The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Our good man

    Our good man

    Nigeria’s President  who sees no evil, hears no evil

    By now, psychologists should be busy studying who the man, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, is. That is if they have not already concluded their findings on him. The man, who is the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, has denied being Pharaoh or Herod. He said he is not even Nebuchadnezzar. No matter what anybody says, he is entitled to his opinion.

    But one of the issues I have with the president is the dissonance between some of his words and his actions, or the actions of his ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which he cannot, unfortunately, say he is not aware of. I was in the third service at the Winners Chapel on January 25 when President Jonathan visited the church. When Bishop David Oyedepo asked the congregation to pray for him, and even when he (Jonathan) made his brief remark at the service, one saw a meek President; one who could possibly not hurt a fly.

    However, I always find it difficult to reconcile this mien with some of the developments in the country, like in the Ekiti show of shame, and to some extent, the Osun governorship election of last year; or in his handling of corruption matters. Even his involvement in the sequence of events that led to the postponement of the general elections that should have started on February 14 is suspect. Would President Jonathan say, in his true Christian conscience, that what Captain Koli Sagir alleged concerning the disgraceful way very senior soldiers – Generals and all – were used to intimidate the opposition during the Ekiti governorship election last year was false? Or that he was not aware of it? Even if he was not, ignorance is no excuse in law, especially at his level. Then, now that a participant has spilled the bean, what has he done? Or is he still holding on to his earlier position that it never happened? Does playing the ostrich make President Jonathan a good man?

    Sometime last week, I watched the video where former President Attah Mills of Ghana was speaking on a ‘sting operation’ conducted at a Ghanaian airport, to see the extent of the rot in the place, and perhaps, by extension, the country. The way the president spoke you could feel the palpable anger and a strong determination to exterminate corruption in Ghana in him. It was the same Ghana that got deputy minister of communications, Victoria Hammah, sacked for merely contemplating stealing in November 2013, at a time when our own president was still dilly-dallying over what to do with Stella Oduah, then Minister of Aviation, over the scandalous purchase of two bullet-proof cars for N255million.

    Not for John Mahama, Ghana’s current president any attempt to make any distinction between stealing and corruption. Not for him any dilly-dally; he went straight for Hammah’s job.  That is how you know a leader who is serious about fighting corruption. Corruption is not a Nigerian; I mean it is everywhere that fowls are stolen at night. The difference is that chances of getting away with corruption are very high in this country and that is because instead of calling those involved the thieves that they are, the Jonathan administration, and to some extent others before it, cultivate them.  Again, between President Mahama and President Jonathan, who is a good man?

    In recent times, I have received numerous text messages that a particular political party has been giving fertiliser, for instance, with the president’s picture on the bags. And my position on this is simple: those whose Christian conscience or Moslem conscience, or even pagan conscience can stomach it should not hesitate to take whatever money, fertiliser or rice, etc. that the ruling party or any party for that matter offers them now for the sake of the election. It is our common wealth. No genuine investor or person who made legitimate income would be throwing money or Greek gifts to voters on the eve of elections. What is important is that after taking such unsolicited gifts, you still vote according to your conscience, realising that those giving such gifts are themselves no fools. Not only will they recoup their ‘investment’ after winning election, what they will take would be several times more than what they gave. Offering Greek gifts is not a way to be a good man.

    Then, one of the poisoned chalices the president is dangling for reelection. He said he would create Ibadan State if reelected. Those clamouring for it are probably politicians who themselves know that even the present 36 states are not viable. Will Ibadan State too be going to Abuja for handouts at the end of every month? A devout president who goes to churches to seek God’s face ought not be doing such a thing because he knows it is not one of the things Nigeria needs now. You cannot mix politics with God.

    In essence, President Jonathan must decide which he wants to serve: wars and chariots or the power of the Most High. I say this because the president cannot be moving from church to church in search of whatever, only for soldiers to be deployed at the slightest opportunity to intimidate innocent citizens. Our hope that the president and his ruling party would reckon with court judgments forbidding the use of soldiers for elections in the coming elections was dashed on Thursday by the Two Brigade Commander/Sector 2 Joint Task Force, Operation Pulo Shield, Brigadier-General Koko Essien, who insisted that soldiers “will be involved in the election to the extent that is allowed by law”. We have been having elections long before the Jonathan administration and we know our soldiers had not been as visible in previous elections as they have been under this administration. Yet, the law has never changed. We all know the circumstances under which soldiers can be drafted for election purposes and the process to do that. So, that cannot be an issue.

    But we have never had a situation where politicians would be giving orders to military officers on how to intimidate the opposition during election as they allegedly did in the Ekiti State governorship polls and which the military authorities have not responded to, even though they were swift in replying General Olusegun Obasanjo for saying the president wants to use the service chiefs for his tenure elongation agenda. What the military authorities did not know or pretend not to know is that the military brought this kind of suspicion to itself. Obasanjo merely said what is in the minds of many Nigerians. Our laws could not have envisaged a situation where more than 1,000 soldiers would be drafted to a place like Ekiti just to conduct governorship election when there were no sufficient troops to send to confront the Boko Haram insurgents in the troubled northeast. It is such abuse of the military that we are talking about; and that, I suppose, is what the courts too have outlawed.

    Now, we are hearing a lot of speculations, some of which ordinarily are easy to dismiss because they are just unthinkable in 21st century Nigeria. Obasanjo had even warned against (?). But we cannot wish these speculations away because that was how the speculation about postponement of elections started and the government tried all the tricks in the world to no avail. It eventually had to force its way through. Anything is possible when you have a good man who is also the leader of a democratic party that is afraid of elections, as president. The latest now is that the president is visiting some ‘Yoruba leaders’, whatever that meant! The point is that only a fool would not know that those who met in Akure last week and are parading themselves as Yoruba leaders cannot even speak for their own immediate families, not to talk of the Yoruba race. That race is too sophisticated for any wool to be pulled over its face. President Jonathan has been in office for more than five years, if he had any intention to restructure Nigeria, he should have done that. It is the kind of ‘divide and rule’ that his administration has been doing; going to the north to assure of one thing and coming down south to assure the exact opposite. I also do not know of any traditional ruler in the southwest zone who would openly canvass support for President Jonathan, knowing the groundswell of opposition to his government and reelection in the region. Any of them who makes the mistake of saying the president is a good man would be reminded they said so of the Babangidas and the Abachas of this world, etc. Yet, see where they landed us. The Yoruba race is one that neither forgives nor forgets when people commit political sacrilege. Such people remain renegades for life!

    Yet, no one can blame the government for whatever shenanigans it might be planning to stay put or avoid elections perpetually. That is what happens when people are not punished for crimes against the State. If General Ibrahim Babangida and his co-travellers who annulled the popular wish of Nigerians in 1993 had been severely punished, today’s leaders would not see those shenanigans as an option.

    We should be on red alert over this our man who is so good that he hardly can make mistake that could attract criticism. When the other time, The Economist said it would not endorse President Jonathan because he has not done well, he said he did not need the magazine’s endorsement for reelection. Reports only last week said he had sent some people abroad to launder his government’s image. I don’t know of any other country in the world that launders its image several times like Nigeria; yet the image remains as dirty as ever.

    When Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka said both the president and General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential hopeful of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have some sort of k-leg, the former as a result of his current performance, and the latter as a result of his antecedents, the president’s men took offence. Such is the goodness of their boss that everybody must eulogise him like they have deceived him over the years to the point that he is now struggling (or is it desperate) to have what should be on his laps just for the asking.

  • Black history month: Why Selma” and not Memphis

    Black history month: Why Selma” and not Memphis

    Measure with care whose history you accept for neither the past nor the dead can loudly contend how they are dressed.

    Before being granted mainstream entry, selected chapters of minority history are given a thorough wash. After being pasteurised, they are given broader exposure. By then, they are no longer Black history. They have been transformed into White history in blackface. Every commercial retelling of Black history dons this mask of a mask. Subtle distortions in presentation produce grave distortions in the lessons derived there from much like an initial deviation in the course of a vessel will take the ship to a vastly different destination unless the course is swiftly corrected.

    Those who control the medium do more than control the message and the messenger. They pick them. As the years transpire, popularised Black history has been steadily turned into a false light. It no longer serves to enlighten; it now often obscures the deeper questions raised by the actual march of history. Events are recast so that history becomes a stranger to itself. Black history has been bent and domesticated. It now indoctrinates both Blacks and Whites to believe the society we now have is the product of a great awakening that broke old chains by the force of new law.

    The Civil Rights Movement (CRM) is portrayed as the second American Revolution, made this time without weapons and battle but with moral suasion and compassion. Although important, the CRM has been overstated. The fruits of the CRM are the fruits of political compromise; political compromise is always preceded by a moral one. The CRM changed America for the better but that change was more incomplete than comprehensive, more fragile than it was full.

    Most Blacks remain estranged from what they seek. For everyone one part of this failure for which they bear responsibility, society bears two parts. Yet, they are being told, by the commercialised salesmen of Black history, that reform has run its course. Your condition is your fault. Go get some bootstraps then pull yourself up by the odd contraptions. Once a progressive, educative too, Black History is now an instrumentality of those who would rather maintain the extant power relationships underlying the political economy. That which was instituted to help us from the hole is now being used to deceive us that we have already escaped. All the while, the hole gets deeper and we sink deeper in it.

    Despite being the work product of a brilliant, highly talented Black filmmake,r the movie Selma falls into this genre of misconception. It is the telling of Black history purposefully made palatable to Whites because its message is the needed reform has been had. This means that the story of the current Black condition is not that reform has been insufficient but that the people have been to insufficient to live up to the reforms.  Most Whites now insist that this blanched interpretation is the only credible one. If Black history is to retain any meaning except as an appendage of mainstream history we must not become gulled by seeing a finely crafted production featuring heroic black figures. While devoid of the flash and glitter of a Hollywood production, our analysis must strive to be more apt and enlightening that the people may better see the limited dimensions of what has been accomplished in their true behalf and the vast expanse yet to be travelled.

    Selma is the latest attempt to homogenise Martin Luther King into an establishment icon. King has been reduced to a slice of himself. He has become a civil rights amulet. In the popular image, King’s work is almost wholly defined by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington and the Selma demonstrations which helped galvanise political support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, seen by many as the legal culmination of the CRM.

    Mainstream history treats the Selma episode as King’s best hour. This error tosses aside the last three years of King’s life as if they were lost years. Those years contain his most humane efforts. The works performed during this challenging period are more instructive to our present condition than are the civil rights achievements so publicly heralded. The Bus Boycott, the March, and Selma brought King fame. The hard work he did after 1965 confirmed his greatness.

    This more progressive aspect of his contributions is willfully ignored by the mainstream. They do not want many people to know this part of his life, fearing the people too may walk this line. This could change the structure of America in ways the civil rights legal measures could never contemplate and in ways that would discomfit the establishment.

    1965 was a watershed year, but the water did not all shed into the same channel. The CRM had joined different streams of Black political thought in an often tendentious coalition. Traditional Black elites and radical activists agreed to work toward the agreed goal: the end of legal racial discrimination. (The only recorded meeting between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was at the Capitol when both attended congressional hearings on the Voting Rights Act.)

    The decision to focus on civil and political rights was apt as it represented the largest yet most attainable goal to which all Blacks could agree. It was the common denominator to which all major strands of Black political thought could agree. With Voting Rights Act’s passage, the ad-hoc political coalition began to crumble.

    Upon winning this battle, the conformist Black elite had its full. They attained their key objective.  Destruction of the most obvious racial barriers would allow them entry into the mainstream. The door of Integration well served them because they were positioned close to it. They just needed the legal key to open it. The majority of Blacks remained miles from the door without means to close the distance. Having a key would do them little good except to serve as a cruel joke of which they were the butt, a stinging keepsake of the oceanic expanse between the high promise of civil equality and the lowly reality of their economic weakness.

    The elite would expand and grow in absolute numbers yet remain a small fraction of the overall Black community. Having achieved most of what they wanted, they would exit the politics of protest to enter mainstream electoral politics. They would no longer posture to change the system. Their modest aim was to gain greater security for their class not be fighting the establishment from within, but by becoming loyal to it, come what may.

    With each year, the Black political class would become more glued to the power establishment. Their role changed without outcry from or due notice to the people.  They would no longer represent the Black community to the White establishment. They would serve as establishment envoy to the people, explaining to the broken and poor why more could not be done and to be patient and grateful because their decrepit condition was the best attainable at the given moment.  The phrases, “We are doing all that we can” or “All that can be done is being done,” are almost always dismissive lies used on those whom the speaker does not feel are entitled to any intelligent explanation.

    Today’s unimaginative Black political leaders are the direct heirs of the moderate, CRM elite.  They both enjoy the same easy conformity to Money Power and an establishment devoid of goodwill toward the majority of the people.

    On the other side of the spectrum were the young activists.  Many of them performed the heroic, dangerous grassroots civil rights work mobilising people to protest and vote.  The foci of their grassroots activity moved from the rural communities of the south to major cities across the nation. These activists recognised civil rights legislation by itself would not answer the question of the worsening ghettoes and super-ghettoes into which too many Black communities had turned.

    Many young activists openly shunned CRM nonviolent tactics. This was not as radical a departure as portrayed. The CRM always contained re was always an important armed element in the CRM. During a meeting at the height of the movement, a senior national leader wanted to poll how many of the grassroots organisers attending the meeting carried weapons while doing their work. They all raised their hands; they all were armed.

    The Black Panthers symbolised this aspect of Black political thought. They saw the Civil Rights Movement as a first step toward radical revolution that would likely prove violent. More because of their revolutionary message than because of their access to weapons, the Panthers were hunted down like dogs. Reactionary groups like the Black Muslims carried weapons. Since they did not challenge the status quo, they were not targeted as severely as the Panthers.

    Between the moderate establishment and the radicals, stood Dr. King. By appearance and vocation, he seemed to belong with the elite. To his eternal credit, he did not limit himself to their cause. His vision was much broader. The Voting Act did not end the campaign. It signaled the beginning of the more fundamental battle.

    King charted unexplored territory for someone considered a member of the Black elite. He remained loyal to nonviolence but would pursue goals that beckoned a drastic, near violent restructuring of the American political economy.  In his ways and means, he remained true to the established norm. Yet, his ends borne more affinity to the radicals than to the Black establishment.

    Thus the Black establishment put him at arm’s length. When he publicly denigrated the Vietnam War and when he espoused the rights of the poor by supporting workers and their unions, moderate Blacks joined the White chorus, labeling him a “troublemaker.”

    Meanwhile, radical blacks said he was too much an establishment figure due to his reliance on dialogue and nonviolence.

    King saw himself not solely as civil rights leader. The CRM was part of a larger struggle, the fight for depressed minorities and the poor in the land of plenty. That fight was itself part of a greater struggle: that of human dignity in all lands for all people.

    King was not killed for his CRM role. The Voting Act was penned three years before his death. America had already absorbed the initial shock of the legislation and had co-opted much of the CRM by then. Rarely is a man assassinated for events several years removed. Famous men are more often assassinated in fear of what they may yet do. He was brought down in Memphis because the work he was doing there was consonant with a larger vision to radically reform America’s political economy. Thus, the mainstream will forever downplay King’s journey to Memphis. Instead, it will act as if his march ended with Selma.

    The Voting Act did not challenge the power structure; it confirmed. For Black people, the Act is rightfully viewed as a major achievement. On another level, the legislation was merely a tool in a fight about which Blacks were dimly aware. The measure was a bit of leverage in the tussle between the moderate and conservative wings of the White establishment. In a way, this echoed the end of slavery a century before. When North and South fought over slavery, the quality of life of the bondsmen was not the main consideration. The true issue was which segment of the national elite would stamp its name on the shape of the nation for the remainder of the 19th century. The status of the Negro was essentially a device by which the two sides kept score in this intramural power scrum.

    In a subtle way, Selma exposes the limited nature of the Voting Act. The film inaccurately portrays President Johnson as opposing the Act. While Johnson had no personal love for blacks and amply directed expletives at us in his private discourse, his record of supporting Black voting rights is incontrovertible. As Senate majority leader, he shepherded the first voting rights legislation outmaneuvering vehement filibuster by fellow Southerners in 1957. As president, he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Johnson supposed the 1965 Voting Act as a logical progression of the 1957 measure.

    However, the film portrays him as a negative force. Portraying him as a hero would lessen the dramatic impact. By sending the message that the Act had to overcome presidential opposition, the film depicts it as more radical a reform than it really was. If the film showed Johnson as a cooperative agent, discerning people would begin to notice the skunk among the minks, the maggot in the honey jar.

    The aims of the CRM and the Voting Act, in particular, were modest ones more favorable to the elite than the Black majority. Most of White establishment was assuaged that the Act would not damage their position. Some knew they would benefit by gaining the elite as pliant junior partners in a national political coalition.

    Black people gain the right to vote without molestation. Due to their lack of economic muscle, they remain restricted to choosing between the two parties created by the establishment. Thus, they remained on the leash owned by Money Power. Occasionally, an individual race may present a progressive alternative. In the main, the parties and their candidates guard the status quo. The differences between the parties are those of nuance and style, rarely of substance. They offer no workable solutions to the conditions of those living in maw of poverty.

    Yes, if you ask a slave, he would select the less serfdom over pure servitude if his choices were thusly limited. My wager is that he would rather a third option: actual freedom. Yet, that option was not on the menu then and is not on the table.  Neither major party offers an economic agenda to relieve the American working class from three decades of stagnant wages, increasing household debt and growing poverty.

    Well-acted and crafted, Selma seems to be an attractive bundle of political sophistry. A joint venture between members the White and Black establishment, it leads you close yet astray. Its implicit message is that the CRM is the zenith of the struggle for racial equality and dignity. Everything that follows is epilogue. King realised the CRM was but a chapter in a larger, more important book.

    To proclaim victory at that point would have been like the America’s Founding Fathers celebrating victory because they signed the Declaration of Independence. The signing of that document did not end the Revolutionary War; it was the true beginning of it in all of its ramifications. Selma and other messages like it caricature King as his one-dimensional, civil rights miniature. They tame him, turning this ever-evolving progressive and humane figure into a symbol of a status quo that would make him bristle. The things he abhorred 50 years ago still hold sway.

    King has become an object of political taxidermy. They have brought him inside the hall of political legitimacy only after having killed him and stuffed his political legacy with their own notions. They mount him on their walls and tell us to be glad because King has won.  They have made him a hero, they say.  In reality, they have turned him into their trophy and have tried to obscure his true legacy in the process. This expropriation will not stand forever. Truth comes if slowly. One day, we shall take him back and display his fuller legacy because that is where the greater good and justice lie.

    08060340825 sms only

     

  • The six-week Boko Haram war

    The six-week Boko Haram war

    President Goodluck Jonathan promised a six-week war against the Boko Haram sect to finish them off. Notwithstanding widespread doubts about the feasibility of ending the war at such a short duration, when it had lasted for all of five years and more, he seems set to accomplish his goal. He based the short duration of the final battles on the multinational force of about 8,000 troops from Cameroon, Niger, Chad and Nigeria, and the delivery of the war equipment he had been expecting. This expected final push made him support INEC’s postponement of the February 14 elections, he said. Going by his now famous reputation for dissembling and stretching his own side of the story, few believed him. But if Boko Haram is neutralised within the space of time he asked for, he will come across as altruistic in his request for election postponement, no matter what the truth is and whatever anyone might think.

    There is, however, no question that had the momentum of the campaigns favoured Dr Jonathan, the elections would have held in February, and he would have swept to victory. In all likelihood, Dr Jonathan secured the postponement in order to catch his breath and to restrategise to enable him win reelection. But as this column pointed out last week, and as a few international newspapers also suggested, whether he wins the war in the Northeast or not, the minds of north-easterners are pretty much made up whom to vote for. They showed it during the campaigns of Dr Jonathan and Gen Buhari. It is unlikely that anything, including the drastic restoration of peace in the region, will swing votes for the president. Too many things had gone wrong in the region for which they hold him largely responsible.

    They do not hold him responsible for the outbreak of the insurgency, but they are appalled by his handling of the revolt, which festered until it sucked in Nigeria’s lowly neighbours to the point where Cameroonian and Chadian armies were either succouring our troops and refugees or even liberating many of our towns, or as in the case of Niger Republic, even insulting our troops for cowardice. In addition, north-easterners have remained unimpressed by his lack of empathy, his contempt for the region’s elite, his wild accusations against the people of the region for conniving at the insurgency, and the scandal of mishandling the Chibok abductions, which is unlikely to be mitigated by the return of the kidnapped girls.

    Dr Jonathan has been in office for nearly six years, and Nigeria has rearmed and fought major ECOMOG wars since 1990, but he has consistently blamed the poor equipment of Nigerian troops on his predecessors, particularly Gen Buhari. The fact is that he misread the revolt, misjudged his capacity, and misdirected the war efforts until too much damage was done, and even now has not proved that he understands the political, cultural and economic dynamics of the revolt. It is for these that he will be held responsible, and for which there will be no electoral rewards for him, in this election or in a future account of the history of this unfortunately sanguinary period.

  • Towards our date with destiny 3

    Towards our date with destiny 3

    It is therefore wishful thinking if those behind election postponement plan or hope to benefit in terms of electoral support from change of election dates

    We said on this page last week that Nigeria’s date with destiny has been delayed by six weeks as a result of the decision the country’s security chiefs made to devote the time allocated for the presidential election of February 14 and 28 to fighting the menace of Boko Haram in the northeast corner of the country.  Arising from last week’s postponement of the presidential election is an episode-by-episode examination of the political campaign that signalled a decision of majority of citizens to resist continued collapse of their dreams into the economic and social problems thrown up by decades of substandard governance.

    As this page has observed several times, Nigeria’s malaise did not start with the incumbent president; it only got compounded under his presidency. The persons who have been helping the incumbent to govern have also perfected tricks (used by military governments in particular) to hoodwink citizens to believe that the government, like several governments before Jonathan’s, has been doing its best on account of which citizens should use their vote to retain Jonathan for another four years. Using the case of national security to justify sudden postponement of the election is a game that Nigeria had experienced before, especially during General Babangida’s military dictatorship.  Primaries and elections were cancelled by Babangida, citing national security as excuse, and most Nigerians accepted to give Babangida the benefit of doubt until the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election.

    From military to post-military era, the power of the federal government has been so enormous that anyone in control of such power who is willing to use the power to his or her advantage can do so and hope to get away with such impunity. The postponement of the election is one such use of power to give advantage to the incumbent president and several invisible characters in and out of the corridor of power who are afraid of what emerged as the Buhari Phenomenon or Effect during the four weeks of campaign after the emergence of Buhari as APC’s presidential candidate and of Professor Osinbajo as his vice presidential candidate.

    When President Jonathan said in his recent media chat that he had contested election against General Buhari before and that the situation was not as filled with tension as the 2015 one, made to be so largely by the “people that surround Buhari,” he too must have recognised the high voltage of the Buhari Momentum. What those who clamoured and still defend the postponement of the election by six weeks are missing is the meaning of the Buhari Phenomenon. It should not be hard for watchers of the campaign to recognise that it is not the impact of the campaign per se that has produced the electrifying effect of APC’s presidential campaign in particular. It looks more like the decision of individual citizens to stop the collapsing of their dreams into the mess that Nigeria has meant to them.

    Just like President Jonathan, this writer has also seen a major transformation in General Buhari and in the character of citizens who follow him during his campaign in different parts of the country. The picture that emerges from Buhari’s campaign, in contrast with that of President Jonathan, is also different from what obtained in 2011. In 2011, Goodluck Jonathan was the darling of the people just as General Buhari has been during the 2015 campaign. Citizens seem to have made up their minds to chart their own destiny by giving their trust to Buhari, as far as the near fanatical followership of Buhari in different parts of the country has suggested. The 2015 campaign is not just about Jonathan versus Buhari. It looks like a contest between Jonathan and a new idea and vision of and for Nigeria on the part of citizens.

