatively autonomous and mutually incompatible stages of political, economic and spiritual  developments. This not only requires astute political engineering, but simultaneous synchronic and structural discriminations and rigorous differentiations. Whether Buhari has these or is driven by a solitary messianism without commensurate conceptual scaffolding remains to be seen.

    But the national question waits for nobody as it aims at the jugular of fragile and inchoate nations. As if to remind us of unfinished business, the northern in the national Question reechoed recently in a stormy collision of ideas between two of the brightest political stars the northern Nigerian firmament has thrown up in recent times.

    Malam Nasir el-Rufai , the governor of Kaduna State, needs no introduction. Brilliant, bold, tempestuous and with a hint of temperamental irritability with opposing ideas, the pesky, pint-sized accidental politician does not take hostages. Often controversial but with a cause, el-Rufai has established quite a reputation as a radical iconoclast and northern gadfly who does not care a hoot about protocols and procedures for political hostilities. In a starchy conservative milieu, this may come across as impish arrogance, but there is considerable merit in el-Rufai’s hell raising.

    Ever since he became governor,  el-Rufai has seized the central northern state by the scruff of the neck dragging the bull screaming and kicking to the watering hole of modernization. When he is not severely downsizing the bloated and unsustainable structure of governance, he is busy abolishing the customary practice of state Sallah munificence. When he is not busy pruning down and “rationalizing” the unwieldy ministries, he is tirelessly scissoring the mammoth workforce.

    There are faint hints of the infamous IMF conditionalities about these reforms and more than a whiff of text book monetarist economics. Nasir el-Rufai often comes across as an unfeeling, hard-hearted patrolman of the World Bank autobahn. But it is better to do something and be wrong than to do nothing and be right. Corrective measures often come from the collision of proactive errors and practical insights.

    It is a desperate situation indeed. It is however el-rufai’s attempt to banish beggars (but not begging) from the streets of Kaduna that has drawn the ire of Shehu Sani, his fellow party man and senator from the same Kaduna state who has accused the governor of pursuing anti-people policies. Urbane, courteous and impeccably well-mannered, Sani  comes from an illustrious line of radical civil society activism and high wire political networking.

    Begging and its corollary of alms giving, particularly in the north, is a culturally sensitive and spiritually explosive affair which should be handled with tact and caution. But it should be noted that begging was never a profession until alms giving was religiously codified as a sign of spiritual ennoblement and charity towards the perpetually impecunious and begging itself is spiritually transformed as a symptom of honorable poverty. Dishonorable poverty breeds revolutions and republican perversities.

    But for the distinguished senator and civil rights activist, these selfsame beggars and despised mendicants form a considerable part of his constituency.  They are his people. He was not elected by beggars to abolish beggars –and begging. In a conservative society, this is the politically correct stance to take. In the event, it is el-Rufai’s monetarist conservatism with its echoes of brutal modernization that tilts at the edge of radical iconoclasm and visionary innovation.

    It is intriguing however that neither Shehu Sani nor Nasir el-Rufai has come up with a holistic and  comprehensive programme about addressing the phenomenon of begging in the north which strikes at the root of the problem. This must involve a regimen of drastic reorientation, compulsorily mass-education and what the great Brazilian sociologist has called “conscientization” of the people. But this is tantamount to striking a fatal blow at the vital artery of the old northern ruling class.

    If it is sufficiently scaffolded and theoretically integrated to become a coherent ideology, President Buhari’s messianic populism may be of help here. It has been established in political philosophy that the greatest good that can come from government is the maximum happiness of the maximum number of citizens. From different ideological spectrums, the Lula advent in Brazil and the Lee Kuan Yew experiment in Singapore have shown how it is people for bold visionary governance to lift a nation and its people from the trough of poverty and indignity to global reckoning.

    How this will pan out in Nigeria remains to be seen. But that this debate is taking place at all between two of the northern luminaries of their generation is a pointer to the political and intellectual ferment that has seized hold of Nigeria and the first astral sign of a post-PDP Nigeria. In sixteen years of misbegotten rule, this kind of intellectual contention that is potentially regenerative in its sheer disruptiveness of the existing order never took place on an inter-party basis not to talk of within the same party in the same region and the same state.

    Once again, we wager that the APC has its work cut out for it. What the “thrilla in Kaduna” is showing is that the new ruling party cannot afford to slam arbitrary textbook policies on the whole nation without first coming to terms with the political, cultural, economic and spiritual peculiarities of its constituting units and mutually contradictory constituencies. The National Question is still very much alive and kicking at us.

     

  • The obstreperous judge of the state of Osun

    The obstreperous judge of the state of Osun

    There is no way a judge would spew such banalities on a state chief executive if, indeed, she was not consumed by hate and it is rather a shame that we still have such bigoted individuals, with the power of life and death, adjudicating in our hallowed courts of justice

    No matter in which university her worshipful majesty, Justice Folahanmi Oloyede, read her law, she could never have passed through the likes of Professors Okunuga, Ijalaiye, Kasunmu or Olawoyin, the way she completely desecrated the judiciary by her ill- advised petition against the Osun State governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, which petition, it is obvious, she must have written out of some deep-seated bitterness. There is no way a judge would spew such banalities on a state chief executive if, indeed, she was not consumed by hate and it is rather a shame that we still have such bigoted individuals, with the power of life and death, adjudicating in our hallowed courts of justice. Reading this woman’s petition, you would not think that any other state, besides Osun, has a backlog of unpaid salaries.

    Meanwhile in Benue State, for reasons not unconnected with non-payment of workers’ salaries, a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja temporarily froze the state’s accounts in Skye Bank, Zenith Bank, First Bank of Nigeria and First City Monument Bank while for the same reason. The Daily Independent of May 16, 2015 reported that workers in Plateau State sacked the entire state 24 lawmakers from sitting over their failure to prevail on the state government to pay their salary arrears running to about seven months. While this is the situation in at least 23 of Nigeria’s 36 states we have the words of the Edo State governor, Comrade Adam Oshiomhole, to the effect that President Jonathan “could only be said to have paid wages only to the extent that Okonjo-Iweala borrowed from the Central Bank; from various bond instruments including drawing down over N3 trillion from pension funds. It was in realisation of this truly pervasive problem that governors of both the APC and the PDP approached the federal government for a bail out which was granted. Unfortunately, given Yoruba’s historic bad belle and pull-him-down syndrome, things were bound to be treated differently in the Southwest, especially in Osun State, where a particular individual, forever wanting to be governor, was sure to find ‘agent provocateurs’, ready to pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him. This, I suspect, is where this judge, who has subsequently been thoroughly excoriated for desecrating the judiciary by legal juggernauts like Chief (Mrs) Folake Solanke, SAN and Professor Itse Sagay, SAN, comes in.

    It  is  also with  this  macabre circumstances in mind, this complete disregard for judicial norms  as well as  everything that can be  considered  decent, and respectful, that Adewale Adeoye, a CNN African Journalist Award winner,  decided  to weigh in on Oloyede’s monumental faux pas. His views are presented, mutatis mutandis:  “Governors should, by all means, be held accountable for their deeds.  All the same, Justice Oloyede erred.  Her petition is curious, suspicious and raises serious issues about the separation of powers just as it is a complete negation of the prescriptions of the code of conduct as it concerns judicial officers.  As one, it is obviously not in Justice Oloyede’s place to initiate impeachment proceedings against the governor. Her petition is novel, has never been known to happen; not here nor in the advanced democracies. This Judge has no history of being a radical and so must have acted at the prompting of politicians, or of a political party.  That she did so publicly is as dreadful as it is bizarre.  No judge, not even in a banana republic, should be seen acting in such a rash and repugnant manner. Why, for instance, has the Chief Justice of the Federation not written such a petition to the Senate calling for the impeachment of former President Goodluck Jonathan when the federal government was borrowing in trillions to pay salaries?  Without doubt, her action demonstrates a gross lack of professional etiquette and so she can justifiably be described as a threat to the judiciary. We have heard that a section of the judiciary stinks with corruption and by this, she has confirmed that such corruption is not limited to financials only; it could very well be attitudinal.  Her inability to check and moderate her sentiments smells to high heavens, exposing her as being extremely weak and unable to rein in her impulses. She demonstrated a flirtatious display of reactionary alliance with the roguish PDP; a party which has spared no effort in making governance in the State of Osun impossible.  Without a doubt, that  party is from whence came the contents  of her petition and it is meant to distract  a governor who is doing his best to ameliorate the effects of their party’s  unrestrained looting which ensured that trillions of naira that should have ended up in the federation account  never got there in the first place.  Nigerians must thank God PDP et al, have been dispatched to political Siberia to rot.

