The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • PDP, APC and abusive election

    PDP, APC and abusive election

    “Never was ability so much below mediocrity so well rewarded, not, not even when Caligula’s horse was made a consul,” said John Randolph on Richard Rush in the early days of the United States Congress. He could very well have been talking about President Goodluck Jonathan. But since the All Progressives Congress (APC) has sworn not to focus on the person of Dr Jonathan, though his person could not be divorced from his modest accomplishments, we may be deprived of great invectives directed against the president. Indeed, insults have from time immemorial been an integral part of politics, and memorable putdowns have served to excite, engage and humour the electorate. As an influence on voting pattern, however, their utility is doubtful. Nonetheless, in 2015, Nigeria seems nostalgically to be returning to the virulent past, a past that never really left us.

    In more than four statements in the past three weeks, the APC has wisely decided its presidential campaign will centre on issues instead of abuse, on facts rather than fiction, and on perspectives rather than persons. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on the other hand has cleverly impressed it on everyone, including party leaders and unwary voters, that its campaign will focus almost exclusively on vitriolic abuse. The reason is clear: on the exigent issues of the day, the PDP is at its wit’s end, unable to offer explanations for its failures and incapable of envisioning a glorious future. The ruling party will therefore do its damnedest to restrict the campaign to abuse and its focus to persons. If the APC is smart, it will recognise it is unlikely to match the PDP in abuse, and must therefore do its level best to stick to issues, where it will be able to prove with little or no effort how woefully the ruling party had performed, and how inept it had become in remedying the grave issues of the day and the mortal dangers of the near future.

    It is often hard to detach abuse from politics, especially because it constitutes an irresistible part of the dialectics of political campaign. But never in the history of Nigeria has any government proved so derelict of achievements as the President Goodluck Jonathan government, consequent upon which it seems unrepentantly set on avoiding campaigning on records. Indeed, it has already kick-started the campaign of abuse, and is pursuing it unabashedly and with all ferocity. In the past two weeks, two top officials of the PDP have dredged the sewers of abuse so openly it is unmistakable what their objectives are. National chairman of the PDP, Adamu Muazu, drew the first blood when, through his assistant, he described the APC candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, as idiosyncratically combative and anti-democratic, traits he concluded would be introduced into APC governance should the opposition party win the presidential election in 2015. It was scaremongering at its worst, but strictly speaking, since it was not libellous, Alhaji Muazu felt confident to make his opinion public.

    If Alhaji Muazu’s misplaced description of Gen Buhari as a warlord was not bad enough, the ruling party’s national secretary, Prof Adewale Oladipo, descended a notch lower by describing the APC presidential candidate as semiliterate, a reference to the fact that he has no university degree. Dr Jonathan on the other hand had a PhD, said the PDP official, irrespective of what he had done, or is capable of doing, with it. The 2015 presidential poll, Prof Oladipo gloated, “is going to be between darkness and light, it is going to be between a cosmopolitan, highly focused PhD holder and a semiliterate jackboot.” The problem with invectives is that they don’t have to bear any semblance to truth or reality. If not, there is hardly any Nigerian who does not know that Gen Buhari exudes gravitas as opposed to Dr Jonathan’s boyish simplicity, honesty as opposed to the president’s manifest and offensive untruths, forthrightness as opposed to the president’s prevarications, energy as opposed to the president’s lassitude, and cultured outlook as opposed to the president’s provocative provincialism.

    Even if we cavil at the PDP’s style of campaign, the party seems to have little or no alternative. There are no spectacular roads rebuilt on a significant scale to flaunt, and no rail network of high-speed trains to boast of. The PDP government has established more universities, but that is not what Nigeria needs, for the government is unable to maintain the existing ones. The hospitals are a little better than consulting clinics, and whole communities and long stretches of roads are unsafe. Kidnappers run riot, abducted schoolgirls are raped and killed, and schoolboys are massacred at will. The government has become so impotent that it seems there is no government in law and in fact.

    To avoid emphasis on these embarrassing facts, the PDP will focus attention on the persons of the APC leadership and candidates. If they are tired of focusing on Gen Buhari, and cannot focus on his running mate, Prof Yemi Osinbajo, they will seize some of the party’s national leaders, especially Bola Ahmed Tinubu, their favourite customer, to denigrate. In short, no matter what anyone says, and no matter what the APC does, the PDP will stubbornly remain glued to a campaign of calumny because of its tantalising opportunities. That is its lifeline; that is its last straw to clutch at. That is the engine of its presidential campaign; that in fact is the culmination of its 2015 campaign. It can do no other thing.

    The electorate will be left to judge in the final analysis who has run the most effective campaign between the PDP and APC, and which is the most persuasive, campaign of issues or campaign of abuse. The voters will be left to judge whether describing Gen Buhari as semiliterate resonates as powerfully as portraying the impotence of Dr Jonathan in rescuing the 219 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram; or whether labelling the general a warlord is not a compliment in the face of Dr Jonathan’s proven failure in taking the battle to the rampaging Boko Haram, a terror group that has caused so much catastrophe in the country and schism, disquiet and restiveness in the Nigerian military.

  • A Nation that betrays its own

    A Nation that betrays its own

    Law is the house that justice built but no longer occupies.

    BULLED into deep complacency by the election of Barak Obama, the political conscience of Black America has finally begun to stir to life. Sadly, it took the daytime killings of Black men by White police officers to revive the community back to political life.

    Protests have occurred in major cities throughout the nation. Black people have been jolted by the realization that their lives remain less valuable than they should be, than what they had been told to believe. They hoped racial discrimination had become a residual breach of the national contract on social equality. The painful lesson relearned is that Black Americans are disposable byproducts of a political economy with little need for most of them and one that affords diminishing living space for that beleaguered majority of Black America.

    The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson was one thing. The strangulation of Eric Garner in New York was quite another. In the Brown case, conflicting interpretations of that day’s events abounded. The shooter said one thing, Brown’s friend said another. Witness accounts varied on important points. Although the aggressor police officer’s testimony remains highly implausible, it cannot be ruled impossible. The possibility that he was being truthful is slight but the possibility nonetheless exists.

    (In a telling postscript in the Brown case, a witness whose testimony was cited by the prosecutor has been discovered to be a mentally unbalanced racist. Moreover, this witness may not even have been at the scene when the shooting occurred. She has previously inserted herself in other cases, giving unreliable testimony. The prosecutor in Brown should have been aware of her flagrant history; yet, he still presented her to the grand jury without informing them of her habit of bearing false witness. For this alone, the prosecutor should be investigated for professional misconduct.)

    The cloud of factual discrepancy and differing versions of the fatal encounter do not haunt the Garner case.  What haunts that case is the episode was videoed for the world to see. Yet, the picture made no difference to the New York prosecutor and the grand jury he selected. Normally, a picture is worth a thousand words. This video encapsulated more than a thousand words. It showed all that is wrong in the racial history of the nation claiming to be the world’s finest democracy. As long as the legal system affirms killings like Garner’s, the claimed greatness of the American political economy is as true as it is false.

