The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Snooping around the capital city (Once again, rustling tea leaves in Abuja)

    Snooping around the capital city (Once again, rustling tea leaves in Abuja)

    There is something very becalming and soul-tranquillizing about Abuja which sits oddly with its reputation as the capital of deadly political intrigues and the capitol of brawling honourables.  Sumo wrestlers abound. Kept thugs, like restrained Alsatians, stare at you from the sprawling amphitheatre of national disorder. Abuja roils forever in palace plots and succession tsunamis.  As one king recedes into antiquity, another begins his reign fumbling and fidgeting ominously with the levers and leverages of power. The king must die, so that the kingdom may live. The emperor is dead, long live the empire.

    You cannot escape family history. Abuja was founded in political intrigues. Its old progenitor prince, the much fabled Abu Jah, was known to have left the Zazzau emirate with his supporters after being worsted in a nasty succession battle in the new Fulani stronghold of Zaria . He had journeyed southward, avoiding the route to the paladins on the plateau with their sure and assured palate for human flesh until he got to the rural paradise nestling on the vast plains of earthy farmers and bucolic humanity. It doesn’t get more peaceful and rewarding.

    There is no big deal about this. Most Yoruba towns and villages were also founded on the same template and prelate: a congregation of disaffected princes and affected paupers fleeing victorious palace coupists. The founder of your own town was an old Oyo prince who had left his forefathers’ empire after being told in no uncertain terms by royal kingmakers that they did not consider him worthy of his father’s storied stool. Go southward, young man, he was ordered with metaphysical finality and alacrity. And southward, he went.

    As the new found  capital of Nigeria, Abuja had its baptism of the fire of political intrigues very early in the day. One night towards the very tail end of 1983, raking gunfire shattered the calm and bucolic charms of the emerging city as well as the complacency of the ruling party, the infamous NPN.  Soldiers had come to terminate the inglorious tenure of the corrupt oligarchy.

    It was said that the Alhaji Aliyu Shehu Shagari, the then president, fled through a tunnel in the presidential palace ably assisted by some loyal soldiers. He was apprehended close to the city of Lafia a few days later. When the smoke cleared, the NPN government had become history. But so also had one of the principal plotters. The urbane, courtly and much admired Brigadier Ibrahim Bako lay dead in the rubble, his life snuffed out by friendly fire.

    The story had it that the brigadier had gone into the presidential dwelling to persuade Alhaji Shagari, a great buddy of his father, to surrender without violence. But something went catastrophically awry with the signals and in the ensuing firefight, Ibrahim Bako was mistaken for enemy and was cut down in the prime of life. Thus ended the life of one of Nigeria’s finest officers. The then Major General Mohammadu Buhari became Nigeria’s military ruler.

    It may interest those currently causing trouble in Abuja that despite his dour, uncommunicative and taciturn exterior, no tactical or strategic detail ever escapes the attention of Mohammadu Buhari. He was rumoured to have ordered discreet investigation into the friendly fire business which terminated the life of the distinguished officer.  But in a great turn of historical irony, the officer who led the forward assault troops that night eventually became a distinguished senator of the Fourth Republic.  If it is the same Buhari that Nigerians have elected their leader and not an expired phantom, the Abuja confederates can be sure that they will hear from him very soon.

    The problem with political intrigues is that once started, no one can be sure of the outcome, not even the principal plotters. Intrigues are equal opportunity employees and they often metastasize in such a way that that they eventually consume their own principals. They trigger off a chain of human reactions the end of which no one can foresee except those very adept at reading tea leaves.

    But if we cannot vouchsafe the eventual outcome of political intrigues, we can foretell the outcome of monumental corruption and graft. It is arrested and retarded national development. After trillions of petrodollars have been lost to humongous graft and brazen state larceny, Abuja is finally beginning to take shape as a modern city of tropical charms and beguiling tranquility. In its leafy suburbs and the architectural wonderland of its suburbia, you have to pinch yourself to confirm that you are still in the hellhole that Nigeria has become.

    As a famous European leftwing contrarian has contended, the glittering cities of the west are not just a monument to human industry and ingenuity but a tribute to millions wasted in process. It is all about the geography of nations. In the tropics, nature plays a spoiling mother. Just as it did to our hunter-gatherer ancestors furnishing them with unearned fruits and venison aplenty, it has also done to their hunter-gatherers successors furnishing them with unmerited natural resources which they waste and fritter away in licentious profligacy. What will take a fraction of resources to build in the west often consumes entire national patrimony in Africa. As it was in the beginning……

    It is late June in Abuja and nature is out in its full resplendent garb. Even the leafy trees and the lush grass appear to be singing. The nostrils pick the aromatic therapy of becalming nature. It clears the mind and the head. The battle zone is far far away, or so it seems until adamant reality began to impinge on dreamy reverie. There can be no paradise surrounded by hell. Something has to give.

    As the First Nation aircraft banked steeply and furiously into the cloudy skies, you are happy to leave Lagos and its diehard denizens. The old colonial capital still retains its Havana-like charms and the quaint Brazilian allure of the surviving ancient quarters of its Portuguese speaking returnees. But despite the best heroic efforts of succeeding administrations, the unfurling megalopolis and bustling conurbation of teeming humanity is fast becoming the world capital of cannibal capitalism with its ever expanding frontiers and trapped economic wannabes. If Nigeria forgets Lagos, Lagos will neither forget nor forgive Nigeria.

    Lest snooper gets carried away by his own sense of epic narrative, it is meet to disclose that what had brought one to Abuja is not the fracas of hooligan honorables or the shenanigans of squabbling senators. As they say, all politics is local. If you are not a good man in your locality, you are not likely to be a good person in your nationality. Like many people, snooper has been personally tormented and traumatized by the plight and misery of workers in Osun State.

    Last Saturday after reading Muyiwa Adetiba’s devastating putdown of the serving governor, yours sincerely felt compelled to send a terse text to a younger friend and old comrade in arms. Anybody who knows Muyiwa Adetiba must know that he is a man without malice or ill will. The governor was so riled and roused by the text and the article that he insisted on an immediate rendezvous in Abuja without any further ado.

    After two long and lengthy one to one sessions, the last stretching into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, one felt sufficiently buoyed that the dire situation of workers in Osun state will be ameliorated if not completely succored in the coming days. In the circumstances, if one loses hope about the fate of Nigeria, exile is no longer an option. The only option is the mental asylum, that is if one is averse to forcibly joining the ancestors.

    The business of the trip concluded, one could not leave Abuja without a courtesy call on the man of the moment who seems to thrive best in adversarial circumstances: Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Even this late in the night, the Asiwaju domain was like an ongoing political rally. You wonder whether they ever do sleep in Abuja.

    A political war council was obviously in session and the place was crawling with political generalissimos : serving and former governors, serving and former senators, current and lapsed assembly people, honorables and former honorables, political ex-servicemen etc. In the expansive dining place, snooper was offered a seat by the departing former governor of Jigawa and his former student at Federal Government College, Kaduna in the seventies: Saminu Turaki.

    In what seemed an eternity after, the man of the moment suddenly materialized from nowhere like a troublous spirit.  He appeared pleasantly surprised to find snooper virtually alone in the dining area munching away without being in the least fazed by all the paraphernalia of power.

    “Ha! The Oloja is here!” the Lion of Bourdillon crowed. Wondering which latest title this one was and sensing that his friend and esteemed comrade in political arms of many decades was not averse to a quick banter despite the unremitting political pressure, snooper rose to the occasion.

    “Oloja of where oooo?” yours sincerely demanded.

    “Oloja of Yakoyo”, the great warhorse retorted as he darted into an adjoining living room for another marathon meet. If all this hurly and burly could be going on, these great political exertions, then it means that the political crisis that has plagued nation and ruling party would soon be a thing of the past, snooper rather naively concluded as he crashed into bed in the early hours of the morning.