    Judges are neither police nor expected to be politicians. Judges are there to interpret the law based on evidence before them. They are not prosecutors, nor can they be judges in their own case. This misdirected judge quoted figures that are confidential to the state even when she did not get them, leveraging on the FOI law, which obviously means  that she has either been personally spying or has agents  leaking state secrets to her.  Clearly, Justice Oloyede is a remnant of the old order, a rookie of the political clan, planted in the judiciary; a clan that wishes to see Nigeria remain a fiefdom of ineptitude, run by a rogue cartel wishing to dominate government for selfish ends. It is the responsibility of any society that wishes to uphold the separation of powers, that intruders like her must not go unpunished by the appropriate authorities.”  Were Justice Oloyede a woman of principles, or a citizen who truly means well for her state; if she were a woman of her word, she should have promptly resigned her appointment except she still cannot see the difference between her high office as judge,  and that of  a mere busy body who has obviously been playing  ‘Edward Snowden’, on the state’s  official secrets . The State of Osun, I think, should proceed to make her have her day in court for this profanity. In concluding, let me say a word for the poor, suffering Nigerian worker.  Nothing can be worse than not getting paid for work done and it becomes more excruciating when this situation continues for months on end.  And, given Nigeria’s parlous circumstances, this situation could go on for years. Or how many times can state governors run to a federal government that is, itself living by its shoestrings? This is why I think the Nigerian Labour Congress should now quit adversarial relationship with the different arms of government. Labour should set out to properly serve the interest of Nigerians workers by posing and finding answers to questions that are crucial if they hope to take workers out of their present cul-de-sac.  For instance, labour’s insistence on uniform salary in all states of the federation is unhelpful because states are not equally endowed.  Also, if the federal government will not perpetually come to states’ assistance in the payment of salaries, then it must quit negotiating salaries and allowances on behalf of other tiers of government. It is absolutely fallacious to think that states like Ebonyi, Ekiti, Osun etc, can comfortably pay the same salary as Lagos, Rivers, Kano, Akwa Ibom, for instance. States must be allowed to pay salaries it can afford based on honest negotiations between Labour and government. For instance, Osun did not have its current problem until the senior workers union arm twisted the government to extend the minimum wage agreement to all categories of staff. From that point on,

    most states discovered they could no longer afford their monthly salary bills. It must be pointed out that in any state of the federation, the public service does not cater to more than about 10 percent or thereabouts of the population. When this small fraction takes everything a government earns in a month, what is left for government to do anything else?  Only this past week the House of Representatives decided to investigate why the capital component of the current budget is not being implemented.  Should any serious body go into such things when even a kindergarten knows why?

    Labour must do this hard work on behalf of workers or give states a free hand to determine their staff strength.

  • Abati: Burden of public office

    Abati: Burden of public office

    I have not been opportune to hold a public office, but I know a number of people who have and whose experience has not been as pleasant as imagined.

    There is a lot of assumption about public office that makes many to do anything possible to get political appointments. President Muhammadu Buhari and many state governors who are yet to appoint their commissioners will currently have more than enough curriculum vitae for consideration.

    The delay in making appointments by Buhari must be giving many sleepless nights as they had expected by now that they would have been rewarded with appointments for their contributions to the president’s election victory.

    While not many easily admit that they want public office to enrich themselves, it is the main attraction for most and not service as claimed.

    There are, indeed, legitimate and illegitimate money to be made in government. Beyond the normal salaries, there are numerous allowances and other pecuniary benefits which make political appointments attractive.

    However, beyond the financial gains, there are a lot of other hassles associated with government appointments which need to be understood by not only those who crave for appointments but members of the public who subject the appointees to what I regard as unfair criticisms.

    This piece is informed by the recent article by a former presidential spokesman, Dr. Reuben Abati, titled: The phones no longer ring.

    “As spokesman to President Goodluck Jonathan, my phones rang endlessly and became more than personal navigators within the social space. They defined my entire life; dusk to dawn, all year-round. The phones buzzed non-stop, my email was permanently active; my twitter account received tons of messages per second.   The worst moments were those days when there was a Boko Haram attack virtually every Sunday.

    “The intrusion into my private life was total as my wife complained about her sleep being disrupted by phones that never seemed to stop ringing,” Abati wrote.

    Expectedly, his piece attracted some negative comments from those who felt that Abati does not deserve any pity or understanding based on the role he played in the Jonathan’s presidency. Abati was definitely not seeking any pity. All he sought to do as far as I am concerned was to give an insight about the life of a typical top government official occupying some sensitive positions.

    Despite his hectic schedule, his greatest crime for which some journalists who should sympathise with him but rather crucify him is that he didn’t pick their calls while he was in office. Yes, he should pick their calls since his job was that of a spokesperson for the government, but the truth is that there is a limit to how many he can, given the various assignments he had to juggle.

    I am not aware of any spokesperson, either at federal or state level, who has not been accused of not responding to calls as much as their former colleagues expect them. A former Press Secretary to a former Deputy Governor told me how difficult it was for her to cope with numerous calls because of meetings she had to attend, travels and other assignments.

    Much as spokesmen and other public office holders should try to maintain their pre-appointment relationships, they should not be expected to meet every demand that require their attention.

    Their stay in government office should not be regarded as an opportunity for them to meet some difficult expectations beyond their capacity. The inner workings of government can be very complicated and unless one is in, it may be difficult to appreciate what it takes to be a government official.

  • Arms and the Men

    I welcome our new service chiefs to this broiling situation and pray they will be able to make better sense of it and translate it to the rest of us in the English we understand so that all things can add up. I’m thinking the kind of English that says ‘the war is over’

    I am sure I join many wary Nigerians in congratulating and welcoming the new service chiefs to their new posts. When I saw them being decorated by the president and their individual wives last night on television, they looked such a picture of strength and purpose I positively shed a few tears. No, I wasn’t crying because of envy this time; I was crying because I wasn’t there to … you know… just hug them and wish them great good luck before they go into battle! Three months to defeat boko haram is a strong and, to many of us, tall order, but you never can tell. I have decided that if I can’t go to the battle front myself (a little busy, you know), I will not let my doubts stand in their way.

    Honestly though, when I saw them last night on TV, they just reminded me of that brave group of fighters called the Three Musketeers who constituted the British Medieval king’s last bastion of defence. They later became four I think; at least many editions later made them four (they knew three were not enough to defeat the enemy) as they were joined by a ruddy youth who quite took everyone’s breath away with his looks and fighting skills. So we do have an appropriate number here. Anyway, The Musketeers were supposed to be men whose oaths to defend the king and state included a readiness to lay down their lives and all. That meant only the bravest, boldest and most noble of fellows could be members of that most elite of elite forces; that was why they were so few.

          To be honest, I never looked long enough at our past servicemen to know if they had those qualities or not. By the time they came, I had been infected by the indifference virus many Nigerians suffered from BB (Before Buhari). So like the rest of my countrymen, I just concluded that the government had simply changed the group of the CC (Come Choppers) and refused to expect anything from them. I do not believe I am in a position to assess them except to say that the war they met on their watch is still on our hands, many months after they took the baton. Reasons for this sad state are not mine to excavate although I have heard someone say that that insurgency was not so serious that even our MB (Mobile Police) unit could not put down under three months if the country was serious. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion; that’s what I say.