    It is therefore wishful thinking if those behind election postponement plan or hope to benefit in terms of electoral support from change of election dates. The evidence before our eyes about Buhari as the personification of an Idea is not likely to be eroded by years of postponement of the election that is to give citizens the opportunity to choose who they want to govern them beyond May 29. It may not be clear to Buhari himself and to his ardent supporters that Buhari has become an instrument of change in the hands of citizens who throng his campaign rallies. It is the magic of the fusion of a new idea and a candidate with respect to Buhari that appears to be missing in the campaign rallies of the PDP and the incumbent president.

    The evidence before citizens’ eyes is the maturation of an idea believed or perceived by citizens to have been embodied in the persons of Buhari and Osinbajo. Those currently governing Nigeria need to pay more attention to the nuances of the thronging around of Buhari and Osinbajo of voters. I have witnessed all the elections in this country since 1959. I have not seen anyone in which the desire for change acquires the high wattage of the 2015 campaign. The closest to this is the election in Western Nigeria in 1965 when the people of the region wanted to use their votes to put to shame a federal government that they believed had set out to destroy the dreams of the region. For those around then, it was not surprising when citizens reacted against the rigging of that election.

    Thus, it is advisable for those handling the 2015 elections (whenever they are finally allowed to take place) that the elections are free, fair, and credible. When citizens mass around a presidential candidate the way they have done in the last five or six weeks, it becomes dangerous for the society if such citizens are prevented from expressing their real choice through the ballot box. It will not matter who at the end majority of citizens vote for; what will matter is that citizens are given free choice to use their vote and that such votes are allowed to count.

    Those who are now calling for the use of Temporary Voter Cards, need to realise that it is too late in the day to do this. We said several times in this column at the beginning of the discussion of permanent voter cards by the National Security Adviser and all the political parties that temporary voter cards should be used if distributing PVCs became impossible before February 14. But now that candidates and citizens have accepted the delay of the elections for six weeks, it is illogical for any political party to call for the use of TVCs. It is also illogical for any political party to campaign against the use of card readers. Using card readers does not amount to electronic voting. An electronic card reader is only a device to confirm the authenticity of the PVC being presented at the poll. It does not make sense to revert to the use of TVCs that cannot be verified, especially after citizens have accepted to wait for additional six weeks before exercising their fundamental rights to choose their leaders. Reverting to use of TVCs is more prone to rigging than using PVCs that can be verified.

    INEC needs to pay more attention to the fact that the Southwest region is lagging behind other regions in the distribution of PVCs. Voters in the Southwest should not be denied the opportunity to use their votes to negotiate a new destiny. So far, too many citizens are having problems collecting their PVCs in the Southwest and this is evident in the latest release of numbers of cards collected across the country. In my household of four, I am the only person that has been able to obtain PVC in Alausa. My wife whose photograph was pasted on the wall has not been able to obtain her card. On the three occasions we went to MKO Abiola Gardens for this purpose, the staff there have not been able to find the PVC of my wife and two other family members among the mountain of cards on and under their table.

    While the country’s security chiefs use the next five weeks to fight Boko Haram terrorists, INEC should double its efforts to bring out the PVCs of citizens duly registered to vote. INEC needs to know that South-westerners have the same right as residents of other regions to dream anew about Nigeria. They also have the same right to use their votes to bring a new Nigeria into being or keep the old one. This right can only be exercised by those with their PVCs in their hands by election time.

    To be continued.

  • The passage to Den Haag

    And whilst we are still on the subject of a looming apocalypse, we will like to use this occasion to warn those who are feverishly fanning the embers of tribal and religious animosities in this country with their hate-suffused adverts, their puerile and malignant leaflets directed against particular tribes and religions and the inane drivels of ethnic jingoism from their television and radio stations. The world has become a global village and they are taking note of the genocidal imbecilities of these outpourings by the merchants of hate and mosquitoes of political passion in our midst.

    Never in the history of political campaigns in Nigeria have things degenerated to this terrible level of ethnic and religious hate-mongering. No one seems to be exempt: from old people who ought to know better and callow youths in want of better civic training.  The avalanche of malicious ethnic categorisations and misanthropic bêtise on the internet and the social media makes one squirm in horror and grim premonition. Everyone is fair game in this campaign of base calumny, including our most revered national icons and globally acclaimed citizens. It is not a good time to be a proud Nigeria.

    It may well be that it is the return of the repressed. But more likely, it is the case of a society seized by Lilliputian leaders who try to drag everybody to their miserable level. It is good to remember that the Rwandan genocide did not begin with the assassination in a plane crash of the Hutu president. It was preceded and accompanied by hate broadcasts and lethal leaflets urging people to exterminate “nyenze”– an abominable term for humanity transformed to insects—and for tall trees to be cut down.

    Yet, it was not always like that even in Rwanda. According to Mahmood Mamdani, the notable Uganda scholar and many others, “Hutu” and “Tutsi” were becoming interchangeable economic rather than ethnic categories before disaffected lower middle class colonial interlopers arrived to recast the class divisions in their home country with the politics of ethnic identity in their conquered territory. Indeed, there was a ceremony known as “Kwahutura” which meant the shedding of “Hutuness” once the cattle holding multiplied and prosperity arrived.

    Snooper has news for those who are fanning the embers of religious, regional and tribal hatred in Nigeria. There is no hiding place for felons. Their names are being complied. When the apocalyptic meltdown arrives, they will spend a long stretch in international incarceration.

  • It’s time for President Jonathan to decelerate tension nationally

    It’s time for President Jonathan to decelerate tension nationally

    If  the president,  in particular,  is concerned with what history will say about him, his considerable energies should now be  directed  at how to leave a lasting legacy

    It appeared to me  strange  then, if not  sinister,  that  in propounding his theory of a mutually  assured  post-election crisis, whoever  of  President Jonathan or General Buhari,  wins  the presidential election, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi did not canvass a free, fair and transparent election, but  rather suggested a  somewhat uncritical acceptance of the result by not just the candidates, but also  their millions of supporters, obviously with diverse tolerance levels,  knowing only too  well ,  that in Nigeria,  a group of  these  supporters  would most probably have been rigged out. I instantly  remonstrated  by pointing  out on these pages that it was curious  he could so suggest when it was  obvious that the PDP, being the party in power, unlike the APC, can very  easily use its position  to  compromise the integrity  of the election as it has done severally  in the past  to the extent that  a sitting president Yar’ Adua  could  not help confessing  that he was  rigged into  office  by the party. I then wondered  as to why  Professor  Akinyemi, rather than  wanting  the  election’s integrity be assured by both parties, he preferred  to commit them to accepting it, willy nilly, no matter  the process that threw up the result.

    My fears would be confirmed soon after when some reputable international diplomats suddenly materialised, claiming to underwrite a Memorandum of Understanding amongst the presidential candidates but also, with nary a mention of the integrity of the process. After all, post election conflagrations do not just happen on their own but because a foul play is suspected.

    All these thoughts came poignantly back to me on the exposure of the secretly recorded audio tape of the Ekiti gubernatorial election of 21 June, 2014. The tape is believed to have been recorded by a Captain Sagir Koli, who served as the intelligence Officer to a Brigadier-General of the Nigerian Army who allegedly collaborated with some chieftains – also named in the tape –  of the PDP to rig the election. Listening to the tape, one hears several references to not just the Army Chief of Staff but also to the highest echelon of government, namely, the presidency.

     It therefore occurred to me that, being past masters at rigging  elections, the PDP must have lashed  onto Prof Akinyemi’s patriotic concerns and hurriedly got the respected diplomats on board to oversee a MOU  they  could  hide  under as it should naturally have moderated a likely violent response to their ‘victory’.  This conjecture is absolutely reasonable  given the  fact  that  the involvement of the military in rigging the Ekiti gubernatorial election  produced  such a roaring success that it  might have been concluded that it becomes the party’s template for all future elections, especially the presidential which they believe would result in a band wagon effect. This  conclusion  has been  further confirmed by  the fact that  two of those who were captured on the  tape – Governor Ayo Fayose  and Musliu Obanikoro – are known to have boasted  at different times later, that  PDP would win all the elections in their respective states hands down.  Declared Obanikoro, boastfully, in an interview with the Punch, published on Sunday, 28 December, 2015: “Ogunlewe said in his interview with Sunday Punch that he doesn’t know whether the PDP will win in the Southwest. He said it is not yet time for him to talk about that. But it is time for me to talk about it. I can tell you that we are going to win. The president is going to win BIG; WE ARE GOING TO CLEAR THE SOUTHWEST. YOU CAN MARK TODAY’S DATE AND QUOTE ME’.

     I am sure Nigerians now know where Obanikoro was coming from. No thanks to a patriotic Captain Koli.

    So incensed, therefore, has the PDP been about the Court of Appeal, Abuja circuit’s confirmation of an earlier Sokoto High Court decision that the president has no constitutional right, whatever, to involve the military in the conduct of elections. In the decision affirmed by the Appeal Court, Justice Abdul Aboki , in his lead judgment in the Ekiti State Governorship Election appeal on February 16, had held 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.

    “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.”

    Knowing what we now know, it should not surprise Nigerians that elements within the PDP are still urging the president to disregard these weighty judicial pronouncements and go ahead to deploy soldiers during the coming elections. Fortunately, Nigerians can go to sleep because we do not have an outlaw for a president. We can rest assured that without the president appealing to the Supreme Court to vacate that ruling, and getting the apex court to so pronounce,  he could not as much as deploy a single member of the Nigerian armed forces to election duties. President Jonathan would never be caught so cavalierly disrespecting the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which he swore to uphold; especially given that he should ordinarily have been embarrassed by the mere allegation of  the military’s involvement, on his orders,  in the  rigging of the Ekiti election.

    But I digress.

    Ahead of that conjecturable plan to again rig the 2015 elections in line with the Ekiti template, it seems to me obvious that Messrs Kofi Annan and Emeka Anyaoku were most probably used by the PDP to pull its chestnuts out of the fire.  I am persuaded  by my good  knowledge of Professor Akinyemi , dating back  a half a century, that PDP, in its sheer desperation , merely quickly lapped on to his suggestion and  invited the gentlemen to assist in ensuring there was no post election crises in Nigeria, as happened in 2011, after they would have viciously rigged it. The statesmen must have believed themselves lending their weighty reputations to a worthy cause.

    Having thus  been caught  smack , both in the  Ekiti electoral heist, which the ‘son of his father’ thinks he can bury under some outlandish grammar,  and its  forward  plan to again use the military  to  rig  the 2015  elections, clearly indicating the hands of God in our affairs, I think the time has come for the PDP and its agencies to sober up, repent and commit itself to  Nigeria. Rather than foisting tension all over the country as we see daily in Ekiti, but was much more bestially demonstrated at Okrika  this past week, I think enough should now be enough for that party which serially misuses both the military and the police. Rather than spreading fear,  killing, detonating bombs  and  spreading mayhem, I think  PDP and its  agencies, known  and shadowy, should now  concentrate  their energies  and  limitless  resources on making the elections free and fair, campaigning  on President Jonathan’s record, these past six years.  If  the president,  in particular,  is concerned with what history will say about him, his considerable energies should now be  directed  at how to leave a lasting legacy. If he does this and wins the election, his stock amongst the citizenry, and internationally, will rise but, even where he loses, he would have left his name in gold.

    Like former President Obasanjo, God has shown him abundant, even unmerited favours and Nigeria, in turn, has been more than good to him. It, therefore, behoves him to think less of  the self,  be grateful to  God, and jettison as many as he can, of all these fair-weather  political  ‘friends’ and  hangers-on, who  are here today, gone tomorrow. The president must think, and reflect, on how far the Almighty God has taken him, far away, from those Otueke days of shoe-less-ness.

  • I’m thinking, I’m thinking…

    I know a thinker when I see one. He/she generally goes around with his/her hands folded behind, face downwards, brow knitted and lips moving in a silent fashion, speaking words not even his guardian angel can hear. Nope, I have not seen anyone like that around here since I came into adulthood.

    I don’t know about you but anywhere I turn now, I find myself facing, eyeball-to-eyeball, one or another larger than life portrait of a political candidate vying for one post or the other in advertorial messages. Worse, each message is declaring the superiority of the fellow’s talents and gifts which even he/she never suspected he or she had. My fear is actually that by the time we are done, they may begin to think they are supermen and attempt to fly off into the stratosphere or parts unknown.

    We have no way of knowing where these advert writers have sprung from, but they are making my head swivel. Here, I am told a candidate has been tested and so can be trusted; there, a candidate is sure because his name ends with something that rhymes with the word; here, a candidate is Nigeria’s lost answer because he is on the winning questioning team; there, a candidate is the only panacea to corruption; there, a candidate is boko haram’s only poison… When I put all these together, I am tempted to ask, did anyone put much thinking into how not to make Nigerians look like gullible fools?

    Incidentally, today, February 22, is World Thinking Day, but you’ll never guess who is celebrating it. This I will not tell you in case it makes you think you are not qualified to be in their midst. I am also not qualified to be in their midst; they think too hard for my liking. For starters, how can anyone think of naming a particular day, World thinking Day?

    With that question in mind, I went to Google and searched it up. There it was, complete with theme, history and raison d’etre. Humbled, I ate my pie quietly and fell to ruminating, goat style. The page began by telling me that the day was instituted as far back as 1926. Imagine that. Who could have guessed that thinking had been around for as long as that? Next, it told me that the theme for this year’s celebration is ‘We can create peace through partnerships.’ I really like the sound of that one. Now, what remains is how to break the news to Buhari and Jonathan that they can be partners in this electoral thing that seems to be dividing the country straight down the middle. Gently, I guess, very gently.

    Well, reader, I told you a while back that my PVC was hot and rearing to go to the electoral day. I am sad to report that it has not gone anywhere near its supposed duty post as I am still holding and staring hard at it and wondering if it will not expire in my hands, right before my very eyes. One of the first things that occurred to me from viewing those posters was that the sellers seemed to think each of their candidates was a hard sell. Let’s start with Jonathan.

    There are those who believe that the man Jonathan is deeply troubled by his present. They are saying that in his very presence, the electricity situation seemed to grow worse. Entire families are managing to die from inhaled generator fumes; casualties of generator explosions are increasing, all because of irregular supply of electricity to the citizenry. Among other things as well, the country seems to be sliding into the doldrums right under him with corruption kicking wild and unshackled, making the gulf between the rich (on government money) and the poor (without government money) larger. All together, they say, he is leaving the populace disenchanted; but he says he is ready to transform all that.

    On the other hand, there are those who believe that the opposition candidate, Buhari, is deeply troubled by his past. They say that as a past military head of state, he was rather brusque, brutish and talked largely in decrees, so did not have much patience for democratic things. Imagine, they say, he never smiled at anyone. As a matter of fact, he was said to have sent some people to prison for displaying too much freedom. Suddenly, they say, here he is canvassing for their votes in a democratic fashion; but he says he is ready to change all that.

    Now, I hope you understand why I am holding my card and thinking over which is more momentous: change or transformation. It’s not as if I particularly chose today to do my thinking because it is the day the world chose that we should all do our thinking in; like a cow, I have chewed the cud several times over the matter without really coming to a conclusion.

    I think the real matter is that no one appears to have been doing some thinking over many matters in this country. I know a thinker when I see one. He/she generally goes around with his/her hands folded behind, face downwards, brow knitted and lips moving in a silent fashion, speaking words not even his guardian angel can hear, save he/she alone. I think they generally call them poets. Those were the signs a king in a far away land once saw in a man and ordered him arrested. What was the charge? He was arrested for thinking too much. Have you seen the way Nigerians move around? Phew, I believe it’s worse than an epileptic frenzy. So nope, I have not seen anyone looking like a thinker around here since I came into adulthood.

    I guess then it is safe to say that Nigerians are not thinkers; if they were, this country would not be like this. People would not illegally stack up billions of the nation’s currency intending to use it for himself or herself alone, not knowing what would become of him/her the very next moment. People would change their attitude to work, neighbours and their diet. People would realise that their stay in this world is often no more than seventy years with a little plus so there really is no point wasting any of those precious years quarrelling or fighting or even sleeping too much. Like someone said, there is plenty of time to sleep in the grave.

    If Nigerians did any thinking, they would realise that money does not answer all things, contrary to popular belief; faith, grace and love are much readier currency. More, if Nigerians were thinkers, they would be more interested in leaving a country where their progenies can comfortably call home. On this World Thinking Day, let us take a few moments to think, think deeply about how we can make peace through partnerships: eating together maybe, working together maybe, and definitely loving this country and our neighours as we ought. As for me, I’m once more holding my card and thinking. Seriously, I’m thinking, I’m thinking…

  • Another revelatory media chat

    Another revelatory media chat

    For those still enamoured of the candidacy of President Goodluck Jonathan, whose support for him rests principally on their hatred for leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC), I offer them the president’s shocking and revelatory performance in last Wednesday’s live television media chat. If after watching the programme anyone still thinks Dr Jonathan merits any patriot’s vote, or that Nigeria is in safe hands with him, as former military head of state Ibrahim Babangida says, then it is useless teaching such a supporter to reason. You do not have to support the APC candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, or like the APC or its leaders, to realise that with Dr Jonathan Nigeria is not only in unsafe hands, but that democracy itself will most certainly be lost should he be reelected.

    Let us take a few samples from the controversial chat. Asked if the six-week military push against Boko Haram would lead to the rescue of the 219 Chibok schoolgirls abducted last April, the president gave this answer: “Well, I cannot give you a specific time range, so that you will not say the president said so. I cannot say in two weeks time; but give us some time. We are working with our neighbours and we are combing the whole area, just give us some time. The case with the Chibok girls is very unfortunate. That is the difference between the current challenges and crisis we face in Nigeria and that of other countries when they had issues of terror. Many nations have experienced terror, even the US has. We know that France experienced terror not too long ago. Other countries, when they have this issue of terror, political boundaries collapse and people work together. But in this case, it is different, we politicise everything. Is that the way we will bring back these girls?”

    It is impossible not to be incensed at Dr Jonathan’s answer. He is acutely aware his word has become meaningless, and is reluctant to give it. So, why draw attention to the impotence of his word? He also sets great store by neighbouring countries’ involvement in Nigeria’s counterinsurgency efforts, but a few days ago even Niger Republic ridiculed Nigerian troops by describing them as cowards who flee in the face of the enemy, while Nigeria in turn described the troops from Niger Republic as looters and poor. The president bewilderingly suggests that while other nations experience terror, the abduction of schoolgirls make the Nigerian experience much worse and more difficult. He is apparently unable to appreciate that his government’s incompetence made the Chibok embarrassment the mess it is. Then he speaks of ‘even the US’ suffering terror attacks, as if to underscore the fact that great and powerful nations, let alone a developing one like Nigeria, are also victims of terrorism. Very poor consolation.

    But perhaps the worst aspect of his response must be his exasperation with what he insufferably describes as the ‘politicisation’ of the Chibok abductions, asking rhetorically and pathetically whether that was the way to bring back the girls. It is shocking that Dr Jonathan still thinks the Chibok crime was politicised. But in fact it is a grave political issue when a president proves so inept at securing life and property, not to talk of rescuing 219 abducted schoolgirls, a fact he, his wife and government at first denied for more than one week. It is a political issue; it should be politicised; and putting pressure on a weak and indifferent government is a legitimate way to get the president to perform his constitutional duties. If he can’t live up to his oaths, he does not deserve any vote.

    Dr Jonathan was also asked how he perceived his main opponent in next month’s presidential election, Gen Buhari. It was an opportunity to act the statesman, and with a little sophomoric philosophy, he could have pulled it through. Instead, he offered his long-suffering subjects a truly baffling and abysmal description of his opponent, and a sad window into his own harried mind. He said: “Buhari contested in 2003 against Obasanjo, he did so in 2007 against late President YarÁdua, and contested against me in 2011. Even in 2011 which was the closest, the tension was not there because the characters that were around him then are different from now… APC started its campaign before me and I watched some of the rallies before I started my campaign in Lagos. If you listened to the way I spoke in Lagos at my flag off, you will realise that I was aggressive.” This is probably the most spectacular indication of who the president is. He is bogged down by trivia and cannot see the big picture, takes things personal in spite of knowing that he occupies an office that impacts greatly on the people, and is bitter and unforgiving over small and big slights.

    It is clear from his response to the question on Gen Buhari, which by the way he failed to answer like a leader and statesman, that Nigeria is saddled with a president who was not prepared for office, has learnt little or nothing from his five years stay in office, and worse, is unlikely to be improved by that office. He thinks he has been more insulted than Gen Buhari during this campaign, a fact he argues has prompted his bellicosity. And he formed the incredible belief that the APC candidate would have been milder had he not been surrounded by diehards. Dr Jonathan does not credit Gen Buhari with the initiative and boldness to repackage his campaign, having failed three times before. The president’s appalling reading of his opponent, not to say the environment, is leading him to horrendous anti-democratic excesses.

    Having concluded that the men around Gen Buhari — in short APC national leaders — are responsible for the pungency, drive and perhaps effectiveness of the opposition campaign, it is not surprising that he has inspired a security cordon around and crackdown on opposition leaders. He seizes every available moment to pontificate on violence-free campaigns and peaceful governance, but he secretly winks at the brutal exercise of presidential power, which he has outsourced in plausible deniability to fawning and paranoid minds in the security agencies. As far as he is concerned, the crackdown on the opposition, the invasion of their offices, the harassment of opposition governors and lawmakers, including the invasion of the House of Representatives, not to talk of the insubordination of policemen and secret service personnel, are nothing but the routine exercise of their duties. This column concluded last week that voting Jonathan would doom democracy. Last week’s media chat, with all the president’s boyish hurting and effusions, shows clearly we would have no democracy to nurture should the increasingly fascist Dr Jonathan be reelected.

    One more example from the chat and I am done. Dr Jonathan was asked what he thought of and intended to do about the fanatical war cries coming from his Niger Delta supporters, most of them so-called reformed militants. He gave a few homilies about unity and peace, talked about the treason he deduced from the northern youths who pelted him with stones, and then simply glided over the question. He said nothing about questioning or arresting the militants who threatened war if Dr Jonathan was not reelected, nor did the duties of a president strike him as so weighty and sacred as to prompt him to denounce the treasonable statements by the militants, and cause the already diseased and compromised security services to perform their solemn duties to the constitution. Dr Jonathan probably sees the creek war whoops as a necessary counterpoise to the northern stoning, and an insurance against his humiliation at the polls.

    There was nothing in Dr Jonathan’s CV to indicate he possessed leadership qualities before Chief Obasanjo inflicted him on Nigeria. Nearly six years after he assumed office, as the last media chat showed, there is still nothing in him or about him to indicate he has the qualities of a leader. He is in effect leading the country to ruin. He cannot be trusted to protect anyone, let alone the constitution. If it suits him, he will ignore the constitutional tomfooleries of Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti, chuckle at the gross insubordination of megalomaniacal police officers like Mbu Joseph Mbu, an Assistant Inspector-General (AIG), nod at the military’s dangerous partisanship and incursion into politics, ignore the secret service’s many direct assaults on the liberties of the people, and envelope the country in so much gloom that the rest of Africa can do nothing but wait in apprehension at the disaster unfolding upon Nigeria. A sneering world already knows Dr Jonathan is unfit to rule; his last media chat proved that point eminently.

     

  • Waiting for Godot

    Waiting for Godot

    (A treatise on political absurdism)

    In Samuel Beckett’s modernist classic, Waiting for Godot,  waiting for the mysterious magician of salvation is a timeless and fruitless venture. Everybody knows in their heart of heart that Godot will not come. Yet they are all compelled to wait. The alternative is too bleak to contemplate, for it simply means that in a thoroughly blighted world, there is even no hope for hoping.  Things had fallen completely apart. The centre was no longer holding.

    Waiting for Godot is a deeply unoptimistic play about the human condition. It is a vision of human society rent asunder; of the universe as a moral void brimming with cosmic futility. There are no heroes, only antiheroes who have forsworn any heroic gesture. Unlike the more expansive canvas of earlier theatre, the modernist canvas of the Absurd is stripped bare. There are no rhetorical flourishes. The cast is pared down to a minimal and minimalist three who babble unintelligible nonsense.  In order to relieve the boredom and sheer ennui of waiting for Godot, the audience is compelled, like the captive victims of an ancient mariner, to make sense of utter nonsense; of relentless and unremitting fatuity.

    Samuel Beckett, together with Eugene Ionesco and Franz Kafka, could be described as the classic literary figures of the Age of Anxiety in which the values that undergirded human societies appear to have collapsed and the old God seemed to have disappeared completely. In his post-prison incarnation, Soyinka, philosophically speaking,  came very close to this frame of mind, particularly in Madmen and Specialists.

    These writers do not even pretend to offer hope to stricken humanity. According to Ionesco, everybody must lift themselves up by the bootstraps or fall into the yawning pit. Several times, it has been hinted that Godot himself is a trope for a God that had disappeared forever. There is no paddy for jungle, as they say.

    As this column never tires of explaining, there are times when literature imitates life in its haunting and unforgettable realism. But there are also times when life imitates literature in its grand fictional sweep. There is a lot about contemporary Nigerian political life to remind one of the Theatre of the Absurd.  Just as the Theatre of the Absurd mirrors a world that has gone out of joints, a world in which God has disappeared and societal values have collapsed, The Theatre of Political Absurdism  is a reflection of a society in which all the institutions girding political norms have collapsed and people are subject to the whims and caprices of individuals without the moral and intellectual capacity for leadership.

    It is a minimal and minimalist society.  Just as everything is pared down to the minimum in the Theatre of the Absurd, in the State of Political Absurdism everything is also pared down and the state is stripped of all resources including human assets. It is the age of minimal generals, minimal statesmen, minimal politicians, minimal philosophers, minimal economists and minimal clerisy. Mediocrity is magnified while real virtue comes miniaturized.

    In order not to further inflame political passions, it is important to reach beyond surface manifestations to get at the root and latent contents of contemporary political developments in Nigeria. By so doing, we may strip ourselves and a sadistic post-colonial state of any illusions about its ameliorative possibilities under current circumstances and conditions. Subsequently, we may be persuaded to come to terms with the harsh verdict that what the situation demands is radical surgery rather than cosmetic scaling.

    If we are looking for evidence of state infirmity and its attendant political pathologies, we may have to look no further than the dramatic postponement of elections by a whole and walloping six weeks. Now let us be fair to all parties concerned. Election dates are not cast in stone and marble, but only up to a point. Shifting election dates particularly when the security situation is dire and darkly portentous is the right and rational thing to do.

    But the shift ought to have been arrived at through elite consensus and an agreement by all parties involved.  What makes the current postponement most galling and odious is that it was surreptitiously effected by a faction of the contending political elite and slammed down on the nation by despotic fiat. It is akin to the referee in a boxing match physically restraining one of the combatants while sanctimoniously asking them to get on with the fight. We all know where this kind of officiating has taken the country before.

    In a truly functioning democratic set-up, it is inconceivable that a coterie of military officers and security kingpins, acting in concert with the presidency and a failed hegemonic party, could ignore the Council of State, the highest advisory organ in the nation, only to proceed to arm-twist the nation’s electoral Czar into supporting a predetermined agenda. It was a sad day for political sanity in Nigeria and a triumph for political absurdity. On this Council of State are at least four former military heads of state. If serving military hierarchs could hold their former commanders in such spiteful contempt, one must wonder what the immediate future portends.

    Readers of this column would have noticed its deep reverence and admiration for the Nigerian military, no matter its human errors of judgement and lapses of the past. Although a creation of colonial subjugation, the army is the first and last national institution standing. No efforts must be spared to save it from itself and from the current beneficiaries of institutional disorder.

    The reasons given for the postponement would have made Samuel Beckett, the master of Absurdist formulations, wince and grimace in ironic admiration. It is a litany of shameless bêtise which has brought the nation further international ridicule and global obloquy. It is not the first time the military have given a timeline for crushing the Boko Haram menace. If the military kingpins are now buoyed up by the arrival of international troops on Nigeria’s sacred and sacrosanct territory, it is an admission that the once almighty Nigerian army could no longer pass muster.

    On the objective plane, the real effect of the postponement will be to give the ruling party a momentous boost in the war of attrition with its main rival. It is the politics of exhaustion. Given its limited resources, it is difficult to see how the opposition can keep up the campaign for another four weeks with the same verve and vigour. Somebody may yet make a fatal campaign slip. The punitive physical regimen may occasion a catastrophic clanger. The dangerous interval may become a ruinous interlude as extra-constitutional forces sniff a stalemate. It is akin to shifting polling posts at the eleventh hour which could induce messianic hallucinations in a few.

    As if by some poetic justice, the stated reasons for the postponement are beginning to explode in the face of those who gave them. A week after the postponement, and going by their own logic, the security situation has worsened considerably. Only this can explain the brazen intimidation, the psychological destabilization and the military siege on the residence of main opposition leaders. Bourdillon is now synonymous with Boko Haram. It reminds one of an American general in Catch 22 who stated bluntly to his military subordinates that his major objective was not how to finish off the Japanese but how to neutralize his main military rival.

    No matter the angelic mien, the sweet boyish smiles, the dissimulating panache, the serpentine charms and base low-minded cunning, Goodluck Jonathan should know by now that except with his hard core supporters, he has exhausted his credit and stock of goodwill with most Nigerians. For a man who started out with such a huge swell of pan-Nigerian good will and affection, this is the real tragedy of his tenure. No matter what he says or does not say, he will come across as a master-dissembler, a Machiavellian zero-summer who does not give a damn about the fate of the country he owes so much.

    For veterans of what has now become a permanent struggle against evil governance in post-independence Nigeria, you can always tell when a ruler has offended the deep sensibility of Nigerians, when he has injured their sense of fairness and what is right. You always know when majority of Nigerians have crossed The Rubicon. That hour is now at hand. How many more times can the day of judgement be postponed? The answer no longer resides with the Nigerian political elite. It is now in the seething streets.

    As for Attahiru Jega, it is now most unlikely that he will finish his tenure without some tarnishing of reputation and besmirching of hard earned integrity. He will be in distinguished company. The Nigerian electoral throne is the graveyard of reputations. The stakes are so high, and when mud is thrown so hard some of it is bound to stick.  A man of Jega’s stoic and saturnine temperament would have been quietly affronted by the ferocity and velocity of the allegations hurled at him, particularly by wild old men who have no further reputation to protect.

    To be sure, there is a school of thought which holds that Jega’s languid and lackadaisical hauteur is particularly ill-suited for a job which requires constant staginess and some showmanship. This is neither here nor there. There can be no doubt that in moments of grave crisis, Jega’s  unruffled self-assurance can be quite becalming for a nation constantly on edge.

    But to appropriate Durkheim, whenever a sociological phenomenon is explained away by a psychological parameter, we can be sure that the explanation is false. The problem about our electoral system is not about the personality type of the chairman of the commission but of a background institutional crisis which will not ignore us however much we choose to ignore it. There is a touch of poetic irony to Jega’s current difficulties which ought to teach our political elite some hard lessons about the dangers of political opportunism.

    It will be recalled that Jega himself had been part of the Uwais Panel on electoral reform. It was a public inquest into the worst electoral calamity visited on the country. One of the cardinal recommendations of that panel was that the presidency should be stripped of its power to nominate and appoint the chairman of the electoral commission. The responsibility should go to a Judicial Council.

    The recommendation had hardly been submitted when Jega was appointed the chairman of the commission and he gladly accepted. It was a strategic gambit on the part of the ruling class which immediately squashed and squelched any possibility of a comprehensive electoral reform. Jega did not deem it fit to explain why he took the job against the recommendation of his own committee.

    But there will always be a return of the repressed. It is this lingering institutional hiatus that has caught up with Jega with presidential interlopers swarming and calling for his head in very humiliating circumstances even as some of his shameless professional colleagues intrigue for the same thankless job..

    We can continue to wait for Godot, but Godot will not come. This is why civilized societies give primacy to building strong and durable institutions rather than building the cult of strong, authoritarian personalities. The absence of the institutions we don’t build will eventually destroy the egoistic personalities we build.  The theatre of political absurdity is not a funny place at all. Unhappy is the nation without visionary institution builders.

  • “We know those who will NOT succeed us”: An open letter to INEC Chairman, Professor Atahiru Jega

    “We know those who will NOT succeed us”: An open letter to INEC Chairman, Professor Atahiru Jega

    Insha Allah, we will hand over but while we don’t know those who will succeed us, we know those who will NOT succeed us”.
    Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, April 1993

    Dear Atahiru,

    This comes with greetings and solidarity to you at this very grave moment in both our country’s future and your own work as the Chairman of INEC. It is a very long time since I last saw you and talked with you and other colleagues about the state of affairs in our country within the context of our collective leadership of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). I testify that then close to thirty years ago, as a lecturer who was perhaps the youngest of the members of the National Executive Council of ASUU, you exhibited the brilliance, the dedication and the courage that you have also shown in your work as INEC Chairman. You know me well, Atahiru: I do not give praise where praise is not due and I do not close my eyes to the faults of those I otherwise admire. So, this is not a song of praise; rather it is a frank expression of solidarity, concern and advice from someone who, I hope, you know to be forthright in all his dealings with his friends and comrades.

    The country and indeed the whole world is rife with rumours, Atahiru, about what really led to your postponement of the 2015 elections by six weeks. Even from faraway in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. from which I am writing this piece, “Jega” is on everybody’s mind! Yesterday, Thursday, February 12, 2015, I participated in a long and passionate discussion with a group of other Nigerians, Africans and non-Africans concerning what to expect at the end of March: will the elections take place or will they not? To the last man/woman in the group, everyone settled on YOU, Atahiru, as the man of the moment, the man who will answer to the country and the world if the elections do not take place. This is a grave, portentous burden for one person to carry; but it is also, fundamentally, a simple and uncomplicated obligation in which, as a matter of fact, you are in a much more impregnable position than the forces that do not want you to succeed, the forces that are perhaps using the postponement of the elections as one step towards the objective of so muddying the waters, so throwing everything into confusion that it will be impossible to hold the elections. I really mean that, Atahiru, you are in a much more invulnerable position than such forces and my main aim in this open letter to you is to demonstrate why this is so and to give you some advice on how you might make your position even more unassailable.

    Of course, I do not ignore the stories, the rumours concerning the considerable arm-twisting, the behind-the-scene machinations that went on before you gave in to the Service Chiefs’ letter that more or less compelled you to postpone the elections. In the ripeness of time, you will be able to tell the country and the world your own side of the story and for the most part, I am content to leave it at that. There is only one aspect of the accounts given so far that I wish to highlight and this is the link, the equivalence that your detractors are making between the significant shortfall in the distribution of the Permanent Voter’s Cards (PVC) and the letter from the service chiefs that placed the burden of whether or not elections can be held in our country on their ability to provide security during the elections. While leaving it to time for you to be in a position to give a full account of how things unraveled last week forcing you to postpone the elections, you cannot, you must not Atahiru, delay for one week on the necessity to break the link, the equivalence between these two factors: the shortfall in the distribution of the PVC’s; the letter from the Service Chiefs. That is the central point that I wish to make in this letter, Atahiru.

    In case the logical reason why these two factors must be quickly and effectively delinked is not clear, let me spell it out: one factor is completely under your schedule of duties and obligations and is putatively under your control; the other factor is not only completely beyond your control, it is in fact quite deliberately and cynically calculated to be so. Indeed, so incommensurable is the gap between these two factors that we might compare it to the gap between a man who is sick because he is severely dehydrated and must therefore be rehydrated as soon as possible and a man who is so massively stricken with throat cancer that he cannot drink water and must perforce be hydrated intravenously. To make the import of this analogy concrete, let me simply say that effective and complete distribution of the PVC’s throughout the country is not unlike bringing water to parched, thirsty throats and souls and God knows that across the length and breadth of the land, our peoples in their hundreds of thousands, in their millions, have been clamoring for these PVC’s as if their very lives depend on it. By contrast, just as the person who is not stricken with cancer would resist any attempt to treat him or her with the extremely dangerous drugs that are used to treat cancer, so do Nigerians everywhere in the country not see soldiers as the guarantors of their right and ability to vote and be voted for. Indeed, the very thought – which more or less amounts to the militarization of electoral practice in our country – is cancerous!

    Unfortunately, logic will not be the deciding factor in what looms ahead of us come March 28, 2015, Atahiru. By this, I am not saying forget logic and do only what is right and just. Logically, you are on extremely weak grounds on the matter of the PVC’s. You and INEC had years to prepare for this election and you had the funding too but came far short of where things should be as close as two weeks to the elections. As a matter of fact, I must confess that I am in some anxiety here for if you and INEC could only score 65% of distribution of the PVC’s with years of preparation, what guarantee do we have that in just slightly over one month you will make up the shortfall of 35%? But you have promised the nation: this shortfall will be redeemed well before March 28. This is why not logic, not common sense per se will determine the course of events, but resolute, patriotic, courageous and, above all else, clear-headed action on your part. What exactly does this entail?

    With complete clarity of thought, you must realize, Atahiru, that having once accorded the Service Chiefs an advisory role in our country’s electoral process that they do not have in the Constitution you have gone as far as you can without yourself becoming complicit in a bloodless coup against the Constitution and the Nation. The Service Chiefs asked for six weeks; you were under no obligation to give them six weeks; in fact, you needed no more than a couple of weeks to straighten out the shortfall in the distribution of the PVC’s; you cannot do it again without becoming complicit in a coup against the Constitution and the Nation. In case what I am saying here is not clear enough, let me spell it out very carefully, Atahiru: you cannot, on your own alone, prevent a coup by the Service Chiefs, acting on behalf of Jonathan and the PDP. What you can do, what indeed you MUST do, is prevent yourself from being made a tool of such a coup come March 28, 2015. If they ask for another postponement, let them, not you, make the announcement and the country and the whole world will know that you are not complicit in a coup against the Constitution and the Nation. But this is conditional upon doing your own duty by making up the PVC shortfall in the next couple of weeks at the most.

    In bringing this open letter to a close, let me make some useful allusions to past and recent history in our country’s political affairs. Perhaps the most traumatic instance when our country’s electoral process has been autocratically removed from the will of the people and placed under military control is the instance signified by the epigraph to this piece in which, in April 1993, Babangida uttered those words that later proved to be a foreshadowing of the annulment of the June 1993 elections: “Insha Allah, we will hand over, but while we don’t know those that will succeed us, we know those that will not succeed us”. Even for a military dictatorship, this was extraordinary, this arrogant and hubristic assertion that not the Nigerian people but a cabal of ambitious and corrupt military officers will decide who will take over from them once they leave office.

    This is more or less what Doyin Okupe in particular and many other proto-fascists in the Presidency have been saying for more than three months now in calling for both the postponement of the elections and the institution of a so-called Interim Government to take over from Jonathan. G.E. Jonathan, E.K. Clark, Chris Uba, Doyin Okupe, Femi Fani-Kayode and Ayo Fayose, none of these belongs to the military; they can act only with and through military proxies, meaning the Service Chiefs. If they want to postpone or cancel the elections come March 28, 2015, let them, acting through the Service Chiefs, announce the postponement or cancellation. I repeat: you cannot alone on your own prevent a coup, Atahiru. Only the Nigerian people can and will. Let them, not you, announce the further postponement or outright cancellation of the elections. Do not let them make you an instrument of a coup which, by the way, may be bloodless in the first instance but may in the end drown our country in rivers of blood and set us back into another cycle of deep and prolonged retrogression.

    Comradely yours, BJ

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu