The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Nigeria’s own ‘Rotten Parliament’?

    Nigeria’s own ‘Rotten Parliament’?

    What our National Assembly members take home is ungodly and inhuman.
    They should slash, instead of trying to justify it

    Even if our senators and House of Representatives members went to the National Assembly naked, they would not require N506,600 each per annum as wardrobe allowance in a country where minimum wage is N18,000. Of course we cannot stop those of them with the means to wear the best of apparels money can buy. But those who cannot should wear whatever the country can afford given its dire economic predicament. After all, the law makers were elected for the primary purpose of making laws and not for fashion parade. The rest of us do not have to go naked for our law makers to look good. Even at the all-time low N18,000 minimum wage, many states are months in arrears. Our lawmakers are not talking about this.

    That over 16 years after the N5million each furniture allowance for our legislators raised ruckus in the country we are still grappling with allowances for them, has proved that we are nowhere near getting the legislators to shed weight. About two months ago, a legislator from one of the state houses of assembly was asked on a live television show, what his take-home pay was. Apparently caught off-guard by the question from an angry caller, the lawmaker murmured some mumbo-jumbo. When he finally found his voice, he said “em em … about (I think) N1m per month”. The angry caller was not impressed by the ‘about’ and he resorted, “so, you don’t even know how much you earn monthly?” The legislator made frantic effort to justify his inexactitude. The caller then asked why the legislator was trying to justify that lawmakers’ pay was not outrageous. He replied that the caller did not know what the issues were. He said there are a lot of people that the legislators ‘settle’ and that if they did not ‘settle’ them, the legislator would not return to the house. Now, the question is: must he return to the house? Was he born there?

    One may say this legislator is naïve for revealing that much, but what he said is the truth. Most legislators want to return to the house. Yet, I have not seen any of them that has convinced anyone as to why they should receive the bogus pay they get. Even when Dimeji Bankole, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives visited The Nation when he was speaker and he was asked the same question on their pay, he laboured in vain to convince the editors that he was addressing on the issue. He brought  his pay slip to the newspaper house and even waxed dramatic by handing it out to us for perusal. But we saw beyond the miserable figure in black ink and quickly pointed out to him that what we were talking about was beyond what was contained in the say-nothing pay slip; so, he should not call dog monkey for us.

    Some legislators say they must be well paid so as to insulate them from corruption, especially from the ministries, departments and parastatals they are carrying oversight on. For me, they are talking like this because this is Nigeria. In other places, both the giver and the taker of bribes, if caught, would go to jail.

    Besides, legislators’ primary responsibility is to make laws for good governance. But our own lawmakers have placed oversight and constituency projects over and above this primary responsibility because of the quick money they make from them. Even the newly inaugurated legislators are already scrambling for what they call juicy committees in the National Assembly instead of struggling to ensure making laws for good governance. It is because of the greed for oversight and constituency projects that our senators in the 7th National Assembly passed 46 bills in 10 minutes on June 3, barely 48 hours to the end of their tenure!

    If good pay is an antidote to corruption, then our lawmakers should have little or nothing to do with the cankerworm, as some of the most pampered in the world.  Despite being well paid, some of them even in the just-ended Seventh National Assembly still got involved in scandals. If we stretch the same logic of poor pay to the police and other sectors, then it means we should understand why police men and others too are corrupt?

    The point is, the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) should ensure that whatever the legislators get is what our economy can sustain.  What obtains is outrageous. For example, as at June 2007, under a new salary package, each Senator was entitled to N53.7 million and a House of Representatives member, N47.9 million per annum. By 2013, the Nigerian lawmaker had become the world’s highest paid at N3million per month (basic salary minus outrageous allowances).  Given the new figures released for some of these emoluments, the senators are to get N4,052,800, N6,079,200 and N8,105,600m for housing, furniture and vehicles, respectively. House of Representatives members will however get N3,970,425, N5,955,637.50 and N7,940,850.50 each for the same purposes. These are mere percentages of their basic salaries and it also excluded the real money spinners for the lawmakers as contained in the fabulous constituency allowances, as well others that are hardly in the public domain.

    I am not aware there was any lawmaker that was drafted into the race. Many of them fought bitter struggles to get their tickets; many spent a fortune to get elected apparently because they expected to recoup their ‘investment’ later. But lawmaking is serious business and is meant for people who want to serve and not those who want to be served. Any of them who is not comfortable with what the country can afford should return home.

    It is fraudulent and self-serving for lawmakers to compare themselves with career civil servants as some of them are trying to do . If there is any issue with civil servants, it is not about their pay; rather, it is about corruption, particularly the ‘ghost workers’ syndrome’ and over-inflation of contracts. Many civil servants who served meritoriously for decades get nothing near what many of these political appointees get for working (?) in just four years. Our present lawmakers conveniently forget that this same job was done creditably by people on part-time basis in the First Republic.  Moreover, legislators in some other countries, including Britain and the United States of America, travel by rail; many live in rented apartments, etc. So, what is the big deal in being a lawmaker?   Why are our own lawmakers making a fetish of lawmaking?

    Our present legislators must begin to make the point that change has finally come rather than keep justifying the absurdity. Part of the ways to herald this change is by shedding some of these indefensible drains on the public till that they collect as pay, either directly or indirectly. We all must have learnt from the last general elections that Nigerians are no longer fools. Indeed, that was amply demonstrated by the protest over the wardrobe allowance last week, even though that was over-bloated. If we all agree that “charity begins at home”; then the ruling party’s lawmakers must live by this dictum. That is the only way they can make nonsense of the saying that there are no firstborns among pigs because all of them (from the oldest to the youngest), play in the mud.

    The legislators must be reminded of the British experience, specifically the public outrage that trailed the revelations by The Telegraph Group which in 2009 leaked the expense claims made by members of the United Kingdom Parliament over several years. Just as our own lawmakers are trying to shield the actual amount they take home annually, so did the British MPs too before the great revelations which caused a lot of public outrage. The MPs lost out and the matter got to the front burner of national discourse. The revelations led to a loss of confidence in politics and politicians. This was eventually followed by a large number of resignations, sackings, de-selections and retirement announcements, together with public apologies and the repayment of expenses by the over- pampered MPs. Indeed, some of them were prosecuted and convicted.

    In summary, it was sundry matters like allowances and excess payments by the British MPs that led to political reforms even beyond these issues and ultimately to the derogatory reference to the British parliament elected in 2005 as the ‘Rotten Parliament’. Our National Assembly members must let reform come from within because coming from without could be catastrophic. They should not give Nigerians the opportunity of storming the place as the French people stormed the Bastille. They should spare a thought  for the  over 75 per cent of the citizens condemned to destitution and  living on less than $2 per day. They should remember the over 40 million youths which official statistics reckon to be jobless.

  • The ruling party and the president: for the sake of Nigeria and the talakawa, will the APC and Buhari be different? (1)

    The ruling party and the president: for the sake of Nigeria and the talakawa, will the APC and Buhari be different? (1)

    The ruling party and the president? Why not the president and the ruling party? The answer to this question is simple, at least in the Nigerian political context. I am directly changing the order of things in our country where, at least under the reign of the PDP, it was unquestionably the president and the ruling party, not the ruling party and the president. In the PDP formulation, the president came first and overwhelmingly so, while the party came second, by a wide, long and deep margin. As we shall see later in the series of which this piece is the first installment, this caused great havoc for the political and constitutional order; and it was also a principal cause and means of the dispossession of the great majority of our peoples in every corner of the land. The president and the ruling party – may this formulation and all that it entails sink into the dungheap of history with the defeat of the PDP as our ruling party, amin yarabi!