    Mr. Garner was a large, burly Black man living in New York City. Estranged from the world of prosperity and steady employment, the man did what millions of city dwellers across the nation do. He street-hustled. Among his money-making ventures, the man would at times buy packs of cigarettes then resell individual cigarettes to people. The area was a poor neighborhood where many people could not afford an entire pack; they would muster coins for one or two cigarettes at a time. Garner was doing no harm; that same day, he even helped resolve an altercation. However, his street hustle was illegal because all cigarette sales are to be taxed.

    The day of the encounter, Garner may not even have been selling the loose cigarettes. Had he been guilty of such sales that day, his transgression was de minimis. A loose cigarette probably sold for no more than a dollar each.  The city tax on the tobacco sales is 10 percent. Had he sold five cigarettes, he owed the city 50 cents (90 kobo) in taxes. For this small indiscretion, a swarm of police officers descended on him like a small army corralling a thief who had pinched the national treasury and the crown jewels.

    Gardner had no chance. While a number of officers pinned him to the ground, one officer administered a choke hold unauthorized by the police department that hired him. Adding indignity to impending death, another officer placed his hands on Garner’s head, using his full weight to press the man’s face into the hard, cruel New York City pavement. The man pleaded roughly a dozen times that he could not breathe. A dozen times, his uniformed assailants ignored the desperate alarm. His last moments on earth were with his face pressed to the ground that he might take in the foulness and grime of the urban sidewalk as his life’s breath was slowly stolen from him by those hired to protect him.

    As he lay dying, no officer sought to revive him. They walked around his body nonchalantly as if walking around an animal struck by a passing car. There was no urgency in their actions, no remorse on their faces. They felt they had done their job. What they had done to Garner was so disproportionate to his alleged wrong; no logical excuse can be assayed for this ending. At most, they should have given Garner a citation as they do any traffic offender or errant merchant. The reason for lethally attacking him for less than a dollar remains cloaked in racism.

    The coroner properly ruled the outrageous death a homicide. Yet, the grand jury and prosecutor thought otherwise. Upon seeing video, they did not see Garner as a human being. All they saw was black and his blackness obscured any sight and sense of justice they might have otherwise known.

    Had Garner lived during slavery, he would still be alive.  The law enforcement officers would have been more careful with him because he would have been the property of a White man. They would have acted with due care in returning the valued property to his owner. He would have been tussled a bit but not executed. Strange how the worth of a Black man’s life is not established by the mere fact of being a human being. It is established by how closely associated he is to White society. To exist outside the social mainstream, makes a Black man a dreaded superfluity, a victim transmuted into the villain in his own execution. Police men who kill him will be excused because they serve a function in society. While you, the Black man, do not.

    Garner and Brown have not been the only casualties of this dynamic.  The average White racist feels the nation is slipping from their control due to Obama’s presidency and to demographic changes that see Blacks and Latinos becoming larger percentages of the overall population. Perceived change prompts a backlash. The average racist joins the Tea Party or sends anonymous cant to rightwing blogs. Those racists in blue police uniforms are more apt to pull the trigger when the face on the wrong end of the barrel is Black or Brown.

    In Ohio, a Black man, walking in a store while holding a non-lethal pellet rifle, was gun downed by police with no reasonable warning. Ohio law allows people to openly carry lethal weapons.  Thus, the man committed no crime. Yet, he was killed and the offending police officers were given no reprimand. It boggles the mind and makes a farce of justice when an innocent man can be executed and those who committed the misdeed are exonerated. He did no wrong yet he is gone. They wronged him yet they suffer not even minor sanction. When such partiality occurs in a foreign nation, America criticizes and writes annual reports condemning it. When it happens in America, the power establishment protects if not celebrates the transgression as a necessary function of law and order. In the process, justice is disinherited.

    Protests against these attacked were organized in major cities throughout the nation.  Had this been the summer and not the advent of winter, more people would have been taken to the streets in a greater number of cities.  The best aspect of this wave of protests is that they were organized by grassroots activists and not the normal servitors who inhabit the Black establishment.  The youthful organizers’ first plank is to halt the street executions by the police.  But they will not stop there. They will see that defending the right to life is insufficient in itself.  That is where the Civil Rights Movement left off.

    Today’s protesters hopefully will assume the mantle of true leadership the current Black Establishment now deploys for their narrow elitist interests. These new leaders will discover the incompleteness in securing the right to life if unaccompanied by demanding the right to live not merely survive on the social periphery. They will demand jobs, education, economic reform and justice. This will attract a backlash much as the Civil Rights Movement did. The most vocal segment of the backlash will be the right-wing conservatives. The most dangerous element of that backlash will be the falsely liberal establishment.

    That establishment has given their Black surrogates marching orders to stop the genuine young leaders from organizing more people’s marches. The Black establishment did not need to be given the directive.  They already felt the heat. They realized their positions were placed in jeopardy. No one was bounded by quandary more than President Obama. If Black people started to display independent action, his job would be on the line.  No, not the White House job. Whether for good or bad, his mark there has mostly been made.

    The position jeopardized by the young Black leaders is the post-White House sinecure the establishment has designed for him – that of the unofficial leader of Black America. For the past six years, he had proven his worth by keeping Black activism in deep freeze despite the  hardtack policies he has initialed resulting in the deterioration of community institutions, particularly Black universities, and a growing disparity between average Black and White per capita wealth and income. During the Obama years, the Black community has been weakened willfully by establishment policy and practice. The establishment hired Obama to smile and pontificate his people all the way to the poor house. He was doing an excellent job of it until the unruly police began to exhibit a deadly overt racism that would cause the somnambulant Black community to awaken. Obama’s slickness was undone by the gratuitous violence of the new praetorians.

    A delicious twist of irony is in the making. Black political consciousness may reawaken under the very watch of a man endorsed by the establishment to keep the Black community politically dormant. Sensing things were going awry, Obama went into gear. He sent fellow Black elitist, Attorney General Eric Holder, to Ferguson to express concern in hope that a tactful display of implied solidarity would keep the natives from turning restless.  Holder announced his feckless Justice Department would investigate the Ferguson Police Department as a way to soothe community anger. The people realized this Justice Department has a nose for privilege and not a resilient sternum when it comes to protecting the weak and under from the rich and powerful above. Holder’s Justice Department refused to prosecute Wall Street for the visible criminality resulting in the 2008 financial crisis and will not take account of those who tortured and terrorized detainees in the alleged war against terror. That same department will not reform the police.

    It is part of the same federal government that militarized the police by providing the surplus military equipment that has transformed local law enforcement into a paramilitary agency unsuitable for democratic society.

    The protests continued. Then the First Couple took to the media to demonstrate their blackness by citing they had been victims of racism because they had been ignored by taxi drivers or mistaken as store clerks by White shoppers. If these trite remarks were supposed to evoke a sense of solidarity with the average Black, they missed the mark. If this is all the Obamas have experienced, no wonder they are out of touch. They should consider themselves fortunate, then open a listening ear that they may learn the realities of the everyday lives of everyday people. (In part, they cited these inanities so as not to offend their White sponsors. If the President testifies that racism is limited to such innocuous inconveniences, it means that racism did not cause dire condition of the Black community.)

    Raising these trivial incidents insults the millions of Black men and women who have felt the heavy intimidation and have been scarred by the instruments of this unjust system. The bones of thousands of Black men lie in the woods, swamps and along the back roads of the south. So many of us have been stopped along isolate stretches of road by policemen with their hands twitching at their holsters or brandishing their billy clubs, waiting and wanting to draw their pistol or swing that club. As rivulets of sweat swim down your back, you tell yourself to be still and don’t move, no matter the provocation or meanness of the man. They await merely one odd movement or angry word and they will pounce. You will be found guilty of causing the assault against you.

    When their trite examples did not work, Obama summoned a white House meeting of the young activists. His advice was to take it slowly as change comes gradually. This advice was not commended by any true interpretation of history. Change may come slowly but those who succeed in bringing reform rarely seek it piecemeal. They ask for the whole thing then take as much as they can get. The young activists should have retorted that, since the bullets did not kill Brown gradually and the stranglehold did not gradually asphyxiate Garner, they see no reason why their pursuit of justice should march gradually.

    Next, Obama deployed mercenary cleric Al Sharpton to confuse and sidetrack the grassroots movement by holding a march on Washington of his own. During the Obama presidency, Sharpton has visited the White House an extraordinary 60 times. He has become Obama’s man Friday just as Obama is Wall Street’s man Friday. Sharpton is the servant of the servant. However, this tack did not work well either. The people are on to Sharpton. They know he has been an FBI informant, ratting on other Black leaders. He may still be. He refused to allow activists from Ferguson a place in his orchestrated rally. He feared they might say something incendiary or anti-Obama. The crowd began to shout him down.  Eventually, some activists managed to seize the microphone and speak their piece.

    Establishment backlash against the protests went into full gear when a mentally unstable Black man killed two police officers in New York, afterward killing himself. The New York Mayor called for protests to be suspended until the burial of the fallen officers. Former Mayor Giuliani criticized Black leaders for inciting hate. Police officials declared that their department had gone on “war footing.” To that declaration, most Black men would respond, “That is nothing new. You have always been on war footing against us.”

    The murder of the two police officers is a tragedy but no greater than the killing of Brown, Gardner and others.  The protests did not lead to the officer’s death. The proximate cause of the officers’ demise was that police nationwide had been too lethal. When a White supremacist executed two police officers earlier this year and draped the corpses in racist flags, the establishment did not rail that White supremacists should disband their racist campaign and organizations. Police officials did not assert they needed to be on war footing against White hate groups. White establishment politicians said little or nothing about this episode. Now that a Black assailant is involved, they shout to the rafters and quake with self-righteous indignation. It is all part of the ploy to keep Blacks in a lowly place.

    The protesters smartly refused to stop demonstrating. To do so would have been a wrongful, coerced admission that their actions prompted the killings of the officers. What they should do is expand the scope of the protests. While protesting police brutality, they should also advocate tighter gun control so that unstable people cannot get easy access to weapons. The spirit of the expanded protests would be that neither the police nor the populace needs to be on war footing. Both should take intelligent steps toward peace.

    Finally, perhaps the Black community is awakening. Theirs must be a dual arising. First, they must come to grips with the fact that the current ways of the political economy work against them. Second, they must realize that the established Black leadership is wedded to the current ways of the political economy. The people must seek reform as well as reject those who claim to be their leaders. Perhaps, just perhaps, the son of the Civil Rights Movement is being born out of the deaths of Brown and Garner.

     

    ( 08060340825) sms only

  • Leadership recruitment: APC needs to proceed cautiously

    Leadership recruitment: APC needs to proceed cautiously

    A few months back, many Nigerians, including this columnist and even All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders, probably never imagined that the main opposition party would rise to its present stature, let alone stand at the door of forming the next government. But here they are, a few weeks to the general elections, poised to assume the presidency, and riding on the crest of popular disaffection with the jaded and exhausted ruling party. In consequence, they must begin to face many obligations, some summoning them to extremely high dose of discipline, imaginativeness, organisation and character. How they respond to these obligations will determine how successful they become.

    They already recognise the huge task of formulating a party ideology out of their variegated backgrounds and disparate worldviews, but this is a task, among many other tasks, they seem to have postponed to sometime in the future. But there is one responsibility they can neither ignore nor postpone: the task of fine-tuning their leadership recruitment processes. This is what will define them and help them chart a responsible and successful path into the future. So far, they have approached the matter rather desultorily and offhandedly, an approach that has cost them a lot in terms of prestige and credibility.

    An example is the rather carefree way they welcomed Femi Fani-Kayode, Ali Modu-Sheriff and Dino Melaye into their fold. Mr Melaye is still with them, and is continuing to play a somewhat prominent role in the party. Mr Fani-Kayode was barely two weeks with them, after defecting spectacularly from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), when he began to rub elbows with APC leaders and accompany them to high-profile meetings. Mr Fani-Kayode is doubtless eloquent and aggressively eager to defend and advance the interest of his friends; but he is also famously eccentric, polemical, abusive, unreliable and almost wholly without leadership character.

    It will be recalled that he insinuated himself into the confidence of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, reviling and denigrating him until he got a job with that government, and then kept quiet. It required little effort, after a while, for him to reject his PDP friends and praise his way into the APC, where it seemed a man of his combative talent and piquant disposition was needed to serve as a battering ram against the PDP. In the end, it also required very little effort for him to pick a quarrel with the APC leaders, whom he accused of sectarian insensitivity, abuse them thoroughly and denounce them as unprepared for national leadership. Mr Fani-Kayode is now back to his vomit.

    Like Mr Fani-Kayode, Mr Melaye is cantankerous, intrepid, willing to risk everything, and a gifted rabble-rouser. He was swiftly welcomed into the APC fold, where he also began to rub elbows with party leaders, offering to lead many of their escapades designed to irritate, frustrate and suffocate the PDP and its leaders. He is a stump maverick and soapbox virtuoso; but he is also a quintessential eccentric who is just a hair’s breadth away from accomplished thuggishness. He campaigns for probity and character, but at bottom those virtues mean nothing to him, going by his behaviour during the last APC primaries in his home state of Kogi. Because of him, a full revolt is underway against the APC in Kogi West.

    Reflecting its problematic leadership recruitment style and policy, the APC has faced serious leadership challenges, and has barely managed to suppress the rage of its Young Turks, virtually all of them a part of the party’s leadership at state and national levels. The party must urgently mature. It must fine-tune its party ideology, establish parameters for recruiting young politicians and defectors into its leadership cadre, and define rigidly the qualifications and character such leaders must possess. If the party is to minimise discontent and run a tight-knit organisation, it must ensure that defectors and other party faithful are no longer automatically inducted into leadership cadre simply because they possess oratorical gifts, eagerness to fight the enemy, and loyalty, much of it skin deep.