    In our new servicemen, I thought I heard soldiers who swore to lay down all they had in the service of the president and country, mostly because the president himself is prepared to do likewise. This means they had come not as soldiers of fortune but of some seriousness. I think they had seen something of the seriousness on our president’s face and that he was not smiling when he invited them to come and serve with him. The guy never smiles anyway. Anyways, they had not come to be chocolate cream soldiers. Those are Bernard Shaw’s soldiers who hide in ladies’ wardrobes eating chocolates while a war is going on. Actually that’s where we got our title today.

     So, I am sure our new service chiefs know they are coming at a rather delicate time in the country’s history when everyone is just about fed up with the country constantly paying out trillions of Naira prosecuting a war it is not winning against some armed banditry. Rather than the war going away, we have all been compelled to watch in horror as our Naira has been going away to never-never land. Honestly, I do believe that if it were not for the fact that we now have Buhari for president, we would not even have known that all that Naira has gone to never-never land; we would all have continued to labour under the heavy tolls of that war believing it was being fought. Actually, I was coming to the conclusion that the war was fast becoming the most expensive in history going by the ratio and strength of the enemy to the country.

    Thanks, I say, to Buhari who is not into any of our nonsense, we now have the luxury of hearing strange tunes from the now retired service chiefs. For instance, we have just been told again that Nigerian soldiers were fighting that war with antiquated war gear while the enemy was fighting with modern war gear. (We first heard it from the soldiers who refused to fight the war with, well, bare hands.) And I thought, someone was doing the arming. But, did that someone get confused as to who the enemy really was? Was the wrong side being armed out in human error? Seriously, it could happen; well, this is Nigeria, man!

    Nevertheless, I consider it rather striking that after such a long time and lots of money, the army is now telling us this unfortunate tale of insufficiency. As the story goes, the U.S. refused to sell arms to the country on account of some breach of some human rights laws. No one in the U.S. will come out clearly on whether it is the breach of the Leahy law or gays’ rights law. Yet militants north and south are somehow able to lay their own illegal hands on the arms they require. How come? These things are just not adding up for me. But then, things never seem to add up for me anyway since my mathematics is near to non-existent.

    My worry is this: if the army had all these facts about weaponry, why were the soldiers who were put on trial for desertion given the death sentence without considering the extenuating circumstances of the case? Like I always say, I am not a soldier; I am just an observer with a desire to set things right. From my observatory therefore, I can see and therefore say that that sentence is a little harsh and untoward. True, the punishment for the crime of desertion should always harsh. But the soldiers did not hide in ladies’ cupboards; they just did not have the right arms they said. So, when the punishment is too harsh, it is no longer punishment; it becomes sadism. In the name of the humanity under which we all groan, I hope the new chiefs will review that sentence.

    So, once again, I welcome our new service chiefs to this broiling situation and pray they will be able to make better sense of it and translate it to the rest of us in the English we understand so that all things can add up. I’m thinking the kind of English that says ‘the war is over’. That is easy enough to understand. I hope that they will use the time they have been given to prosecute the boko haram war to truly bring this sickening situation to an end. They should remember that just as their predecessors now have the opportunity to explain their commands to the nation, they will also have theirs at the end of their own service lines. For their sake, the nation hopes they will be able to employ their opportunities to give explanations of triumph rather than apologies.

  • As if there is no change in the air

    The recent expression of worries of members of the National Peace Committee (now re-named the National Peace Council) at the end of a meeting with President Buhari provides a subtle demonstration of the desire to tolerate the culture of impunity

    The more things change, the more they remain the same? This question cannot be more apt than it appears to be in today’s Nigeria. Many pundits are already describing the durability of old habits in the country as a manifestation of the Nigeria Factor, a psycho-social condition that  gives Nigerians across the social spectrum oversize energy to make the wrong thing look right without blinking; to do the wrong thing and expect the right result; etc. How else does one explain the behaviour of some members of the Peace Committee or of the Senate that is still not totally out of the woods from the crisis some of its members foisted on the body of the country’s upper legislative chamber a few weeks ago?

    Immunity or the flair to soar above the rule of law has been a part of the Nigerian condition for a very long time. It did not come with the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan nor with the first post-military civilian regime midwifed by General Abdulsalami Abubakar. Immunity in political, social, and economic matters was present during most of the decades of military rule. Military dictators fired tenured civil servants with enthusiasm and without any reference to the law of the land.  There were also military governors who flogged civil servants; shaved the heads of journalists; and ordered some public servants to do frog jumping. What got worse over time and especially during the post-military civilian regime since 1999 is the desire of elected political office holders or appointed ones to do whatever appealed to their fancy, without worrying about how such behaviour advances the cause of accountable, ethical, and elegant civic life.

    The recent expression of worries of members of the National Peace Committee (now re-named the National Peace Council) at the end of a meeting with President Buhari provides a subtle demonstration of the desire to tolerate the culture of impunity. Some of the statements of Bishop Kukah in particular should worry lovers of democratic governance. In his assurance to citizens about the objective of the meeting the National Peace Committee held with President Buhari, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto said: “I think what we are concerned about is the process. It is no longer a military regime and under our existing laws, everybody is innocent until proven guilty. . . .Again, our own commitment is not to intimidate or fight anybody. The former president’s commitment and what he did still remains spectacular and I think that President Buhari himself appreciates that. So, our effort really is to make sure that the right thing is done.”

    As much as the Bishop tried to assure citizens that the NPC is not worried about the federal government’s decision to put on trial those under investigation for looting the nation’s treasury, there are still questions that are not answered by his clarifications on the purpose of the special meeting with President Buhari. What has the president done since his assumption of office to suggest that he is likely to act in contravention of the principle of rule of law or to ignore ‘doing the right thing’? Have any citizens approached the National Peace Committee that their rights have been violated? Since when did the NPC, a group cobbled together before the 2015 presidential election, become a group for promotion of human rights in place of the constitution and the judiciary? Are there any suggestions that those being prepared for arraignment in a matter of weeks may be unable to protect their rights, should President Buhari’s government put them on trial without just cause? Perhaps, the NPC needs to give citizens more information about details of the negotiations that made the result of the presidential election acceptable to former President Jonathan, if only to assure citizens that the Committee/Council is not to become a non-elected and informal layer in the governing process.

    Now that President Buhari has given the National Peace Committee a new name, is this an indication that the body has been given a new lease of life? In what specific areas is the National Peace Council to look for peace? What exactly has broken that the NPC is now being charged or re-charged to fix? The nation and the entire world had amply congratulated former President Jonathan for accepting the results of the 2015 presidential election. What other matters are yet to be resolved after the graceful departure of Dr. Jonathan at the end of the inauguration of President Buhari? What is the cause of democratic governance going to gain from NPC becoming a permanent feature of the political culture? Is the extension of the tenure of the Peace Council an indication that the war in Nigeria is not just the one with Boko Haram but others within the polity that are yet to be named?

    Furthermore, is the re-naming of the Peace Committee an attempt to turn the ad hoc group into a standing body to settle issues outside the judicial framework? Shouldn’t members of the committee give the new president the benefit of the doubt that he ought to know what is right to do before accusing or arraigning any citizen on charges of corruption? Is it too much to expect that President Buhari can understand without being prodded that the government he now heads is not a military regime, months after he had contested and won a national election? Once a new government is in power, such pre-election groups set up to advise outgoing and incoming administrations should be allowed to move off the political and media radar, particularly once they had fulfilled the objective for which they were created. Shouldn’t members of the Peace Committee/Council have been thanked for a job well done and given the time to face their regular responsibilities in the various sectors of the society from which they were recruited?