    As we know, there were three presidents during the reign of the PDP: Olusegun Obasanjo, Umar Musa Yar’ Adua and Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. Without exception, these men all completely subordinated the ruling party to the total and jealous control of themselves and their henchmen. Yar’ Adua and Jonathan were, relatively speaking, weak, indecisive and clueless men but even they succeeded in bringing the ruling party, the PDP, under the complete sway of the self-interest and self-aggrandizement of themselves and their minions. With Obasanjo, this tradition of complete and unrestrained subordination of the ruling party to the control of the sitting president reached its apogee, its apotheosis. In perhaps the very worst expression of this total imposition of his self-interest, his anxieties and insecurities on the ruling party, Obasanjo forced virtually all independent minded, thinking and progressive leaders out of the party while promoting people described by the late Chinua Achebe as “politicians with low IQs” that he could manipulate to positions of power and influence within the party. With these observations in mind, I hope the reader will recognize that it is in order to subject this legacy of the PDP for the Nigerian political order to scrutiny that I have jettisoned the formulation “the president and the ruling party” and opted instead for “the ruling party and the president”. If this is the case, the question that arises is, what led me to this issue and what do I have to say about it that the reader and all compatriots in general might find informative or even thought-provoking, whether or not they are supporters of the new ruling party, the APC?

    I confess that for me, this issue arose from Abubakar Bukola Saraki’s election as Senate President by majority votes that he received, not from his party, the APC, but from the defeated former ruling party, the PDP. Concerning this act that I described in last week’s column as an ‘anti-party and anti-democratic coup of impunity”, two considerations stand out. The first consideration pertains to Bukola Saraki while the second one pertains to the President, Muhammadu Buhari. This is the first consideration:  immediately after he had secured victory by dumping his party and turning to the PDP for the majority votes that he could not get from the APC, Saraki quickly dismissed allegations that he was leaving the APC for the PDP. As a matter of fact, he vigorously reaffirmed his loyalty to the APC and scheduled a courtesy visit to the Abuja Headquarters of the Party. Nobody could miss the implications of these post-victory acts of Saraki: he had merely dumped his party temporarily; once he had obtained the high office he desperately wanted, he came back into the APC fold as if the pact with the PDP that won him the Senate Presidency was a matter of mere convenience made possible by the well-known fact that this was – and presumably still is – what the PDP is there for.

    The second consideration that pertains to Buhari is a bit more complicated. It arises from the fact that the President was completely unperturbed that Saraki dumped the APC – even if this was “temporary” – and went to the PDP for the majority votes for his election as Senate President. True enough, the President did make mild remarks of regret through his spokespersons, but on the fundamental issue of how party leaders may or may not use the party in pursuit of their political ambitions, Buhari was completely silent, so much so that as of now, Sunday, June 21, 2015, we do not know where he stands on the matter. In other words, we do know where Bukola Saraki stands on the matter: political parties are there as means of obtaining and consolidating the quest for power; whether the instrument is PDP or APC, it does not really matter as long as one’s driving ambition and goals are achieved.

    Let us be very clear and unambiguous on this observation: everyone knows that Bukola Saraki is, even by the standards of professional politicians, an inordinately ambitious man whose real and ultimate goal is the Presidency itself. He is in the APC today; if the PDP, by some stroke of unimaginable reversal of political fortunes for the country, comes back to power, Saraki will be back in that resurrected PDP, absolutely without any qualms whatsoever. That is why Saraki stands. But we do not know where Buhari stands on the mater. And we need to know. Will he be like the PDP Presidents all of who regarded the ruling party as the extension, the objectification of their personal and political grip on power? Or will he depart from that tradition and create a different order of relationship between the presidency and the ruling party in which each is a joint partner, a collaborator in the enormous tasks of uniting our peoples and redressing the terrible and unregenerate imbalance between the haves and the have-nots in our country?

    There is of course much that we do know about the President. Some things we know by facts, others we know through myths, legends and hearsay. We know that he was one of the war commanders that fought to keep the country one, this in a civil war that forever changed the nature of the country, for good and/or ill. We know also that he was one of the eight military dictators that have ruled this country. Significantly, we know that he wanted very, very much to become President, that it was only on the last of the FOUR times that he put himself in competition for the presidency that he finally won. From legends and hearsay, we learn that he leads a simple and disciplined life, devoid of the lavish and ostentatious lifestyle made possible by the enormous wealth and fortune that some of the other living former military dictators took with them when they left or were forced out of office. We know also that among all the former military autocrats, Buhari is the only one with a credible claim to economic and political populism, though whether this populism is right-wing or popular-democratic or a mix of both, it is hard to tell. Finally, we know that Buhari hated the PDP with a great passion, not only because that former ruling party kept him from power at the center by rigging itself into power each of the three previous times before the 2015 elections, but also because corruption, indiscipline and squandermania grew completely out of control in the last years of the reign of the PDP. Reflecting on this conditioned animosity toward the PDP and all it stood for, will Buhari use the awesome powers of authority, influence and patronage attached to the Nigerian presidency in a way that takes the APC away from the PDP pattern of complete subordination of the party to the president and his personal and political self-interest, anxieties, fears and obsessions?

    In the political history of our country, Muhammadu Buhari is the only man who has stood for election to the Presidency FOUR times. There is absolutely no doubt that the elections were massively rigged on each of the three previous times when he did not win. But we know also that had the elections been free, clean and fair on any of those three occasions, Buhari could not have won for the simple reason that he did not have the nation-wide plurality that is needed to win the Nigerian presidency. In other words, he could never have won on the ticket of his former party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC). Only with the mergers that created the APC was he finally able to win the presidency. Apart from his own former party, two other political formations, among others, made the founding of the APC possible. These were the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and a large critical mass of defectors from the PDP. This means that in a manner that promises to be different from how the PDP became Nigeria’s ruling party and went on to produce three presidents before it was finally consumed by its internal contradictions and the electoral anger of the Nigerian people, the APC and Buhari not only have to govern far more democratically and justly than the PDP ever did, they have to do this on the basis of hitherto unprecedented patterns of genuine partnership and collaboration between the party and the presidency.

    Buhari’s response to the Saraki “coup” against the party in the Senate President elections last week does not offer any sign that the President fully appreciates this fact, this necessity. In next week’s concluding piece in the series, we shall explore this proposition at much greater length, basing the central argument on the simple but profound contention that if the APC and the President are on the same page in turning our economy, politics and society around from the ravages of the PDP years, the fears and anxieties that currently act like impediments to forming a strong, vibrant and regenerative partnership between the new ruling party and the presidency will disappear.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Odolaiye Aremu sings for Azeez Arisekola Alao

    Eniti aiye banfe (When a person is beloved by the world)
    Bo f’ewe dewu yi o ye e (Even if he makes for himself a dress of leaves
    It will be found very befitting)
    Bi ikan ba duro, ile o la (If the all-consuming termite tarries
    It will be consumed by the earth)

    As soon as the warm winds from London brought the shocking news of the death of the great Ibadan business mogul, entrepreneur, philanthropist extraordinary and influential broker behind the political scene, Alhaji Azeez Arisekola Alao, snooper went in search of the classic by Odolaiye Aremu, the great Ilorin musician and exponent of dadakuada music.

    Snooper is not always on the same political page with Arisekola, particularly during the military inquisition and the drama that led to the annulment of the best election ever held in Nigeria and the death in malignant custody of MKO Abiola.  But this column always insists on giving a person his dues. The unprecedented outpouring of grief in Ibadan and environs shows how much beloved this man was and how positively he touched the lives of many people through his various empowerment schemes.

    There are important lessons to be learnt from Arisekola’s life. First is that it is possible to lift one’s self up by the bootstraps no matter how adverse and penurious the circumstances.  The second is that having lifted himself up, one must never remove the grimy ladder from those who may be equally gifted but without the grit and determination.

    A precociously bright student, the young Azeez was the finalist in the entrance examination to Christ School in 1960. In the same year, he also came third in the entrance examination to Lagelu Grammar School. But the straitened circumstances of his parents could not allow him to go to secondary school. It was the end of the road for the young fellow in terms of formal education.

    But not to be cowed by fate or bullied into submission by adversity, the youth ploughed his mental gifts, eye for details and determination into the business of buying and selling. He made a roaring and extraordinary success of it. In a few years, Arisekola became a household word in the western parts of the country, particularly Ibadan and environs. Those who have been hearing his name for a very long time would be surprised that Arisekola was still under seventy when he answered the final call.

    As soon as fortunes began smiling on him, Arisekola initiated a Scholarship Scheme for the poor and the talented indigent. He named it after the father who was unable to send him to school. It was an act of exceptional nobility and filial devotion.  Numerous examples abound of his kindness, courtesy and generosity. He was a patron of politicians in need of economic rehabilitation as well as a partisan of the desperately poor in search of their daily bread. This feudal munificence was in keeping with the Islamic injunction. Arisekola was a man of muscular devotion to the Islamic faith.

    Despite his Croesus-like wealth and his Midas touch going forward, the late business mogul conducted and carried himself in public with amazing grace and simplicity. He wore no airs. Although not a politician in the formal sense of the word, Arisekola was the quintessential man of the people. He was the sort of person who could haul a former classmate out of a crowd and engage him in public bantering. There was always something about him of the home boy made good and an unrepentant Ibadan nationalist.

    Snooper recalls a chance encounter with the late billionaire at a public event in Ibadan last year. Arisekola’s warmth and lacerating wit was a reporter’s delight any day.  The Aare Musulumi seized the High Table with his impish humour and irreverence sending yours sincerely almost toppling with laughter. May Allah receive the departed.

    This piece is republished because it never made it to the internet edition of the paper.

  • Saraki’s consolidation trips

    Among the few trips Senate President Bukola Saraki has undertaken since he emerged president of the senate, his visits to former military head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar, and former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, stand out for what they signify. Senator Saraki has been under some strain concerning the manner he emerged Senate President. With 51 All Progressives Congress (APC) absent from the senate on June 9 on account of a meeting they were to hold with President Muhammadu Buhari, the senate leadership election was conspiratorially held by affirmation in a matter of minutes. The snap ‘election’ was held perhaps because Senator Saraki had defied his party which preferred other candidates for the senate’s leadership positions. Since then, neither Senator Saraki nor his party had known peace.

    To mitigate the doubtful legitimacy of his position, Senator Saraki has embarked on panic trips to the nation’s opinion moulders and respected former leaders, especially the vociferous ones among them. This is where Gen Abubakar and Chief Obasanjo come in. The Senate President visited Gen Abubakar last Thursday, and Chief Obasanjo last Friday. It is not clear what they discussed, but it is almost certain he is attempting to legitimise his heretical move against his party, especially the aspect of conspiring to elect a PDP senator as the Deputy Senate President. Whether Senator Saraki can force a fait accompli on his party is not certain; but if he is to secure any legitimacy at all, he will have to do it through his party, not by the imprimatur of party outsiders.

  • The sum of all our hopes and frustrations

    Nigerians had hoped to kick corruption doorwards if not outdoors since the general consensus seems to be that politicians have turned the national treasury into a sort of Aladdin’s cave to which they alone have the password, key and right of entry and have denied every other Nigerian the same right to enter

    I do not know what the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission is thinking by allocating these huge sums of money for the national assembly allowances; nor do I know what the assembly is thinking by accepting it. From news reports, I read that our senators are to enjoy N24m and the federal representatives are to enjoy about N20m as allowances and emoluments every month or is it every quarter now, I hardly know which. Whichever one it is, it is bad.

    These crazy sums are especially gruesome considering the financial situation of the country right now when we are borrowing to eat. I think the actual truth is that the collective national thinking outrightly condemned those sums as totally unreasonable a long time ago. The last national assembly nevertheless went ahead to enjoy them against our better sentiments. And now, because we the people did not insist then, the ugly problem has reared its head again. What is worse, from news commentaries, it is said that our assembly men and women insist on collecting their emoluments before they even sit. I think the common parlance for this is upfront. Haba! Which one of us gets his/her salary before working in this country?

    I honestly do not know what all these huge sums are about, and what work they really compensate for. Are they supposed to reward work done on behalf of the country, such as physically carrying it on their shoulders like the legendary Atlas is said to be doing carrying the world year in, year out? I think teachers are already doing that; masons such as bricklayers are doing that too, and they do not get anything near .0000000005 per cent of that sum. I also think that roadside labourers, construction engineers, geologists, housewives, etc., who break sweat working for hours under the hot sun, you know, ordinary people like you and me, are already doing that and they are not paid anything near that sum.

    Indeed, after working for hours on end under the hot sun, some are not even paid at all. I know graduates in professional fields who have toiled under the sun for years carrying this nation till they are almost hunched in the back. For their pay, they have been told ‘come back tomorrow.’ For many of them, tomorrow has not come. There are yet others who are middling in circumstances you and I cannot even begin to imagine, hovels at best, and paid near to nothing.

    Yes, there are many states and local governments which have not been able to pay their civil service workers, teachers, etc., because of supposed shortages, even as we speak. There are people whose earnings are not even as structured as those of civil servants and who look on the latter with envy. You know because they mutter things like, ‘at least someone is owing you; one day, he’ll pay you. What about me; who is going to pay me?’ You’ve guessed it; those are called the unemployed. Unfortunately, some of our honourable assembly members were once in that category.

    Let me tell you the sum of our hopes. By electing Buhari as president, the honourable members of this country had kind of hoped to use these four years to at least be able to kick corruption doorwards, if not downright outdoors. The general consensus seems to be that politicians have turned the national treasury into a sort of Aladdin’s cave to which they alone have the password, key and right of entry and have denied every other Nigerian the same right to enter. Seriously, awarding lawmakers a wardrobe allowance of N1.7/1.4m for senators and federal representatives respectively does not show much hope for our hope. Indeed, you can say that those gruesome sums sum up our hopelessness.

    That is why I want to ask myself a series of questions. Whatever happened to patriotism, vision, nation building, love of one’s country, sacrifice or selflessness? Yep, the fact that I am asking myself these questions does not necessarily mean I have the answers. You find your own answers. For one thing, I believe that patriotism seems to have travelled and left the country denuded; it has left it bereft of men of ideas, vision and goodwill. Only men of wood are left to take charge of the affairs of the country.

    Sorry to say this, but there are too many politicians who have nothing to offer the country by way of tangible ideas except to collect these huge sums for their personal enjoyment. Many only go to mark their presence in the chambers; many are said not to show up for much of the year. Many there are too, whose main preoccupation seems to be organising themselves into caucuses to determine outcomes of motions, bills and who goes into juicy committees to bring ‘something home’. Their days are spent holding endless meetings determining ‘outcomes’. For instance I read in the news that oil barons and the like, the very people killing the country, jumped on board the senate president elections. Yep, their oily hands were in it; and that comes with all kinds of implications. Yet, these politicians are paid the princely sums we have been talking about. I tell you, those sums represent the sum of all our frustrations.

    So, what happens to all our hopes of effectively getting rid of corruption soonest? I believe it is alive. All you have to do is do a travelogue into social media and you will get a feel of the people’s thinking. People are not fazed by what is happening. Without ever having sat together at a meeting, it is as if they have come to an agreement that they are only giving Buhari’s government a chance to clean up this mess, and others such as the purchase of unneeded jets by governors, before going on to the next course of action. What that is?  I don’t know, maybe to spontaneously combust; I am not people. It appears though that the people are determined not to be frustrated for too long.

    As we said on this column a few weeks ago, our greater disappointment is in the NLC who has a big enough reason to call us, the workers, out in the matter of these gargantuan assembly emoluments. The failure to stem unreasonable executive and legislative spending years ago has resulted in the failure we are witnessing today – inability to pay workers.

    The other body, the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), which is said to be responsible for fixing these wages in the first place, clearly has some explaining to do. It needs to explain to the nation its generative formulae that enabled it reach this unheard of conclusion. Otherwise, we would be forced to ask again, what were they thinking?

    Definitely, I don’t think Nigerians are taking this matter lightly this time. Apart from those talking about a peaceful revolution, some have organised themselves into protest groups. The first of such groups has called on the assembly on a courtesy visit to lay down its grievance, you know, just like the mafia does. Typically, the mafia people first tell you, smilingly, how unhappy they are with a problem which only you can eliminate. The next step will eliminate the smile.

    Before we call in the mafia-style sleight of hand, I think it is time for us to seriously begin to talk about part-time politicians. Someone muted the idea a while back and it has caught on with me. How about you? That may just pull us out of the sum of these sticky jams.

  • Shame of our nation

    It’s always hard to resist the temptation of lamenting the sorry state of our development each time one travels out the country. I usually try not to get despondent about our situation believing that as Christians usually say, all will be well sooner or later, but the rate of progress is not as encouraging as it should be.

    Too many things are just not right in the country and one is not sure how soon we can recover from years of missed opportunities for the overall development of the country.

    A trip to South Africa penultimate week once again got me thinking about how much we need to do to catch up and take our rightful place in the comity of nations, at least in the continent.

    Right from the road leading to what we call our  international airport in Lagos, one is confronted with the shameful decay of our infrastructural facilities. Potholes and overgrown weeds dot portions of the road)

    A foreigner who drives along the airport road on his first ever visit to the country is immediately confronted with the image of a country in a state of disrepair.

    I remember that former president Goodluck Jonathan was alarmed by the poor state of the road during a visit to Lagos and he promised to direct immediate repairs. As usual, nothing happened till his tenure ended.

    Reconstruction of the car park has remained uncompleted for years and has resulted in indiscriminate parking and inconvenience for passengers.

    Inside the airport, the air-conditioners were on holiday due to ongoing repairs, while the conveyor (+belt) managed to work with some parts falling off.

    The toilet facilities were also below the standard of an international airport. I tried to use the electric hand dryer and it didn’t work.

    There is simply no basis for comparing our airport with that of Johannesburg and Cape town which I passed through during my recent visit.

    The trip also reminded me of the shame that while other African countries like South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia and others still had their national airlines, the Nigerian Airways is no more. Some of our private airlines which fly international routes unfortunately do not have good reputation.

    With all the money allocated to the aviation sector by successive governments, the state of our airports is nothing to be proud of. It is not unusual to hear foreign passengers loudly complain about the poor state of our facilities and wonder why we have remained a giant with a feet of clay.

    With the change promised by the new government, one can only hope that the aviation sector and others in the country will witness real transformation as quickly as possible. For too long, our governments have paid lip service to implementing the right policies needed to turn the situation around for good.

    We cannot afford to continue to be the laughing stock among other nations, some of which do not have the kind of resources we have to provide adequate infrastructures. President Muhammadu Buhari must make good his promise of ensuring that the right persons are appointed as Ministers and heads of  other agencies. There is a lot that needs to be done to redeem the image of the country. It is better late than never.

  • Saraki and APC’s seething cauldron

    Saraki and APC’s seething cauldron

    It was clear from the beginning that the All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders were deeply suspicious of Senator Bukola Saraki, and were unwilling to have him elected as the Senate President of the 8th Senate. He had been Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Governor of Kwara State, a defector among many others, including five sitting governors, to the APC since 2013, and one-term senator. He worked hard for his new party, risked so much, and together with scores of APC leaders and bulwarks, secured sweet victory against the prematurely ageing and considerably conceited PDP. In a party of some 60 senators, 210 Representatives, and 22 governors, he had a following that could not be ignored, and a presence that transcended but unfortunately divided his new party. To many party faithful, leaders and the wider public, it was inconceivable that a few APC leaders, essentially ensconced in the party’s headquarters, could seek to elbow Senator Saraki out of the senate leadership race.

    The distrust for him was, however, deep, though constricted. Without saying it, his opponents thought him excessively ambitious, unprincipled, amoral, ruthless, and without filial — whether of party or family — loyalty. Before and during his brief campaign for the senate presidency, he was accused of bringing every vice in his being into the service of that ruthless ambition. He disagreed. He believed he had a right to be ambitious, and in particular to aspire to the leadership of the senate. He saw nothing deeply offensive about being Machiavellian, for in his estimation, no one approaches the goals of power and office with the squeamish diffidence of a neophyte. As a veteran of many political wars with an eye permanently fixed for the main chance, he intuitively understands the need for strong-arm tactics. But in executing his plans for the senate leadership, he inadvertently but remorselessly justified the fears and suspicion of the party leadership.

    The party had conducted a mock election to present consensus candidates for the National Assembly (NASS) leadership, to wit, Senator Ahmed Lawan and Representative Femi Gbajabiamila. That consensus, from which Senator Saraki and his counterpart in the lower chamber, Yakubu Dogara, from Bauchi State dissociated themselves, woefully failed to fly in the face of what many uncritical members of the public regarded as the APC’s distasteful attempt to circumscribe the tenets of democracy. The consensus, they said, was either undemocratic, unrepresentative, or that it dangerously impugned the virtues of fairness and equity. Senator Saraki represented a solid group of PDP defectors in the APC, and that group was in danger of being short-changed. Worse, they argued, rather than view the party consensus as a real consensus, it was in fact a consensus engineered by Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the party leader accused of being both a control freak and power monger.

    Even though he and his group were invited to all APC meetings where the consensus was to be built, Senator Saraki was smart enough to recognise that the party leadership was suspicious of him. He rightly gauged that the leaders had no intention of giving him the ticket. He therefore took his destiny in his own hands and planned his war. He discountenanced his party’s change mantra and deployed all the old tactics the PDP was famous for to build a devastating coalition. He coaxed and cajoled legislators and reporters, and adopted scaremongering tactics.  No one could quote him directly on some of the stories that inundated mainstream and social media, but the suggestion came from his bivouac that Asiwaju Tinubu was deliberately and malevolently running rings round President Muhammadu Buhari, after virtually installing many other party leaders and popularly elected officials. No one in the party should have so much power concentrated in his hands, they concluded.

    The consequences of these campaigns were that Senator Saraki upped the ante, played Senators Ali Ndume and Ike Ekweremadu against each other, negotiated his party’s clear victory away by supporting a PDP senator for the position of deputy senate president, and seized upon the APC’s momentary lapse of concentration to engineer an election in which more than 50 senators were away at a botched meeting with the president. There were indications he could still have won had he and his backers, most of them snickering PDP ranking senators, allowed polling to proceed honourably. But citing legalistic reasons, and feigning ignorance of the meeting called by the party with the president, Senator Saraki stole behind his opponents and dealt them a death blow. The style, not to say the motive, rankled against the new philosophy the APC sold to the electorate during electioneering. But Senator Saraki justified his methods as completely legal, and even moral, for his opponents also deployed underhand methods to disenfranchise him.

    It is not certain what the APC can do to remedy the problem or assuage the deep public embarrassment and humiliation it faced with Senator Saraki’s election. The party’s leaders have, however, finally reconciled themselves to his victory. But, in a perverse way, given the style, method and the structure of Senator Saraki’s victory, the APC leaders’ opposition to him was comprehensively justified. It is not easy to defy your party, but he did it robustly. In addition, he struck a deal with the opposition PDP, undermined his own party, and vitiated its March and April polls victory. He underscored what APC leaders probably feared most: that Senator Saraki was definitely not sufficiently APC, and could not be trusted to lead the party’s policy and ideological charge in the senate or elsewhere, notwithstanding his contributions. There was no emotional commitment between him and his new party other than as a vehicle for achieving political goals, they insinuated. Though he scorned the idea of returning to the PDP, as some have speculated he might do soon, it is all but clear he remains indistinguishable from his former party. He may not defect; but he is not in love either. As every family knows, there is no marriage as sterile as one in which a spouse is emotionally indifferent.

    Senator Saraki is not only capable, as he has shown, of brutally hurting party relationships over what he described as unjustifiable wrong done him, his election and the cohabitation he has consummated with the PDP will inordinately complicate the task of building the APC into a left-of-centre organisation with clear, progressive and enduring philosophy. His style is idiosyncratically PDP. He is, therefore, inured to the PDP’s vices, shenanigans and deplorable style. In any relationship he strikes, Senator Saraki will most probably insist on his own way, no matter the cost. But more humiliatingly for the APC, its failure to enthrone its candidates will considerably weaken it as a party, structurally and morally, and make it almost redundant. It is so weak now that rather than any of the coalition of victors in the NASS leadership contest defecting to another party, the possibility of seizing control of the party at a later date is even much more likely. To all intents and purposes, the APC is now either asphyxiating or already apoplectic.

    The party will have to fight scrupulously and cleverly to reclaim respect and impose discipline. If they push too hard, they could self-destruct. And if they approach the grave challenges facing them so early in the day lackadaisically, the party could become inconsequential. It is even harder to understand why some notable party leaders were not sensitive to the deeply nuanced politics of the NASS elections. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, probably because of his ambition for 2019, has thrown in his lot unreflectively with Senator Saraki. He is himself not the most principled politician around, given his capriciousness and flighty political dalliances. He has built a reputation for unpredictability to the point that every scintilla of presidential character in him seems irretrievably lost. Surprisingly too, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, whom many, including this column, had touted as a future president, was disappointingly unable to appreciate the nuances and implications of the Saraki revolt, and had indeed even celebrated the comprehensiveness of his party’s humiliation in both legislative chambers, humiliations he regarded as triumphs.

    President Buhari may have his misgivings about the role the party attempted to play in the NASS elections, especially in view of his conviction that the legislature should be completely independent. Nor, is it clear how much he is bothered by insinuations of the role and influence Asiwaju Tinubu is alleged to be amassing to himself. But so far, neither the president nor Alhaji Atiku, nor still Mallam Tambuwal, has demonstrated deep understanding of what their party should be, and how it should be run, not to talk of the power and influence it should command. If they understand that without the party, their positions and ambitions could suffer constant reverses, none of them has shown it. Indeed, it is not even clear where analysts got the impression that it is wrong for either the president or the party to show interest in who become NASS leaders. Nor is it clear where they adapted their theory of complete legislative independence. The president in particular has been misadvised on the legislature, especially the relationship between the presidency and the lawmakers. It is certainly not undemocratic for him to be interested in who lead NASS, or have friends and supporters in both chambers. More, he should be interested in NASS leaders whom he can described as passionate party men and loyalists, those who can help give a concrete feel to his ideas and visions of the country.

    President Buhari may be seeking to burnish his suspect democratic credentials by bending over backwards to allow democracy to take root in all the branches of and arms of government. But the country still needs a strong president, one who has definite and visionary ideas of what to do, how to do them, and when. Those who have the president’s ears must nudge him to open up to edifying power groups across the country rather than inadvertently sequester himself in the captive hands of eloquent, sinister and capricious politicians and governors. He should have studied the implication of a Saraki senate before deciding on non-interference. Senator Saraki’s campaign style was so open, so disavowing of everything the APC stands for, and so pregnant with gloomy forebodings that they recommend themselves for the president’s determined, even if subtle, countervailing moves. His refusal to intervene, not to add his reluctance to inaugurate the 8th NASS, spoke more to his incomplete understanding of democratic precepts than his salutary regard for democratic norms and an independent legislature. Even his statement after the NASS elections neither captured the tragic undertones of those elections nor gave a clue as to just how forceful, prescient and powerful he hoped to be as president.

    Senator Saraki’s campaign style and controversial election have given fillip to a weak and struggling PDP. He exhumed them, and gave them life. He also surrounded his campaign with men like Dino Melaye, a politician so enamoured of injustice and undemocratic practices that he poisons everything he touches. The PDP, which should strive to redefine itself, and especially the ideas it hopes to project in the next few years, has instead been given a soft landing and leeway to take a shot at the presidency in 2019. The APC has not really and fully defined itself. The PDP’s unprecedented involvement in the leadership of the NASS will complicate APC’s journey of discovery and definition. What is clear now in NASS is the triumph of a group dedicated to conservative approach to politics, society and economy. Because the NASS elections witnessed dangerous compromises, APC will be compelled to tread softly and slowly, if not emptied of its soul and inner core.

    The NASS elections also indicate that the APC has not found the formula to grapple with the inchoate ideas, controversial standards and acute restiveness of the party’s Young Turks, many of whom resent party discipline and control, and don’t get along very well with party leaders. Senator Saraki’s election in particular has left a deep wound in the party that will be difficult to treat. APC leaders must therefore adopt more imaginative consensual and inclusive political tactics to cater to the needs of the many groups in the party. But perhaps the frictions and fractures displayed so early in the day will help the party to moderate its methods and find more ingenious ways of communicating its nuanced march into the future. If this is not done forcefully and soon, the PDP, which has found the APC’s fault lines, will exploit the situation desperately and ruthlessly.