    But the sun had hardly risen when Bukola Saraki struck again from his senatorial bunker. Once again, the wonder boy from Agbaji and master of Panzer politics made a short shrift of party directives about senate officials. Ruling Senator Bariyu Gbenga Ashafa summarily out of order,  the son of Oloye threw the party directives into the dustbin with a regal frown and without giving it as much as a glancing look. The lower house followed as if on cue with much wild lunging and fistfest as Speaker Yakubu Dogara looked on in boyish bemusement.

    Surely something is bound to give and very soon, too. Senator Saraki seems to have gone too far in his defiance and contempt of party norms and principles. Men are hanged not because horses are stolen but so that horses will not be stolen, as they say. If the party does not act on this latest Saraki contumely, it is bound to face a shuddering implosion as its authority and legitimacy evaporate. If it acts, it may face a signal fracturing as Saraki leads his fellow dissidents back to the old PDP or some emergent and emergency power formation.

    Complicating the power game,  President Mohammadu Buhari has quietly reasserted his authority by insisting through his alternative spokesperson that he is indeed the leader of the party. It is surely a strange and confounding party leader who will not take more than a cursory interest in the current imbroglio tearing the fragile alliance apart.

    Yet by asserting his leadership claims while showing an apparent disinterest in the festering rebellion in NASS, the president has summarily liquidated all other loci of power in the party while tying the hands the party panjandrums behind their back. Without a presidential imprimatur it may now be impossible to rein in or discipline the Saraki faction without open warfare breaking out in the party.

    In an objective rather than pejorative manner of speaking, all those who helped the retired general to power may yet discover that it is difficult if not impossible to shed the military frame of mind. In the army, there are no political middlemen only officers and men. Buhari is showing his hand as a master of strategic attrition in which the opponent is worn down in a battle of will and psychological stamina. The rope-a-dope strategy famously exemplified by Mohammed Ali prepares you to absorb punishing body blows while you wait to deliver a terminal sucker punch.

    Nigeria and Nigerians are in for very interesting times.  In all probability, it is bound to get rowdier and more chaotic in the short run as centrifugal forces in the ruling party fight for dominance and supremacy and as old regional prejudices reassert themselves in the face of possible political marginalization. If Buhari’s reforms and efforts to sanitize the polity kick in early enough, he may be able to summon a pan-Nigerian phalanx backing and protecting him. But if they don’t, he may find himself at the mercy of an adroitly scheming Bukola Saraki and fellow confederates bent on thwarting and eventually ousting him. It is still early in summer and tea leaves are beginning to rustle once again in Abuja.

     

  • Baba Lekki solves the change riddle for the nation

    It was a distraught and distressed Okon who went in search of the old contrarian who had moved his headquarters of state subversion to the seamy swamps of Okokomaiko.

    “Okon, why are you looking like a man who has just been beaten by his wife, or am I the yeye man who cannot pay you?”, the old man smiled with a contorted visage.

    “Ha baba no be like dat sam sam.  Sikira no fit. Even him Yoruba papa no fit. But dis days when I go market go buy meat, he get one Hausa meat seller who dey shout as I dey reach him slab. “Ha, ha Yaro Okon, akoi changi, akoi changi, ba changi mana, ba changi”, baba wetin dem mala dey say?”, the poor boy moaned.

    “Ha Okon you are a fool. The man is asking you whether you have correct change”, the old man shot back.

    “Wetin be my own for dem  yeye change? No be dem mala for Abuja say him get am for plenty change?” Okon snarled.

    “ Okon, dat one na dem parable of meat seller. What the mala is saying is that no be Daura mala alone go bring change. For there to be real exchange, everybody must have correct change. Yeye Nigerians”, the old man spat and dismissed an even more confused Okon. “

  • Ekiti: God is not mocked

    Ekiti: God is not mocked

    Recent disclosures of DSS hyperactivity in that election, together with that of elements within the Nigerian Army, can only go to further confirm that Fayose must currently be supplicating God for forgiveness

    “7 Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8 Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life”  – GALATIANS 6:  7-8.

    According to newspaper reports, Governor Ayo Fayose was in church this past week to celebrate and thank God for his ‘victory’ at the state’s governorship election of 21 June, 2014. The governor certainly knows better and, as a Christian, should be well aware that God cannot be mocked. Recent disclosures of DSS hyperactivity in that election, together with that of elements within the Nigerian Army, can only go to further confirm that Fayose must currently be supplicating God for forgiveness.

    However, that’s for another day.

    We would rather talk today about governance. We cannot forget that he has had a million demons to fight for survival and was, therefore, obviously distracted.  This interrogation will, therefore, not be about how secure  the state  is, with its tens  of kidnappings, not  on how the elders, whose welfare package he  had, like Thatcher the milk Snatcher, yanked off  their  reach nor, indeed,  about how those  investors  who, encouraged by the relative peace  of the Fayemi  era,  sank  billions on  first rate  hotels, are now getting by, if at all.  Focus would therefore be on the governor’s failure to pay the state’s work force and pensioners.  This becomes germane in the light of the federal government’s release of the list of which states it owes; a list on which Ekiti State did not appear. For the moment, therefore, we are taking that list as fact until the Ekiti State government can prove to the contrary beyond doubt.

    Commenting on the subject on Ekitipanupo this past week, a member wrote: “Remember Fayose denied ever collecting N2b from the Ecological Fund for a long time. On the state radio and television, he turned payment from the Ecological Fund to theatrics, saying: “Whether ecological fund, meteorological fund , biological fund or Ekitilogical fund o, I don’t know anything about it. I have not collected any kobo.” He kept denying this until APC, armed with the FOI law, was about to obtain facts of the payment from the Fund. Officials in the office leaked our initiative to him and before you know it, Fayose got his media aide to admit collection of the money. A week later, he announced the award of contracts for ecological projects worth exactly N2b. When the projects were advertised, and where sited, remain unknown to anybody. He equally denied collecting N22b in refunds on federal projects executed by the state government. Meanwhile, ex. Minister Dayo Adeyeye exposed Fayose inadvertently during President Jonathan’s campaign in Ekiti State. Intending to shore up GEJ’s profile, he announced that the president had refunded money spent on federal projects but that slip reportedly put him in trouble with Fayose.

    Contributing to the same topic, I wrote, inter alia: “I think that the correct emphasis on the Ekiti situation should be the following:

    1. Governor Fayose got paid over N10b – that should now read N22b – outstanding indebtedness plus another N2b ecological fund.  2. He has been paid monthly federal allocations to date – including the one for which he did not pay salaries in September (?). 3. He requested and got a six-month moratorium on bond repayments on which Fayemi never once defaulted. 4. He cancelled the welfare fund for the elders, which was gulping a minimum N100m per month under Fayemi.  5. He has not paid subventions to Ekiti State University and the College of Education for at least four months.

    6. He unilaterally reduced Obas’ salaries, and among other things, abrogated some state agencies with hundreds of workers. If he is not paying salaries because of debts allegedly incurred by his predecessors, as he continues to claim, without proof, shouldn’t he reschedule the repayments as he did with the bond?”

    Now, if we were operating in the realm of conjecture when those comments were written, what about now that the federal government has affirmed it is not owing the state a kobo? Incidentally, I have read some rebuttals from supporters of the government. But how would they rebut the  live video recording which captured Dayo Adeyeye  at a presidential campaign at which both Fayose and the ex-president, among others, were present and, in which, Adeyeye praised Goodluck Jonathan for  giving Ekiti a university, as if from his own purse,  as well as for paying all the federal government’s indebtedness to the state. In a situation where a whole state, its royalty, the gentry as well as its hoi polloi, have been  comprehensively silenced, it would be greatly appreciated if Governor Fayose would let the world know the truth about his failure to pay workers and pensioners up to date. It would not help pointing fingers at other defaulting states, as circumstances differ. He should let us know if, as claimed by one of the few remaining Ekiti elders still with a voice, himself quoting one Omot Omenge, he is paying for some pre-election commitments.

    Enough of this charade – shagari did not work with npn majority in the senate

    I believe Nigerians must be sick and tired of the charade following the Saraki/Dogara sell-out in the National Assembly. The show of shame in the House this past Thursday, and with Saraki arrogantly rejecting the party’s choices, the time has come for the APC to firmly  establish  party supremacy over these nauseating, overarching individual ambitions. The party must go for broke and Saraki and his co- conspirators could very well head back straight to the PDP to meet their corrupt, alleged instigators and financiers whether from within or outside the National Assembly.

    He could, in fact, visit Otuoke, post haste.

    With the NPN having 36 of 95 Senate seats, and 165 of 443 in the House of Representatives in the Second Republic, President Shehu Shagari did not have a majority in any of the chambers of the National Assembly; yet filled the offices with its  party members and, poignantly, with Bukola Saraki’s father as Senate leader. The leadership were the party’s choices, not of some individuals who think the world of themselves.  Nor has President Obama’s party a majority in both senate and congress. If by their own hands, these prodigals end up where Nigerians thought we had exited in 1999, they are the ones who have cockroaches in their wardrobes and, therefore, risk jail terms or worse, for economically despoiling the country. This I guess, should indeed, be their just comeuppance, rather than their present life of obscene opulence and arrogance. I have no doubt that Nigerians would file right behind the APC and President Buhari in the government’s fight against corrupt gangs who intend to coyly continue their 16-year stranglehold on the country.

     

    Still on the Saraki-APC Fiasco

    E-mail from a reader about last week’s article: As I expected, your description of what transpired in the NASS leadership election as a fiasco is spot on. On the 9th of June, I got several calls of lamentation from well-meaning Nigerians who, like me, are severely weather-beaten by PDP’s sixteen inglorious years, wondering if all hopes of redemption are now in vain. Nearly all were tearfully emotional, showing Nigerians’ high hopes on the president, his party and his yet to be team.  Is President Buhari aware that what endears him to an ordinary Nigerian is his honesty, discipline, and the penchant for law and order, all of which vamoosed in the manner Bukola Saraki was elected Senate President?  The manner and the characters behind his emergence smack of nothing but treachery and back stabbing, both of his party, and the Nigerian people. While the process in the House was transparent, this cannot be said of the charade in the senate.  I was, therefore, not surprised to see Mimiko, Akpabio and company, celebrating. How come the clerk of the senate who displayed such disrespect for the president has not been sanctioned till now? Wike has just invaded the home of Ibim Semenitari, a former Rivers State commissioner, with thugs and policemen, destroying both her, and her husband’s, properties. This, in an APC-controlled federal government?  Are our people asleep?

    Or they just don’t know what to do with power?

  • The Achilles’ heel of a country

    The Achilles’ heel of a country

    I suspect the people are getting tired of a police unit existing in name as the de jure strength of the nation but which constantly allows itself to be showcased as the de facto Achilles’ heel of the nation

    Yes, dear people, Nigeria has done it again: it has written its name in the universal book of infamy once more. This time, it did it through the antics of a daring female teenager who led an armed gang to lay a brazen, crude and openly defiant siege on a bank in Lagos and rob it blind – for as much as eighty or so million Naira! The news report gave further details which I am certain will be denied or corroborated very soon, but which are difficult to believe. There are two things here. First is the effect of unemployment on the people and second is the response (or lack of it) from the police. We will address the first later. Today, let us take the second.

    The fact that the police were said not to have responded to this brazen attack on the country is disheartening. Let me hasten to tell you that it is not an easy thing to be accosted by gun wielding robbers. I believe the mind just seizes up on you. Most times it is not so much out of fear as out of anger, that someone who refuses to put his back and arms to work to earn a living would sooner pick a gun and put it in the face of another human being than pick a shovel. And that’s why we have the police. At such times, we call them up to use their supernatural powers to discourage people like that.

    Last week, however, that organ was said to have failed us in the hour of trial. According to news reports, some of the robbers had first scared away the policemen in the police station right across the street from the bank by shooting at them. Then the shooters remained outside while the siege on the bank lasted. During that time, it was said, the few remaining policemen had taken refuge somewhere. I am so hoping this account is not true, and that sometime soon, someone will come up with a better story to bolster the people’s confidence in the police.

    Not that the police have invested much in the people’s confidence. Sometime in the week, I was listening to a radio programme, which took in calls from listeners, on whether the army should really be taken off check points. It shook me to hear many of the negative comments from the public on their police. Some said they could not trust a police that asks complainants to pay one hundred thousand Naira ‘to facilitate running around’ in order to investigate a complaint. Many lamented the fact that the police are too used to collecting ‘twenty Naira’ from people for them to be effective at checkpoints; they just might go and collect that twenty Naira from a bomber.

    But I ask: are our Nigeria Police content and happy with the dilapidated image they have garnered over time? Why then are they not making any efforts to do something about it, all to a man? From the news report on the assault on the bank, not one person even attempted to accost these robbers either by force or stealth. We all know that it’s not all the time that force of arms actually works in emergencies; some situations demand mind games and contest of wills, personalities and intellect. When these are put to use, they can prove superior to bullets and guns. It is also when that happens that heroes are born, although they can also die. The fact that we have no heroes in this story means that no one was willing to try these. (Whisper) I think they were running away from the reality that, somehow, Nigerian heroes wind up dead.

    Seriously, this reluctance by Nigerian policemen to do their jobs is truly scary, considering that everyone believes they have the nation behind them. They carry the nation’s power anyway. This authority should have been brought to play during that siege, not after, as the reports gave. The reports said that about an hour after the event, there were many police vehicles and men besieging the place you would think it was another problem. They had come to assess the crime scene. I had an experience like that too, but I will not regale your ears with that story now.

    What then might be responsible for this timidity? The reason I ask is that I suspect the people are getting tired of a police unit existing in name as the de jure strength of the nation but which constantly allows itself to be showcased as the de facto Achilles’ heel of the nation. I think someday, they will bring down the house. You remember the dogs feeding on a little boy and the police looking on? Or the crowd frenzy that killed some students while the police looked on? Ah ha!

    I don’t know, but you might cite reasons such as insufficient armoury, or insufficient training, or insufficient funds to run the unit, or even insufficient morale. Me, I would cite the fact that this country is completely messed up and no one knows who is doing anyone’s work anymore, or what effect anyone’s action may have on others. Wherever you have a compromised political leadership as we have had in the last sixteen years, there is often a tendency for people to take the law into their hands and for others to throw up theirs.

    I think the general belief is that the gradual descent of the police into the state we witnessed last week has been caused by their involvement in the political games of the unconscionable politicians that have run the country from the very beginning, including the colonial period. There has been no political dispensation that has not used the police for awkward purposes, beginning from the colonial times. Professionalism in the police came dead on arrival.

    Professionalism needs to be brought to play so that policemen can earn the respect they require to function. Crime has gone up several notches in sophistication so the police need to be brought up to date in crime fighting. What is said to have happened last week represents the lowest point of our shame. We can swallow that. What we cannot swallow is doing nothing and going back to business as usual as if nothing happened. I think that is the real crime for which we will need that young female to come and bail the country out by leading us in the fight against crime. Talking seriously, we need to get the police to step up.

    P.S. – Give that list already.

    I am adding this postscript to share my amusement with you. I listened to the reason given by one of the president’s media men on why the release of the cabinet list is delayed. He said something to the effect that the president was taking his time because he did not want to have to sack someone almost immediately after engaging him or her. Frankly, I laughed. In short, he did not want to make any mistakes in his choice.

    I have always quoted the saying that the only person not making any mistake is standing still. Well, that’s what the president is doing right now. But if he will end up appointing human beings and not angels or Martians, then he should just do it and hope to God he gets it right. Believe me, as long as there are only humans on earth, some of those to be appointed will turn out to be monsters, serious mistakes, perfect, good, mediocre, unnameable, etc. Sir, close your eyes, say a prayer and give that list already.

  • APC’s unsteady gait

    APC’s unsteady gait

    Of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is honest enough to admit it, the party will confess it is reeling under the weight of two major problems, the resolution of which will determine its future and staying power. There are indications it has a future, one way or the other; but whether it will hang in there for much longer than its enemies wish it, is not quite as clear. The first problem is a bundle involving the unresolved and convoluted mess that accompanied the June 9 National Assembly leadership elections, the intrigues by some prominent party leaders to position themselves well for future battles they know are inevitable, and the deathly struggle between the party and its legislators over the elections of top NASS leaders. This bundle will test the nerves, patience and wits of party leaders. There are no guarantees the party will resolve all these problems amicably, or build and administer enough safeguards to ensure that whatever crises are evident at the top levels of the party will not course through the less disciplined, less philosophical ranks.

    The second major problem is a rather straightforward one. The refusal or timidity of President Muhammadu Buhari to assert himself as party leader has created a vacuum that is being exploited by many party leaders who view his reluctance as an opportunity to foist their own agenda and loyalists on the party. The NASS leadership elections, which produced Senator Bukola Saraki and Hon Yakubu Dogara, showed clearly how different agenda are competing for supremacy in the party, and how loyalists of party leaders are already fiercely positioning themselves for the coming battles and the spoils of war. The APC is an amalgam of three or four parties with different orientations and worldviews. None of the constituent parties had been completely assimilated before APC’s momentous poll victory in March and April was achieved. Nor had the party, before the crisis broke out, built and propagated an ideology as its lodestar, by which party leaders and members were expected to plot their directions in national affairs.

    The first problem is truly fundamental, and it goes deep into the foundation of the party’s seemingly intractable crisis. Given the intensity of the struggle to achieve dominance in the party, ambitious party leaders will fight bitterly to position themselves in vantage positions in the coming months, if not years. The struggle is at the moment manifesting in the effort by future presidential aspirants to secure top legislative positions or begin the process of knitting watertight alliances to make their ambitions feasible. However, what is really at play in the APC today is much more than securing top posts and cobbling alliances. Looking at the continuing and increasingly fierce fight for the remaining legislative positions, it is evident that a struggle to control or hijack the party itself has begun. Groups and party leaders are engaged in a fight with current executives of the party to fill legislative positions. The objective seems to be to weaken the party, render it incompetent in exerting influence on the party’s elected members, turn it into a toothless advisory body, and perhaps eventually take it over.

    At the moment, the APC is being isolated from its elected members and future presidential aspirants, not by choice, but apparently because powerful elements within the party have begun to defy and countermand the party’s decisions. Previously, it could bark and bite, as it showed when it conducted its first presidential primary last year. The party was in control of the processes, and no one was left in doubt who wielded more influence, the party or individuals. There are arguments that the party has not been clever enough in striking a balance between its enormous power and the needs and desires of its members. The current rebellions in the legislature and among other powerful party members are said to be a reaction to that lack of balance.

    The possible overthrow of the current leadership of the APC is, however, a worst-case scenario. It is indeed hypothetically possible for the ongoing struggles within the party to lead to a better balance in the relationship between the party and its members. Current battles may therefore be considered as a teething problem until a consensus on party structure, operations and power relations have been achieved. But it is also possible that, like the PDP, the struggle for party control may tip over into unrestrained instability if no clear winners emerge. One way or the other, the volcanic APC, which is still in the process of formation, must cool down into a shape. It became active barely two years ago before it had time to acquire definite properties. Now, as the ruling party, it has been thrust into the thick of a national economic crisis, and must find ways to grapple with that crisis of monumental proportions, as well as define its own essence and properties in a way that joins party members and leaders in a stable and mutually beneficial relationship.

    The second major problem confronting the APC is also huge, but not as complex as the spillover crisis from the NASS elections and the inflammable relationship between the party, its leaders and regicidal legislators. If President Buhari is chary of involving himself both in running the APC and showing his hand in the legislature, it is suggested that the unsavoury effects of former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s meddlesomeness in the legislature could be responsible. Under President Obasanjo, the legislature was cajoled into becoming an arm of the ruling party and a spineless appendage, like most other national institutions of the day. Consequently, the party became a superfluous institution, and the National Assembly a weak, confused and ineffective arm of government incapable of checking the excesses of the executive.

    President Buhari is believed to be concerned that both the APC and NASS could be disemboweled by undue interference from the executive branch. Pursuant to this, he has tried to stay aloof from the party as much as possible, and refused to signal openly where his preferences lie in terms of the leadership of the legislature. His aloofness, it is however argued, has led to a few powerful individuals in the party attempting to force their way into special positions in the legislature, and perhaps soon into the party’s leadership. It is, therefore, agreed that a vacuum exists in the party, which a number of individuals are attempting to fill. One of the best ways to resolve the problem, some say, may be for the president to exercise his powers and authority over the party in cleverer and less destabilising ways than Chief Obasanjo executed over the PDP.

    Until President Buhari gets involved in APC affairs, the struggle for dominance will certainly continue. Nigeria is not yet a developed democracy. And though the president has reechoed United States President Barack Obama’s declamation on the evils done to democracy and governance in Africa by strongmen, he must appreciate that the current state of Nigerian democracy calls for intelligent interventions. But for President Buhari to intervene sensibly in the APC and stabilise its affairs, he must demonstrate deeper and uncommon understanding of democracy as a concept and Nigerian politics in practice, and reflect in his actions and ideas a vision of where he hopes to take Nigeria, and if possible, also Africa. It is not certain that the president has such perspectives. If he does not, his aides and advisers should help him conceive a brilliant and workable perspective on Nigerian politics and democracy.

    Above all, he must demonstrate the push and will to get involved. If he does not, the party that brought him to power will eventually be hijacked by forces whose ways and manners may be inimical to his presidency, while those individuals whose ways and manners he is accustomed to and approves may be replaced by people of suspect altruism and self-centered goals. It is not an option for him to avoid dirtying his hands with party problems and affairs. If he does not, his party could become destabilised. It will clearly not be in the interest of his presidency for his party to engage in interminable battles that will distract, confuse and debilitate him.

  • Devils at the crossroads

    Devils at the crossroads

    (The neo-colonial state and the emerging Nigerian society)

    Unlike what obtains in organic nations where the state acts mostly in concert with the will and aspirations of political societies or at the very worst in dialectical modification of each other, the Nigerian state has been mostly at odds with the genuine aspirations of the emerging Nigerian society as it struggles with the imperatives of modernity and modernization.  The result is a war of all against all which leaves the nation bruised, battered and permanently bleeding.

    The origin of this endemic crisis of nationhood can be located in the colonial constitution of the modern Nigerian nation and the type of indigenous political elite authorized by the colonial masters to facilitate the project of permanent domination of the global periphery.  Colonialism destroyed the extant political structures and the viable states of the constituting nationalities and replaced them with an alien structure so hostile and implacable as to be at violent variance with the genuine aspirations of the indigenous people.

    No matter the prefix to delimit its historical actuality, it is obvious that there is not much difference between colonialism in Nigeria and what has come after it. In reality, “post” is often a marker of barely disguised continuity rather than sharply delineated discontinuity. As an English wit has quipped, there is no point in settling the order of precedence between a flea and a louse. They are both bloodsucking vermin.

    In many African nations where enlightened indigenous elites seized the reins of power after independence, they saw the overriding need for the visionary reconstruction and recreation of the colonial state in order to humanize it and make it more amenable to the genuine needs and aspirations of the people. It is this epic narrative of recreation that has found a few African nations on song for economic development and national integration.

    This is the difference between Nkrumah’s Ghana, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Senghor’s Senegal, what could have been Augustino Neto’s  Angola and a laggard Nigeria. Upon independence in Nigeria, what took place was the Africanization of colonial tyranny and a mere change in the personnel of despotism and extractive predation. The managers of the interior simply switched colour in the colonial plantation.

    Yet it will amount to self-slander to insist that the colonial incursion into Nigeria did not throw up some visionary leaders. Beginning from the end of the nineteenth century, a string of intellectual pamphleteers and writers from the Lagos coastal aristocracy subjected colonial rule and its sham pretensions to searing critiques and penetrating putdown. It was a very risky thing to do and it was to draw the ire of the Lugard brothers who responded with vitriol and vehemence.

    The long list of illustrious anti-colonialists and conscientious objectors stretches from the great lawyer, Sapara-Williams, Otunba Payne, Henshaw, Sir Kitoye Ajasa, through Herbert Macaulay, the wizard of Kirsten Hall, and on to Nnamdi Azikiwe, H.O Davies and their contemporaries. Azikiwe’s stirring anti-colonial rhetoric and polemics of Black emancipation set the tone for the final push against colonization. In retrospect, it can be seen that Obafemi Awolowo’s  radically humane project of the rapid emancipation of his people from the jaws of colonial depredations represents a visionary and pragmatic critique of colonization at its most destabilizing.

    Unfortunately in the run up to independence as the Lagos coastal elite appear to have lost steam as a result of historic fatigue while Zik became bogged down and embroiled in bitter local politics, the feudal colonial state reasserted its authority and suzerainty with vigour and ferocity.  Under the less than watchful eye of bitterly feuding regional politicians, this predatory and patrimonial state transformed into the predatory and patrimonial post-colonial Nigerian state with the war cry of always centralize! It is as if a nation is nothing more than a vast military garrison.

    It is the repercussions and fallout of this overcentralization and harshly unitarist system which have led us to where we are today. It is an ideal breeding ground for despotism and the garrison politics, not to talk of military irruption which often lead to a forcible homogenization of the nation with predictably disastrous results. No matter the military might or the feudal wiles, it is impossible to homogenize a heterogeneous nation of contending nationalities in mutually incompatible stages of economic, political and spiritual modes of production.

    It is a measure of this endemic crisis of nationhood that a western observer recently described Nigerian leaders, particularly in their post-military incarnation, as “personalist and patrimonial”. It is a short, pithy and pitiless summation which captures the roiling contradictions of the Nigerian post-colonial state and its hapless political society. In a telling contribution to the debate, President Mohammadu Buhari was reported to have observed that in Nigeria, strong men destroy institutions.

    Institutionalized rule because of its impersonal and rational nature, its clause of substitute actors and abstract procedures is the logical enemy of patrimonial rule and its father-figures. Yet in saner climes, these human institutions are the creations of strong men and women with a selflessly visionary imagining of a better, fairer and more orderly society.

    Building institutions is not a tea party.  It is the product of repeated gestures and habits burnt into the human consciousness where they become routinised and accepted norms of human behavior which in turn are emblematic of society over time. When General George Washington declined to become an American presidential monarch, he set the tone and template for political rectitude and the institutionalization of democratic rule in the new nation.

    Washington had the full weight of history behind him. Whatever their personal contradictions, America was founded by visionary intellectuals with radical notions of human emancipation and the inalienable right of each person to choose how he would be ruled and by who. Despite the horrors of slavery and the decimation of the native Indian population, Washington would have felt that his ancestors did not escape from the horrors of absolutist rule in the old world only to inaugurate same in the new world.

    It is this absence of a transcendental idealism and the sheer lack of capacity to envision a free and prosperous new society from the ashes of traditional authoritarian society and colonial predation that has been the bane of the bulk of Nigeria’s post-independence leaders. But you cannot give what you don’t have. If we must complain about the sluggishness of a stream in midcourse, we must first take a look at the origin.

    In the absence of a critical pan-Nigerian mass which can galvanize and serve as the nucleus of a radical political emancipation of the nation and pioneer its rapid economic emancipation, and given the obvious incapacity of the political elite to act in pan-national concert, various segments of the emerging Nigerian society have risen in stirring critique of the patrimonial and neo-feudal state.  Since independence and as a result of radical disaffection with the state of the colonial union, all the major nationalities have threatened at one time or the other to leave the nation.

    Most of the time, this disenchantment with the nation remains at the level of muted murmuring and private cursing. But occasionally, they assume the status of armed critiques which leave the nation roiling in a bloodfest, the most devastating and destructive being the civil war. This is not discounting the Tivi uprising, the Niger Delta insurrection and the ongoing Boko Haram war which has laid waste most of the North East of the nation.

    The federally engineered scuttling of the Awolowo project also occasioned much bloodshed. Although the Yoruba nationality has never risen in armed confrontation with the Nigerian state, its political rebellion and intellectual critique of the architecture of the nation have twice led to bloody confrontation with the federal might and quality casualty for the ethnic formation.

    Yet despite perpetual adversity, Nigeria is slowly changing. The slumberous giant may be rousing. There is an obvious change in the demographic complexion of the nation and a shift of ideological orientation which bode ill for personalist and patrimonial rule. The problem with compulsive thieves is that they never know when they have stolen too much for the owner not to notice. But when devils get to the crossroads, they must also tremble, for it is usually a short ride to perdition.

    Twice in the last twenty two years, the Nigerian multitude have risen as one to demand momentous change in the structure and system of leadership in the nation. On June 12, 1993, the pan-Nigerian mass voted for MKO Abiola and the termination of despotic military rule. Although they did not succeed in installing Abiola, the chain of events triggered by the annulment led to the eventual retirement of the military to the barracks. Failing to correctly decode the signal, the military ended up disgracing and humiliating itself.

    On April 28th 2015, Nigerians rose as one again to vote for change as personified by Mohammadu Buhari and for the termination of inept kleptocratic rule famously exemplified by the last administration. This time, they seem to have succeeded in both objectives, or so it seems. Last week, the regnant rump of the patrimonial cabal struck in the hallowed chambers of the senate in a daylight putsch at implacable variance with the mood of the nation. For them, the nation can go to blazes as long as they have their way even over the corpse of party and noble principles.

    Is another “democratic” annulment of the national will on the way? As it happened with the SDP in 1993 and the federally engineered implosion of the Action Group in 1962, the irony of all this is that the victorious party which is at the vanguard of radical transformation is also the weakest link in the radical evaporation of hope and change. With the APC reeling from one crisis or the other ever since, is history about to repeat itself?

    If the APC implodes, the only possibility in the horizon is radical anarchy. Change should not shortchange a nation. The widespread condemnation of the senate putsch and of the over-pampered privileges of the National Assembly is a pointer to a looming social combustion. Without a dominant party with clear moral and political integrity through which the turbulent social discontents can be channeled and routed, there is bound to be a direct collision between the streets and the state. It is another word for chaos and anarchy.

    The leadership of the APC must put on their thinking cap. Change is possible only if there is a party that drives change. Let those who are fanning the embers of discord and disunity both within and outside the party understand that that they are also in the shortest run organizing their own political funeral. For now and with President Buhari at the helm, this coalition of contraries represents Nigeria’s best hope for orderly change and the principal powerbrokers must find strength, resolve and visionary energy in the countervailing polarities. Otherwise, the party itself will become part of an unfurling narrative.

  • Lawmaking: social responsibility or self-enrichment?

    Lawmaking: social responsibility or self-enrichment?

    All the ideas emanating from the National Assembly regarding remuneration of lawmakers are far from the ethic of social responsibility, which requires people in leadership positions to accept an obligation to act for the benefit of society

    Even a few days into the new administration, it is becoming clear that some lawmakers are already acting as if they have lost the political will for change.

    Given the manner of choosing principal officers in the new National Assembly recently, it is not exaggeration for a public affairs observer or commentator to say that it is getting hard (or harder than in the days of Jonathan) to tell who and who in the legislature is working for APC’s manifesto of change or for PDP’s commitment to continuity or ‘business as usual.’ But today’s column is not about how and who got into the juicy positions in the Senate and the House of Representatives. After all, the ruling party has officially assured the public that it is ready to work with those elected into legislative offices, regardless of the initial controversy generated by the sidelining of 51 APC senators. Some people would say that the elite struggle for power in Nigeria is better left to the elites within the power circle to sort out. But citizens need to get intervene in the discourse of power politics before self-serving politicians drive and bury them in poverty.

    The interest today is to focus on level of remuneration for lawmakers in the new Nigeria of diminishing revenue from the easy source of foreign exchange that had driven individuals and organisations for decades to expect to be pampered with huge salaries and outlandish allowances. In the days of high revenue from petroleum, even the authors of the current constitution chose to give the power to determine what states and public office holders get as allocations and salaries/allowances to a group. The Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation, and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) is constitutionally charged with recommending what every stratum of the polity gets from proceeds from the oil flowing from wombs of the Niger Delta. Although RMAFC prides itself on its website as independent, it remains to be seen how much of that independence or autonomy has been used to plead for moderation in matters pertaining to remuneration of political office holders and lawmakers. RMAFC is on record as complaining about several allowances lawmakers awarded themselves in the past, an indication that lawmakers have taken liberty to exploit their positions.

    Whatever was the culture in the past, the new economic realities in the country now call for more critical thinking than was the case in the regimes of Olusegun Obasanjo, UmaruYar’Adua, and Goodluck Jonathan. The abundance that led to creation of 36 states, 774 local governments, over 400 House of Representative members, over 100 senators, and even recently to recommendations for moving the number of states from 36 to 55 appears to be drying up faster than the authors of the Nigeria of today could imagine.

    All the ideas emanating from the National Assembly regarding remuneration of lawmakers are far from the ethic of social responsibility, which requires people in leadership positions to accept an obligation to act for the benefit of society. For example, the claim by the deputy speaker that the National Assembly is a separate arm of the federal government with its own peculiarities does not suggest any readiness on the part of this APC man from Osun State to respond appropriately to the call for prudence and sensitivity to society’s needs. To say that a budget of 150 billion naira is not much because it is less than three per cent of the total budget is tantamount to ignoring the new realities on the ground. Similarly, the defence of over half a million naira wardrobe allowance for lawmakers by the new Senate President and the spokesperson for the RMAFC during his recent visit to the Senate leader also misses the point.

    While it may not be right to blame the 8th National Assembly for the largesse given to lawmakers directly or indirectly in the last sixteen years, it is proper to expect new legislators, particularly those who got elected on the platform of the party that promised Change to get critical and creative about how to end what citizens generally have considered as oversize budget to pamper lawmakers in particular. A country that has borrowed money to pay salaries even at the federal level is not in any position to justify giving its legislators salaries and allowances higher than what their counterparts earn in wealthier and more advanced countries or what senior public servants like judges, professors, permanent secretaries, generals, etc earn for serving the country on a full-time basis.

    Given that the long list of demands that the anaemic treasury inherited by the new government must have forced President Buhari to take to the G7, no legislator should need special persuasion to realize the need to cut out the culture of waste inherited from the past. Nigeria is still one of the poorest countries in the world, despite its huge petroleum revenue in the past. Over 65% of Nigerians are believed to live on less than 300 naira a day. Child and maternal mortality in Nigeria is higher than that of many of its neighbours. Education and health care are two major social services that have been in decline for years. Most Nigerians have access to electricity not for more than two hours a day. Most Nigerians have no access to potable water while about 98% of Nigerians travel on substandard roads on a daily basis. Most Nigerians working in the public sector do not get their salaries as and when due while pensioners in many parts of the country get their pension benefits usually in arrears. Apart from the special insecurity of Boko Haram, most of the roads and streets in the country are unsafe for any form of night-time economic activities. All of these happen even after the government at all levels owe over $60 billion, most of which have apparently been used to finance recurrent expenditures. What other evidence should any serious-minded lawmaker need to get real?

    There has been so much opaqueness about how much money is given to lawmakers as salary or allowance. While the basic salary of the average legislator looks normal, the list of allowances is scandalous: furniture, wardrobe, utilities, vehicle maintenance, leave, newspaper, constituency, recess, domestic staff, entertainment, personal assistance, etc. When added up, all these allowances and salaries put the Nigerian legislator as the highest paid lawmaker in the world. And this is despite the fact that lawmaking in Nigeria is a part-time activity, 120 to 180 days on the job in a year. Citizens serving the country in non-elective positions have to work 260 days in a year to earn a net income that averages between .001 to 10% of what lawmakers and other political office holders get in the name of allowances.

    As laudable as the decision of the new governor of Kaduna State to take only half of his salary is and as ridiculous as the readiness of the Bayelsa Senator to pass his wardrobe allowance to widows in his state and workers in Osun State sounds, what is needed at this point is not good-hearted philanthropy from overpaid political office holders in the executive or the legislature. The country’s economic condition, most graphically illustrated by borrowing money to pay salaries and the long list of requests President Buhari had to carry to Bavaria for consideration by members of the G7 group, calls for bold intervention.

    The onus to show a higher sense of responsibility in determination of what to pay federal, state, and local political office holders is not just on the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission. Lawmakers should seize the initiative to assure citizens that they are not in the National Assembly for the over generous emoluments inherited from sixteen years of profligacy in government. When citizens shifted majority of their votes from the PDP after sixteen years to the party that promised to change the way the country has been governed, they wanted to end a model of governance that appeared to privilege enrichment of the tiny political elite over the general welfare of citizens. Undoubtedly, the Resource Curse that is part of the rentier state nurtured in the last fifty years must have produced the regimes of indulgence that the 2015 election results had promised to change. If, as it has become clear, our Manna economy cannot sustain prodigal allowances of the tiny political elite, it stands to reason that the change to an economy based on productivity and taxation will not be able to sustain the extravagant allowances for lawmakers and members of the executive branch of government. It is time for citizens to get more vigilant.

  • The two Buharis and microwave change

    The two Buharis and microwave change

    Under the convenient cover of anonymity many of those who voted for continuity of Goodluck Jonathan’s disastrous rule have teamed up with others who truly plumped for a new beginning to bemoan the failure of Presidency Muhammadu Buhari to deliver change at the speed of a microwave.

    The former are motivated more by mischief to paint the picture of a bumbling president in the same manner their fallen hero was caricatured in the last four years. The latter are not exactly driven by patriotism but more by that Nigerian habit of rushing around in circles before deciphering why we’re scurrying around so furiously.

    The calamity that has befallen the nation is that three weeks after taking office Buhari has not appointed a Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) who by his mere emergence would magically transform our fortunes.

    Even more sacrilegious is the fact that the country still doesn’t have cabinet ministers. Those who have waited this long to moan have been uncommonly patient. After all, I did read a post by a supposedly enlightened blogger who wrote this on his Facebook page: ‘Three days and Nigeria still doesn’t have a government. Hmn…!’ This was on June 1, 2015!

    The last I checked the structure of government doesn’t crumble just because someone hasn’t been appointed Chief of Staff, SGF or minister. The fact that the president is getting things done is confirmation of that.

    In any event, historically, in the Fourth Republic it has taken even the most prepared of presidents at least four weeks to put together a cabinet. Taking that time to assemble a team that would run a race of four years is not being tardy in my book.

    That is even fast when we consider certain examples from around the world. After winning the March 17, 2015 general elections it took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu almost two months to cobble together a cabinet.

    I suspect that much of the hysteria is being driven by those interested in being appointed to some of these offices. They are frustrated by the fact that Buhari has refused to show his hand and is taking his sweet time to resolve things. I can understand how that can unsettle politicians who are desperate to be relevant again.

    For the average Nigerian the naming of a Chief of Staff to the President doesn’t change the price of beans at Mile 12 market in the short term. Buhari has to govern with a team of ministers and he would name them sooner than later. He understands how hungry people are for change. That is why he kept trying to lower sky-high expectations that things would change overnight.

    We would all be totally stressed out if we don’t take the trouble to understand the man in whose hands we have put our collective fate. Indeed, if we remain our usual impatient selves, then it’s going to be a very long four years under the Buhari presidency.

    One-time British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said of herself: ‘the Lady’s is not for turning!’ We have on our hands another self-assured and stubborn customer. He would not be moved until he’s ready to move.

    After winning the All Progressives Congress (APC) ticket in Lagos last December, he came under intense pressure to quickly name a running mate. The furore was as much the product of intense jockeying by those who fancied themselves for the role and the anxiety of the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which was waiting for an opening to attack its rival.

    Rather than seeing the time it is taking to constitute a cabinet as some great failing, people should understand that today’s Buhari is a totally different package from the stern, lean-faced infantry general who 30 years ago delivered change under a military regime “with immediate effect.”

    Despite the good his regime did restoring orderliness, paying off debts and stabilizing the economy, it would be ultimately undone by its cavalier abuse of human rights. When General Ibrahim Babangida and his co-conspirators took over they didn’t accuse the man they toppled of fiddling with public funds; they posed as liberators who had come to restore freedoms taken away by a stern dictator.

    Back then in 1985 not many would have predicted that the man who left office reviled as a draconian junta leader would 30 years later be swept back into office as an almost messianic figure.

    But by joining those he once scorned to compete for power, Buhari invited intense scrutiny of his time in office. It was an exercise that his foes welcomed with glee and executed to devastating effect. Along with the caricature that he was a Muslim fundamentalist, the general was portrayed as a harsh despot who would never change his ways. The caricature was especially effective down south.

    He may not have apologised for the most egregious abuses, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he understands how his record and image worked against him in three previous attempts at being elected president.

    In the 2014-2015 election cycle we have been confronted with a re-packaged Buhari. The man who once suspended constitutional government and ruled by decrees now swears by the constitution. He was accused of religious fanaticism, he countered by running twice with not just any Christian – but with Pentecostal pastors. Once derided as the ultimate anti-democrat he now overcompensates by making sure his every move is by the book.

    The new Buhari is one who thinks meddling in the leadership scheming of the National Assembly is a no-no because they are a different arm of government. He is a political innocent who just received a lesson in skullduggery when his APC was outmaneuvered in a conspiracy involving some of those who having been grinning in his face like friendly sharks, while plotting to undermine him and further their own interests.

    Without question the president believes that the troubles some of his predecessors had with the legislature had to do with their attempt to impose leadership. Of course, he had the recent example of Aminu Tambuwal to point to. But his hands-off approach also has much to do with not giving opponents grounds to cry that the old dictatorial traits were returning.

    The trouble with the new Buhari – the converted democrat – is he expects politicians to be honourable. Unfortunately, Nigerian democracy is a jungle where anything goes. He expected Bukola Saraki to toe the party line; the rebellious senator thumped his nose at the APC high command and cut a deal with the enemy – leaving the majority party humiliated in a chamber where it held a comfortable majority.

    The new Buhari is keen to prove his democratic credentials so he has made peace with the reality he’s been handed at the National Assembly. An Olusegun Obasanjo would not rest until he’s hounded the usurpers out of their thrones. That is not likely to happen with Buhari Mark II.

    He has shown unwillingness to manipulate the coercive instruments and agencies of state in pursuit of partisan political ends in ways that Obasanjo or his pupil, Goodluck Jonathan, would have done. That is why Ayo Fayose is still governor of Ekiti State today.

    Before the March 28 polls no one was sure which of the Buharis would show up as president – the old or the new. Former First Lady Patience Jonathan ventilated those fears when she repeatedly warned voters at campaign stops not to vote for the general as he would jail them and their spouses.

    The day after he was inaugurated many actually expected him to begin clamping PDP cabinet members into detention as the general circa 1983 would have done. Somehow a stop order whose origin we still don’t know went out preventing certain former office holders from travelling. It took the intervention of the new Buhari to clear the coast for the frightened to flee overseas and watch what would unfold from a safe distance.

    But being a stickler for rules is one thing, being politically naïve in an environment like Nigeria is a totally different matter. Former Vice President and APC chieftain, Atiku Abubakar, in a recent interview described Buhari as ‘a leader and not a politician.’

    It sounds contradictory to say a man who won the ticket of a political party and eventually became president is not a politician, still the statement is quite revealing. What Atiku was really saying is Buhari is an innocent at large in the dark and murky ways of Nigerian politics.

    Obasanjo and Jonathan may have made their mistakes in the manner they tried to impose leadership of the legislature but they were not wrong in taking more than passing interest in who became Senate President or Speaker. These are people who will determine the success or failure of your legislative agenda, and to be unperturbed whether they would be hostile or friendly is a big mistake.

    Although there’s very little a president can do to influence who leads the United States Congress because of their established democratic traditions, still we see that a hostile legislature can render the most powerful leader on earth impotent. The Barack Obama presidency has been paralysed at critical points in recent years by the hostility of the Republican congressional majority.

    Here in Nigeria, Obasanjo’s third term dream was shot down because the Senate and House turned against him.

    Again, we see in the tragic case of the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola that the consequences are often grave in this environment when the leader declines to show interest in who controls key points in the nation’s power architecture.

    Abiola had won the ticket of the then Social Democratic Party (SDP) narrowly seeing stiff competition from the candidate of the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua political machine. He was so satisfied with what he had accomplished he generously declared he didn’t care who became party chairman.

    His position led to the emergence of Chief Tony Anenih. This would later prove to be pivotal after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election results. After Babangida stepped aside and Chief Ernest Shonekan’s Interim National Government (ING) was eased out by General Sani Abacha, the SDP under the new chairman lost the desire to press for actualisation of Abiola’s mandate.

    Even worse, they quietly began negotiating for positions in the new military junta that would ultimately bury the June 12 mandate. Who knows what would have happened if Abiola had backed a candidate for chairman who was committed to his vision?

    Aside his determination not to get his hands dirty playing politics what has changed between the old Buhari and the new? Only the methods if you ask me. He is still committed to fighting corruption, restoring security and stabilising the economy. This was the same agenda when he took office 30 years ago. The only difference is that terrorism was an unknown phenomenon back then.

    Can this new, aging Buhari who has to work with a National Assembly leadership whose emergence he had no hand in still deliver the change he promised? There’s no reason why not.

    Exercising the powers of the presidency doesn’t call for the strength of the weightlifter. A friend argues that the Saraki-Dogara rebellion is just a sideshow and that even if there are no new reforms or bills, there are existing laws on our books for any serious president to jail 1,000 corrupt Nigerians every month.

    The problem with the Nigerian system is not a shortage of laws it is the absence of political will to enforce what we already have. Is it not a marvel the way the EFCC has been prosecuting people and arresting hitherto untouchable politicians all because the body language of the new president indicates he would not tolerate sleaze?

    The 73 year-old Buhari may be looking wistfully back at when he was 37 years old. But he doesn’t need the strength or stamina of his youth, neither does he need Saraki and his crowd to pat him on the back in order to deliver change.

    All he needs is that same iron will which first arrested the attention of Nigerians 30 years ago, as he begins to change the ways things are done in this country.

  • Time for Buhari to inspire and set the tone

    Time for Buhari to inspire and set the tone

    While addressing Nigerians in South Africa during his last African Union (AU) trip, President Buhari wondered why Nigerians were so anxious to see him appoint his ministers. He would do so eventually, he promised, without making mistakes. He attributed the slow pace of appointing ministers to the Goodluck Jonathan’s transition committee’s non-cooperation with his own transition committee. President Buhari appears unable to understand Nigerians who worry about his pace. While they may be wrong to stampede his government, they are not wrong to want some inspiration and tone-setting from him after more than a decade of appalling governance by the PDP.

    Apart from learning to listen to his countrymen, President Buhari must also find efficient ways to address their fears. They may sometimes be wrong; but they know the president won’t always be right. More importantly, given the antecedents of the president himself, and what the country knows of him, they know he is not infallible and is advanced in age. They knew who he was and what he was capable of doing before they voted him into office. It is pointless of him to excuse his weaknesses, such as his age, or justify his pace on account of extenuating circumstances. What in fact he should worry about is living up to the image which his supporters and admirers have of him. They see him as firm, courageous, intolerant of slothfulness and corruption, and patriotic.

    So far, however, while he may have embarked on a methodical approach to tackling the crises bequeathed him by the last government, the people are yet to see the Buhari they knew more than three decades ago, and the Buhari who had stuck stubbornly to the principles that have ennobled his life and politics. They want him to begin to set the tone for change in every area of national life, starting from any part of the decayed national system. They know he does not even need to appoint ministers before he sets the needed tone. If only he will bark, they reason.

    If his supporters are worried, it is because they fear they may be seeing a president who appears petrified by the constitution. They need him to respect the constitution and the laws of the land, and not be tempted to indulge in the self-help and impetuousness of many decades ago. But they more keenly want him, within the ambits of that same constitution, to thunder through the land almost like a lawgiver, the palladium of moral, political and judicial rectitude. If they feel nothing significant has changed since he assumed office, he must understand their perspectives and fears, and give them the substantial change they ask for and deserve. All they ask of him is that while he is assembling the first-rate team he promised, let him set a mighty, incontrovertible and magnificent tone for how Nigeria should be ordered, governed and viewed.

  • The Saraki-APC fiasco and its implications for Buhari’s anti-corruption war

    The Saraki-APC fiasco and its implications for Buhari’s anti-corruption war

     Not only  are these allowances probably much higher today, with Saraki as Senate President, President Buhari is guaranteed a monstrous fight to reduce this highest pay to political representatives anywhere in the world, Britain and the U .S inclusive

    “Government is determined to secure the country, manage the economy, create employment and fight corruption. Some articulate writers have said if we do not kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria. This APC administration intends to kill corruption in Nigeria. We will do our best, I assure you. We are getting the facts and logistic requirements together” –President Muhammadu Buhari to Nigerians living in South Africa.

    A fiasco is defined as a humiliating failure; some effort that went quite wrong or a wine bottle in a straw jacket. For me, this is precisely what the shebang at the National Assembly represents for the APC.  Truth be told, my initial reaction to Bukola Saraki emerging the Senate President was: Yes, if a Tambuwal, why not a Saraki? Nor was that a flight of fancy because I believe, and still do, that he was as qualified as any member to be the Senate President considering his contribution to the emergence of the party. It should not be difficult to remember who heads the political camp to which Abubakar Kawu Baraje, who led the walk-out from the PDP Abuja mini-congress on Saturday, August 31, 2013 belongs, nor the fact that Senator Saraki brought a whole state with him into the party.  However, all these thoughts were shredded when it became known that, out of desperation, he permitted his coronation to be, not only instigated, but funded, by a gang of PDP treasury looters and their cousins, the oil subsidy rogues, all of who are eager to hamstring the anti-corruption war President Buhari promised Nigerians so they can again escape justice through the machinations of the now totally rudderless EFCC.  They have since been on a celebration binge. It is galling, if not puke-inducing, that in his political alchemy, Saraki thought nothing of selling his party cheap by accommodating Ike Ekweremadu, a PDP senator, as Deputy Senate President.

    The Saraki shenanigan becomes more nauseating the more when we come to learn of the horrendous corruption of the Jonathan administration. For instance, President Buhari is expected to meet the leading global watchdog on corruption, the Oslo-based, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), very soon to see how billions of dollars in the Nigerian oil revenue leakage can be curbed. According to Zainab Ahmed, the Executive Secretary of its Nigerian arm, over $7.5 billion is yet to be recovered from oil and gas companies since 1999, while the agency’s audits show that $11.6 billion of dividends between 1999 and 2012 from the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) company were not remitted by the NNPC whose oil swap deals have been discovered to be more of scams.

    And that is only in the oil sector.

    As you read this, millions of Nigerian workers, in at least 23 of Nigeria’s 36 states, have not been paid their salaries for over six months. It therefore becomes extremely agonising that Bukola Saraki, a leading light of a party elected almost solely on its promise to fight corruption could, out of overaching ambition, go into an unholy alliance with these mandarins of corruption. Nigerians must now brace up for all manner of opposition from the National Assembly to the Buhari government’s efforts to kill corruption, a demonstration of which we may soon see during the president’s attempt to re-energise EFCC. Saraki, of course, knows that something must give but if he thinks he would succeed in thwarting the hopes of Nigerians, then I have news for him. It’s even nice that he showed his hands, and what manner of National Assembly he intends to lead, early.

    In the article: ‘It Is Time We Storm This Bastille’, (Sunday,12th June, 2011), I wrote as follows on then immediate past Bankole-led House of Representatives: “When in the past week the EFCC finally caught up with the erstwhile Speaker of the House, Nigerians came to know that the Speaker, together with the House leadership, had been borrowing illegally for un-appropriated purposes. In their defence we came to learn that the following new allowances were approved at an executive session on March 30, 2010: Speaker N100m, Deputy Speaker N80m, House Leader N60m, Deputy House Leader N57.5m, Chief Whip N55m, Deputy Chief Whip N54.5m, Minority Leader N54.5m, Minority Whip N50m, Deputy Minority Leader N50m, Deputy Minority Whip N50m’.  For what job you would you say!  They also agreed payment of outstanding allowances dating way back to 1999 – 2007; all from un-authorised funds.”

     Not only  are these allowances probably much higher today, with Saraki as Senate President, President Buhari is guaranteed a monstrous fight to reduce this highest pay to political representatives anywhere in the world, Britain and the U .S inclusive. I then concluded by saying that we, the people, must storm the National Assembly and chase them back to their villages or to gaol. Already, even before the ink on the signatures of members  of the 8th Assembly could dry, they are  now expecting alerts from their banks announcing their respective share of a humongous N8.4 Billion ward robe allowance as if they have been going naked all their lives.

    How unconscionable can they get?

    No wonder a highly perceptive Dr David Kuranga, of Kuranga and Associates, has suggested that “if President Buhari is going to have any success in unravelling the complex and heavily entrenched corrupt interests in Nigeria, he is going to have to successfully tackle and overcome far more difficult opponents than the Saraki allies who just bested his party in the National Assembly.” This is very true because their ambition to eat Nigeria raw is collective and party blind.  Therefore, for President Buhari to succeed, and for Nigerians to be free from these predators – the Deputy House Speaker, Lasun Yusuff, is already quoted as defending their utterly callous N150 billion budget in a dying economy – Kuranga concludes that President Buhari, and of course, the party, should treat the senate leadership as a political insurgency until they surrender and resign from their positions and that Nigerians just must say no to a political class riding roughshod on their well-being.

    Otherwise, it will be a promise of change deferred.

    It’s a new dawn in the housing industry in Nigeria –the Nigerite story

    I seize this opportunity to congratulate the Board, Management and staff of  Nigerite Ltd, Nigeria’s leading  manufacturer in the roofing, ceiling and flooring  sub sector, which, this past week,  formally commissioned its multi billion naira Kalsi project, thus opening a new vista, and opportunity to providing fresh solutions to the Nigerian  housing industry

    I hasten to appreciate, and commend the strategic thinking of both the Board of Odua Investment Ltd,  then under the Chairmanship of  Alhaji Sharafadeen Alli, Dr Bayo Jimoh as Group Managing Director, his successor, Wale Raji  and the Etex Group, Nigerite’s Belgian partners which, with its over a hundred years experience in the field, and presence, in more than 40 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America, had the presence of mind to know that for Nigerite to retain its  premier position in  the Nigerian roofing, flooring and ceiling sub-sector, it must step up to becoming a total housing solutions company. Hence the strategic entry into the Dry Construction technology phase, which means, among other things, that a 4-bed room bungalow can now be fully delivered in 2-3 weeks, anywhere in the country.

    It gladdens the heart too  that one’s name, as Board chairman, and those of my worthy colleagues on the Nigerite Board when the project was approved, can never be missing when the history of this golden era of Nigerite, is being written. It is with a heavy heart that I recall the  extremely valuable contributions of our two elderly colleagues, Otunba Olu Adebanjo and Chief Sunny Oyekunle, the long serving Company Secretary, who were recently called to higher service. May their gentle souls rest in perfect peace.  Immense congratulations to the successive Managing Directors, especially, Monsieur Frank Le Bris, and his management colleagues who saw it to completion. I warmly congratulate the entire staff who should see this as a further guarantee of their jobs and means of livelihood.

    Manufactured from cement, quartz sand, cellulose, natural calcium silicate, and water, Kalsi boards are processed by autoclave (drying process under high pressure and temperature) for durability and dimensional stability, and have massive advantages over the traditional building methods.