    There is also a report that the Senate has decided abruptly to end public hearing on review of its members’ salaries and allowances. The Senate has chosen to refer matters of salary review to its own committees while some of its members are noting that the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Allocation Commission is the sole authority to determine how much lawmakers earn. It is reassuring that the Senate is now preoccupied with the matter of process. Other senators seem to have concluded that having pruned down the budget of the national assembly from 150 billion to 120 billion naira, there should be no need for any review of the salaries and perquisites of lawmakers. In the tradition of maximising the use of power entrusted to individuals and groups in an ethos characterised by immunity, the Senate is acting as if it wants to avoid being monitored by citizens who initially showed concerns about the oversize pay and benefit package of lawmakers.

    Is the Senate leader’s decision to move debate over salary/allowance review from public gaze an attempt to sweep the matter of legislative finance under the mat? The culture of the last national assembly was similar in many ways to that of the executive of the time. During the Jonathan era, it was not unusual for lawmakers to summon members of the executive for fact-finding and for such office holders to refuse to heed such calls with impunity. For four years, the lawmakers kept with impunity the details of their salaries and allowances away from the public. It is therefore not unlikely that the decision to halt public hearing on salary and allowance is being made with the belief that there is nothing citizens can do to make senators change their mind on how much they want to be paid.

    What senators should not be allowed to forget is that the game has changed. The voters that brought the lawmakers to office are starkly different from those that were claimed to have voted for many of them four years ago. In 2015, majority of voters got fed up with the ethic and style of governance and lawmaking in the last six or more years and thus voted for a new governance ethic. The mandate given to majority of the lawmakers last April, just like the one given to President Buhari, is one that requires transparency and accountability. If there are lawmakers who believe that they can muscle their way into any level of salary and allowance they feel can carry “increasing obligations to their constituencies,” they will need to remember that the constituents they now have will like to be consulted fully on all matters including how much their representatives take home as salaries and allowances. Should the nation’s revenue profile require any form of rationalisation that may affect any kind of allowance for lawmakers personally or for their constituencies, legislators and the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Allocation Commission need to be made aware of the principle that ultimate sovereignty lies with the citizens, not their representatives in the lower or upper House.

  • Buhari’s superfluous ministers and national rebirth

    Buhari’s superfluous ministers and national rebirth

    The mild and sarcastic debate about what Nigeria and President Muhammadu Buhari gained from his July 19-22 visit to the United States will continue for a little longer. It is in the nature of politics for its combatants to plot hugely distractive talkfests to upstage one another. The president was ecstatic about the visit, and his aides have reeled out flattering figures of the economic, security and diplomatic gains the four-day trip afforded the president and the country. Presidential aides mention some N2.7trn investment funds, in addition to the considerable thaw in the tense relations between Nigeria and the US. Furthermore, said the aides, the US, notwithstanding the constrictive Leahy amendment, may be preparing to sell modern weapons to Nigeria to revitalise the intractable war against Boko Haram.

    For the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which President Buhari at least once mispronounced during his meeting with President Barack Obama, the gains of the visit are unquantifiable. The opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), however, remains convinced the visit was virtually useless. But considered as a whole, there are elements of the visit that are quite salutary both to the prosecution of the war against terror and the badly battered image of Nigeria. Yet, it is difficult to resist the feeling that the visit, apart from being hasty and a little incoherent, glossed over many salient economic, political and diplomatic issues.

    The visit was not entirely worthless, as the PDP has sought to portray it, perhaps out of envy. But it probably suffers the problem of timing and content. On the day the visit really began on July 20, the president timed his justificatory Washington Post piece to announce his diplomatic intentions and economic and social reengineering hopes. It read like a summarised transcendental agenda. Not only was the Washington Post forum to advocate such germane state issues misplaced, it was indefensible that the core elements of the piece were not debated at home before they were presented to the international community.

    Among other issues raised, the article asserted quite definitively that the Buhari presidency’s reengineering programme would be anchored on three fundamental elements, to wit: “First, instill rules and good governance; second, install officials who are experienced and capable of managing state agencies and ministries; and third, seek to recover funds stolen under previous regimes so that this money can be invested in Nigeria for the benefit of all of our citizens.” In that case, the visit should have waited until at least the first two elements of the road map were tackled. Importantly too, it is curious that the president missed the import of his weighty statement, which gave the impression that either his ministers, who he says will be appointed in September, are superfluous, or that he already has a small caucus of super-thinkers conceiving infallible policies for him.

    The anti-terror war is important and urgent, and Nigeria needs all the help it can get. But to visit the cerebral nation of the US and its equally cerebral president without his policy team, and without having sieved and weighed his fundamental programmes, is nothing short of undue haste. He may have returned with trillions of investible funds, and spruced up the image of Nigeria from the cavalier level the Jonathan presidency consigned it, but it seems all but certain that so much more could have been achieved had President Buhari placed the cart and the horse in their proper order. The visit also came at a time when the president was yet to appoint most of his advisers. Had he the full complement of advisers, and probably ministers too, he would have recognised the great value of state visits as a diplomatic tactics by nations to assess the depth and vistas of visiting leaders, not merely as a means of presenting a shopping list.

    From President Buhari’s Washington Post article and all the reports of what transpired during his US visit, including his gaffes, it is doubtful whether the results he returned with met the huge expectations of the trip. But perhaps his expectations were limited to essentially what the president and his aides conceived and adumbrated. If that is the case, the president must be told he had no right to circumscribe his expectations, given the wider and ramifying needs of Nigeria, and the place and destiny of the country as an ambitious continental leader. In fact, now, the fear in many quarters is that the president’s inability to appoint advisers and ministers — for that is what it amounts to — constrains the quality of his policies, if not his ideas, as will be shown presently. It is not clear what the private feelings of his host were, but it may seem the US will be in a quandary just how to plug in to the needs of a visitor who has not quite enunciated his economic or social road maps with clarity and coherence.

    President Buhari appears fixated on his honesty and integrity, two of his many virtues evidently beyond dispute, as indeed his host, President Obama, testified and amplified. But before visiting anywhere, President Buhari needed time and required diligence to enunciate his economic blueprint and a concise and expansive programme for societal regeneration and reengineering. Neither at home in Nigeria, nor anywhere he has visited, including the US, had the president given indication of what his great programmes would be. Perhaps work is ongoing on these two matters. Again, if that is the case, let him add a third item — a political manifesto for Nigeria, on which he has said absolutely nothing.

    Except this columnist is greatly mistaken, no one has heard President Buhari declaim on any of these germane national issues with the expansiveness and comprehensiveness they demand. The suspicion is that, as many have argued, citing the examples of improved electricity supply, some stability in fuel supply, and renewed vigour in the anti-corruption war, the president may be relying on his body language to whip the country into line, just as former president Jonathan’s body language gave fillip to corruption and impunity. In addition, he is believed to be hoping that once a sizable fraction of the about $150bn he said was stolen from the Nigerian treasury was recovered, the country would naturally bounce back, the economy would get back on the right tracks, quality of life would improve, crime and terrorism would decline, and Nigeria would be well again.

    It is not clear what proportion of Nigeria’s problems which that automated exercise would resolve, or whether the government’s grandiose hopes of an effortless future are not largely utopian. In any case, there is no precedence anywhere to show that given the gravity of the country’s problems, not to talk of the depth and breadth of the challenges it is facing, superficial measures are incapable of cutting the skein of crises in which Nigeria is entangled.  The president may have doubtless read about a few recent economic miracles in some parts of the world, particularly Asia. He may wish to take a cue from any of them, particularly China. The more than 10 percent growth rate sustained by China since the 1980s was not by accident. It was largely a product of the conviction, passion and relentless commitment to radical, if not revolutionary, reformist economic policies by Deng Xiaoping.

