The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Map for map, they marched to ‘electoral’ war

    Map for map, they marched to ‘electoral’ war

    It was billed either as a contest of ideas — such ideas and philosophies as could be gleaned from their disparate thoughts and statements — or as a contest of men: with Muhammadu Buhari on one side, stolid, taciturn, combustive and unyielding; and Goodluck Jonathan on the other side, flighty, prickly, variable and conspiratorial. Perhaps, in some ways, the contest for the presidency, which took place yesterday, was some of these. But after reporting the contest for months, the media, in the last week of the campaign, turned it into a contest of maps. Map for map, both media and contestants marched into battle, their ensigns held behind their backs or trampled under feet, their principles in abeyance, and their virtues a smouldering wreck.

    First to fire the early shots among the great national newspapers last Sunday were The Nation and The Punch whose predictive maps looked eerily similar in many respects. Eight states would be battlegrounds, predicted The Nation — three from the North-Central, two from the Northeast, two from the South-South, and one from the Southeast. The paper gave Ekiti in the Southwest to Dr Jonathan, perhaps on account of the disruptive power of Governor Ayo Fayose rather than the conviction of the state’s electorate. But The Punch thought seven states and the FCT would be battlegrounds, with one form the Southwest, three from the North-Central and the FCT, and two from the Northeast. Minus the battleground states, both The Nation and The Punch seemed to give Gen Buhari victory, especially because the APC was expected to sweep the states with high electoral votes.

    Not to be outdone, The Sun published its own map a few days before the poll. Only five states, according to the paper, would be battlegrounds — two in the North-Central plus the FCT, and two in the Southwest, among which was, shockingly, Lagos. In terms of the high electoral votes states, The Sun seemed to say the contest could go the way of Gen Buhari. With three major newspapers appearing to give the contest away to Gen Buhari, it was like telling Dr Jonathan to go into pasture. But not if the Jonathan campaign could come up with a joker of its own, literally and figuratively. And, presto, Dr Jonathan’s men came out bullish with their own map published on the front pages of many newspapers across the country, expenses not spared, and with no thoughts absolutely for moderation.

    In the great contrarian map, the PDP/Dr Jonathan camp gave the battle to themselves, not by a whisker, but by a huge and insurmountable margin. Let Gen Buhari go and hang if he wished, the new map seemed to indicate. Whereas the three major newspapers based their cartographic enterprises on explicable and internally generated sleuthing, the Jonathan map based its own on far-flung authorities, including an unknown Nigerian newspaper, and surveys by a potpourri of faceless international risk analysts. Risk? Ah, well, why not, it’s politics, isn’t it?

    In the Jonathan map, only six states were grudgingly conceded to Gen Buhari, and five states were regarded as battlegrounds. The remainder were allotted willy-nilly to Dr Jonathan, lock, stock and barrel, for him to take gaily and triumphantly into his barn. The entire Southwest, minus Osun, was allotted to Dr Jonathan; so, too, the entire Southeast, all totalling 26. The battle needed not to have been fought in the first instance, going by that phantasmagoria from Dr Jonathan’s electoral and cartographic camp.

    Miffed by the abuse of the fine science of cartography, and pleasantly shocked by responses from states like Gombe, Kogi, Edo and Ekiti whose leading lights swore there had been political and electoral changes in all four states in the past few weeks, changes they argued the paper’s correspondents failed to capture, The Nation felt compelled to revisit its map, and redraw it. The fresh map published on Friday was a stirring, ringing and thunderous one-sided contest and victory for Gen Buhari. It also showed that the Buhari territory had broadened considerably, while the Jonathan country had shrunk ominously. Nine states became battlegrounds, instead of eight. Alas, the Jonathan camp could not respond to this new cartographic affront from The Nation: it was just one day to polling.

    After the results are known, perhaps late Monday or early Tuesday, it will be evident which newspapers hosted the most gifted cartographers, and which ghosts had the temerity to adjust boundaries while wearied and innocent men slept. Who knows, if the polling went well, the elections could become a landslide, and poets could even compose all sorts of poems such as the one below.

    Map for map, the media marched to war.

    Cheek by jowl they drew and shuffled their boundaries,

    Partisan cudgels on their necks like albatrosses;

    Swayed by the morsels of PDP and APC.

    Ethics foresworn; logic vaporised,

    To convince all who of the two candidates deserves victory.

    Map for map, they thrust forward,

    Marching drunkenly between transformation and change.

    The maps may not be the most important landmark of the 2015 electioneering, considering the role money has played and the expertise the PDP has deployed into dispensing financial inducement. Indeed, the entire Southwest was abuzz three to two weeks to the election, as President Jonathan virtually took control of his own campaign and sidelined his campaign organisation. He swept through the Yoruba country and smooched with traditional rulers, and according to reports, distributed financial largesse on  a scale that beggars belief. The Ondo State governor, Olusegun Mimiko, also organised youths and freelance Afenifere leaders for Dr Jonathan in the guise of creating a favourable momentum for the president to implement the 2014 national conference report.

    Then there was the irrepressible chicanery orchestrated by the Jonathan campaign to discredit INEC, humiliate the electoral commission chairman, subvert the use of permanent voter cards and card readers, and empower militants and militias as a counterforce to established and lawful security and paramilitary agencies.

    But on the whole, the maps were the most noticeable tools that drove electioneering to giddy heights in the closing moments of the elections. They will be remembered for a long time, if not for their cartographic accuracy, at least for their political razzmatazz, and as a catalyst for politics as entertainment. The competence of media cartographers will doubtless increase in the coming years, with many of them developing skills that cannot be gainsaid domestically and internationally. Should maps in fact be capable of winning elections, Gen Buhari would be crowned tomorrow or next. But as religious leaders always say, the electorate should pray against inconclusive elections on account of the problems with card readers.

  • Between ourselves and our institutions and between Marx and Rousseau: election eve reflections (2)

    Between ourselves and our institutions and between Marx and Rousseau: election eve reflections (2)

    Man’s conceiving is fathomless. His community will rise beyond the present reaches of the mind. Orisa reveals destiny as – self-destination
    Wole Soyinka

    What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    At the end of last week’s beginning essay in this series, I posed the following question with the promise that it would b the starting point for this week’s concluding piece: Who among genuine, independent-minded patriots in our country today think that we first have to change the character, the morality of a Fayose, a Chris Ubah or a Musiliu Obanikoro from within before we can make our present constitutional and institutional arrangements give us free, fair and credible elections? In case the basis for my citing these particular persons is either not clear or is perceived as a reflection of a partisan promotion of the electoral interests  of the APC, the main opposition party, let me  quickly make some clarifications that would better reveal my purposes in this series.

    As nearly every knows, Fayose, Ubah and Obanikoro are the main anti-heroes of the Ekiti-Gate electoral mega-fraud.  Well then, consider the following developments after the exposure of these men as cynical and ruthless election riggers, developments which, in almost any other country in the world, would be almost unthinkable. First, after initially denouncing the Ekiti-Gate audio clips as fake, Fayose later admitted that it was indeed himself, it was indeed his voice that was so prominent in the clip. From that admission, Fayose then declared for the whole country and the world to hear that he was not taking anything back from what people heard him say in the audio clip and that if it likes the opposition party, the APC, could take the matter to the law courts. This completely leaves out of account the fact that far more than the APC, it was the people of Ekiti State that suffered the terrible criminal wrongs revealed in the Ekiti-Gate audio clip.

    In the second significant post-Ekiti-Gate development, Goodluck Jonathan himself first said the audio clip of Ekiti-Gate was a fake. But after Fayose’s authentication of the audio clip, Jonathan then said he and his administration could and would not do anything about it because the man who secretly recorded the clip, Captain Sagir Koli of the Nigerian Army, had fled the country instead of staying to defend the authenticity of the audio clip. This is exactly what Jonathan said: “How can we do anything about it when the man who recorded it ran away”? As everyone knows, Captain Koli fled for his life. In his absence, his junior brother was arrested, kept in prison for seven months where he was severely tortured. This leaves us to wonder what would have been done to Koli himself if he had not fled for his life. To cap the series of impunities that followed the original mega-impunity of the Ekiti-Gate electoral fraud itself, Jonathan then sent Obanikoro’s name to the Senate for confirmation as Minister of State in the Foreign Ministry. And of course, against the hue and cry of both opposition Senators and the Nigerian public, the Senate President, David Mark, had Obanikoro confirmed.

    In all this we must remember that without Captain Sagir Koli, we would never have known anything about the revelations of Ekiti-Gate. The impunity with which the use of the army, the police and electoral officers to rig the June 2014 Ekiti State governorship elections for Fayose and the PDP was perpetrated in secret. Like all institutions and organs of the Nigerian state, the army, the police and the election commission, together with the women and men who serve in them, are expected to be above undue and illegal control and manipulation by anybody, no matter how highly placed. This, indeed, is the moral and functional foundation of state and public institutions in all modern societies: rational, objective, impersonal and tested bodies before which all persons whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated get equal, lawful treatment. This is why, initially, the impunity revealed by Ekiti-Gate had to be done in secret. Thus, it is a mark of the utterly corrupt and dysfunctional state of our institutions that when the secret impunity was exposed, the impunity became even more brazen and cynical. Fayose said “I am the one who said everything you heard in the tape; go to court if you wish”. Jonathan rewarded Obanikoro with a ministerial appointment which he had David Mark confirm in the Senate, in spite of the universal condemnation of the move. Nigerian Pidgin English has a wonderfully resonant term for this level of impunity and it is – wetin una fit do?

    No Nigerian Head of State has taken “wetin una fit do” to a baser, more odious and more rapacious level than Goodluck Jonathan. This says a lot because without exception, all our military dictators were, in various ways, embodiments of “wetin una fit do”. By the way, this includes Muhammadu Buhari when he was a military dictator. But Jonathan beats them all in the culture, practice and consolidation of “wetin una fit do”, whether the subject is looting and mismanagement on a grandiose scale by his appointees and cronies (remember the 2.3 trillion naira oil subsidy mega-scam?); lies and deceit to cover up mediocre achievements and lack of vision (remember the claim of having created millions of new jobs in an economy in which joblessness is at a historic high?); and gross spinelessness in meeting security challenges and the resultant crippling sense of despair in the country (remember his use of the slogan of the Chibok activists’ “Bring Back Our Girls” at the beginning of his campaign for reelection?).

    Like President, like party. Thus, no political party in our country has come close to the PDP in taking “wetin una fit do” to forms and levels that even the regime of Sani Abacha, the most deranged in our political history, did not or could not go. These include but are not limited to scrambling for political office that is as internally fierce and anti-democratic in party primaries as in local, state and federal elections; a semi-literate former hair dresser as Speaker of the House of Representatives; an illiterate political kingpin whom Chinua Achebe called “a politician with low IQ”  as the political godfather of Anambra state which has one of the highest concentrations of educated elites in the country; a thug who was rigged into office as the governor of a state and immediately proceeded to perpetrate atrocities like publicly slapping and humiliating a high court judge and making 7 members of the state assembly hegemonic over 19 members of the same assembly who belong to the opposition party.

    To this dispiriting profile of the rule of “wetin una fit do” under Jonathan in particular and the PDP in general, we must make two very crucial qualifications. One: PDP and Jonathan may be the worst incarnations, but they do not have a monopoly of the culture, practice and consolidation of “wetin una fit do”. With a few notable exceptions, all our politicians and all our ruling class political parties are implicated in the impunity of misrule, mismanagement of resources and plain and arrant looting of public coffers that PDP and Jonathan have to taken to the depths of moral cynicism. Secondly, there are areas of public institutions, utilities and services in this country that, no matter how miniscule, are resistant to the culture and practice of “wetin una fit do”. I would like to conclude this series of what I am calling “election eve reflections” with a brief discussion of these two points.

    The first point can be very easily and summarily engaged. For me, by far the most telling index of the reign of “wetin una fit do” among the generality of our politicians and political parties is the fact that it is not only the case that there are no important ideological and issue-based differences between them, they are in fact remarkably adept in moving in and out of one party to another. As I once observed in this column, in my estimation, APC is nearly three-fourths composed of former PDP members. As the particularly notable case of Nuhu Ribadu proves, part of PDP is also former APC or other opposition political parties. In concrete terms, perhaps the most eloquent illustration is the fact that, without exception, all the ruling class political parties actively and voluntarily participate in the cult of silence and secrecy around the unjust and wasteful salaries, allowances and emoluments that our legislators receive that, compositely rates as the highest that any group of legislators are paid in the world. All the governments in the country, at all levels spend far more on recurrent expenditure than on capital expenditure for development projects that could extend the national wealth to the masses of our people. Anyone who thinks that without unceasing struggle an APC victory will change this fundamental aspect of political rule in our country at the present time is in for a rude shock if the party is victorious in the coming elections.

    Nigerians in the main don’t pay much attention to this fact, but there are three crucial institutional, regulated aspects of our national economy that are, relatively speaking, free of the impunities of “wetin una fit do”. For this reason, they are worthy of our attention, of our prognoses for the future in terms of building and sustaining modern institutions that work efficiently and work for the benefit of most if not all Nigerians, regardless of ethnicity, religion, age, gender or party affiliation. These are, in a random order of iteration, the financial services industry; the communication and information IT industry; and the air travel industry, especially in conjunction with the infrastructures of airports around the state capitals and major cities and towns in the country. I do not wish to give the reader the impression that I overlook the imperfections and frustrations that Nigerians, as costumers and consumers, experience from these particular sectors of the national economy. What I am saying, what I am emphasizing is the fact that compared with almost any other institutions of the Nigerian state and society at the present time, these three sectors are relatively free of “wetin una fit do”.

    One last word in these deliberately open-ended and inconclusive “eve of elections reflections” and I am done. Please pay attention, dear reader, to the fact that these three sectors of our national economy are for the most part and in all parts of the world, vital areas of the institutional life of bourgeois democracy. Some theorists and commentators have begun to argue that Nigeria is already a developing country with a middle income economy. I don’t think we are there yet. But we are on our way there. The point is that with Jonathan and the PDP and the excesses of their “wetin una fit do” profligacy, we would never have gotten there. I mean, the likes of Fayose, Obanikoro, Ubah and oga patapata himself are nothing but incarnations of a barawo, area boy lumpen-bourgeoisie. The point now is, first, whether an APC victory would take us there and, secondly whether an APC-led bourgeois democracy can incorporate social democratic policies and initiatives that would bring unity, true federalism and social justice to our country in the years ahead. From military dictator to a bourgeois democrat with a dash of populist inclination toward social democratic leanings – this is a tall order for General Buhari (rtd.) to fulfill.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Sight and sound of 2015 electioneering

    Sight and sound of 2015 electioneering

    President Goodluck Jonathan is one of the candidates in this year’s presidential election. The problem, it must be emphasised again, is not that an Ijaw man rose to become president of Nigeria, as if there was any institutional bias against minority politicians, or a glass ceiling to limit anyone’s ambition. What the past five years or so have shown is that too many people, including perhaps the president himself, have entertained inaccurate notions of the qualities a president must possess to function optimally. The emphasis of most presidents, as this column warily noted a while ago, was always on building roads, hospitals and schools, among other structures. While these responsibilities are important, a president must, however, display qualities much deeper, more expansive, more inspiring, and more envisioning than just building structures. It is not clear what yesterday’s presidential poll would tell us, whether voters were able to make a sound judgement on how well Dr Jonathan had met the demands of his office in every ramification, far beyond what he had built or not built in his first term, and up to the sublime and probably the most important attributes a president must show. Whatever they say, it must be hoped it truly reflected their views, not the manipulations of powerful individuals.

    By far the most important sight and sound in this year’s electioneering was the role of the media. Ideally, and especially because the major media are privately owned, they are at liberty to endorse their preferred candidates within the ambit of their professional ethics. But, in general, they seemed to have redefined their ethics, blurring the line between partisanship and indefensible behaviour. Apart from opinions that ran the gamut of partisan bias, even political advertisements oscillated wildly between the reasonable and the unreasonable. In many instances, purely defamatory advertisements were, in the case of some electronic media, combatively presented as investigations rather than advertisements, without any indemnification whatsoever.

    Interestingly, despite spending humongous sums on publicity and advertisements, the PDP and the Jonathan campaign organisation repeatedly accused the APC of deploying heavy propaganda on everything, including politics. It is believed that the Jonathan campaign’s complaint indicates the impact of the APC campaign, notwithstanding deriving support from only one television station and barely three or four print media. The PDP, on the other hand, had the support of more than four or five television stations, about seven major national newspapers and scores of columnists.

    If the electoral process culminates in the election of new and visionary leaders, the laborious 2015 polls will have been worth the time and money. It will indicate that the abusive propaganda, some of the most vicious of which were directed against supporters and builders of the opposition rather than aspirants and candidates, were rendered ineffective and inoperable. It will reflect the frustrations of the people exhausted by years of economic woes, social crisis and ruinous security problems.

  • 2105 presidential election and Nigeria’s destiny

    2105 presidential election and Nigeria’s destiny

    If yesterday’s elections were free and fair by national and international standards, President Jonathan would have pushed the country in the direction of its destiny

    If the presidential election yesterday was free, fair, and credible, Nigeria as a country would have moved very close to its destiny of a peaceful, stable, unifiable, multi-ethnic modern state that is pro-development. The euphoria ignited by a free, fair, and transparent election would be of immense pleasure to the nation as a corporate body, its citizens and friends across the globe.

    The distance between the country and its destiny since independence can be traced to several factors. One was the desire in the first republic for a one-party state by a ruling party that wanted to dominate the rest of the country. Another was the rise of military regimes that succeeded in changing the character of the country from federal to quasi-unitary system of governance, most of which in the process became more corrupt than the civilian regimes they ousted from power.

    The last factor was recurrence of fraudulent or manipulated elections between 1959 and 2014. It is on record that the 1959 election supervised by the departing colonial master was rigged in favor of the section of the country that Britain preferred to succeed it. Similarly, the 1964 federal election was rigged in favor of the ruling party, just as the 1979 and 1983 presidential elections were adjudged by many citizens to have been manipulated in favour of the ruling party at the center. The June 12, 1993 presidential election claimed by its organiser, General Ibrahim Babangida, as the freest in the nation’s electoral history was also ‘rigged’ against the winner, MKO Abiola at the end through annulment. The other four elections: 1999, 2003, 2007, and even 2011 were all perceived by national and international observers as below the average standard of democratic elections in the so-called third world. No wonder, one of the earliest promises of President Jonathan after he assumed the presidency in 2011 was to ensure conduct of free and fair elections. If yesterday’s elections were free and fair by national and international standards, President Jonathan would have pushed the country in the direction of its destiny, but more on this later.

    In many ways, corruption, believed to be the cancer that has been destroying the country, cannot be isolated from the type of governments that the country has been saddled with since 1959: military dictatorships and civilian administrations brought into being by questionable elections. Citizens for too long have known that a government created by fraud cannot but be fraudulent. Consequently, many citizens, if not most, view all the governments since independence as lacking in legitimacy. Such citizens see corruption as part of the political fabric of the country and joined their leaders on the bandwagon of political and bureaucratic corruption. If by chance or design yesterday’s elections were free and transparent, legitimacy would finally come to the governments that grow from them.

    The first vital step in rebuilding governments at all levels in the country is a free and transparent election. It will stop the tradition of personalistic and neo-patrimonial state that has been in existence in the country’s independent life till now. In other words, the culture of impunity that has raged for decades will be over. Citizens’ consent to their governance through free and fair ballot will further energise them in their demand for full accountability from those who govern them. Not only at the executive level will a new culture emerge from fair election, the legislative culture in the country in the last sixteen years will have to bow to the expectations of citizens who own the mandate now freely given to the executive and the legislature.

    Whether the incumbent is the winner or loser of a free and fair election, he will come out as the moral winner. He will write his name in gold as the first president that respected citizens’ fundamental human right to choose their leaders in an unfettered election. President Jonathan will, despite the muscular and vitriolic campaign of the last two or so months by his supporters,  be able to beat his chest in any part of the country while saying that he has become one of the builders of a free modern polity. If he loses, he will be one of the many democratic leaders across the globe that failed to win re-election, something that has never happened in our own country before him.

    Should General Buhari win a free and fair election, he is likely to be humbled by the trust of the people in giving him the opportunity to rule the country several decades after he had ruled it as a military dictator. He will no longer see his power as deriving from the barrel of guns but from the hearts of voters across geopolitical and ethnic lines. Consequently, he will be more likely than not to listen to the wishes of the electorate, knowing full well that without them, he could not have become president in the last quarter of the life of an average ruler. There will be no space in his government for any manner of ethnic or cultural domination but only for the building of a modern democratic multiethnic nation.

    As for the average citizen, he or she will feel invigorated by free and fair elections. The feeling of political impotence on the part of the electorate which has created an I-don’t-care attitude over the years will disappear. It will become easier for the electorate to demand accountability from their president and lawmakers. It will become easier for citizens to join policy debates about how much should their lawmakers earn directly and indirectly. Citizens will have more opportunities to bring the issue of re-federalising the country for unity and development on the table with the hope of stimulating a process that is inclusive in terms of how to make the country work and keep it united for progress and development.

    International friends of our country will be more likely to be partners than what they have been. Our immediate neighbours in the ECOWAS will feel relieved that the giant of the region has finally risen to the challenge of accepting the nuances of democratic process and governance. No longer will our West African neighbours feel threatened that post-election violence will create another wave of refugees that can destabilise smaller countries in the region. A Nigeria that has finally joined the ranks of Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, etc., in moving away from the culture of impunity to one of accountability and the rule of law will certainly become a friendly lever of economic power in the region.

    With respect to our other international friends in Europe, the Americas, and the Orient, Nigeria’s free, fair, and transparent election will have to disabuse their minds about the facile generalisation about Nigeria being largely a rogue, failing, or failed state. The feeling in the outside world that a country that cannot conduct a free and fair election lacks legitimacy and cannot be trusted to respect accountability will diminish and gradually disappear as the culture of allowing citizens to choose their leaders grow in the country.  Nigeria will be able to see more genuine investors, instead of hearing about them on government-controlled radio and television announcements.

    Finally, millions of Nigerians at home and abroad who have been worried stiff about the future of the country will now sleep without the fear:”what are we going to do if things suddenly fall apart.”

  • A deadline and a dateline

    A deadline and a dateline

    (Why the cock will still crow at dawn)

    As a people, Nigerians are confronted with an impossible deadline and a deadly dateline. For many local observers and foreign pundits, 2015 is the crunch year for Nigeria. There is a cruel convergence of certitude about it all. The Americans are even rumoured to have produced the equivalent of a manual of political euthanasia for a terminally ailing country. 2015 is seen as the year when Nigeria will finally unravel and go into deserved oblivion, or miraculously survive and be on its way to genuine nationhood.

    After four years of what many consider as the most callous, unresponsive and irresponsible government that has ever been witnessed in the history of this country, Nigerians are waiting this morning to see whether their punishment has been further extended or whether the nation has been granted a dramatic reprieve from perdition. This is the moment of truth when all self-protecting illusions are torn to shreds.

    An eerie calm has descended on the land as Nigerians await the outcome of the most keenly contested and by far the most “modern” elections in the history of the nation. No matter what happens in the next few hours or days, whether it is an engineered stalemate, an outright victory for the contradictory forces of rational modernity or the final proof that it is impossible for Nigeria to transit to modernity in its current structural iron jacket, it is clear that the nation can never be the same again.

    No matter how much longer it takes to terminate and how many more of our dead compatriots we are forced to bury, the Jonathan presidency is a historic terminus for Nigeria. A terminus is the end of a journey. But it is also the beginning of another journey. As a nation, we have been taught a memorable lesson. Goodluck Jonathan has shown what happens when a nation allows the quest for political justice to override the question of social equity.

    Four years earlier in an attempt to right the historical and political injustice visited on minorities, particularly Southern minorities in the nation, Nigerians voted overwhelmingly for Goodluck Jonathan, an ethnic Ijaw from the provincial backwater of Bayelsa state without any sterling antecedents of public service. By so doing, the nation and its power barons deliberately ignored the competing claim for social justice represented by the lean spare frame of the pious and astringently ascetic retired general, Mohammadu Buhari.

    Unfortunately after four years of incredible misrule which can only be described as organised banditry elevated to statecraft, Jonathan has left the country in a substantially worse shape. Nigerians have never been more bitterly polarised and divided along ethnic, religious and regional fault lines. The quest for social justice has been compounded and exacerbated by Jonathan’s ethical obtuseness and penchant for daring impunity. Nigeria has been dragged into the cesspool of state delinquency. In short, the national and social questions have worsened.

    But not even the most horrendous social experience is without its political value. If General Abacha exhausted the political and historical possibilities of military rule based on regional, religious and ethnic arrogance, the Jonathan ascendancy has sealed the possibility of democratic rule in Nigeria based solely and exclusively on minority rights and sympathy for the excluded. Henceforth, and that is if Nigeria survives this modernization of its political ethics and ethos, every one will have to swim or sink based on their individual record and not on the plight of tribe.

    After all allowances have been made, there is a sense then in which it can be claimed,  the ugly campaigns and hate sermons notwithstanding, that this election represents a victory for the Nigerian people and the Nigerian electorate. In the past years and decades, apart from periods of outright military despotism, the Nigerian electorate have struggled to reassert their sovereignty and the supremacy of the voters despite unrelenting attempts to obliterate and even abolish them by the Nigerian ruling cartel.

    In the past eight years, beginning with President Umaru Yar’Adua’s admission that the election that brought him to power was gravely flawed, the Nigerian electorate has been involved in a deadly duel with the ruling elite. The Uwais Panel Report represents a major watershed in the struggle for participatory democracy in Nigeria. Realising that it had procured for itself a throne of bayonets, the government quickly dumped its cardinal recommendations.

    The niggardly concessions have been wrested at considerable cost to the nation and the people. It is not because the Nigerian ruling class wants and wills electoral reforms. It has been wrought against their will and wits. In the history of the modern world, no authoritarian cabal has ever been willing to free a nation from electoral slavery. But then no maxim or gun or canon has been made by mankind that can silence the voice of the people when they are ready and when it booms collectively.

    It should be noted by those who are sold on ugly ethnic typologies and religious slurs that the current battle for electoral modernity is led by a scion of the old northern feudal oligarchy. Attahiru Jega, up till this moment, has withstood all the attempts to smear his reputation and drag his name in the mud by the agents of a government proclaiming transformation as its national mantra. Some transformation indeed. The situation speaks to the paradoxes of history and the contradictory nature of actual class formations.

    It has been noted that with the seeming inevitability of globalizing capitalism, every sane human society must negotiate its terms of entry and the conditions best suited to its people. The irony of it all may well be that this is what the socialist phase of development has done for China, Cuba, Vietnam and to a lesser extent Russia. From an opposing and contradictory paradigm of human development, this is what the recently departed Lee Kuan Yew has negotiated for the Singaporean nation.

    By deliberately bequeathing power to a reactionary clique, the colonial conquerors of Nigeria made sure that we entered the struggle with modernity holding the short end of the stick of progress. It was not their fault. There was nothing in Lord Lugard’s vitae to suggest that he was trained or had been made to acquire the skills of nation-building. Lugard was a master of the colonial suppression of agitated natives. Nigeria was not conceived as a nation but as a colonial plantation for the expropriation of indigenous natural resources. It is easy for a colonial plantation to become a Banana Republic.

    In the event, it has proved virtually impossible for Nigeria to produce a world-historical leader to lead its people out of the dungeon of colonial retardation to genuine modern nationhood. Anytime a leader emerges who shows the promise and the possibilities, he is immediately hammered into position by hostile forces already primed for reaction. Yet there is enough architecture in the ruins to show what Nigeria can be once it gets its act together.

    The miracle of it all is not that Nigeria has survived but that it continues to survive despite the disabling circumstances of its provenance and the damndest efforts of its own leading citizens. There must be something about this huge block arbitrarily hewn out of the heart of a benighted continent that has refused to accept its sorry destiny.

    Some observers have pointed out the ironic self-subversion of the colonial imaginary which believes it can create such a rich and impossibly gifted country, the greatest conglomeration of black souls ever, only for it to disappear without any trace, once the original charter of colonial exploitation has expired. It is as if the spirit of Nigeria is insisting that it will not disappear until it has fulfilled its destiny and obligation to Africa in particular and the Black race in general.

    That obligation has been long in coming. In the meantime, Nigeria has tested the patience and endurance of just about everybody. The colonial masters hurriedly abandoned Nigeria to its fate after it became clear that the colonial plantation cannot be sustained without its own interior managers.

    But as the title suggests, interior managers are not visionary administrators but feisty and ferocious bookkeepers interested only in the balance sheet of expropriation. In the absence of a modernising elite and of a visionary master template to frogmarch the nation to compulsory and competitive modernity, Nigeria will continue to flap and flounder about like a beached whale. Like an elephant and the proverbial battery of blind men, everybody will continue to point at different parts of the mammoth as the real thing.

    In retrospect, it can now be seen that what has been going on in the geo-political space named as Nigeria is a struggle for modernity stretching back over two hundred years to the 1804 Jihad of Usman Dan Fodio, the itinerant preacher and gifted Islamic scholar. Affronted by the hedonism and heathenism of the brand of Islam practised in the north of the country, the radical preacher forcibly imposed a process of purification from within. But in a sublime piece of historical irony, the Dan Fodio revolution merely deepened the mode and relations of feudal production in the north, leading to classical feudalism in its area of authority.

    And there have been many other modernizing wannabes too, with many perishing in the process. From the Five majors who were sworn on ridding the system of ten-per-centers, Major Orkar and colleagues who were bent on a forcible and arbitrary restructuring of the nation, Chief Awolowo who arguably held the most visionary roadmap, and a line stretching all the way back to Sheikh Alimi, the much maligned Afonja and of course the “Victorian” Lagosians who tried to impose classical western values on the new nation, it will be discovered that Nigeria has never been short of transformers.

    In the next few hours or days, we are about to find out whether that critical mass and a truly modernizing elite has really arrived or whether we have to tarry awhile. No matter what, the cock will still crow at dawn, but something tells snooper that after this election, Nigeria will never be the same again.

  • The day after: Wither Nigeria?

    The day after: Wither Nigeria?

    It is the day after and I ask:  where exactly did President Jonathan and the PDP leave the entity called Nigeria?

    The problem that we have is Mr Goodluck Jonathan himself – a president who prides himself on his own weakness and incompetence and whose love of false prophets and strange women knows no bounds and has no end. “A president who is as confused and as clueless as the comic character called Chancey Gardner in the celebrated 1970’s Peter Seller’s Hollywood blockbuster titled “Being There”  -Femi Fani-Kayode (President Jonathan’s Campaign Spokesperson)

    It is the day after and I ask:  where exactly did President Jonathan and the PDP leave the entity called Nigeria?  What is left of it? Is it standing, dead, ruptured, wounded or warring?  Is it in the midst of, Kenya-like, a horrendous post-election conflagration, more like a civil war? Did this weakest ever   president succeed in taking the country down with himself, win or lose? I am writing this article a whole 48 hours ahead of the election and so haven’t the slightest idea who of Jonathan or Buhari has won.  But that changes nothing, since either he wins or not, Goodluck Jonathan has damaged Nigeria beyond immediate repair. The country is, without question, in worse straits than Europe at the end of World War 11. Exploiting every conceivable fissure in a huge, multi-ethnic country – ethnicity, religion, anything;   and manipulating everything in completely unimaginable ways as survival tactics, President Jonathan has left Nigeria more divided than ever. He split everything on his way and, in particular, shredded the Yoruba nation worse than did the long Yoruba inter-tribal wars of the 19th century.  With an eye on his re-election, he vacillated so needlessly he ended up sending between 15-20,000 Nigerians to their early deaths in the hands of a Boko Haram by deliberately permitting it to fester and luxuriate.   Add to this the thousands of widows and orphans and an estimated 1.5 Nigerians that have been turned to internally displaced persons. Through a mindless  divide and rule tactics  he  gave undue advantage to a small fraction of his  Niger Delta  compatriots,  gave them unmerited access to huge, sometimes,  illicit funds  and turned them to instant billionaires even as Nigeria  became  the world headquarters of stolen oil.

    The best way to appreciate how low he has taken Nigeria is to take a critical look at some institutions of state, namely: the police, army, and the economy whose national currency he shredded so nastily. An advertorial which appeared in The Nation of Wednesday, 25 March 2015 and yet unrebutted, showed how a total of 600 million dollars was taken from the Central Bank vaults under spurious national security reasons – reminding one of Abacha – and it has since become common knowledge that all manner of characters and organisations are being bribed in dollars all over the country ahead of the presidential elections.  If any institution has been thoroughly worsted, it is the Nigeria Police now turned PDP -Police. That institution has so completely lost its soul it is now being used by President Jonathan for the most heinous of assignments. Under the lead of  a totally  uncaring  Inspector-General , with its  men and women  training and living under the most wretched  of conditions, the police has become so disoriented it is now seen protecting  the likes of OPC thugs, armed to the death, behaving like rabid dogs  as we recently  saw in Lagos. It is, indeed, worse in Ekiti where it is now  nothing more than the  attack dogs  of the rigged-in governor who has put the entire state to rout.  When not being used to protect an illegal 7-man rogue legislature, the police is, zombie-like, enthusiastically running opposition politicians to ground and assisting his group of thugs.  With its men paying for everything needed for official duties despite the humongous annual budgetary allocations to it, the Nigeria Police is today nowhere near any national police. It has become so unkempt and uncared for that, as they have threatened, some elements within it should about now be going on strike. In its present circumstances, the Nigeria Police has been turned into a completely anti-democratic institution.

    The least said about an otherwise well trained Nigerian Army, respected world-wide for its discipline and abilities demonstrated  at several peace keeping, even enforcement, operations,  the better,  as  President Jonathan has  listlessly turned  it into a tool of political manipulation so horrible the rag tag Boko Haram accounted, unfortunately, for too many of  its members  thus  turning  their wives  to widows and the  children to orphans simply because, rather than fight Boko Haram, he  decided to use them  to serve his own personal desires. It got so bad its one time Chief of Staff was alleged to be a sponsor of Boko Haram by an expatriate peace negotiator who should know.

    It got worse.

    As has now been evidentially proven through the Captain Sagir Koli  Ekitigate tapes, President Jonathan so thoroughly undermined the integrity the Nigerian Army when he allegedly  – Obanikoro  and Fayose’s words –  ordered it, through its Chief of Staff,  to rig the Ekiti governorship election of 2014  for Ayo Fayose. So ruinous was that directive that the Nigerian Army will never ever completely erase its unwholesome consequences. By the time everything is known about the current election, it is almost certain President Jonathan would also have used the army to rig again for both himself and his party. It will be most unlike an eminently pliable President Jonathan not to have acquiesced to the illicit demands of the likes of Wike, Fayose, Obanikoro and Akpabio to have soldiers rig for them in their respective states.  If, therefore, there are post-election crises, the entire world should know who to hold responsible.

    Nor is that all he has done to tarnish the image of the Nigerian Army

    Some two weeks ago, the army leadership, apparently acting on orders from above, told Nigerians that elections will not take place in newly freed areas. Incidentally, this is by a government and party whose silly, unpatriotic fight over PVC was premised on no Nigerian being disenfranchised. So what did this president tell the army? Thanks to Chadian army authorities, we now know that Nigerian soldiers were ordered not to take over control of the freed territories in order to make them unsafe. The consequence was fast in coming: not only were several  Nigerians killed, about 500 were reported seized and carried away by Boko Haram from one of such towns already freed by the Chadian soldiers. Big surprise is it, that an army that put the dreaded Boko Haram to rout in six weeks could now be running away from taking over control and responsibility in the captured areas. That is how ineffective the president has rendered a once formidable Nigerian Army which, some thirty years earlier, under General Muhammadu Buhari , yes, the same  Buhari, ran Chadian soldiers  beyond their own borders  as a reprisal for an attack on Nigerian territory – a tale of two heads of state. The army has, however, proved itself by putting Boko Haram to the rout in six weeks even though the president has restrained it for a whole of six years claiming, without a shred of evidence, that his government had been infiltrated by the same Boko Haram.

    Unfortunately, while the president and his agents failed to completely shame the army as an institution, they are still relentlessly at work rubbishing its leading lights –the generals who gave everything to make the Nigerian Army worth its name in gold before its current ruination.  Following the lead of a president who called General Obasanjo, a former head of state, a motor park tout, all manner of rehabilitated drug addicts have since described General Buhari as an illiterate while the president’s own unrestrainedly loquacious wife, Patience, has declared the APC candidate, General Buhari, another former head of state, brain dead. Nor was General T.Y Danjuma, a former Chief of Army Staff, spared by some irritable, totally insufferable and ordinary, Niger-Delta militants turned billionaires. So miffed at all these shenanigans was General  Babangida,  also a former head of State, and victim of these reckless president-led attacks , that he had to issue a press statement decrying the descent into outright depravity. Wrote General Babangida: ‘ Nobody is stopping  anyone from campaigning for their preferred candidates but to do so at the expense of the reputation, contributions, patriotism, loyalty and sacrifice  of former presidents to the Nigerian state is, to say the least, immature. It is therefore callous, wicked, out of sync, cynical and a show of crass ignorance for anyone to undermine the military institution by embarking on mudslinging campaigns against former presidents and leaders with military background.’  And the clincher, which should resonate with these foul mouths: ‘it is this form of demonisation and stigmatisation that often compels us to exhibit espirit de corps amongst ourselves in support of our military institution, and colleagues, when the stakes are high.’

    One can only hope that those who have ears have heard.

  • Unprecedented election anxiety

    The Goodluck Jonathan government should feel deeply mortified by the fact that since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, Nigerians have never felt so anxious and fearful during an election as they felt over yesterday’s poll. Who is to blame for this atmosphere of fear and anxiety? In his address to the nation on Friday on the elections, the president, who can’t ever manage to match his words with action, spoke about his preparedness to deal with fomenters of electoral violence. But what did he do when Gani Adams Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) ran riot on Ikorodu Road, Lagos, ostensibly in the service of a president who had just given him a contract to police pipelines?

    Did the president not misuse and unconstitutionally deploy the military and the Department of State Service (DSS) during the last Ekiti and Osun governorship polls, and now in Lagos, thus militarising the polls and intimidating the electorate? Could the president pretend not to feel the apprehension of the public? The president also spoke of his preparedness to uphold the oath of office he took in 2011. But what did he do in Ogun State when former governor Gbenga Daniel frolicked with minority lawmakers committing sundry illegalities? What indeed has he done in Ekiti as the fanatical Governor Ayo Fayose continues to go berserk with seven lawmakers, assaulting judges and orchestrating violence against the opposition?

    On Friday, as he addressed the nation, it was clear Dr Jonathan was insincere. He did not mean a word of what he said. More, given his indulgent handling of errant police officers such as AIG Mbu Joseph Mbu, it is apparent he has contempt for his own views (perhaps they are really his speechwriters’ views foisted on him), and feels inconvenienced by the strictures imposed by the constitution, the demands of democracy, and the pains experienced by the country he has so badly misgoverned.

     

  • Quotes from the past

    The hope of transformation and change still floats high!

    Today, dear reader, we are treating you to an excellent dish of quotable quotes from essays past and essays gone from this column on the Nigerian brand of politics. Hopefully, yesterday’s elections have come and gone, and while we await the results, we will all school our hearts and minds and stomachs to accept the outcomes. While we wait, let us enjoy this potpourri of assorted smile-bringers:

    ‘No right-minded parent living in the twenty-first century would send his child into the forest to learn life’s lessons now. I think, rather, that many parents would prefer to go and stay in the forest themselves if they are sure their children will not be there! But here was Nigeria, while still tottering on her feet and not even used to wearing shoes, being granted independence and told she could now live alone. More or less, she was told to go into the wild forest of democracy, unschooled, untutored, and survive. Naturally, she has had to learn her democratic lessons on the job. This is why she has the fragments of so many republics strewn around her.’ (From ‘How many republics does Nigeria need to get it?’ 2011).

    ‘The wonder of politics is the fact that all the gladiators believe it is only a game, yet few can truly say ‘I concede defeat.’ To a man (and woman!), eyes bulging out, sinews taut, mouths widened, all contestants in these elections are hauling disgraceful tirades, unbefitting epithets, unmentionable names and claiming pyrrhic victories that will certainly destroy them in the end. Clearly, anyone who wins will exude nothing but the putrid stench of the cesspool fight. So, we have a divided polity. We have contestants roiling in murky cesspools of other-loathing and an electorate dreaming of change.’ (From ‘Did my vote really count?’ 2011).

    ‘Once upon a time, a politician was said to have been given the very onerous task of ensuring that he sacrificed a pigeon daily into a pot under his bed, to ensure the sustenance of the political victory he pilfered. Three things came out from that story. One, the herbalist was more powerful than the people or the constitution; two, the politician had little time to do the work he was ‘elected’ to do because he was too busy sacrificing pigeons; and three, the pigeon population became greatly depleted. And so, the Nigerian political arena is filled with politicians crisscrossing the terrains looking for good herbalists or hit men, not votes.’ (From ‘Where is the sport in the game of politics?’ 2011).

    ‘Then my mind went to the recent events in the country, particularly the recent crash of a sitting governor’s ‘private plane’ and it did some somersaults, my mind that is, not the plane. How on earth is a governor able to afford a ‘private plane’? Is his state able to afford a modern, 21st century transportation or electricity system or housing or water or hospital or living standard or any standard for its citizens? What roils the mind is that you can’t just decide to go and greet your friend with those things. Where will you pack it, your friend’s bicycle shed? And then rumour has it that there are many other governors on the waiting list for these winged things, waiting to buy them that is, and may be fly them and crash them. What is just wrong with us in this country that robs us of all thoughtfulness? I hear one of them powerful government people bought one of those planes, and, not having too many places to go with it, had to leave the thing hanging around all day many days in its hangar. Now, I have to struggle for fuel with their stupid planes.’ (From ‘Of private planes, police copters, air ambulances and fire engines’ 2012).

    ‘Better still, we could ask our artists to draw us a picture of democracy to include the following, if I may. First, I expect democracy to have a heart of gold – kind and caring – with which it would touch the lives of all those who believe in it. Then, it should be strong enough to be able to endure all the attacks and attempts of its enemies to weaken its structures, particularly politicians who like to call white black and black white. Then, it should look attractive. It shouldn’t look too much like a woman, beguiling and deceptive; nor too much like a man, deceptive and destructive. It should just look … right. Once, a man was arrested for being drunk. He explained that a woman had asked him to build for her a new hen house from the materials of the old one. He should, however, not tear down the old one until he had finished the new one. So, he went out and got drunk. I believe the artist will get the picture.’ (From ‘Wherefore art thou called democracy?’ 2012).

    ‘We need to demonstrate that we understand democracy now or quit trying. Clearly, in the hands of this present breed of politicians, it is patently endangered. In itself, doubtless, it is one of the noblest pursuits of man. Democracy allows government to be unobtrusive and minimally involved in man’s daily life as it quietly directs national activities for altruistic goals aimed at mankind’s benefit. Democracy is worth pursuing because it allows man to reach that basic and minimum level of life required for the pursuit of happiness. If only … if only … (sigh!) … if only we did not have all these politicians standing in the way of our pursuit of democratic happiness. Now, what do we do? Just what do we do?’ (From ‘Demonstrate democracy or quit trying’ 2012).

    ‘Clearly, it is time to call out the democracy umpire. No democracy can thrive in a colony of ants that refuses to know and respect the positions, authorities and limits of its members. They will all soon go array and awry. Let the umpire tell us: have we got it (democracy) or have we lost it (our good sense)? I think we have not got it, and I think we have completely lost it. For one thing, the government needs to realise that the people, the electors, want to be respected. For another, we the people want life to be a little more possible so that the president will stop enjoying his score card alone. Let us the people enjoy it too.’ (From ‘Democracy Day blues’ 2013).

    ‘This is why it is possible for the president of this country to forget the people’s will in the matter of who wins or does not win a governorship or senatorial seat election. I hear reps and senators from that party are also demanding that the largesse of automatic second term be extended to them. That means no election on earth can replace them. Hurray!  Frankly, I think we should by-pass these assemblymen and vote in the godfathers. They are more knowing. And while we are on the matter, I would like to also obtain the president’s permission to go for a second term as the chief controller of my dog. He is somewhat heady and I am not too popular with him right now mainly because I have not been too kind to him. If he were asked to choose his controller through an election …’ (From ‘Nigerian leaders: A commitment to sharing…’ 2014).

    Postscript today:

    In all honesty, I would like to report that the results of those essays have led to the transformation of the country, but I can’t. The evidence on ground belies that fact. PHCN still releases and withholds electricity at will, politicians are still crazy; the roads I ply are still impassable, literally; food is still astronomically expensive even for me (I now eat beef sparingly, honest! Plus my doctor has pitilessly struck it off my diet), etc. Yep, the hope of transformation and change still floats high!

  • The long wait

    The long wait

    At last, the election, despite attempts to scuttle it

    By the time you are reading this piece, the first set of the 2015 elections would have been over, other things being equal. But we have the second leg in less than two weeks, precisely on April 11. Ordinarily, the elections ought to have come and gone on February 14 (Presidential and National Assembly) and February 28 (governorship and state houses of assembly), but were postponed to March 28 and April 11, respectively, essentially by the military chiefs who said they could not guarantee security if the elections were held as earlier scheduled. The thinking in government then was that, among others, the Chibok girls abducted in April last year would have been found within the six weeks and the Boko Haram war would have been contained. Then, most importantly, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would have had enough time to perfect rigging plans, splash dollars on willing and unwilling Nigerians, to boost its chances at the polls.

    While the government has been celebrating the defeat of the insurgents with the assistance of troops from Chad, Cameroon and Niger Republic, mum has been the word on the Chibok girls. Apparently, there does not seem to be any hope in sight about their whereabouts yet, and, in their stead, the government decided to renovate their school as if that is of any meaning to the girls’ parents. Anyway, the Goodluck Jonathan administration is a master when it comes to ‘promise and fail’. It would again promise that the search for the girls continues when indeed nobody is talking about them again, if we know this administration as we should by now. Then, his government would go to sleep again only to wake up two months to the 2019 elections (if it finds itself in the saddle once again) to start frantic attempts to right the wrongs it could not address in the last nine or 10 years.

    But one thing that had been agitating the minds of many Nigerians is the issue of the card readers that the ruling party does not want used for the elections. As it were, it seemed the last joker the ruling party wanted to use in its bid to have a field day in the election. Mercifully, last week, the courts, including the Court of Appeal and the Federal High Court said INEC should go ahead with the card readers.  Indeed, the Federal High Court which ruled on the matter on Friday asked both the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the Attorney-General of the Federation, Mohammed Bello Adoke, to appear before it on April 24, to look at the illegality or otherwise of the use of the card readers for a general election. Even baby lawyers know the meaning of that. So, those who might have been hinging their hope on the court stopping INEC from using the card readers have to return to the drawing board for the next item in their inexhaustible bag of mischief. By the time they begin to perfect that, the election would have been over.  But it is gratifying that our courts have not allowed themselves to be used by politicians who are ready to bribe God if He would be available for bribing, or bring the roof down on everybody where that fails, just to satisfy their selfish urge for political power which, unfortunately, they do not know how to use.  One must especially commend the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Mahmud Mohammed, who had earlier warned judges against any hanky-panky, especially in political cases. This is by far different from some of the previous general elections which produced billionaire judges but which messed up our judiciary and the electoral process.

    One terrible thing about the PDP is its futile attempts to hide behind one finger in its opposition to some of the processes and procedures guiding the 2015 general elections. Take the postponement of the elections for example. The ruling party had tried surreptitiously and severally to make it look as if the decision was that of INEC. But when it was clear the electoral commission was not going to play that kind of ball that would have meant an indictment of itself, thereby strengthening the hands of those who had been fishing for excuses to remove the commission’s boss, the National Security Adviser took the responsibility of announcing the government’s position that the country was not safe enough for the election.

    There is also the case of the Young Democratic Party (YDP) that was threatening to hold its party primaries on March 26 and 27, a day to the general elections, on the strength of a court judgment that ordered INEC to register it. Again, even a baby lawyer knows that the judge never issued any order to the effect that it should participate in this year’s elections because the courts are aware that issuing such an order was futile, given that ballot papers for the elections had been printed and it is late in the day to disrupt the process simply because of an unknown party that is probably serving some masters in power who have suddenly developed a phobia for elections. Even if YDP was right, what is to be done is to weigh its interest against that of the nation. Obviously, national interest would prevail. And that was what the court did by clarifying that it never said the party should be included in the ballot papers for this year’s elections. Imagine, a party that probably cannot muster 250,000 votes now wanting to be an issue in a general election? Who does not know that something beneath the river is beating the drums for the whirligigs that are ‘dancing’ on it? But that is how they had been using inconsequential matters to cheat Nigerians.

    When we take a trip down memory lane, we would see how the PDP Governors Forum itself came into being. When you have people who cannot do a simple arithmetic in an election involving only 35 people because they wanted to be fraudulent, then you can understand their frustration with card readers. As a matter of fact, not a few people felt part of the reasons they fought for postponement of the elections was to see if they could make INEC adopt both the Permanent Voter’s Cards (PVCs) and Temporary Voter’s Cards (TVCs) simultaneously for the elections so they could reenact their usual rigging at the polls. When that campaign failed, they also sponsored some people to raise questions with card readers. But the meeting of the PDP governors in Lagos a few weeks back clearly exposed the party as the brain behind the scathing opposition to the use of the card readers. That is their style. The government even toyed with the idea of Interim Government, can you imagine!

    The primitive manner the Jonathan government has been running Nigeria is even reflected in the way and manner some of its officials are stealing from the country’s coffers. Indeed, to refer to what is happening under this administration as stealing is putting it mildly; it is also primitive as in primitive accumulation. Unfortunately, the president still believes the rate of corruption is exaggerated in the country. He is asking for four years to address the corruption in the oil sector! A leader who calls the gargantuan corruption in this country mere stealing is not fit to continue in office because by the time he wakes up to the reality, it would have been too late. Just as the country is now sweating to bring back the Chibok girls when it should have done so with ease had the president believed early enough that the girls were truly kidnapped.

    The world must have been shocked about how Nigeria degenerated to the extent that some of these developments have come to be our lot in the twenty-first century. But a country cannot rise beyond the level of those governing it. Even some of the people that we thought were coming from places where best practices reign supreme, where transparency and accountability are their creed suddenly sink the moment they join the Jonathan presidency. They see their critics as irritants and pollutants that are only out to discredit them. Take Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala for example, how can she see anyone who says she has not managed the economy well in bad light when all the indices point to that, from the exchange rate to unemployment, etc? All she offers are statistics that do not have any bearing with reality. The good thing though is that many Nigerians are now prepared to take their destiny in their hands, in spite of the rural and primitive devices of the Jonathan government to keep the country in perpetual bondage and darkness.  Whether all their satanic plots added to or subtracted from their once upon the biggest party in Africa would be known in a few hours from now.

  • A day in Ibadan

    A day in Ibadan

    This last Thursday, a historic gathering of Yoruba leaders took place in the iconic parliamentary hall of the old Western Region.  Summoned by the much respected and admired General Ipoola Alani Akinrinade, it brought out the very best and the brightest of the race. It has been said that the Yoruba people are always at their best when under grave political pressure. This meeting did not disappoint.

    The cream of Yoruba intelligentsia, traditional leaders of thought, business barons, traditional rulers, technocrats, religious leaders, our consanguineous relations from the South South and battle tested representatives of the dominant political tendency gathered to chart a way forward for the region in the turbulent and tumultuous waters of contemporary Nigerian politics. Snooper was there.

    In an important sense, the Ibadan summit was something of a watershed in the post-independence politics of the Yoruba people. It marked the formal end of hegemony of a certain kind of Yoruba leadership and the ascent to full dominance of another. There was a certain political élan and briskness of purpose in the air. Although regicide was in the air, there was not a word about the old political royals. The Yoruba, like all people of empire, can be very clever, classy and circuitous when dethroning their own kings.

    The choice of venue could not have been more apt. It was an act of political wizardry, worthy of the greatest Yoruba political cognoscenti. Abiola Ajimobi, the urbane and witty host governor, was at his best as a discerning aficionado of the history of theYoruba race and his Ibadan people. Rauf Aregbesola, the politically focused governor of Osun state, electrified the audience with his grim agitprop. When Yemi Osinbajo made his late entry as if on cue, the entire hall erupted in wild jubilation. It was clear by then where the dominant spirit of the Yoruba resides.

    It was in this storied building that the Yoruba people were first forcibly dispersed in post-independence Nigeria in a federally engineered disruption whose echoes reverberate up till this moment. Agents of the federal government acting in concert with political renegades and internally disaffected members of the ruling party conspired to unleash a memorable mayhem on the most sacred sanctuary of democratic governance.

    Before that historic rupture, the Action Group led government had taken a clear lead in the political, economic, educational and social fields of the nation. Such were the radically humane policies, the revolutionarily innovative programmes, that in five years of the Great Leap Forward, the Action Group had completely transformed the Yoruba society in a way that could not have been imagined.

    In one generation, the Yoruba people moved from the farm to the factory. Even our traditional western traducers were impressed. Television came to Western Nigeria before some backward and backwater European communities. It was too good to be true. But while our former colonial patrons nodded in admiration, other sectional Nigerian leaders also noted in affronted envy and cynical malice. For them, it became a question of the west and the rest of us.

    Fifty three years after that historical dispersal, the nuclear fallout is still very much with us. It fed directly into the disputed and violence-suffused federal elections of 1964, the first coup, pogrom, the civil war and decades of untrammelled military despotism. It has also led to the political and economic retardation of the country on an industrial scale. As it was in the beginning, so it is at this end of the beginning; a conjuncture brimming with ruinous possibilities and fearsome portents.

    Once again, the Yoruba society has been turned into a theatre of war and political hostilities with the barely literate trying to lord it over the vastly literate. Only in Yorubaland is this kind of “America wonder” possible. Those who are incapable of learning have taken to teaching, as Oscar Wilde would famously put it. In times of strife and stress and of a bitterly polarized political elite, the Yoruba political mob have always tried to seize control, as this column once warned. Have guns and cutlasses and the elite will travel out.

    The consequences of this unending political gridlock are too horrendous to contemplate. In the course of time, the Yoruba nation and people have lost many of their illustrious scions and icons. From MKO Abiola who won a federal election only to be brutally murdered in incarceration, Architect Layi Balogun, another presidential aspirant, who died in cloudy circumstances, to James Ajibola Idowu Ige who was murdered in his bedroom.

    Neither our women nor illustrious military scions have been spared. Kudirat Abiola was brutally gunned down in broad daylight. Mama Bisoye Tejuoso, a self-made billionaire and Iyalode Egba, and Suliat Adedeji were subject to unimaginable ritual torture before being callously dispatched.

    Francis Adekunle Fajuyi who was despised and constantly dismissed as an Action Grouper by his Commander in Chief was killed while protesting the abduction of the same boss while Victor Anuoluwapo Banjo, a literary genius going by the power and potency of his letters, was finally silenced after several Biafran volleys had been emptied into him. “I am not dead yet”, Banjo continued to moan in heroic defiance of inevitable fate.

    The question to ask and which was not addressed by the Ibadan summit is why the Yoruba elite have been such agreeable grist to the federal crushing mill. Morbid fear, hatred and envy we can understand as the inevitable pathologies of boxing people in different stages of spiritual, intellectual, political and economic development into a colonial cage of contraries. But the question we need to ask is why succeeding federal government, irrespective of its core ethnic affiliation, have always found it convenient to turn the Yoruba nation into a theatre of war.

    It is not a question of pride or ethnic chauvinism, but as a result of their history and developmental trajectory, the Yoruba have come to accept certain minimum standards and bar of governance which they are not prepared to lower not even for any of their own wayward children. As this column noted a few weeks ago, it is a question of post-colonial political habitus. In the post-colonial colonium, all the nationalities retain their pre-colonial vibrancy and sense of identity. Here, the group-think and group-feeling are so strong that you do not need to meet at midnight to come to a consensus about what is best for your ethnic group.

    The consensus emerges from the blues so to say and there is no political magic about it. It inheres in the subliminal subconscious of the people or what is known as the political unconscious. For example, nobody has begrudged Professor Ben Nwabueze when he noted that it was in the best political and economic interest of the Igbo people to vote for Goodluck Jonathan.

    That was before the great constitutional lawyer began flying the famous Government of Unity kite. Intuitively, the Ijaw people also know who to vote for without being railroaded. Wise leaders know how to tap into the dominant mood and the political unconscious of their people. When they try to alter the dynamics without any corresponding historic shift in the mood of the people, they become political fools who are out of touch with the political habitus of their own people.

    To repeat, the bane of modern post-colonial Nigeria is the fundamental incompatibility of habitus of its diverse people which has made it impossible for it to evolve into an organic nation. An organic nation is a cohesive community of shared values, ideals and aspirations. In the absence of an overriding national veto and ethos which can homogenize the diverse values of the diverse constituents, a restructuring of the huge amalgam of a nation into properly federating units is imperative. This is why after independence, the Yoruba people and their allies have been at the forefront of the struggle for genuine federalism.

    Going forward, it will take an exceptional historical figure to override the veto of habitus by appealing to the best national instincts of the diverse people of Nigeria. This cannot be done by a leader who out of spite and contempt marginalizes a whole hegemonic bloc or who out of fear puts a vital region under military siege just to secure electoral advantage.

    The Ibadan summit has gone a long way in distilling the contemporary political essence of the Yoruba people. As speaker after speaker, particularly those who were delegates to Jonathan’s confab, mounted the rostrum to denounce the confab in its entirety, it became very obvious that the main plank on which Jonathan seeks electoral reprieve in the old west has collapsed under the weight of its own inner contradictions. So also has the last shred of credibility of those who have been clinging to the sham confab as their political talisman.

    In the flux and fluidity of post-colonial politics, it is not the betrayal of known enemies that hurts but the perfidy of known colleagues and former comrades in arms. In the past fifty three years in Yoruba land beginning with the decimation of the Action Group, going on to the struggle for the de-annulment of the June 12 presidential election and now the malignant presidency of Goodluck Jonathan, the fiercest battles in Yoruba land have always been between progressives and former progressives.

    It may well be that these external battles are a reflection of the internal battles within the Yoruba soul itself, torn in traumatic ambivalence between a radically heady engagement with an unknown and scary future and a rearguard conservative action to preserve the gains of the immediate past. Without the colonial incursion, it is arguable that the Yoruba nation might have figured out its own engagement with modernity on its own terms and in its own right and with the flair for the dramatic peculiar to the race.

    But there is no need crying over split milk. In the post-colonial hell that we have found ourselves, no Nigerian nationality or constituting units is exempt from the millennial horrors. The first step out of the debilitating debris and chaotic ruins is to see off the Jonathan calamity which is the regnant manifestation of a neo-military fascist machine gone haywire. It is only after this that we must all sit down to figure out what to do with a nation in permanent deferral and denial.

    The beauty of the historic summit in Ibadan is that it is neither a vote against particular individuals nor a vote for particular individuals. It is a guarded endorsement of the future with all its scary shortcomings and shenanigans and of all the people who valiantly struggle for a seismic shift in Nigerian politics, personal foibles notwithstanding. A nation is a permanent work in progress and process and we cannot be slaves to the past. The problem is not in failing and falling but in falling and failing to get up. This is what we must keep in mind as the Nigerian ship of state once again trawls uncharted waters. It has been a historic day in Ibadan.