The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • 2015 elections and Southwest’s silent majority

    2015 elections and Southwest’s silent majority

    Yoruba masses are not worrying about ministerial appointments but about jobs and infrastructure that can make their life meaningful

    Most Nigerians will find it hard to believe that the Yoruba have a silent majority or minority, given the folk belief in the country that the Yoruba are the noisiest political animals on Earth. But having observed the political behaviour of the Yoruba as an adult for over half a century, I make bold to say that most Yoruba are silent voters while many of their political leaders are noisy campaigners. The presidential campaign events in the Yoruba region by aides and supporters of President Jonathan are reminiscent of the campaign culture of 1965 in Western Nigeria, especially in the frantic character and tone of campaigns by individuals and groups that choose, in the character of asunrara (professional mourners) to cry more than the bereaved.

    Although the level of desperation today in pushing the case of preferred candidates by supporters is as palpable as what obtained during the electoral contest between Alhaji Dauda Adegbenro and Chief Ladoke Akintola, campaign on behalf of PDP and its presidential candidate in the Yoruba region in 2015 evinces significant traits of cultural decline that makes the bizarre electoral campaign of 1965: “Whether you vote for us or not, we have already won the forthcoming election” a child’s play. One thing that was in vogue in the 1965 NNDP campaign and that is more pronounced in 2015 is targeting campaign messages at the elite and with little consideration for the masses, which was the sole focus of Action Group campaign in 1965. For example, President Jonathan and his aides in the Yoruba region have given more attention to elite groups such as the Yoruba Council of Elders, Old Afenifere, and assemblage of Yoruba Obas.

    On the part of Yoruba Council of Elders, the decision to support Jonathan’s candidacy is hinged on his readiness to sign a memorandum of understanding with the council on how he would include Yoruba people in his distribution of the largesse of office in his second term. No date and time have been set for the signing. As it was in the days of Obasanjo, so is it now with YCE. The Council of Yoruba Elders is more interested in extracting concessions from Jonathan in terms of how many ministers or board chairpersons he would allocate to the Yoruba region if he gets elected. Nobody in the council seems to be interested in asking why an Ijaw man from a region of the country that used to be a part of old Western region would marginalise Yoruba people in the last five years, despite the contributions made by Yoruba activists to his emergence as president after the death of UmaruYar’Adua and votes from Yoruba states for his bid for the presidency in 2011. It is not clear if YCE is aware of the worries of silent Yoruba voters who have been trooping out to welcome Buhari from Akure to Lagos. Yoruba masses are not worrying about ministerial appointments but about jobs and infrastructure that can make their life meaningful.

    Still on elite politics, whatever is left of Afenifere has chosen to hoodwink Yoruba voters by trying ‘to call a dog a monkey.’ Harping on the Jonathan national conference of appointees, Afenifere has chosen to focus on its belief that it is only President Jonathan that can implement the recommendations of his conference. Assuming that there are significant recommendations from the conference, it is wrong to claim that it is President Jonathan or any other person as president that can implement such recommendations. Restoring federal provisions to the constitution is not an executive matter. It is the legislature at the federal and states that can do this. It is thus dishonest to keep harping on the issue of allowing President Jonathan to come for a second term for the purpose of implementing re-federalisation of the country.

    Ironically, it was only during Jonathan’s visit to Yoruba region that he himself spoke of the national conference. He did not mention anything like this during his visit to the North nor before his own people in the South-south. Given the President’s selective mention of the national conference and Afenifere’s obsession with the recommendations of the conference, silent Yoruba voters are now put in a position to accept the charge at the beginning of the 2014 conference that the national dialogue was convened principally to divert attention from Jonathan’s accomplishment or lack of it during his first term and to focus on a mirage or a ploy to cultivate Yoruba voters.

    It is true that as a leading member of EgbeOmo Yoruba, Action Group, and Unity Party of Nigeria, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his political associates struggled for enhancement and sustenance of federalism in the country. It is also true that Yoruba people since the 1980s have called stridently for return to federalism. But Awolowo and others have not asked for a federal system that denies federating units the power to raise revenue with which to fund their development. Chief Awolowo called for a federal constitution that would allow each federating unit to have an education system that is linked to its culture. The 2014 conference did not consider this aspect of federalism as well, despite several papers sent to Yoruba presidential appointees to the conference. The conference was pleased with the status quo of federal government interfering in education at all levels. Chief Awolowo and other Yoruba federalists did not at any time call for continuation of a judicial system that had grown out of decades of military dictatorship and distortion of the judicial culture of the country, but the 2014 national conference, now being referenced as indispensable to federalism by Afenifere elders, did not see anything wrong with a judicial system in which the federal government is the be-all-and-end-all of judicature in the country, in contradistinction to what obtained in the years before the first coup d’etat in 1966.

    Is it not curious that the PDP as a party did not openly support the Jonathan conference in 2014? Even now, the PDP as a party has not joined the Afenifere group in using the national conference as a talking point in the campaign for a second term for the incumbent. Given the fixation of Afenifere on recommendations of the national conference, it is not out of place to ask if there are other things about the national conference report known only to Afenifere elders and that are unknown to President Jonathan and the party for which he is the flag bearer.

    The immediate task before Yoruba voters is not implementation of recommendations for a new federal system that invokes the principle of federal legislative supremacy for every item on the Concurrent list. The failure of the conference to touch the principles of fiscal, cultural, and judicial federalism, all hallmarks of shared governance and sovereignty that set federal systems apart from other governance models is obvious to Yoruba voters most of whom may not have the means to call press conferences.

    This is the time to push each candidate to tell voters how he would provide leadership for the project of re-structuring the polity in a way that citizens can own the process, rather than just 400 appointees of the president. Yoruba voters also know that not all the 400 appointees share the optimism of Afenifere elders about the outcome of the conference, and this includes people from President Jonathan’s region of Nigeria. As it is, it appears that it is only Afenifere and its cheer leaders that are pleased with the conference. But Yoruba federalists have reasons to suspect any conference recommendation that responds, in the words of Afenifere to just Yoruba demands. This may be why President Jonathan himself shies away from raising the issue of the conference in his campaign outside Yoruba land.

    Afenifere elders, like any other Nigerian citizen, have a right to associate with any candidate and party of their choice. What they do not have is the moral right to hoodwink silent Yoruba voters by claiming to think and act on their behalf on the issue of bringing federalism back to the country, an exercise once described by Sir Olaniwun Ajayi (a conference participant and a federalist in thinking and scholarship) as game playing. Afenifere elders must remember the character of the political dynamic during the campaign of 1965. Yorubaland was split between elite politicians as forces for the status quo and mass political movements represented by the silent voters who often sang Bo o r’owo mi o orinu mi (what you see is not what you get). Silent Yoruba voters today know the difference between functional and cosmetic federalism, just as their counterparts in 1965 knew the difference between power politics and welfare politics.

  • Whose reputation will this PDP not shred?

    Whose reputation will this PDP not shred?

    If Odikanlu knows this much, and still proceeded to advise as he did, it should be quite reasonable to conclude that he deliberately wants the forthcoming elections rigged in favour of both the PDP and President Jonathan who gave him his present job

    The minute ‘Goebbels’ started the campaign for troops deployment I knew that desperation had set in. PDP, at the best of times, is like an asylum of desperadoes even when not facing a make or mar election capable of finally terminating its corruptive tendencies.  Recently, two court judges,  one at the High Court and the other of  the Appellate,  both  well aware of the prevailing security situation in the country, have done justice to their oath of office and the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria by declaring  that ‘”even the President of Nigeria has no powers to call on the Nigerian armed forces and to unleash them on peaceful citizens, who are exercising their franchise to elect their leaders, further stressing that “whoever unleashed soldiers on Ekiti State disturbed the peace of the election on June 21, 2014; acted in flagrant breach of the Constitution and flouted the provisions of the Electoral Act, which required an enabling environment by civil authorities in the conduct of elections.” A more courageous Appeal Court should, however, have made the logical consequential order of invalidating the election. But no matter, the judges upheld the dignity of the courts.

    And I salute them.

    Therefore, for anybody, however seemingly well placed, to advise the president to continue in that flagrant illegality is to demonstrate the greatest level of irresponsibility which is why the Nigerian Bar Association must move rapidly to discipline Chidi Odikanlu, Chairman, National Human Rights Commission, and a professor of Law to boot. Or how ludicrous can a professor of Law get advising, not that a decision of court be appealed but that the transgressor should continue in that damnable illegality? I verily believe he had been compromised or hugely compromised himself to vomit that baloney unashamedly on national television. And some questions naturally arise:  Is it possible that Professor Odikanlu has not heard of Ekitigate? Does he, like President Jonathan, consider a tape secretly recorded by a Military Intelligence Officer, a captain – present at the scene – who felt thoroughly humiliated seeing the manner in which bloody civilians were humiliating his Commanding Officer – a Brigadier-General- a fabrication too?  Could it be that those who recruited distinguished international diplomats to underwrite a suspected Memorandum of Understanding have also got him? Can Odikanlu tell the world what proportion of Nigeria is in a civil war?  Where exactly does intellectualism stop and banal ethnic preferences take over?

    And just in case he honestly has not heard about Ekitigate, it is that deployment of soldiers, allegedly on presidential orders, in cahoots with a notorious Igbo election rigger, who came to Ekiti with a huge stash of money withdrawn from the Umuahia branch of the Central Bank of Nigeria, thereby indicating government as the financiers of the electoral heist, as well as photocromic ballot papers. It did not end there, as also present was a group of Yoruba politicians; some currently serving on President Jonathan’s cabinet, and a Brigadier General all for the sole aim of rigging the Ekiti State governorship election for the president’s party.

    If  Odikanlu  knows this much, and still proceeded to advise as he did, it should be quite reasonable to conclude that he deliberately wants the forthcoming elections rigged in favour of both the  PDP and President Jonathan who gave him his present job. I am still at a loss as to why he had to tell Nigerians on national television that he is not a politician, even without being asked.

    ON THESE MERRY-GO-ROUND OVER THE LAST NATIONAL TALKSHOP

     First it was Akure but this past week, the Jonathan Southwest Campaign train, aka PDP’s Afenifere, which it became when the likes of Senator Omisore started attending its meetings, crawled to Ibadan. The way they are going about it, you would think only Yorubas attended the National Conference. In what has become a rare moment of candour, a respected member recently declared the Akure meeting a PDP affair which, of course, Nigerians know too well. Otherwise, can they tell us who is picking the bills? Or can these people, in the name of Oduduwa, swear by the god of iron that they have not been compromised? Already, the Anambra APC has asked Ohaneze to return its own N6.2B bribe delivered in two tranches of N1.2B and N5B. The Yoruba nation is waiting for their response. But by the way, isn’t the promised oil pipeline security contract getting too late in coming? Is this tardiness not a confirmation of how President Jonathan actually holds us in these parts? And by the way, why are these respected elders being herded all over Yoruba land on an issue that is pan-Nigerian, acting like only they attended the conference? Is the Yoruba nation in any way ennobled by this obsequiousness?

    No, I am well aware it took them a whole lot of effort to persuade the number one hater of a National Conference to become its ultimate convener. Of course, only the uninitiated would not have heard that they allegedly wrote the conference’s original memo, got one of its members appointed to jump start it and had the highest number of any group delegation. Didn’t they even attempt to also donate the chairman?

    At their urging, weren’t honest Yoruba leaders like Chief Deji Fasuan and Senator Biyi Durojaiye substituted with pliable characters? All these, and more, we know and you would almost think they are a re-incarnate of the immortal Alao Aka Bashorun whose seminal idea a national conference in Nigeria is. But no matter, a people in need of political shelter will sure lap on to something!  But, again, why has implementing the recommendations of a Pan-Nigerian conference suddenly become their business alone? The answer is simple: it is the only seemingly passable justification for their in-explainable support for an irredeemably corrupt government Awo would never have touched with the longest pole.

    But how come their traditional collaborators are not in on this?

    Are they telling Nigerians that six months is too short for President Jonathan to do anything on the recommendations beyond setting up the Adoke committee to review it but which, in truth, was a deliberate delay tactics? What Nigerians now know is that once the conference failed to produce the expected two extra years for the president, the convener most probably lost all interest.  It is the failure of that promise that made the president distrustful of their promise on Yoruba votes. This also led to last week’s campaign shuttle during which the president re-commissioned a project Obasanjo had commissioned way back 2007 at which Gbenga Daniel was present and smiling broadly. The president, whatever PDP Afenifere may be telling him, knows that he has done nothing to deserve Yoruba votes. He knew he treated the Southwest with utter disdain while simultaneously enabling another geo-political zone to take complete control of Nigeria’s regulatory agencies thereby further pauperising the Yoruba and turning erstwhile controllers of the commanding heights of the economy into hapless, marginal players whose banks were indiscriminately confiscated and their PPP projects illegally and summarily terminated. Shouldn’t President Jonathan have remembered that besides our massive votes for him in 2011, it was the Soyinka’s, the Falana’s and co, who rescued him from the mafia then out to eclipse his political life? Yoruba-friendly, indeed!

    Let me conclude this piece with the wise and timely words of an OduaPathfinder Editorial: ‘When PDP’s Afenifere says it wants the Yoruba to support Jonathan because he will implement the conference recommendations, it is obvious, from the recommendations of the Conference, that Goodluck Jonathan is not in pursuit of “True Federalism” but the strengthening of his presidency contrary to established concepts of Federalism. Hence he must be rejected at the polls. This is the historical imperative for the Yoruba Nation.”

     CONFIRMING PRESIDENT JONATHAN’S ‘IMPRESSIVE’ ANTI-CORRUPTION WAR

     The heavy security attached to Femi Fani-Kayode as he continued defence in his money laundering case at the Federal High court, Lagos, this past week, made up of “five fully armed RIOT policemen and more than four plain clothes security policemen” – all protecting a man on trial for allegedly laundering N100M, must reckon as the most brazen demonstration of President Jonathan’s selective and effete anti-corruption war.

    It is, of course, one more reason CHANGE has become a must, if Nigeria is to survive.

  • A collision of habitus, and a way out……..

    To put things bluntly, boldly and with bald brevity, a habitus is the complex habit of viewing things, of reacting to events and of projecting this world view which is peculiar to groups, classes, corporations, guilds and certain associations. If this concept is extended to nations and nationalities particularly in Africa, it means that colonization or no colonization, ethnic nationalities continue to have their own habitus which they then project on the national plane inevitably and unavoidably.

    In the end perhaps nothing can beat the description of habitus as “structured structures pretending to be structuring structures”. Stripped of jargon, it simply means habits already determined and conditioned by history and sociology in a different historical milieu parading as habits that must determine contemporary history and political exertions in a new situation.  It is not habituses themselves that are often the cause of national conflicts in a multi-national nation. It is their incompatibility or mutual unintelligibility.

    This is what happens when people of widely divergent economic, political ,cultural and spiritual modes of production are summarily hauled into the same nation space and told to get on with it. This is the origin of the colonial Bedlam as nation. The colonialists themselves for reasons best known to them made sure that the divergent habituses of the colonized nationalities of Nigeria would solidify further into immutable epistemological categories by forbidding interaction among the political elites of the new country for almost five decades after amalgamation.

    In the event, the subsequent interaction became a dialogue of the deaf eventuating in a collision of sacred altars. For example, how do you advise persons whose family and ancestors have owned serfs not to own serfs in a supposedly modern nation-state emblematized in proud citizenship? How do you ask a group not to cut economic corners when it is part of their habitus and revolutionary self-emancipation? Or what do you do to help a people or nationality stranded between a feudal past they abhor and a future they distrust?

    Going by this logic, Nigeria’s problems are tractable. All that needs to be done is just to imagine the British, French, Germans and Danes all boxed into the same nation-space, despite their distinct cultures and habitus. Despite national boundaries and barriers, they have been at each other’s throat, chalking up several national wars and even provoking the greatest armed conflicts in the history of humanity. What if they were to be boxed into the same colonial cage of active contraries and contradictions?

    During the negotiations that led up to the Treaty of Versailles, an American diplomat was so scandalized by the unremitting hostility and umbrage of the French Prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, a.k.a The Tiger, towards the defeated Germans that he was forced to ask him. “Sir, have you ever been to Germany?” An inconsolably irate Clemenceau shot back: “No sir, I have never been to Germany, but twice in my lifetime Germans have been to Paris.”  Had the tiger lingered a bit longer, he would have witnessed a third German “visit” in 1940.

    As far as habituses within the nation-space are concerned, an armed national struggle against external conquerors or a momentous and sustained national struggle against internal colonization such as Nigeria briefly witnessed during the June 12 crisis can throw up potent national ideologies which serve to override or even suppress widely divergent outlooks and incompatible habitus.

    This is what has happened in South Africa, Namibia, Ghana, Tanzania and to a lesser extent in Senegal, Benin Republic, Botswana, Angola and Mozambique. In Ghana, you cannot hear of an Ashanti or Akan hegemony. In South Africa, the old Zulu-Sotho rivalry has been effectively sublated under the rubric of a pan-national destiny.

    Nobody even remembers the names of the major ethnic nationalities in Tanzania. Julius Nyerere certainly did not belong to any of them. Neither did Leopold Senghor, a minority Wolof and Christian in a predominantly Muslim country. Thrice in Nigeria’s history, we have missed opportunities to come up with potent ideologies which could serve as rallying weapons of national unity and instruments of managed homogeneity.

    In the run up to independence, there was no pan-Nigerian struggle as such. What we had as independence approached were accelerating and accentuating regional habitus. Despite the presence of three regional titans, the structural impedimenta was such that it was impossible for the leader with the towering intellect and the force of character that could override the veto of habitus to emerge.

    The same scenario repeated itself in the post-independence struggle against internal colonialism. Despite the presence of two of the three titans in the Second Republic, the fierce contention merely led the destruction of the two republics rather than facilitate the emergence of a pan-Nigerian leader. Since nature abhors a vacuum, the formal political liquidation of the three regional leaderships led to the consecration and institutionalization of military despotism in Nigeria.

    It was perhaps the struggle against military despotism in Nigeria as seen in the battle to de-annul the presidential elections of June 12, 1993 that showcases the inherent structural weaknesses of the colonial bedlam as nation. Despite the fact that the situation was ripe for the emergence of a pan-Nigerian leader and a potent ideology for the emancipation of the Nigerian people from the clutches of military and feudal despotism, progressive forces managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The putative leader of the rebellion was himself done to death in captivity.

    Although the military itself lost command and was forced to withdraw to the barracks, it was not before it has imposed a neo-military civilian fascism on the nation. Once again, the struggle-fatigued progressives were outflanked and outwitted in a battle of wits and will with the retreating military. In sixteen years, beginning with General Olusegun Obasanjo, three of such hybrid governments have been imposed on the nation in a seeming Russian roulette.

    But now again in 2015, the forces of discontent are surging forward once more in a massive battle of will occasioning a drastic realignment of forces such as we have not seen since the First Republic. In living memory, Nigeria has never been this agitated by an election. All the old demons have once again erupted on the scene. In an irony of ironies, it is a retired ruler, a former military strongman, who is at the rallying head of opposition forces. It doesn’t get more profoundly paradoxical than that. The ways of history are truly immutable and mysterious to boot.

    The more subtle irony is that whenever a pan-Nigerian struggle is ongoing the contention for the structural re-designing of the nation is most muted and at its lowest ebb. On the part of progressives, this is a desperate strategic gambit. Since democracy is a game of numbers, it is also important to appeal to segments of the operating status quo and those whose habituses have conditioned them to believe that there is nothing actually wrong with Nigeria the way it is structured. The problem however is whether a party, except in a condition of dire national emergency, can prosecute an agenda that is not on its manifesto.

    This is why the stakes are so high. The atmosphere is so poisoned and rancorous. Going forward, and unlike the situation in 1964, 1979 and 1999, there is no minimal elite consensus about even the conduct of the election. The military high command has been sucked into the vortex of political contention in a way that unfortunately suggests that this is also a national referendum on the military. The gains of demilitarization have been wiped out overnight.  The situation cannot be more portentous.

    Either way, there is bound to be a ferocious backlash. Anybody who wins this is going to inherit a bitterly divided nation, a badly polarized political elite and a burglarized treasury. It is not going to be a win, win situation. If it is this despicable status quo that prevails, it means Nigeria’s fate as a viable nation is sealed and there is no point in mourning any further. But if it is the forces of change however flawed, it means we can begin to dream again about the manifest destiny of this potentially great nation.

    Political impurities sometimes have their uses. As the martyred Abiola has brilliantly demonstrated, rightwing reactionary resources of opulent wealth and vital connections can sometimes be brought to bear on leftwing projects of national emancipation in a telling manner. For the first time in the history of the country, a major coalition and coalescing of oppositional forces which would have been beyond Awolowo’s piously ascetic ken and puritan disdain for political horse trading has now been effected in a dramatic and stunning manner.  Whatever happens at the election, Nigeria will never be the same again.

    Let us now recap the imperative of this moment for our traumatized and disoriented compatriots. At the moment, Nigeria has descended into the very pit of hell despite the itemist inanities about pseudo-developments by this misruling cartel. Going by all indices, we have virtually a failed state on our hand. It is better to follow a brave and courageous pathfinder who will lead us out of the very depths of Hades than to stick to a famously incompetent dissembling despot who will confirm us in perdition. Nothing can be built on nothing and you cannot give what you don’t have.

    This is the pressing imperative of the moment. It is after we have been led away from hell that we can begin to ask questions about the finer particularities of habitus and how we can structure this colonial bedlam in a way that will release the genius, the vibrancy and the vitality of its diverse and diversely gifted nationalities. If there is no nation, there is nothing restructure. Hell has invaded everywhere in Nigeria and there is no point asking about the cuisine when the kitchen is on fire.

  • It’s the Lord of the flies again, but now with the adults present

    For money and power, we are showing our young ones that life in all its sacredness must bow its lovely head; sacred blood can flow irreverently

    In the Lord of the flies, for those of us who have not read that classic by William Golding, a group of British school boys are marooned on an island during a raging war because their plane is shot down. At first they are afraid. Soon however, they begin to organise themselves as they think the adults would have done under the leadership of the reasonable boys among them. Very quickly though, all the boys fall under the influence of the not so reasonable ones who lead them all down the path of certain destruction but for the timely arrival of a naval ship to rescue them. The novel symbolises resident evil in man’s heart.

          That evil seems to have gone abroad in our midst here where stupid games are playing out with people’s lives as stakes. Sometime during the last couple of weeks, someone reported something that happened in his quiet neighbourhood in one of Nigeria’s quiet cities. It certainly was very far from your boko haram territory. In the early afternoon of that day, a young man ran into the neighbourhood, apparently running away from someone or ones running after him. Soon, those ones caught up with him right about where our reporter was and, there on the street before everyone’s eyes, descended on him with machete blows, cutting and cutting until he was dead. To make sure he really died, one of the young men was said to have stood over him, superintending the taking of the last breath.

          Reader, I would like to report that someone made an attempt to stop them in the act but I cannot because nobody did. Everybody was afraid of the devil that was afoot during the noon day that made some able-bodied young men not to be afraid of spilling another young man’s blood. Rather, the neighbourhood did the most natural thing: people ran inside their houses or shops and motorists sped by.

           Reader, we the people of Nigeria have become very casual about lopping off our neighbours now. No one’s life appears to have any sacred value anymore; so no one’s blood is too precious to shed. For me, the height of the insult to our collective sense of humanity was the audacity, intrepidity, boldness and insouciance of the one who stood over the slain man to make sure he was really dead. That insult just stings for two reasons.

            The young men represent the crop of young ones we are breeding and teaching now to have no respect whatsoever for living humanoids. The sense of value we are upholding now respects only two things: money and power. For these things, we are showing our young ones that life in all its sacredness must bow its lovely head; sacred blood can flow irreverently. We the adult ones are showing these young ones that a life that is not holding either money or power is not worthy to draw any air. That is the cave man for you all over again, whose cudgel was his bargaining chip.

            Worse, the young men did what they did because they had no fear of the nation’s police or law. Clearly, between the law and order, they have found their niche: disorder. As a matter of fact, it is becoming increasingly clear that you can walk the entire Nigerianery without fearing the law. For one, there are so many unsolved murders, so many headless corpses, bodiless heads, ritual killings, etc. No explanation has come to us little ones to clear the muddled air on many of them. This was why the young men had all the intrepidity to wait and ensure that their comrade dutifully drew the last breath in their presence. As always, the police came to remove the body with a great deal of silence.

          Sometime in the week, the story broke somewhere in Lagos that a couple’s quarrel over valentine allegedly ended violently with the man falling down from a one-story building to his death. Then the story ended with the fact that the wife, a party in the quarrel, had travelled to her hometown. Wonderful, I thought; where was the police to give this woman the third degree inquisition on the matter? Even if she would be declared innocent at the end of the investigation, we should at least see that efforts had been made to account reasonably for the man’s death.

           Seriously, there are just too many cases of death going unaccounted for. Take the riot that broke also during the week in a Lagos park between rival gangs. Throughout the recounting of that story, there was no indication that anyone was investigating anything. Yet, weapons were used, people were involved, the scene of action falls under the jurisdiction of Nigeria, and four people died.

           It seems now that everywhere you turn, people are playing games with other people’s lives. None of the incidences recounted so far warrants the loss of a single soul. Take the first story. It turned out that the participants were all cult members who decided to visit every infringement with machete. I don’t know, but I think that whatever might have caused the disagreement could have been taken care of by the limping laws of the land.

           I used to think that life should be casual (because you have little control over much of it) and death should be scarce (because only the Almighty has control over it). Now, many Nigerians are playing god over the lives of others for unearthly reasons forgetting, quite forgetting that NOBODY, BUT NOBODY, GETS AWAY WITH MURDER. Even for partaking in the decision to commit the blasted thing, nature will recompense through that which we love most when we least expect it, if the police will not.

            I am positive I have told this story before but I will repeat it anyway for those of us who missed it the first time. A radio station aired the story somewhere in Lagos some years ago. A retired police officer had gathered his relatives together to celebrate his child’s graduation from a Nigerian university. The plan was that the young fellow would come with his friends to join the family who left earlier for the graduation grounds. After waiting in vain for the young one to join them, the restless relatives demanded that the father find out what was delaying the celebrator from coming to enjoy his day of glory.

           After calling all around, the father eventually found out that his son had been felled by a police bullet at a checkpoint. Stunned, the crowd broke into different crescendos of wailing but the father held up his hand and asked that no one should wail on his behalf for he believed that what happened had come from the throne of justice. Some twenty something years before when he was a young policeman, he said, it was his bullet which felled a student during a students’ riot. Only the family of that student grieved the act at that time. The act, he said, had come home full cycle as his own son was felled by the bullet of another policeman.

            Space and time will not permit us to tell the stories of other young men felled by bullets from their fellow cult members’ guns on their wedding days, or graduation days or one day of glory or another. There is certain truth in the saying that he who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind, but the point is that the absence of deterrents in the land is not helping these young men curb their exuberance, enthusiasm and wild, tempestuous natures in their Island games. Let us all begin to do our work to help these young ones grow up properly.

  • Let Jega be

    Let Jega be

    If the general election earlier fixed for February 14 had held as scheduled, many eligible Nigerians would have been denied the opportunity of voting for their preferred candidates.

    Despite the claim by the Chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Attahiru Jega, that his Commission was ready to conduct the election, it was apparent that the logistics for the nationwide exercise had not been perfected.

    The Permanent Voters Card (PVC) to replace the Temporary Voters Card (TVC) were not available in many centres. Despite public holidays declared by states governments to enable citizens collect their voting cards, INEC admitted that 48,098,000 out of 68.83m, representing 65 percent, had been collected as at the eve of the rescheduled election.

    As if to confirm the lapse in the production and distribution of the cards, many people, including some prominent persons, searched endlessly for their cards and had to re register when INEC owned up in some instances that the data earlier collected were lost.

    The training of ad-hoc staff had not been completed, while the use of the card reader was still a bit confusing.

    In a way, the postponement of the election based on lack of guarantee of security by the military was an opportunity for the INEC to perfect its arrangements for the election.

    Notwithstanding INEC’s shortcomings, there is no justification for the recent call on Jega to resign by the Southern Nigeria Peoples Assembly, led by Chief Edwin Clark and some other groups who are mainly supporters of President Goodluck Jonathan.

    The accusation against Jega that he has connived with northern leaders to rig Jonathan out of office is a wild claim which the group cannot substantiate.

    It is unfortunate that the Clark’s group which include senior citizens of the country who should be regarded as elder statesmen are leading a campaign of calumny against the chief electoral officer who has a track record of conducting free and fair elections that have been hailed across political divide in the past.

    While INEC’s preparations can be faulted this time around, his resignation at this crucial stage of the general election will rather complicate issues than solve the problem of having a smooth election in accordance with the constitutional provisions.

    Even if Jega offers to resign at this stage of election preparations, he would be guilty of sabotaging the electoral process. It is too late in the day for him to back out of the crucial exercise or be asked to leave over partisan allegations by those opposed to his conducting the election for ulterior motives.

    From all indications, the Jega-must-go proponents are acting a script to discredit the INEC boss to have reasons to fault the outcome of the election if their party loses at any level.

    Jega and his team have done fairly well in past elections that they should be given the benefit of the doubt to perfect whatever needs to be done ahead of the rescheduled March 28 election.

    Though President Jonathan has denied any plan to remove Jega, speculations have been on about the federal government’s plot to sack the INEC Chairman.

    The president will do well not to succumb to any pressure to move against Jega by his party members.

    Any attempt to send Jega on compulsory pre-retirement leave that will prevent him from conducting this election, will be counterproductive for the electoral future of the country.

  • Impunity: Like Nigeria, like Niger State

    Impunity: Like Nigeria, like Niger State

    When the Chinese want to curse you they say “May you live in interesting times,” or some words to that effect. It is hard, if not impossible, to dispute the fact that these are indeed interesting times in Nigeria, as in much of the world, where impunity seems to have become the bye-word for politics.

    Politicians everywhere lie a lot and all too often try to cut corners. But in few countries, if any, do they do so with so much impunity as in Nigeria. Worse still, ours seems to be a country where not only does impunity, by definition, attract no punishment but, on the contrary, is even rewarded.

    Which explains why a top police officer would abuse his uniform, as Joseph Mbu did during his long tour as Commissioner of Police in Rivers State – there he once, for example, stopped the governor from driving into his residence through a particular route at the behest of the First Lady – and a short spell at the Federal Capital Territory where he once illegally tried to stop a demonstration for which he was rightly denounced by the Inspector General at the time, Mohammed Abubakar, and yet get promoted instead of getting sacked.

    This also explains why, now as Assistant Inspector General of Police based in Lagos, Mbu had the nerve to instruct his men to kill 20 civilians for every policeman killed in the event of a breakdown of law and order in the March and April general elections. Happily he has since been quickly denounced once again by his boss, this time Suleiman Abba. Sadly, however, he still remains in his post, and for all you know, may be the next Inspector General, given his purported intimacy with the powers that be in Abuja.

    This level of impunity in the country also explains how a governor-elect would invade the sacred chambers of a court room in his state with a mob, tear court papers and even rough up of a judge, all in a bid to stop the hearing of a petition against his election, and all you get from all three arms of government, the desecrated Judiciary in particular, is pin-drop silence.

    It is the same high level of impunity which explains why the authorities in Abuja would give conflicting and hardly tenable excuses for shifting of the dates of this year’s general elections. First they said the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was not ready because it had not distributed enough permanent voters’ cards (PVCs). But when it transpired that INEC had distributed more cards than the average turn-out at Nigeria’s elections since the very first one, they resorted to the bogey of insecurity even though the role of the armed forces has always been the secondary one of last resort in case of serious breakdown of law and order during elections.

    And now that all but few Nigerians have their PVCs, INEC is being told to allow the use of temporary voter cards in a situation where card readers, as a great check against impersonation and rigging, can only read PVCs. Clearly, someone, somewhere, is frightened that for once he would not be able to write results of elections as he has been used to.

    One can go on and on with even more telling examples about why these are indeed interesting times in Nigeria, but AIG Mbu, Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State and the conflicting explanations by the authorities in Abuja for postponing our elections are sufficient evidence that the country has indeed been labouring under a curse.

    And what is true of the country seems to be perhaps even more so of one of its 36 constituent units – Niger State, my home state.

    Nearly one and a half years ago, on October 9, 2013 to be precise, I speculated on the outcome of this year’s governorship election in the state on these pages. My reference point was a full page advert in Daily Trust, which tried to promote the prospects of the deputy governor, Ahmed Musa Ibeto. I said then that Ibeto’s chances of even winning his ruling party’s governorship ticket were slim and his chances of winning the election itself even slimmer, in case he proved me wrong about his chances of clinching the PDP governorship ticket.

    “Chances are,” I concluded in the piece, “the next governor of Niger State may be Abubakar Sani Bello.”

    Since that piece, for which I was widely denounced by friends and foes alike, Bello, the son of Colonel Sani Bello, a former military governor of Kano State and a business mogul from Kontagora, has clinched the governorship ticket of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and, from all indications, the governorship of the state is his to lose.

    However, even in my wildest imagination I never thought Ibeto would lose his party’s ticket to someone who, until he was foisted on the party by Governor Muazu Babangida Aliyu, was virtually an unknown quantity in the politics of my state, except, of course, for the fact that he is the son of a prominent member of the so-called “Bida Mafia”  namely, the Class of ’62 of Government College, Bida, which has produced possibly the single largest number of army generals in Nigeria, including former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida and former head of state, General Abubakar Abdulsalami – incidentally, the father in law of Bello. Col Bello, the father, was also a member of the class.

    When I wrote my piece in question, I never, again in my wildest imagination, thought that the relationship between Aliyu and Ibeto would deteriorate to the extent that it has, with Ibeto decamping to APC in frustration and his boss ejecting him from executive council meeting last month and going over his head this month to appoint the Speaker of the state’s House of Assembly as acting governor for a period of 10 days while he was away on Umra, the lesser Hajj.

    Governor Aliyu has laboured hard to defend his moves against his deputy but, as is usual when people attempt to defend the indefensible, he and his men have been giving conflicting reasons. In any case, before he moved against his deputy, the governor had given his word that he would never allow his deputy’s defection affect their official relationship. This probably explains why his spirited denial of media reports that he recently said there is no morality in politics has met with widespread skepticism, even cynicism, from the public.

    When the governor announced Umaru Nasko, the son of Major-General Muhammadu Gado Nasko, a former military governor and minister of FCT, as his preferred successor, there was widespread consternation in the state, not least even among its elite. This was first, on account of Nasko Jr’s short-lived and mixed record of public service as a commissioner in the state, and second, on account of unflattering gossips about his rather exuberant lifestyle. Such was the depth of consternation in the state that even his father initially objected to the governor’s intentions of anointing his son as governor.

    However, in the end blood proved thicker than principle – the principle that merit rather than mere pedigree should be the overriding factor in determining who leads society. Here, it must be said that General Babangida deserves fulsome praise for firmly keeping his son, Mohammed, out of the race, essentially on account of the son’s perceived lack of experience in public service.

    What now remains to be seen is whether Governor Aliyu will realise his wish to be succeeded by someone whose main qualification is that he will ask few questions, if any, about the last eight years of virtual stagnation, if not decay, in the state, to put it nicely.

    Given the justly angry mood in the state against the incumbent, as in the entire country against the president – coupled with the fact that the courts on January 30 nullified the election of Dr Nuhu Zagbayi, the PDP candidate widely regarded as the governor’s proxy in the bye-election, which followed the death of Dahiru Awaisu as senator of the governor’s senatorial district, and awarded same to David Umaru, the governor’s APC rival in the March 28 election – it is highly unlikely that the governor will realise his wish.

    As I said nearly 18 months ago, chances are that Niger State’s governor on May 29 will be Abubakar Sani Bello – for better or for worse.

     

    Re:  Unlearn lesson of “June 12”

    Sir,

    With due respect to an eminent columnist, the title of your column (of February 18) should have been “The unlearned lesson of “June 12” not “unlearn.”

    +2348053215757.

    Sir,

    You had nothing to say today (February18) and even simple caption was “unlearnt” (not unlearn).

    +2348038720742.

    Both readers are right on account of the title. It was an inexcusable slip.

    Sir,

    In your column of today (February 18) you inadvertently referred to NRC as the National Republican Party instead of National Republican Convention.

    Sa’idu Liman,

    +2348036220413.

    Sir,

    Have you ever tasted alcohol or perhaps got drunk on it? Please go ahead and indulge yourself on a bottle of wine – you will discover why it is difficult for our leaders to learn from “June 12”.

    K. Banjo,

    +2348033192254.

    Sir,

    It is now evidently clear that Jonathan plans to use the army to rig the polls as in Ekitigate and damn the consequences. The recent attack on OBJ by DHQ points to that and Jonathan’s kinsman is COAS. The polls postponement is to perfect this strategy.

    +2348075476140.

  • Jonathan’s Southwest endorsements

    Jonathan’s Southwest endorsements

    President Goodluck Jonathan was in Lagos last week to commission four warships as well as meet various Southwest leaders over next month’s polls. To win the election, he will need a sizable support from the Yoruba states, after it emerged his support base in the North could no longer be guaranteed. To help the president, Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State is pressing hard on Yoruba leaders, especially the Yoruba political organisation, Afenifere, to endorse the president. Some two weeks ago or so, Afenifere, tired of just being Dr Jonathan’s fanatical apologist, gave that endorsement lavishly and remorselessly as his leading southern eulogist. But since then a few things have happened, chief among which was the worldwide negative reaction to the postponement of the general elections, that shook Dr Jonathan’s confidence in his reelection chances. He thus apparently needed reassurance. That extra assurance was given him by the meeting convened by Dr Mimiko in Akure last week, a meeting presumably called to enable the Yoruba review the outcome of last year’s national conference.

    Presided over by Ayo Adebanjo, and attended by, among others, Frederick Fasehun and Gani Adams, the meeting once again enthusiastically endorsed Dr Jonathan in crassly political, divisive and bigoted terms that made many wince. They were obviously more preoccupied with the politics of Jonathan’s reelection than having a dispassionate review of the confab report. For instance, reacting to the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential ticket, which has their son Yemi Osinbajo as running mate, the Afenifere leaders said a vote for the APC was a vote for disaster. “…We have openly identified with Jonathan in this presidential election because we do not want the Buhari experience again,” began Dr Fesehun incredulously with the ethnic triumphalism and vulgar logic most of us have sensibly outgrown. ‘‘Some people said they were born to rule but we want to let them understand that Yoruba people are born to lead and guide to the right path. Some people are showing Buhari as the guiding light but they don’t know what Buhari is. Four more years of Jonathan is acceptable than eight years of nightmare under Buhari…Jonathan is the only good thing available to Nigeria and I come out to say boldly that it is either Jonathan or nothing.” Boastful, sickening.

    Convinced in the words of Chief Adebanjo that voting APC presidential ticket would be a “mistake Nigeria cannot afford,” the Mimiko/PDP meeting reiterated its endorsement of Dr Jonathan and asked the Yoruba people to follow suit. Though Chief Adebanjo complained that the meeting was dominated by Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) faithful, he was not dissuaded by its partisan connotation to sign the communiqué of the meeting purporting to represent the feelings and aspirations of the Yoruba race. It is clear the Yoruba are divided, as they have been from time immemorial, and Afenifere is an unscrupulous faction in that division.

    The Afenifere endorsement is unlikely to amount to much, for most voters have already made up their minds whom to vote for: whether for Dr Jonathan in the case of those who stress his Christianity but discount the president’s appalling failings, lack of vision and irritating dubieties, or for Gen Buhari in the case of those who are sick and tired of the domestic and international ridicule the president has subjected Nigeria to, and of the general indiscipline, economic decline and constitutional infractions that hallmark his presidency. For an organisation that immodestly tried to prop up Dr Mimiko as the new Yoruba leader simply on account of his October 2012 electoral victory, it is not entirely implausible that its leaders, miscomprehending the fundamentals of leadership, are driven by private and base sentiments.

    Paradigms shifted when M.K.O. Abiola vied for the presidency in 1993. It became clear that anyone who hoped to win presidential election must appeal to both the North and South in sufficient percentages, must not be seen as an ethnic champion, and must be judged to be honest, fair-minded and ready to work for all. Former president Olusegun Obasanjo did not win in 1999 because he was a better thinker and politician than Olu Falae, but because he was seen as the politician with the broader appeal. Former president Umaru Yar’Adua was foisted on the country. On his own, let alone in combination with the previously unknown and undistinguished Dr Jonathan, there was no way he could have won. The question then is, does Dr Jonathan have the broad appeal, the discipline and the know-how to win in March, for which Afenifere has staked its future and whatever is left of its reputation?

    The Afenifere endorsement is unlikely to have been prompted by the national conference report, as they disingenuously said, for they are not so stupid to imagine that a superficial and disinterested Dr Jonathan could unilaterally push through the restructuring they imagine. Explanations must be sought elsewhere. Perhaps the place to begin is the division among the Yoruba, which has sadly appeared to ossify broadly along two main lines: for or against APC leaders. There is no chance of conciliation in the near future, for the factors that divide the Yoruba seem cast in granite and have very little to do with Dr Jonathan’s competence or otherwise, his promises which he breaks with disarming ease, his honesty or lack of it, national conference or no conference, or even his belated federal appointment palliatives to the Yoruba which were activated by reelection politics. Afenifere leaders actually see APC leaders as intransigent, grasping and illiberal; and APC leaders see Afenifere as anachronistic, ideologically vacuous and selfish. But at bottom, the competition is really about economic/financial power and political influence.

    Barely a few years after the inauguration of the Fourth Republic, APC leaders unceremoniously overthrew Afenifere hierarchs in a bloodless political coup d’etat that is still resented by the latter till today. That coup consigned Afenifere to the backbench of Yoruba politics from where they have growled and struggled to make their voices heard. The resentment will grow, and Afenifere leaders will continue to fight back, for they sense that the APC does not always have the best generals in the states they govern, or deploy the best tactics to win either elections or the hearts of the Yoruba. Poor strategies rather than poor ideas made APC to lose Ondo and Ekiti, and even the states currently under their control are only holding on by the skin of their teeth. To stand a chance at all, and under the circumstances enumerated, Afenifere has little choice but to throw in its lot with the PDP. But therein is the fatal paradox they must contend with: should the Afenifere/PDP combination overcome the APC, Afenifere would ineluctably disappear, for the logic of its existence within the PDP world would no longer be tenable.

    The economic/financial factor is a major issue among the Yoruba, and has always been. If they are to survive as a group, Afenifere leaders must seek alternative sources of empowerment. The only alternative available today is the Jonathan government, from which both Dr Fasehun and Otunba Adams, envying the likes of Niger Delta militants, are fighting tooth and nail to get pipeline protection contracts. Should Dr Jonathan win, both gentlemen, who have spoken vulgarly of a sense of entitlement, would be accommodated in Nigeria’s rent economy. Like Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti and Dr Mimiko, the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) leaders have a foreboding of the cruel fate that awaits them should APC win the presidency.

    The division in the Southwest is only painted in grand and altruistic colours. In reality, however, it is a bitter and acrimonious struggle for life and sustenance. Afenifere and Dr Mimiko’s PDP group gave their endorsement not because they cared whether Dr Jonathan perished or Nigeria was restructured, but that APC should flounder and drown, by whatever agency that end could be procured. The endorsers do not mind being encumbered with the loathsome prejudices of the past, or that their enunciation of hatred for a section of the country could easily inspire crimes against humanity. Nor have they intelligently deconstructed the problems of Nigeria and examined the paradigms necessary for rebuilding and renewing the country. Nor do they bother, even if they appreciate the consequences, about the danger of the entire Yoruba endorsing one party, a pitfall the Ohaneze Ndigbo and the Muslim community have carefully tried to avoid.

    Centuries after the Yoruba generalissimo, Afonja, famously endorsed a rebellion against the larger and deeper interest of the empire he was assigned to protect, historians have continued to assess the consequences of his fateful action. There is nothing in their past and present to show that the Yoruba have learnt any lessons, or that in the continuing dynamics of nation-building they have the cultural fluidity and intellectual depth and elasticity to make adjustments for the future. Worse, as Afenifere’s disgruntlement and ethnic and religious hatred against the North have shown, and as the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE) also displayed last week in their meeting in Lagos with Dr Jonathan, the Southwest has not wholeheartedly embraced the lofty principles and values upon which their progenitors founded and nurtured their great race, principles and values that are, alas, periodically betrayed sometimes by a whole generation.

  • Palladium’s endorsement: Voting Jonathan will doom democracy

    Palladium’s endorsement: Voting Jonathan will doom democracy

    In 2011, this column endorsed Nuhu Ribadu for the presidency though it admitted he could not win; believed Muhammadu Buhari was best placed to impose meaningful, even if not modern, rule on Nigeria; and announced that Goodluck Jonathan would win though he was unprepared for the presidency and unsuited to a post nothing in him was capable of grasping. Dr Jonathan indeed won, and has proved a spectacular failure: he has been unable to respond temperamentally and intellectually to the demands of the lofty office he has occupied for more than five years. In four years, however, Gen Buhari’s stock has risen in inverse proportion to Dr Jonathan’s steeply falling share price, and though his ideas, policies and behaviour appear hexagonal to the country’s round and modern needs, the retired army general and former head of state has nonetheless grown to become a round peg in a round hole. Only Mallam Ribadu has seemed an inconvenient departure from the 2011 mould, seeing how his steely interior, patriotic fire, altruism, and even-tempered religious and ethnic credentials all appeared wrapped in unstable and unpalatable chemical composition.

    This year’s presidential election needs no nuanced endorsement. Sensing that the All Progressives Congress (APC) momentum had become unstoppable, the Jonathan government worked intensively to stymie it and possibly redirect the momentum in favour of the ruling party. But if the reordering of the election schedule that put the presidential election first unlike in 2011 did not dampen the opposition enthusiasm nor undermine their momentum, it is hard to see the postponement of the election from February 14 to any date in March constituting a negative and morale dampening factor in the drive to unseat Dr Jonathan. The Jonathan government hopes the multinational force against Boko Haram in the Northeast will triumph and the credit for victory will go to Dr Jonathan. The president also hopes that the opposition will become discouraged, and that somehow, by a divine sleight of hand, events will turn around to favour the ruling party. If anything, however, the anticipated intervening variables expected to work in favour of the ruling party may inexplicably work against the Jonathan government. One month postponement or so will not change the incompetence of five years, restore a broken and failing economy, erase the universal negative opinion of more than five years, or stanch the flow of gaffes and monumental indiscretion.

    Last week, this column took Afenifere, the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural and obviously political organisation, to task for endorsing Dr Jonathan. The group had unbelievably and conveniently anchored its endorsement mainly on the promise by the president to implement the resolutions of the national conference. As an aside, Afenifere also suggested that voting Dr Jonathan’s opponent was tantamount to endorsing slavery, presumably northern slavery, and that in any case the opposition party had kicked against the convocation of the national conference and so was undeserving of the Yoruba organisation’s support. Afenifere did not say, and for obvious and sinister reasons could not say, how they expect Dr Jonathan to implement the conference resolutions when no one knows the composition and temper of the next national assembly. Nor, given his temperament, inattentiveness to details, proven lack of patriotism, and his sectional and provincial worldview, is it clear how Dr Jonathan hopes to overcome his notorious habit of breaking promises to keep a promise not anchored on either patriotic or philosophical conviction.

    Since the controversial Afenifere endorsement, it has become abundantly clear that the organisation neither spoke for nor represented the Yoruba. The endorsement was nothing more than the private and presumptuous opinion of a group of self-seeking and acrimonious politicians prompted by Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State and former Governor Gbenga Daniel of Ogun State. They stilled the protests of their consciences, rode roughshod over a commonsensical view and reading of history and politics, and projected clumsily into the future on nothing but a magic carpet to offer that futile and unmerited endorsement to Dr Jonathan. Except they tell themselves a hopeless lie, they know, as indeed the rest of the world, that Dr Jonathan, should he win the poll, is unlikely to perform better than he has done. Not needing re-election after 2015, he would bare his fangs, subvert values and sound principles, denude every political virtue conceivable, harass and intimidate the people out of their constitutional rights, and break every promise he has made.

    Perhaps inspired and emboldened by Afenifere’s endorsement, the even more superficial Yoruba organisation, the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), which for more than two decades had affected to fight for and protect the rights of the Yoruba, has also offered Dr Jonathan their endorsement. Whereas Afenifere pretends to be philosophical, anchoring its preference for Dr Jonathan on the need to restructure the country, OPC on the other hand anchors its endorsement on materialist grounds, perhaps because it wants a pipeline protection contract. The president, it said enthusiastically, had promised to build a deep seaport in Badagary, the best in the country, and a free trade zone and seaport in Lekki. When he met the president and complained about the poor representation of the Yoruba in his cabinet, said OPC’s flustered and flattered leader, Gani Adams, Dr Jonathan ‘within three days’ appointed a Yoruba as his chief of staff.

    If the Southwest, which used to be a thinking region, is now overtaken by charlatanism, it is not difficult to imagine why the evident and self-admitting failures of Dr Jonathan have elicited mixed reactions in many other places. I do not know of any north-easterner who would reward Dr Jonathan for his abysmal and vexatious handling of the Boko Haram menace. Nor do I know any parent, except one without empathy, who would ignore the more than nine-month-old Chibok abductions in which 219 schoolgirls were seized by Boko Haram militants to endorse Dr Jonathan. I do not also know any unemployed and hungry man except a sadist who would ignore the failing economy crippled  by Dr Jonathan’s government and vote for him. I do not know any patriot who would ignore the humiliating fact that the current onslaught against Boko Haram is inspired and led by Chad and, like the Afenifere and OPC, foolishly and shamelessly endorse Dr Jonathan. Indeed, I do not know any self-respecting Nigerian who would listen to Dr Jonathan’s many embarrassing gaffes and his wife’s noxious and verbose tales and brush aside all scruples to vote for him.

    After the Chibok abductions, the world became sick and tired of Dr Jonathan, and in diplomatic and polite circles they speak of his legacies and his government in idioms and proverbs, describing him as an exasperating failure that cannot be redeemed by either reelection or rehabilitation. Opinion of him abroad is universally poor, whether among foreigners or Nigerians. Even in Africa, there is not one country where Nigeria is respected, thanks to Dr Jonathan whose style, speech, and actions have consigned the country to the dustbin. The world has made up its mind that it would indeed be tragic for Dr Jonathan to be returned to office, for they are sure nothing inspiring can come from him, no matter how long he postpones the election.

    But in spite of Chibok, insecurity, failed economy and threats to the survival of the country, it is precisely within beleaguered Nigeria that opinion on Dr Jonathan is divided. The main reason, discounting the ethnic balderdash oozing out of the creeks and parts of the Southeast, is religion, a highly divisive and incendiary factor propagated energetically by Dr Jonathan himself. He was that factor’s originator, mastermind, and catalyst. He has curried the Christian vote as irresponsibly and recklessly as a medieval bigot, unconcerned by any fear that his opponent could also deliberately and as openly curry the Muslim vote. Where would that leave Nigeria? But if he is receiving any hearing, it is a pointer to the shortcomings and abject failure of Christian leaders who should draw on the wisdom of God to denounce the sectarian bogey and divisive politics of a shortsighted leader.

    Knowing Dr Jonathan for who he is, everything he stands for is unscriptural. His private and public morals are unsatisfactory, his Christian ethic, to which he pays only lip service, is twisted, and his heart, not to say his soul, is full of malice (of the malignant type), envy, hatred, hypocrisy, injustice, pride and all forms of pomposity, notwithstanding his open show of humility. It is to this pharisaical approach to religion and politics that Christian leaders, trading and peddling secular influence, have subjected the purest doctrines of Jesus Christ, as if it mattered to Christ what obstacles exist in a State House against the Scriptures, as if once a hypocrite took Christianity under his wings Christian doctrines would be given fillip. But even if Christian leaders should support Dr Jonathan, could they hope to keep a Christian in power for the next 10, 20 or 30 years? Would a Muslim not one day mount the throne?

    For much of 2013 up to the third quarter of 2014, most churches had laboured under the delusion that Dr Jonathan was God’s choice for Aso Villa. There was hardly any exception to this profanity. Many churches still labour under that delusion; and had a top pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) not been on the APC ticket, it is not clear where even that great and huge pentecostal church would tilt today. Churches of course reserve the right to support whomsoever they wish, individually or collectively. But they have a responsibility to recognise that the political leader they support must satisfy the standards of Christ, and importantly, Christian leaders must also recognise that they have congregations that run the gamut of the country’s political persuasions. It is irresponsible to discountenance these facts or to tyrannise from the pulpit.

    Of the many contestants for the presidential stool, only two are worthy of attention: Dr Jonathan and Gen Buhari. President Jonathan is familiar to us by his failures and present and continuing inadequacies; and Gen Buhari by essentially his past, especially his 20-month rule as a military dictator. The retired general is certainly no policy wonk, and can’t even be relied on to engineer remarkable economic and political ideas, nor to preside over the most thoroughgoing democratic practices sorely needed by the country. In fact, much of his brutal past, which he has done little to expiate, leaves much to be desired. But because the choice for Nigeria is between Dr Jonathan and Gen Buhari, it is critical to consider what the urgent problems of the day are, and who better to address them between the two leaders.

    In a nutshell, the country desperately faces the problems of insecurity/insurgency, economic decline/collapse, indiscipline, corruption, leadership collapse on a continental scale, ethnic and sectarian divisions, and national crisis of confidence. Because Dr Jonathan either originated these problems or promoted and worsened them, and because he is in fact a sham democrat, he cannot be trusted with the task of providing the remedies and leadership needed for a national rebirth. Should he be reelected, Nigeria’s democracy would certainly be lost, for no elected president has deployed the police, army, secret service and all other instruments of state to partisan uses as Dr Jonathan.

    On the other hand, Gen Buhari may not have completely and believably transformed into a true and modern democrat, but he at least has the discipline to rein in the rampant insurgency laying the country waste, the common sense and altruism to subject himself to the constitution, and the ethical wherewithal to tackle the corruption and economic collapse threatening to trigger a revolution in Nigeria and destabilise the sub-region. He seems able to restore the pride of the nation, and in many ways stand as a strong and disciplined symbol around whom technocrats can have the space, safety and comfort to design appropriate redemption policies. He will make the better president of the two. More, if the country is able to rise above ethnic and religious sentiments, he is in fact the only choice today, whether that today is February 14 or any other date.

  • General Momoh (unretired), NOT General Obasanjo (retired): an open letter to the Defence Headquarters, Attn: General Chris Olukolade

    General Momoh (unretired), NOT General Obasanjo (retired): an open letter to the Defence Headquarters, Attn: General Chris Olukolade

    It has to be restated that the military as an institution is neither as inept in the discharge of its duties nor is it being misused for political ends in the manner the retired General Obasanjo … has probably been made to believe
    From statement from Defence Headquarters, Monday, February 16, 2015

    Dear General Olukolade:

    On one level, General, you have my sympathy. As the General in charge of information at Defence Headquarters in Abuja, your job at the present time is not an easy one, no, not by a long stretch! The reputation of the Nigerian armed forces or more specifically, the collective reputation of the top brass, the Service Chiefs, is in tatters. The claim of our armed forces to professionalism of the highest order and to integrity and impartiality in the electoral process has been severely, some would say shamelessly compromised. This is why I start this open letter to you, General, with an expression of sympathy: yours is not an easy task, this task of retrieving the army’s honour, respect and integrity in the face of the near universal contempt of Nigerians and the international community for recent widely publicized unprofessional, corrupt and dishonourable actions of top members of the armed forces.

    To those reading this piece who might think that I am being sarcastic in expressing sympathy for your onerous task, General, I wish to draw the attention of such readers to the Statement that you personally made about two weeks ago on behalf of our country’s armed forces. I have that Statement in front of me as I write this open letter to you, General. It is a dignified and well composed Statement. In it you unequivocally affirmed that the armed forces of our country will remain, in your own words, professional, apolitical and non-partisan in the present electoral cycle. You stated that there were no ulterior motives in the Service Chiefs’ letter to the INEC Chairman that caused the postponement of the elections from February 14 to March 28. In fact, in the Statement you made the following ringing assertion that I wish both to endorse and to bring to your attention and the attention of all Nigerians: “No excuse will be acceptable for any act of commission or omission that tends to compromise the law or the electoral process as well as decent conduct or judgment on the part of any service personnel while discharging duties related to elections in any part of the country”.

    I have said that this Statement of yours, General, is dignified and well composed, adding that it makes affirmations of dedication to professionalism, integrity and decency which every patriotic Nigerian should endorse. However, this is only if your Statement is read in a de-contextualized act that ignores things that are happening in our country at the present time that make your assertions almost meaningless if not even hypocritical, General. In support of this strong observation, I will advert to two incidents both of which cast grave doubts on the sincerity of the assertions that you make in this dignified and well composed Statement of yours. Since the first incident is the milder of the two examples that I wish to discuss, I will deal with it first before coming to the second and far more damaging incident.

    First then, is the incident at the National Peace Committee Meeting in Abuja on February 2, 2015, when the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshall Alex Badeh, stated for the whole country and the world to hear that the armed forces were in a state of complete readiness for the elections on February 14. Indeed, in order to underscore his point, Air Marshall Badeh stated further that though the armed forces were engaged in counter-insurgency campaigns against Boko Haram, they had capabilities to ensure security for the whole country. Moreover, one by one, the other Service Chiefs present at the occasion echoed Air Marshall Badeh’s assertions: Army Chief of Staff, General Kenneth Minimah and Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshall Adesola Amosun.

    Here, it is necessary to state that the Service Chiefs made these assertions in order to quell rumours that were already circulating that the elections were going to be postponed, rumours that were so rife that the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, came to Nigeria with the sole purpose of dissuading the Jonathan administration from postponing the elections. At any rate, on February 2 the Service Chiefs gave assurance that they were ready for the February 14 date for the elections. However, three days later, on February 5, these same Service Chiefs wrote the infamous letter to the INEC Chairman completely reversing themselves.

    Up till now, none of these Service Chiefs has thought it fit and proper to explain to Nigerians why they reversed themselves, why within the space of 72 hours they moved from readiness for and commitment to elections on February 14 to a need for six weeks to quell the Boko Haram insurgency before they could be sure that they had the capability to assure security throughout the country. General Olukolade, you too have not thought it fit to give Nigerians the reason(s) for this volte face of the Service Chiefs between February 2 and 5. As a matter of fact, you have acted as if this about-turn did not happen and as if Nigerians do not remember that it happened. Believe, me Nigerians do remember it; moreover, they will recollect it if another about-face makes the Service Chiefs ask for another postponement of the elections beyond March 28.

    I now come to the second and far more damaging occurrence that makes your Statement almost meaningless, to the point of hypocrisy and bad faith, General. I refer here to what is now known as “Ekiti-Gate”. Since I am sure that you do know what this alludes to, I will explain it very briefly here, principally for the benefit of those readers of this piece who may not have come across it on the Internet. Thus, “Ekiti-Gate” refers to an audio clip that has gone viral on the YouTube. In the clip, a currently serving Brigadier General in the Nigerian Army, Aliyu Momoh, is distinctly heard receiving instructions from Ayo Fayose and other chieftains of the PDP on how to play his own part as a representative of the Nigerian Army in rigging the Ekiti State gubernatorial elections for Fayose. It is bad enough that General Momoh features prominently in this damaging and treasonous conspiracy; what is even more incredible is the amount of disrespect and condescension that Momoh receives from politicians who are little more than glorified thugs. General Olukolade, do you think that the Nigerian Army can clean itself of the shame, the odium that General Momoh has brought to the armed forces if you do nothing about the incident?

    For your information, General, though President Jonathan denounced this audio clip as a fabrication without having ordered any investigation to ascertain its authenticity, one of the principal figures in the clip, Ayo Fayose himself, has confirmed its veracity. In a statement issued this past Wednesday that was signed by Governor Fayose’s Special Assistant for Public Communications and New Media, one Lere Olayinka, Fayose admitted that it was indeed his voice that is heard in the clip and that he was merely rebuking Brigadier General Momoh for being partial to the APC. Moreover, we now know that the person who secretly recorded the clip and forwarded it to the Internet so that the country and the whole world can get to see the collusion of high placed elements within the Army with the PDP in the present electoral cycle is one Sagir Koli, a Captain in the Nigerian Army who has since gone AWOL and fled into exile in fear for his life. My question to you, General, is why are you silent about this audio clip? You are the Director of Information at Defence Headquarters: why are you silent on this scandal that has more or less made nonsense of the claims of professionalism, decency and impartiality in your Statement of two weeks ago?

    In case you do not perceive the intent of these questions, General, let me point it out to you: if you remain silent on this Captain Sagir Koli affair, it means you are in collusion with what General Momoh did in the “Ekiti-Gate” outrage, you and the Service Chiefs and the military top brass. This past Monday a Statement came from Defence Headquarters that bitterly condemned General Obasanjo for daring to assert in public denunciations that the Service Chiefs were used by Jonathan to plot tenure extension for himself and, more generally, that the military has been politicized in the present electoral cycle. I do not know if you had a hand in that Statement, General Olukolade. I say this because that Statement was also silent on General Momoh and Captain Koli. In other words, a statement is made by Defence Headquarters savaging Obasanjo, a retired General for dragging the name of the army into mud; meanwhile, the same statement completely leaves unmentioned the name of a serving General who has actually rubbished the reputation of the army top brass by the way in which he was treated by political thugs like an errand boy for whom no amount of condescension was too much. Thus, it is the height of mendacity for the statement issued by Defence Headquarters this past Monday to have asserted the words that serve as the epigraph for this piece: “It has to be restated that the military as an institution is neither as inept in the discharge of its duties nor is it being misused for political ends in the manner the retired General Obasanjo… has probably been made to believe”.

    Some final, open-ended questions for you, General. I pose them not to receive any responses from you as such but as teasers to the invisible or hidden state of politics within the armed forces of the country as we lurch to another round of fateful elections. How many Generals of the like of Aliyu Momoh are in the armed forces? Are they few or are the top echelons of the military brimful with officers that cannot stand up to corrupt, power-drunk, neo-fascist political thugs? Are the junior officers and other ranks full of the likes of Captain Sagir Koli? And is this why you are silent about “Ekiti-Gate”? Are political sentiments across the spectrum of officers and non-officers in the armed forces reflective of, on the one hand, the deep yearnings for justice, peace, security of life and possessions and above all else, better conditions of life for the majority of our peoples and, on the other hand, the forces that wish to keep us in darkness, injustice and stagnation? General, can you give assurance that the army will conduct an investigation into Brigadier General Aliyu Momoh’s role in “Ekiti-Gate”?

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The junta and the hunters

    The junta and the hunters

    (Power formations and hegemonic politics)

    These are grave times in Nigeria. Once the hope of Black Africa, it has taken a postponed election to further expose the vulnerabilities of its major institutions. Increasingly besieged and embattled, the Nigerian government is beginning to look like a civilian junta. Of course, a civilian junta is an absurd and oxymoronic formulation; a generic contradiction in terms.

    But something new always comes out of Africa. A junta is normally a military tyranny organised and run by military men who do not pretend to be democrats. But where a civilian government drops all the paraphernalia and pretences to civil rule, where the military knuckle assumes critical dominance in the formulation and execution of state policies, then a civilian junta is in active process.

    The Nigerian political elite have never been this divided and polarised along ethnic, religious and regional fault lines. But somebody has to be in charge either to reunite the country or to preside over its momentous disintegration whichever may be the case. A civilian junta is in place when in response to grave pressures, an elected ruler, acting in concert and conspiracy with the ranking military echelons, cedes actual and virtual power to the armed forces in order to retain his office and for as long as possible. For such a man, ruling from an armoured car may be preferable to yielding power to opposition elements,

    It is a very dangerous combination of delusion of grandeur and power psychosis. Africans are more accustomed to the phenomenon of civilian despotism, a situation in which an authoritarian ruler and strongman gathers all the reins of power, particularly the military and security forces, to unleash untrammeled autocracy on the nation . The clearest and classic example of civilian despotism in Nigeria’s post-independence history was the eight-year rule of General Olusegun Obasanjo.

    In post-colonial Africa, these authoritarian despots always come with a military or semi-military background. The list is endless: Joseph Mobutu, Siad Barre,  Omar al-Bashir, Kerekou, Mugabe, Compaore, Nguema Mbasago, Ghaddafi, Yahya Jameh, Samuel Doe, Lansane Conte, Ben Ali , Dennis Sessou Ngueso, Idi Amin Dada, Jean-Baptiste Bokassa, Eyadema and a host of others. Their sad and dismal careers speak to the impossibility of transition from the old African society to some form of political modernity without considerable national trauma and psychic injury.

    The Nigerian version of this old African drama and dilemma is as intriguing as it is fascinating. This past week, General Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who threw away the hegemony of his own party in a fit of vengeful hubris, finally blew his top and the lid off the witches brew. It was the inevitable decertification of the old sorcerer’s apprentice which may well consume the apothecary itself.

    In a publicly enacted ritual of terminal divorce suffused with dark symbolism, Obasanjo presided over the summary dismembering of his membership card of the ruling party. The presence of King Lear in this ominous drama of disinheritance cannot be discounted. The Fourth Republic was tailor-made for an Obasanjo presidency and appropriately built around his explosive personality by its military progenitors. It was an unstable coalition of contraries glued together by the pursuit of power and its privileges.

    But by tearing his membership card in such a violent and dramatic manner, Obasanjo may well presage the violent and dramatic end of the PDP or the Fourth Republic, as the case may be. Yet Nigerians must learn to separate the core import of Obasanjo’s interventions, his deep and astute reading of political currents, from the ungainly and unstatesmanlike antics. As the late General Oluleye famously noted, the Owu general is capable of the good and the bad in equal celerity.

    By comparing the endgame antics of Goodluck Jonathan to the fatal stalling and stonewalling of Laurent Gbagbo, Obasanjo might have put his finger in the heart of the matter. As we navigate dangerous and uncharted waters, this may well turn out to be an insight of genius which is not available to a classroom professor of Political Science.  But the momentous clarity of mind amidst universal confusion may yet return to haunt Obasanjo himself.

    Gbagbo was a typical professor of History who refused to learn from and internalise the lessons of history. His was the clearest example of a civilian junta, a military order with a civilian figurehead. He had come to the presidency by pure accident and the law of unintended consequences. The old Ivory Coast had been effectively partitioned by war.

    A perpetual outsider forever mumbling superannuated Marxist mumbo jumbo, Gbagbo did not belong to any of the Ivorian major power blocks. Yet with military backing, he succeeded in playing them against each other until Henri Konan Bedie removed the rug from under him in an electoral play off by aligning the dominant hegemonic block behind Alisane Quatarra.

    The rump of the old Ivorian military who could not be inconvenienced by the electorate ignored the damning verdict and swung in his favour in a final showdown. Appropriately, Laurent Gbagbo was captured in an underground bunker where he was hiding with his mistress. By then, the whole country was ablaze. Those who sow the winds must reap from the whirlwind.

    Three recent instances of the antics of a civilian junta can be seen in the overt deployment of the military in the power game among contending factions as well as the unwholesome deployment of military and security forces in determining the outcome of electoral competition. They speak to a creeping and complete militarisation of governance in what is formally (or formerly?) a democratic polity.

    First, was the flagrantly partisan intervention of the military High Command in the General Buhari certificate saga. It was clear that the military kingpins were being suborned to enter a political fray in a way that would completely compromise their neutrality and the integrity of a national institution. The army should be the last custodian of national order, not subject to the whims and caprices of transient rulership.

    Second, was the final say granted to the military echelons in the postponement of elections even in the face of contrary advice by the Council of State, the highest advisory body in the nation.  On that august council were at least four former military heads of state. Symbolism and totems of authority matter. In a democratic setting where the military is formally subordinated to civil authorities, the most civil and courteous thing for the military Brahmin  to do would have been to inform their former commanders in chief about the dire security situation necessitating a postponement.

    By formally surrendering the levers of power, authority and critical decision making to his military appointees even after the pronouncement of the Council of State, President Jonathan may have wittingly or unwittingly set in motion a chain of events which nobody can predict. More dangerous is the seed of discord this appalling indiscretion has sown among the political class.

    If it had been well thought out, the shift in the polls ought to have come with a ban or firm ceiling on political campaigning and advertisement. What is unfurling with the saturation bombardment of the airwaves and the media with Jonathan’s campaign jingles technically after elections ought to have been held and Jonathan’s deployment of federal resources for image-burnishing trips is nothing but prefabricated rigging.

    Third and even more heinous is the involvement of the military in electoral heist as seen in a recorded video that has gone global. Mum has been the word from the authorities. Even while most of the participants have acknowledged their participation, the presidency is still in denial, claiming that the whole recording was a fabrication. The outrage of Nigerians who have heard the tape and their irate commentaries in the social media and the internet count for nothing.

    Power may get away with perversities but only in the short run. Retribution often comes from totally unexpected quarters. The subsequent interview with Captain Sagir Koli, the officer who secretly taped the unholy proceeding, spoke to some fearsome counter-hegemonic rumblings within the military.

    The young man came across as fearless and a tad heedless, his body language dripping with deep contempt and venom for the political class as a whole irrespective of party affiliation. If this is the mindset of that volatile stratum of the military, then God help Nigeria in the coming months.

    How then did we come to this sorry pass? Whatever happened to Jonathan’s pan-Nigerian mandate and the huge swell of national goodwill and affection that marked his coming to power? Jonathan’s cardinal problem, it seems, stems from a fundamental incapacity to outgrow his provincial origins and antecedents. He has allowed himself to be miscued by the power sharks that captured him into confusing the advent of a nascent power formation with the arrival of a new hegemonic block. Hegemonic blocks are made of sterner and more solid stuff.

    Jonathan has frittered away a golden opportunity to lay the foundation of a modern Nigeria and to become its first truly modern president. By sheer fecklessness, he has allowed the old hegemonic blocks to claw their way back to political contention in a way that has gravely imperiled his own presidential survival.

    It is not a question of being a minority president but of sterling endowments. Julius Nyerere, Leopold Senghor and more recently Paul Kagame were all minority presidents in their respective nations. But they succeeded in fostering a visionary hegemonic class for their nations.

    Rather than building bridges across the yawning divides of a fractious and volatile nation, Jonathan, surrounded by ethnic revanchists and the traditional carrion feeders who have no sense of proportion or proprietary, began burning bridges, isolating and alienating dominant blocks and important stakeholders. A transient power formation can continue to delude itself that it’s a new revolutionary block as long as it doesn’t have to face the electorate. When the moment of truth arrives, it will learn the truth about itself.

    As it is, with Jonathan increasingly relying on force and the military knuckle and with the monsoon of multitude at General Buhari’s rallies waiting for the final word, only Nigeria’s legendary luck can prevent a coalition of altars in a way we have not seen since the sixties. Unless a way is found out of this radical lockhorns through genuine gamesmanship, the gigantic collision and the humanitarian catastrophe that will accompany it will change the demographic complexion of West Africa forever.

    It is a case of a junta and its determined hunters. The irresistible has finally come in full view of the immovable. For the first time in the history of the country, we have a civilian junta that is mortally afraid of its political and economic shadow. We also have a military High Command that dreads a ferocious backlash having been sucked into the vortex of political contention perhaps inevitably and unavoidably as a result of the political economy of fighting a dreaded insurgency. And we have their implacably determined hunters.

    It is a looming Armageddon, and no one has ever been known to be a clear winner in an apocalyptic meltdown, certainly not the host society. More often than not, and in the absence of genuine revolutionary consolidators, these things end in the mutual ruination of the contending classes. It is time for the wise people in this beleaguered nation to put on their thinking cap. No nation has been known to survive the combination of economic, political and religious upheavals.