  • Prof Bolaji Akinyemi Vs PDP’s history of electoral apostasy

    Prof Bolaji Akinyemi Vs PDP’s history of electoral apostasy

    One would not but wonder what facilities the professor thinks the opposition has to start a crisis knowing how unencumbered the Nigeria police and other security agencies are in turning their offensive weapons on its members

    Since I can, with considerable justification, claim some close affinity with Professor Bolaji Akinyemi who I had actually celebrated on this very page before – see TWO OF A KIND – Sunday, April 29, 2012 – this article should qualify as the archetypical Yoruba’s ‘oro to so sini lenu to bu’yo si -words that foul up the mouth but simultaneously sweetened it by adding salt  because  I ordinarily should not be seen controverting Professor Akinyemi on a public forum like this. Unfortunately, these are not ordinary times.  Our last  mutual engagement, together with some distinguished Yoruba icons, was the  effort , not only  to position the Southwest  appropriately within the Nigerian mix but, in particular, to birth a Socio-Cultural Pan-Yoruba Organisation where all Yoruba, irrespective of  political party affiliation, can sit amicably together to collectively interrogate  the way forward for the Yoruba  nation’. The story of AGBAJO YORUBA AGBAYE, under the distinguished interim Chairmanship of Lt. Gen. Alani Akinrinade, but which was mummified by then Southwest PDP governors during those days of the locust, is for another day.

    In our own respective corners, however seemingly significant or insignificant, we make history every day. So not many are likely to forget  Professor  Bolaji  Akinyemi in a hurry having served, not only as Director-General, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs,  but also as the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister during, arguably, the most winsome period in the history of our external affairs relations as a country. To that period must be credited his worthy attempt to establish a CONCERT OF MEDIUM POWERS. I would not know now, if he still considers that as his greatest achievement in public service given his recent, more than seminal role, in the National Conference which the president recently confessed was a ‘Yoruba’ initiative.

    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 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.

    For instance, in a text message  to me a few hours after his WAY FORWARD went public, a literally infuriated Olumide Ayeni, PhD, a top class legal practitioner and celebrated Omoluabi, not given to easily  losing his cool, shot it down writing as follows: ” Good evening uncle and seasons compliments Sir. I thought Professor Bolaji Akinyemi is supposed to be an eminent political scientist and statesman.  Why is he preaching to the converted and playing the ostrich?  If he is to be taken seriously, let him stand up to the truth as there can be no violence next year if the elections are free, fair and transparent.  JFK it was, he wrote, who once said that ‘those who make peaceful change impossible make violent ones inevitable. How on earth did he think that even a fool would not see through his red herring dressed up in statesmanlike pronouncement? This is hubris of the highest order and I am so disappointed’.

    The respected OODUA PATHFINDER was more scathing in its editorial on the subject.  Paraphrasing the paper, it is of the opinion that Professor Akinyemi  is being clever by half by pretending  he  is ignorant of the nature of the current Nigerian presidency  thereby leading him to suggest that  both parties would  jointly be  responsible for President Jonathan’s anti-democratic actions. Writing further, it said ‘there is only one person to be held responsible for any violence and that is the president. The reason it wrote, is simple because he has never held anyone accountable for any high crimes, even as he himself is an active participant. Violence, it says,  does not occur in a vacuum; so  when  security forces embark on illegalities, hiding under “orders from above,  when state institutions are used to maul the opposition,  it is no rocket science – as the professor himself would say – to know that its purveyors are setting the stage for violence. So, Akinyemi’s warning, the paper concluded, would make sense only if the president had been acting within the Constitution he swore to uphold”.

    This government has committed and has not stopped committing serial illegalities thus confirming the truism that the president really doesn’t care a hoot as he personally once told Nigerians. It harassed and tear-gassed elected representatives of the people, and recently led sundry beneficiaries of its ill-digested economic policies to donate sums of money far in excess of the campaign funds allowed by law. Try go to court to challenge this affront on the citizenry and you see Nigerian courts find in favour of a government that has succeeded in compromising every institution of state.

    Also, rumours already have it that like it happened in the Ekiti election where NYSC members used were trained in far away Akure, those to be deployed in 2015 are already being ‘bent’, preparatory to assist in rigging the election, a situation which, if true, can completely endanger the lives of these young Nigerians. Parents are therefore put on this long notice to warn their children or wards who might be carried away by amounts which to, a 21billion-plus rich PDP will be nothing more than a pittance.

    With some of these illegalities not unknown to Professor Akinyemi, it is a surprise he could opine that the two parties should be held responsible for any election-related crisis. Worse is the fact that though most Nigerians are aware of  PDP’s history of electoral apostasy -apostasy used  here loosely to describe  the party’s serial electoral malfeasance – it accounted for  a self-confessed rigged-in president- the highly regarded professor still found  it difficult to be a honest broker. PDP has graduated far and beyond traditional rigging tactics and had gone scientific as we saw in the Ekiti election. The inability to prove it at the Ekiti Election Tribunal was due to its technicality but I believe that Nigerian lawyers will soon get round it. I have no doubt that its success in Ekiti would spur PDP to its further deployment in the 2015 elections. It is therefore the responsibility, not of a complicit INEC, but of opposition political

    parties to negate that possibility. One would not but wonder what facilities the professor thinks the opposition has to start a crisis knowing how unencumbered the Nigeria police and other security agencies are in turning their offensive weapons on its members. Comparisons can be  odious as what is generally forgotten  when  some misguided people attribute the 2011 post election crises to General Buhari is the fact that his oft-quoted statement  had a  condition precedent which is: IF ELECTIONS ARE RIGGED, there would be crisis.  Last Sunday on this page I mentioned how the first day’s  election was  allegedly cancelled just  to ascertain the general’s area of strength to which fake papers were then allegedly ferried on subsequent  days; something they did successfully because of the general’s lean manpower resources on ground but which today, is no longer the case.

    In concluding, I wish to respectfully say that had Professor Akinyemi, in his letter, laid the requisite and appropriate emphasis on the critical need for a genuinely transparent election, – something ONLY President Jonathan can guarantee, he would have found me standing ramrod behind him.

  • Making the consumer king

    Making the consumer king

    Consumer Protection Council’s rift with Coca-Cola as litmus test

    After a three-week vacation, and one in which I deliberately decided to rest my column, one should return pregnant with issues to deliver, especially given the flurry of political developments within the period. True, I was tempted not to suspend the column during my vacation in view of the (then) pending primaries of the major political parties, the most talked-about being those of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), which threw up the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari, respectively, as contenders for the presidency.

    Gen. Buhari’s emergence has no doubt altered the political calculations, especially in the PDP which had probably hoped that the result of the APC primaries would be different. Anyway, this is not a matter for today. The issue is still evolving and I intend to leave it for now. Next year is going to be loaded politically and one needs to reserve one’s energy so as not to dissipate it on rehearsal when the real dance is yet to come.

    I want to devote this piece to an issue that I had kept postponing since it began early in the year to attend to what appeared to me to be the real burning issues, national or international. But, I have to break that jinx today because the matter is also a burning issue in its own right; first because of the lives of the millions involved and also because of its wider implication for protecting public watchdogs in the country.

    It is the issue between the Consumer Protection Council (CPC) and two big players in Nigeria’s food and beverage sector, Coca-Cola Nigeria Limited (CCNL) and its franchise bottler, Nigeria Bottling Company (NBC) Ltd. The CPC had, following a complaint by a consumer that he bought two half-filled cans of Sprite, one of the products produced by the companies, issued an order on the companies in February, 2014, with specific timelines for compliance. This was sequel to an investigation which spanned over five months and entailed factory inspections, written and oral representations and analysis of evidence, pursuant to the consumer complaint. Eventually, the council fined the companies N100m, which they are contesting in court. For me, the fact that this has been challenged in court is a good development.