    For Mr Deng to stake everything to enunciate his state capitalism idea, an idea that earned him terrible and costly rejection twice during the 1966 Cultural Revolution and shortly before its end, he undoubtedly possessed depth of economic thought, far beyond what Chairman Mao Zedong boasted, and also way beyond what Mr Deng’s friends in the Chinese leadership, Zhou Enlai and Hua Guofeng, displayed. It is remarkable how the courage and depth of one man impacted the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese and Asians, and astounded and gripped the attention of the rest of the world for the past three decades and more.

    It may be unfair to suggest that President Buhari does not possess some of the attributes displayed by Mr Deng, but so far, he has not shown those attributes as reassuringly as would persuade the country that a pair of steady hands and a very reflective mind is presiding over Nigeria. He postpones the appointment of advisers and ministers until sometime in September. Yet he says he will recruit the best to help him govern the country. Does he not have faith in these ministers and aides to contribute meaningfully and substantially in setting the foundation for Nigeria’s greatness, a foundation none of his predecessors, including the opinionated Olusegun Obasanjo, had been able to set? His reliance on a shadowy coterie of aides and permanent secretaries to formulate the rules, reforms and guidelines he talked about is seen by some of his critics, many of whom benefited financially from the Jonathan presidency, as a cover for his inability to come up with the critical and core ideas by which he hopes to run the country. He had 12 years to run for office, and enjoyed the luxury of nearly five months after he won the presidency, but he has been unable to articulate his economic ideas as clearly as Mr Deng, who was inspired by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, enunciated his own economic model. Not only has President Buhari’s economic ideas remained vague — at least nothing more transcendental than the practicalness he is famous for — there has also been no concise political idea and no uplifting notion of a great nation and society. It was General Douglas McArthur’s illuminating concept and vision of a modern Japanese society and its future in the murky waters of Asian geopolitics that led to his formulation of a unique Japanese post-war constitution, which was fleshed out by Japanese bureaucrats, including Shigeru Yoshida.

    It is possible President Buhari’s aides are hard at work to formulate these needed ideas, and perhaps at the proper time, he will articulate them. When he does, the country will understand the direction he hopes to lead them. In his Washington Post article, he told the world he would be presenting before President Obama how he hoped to proceed. He needed to have made the presentation first to those who voted him into office, secure their assent, and give them direction. The scale of the rot is huge, as he has said repeatedly. But he must not expect that the fundamentals of that rot will respond to his talisman on the scale the country requires simply because his idiosyncratic rule is factored into the equation. Citing President Obama’s slow progress in assembling his first cabinet is hardly an inspiring example. The APC may defend President Buhari as much as they can, but the job of healing Nigeria and setting her on the path to greatness is too urgent to subject to the methodicalness the ruling party boasts of.

    What the country wants to see in September, the arbitrary date President Buhari has set for his cabinet’s composition, are both a fine set of ministers and, more importantly, a coherent vision of his economic, political and social ideas. He must not disappoint, even if there is nothing he has said or done so far to indicate these great and ennobling ideas will come on the soaring scale expected by Nigerians. What he has done so far may be noteworthy, and his personal attributes inspiring. But what sets a glider apart from a rocket is the propulsion system. As Mr Deng proved in China, and Charles de Gaulle showed in France after World War II, and Joseph Stalin illustrated in the former Soviet Union, and as a host of other ancient and modern empire builders showed poignantly, nothing moves a nation, stabilises it, and entrenches it in greatness as the force of idea. It is President Buhari’s ideas or their lack that will determine what kind of ministers and advisers he will appoint, what rebirth the country will experience, and whether his legacies will endure, unlike the questionable and short-sighted legacies of his predecessors.

  • Re-presenting the Under-represented: Toward A Recovery of the American Dream in Higher Education

    Re-presenting the Under-represented: Toward A Recovery of the American Dream in Higher Education

    Utopia Postponed

    Chairman, dignitaries spiritual and temporal, distinguished audience, I want to begin by thanking the organisers of this forum for a timely and wonderful idea, an idea which is in keeping with the finest tradition of the Catholic Church and this remarkable institution of higher learning. As Shakespeare has noted, great reckonings always begin in small rooms, and I am sure that when viewed retrospectively, the deliberations of this forum will be seen as a remarkable and worthy intervention in the educational process of the United States.

    Let me assure the organisers and sponsors that whenever and wherever human history is recorded, there is always a special status and pride of place accorded to the nobility of those who seek a voice for the voiceless and give a helping hand to the helpless.The Roman Catholic establishment is very much part of this noble tradition, and the founding sisters of this university are illustrious exemplars.

    We can even go back in history to the example of Jesus Christ whose radical humanism often led him to a risky identification with the poor, the meek and the wretched of the earth. I say all this not to flatter or to cajole but to place before you the incontrovertible facts of history. In the course of this address, I will show how certain historic personages of the Catholic Church, from Bartolome de Las Casas, the seventeenth century catholic archbishop of Chiapas, to the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, a leading French abolitionist of the early eighteenth century, played crucial roles in re-presenting the misrepresented.

    The phenomenon of under- representation is one of the crucial challenges of our time. At the level of contemporary global politics, it has bred wholesale alienation of national communities, alternative cultures and even civilisations. It has ruptured the old international order and it threatens the very paradigm of the nation-state.

    On the other hand, it has spawned in the alienated several desperate measures which range from a strategy of excluding the excluders to what has been described as the logic of perverse connection which invariably means a resort to international crime in order to connect to the grid of the global economy. This often involves deploying the technology of globalisation to achieve ideological ends widely at variance with the goals of an American empire in denial.

    I have put things in this global perspective in order to secure a broader canvas. What concerns us at this forum is not under-representation at the level of global politics, but under-representation at a national and even more fundamental level of human endeavour. We are talking of under-representation in higher education in the United States. It is indeed a supreme irony of history and the human condition that a nation founded on the ideals of freedom and equality, and on the ruins of the feudal injustices of the old world should find its own system of higher education riddled with gross inequities.

    Despite affirmative actions and other ameliorative steps, and despite the struggle and efforts of the civil rights groups and other concerned agencies, the cruel reality of under-representation in the American higher educational system stares us in the face in all its vertical and horizontal dimensions. And this is not just an academic exercise. The symptoms of this national malaise are as clear as they are threatening: cynical distrust of government and political institutions, alienation, social dislocations of biblical proportions, and a progressive loss of faith in the American dream.

    This is what has brought us here today. My address is predicated on the fundamental premise that certain philosophical and ideological correctives are imperative before effective political actions. Without such a foundation, all actions, however heroic and spectacular, are ultimately futile and an invitation to anarchy. In the words of a famous Nigerian novelist, we must go back to where the rains started beating us. As intellectuals, our principal responsibility is to think and illuminate the path of mankind. Before mounting the political barricades we must first remove the philosophical barriers. As Hegel has noted, if reality is inconceivable then we must forge concepts that are inconceivable.

    My address is structured around the major trope of re-presentation. My argument is that before under-representation came misrepresentation and before full representation there must come a re-presentation. In other words, we must first decode and properly understand the hegemonic strategies by which wholesale communities, races, groups are first “othered”, and then compelled to come to terms with their disadvantage as if it is a naturally ordained phenomenon.

    If one were to take a long view of history, it is possible to see this insidious manipulation of military and economic advantages for the purpose of political and intellectual subjugation as a trans-historical phenomenon which is certainly not without its utopian impulses. The anguished cries of Shylock, Shakespeare’s embattled Jewish merchant of Venice, as he tried to reassert his humanity in the face of widespread denial, comes to mind as a grim and timely reminder of the fate of stigmatised minorities however rich and powerful.

    At certain points in history, a people or a society, consciously and unconsciously, often invest themselves with the divine mantra of the bearer of a new telos whose historic destiny is to lift the rest of humanity, often by the bootstraps, to a higher level of civilisation. Yet the immense human suffering often engendered, the world-historic agonies, the cruel and merciless rationalism unleashed on innocent populace are simply staggering and often grossly disproportionate to the eventual benefits to mankind.