    Nigerian democracy lacks depth, direction and quality. The APC was expected to be the tool to recalibrate these standards. In view of what happened last Tuesday, especially how some analysts erroneously thought the results of the NASS leadership elections bode well both for democracy and diffusion of power, Nigeria still has a long way to go. That journey cannot be helped by Senator Saraki’s victory, let alone his style and ambition, which come at the expense of his party. Sadly for the APC, it seems that only a few of its members really appreciate what the country is up against and how it should transcend the self-inflicted problems of a poorly drafted constitution, national redefinition, and national rebirth. The problem is enormous. Given the fractious coalition that gave APC victory in the general elections, not to talk of the anticipated clash of egos in the party, that problem will be with us far longer than we fear.

  • 49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari = Saraki’s anti-party, anti-democratic ‘coup’ of impunity

    49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari = Saraki’s anti-party, anti-democratic ‘coup’ of impunity

    Friday, May 12, 2015: as I write this column, a meeting is being held between the President, Muhammadu Buhari, all elected members of the APC in the Senate and the national leaders of the new ruling party. The intention is to resolve the crisis sparked by the ‘coup’ carried out against the party by Senator Abubakar Bukola Saraki through the brazen manner in which he aligned himself with the defeated former ruling party, the PDP, to get himself elected Senate President. It is likely that by the time this column is published on Sunday, May 14, the crisis would have been resolved to the satisfaction of the bickering parties involved in the crisis. This is unlikely, but it is not completely impossible. We are still very close to the era of the PDP’s rule, together with its accustomed habit of lurching endlessly from one crisis to another. Thus, if this particular crisis is resolved, the new ruling party may very well lurch into another one and this will continue until the ghosts of the PDP years have been laid to rest or sent permanently into the netherworld of historical oblivion. Meanwhile, in this article, I wish to reflect on some rather extraordinary aspects of Saraki’s “coup”. As we shall see, the big lesson, the important “take-away” from this ‘coup’ is the frank and sober recognition that though PDP was electorally defeated, the defeat is yet to extend to the party’s deep roots in the subsoil of the endlessly amoral ethos of political elites in all our ruling class parties.

    As the details of the Saraki ‘coup’ have been widely reported, I shall draw attention in this article only to those aspects that I consider the highlights. For me, perhaps the most salient of these highlights are those indicated in the bizarre ‘arithmetic’ in the title of this article: 49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari. Saraki belongs to the APC, though of course he was once a chieftain of the PDP. Because a caucus of his new party, the APC, chose someone else to support for the Senate Presidency, Saraki dumped his party and went to the PDP from which he got the overwhelming majority of the votes that gave him the Senate Presidency. But please note that even with 49 votes, the PDP could not have secured the position for Saraki precisely because 49 is 6 votes shy of the simple majority of 55 that any contestant needs to win the Senate Presidency. This in effect means that in this bizarre “arithmetic”, 8 is at the very least as important as 49: Saraki absolutely needed those 8 defectors from the APC that linked up with the 49 PDP Senators to produce the winning majority of 57. But then, along comes the most critical number in this “arithmetic” of electoral sleaze, this being Buhari’s 1. Before I come to a discussion of this most significant number in this “arithmetic” permit me to briefly dwell on a few other details of Saraki’s pact with the PDP in open defiance of his party and its electoral victory in the recent general elections.

    As part of his pact with his former party, the PDP, Saraki and his 8 APC accomplices rewarded the PDP with the posts of the Deputy Senate President (Ike Ekweremadu, Enugu-West) and Senate Leader (David Mark, former Senate President). It should be noted here that as soon as the leadership of the PDP sensed that the APC senatorial body had fragmented into factions jockeying for leadership posts, it instructed all its members to act together to align with Saraki’s disgruntled faction and exploit the situation to the maximum extent possible. In the event, the capture of the posts of Senate Leader and Senate Deputy President by a party still licking the wounds of a massive electoral rejection by Nigerians is nothing short of spectacular. This has to be one of the exceptions in modern political history in which a defeated party that has less than half of the total number of seats in a legislative chamber nonetheless wins the posts of Senate Leader and Deputy Senate President. Indeed, as Buhari meets with the two bickering factions today with a view to mending broken fences, this anomaly in which the Nigerian people elected APC only for the PDP to defeat the APC in the Senate will be on everyone’s mind.

    This leads directly to the issue of the most important number or integer in our strange ‘arithmetic’, this being Buhari’s 1 that combined with PDP’s 49 and APC’s 8 to make Saraki’s ‘coup’ possible. Admittedly, this was/is a non-casting vote for the simple reason that the President is not a member of the Senate. With regard to this single all-powerful Buhari vote that is more virtual than actual, perhaps the most important observation to make here is that in the course of this week when this crisis has unraveled, Buhari’s position has evolved gradually to the point where today he is meeting with both the Saraki and Lawan factions. His very first view, as expressed by his Special Adviser (Media and Publicity), Femi Adesina, was that though regrettable and against the interest of the party, Saraki’s election as Senate President was a fait accompli that had to be accepted if only because it “appeared to have followed due constitutional process”. Indeed, Buhari in this first response to the crisis went as far as to assert that he was willing to work with whoever the lawmakers elected.

    To say the least, these were astonishing remarks from the President. The first observation is completely erroneous since close to half of Senate members were absent when Saraki’s election took place, a situation that has about it all the marks of the many infamous instances when the PDP conducted its primaries or impeached state governors and assemblymen with only a fraction of members present. Particularly troubling in this first response of Buhari was the assertion that he had no preferred candidate for any leadership posts in the National Assembly and was willing to work with whoever the lawmakers elected. Please note that this assertion was not made in a vacuum; it was made after the PDP had aligned with Saraki’s minority faction within his own Party, the APC and as part of the deal elected David Mark as Senate Leader and Ike Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate Leader. Above all else, please note that Buhari expressed these initial views after the entire leadership of his own party, the APC, had rejected Saraki’s ‘coup’ absolutely without any equivocation. Indeed, note too, that Saraki has thanked the President again and again for not siding with the Party leaders in rejecting his election as Senate President.

    There is a more sinister view of Buhari’s role in Saraki’s “49PDP + 8APC + 1Buhari” coup against his party, but I remain unsure whether or not there is any credence to it. This is the view that Buhari and the Presidency may have as a matter of fact deliberately lured most of the APC Senators away from the Senate when the inauguration of the 8th National Assembly and the vote on the Senate Presidency took place. The story is that the inauguration of the new National Assembly had been postponed and Buhari was instead going to meet all the APC Senators at the National Conference Centre to try to resolve the crisis between the two factions. Saraki and his defectors stayed at the National Assembly and went on with the election; meanwhile, the President never showed up at the National Conference Centre to meet the Lawan Unity Group. This story, this view is not implausible. For me, it just stops short of providing elements of action and reaction, words and deeds that would indicate that this early in his administration, Buhari is already so wary of the constraints of party discipline and party supremacy on the presidency that he was willing to clear the path for Saraki to go outside the APC to clinch the post of Senate President.

    At any rate, by the end of the week, definitely by Thursday evening, indications were coming from the Presidency that Buhari was moving away from regarding Saraki’s coup as a fait accompli and also that the President is a party loyalist. And so in place of Femi Adesina, Special Adviser (Media and Publicity), one so-called Presidential Spokesman, Garba Shehu, did the rounds of media outlets to express a distance between Buhari and Saraki, together with the staff of the National Assembly that had participated in Saraki’s election. Mr. Shehu indeed went as far as to assert vigorously that Buhari respects and would uphold the supremacy of the party that brought him to power. Moreover, Shehu asked the public to take note of the fact that the President had not called Saraki or any of the other putative winners of the National Assembly leadership posts to congratulate them.

    It is deeply symptomatic of how much this crisis within the APC is embedded in the legacy of the PDP that Buhari himself has not personally uttered a word on the crisis. This is, quintessentially, the PDP style, from presidents to governors: responses to crises rocking the party and the nation to their foundations are left to special assistants and spokespersons. This is meant to leave all guessing, all musing on exactly where the boss stands. Buhari even appears in this matter to have directly copied Jonathan’s distribution of duties between Doyin Okupe and Rueben Abati in his own two “voices” this week, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu. In this pair of media stand-ins for the President, one person, like Okupe, was blunt, bullish and simplistic while the other, like Abati, was more media-friendly, nuanced and conciliatory. In the end, both but represent two sides of the same coin, this being the “coin” of a conception and a practice of power that stands sovereign over party, nation and the people.

    This is part of the PDP legacy. If by the end of this week we still do not know exactly where Buhari stands in this Saraki ‘coup’ against the APC, if we still have to get his feelings and thoughts from his double-headed media representatives, know, dear reader, that the PDP’s astonishing gains in the Senate elections this week run much wider and deeper than we realize.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The fear out there

    The fear out there

    Can Saraki fight corruption?

    President Muhammadu Buhari became an issue in the last presidential election because of his antecedent in the anti-corruption war. The ‘Change’ slogan of the All Progressives Congress (APC) under which he contested itself became appealing to Nigerians as a result of this perception of Buhari as a man with zero tolerance for corruption. So, Buhari’s victory at the polls was Nigerians’ powerful statement of rejection of the Goodluck Jonathan administration and its romance with corruption which it glorified as ‘stealing’.

    That was why many Nigerians were shocked by what transpired in the National Assembly last Tuesday, when Senator Bukola Saraki was elected Senate President. He was able to get 34 votes from senators of his former party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as well as 23 from the APC, a clear indication of the gulf in the party. This was at a time majority of the other APC senators were said to have gone to honour an invitation from President Buhari, probably in a last ditch effort to mediate in the crisis that had rocked the party before Tuesday and make the party speak with one voice in the election.

    Although the APC does not have two-thirds of the membership of the Senate, it has a simple majority. With that, Nigerians went to sleep after the elections, thinking that they had done their bit to give the party the opportunity to dictate the policy thrust in the National Assembly, which is crucial in the fight against corruption.

    The same situation applies to the House of Representatives where the APC also has simple majority. Speaker Yakubu Dogara who (alongside Senator Saraki) defied the party to contest the position of speaker defeated the party’s favoured candidate, Femi Gbajabiamila, by a slight margin of 182 votes to 174. Apparently, the development in the Senate influenced the voting pattern in the House because the south west (where Gbajabiamila comes from) alone could not have produced the vice president, Senate President as well as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Apparently too, the crisis reflected the party’s inability to reconcile the different tendencies in its fold, especially with regards to the legislature’s leadership, a thing that eventually led to the mock primary that it held on June 6, preparatory to the inauguration of the National Assembly on June 9.

    Regrettably, the mock primary was itself mocked by the Saraki group which rejected its outcome outright and decided to defy the party by standing for election into the National Assembly positions against the party’s directive. Senator Saraki and his group promptly reported in the National Assembly and went straight to business. The rest is history.

    It is instructive though that, in a Senate with 108 members (one is dead), the upper legislative house started on such a shaky note. The APC initially threatened to deal with Senator Saraki and Co. even as some other senators also threatened to go to court to challenge the process of Saraki’s election. Unless the matter is amicably resolved, the eventual winner of the caucuses flexing muscles would depend on a lot of factors, including financial inducement, given the role that money was said to have played in the Senate even on Tuesday. This position is further strengthened by reports that some of the APC senators have been pledging to work with Senator Saraki.

    But the incident should not have caught anyone by surprise, unless we want to deceive ourselves. It was inevitable, whether in the long or the short run. The surprise element is that it came this early.  When you have political juggernauts and those who see themselves in that light in an alliance, there is bound to be problem. Remember too, the way and manner the APC was formed is another issue. It was not as if most of the people there are bound by any ideology; they just came together by happenstance. And that happenstance was the common enemy: former President Goodluck Jonathan. So, the only consideration that brought the different people from different backgrounds into the APC was the need to ease out the former president, probably for different reasons, too. It is now that that has been achieved that the centripetal tendency is now giving way to the centrifugal contradictions.

    But let me leave politics to politicians. After all, some of the APC senators who earlier said they would not accept the result of the senate election are reported to have resolved to work with Senator Saraki. These politicians, they work in mysterious ways, and that is why it is difficult to stick out one’s neck for them! I hear the reason for the volte face is to enable them be in the good books of Senator Saraki for consideration for juicy committee appointments!

    That, if true, is part of my fear for our politics. But my main worry is about Senator Saraki’s emergence as Senate President and the likely implications for the Buhari administration’s anti-corruption war. Even the uninitiated knows that President Buhari won the presidential elections because of his anti-corruption credentials. Indeed, I said in this column after the retired general emerged the presidential hopeful of the APC that the PDP was in trouble. Even the PDP knew; and that was why they resorted to hate campaign when they should be advertising their achievements.

    Mercifully, I am not alone in my fears that President Buhari’s anti-corruption war may soon enter into some troubled waters with the developments in the National Assembly; many other people share a similar sentiment.  Indeed, some of them called on Tuesday as the event unfolded to ask how the war would be won with Senator Saraki as the Number Three Citizen. Many of my colleagues received the same message either via personal calls or through text messages. Will Senator Saraki be comfortable when laws are to be made to make people who once grounded our banks pay for their crime? Will he be at home with laws or efforts to make those who exploited and are still exploiting Nigerians through fuel subsidy account for their actions? Or will he be at ease when the powers that are keeping Nigerians in perpetual darkness despite the humongous amounts of dollars we have spent on power projects are asked to vomit the public funds that they had swallowed? These and many more other questions went on simultaneously in my mind and made me uncomfortable throughout last Tuesday and even for the better part of Wednesday. I am just recovering from the stupor. Again, many people who sent similar messages of depression wondered aloud if this would not be a mere continuation of the business as usual in the Senate.

    It should be understood that there is nothing personal about my fears and Senator Saraki. It is just a matter of his antecedent and the antecedents of some of those behind him. I have no doubt Senator Saraki would be shocked if he conducts an independent opinion poll about what I am talking about. Of course I am not unaware that some people would want to ask whether some other people or persons are better than Senator Saraki when the issue is corruption. But that is beside the point. Those people are not the country’s Number One or Number Two citizen or even Number Three; even if they were, they had served in different periods, including when the government did not see any need to deal the corruption cankerworm a serious blow that would make all other things fall in place, because corruption is at the root of almost all our problems in the country.

    I have said it before. And I am restating it; that corruption is not the easiest thing to fight because it would always fight back. To put it bluntly, not a few persons saw Senator Saraki’s emergence as part of the plot by corruption to put a clog in the wheel of President Buhari’s anti-corruption battle, even if the ruling party itself contributed inadvertently or otherwise to the development. I can only hope this is a misplaced fear. I sincerely pray so. For now, however, I hold my peace.

  • The new NASS: old struggle with new armour

    The new NASS: old struggle with new armour

    What happened last Tuesday is worse than mere carpet crossing; it is a coup d’etat against the ruling party, a relic of the old political culture that citizens voted against last April.

    Many of regular readers of this column have bombarded me with questions and requests for comments on the recent election of principal officers of the two houses of legislature. Despite my efforts to wriggle out of discussing this matter until all the facts are in, many of such readers have insisted that my emphasis on the Manifesto of Change in the last few weeks should make it obligatory for me to comment on what appears to them as an assault on change.

    By way of preliminary remarks, those who asked for votes on the promise of change did not include PDP members who eventually got elected on the platform of that party. It is thus pointless for citizens to lose sleep that current and former PDP governors and other representatives in the new National Assembly chose to assist in getting Saraki as President and a leading member of the PDP, Ike Ekweremadu as Deputy Senate President. PDP lawmakers have not done anything unusual. What is clear is that the PDP is still very strong in the Senate. Although this should not be an excuse for the leverage demonstrated a few days ago by PDP lawmakers in the new National Assembly, in view of the fact that the majority of the Republicans in the 113th Congress of the U.S. Senate was not any more significant at 53 Democrats to 45 Republicans than that of APC’s 64 to PDP’s 45 in Nigeria’s 8th National Assembly. Yet, it was easy for the Democrats to elect the principal officers of the Senate. The difference between the two contexts was party cohesiveness and discipline.

    If what happened in the National Assembly had been in the days of “PDP Power,” it would not have created tension for many as it has now, given the number of emails I had received since Tuesday. In a period when the safest psychological state was not to expect so that one was not disappointed, nobody would have worried or been worried by what appeared as political tricksterism in the election of principal officers in the national assembly last Tuesday. But in a government – executive and legislature – that came to power on the manifesto of change, it is conceivable that the average newspaper reader would feel disappointed by the behaviour of APC members of the new legislature.

    Citizens have no reason to feel despondent at this point. It is too soon to feel discouraged. Buhari and the APC promised change, and it is logical for citizens to expect clear departure from the political style of the past in the first major action of the APC-controlled legislature. President Buhari may be a reformed or born-again democrat as he was presented during the last campaign. It is not being realistic to expect that all the folks in the APC are democrats in the true sense of the word, given the mass migration of politicians seeking power and recognition to the party in the last one year.

    Without any exaggeration, the APC is a political party that is still unfolding or evolving. As it is today, it is a mix of political views and ideas. And this should be understandable, given its history. It is obvious that the APC is a party that houses ideological factions. If this was not clear before the elections, the events of last Tuesday illustrates graphically that there is diversity of ideological perspectives in the APC, unlike what obtains in the PDP. From its inception, the PDP had shown no apology for being a party of the extreme right ideologically, a conservative political party, despite periodic rhetoric of progressive politics by individual members of the party. PDP was created largely to sustain the governance philosophy and style of the military dictators that midwifed the party. In a study of the governments of Nigeria from colonialism to now, Atul Kohli described in a book STATE-DIRECRED DEVELOPMENT: Political Power and Industrialisation in the Global Periphery those who had governed the country in the post-independence era as ‘personalistic and patrimonial.’ In the last sixteen years, ‘PDP Power’ whether under Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, or Jonathan, was deployed to confirm Kohli’s classification of Nigerian rulers by ensuring that each PDP government in the last sixteen years built on the culture of corruption that is generally the result of a governance driven solely by personalistic and patrimonial interests.

    With respect to the APC, the party ideologically houses mainly centrists sandwiched by a thin layer of rightists and leftists. This amorphous situation was compounded by the migration of members of the New PDP to the APC shortly after the formation of the party. What played out as lack of cohesiveness or discipline with respect to the election of principal officers of the national assembly last Tuesday is the effect of the party’s ideological amorphousness. Those who came to the APC out of dissatisfaction with the culture of a political party besotted to power sharing should be expected to have as much interest in sharing of the plums of office, as those they met in the party. It is thus not bizarre that members of the party that lost out in the primaries to select the presidential ticket and others who believe they too had worked hard to bring victory to the party in their respective states became passionate about their desire for office in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Ambition in this instance is not a political crime or moral lapse.

    What is absurd is the failure of the APC to prevent any of its members from negotiating the interest and right of the majority party away through an ugly form of horse trading with the PDP, to the extent that in the name of geopolitical balance a current PDP member was given the position of Deputy Senate President as a compensation for the PDP’s decision to give the position of Senate President to a visible member of the APC, regardless of the choice of majority of his colleagues in the APC. In a political culture that focuses on power, there is bound to be politicians that act solely in the interest of obtaining power from the electoral victory of their party. But invoking the principle of geopolitical balance to justify what happened on Tuesday is diversionary. There are many other more straightforward and respectable ways to achieve geopolitical balance.

    On the question on the implications of this action for the manifesto of change, it is too late to tell. However, it signals the possibility of other conspiracies between a section of APC and the PDP to scuttle executive policies that may be in the interest of citizens but not to the advantage of ideologues of personalism and patrimonialism in both APC and PDP. It is unlikely that the new alliance between some APC members and the entire PDP lawmakers can threaten the president with frivolous impeachment. For that to happen, APC will have collapsed as a party. However, executive bills sent to the Assembly stand the risk of being delayed or deformed, should APC leadership fail to find strategies for containing its errant members.

    As for whether this action can destroy the manifesto of change, especially from the executive side of the federal government, President Buhari himself will have to have changed his mind on his electoral pledge to end the politics of corruption and personal interests that endeared voters to him two months ago. Having promised the nation and the international community two months ago to move the country away from policies that promote the interest of the elite to those that address the problems of people at the grassroots, he should have nothing to fear about conspiracy between some members of the party on which he got elected and those of the party he defeated in the last presidential election. Once majority of citizens are solidly behind good policies of Buhari, regardless of how uncomfortable such policies make politicians beholden to self-promoting political practices, there is nothing to fear.

    But there is a need for concerted efforts on the part of leadership of the APC to make the party more cohesive ideologically. What happened last Tuesday is worse than mere carpet crossing; it is a coup d’etat against the ruling party, a relic of the old political culture that citizens voted against last April. One lesson that nobody can miss is that the strategy employed to gain power from a non-performing political party may not be enough to sustain a new party in power. Party leaders need to remember a Yoruba proverb: Bi inako baa tan l’aso, ejekii tan l’eekan (for as long as lice hold on to or reside in its owner’s clothes, there will continue to be blood on the owner’s fingers resulting from the owner’s efforts to fight the lice). The political fabric of the country is still replete with lice and what happened last Tuesday in the National Assembly is a graphic illustration of this malaise.