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Category: Sunday

  • Uche Chukwumerije and Atahiru Jega: honouring the departed and the living of the Nigerian left – complexly

    Uche Chukwumerije and Atahiru Jega: honouring the departed and the living of the Nigerian left – complexly

    I solemnly swear to it: just a few days before the news of his death came to me, I was thinking a lot about the late Senator Uche Chukwumerije. The reasons for this were both very specific and general. With regard to the specific reason, I was thinking of the late Senator in connection with the known and unknown ramifications of the defeat of the PDP as our country’s ruling party. Of the admittedly few intellectuals and progressives in the PDP, Chukwumerije was the only one who, to the very end, I resolutely refused to see as being “naturally PDP”. Indeed, since 1999 when the PDP came to power, anytime that I thought of Chukwumerije my mind went to something Lenin famously said about the British playwright, George Bernard Shaw: “a good man fallen among the Fabians!” Lenin considered Fabians and their form of socialism fake and delusionary while for Shaw he had a deep respect for the dramatist’s intellect and politics. On account of this analogy between Shaw among Fabians and Chukwumerije in the PDP, as I reflected on what more or less seems to me to be the historic end of the road for the defeated ruling party, I felt quite keenly that this was something that I would like to discuss with Chukwumerije – though I had not seen him or spoken with him in about forty years and without knowing in fact that at that precise moment he was either dying or had died.

    In this context, the news of his death startled and saddened me immensely. This sadness was made even sharper by the controversy that almost immediately erupted with the announcement of Chukwumerije’s passing. Very few of those writing about him cared for his decades as one of our country’s most prominent, brilliant and dedicated socialists and Pan Africanists. More importantly, almost no commentator tried to wrestle with the ambiguities, contradictions and imponderables of the connection between his decades as a passionate and influential voice of the Nigerian and African Left and his deep embroilment in the last stage of his life in the often rank and decadent bourgeois politics of the PDP. For me of course there is no question that this delicate or perhaps even explosive issue has to be engaged as we mourn his passing and honour his memory.

    It was my acceptance of this difficult task that led me to the recognition that we face the same kind of challenge as we honour Atahiru Jega for the heroic role that he played in the recent 2015 election cycle. This is because, as far as I am aware, as with the life circumstances of Chukwumerije, no one has raised the possibility of there being any connection between Jega’s years as a radical, leftist academic and both the missteps that nearly ruined the performance of his duties and obligations as INEC Chairman and the courageous steps that he took to peacefully resolve a near calamitous crisis for the nation’s political survival. It is this analogy, this comparison that explains the title of this piece: we must honour these two men, one living and one freshly departed, at a moment when a landmark election once again raises for us the specter of the bad faith and self-negation that attend all who move from radical and progressive politics to the extremely divisive, corrupt and unregenerate politics of the ruling political elites of our country. For tactical reasons, I shall deliberately approach this topic from very personal encounters with the living and the departed, Jega and Chukwumerije. First then, I turn to the late Senator.

    In all, Chukwumerije and I personally met only about three or four times. Moreover, these meetings all took place in the mid-1970s. Of course our relationship continued beyond the period of these personal meetings through the short pieces I wrote for his famous newsmagazine Afriscope. Of the encounters themselves, these took place through the agency of Kole Omotoso. Before my arrival at the University of Ibadan as a young lecturer in 1975, Kole had regularly paid visits to Chukwumerije and his family at Anthony Village on the Lagos Mainland. Kole had been a junior and slightly younger contemporary of Chukwumerije as an undergraduate of the University of Ibadan. Of course, the late Senator had graduated long before I arrived for my studies in 1968. But this did not prevent me from hearing inspiring stories of his radicalism and being greatly affected by the stories. And there was Afriscope, unquestionably the most influential and professionally best produced newsmagazine of the Left in Africa in the period. For these reasons, when Kole asked me one weekend to come along with him to meet Comrade Uche, I jumped at the opportunity. And that was how the encounters started.

    These occasional weekend visits that Kole and I made to what were the combined offices of Afriscope and the home of the Chukwumerijes were, in total, only about three or four times in number. Moreover, they took place almost forty years ago and eventually marked a hiatus in which between then and now when the Senator-Comrade is gone, we never personally met again. But our conversations, our interactions left a deep and lasting impact on me. The hospitableness of Chukwumerije himself, his wife and children was of the very essence of care and solicitude in the extremely cramped space of a home that was also the offices of an important newsmagazine. Kole and I would talk with Chukwumerije late into the night, only to resume our discussions the next morning after breakfast. This round of early morning discussions would typically last until we then had lunch in the early afternoon after which Kole and I would set out on our journey to back to Ibadan.

    I remember Chukwumerije very vividly from those conversations as a brilliant man, an extremely well read and knowledgeable intellectual and a passionately committed socialist and Pan Africanist. As a matter of fact, in matters of intellect and passion for the radical and progressive traditions of the Left in Africa and around the world, when I think of Chukwumerije, almost simultaneously I think of the late Omafume Onoge. This is because in their presence, in the keen perception of their deeply ingrained and extensively researched knowledge concerning revolutionary movements of the past and the present, of Africa and around the world, you could not but be infected with their resolve and their optimism. Intellectualism of a very high order, unpretentious but deep and wide in its commitment to liberation from all the forces of reaction, injustice and darkness in our country and Africa, this was what drew me so powerfully to the late Senator in those visits to his home and editorial offices in Lagos in the mid-1970s.

    Did Chukwumerije take his radical and dedicated leftist socialism into his passionate embrace of the Biafran cause during the civil war? I frankly don’t know. My guess is that he probably did, though in the end like all others on the Biafran side who were leftists, he was for the most part quite ineffective strictly speaking as a leftist because collective struggles around trauma and survival trumped ideology in the secessionist republic. This negative dialectic became worse for Chukwumerije and other Leftists in post civil-war Nigeria. This was because in almost every instance, comrades found out that the socialism of one man or of one woman could not but be hopelessly isolated and compromised within ruling class parties that were crassly based on the lowest common denominators of excessive self-enrichment, ethnic divisiveness and opportunistic capitulation to foreign domination of the country’s economy.

    Famously, Chukwumerije was militantly and even derisively against the June 12 mandate of M.K.O. Abiola; and he served in both the Shonekan interregnum and the Abacha administration though for very brief periods in both cases. To the end, he did deny that his opposition to Abiola was based on ethnic animosity. The reason that he gave happened to coincide with the reason that Fela Kuti, to the very end of his life, gave as his opposition to Abiola, this being that his ITT connections made him an agent of the imperialist domination of our continent. As for Chukwumerije’s support of the Shonekan and Abacha administrations, we might do well to remember that other prominent Leftists also lent their support and services to those regimes. The case of the late Sam Aluko comes to mind here with his imponderable claim that Abacha was the greatest Head of State that Nigeria ever had. A lone socialist or leftist surviving with his or her convictions uncompromised in the moral wilderness, the ideological wasteland of Nigeria’s ruling class parties? Not a single exemplar of this “survival” has been thrown up by our political history and Chukwumerije was no exception to this norm. We must mourn him and honor his memory with the burden of this bitter truism.

    Atahiru Jega was, symbolically and psychically almost consumed by this negative dialectic. I had met him and worked closely with him within the collective leadership of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in the early to mid-1980s. Like all other members of that collective, I had been greatly impressed by his brilliance, seriousness and dedication as a radical intellectual of the Left. Which is why after my initial surprise that Jonathan replaced Maurice Iwu with Jega, I came to the conclusion that Jonathan and the collective mind of the ruling party had probably chosen Jega based on their wily recognition that once leftist academics joined ruling class parties or took up positions of great authority and influence under the state, they consistently or perhaps even inevitably became tamed, domesticated. For by the time Jega was appointed INEC Chairman, he had moved from the ranks of the foot soldiers of ASUU to being one of the most highly respected Vice Chancellors in the Nigerian university system.

    Many of Jega’s missteps as INEC Chairman arose from this contradiction. I will identify only two in this discussion. One was his willingness to conduct elections with at least one-third of the electorate disenfranchised on the basis of deprivation of permanent voters’ cards. Jega’s rationalization of this decision is not unreasonable, but it is profoundly non-democratic and perhaps even counter-revolutionary. This was his explanation that in many of the gubernatorial elections before the presidential elections, only around 30% of the electorates had voted. The second great misstep pertains to Jega’s capitulation to the manipulation of the Service Chiefs, especially as this almost came to being repeated on March 28. In fact, it was precisely at that moment that Jega’s heroism emerged. For once he saw that Nigerians in their millions and the international community through very powerful spokespersons were against repetition of the postponement of the elections, Jega saw that his isolation was more apparent than real. In a literal sense he was still a lone voice in the gaggle of forces closing in on him and working for his downfall or failure. But in a symbolic sense, he recognized that the weight of the survival of the country rested on his composure under fire, his courage under the extreme provocation of desperate and ruthless nation-wreckers.

    I admit it. I have barely touched the full scope of this negative dialectic in which Chukwumerije and Jega, each standing for a departed and living comrade, conducted their affairs and engaged the challenges they confronted in the broken and destructive wilderness of Nigerian ruling class politics. But if I have achieved anything in this piece, I hope that this will be seen as having laid to rest the myth of the isolated leftist or socialist who believes that he or she remains consistent or even credible in his or her embodiment of the dreams and aspirations of a just and egalitarian social order in our country while cavorting with the looters, the wastrels, the nation-wreckers.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • An unrepentant PDP

    An unrepentant PDP

    Angry party chiefs do not know the harm they did to the country

    From the angry reactions of some stalwarts of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the party’s defeat in the last presidential election, and in many states where it used to hold sway, it is clear that the party chieftains had not been telling themselves the home truth. And, in any human relationship where such honest truths are missing, the result is the kind of defeat that the ruling party suffered.  Of course, no one expected that a party that had been dreaming of ruling the country for 60 consecutive years should not bemoan its loss in only 16 years. So, ruing over the loss of such a golden opportunity is legitimate. The good news though is that PDP’s loss is Nigeria’s gain because it would have been disastrous for Nigeria if PDP had won the last elections. The way things are, Nigeria would not forget in a hurry that a political party called PDP once held sway in the country.

    Of all the people that have been blaming other persons for their defeat; everyone else but themselves, Ahmed Gulak, a former senior special adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan is perhaps the most strident. Hear him: “There is no party chairman of the PDP since 1998 that has led the party to such a disastrous outing. As a result, the national chairman should consider himself one of those who have to give way for the new party to come up. In fact, he doesn’t need to be told to turn in his resignation letter.” Although Adamu Mu’azu had denied the allegation that he worked against the president during the election, saying it was an   “allegation made long ago without any substance,” it is doubtful whether the explanation would be accepted.

    The ‘Muazu must go’ people are even threatening to fire the party’s National Executive Council (NEC) and Central Working Committee (CWC). One imagines how many chairmen they would sack. They seemed to have forgotten that Muazu came in after the former party chair was removed.

    It is instructive that none of those adducing reasons for the party’s defeat mentioned anything about corruption, the first major sin for which Nigerians said change was inevitable. Maybe like President Jonathan, the PDP leaders too do not see that as in issue. Of course, why should they worry about mere stealing which some people chose to describe as corruption so as to soil the ruling party’s image? None of those who want Muazu’s head in a platter is talking about the party’s cluelessness on the country’s economic problems. They do not remember the thousands that leave schools yearly without any hope of getting jobs. Many of them died in search of near non-existent jobs at the Immigration in March last year. As a matter of fact, many of those with jobs have been retrenched under the Jonathan administration as a result of the inclement business climate.

    Power supply remains as problematic as ever, with the government giving excuses instead of light. Rather than celebrate the number of hours they give Nigerians uninterrupted power supply (if they can’t assure it 24/7), they kept referring to the privatisation of the power sector as an achievement, as if that translated into improved power supply. But their cronies that they sold the power firms to who complain of lack of funds to do their business were able to cough up N500m for the political campaign of the PDP. These were the same firms that the Federal Government has so far given a whopping N57.72bn.loan under the N213bn Nigerian Electricity Market Stabilisation Facility, to boost their operations. So, we have a situation where both the government and the power firms are entertaining themselves with Nigerians’ money. Or, what do we call ‘the money they are sharing’ after the firms had been sold to private individuals?

    When during the campaign Nigerians wanted the PDP to render account of what it had done to earn their reelection, the party was busy accusing the All Progressives Congress (APC) flag bearer in the election, General Muhammadu Buhari, of not having school certificate. At some point, they said he was too old; at another, they said he was brain dead. Were these PDP’s achievements? Unknown to the PDP, the party helped Nigerians to make up their minds that it was because it had nothing to say that it made fishing for excuses about Buhari its preoccupation. Even fools in the country knew that the PDP was in trouble the moment APC came up with Gen Buhari as its presidential candidate.

    Moreover, the party chieftains accusing Muazu of not leading the party to victory must have been living in fool’s paradise to think that their party would still have won the election despite the losses it suffered with the defection of several of its heavyweights to the opposition party long before the election. When those people were leaving, some of us warned them of the consequences, they ignored us. Of course when we were warning, it was not because of our love for their party and whatever it represents, but more because when the chips are down and their electoral misfortunes begin to manifest, they would want to cry foul where none existed. A Yoruba adage says ‘he flogged me but it did not pain me; it can never be the same as when one was not flogged at all’. If a political party lost five governors at a go, with many others remaining in the party only in name (their hearts were somewhere else); the same party lost the country’s number four citizen to the opposition and still maintained that it had no problem, then, someone must have been deceiving someone.

    Of course we cannot overlook the effect of the use of the Permanent Voter Card (PVC), the Card Reader, etc. that the PDP for long kicked against but which the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) insisted on using in the election, because it made it more difficult for the party (and maybe others) to freely rig the elections as they used to do.

     Only an insensitive party or one that has any other means to win the election apart from the votes of Nigerians would have expected that President Jonathan would fly in the elections. Indeed, fielding the president was an insult to the sense of judgment of Nigerians to elect a president with the capacity to meet up with their great expectations. But the party’s hierarchy stayed fixated with him and even went to the extent of conning some of their members who were allowed to pay for the party’s ticket when they knew there was no vacancy for the office, at least as far as their party was concerned. So, why blame all of this on Muazu and the CWC? Where were they all when all these anomalies were taking place, that they could not put their foot down that the party must look for someone else to contest the presidential election?

     The point is, it is immaterial if the PDP sacked Muazu 10 times over; he is not the problem. What the party needs to shred is its heart and not its garment. If PDP survived this long, it is because Nigerians have become so pauperised that many of them have lost a sense of what is morally permissible and what is morally reprehensible. They have been bitten by what I call the ‘Ekiti bug’. PDP has so far made life unbearable for Nigerians that many of them would see paper on the ground and take it for money. So, when the party gave them N1,000 in exchange for their votes, they accepted happily. When the party offered N5,000 to some of them in exchange for their Permanent Voter Cards, they accepted, in some cases, with thanks. This was part of the strategies the party adopted in places where the opposition is strong. They knew people would not vote for them there but that was not their headache; their concern was to make it impossible for such people to vote for the opposition.

    In countries where people are politically conscious, there is no way the PDP would have scored the millions of votes that it got in the presidential election. One must admit though, that the level of political consciousness was higher in the last elections; and that was one of the reasons for the defeat of the ruling party. I have been writing weekly columns long before the country’s return to civil rule in 1999. But, never have I been bombarded with e-mails and short messages by Nigerians who were eager for change in the political equation like I got in the last elections.  That the party’s leaders could not see the handwriting on the wall speaks volumes about their disconnection with Nigerians. Anyone thinking of resurrecting the PDP in its old image must think twice because it would be dead on arrival.

    Indeed, that the ‘remnants’ of the party’s leaders are thinking the way they are regarding their losing the election gives the impression that the PDP harbours a lot of unrepentant politicians;  despite the damage they have done to every facet of our lives in the last 16 years. But the good news is that Nigerians are happy that finally, Papa Deceived Pikin and Pikin Deceived Papa (PDP), until they wobbled and fumbled out of Aso Rock Villa.

  • After the war, APC struggles to manage the peace

    After the war, APC struggles to manage the peace

    Considering how difficult it has been for them to come up with a zoning formula to share the spoils of war, the still exulting All Progressives Congress (APC) is beginning to discover that the easiest part of what they achieved a few weeks ago is fighting the electoral war that castrated the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Their nightmare may have just begun, however. Even after surmounting the difficult task of sharing the legislative and top cabinet and presidency posts available, APC leaders, many of them set in their ways and defined by their rigid and unsparing outlook, will find themselves engaging in fresh supremacy battles. By Thursday, the party’s leaders were yet to agree on who gets what, particularly in the legislative branch. After failing to agree, they excused their tardiness on the fact that neither their National Executive Committee (NEC) nor their National Working Committee (NWC) had met over the sharing formula.

    The eminent gentlemen who met on Thursday in Abuja, however, constitute the real movers and shakers of the party, personalities behind whom no great decisions could be taken nor binding agreements reached. Yet they floundered in their very first post-war task. They probably see their failure to agree on the spoils as one of those political things; for after all, everyone predicted apocalypse in 2012 when the party was formed and teething, and more virulently again last year when the party’s juggernauts arrayed themselves in battle to elect party candidates. But they are still standing, not keeling, and are even winning battles and wars, and garnering trophies. Perhaps after testing themselves sorely to their elastic limits, they will surprise us with a stupefyingly easy agreement. If they do, their long-suffering supporters must hope that the injuries from the internecine battles will not aggravate the lacerations from past intra-party squabbles.

    There is a chance the party will get so complacent and feel so invincible that its leaders will stoically see every internal battle as indispensable for sharpening party philosophy and strengthening party cords. There is also a chance that they may even become so battle-hardened that they will intentionally furnish themselves wars in order to sustain excitement and purpose. However, it is also possible that the party’s elders are conscious of the fact that these struggles are necessary in the party’s early years to enable it define itself, its worldview, and its philosophy. But it is no use second-guessing them. What is important is that they must not overrate their strength or internal cohesion, nor pretend they do not know a bitter and defeated opposition waits threateningly and even treacherously on the sidelines to pounce on them.

    From experience, the victorious party must have understood during the poll war that other than two or three print media establishments, and one or two electronic media houses, the party is encompassed by very hostile media sworn to undermining and crippling it using the artifices of misinformation and disinformation. The party has few media friends. Their media enemies will seize upon every mistake by the party to emphasise and prolong its discomfort. President Goodluck Jonathan put that hostile media to good use in the Southwest to reduce the APC’s advantage and very nearly created an upset in Lagos. That same hostile media are still deeply upset by the Buhari victory and are willing to be deployed in battle against a party they deem sanctimonious, unbearable and meddlesome.

    The PDP fractured badly in the last months of the campaigns, so badly and unexpectedly that it never recovered. The APC must know that whatever unity it lays claim to now is tenuous and skin deep. If the PDP did not survive its divisions, despite having the resources and time to construct a party to its own taste, it would be presumptuous of the APC to imagine it can withstand a major early test when it has not demonstrated the kind of cohesiveness and ideological clarity capable of sustaining the new party through thick and thin. There are indeed already visible factional lines within the victorious party —factional lines engendered by powerful and sometimes resentful blocs — and a few other tendencies showing their disturbing and dangerous silhouettes.

    APC leaders must start to ask themselves whether their talents transcend, as they hope, fighting electoral wars, and whether truly they even understand themselves and the various tendencies and interest groups within the country it is now their privilege to govern. Surely they must appreciate that if five zones came together to deliver the presidency and a majority of state governorships to the APC, a few factors must have been responsible for that unity of purpose. The agreement is not eternal; it is tentative. Subtract, for instance, the North-Central or the Northeast from the victory equation, and the APC could not achieve the success it recorded in the last polls. Similarly, take either the Northwest or the Southwest from the equation, and the victory could have gone to the PDP.

    In the end, the APC will agree to a zoning arrangement. Whether that arrangement will satisfy every tendency within the party is a different thing. Whether that arrangement will not also create more troubles for the party than it can manage is another thing. So far, however, the ongoing disagreements show that the party is still evolving, perhaps just as the country itself is evolving. It is evident that the party, like the PDP it defeated, still does not have a centralising idea, something much bigger and ennobling than the mere acts of merging parties, winning electoral battles, and sharing war booty. Even if they manage to overcome the present squabbles, the APC must still develop an idea of itself and its mission, as well as an idea of the country. Then they will have to market these ideas to the rest of the country, and hope that the ideas would be bought and embraced.

    If the PDP, with all the resources it could muster to placate aggrieved party members and leaders, still unravelled months before the polls, the APC must not feel so sanguine. If the zoning arrangement is not properly managed, the victorious party could lose its leadership of either or both chambers of the National Assembly. The party’s enemies would help exacerbate the divisions, even as aggrieved zones dictate what directions their national lawmakers would go. The Northeast, for instance, is campaigning for either the Senate presidency or Speaker of the lower house. And it argues that the Southwest, which is also reportedly angling for the Speaker’s post, should be contented with the vice presidential position and Deputy Speaker. It is not impossible the Southwest probably reasons that it needs greater influence in the legislature to advance great constitutional changes and other ideas, but after championing the huge change the country is about to enjoy, the Southwest needs to calculate the cost of party disunity which regional disaffections are bound to make prohibitive.

    Rather than expend energy squabbling over positions, the APC should more appropriately prepare for the daunting task of ruling the country and extricating it from the tragic decay the outgoing government had consigned it. The outgoing government has laced the country with booby traps and other potentially destructive and divisive policies, cultures and practices. Countering these problems and dissipating them will not be easy for the APC, especially if the countermeasures are complicated by aggrieved zones mischievously seeking their pound of flesh. It is, therefore, important that the zoning arrangement must be fair and inclusive, not presumptuous, not insensitive. The party will not be helped by the incoming opposition, nor by a hostile media, nor yet by an impatient, oppressed and angry electorate. The APC will in fact again need the talisman that gave it great primaries, credible convention and a great and stupendous victory in the polls.

    Neither the electorate nor this column has great confidence in the party’s elders to manage the internal crisis unfolding in the party and on the nation. There is a certain rapacity for posts and influence going on in the party, and there are too many young hot heads who have overstated and overrated their contributions to the party, some of them governors accustomed to unquestioning loyalty and obedience in their states. Thrown into this mix is a potpourri of fanatical jobholders, ethnic champions, and ambitious persons with an eye on the future. It took extraordinary efforts to rein them in before and during the primaries and convention, and especially when the Buhari Campaign Organisation was being constituted. With the presidency safe in their pockets, and fearing that whatever happens early in the life of the new government would likely be sustained hereafter, the jostling for positions and influence may take a more deathly tenor.

    If squabbling APC leaders manage to overcome their divisions and take effective hold of the Senate and Reps leadership without serious consequences for party unity, then perhaps they have more mettle and wisdom than Nigerians are prepared to acknowledge. From experience elsewhere, conservatives do much better at sustaining party unity than progressives. But if gold rust, as the PDP showed in its fractiousness and loss of the presidency, what then will iron do in the case of squabbling APC? APC leaders must be told indeed that their supporters and Nigerians who have a favourable opinion of their party are embarrassed by their squabbles and manoeuvres. They must summon the maturity and wisdom required to rule, far in excess of the brawn and reckless daring with which they applied themselves to warring for the coveted presidency.

  • Last weeks of the Jonathan presidency

    Last weeks of the Jonathan presidency

    President Goodluck Jonathan may have easily conceded defeat to APC’s Muhammadu Buhari, but he is definitely still hurting from the ignominious loss he suffered in the last polls, particularly how almost irretrievably he led his party to a humiliating defenestration. Even before he cast his own ballot, he wore a cadaverous look on his face, as if he felt and exuded defeat. He had been interviewed in Otuoke where he was to vote eventually, and while responding to a question on live television, he was absentmindedly chewing on something. He was unpresidential on that occasion; but it was more a reflection of how bad he felt and how sunken he was in spirit before the ballots were cast.

    Had former Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Suleiman Abba, been a perceptive law enforcement officer, he would have known that for the next few weeks before handover, Dr Jonathan would act desperately like a scorched snake, eager to strike at anyone he thought contributed to his defeat, or anyone he thought ridiculed him. Mr Abba is a luckless police officer, the first victim of Dr Jonathan’s last malignant attacks. Since his appointment some nine months ago, he had not shown either guile or perceptiveness in carrying out his responsibilities as the nation’s top police officer. Because he lacked character, and knowing he still had a few years to go before retirement, he began to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. He was consequently spewed out of the president’s mouth.

    Dr Jonathan will do more spewing should anyone bait his anger. That he conceded defeat to Gen Buhari and acted, in the exaggerated estimation of many of his countrymen, as a statesman does not mean he had suddenly acquired the intellectual and philosophical depth required to place his loss in the right perspective, nor to look to the future with the calm maturity necessary to rehabilitate him in the eyes of the world. More and more, the presidency will look deserted in the weeks ahead, and the president himself will flash wan smiles at anyone, human or animal, who saunters into the presidential precincts. His hair will grey faster of course, and when he is alone he will fall into such abject lugubriousness commonly associated with men on death row that few would bear to look in his face.

    In retrospect, Dr Jonathan was right to suggest single term of seven years for the president. That way the president will have his cake and eat it; and when he is done gorging on the cake and wine after seven perhaps notorious and uneventful years, he will still leave with his head held high and his dignity unaffected by the scandals he had fomented. But Nigerians can’t say because the effect of his defeat is apocalyptic, the country must adopt that unwholesome and unsanitary one-term scheme. Dr Jonathan failed the country, and is leaving it humiliated and more divided than it had ever been. Let him in the next few weeks before the change of baton also partake of the pain and agony of the psychological defeat he has brought upon the country.

  • Implications of Change Manifesto (2)

    Implications of Change Manifesto (2)

    Moving away from the state of anomie that has been a part of the country’s experience over the years certainly requires heavy-duty calibration of all dimensions of governance and government

    Last Sunday, we examined the alienation between the State and the citizenry on account of a political and economic system that has denied citizens of their political efficacy through a governance system that is powered by rents collected from sale of petroleum. We concluded the piece on the need to move from a rentier state back to a productive economy, such as was in vogue in the country in the years before the civil war. We will today focus on the implications of the post- civil war political structure and culture (that should now be a part of the Manifesto of Change) on subnational units of government.

    As we mentioned last week, corruption in our country has two causes: remote and immediate. While immediate cause can be traced to character flaws of individuals in positions of authority, remote cause can be traced to the character of the country’s political economy over the years. The change of the economy from productive activities (agriculture, manufacturing, and service provisions) to rent collection from petroleum since the 1970s created a very fertile land for the growth of public and bureaucratic corruption. Multiplying states from 12 to 36 in the years after the civil war and designing such states to run on the steam of allocated funds from revenues from petroleum led to estrangement between citizens and governments all over the country.

    The fragmentation of the four regions in existence before the civil war marked the beginning of a political economy that enabled political leaders to personalise governance and freely appropriate public resources at the national and subnational levels. The revenue from petroleum was enough for the elite to share and settle scores among them, just as it was sufficient to establish and sustain security forces to keep citizens in line to cheer their political leaders as they enrich themselves. The relationship of alienation between citizens and the State made it easy for governance institutions to be built and nurtured, not for the contributions they could make to national development but for the symbolism of progress they can evoke.

    For example, the educational system grew in size with the same speed that it lost its purpose. Credentialing replaced learning all over the country. Infrastructure was neglected by leaders whose goal was to acquire enough funds to open accounts in foreign countries to train their own children, not minding what type of education the average citizen receives at home. The public school, known as the institution that generates literacy and development in most parts of the modern world was ignored by governments while citizens with access to funds created private fee-paying schools to replace or eclipse public schools. Academic standards and quality assurance were thrown to the wind by most learning institutions, and the consequence is what both citizens and political leaders now refer to as educational decline.

    The federal governments has viewed for the past 50 years freedom and development at the subnational level as a threat to national unity and integration. In the process, those holding the lever of federal power have been preoccupied with loading powers and functions on the federal level of governance. Politicians and public servants at the federal level with oversize revenue allocation have found pork everywhere and have been cutting without qualms as much for  themselves as could be done in a system that promotes impunity to shield those who defraud the state. At the subnational level in 36 or more capitals, the mimicry of federal style of personalistic and patrimonial governance has grown. At every level of government, those who seek political office also feel bound to privilege immunity over integrity, to the extent that even lawmakers also seek immunity for themselves in an amended constitution.

    There is no doubt that General Buhari has been voted by majority of Nigerians to inherit a broken nation, not in territorial terms but clearly in moral and political terms. Generally, the local parlance: “Nothing works in this place and nobody seems to be in charge” remains true until May 29. In a few states where there is an appearance of governance and progress, such situation is more of aberration that brings more danger to such states as citizens rush in droves from their states to such places. Moving away from the state of anomie that has been a part of the country’s experience over the years certainly requires heavy-duty calibration of all dimensions of governance and government. But building or re-building institutions that can sustain good governance also requires new thinking, more so now, that what has made it easy for both leaders and their supporters to abandon rules of engagement at all levels— easy flow of funds from petroleum— may be approaching its long lean years.

    It is common knowledge that no modern nation has been built or sustained with just one commodity: rent collection from petroleum. Most modern nations are sustained by revenues raised from activities of citizens and companies by way of taxation. No modern nation has survived without proper infrastructure, particularly energy provision for manufacturing, just as no modern nation can remain so without respectable mass transportation systems. No modern nation exists without internal and external security. In short, no modernity without infrastructures for modernisation.

    Correspondingly, no multiethnic nation can thrive under a political structure and culture that concentrates power and functions at the centre.A system (such as has been in existence in the country for decades) that grows a central government that controls subnational governments is not likely to be conducive to national development and unity. Most multiethnic federations that have succeeded are those that have promoted an ethos of cooperation among constituent groups, not those that have held subnational governments by the jugular all in the name of promoting national unity. There are plenty examples of multiethnic polities and societies that seem to have built national unity and development on the pillar of freedom for subnational groups to serve as centres of production and innovation. The United States of America, Canada, Brazil, Belgium, Switzerland, and even South Africa are illustrations of successful multiethnic governance.

    It is instructive that none of these countries has denied any section of it the fiscal autonomy of federalism that it needs to innovate and flourish. Given the magnitude of the systemic damage that has happened to Nigeria over the years, it may be unrealistic to expect that General Buhari will hit the ground running by leaving aside the problem of growing insecurity, endemic corruption, and dilapidated infrastructure and embarking in his first day in office. It will also be delusional to govern in a way to suggest that national development can ensue from a system in which the central government controls subnational units like vassals, the way Nigeria has been governed for almost 50 years.

    It is salutary that outgoing President Jonathan has refrained from accepting cosmetic constitutional changes sent to him by the outgoing legislatures. Even if President Jonathan had won the election and have been given the opportunity to implement the recommendations of the national dialogue that he established last year, he still would not have addressed the problems militating against freedom and development in the country, because the recommendations from his own conference are not any more substantial than those from the departing federal lawmakers.

    As daunting as the problems of corruption, insecurity, infrastructure deficit, and educational decline might be, suggestions to General Buhari should include finding ways to think creatively and courageously about how to govern Nigeria with a constitution and a political structure that Nigerians like. The existing constitution was almost used to prevent him from getting elected, if the rest of the world had not warned against deployment of overbearing federal might—police, military, and other security agencies— to intimidate voters across the country. Assuming, as usual, that the problems of Nigeria pertain only to the content of governance and not its form is to miss the point about how to return government to citizens through establishment of a productive economy in the different regions with the view to facilitate the growth of each region to create an education and an economy that can nurture a federal system.

    General Buhari may not need to rush into solving the country’s lingering political problems. However, he and his governing team need to get the matter of re-federalising the country back to the top of the list of Must-Dos, without doing anything to take political advantage of citizens’ yearning for an integrated multiethnic nation-state that is positioned constitutionally and structurally to benefit from unity of purpose than one that is designed to generate suspicion among its constituent units, as Nigeria has been for the past 50 years.

    To be continued

  • PDP: big money, propaganda and utter debauchery

    PDP: big money, propaganda and utter debauchery

    Since Dr Reuben Abati disputes the N2 trillion allegedly spent, he should help convert all the money spent by TAN on its pro-Jonathan propaganda which began a full year ahead of the elections focused on labelling self-evident lies as evidences of transformation

    PDP is dead, okay almost. No thanks to PVCs and the Smart Card Readers and, of course, an INEC Chairman whose integrity you can take to the bank. Prior to the elections, various organs of the party had coyly obtained about 20 million voters’ card numbers from their unsuspecting owners.  Claiming to be looking for endorsers, TAN, by its own admission, grossed 17.8 million signatories with their voters’ card numbers. Omo-Ilu Foundation must have distributed, and received back, close to 2 million application forms, also with voters’ card numbers in the Southwest, making close to 20 million voters numbers available to be cloned but for the Smart Card Reader.

    Nigerians should, therefore, congratulate themselves for their historic escape from a 16-year virtual enslavement. Even President Jonathan, by his own confession, has been entrapped for his own six of those years. Nigerians also know that in the last four, although we voted for one, we got two. While one sat placidly, watching our problems multiply, with hundreds of children stolen under his nose, the other ran roughshod over the entire country, especially in her south south zone, causing problems everywhere she went.

    Again, because he that is down needs fear no fall, let us spare the PDP but take a cursory look at some of its most outlandish legacies. First, the humongous, absolutely unimaginable amount of money they spent on the presidential election. Since Dr Reuben Abati disputes the N2 trillion allegedly spent, he should help convert all the money spent by TAN on its pro-Jonathan propaganda which began a full year ahead of the elections focused on labelling self-evident lies as evidences of transformation. Or how can any serious organisation claim that President Jonathan fought corruption to a standstill, even as corruption related cases were being serially withdrawn from the courts?  And why do they think a wily Femi Fani-Kayode moved over to the PDP?  Dr Abati should also convert to naira and kobo, all the amount spent on those dizzying television adverts which were, allegedly, funded by federal government agencies. Then to the campaign proper, he should tell Nigerians how much was spent on logistics, adverts –radio, television and outdoors, as well as the staggering ‘mobilisation’ fees paid, mostly in hard currency, to all Lagos -based tribal associations then being assiduously recruited to work against the Yoruba; to Obas, Obis and Emirs; to the ever available CAN and other faith-based organisations, not leaving out hotel expenses at the most expensive hotels in the country. Others are fuelling the thousands of vehicles deployed, rendering operable the entire presidential fleet of 10 air craft and others that were chartered, all put in the service of that most expensive campaign ever in the history of Nigeria. I have deliberately left off security and INEC officials, many of who must have been handsomely ‘settled’ to turn the other eye as we saw copiously in Akwa Ibom and Rivers states. Before he can successfully dispute the allegation that PDP spent N2 trillion of public money on the election, Reuben must tell Nigerians how much the PDP spent.

    Apart from literally emptying the national treasury and instituting corruption and crass debauchery in the country these past 16 years, the Peoples Democratic Party has completely disembowelled Nigeria; it  has turned it to a mere shadow and we are only fortunate that a man like General Muhammadu Buhari will be taking over in days. While President Barrack Obama took over an America that was economically humbled as a result of a general economic downturn, General Buhari will be taking over a country economically, as well as morally, in ruins. Nobody has captured our current circumstances better than Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú, a Premium Times Editorial Board member, who we shall be quoting here at some length.  Her article: ‘Thieving Nigerian Elite and Their Brats’, apart from very accurately capturing the Nigerian condition at the tail-end of the Jonathan era, situating as it does, some of the reasons our politicians, public servants, oil subsidy and pension scammers –all friends of the government – steal much more than they would ever need in nine lives, it also points us in the way of the much desired relaunch of the War Against Indiscipline.

    Wrote Ademola-Olateju: “The rich Nigerian makes a compelling case that unearned money is unfulfilling. That explains their enslavement to primitive acquisition, ostentatious consumption and transparent displays. The Nigerian wants to be rich just to show and to oppress those around him. They steal more and covet more, long after the money has become a burden rather than a comfort. They are raising brats and self-absorbed children who are accustomed to living large from infancy. They have no idea they are ruining this country much more than what they stole but by contaminating the environment with children who have no respect for hard work and know nothing about integrity. They see expensive vacations and high brow shopping as commonplace. What the truly wealthy in other nations consider as luxury is commonplace in Nigeria. Luxury loses meaning when it is a constant. Constant luxury is no luxury at all; luxury is not commonplace! There is no need for sweeping generalisations as some people earned their wealth in this country but how many are they? How many are genuinely rich and not fronting for people in government or enabled by insiders? Richard Branson who owns Virgin Atlantic has children and they fly economy. How many Nigerians are as rich as Richard Branson? Unfortunately for these thieving parents, their children know them as thieves and they themselves are trying to be bigger thieves when they grow up. They are all over the Lekki-Ikoyi corridor and the streets of Maitama and Asokoro, displaying the stereotypical arrogance of privilege. They are everywhere, driving fast cars and lacking the motivation to accomplish anything in life. Our rulers who stole us blind send their children abroad to study with the aim of coming back to take over the reins of power; have they? No! It doesn’t work that way. Privileged children have no motivation to take better control of their education. They have the money to stay in posh apartments, ride expensive cars and party away because the money is there for the taking. There is no need to learn for a future career. While their children struggle through school, partying and doing drugs, the parents are still delusional, hoping it is just a phase. It is not a phase! Life without work, however financially secure, is an aimless life. A life without purpose. That is why monied children are swinging in oceans of anxiety, indecision and despair. In essence, money robs children of their ambition. When children are in full knowledge of their parents vast fortunes, they are more likely to develop a twisted view of the world. Money prevents them from developing a strong sense of empathy and compassion. The result? The aim of sending them abroad eventually falls flat. The best among them come back as DJ’s and the children of their drivers and nannies become doctors!”

    Continuing, she writes: “we owe it a duty to tell it loud and clear that stealing billions of Naira will not bring them all they had hoped for nor will it guarantee happiness. We must educate people on the concept of service and aspiring to something greater than the self. Parents, teachers and the clergy must go back to preaching our lost values as people are truly happy when they concentrate on things that make the world a better place. How many Nigerians alive today can have the cult following Buhari has? Money did not fetch him that, something far greater did.

    “If nothing is learned from the profligate times of Goodluck Jonathan, we, at least, know that stealing is far more complicated than it seems. Money is never enough! The rich worry more about money than the poor. They worry about losing it, so they steal more and more. As the zeroes increase, the dilemmas get bigger. If anything, the rich faces more melancholy than the rest of us. We generally believe a little more money would make our lives happier and in many instances it is true. But the hard truth is; human appetites for material indulgence are rarely satisfied. Money is overrated!”

    As we march into the new Buhari era, therefore, we all must learn to abandon those negative actions and traits that combine to put us smugly amongst the wretched of the earth. We must graduate out of PDP-ism, forever.

  • A long walk to freedom

    As the world settles into the new millennium, a radical shift in the balance of demographic composition appears to be under way.  A huge change in global population and the pattern of human settlement is taking place before our very eyes.

    As the phenomenon of globalisation abolishes time and space, as its momentum dissolves barriers, as its dynamic collars and corrals nations into involuntary cooperation, those left behind in the remaining hells on earth are also “globalising” with their feet. The result is human migration of awesome proportions which often rivals the best space adventure in terms of imaginative daring and resourcefulness.

    The world, particularly its better managed metropolitan centres, is under siege from this human armada. For the first time in its history, the Hispanic population in the United States is poised to outstrip the Black populace as the dominant minority. In Britain, unwanted guests show up at royal banquets. Primeval cousins long abandoned in ancestral homesteads suddenly pop up at dinner in the affluent west.

    A huge human tornado with origins in the distressed nations of sub-Saharan Africa is assaulting the European coastline. From Mexico and Cuba, and particularly from the human fiascos of Haiti and the Dominican Republics, it is a daily battle of wits and will with American coastguards; from Central Europe, the Western European gateway is often subjected to amphibious assaults combined with an infantry dash across the Channel tunnel as human initiative and sheer will power make nonsense of impregnable fortresses; from Asia, the boat people still take to the perilous seas.

    Accompanying the tragedy of this people are tales of extraordinary courage in the face of unimaginable adversity. These are epics of heroism stretching the limits of human endurance and the threshold of pains. They would make the fabled Moses wince in admiration. Almost without exception, the ordeal invariably ends in forced cannibalism as the logic of survival takes over from the imperative of civilising refinement.

    They tackle their grim fare with mournful restraint rather than the joyous relish of the truly famished. When rescued, survivors are usually in a state of delirium babbling insensate nonsense or staring at their rescuers in terminal disorientation. The desert and the high seas are not the most hospitable of places.

    Whatever it is that would make human beings subject themselves to this extreme torture and tribulation must be quite unsettling. Human migration, to be sure, is the first condition of humanity, and is the biological equivalent of shifting cultivation. No nation, tribe, race or people can boast with any assurance that their current location is the precise origin of their ancestors.

    Reeling before victorious armies, escaping from social hostilities, absconding from pandemic pestilence and other epochal disorders, or literally in search of greener pastures, mankind has always been on the move. Indeed, it is said that during the glacial age, certain precursors of the human race went back to water from whence they came rather than face the intense hostilities on land. Hence, the anomalous features of certain sea mammals, particularly the whale and the dolphin.

    But migration can also be an internal continental affair. The Yoruba wax eloquent about their origin in ancient Egypt which they left after a fierce battle of succession. The Fulani almost certainly left the Atlas mountains, incubating and mutating for several centuries in the Futa Jallon Plateau from where they eventually fanned across northern West Africa. The Itsekiri of the Niger Delta are almost certainly of Yoruba extraction. Sometimes, a triumphant army can engender dislocation and dispersal of epic proportions.

    This is what is behind what is known as the Mfekane phenomenon in South Africa when the victorious Zulu army scattered all the tribes to the wind. The one hundred year civil war which attended the collapse of the old Oyo Empire in the eighteenth century altered the demographic constitution of the Yoruba nation forever, engendering little local difficulties such as the Modakeke phenomenon, the Owu “ Diaspora” and other contemporary political imbroglios.

    Africa, as usual, occupies a unique position in this migratory conundrum. Something new always comes out of Africa. And we are not talking of bizarre exotica. There are three features unique to the benighted continent. First, there is no record of human migration back to Africa. The much storied captivity of the children of Israel in Egypt ended when Moses led his people back to freedom.

    The Jews have travelled long and hard ever since then, but certainly not back to Africa. Human beings may have erupted from the plains of East Africa, but it would seem that the natural human instincts lead away from the stifling heritage of the founding continent. When the heroic Colonel Netenyahu led his men on the famous Entebbe raid against the murderous thugs of Idi Amin, he was re-enacting an atavistic ritual.

    The second distinguishing characteristic for Africa is the absence of a civilising hub or nucleus to act as a magnet for the disconsolate and discontented of the continent with the exception of negligible and miniscule oases such as Botswana, Namibia and Senegal. North America has its United States and Canada; Europe has its affluent western nations and Asia has its Asian tigers.

    With Zimbabwe having joined the common ancestry of failed postcolonial states, with South Africa slowly unravelling as the revolution begins to consume its children and noble ideals, with the Nigerian mammoth taking its time to fulfil its manifest destiny as a multinational haven for the black person, Africans are left with no alternative than to flee Africa.

    The third characteristic is a function and a working out of the logic of the first two. It is true that Africa is not unique when it comes to hellish spots on earth where everything is short, nasty and brutish. The hell-hole of Haiti, the voodoo-ravaged disaster zone that is the Dominican Republic, the stone-age barbarity of the Taleban conquerors of Afghanistan, the trigger-crazed weirdoes of Chechnia, the morbid cruelties of the Balkan triangle of Kosovo-Macedonia-Serbia and of course the dark caves of Irian Jaya all compete for supremacy in the absolute misery index.

    But it needs restating that it is in Africa, particularly the vast human zoos of the sub-Sahara, that hunger, disease, want , famine of biblical proportions, epidemics of dereliction such as AIDS and the pestilential Ebola virus have combined with evil governance to produce a new paradigm of human affliction and destitution. Those who are looking for a vision of the apocalypse need not look very far. It is here on the continent that gave birth to humanity.

    Those who have not been devastated are voting with their sturdy limb. Their patience exhausted by the moral, spiritual, economic and political bankruptcy of the continent, they turn their back on family and friends forever. Let the dead bury the dead, they seem to be saying. But to reach civilisation, they must first confront the immense void of the Sahara, a monstrous wasteland stretching over three thousand miles teeming with ancient and recent bones.

    As the scalding sun singe their hair and the roasting sand burn their feet, they turn into hallucinating wrecks often before wild animals put finishing touches to them. This Old Testament suffering has now been memorably captured in a documentary titled, Exodus From Africa. It is a crying shame for humanity in general and Africans in particular.

    Those who subject themselves to this terrifying ordeal are by no means feckless or irrational. Indeed it may be one last act of stupendous will as they seek to rejoin remote cousins whose ancestors’ better honed survivalist instincts led them away from a sinking hulk. It is a leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

    To be devoured by wild animals in the Sahara desert may well be a better fate than to be eaten alive by the RUF savages of Sierra Leone. To die with hope in the Sahara inferno is probably a better deal than to expire under the heaving institutional debris of post-colonial Africa. Meanwhile as this goes on, as the flowers of Africa are daily scorched in the Saharan hell, African leaders are busy changing the name of their moribund and comically inept organisation, as if a name-change has ever kept receivers at bay.

    The question then is: Who will save Africa? Certainly not the hypocritical West and its institutions and instruments of domination. Too selfishly preoccupied with the gains of globalisation, Western nations have failed to note the debilitating effects of this phenomenon on fragile economies and still more fragile nations, delinked, decoupled and un-networked as a result of a different mode of production and the different logic of their mode of insertion within the structure of the modern nation-state.

    Without ever consolidating the gains of the nation-state, African nations are compelled to abolish embryonic national institutions and seek their fortunes in a solidarity of aberrant states. As it was with the internationalisation of slavery when Africa was occupied and its territorial mass forcibly organised along the image of the conqueror without any regard to internal dynamics, so it is with globalisation.

    Yet if one cannot argue with an earthquake, one can at least study its momentum and master its inner logic. Rather than being demonised and diabolised, globalisation ought to be rigorously encountered. This is the urgent task for the intellectual and political elite of Africa. Human development is not a charity ball, and western nations do not owe any obligation to any continent, beyond their own enlightened self-interest. To be at the periphery of any mode of production is not the disaster it seems.

    Western nations were able to overcome the contradictions of feudalism precisely because they were at its peripheral formation. This feat would have been impossible in the classically feudal economies of ancient Ethiopia, China and the old Tsarist Russian Empire.

    While consolidating their national institutions, African nations can creatively deploy the political devolution and economic deregulation of globalisation to overcome the contradictions and monstrosities of the authoritarian colonial state. If astutely handled, an unviable and unworkable monolithic behemoth like the current Nigerian nation can transform into a genuine multi-national state which can then serve as a transforming hub for other failed colonial contraptions.

    Either way, it is going to be a long walk to freedom. Where reforms fail and earthly authorities falter, people lose interest in the pursuit and possibility of worldly happiness, and those who remain will be driven to seek otherworldly succour and solace accordingly. This is not because religion is the opium of the people but a result of a basic human need for reassurance that life itself is not an expensive joke.

    In periods of political and social disorder and the total collapse of values, humanity seeks refuge in the transcendent morality which ennobles suffering and canonises pain. If this makes them vulnerable to religious charlatans, it also prepares the ground for the emergence of genuine redeemers, prophets and twelfth imams who will be at the head of rampaging social forces with absolutely nothing to lose. By then it will be too late for the undeserving elite of Africa and for many who would have taken one long last look at the crumbling cradle of mankind.

     

    (First published in 2003 )

  • The great unread

    I think the world is trying to tell us to open the blessed books and find all the secrets of the world tucked between the pages

    Like the great unwashed, unbrushed and unshoed, there is just so much you can do with the great unread. They not only do not believe that you mean well by telling them to take a bath, brush their teeth, lace up their shoes or read a book, they actually believe they have a right to be left alone to enjoy their states of nature. Take the great unwashed as an example. They hate getting into water whereas the rest of the world enjoys the various temperatures of water cascading over them to wash the filth and grime of yesteryears off. Oh yes, dear reader; some grime can stick to that lovely skin of yours for years. If you don’t believe me, take a real good bath and scrub yourself real hard. Then towel yourself down. After that, just rub up and down any square area of your leg or part of your choice, and what comes off on your finger? That’s right; last year’s grime; and if you look closely, you’ll probably be able to tell where you collected the idiot dust responsible.

    The great unread are quite another kettle of fish. A mixed crowd you have there to be sure. There are first those who are unread because they cannot read. They are unable, unschooled and untutored. These are the ones the mass literacy programmes should be intensified for.

    Then there are those who can read, but who for their lives or money, would not deign to pick up any intellectual material to read and educate their minds. These are the ones who deserve our sympathy, exasperation and a shake of their shoulder: WHY ARE YOU NOT USING YOUR GOD-GIVEN BRAINS?

    Then, there is a third group. You know, just as you can have Limited Liability Companies (Ltd.), so also you can have those with Limited Reading Deeds (Lrd.). These ones read all right, but usually when they have no choice in the matter. They are the ones who only read the blurbs of literary texts to pass examinations. Then there is yet a tiny set of people who are hardly talked about. They read voraciously and, wonder of wonders, they even write. But then, who gives this group the time of day? Not you!

    So, these are your groups of readers and non-readers. Is it any wonder then that Nigeria is said to constitute one giant mass of the great unread?! And you know what they say about the unread, don’t you? They neither know nor seek to know. Yes, indeed, there is a stereotypic joke flying around about you: they say that if you want to hide any secret from a Nigerian, write it and put it between the pages of a book. How did we get to this point?

    I don’t know but I think the world had Nigerians in mind when they set a day aside in the year to pay attention to books, copyrights and intellectual properties. Dear reader, please don’t mind me for yoking together these fine birds of the same feather because they have come on each other’s heels. I think the world is trying to tell us to open the blessed books and find all the secrets of the world tucked between the pages.

    One of the reasons the reading culture went down in this country might be the fact that books went out of the reach of the ordinary man and woman. In other words, books were priced out of the hands of those who needed them most. And I believe, as I have said before, that it started in the seventies, when the cheap paper industry was deliberately killed by you know who: your friends the government, in order to hurt the newspaper industry so that news would not be easily accessible to you and me so that we will be in the dark about things so that the government could continue to do what they liked without you and I being the wiser so that….. Now you know why I hate talking about the government: it makes me too emotional (sniff, sniff).

    The ultimate effect has been that the book industry is now suffering because books that should cost nothing more than a fraction of a child’s daily allowance are now costing a good deal more than a half of a father’s monthly emolument. In foreign countries, children have been known to use their allowances to purchase comics and light reading materials in order to improve their cognitive reasoning, reading, and ethical abstractive abilities, not to talk of their written and yes, spoken English. Here, children are preoccupied with worrying about where their daddies will get food to put on the table. I ask you, where, among the family’s catalogue of needs, should ‘reading for leisure’ books be fixed without having to break the bank, steal or borrow?

    This year, I understand the theme for the Books and Copyrights day is ‘Read the World’. Honestly, if I didn’t know better, I would have said that the composers of that theme were trying to taunt us to do something about the great unread in our midst, like (whisper) RID THE WORLD OF THEM OR SOMETHING. But, I will be more charitable and pretend I speak English sometimes, like a Nigerian professor of English who was asked in a foreign hospital if she spoke English, and she said ‘sometimes’. In my little English, I will therefore hazard that they are asking the government to do something about the cheap paper (pulp) industry; or read (the lips of) the world and hear what it is saying such as, ‘You pirates, respect our intellectual properties!’

    I cannot seem to understand the philosophy of intellectual piracy. When Shakespeare’s Hamlet said ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (1, 5, 166-7), I thought he was talking about how his friend needed to add more value to his books by learning more of life’s lessons. Here are your intellectual pirates deciding to reduce the value of books by making the author’s efforts worthless in his hands. Is that wickedness or what?

    Sometime ago, when I visited a shop, I found copies of my favourite classical pieces at prices that shot through the roof. I bought them anyway and I felt happy that I had appreciated the efforts of some musician somewhere. Those around me thought otherwise. To start with, they looked at me as if I could not possibly be serious about having bought them at those prices. Then they informed me with a turn of their lips that I could more easily have bought these things at only a fraction of those prices from those chaps that ferry them around in wheel-barrows who bring them in from China or Onitsha. Then they forbore to touch them.

    Seriously, cheap versions of anything are good, but they must come with the consent, and to the gain, of the artist. Presently, I understand that the Nigerian copyrights commission is at war with intellectual pirates, burning their hauls and all that. I think it is time to go after those who import the pirated copies of other people’s works.

    There is an urgent need to make books and other works of art accessible to the public at legally reasonable prices. This not only discourages piracy, but educates the public, reforms characters in many ways, ennobles people’s minds and makes cultured individuals of people. Ultimately, it encourages more creativity, which in turn contributes to societal development; and in this cyclical movement, everyone gains.

  • APC and the Tinubu phenomenon

    APC and the Tinubu phenomenon

    In 2003 when he broke ranks with his fellow Southwest governors and declined to form an ethnically motivated political and electoral alliance with former president Olusegun Obasanjo, few people knew what really motivated Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was at the time Lagos State governor. When the alliance blew up in the faces of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) governors who blundered into it, it was suggested that Asiwaju Tinubu was prescient. It was obvious he could not trust Chief Obasanjo whom he considered adept at ambushing friends and enemies alike and skillful in seeking advantage over them, often unscrupulously. But there was a second, perhaps more potent, reason for balking at the deal with the former president. Asiwaju Tinubu was naturally uninterested in any alliance not anchored on ideas. Allying with Chief Obasanjo simply because he was Yoruba, especially one who neither approximated nor projected Yoruba worldview and values, was to him ignoble.

    In retrospect, Asiwaju Tinubu served notice early in the day what kind of politics he wished to play, and what kind of person he liked to be thought of. His ideas might not possess Aristotelian streaks, but he was passionate about them, and he took inordinate risk imbuing them with life. He was not afraid to walk alone, nor be pilloried fairly or maliciously, and he seemed to take pleasure in risking everything he had for the sake of causes, and if it came to that, persons, he believed in. But he took care to outlive the enemy rather than hug reckless martyrdom. He of course recognised he was not always right, but he seemed at peace with himself even when he was wrong. Sometimes brusque, sometimes combative, a little obtruding and consciously ruthless, he was in equal measure humane, farsighted, sacrificial and thoughtful. He in fact seemed to have built his political career on a curious amalgam of virtues and vices that made him one of the most loathed and loved, but more accurately paradoxically indefinable, person in politics today.

    Twelve years after he defined his place as a huge risk taker in politics, and after more than a decade of plotting and scheming, envisioning and practicalising, Asiwaju Tinubu has worked himself into a central position as an ideologue, kingmaker and democrat to whom, more than anyone, the country owes both the deepening of its democracy and the dramatic electoral overthrow of the Goodluck Jonathan government. He could have shortsightedly entered into the unwholesome and opportunistic electoral arrangement with Chief Obasanjo in 2003, and settled any discussion as to what kind of man he was. And in 2007, he could also have accepted the government of national unity offered by his close friend and former Katsina State governor, the late Umaru Yar’Adua. But on both occasions, his instinctive understanding of the value of opposition politics, his unstated belief in the superiority of his ideas, and his charismatic independence, even aloofness bordering on isolation, compelled him into a different political trajectory.

    That trajectory has taken him through a roller coaster of emotions, plucked him from the politics of one state — Lagos — and hopped, stepped and jumped him via regional politics of the Southwest, and landed him smack in the coveted middle of national politics, as tactician, strategist and kingmaker. Now, even his enemies, of whom there are hundreds, will respect him though they continue to loath him. Asiwaju Tinubu’s success and prominence in politics must, however, be properly contextualised. In the 2015 polls, he was simply well positioned. Dr Jonathan had worked up the electorate into a fever over his poor handling of national affairs, including unemployment, Chibok schoolgirls abductions, declining economy, corruption and many debilitating and vexatious policies. A change had become desirable by as early as 2013. Gen Buhari, the APC candidate had also recognised the limitations of his politics of exclusion and non-compromise, and had risen astronomically in the stock of the electorate to achieve cult following. And the world itself, especially the great powers and superpowers, had become quite fed up with the mediocrity in Nigeria. The conditions were ripe for change, and it required someone of uncommon perception, vision and courage to midwife it.

    Nigeria was fortunate that the ripe conditions were met by one man (or what a great wit poignantly and cryptically describes as ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’), Asiwaju Tinubu, who showed fierce determination and character in 2003, reinforced that character and self-belief in 2007, expanded his horizon from thence onward, and in 2011 began to envision the kind of alliances and friendship across ethnic groups, regions and religions that were necessary to change the old order. While still confined to his Lagos State as a lone survivor of the Obasanjo Tsunami, and whereas the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) controlled more states than his Action Congress (AC), he began to act and speak as the national opposition, unafraid he could be crushed by a dominant Abuja and a domineering and unsparing President Obasnjo.

    Not only did he succour former Plateau State governor, Joshua Chbbi Dariye, who was unlawfully impeached and hunted by both President Obasanjo and a colluding PDP in 2006, he also lent a helping hand to former Oyo State governor, Rashidi Ladoja, who had also come under President Obasanjo’s impeachment axe in the same year. To underscore the fact that his political convictions were not a fluke, he was to later extend the same assistance to the impeached Governor of Adamawa State, Murtala Nyako. An incurable believer in presidentialism and its undergirding principle of federalism, Asiwaju Tinubu gladly reached out as a champion of the constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers to anyone oppressed. It was no surprise that he took active interest in the electoral processes of Southwest states, including the South-South state of Edo; nor was it also surprising that many ambitious politicians saw him as a reliable friend and bulwark in the fight for electoral probity. He fought to reclaim Ekiti, Osun, Ondo and Edo States; and by the next round of polls in 2011, he offered more than an arm and a leg to claim Ogun and Oyo States.

    Between 1999 and 2011, it was clear to every observer that the presidency meddled in the affairs of the National Assembly, thereby robbing Nigeria of one of the main legs for the sustenance of democracy. In particular, Chief Obasanjo meddled actively in the legislature, enthroning and dethroning at will. Even out of power, in 2011, he still attempted to enthrone Hon Mulikat Adeola-Akande as the Speaker. By that time, however, Asiwaju Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) had come of age. Brushing aside the sentiment of zoning and ethnicity, and recognising that his party held the ace in the Southwest, and also aware that he needed to stamp his authority on the democratic process, he forged an alliance with other independent forces within and outside the House of Representatives to elect a Speaker of their choice, Aminu Tambuwal.

    It took enormous courage to embrace a prescient choice that at face value seemed to disadvantage the Southwest to which the PDP had zoned the position. But needs must when the devil drives, and Asiwaju Tinubu shut his eyes, steadied his nerves and bit the bullet. The recriminations that followed were fearsome and unrelenting for more than four years. He was blamed for every problem in the region, and in particular for Dr Jonathan’s deliberate and orchestrated marginalisation of the Yoruba. The grey hairs and hot blood of the Afenifere and Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) respectively assailed him, and propped up the Teflon Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State as the new rallying point for the Yoruba. They are now all silent, their last hoary gasp made when Oba Rilwan Akiolu of Lagos took the Igbo in Lagos to task.

    It is not clear at what point Asiwaju Tinubu began to entertain the thought of winning the centre, especially because he had unsuccessfully tried to forge a winning alliance both in 2007 and 2011 for that purpose. But after seeing the political spinoff from his fortuitous backing of Hon Tambuwal for the position of Speaker, and considering the doors it opened to the North, and the fact that many permutations suddenly became appealingly possible, a fresh and more vigorous attempt to form an alliance looked realistic. The Yoruba organisation, Afenifere, bitterly opposed the ACN, denounced Asiwaju Tinubu, and blamed him for all the region’s woes. Undeterred, however, a new broad-based alliance, which took advantage of the estrangement of some five or seven PDP governors, was formed a year after in 2012. But notwithstanding the flourish and excitement with which the new party called APC presented its roadmap and manifesto, few knew that barely two years later, they could sweep so dramatically and grandly into power.

    If Asiwaju Tinubu dreamt of winning the presidency for the APC, he did not speak it confidently. There were the structure and organisation of the gangling and unsteady party to contend with, as many old party hands resisted new ones. There were also contentious primaries to overcome, not to talk of the more volatile election of a presidential candidate. Indeed, every prognostication was unfavourable, with many analysts, including former Aviation minister Ebenezer Babatope, swearing that sooner or later the new party would implode. Surprisingly, perhaps also to the party’s leaders, the party held together. It also became clear that the driving force was Asiwaju Tinubu, who worked tirelessly and imaginatively to keep the new alliance going. Even if he could not get the ultimate prize of the presidency for the APC, he thought, the party could at least rise to become a strong and powerful opposition with expanded reach. A number of Southwest groups, including Afenifere, accused him of helping the North to enslave the Yoruba, but he forged on nonetheless.

    Any astute politician who studied the statistics of the 2011 polls would know it is sentimental nonsense to speak of enslavement. Dr Jonathan himself had to forge an alliance between at least four geopolitical zones to win in 2011. No northern or south-western politician could win the presidency without a strong alliance. A smart politician would appreciate that Dr Jonathan’s policies had alienated the North. It was, therefore, ready for an alliance. The Southwest, notwithstanding the outlandish conclusions of the Afenifere, was also frustrated and alienated, and was ready for a deal. If no other zone embraced the change mantra, four zones already implicitly did. Having secured the friendship of the North, instead of hating and preaching to them like the Afenifere did, Asiwaju Tinubu managed to finally cobble together a winning alliance and formula which even the controversy over the presidential running mate could not scupper.

    Two final factors seal the reputation of Asiwaju Tinubu. Not only was he ready to work with difficult politicians like Chief Obasanjo, whose crippling conservatism and meddlesomeness many Nigerians resented, since 1999 he had imbibed the Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello culture of leadership recruitment, building young men and women whom he unleashed on the country as future leaders, while also reconciling with his powerful detractors to the point of even describing Chief Obasanjo incredulously as the navigator. Those future leaders sometimes disagreed with him, and even took advantage of his liberal spirit and forbearance, but he seemed to have an uncanny appreciation of their limitations and thus readily accommodated or overlooked their foibles.

    He may not be president-elect or vice president-elect, but the role he played in deepening democracy, sustaining and nurturing the culture of opposition, and strategising the defeat of the PDP, have all raised his profile sky-high. Like the APC, his main challenge will be how to manage both his success and new profile. Two years after its formation, the APC won the presidency even before it had time to solidify its structure and reinforce its raison d’etre. It is, after all, clear that the party has many tendencies, and its core values may seem even tenuous and fragile, especially seeing how a mixed multitude had flocked into its membership in the past months. Asiwaju Tinubu himself, the man with the onomatopoeic Borgu (kwara State) traditional title of Jagaban, is not the most patient of men when it comes to running with a vision; but while he is doubtless a progressive, he appears more pragmatic than philosophical, more practical than an ideologue.

    The APC is a young party, undoubtedly precocious. But it is also brash and to some extent inexperienced. It needs time to establish itself and concretise its philosophy and traditions. Asiwaju Tinubu is tarred with the same brush. Though he sometimes sounds eclectic, his ideas are nonetheless still in formation. But much more challenging to him is that not being president or vice president, and being consumed by a gripping vision for the seemingly impossible, he must now watch how his party and other elected officials would run with the vision. He will assume that everyone has cottoned on to the vision; but more, he will squirm and writhe in anxiety from a point (which point?) in the scheme of things that posterity will place him. For someone so enormously endowed, but one also abounding in his own idiosyncratic shortcomings, his greatest battles may be ahead of him: not battles of strategising and winning elections; but battles of sustaining the lofty height he has climbed as a person and politician, and turning the APC into a more cohesive, disciplined and philosophical organisation, one capable of both midwifing the change the country yearned for when it voted Gen Buhari and developing Nigeria into a developmental tiger far surpassing those of Asia.

  • After the biggest party

    After the biggest party

    (The rise and fall of the PDP)

    It was a messy and dismal end. There are some deaths that are dignified and ennobling in their calm fortitude and heroic defiance. But not this one. The PDP has died as it lived: beyond its means and probably beyond the means of the country as well. A presidential capitulation quickly snowballed into an anarchic retreat and a rout ending in an electoral massacre on the scale of a Homeric battlefield.

    We will be counting the principal political casualties for many years to come. State orphans abound. The sixty year Reich has become the sixteen year wreck. There are no mourners in this Sambisa forest of the quick and the wounded; only rotund vultures and pot-bellied hyenas having a field day. It is an Eliotsian wasteland, and April is the cruelest month.

    Not even the greatest political soothsayer could have foreseen this distressing disintegration and death of the greatest party in Africa. One of its shrewd and astute founding fathers, in a moment of embattled lucidity, had cautioned that this was not a political party but a rally. A rally is just a collection of different mobs on parade. If there is food, the mob will stay quiet. But if there is no food, the mob will quickly dissolve into its component units, all heading in different directions.

    After the greatest party comes the great hangover and headache. An army founded on the principles and ideology of loot can never survive the removal of its feeding bottle. The same fate also awaits any political party founded on such nefarious axioms. But we cannot afford to gloat too much on the horrid demise of the Nigerian behemoth. Like a festering corpse abandoned by even close relations, the PDP has become a national and public health hazard.

    The methods, means, principalities and instrumentalities by which this maladroit mammoth met its timely end will be studied and analyzed by students of politics in  multi-ethnic societies with self-cancelling pluralities of power fulcrums for years and generations to come. They are beyond the standard fares of conventional post-colonial Political Science. But it is also important for the Nigerian intelligentsia both at home and in the Diaspora to study and analyze what went wrong as a guide to the future in all its gripping immediacy. We are not out of the wood yet.

    In the long run, the PDP was a child and victim of the circumstances of its provenance and progeny. It was an army arrangement. It was never conceived as a genuine and organic political party or mass movement. You cannot give what you don’t have. The army does not do mass movements, except in battle formations. That is a contradiction in terms and offensively pejorative of its constituting ethos. The army thrives on hierarchy and rigid differentiation. All animals are not equal, and some are even more unequal than others. This is the pecking order of nature itself. Democracy is a product of human evolution away from the state of nature, but even then for democracy to thrive there are certain undemocratic institutions that must be permanently in place.

    Like its NPN forebear which met the same fate in a military putsch, the PDP was not conceived as a conventional political party, but as a gargantuan coalition of big people and power brokers whose influence and authority would be so all-encompassing as to guarantee national stability and ward off the centrifugal forces which have hobbled Nigeria since independence. In the event, the PDP was just a variation of an old theme by very much the same military aristocracy.

    On the face of it, it was a patriotic and nationalistic move. You cannot blame the military for being unable to envision a society beyond its own regimental and ideological purview. The Babangida political experimentation with a two-party system threw up a wildcat and a political maverick that could not be relied upon to guarantee military interests which under the long gestation of despotic rule had become national interests. In an attempt to forcibly liquidate the contrary forces, Abacha almost ended up liquidating the whole country.

    Under clever guidance and astute remote control, his successors were not about to make the same mistake. It is easy to forget that General Abubakar Abdulsalaam, in his first broadcast to the nation after General Sani Abacha’s demise, promised solemnly to see the Abacha transition programme to its speedy conclusion. But after being swiftly countermanded by those who put him there, a contrite general announced a new transition programme.

    But just as you cannot step into the same river twice, no two historical conjunctures can be completely alike whatever their outward similarities. 1998 was not 1993. If the military hierarchy had bothered to take a peep into the political horoscope, they would have noticed that population-wise, Nigeria was becoming a much younger country and the demographic condition was about to change forever. The relentless forces of globalization had led to a radical democratization of the means of violence as well as the methods of mass enlightenment.

    In the event, the logic that led the military to an Obasanjo also led to the eventual disintegration of the ruling party. Having exhausted its historical and political possibilities, the military hierarchy had to look for a safe pair of hands and a bluff retired general to cover its retreat to the barracks. The PDP opening convention was a classic case of a textbook military operation as the founding fathers of the party were muscled out by sheer military might. Obasanjo famously took his delegates to the convention in a sealed train and tellingly bivouacked outside the city.

    In the circumstances, the organic growth of party and the deepening of the democratic process were left in the hands of a man who by training and temperament is an authoritarian autocrat who had no truck with democratic niceties. When the retired general famously asked the Turaki of Adamawa whether he could obey simple instructions, many thought it was an eccentric joke. Atiku himself would later find out to his political peril that the Owu warlord meant every word.

    As for the deluded remaining founding fathers of the PDP, they soon found out that military khaki is not civilian brocade. As Obasanjo went for their political jugular, they began deserting the temple, one by one and two by two as the occasion demanded. The fiery autocrat next turned his caressing attention to the main opposition parties, engineering such momentous fissures that none of them survived the thunderous implosion.

    If the PDP ever had a soul it fled at the Jos convention. In other words, the party died in vitro. It was a mere vehicle for demilitarization which quickly transformed into a fascist terror machine for maintaining a hegemonic stranglehold on the nation. As Obasanjo has brilliantly demonstrated, it takes two to play at the fascist game of hegemonic domination. The same logic of the despotic suborning of a nation which made it possible for a military cabal to impose Obasanjo on the polity also made it possible for Obasanjo himself to impose two successors on the nation without heavens falling.

    The game could have gone on for quite some time, but for the dramatic intervention of hubris so overweening that it is beyond the ken of human comprehension. Yet it was a matter of time, with the PDP becoming a stalled behemoth unable to move itself or the country forward and with its monstrous proboscis sucking life out of the nation.

    But only the bold and deeply cunning can call to the bold and deeply cunning. It took an inchoate and incongruous alliance to have the measure of the PDP  in the remarkable political plot that brought the unflappable and wonderfully poker-faced Aminu Tambuwal to the speakership of the House of Representatives

    At  that point in time, political neophytes, particularly the traditional carrion feeders of the South West otherwise known as mainstreamers who did not know where the game was heading ,thought that the ACN had thrown away their pot of amala. But the PDP had been pole-axed and it was only a question of time before the mammoth would crash on the canvas with a resounding thud. As the end approached, even the wily patriarch openly tore his membership card.

    There are great lessons to be learnt from the rise and fall of a party that constituted itself into a nuisance and menace to the Nigerian polity. Despite the national euphoria that greeted the dethronement of the ruling party, the future is full of dark forebodings. Unfortunately if care is not taken, the same fate awaits the now dominant party. This is what should concern all patriotic Nigerians.

    As it was in the beginning, so it seems at the end of the beginning. Like the PDP, the APC remains an inchoate and incongruous alliance; a mere vehicle to capture power teeming with contrary characters and mutually contradictory elements all in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical complicity. In trying to outsmart and outwit the PDP, it has had to be like the PDP; or at best its veritable doppelganger. In other words, there is no qualitative difference or deep ideological divergence between the two parties.

    This is a veritable source of a coming anarchy. The ranking APC hierarchs must now find within themselves the deep reserves of strength and character to give the party a soul and a capacity for organic growth which will drive change and accelerated development for the country as a whole.

    Luckily, they don’t have to look very far for a driving template. The APC already has their two leading chieftains as shining exemplars of the power of a missionary envisioning of a new society. The APC should fuse the pragmatic Democratic Welfarism of a Bola Tinubu with the instinctive messianic populism of a Mohammadu Buhari to evolve a left of centre party whose developmental strides will resonate with Nigerians and the Black Race for generations to come. This is the only way to avoid the fate of the PDP.