    In the event, it compounds and complicates the quest for an ideal society and the redemption of humankind. The question begging for an answer is this: How did the United States of America which was supposed to represent a new beginning for mankind, away from the inequities and iniquities of the old world, come to be haunted by this ancestral sin?

     

    In the Beginning

    In 1809, more than half a century before the outbreak of the American civil war, the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, sent a manuscript of a new work to Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and the third president of the United States. The book was a celebration and commemoration of essayists, writers and scientists of African extraction who had found their way to the west. It was titled, De La Litterature des Negress. Despite his principled opposition to slavery, Jefferson’s view of the intellectual capacities of black people was notoriously truculent and characterised by savage dismissals.

    In an infamous passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson noted thus of the African American: “It appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites: in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous”.

    This remarkable diatribe was coming on the heels of the literary exploits  of the trio Equaino, Cuguano and Sancho, former slaves of African descent, who seized late eighteenth century literary London by the scruff of the neck and were feted in all the leading saloons of England’s capital for their astounding feats of imagination. Being very well-connected to the metropolitan circuits of the old world, Jefferson could not have been unaware of the literary triumphs of these exemplars. Perhaps it was a case of prejudice compounded by deliberate ignorance. Gregoire’s treatise could have been a well-aimed and profoundly clandestine attempt to help Jefferson modify or moderate his unhelpful worldview.

    But it was an uphill task. The same views resonate in the works of European intellectuals and philosophers such as David Hume, Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and even Karl Marx. As far as Marx was concerned, India and the African continent lost nothing in the wanton destruction of their old culture by the European conquerors as it was a culture shot through with idiotic superstitions and morbid myths.

    As late as the late twentieth century, the celebrated historian, Hugh Trevor Roper, would dismiss African history as characterised by a dark void in one long night of savagery. And as the early nineteen fifties in post-bellum Atlanta, a grand lady of a house would be so shocked by the discovery that a moonlighting African American houseboy could read that she would exclaim: “Vernon can read!!!” This later became the title of the autobiography of the “boy” in question, Vernon Jordan, corporate lawyer and golf course crony of William Jefferson Clinton.

    This rather inauspicious beginning marked the insertion of African Americans into the educational system of their new country and has ever since determined its less than glorious trajectory. Not only were black people regarded as unlettered savages, the very idea of educating them was forbidden and criminalised. Specific laws were enacted making it a criminal offence to enrol them in schools. The situation was later to create its own macabre absurdities. Several African Americans who triumphed over this legal adversity by sheer fortitude and indomitable will were later to find themselves confronted by an impossible situation.

    On a book signing tour, Fredrick Douglass, the former slave, was advised by his Abolitionist sponsors not to sound too posh and educated lest people began to doubt the veracity of his story. An infamous review of a slave memoir in The Christian Examiner of 1839 opens with the immortal put-down: “We read, in what professes to be the language of a slave, that which we feel a slave could not have written…” Not only must the minority subalterns not speak, they must also not write. And thus was sown the seeds of contemporary under-representation of African Americans in higher education in the United States.

    From the other end of the spectrum, the story is no less appalling and sordid. Fifty years after the conquest of the Inca civilisation by the Spanish conquistadors, the genocide of the Amerindians was so cruel and compelling that Bartolome de Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapas, and himself a Spaniard, was moved to protest. The local populace was treated worse than the animals of the conquerors. According to a moving account: “The majority of the Spanish military, administrators, and colonists, hungry for gold and power, saw the occupants of the new world as irrevocably Other, less than human, or at least naturally subordinate to Europeans. In a blistering philippic, La Casas notes: “The nature of men is the same and all are called by Christ in the same way”.

    For those interested in history as a museum of atrocities and of man’s inhumanity to man, we can move to nineteenth century Congo and the brutal and systematic elimination of the local populace by King Leopold of Belgium. Two centuries earlier in the same area, the Portuguese had completely decimated the proud people of the Kongo kingdom and carried off virtually the entire populace to the new colony of Brazil through the slave port of Luanda, the capital of present day Angola. When the Portuguese arrived fifty years earlier, they had met a social structure and political administration vastly superior to the one they had left behind at home. But it was an administration without military firepower, and the people paid very dearly for this historic remission.

    But what goes around must come around, and the whirligig of time often brings its own revenge. In the third decade of the nineteenth century, Mexico, with its native Indian populace and overlay of the old conquistador class, finally came within the rifle sights of the triumphant and relentlessly expanding new nation. Having succumbed to a dissolute and corrupt military oligarchy, Mexico presented a classic case of political disorder and social turmoil.

    The philosophical launch pad which facilitated the military subjugation of the Mexicans was known as the doctrine of manifest destiny which held that it was the God-ordained destiny of the United States to bring civilisation, economic prosperity and good governance to the rest of the continent and possibly beyond. This was the stirring of empire, and although this strain of messianic covenant as God’s chosen people has always been present in America, it was in 1845 that John O’Sullivan gave it an authoritative seal in an influential article for The Democratic Review.

    Up till today, many Mexicans regard Los Yanquis with suspicion and sullen resentment. But with the conquest of Mexico and forcible acquisition of a large swathe of its territory, the United States became host-and hostage- to three major minority groups: native American Indians, African Americans and Hispanic Americans. It is no wonder, then, that these groups represent the most under-represented groups in higher education in America. When it has been persistently and consistently drummed into your ears and drilled into your head that you belong to an inferior race and that you are naturally sub-human, it is very hard to rise above the history stupor and the morass of self-pity.

    Naturally enough, you begin to evolve strategies of containment or stratagems of accommodation to a hostile reality of modern enslavement. This is where misrepresentation leads to under representation and structural exclusion induces self-exclusion. In such circumstances, the very notion of an American dream becomes a tall order, an ideological sweetener for the bitter reality of injustice and inequity. The threat of this disequilibrium of opportunity to racial and social harmony in the United States can be better imagined.

     

    Recovery and Re-Presentation of the Subject:

    What the above historical excursion has shown is a drama of misperception and wilful misrepresentation played out across history, across time and across different societies. What we can learn from this is that there are no naturally inferior people, races or societies. This is merely an ideological stigmatization designed to maximize temporary historical advantages and justify economic belligerence. No society is exempt from this. By the same token, history does not confer any special status on any people or society.

    In the interplay of opportunities and unique circumstances, the relay baton for human advancement, as we have seen, often shifts. As it emerged from the long night of the dark ages, the “modern” west has had to define itself and construct its identity not only in total opposition to and exclusion of all that had come before, but also against an inter-lapping barbarous other. This is merely one of the founding myths of modernity as it wilfully ignores the crucial contributions of non-western societies, particularly the Muslim and African worlds, to the very notion of modernity.

    Identity, then, is a function of difference. But while to differentiate is normal and in order, to discriminate on the basis of difference is not and is profoundly subversive of the very basis of our common humanity. The struggle for a just representation in higher education in America must proceed with this re-affirmation of our mutual humanity and the common ancestry of humankind. But while the struggle for political justice and equity proceeds apace, the under-represented, rather than succumbing to self-pity or reconciling themselves to the status of second-class citizens, must also gird their loins to make a positive intervention on the education stage both collectively and individually.

    For groups long suppressed and repressed, long ideologically conditioned to seeing themselves as naturally disadvantaged, this may be a tall order indeed. But it is a banal truism that heavens help those who help themselves. And one is very pleased to note that integration of minority groups into the mainstream of higher education in the United States are already evident in many of the thoughtful proposals for this forum. From the redemptive spirit in African American sports, the need for blacks and other minorities to utilize available educational support in USA, computer literacy training for older adults, to pedagogical alternatives for the marginalized and the growing need for on-line higher education. These are all immense resources for a journey of hope and redemption, and the recovery of the American dream in higher education.

    Indeed as history has shown, the great ideas for moving a society forward do not come from hegemonic groups that are happy with the status quo but from the ranks of the marginalized and excluded. These momentous insights are often wrenched at great personal costs and immense suffering. We recall Sigmund Freud writing with what he himself has modestly described as a “a modicum of misery”.

    We recall Antonio Gramsci, a consumptive hunchback, being thrown into jail with the war-cry: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years”. Unfortunately for Mussolini, it was precisely in prison that Gramsci wrote his best work. And we must remember the example of Franz Kafka, wracked by consumption and tuberculosis, a victim of multiple displacement, who nevertheless went ahead to create some of the most haunting allegories of the human condition.

    Let me caution, however, that while we struggle for political justices and equity and we deploy all available intellectual resources in the quest for the full representation of all marginalised groups in higher education in the United States, we must not allow hatred to dwell in our heart. For this is ultimately self-defeating. We return then to the good Bishop of Chiapas, Bartholome de Las Casas , who reminded the conquistadors that humankind is one.

    If this is turned on its head, we discover that we are all guilty of marginalizing and oppressing the other. From the phenomenon of Mfecane or dispersal visited on South African nationalities by Chaka, the late Zulu conqueror, the reality of Arab slavery in Black Africa even at this moment, the colonial ravages and despoliation in the old and new world, to the current decimations of globalization, there is no record of human advancement which is not at the same time a record of barbarity—to paraphrase Adorno. And as Albert Camus has observed, “There is a solidarity of human-beings in aberration”.

    But while we regret the dark spots of history with all their trauma and pains, let us also remember the bright moments. In the United States. let us recall the examples of great and good Americans like George Washington who declined to reign as the sovereign monarch of his beloved country and chose to be ruled as an equal citizen; Abraham Lincoln who sought a just human solution to societal conflicts; and of course the man we all honour this month, Dr Martin Luther King, who had a dream of an America rid of social segregation and under-representation and was happy to lay down his life in the pursuit of that ideal.

    When we recall the strivings of these great icons of social and political justice, even as we add our own modest contributions at this forum, we can come to the conclusion that the utopia represented by the United States and incarnated in the American dream has merely been deferred. My task is done. I thank you for the excellent opportunity.

     

    • Keynote speech by Professor Adebayo Williams at the forum: Under-Represented Groups and Education: Challenges for the 21stCentury.

    February 12-13 2004 , J. E. and L. E. Mabee Library, University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas.

     

    • Adebayo Williams was the Amy Freeman Lee Distinguished Chair of Humanities and Fine Arts

    University of The Incarnate Word, San Antonio, TX78209

     

  • Kiddies’ literary retreat: bringing children’s literature to the knowledge table

    Kiddies’ literary retreat: bringing children’s literature to the knowledge table

    In the tradition of journalists’ facility to present the complex in an accessible language, Ajibade electrified the hall filled with children in their pre-teen years with hints on how children can use contemporary communication technology to enhance access to and quality of reading

    Lagos, like Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna, and Enugu, has been an active laboratory for creation and promotion of understanding and appreciation of literary products.  But a long time, literary fairs had been more of the diet of adult consumers of cultural products with very little attention to children’s literature. But the critical study of children’s literature is active generally in Nigeria, as many scholars write academic articles on various aspects of literature for young people while promotion of children’s literature has, for obvious reasons, taken a distant back seat in formal efforts to promote children’s interest in reading and appreciating literary works that are not necessarily written for adult audience.

    But Lagos witnessed a new surge in popularisation of writings for children on the first of August this year, when Winnay & Co organised a special retreat for children at the Vining Hall in Ikeja. The event was sponsored by Layide James Buks, a subsidiary of Winnay & Co that specialises in educational materials for young children. Mrs. Funke Aledeinu, the author of the three books presented at the multimedia event, chose to bring back the tradition of anonymity that underlay the propagation of stories in the days of oral tradition. The three books had a copyright page that did not include the author’s name, thus suggesting a deliberate separation of passion for creation of the object of beauty from the celebration of the author. But today’s piece is not about what may be a novelty in the profit-driven ritual of book launch in Nigeria. The focus of today’s column is the implications of the retreat organised by Layide James Buks principally for children’s literary retreat for the purpose of aesthetic and ethical education of  children in an ethos threatened by declining sensibility for the beautiful and the moral. Her three books: Tortoise, the Wise, David & Goliath, and Tortoise, the Tortoise, provoke new thinking about the teaching of children’s literature in an age in which the written word is being threatened by secondary orality.

    Ironically, today’s comment on this event is not addressed to children but to parents and guardians, who are responsible for socialising children into the world of knowledge through the arts. One reason for targeting adults who were just a minority at the literary retreat is that it is this demographic group that has material and social leverage to drive promotion of this important genre of literature.

    Kunle Ajibade of The News Magazine was the main speaker at the event. He spoke to the children on the importance of reading as the foundation for knowledge acquisition and expansion, thus raising one of the issues that must have driven the author to write three books that highlight deployment of intercultural literary techniques in the creation of stories for children in a global space that is being moulded by a combination of writing, oral tradition, and secondary orality made possible by communication technology. In the tradition of journalists’ facility to present the complex in an accessible language, Ajibade electrified the hall filled with children in their pre-teen years with hints on how children can use contemporary communication technology to enhance access to and quality of reading.

    The retreat was designed to imitate the character of contemporary cultural production. All contemporary modes of communication were given detailed attention by the author and organiser of the retreat. Each of the three books printed and published locally was beautifully done and in children-friendly colours: orange and yellow. Each monograph also includes a CD version with pictorial enrichment of important milestones in the story it tells. In addition, there was a digital presentation of selections from the stories; a short enactment or dramatisation of parts of David & Goliath, and readings and interpretations of the two trickster narratives; Tortoise the Wise and Tortoise the Tortoise. The mixing of modes electrified the hall for the children who also took part in a question-and-answer fashion in interpretation of the stories. And the organisation of the entire book presentation focused on expansion of children’s interests in fantasy and adventure at the expense of adults’ enthusiasm to please the author by ‘launching the books in grand style.’

    The author raised many contemporary universal issues. For example, David & Goliath retells a well-known biblical story in a way that satirises raw power by casting Goliath as an imperious might-is-right hegemon while David is presented as a young man of intelligence, faith, and dexterity. The story also includes illustrations of the universal psychological theme of sibling rivalry, without sacrificing in its conclusion the importance of family values and unity.

    The two Tortoise stories use the trickster-figure to illustrate self-absorption in one story and to project the trickster as iconoclast and agent of change in another. This narrative style emphasises the universality of the trickster as embodiment of the two sides of the human condition: good and bad. Just like in David &Goliath, the author retells the tortoise tales in a way to bring into focus the post-modern theme of environmentally sustainable development. In Tortoise the Wise in particular, the author promotes bio-diversity through a conference or summit of animals in which smaller animals complain about the predatory power of larger animals as well as of human beings. Elephant poaching in particular by human beings for profit and its threat to bio-diversity is challenged in the mode of conference debate among the animals.

    Other important issues raised by the retreat are the relative neglect of the important genre of children’s literature. In general remarks, attention was drawn to the little role being played by state and local governments in the promotion of children’s literature, outside the rhetorical worry by government leaders about the need to support “children as leaders of tomorrow.” Unlike in what obtains in other democracies, local governments in our country have very little support for cultural production for citizens in general. The neglect is worse in respect of children. Even at the level of teaching institutions, apart from individual publications by the professoriate, there is little attention being given by universities and colleges of education to the promotion of children’s literature as a major stage in the intellectual and creative development of children.

    Layide James Buks did not raise millions of naira from the presentation of the three books presented at the fair, because the author did not set out to do that, as disappointing as that was to adults in the audience who came to show their financial support to the author. Mrs. Funke Aledeinu through Layide James Buks achieved one obvious objective: organisation of a special retreat for children that gives adults and children in a formal setting opportunities for dialogue on the role of creative writing in the enrichment of taste and knowledge.  State and local governments certainly have a lot to learn from Layide James Buks about how to support children’s intellectual and artistic development.

  • Between Sagay and Falana: the law, the people and the social cannibalism of corruption (2)

    Between Sagay and Falana: the law, the people and the social cannibalism of corruption (2)

    Both in number and impact, the emails that I received in response to last week’s opening essay in this series constitute some of the most eye-opening responses I have ever received since I began regularly writing this column more than eight years ago, first in The Guardian under a slightly different name, and then in this paper, The Nation. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that after reading many of these responses, I began to feel like one of the unhappy souls in Plato’s celebrated Myth of the Cave! As those who have read this classic of ancient, Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy will remember, the hapless characters in Plato’s myth, after living their entire lives in a deep, underground cave shrouded in darkness, one day emerge from the cave and its miasmic darkness. But instead of feeling liberated by the brightness of the light that they find in the world outside the cave, they are utterly blinded by its incandescence. As it has been taught to innumerable generations of first year philosophy students, the moral of this myth is that in conditions where darkness, ignorance and mediocrity reign supreme, the sudden introduction of truth, enlightenment and probity may prove, not liberating, but confounding. Ergo, truth, justice and liberating knowledge must be introduced in small, manageable doses in a world in which their opposites – falsehood, injustice and cynicism – always have the upper hand, especially in the professions among which, for our purposes in this essay, we must highlight the law. In case all this sounds rather mysterious, let me briefly give some of the details of the emails I received before linking what they revealed to me with my concluding reflections in this series that began last week.

    Perhaps the most startling of the revelations that I received from the emails was the assertion that the problems and crises in the judicial system in Nigeria were far much deeper, wider and systemic than what was indicated in the essential critique I had made in last week’s article. Let me remind the reader that that critique of mine stated that both the law and its implementation in Nigerian courts constitute nearly impregnable accessories to the cynical, merciless and social-cannibalistic looting of our national, collective resources. Beyond this critique – which, I thought, was serious enough – I was told that Nigeria is the ONLY country in the world in which interlocutory injunctions intended to delay, prolong or even permanently defer successful prosecutions are not only allowed but widely practiced in criminal cases. In other words, in virtually all of the other nations of the world, interlocutory injunctions are allowed only in civil cases, and then only under clearly stipulated and limited circumstances. Only in our country do interlocutory injunctions operate as a weapon, a shield against successful prosecution of those charged with criminal offenses, especially offenses pertaining to looting and corruption. Who does not know that petty criminals do not have the money to hire lawyers, especially of SAN vintage, to tie up cases against them? Dear reader, think of this the next time that you read in the newspapers that an interlocutory injunction has been filed by a lawyer and accepted by a judge in a case of criminal prosecution: Only in Nigeria and for the most part only in cases pertaining to looting and corruption!

    In my utter stupefaction in being told of this fact, I asked some of my email correspondents when and how this incredible exceptionalism in our judicial system came into existence and I was informed that it was started about a decade and half ago. This makes its inception almost exactly coincident with the return to civilian “democracy” after the long and serial interregnum of military dictatorships in our country. In effect, this means that one of the most revealing marks of the kind of “democracy” reigning in post-1999 Nigeria is the legal convention and practice of giving protection, through the use of interlocutory injunctions, to criminal looters who have no equals in the world in the scale of their greed and impunity. This “democracy” is thus nothing but a looters’ paradise in which excessively predatory instincts and practices have the solid protection of the law. In the blinding light of this revelation, it becomes clear, all too clear why all the three presidents since 1999 before Buhari – Obasanjo, Yar’ Adua and Jonathan – constantly gave the excuse that their “fight” against corruption was hampered by their respect for the “rule of law”. What they never cared to reveal is that by this they meant their endorsement of and collusion with the use – the overuse really – of interlocutory injunctions. The point now is that the cat has been let out of the bag and Buhari does not have that excuse.

    I wish I didn’t have any more revelations of the stultifying nature of the uniqueness of interlocutory injunctions in criminal cases in Nigeria to report from the emails that I received this past week but alas, this is not the case. For it appears that “interlocutory injunctions” does have a slew of other siblings and cousins in the dysfunctional family that is our judicial system. It appears that beyond the specific instance of interlocutory injunctions, accumulation of wealth, status and prestige among our lawyers and judges are all solidly built around the extreme sluggishness, the extreme cumbersomeness of the administration and dispensation of justice in our country. For this reason, there seems to be an entrenched and almost immoveable resistance to change and reform among our lawyers and judges. Additionally, some of the problems in our judiciary are so comical, so absurd as to be beyond belief. My “favorite” in this regard is the fact that judges mandatorily have to write their judgments in long, hand-written texts; their judgments cannot, must not be typed!

    It says a lot that much of what I have written here about the terrible state of the judiciary in our country comes from lawyers themselves: there are reformers and would-be reformers in the profession. Unfortunately their ranks are thin and the weight of investment in wealth accumulation, achievement of prestige and maintenance of status and the pecking order among their colleagues works overwhelmingly against these reformers. In this, the legal profession in Nigeria is no different from other upper middle class professions like medicine (doctors and pharmacists); academia (the professoriate and the academic administrators); and surveyors, engineers and industrial chemists. Without exception, all these professions and their ranks are deeply infected with the rot that is endemic to the predators’ republic that our “democracy has been since the return to civilian rule in 1999. Thus, in all these cases, true and genuine reforms will not only come from within the judicial system itself; they will also be precipitated by reforms in and of the political order at large.

    The upshot of this preceding observation is that we cannot wait until the entire judicial order is reformed before we put a stop to the cover and protection that the judiciary provides for criminal looters who “kill” through the consequences and ramifications of the vast, mind-boggling sums they steal from our national coffers. It will take a vast and sustained project of reform to clean up the mess, the unwieldiness in our judicial order. Before then and right now, the stolen loot has to be recovered; and endemic corruption has to be halted in its tracks. The suffering, the hardship that it causes to millions of our peoples cannot, must not go on.  I believe that as indicated by Falana, the acts enacted by the 7th National Assembly just before its dissolution can provide at least a minimal basis both for recovering a substantial part of the monies looted and for at least curbing the excesses and the impunity of corruption in our country. This in effect means that beyond the enabling laws that will minimally make this possible, Buhari and his administration have to look beyond the law, beyond the cooperation of lawyers and judges for recovering the stolen loot and curbing corruption. What exactly do I have in mind in making this assertion?

    It is on record that many foreign governments and financial institutions have given strong indications that they are willing to give every assistance necessary to Buhari and his administration to recover the stolen monies that have been hidden away in foreign countries and bank vaults. Indeed, reportedly, the names and sums involved have been privately divulged to the new administration. But so far, how have the items of information been used, been acted upon? At best, they have been “revealed” to us, the Nigerian people, piecemeal, in a completely uncoordinated and haphazard manner, as if an open, detailed and comprehensive account to Nigeria and the world is either unnecessary or would be damaging to efforts to recover the looted sums. This is completely erroneous. If Buhari and his advisers don’t know it, let them know now, today, that so far on the interrelated issues of recovering stolen loot and curbing corruption, they have been acting like amateurs and inept improvisers. They have been throwing all sorts of figures around; and they have given no clear outlines or guidelines of what they are doing now and will be doing in the months and years ahead. And above all else, they are acting as if they regard the Nigerian people as passive bystanders in the whole project. We are not, both Nigerians at home and Nigerians abroad.

    I ask all who are reading this to please get involved. Write to your Governors and Senators and “Honourables”. Have the leaders of your professional associations to speak up on your behalf. Hold peaceful demonstrations and rallies asking the new administration to give a full account of what they are doing to recover the stolen loot and what they are going to do with it when it is recovered. In some accounts, the total sums involved are as much as $150 billion dollars. Even half of that, if wisely spent, will substantially reduce the suffering and the hardship in the land. So compatriots, don’t wait for them to deign, to condescend to let us know what is going on, at their pleasure. Demand to know as if the survival of our country depends on it because, as a matter of fact, it does.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu