The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • The sham peace accord

    The Peace Accord signed by the candidates is nothing but a decoy as PDP will rig mercilessly

    On Thursday 15 January, 2015,  Feyisara  Falana wrote as follows on  the Face book wall of Comrade Adeboye  Adebayo: “JUST BE INFORMED: URGENT: “I just discovered a secret being planned by Campaign for Goodluck Jonathan Group. They are giving forms out for masses to fill telling them that they will get benefit from the president. The secret behind this is when you fill this form you have to include your voter’s card number on it. How are we going to use this voter’s card? We will insert the voter’s card into a machine that will read the card. Once anyone has sold his card unknowingly for the Goodluck campaign, the machine will reject his/her card on Election Day. It will show that you have voted already, because the number must have been used to vote before the election for Goodluck. Please spread this news before our ignorant people sell their votes for peanut. This is my contribution to save this honourable country from sinking to another FOUR years. Good morning Nigeria”- Feyisara Falana.

    Let me quickly add that I would not be surprised if all the signatories TAN coyly  obtained  from the youth of  every  geo-political zone  allegedly endorsing the president have also inserted their voters cards number and will be treated accordingly. In which case, the presidential election has already been won well ahead of 14 February, 2015. Therefore, like the peaceful, but scientifically rigged Ekiti election, the presidential election, in particular, will be peaceful only on the surface.

    On the same day that Feyisara Falana was doing that yeoman’s patriotic duty, I wrote as follows on the ekitipanupo web portal concerning the boast by the Senate President, David Mark, that PDP will not only win the presidential and other elective positions in the 2015 general election, but will do so transparently in a free and fair contest, such that it will be acceptable to the opposition, the APC: “I sincerely thank David Mark for this since it appears APC has learnt nothing from Ekiti. The Peace Accord signed by the candidates is nothing but a decoy as PDP will rig mercilessly. They have too much to lose not to rig in addition to using security agencies to protect and cover their tracks. Kofie Anan and Anyaoku, two highly regarded international diplomats, should help Nigerians further by telling us how they got involved in this. Since when have they been thinking about intervening? Was it before or after Prof Bolaji Akinyemi flew the kite of a MOU? Is this diplomacy or duplicity? Nobody wants violence but how has PDP shown they won’t rig? Will the president deploy soldiers, policemen, militants in masks or not? Why did the diplomats not emphasise transparency and integrity of the electoral process? Left to me, this accord is a carte blanche to the PDP to rig to their hearts’ content and so they will in which case the CHANGE being celebrated all over the place will be a chimera. APC should immediately seek legal ways of making rigging impossible. February 15 will be too late.  It is not too late. With this PDP, huge campaign crowds for APC is no guarantee of victory. They showed us that in Ekiti. Having been once beaten, therefore, APC in my view, should be TEN times shy. I have seen nothing to that effect.”

    In “It Will Be Most Unlike PDP Not To Rig The 2015 Election”, 4 January 2015 , I had written as follows about Musliu Obanikoro: “In an interview, published in the Punch of Sunday, 28 December, 2015, Obanikoro declared assuredly: “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.”

    Also, in:  “Prof Bolaji Akinyemi Vs PDP’s History Of Electoral Apostasy”, 28th December, 2014,  I wrote: “He  recently wrote a letter to  both President Goodluck Jonathan and General  Muhammadu Buhari which, in my view, was either misplaced, or failed to lay emphasis on the appropriate issue thus indicating that he failed to reflect deeply on the ill-consequences of  his 1993 letter to General  Abacha, also at a time of considerable anxiety in the country. In the letter, he suggested that the two presidential candidates of Nigeria’s two foremost political parties should sign a Memorandum of Undertaking to have peaceful campaigns as well as having their supporters ACCEPT WHATEVER THE RESULT(caps mine) of the 2015 presidential election. Not a few see this suggestion as anything other than offering a carte blanche to a rig-prone party like the PDP to rig the 2015 election to its heart’s content  since such an understanding would have completely tied  APC’s ‘hands’ behind its back. Recent elections during which President Jonathan turned the concerned states into virtual garrisons with all manner of ‘security operatives’, some of them masked, and who in turn manacled the opposition, more than justify this conclusion. It could only be a shame that many believe that Professor Akinyemi is probably only the messenger here, given his well known capacity for original thinking, and that he most probably knows more than he volunteers given his well known chummy relationship with the government.”

    I am sure something preposterous is afoot and APC had better wake up.  There is no doubt whatever, in my mind, that, unknown to these distinguished international diplomats, they are again being used to hoodwink Nigerians like they did in the MKO Abiola case in 1998. I am not certain their involvement is a happenstance nor is it altruistic. If anything surprises me in all these, it is the failure of the  astute and  experienced politicians as  well as the  egg heads in the APC  to see how they are walking into a trap with their eyes open because not a single one of the five terms of the accord talked to a fair and transparent election. None.  I repeat again: I do not want any violence before, during or after any of the elections.  But, for Christ’s sake, what assurances do Nigerians have that the PDP, with the connivance of INEC and some rogue international scientists will not rig the election from source and through the use of soldiers, kill and go police men, as well as members of the Niger-Delta Volunteer Force who are usually masked as they did in Ekiti or scientifically as we also saw there. I had never seen a more peaceful election than that of Ekiti but that was because the ballot papers had been pre-programmed and rather than supply Indelible ink, INEC deliberately supplied Ekiti voters vanishing ink.

    I am also quite aware that hundreds of thousands of the forms referred to by Feyisara Falana have been distributed all over the Southwest by a chieftain of the PDP under the pretence that he was going to offer all manner of employments, loans, etc to these  youth. If APC is suffering from an unimaginable failure of intelligence, let me tell them that hundreds of thousands of this form have been distributed from the Ijebu Igbo axis of Ogun State. APC just must stop this or forget everything about victory. It would thus have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

    It was former Governor Segun Oni of Ekiti who first drew our attention to this evil form during his maiden outing with the APC, warning Ekiti people not to sell their souls to the devil, picking forms from those who would take them through rituals. Back in Lagos, a top official of the Bus Conductors Union  came to my office to show me a copy of the form and I saw with my very eyes where applicants were being asked for their voters’ card numbers as well as their mothers’ names; the latter for ritual purposes.

    I think the way out is for the APC to quickly go to court to obtain a ruling outlawing the use of Card Readers in the 2015 election on the grounds that its integrity is already compromised.

    A stitch in time will safe more than nine.

  • Ensuring non- violent election

    Amidst the cross fire and acrimony that have so far characterised the electioneering campaigns for the February general elections, the outcome of the workshop on non-violence held in Abuja last Wednesday provides a ray of hope that the exercise may not witness the scale of violence witnessed in the past.

    With the tension in the country over the likely outcome of especially the February 14 presidential election, it is necessary to call all political candidates to order and remind them of the need not to engage in activities or make utterances that could lead to violence before, during and after the election.

    Instead of engaging in issue-based campaigns, focused on their past performances and their plans if elected, some candidates and their supporters have been engaged in all manners of name-calling and are threatening to take the laws into their hands.

    There have been veiled threats by supporters of President Jonathan to shut down the refineries if their candidate is not re-elected while pro-Buhari supporters have also said the APC will form a parallel government if there are proven cases of electoral malpractices.

    In some states, political violence has already assumed alarming proportion with clashes between supporters of rival parties resulting in deaths.

    It is against this background that the organisers of the Abuja non-violence workshop has to be commended for getting the presidential candidates of political parties in the country to sign the five points accord.

    Even if, as some have noted, the two main presidential candidates – President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari, whose picture embracing each other has gone viral – were playing to the gallery, it is significant that they openly pledged to abide by the accord.

    It is up to the leaders to send the right signals to their followers that election into political offices should not be a do-or-die contest. While there may be personal selfish interest, contestants are not supposed to be permanent enemies.

    To ensure peace, winners must be magnanimous in victory, while losers should be gracious in defeat. What is important is that there should be a level playing field for all contestants and electoral regulations complied with.

    If for any reason, losers are not satisfied with the result, there are legal options to seek redress instead of resorting to violence.

    Good enough, there are enough cases to cite where those who secured electoral victory by the back door were sent packing. To a large extent, our judiciary has proved/proven that though justice may be delayed, it would not be denied if any complainant is able to prove his or her case.

    Party members should have by now accepted the fact the political ambition of their candidates is not worth dying for as President Jonathan has repeatedly stated.

    Why should supporters take up arms against themselves when those they are fighting for may someday reconcile their differences as we have seen in recent political party membership realignments in the country?

    As former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, warned that, with Nigeria’s strategic position in Africa, we cannot afford to have an election whose outcome will be violently disputed and throw the nation into chaos.

    Despite the imperfection of the electoral process, all parties concerned should do everything possible to guarantee the continued peaceful coexistence of the country.

  • Voting against one’s interests: identity politics and the 70% in dire poverty (1)

    Voting against one’s interests: identity politics and the 70% in dire poverty (1)

    Be se tiwa, bee si se tiwa, Demo a wole! [Whether you’re with us or you’re not with us, Demo will win!] Chief Remi Fani-Kayode, on the eve of the 1965 Western Regional elections

    The epigraph for this week’s column comes from perhaps the darkest hour in the turbulent history of electoral politics in Nigeria. Concerning that perilous moment, two events connected with two larger-than-life personalities stand out. The personalities were Chief Remi Fani-Kayode; he was the Deputy Premier in the Western Regional government of the then Premier, Chief S.L. Akintola. The other personality was Wole Soyinka. Since Wole Soyinka was and is Wole Soyinka, he needs no further introduction here. In the Western Regional elections of 1965, both men were indirectly locked in an epic battle whose ramifications and resonances go to the heart of the subject of this week’s column, this being identity politics as either a salvation and/or a graveyard for the interests of the poor and the disenfranchised that constitute the human and demographic majority in our country. What does this mean and how did Fani-Kayode and Wole Soyinka come to be the respective embodiments of the contradictions of identity politics in the Western Regional elections of 1965? And moreover, what does all this have to do with the forthcoming general elections of 2015? Let me explain.

    For the benefit of the young readers of this piece who were either not yet born in 1965 or were below the age of 10, it is important to recall who Chief Remi Fani-Kayode, aka “Fani Power” was. A brilliant and professionally very successful lawyer, he achieved his highest prominence in politics when he became Deputy Premier of the Western Region and second-in-command to Chief S.L. Akintola as Party Leader of the Nigerian National Democratic Party that was universally known as “Demo”. “Demo” was a breakaway rump of the erstwhile Western Regional governing party, the Awolowo-led Action Group. “Demo” was also a widely feared and hated political party that played politics at the basest level of primordial, cynical and opportunistic sentiments. Its political calculations began and ended with what, in its view, were ostensibly in the best interests of Yorubas but were in actuality meant to maintain Demo’s fascist grip on power. Thus, in the light of such murky calculations, Akintola, “Fani Power” and the other bosses of “Demo” felt that, in essence, they had to do two things. What were these tow things?

    One: The NNDP or “Demo” had to go into alliance as very junior partners with the most powerful conservative political forces in the country as institutionalized in the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) and its two legendary leaders, the late Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and the Nigerian Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Beside these two towering figures, Akintola and Fani-Kayode were and acted like political minions. Two: “Demo” had to disparage and tear down everything that Awolowo and the Action Group had achieved. Since the free education, free health services and other social-democratic policies of the Action Group were immensely popular in the Western Region, the only way that “Demo” could discredit them was to pass these programmes and policies off as evidence of Awolowo’s incipient, creeping “socialism” and “communism”. Thus, everything, “Demo” warned the people of the Western Region, would be shared by Awolowo: property and personal possessions; wives and concubines; the debts that citizens owed through reckless and irresponsible financial practices and activities; even the clothes in one’s wardrobe and one’s back. These ideological views, “Demo” asserted, were against the traditional culture and morality of the Yoruba people. Indeed, Akintola and “Fani Power” took their opportunistic politics of identity to the extent of forming a Pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organization that they named “Egbe Omo Olofin” as a counterforce to the much older “Egbe Omo Yoruba” that had historically had very close links to Awolowo and the Action Group. But all its tactics, all its oratory failed to win “Demo” popularity and legitimacy in the Western Region and it was against the background of this total failure that, on the eve of the 1965 regional elections and in an address that was broadcast on radio and television to the electorate that “Fani Power” uttered his infamous pronouncement: “whether you are with us or you’re not with us, Demo will win”. This was worse than rigging, worse than any heinous electoral fraud that Maurice Iwu and Olusegun Obasanjo ever perpetrated on Nigeria and Nigerians for in “Fani Power’s” declaration, victory had been declared before the elections took place.

    The role of Wole Soyinka in that fateful electoral conjuncture can be summarily stated and is best summed up in the well known Radio Station holdup event. It is the very height of collective insult to declare to any people in the world that whatever they felt about any government or political party, that government, that party will achieve electoral victory in total and complete indifference to the wishes, the interests of the given people. Thus, it was this collective insult to the people of the Western Region that paved the way for Soyinka’s radical intervention. His heroism achieved legendary status in the Western Region precisely to the extent that it articulated a need, a will to tell “Fani Power” and “Demo” that the people of the Western Region are a people whose collective will and interests could not be so easily set aside.

    This is identity politics at its most radical and uncompromising. Thus, it is very surprising that most accounts of Soyinka’s Radio Station holdup act have left out that prior pronouncement of “Fani Power” – whether you vote for us or you don’t vote for us, we will win. And please note that it was in the voice of a “free Nigeria” and not only a free Western Nigeria that the gunman at the Radio holdup spoke. This was contained in the pre-recorded message that the gunman substituted for the broadcast of the fake electoral victory of “Demo”. In effect, Soyinka moved, in the same act, the same event, from an insult to the people of the Western Region to the implications of “Demo’s” electoral superlative act of rigging for fascist, violent suppression of rights throughout the whole country. In other words, he moved from identity politics to the politics of popular, radical democracy for and in the whole country.

    The great supposition of identity politics is that when one acts in the domain of politics one ought to act, first and foremost, in the interest of oneself and one’s own group of belonging, be that group racial, ethnic, regional or religious. On this account, only a Black man or woman can best speak for and represent Black people in the United States of America. In Nigeria only the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), only Ohaneze Ndigbo  and only the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) can speak for and represent the interests of Northerners, Igbos and Yorubas respectively. Indeed, the often unspoken but unshakeable faith of proponents and practitioners of  identity politics rests on the premise that only members of one’s own natal group can act best in the interest of the group. But this is a questionable assumption. As we have seen in the two cases embodied by “Fani Power” and Wole Soyinka in Western Regional elections of 1965, one protagonist whose party claimed to be acting for and in the interests of the Yorubas was actually confronting them with fascism and political enslavement while the other agent extended the sphere of his identity politics far beyond the Western Region to the whole country. This raises the fundamental question of how exactly identity politics combines the personal interests of, on the one hand, the professional politician and, on the other hand, the interests of the totality of members of the racial, ethnic or religious group to which the politician belongs. In coming to the conclusion of this piece, let us carefully examine the ramifications of this question.

    The basic presupposition of identity politics is that the circles of interests between the politician and his “tribe”, region or religious community converge. But this is hardly ever the case. This question becomes even more complex and more fraught when, as in a country like Nigeria at the present time, virtually in all the communities in the given nation, the vast majority of the people are very, very poor. Poverty always makes nonsense of the presuppositions of identity politics and the more extreme and widespread the poverty, the more deeply problematic the play of identity politics. Let me put this observation in the form of some concrete questions. Are the Northern poor, the Southern poor, the Niger Delta poor, the Christian poor, the Moslem poor, the Ekiti State poor and the Akwa Ibom poor, the Kanuri poor and the Tiv poor each be best represented and spoken for by the big men and women, the professional politicians of each group? If not, who speaks for all the poor of the land, for the 7 out of every 10 Nigerians who live in abject poverty? What do each of the two main ruling class parties, the PDP and the APC, have in their composition and in their ideologies to give us an indication of the differences between them in the practice of identity politics? Are there in fact any significant differences between them on this particular point? What does the inherent identity politics in the alliance of the “core” North and the Southwest as the dominant formation within the APC portend for the interest of the poor of the land, if at all it portends anything by way of social, redistributive justice in our time? Finally the most basic question of all: Why do the poor, in our country, as in many other countries of the world, often vote and act against their own economic and political interests in the name of and under the sign of identity politics? These and other related questions and issues will provide our starting point in next week’s conclusion to the series.

    [To be continued]

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The falcon turns on the falconer

    The falcon turns on the falconer

    Turning and turning in the ever widening gyre, the falcon finally rounds on the old falconer. It is a scary scenario. When W.B Yeats, the great Irish poet and statesman, penned his famous poem of anarchy and the dissolution of the old order from which our own Chinua Achebe took the title of his most famous novel, he could not have had Nigeria in mind.

    As a matter of fact, the proud Irish genius was ruing the dire consequences of English colonialist disruption in his own homeland. The damning ironical similarities could not have escaped a master of sublime irony like the late Chinua Achebe. As it was in colonial Ireland, so it is turning out to be in post-colonial Nigeria.

    The rift between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and his former protégé and current president, Goodluck Jonathan, is slowly and inexorably assuming the proportions of a great Shakespearean tragedy. This past week, Jonathan, in a breach of presidential protocols and etiquette, dismissed his tormentor and benefactor in very unsavoury terms. Judging by Jonathan’s moody and irascible mien at the opening of his presidential campaign in Lagos, this ferocious reprisal appeared to be a mere opening salvo.

    In fairness to President Goodluck Jonathan, there ought to be a threshold for presidential patience and punishment absorption. For weeks General Obasanjo, a grandmaster of the war of punitive attrition and psychological destabilization, has had the full measure of his man, peppering him with vicious jabs while baiting him to exhaustion like a bear at bay.

    But we must learn to separate the message from the messenger. The way out of the unseemly rumpus between political father and his estranged son on whom he has showered undue and promiscuous preferment is to locate it within the crisis of political leadership in a post-colonial polity teeming with ethnic and religious contraries.

    The colonial authorities, in a bid to retain the political initiatives, deliberately foisted a weak and divided political class on their conquered territories. Whereas different regional factions of the nascent Nigerian nation did not formally come together until the end of the forties, the army in whatever rudimentary form has been in existence even before the amalgamation. With its residual discipline and organizational cohesion, the military is thus the most organic national institution created by the colonialists capable of throwing up messianic nationalists at short notice.

    The bigger the colonial head, the bigger the post-colonial headache. In a post-colonial nation brimming with pre-colonial nationalities of unyielding vibrancy and resistant modes of religious, economic and political productions, the post-independence army is usually the most privileged institution with the capacity to produce unifying figures of nationalist fervour whatever their personal deficiencies and lack of adequate mental preparations. In other words, it is a fake and cruel cue that comes with the peculiar flavour of perfidious Albions.

    Yet whatever our umbrage at the ugly and nasty turn of events, we must give this to our ancient generals. Obasanjo is possessed by the abiding and resilient hubris that comes with this historically determined military messianism. It is this hubris that has propelled the crusty warlord, ahead of most of his colleagues and contemporaries, to the dizzying heights of a post-colonial society rigged against rationality and order. But it has also seen him at least on one occasion plummeting to the nadir of his fortunes.

    It may be a question of personal vanity or extreme narcissism. But when it works, it works very well for the old Owu warrior. But the problem is why the general always ends up at daggers drawn with his own political creations. From Alhaji Aliyu Shehu Shagari whom he singlehandedly and craftily imposed on the nation and who was later to bitterly resent Obasanjo lecturing him on the politics that he claimed to have learnt while the general was still a mere school boy , through Umaru Yar’Adua whom he recklessly and single-mindedly foisted on the nation in a grotesquely rigged election, and now to Goodluck Jonathan, a test tube baby of his political  laboratory, Obasanjo has always ended up in mortal conflict with his own.

    In all probability, Obasanjo, blinded by hatred and personal aversion for his fellow Yoruba man, never studied the confidential files on Alhaji Shehu Shagari to determine his suitability for the mental rigour and discipline of presidential office. The same can be said of the bizarre political engineering which led him to plump for the medically challenged younger brother of his beloved and loyal former second in command against more compelling and competitive rival claims. In the case of Goodluck Jonathan, it would seem that a meek and compliant mien was all that mattered to the patronizing and paternalistic general rather than preparation, temperamental suitability and adequate mental magnitude for the daunting task.

    But whether we like Obasanjo or not and whether we are sold on what he has to say or not, what cannot be denied or taken away from him is the fact that his harsh and unflattering criticisms of his own creations and former military subordinates often resonate with, and are in complete alignment with, the dominant mood of the nation at their particular moment. This was the case with his merciless pillorying of General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha as well as his devastating endgame savaging of Alhaji Shagari, Umaru Yar’Adua and now Goodluck Jonathan.

    It has been said that a man can make for himself a throne of bayonets, but whether he will be able to sit in it is another matter. Yet by some paradoxical logic, Obasanjo stands head and shoulder above his fellow colleagues and members of the Nigerian caste of retired rulers in his inability to sleep with evil even when it is a product of his own devilish imagination. While others, probably in deference to the ancient code of feudal nobility, maintain the sealed lips of complicity with the ascendant status quo, not so the rampaging and rambunctious general.

    This is why Obasanjo’s interventions, however self-serving and apparently disruptive of order and peace, also come with the hallo of profound patriotism and game-changing possibilities. Given what is known as the cunning of history, what is currently working out may well be a case of the iron law of nemesis and the logic of creative destruction.

    This is where Obasanjo, like everyone else in this hour of grave national crisis, also needs help. A pandemic crisis is an equal opportunity employer which does not discriminate against anybody. After surveying the ruined tapestry of his gargantuan appetite for mischief and diabolic scheming, General Simon Bolivar, the great Latin American icon and liberator, was known to have rued to himself: “How am I ever going to get out of this labyrinth?”

    While Obasanjo’s misgivings often resonate with the ascendant mood of the nation, his preferred solutions are almost always at variance with the mood of the country. During the June 12 crisis, Obasanjo was known to be openly rooting for an interim government while insinuating that MKO Abiola was not the messiah Nigeria was waiting for. This was after fourteen million Nigerians have voted with a whopping nine million rooting for the martyred business mogul.

    Given his essentially authoritarian cast of mind and anti-democratic temperament, Obasanjo is often led to despotic “solutions” which often compound the national crisis rather than ameliorate it. Already, there are whispers and in fact open canvassing for an interim national government. The more things change, the more they tend to remain the same. But it is impossible to step into the same river twice. The Nigeria of 2015 is not the Nigeria of 1993. Too much murky water has passed under the bridge and for one there is a dramatic upsurge of painful awareness in the post-military polity.

    Let us get this clear. After the bungled and deliberately mismanaged Constitutional Conference, the Nigerian ruling class lost the last opportunity of imposing a solution from above on the crisis both in the interim and in the long run.  Constitutional Conferences are elite driven mechanisms for imposing nationalist solutions on a national crisis which require elite discipline and cohesion. This was precisely what was lacking in the last shambolic outing at Abuja.

    To be sure, and as this column has stated ad nauseam, elections, particularly in a country hobbled by the trauma of abiding ethnic, religious, regional and economic polarities, do not resolve the national question. In fact, they tend to worsen and exacerbate it. As we have seen in the case of Kenya, Cote D’Ivoire and also Nigeria, elections tend to tip fragile and unstable nations over the abyss into conflagration and civil wars.

    But we cannot terminate a full pregnancy without the gravest danger to both mother and baby, just as you cannot abort a flight after the plane has reached a certain critical momentum without crew and passengers being imperilled. Having boxed ourselves into a corner, we must now go on with the election willy-nilly. It is no longer an elite-driven initiative. The Nigerian multitude having been critically engaged in the electoral process, they can no longer be easily disengaged without dire consequences. There is no way the elections can now be postponed without playing into the hands of extra-constitutional forces already on the prowl.

    Without any doubt, the nation is trapped between the devil and the deep blue seas. There is no easy way out. The gravest danger of the next few weeks is the fact that with the hounds of national distemper and disaffection relentlessly baiting and chafing at him, an exhausted and disoriented President Jonathan might be miscued into reaching for his own extra-constitutional “final solution” which may then topple the nation into the yawning abyss of anarchy and millennial mayhem. This nation has once again arrived at a critical conjuncture. May the legendary luck of Nigeria save us once again.

     

  • Samuel Goldwyn re-membered

    And whilst we are still on the subject of increasing political desperation and unease in the land, it is meet to report that all has been very well in the field of semantic infelicities and linguistic howlers. It is an embarrassment of malapropist riches and verbal indelicacies. Were Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe, the great exponent of felicitous infelicities,  to be alive—to appropriate Samuel Goldwyn— he would be turning in his grave.

    Nigeria seems to be blessed with an abundance and endless supply of politicians with a colourful turn of phrase and capacity for mangling syntax and muddling up meaning.  President Jonathan seems to be well ahead of the pack in this department. What with his memorable dismissal this past week of his former benefactor turned major political adversary as a motor pack tout pretending to be a statesman. Phew!!!!

    We will leave the collection of the golden gems of Jonathanisms to future academic researchers, as advised by a famed columnist. But it is not only Nigerian politicians who have a capacity for creative misprision bordering on linguistic genius. Snooper remembers his mechanic at the great university for culture and learning telling him that he did not come to work because he came down with a bad case of “He-fever”.  When he was pressed, he replied in the vernacular that he had “ako iba”. In order to capture the vicious ferocity of this type of fever, the Yoruba decided to masculinize its deranging capacity.  Our man then took it upon himself to find an adequate English expression.

    But who was Samuel Goldwyn? Goldwyn was an Eastern European immigrant who arrived in America shoeless, penniless and unable to speak a word of English to boot. But by dint of hard work and sheer force of personality, he went on to become fabulously rich and about the most famous and influential of American film moguls in the last century. Many believed that his linguistic contretemps and verbal howitzers hid great wit and a lacerating intelligence. Goldwyn himself put things classically when he noted that “If I appear confused, it is because I am thinking”.

    Snooper will leave the readers this morning with a few of this great man’s remarkable contributions to English language. Welcome to golden goldwynisms.

    1. Please include me out of that one.

    2. A verbal agreement is not worth the paper on which it is written.

    3. I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they are dead.

    4. A hospital is no place to be sick.

    5. It’s absolutely impossible, but it has possibilities.

    6. Don’t pay any attention to the critics-don’t even ignore them.

    1.   Charlie Chaplin, a bosom friend and great crony of Samuel Goldwyn, has been known to confess in private that he mischievously made up some of these famous sayings only to attribute them to his friend. Well, please include snooper out of that one.

  • Long live Charlie

    Is it true that a journalist can be killed in the course of doing his or her work?” A student journalist once asked me at a seminar. I wished I could tell him no, knowing that a yes response would further convince him that the journalism profession is too risky for anyone who doesn’t believe anything is worth dying for. Unfortunately, I couldn’t deny his fears considering that chances of being killed on the job is one of the hazards of the profession, especially those covering crises situations like war and others.

    According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 61 journalists were killed worldwide in 2014. The breakdown of the beats of the victims indicates that 59 percent of them covered war, 69% politics, 54% human rights, 15% corruption, 16% crime and 5% culture. The percentages add up to more than 100 because more than one category applies in some cases.

    Although no Nigerian journalist was among those killed on duty last year, we have had cases in past years, like the journalists killed while covering the bomb blasts by the Boko Haram insurgents in Kano and Maiduguri.

    Last Wednesday’s killing of 12 persons, including four cartoonists of a French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, by masked gunmen in Paris has again confirmed how dangerous journalism can be.

    The suspected Islamic militants who carried out the attack were reported to have claimed that they have avenged anti-Islamic publications by the newspaper.

    Like every other terrorist attack which has claimed hundreds of lives, the killing of the cartoonists, policemen and others is condemnable.

    There is no justification for the attack on the newspaper, notwithstanding how provocative their publications could have been. In a world where freedom of expression by everybody is guaranteed, the attack is an assault on individual rights and press freedom.

    The action of the gunmen and whichever group they may belong to is typical of their intolerance for the views of others regarding their religious beliefs. Like they have always done, they have taken the laws into their hands to unleash yet another round of terror which is gradually becoming the order of the day globally.

    As long as terrorists continue their endless killings in the name of defending a prophet or religion, those who regularly lampoon and expose them for the evil which they truly represent – like cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo – will have every reason not to spare them.

    The terrorist groups worldwide have wrecked so much havoc that the media cannot afford to keep quiet about their unjustified violent activities. Journalists will be failing in their duties to be the voice of the voiceless against extremist Islamic tendencies which most adherents of the religion do not subscribe to.

    While anybody or group may disagree with any publication, resorting to killing journalists should not be the option. Killing of the cartoonists cannot stop the media from reporting the heinous crimes by terrorists.

    The gunmen might have succeeded in killing the cartoonists, but cannot kill the driving force behind the principles Charlie Hebdo stands for. The newspaper will be back on the newsstands soon to continue to haunt the terrorists and their cohorts.

    From the reactions of journalists in particularly France, there is no killing Charlie. Journalists have declared ‘Je suis Charlie’ meaning ‘I am Charlie’.

    Long live Charlie!

  • Dynamics of APC, PDP presidential campaigns

    Dynamics of APC, PDP presidential campaigns

    Barely one week into their presidential campaigns, the leading contenders for the presidency, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), have given indications of the perspectives of their candidates and parties, as well as, strangely, the deep and fundamental intangibles of their worldview as they relate to the concepts of leadership, vision and philosophy, either real or abstract. It is not certain that the limited time available for campaigning is enough to make the PDP persuade Nigeria’s distraught, cynical and skeptical electorate to re-elect President Goodluck Jonathan, to overlook the many problems he has been unable to grapple with in a coherent, consistent and courageous manner, and to sympathise with his emotive responses to allegations of illiberal approach to politics and shocking lack of intuitive appreciation of the elementary challenges facing the country he has ruled for more than five years.

    Nor is it also certain that the limited campaign time will permit Muhammadu Buhari, the APC presidential candidate, room to sell his candidature and virtues, and also to dispel the many criticisms validly leveled against his less than two years in power as military head of state in the early 1980s. Many of those criticisms, in spite of the long intervening years — nearly all of 30 years — still retain their potency and validity. There are doubts he has really transformed from a rigid, abrasive, ruthless and imperceptive ruler he once was. He is accused of jadedness, sectarianism, tribalism, lack of rigour or intellectual depth, and an unforgivable lack of empathy. His opponents will try to put him on the defensive and make the time very short for him to prove his bona fides.

    Indeed, the dynamics of both campaigns will be influenced by the considerations above, some of them extraneous, others misplaced and specious, and yet others simply deliberately mischievous. The more adept of the two campaigns will, however, utilise the limited time fairly effectively, if not to completely prove their competence to present the next president, at least to make their candidate the lesser of two evils. Given the constricted choices the country faces, the electorate will have to choose one way or the other, for choose they must. So far, as a matter of fact, both campaigns have emitted sublime signals, some of them quite portentous, of what their parties are, who their candidates are at bottom, how limited their vistas are, and what they mean to Nigeria. It is not quite clear whether a consideration of these intangibles, these so-called sublime signals, will influence the direction of voting, for the voters are themselves quite limited in horizon and are sentimental. But these signals will doubtless determine the direction, health and sustainability of the country in the medium to long run.

    Take the kick-off of the Jonathan re-election campaign in Lagos for instance. It was symptomatic of the partisan malaise that has turned the PDP into a fearsome behemoth with no internal moral core and absolutely no regard for other political parties and democratic fundamentals. The kick-off also showed in disturbingly bold relief Dr Jonathan’s intellectual weakness, questionable historicism and perverse logic, limited worldview, malignant extemporaneousness, sweeping and unpardonable generalisations and conclusions. “Those of my age and above are finished; we are gone,” moaned the president puzzlingly. “That is why I am addressing those of you that are voting for the first time. We believe it is you that will take us to the moon. My generation has failed, we couldn’t take Nigeria to the moon.”

    The problem is not just that this questionable reading and understanding of history and contemporary events expose the president’s inadequacies, especially his lack of logical reasoning, but that they indicate a far more disturbing manifestation of the low quality of leadership in Nigeria, a lack of mastery of the existential and geopolitical threats facing the country, and an infatuation with boyish utopia.

    The highlights of the president’s Lagos campaign, especially his tendentious rationalisation of his failing counterinsurgency war, his justification of his slow anti-corruption campaign, his defence of inept arms procurement methods, and his shocking inurement to his self-incriminating statements over MEND’s 2010 Abuja bombing, shocked and perplexed the thinking members of his audience, some of whom exclaimed in gasps behind him on the dais. Nonetheless, some of the facts mentioned by the president were incontestable, such as the neglect suffered by the military over the decades. But his suppositions, his inferences, and his conclusions were astonishingly unpresidential, not to say inimical to the growth, stability and good fortunes of the country. There is nothing he said in his Lagos campaign that entitles him to victory, or gives indication he had the subtlety and philosophical depth needed to rule a complex country in the 21st century. When he was right, which was seldom, he did not cut the figure of a president, or present the facade of a noble or of a philosophical-king. And when he was wrong, which was often, such as when he guilefully and gleefully promoted sectarianism and ethnic divisions, he did not surprise.

    Dr Jonathan, alas, displayed none of the composure associated with the high office of the presidency. In the Lagos campaign, as he sadly did elsewhere in recent times, he quiveringly and emotionally fulminated against his opponents, endorsed the anti-democratic tendencies of state security agencies, preoccupied himself and his presidency with elemental things, and propounded none of the salient and uplifting ideas a complex society like Nigeria should embrace. None whatsoever. In the Lagos campaign, he tried to defend himself as much as possible, though he made a hash of it. And almost as an afterthought, he tried to sell a policy or two, but was unable to persuade either by logic or by force of his personality. The past few decades have been ideationally barren for Nigeria. Under Dr Jonathan, the sterility has grown incomparably. Four more years of him would not regenerate the country, as his campaign seeks to convince the electorate, or reposition it in line with the modernising ideas and infinitely changing complexities of the 21st century.

    Conversely, the dynamics of the APC campaign exhibit a different hue. The opposition party, poised as it seems on the edge of victory, has about three weeks or four to prove the capacity of its presidential candidate and his advertised transformation into a modern, if unaccustomed, democrat and liberal. In Lagos, a hysterical Dr Jonathan said that that transformation was not possible, and a vote for Gen Buhari would ineluctably return Nigeria to the dark days of atavistic prosecution of the anti-corruption war, where suspects were crated and jailed without regard to the law. But compared to Dr Jonathan’s campaign volubility, Gen Buhari, not the most eloquent of men, has always spoken laconically, often with a terseness that belies his political and leadership experience and hunger for office. His gaffes and indiscretions are thus few and far between. Beyond seemingly partitioning the campaign between himself and his running mate, Yemi Osinbajo, a law professor, to achieve maximum impact, the general’s taciturnity and the silent and subterranean jostling for power and influence in the APC appear to cause dreadful unease in campaign and political circles.

    Unlike the PDP whose power structure had earlier been defined and shaped, perhaps disapprovingly, under the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, with occasional eruptions between governors and the presidency, the APC has the onerous and compelling burden of campaigning for the highest office in the land at the same time as embarking on a difficult journey of self-discovery, self-definition, and self-actualisation. The ongoing internal jostling may have no significant effect on the party’s electoral chances if well managed, but in more ways than party apparatchiks think, the future of the party and its performance as a ruling party, should it attain the highest office, could be considerably stymied by that burden.

    A faint trichotomy is thus visible in the APC. On one hand is the powerful and inspiring arm of the party responsible for the formation of the APC, an amalgam of parties many but that powerful and inspiring few at first believed impossible. On the other hand is the northern caucus desperate to regain the presidency, a desperation fuelled by the incontestably poor performance of the Jonathan government. And on the third hand is a coalition of forces made up principally of governors and other party leaders determined to gain the upper hand in the power struggle, an upper hand they hinge on what they describe as the political altruism of checkmating any domination within the party. The battle for supremacy in the PDP was brutally and peremptorily settled by Chief Obasanjo. It will take a little while for that battle to be settled in the APC, whether they win the presidency or not.

    Though the APC is doing its best to conceal that jostling, a perceptive observer will notice the fault lines, as faint and imperceptible as they may appear. But what cannot be hidden is that if care is not taken, and irrespective of whether the party wins the presidency or not, the internal struggle may be won by an arm of the party that does not have the passion, drive, depth and conviction that inspired its formation. On the surface, there may be nothing wrong with having many tendencies within a party, as some developed democracies have shown. But for a party still in formation, and one which seems close to winning the presidency on the strength of the appalling incompetence and failures of the ruling party, it would indeed be cynical for the jostling within the APC to be settled in favour of an arm more desirous of dominating and moulding it into a typical party, almost indistinguishable from the PDP, than imbuing it with the kind of substance and character both the party and country need to survive and flourish.

    But perhaps this observation is an exaggeration. Perhaps the internal struggles in the APC are rather inconsequential. If that is so, the party is lucky. However, all indications show that there is a mild tremor within the party, even if that tremor may not hamstring both its campaign and battle to win February’s presidential poll. What is clear overall is that both the PDP and its candidate, Dr Jonathan, are “spent and finished,” a Freudian slip the president himself made in Lagos at his campaign kick-off. The dynamics of the PDP campaign are such that the party seems fated to lose the elections because of the president’s off-putting personality and general incapacity. The dynamics of the APC campaign, on the other hand, are such that the party seems poised to outperform its expectations in spite of Gen Buhari’s inability to generate excitement by his speech and campaign style, and the dredging up of many of his past objectionable statements and policies by the ruling party.

  • The funny thing about Change…

    ‘Change will not come if we wait for some other person’

    This morning, I obtained my PVC. I know, I know, some of us might be thinking I was rather tardy about it, while others might be thinking that they might be so lucky. As they say in teenland, ‘whatever.’ Prior to getting it, I was a little worried that if I didn’t I could get into some kind of trouble. What if the government woke up one day and decided you could not send your children or wards to school, or enter a government building, or get buried, or God forbid, even vote without your PVC? So, you can imagine my relief when I got it. I immediately thought, now, the government has no right to prevent me from being buried, should I be so thoughtless as to die.

         As I held the card, it occurred to me that the picture on it was not quite to my taste. It was a reflection of me alright, but I thought I looked a little hazy and unsure of what the whole process was about, just like a woman suffering from dementia being woken up early in the morning to go and give a lecture on astrophysics. I however consoled myself with the fact that the candidates would hardly be after my beauty (they don’t want that), brains (they don’t need that) or brawn (ho, ho, they have enough thugs, thanks). Perhaps, I had that confused look because of the presidential candidates and what people are saying about them.

          I understand that there are about twenty-six registered political parties, out of which only about eleven or so have fielded presidential candidates. Yet, only two of them are said to be in strong contention. Wonderful, said I, we are having a personality-based election where you choose between one set of tribal marks over another; rather than a party-based one where you choose one ice cream flavour over another. In other words, this election is saying there is no difference between the parties: they are all about eating ice cream.

           You can therefore empathise with me I’m sure as I’m in a dither over which of the candidates to choose, or whether I am even going to vote at all. Right now, there are two gimmicks being peddled. The one is about continuing the process of transforming the old order while the other is about changing the old order. The one is about the old order transmuting while the other thinks the old order needs transmigrating. Here’s my objective take.

            My Encarta says transforming is changing things dramatically, and to change is to transform or make something appear different. So, clearly, both candidates are peddling words centred on how they would wave their magic wand and the old order would transmute in Nigeria. As of now, the programmes are not yet clear, but I guess as they become clearer to the participants, they would let us know. For now, it is enough for us to know, according to a TV ad., that Dr. Jonathan is comparable to Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama… I wonder, did the list include Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Mother Theresa…? I don’t know; maybe I missed those parts. Anyway, that ad parades the list of world figures who have given their brains, blood or even life to make a difference while gaining little or nothing, as a premise for us to understand how to view the achievements of our current president.

          Hmmm! Thing is, the copywriters of that TV add forgot one major truth: the people mentioned were made world figures by history not by ads or people. In other words, history judged them, they were weighed in the balance, and they were not found wanting. Sadly or happily, that same history awaits us all. So, I would prefer that we wait for history to add our dear president to that exclusive league of extraordinary gentlemen or… It is too early to decide whether the country has been transformed or not.

          For now, we will do well to remember that in most parts of this country, there is no electricity for more than three quarters of the day (if and when), pipe borne water is absent, many major highways are practically impassable, people are still being abducted as we speak, others sleep with one eye open, possibly waiting… One major culprit in all these is what many of us have pointed out, and that is corruption. Yet, the president has stated that if he would be given a second coming, he would not send anyone to jail for it (perhaps because of the first stone and all) but would rather study the phenomenon and decide on the best procedure, perhaps strengthen institutions.

          Anyway, on account of all the billions of the nation’s funds flying left, right and centre but ending up untraceable, the people are now clamouring for change in the nation’s body politic. In response, the other candidate has also been peddling the slogan of change at the end of a long hook for the people to bite. And are they biting! Now, everywhere you turn on the internet, the month of February has been turned to … Go and find out yourself; I am not the man’s campaign manager.

           Still, on my part, I am hesitant. For one thing, we have a presidential candidate, Rtd. Gen. Buhari, who has been a soldier all his life (I suspect even from the womb) suddenly transmuting into a politician. Something is not sitting well. Remember how angry he got when the nation did not vote him into power in 2011? That was a real, soldierly anger, forgetting that it was quite possible that people really did vote in Dr. Jonathan, in all their innocence. Can that righteous anger change? True, a few things are changing. For one thing, I think the candidate is realising that neither an insular north, nor south west, nor south east, can Nigeria make. A part, in this instance, can never make a whole; so to be wholly accepted in one part is not the same as being accepted in the whole part. For quite another, have you noticed his dressing lately?

             Anyways, people clamouring for change need to do some sitting up. I checked the internet for quotations on change and I found a site that registered 2,536 of them! And what’s more, many of them agreed that change is not an external thing; it is an internal thing. Listen to these: ‘be the change you want to see’ (M. Ghandi); ‘everybody thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself’ (L. Tolstoy); ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has’ (M. Mead). I like this one: ‘change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek’ (B. Obama); ‘and that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time’ (L. Bray). ‘We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted change you’re the one who has got to change’ (K. Hepburn); ‘I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples’ (Mother Theresa).

           I suspect that the Nigerians clamouring for change expect someone to come and change other Nigerians so they can continue to cheat and fleece them. Few Nigerians are ready to forsake the illegal perks they are receiving from their offices: misuse of office properties, funds, personnel, and misapplication of office rules and etiquettes, etc. People are not ready to give up their own corruption; but they expect someone to come and make every other Nigerian give up their rights to be corrupt. How realistic is that? So, I look at my PVC in my hands, and wonder what it is worth: promise of transmutation, or change that I’m expecting? I can’t decide, so I pocket it.

  • Transition government and other shadow chasing efforts

    Postponing election for two years is another form of annulment, regardless of how much it is packaged as a national security scheme

    Just a few days after The Vanguard published a story which insinuated that General Olusegun Obasanjo has been calling (to no one’s hearing) for an Interim government, another call came from what many activists and believers in the possibility of a Nigerian variant of liberation theology would readily call a most unexpected source: one-time leader of Save Nigeria Group (SNG) and Senior Pastor of the Church of Latter Rain Assembly. The call, put simply, is for postponement of national elections for two years and  installation of a Transition Government to be headed by the incumbent president and assisted by specially invited or anointed citizens to prepare for postponed elections when the term of the special regime lapses. In other words, the call seeks national consent for suspension of the most important aspect of democratic governance: elections.

    Had Obasanjo’s call for Interim Government been audible to citizens, most citizens would not have been upset by this, given the general assessment of General Obasanjo as having no fear to say whatever he chooses to say about persons and institutions. This writer would also not have been surprised, knowing that General Obasanjo comes from a professional background that is popular in the country for preferring interim governments manned by members of the military or headhunted civilians.

    But the call from a man who led hundreds of Nigerians (including General Alani Akinrinade, Admiral Ndubuisi Kanu, and hundreds of citizens including this writer) under the aegis of SNG on protest marches in Lagos and Abuja on behalf of due process and rule of law is hard to dismiss, the way such calls from Obasanjo (if actually made) would have been ignored by citizens who define themselves as lovers of democratic culture. Having worked with Pastor Bakare for a few years on various political issues, I am not impressed by the noise in the social media that he is preoccupied with assisting President Jonathan to enjoy the eight-year tenure allowed by the constitution without necessarily having to go through the rigor of election. I make bold to say that I know him well enough to know that he does not need  to stake out his neck for any president on account of favour seeking, not after he had served as vice presidential candidate of General Mohammed Buhari in the bid to unseat President Goodluck Jonathan in 2011, about two years after he mobilised Nigerians to struggle for respect of the constitution with regards to appointing Jonathan  as substantive president after the demise of President Umaru Yar’Adua.

    But it is necessary to ask for more details of the proposal to bypass election and appoint someone who was elected four years ago to the same office, in order to avoid any threat to peace and stability in the polity after an election that was scheduled four years ago. Without doubt, there is no better time for the Cassandra syndrome to afflict citizens than the current election season.  Since the announcement of the candidacies of Buhari and Jonathan for the highest office in the land, the polity has been unduly heated. Security agencies have been promising fire and brimstones against politicians who make whatever security experts consider to be inflammatory statements. Party spokespersons and even professional prayer warriors have been warning and praying against violence and disintegration.  Even leaders of political parties that no longer appear on the political radar have been screaming about their chances to win elections and warning against post-election violence. What could have been a moment of excitement for citizens of other democracies have become a source of worry to citizens, largely because many people have become scared that the forthcoming election is not likely to be free and fair to the point that reasonable party men and women will accept the will of the electorate.

    It must be the tension in the air that has pushed otherwise well-meaning people to make proposals that are likely to deny citizens of their political and civil rights to choose the leader they want at elections. On one hand, a former minister called for a memorandum of undertaking between Buhari and Jonathan on an irrevocable pledge to restrain their supporters from becoming violent after the election, regardless of whether the election was free and fair or not. In another instance, a national leader in the movement for justice and democracy in the land and one-time presidential candidate called for cancellation of the 2015 election and coronation of the incumbent as president for two years.

    The proposal to cancel or postpone the 2015 election for another two years shows very little respect for citizens. Millions of citizens had made so much sacrifice to obtain their permanent voter cards from grudging distribution centres in the last few weeks in preparation for a chance to assess their leaders. Other millions are losing sleep for INEC’s decision to dole out PVCs that constitutionally belong to citizens by right, all in an effort to exercise their right to vote and their duty to the State. What makes the need for President Jonathan to have an eight-year tenure so crucial that citizens’ rights will have to be abrogated? What verifiable evidence does anyone have to suggest that there will be violence after a free and fair election?  Or, are those that have fallen victims of fear mongering sure that the election will not be free and fair to the point that it will induce violence?

    The country had gone on this road before. Many military rulers had shifted election dates on account of national security. General Babangida cancelled party primaries all in the name of national security. He even annulled the 1993 presidential election in order to ensure the country’s peace and stability. It is too soon to forget the huge sacrifices made by citizens after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. Hundreds of citizens died at home and some in exile as a result of government’s repression of citizens who chose to protect and defend their votes after the annulment of 1993.

    Postponing election for two years is another form of annulment, regardless of how much it is packaged as a national security scheme. The only person to gain from such proposal is the incumbent president. All citizens and other contestants for office are losers. Are governors and legislators also supposed to enjoy tenure elongation? Which of the agencies in the country are to determine members of the Transition Government at federal and state levels?  If the country is so much at risk because of conducting the 2015 election, what evidence do we have that arranging a transition government will not be more risk prone than the arbitrary arrangement?  Should the proposal of the founder of SNG be adopted, the country stands the risk of failing to achieve peace and stability and lending credence to the Yoruba saying: Ole baa ti o bere fun odo nla (a lazy person is unable to do the simple task at hand and asks for something more complex).

    Whatever may be the flaw of the 1999 Constitution and the electoral laws, they both provide for straightforward ways to enable citizens choose their political office holders from president through governors to lawmakers. Opting sixteen years after the exit of military dictatorship for annulment and suspension of elections in the name of national security is sheer escapism. What is needed at this stage is for all patriotic citizens to struggle for free, fair, and transparent elections that are capable of making post-election violence unnecessary for voters.

  • After the deluge: beyond corruption and regional realignment of forces in a post-PDP Nigeria (2)

    After the deluge: beyond corruption and regional realignment of forces in a post-PDP Nigeria (2)

    My generation has failed… we are gone. We are a spent force.
    President Jonathan, at the launching of his reelection campaign in Lagos

    Paradoxically, the most eloquent testimony so far in giving an indication that we are very close to a post-PDP Nigeria came from no other person than President Goodluck Jonathan himself at the flag off for his reelection campaign in Lagos this past Wednesday. It is a universal phenomenon for all incumbent administrations in liberal democratic countries to be defensive in reelection bids, especially where such administrations – like that of Jonathan – have performed abysmally poorly. But at the launching of his campaign this past week, Jonathan went far beyond this norm. He was not only defensive, but he was pretty close to being defeatist; moreover, he gave a clear, unambiguous indication that the source of his defeat is not Buhari and the APC but nothing less than history itself. How did he, how could he make such a devastatingly negative summation of his political legacy at a rally to launch his reelection campaign? Let me explain.

    Jonathan started his speech at the event by apologizing to government workers and contractors who have not been paid their salaries, wages or due recompense for work done. But he quickly went beyond this defensiveness and both in tone and substance he began to sound as if he was not only battling Buhari and the APC but against all past administrations before his own. He asked his audience at the event as well as the whole nation to ask all his predecessors what they had done with the nation’s wealth. On corruption he stated emphatically that if all the past governments we have had in Nigeria had played their parts in fighting corruption it would not have heightened beyond control today. It is of course very strange for an incumbent President to admit that corruption has gone beyond control in his time in office; far worse is it for the same President to declare that the failure was not only his own but, collectively, that of all past administrations and, indeed, his whole generation. Thus, while the Chief Host at the event, Dr. Segun Mimiko, described Jonathan as “the most abused and negatively profiled President in the history of this country”, the “oga patapata” himself made the declaration that serves as the epigraph for this piece about not only himself but his generation: “My generation has failed… we are gone. We are a spent force”.

    It would of course be erroneous and misleading for me to give the impression that Jonathan at that launching of his campaign more or less conceded defeat by Buhari and the APC. Nothing could be further from the facts, the truth than such an observation, such a claim. Indeed, the essential point of my comments on what transpired at the PDP rally in Lagos this past Wednesday is to highlight the fact that Jonathan included Buhari, APC, Obasanjo and all past administrations in our country in the monumental failure that he admitted and bemoaned. In essence then, what Jonathan was saying amounts to a declaration that both he and Buhari, both the PDP and the APC, and both his administration and all past governments in our country put together are failures.

    At this point, I take note here and draw the reader’s attention to the fact that Jonathan in his speech at that rally again and again compared himself to Buhari and logically, he presented his opponent as a worse failure himself, as indeed a previous ruler of the country unfit for being returned to the seat of power. That is the voice, the promptings of candidate Jonathan who wants to win at all costs and come what may. But we must, I urge, pay attention to the weight of historical and political contradictions bearing down on Jonathan as “the most abused and negatively profiled President in the history of this country”, as Mimiko put it. Thus, the essential point I am making here is that almost against his own conscious aspirations and desires, Jonathan at the rally to launch his reelection campaign gave more than a mere hint of a subconscious intimation, an involuntary presentiment that we are on the cusp of a political space, an order of governance that is post-PDP. If the PDP loses the coming elections – as it should and probably will – then we will be plunged into that new political space very soon. But if the PDP rigs itself into perpetuation of its admitted “failure” then of course the day of reckoning will be delayed yet again. In this series, I take the position that that day of reckoning, that new space of political discourse and possibility is at hand and we must prepare ourselves for it.

    In last week’s opening essay in this series, I identified two factors as the twin pivots around which the defeat of Jonathan and the PDP in the coming elections revolve. These are, respectively, corruption and the coalition of mainstream politicians of the “core” North and the Southwest as the dominant formation within APC. In this concluding piece, I now add that these are expedient but not sufficient indices of a true post-PDP political order in our country; expediency, I am urging, is not the same thing as sufficiency. This is because neither the war on corruption nor a realignment of forces among our political elites, nor indeed a combination of the two factors will produce a political order that will clean up the colossal rot and end the great suffering and insecurity for millions of our peoples that the PDP has left as its political legacy for any successor government, any new ruling party in our country. Thus, the fundamental question is or will be the sort of capitalist or bourgeois democracy that comes into being in a post-PDP Nigeria. To put this in very blunt terms, the question is whether a post-PDP Nigeria will still be a pseudo-bourgeois, “agbero” or “area boy” capitalism with its thieves’ headquarters at Aso Rock or a people’s progressive capitalist democracy. How do the twin factors of corruption and the realignment of forces that will be at the centre of the coming elections relate to this fundamental question?

    Concerning corruption, there is a joke making the rounds of elite political circles in the country at the present time that is very pertinent to the subject of our discussion in this piece. Here it is: at the very earliest indication that Jonathan and the PDP are losing the presidential contest, say a few hours into the vote count, many private jets will fly out of the country as the kleptocrats and “lootocrats” close to Jonathan and the PDP flee the country in terror of the punitive measures they expect from Buhari. To this, I add the following questions: What of the kleptocrats and “lootocrats” close to the APC and the other ruling class parties, will they also take off in their private jets or will they feel secure in the knowledge that only miscreants and felons close to the PDP will face the day of reckoning? Will the war on corruption extend to a much needed project to end the monumental waste and squandermania that are endemic to virtually all our ruling class political parties, state governments, National Assembly men and women, local government bureaucrats and their hundreds of thousands of cronies and supplicants? Will the privatization of national and public utilities and assets that are no more than another form of looting since they do not conduce to functioning capitalist enterprises continue or will a post-PDP administration undertake a massive review and revision of the privatization bonanza for the rich and the powerful of the land? And finally: corruption has many faces and wears many masks that hide its gaping wound on the body politick: will a post-PDP dispensation strip away the masks and get to the beating, pumping heart of the nation and its millions of looted lives or will it be business as usual with a mere change of the cast of characters?

    The coalition of big political forces of the “core” North and the Southwest that is the dominant formation within the APC presents an even more complex factor in any preliminary projections into the political order of a post-PDP Nigeria. The popular view, the common assumption is that this is largely a Hausa/Fulani/Kanuri and Yoruba alliance to which politicians of the other zonal and ethnic groups of the country are very important and very volatile supplements. While this is not an entirely factitious view, it is nonetheless a massively oversimplified perspective on the politics of a post-PDP Nigeria. Nigeria is not different from virtually all the other multiethnic and multicultural democratic countries of the world in which any political plurality that confers hegemonic domination on a ruling party is usually necessarily based on alliances like the one that produced the APC. But what is lacking in the dominant political discourses in Nigeria is the recognition that in all the coalitions and alliances that produce ruling parties in the bourgeois democracies of the world, politicians not only represent their zonal, ethnic and religious groups but also their class interests, especially as these are based on the forces and means of production from which their wealth and power are derived.

    Perhaps the most concrete way to express this is to pose the question as to whether the terms “centrist”, “center-right” or “centre-left” can be applied to the APC in particular and, more generally, the political order that will supplant the reign of the PDP. The answer is of course yes, a resounding yes. But the question is not being asked now, as we approach February 14, 2015. But it will be asked thereafter, no question about it, that is if the coming elections move us to a truly post-PDP Nigeria. Beyond the “corruption sublime” of the PDP era, and beyond the return of power or the presidency to the North, the fundamental question of redistributive justice for all our peoples will be raised; and it will be raised in a manner that was not possible when we were all so completely absorbed during the reign of the PDP by the social, moral and spiritual ravages of corruption. In other words, if and when corruption becomes reduced to a scale not higher or worse than we find in most countries of the African continent and the world, we will then face the real challenges and problems of producing a 21st century capitalist democracy that is either functional and bourgeois or social-democratic and popular or perhaps even a brand new combination of these two archetypal forms.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu