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The bibliophile and the exegete as exemplary teacher: for Modupe Oduyoye @ 80

Ko si ede ti Olorun ko gbo [There is no language that is incomprehensible to God]
A Yoruba adage on the philosophy of language

When word came to me just this week that a symposium is to be held at the University of Ibadan next week to mark the 80th birthday anniversary of Mr. Modupe Oduyoye, my initial thought was one of profound regret that because the notice came so late, it will not be possible for me to be at the event. Then in the manner in which after night comes daylight, my feelings of regret turned to the deep feelings of reverence that I had always had for my old teacher ever since, for about three years, he taught me at Ibadan Boys High School (IBHS) in the 1960s. I am of course not the only old boy of that school that holds Mr. Oduyoye in reverence for the impact he had in the school when he taught there between 1959 and 1963. I have never met a single old boy of the school from that period who does not regard our old teacher’s impact on us as anything less than legendary. Moreover, the circle of Mr. Oduyoye’s fervent admirers is nothing short of astonishing in its breadth and reach, in Nigeria, in Africa and in other parts of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that, shunning all attractions and seductions of intellectual glamour, Mr. Oduyoye has consistently been far more devoted to carrying on his monumental work on historical and comparative linguistics as a basis for unraveling some of the thorniest problems of the African past in relation to the past of the entirety of the human race. In this tribute to my old and revered teacher, I will follow the path of almost everyone I know when they talk about Mr. Oduyoye which is to tell the story from the vantage point of their own particular encounter with the teacher, the man, the intellectual.

Of course I did not know that Mr. Oduyoye was a “bibliophile” and an “exegete” of the highest order when I first encountered him as my teacher in Forms Two, Three and Four. In fact, at that time, these words, these terms did not exist in the achieved vocabulary of my studentship at that stage of my education. All I knew was the fact that from the very first time that I sat in his English Language and English Literature classes, I felt an instant, greatly empowering validation of my love of books, reading and writing. The love of books and of reading had started in primary school days and had been greatly facilitated by my membership of the old Western Region Library close to the Gbagi commercial district of Ibadan. As I have said in a tribute to the late Professor Dapo Adelugba when he turned 70 in 2009, he and a friend of his, one Nelson Olawaye, had greatly encouraged my reading habits while I was still in primary school.

But what Adelugba and Olawaye did not know was the fact that at home, in a very large polygamous family setting in which, at any one time, there were close to twenty children, I did not exactly have auspicious conditions for the fulfillment of my passion for reading books. Indeed, my father took the position that my “escape” into books was a way of avoiding my share of household chores – which was perhaps partly true. Thus, without being in the least aware of it at the time, by the time I entered secondary school I was in a great, almost consuming need for both the space and the validation for my passion for reading. Since Mr. Oduyoye was not the only teacher of English Language and English Literature that I had in my five years at IBHS, the thing that needs explaining is why it was he and not any of the other teachers that had such a deeply formative influence on me and most of my classmates.

Founded in 1938, ten years before the founding of University College, Ibadan (UCI), IBHS used to have many fresh graduates from UCI as either permanent or temporary members of its teaching staff. In my recollection, none of these graduates of UCI had anything remotely close to the impact that Mr. Oduyoye had on us. He not only taught Language and Literature better than anyone else, he was in charge of virtually all the cultural and intellectual extra-curricular life of the students. He was in charge of the school library, the school’s literary and debating society, the school’s literary magazine, “Triumph”, and the school’s Students’ Christian Movement. On top of this, he dressed simply and for the five years when he was our teacher he followed the same invariant dress code of white short-sleeved shirt over white shorts. Perhaps above all else, Mr. Oduyoye was about the only teacher who, though he never used the cane, yet had the greatest moral and psychological authority with us. Certainly speaking for myself, it mattered a great deal to me that he made me one of the school’s librarians, a member of the editorial board of the school magazine, and the leading representative of the school’s literary and debating society in our contests against the other secondary schools in Ibadan. As incredible as this may sound now, none of this made me feel that I was a favorite of our beloved and respected teacher; in fact, we all knew that nobody was Mr. Oduyoye’s favorite since we all knew that he gave equal attention, equal recognition to each and every student. Rather, the positions to which he appointed me made me feel vindicated in intimations that I was then gradually and imperceptibly feeling that my future career lay in English Language and Literature in particular and more generally, the profession of an exegete, an interpreter of literary and cultural texts.

In 1964, the year after Mr. Oduyoye left IBHS for Yale University for studies toward a Bachelor of Divinity degree which was also my last year in secondary school, I was expelled from IBHS for leading a student revolt against the school authorities. Luckily for me, my name had already been sent as one of the school’s West African School Certificate Examinations registrants, although the school authorities tried to have my name withdrawn, fortunately unsuccessfully. Although I was fairly sure I would pass the exams even though I would be taking them as an expelled student, I was in utter despair about the future. I mention this fact in this tribute to Mr. Oduyoye because his response to the letter of despair that I wrote to him at Yale about my expulsion did a lot to assure me that beyond my expulsion, in the final analysis what mattered was my belief in my abilities and my determination; as long as those were intact, he wrote to me, I could go as far as my talent and will could take me.

The Young Shall Grow: so goes the well-known name and inscription on the buses of one of the leading transport enterprises in our country. In time, as I grew older intellectually and professionally, I began to have a clearer and deeper understanding of what Mr. Oduyoye had meant to me and my schoolmates in that most formative period of our intellectual development. This was in no small measure aided by encountering the nearly endless string of the published works of our old master himself in the fields of Biblical studies, Yoruba language, names and culture, African antiquity and historical and comparative linguistics. As author and publisher, Mr. Oduyoye is almost unparalleled in his distinctiveness among our country’s intelligentsia. At one time he was the Literature Secretary of the Christian Council of Nigeria and the publisher in charge of Daystar Press, the Council’s publishing outfit. When he retired from that position, he moved to Lagos and became the publisher of Sefer Books. In these two positions in which Mr. Oduyoye’s work as publisher and author achieved full flowering, it at last became clear to me how bibliophilia and exegesis – respectively the love or veneration of books and the interpretation of texts, especially scriptural texts – had been so central both to Mr. Oduyoye’s legitimation of my passion for books and reading at IBHS and to my eventual career as an academic. Let me explain what I mean by this, even if in a rather roundabout manner.

Every time that I speak to a new class of graduate students, I tell them that for my doctoral dissertation at New York University, I read over five hundred plays on and by African Americans, all produced in a period of over two centuries. In addition to these plays, I read hundreds of secondary critical books and thousands of essays and articles. I then ask the almost always astonished freshmen grad students how in the world I could have managed to read so many plays, books, essays and articles in order to write just that one “book” that was my doctoral dissertation. To this question, my students typically do not know what to say. But lo and behold, the mystery, the astonishment is lifted when I tell them that the only way in the world that this seemingly incredible feat was possible was the simple fact that I loved reading so much that far from being a burdensome task, reading hundreds of books and thousands of articles was actually for me a multiplication of reading pleasure, again and again and again. This view goes to the heart of what Mr. Oduyoye contributed to my intellectual development at a very formative time in my life. It also goes to the heart of the rich legacy of his published books and monographs that will be the subject of the symposium to be held in his honor next week.

Working in modern languages of Africa and the wider world like Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Arabic, English and French together with ancient languages like Greek, Latin Aramaic and Hebrew, Mr. Oduyoye has for decades now been challenging seemingly settled orthodoxies on the peopling of our continent and the role of language inter- and comingling in that history. The number of texts that he traverses in this vast project are literally uncountable. More staggering are the intricacies of transformations that he uncovers between what he calls cognate forms in languages ancient and modern, African and non-African. If there is one grand theme in this vast and endlessly varied work, it is Mr. Oduyoye’s strong thesis that our languages prove that we are all far more related than we know or care to admit. This is why, for the epigraph for this tribute I have chosen the Yoruba adage that states that there is no language that is incomprehensible to God. This is, surely, a utopian philosophical proposition. But it is also something that Mr. Oduyoye takes great pains to demonstrate through the vastness of his work as one of our country’s greatest bibliophiles and exegetes. I was immensely fortunate to have been his pupil and to have very early in my studentship been bitten by the bugs of his bibliophilia and exegesis. In my time, I have proudly but diligently infected others with these bugs. Long life and health to you, old master!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 15, 2015
An unseasonable remembering of JUNE 12

Nigeria does not need another June 12, targeted at the North, the South-south, or Southeast

The season of remembering June 12, 1993 as a day in our country’s political history and as a trope for resistance of oppression is three months away. But the bizarre circumstances of our time make a premature remembrance imperative. In normal times, nobody will say or do anything that is capable of bringing back the memory of June 12, but words and actions in the last two months by both political and cultural leaders are strikingly similar to the circumstances before the election (that could have brought MKO Abiola to the presidency) and the uncertainty and instability that came after the annulled election.

Although the election contested by Chief Abiola and Alhaji Tofa on June 12, 1993 was sponsoredand supervised by a military dictator while the 2015 election is mandated by the 1999 Constitution, the circumstances before both elections are looking too similar and thus becoming worrisome to anyone who believes that the survival of the Nigerian Union depends on consolidation of democracy and on proper democratic transition between regimes or at the end of each presidential/gubernatorial tenure. In what ways are the days before the two elections looking alike?

In 1993, primaries were cancelled just as citizens were not sure if the election was going to hold until the election came upon them. There was a group known as Association for Better Nigeria that emerged miraculously to make efforts to stop the election through an Abuja court. In 2015, pre-election primaries were not cancelled but the presidential election was postponed from February 14 to March 28. Furthermore, a new political group, Young Democratic Party, threatens to go to court to stop the election shifted to March 28. The desire to stop the election is on account of the insistence of YDP that its name be put on the ballot by INEC to enable it contest the presidential election on March 28, a little over two weeks away from the election and despite the fact that Young Democratic Party has not conducted its primaries to choose its presidential candidate.

Events after the 1993 presidential election are resonating in the election discourse of 2015. In 1993, an Interim Government was installed to replace what would have been a democratically elected president with mandate from majority of voters in an election that is still being touted today (even by those who annulled it) as the freest and fairest in the political history of the country. The Interim Government was also branded as a Unity government. The Interim Government that started with Chief Ernest Shonekan quickly transformed into a Unity government under General Sani Abacha after he kicked out Shonekan, and the rest is now history.

In 2015 and even weeks before the election, self-appointed political engineers (as individuals and groups) have also been drumming for Interim government and Unity government. Even a group led by Prof. Ben Nwabueze, the country’s foremost constitutional lawyer, has called on whoever emerges as winner of the election to install a Unity government that draws ministers and board chairs from the political parties in contest for the presidency. It turned out that the Interim Government put in place by General Ibrahim Babangida in 1993 was a transition government between two military dictatorships, thus suggesting that annulment of the June 12 election was premeditated and that the matter of Interim Government was a stratagem to prepare for entrance of Babangida’s military successor.

What is confusing about the noise being made in support of Interim and Unity government in 2015 is that the election is supposed to be a process at the end of one democratically elected government to choose another or renew the tenure of the incumbent. Under the constitution, the incumbent is qualified to contest for a second term in office just as any member of opposition parties is qualified to contest against the incumbent. Under the constitution that brought the incumbent president to power, there is no provision for an Interim or Unity government. And there is no incontrovertible evidence that the incumbent has decided to sit tight regardless of the outcome of the election. If anything, President Jonathan has assured the nation and the world that he will quit if he loses the election.

Are the new political engineers in the country’s boiler room seeing what President Jonathan himself cannot see and what the rest of the country is unable to see? Or, are they simply playing the role of Cassandra, foretelling doom, regardless of the facts on the ground? Are the new political engineers scheming to suspend the constitution and bring a new contraption into being? Is the call for Interim or Unity government simply a manifestation of the nation’s pathological problem, known in popular parlance as the Nigeria Factor, a reference to the propensity of Nigerians to engage in denialism? Whatever it may be, it is a dangerous call to make on the eve of a constitutionally-mandated election. Such calls have the capacity to disorientate citizens and demoralise voters.

What makes the 2015 election different from the one of 2011? The two leading candidates today were the two front-runners in 2011. The campaign in 2011 was decent, even elegant. The two candidates and their supporters focused on what they could or would do if elected, just as the pundits on duty then encouraged voters to exercise their franchise fully. In 2011, nobody mentioned the two concepts now in circulation: Interim and Unity governments. Even when General Olusegun Obasanjo declared that the 2007 election was a ‘do-or-die’ event, no political engineers called for Interim or Unity government. I still recall the encouraging assessment made by President Jonathan at the end of the 2011 election: “a successful and acceptable civilian to civilian election,” a subtle reference to the 2007 election that brought him in as vice president as not successful and acceptable.

Calls for Interim or Unity government are confusing citizens and are capable of making voters feel that their votes would not matter. Even some social media pundits are more alarmist than the political engineers that propagate their ideas in the traditional media. Some social media pundits are already insinuating that 2015 may produce the June 12 for the North, just as 1993 did for the Southwest. Realising that in 1993 the two principal characters that annulled the presidential election were from the north: Babangida and Abacha, and the victim: MKO Abiola was from the Southwest, any innuendo about a Fulani June 12 should be (and is) worrisome.

Nigeria does not need another June 12, targeted at the North, the South-south, or Southeast. Those who participated in pro-democracy struggle to move the country beyond sidetracking properly conducted elections, just like those who stood by to watch them, cannot but remember that the years of transition from military dictatorship under Babangida to Interim Government under Shonekan and back to military dictatorship with the obsession to transform into elected civilian government were some of the worst years in the country’s history, especially in terms of repression, unnecessary loss of lives through extermination of citizens by those in power, and erosion of Nigeria’s international dignity.

Like a civil war, one June 12 is enough for a country that wants to survive as one. What is at issue in 2015 is straightforward and clear: fair, free, and credible election. All suggestions from political engineers and pundits should be to encourage politicians and citizens to talk and work towards free and fair election and to support INEC to conduct free, fair, and credible elections. A free, fair, and credible election is the only thing that can move the country towards further consolidation of democracy and assure citizens that the country as a multiethnic ‘state-nation’ is worth giving a chance to find its feet and grow, not calls for extra-constitutional political contrivance.

March 15, 2015
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom and liberty

This is why I am appealing to the APC to instruct all its agents to ascertain that only INDELIBLE, as opposed to VANISHING INK, is supplied for use

In the case of Afenifere that has so shamelessly and so strangely declared its support for President Jonathan, its support is worth little or nothing to the PDP. Afenifere is no longer the formidable political organisation or movement that it once was. None of its present leaders can win elections in the Southwest. They have become irrelevant in the politics of the Southwest where their political influence has fallen considerably. Equally, the traditional rulers in the Southwest that President Jonathan has been trying desperately to woo have little or no influence on the electorate in the region. Even in Ife, the Ooni, the leader of the pack, has little or no political influence now. So trying to bribe the Obas is a waste of money, time and effort. They cannot deliver the votes Jonathan needs to win the elections, if they are free and fair” -Ambassador Dapo Fafowora, fromer Nigerian Ambassador to the United States and Deputy Nigerian Representative to the United Nations.

God bless the Awujale of Ijebu land. You feel proud as a Yoruba man listening to Kabiyesi respond to President Jonathan during his visit to the paramount ruler, Thursday, 12 March, 2015. Kabiyesi is not one to lie, promising what he knows no Oba in Yoruba land can deliver.

Do you lecture the converted? Received knowledge would say, no. But that exactly was what I saw Governor Olusegun Mimiko do to his colleague PDP governors this past week in Lagos as he lectured them on the advantages of restructuring while everybody else looked like the governor was speaking Greek. The few acclamations that interspersed his long lecture were extremely tepid and unenthusiastic. Even Governor David Jang, Chairman of the Forum, was so listless he had to be helped out with his contribution. I could not stop wondering whether he knew that TVCs were being withdrawn as people obtained their PVCs, yet he was canvassing its use. Nobody joining the programme midway would ever have thought he was watching a meeting of state governors. It is, however, interesting that it has now become the burden of the Southwest PDP, and of course its acolyte, Afenifere, to carry restructuring literally on their heads for a president who, outside of the Southwest, has never made it a campaign issue. Not surprisingly, no governor at the event, besides governor Mimiko, did either.

It is equally interesting to now see PDP top guns, David Jang, their 16-is-greater-than-19 governor’s forum chairman inclusive, with their subalterns, running all over the place, ranting as to why Card Readers should not be used. By doing this, a few things have become clearer to me personally. In the first place, it says very loudly that the Ekiti rigging template, already eloquently attested to by the Captain Koli tapes, and on the basis of which President Jonathan must have once told some ambassadors that the elections would be the easiest ever, has been abandoned. I must say, however, that the six weeks’ postponement could very well be their way of getting their election-fixing rogue scientists to invent other versions. PDP is that desperate. This is why I am appealing to the APC to instruct all its agents to ascertain that only INDELIBLE, as opposed to VANISHING INK, is supplied for use. Secondly, and this explains their strident opposition to the use of card readers, is the fact that by its use, PDP will not be able to profit from a total of about 20 million voters cards which they most probably have cloned from the VIN card numbers fraudulently extracted from the 17.8 million youths TAN claimed endorsed President Jonathan as well as the about two million forms distributed all over the Southwest by a chieftain of the party on the spurious grounds that he was going to give them jobs and loans. If they contest this, they should tell Nigerians why they required VIN card numbers on those documents. Indeed, thinking that INEC was complicit in this fraud and would feed the 20 million into its system ahead of the elections, I once, on these pages, advised APC to go to court over the use of card readers. But now seeing how troubled they all are, wanting Jega out by just about any means, it is obvious the professor remains his decent self. However, we cannot go to sleep as that does not, in any way, remove the danger still lurking within INEC with many PDP card carrying members like a former Ebonyi State PDP chairman still on duty. There is, too, that one who we heard in the Ekitigate tape gave Fayose some sensitive INEC materials which he reportedly printed and used in rigging the election. Even if it is the last thing Professor Jega would do before exiting, he must fish out that rotten pig who so egregiously compromised the agency.

It is to rig the elections that they are doing everything to discredit a card reader which cannot discriminate between parties but would apply equally to all voters. PDP cannot win a single local government election without rigging as Nigerians have seen time and again. From the grave vine, we have now heard they would ensure there is no network, nationwide, on March 28 so they could blame INEC for using card readers. If this fails to stalemate the election, as it sure would, because it is not internet-based, we are told, they could orchestrate June 12 all over again, and when trouble erupts, Afenifere and their other endorsers in the Southwest would not only rise in their support but would start leading delegations to Abuja to express that support. It has, in fact, been suggested they already knew there is no way a people completely sidelined from democratic dividends for a whole six years, as we saw in the case of a highly qualified Yoruba CBN Deputy Governor, a 1976 graduate and long time staff of the apex bank, who, indeed, acted as its governor, had to give way for a 1984 graduate and total stranger to the bank, but who is from the favoured geo-political zone, when it came to appointing a substantive Central Bank governor. Nor did it matter that the Finance Minister and not less than 60 percent of heads of regulatory agencies come from those parts.

For obvious reasons, the Jonathan government had to shift the 28 February election. They just had to go for broke as the auguries were too bad, seeing defeat staring them in the face should the elections hold. But there could never have been a better time for the Sahara Reporters’ airing of Captain Koli tapes. It caught the PDP in their very jugular; whatever the braggadocio of the falcons and their falconer. For the PDP, it was road closed. Otherwise, that Igbo serial election rigger would still have been hawking about his photocromic ballot papers and the PDP would have won the election long before it took place. That route having been closed, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the six additional weeks is to enable the PDP, as indicated earlier, devise new rigging techniques. As at the time the National Security Adviser suggested postponement at the Chatham House on the grounds that sufficient number of PVCs had not been distributed, INEC had distributed about 65 percent which was much higher than the 35 percent it did in Ekiti as at the time of the governorship election and nobody heard all these jeremiads about number of PVCs distributed. Sensing then that it would not gel, they had to quickly manufacture insecurity as if a seven-year-old insurgency had just dropped from Mars. An insurgency they had romanced all these years, deliberately ill-equipping our patriotic, well trained and disciplined soldiers, suddenly shot into limelight becoming the linchpin for election postponement. Forget, in the meantime, that collaboration with our neighbours had long been suggested by the French President and Abuja did absolutely nothing. It now suddenly hit the president that he had to cooperate with them. I am sure that the full story of these days would be told one day in future and Nigerians will get to know how they were fooled. We can only imagine now, how many lives could have been saved and disruptions to the lives of our hundreds of thousands of Internally Displaced Persons avoided.

So here we are, with whatever remains of their magical 6 weeks, and I am pleading with all Nigerians to vote right as four more years of the same, or worse, is certainly not what we deserve as a nation.

March 15, 2015
Are you a happy person?

I know that most of our adults in this country think that happiness is a fat bank account, stolen or borrowed; while the youths think it is a one-way visa to the USA

Reader, I wish I could tell you that I look exactly like the picture you are seeing right now on this page, but I cannot. What with one thing and another, I am missing a leg or arm or half a smile on this happiness project. When my eyes are not literally crossing each other’s paths trying to make sense of the many incomprehensible troubles Nigerians have a penchant for digging up for me, my mouth is in a permanent snarl of exclamation over the things they take as normal. So no, my eyes are not closed in some blissful inhalation of my inner peace and my mouth is not spread in a wide grin of satisfaction over my social condition. I am a hapless and helpless Nigerian. Indeed, my inner turmoil and outer condition have now collectively radioed in for backup: the tears, sniffles and good ol’ adult howling.

What about you, are you a happy person? I know a happy person when I see one; he/she looks exactly like the picture you are looking at. I doubt very much if your happiness quotient can be any higher than mine though: that of any blue-blooded Nigerian cannot be anything to speak of considering the many sources of our national outrage right now.

As I am writing this, there is no electricity. I am using the backup battery thoughtfully devised by someone in another economic market whose own nation first ensured there was electricity to enable him to spend long hours researching how to make the devise that I would use in my own uneconomic market. You get my drift? Then you’re better than me. Anyway, there has not been enough electricity to fill two cups, and yet there are places, I am told, where electricity is supplied in spoonfuls, no matter that there are national, state and local governments in place charged with the affair of ensuring that electricity flows constantly. So, Nigeria’s electricity is short-circuiting my happiness line.

On the matter of the roads, we have been given over to hissing and gnashing our teeth on account of what our fellow Nigerians have made of us, literally. Have you tried travelling on the Oyo-Ogbomoso road lately? Seriously, you will not only curse the fellow-dude who got the contract but failed to execute the dualisation of that road, you will spit at your government and all those connected with it. That road represents all roads in Nigeria that manage to slice off huge chunks of your contentment.

Then, there is the matter of having to work for a living; children having to transport water over long distances; housekeeping monies buying less and less while responsibilities are increasing more and more, elections being delayed… Tell me now, while we are busy attending to all these, what time do we have to be happy?

On Friday this week, the world will celebrate the international day of happiness. Don’t let us go into why and how it has come about that such a thing as happiness needs to be celebrated. To start with, I had always thought that happiness was a personal thing, a matter between one and one’s chi: if your chi smiles at you, you get happy, if it fails to smile, you just go look for somewhere to drown quietly without being a public nuisance.

The United Nations for instance thinks otherwise. It says that the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal. That means that I can now go around proclaiming this goal in the face of all my enemies, starting with the government. When the government fails to give me electricity in my house, I now have the right to wave the red flag at it and say, boo hoo, you government are standing in the way of my lawful pursuit of happiness. See you in court. Oh yes, by that UN declaration, you can now take someone to court for obstructing your path in your pursuit of happiness. Let me just check with my lawyer first…

So far, you will agree with me that the pursuit of happiness in the Nigerian socio-politico-economic space is harrowing, if not nigh impossible. Yet, let us look at another possibility. Let us suppose for a moment that happiness can happen in spite of this cloudy space. Let us look at our governments across the board as errant children that you can’t get through to; so we must find ways of getting around them to pluck our own happiness from their tight-fisted jaws.

This is what I mean. I know that most of our adults in this country think that happiness is a fat bank account, stolen, borrowed or begged for; and the youths think that happiness is a one-way visa to the USA. Indeed, most youths and young-at-hearts have the ants in their pants to ‘dump’ this country and make for parts unknown in search of a better life. Who can blame them? The only trouble is that what motivates most of them is often economic. They have not yet taken the trouble to get to the heart of life and find its meaning in order to know exactly what they want from it. Usually, most of us are after that special thing we can hardly name ourselves, that thing that is so elusive and difficult to pin down, the performance of which just brings out the sweat from our brows, the jump to our hearts and the tongue hanging out sideways. That is the point where our happiness hangs.

For many of us, that tongue hangs out sideways when we are entertaining. Oh, you should just see us at the pinnacle of a successful bash, dashing here and there waiting tables on guests. For some, it is gathering children together and mentoring them. Oh man, you should see such people showing children the way to go in life. For many, it comes from constructing one edifice after another, planting houses with government money. All that matters to them is that the buildings should sprout up and sideways like magical things from Aladdin’s cave.

It is time I think for us as Nigerians to begin to examine what brings us happiness. True, happiness around here would have been much enhanced if social amenities were present. Such things add to the quality of life. After all, it would be a good thing to be able to flip a switch and bathe the room in light, turn a tap and flood the floor with water or even drive your car and not be jolted through the roof by bad bumps and potholes the sizes of dams. It gets even better when you do not have policemen or their allies harassing the life out of you for not having some intangible thing or the other in your car on a journey at night when all you want is to just get home.

Honestly, what one does for happiness does not matter provided it safeguards the environment, does not harm any other person and it allows one to treat others with respect. That’s not me; I got it from the happiness site. But we all need to look inside us and bring out that special thing which perhaps the world has not yet known and which may even do this country some good. I still believe that developed countries are where they are today because their people pursued their happinesses in ways that added value to the environment, one item after another. We can do that too; sure we can – one item after another. So, be a happy person; pursue your dream and change the face of Nigeria for the better. As for me, I am happiest just talking to you…

March 15, 2015
Battling Boko Haram

The string of successes recorded by the Nigerian military forces in clearing Boko Haram insurgents from towns they occupy in some states of the North East region of the country is heart-warming.

Last Friday, the Director of Defence Information, Major-General Chris Olukolade announced the capture of the Madagali, said to be the last major town held by the terrorists in Adamawa State.

The Nigerian troops had reportedly routed terrorists from different towns and communities in Adamawa, Borno, Yobe and Gombe.

The six-weeks operation launched by the military, which was the excuse for not being able to guarantee security during the earlier dates fixed for the general elections, seems to be yielding results and there is cause to be hopeful that terrorists days of unhindered takeover of communities are over.

Although the insurgents have continued their deadly attacks in some cities in the region, indications are that the Nigerian army may have finally found the strategies to dislodge them or at best curtail their activities.

The involvement of the African Union regional forces has undoubtedly aided the success of our soldiers, they deserve commendation for halting the worrisome advancement of the insurgents who are determined to possibly carve out their own Islamic state from the country.

Last weekend, Boko Haram’s pledge of alliance with the Islamic State of Syria and Iran (ISIS), which has been globally accepted as a terrorist group is a clear indication of how far the group intends to go in order to achieve whatever cause it claims to be campaigning for.

The Nigerian forces have proved that they have the ability to combat the terrorists if they get the ammunitions required for such sophisticated desert battle against the terrorists. It is unfortunate that it has taken this long to adequately equip our soldiers, many of whom have been killed and wounded along with thousands of other civilians.

Now that we seem to be having an upper hand, everything necessary should be done by the Federal Government to sustain the momentum and once and for all, cut the insurgents to size. The regional efforts should be fortified and there should be no room for any disagreement that can hamper the joint efforts required to win the battle against the terrorists.

If the claim by the Chadian President – Idriss Deby that he knows the whereabouts of Shekau, the Boko Haram leader is true, whatever is required to capture him dead or alive should be done. Whatever disagreement exists between the Nigerian and Chadian governments over how to prosecute the anti-terrorist battle should be resolved in the interest of fighting a common enemy group like Boko Haram.

More than ever before, there is need for regional cooperation particularly among countries directly affected by the crisis, and backed by the international community. National pride over territorial issues and credit for who is doing what in the battle should not becloud danger involved in allowing lack of unity of purpose on this matter.

Terrorism is a global problem that has to be tackled urgently before it consumes all of us.

March 15, 2015
Plotting election stalemate

The March 28 presidential election has been framed as a contest between a young and energetic politician and an old and infirm opposition standard-bearer, between a liberal Christian and a Muslim extremist, and between a southern federalist and a northern unitary and hegemonic slaveholder. Around these divisions have grown and flourished a noisome assemblage of vicious and unrelenting propagandists and a coterie of uncouth, remorseless and violent party supporters. And at the centre of these divisions has perched in all his resplendent best and on all fours a detached President Goodluck Jonathan sometimes conniving at the divisions, but more often feigning ignorance of these divisions or pretentiously sermonising against the deepening political and social vices spawned by his policies, politics and subdued rage against opponents.

In reality, however, and as the campaigns have shown so far, the March 28th presidential election is all about the failure of Dr Jonathan to offer brave and brilliant leadership. He doesn’t think so, and his supporters, especially his kinsmen and other paid loyalists, insist the animosity against him reflects the sectarian, regional and ethnic schisms in the country. Former president Olusegun Obasanjo even recently alluded to the president’s leadership failure, but because he himself offered uninspiring leadership in his eight years in office, his views are either discountenanced or ridiculed. Evidently, however, Dr Jonathan has indeed given his more than 170 million compatriots poor leadership, and deliberately accentuated the divisions in the country, divisions which now run dangerously wide and deep.

The opposition against Dr Jonathan, this column has always insisted, has very little to do with his background, religion, or the vaunted bogey of northern supremacy and irredentism. Everything boils down to his unsatisfactory leadership, his poor grasp of issues — whether economic, political or cultural — and his lack of colour, charisma and incomprehension of the fundamentals of leadership. His failures made the search for an alternative relevant and desirable, and the people’s preparedness to embrace former head of state Muhammadu Buhari an obligation. It does not matter that Dr Jonathan’s supporters vociferously but without substantiation portray him as the man for the moment; or that his kinsmen threaten war in case of defeat; or groups such as Afenifere mischievously rest their support for him on chimeras; or that poverty has made many susceptible to the ruling party’s fecundity in buying and enslaving consciences; or that individuals like Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State, having taken leave of their senses, hysterically and with unrestrained ferocity concoct lies to advance Dr Jonathan’s interests.

It is baffling to hear the president’s supporters present their case. Obviously, they are living in denial. Should Dr Jonathan win, he will doubtless take actions that will worsen the alienation being experienced in the country, compound the nation’s economic woes, aggravate divisions, and judging from the way he has allowed his reelection campaign to be run, exacerbate tension and hate speech, and enthrone propaganda, lies and vile and scurrilous media attacks on persons and opponents. In addition, he will promote all forms of assaults on civil liberties, subvert or attack the courts, and further lower Nigeria in the esteem of regional and continental neighbours and rivals. Already the image of Nigeria is badly battered. Should Dr Jonathan return, it is inconceivable he will begin to demonstrate the inspiring leadership for which he showed no inclination in his first term, or enunciate lofty values the rubric of which he has so far been incapable of grasping and evaluating, let alone projecting.

Furthermore, though Dr Jonathan has laboured strenuously to keep the economy from keeling over in the face of perhaps the most horrendous mismanagement of the economy ever experienced in these parts, should he win, he is expected to enunciate in a brutal and pigheaded fashion a devastating welter of measures certain to undermine the polity and trigger more revolts, if not a conflagration. It would be foolish to take such huge risks when in fact the country should be running in a totally different direction, exploring other options and paradigms. The choice before the people, therefore, is not between a young and energetic president and an old and infirm challenger, nor one between a liberal and an extremist. These are inaccurate and unsubstantiated labels and categorisations. The choice the country faces is one between an undisciplined, uninspiring and mentally exhausted president — in short paralysis and disaster — and a disciplined and sensible patriot — in short the country’s last straw. Nigeria should not be discouraged from trying the alternative because of Mr Fayose’s hysteria and the grudge and animosity of self-centred groups like Afenifere.

But perhaps more frighteningly, there are strong indications the Jonathan government is working ardently, in collusion with powerful cabals within the country, for a political stalemate. There is no question a second Jonathan presidency will doom democracy and enthrone fascism. But a stalemate, as is being widely speculated, will plunge the country into something far worse, something far more violent and bloody. It is believed that Dr Jonathan and a few other power mongers are determined to exclude Gen Buhari from power should he win the March 28 poll. In furtherance of this, some sources suggest, everything is being done to ensure the elections are either sabotaged and judicially postponed one more time in favour of an interim government which would be presented as a fait accompli, or the elections are compromised through rigging and/or violence. This is why many analysts are suggesting that Nigeria may be back to the trenches of 1993, and doomed to fight a fruitless and needless war of attrition all over again. Should that war be fought, it is uncertain what the fate of the country would be or what would be the end of the protagonists of the war who are playing God.

The panic believed to be fuelling this speculated stalemate is the fear that Gen Buhari is expected to win the poll, and should he win, would enunciate and implement far-reaching changes in the country’s body politic. Indeed, few believe the postponement of the elections from February 14 to March 28 was prompted by either security measures, even though that excuse on the surface seemed plausible, or by low distribution of permanent voter cards (PVCs), even though subsequent more robust efforts at distributing the PVCs give a fortuitous ring to the postponement. Had the elections held in February as originally planned, it would have been difficult to prevent the Gen Buhari/All Progressives Congress (APC) momentum from translating into victory. The momentum has been checked but not destroyed. It is even likely that one or two weeks to the polls, another Buhari momentum could be triggered. Should the elections hold on March 28, there is nothing on ground to indicate that the APC would lose or even win narrowly. This may account for why there are speculations of a contrived stalemate being engendered by the Jonathan government.

Three reasons account for the Buhari/APC momentum, and why neither the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) nor Dr Jonathan will be able to arrest it. First, Dr Jonathan has not shown leadership, has been the most divisive president Nigeria has ever had, and he has run the economy and society aground. These troubles have turned many voters against the president and his government. Second, Gen Buhari, notwithstanding his weaknesses, has enjoyed cult following in many parts of the country, particularly the North. His reputation is enhanced by the absolute colourlessness and ineffectiveness of his opponent, Dr Jonathan. Third, by a seeming celestial sleight of hand, the APC has managed to put Yemi Osinbajo, a reputable professor of law, south-westerner, and leading pastor in the large pentecostal Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) on the APC presidential ticket. The worst efforts of the now morally weakened and politically compromised Southwest group, Afenifere, a group that tends to reflect only the Christian perspective of politics, has failed to make a dent on the reputation and appeal of the APC presidential ticket both in the North and in the Southwest. The PDP now fears the ticket to be solid and impregnable.

Whatever stalemate Dr Jonathan and other power cabals contrive can only end either in bitter confusion or violence that may consume the perpetrators or in the emergence of a new dawn that will exclude those who have abused their offices and the trust reposed in them. Fears of a breakup may be exaggerated. And the belief by the government that the security agencies are united behind it may also be a mirage. One way or the other, peacefully or otherwise, a faction of the political class appears destined to be demystified on March 28. It is hard to see mediocrity rewarded, or the country plodding down the same dusty and treacherous road it had trudged for about 16 years.

March 8, 2015
Between authentic Yoruba demands and what these elders are hawking around

How can these elders expect Yorubas to vote a man who treated them with unequalled disdain for all of his six years in office?

The name PDP Afenifere cropped up some two years ago when the Yoruba nation began to see the likes of  Iyiola Omisore, the forever wannabe-be governor  of Osun State –  attending  Afenifere meetings. But it has since got worse, with even Igbos now routinely attending, probably  bearing President Jonathan’s  election-related  gifts  or there to  attest  to  the  loyalty of  our elders to their new leader.  It doesn’t get more horrible for a proud Yoruba people.  And, for a certainty, the Ikemba  must be smiling in his grave; he who had wanted, but failed,  to make Col Banjo an Igbo viceroy in Yoruba land  when, during the Biafran war, he armed him to go conquer Lagos, now seeing  his Igbo brothers, Peter Obi and Udenta, resplendently seated, like conquistadors, at a once  revered Yoruba conclave. A single one of our Yoruba elders is yet to attend an Ohaneze meeting.

Could these elders have forgotten the Ore war?

A defining election is here with us, one in which the Yoruba nation must not permit itself to be obfuscated, especially by self-lovers who should ordinarily be our guarding lights. Unfortunately, a Pauline conversion, on an industrial scale, has since happened, and today, those who used to lead us are themselves now being led by a ‘youth’. Yet, however odious the situation, we still must be careful how we approach this delicate matter that fouls the mouth, but instantly adds salt; lest we be confused with that insufferable  PDP Goebbels, who  manufactures a lie, a day.

I am a student of  history and learnt at the feet of the very best – Akinjogbin, Fajana, Anjorin, Afolayan, Igbafe, Omosini, not to mention the incredible duo of  Segun Osoba and Banji Akintoye, about  both of  whom I have written copiously on this column, these past ten years, beginning with the rested Comet. That was at the Great University of Ife, close on fifty years ago, and it is on that legacy I will leverage to shred this unprecedented attempt by so tiny a few – you can now count them on your finger tips – to mislead the entire Yoruba nation; a people with a history dating back thousands of years and a people you would never describe as foolish. Worse is it, that this is in a subterfuge aimed at corralling them to queue behind, unarguably, the most corrupt government in Nigerian history. After all, the essence of history is using the past to illuminate the present, and the future, so that mistakes are rendered negligible. How can these elders expect Yorubas to vote a man who treated them with unequalled disdain for all of his six years in office?

And how do I do this in a manner that will so resoundingly blow off the shibboleths they are ceaselessly hawking about, running from Akure to Ibadan, and herding thousands of our youth to Akure for no other reason than to socialise bribery, in the forlorn hope that these young people Jonathan’s government could not give jobs, will now give him victory in Yoruba land.  All I have to do is present to the sons and daughters of Oduduwa, their long standing  demands  for proper restructuring as contained in the YORUBA AGENDA  which I urge them  to  compare with the dead on arrival recommendations of the Jonathan Confab they now equate to a silver bullet for the myriad problems currently hobbling Nigeria. This will convince our people that these elders’ merchandise is nothing but a pig in a poke. Happily, we are too smart to be sold on the cheap, especially since we are well aware that, deep down, all this showboating is targeted at oil pipeline contracts and political rehab.

The Yoruba Agenda, 2005, represents the culmination of efforts and ideas which have been canvassed in Yoruba land since the agitation for a return to true federalism energised those seeking a solution to the perennial crisis of governance in Nigeria. After its adoption at a Yoruba Assembly, it was submitted to a meeting of the Southwest Governor’s Technical Committee and it formed the kernel of the report submitted to the 2006 National Conference which was aborted. Unlike any other document, it enjoys the singular attribute of having every stratum of the Yoruba nation making a contribution.

It contains some specific, and, immutable demands which you would think these elders ensured were incorporated in the recommendations, but for where? Among these are the following: a self-governing and autonomous region to mobilise the energy of the Yoruba for progress and development and to ignite their collective resolve for cultural renaissance, educational resurgence and social stability; a right for the Yoruba to live under a regional government within the Nigerian Federation with its own constitution and which will be the master of its own internal affairs.  One which will function as one out of six regional governments  which  will form the federating units in a federation operating federal and regional constitutions.

Naturally, the new federation will undergo structural changes which will touch on, among others, the scope and limits of the powers of the federating units; the form of government, revenue allocation and fiscal federalism which will ensure that each region can develop at its own pace; resource control, police and policing and a judiciary which will have a federal Supreme Court for strictly constitutional cases and at the regional level, the apex court will be the court of Appeal. Indeed, under these Yoruba demands, membership of the National Judicial Council shall be so representative that excessive power would no longer be concentrated in the hands of the Chief Justice of the Federation. The present archaic, unproductive, centralised, single and unified police system would be jettisoned for a system of federal and regional police.

The above are only some of the original Yoruba demands as contained in the Yoruba Agenda. Were PDP Afenifere to have based its endorsement of President Jonathan on their inclusion, or even only a majority of them, I could very well have elected to be their orchestra’s drummer boy.

But what is the testimony of Mr Femi Falana, SAN, who, like them, was a conference delegate but one you would never find running between Akure, Owerri, Delta, Ibadan or Abuja?  In an interview he granted The Nation newspaper and published on Thursday, 5 March 5, 2015, Falana said as follows in answer to the question: Can you be more specific  on the Yoruba Agenda at the national conference?: ”Frankly speaking, answered him, the Yoruba agenda was anchored on regional autonomy, restructuring, parliamentary system or Westminster model, fiscal federalism or resource control, unicameral legislature, a ceremonial president and a prime minister with full executive powers, a special status for Lagos State, state police and deletion of the Land Use Act from the Constitution. Those were the items which constituted the core Yoruba Agenda. The items were defeated in to-to at the confab. Of course, the establishment of State Police scaled through on the basis of the role of the civilian joint task force in the fight against insurgency in the Northeast region. I challenge the authors of the Yoruba Agenda to point to other items that were adopted by the Confab.  Indeed, the approval of State Police, we learnt, was not based on the initiators’ advocacy.  Falana went further to explain that the Confab made three types of recommendations on policy direction, statutory amendments and constitutional review which require the promulgation of over 50 new laws and amendment of about 80 existing legislations and that although some of the bills were prepared and submitted to the government, the President did absolutely nothing in the past six months except set up the Adoke committee to study the report. Or could our elders have forgotten that the legislature has a role to play in its implementation in which case they must have to endorse all the federal legislators too?”

Given the above, one can only conclude, like this column did last week, that this is all a poorly calibrated ploy to mask their support for a government which Chief Obafemi Awolowo, by whose name they swear, would never have touched with the longest pole.

I wish, therefore, to plead  with my Yoruba compatriots that while we continue to accord these elders all the respect they so richly deserve, a single one of us must not make the mistake of voting a man who has so ill-served the Yoruba race and Nigeria.

March 8, 2015
Humour in uniform

(The strange case of Dr. Goodluck and General Jonathan)

These are strange times indeed. Once again, life is imitating literature in such an emphatic and compelling manner in this hellish corner of the globe. Fiction writers may soon become surplus to requirement. As the mother of all electoral wars drags itself towards a definitive climax, strange creatures are crawling out of the woodwork even as extraterrestrial figures invade the Nigerian firmament.

By the way, does anybody remember the famous classic by Robert Louis Stevenson titled The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? It reads like a compelling medical bulletin on bipolar disorder. During the day Dr Jekyll is a respectable medical practitioner. But at night, he is transformed into a ferocious monster furiously hacking to death women of easy virtues in the Red Light district.

Has anybody noticed that shortly after this column characterized his government as a civilian junta, i.e a civilian government with military strongmen in the background conducting the orchestra, Goodluck Jonathan himself upped the ante by swapping his customary fedora-capped resource control costume with the full military fatigues of a Commander in Chief, swagger stick to match in a surprise and brave visit to the Boko Haram front?

If you are in any doubt about this dramatic transformation of Jonah to the great Attila, just hear it from the old warhorse’s mouth. According to Edwin Clark: by going to Baga, Jonathan has shown the stuff of great generals. All hail the Commander in Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, General Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.

It was obviously part of an elaborate military bluff and psychological offensive against the dreaded sect. Not even Jonathan’s worst detractors can begrudge him this one. He looked every inch the part of a civilian general, a violent oxymoron to be sure, but a political possibility in the post-colony. A lot of drilling and grilling must have gone into this military education of the presidential cadet, including gait correction, physique stiffening and the science of martial bearing.

Yet as many theorists of semiotics and scholars of symbolic perception and impression management would attest, this type of image conjuring can work both ways. While the image of a virile and potent leader may serve to reassure a people dazed and traumatized by war and senseless carnage, while the impression of strength and defiance may destabilize the Boko Haram enemy, the same image may send a wrong and even contrary message of intimidation and coercion to a seething democratic citizenry on the verge of a make or mar election.

It will be recalled that on the eve of the infamous 2007 election which he himself famously dubbed a “do or die” affair, General Olusegun Obasanjo even more famously donned the full ceremonial uniform of the Commander in Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces replete with the dark goggles of a Latin American caudillo. Needless to add that it was a prelude to the worst electoral pogrom in the history of the country.

There are many things that are disturbing and unsettling about the strange overnight transformation of Goodluck Jonathan from a meek, gentle and inoffensive pacifist to a furiously belligerent commander in chief. If he had the fire in him all along, why wait till now when a vast swathe of the country whose territorial integrity he swore to protect lies in ruins, completely devastated by the Boho Haram tempest?

Why wait until now to show the fire in his belly, the swash in his buckle and the rattle in his sabre? Could this temporizing be part of an elaborate strategic plot to render a substantial portion of the north militarily, politically and economically hors de combat so as to be in a position to pose as liberators later? If so, it will amount to a particularly cynical and cruel ploy to reap electoral dividends from the misery and devastation of the North Eastern people of Nigeria.

Whatever it is, it is certainly curious that a hitherto combat-shy commader who had exhibited no appetite for confrontation or aptitude for hostilities could suddenly hop on the plane to visit war ravaged areas and inspect damaged facilities. It will be recalled that for months, despite intense pressures and muted grumblings, Dr Goodluck refused to visit the war affected areas or Chibok, the town where almost three hundred students of a Secondary School were abducted almost a year ago. Suddenly, General Jonathan took over, and the rest is recent history.

The plot thickens and the mystery deepens when it is realized that it is the same Nigerian army which has been a subject of international ridicule and global contempt for its seeming ineptitude and sheer incompetence on the battlefield that has suddenly rediscovered its old fighting flair a tad late in the day. Was the army slandering itself all along by affecting incompetence, or were the troops trying to prove a point?

Whatever the case may be, the ease and resolve with which the Nigeria military has been relentlessly rolling back the Boko Haram was not the surprise but the fact that so much of Nigerian nation space had already come under the suzerainty of the dreaded sect. This has led to a new military maxim worthy of Baron von Clausewitz: If you don’t recapture, you never know how much has been captured.

But if you think you are close to unraveling this strange tale of how an institution and its chief commander can experience a cyclothymic swing of moods between extreme placidity and sudden ferocity, you are surely mistaken. It will be recalled that the Chadian military Command once accused our army of loss of fighting appetite, to put it rather diplomatically. This past week, the same Chadian army openly accused their Nigerian counterparts of stalling and stonewalling in a final vicious push to rout the Boko Haram insurgents.

At least, the Chadian army has shown an internal logic and consistency underpinning its operations and reputation for brutal severity. In a statement obliquely directed at this charge, the Nigerian Commander in Chief stated that the military was being careful so as to avoid heavy civilian collateral damage. Is this a new version of what General Gowon famously referred to as “police action” in the first three months of the civil war before the Biafrans almost arrived at the gates of Dodan Barracks?

You would have thought that at this perilous stage the military would throw everything to rout a Boko Haram that has its back to the wall. The latest argument from the Nigerian military authorities is that the Boko Haram sect is using the abducted Chibok girls as a shield. But it is obvious that this cuts no ice with the Chadian army which has given the sect a surrender ultimatum failing which it would be pounded into annihilation. Actually, the Chibok shield bogey is a no-brainer dredged up from the past.

By slowing down the offensive, could it be that somebody somewhere does not want to run out of the major joker for further postponing the elections? In a war situation, the postponement of elections is the election of postponement. Postponement is chosen for the people. It is a form of annulment which is more lethal and sophisticated than the original.

Meanwhile, and while this sudden lull in the prosecution of the real war is going on, a saturation bombardment and carpet bombing of enemy political territory, the like of which has never been seen or heard of in this country and whose sheer savagery will make the authors of the Geneva convention wince in trepidation, has been unleashed on the opposition. Have we finally arrived at the dreaded conjuncture when anything, including national cohesion and the military fortunes of the nation in an actual war, can be thrown into an electoral contest without caring a hoot or giving a damn?

When the outcome of an electoral war supersedes the outcome of an actual war, a nation can be said to have entered the realm of political schizophrenia. It is all about the spoils of power, stupid, and the country is split down the middle in a way that may suborn national will and identity. It is a fearful situation. May God help the English patient pretending to be Nigeria in the next few weeks.

March 8, 2015
Presidential poll as cauldron of intrigues

No fewer than three main plots are believed to be afoot in the run-up to the March 28 presidential poll. First, it is suggested that President Goodluck Jonathan, believing he would be defeated in the poll, is intriguing to either postpone the polls or contrive an indefinite postponement. The president, the speculators suggest, is unmindful of the legal or constitutional implications of another postponement or cancellation. That he will not stand on any solid ground, they say, is not enough reason to dissuade the president from attempting that contrivance. Should Dr Jonathan proceed to give life to this plot, he will find ready support in Governor Ayo Fayose, that mindless proponent of crazy schemes, and other likeminded purveyors of subterfuges.

Second, it is also suggested that Dr Jonathan, having sworn not to hand over to a disfavoured successor, may be scheming for the emplacement of an interim government, for which he and his supporters might already be shopping for candidates. Former president Olusegun Obasanjo is thought to have spied on this scheme much earlier than most Nigerians, and has frantically warned that the president was reenacting the Ivoirien stalemate that led both to a short but brutal war and the disgrace and trial of former Cote D’Ivoire president, Laurent Gbagbo, and his wife. The president has denied the existence of such a plot, but news and speculations of the scheme have endured. In fact, a recent Abuja court order mandating INEC to register the Young Democratic Party (YDP) and include it on the ballot is cited as an indication of the tightening plot against the election. This seemingly innocuous but anomalous judgement is believed to be designed to provoke a postponement of the polls.

Third, there is a massive, relentless, incoherent and illogical campaign to replace the INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, a professor of political science. The campaign is orchestrated by indulgent Niger Delta politicians sated with oil money, and leading PDP officials corrupted by power and largesse, who have even gone ahead to call for the abandonment of PVCs and card readers. Some Southwest politicians in the PDP and Afenifere whisper their support. Indeed, no day breaks without one powerful group or another calling for the head of Professor Jega, with some of them, like Mr Fayose, encouraging the president to fly in the face of common sense by either sacking the INEC chairman or sending him on leave. Heavens will not fall, says the truculent Mr Fayose. Though the president has denied any intention to remove Professor Jega, he has a history of not meaning most of what he says, a culture that has led his loyalists to continue exerting pressure on him to dispense with Professor Jega. The plot against the INEC chairman is designed to complete the three legs of determining the outcome of the polls in favour of the president and his party.

In the days ahead, many more plots will manifest with the intent to shape Poll 2015 outcomes. But it is well known that deliberate and artificial concoctions and manipulations that undermine popular will often end tragically for a scheming government. There is nothing to indicate Dr Jonathan’s schemes would end differently. If in doubt, aspiring schemers should ask the United States where their short-sighted intervention in Iraq and the regime change they inspired led them. Did it not birth ISIS, destabilise Iraq, give the hated Iran the upper hand in the region, complicate Syria’s manifold troubles, and completely undermine the so-called New American Century, a trashy piece of ambitious internationalist theory of American foreign policy?

March 8, 2015
Election cold feet: the dying gasp of a ruling party or of the Nigerian predators’ republic?

Cold feet: (1) apprehension or doubt strong enough to prevent a planned course of action. (2) to have ‘cold feet’ is to be fearful to undertake or complete an action.
Dictionary.com (online)

One of the most interesting revelations made by the INEC Chairman, Professor Atahiru Jega, during his appearance at the Senate on February 18, 2015 was the fact that for the Ekiti State gubernatorial elections in June 2014, only about a third of the Permanent Voters’ Cards produced for the election was collected by registered voters. This, in effect, means that les than 35% of PVC’s produced were collected. Although this revelation is interesting for many reasons, I will mention only three of such reasons.

First, it shows a depressing level of voter apathy in EkKiti state, an apathy so vast that it more or less constitutes a danger to the survival of democracy in that particular state, if not indeed in the whole of our country. Secondly, it shows that in Ekiti State as in many other states of Nigeria and many other countries of the world, voter apathy provides no justification for the postponement or cancellation of elections. It is not an inspiring thing to say, but voter apathy is an aspect of electoral politics in the world, including even the most stable bourgeois democracies on the planet. The antidote for it is not postponement or cancellation of scheduled elections; rather, it is the institution of policies and actions that expand popular participation of all segments of the population in democratic governance, most especially in economic and social affairs. If the benefits of democracy reach the most marginalized, if the gap between the haves and the have-nots are significantly decreased, if people across the board feel satisfied that they have rulers who listen to them, voter apathy substantially decreases. The third and perhaps the most important reason why Jega’s revelation about the low collection rate of PVC’s in the Ekiti State gubernatorial elections of June 2014 is of great interest today is the fact that the PDP at that time was quite satisfied to go ahead with the elections despite the extremely low rate of PVC collection. Today, the story is very different and that is the thing that I wish to reflect upon in this piece.

Of all the registered parties in the country, the PDP is the only party at the present time making noises about the collection of PVC’s. Two weeks before the formerly scheduled date of February 14 for the presidential elections, collection of PVC’s had already reached 65%, a figure more than twice the figure for the June 2014 Ekiti State governorship elections. At the present time and as revealed during Jega’s appearance before the Senate on February 18, collection of PVC’s countrywide has reached 75.9%. And yet, the PDP is shouting to the high heavens that presumably unless collection of PVC’s reaches 100%, the elections cannot and must not be held. If, dear reader, you wish to know why it was okay with the PDP to go ahead with the Ekiti State elections in June 2014 with less than 35% of PVC’s collected and why it is not okay now for the same party to go ahead with elections with 75.9% PVC collection rate, look no further than what in the title of this piece I am calling “election cold feet”. Permit me to give a few other indications beside PVC collection rate of this malaise of “election cold feet’ that, in our own symbolic Ides of March, has suddenly stricken the ruling party.

The most dramatic dates in the etiology of this malaise that now afflicts the ruling party are February 2 and 5, 2015. As I have previously written in this column, on February 2 in Abuja and before a world press conference, the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshall Alex Badeh, the Chief of Army Staff, General Kenneth Minimah and the Chief of Air Staff, Air Vice Marshall Adesola Amosu all affirmed that the Nigerian armed forces were in a state of complete readiness for February 14, the scheduled date for the 2015 presidential election. They made this assertion in response to then growing rumours that the elections were going to be postponed. However, three days later, on February 5, these same men, together with the Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Usman Jibrin, completely reversed themselves and wrote the infamous letter to Jega saying that the armed forces were not ready for the scheduled February 14 date and needed six weeks in which to bring the Boko Haram insurgency to the minimum level of containment that could free the armed forces to assure countrywide security during the elections. To date, these Service Chiefs have given no reason, no justification whatsoever for why they reversed themselves. The reason for this is not difficult to discern for in what language, in what rational codes of military strategy and tactics can they explain the “election cold feet” of their Commander-in-Chief, Goodluck Jonathan. For this is what explains the gap between those fateful dates, February 2 and 5, 2015: about slightly more than a week to February 14, the President realized that the collection rate of PVC’s was not enough as an excuse to postpone or scuttle the elections and assuage his growing election cold feet; something more “weighty” and more inscrutable was needed. And for that the Service Chiefs willingly reversed the assurances they had given on February 2.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think we have ever encountered “election cold feet” in the history of electoral politics in our country. Massive, messy and violent rigging of elections, yes. Election returns in which the figure recorded for actual voters is higher than the figure of registered voters, yes. Elections in which a declared or eventual victor happened not to have been on the ballot, yes. But never, never “election cold feet”. Thus, as the new or postponed dates of March 28 and April 11 draw nearer, the “cold feet” of the PDP, as a unique and special kind of electoral malaise, has risen to the level of a raging, feverish inferno of total unwillingness to have elections or to have elections only on terms completely controlled by the ruling party. Thus, this very week, Ayo Fayose, the Ekiti State Governor, the antihero of Ekiti-Gate, a man for whom the level of impunity in obscenity and bad faith is bottomless, Ayo Fayose has this week been screaming “sack Atahiru Jega and the skies will not fall!”

For obvious reasons, for most people in our country and among interested forces in the larger international community, “election cold feet” is all too transparent as the disease of a ruling party that is so terrified of a resounding electoral defeat that it will do everything possible not to face the electorate. For this reason, there have been speculations as to just what it is that makes the PDP so terrified of going before the Nigerian electorate. Some talk of a power lust that is fueled by the money lust of an administration that has overtaken all previous records in the looting and mismanagement of the nation’s wealth and the public purse. Others talk of the terror of what a new administration will do to the kingpins of the PDP, the revelations, the exposures with which, for months and years, we will be inundated after May 29, 2015, the inauguration date for the new administration. Others talk of the fear, the certitude even of the bosses of the PDP that once the party loses its hold on federal or central power in Abuja, it will simply wither away as a national party since it has never forged any organic or viable links to hold it together as a party beyond the sharing of loot, the spoils of office and the actual and symbolic uses of power. All this is true and especially of characters like the Ekiti State Governor, Fayose. Where in the world can he run to after May 29, 2015?

I suggest that we need to look well beyond the anxieties and fears of the ruling party as we ponder the ramifications of the PDP’s election cold feet. There are many reasons for this. In the first place, in the intensity of the current fierce struggles to defeat the PDP’s desperate efforts to scuttle the elections, many people are beginning to slide ever so slightly into a terribly complacent presupposition that because we are all determined to have the elections against the PDP’s calculations, we are all APC diehards. I speak for myself but I hope that I speak for many others in asserting most vigorously that my total commitment against the PDP’s efforts to deprive the Nigerian electorate of the civic and constitutional right to exercise their choice directly through the ballot box and not at the behest of the Service Chiefs is a value in itself and is not attached to the electoral fortunes of the APC or any other party. Let me express this idea in a more concrete form: I wish, oh how I wish that the PDP’s election fever is the last, dying gasp, not just of the ruling party, the PDP, but of the entire Nigerian predators’ republic that has been at the helm of affairs in our country at the center in Abuja and in the states since 1999. But I know that this is not the case. The road to that will be long and hard. This brings to my mind the Chinese adage which states that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Defeating the PDP’s election cold feet is, in the light of this Chinese adage, the first step in a long, long journey. Let that first step commence, firmly and resolutely.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 8, 2015