The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Parastatals and the ethic of change

    Parastatals and the ethic of change

    Allowing the FRSC to legislate compulsory use of speed limiter by motorists, particularly private motorists is one way of over outsourcing governance and in the process shortchanging the democratic process

    Parastatals were in the news most of the time during Goodluck Jonathan’s presidency. At some point, there were complaints that many parastatals, especially those with the power to collect revenue failed to remit such revenues to the federation account as and when due. At another time, it was the sheer number of agencies designed to assist the government in the governing process that caused concerns. To address this, a special committee under the chairmanship of Steve Orosanye was created to suggest ways of rightsizing and downsizing the plethora of agencies. The committee made its recommendations and very little (if any) was adopted. So soon in the life of the Buhari government, parastatals are coming back to the radar.

    One of such agencies is the Federal Road Safety Commission, an agency with its origin in the vision of a stellar patriot who brought the attention of the nation to the needless and avoidable deaths on the country’s roads. As this vision was born during the era of military dictatorship, the FRSC became a child of military creation via the mechanism of decree during the military presidency of General Ibrahim Babangida. The decree that established this agency was transformed in the post-military era into the current Federal Road Safety Commission Act of 2007.

    Today’s piece is not to argue against the existence of the FRSC. On the whole, the FRSC has been a useful agency, even though it came into being on account of the failure of the country’s law enforcement system. The birth and nurturing of FRSC is, though, the product of a fertile imagination, it would not have been necessary if the police force had performed its duty with respect to traffic management creditably. But the focus today is on how to save FRSC from overgrowth, particularly in terms of the power to make legislations that affect citizens without proper consultation with citizens and those citizens had elected as their lawmakers.

    The latest announcement from the FRSC is to the effect that the Commission, in collaboration with the Standard Organization of Nigeria (SON) and the Nigerian Police, is in the process of making it mandatory for citizens to have speed limiters on their vehicles. According to the Commission, the rationale for this move is the conclusion that about 50% of road accidents in 2014 resulted from speed. Another cause of accident in the words of the agency is the continued use of “expired and used tyres” by motorists. Without doubt, the increasing number of accidents on the country’s highways should trouble all patriots and in particular an agency with the raison d’etre of eliminating or minimizing road accidents. But both the FRSC and the federal government should ensure that a policy with otherwise good intentions does not by way of the law of unintended consequence become a facilitator of corruption and abuse of citizens’ rights as well as of the democratic process.

    The political moment of promised change and renewal is an appropriate one to look again at the multitude of agencies governing on behalf of the elected governments at the federal and subnational levels. Short of radical transformation of the police system currently in place, it is more likely than not that there will be need for an agency like the FRSC for some time to come. But the new government must not over delegate its lawmaking functions to agencies that are not elected by citizens to perform such functions. Allowing the FRSC to legislate compulsory use of speed limiter by motorists, particularly private motorists is one way of over outsourcing governance and in the process shortchanging the democratic process.

    Looking through the published functions of the FRSC on its website, it is clear that it has “the responsibility to recommend works and devices designed to eliminate or minimize accidents on the highways and to make regulations in pursuance of any of the functions assigned to the Corps by or under the FRSC Establishment Act of 2007.” What is not clear in the recent announcement on the installation of speed limiters on every vehicle is whether this is a recommendation to the governments or a fiat from the Commission. Whatever this policy is designed to be, it is necessary to have a public debate on the issue of mandatory use of speed limiters by individual motorists and by taking the issue to the National Assembly before it is enforced on the highways.

    Similar regulations have gone unnoticed by citizens in the past. For example, making it mandatory for motorists to have in their vehicles so-called ‘C-Caution’ device to alert other motorists about a stalled vehicle on the road has more or less become a normal part of the culture of driving on our highways. However, citizens have not failed to complain that this regulation is passing the buck on the part of government. In cases of good road design that includes having a functioning shoulder for each highway, it would not have been necessary for motorists to spend meagre foreign exchange on imported road caution gadgets. Most motorists outside Nigeria do not know what ‘C-Caution’ device is. Another one is the moribund regulation on obtaining special permit to operate on the road vehicles with tainted glass. Except on rural roads, both the police and FRSC workers appear to have gotten tired of asking motorists to provide such permits, largely because citizens have resisted this arbitrary regulation.Another one is the requirement that drivers wishing to renew their license have to provide a certificate of attendance at a driving institute. In many FRSC driving license issuing centres, drivers are even told which driver education institutes to obtain their clearance from! Citizens have been going along with all these regulations but not without complaints.

    The unfolding effort to make it compulsory for motorists to install speed limiters on their vehicles is similar to the regulation on ‘C-Caution.’Except for speed limiters installed by manufacturers during the building of a vehicle, individual speed limiter purchased and put in vehicles by drivers is not known to be effective in any country. First, such device can be (and is often) ignored by motorists, as it chimes and stops after some time. Secondly, this is passing the responsibility of government to citizens. Most of our roads do not even have visible speed limit signs. There are no speed detecting radars on our highways to assist highway police to track motorists who exceed speed limit and to caution motorists while they drive, as it is often the case in other countries. The agency may achieve its objectives better by also advising government on providing proper infrastructure including filling potholes before they become gorges on highways.

    More fundamentally, how democratic is it for an agency to create regulations (legislations more or less) that impact on citizens’ property rights? Speed limiters are optional accessories that have nothing to do with driver’s capacity to comply with traffic codes, especially announced speed limits. Good roads, speed radars, and even installation of cameras to check and issue tickets for exceeding speed limits are better and less cumbersome ways to ensure that motorists drive safely and within speed limit.

    Over regulation has a tendency to be counter-productive. Making it compulsory for commercial and non-commercial drivers to install speed limiters on their vehicles smacks of avoidable over regulation and an un-necessary punishment of safe drivers.The new government—executive and legislative—needs to review the functions and powers delegated to agencies. Non-elected administrators should have the power to make laws. In other countries that have considered ways of enforcing speed limits, their legislators, not administrators in parastatals, have initiated discussions that have included public debate on such matters. The culture of outsourcing legislation to agencies needs to come to an end under a Change Regime.The media needs to get interested in interpretative reporting of activities of parastatals while citizens need to insist on proper debate of issues that may affect them. Change is a process that requires all hands on deck.

  • APC’s teething and identity battles

    In a day or two, it will be clear how successfully the two-year-old All Progressives Congress (APC) has fought the many battles confronting it without fissuring dangerously or setting the stage for future upheavals. The party was conceived and born in battle, suckled in battle, and weaned on the fiery and tempestuous fields of intense and sometimes sanguinary jostling for primacy. Given the sometimes destructive and disruptive effects of its founding culture of aggressiveness, the party and its supporters may already be looking wistfully ahead to the day when it will rest from its many battles and terrifying exertions. Right from its birth in 2013, the party had been primed for war. Two dizzying years of battling the enemy and triggering a revolution of sorts have made the party to fight so convulsively that a few of its own children have been consumed by the revolution.

    In the past two or three weeks, this primed war machine, which unprecedentedly and shockingly swept the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) away in a blitzkrieg, has been engaged in an intense primacy fight for the nation’s top legislative posts. The battle is complicated by stated and unstated factors and objectives, a part ideological, and a part simply political or group interest. The battle lines may not be clearly delineated, but the subterranean forces shaping the battle are easily discernible. Indeed, for a party that won the presidency by nearly 2.6 million votes, and took 60 out of 109 Senate seats and 225 out of 360 House of Representatives seats, it is a miracle its internal turbulence has not undermined its burning resolve and hunger for power as well as its appetite for war.

    In the early days of merger, when three major political parties and a faction of a fourth came together to form the APC, quite a number of its own sceptical members and a few top PDP leaders predicted confidently that the amalgamated party would unravel one way or another. Its objectives, the PDP scorned, were neither altruistic nor concise enough. It was obsessively sworn to capture only power, and perhaps immorally desperately. That objective could not be realised in two short and turbulent years, let alone by an amalgamation of strange bedfellows, and certainly not in 2015, the PDP leaders argued and boasted.

    The APC, however, defied gravity. Despite the jostling for influence among the party’s many tendencies, a jostling complicated by the addition of five PDP governors about nine months after the party’s founding, it stayed united enough to engage the ruling party in series of ideational, social and political battles, to organise pacesetting party primaries, and to hammer out a relatively concise party platform. What kept them united is a little hard to fathom. Perhaps, they had burnt their bridges and had nowhere else to go or to retreat. Perhaps they were more prescient than anyone gave them credit. Perhaps, also, the party’s many competing tendencies imagined it would be less tasking and cumbersome to achieve ideological and group primacy within the new party than outside it.

    It is not certain that the battle for the soul of the party, of which the struggle for top legislative positions is just a part, will be determined in the next few days. The party won a major election in a spectacular fashion while its own soul was still undergoing formation and maturity, and when its identity was just crystallising. No one knows when the party’s structure, identity and culture will be fully formed. What is more, no one can say precisely whether the poll victories of March and April will have a positive or deleterious effect on the party. The picture may be clear in a year or two. By that time, certainly, there will be many internal victims of the party’s many battles. Barely a year after the part’s founding, some of its principal inspiration, such as Tom Ikimi, Ibrahim Shekarau and Annie Okonkwo, felt suffocated enough to resign.

    While the media and analysts have focused on who is battling whom, and who is enjoying the upper hand, it is more useful to draw the attention of the party and the public away from personalities to what the party must represent and the ideas and visions needed to ennoble its actions and goals. The suspicion is that the battle for legislative positions at the moment is driven by personal ambitions rather than higher party goals and philosophies, by hubristic struggle between tendencies and individuals, and by short-term manoeuvres and short-sighted power accretion. If the ongoing battles end in such a manner that the party is structurally sounder and subliminally ennobled, then the fights would have been worth it. The public will wish that triumphs in the party are inspired by persons and leaders with a nobler sense of the future.

    The spectacular collapse of the PDP is partly explained by the general absence of a galvanising party philosophy. Notwithstanding claims to the contrary by some of its leading lights, the indisputable fact is that the PDP really stood for nothing. If the APC is to endure and flourish, it must stand for something grander and more sublime than its programmes and manifesto indicate. The ongoing struggle in the party must lead in that direction, and produce avatars and custodians of that futuristic ethos in the noble sense often envisioned by the world’s leading statesmen and conquerors.

  • The Socrates of Oworonsoki

    As the rogue fuel shortage began to bite harder during the week, and as bodies of able men spilled into the streets hunting for the rare stuff the way frenzied pigmies hunt for rodents, our mind went back to the old man,  Bros Akins Woroworo, a.k.a  Atatalo Alamu. It has been a long time since he communicated with the outside world. He has been in permanent mourning since the last fuel uprising failed, performing, as he claimed, the last rites for a nation in a terminal seizure of political epilepsy.

    For good measure, he had buried his head in white sand at Maroko, ignoring the police and passers-by alike and often sending forth stupendous fumes of prohibited weeds from his massive ancient pipe. Occasionally he would barge into a nearby five star hotel to steal their food and to harangue the guests at the lobby. Then he would return to his ostrich-like existence at the famed beach.

    When snooper asked about the choice of Maroko and his punitive regimen, he observed that it was symbolic. “This was where the real tragedy of post-colonial Nigeria began when native men in uniform violently dispossessed native men without uniform of their land and property only to proceed to share the loot among themselves.”

    As the fuel crisis entered its second week, snooper learnt of a major scam that bore all the imprimatur of the old devil. A man in Oworonsoki was claiming that he had turned water into petrol and was offering the stuff for sale at a heavily subsidized rate. We immediately smelled a rat, and our old friend. And to Oworonsoki we headed, on a bleary day when the sky blew its top.

    A human snake of a queue had formed from the Ogudu end joining the one coming from Alapere to form a serpentine confluence of distraught humanity. With much pluck and daring, snooper wangled his way through the queue. In a situation of near total anarchy where everybody is afraid of everybody, the gutsy fellow is usually a winner. When there is general disorder and insecurity, the person who has the mantra of order and security can get away with murder.

    And lo, it was the old man indeed. He had set up shop at the weedy intersection of the multiple fly-over. In the marshy background, the brackish and murky water of the Lagos lagoon foamed like fresh palm wine. The old man eyed everybody with amusement and weary contempt. Then he saw me.

    “Ah Agbadagbudu boy, long, long time. You come for the show, too?”, he crowed.

    “Bros, what is this?” I whispered.

    “Ask the fools. Sebi na dem want cheap fuel?”, he screamed with much hilarity as he gestured wildly at the crowd. My fear at this point was that he could be lynched by the irate crowd if it was discovered that it has all been a cruel hoax. To my utter surprise, the old man seemed to be enjoying the discomfort of the crowd. In a show of sublime disdain, he even changed the topic as desperate men and women swarmed all over.

    At this point, the crowd became rather unruly. A man who looked like a spare parts baron began to complain aloud.

    “When are we going to get this thing now, abi na dis kind yeye talk-talk we come for?” he growled.

    “ Shief, ankali fa, he who must drink hot pap must exercise patience”, an Ogbomosho man with deep tribal marks cautioned the increasingly agitated fellow.

    “Shut up, Zebra crossing. Am I talking to you?” the increasingly agitated mogul scowled at the man. At this point, the old man decided to intervene.

    “Listen, you fools”, he said and suddenly jumped up. “Have you idiots ever asked yourself why everything horrible and hideous in the world has a black adjective to qualify it? Black sheep, blackguard, blackmail, black spot etc. And now you want cheap black market petrol?  Se mi ni baba yin ni? (Am I your father?) Yeye people. Just go and hide your head in shame.”

    “Chineke!!! This crazy man has fooled me again”, the spare parts magnate groaned as the crowd began to disperse in sullen despair and displeasure. As the last of them slunk away in defeat, the old man fixed snooper with an unnerving gaze.

    “See how meek and docile your people have become and you are expecting great changes. You have a revolutionary situation at hand but no revolutionists on hand. People are just making stupid noise all over.  You cannot access the gains of a revolution without revolutionary efforts and strivings. It is only then that you can create your own courts and legal procedures that bypass the normal status quo. Human fuel shortage, that is the real problem, and it leads to paralysis and impotence in the face of evil, but..”

    “But we must start from somewhere. At least we have voted out an evil government” I ventured.

    “Shut up!” the old man screamed as he charged at me with his massive pipe.

  • Love in the time of Vuvuzela

    It has been a colourful presidential inauguration pageant in Abuja. Nigerians are over the moon. It is a honeymoon that seems designed to last for a long time. For now, President Mohammadu Buhari can do no wrong. Journeys seem to end in lovers’ meeting, as their own WS has put it. Even old foes like the aging Creek contrarian, Edwin Clark, have chipped a word or two of endorsement in remorse and contrition. This is as it should be. The whistles of approval are blowing all over the place like a million primitive horns. It is love in the time of vuvuzela.

    Snooper finds the presidential address plucky and inspirational but choppy and unduly chirpy in parts. It doesn’t matter. Nigerians love the bit about Buhari not belonging to anybody. For too long, Nigeria has been held hostage by a heartless power consortium and their designated dingoes. Whether they will let him be without Buhari dropping some iron bricks on their back remains to be seen.

    Like a veteran war correspondent, Okon has been embedded in Abuja all week. But of all the issues that should catch the mad boy’s fancy, it was the appearance of King Mswati the third, the hypergamous, energetic and punitively heterosexual ruler of Swaziland and Africa’s last absolute monarch, swankily attired and looking sharp and snazzy in bespoke suit. As soon as Okon sighted the preeminent playboy of the southern hemisphere, he let forth a hoot of panic and admiration in parts.

    “Bia, I been dey hope say no be you capture dem Cecelia girl I ben dey look for?” Okon hollered as he accosted the suave monarch who smiled back in regal bemusement. A security official quickly moved in with a stern frown.

    “What’s the matter” the rookie growled as he collared the crazy boy.

    “I wan ask weda na him steal dem Cecelia girl, Dem say he get him own Sambisa forest for him Obodo”, Okon whimpered.

    “Get lost”, the security man screamed as he pushed the mad boy away.

  • The task before NLC

    I actually expected the NLC to have taken serious umbrage when the news broke some two years ago that Nigeria was keeping the most expensive parliament. I thought the indignation should have come out as one instantly and collectively delivered expletive, complete with a compliment of phlegm: What the…!

    I was flabbergasted to hear that the outgoing National Assembly managed to pass 40 bills in 10 minutes. I have tried to come up with all kinds of excuses for it. They must have been working on those bills all the four years, and those things probably needed only minor adjustments to make them ripe, and that ripeness came right about…last week. I can just see the assembly men now, all in their starched and flowing agbada, sitting in their plush assembly chairs that sooooooooooooo fill me with envy, wiping their 25 million-Naira-a-month-manicured and pedicured brows as they hastily flipped over the bills, and exhaling their long held breath into one giant ‘Phew’!

    The country however is not exhaling. It can’t. Our breaths are drawn in as we inhale in bewilderment, wondering what we needed the men for in the first place. I could have passed the bills, right on to my neighbor, who would then pass them on. What greater passing do you need? Seriously, though, what is the record in other countries? Since Nigeria has the poorest record in maternal death, infancy death, life expectancy, yet with the highest paid parliament, it is good to ask what the record is. The parliamentarian payout is also why the rest of the country has palpitations, both in its collective hearts and finances.

    The most astounding thing is that these assembly men do not perceive any contradictions in this interesting scenario. They are still jaunting around the globe, they and their families, like there is no tomorrow. Actually, it does appear as if there will be no tomorrows for the country, particularly when it comes to fuel subsidies.

    There have been so many arguments for and against fuel subsidy removals over the decades. In fact, it does feel like the arguments have been going on forever. The way it is now, it might be wise for mothers to make it their duty to tell their infants-at-arms first thing that now they have come into the world, and Nigeria in particular, it would be wise for them to know that there is a raging argument on over the removal of fuel subsidy: to be (removed) or not to be (removed). So, the infants will do well to quickly make up their minds where they belong on the subject. Silly, isn’t it? Just like a book I read in which an entire kingdom went into a debate on whether to break an egg at the front end or the rear end. I tell you, it had the entire kingdom divided down the middle into front-enders and rear-enders. So now, we are going to have our infants growing up as either Tobeans (subsidy removal men) or Nottobeans (subsidy retainer men).

    Anyway, going by national records, there has always been one powerful body standing firmly in the way of subsidy removal: the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC). In fact, the body is such a strong Nottobean that it had the entire country queuing up behind it to protest against the Tobeans. And it worked, with a little loss of face, but it worked. Now, the argument is picking up momentum again and now everyone is pitching his/her tent yet again on either side. This time, we do not know where the NLC will lead us but I have a take on the matter.

    I know there are countries where there is no oil subsidy. Fuel is sold at the market forces by the procurers. You must grant though that in those countries, everyone lays their cards on the table. Their parliamentarians do not use a quarter of the country’s gross earnings as their own unearned, unneeded earnings. Their presidents or prime ministers use the same means of transport like anyone else, not maintain fleets of convoys that mow the people down as those ones try to grope their ways through the mazes of poverty and want on the streets. No sir, the children of the leaders in those countries also attend the schools next door; not some select ‘oberseas’ schools of privilege. Need I go on?

    Until we retrieve the country from the hands of the wasters so that we know exactly where we are, we are not qualified to talk about fuel subsidy removal. And this is where the NLC comes in. NLC has been known to be an umbrella body for workers across the country, in the forefront on the struggle for the welfare of its members. It has struggled for a higher minimum wage for workers. It also employed its fight mechanism in the struggle against subsidy removal. I actually expected this same body to have taken serious umbrage when the news broke some two or three years ago that Nigeria was keeping the most expensive parliament and one of the lowest-paid working groups in the world. I thought the indignation should have come out as one instantly and collectively delivered expletive, complete with a compliment of phlegm: What the…!

    Nothing came. So today, that parliament worked out its term and, on their way out, delivered us two, no three, slaps. One, the senate passed 40 bills in ten minutes flat at its last sitting as we said above, according to news reports. It seriously begs the question: what had been going on all the while the sessions were on? The House of Representatives could not even rally its own members to a sufficient number at the last sitting, according to more reports. You have to agree that forty-something is a far cry in sufficiency from two hundred and something.

    The second thing came in the form of a stupendous severance package slapped on a country made up of the poorest of the poor. The executive and legislature severing themselves from national affairs would collectively collect a pay running into billions of Naira. And I think they are less than five hundred in all. And I asked two questions. One, does this money even mean anything to anybody any more? It is obvious that our politicians ceased to respect the naira a long time ago, after helping to bring it on its knees and sink it in the mud. The second question is: if the country pays that money, does it guarantee that we will never hear anything about these people or even hear their names mentioned anymore? The reason is that it is very obvious that these men and women do not have any love of the country in their hearts. The only romance they know comes through rubbing the jingling coins in their pockets. So yes, we do not want to hear their names anymore.

    The third slap came when some politicians/local government chairmen who served for one term only began to ask that they be given a pension. Now, that’s awkward, I thought. I remember clearly when the 1999 assembly fixed an outrageous emolument for itself (nothing like the present one). It was so irritating to people that the assembly then had to explain that it had built in some kind of pension for itself and everyone went, which pension, for what work? But people kept quiet, for the sake of peace. So, it sounded very strange that the same parliament, mere new wine, would be asking to be paid a pension! That’s like a fish asking for retirement benefits from the angler for allowing itself to be caught.

    Anyway, the task before the NLC is quite clear. Its job is not only to ask for benefits and welfare; its job also includes helping the country gain some kind of fiscal sanity by ensuring that emoluments are in tune with reality. It must cry out against all over-the-bar spendings.

  • Fuel subsidy for whom?

    How much is the official cost of a litre of fuel? I am forced to ask this question which every Nigerian knows the answer to because my experience in the last two weeks has left me wondering if there is still a basis to claim there is an official price for the prized commodity.

    Instead of the official price of N87 per liter, the cheapest I have bought a litre in recent weeks is N100 a few times, while I have most times paid N120-N140. At the height of my desperation to avoid being stranded in the office, I bought a litre for N500. I am told some paid more than this unbelievable amount when they had no other option.

    I guess I and others who have been buying fuel at the exorbitant cost should be blamed like a petrol attendant told me. If we don’t buy the expensive fuel, the attendant said his manager will not be encouraged to ask him to sell at the price he admitted is too high for a litre of fuel.

    The attendant is right. If we don’t buy the expensive fuel, marketers would not drink it as I argued at a station where an attendant claimed he was doing us a favour by selling fuel when other stations were closed.

    I told other motorists who were prevailing on me to pay the extra N100 charge by the attendant for selling into a keg that it was wrong to do so since the oil marketers will still claim the subsidy for the fuel being sold to us at more than the official price.

    But who is to blame? I and others who need fuel to go to work, our business and other important appointments and can’t afford to stay for hours on long queues at petrol stations that have fuel to sell at relatively cheaper rate or successive governments in the country which have mismanaged the oil sector?

    How do we justify that we are an oil producing country yet we don’t have any functioning refinery and we have to import fuel at rates which have to be subsidized by the government?

    Despite report s of agreement reached with oil marketers to begin lifting of fuel from major depots while the disagreement over the actual amount being owed is resolved, each fuel station has been selling at their preferred rate instead of the official price.

    Not even threats by the Directorates of Petroleum Resources to clamp down on stations that sell beyond the official price has stopped many oil marketers from exploiting the scarcity to milk desperate fuel seekers like me.

    Black market fuel sellers and other individuals have also taken advantage of the situation to sell at incredible prices while law enforcement agencies watch helplessly or as alleged in some quarters connive with them to get their own cut of the profit.

    In the desperation to buy fuel, some have bought adulterated ones which have damaged car engines.

    As it is, there seem to be no indication when the scarcity will be over. The government has lost control over enforcement of sale of fuel at official price and the oil marketers are determined to keep selling at the price that suits them.

    Instead of subjecting Nigerians to endless hardship of the scarcity, the government should once and for all remove the so called subsidy on fuel and allow market forces determine how much to sell.

    We are already getting used to buying at different rates from various stations. For those outside Lagos and major capital cities, buying fuel at more than the official price is not new.

    The controversial amount being paid to oil marketers can be channeled to improving on many other infrastructural facilities which will reduce cost of transportation and reduce the need for everybody to keep their cars on the road.

    As soon as possible the new federal government will have to give priority to reviving the old refineries and possibly build a new one but for now we have to do away with the so-called subsidy.

  • Jonathan’s parting shot

    Jonathan’s parting shot

    The ex-president cannot dictate whether his successor should probe or not; or the period the probe should cover 

    One had thought Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, the immediate past president of Nigeria, would give us a breather so Nigerians could pick the bits and pieces of their lives together. But try as one did, Dr Jonathan would always do or say something that would compel one to return to him. Without doubt, we would continue to talk about the Jonathan administration for some time. But then, after this piece, I intend to have a deserved break on the former president because, by last Friday, old things were supposed to have passed away and all things had become new.  I hope Dr Jonathan would let me be.

    One was compelled to return to the former president because of his speech last Wednesday at the valedictory session of the Federal Executive Council in Abuja, where he again expressed his morbid fear for probe. And that if the Muhammadu Buhari administration must probe his government, then, it must be ready to probe his predecessors too.  “I believe that anybody calling for probe must ensure that these probes are extended beyond the Jonathan-led administration. Otherwise, to me, it will be witch-hunting … How do you allocate oil fields, marginal wells and all that? Do we follow our laws? All these should be probed …” the former president told his audience in his vintage, even if infantile fashion. Dr Jonathan also told his cabinet members that they had performed well and that those criticising them were merely doing so for political purposes. Obviously the former president must be putting performance on its head. But there is nothing wrong with this; after all, the lizard that falls from a wall too acknowledges the ‘feat’ it has performed by nodding its head!

    Of course, Dr Jonathan got the usual applause from his ministers. That was the way they kept deceiving themselves until they sent themselves packing from Aso Rock Villa. They kept applauding ministers who reeled out statistics which had no bearing with what was on ground. It was the same statistics that pushed the Jonathan government into the dustbin of history on March 28.

    Anyway, while the former president is entitled to his opinion on these matters, unfortunately, his opinion, especially on the vexed issue of probe does not carry any weight. It is not for him to say whether probe is necessary or unnecessary, or the period it should cover. That is the prerogative of the new government. In the first place, if he was comfy with corruption and saw nothing wrong in probing those he succeeded, that was his business. In the same vein, it is late in the day for him to start talking about “improper allocation of oil fields”. If he knew there were any such things, why did he not do something about them in his more than five years as president?

    That he did not do anything about the issues he is now raising less than 48 hours to his exit from power shows the pride of place that corruption occupied in his time. And this is globally acknowledged. He did not leave anyone in doubt that he was quite comfortable with persons of questionable character who walked in and out of Aso Rock while he was the landlord there. He even crowned the infamy by referring to the massive looting of the country’s treasury as ‘stealing’. That was his position on, and predisposition to, corruption (and he is perfectly entitled to it), even though it explains why the country is in the mess he left it in. But it would be preposterous to recommend that failed paradigm to the incoming government. Dr Jonathan on his own accord made ‘transformation’ his government’s mantra; Buhari could decide to make anti-corruption (probe) his. So, there would be nothing unusual about that.

    So, rather than keep blackmailing the new government not to probe his government, the former president should advise his ministers and other aides that had stolen public funds to return at least a substantial part of it. That would be much more like it, rather than this cheap popularity or victimhood that Dr Jonathan is seeking. Negotiation can only begin when what is returned is proportionate to what was stolen.

    The former president may be right that corruption did not start with his government. But what he feigns ignorance of is that it assumed an unusual dimension in his time. Indeed, the Jonathan government ‘liberalised’ corruption, as it were! If I must remind him, even General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida whose regime was notorious for being highly corrupt, said they were ‘angels’ compared with what happened in the Jonathan years. For once in recent times, Babangida appeared to be talking sense. Perhaps it was even the impression in Babangida’s time that the country’s economy was resilient (as it did not collapse despite the massive assault on it) that propelled the mindboggling looting of the treasury in recent years. Unfortunately, we have now seen that it is when stealing has not reached a crescendo that an economy would not collapse.

     In Dr Jonathan’s time, looters stole too much for the owners to notice. That is why we have unending fuel queues; states and even the Federal Government are leaving backlog of salaries unpaid, etc. as legacies of the Jonathan government. We are in crisis not just because oil prices fell; it is more due to the government’s cluelessness about how to husband the country’s resources, and the unprecedented looting of public funds.

    So, Dr Jonathan should stop romanticising probe. Indeed, the way he had been talking about probe, one begins to wonder if it is not a question of the guilty being afraid. But, the earlier the former president realised that whatever the Buhari government decides to make its priority is its prerogative, the better. Dr Jonathan’s government behaved like the biblical rich man who throughout his lifetime did not know Christ only to get to hell to bear the consequence of his choice. If former President Jonathan was blind to issues of corruption in his time, it was not because he did not have enough warnings about its prevalence in his government; he had a surfeit of it. Indeed, in my January 12, 2014 write-up titled “2014: agenda for Jonathan, fight corruption and other things shall be added unto you”, I had admonished the government to deal squarely with corruption and every other thing would be added unto it. That admonition, like many others at the time, was like the lone voice in the wilderness. Yet, if we are not having electricity today, it is because of corruption. If people are dishonest about fuel subsidy, (for which reason the ordinary people were to be punished by removing subsidy when what they needed to remove was corruption) it is because the government condoned corruption. Indeed, that we are importing fuel at all is the product of corruption. In essence, corruption is at the root of why this country is not working today.

    So, Dr Jonathan has no reason now to be crying wolf under the mere suspicion that the new government could decide to ask questions about how his government spent public funds. It is true the new government does not have to devote all its energy to probes, the truth is that we cannot make progress if we allow those who had absconded with public funds to enjoy the ill-gotten wealth. Moreover, like adults that we are, when we stumble, we have to look back to know why. Perhaps Dr Jonathan would have succeeded if he did just that.

    He decided his government’s mantra; he cannot dictate his predecessor’s. If he chose to embrace corruption, it was not for lack of knowledge of its prevalence but because he did not think it necessary to fight it. As they say, anyone who caused rain to fall should not be surprised if the rain is accompanied by thunderstorm. So, if Dr Jonathan gladly and willingly embraced corruption, he should also gladly embrace its consequence (if any). His appeals to ethnic and primordial sentiments did not take him far before. It would not take him far now, either.

    Nigeria is one of the few places where a president or public official, rather than say ‘I have nothing to hide, probe me’; would be saying ‘if you want to probe me, you must be ready to probe my predecessors. Otherwise, to probe me would tantamount to witch-hunt’. But President Buhari should not be deterred by that blackmail. If he wants to probe, he should go ahead, allegation of witch-hunt or wizard-hunt notwithstanding.

  • The Nigerian state and the economy of disaffection

    The Nigerian state and the economy of disaffection

    Now that the protocols of power have disappeared and the inauguration of a new president over, we can resume in earnest the business of thinking aloud about the problems and prospects of Nigeria. The last few days to the inauguration of the Buhari administration have been particularly hair-raising. It has been the equivalent of an apocalyptic meltdown in Nigeria. What we dreamed of in improbable nightmares suddenly became a fearful reality. For a moment, it seemed as if something was about to give.

    For the first time in living memory, Nigerians experienced the equivalent of a virtual state lock down. As striking petroleum sector workers held the nation by the jugular, the national electricity grid collapsed.  No light. No food. No fuel. No salary. No government. For the first time in living memory, Nigerians experienced what it is like to be at the mercy of individuals and enemy nationals waging an economic warfare against their own nation.  Welcome to hell on earth.

    The phantom petroleum subsidy which is a function of phantom accounting, phantom ships, phantom bill of laden and phantom landing finally turned Nigeria into a phantom land. On Tuesday, snooper was at the Capital Oil filing station on Ojodu Berger around ten in the night to witness the pilgrim’s progress towards perdition. It was a scene out of the apocalypse.

    Fists of fury and empty jerry cans flew at short notice. Men yelled at each other like famished hyenas. The surly night was no respecter of past achievements and future distinctions. Even this late into the night, the express road leading out of Lagos was an automobile bedlam. Vehicles snarled and yelled at each other.

    As a nation and as a people, part of the problem with Nigeria is our inability to accurately describe and pinpoint what torments and ails the country.  It has been suggested by many that Nigeria runs a kleptocracy. A kleptocracy is a government of thieves by thieves and for thieves. While this concept captures the superficial features of our affliction, it does not exhaust its deeper essence.

    When and where disaffected nationals bring a country to its heels by waging an unrelenting economic warfare against the nation, an economy of disaffection prevails. To be sure, this is often a question of weapons of choice and necessity, for there are other forces that bring a country to political heels through sheer number and superior political skills or bring it to religious perdition through organized spiritual siege.

    In the event, the economy of disaffection stems from many sources. In many cases, it could be part of some unresolved national question.  It could be part of a fundamental dispute between old and new power blocs; between the resilient but lethargic residual and the untamed but dynamic emergent. It could be the fallout of a fundamental collision of economic altars within the mutually contradictory constituting units of a nascent nation. It could also be a reflection of class warfare by a pan-national underclass against a dysfunctional state with all the features of state banditry itself.

    On its current scale, the economy of disaffection can no longer be regarded as part of the shadowy networks of illegal and semi-criminal activities that make up the informal economy. It is the formalization of informality or the normalization of economic abnormality. It ranges from smuggling, kidnapping, armed robbery, bunkering, the operation of illegal refineries, the hijacking of petroleum products by pirates, the direct sabotage of petroleum passage, mounting book piracy, the wholesale importation of expired drugs, pension scams which is akin to robbing the dying and many more.

    Economically, the state has lost its raison d’etre and is totally at the mercy of more powerful and more resourceful non-state actors who have taken over the commanding heights of the economy. Like the democratization of the forces of coercion which has completely demystified the Nigerian state and robbed it of its aura of invincibility and impregnability, the economy of disaffection has finally undone the Lugardian state architecture. As it was said in the old Zaire of Joseph Mobutu, everybody gets by but on the corpse of the post-colonial state.

    Whatever may be the cause of the economy of disaffection, it should be clear that its un-Nigerian and anti-Nigeria activities cannot be sustained in the long run without provoking state collapse. The run on the Naira in the last few years occasioned by unregulated business activities and state burglary of the Exchequer, and the collapse of the national grid for a few days this past week should serve as pointers to a looming apocalypse.

    Unfortunately, the first and major victims of an economy of disaffection are the multi-national underclass themselves. While those at the apex smile to the bank with their loot, the members of the underclass are sentenced to further immiseration and poverty by the economic meltdown.  Their small scale ancillary industry dies out as a result of lack of power and fuel and their patronage shrinks dramatically. When the smoke clears, more people would have been sentenced to the Nigerian underground. More nationals would have been downloaded into the peonage of perpetual poverty.

    This is the ticking time bomb that all the post-military administrations in Nigeria have been priming, and the consequences have now arrived with us in all its implacable fury.  Yet it is obvious that it cannot be confronted by mere palliatives. The roots of the disaffection have to be uncovered and tackled. This is why all the dodgy schemes accompanying the removal of petroleum subsidy in this country from so called Mass transit transportation, poverty alleviation schemes, Petroleum Tax Funds and SURE-P have come to naught.

    The time has now run out for these state-subsidized scams. We have been arguing for the past twenty five years that as long as there is a run on the naira through a burglarized treasury by corrupt and dissolute administrations coupled by the wild purloining of the national currency by economic brigands, a gap will always open up which gives the illusion of subsidizing.

    As long as a national product of Nigeria is being purchased by foreign currency earned from the same product, the illusion of subsidy will never go away. This economic psychosis is a function of the historic psychosis of the Nigerian ruling elite. It is not subsidy that should be removed, it is those who have brought Nigeria to a sorry pass that should be restrained or reined in by the iron laws of the state.

    It is not in the interest of those waging economic warfare against the fatherland through the economy of disaffection for a drastic solution to be found for the subsidy conundrum. They will fight tooth and nail. These are enemy nationals for whom the idea of the nation has not come. For them, Nigeria is and remains a no man’s land; a jungle of primitive and predatory extraction; a new Congo of combustible combos in which God marches with the quick and quick-witted.

    Mohammadu Buhari has his work cut out for him. This is where his authoritarian messianic populism will help. In his first coming as an economic nationalist, the former military ruler, proudly and stoutly rejected all blandishments from the western powers to devalue the naira. Some of the measures he introduced, particularly counter trade and stiff fiscal regulation, were dismissed by western interlocutors as signs of economic illiteracy. Yet they would have worked very well if Buhari had been allowed to stay the course.

    But the world has since moved on. The modern economy is no longer powered by natural resources but by ceaseless knowledge production.  Yet if the erosion and dilution of national boundaries premised on the rampaging forces of globalization has occurred at all, it is only in the peripheries of the global order.

    As a state, America remains bullish and bearish remorselessly powered by the messianic notion of American Exceptionalism. The Brits are chafing at the grinding homogenization of an abysmally incompetent EU while the Scots are bent on dismantling the entire union or its more egregious oversight function. Canada is moving in the direction of a multi-state nation. The reports about the death of the post-Westphalian state appear to be widely exaggerated. Let the premature obituarists take note.

    In the circumstances, it is said that you cannot step into the same river twice. But if Buhari was an economic nationalist in his first coming, he must become an economic hyper-nationalist in his second sojourn if he is to retain a minimal notion of Nigeria as a viable proposition. Buhari must look for a new set of indigenous economists to fashion out a new economic order for a dying nation. There are many quiet Nigerians doing a lot of good work in that intellectual domain.  The reliance on World Bank quacks mouthing shopworn shibboleths from the Chicago School has cost Nigeria very dearly in the past three decades.

    Buhari must be wary of the kind of “policy experts” he takes seriously. He must reflect deeply on the tragic career of President Olusegun Obasanjo who by early nature and instinct was an economic nationalist until he got swamped and stuck in the eddy of premature western adulation and metropolitan mendacity. Beyond the hidebound hallucinations of the intellectually challenged, some of these local “experts” have not done a day’s thorough reflection on the agonistic nature of modern economics and the plight of the Black people in the global order.

    But even at that, a new economic blueprint without a thoroughgoing reevaluation of the architecture of the post-colonial state cannot completely address the adversarial possibilities of the economy of disaffection in all its nation-threatening potential. It goes straight into the heart of the National Question itself.  If President Mohammadu Buhari is in any doubt, he needs to look no further than the parting shots of former President Goodluck Jonathan.

    In a widely quoted Parthian, Jonathan urged Buhari to extend any intended probe to past administrations and to adjudicate judiciously on the pattern and procedures of the allocation of oil wells since independence. This is as close to opening a Pandora Box as it can get. It is a very telling and revealing moment for the Robber-baron politics and economics of the Nigerian post-colonial state. While not denying culpability for mismanaging the Nigerian economy, Jonathan is saying that he is not the only culprit and should not be so treated.

    In that fleeting moment of radical epiphany, Jonathan disemboweled the post-colonial state in Nigeria and reveals a deep political animus powered by the economy of disaffection which is predicated on what a great contemporary sociologist has called a deliberate strategy of excluding the excluders. Plucked from a provincial backwater, the foaming Niger Delta creek claimed its own in the end.

    All those who recruited a man weighed down by such political neurosis and deep ancestral resentment as a blue-eyed boy and pawn of an unjust order might have supplied the burning pyres of their own political funeral. Indeed, if the linguistically challenged former president is not merely slandering himself and his government, it shows that he had merely played along in order to wreak further havoc on the social and national question.

    The Nigerian post-colonial state has become the political and economic pallbearer of the nation and only a drastic surgery can suffice at this point. While there is no doubt that President Mohammadu Buhari has the iron will and the adamantine integrity to handle economic saboteurs, going forward he will need exemplary political skills and superior savvy to handle the pathologies arising from the economy of disaffection and the poverty of our politics.

  • May 29, 2015: Scattered, cautiously optimistic reflections on an historic turning point

    May 29, 2015: Scattered, cautiously optimistic reflections on an historic turning point

    It is May 29, 2015. This is the first time since I began writing this column that the subject and the title of the column coincide exactly with the date of the actual writing of the column. The column will of course not appear in print and online until two days later on Sunday, May 31. But for me it is a massively consequential and symbolic fact that on the very day that I am writing about it, a great historical turning point is taking place in our country’s history.

    Physically, I am far away from home but in spirit and imagination, every part of my being is at home. I confess that I am deliberately giving myself over to the sense and spirit of euphoria that the vast majority of Nigerians at home and abroad will be feeling today. Indeed, I will permit myself to celebrate the occasion, sorry that where I am, I will be celebrating alone. If I were in Nigeria today, I would of course not be enjoying the occasion, the historic moment alone. I would be doing so with a small group of friends and comrades who, like me, know only too well that though we have cause to celebrate, we should do fully aware that our celebration, our optimism ought to be cautious. But again I must confess: although the caution is there, it is the celebration, the thankfulness that is the stronger aspect of what I am feeling today, even if one part of me suspects that our cause for celebration may turn out rather short-lived. This brings to my mind, an old sardonic one-sentence joke that Kole Omotoso used to occasionally tell when were undergraduates at the University of Ibadan: “Today, let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow, we may diet!”…

    And indeed, many Nigerians will be celebrating today with the crushing weight of present injustices and insecure and uncertain futures on their minds. Hundreds of thousands of workers across the length and breadth of the land have not been paid their salaries and wages for months. With the sharp decline in the generation and distribution of electricity in already vastly inadequate national, regional and local power grids, many factories and enterprises are folding up. For these reasons, joblessness which was already very high has worsened immeasurably. The new Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbanjo, has stated that the outgoing Jonathan administration left a totally ruined economy for the new administration to deal with. And he is right, so right indeed that if Nigeria were a company, it would have had to declare bankruptcy and be put into receivership. In effect, if this is the case, then the outgoing administration not only left behind a ruined economy, it also left a ruined, broken country of millions of souls in the grip of a totally preventable immensity of hardship and suffering. Fela’s bitterly sardonic question comes to mind here: Are we a people forever doomed to be ‘shuffering’ and ‘shmiling’?

    For most Nigerians and perhaps the rest of the world, the case for celebration today even in the midst of the pervasiveness of hardship and suffering in the country is very strong. This rests on the unspoken philosophical premise that hardship and suffering in human life and experience tragically have no limits; when you think you have seen the worst, the abyss in suffering and hardship, other cases emerge as if from the black holes of the universe to tell you that “you aint seen nothing yet”, as the Americans put it.   Translated into concrete terms pertinent to the subject of these reflections, this means that as bad and terrible as life was for most Nigerians in the last years of the PDP/Jonathan rule, things would have been far worse if at the end of the recent elections in our country the world saw yet another African national electoral exercise slide into a savage, fragmenting civil war and the collapse of all institutions of orderly and cohesive governance.

    I accept this rationale for our celebrations today, May 29, 2015. And I add that we ought to celebrate some new and almost unprecedented things that follow logically from it. Of these, two things, two principles which, though distinct are inseparable, are in my opinion, fundamental. One: The principle is now made clear that Nigerians can kick their rulers out of office and elect another set of rulers who can also, if they misrule and despoil the nation, be kicked out of office. Two: Only on the basis of true and not bogus electoral pluralities that reflect the nation’s ethnic, regional and religious diversity can such exercises of effective and consequential electoral choice be realized and consummated. This is the fundamental rationale of all the bourgeois-liberal democracies of the world and of modern political history: if one set of rulers are barawos, you can throw the bums out of office and choose another set, on and on and on until the right group comes into power and does what is right and just by the entire citizenry.

    Obviously, Muhammadu Buhari is the man of the moment. The cheering, salaaming phrase of his most ardent of supporters, North and South, during the electioneering campaigns was “Sai Buhari!” I first tried to count the number of times that I encountered this phrase on twitter accounts on the internet during the electoral season and gave up when I saw that many Nigerian youths, including many in the diaspora, had embraced the phrase as a victory slogan. “Sai Buhari”! The phrase intrigues me almost endlessly. The over-concentration of power and authority in the current presidential order in our country is almost without equal among the liberal democracies of the world. In this column and in other sites and locations of critical political commentary, I have long opposed this over-concentration of power in the Nigerian presidency. I now raise that critique again, prompted this time by this phrase, “Sai Buhari!” “All Hail, Buhari!”

    I once again ask that constitutional and institutional constraints be placed on the over-concentration of power in the Nigerian presidency. It would surprise and delight me no end if the initiative for this comes from Buhari himself. But I doubt that it can and will. It is very rare in the history of human political institutions for rulers to trim down the scope of their power and authority to govern. And let us not forget that though he has now asked that the title, “General” be dropped from all public and private references to him, Buhari was once a military dictator. I may be wrong, but I think he will be nothing like what he was when he was an absolute military ruler. But all the same, the move to curb his power and authority as President will not come from him. Neither will it come from the politicians of both the new ruling party and the opposition parties. This is because almost without exception, all our politicians and political parties live and feed on the patrimonial order that vast concentration of power and authority in the presidency and the state governorships makes possible. Thus, the move to cut down the powers of our rulers, starting from the Presidency, must start from us, the people.

    As we celebrate in moderation and with cautious optimism today, May 29, 2015, let us reflect on the fact that the task of pulling the economy and the country out of the almost bottomless pit of hardship and suffering into which the PDP era has plunged them will demand sacrifices, huge and protean sacrifices. This is indeed the thought that most troubles me in these reflections. Let me explain what I mean by this observation.

    First of all, I do not think that most Nigerians recognize the sheer scale of the sacrifices that need to be made to turn the country and the economy around. Wastefulness and squandermania reside not only among the political and economic elites; they have percolated into the ranks of the masses of our people. There is little appreciation of the fact that the wealth of the nation, when not socially reproduced through the expansion of value-added economic production, is close to the poverty of the nation and all its peoples, the rich and the poor, the elites and the masses. I mean, what is the value of “wealth” for any and all the citizens of a country in which the most elementary amenities of modern life are grossly inadequate, both in supply and in quality?

    The most important point of these reflections is my deeply troubling regret that our peoples and the organizations that stand in solidarity with their hardships and sufferings do not emphasize strongly enough that the sacrifices that have to be made at this historic turning point of our country’s political affairs should come primarily from the rulers. How validly can you ask a people who have been doing nothing else but make compelled sacrifices to their rulers’ endless greed to get ready to make yet more sacrifices? Indeed, what moral authority, what spiritual capital do politicians and political parties in our country have for them to call our peoples to make sacrifices?

    I make this point especially in the context of the cultural and symbolic significance of the value of sacrifice and sacrificial themes in all our religious and metaphysical traditions, both the traditional religions and the Abrahamic traditions of Islam and Christianity. In these traditions, our peoples are perpetually called upon to make offerings, to make sacrifices in order to obtain divine or providential grace and favour. Well, for once and in the real world of this new and historic turning point, let us ask the new rulers what sacrifices THEY will make first before asking the people to get ready to tighten their belts. For believe me, if they haven’t already started to do so, they will sooner or later be asking YOU to get ready to make sacrifices.

    And so today I celebrate – in moderation and with cautious optimism. And I ask: this time around, who will be doing the sacrificing? Who will be the “sacrificer”; who will be the “sacrificed”?

  • Buhari’s businesslike speech

    Buhari’s businesslike speech

    As far as speeches go, President Muhammadu Buhari’s inaugural speech was not his most creative or inspiring. And even though quite remarkably he delivered it much better than he had done in recent years, and addressed many salient and troubling national issues, it hardly proceeded beyond the serious ordinary, a businesslike speech from a man and politician more obsessed with reflecting reality than climbing the esoteric heights of rhetoric. He seemed to serve notice, by the barely 2,000-word speech, that his government would emphasise substance over the meretricious. In his first coming as a military head of state, when his elocution was much more endearing than it is now, when the invincibility of youth pushed him to brinkmanship and great daring, he felt the encumbrances of age and military rule less than his cautious, slower and more reflective inaugural speech exuded.

    In 1984-85, his style led many to believe he was an inflexible ruler, disdainful of consensus. But his speech last Friday, minus the influence of his 72 years age, gave the wholesome impression he was misunderstood or misread during his first tour. He learns, he builds consensus, and he is not a reed unwisely refusing to bend before the wind, especially when that wind has nothing to do with the great and noble elements of life, such as principles and other political virtues. President Buhari says he has changed. This is not the whole picture. What has changed about the man, as his speech conjured, is not the essential Buhari, to wit, his fidelity to honesty, his wholesome embrace of truth, his quaint philosophy of family, and his fanatical admiration for values and virtues that ennoble and differentiate a person. What has changed is his understanding, not his person, of some of politics’ and life’s eternal verities in accordance with global standards and shifting mores.

    During electioneering, he had been compelled by the electorate to admit his wife into the campaign trail. For so ascetic a man as the former army general, voters were pleasantly surprised to discover he had not only a beautiful wife, but also a beautiful family. By compelling him, voters humanised him rather than limited or diminished him, and they even raised him to an unusual if inadvertent aesthete of culture and fashion, and a purveyor of grace and goodness. But he was, and apparently still is, also a traditional man, with a distinct and decent streak of religiosity. And despite his accomplishments in military and politics, he is still at bottom a shy man. As he alighted from his vehicle at the inauguration ground, he went many brisk paces ahead of his wife, as if he felt the discomfort of many faces harshly focused on how this intensely private man would relate with his wife in public. When he was gently admonished by former president Olusegun Obasanjo to go round the VIP Box to acknowledge the presence of the many dignitaries who graced the occasion, he imperceptibly restrained his wife from following him as he made his way up the stand.

    President Buhari has come a long way, both in maturity of view and in social graces. He is no longer the starry-eyed military officer of some 30 years ago, nor will 21st century Nigeria with its feral social media and intrepid orthodox media allow him the privacy he covets. He has managed to secure a beautiful wife and family; the world will scrutinise how he relates with them. Without doubt, it seems obvious that even in this awkward area of his life, he will also learn and mature much faster than anyone will give him credit. They may not be able to get him to kiss his wife in public, for that will be the day, but they will get him to match his brisk pace with her dainty pace. And his daughters, who have shown independent and admirable personalities of their own, will be hard to restrain in living their now very public lives, especially considering how well in the past they had comported themselves.

    Like sportsmen and musicians, politicians and especially leaders are in fact leading celebrities. But it was not just as celebrity that the crowd that thronged Eagle Square on Friday wanted to assess President Buhari. Yes they would have loved the president, the vice president and their wives and children not to be too far apart, and they would have loved, after the president took his oath, to have the first and second families stand together on the platform where they were sworn in. For, attending inauguration, wherever it is done, is the perfect symbolism and embodiment of politics as entertainment. But much more, the crowd also wanted to hear the president speak, and for that speech to grab them with all the literary and psychological ornaments of fine words, great statements, fiery promises or threats as the case may be, and any other thing deemed efficacious in arresting and entertaining the crowd.

    In his perfectly synchronised but sedate speech, President Buhari neither inflamed the crowd nor alarmed the elite. Probably the most alarming thing he said was his poetic declaration that he belonged to everybody and to nobody. It was the perfect statement indeed for everybody who feared that the president could be a hostage to one religion or ethnic group or the other. Perhaps it also assured the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and any other political party fretting in dark and obscure corners, that the president could be less schizoid about other parties. And probably the most stirring part of his speech was when he remarked about Nigeria’s founding fathers in the opening paragraphs, and assured that the people would not regret voting him into office. He also reminded his audience of their proud heritage, of the empires that had dignified their parts of the country.

    Other than these few inspiring statements and assurances, there was little else in the speech but normal reiteration of promises made during electioneering. He would tackle Boko Haram by relocating Army headquarters to Maiduguri. But former president Jonathan did that too, if a little unsuccessfully. He would take more than a passing interest in what is happening in the other tiers of government, especially the local government. Perhaps he can; but he will navigate testy legal and political grounds to do that successfully. He will continue to support the amnesty programme, which he reminded the country would end in December, and will redirect efforts to developing the blighted oil rivers. Well said, and an indication of his comprehension of the weaknesses of the programme.

    It is difficult not to go away with the impression that President Buhari deliberately refused to inflame or alarm the people with his tempered speech. He had made greater speeches and statements before, even during electioneering. He was never as tedious as his predecessor, nor as burdensome and ponderous as Chief Obasanjo. In fact his austere phrases, not to say the overall terseness of his speeches, have their own invaluable appeal. Last Friday, his speech was businesslike, to the point, achieved brevity and conciseness, and conformed to the image of a leader whose bona fides Nigerians have grown to appreciate and trust. It will be a rare thing indeed that President Buhari can be tutored to write or deliver better speeches than he has done so far.

    What will not be in doubt is that he will act with far better acuity and purpose than he has spoken. The reasons are his inimitable intuition, hard work, honesty of purpose, and patriotism. He will respect democratic values, as he has promised, but he will nonetheless hit malfeasance and sloppiness as hard as he has become accustomed to. He may lack depth in certain  areas of modern economics, but he will make up for that with his indisputable eclecticism, and reliance on trusted and brilliant aides. He talked of immense goodwill following Nigerians and himself to Friday’s presidential inauguration. It is hard not to get the feeling that time and the elements appear to be combining to favour him and the country he is trying to salvage.