    It is true that Nigeria needs investors, but I detest this impression that these foreign companies are doing Nigerians a favour by operating here. It is true that our operating environment is not that business friendly but this should not be an excuse for people to give us subhuman treatment. Some people even wonder about the big deal in having half-filled cans of a beverage. It is difficult to blame such people given where we are coming from. The point is, we have been so dehumanised that we do not even know that we have rights as human beings. How many people here, for instance, know that there is something called ‘consumer product recall’ in which millions of defective products are withdrawn from the market in order to protect the consumer? In civilised climes where this occurs, the overriding consideration is not the loss to the companies but the health and safety of the citizens and consumers. These big companies know all these and more; they know how they are forced to shell out huge sums in compensation over some of the things we consider non-issues here.

    In the specific Sprite case, key findings of the investigation revealed that the cans of the soft drink were defective, that the companies neither had a written shelf-life policy for their products nor an implementation plan outlining practical steps for the implementation of the companies’ first in first out (FIFO) rule.  The investigation also revealed that the companies’ grievance resolution policy does not properly address compensation for injury or compensation in instances where replacement will be inadequate.

    It is only if we want to deceive ourselves that we would pretend that these defects are not there, not only with Coca-Cola products but with many other producers’ as well. We have had cases of people who saw cockroaches in bottles of their soft drinks. We have had cases of people reporting other particles in the drinks. Some of these are easily detectable if the drinks are not coloured; but detection is difficult in instances where they are, as one might even have started to consume the content before seeing the strange objects.  This could be the handiwork of some competitors in situations of unhealthy rivalries in which producers of similar product try to outdo one another. It could also be the result of laxity in quality control from the manufacturers. Whichever it is, it is not good for the consumers. And this is why governments all over the world create agencies to monitor manufacturers to ensure that they produce products to standard.

    On a personal, Coca-Cola is my favourite soft drink and it is likely to remain so until I find a better alternative. But I have also had cause to complain to the woman selling it on our premises on not less than two occasions that the taste of the product was different from the usual one. As a matter of fact, the usual gas released when the bottles are opened was conspicuously missing on all occasions that I experienced such. She would always ask me to come for replacement but I never did.

    I know that ignorance is no excuse in law; but I must confess that much as I am usually particular about the expiry dates of most other items I buy, including milk, butter and margarine, it never occurred to me that soft drinks have a shelf life-span. And if at my level I do not know, I wonder the millions of Nigerians who suffer such ignorance. But then, it is hard to blame anyone for this as not much emphasis is placed on the producers inscribing the expiry dates conspicuously on their bottles as do the manufacturers of drugs, cosmetics, etc. I think they are just beginning to do that. I guess too that I am part of the problem because I had always kept the defects in the product to myself and the retailer. But again, there is a limit to how far you can push such a case once the drink has been opened. You need all the angels in heaven swearing in order to prove that you are not trying to play a fast one on the company so as to make some quick money.

    The point is that the CPC needs the support of all in its bid to ensure that sanity is brought to bear on the beverage sector and in other sectors where it has jurisdiction. It is good that the Federal Government has waded into the matter by dragging the soft drinks companies and their chief executives to court for alleged criminal breach of Consumer Protection Council (CPC) Act. Early in the year, the council ordered the management of Aero Contractors Company of Nigeria Limited to compensate 39 passengers on its flight AJ132 of November 8, 2013 who were abandoned at the Abuja International Airport and left stranded overnight. Aero Contractor Airlines was ordered to pay N41, 000 each to the passengers, bringing the total fine to N1.599million. Such an agency is not likely to be popular with the corporate players it is supposed to regulate their activities in our kind of environment where many other public watchdogs are compromised.

    Although the practice of not wanting to abide by global standards is common even among many Nigerian companies, it is particularly worrisome that multinationals that should know better are in the forefront of this. What is particularly perplexing is that some of them even have different standards for the Nigerian market and do all kinds of things which they dare not in their home countries or even in some other African countries here apparently because no one cares about anything in Nigeria, or at least so they think. That is why they would have the temerity to threaten to have removed any chief executive of a supervisory agency who is not prepared to play ball with them. There is no way the  consumer will ever wear his crown as king if we continue to tolerate such nonsense.

    Thank you all

    I was away for just three weeks but some of my readers made it look like I had been off duty for far longer the way they kept asking what happened. I guess that was because I proceeded on the vacation unannounced in the first week. Thank God I am back. I am particularly grateful to Simon Oladapo, a regular reader of this column who got married on December13. He was the first person who called to find out what the matter was.

    I thank you all and wish you a happy New Year in advance.

  • Don’t let them die

    Don’t let them die

    These are traumatic times for the nation. The country has been literally foaming in blood.  We may have to reach back to the apogee of the In?a empire for the equivalent of such medieval bloodletting. The outgoing year is our own annus horribilis, no doubt about that. Before our eyes, Nigeria has become a legendary abattoir with the odour of gore and human dismemberment hanging heavily in the air. The only consolation is that if compulsory change does not come to these climes very soon, we can as well call in the receivers.

    When a nation is in such historic distress, it can be assumed that its major institutions are also afflicted. An organic crisis of the state does not spare the vital organs of state.  The army is the premier institutional bulwark of the state. If we say Nigeria is in traumatic distress, the trauma is writ large over the military in its operational and strategic capacity as well as its offensive and defensive capability.

    Despite its return to strict professionalism and the enviable strides it has taken in the demilitarization of the polity, the Nigerian military has not been smelling of rose in recent times. The army has suffered a painful and tragic demystification. Once fabled and much respected for its peace-keeping prowess abroad, the Nigerian military has been humbled and taken to the cleaners by a hitherto rag-tag militia which has now acquired the offensive deadliness of a well-motivated fighting force.

    Reader of this column would have noticed a reluctance to discuss military matters. This is because of the sensitive nature of national security and the territorial integrity of a nation, no matter who is in temporary power.  But the military is subordinated to civil authorities because military matters are far too serious and important to be left to professional soldiers.  As the modern world is proving, the armoury of knowledge is far superior to knowledge of armoury. The human brains carry the deadliest ordnance.

    Yet as the last defender of the state and the ultimate bulwark against insecurity and anarchy, the military must be insured and insulated against petty partisan politics. A disgraced army is not only a danger unto itself but a grave danger to the nation. When the army ceases to exist as an effective fighting force, the nation itself ceases to exist as a viable proposition.  This is why whatever its past misjudgment and its current misdemeanour, enlightened self-interest dictates an urgent engagement with the military in order to help them out of the current cul de sac.

    There is opportunity in every crisis and there is no terrible situation without its redeeming features.  It is just as well that the Boko Haram crisis remains within the ambit of an internal security operation rather than outright war against an external enemy.  That notwithstanding, the fallout has been equally remarkable. At the last count, eighty officers and men of the army have been sentenced to death for mutiny.  About two hundred enlisted men are in the dock awaiting trial and sentencing.  It doesn’t get more grotesquely unsettling.

    Let us be clear about something. There can be no question of condoning mutiny which is a grievous offence that undermines the cohesiveness and integrity of the army as an effective fighting force. In dire war situations, mutineers, deserters, cowards and other saboteurs are often rounded up and summarily shot without any recourse to legal acrobatics.

    Yet the disproportionate number of culprits and the nature of insubordination in this case suggest something more fundamental than routine mutiny.  Many of these men have been shouting from the rooftop that their real offence was to have the temerity to ask for better and more adequate weaponry to conduct a campaign against an enemy armed with modern and sophisticated ordnance. This effrontery has merely earned them an elongated charge sheet.

    Last Friday, at a press briefing that was as bizarre as it was bristling with dark comedy, the military paraded an untagged colonel as a whistle-blowing suspect. Morale and discipline appeared to be at their lowest ebb. Even the most malignant enemy of the black race must be sad and sorry that this is happening to the army of the greatest conglomeration of black souls in the world.

    All of which suggest that as usual we may be treating the symptom while ignoring the fundamental ailment.  An internet cynic noted wryly that at this rate the army may as well end up putting a whole brigade on trial for mutiny. The sheer absurdity of the suggestion ought to alert us that we may actually be looking at something probably more sinister: a complete collapse of discipline and the fracturing of the army.  Having fought a civil war without the army fracturing, the nation may well be suffering from the accumulated stress of partially resolved crises.

    The ongoing armed critique of the nation and the state by the Boko Haram insurgency has exposed the grave flaws of both in a way that the civil war and the numerous coups and military uprisings never did. Coups and civil wars are endogamous crises of the state, internal disputes among state personnel who have gone to the same schools and learnt the same fighting strategy. The contradictions are not fundamental and are easily resolved.

    Insurgency, on the other hand, particularly religious insurgency, is an exogamous crisis and an externally imposed confrontation with a different paradigm of engagement and a different order of battle. It is a duel unto death without any mediating or countervailing circumstances. The current crisis of the Nigerian military formations is a reflection of a more fundamental crisis of the Nigerian state and nation. Although the Boko Haram crisis could have been better handled, the ascendant generation of Nigerian military leadership cannot be held responsible for the Boko Haram insurgency.

    Endogamous crises of the state, because they involve non-fundamental contradictions, are ironically a double-edged sword. Since they are easily resolved and without rigorous inquest and sufficient retribution they leave a trail of impunity and a culture of state promiscuity. For example, because they were still in passive power, the military got away with their misadventure in partisan politics without properly evaluating its short term and long term effect on the institution. Till date, no rigorous inquest was ever conducted into the real cause and consequences of the civil war.

    It is the sins of omission and commission of their forebears that have caught up with the Nigerian military. When he was asked why the post-Saddam Iraqi army wilts so pathetically before the ferocious onslaught of the ISIS fighters , the American ambassador noted tersely that it was because they had nothing to fight for.  Yet this was the fragment of the same army whose forebears fought the Iranians toe to toe in a seven year grudge match between the Shitte elite of Iran and the ascendant Sunni hegemonists of Iraq.

    The reason for this contrasting attitude within what is supposed to be the same military formation is very simple. Under the tyrannical and cruelly whimsical Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi military had something to fight for. It could be a debased and authoritarian form of Iraqi nationalism but it worked. In the Iraq of post-American occupation, both nation and nationalism have disappeared leaving a volcanic landscape permanently irrigated by blood.

    The failure of successive generations of Nigerian leaders to evolve a national ideology as a byproduct of forging the disparate nationalities into an organic community has now returned to haunt the military in its operative and strategic capacity. Simply put, the Nigeria army has nothing to fight for. All the great armies the world has seen, from the army of Alexander the great that swept all before it, the Tartan hordes of Genghis Khan, the human waves of Mao tse Tung, to the rugged Vietnamese insurgents of Ho Chi Minh, have always had something to fight for. For centuries, the political notion of American Exceptionalism powered its fighting forces.

    Against the ferocious Boko Haram insurgents, it is the military’s residual fighting flair developed in the course of several international peace-keeping operations that has kept it going.  It was the fighting spirit that produced the likes of the late, iconic Brigadier Maxwell Khobe whose heroic exploits in Sierra Leone have entered military legend and folklore. But it relied on individual talent rather than on solid tradition.

    Needless to add they can only thrive and flourish within the context of conventional military operations against mainly conventional fighting forces and small time scoundrels.  Against an unconventional fighting force with determination and a suicidal frame of mind, an ill-equipped and de-motivated army is bound to have its back to the wall. Only an army imbued with formidable nationalist zeal combined with superior knowledge and cutting edge technology can trump the wild and merciless fanaticism of a fighting outfit spurred by religious extremism.

    The transformation of the Nigerian military into a modern and effective fighting force cannot be divorced from the transformation of the Nigerian nation itself to true political and economic modernity. We can have a debate about the principles and modalities as part of the current pitch for genuine change. Meanwhile and in the interest of concerned compatriots and posterity, the Nigerian army should immediately put on hold the impending judicial slaughter of its own. Nigeria has already witnessed too much bloodshed in the last few years.  Please don’t let these men die.

  • Falling oil prices and Nigeria’s ‘blessed’ 36 mini heads of states: can we learn from the specter of fast dwindling revenues?

    Falling oil prices and Nigeria’s ‘blessed’ 36 mini heads of states: can we learn from the specter of fast dwindling revenues?

    The house maketh the feasters merry; it is emptied out.
    Bertolt Brecht, “Concerning Poor BB”

    Professor Abiola Irele will be surprised to read this, but it was in his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A., that the conversation that eventually led to this piece took place sometime in mid-November. By that time, though global oil prices had not yet plummeted to slightly less than 50% of what they had been in August, I was still sufficiently troubled by the irony in the “good luck” in the increase in what dollars from my salary could fetch in exchange with the Naira. With this in mind, I thought of the bitter irony in the Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah’s Why Are We So Blest? In the novel’s symbolic plot and character structures, Africa’s economic and social elites are presented as a neocolonial glitterati doomed to achieve and enjoy their wealth and prestige, their “blessedness” at the expense of the terrifying poverty and squalor of the living conditions, the life chances of the great majority of their compatriots.

    With this in mind, during that conversation with him in mid-November, I ruefully observed to Professor Irele that the gain in the value of my dollar-denominated salary at Harvard in exchange with the Naira is the other grim face of the downward spiral in the value of our national currency. In other words, my gain, my “blessedness”, is the result of the misery that the devaluation of the naira would cause to my country. Before I could finish my sentence, Professor Irele shot back at me: “Speak for yourself, BJ! You have to send dollars to Nigeria in exchange for the Naira; I have to send Naira to my family in the U.S. in exchange for the dollar”. From this short exchange and from Armah’s Why Are We So Blest?, it was a short step for me to identify who among our country’s political elites are, like me, protected from the freefall of the Naira in the face of rapidly falling world oil prices. The President and the Executive Governors of our 36 states: they are the most cushioned, the most insulated from what almost all Nigerians are feeling now and may perhaps feel even more sharply in the months ahead as the oil prices continue to tumble. The governors – the mini heads of state in Nigeria – in particular embody more than any other social group that word “blessed” as deployed with devastating irony in Armah’s novel: a state of benighted “blessedness” that is dependent on the hardship and suffering of the vast majority of the people. This is the subject of this week’s column, but before I come to it, permit me to dwell briefly on falling oil prices and what many progressive and patriotic commentators in Nigeria are saying about the alarming specter.

    In the present discussion, space will allow me to reflect only on perhaps the two most important things that the most astute commentators are saying about the falling oil prices. First of all, they are saying that the hardships that are already here as well as those to come must make us learn, as many other oil-producing nations have learned, that we must diversify the national and local economies in our country and stop depending so overwhelmingly on oil. This argument which, by the way, has been around for at least two decades now, is buttressed by the fact that Nigeria has an abundance of many other natural resources that lie untapped because of the ease with which oil revenues flow into our national and state coffers. The second argument is newer but no less crucial: a country’s most valuable resources are its people. For this reason, far more than oil, far more than any other single or group of natural resources, it is the human beings and their capacities and potential that must constitute the resource base of our country. After all, there are countries on this planet that have little or no natural resources and therefore depend almost entirely on their human capital. For if you have developed human capital, if you mobilize and strengthen the productive and creative capacities of your people, you can get natural resources from other countries of the world, especially countries like Nigeria that fail to tap and develop the productive capacities of their peoples.

    We all know that the least developed and therefore the most under-utilized resource that we have is precisely this one that pertains to both the capacities and potential of our people, most especially our young people that constitute the demographic majority of our populace. On the basis of this factor, we can see clearly that our massive and distorting overdependence on oil revenue has not only led to a looting frenzy, a systemic and collective kleptomania by our rulers, but far worse is the fact that it has led to wastage on a monumental scale of our most valuable asset as a nation, this being the productive potential of the teeming millions of our young people. The potential is there in our youths in whom the future of our survival as a nation and society depends; but that potential remains blighted and unrealized thanks to the “blessedness” of our leaders’ profligate overdependence on oil revenues. This brings us back to the issue of those in our country who, in their state of “blessedness”, are the most protected from the terrifying prospects of our dwindling oil revenues.

    Now, it is true that in land size and population, most of the states in Nigeria are in fact like many of the countries of the world. But that is not why the governors of our 36 states feel and act like heads of states in their own right. The reason is simply and unambiguously a dependence on oil revenues that is like the dependence of human beings, human communities on water. Much in the manner in which no human community can survive without reasonably assured access to water sources, so can the system that has given us 36 mini heads of states in Nigeria not survive without our overdependence on oil revenues. In all but two or three of our 36 states, oil revenues constitute the only source, the only raison d’être of both the governor’s administrative legitimacy and symbolic, honorific prestige. Even in the exceptional states like Lagos and Rivers, the over-reliance on oil revenues is also decisive, if not overdetermining. For everyone knows that every month, the 36 states all head to Abuja to collect their respective allocations from national oil revenues and that this is the single most important activity of each of the 36 states. What is not duly or sufficiently recognized, in my opinion, is the fact that this activity also sets the tone and the agenda for all the governors, al the chief executives of the 36 states. For I think that it is not sufficiently recognized that if the monies monthly paid out to our mini heads of states are not paid to them but are, by a completely different order of governance than the one practiced now, diverted to developing the human capacities and potential of our peoples, the governorships, the mini heads of state syndrome would end tomorrow and absolutely nobody would mourn its demise.

    As I stated at the beginning of this piece, the President and our  36 mini heads of state are, like me and millions of Nigerians who work abroad especially in the countries of the convertible currencies of the world, are protected from the dire prospects of the naira’s spiraling downward plunge. We are “blessed”. But the “blessings” are very illusory, more so for our mini heads of states than for Nigerians who live and/or work abroad. This is because the consequences of the falling value of the Naira in relation to the dollar and the convertible currencies of the world are more gradual and less immediate for Nigerians working abroad than for our mini heads of states. Their monthly trips to Abuja are becoming more and more fraught, more and frustrating. Sometimes, they return with empty bowls, with promissory notes whose future redemption is not assured. They are hanging on by the skin  of their authority and legitimacy as all their clients, all their creditors pound on their doors, demanding both their just and unjust share of the largess from the overdependence on oil revenues.

    There are many lessons to learn from our dwindling oil revenues. Hardship and suffering often serve to teach us about ourselves, about the world and about life. For me, the greatest lesson that we can learn from the current crisis of the downward spiral of oil prices on the world market is that oil revenues, as long as we continue to be able to garner them even if they decline, must go to meet the needs of the young and the most needy in our society. This calls for the abolition of the mini heads of states system of governance in our country, together with its chief hegemon – the strong, bloated presidency. I doubt that this is about to happen. But this is no reason not to herald its presence on the horizon of the present.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Le moinmoin, cest moi

    Whoever coined this name for the Yoruba delicacy made from beans must have a sense of the wild possibilities of language. The name connotes a mellow mellifluousness and a delicate deliciousness which haunt the taste buds for a long time. Even the indigenous name–?l?l?— connotes suppleness and subtlety which hint at Yoruba cuisine at its most gloriously addictive.

    The reason for this flight of linguistic fancy and culinary masturbation so to say is a passing reference to the great Yoruba delicacy in this past week’s offering of fellow columnist, Tony Marinho, in a moving tribute to his late stepmother, Madam Grace Ebun Marinho, who recently joined the Saints Triumphant. It is when you realize that others also share your secret passions that our common humanity is reinforced.

    As a whistle-blowing patrol guard of ancient Yoruba cuisine, snooper took in Marinho’s casual reference to “moin moin” with considerable skepticism at the initial stage. “What does this oyinbo-looking man know about moin moin?” yours sincerely rumbled to himself in ill-humour. But after the first paragraph, one became convinced that the good old doctor was an aficionado of the delicacy indeed.

    Two quick tests of connoisseurship did it. The doctor also has an abiding distaste for synthetic moin moin which comes wrapped in cellophane. This usually robs the end product of a certain aroma and exquisite taste supplied by the indigenous wrapping leaves usually freshly cut. Second was Marinho’s contention that  “good moinmoin always leaves the best tasting morsels hidden between the leaves”.  Marinho is spot on. This is what is known in native parlance as “l?b?”

    About thirty two years after describing this delicious phenomenon as “elusive sublimities cowering under the wrapping leaves” in a review of Soyinka’s Ake, snooper is hard put to beat himself. L?b? is the ultimate delight of the moin moin aficionado. It is not always enough to fill the month; always leaving tantalizing hints of insatiable demands.

    Right from youth, snooper has always had a huge passion for steaming moin moin.  Among friends and close acquaintances, this was always a source of heavy jokes and feisty pranks.  If one were to be stranded or sequestered on an uninhabited island, the last request will be for a generous supply of ??l? and ? ko.

    And whilst we are still on the subject of moin moin, it is meet to report on a curious incident that occurred on September 9th this outgoing year. Snooper’s longstanding crony, Barrister Akinlawon Ige, a scion of the illustrious Ige family of Esa Oke, suddenly materialized at the doorstep brimming with mischief and merry gamesmanship. He had left Ibadan at cock’s crow to head for Lagos just to wish his friend a happy birthday.

    Before anybody could say Jack Robinson, Akin had unleashed a basketful of steaming moinmoin and eko all the way from Ibadan. It was a wonderful birthday present. Without wasting any further time on formalities, snooper led the lawyer to a corner of the house where domestic hostilities duly commenced.  After about an hour the whole house was piled up with dead wrapping leaves with both aging delinquents unable to get up. Whereupon Akin crawled up and ordered his driver to take him back to Ibadan. Mission accomplished. Snooper sank back in sated torpor. God bless you all and happy new year in advance.

  • Kenya’s retrogressive anti-terror law

    Buffeted by relentless Al Shabab terrorist attacks, Kenya has passed a controversial anti-terror law permitting the incarceration of terror suspects for up to one year instead of the previous 90 days limit. The law also increases sentences and gives the authorities more powers to tap phones, while journalists could be jailed for three years if their reports “undermine investigations or security operations relating to terrorism,” or if they publish images of “terror victims” without permission from the police. It will be recalled that President Goodluck Jonathan’s initial state of emergency declaration contained a few of such deplorable anti-freedom and anti-media provisions.

    But what is even more controversial about the retrogressive Kenyan law is not the severity and unreasonableness of the law, but the government’s response to criticisms by the United States. The US, said Kenya, had worse provisions in its own anti-terror law, while Kenya had checks and balances. Kenyan opposition parties and the media do not believe the new anti-terror law is reasonable. They think it is execrable, dehumanising and targeted at creating a political hegemony and police state. Kenya is after all notorious for its police repression.

    It is shocking that rather than address the concerns of democrats and human rights activists, Kenya boasts only of the fact that US anti-terror campaign record is worse. It is unfortunately true that the US is forfeiting its moral leadership of the world by its unscrupulous anti-terror war and unrestrained police repression of blacks; but it is sadder that Kenya cannot seem to appreciate that rather than compare itself with a bad case., it owes its people the responsibility of creating social and political systems that should be the envy of all. That it is a developing African country does not mean it should be a laggard in good laws, or compare itself only with worst cases. The quality of leadership in black Africa is appallingly poor; Kenya should not make it even poorer.

  • As we ring out the old year…

    Christmas is gone but the bleakness remains to close the year for us; though I must say it is a hard bell to ring out the year with

    In a few days, the bells will ring for year 2014 to take a bow and exit the stage, and for another to take its place. As usual, a great deal of fanfare attends this change of baton, which begins with the celebration of Christmas. Quite early in the season, for many of us though, Christmas had promised indeed to be a bleak time of it if there was no supernatural intervention. First, though, my own story; it’s a long one but I will cut it short.

    It all began about eleven days to Christmas. We were all sitting quietly in our house of an evening minding our own business and enjoying what little electricity we were given by PHCN (or whatever name they go by now) out of the kindness of their heart, when there was a sudden explosion. We would have put it down to a tyre blow-out or a quarry action if the thing had not coincided with a power cut as we were promptly dumped into pitch-black darkness. That sounds like its coming from the transformer, commented someone from a corner of the dark room, and that means trouble. Why must you put the worst construction on every sound?, someone else asked, obviously trying to stifle her own fears; for all you know, it might well be the top-floor swimming pool of that neighbourhood rich man deciding to come down to street level.

    Actually, that’s another story. I also did not know that it was possible to situate a swimming pool on the top floor of a three-story building; but there you are; only those who have money know how to spend it I guess. Anyway, the fears of our pessimist were confirmed the next day when electricity was not only not restored, a nasty and wild rumour began to spread through the neighbourhood in the route where electricity used to take: there would not be any energy for a while: the transformer had been damaged. TEN DAYS TO CHRISTMAS?, I shrieked. Whoever heard of such a thing? So, while others are singing ‘On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…’ song, I would be singing ‘On the eleventh day of Christmas, PHCN sent to me…’ Imagine that!

    In place of help, only a story spread. A very disrespectful animal, we were told, had run violently into the transformer structure, damaging some parts and managing only to get itself thrown out violently too. Fortunately or unfortunately, the blessed thing was not killed, only stunned, as neighbours reported that the thing got up and walked away after a while. Pity, I thought, at least the neighbours might have been compensated for the darkness they would have to endure as the darkness continued relentlessly into the coming days.

    That was when we heard others tell of their experiences. In their neighbourhood, said one, when the transformer conked out, we had to wait for three months to get light again. Another reported that each house had to contribute money in thousands to get a new one. Someone asked us: is there no rich man in your neighbourhood who can get one for himself and then make you people his parasites?

    Indeed, Christmas was but a mere one day away when, with the combined efforts of the concerned consumers led by our pessimist and the (now gallant) PHCN men who looked to me like Fathers Christmas attending to my wish, the flow of electricity was restored right as the neck of Christmas began to peep in. Phew, it was a close one! I hate to think about the many other neighbourhoods where the entire body of Christmas would pull in, feet and all, and there would be no electricity to even light their ways to the kitchen: due to some errant, stupidly playful goat or cow or act of the devil. I sincerely hope such neighbourhoods find respite soon. Now, in my neighbourhood at least, we are back to abnormality: i.e., a constantly interrupted flow of electricity, thank God. Obviously, when the almighty said let there be light, he did not have Nigeria’s PHCN in mind.

    While the uncertainties about the electricity lasted, another shocking piece of news emerged early in the month. It would be a bleak Christmas indeed for many of my countrymen and women because salaries would be delayed or unpaid on account of the downturn in the economy. Now, when I heard that, it felt like a horror story titled ‘The return of Job.’ He it was who was reputed to have said that that, which he feared most, had befallen him. For us the people, it simply meant that that which the government promised to do, it had begun to do. Remember that it had promised that salaries would immediately become irregular on account of the downturn? Well!

    We have said it before, and I think it needs reiterating here, that it feels a little unfair and sad that the salaries of workers should be the first place of call for the government when faced with cuts in revenue. Honestly, I have wondered aloud why this should be and I have received no education on the matter. Indeed, the silence following my questions on the matter has been truly deafening. Why are people’s jumbo pays not attacked?

    I soon had some experience of what the nation’s finance team promised when the minister said that hard times awaited us in the country. Reality really dawned when I went through the banks. It was only on a fact-finding mission, I assure you, since most of what I have can be carried on my person. That reminds me of a joke.

    You know those stereotype jokes? Well, this one is targeting several groups at once. There was this rustic just come into town, a real Mr. Deeds. Well, what does he do but go and fall into the hands of robbers who beat him black and blue to get at his pocket. Naturally, your rural fellow put up a spirited fight but he was outnumbered and out-techniqued by the city thieves. When the robbers eventually got at what he had in his pocket, they were so disgusted they flung it back at him and sternly rebuked him. ‘You mean you put up this big fight just to save your three dollars?’ ‘Naaaa’, replied he, ‘I thought you were after the one hundred and fifty dollars I had hidden in my shoe’. Like I said, most of what I have can be carried on my person.

    Anyway, since I know that most people do not use shoes to hold money any more but banks, Christmas time is always a tedious time for bankers and clients. What was my surprise then when I stepped into some banking halls and found I could quite well have driven my car in without hindrance. Where normally you could find nowhere to put one foot after another in some of the halls because of the press of customers, there was ample space. The crowd was just not there. It was true what people had been whispering then:  it would be a bleak Christmas indeed because many salaries were missing.

    Well, Christmas is gone but the bleakness remains to close the year for us; though I must say it is a hard bell to ring out the year with. So, as we ring out the old year and make room for the new one, I just want to give you two wishes. I want to wish you strength to see the year through, fighting for what’s in your pocket and your shoes. I also wish that no errant goat will cross your path, or your transformer.