The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • The Banana Republic and its police

    The Banana Republic and its police

    Originally, the term ‘Banana Republic’ referred to small countries which are politically unstable, dependent on a primary agricultural export and are ruled by a wealthy and corrupt clique. Their police forces are often brutal, corrupt and engage in human rights abuses. They are intolerant of political dissent.

    Over time the term has evolved – moving away from the sense of some tiny country whose economy revolves around banana plantations or some other similar primary export. Today, countries struggling with rampant corruption and political instability, mass unemployment, wage inequalities, poor social services and where the security forces are used to oppress their own people define the concept of the ‘Banana Republic.’

    As I tried to make sense of the actions of the Nigerian police, Department of State Security (DSS) agents and soldiers who laid siege to the National Assembly last Thursday, the phrase ‘Banana Republic’ leapt at me. It was not for nothing. A series of events – beyond that day’s madness – pointed to the fact that Nigeria ticks most of the boxes to be so classified.

    Ever since the images and story of that morning’s assault on legislators went viral, a number of senior administration officials have been fingered as having ordered the siege in an attempt to block Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, who had defected from the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) to the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) from presiding.

    I am not bothered about the identity of the official that gave the orders. Knowing the way Nigeria operates, there’s no way security forces can storm the National Assembly and shut out lawmakers without getting their matching orders from the very top. To suggest that ‘Oga at the top’ was unaware is even more scary as it conjures images of a moving train with no one at the controls.

    This latest incident is confirmation of the damage that has been done and is still being done to the Nigerian police. Over the years, a succession of pliant force leaders have acquiesced in turning an institution that is part of our commonwealth into the enforcement arm of whichever government controls the center. That can only spell trouble going into an election year.

    In the dying days of the Second Republic, the then Inspector-General of Police, Sunday Adewusi, unashamedly made it clear the police would further the interests of the then ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) over and above those of the other parties. His commissioner in the old Anambra State, Bishop Eyitene, humiliated the then Governor Jim Nwobodo, severally.

    Even before last Thursday’s display at the National Assembly the police and some of their sister services showed that they had not changed from their servile ways. They don’t behave like a force operating in a democracy, but more like oppressors and conquerors.

    Many still remember how the former Rivers State police commissioner, Mbu Joseph Mbu, turned him himself into the personal adversary of the Governor Rotimi Amaechi. At one point his men tear-gassed Government House, Port Harcourt. Following his transfer to Abuja, he bragged about being a lion who had caged the pesky governor.

    In the run-up to the Ekiti governorship elections in June, Vice President Namadi Sambo showed up in Ado-Ekiti for a PDP rally – prompting the police to, again, show their true colours. That same day former Governor, Kayode Fayemi, who was traversing the town, had an altercation with a police officer who was particularly rude. I recollect his response when someone drew his attention to the fact that he was talking to the governor.

    He said: “Which governor? Who is governor when Vice President is in town? I don’t know any governor!” He said that to Fayemi’s face and hearing.

    In the same Ekiti, the week that seven legislators in a 26-person house sat to approve Governor Ayo Fayose’s nominees, the police provided the stiff arm to keep the governor’s opponents away until the illegality had been perfected.

    When Tambuwal defected to APC, it was the police that pronounced he had lost his Speakership – not the courts! The scandalous nature of the force’s presumption in usurping judicial duties is till date still lost on its leadership, as they continue to defend their indefensible decision to withdraw his security details.

    Since the Speaker’s defection, several members of the House and three erstwhile APC senators from Ogun State have crossed party lines. I don’t recollect the Inspector-General of Police, Suleiman Abba, stripping them of their orderlies and ordering them not to enter the National Assembly precincts.

    Examples of outrageous conduct by the police across the country make for embarrassing reading. But they carry on this way because our political leadership is so parochial. Small men in big offices don’t bother about elevating our democratic experience; they are more concerned with manipulating the coercive instruments of state to extend their grip on power and privilege.

    One of the worst things about the Goodluck Jonathan administration is its lack of originality. For someone who promised to be a breath of fresh air, it’s a shame that he and his team always run back to the template of impunity designed by the first PDP president, Olusegun Obasanjo.

    Long before the incumbent found himself unexpectedly president, his predecessor walked this lawless path. In the heat of his quarrels with his then deputy, Obasanjo sacked Atiku Abubakar’s aides and stripped him of every privilege of office he was entitled to as Vice President – including security details.

    It was all because he defected to another party after the president had frustrated him out of PDP. Atiku went to court and won a famous victory that allowed him to continue as VP until the last day of his tenure.

    It was under Obasanjo that former Plateau State Governor Joshua Dariye and one-time Oyo State Governor, Rasheed Ladoja, were ‘impeached’ by a minority of members of their respective houses of assembly. The then president sustained the illegality because he could order the police and soldiers around. Ultimately, the courts overturned the sham impeachments – much to the shame of the ruling party and its government.

    Although the Nigerian constitution recognizes the executive, judiciary and legislature as independent but equal arms of government, Obasanjo pioneered a doctrine that sought to make legislators appendages of Aso Villa. He and the party worked actively to install their lackeys in legislative leadership. Where they failed they spent their days plotting to topple the incumbents until they had their way.

    The latest political crisis can be remotely traced to the fact that Jonathan also attempted to foist his yes-men and women upon the House of Representatives only to be embarrassed by an assertive chamber that decided to chart an independent course under Tambuwal. Aso Villa had never been comfortable with a Speaker it didn’t make and things were bound to come to a head one day.

    What happened on Thursday is a watershed in the development of Nigeria’s democracy. As the brave and heroic lawmakers risked injury scaling the locked gates, they were serving notice that Nigerians would no longer be cowed by a force that has turned into an oppressor of the very tax payers who pay its bills. They were saying that this country would not be ruled by some Inspector General of Police but by the will of the people reflected in their elected representatives.

    I have been entertained by some ‘commentators’ who have tried to turn what played out on last Thursday into some so-called ‘show of shame’ on the part of the lawmakers just because they scaled the gates to access their chamber.

    The analogy that comes to mind is that of a man screaming loudly because his balls are being squeezed in a vice. In walks this advocate of acceptable public conduct to berate the suffering fellow for disturbing the peace, were he to switch places with the noisemaker, he wouldn’t be so dignified. Clearly, some people never heard of cause and effect.

    The heat triggered by the attempt to forcibly oust Tambuwal is so unnecessary. Jonathan and his people could have gone to court to challenge the defection. They didn’t because despite their preachments they don’t really believe in the rule of law. So they resort to self help. Like we saw a few days ago, it always ends badly.

  • Permanent voter cards: INEC’s might versus citizens’ right?

    Permanent voter cards: INEC’s might versus citizens’ right?

    INEC’s response to queries from citizens who could not find their names and pictures but had with them their temporary cards is nothing more than another indulgence in the culture of excuses.

    The latest controversy on our political landscape is the issue of what the Independent National Electoral Commission calls the Permanent Voter Card. Since INEC’s shoddy work in releasing PVCs to citizens, the country’s political temperature has been raised noticeably. Opposition parties, APC in particular, have justifiably cried foul while image makers for the ruling party at the centre have made frantic efforts to dampen what appears to be a nation-wide opposition to impending disenfranchisement of citizens. INEC itself appears to be less forthcoming on how to resolve the crisis caused by its inefficiency.

    All over the world, the most important ritual of democracy is election. It may come every four years in some countries and every five years in others, but come it must in the character of rituals. The famous claim in democracies that sovereignty belongs to the people is most concretised in electoral democracy: the inalienable right of citizens to choose at constitutionally specified intervals, the persons they want to govern them in the political territory to which they belong as bona fide citizens. Citizens’ right to choose those who rule their country becomes compromised when they are deprived of their right to vote. The right to vote is, first and foremost, represented by unfettered to access to the voter card without which no citizen can cast his/her vote during elections.

    It is a common belief in democracies all over the world that any attempt-intentional or unintentional-that makes citizens feel that their right to choose their leaders has been abridged constitutes an attempt to deny citizens their claim to sovereignty. Such deprivation is perceived as deliberate effort to rob of their citizenship. Denying citizens access to voter cards is a clear case of annulment of citizens’ political and civil rights in a democratic country. Where such happens, concerned citizens have a right to scream, protest, and even go to court. Failure to protest and demonstrate against abridgement of such rights is tantamount on the part of citizens to knowingly committing political suicide.

    However, in the present circumstance of millions of citizens not being able to collect their voter cards from INEC officials, the onus of rectification rests solely on INEC, if the commission is not to be labelled as election rigger. Members of the ruling party and spokespersons for the president should have no role or voice in the matter of INEC’s failure to make voter cards available to citizens without fetters. For the ruling political party to criticise other parties for protesting against INEC’s failure to provide voter cards to citizens as required by law, such ruling party spokespersons give the impression that it aids and abets (or at least condones) the commission in its failure to perform its constitutional function properly.

    As a citizen who registered to vote as required by the country’s electoral law, my experience in M.K.O Abiola Gardens during last week’s release of voter cards convinced me that INEC was not prepared to release voter cards to citizens without fetters. The Commission was absent on the  first day it was billed to release cards, a day set aside as work-free to enable citizens perform their constitutional duty with ease. On the second day when INEC’s agents came, the performance of the agents was abysmally low. The agents were rude to citizens, shouting at them and ordering them around. Citizens who came there with their temporary voter cards (with their pictures on them) were ordered to first go and search for their names among hundreds of names and pictures pasted on the walls.

    Furthermore, when citizens came back to tell the agents that most of the papers had fallen off, they were told rudely to put the papers back on the wall  themselves, if they were truly interested in obtaining their PVCs. When citizens asked for assistance and glue to re-mount the papers on the walls, they were told to bend down and search for their pictures among sheaves of papers on the ground, if they were not ready to put the papers back on the wall. Those who did not see their pictures on the walls or on the ground were told caustically to wait for future announcements in the media about when they should come for re-registration. Those lucky enough to find their names, like me, were made to line up in the sun while the agents groped for cards in trays on and below the table. In the three hours I was there, more people were unable to find their names on the wall than those lucky enough to find theirs.

    The experience of those who were able to find their names is enough to accuse INEC of subtle or covert attempt to rob or deny citizens of their right to vote in the 2015 election. Rights in democracies are not supposed to be given grudgingly. Instead of providing a facile access to the cards for citizens on the day I went to collect my PVC, the agency frustrated citizens and gave the impression that the agents preferred to annoy citizens to quit without receiving their cards. One did not on that day need to be a critical citizen to suspect that INEC agents were more interested in holding on to the permanent voter cards than in giving them to their rightful owners. Otherwise, the culture of service (as low as it is in our country in relation to others) is generally higher than what I observed that day.

    INEC’s response to queries from citizens who could not find their names and pictures but had with them their temporary cards is nothing more than another indulgence in the culture of excuses. “Losing over one million names on the computer” is reminiscent of NEPA’s excuse of power outage coming from too much water during the rainy season and too little water during the dry season. In other countries where governments and their agencies have been made (or are in the habit of) respecting citizens, there would have been announcements of the loss of one million names to the computer well ahead, to prepare citizens for the frustration that might arise at the point of collecting voter cards. In addition, a complaint and rectification table would have been created to solve problems of those who did not find their names on the same day and at the same venue. Scheduling another time to do this appears designed to make the process cumbersome and frustrating to citizens, with the ultimate goal or hope discouraging them from fulfilling their civic duties.

    There are some issues that INEC needs to clarify for citizens. When did the agency realise that it had lost over one million names? What type of computer and software does the agency use that has no in-built device to prevent such huge loss? Were handlers of such computers properly trained or were they just irresponsible? Why has the agency not chosen to input the names that were lost from the master records in their headquarters long before the date to release cards to citizens? Why did INEC not announce and publicise all the names purportedly lost well ahead of the time for release of PVCs? Why did INEC wait till a time so close to the election to make permanent voter cards available to citizens? What is to be gained or lost if citizens with their temporary cards are allowed to use them to vote in 2015, instead of insisting that they must come back to do another registration, realising that the registration they did about four years ago had miscarried under the watch of INEC? In a country where all other important documents: passport and driver’s licence are not permanent, why is the voter card being made permanent and not renewable like other civic documents, as it is done in many other democracies? How can INEC guarantee that no citizen with a copy of his/her temporary card will be prevented from exercising the right to vote three months from now, should they still be unable to obtain INEC’s permanent voter cards?

    Political party leaders who went to complain and protest on behalf of citizens about the injustice and danger in the shoddiness of INEC with respect to providing all duly registered citizens with their voter cards have shown good leadership. There is nothing partisan about insisting that citizens, regardless of their party affiliation, must be given the opportunity at elections to indicate their choice. There is everything wrong with an agency charged with protecting such right to act– knowingly or unknowingly – as an agent to deprive citizens of their right to vote. Political party leaders also need to encourage and support citizens to protect their right to vote, as such protection is better handled by the aggrieved, through litigation-individual or class action.

  • “Fail in English, fail in all” – and my conditioned envy of Physics and Mathematics

    “Fail in English, fail in all” – and my conditioned envy of Physics and Mathematics

    It took me a long time to discover that the great professional or intellectual envy that I have had of Mathematics and Physics (and of mathematicians and physicists) all my adult life had its roots in my secondary school education, especially with regard to what we used to call “fail in English, fail in all”. I say “envy” deliberately, for I could as well have said “admiration”. This is because while I have a great admiration for all the sciences and scientists, especially the really gifted and conscientious among them, what I feel about Mathematicians and Physicists is envy. Admiration is to envy what possibility is to improbability: we admire what is within our ability to achieve and envy what seems totally beyond our capability to master. This is what I feel about Physics and Mathematics.

    This disciplinary or professional envy is one of the unspoken, subconscious highlights of my life as a professional academic. It is not an envy that drives me crazy with distraction, thank heavens! But it is enough to make me know that it is an unwelcome and perhaps psychologically unhealthy thing. And only this realization has stopped me from quitting my job as a Professor of Comparative Literature and going to enroll in a bachelor’s programme for a combined honors degree in Mathematics and Physics! Ah, “fail in English, fail in all”, what roiling confusion thou hast wrought in my adult intellectual life!

    Of course, since I dare not presume that most of those reading this piece know what “fail in English, fail in all” exactly meant in the lives and careers of all secondary school pupils in my teenage years, I suppose I had better explain the term and its meanings first before attempting to show its linkage with my envy of Mathematicians and Physicists. The phrase literally meant what it proclaimed. Before the creation of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), the examining body for all secondary schools in English-speaking West Africa was based in Cambridge, England. This was the period in which the “fail in English, fall in all” policy was put in place. It meant that if you failed in English, you were automatically denied the passes that you might have recorded in all other subjects for which you might have sat in your school leaving exams. But the real emotional force of the phrase went far beyond literalism. For not only did you automatically fail all other subjects if you failed in English, you had to retake all those other subjects with English in the next round of the Cambridge school leaving exams. Everyone in my generation (and several generations before ours) knew or had heard of hapless, unlucky students who sat year after year for the Cambridge School Certificate Exams and failed year after year only because they had failed in English while sometimes performing brilliantly in the other subjects. Indeed, it was not unknown for the educational prospects of many otherwise brilliant students who could never obtain a pass in English to founder and crash only on the basis of this policy of “fail in English, fail in all”.

    With English being my very best subject, I was of course one of the few very lucky students who were completely immune to the real and imagined traumas of this policy. And I knew it, perhaps knew it in a manner that would ultimately work against me, though I did not know this at the time. All I knew, all most of the other students never let me forget was the fact that I was relieved of the endless hours and herculean efforts that others put into passing in English. This was made all the more blessed for me – so I thought at the time – by the fact that my ease with and in English opened the doors for excellent grades in other subjects like Literature, History, Government and Religious Studies, these being subjects in which competence in English was considered essential and mastery a divine gift. This meant in effect that with English, I was assured of automatic excellent passes in FIVE subjects. All I had to do, all I thought I had to do was perform well in two other subjects and I was okay. In my case, those other subjects were Geography and Chemistry in which I did sufficiently well without ever having really had to apply myself rigorously to their specific demands as academic subjects.

    At this stage in this piece, perhaps it is necessary for me to pause and explain the colonial basis of this “fail in English, fail in all” policy as this was an absolutely crucial aspect of general educational policy in the colonies of Great Britain. On the surface, this colonial dimension was merely apparent; it did not loom large in our consciousness. English was the medium of instruction in all subjects and this was the reason why a pass in English was compulsory, not because English was the language of our colonizers, the language of our cultural and linguistic tutelage. This is what we were told. And it is necessary to point out that we were given this rationalization of the policy by black, Nigerian and not white, English teachers. But dig a little deeper into the historic context and the impregnable colonial basis of the policy was revealed. For instance, it never occurred to us until after the policy had been relaxed or completely retired why students who failed in English had to redo ALL subjects over again, including even subjects in which excellent passes had been recorded. I mean, why did they not simply have students who had failed in English retake only English? What was the point of making such students retake every single subject if the whole basis of the policy was not to make English the language of colonial triumphalism?

    Almost a half century later I see it now, but I must confess that I did not see anything wrong as such with the policy when I was one of its few lucky beneficiaries. I was sympathetic to its victims, especially the students who we thought were “wizards” in the sciences but who somehow never seemed capable of finding their graces in English, the key that opened the doors to success in many other subjects, the language of the imperial lords of the planet. The worst part of my memory of this period in my life is the realization that the policy was a vital part of the general colonial educational policy of keeping the number of high school products that would or could go on to higher degrees through university education very, very low. And indeed, it was not until WAEC replaced Cambridge as the examining body and students could combine passes in the West African School Certificate Examination (WASCE) with passes in the General Certificate of Education (GCE) that it became possible for university education to be available to thousands of high school leavers that could never have got past the iron gates of “fail in English, fail in all”.

    How does this all connect with the besotted envy of Mathematics and Physics of my intellectual adulthood? Well, I must emphasize the fact that what I see now with great clarity I simply did not see, did not comprehend then. For I realize now that  deep down, I must have felt a deep fascination with these two particular subjects. This may have been because they were the two subjects that I found the most challenging, the most resistant to my efforts, not to achieve mastery but to get a bare, working knowledge of their “mysteries”. There was a rather funny and poignant way in which this was manifested: the brightest students in Mathematics and Physics envied my consistently excellent performance in English and plainly showed it; but clothed in the marvelous cloak of English, I could not and did not show them my envy of Mathematics and Physics. However, I could not hide this truth from myself, even if I wanted to – which I didn’t. For I knew only too well how I often secretly leafed through the pages of Mathematics and Physics textbooks marveling at the strange and endlessly fascinating “language”  that I found in those textbooks. And I knew only too well the tremor that coursed through my whole body when the “wizards” of Mathematics and Physics among my classmates held their own against our teachers in these subjects.

    In my adult intellectual life, I of course came to a much better understanding of these aspects of the great miseducation that that “fail in English, fail in all” policy had wrought in my life as a professional academic. Permit me to become rather sentimental in my expression of this pathos. I think I was/we were all born into this world to have a working knowledge of Physics and Mathematics, to avail myself/ourselves of their incredibly rich methodologies and procedures for understanding the physical laws of the universe and the logical, abstract relations between numbers, phenomena and things that we cannot easily perceive with only our eyes and the other sensory organs. I was/we were born into this world to penetrate the veil that hides super-small things and relationships from our perception. But that accursed “fail in English, fail in all” policy made it impossible for me to realize these things for which I was born into this life to know and appreciate from the closeness of, if not of an expert, then of a competent amateur. How did this happen, you ask?

    You see, I had bad teachers in Mathematics and Physics. But this did not bother me in the least – until it was too late. If I had had bad teachers in English, I and my classmates would have raised hell and protested mightily. But we did not protest at all against the bad teachers that we had in Physics and Mathematics. Indeed, now that I think about it, I realize with the shock of recollected memory that the students who were good in these two subjects did not protest either. They were far too busy worrying about passing in English to expend their energies on subjects they knew they could easily pass even without good teachers. When eventually I wanted to protest against the bad teachers that I had in Physics and Mathematics, it was about four decades too late!

    I do not wish to end this piece on a sad, defeated note. If the conclusion that I wish to make is not exactly buoyantly optimistic, it is nonetheless hopeful. Now, I know more about and of Physics and Mathematics than I knew two or three decades ago. For the most part, I have been learning – again – the most basic and rudimentary aspects of these two subjects from scratch and mostly by self-instruction. I shall never get a combined honors bachelor’s degree in Physics and Mathematics, but I am slowly coming to a deep and gratified appreciation of the practical applications of these subjects in modern societies and modern life. That’s enough for me. Q.E.D.

     

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Looking back and looking forward

    Looking back and looking forward

    This week as the unhinged Jonathan administration finally slipped its rational mooring with the armed invasion of the National Assembly, Nigerians must now brace themselves for the worst imaginable political catastrophe. There is a chilling feeling of Déjà vu abroad. The pictures are all too reminiscent of the 1962 bedlam in the Western Region House of Assembly. But while one event may resemble another distant event, you cannot step into the same river twice.

    It beggars belief that there are some of our compatriots who are justifying and defending this wanton desecration of a very critical state institution. Patriotism is truly the refuge of scoundrels. This columnist is often amused when our ersatz patriots and emergency nationalists mount the rooftop to proclaim their love for the nation and its presiding eminence. Given the battles some of us have fought for this country, both against military and civilian despots, their delusional nuisance ought to be a source of wry bemusement. But sometimes, the joke is carried too far.

    When many of us were battling to revalidate Jonathan’s legitimate claims to the presidency in the face of a desperate conspiracy by a feudal cabal, he had no ambassadors then. They were still in the diplomatic crèche for hustlers. Or more likely, they were studying the game as usual to see which way the gravy train was heading. But now that they have captured Goodluck, turning him into an ethnic and sub-regional president, it is good luck to all of them.

    As part of a constant reality check, this column often takes a retrospective glance at the immediate past. The result can be sobering and profoundly therapeutic. It is an elixir for the soul in depressing and degrading times. You are aware that when everything has ended in an absolute disaster, little is worth salvaging in the eternal cycle of political stupidity. You can then be reconciled to reality under duress, apologies to Fredric Jameson, the great American literary theorist.

    If Jonathan fails, it will not be from want of initial support from vital segments of the Nigerian civil and political society. It will be due entirely to his fundamental flaws of character. In the end, character is fate, as no one can escape the implacable consequences of their foibles. As the Greeks will say, call no man lucky until that day that he carries his luck to the grave.

    As it is at the moment, nothing can be expected from Jonathan in terms of the fundamental political re-engineering of this structurally disfigured country; nothing in terms of a visionary developmental blueprint and nothing in terms of moving the nation away from endemic political paralysis. Once again, the nation walks the path of thunder.

    In their tokenist trifling with harsh and bitter reality, Jonathan’s supporters may continue to point at kilometres of road constructed, stadia built, old rail wagons refurbished and new universities opened, forgetting that these are all ad hoc projects without any holistic integrative structure. In any case, even a third rate local government chairman with the same funding will not be jubilant about this.

    With the benefit of hindsight, the Jonathan presidency represents the greatest frittering away of historic opportunities and possibilities for this nation. No other civilian ruler in the history of the country could be said to have acceded to power with such massive goodwill and a pan-Nigerian groundswell of hope and optimism. But in the end, no man can give what he doesn’t have. To have invested such hopes in the first instance in an untried and untested fellow is a prime example of the collective delusion and daydreaming to which Nigerians are particularly prone.

    The Jonathan presidency has become a historic albatross for the nation. But like a misbegotten child mounted on its mother’s back and with the feet grating on the floor at the same time, it will require considerable tact and adroitness to set down if it is not to bring mother and child crashing to the ground.

    This latest executive tragedy will not stop Nigerians from dreaming. It will not stop us from imagining a greater tomorrow in which this formidably gifted nation will take its rightful place in the comity of great nations. That greater tomorrow may appear like a forlorn dream in the distressing circumstances of the moment. But all great human achievements are products of imaginary projections. Nothing worthwhile can be achieved without visionary dreaming.

    This morning, we republish a piece published three and a half years ago in 2011 when Goodluck Jonathan first acceded to the Nigerian presidency on his own steam. Our expectations have not been met and certain things have since happened to the fabled Nigerian military. The reader is invited to take an intellectual excursion to our immediate past with the columnist.

  • Jonathan’s Nigeria

    Jonathan’s Nigeria

    A country’ s frightening descent into banana republic

    One question that I have always remembered most times when I stumble on anything on the French Revolution was that asked by my European History teacher in my Higher School Certificate (HSC) days at the Federal School of Arts and Science, Ondo: “How did the French Revolution beget the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte”? I guess someday, some students of Nigerian History would also be asked: “How did a potentially great Nigeria beget the serial incompetent and corrupt regimes hat brought it to this sorry pass”?

    It was clear immediately the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Aminu Tambuwal, dumped the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the All Progressives Congress (APC) on October 28 that the PDP would not take it kindly. I had said then that the party would resort to crude and primitive tactics instead of coming up with civilised means of settling scores, if any.

    In essence, the police take-over of the  National Assembly on Thursday was quite predictable. Discerning observers of the country’s political situation knew the day would not go without incident. President Goodluck Jonathan had written to the National Assembly for extension of the state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states. If that had been granted, it would be the fourth such extension and no one needs to be reminded that the emergency is not working. If more than 200 school girls could be abducted from their school in Chibok in spite of emergency; if bombs could be exploding in motor parks and other public places, including schools even in the daytime in spite of emergency, we need no one to tell us that the emergency has failed. And, as the House of Representatives noted, if you are using a particular strategy that is not working, you restrategise. There is no evidence that the government has done or is now prepared to do things differently. In the terror war as in other spheres of life, it has been tall in words but abysmally short in action.

    Ordinarily, one would have condemned the action of the House of Representatives members who climbed the iron fence at the National Assembly to make their way into the chamber. But then, that would not be fair because their action only resonates with what the ruling party has been doing and which the presidency has pretended not to see. Impunity is only begetting impunity. The most recent example is Ekiti State where seven lawmakers hired two unknown quantities to make nine, to ‘impeach’ the speaker. The same police force headed by Mr. Suleiman Abba that provided cover for those who perpetrated the show of shame in Ekiti said it had to move in to prevent a breakdown of law and order at the National Assembly. It further claimed that Mr. Tambuwal came to the assembly complex with thugs. Much as they would have to provide evidence of this, the question to ask Mr. Abba is whether he had expected Mr. Tambuwal to be walking all alone when he, Abba, had withdrawn his security details illegally?

    Weeks have passed and Mr. Abba is yet to restore the security details because, in his view, Tambuwal has ceased to be the Speaker on account of his defection. Obviously, Mr. Abba is not aware that Governor Segun Mimiko of Ondo State and the speaker of the state house of assembly also defected from the Labour Party (LP) to the PDP, and none has relinquished his or her official position; none has lost any of the rights and privileges attached to their respective offices. Should the same law that binds the masquerade not be binding on the women in purdah, that is assuming Mr. Abba is in a position to say the action was illegal? Haba, Mr. Abba!  The IGP told journalists after a meeting with Vice President Namadi Sambo  over the sad incident on Friday that: “Somebody was removing road blocks mounted by police, we have never seen this kind of thing in the whole world”. But he did not tell us where else in the civilised world the police are used for partisan purposes like the Nigeria Police Force. The police, now an extension of the PDP, and like the ruling party, are now the litigant, the prosecutor, the judge and the law enforcer. Clearly, this presidency is several centuries late in coming. Clearly too, IGP Abba does not belong to this age.

    But what all we have been seeing point at is that the Jonathan presidency is bare without the country’s security forces. Indeed, one would not be wrong to say that even the security agencies see themselves more as the president’s and his party’s security agencies rather than those of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    But things cannot continue this way for long, with democracy now being endangered by people who contributed nothing to the struggle for it. This should not be surprising though because you cannot value what you did not labour for. Unfortunately, it is the same people who were nowhere to be found during the struggle for the return of democracy that have cornered the chunk of the spoils of the bitter struggles that brought democracy back in 1999.

    However, it is instructive to point out that things were not this bad in 1983 when Alhaji Shehu Shagari and his cohorts were rendered jobless. Sadly, we appear to be following the same trajectory. When in the Second Republic the (now late) Chief Obafemi Awolowo said our economy was collapsing, the then ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN), which I consider the PDP its offshoot, said there was nothing like that only to come out with what it called Economic Stabilisation Act (1982) which spelt out some austerity measures some months later. The problem then was oil glut which brought crude oil prices to rock bottom levels. About thirty-two years later, we are back to square one. Crude prices are going down again. And, after living in self-denial for months, the Federal Government came up with its own version of austerity measures. Just as in the Second Republic, those who saw the trend coming and warned earlier were called names, with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the country’s finance minister saying the country was not broke but that it only had cash flow problems.

    This is why one can understand US President Harry Truman who in frustration demanded for a one-handed economist. “Give me a one-handed economist” he said, adding “All my economists say, ‘on the one hand…on the other’”. For God’s sake, what is cash flow problem? If the cash is there, why would it not ‘flow’? Instead of sitting down to address the looming danger which has eventually stared us all in the face, they kept assuring there was no cause for alarm. Incidentally, the same Okonjo-Iweala is coordinating minister for the economy. Apparently she was so chosen because of her Bretton Woods background, which may not necessarily be useful in our kind of situation as a developing country. A President Truman would by now be shopping for her replacement.

    Regrettably, not President Jonathan because, just as Nigeria does not require an Okonjo-Iweala kind of finance minister at this point, the country’s problems transcend a presidency that is applying analogue solutions (brute force, illegalities, etc.) to digital problems. The end-time signs of the Second Republic are already manifesting: bad economy, crippling corruption, crass incompetence in high places and, to crown it all, using the security agencies as crutches to sustain a corrupt and inept government. Where did Alhaji Shagari end despite unleashing the kill and go on Nigerians?

    Perhaps never in the history of mankind has the goodluck of one man become the albatross of millions of fellow citizens. A president who has spent over four years in office cumulatively does not have to be as anxious for reelection as President Jonathan is to the point of intimidating everyone considered a hindrance to this importunate ambition. If the president had worked hard in the right direction, what should be speaking for him now are his achievements. He should be telling Nigerians not just the amount of megawatts of electricity he has added to what he met on ground but how much of it is available to them. Years after he said we should be ready to dash out our generators, we are still importing more. The president should show Nigerians the dent he has made on unemployment; he should tell them what the exchange rate was when he took over and what it is now. Even on his basic responsibility of security of lives and property, he is a monumental failure. That is why, like an old woman who is never at ease when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb, President Jonathan has become so intolerant of those who think he does not deserve a second term. And that is why he is unleashing the police and sometimes soldiers on them, even as the soldiers are unable to grapple with their basic responsibility of defending the country’s territorial integrity.

    We wobbled and fumbled to this sorry pass because we failed to protest against little impunities like the ones the PDP is daily perpetrating now. The danger, however, is that, four more years in the hands of this government, the question that a great historian asked about Ghana Empire would be relevant to Nigeria’s situation: “Despite its opulence, greatness and wealth, by 1240 A.D., Ghana Empire was no more. The question now is: What caused such an inglorious fall of such a glorious empire”?

  • Global economic blues

    Global economic blues

    Economics is the attempt to make a happy marriage of the uncertainty of good fortune to the certainty of greed.

    THE global economy staggers about like a listless man tired of being locked in that amber condition between decent health and dire sickness. Debilitation pervades the global political economy. Apparently, someone forgot to tell the 2008-2009 Great Recession that it is the past. In some ways, it remains with us more than it has departed. Statistically, the world is no longer in recession. But, people can’t eat, wear, drive or reside in statistics. They eat, wear, drive or reside in whatever their wages can afford or what they can shape by the skill of their hands. For them, the recession has lived close by like a rowdy neighbor. The moment you think you have heard the last of him that you might enjoy a quiet night, he brews even greater commotion.

    Statistics are brandished to tell people to ignore their reality. Statistics tell the people to smile and be thankful; things are on the increase. The misery they feel is a horrid self-delusion. Thus, they should not look to government for relief or reprieve. They should forget their shoddy wages and indebted lives in order to rejoice at the accretion of GDP.

    It seems a non sequitur that the majority of the people would become their lesser economic selves as GDP becomes greater. We have been fed the tale that all we need consider to determine our economic well being is the GDP rate. While the relevance of GDP to true wellbeing may be mythic, it is not the Golden Fleece. We tend to err when we come to value the measurement more than the thing being measured. Focusing on GDP is like reading every other word of an important missive. This concentration is a half-truth, akin to taking a half-bite of an apple or receiving a half-kiss. It is rather unavailing and unappealing.

    It brings into question the overall objective of economic policy. Is the intent to increase aggregate numbers or to improve the living conditions of as many people as possible?  This difference is important because the two possible objectives are sometimes interrelated but they are not always synonymous. However, mainstream economics requests that we have faith that the two actually are the same. Because of this inaccurate bias predominating the economic news we receive, I periodically return to this discussion of economic bias in order to pierce the intellectual miasma in which convention wisdom seeks to cloak us. Imagine a street where ten extremely poor families reside. Then one family wins a coveted and enormous lottery. Before the per capita income of the neighborhood was a pittance. Because of the windfall that has graced the one family, the street’s per capita income – the neighborhood GDP – has increased so dramatically to where the entire place is considered the home of the affluent. Yet, something is amiss. The statistics are real but inaccurate. If the lottery winners hold the majority of the funds to themselves as they most certainly will, they have been enriched to the utmost. Without something else happening, the rest of the neighborhood remains immersed in poverty but are told to rejoice because their community has become rich. The neighborhood is rich yet the majority of its people remain bruised by the maw of penury.  As with neighborhoods so it is with nations.

    Most growth of global GDP has gone to affluent elites. And most of this marginal growth has gone to the even numerically smaller financial sector within the overall elite. The financial sector has won the lottery but the rest of the economy is no better off. The more the financial sector gains, the more it influences government so that economic policy will sustain and increase the rewards given the financial sector.

    In economic reality, there is no such thing as the free market. The market is shaped and directed in a manner to profit those who paid for the shape and direction the economy will take. Those who do not invest in how the economy is structured, those who think the economy’s present architecture follows some inexorable principles akin to the laws of natural science, will believe the economy is destined to be as it is.  Mistaking this subjective social construct as something immutable as if design by science and logic, they will see no need to invest in its redesign to better suit them. That which they refuse to invest upfront to safeguard their interests will be multiplied then charged against them when the dividends and taxes of reward and burden of our economic processes are allocated among all the players in the system.

    We must remember that all fields of human endeavor are ultimately connected. In the abstract, we compartmentalize our activities into social, political and economic categories. In reality, there is no barrier between them that is not always and everywhere violated. The elite would rather you believe that some things are purely economic and therefore scientific. They would have you focus solely on the GDP, solely on aggregate wealth created within the system.  For you to fixate on this point is to become “GDP blind” as one would become sunblind by gazing too long at our closest star. Such a condition would blind us to other important things we need to see so that we will not be rendered both blind and ignorant.

    To help avoid this tragedy, I prefer the phrase “political economy” instead of trying to split things into artificial political and economic spheres. By acknowledging the interplay between political and economic forces we are led to ask questions that protect against GDP blindness. We come to ask:

    1. How is the political economy arranged, by whom and for what purpose?

    2. What is the allocation of power, wealth and influence within the system?

    3. What goods and services are to be produced, why are these produced, and how are they allocated and why?

    4. What are the marginal changes and causal links between the economy’s productive processes, the actual inventory of goods and services produced and allocation of power, wealth and influence among the various sectors of the political economy?

    These questions initiate a more curious inquiry and seek a deeper understanding of the political economy than the one dimensional focus on GDP. The more we think in these terms, the more we bring ourselves to the point of realizing the political economy is shaped as is because of the subjective bias of those who have placed themselves in positions to make decisions that determine the fate of all.

    We don’t have the space to overview the entire world but a glance at three important economies will indicate what is to unfolding. We have steadily returned to the type of debt-fueled, speculative world that existed immediately prior to the 2008-9 Recession.  A few policy miscues in strategic nations and recession may be upon us with such swiftness that we shall feel as if we have been cursed by some deity instead of merely being led astray by unfortunate policy.

    Experiencing modest growth, America has been fortunate among the developed economies. But even here, the vast majority — roughly 90 percent of the population — is no better off now than they were the day after the prior recession officially ended. Even with this, America has done better than its peers. This relative good fortune is more the product of good fortune than of good policy. In late 2011, President Obama handed conservative Republicans a stark austerity “Grand Bargain” paring social programs below the bone. He gave it to them on a silver platter.

    Due to their neuralgia toward the gift bearer, they refused to accept his offering although he had gone so far as to offer them greater long-term budget cuts than they requested. Instead of accepting the conservative feast he presented, they trashed the offered smorgasbord then crammed the silver platter down his throat. Had they taken the deal, America would have started feeling economic contraction by mid-2012, giving a blow to the President’s reelection bid. President Obama could have lost the election that year but for Republican blind hatred. During these last two years in office, he still might renew this fiscal austerity offer for two reasons. He is a more midstream Republican than liberal Democrat regarding economic policy. Despite the mountain of empirical evidence against it, he believes austerity leads to growth. Second, he wants to accomplish something big to enhance his flagging chance at a memorable legacy. Thus, he may be more concerned with demonstrating he can hatch a bipartisan economic deal than he is concerned about the actual economic consequences of the deal. This time, the Republicans may accept the offer. Downturn looms at a time the world can least afford it.

    A second reason America has logged growth is because of the monetary policy called quantitative easing (QE).  The media incorrectly calls QE a stimulus program. This willful error is to entice the public to conflate this monetary action with expansionary fiscal policy. They prevaricate because they want the public to believe all “stimuli” are the same. This is a serious intellectual fraud.  Basically, monetary policy focuses on the financial elite with the implicit hope that something will trickle down to the common folks. Monetary policy is almost always geared toward the affluent. Fiscal policy is different because its direct targets can be more diverse. The rich are still usually the major beneficiaries but the poor and working classes are sometimes directly benefitted. In short, both monetary and fiscal policy generally favor the rich but fiscal policy sometimes is used to help the common man.

    QE is not a stimulus program as much as it is an asset swap for the affluent. A fiscal stimulus program would hire the unemployed to engage in public projects or would provide social welfare services for the needy. It would provide money in exchange for labor or because of a person’s impoverished condition. In contrast QE was a mechanism by which the American Federal Reserve purchased bonds and other financial paper from investors. As such, it merely substituted one form of financial asset for a more liquid one, that of money.

    To some extent, this allowed some people to remove assets of questionable value from their balance sheets without suffering the loss they would have incurred if forced to the sell the paper at true market value. In effect, this amounted to a government prepayment of investors, giving them money for the securities they were willing to release from their financial portfolios. It enabled the investor class to take new funds and reinvest them in another round of financial speculation. Consequently, QE helped bid up stock market prices and also devalued the dollar. This damaged the export industries of developing nations; at the same time, it brought another wave of speculative investment to many developing nations. However, with the ending of QE and the slowdown of the global economy, that money is leaving the developing world and heading home as it always does at the sign of hard times. This flight will damage the financial stability of those nations that were careless enough to quickly welcome the fast money, once again forgetting that speculative money is always of the “easy come, more easily gone” variety. The net effect of QE was to artificially enhance financial asset prices. It raised the ceiling on financial assets without doing much to repair the floor of the productive sector of the economy. The investor class benefitted handsomely, the working class not at all.

    Japan introduced a program akin to QE on amphetamines. Going much farther the American edition, the Japanese version included the Central Bank’s purchase of even stock market equities. This has been a boon for the speculative investment class. As in America, it placed downward pressure on the Yen, making imports more costly. Yet, at the same time, the government imposed high consumption taxes on a population that was already too frugal and a nation with weak aggregate consumer demand. Thus, the Japanese government has almost literally torn the economy in two, purposely profiting the financial class while undermining the average person by unduly taxing their consumption. This will further lower aggregate demand, serving to deflate the real sector of the economy.

    The Euro zone has been an experiment in austerity.  The experiment has failed. The zone teeters again on the edge of recession. Even German’s economy is fragile. Its usual trading partners are so cash-strapped that they cannot purchase higher volumes of German exports. Meanwhile, some people possessed by a mortician’s wit have begun celebrating because Greece experience roughly 2 percent growth the past two quarters. They claim this shows austerity’s effectiveness. They are right but not in the way they intend.

    Due to austerity policies, Greece slumped from recession into depression six years ago. Its depression was the worst in modern times; Grecian output and employment fell more steeply than America’s during the Great Depression. The austerity program was intended to reduce the nation’s debt/GDP ratio which stood around 125 percent at the time austerity was first applied. Austerity worsened the ratio to over 175 percent by the beginning of this year. Austerity –cutting the budget – increased government debt! This misstep was taken because decision makers exalted conservative theory over empirical evidence and rational practice. Self-strapped to conservative orthodoxy, they assumed government expenditures had a negative multiplier effect. Thus, any budgetary savings would result in an even greater increase in overall growth. This was worse than conservative myth; it was a lie injurious to those who had to live it. Empirical evidence showed that the multiplier regarding government expenditure was closer to 2.5. For every euro slashed from the budget, the overall economy shrank by 2.5 euros. Implicitly recognizing this, the international troika (IMF, EU and World Bank) allowed Greece to engage in some expansionary budget engineering through an ambitious highway reconstruction program at the beginning of the year. This fiscal expansion is the primary reason for the slight new growth Greece has experienced. Thus, after six years of depression, Greece has tasted a bit of growth only because it was given a small dose of fiscal expansion.

    The global economy walks toward renewed recession because it has been engineered to do so. In too many nations, government policy has been to elevate financial asset prices and encourage speculation among the investor class. The valuations of their assets have hit the roof. For them, happy days abound. Meanwhile, governments choke fiscal policy, claiming discipline is in order. Why it is in order fiscally but not monetarily they dare not divulge. This discrimination has nothing to do with objective economic principle. It has everything to do subjective bias. They believe the best and easiest policy is to cosset the wealthy while allowing the rest to lunge at and fight over whatever crumbs may descend from the table of plenty. Unless this policy course is altered, aggregate global demand will remain suppressed. Most people will live as if in a recession but the global GDP will still be in the black due in part to the overvaluation of financial assets and other speculative activity. The elite and their hired experts will not only have their cake they will still be eating it as well. They will have also taken a good portion of slice intended more fairly intended for the rest of us.

     

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • A dream for Nigeria

    Snooper suspends all intellectual hostilities this morning to wish President Goodluck Jonathan well as he takes full charge as the third elected president of the Fourth Republic of Nigeria. This must be a moment of charity and sober reflection. Nigeria’s history has been a long nightmare punctuated by sleepwalking. This columnist is dreaming sweet dreams this morning and we urge Jonathan to become a visionary dreamer too, if he is to rescue Nigeria from the purgatory of damned nations. The odds may be stacked against him at this point but that is just the point about visionary imagining.

    Without dreams, nations and people must perish. Without hope life is a sour and surly joke. But being optimistic about Nigeria carries extremely grave risks. It is a deeply compromising ritual. To start with, analytical integrity may have to be abandoned. Hard facts on the ground may have to be ignored. The logic of events will have to be sacrificed. Yet we must dream our way out of the current nightmare. It is not the failure of nations and state collapse that we must fear. It is the failure of national will.

    This is why children and youths are the best nation builders. Because they carry no ancestral baggage of resentment, no evil memory of ancient tribal feuds, youths have a better capacity to dream and to will into existence a new society. But we are already beginning to poison that romantic well of national wellbeing. Our youths are gradually being sucked into a vortex of fear and trembling. The Other is hell. Ask prospective members of the National Youth Service Corps.

    When he was asked why he remained defiantly at odds with the Italian state and cheerfully hopeful about the future despite bitter defeats, stunning reversals of gains, persistent harassments, incarcerations and the murder of his colleagues and comrades in arms, Antonio Gramsci retorted that it was due to optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. Optimism of the will is the ability to dare and dream ; the capacity for continuous exertion and permanent struggle for a better society even where the intellect tells you that it will all be to no avail in the end.

    Gramsci should know.  He was a human exemplar. The great Italian journalist and outstanding leftist theoretician lived life as pure hell. A hunchback wracked by every conceivable human affliction, the great man produced seminal works under intense pressure and suffering. Here was a man sent to life-long jail by Benito Mussolini, the late Italian dictator, with the war-cry: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years!” Although Gramsci perished in jail, it was from prison and under the most abysmal conditions that he wrote his best works. You can imprison a man but you can never imprison his mind.

    Let us thank god for great mercies. Twelve years ago exactly today, the Nigerian military departed in a hail of controversy and ill-will. They turned out to be neither political nor economic messiahs. But they managed to hold the nation together in spite of themselves. It is still a tense and fraught unity with an American Nostradamus starring us in the face.

    In many countries, the military often act as the human incarnation of the providential will that wields together the heterogeneous forces of a nascent nation, forging an organic community from disparate nationalities and in the process turning a nation in itself to a nation for itself. But in Nigeria, the military goofed catastrophically and it was only by a divine miracle and the legendary luck of Nigeria that the armed forces survived the ethnic and religious fissures that have polarised the larger Nigerian society.

    But we cannot blame a river for being sluggish and tardy in midstream without looking at its origin. The Nigerian military began as an instrument of colonial pacification; an armed will of the metropolitan imperium. And for most of its post-colonial existence, the Nigerian military lived up to its billing as an army of occupation without an ennobling vision of a just and humane society or an enabling visionary for that matter.

    Yet in just twelve years of depoliticisation and re-professionalisation, we have seen how a professional military can act as a stabilising bedrock of the nation and of the political order, despite the suicidal antics of an errant political class. We salute the gallant men and women of our armed forces for this recovery of initiative and for their rediscovery of the ethos of the modern army. Had it been the army of yore, the past two years would have been sorely tempting indeed. Happy indeed is the land without the need for a military hero.

    Goodluck is lucky. He is beginning his real presidency on this happy augury of a military safely ensconced in the barracks. Secure in the knowledge that the military threat has receded, Jonathan ought to have his mind free for the great feats of social engineering required to return this country to the path of sanity and rationality. But he remains gaffe-prone and susceptible to unforced errors of political judgement which may prove fatal in the long run.

    Like all responsible electorates all over the civilised world, Nigerians must brace for the consequences of their choice. In the long run, the Jonathan presidency may be more important in terms of its profound symbolism than in terms of real achievement. While many Nigerians had thought that the social question of justice and accountability should be superior to the political question of regional hegemony and monopoly of power, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians had thought otherwise. For them, it is more important to lay down the rule once and for all that the Nigerian presidency is accessible to and attainable by all qualified Nigerians irrespective of origins or ethnic affiliation.

    For many Nigerians, then, the Jonathan presidency represents the first real people driven power shift in the country as distinct from the cartel-driven “army arrangement” that brought Obasanjo and Shagari to civilian power. But Jonathan is not his own creation and the myth of the “shoeless” boy who made the Nigerian presidency does not even begin to address the problems of power disequilibrium in Nigeria. Neither does his belonging to a minority among a minority group scratch the surface of the national question. A wound does not heal by merely clearing the pus of dereliction. It is just the beginning of the healing process.

    Yet the way history often unfolds in a neat and exacting symmetry defies human understanding. Exactly forty five years ago today, a monolithic north exploded in response to what it saw as the challenge of the five majors and the chain of events that brought General Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi to power. At this very moment forty five years after, the core hegemonists of the north are seething with anger and bitterness over the chain of events or what they believe to be the chain of conspiracy which has robbed one of their own of the presidential slot.

    It is to be stressed that neither Aguiyi-Ironsi nor Goodluck Jonathan initially sought to rule Nigeria. Both are beneficiaries of extra-human and cosmic forces precipitating sharp historical detours: the one profiting from a mutiny he knew nothing about but which decapitated civilian rule; the other a beneficiary of a biological accident which altered the power equations. But no man has ever been known to throw away a juicy piece of federalist morsel. Ironsi made hay by attempting to bring Nigeria under his unitarist anti-federalist jackboot. Jonathan has consolidated his grip in an election which has further exposed the hideous wounds and fault lines of the nation.

    As it was in May 1966, so it appears to be in May 2011. But if history repeats itself, it is not always under the same circumstances. Today, the northern core hegemonists are without their middle belt satraps, their eastern mercenary class of power profiteers, their Yoruba collaborators, their riverine subalterns and the military card they are wont to press into service when the going gets stormy. However, there are new kids on the bloc.

    The immiseration and de-industrialisation of the north under the watch of its own military and civilian scions has dramatically expanded the vast underclass of ill-educated rabble and casual riff-raff ready to be pressed into murderous service at short notice. With their burning resentment now framed as a political jihad against their local oppressors and now framed as a religious project against an “infidel” state the stage is set for a genocidal explosion on a truly industrial scale.

    What this means is that under Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria has slipped into a perilous conjuncture which requires brilliant statesmanship and extraordinarily creative political engineering. Like Ironsi, Jonathan may be ill-equipped for the job at hand. He may not have the wherewithal to deal with what is clearly an emergency situation. But unlike Ironsi, if anything untoward were to happen to Jonathan, the apocalyptic meltdown and descent into hell would be such that 1966 Nigeria and 1994 Rwanda would be a child’s play.

    This is not just another political game. We have arrived at the limbo between death and resurrection. It is the luminous zone of childlike reverie and collective daydreaming. In their dream, most Nigerians will vote for resurrection. Let Jonathan join in the dreaming too. It is a dream for Nigeria, a dream for Africa and a dream for the entire Black race. The alternative is a nightmare that is too cataclysmic to imagine.

     

    First published in May, 2011.

  • ‘Baby Doc’ Fayose: usurper, propagandist, despot

    ‘Baby Doc’ Fayose: usurper, propagandist, despot

    Justifying the coup he plotted and executed in the Ekiti State House of Assembly last Thursday, the same day a similar madness was unfolding in Abuja, Governor Ayo Fayose claimed the leadership of the assembly had abandoned work. He was uninterested in what the constitution says, or the fact that he virtually drove the lawmakers out of town. Seven lawmakers out of the state’s 26 lawmakers could unseat Speaker Adewale Omirin and other legislative leaders, the governor and his rebel lawmakers argued. They also suggested that the circumstances of their rebellion and the continuing opposition of the APC lawmakers to the governor were more salient than the issue of whether or not seven members formed a quorum when they sat, or whether or not the constitution supported their actions.

    Mr Fayose’s style is straight from Nazi book of propaganda. First demonise the victim using the most dismal forms of misinformation and disinformation, then savage him by unconscionably distorting the law and constitution, and then finally keep the electorate tethered to lies and sated on a diet of sweeping propaganda, creating a siege mentality and predicating subsequent subversion of the constitution on the victims supposed sins. After Mr Fayose was sworn in I had thrice attempted to draw the attention of Ekiti to the style of their governor and the complex he suffered from. But somehow, they had convinced themselves that the state’s enemy is somewhere in Lagos, as the governor alleges, and the resources of the state are plundered by that unseen and distant enemy.

    Having found the formula efficacious, Mr Fayose is likely to deploy it in all its bitter severity until the state is fed up with his atavism, the upheavals he is stirring, the decay enveloping the state’s democratic and judicial infrastructure, and the extension of his abuse of power to include his erstwhile supporters. Recall that he began his manipulation of the state even before he won the election and before he was inaugurated. He made a bogey out of APC leaders and accused former governor Kayode Fayemi of kowtowing to them in Lagos. He also accused Dr Fayemi of building a palatial mansion and founding a university in Ghana at the expense of Ekiti people. Once he won the election, and knowing he had neither a programme to govern nor the acumen to offer civilised leadership, he began to inflame the Ekiti mob, priming them for attacks against his enemies. Soon he was marshalling an attack on the judiciary, virtually intimidating them into silence. And he has now turned his gaze on the legislature to weaken it and destroy it by a series of intimidating measures. Rather than build Ekiti and make it a pride among states, he is set on destroying its image, dividing its people and wrecking whatever is left of its weakened institutions.

    Mr Fayose, at his inauguration and at other fora, said he was a changed man, sobered by age and his Christian ethic. His government, he promised, would be inclusive, and he would offer Ekiti the leadership it yearned for and probably deserved. Mr Fayose has not only refused to change; his inchoate ethos has in fact considerably declined, even as he has exhibited none of the wisdom and temperament that come with age. If he has any Christianity in him, in view of the spectacular thanksgiving he offered after his inauguration, it is not clear which verses of scriptures he rests it upon. He has mutated into the worst fascist any state can produce, and has become a propagandist and cruel and cynical manipulator of the people’s ignorance. He is cynical enough to continue to feed Ekiti the nauseous diet of fear of outside attackers, and he will stop at nothing to destroy those who oppose him. He will cast his enemies as stooges of Lagos money power, and his opponents and media critics as agents of destabilisation. He will create an atmosphere of fear and resentment, pitting Ekiti people against themselves, and setting the stage for the most pernicious attack on common sense and other symbols of Ekiti civilisation.

    But Mr Fayose, who reminds us of the sybaritic dictator of Haiti, Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, will soon exceed even his own theatricality. Perhaps, then, Ekiti will finally wake up to the political nightmare they have brought upon themselves with the connivance of credulous Yoruba politicians and activists battling their own private demons and nursing their pet jealousies.

  • The dead man who found his way home and other random thoughts

    I love thee well, Nigeria my country. The reason why, I really cannot tell.
    Though your story be crooked or torrid, I love thee well, that you can tell.

     

    In Nigeria, nearly everything mysterious is possible. Are you looking for a fighting hen with three legs? It was born in Nigeria. Are you looking for people who have killed each other over one or two thousand Naira? It has happened here. Are you looking for a land where the clear winner of an election is not really the winner? Its right here in Nigeria. Don’t ask me for proof of these things. I read them in newspapers just as I am sure you also did but probably did not pay attention, just as I read that a dead man found his way home, against all odds.

    During the week, we read the story of a man who was reported to have been missing from home and work for days, only to have been found stowed away in some mortuary. The story says that the man left home for work and did not return, while the work place confirmed that he did come to work but he signed off at the end of his shift. So, he was not seen at home or work until about five days later, when he was found in the mortuary. Now, this is where the wonderful story really begins for a writer who loves mysteries; for somewhere between closing off at work and failure to report home, Nigeria’s tale is told.

    First of all, there are conjectures to be made from that interval of time, which the dead man cannot confirm or deny. Could he have been kidnapped? That of course would not surprise any Nigerian as there are people always on the watch for making a few pennies off their neighbour. Just this morning, I was reading of how a man, his wife and nine-month old baby had been caught in the act of kidnapping, a family business you could say. (Is the baby also liable, I wonder?). Anyway, he confessed to have helped his gang to kidnap his former colleague. Can you just imagine that? Now, when you walk or drive on the road or you are in a taxi or you are at your office, you have no idea who is sizing you up for just how much you are worth, dead or alive. Does it not make you shiver that our Nigeria has become something else?

    The man, according to the story, was picked up by the police in a neighbourhood somewhere between his home and place of work and placed in a mortuary. Presumably, it was said, he had slumped because he was suffering from some ailment. Now, we do not know exactly what happened to this man’s blood sugar or blood pressure or something else but it is consternating indeed the number of people suffering from one or other of these bloods in Nigeria and yet do not follow instructions or they prefer go after miracle cures. This is a general comment for all of us and not addressed to the family but I believe that it is only in Nigeria that people think that diabetes or hypertension can be ‘cured’ by herbs or bouts of night vigil. The night vigilians are even worse. Rather than take drugs or attend clinics punctually and regularly, they believe that an endless number of ‘rejecting IJN’ will resolve the blood issue. Even till this morning, I know a patient who kept shifting his/her doctor’s appointment day after day because s/he needed to travel; so the doctor should please not be ‘annoyed’. The doctor sweetly said he wasn’t but that s/he should please leave a note on her kitchen table that, should anything happen, s/he failed to keep his/her clinic appointments. It is only in Nigeria that health is valued for much less than the price of the cheapest lace material.

    The story also says that the people who observed the fallen man lying there were afraid to go near him perhaps because of fear of the ebola virus. There was a time in Nigeria when everyone was his brother’s keeper. True, the fear of ebola appears now to be the beginning of a great basket of wisdom. However, that did not absolutely absolve that neighbourhood of the guilt of failing to assist the fallen man. For one thing, ebola had been successfully banished from the country. For quite another, anyone from the age of forty can fall down anywhere in the country now considering that the life expectancy in this country is falling everyday with the stress of living in Nigeria. Forty-something is now the new seventy-something.

    Worse, who can tell if that man would not have survived if he had benefitted from some kind of medical intervention or if there had been some rallying around by the people or if he had been given first aid? Since no one could move near him, we really do not know how long it took him to die. Unfortunately, Nigeria is replete with such stories of needless losses.

    Much worse than all the above, it was reported that the police team which picked him up saw the man’s identity card but did nothing about contacting the family or his work place. This is a very strange thing for a police force to do, any force in the world. Of what use is one’s identity card if not to state the important information regarding one’s dead body? Are such pieces of information not to be used should anything happen, like falling down arsy-varsy? What exactly does it mean when we hear, ‘The police are your friends?’ Honestly, I need some education on that matter because if you ask the citizenry, all the ‘friendings’ appear to be coming from the people and very little is coming from the police. Is this deliberate? For instance, why could two policemen not cover areas in beats as we see them do in other countries, so that such matters as contacting a dead man’s family would easily be handled by the pair or group assigned to that area? With the reorganisation going on in Lagos, I don’t believe there is an address that cannot be located now, more so, a place of employment. We have so many questions for the police to answer on this matter but I guess mum’s the word.

    Anyhow, that is the story of Nigeria told by the people themselves. It is an unsavoury story though, all things considered. The story of this man has brought to the surface the great amount of indifference to life running as undercurrents even as we all appear to be going around building houses, building businesses, building money and anything else that can or cannot be built. It sort of makes you think that it is all so worthless if a man can just slump on the road and no one would help him but providence. Perhaps, I’m taking too dim a view of the situation; after all, providence is still there for us, both king and peasant.

    I commiserate with the family of Mr. Oranusi for its loss; his story is an example of how a dead man can find his way home. It also shows how much everyone is really on his/her own in this country. In this scientific age, you sort of think that we can do things a little more methodically as a nation rather than rely overly much on providence to help the individual. Right now, fortuitousness seems to be guiding us all. This is why we still do things the same ancestor-preferred way: no research input into civil service reforms, business methods, products output, eating systems, social engineering systems, etc. This should not be. Nigeria’s sad tale, as told in the death of one man, can still change.

  • Banire, Bamidele and APC’s Young Turks

    Banire, Bamidele and APC’s Young Turks

    The All Progressives Congress (APC) has an uphill, but not insurmountable, task of keeping its states safe from predators and winning the 2015 presidential election. The party probably recognises the enormity of the task ahead, and may be planning an onslaught against it. But beyond recognising the obstacles, it will have to devise virtuoso ways of tackling the challenges that seem set to doom its efforts. As indicated in this place last week, some APC states are in turmoil, destabilised by internal dissension and plagued by powerful external enemies and neighbours. To retain its hold on its states, sustain unity within its ranks, and expand its suzerainty over hostile states and Aso Villa, the party will have to do almost the impossible, including wishing for a miracle, and looking for means of calming the tempest triggered by some of its radical and younger elements. Some of these younger elements camouflage self-promotion in altruistic, ideological and philosophical colours. And a few others have axes to grind with their party leaders, state and national. But even if the quarrels cannot be resolved outrightly, the overall success of the party in 2015 will depend somewhat on how successfully party leaders manage the rage within.

    A few months before the June governorship poll in Ekiti, Opeyemi Bamidele (ACN/Labour, Ado-Ekiti/ Irepodun-Ifelodun), publicised his war with the APC and looked on imperturbably as the party drowned in the wake that followed the storm he unleashed. His grouse, analysts suggested, was not just the senatorial ticket that was coaxed from him, a loss some said he had reconciled himself to, but the rather uncomplimentary and disrespectful way he believed he was ostracised from the decision-making organ of the party and state government. He and his supporters believed party leaders and government officials played politics of exclusion. What was intriguing about the misunderstanding in pre-election Ekiti was the implacability of the combatants: Dr Fayemi  gave no quarter; and Hon Bamidele, anticipating APC would come a cropper, eventually defected to the Labour Party.

    Hon Bamidele signposted the coming of the Young Turks in the APC, a group of irreverent, sometimes irascible, but iconoclastic politicians unafraid of rocking the party’s boat or provoking its mercurial leaders. While the embers of the revolt triggered by Hon Bamidele was yet to die, Muiz Banire, the National Legal Adviser of the APC and many times commissioner in the Lagos government of former governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Governor Babatunde Fashola, stirred up a hornet’s nest, pockmarking the Lagos skyline with incendiary comments on his party leaders and, in particular, Asiwaju Tinubu. Where Hon Bamidele, the activist, had contrastingly restrained himself from dragging Asiwaju Tinubu into the Ekiti imbroglio, not even in snide remarks and insinuations, Dr Banire has shown less ruefulness, though as a legal practitioner he was expected to possess more conservative and diplomatic skills in polemics and discourse.

    It should not matter to a party loyalist whether a candidate wins on his own merit or is helped by his party’s reputation and organisation, but Dr Banire, perhaps pursuing covert agenda against his party, surprisingly suggested that Governor Rauf Aregbesola won the August governorship election in Osun in spite of the APC. The August 9 win must be delinked from the party, he asserted. Why a party leader should gloat that his party had no significant input in helping candidate Aregbesola to win is hard to understand. It is a needless argument to make. But Dr Banire is a Young Turk, and from his imprecates against his leaders and sweeping dismissal of their relevance and proclivities, some of whom he deprecatingly described as a cabal, he creates the impression of a tough politician, one who can call his soul his own. Though his legal and political arguments fail to persuade completely, and his lexis a little rough-hewn in some aspects, he cuts the image of an intellectual deserving of respect.

    The APC needs internal opposition in order to enable it hammer out better platforms and establish a solid, robust and cohesive party. The likes of Hon Bamidele and Dr Banire are in my opinion invaluable to the APC or any other party for that matter. Hon Bamidele cannot flourish in a somnolent party like Labour, and his organisational skills, not to say his ambition, would be wasted or diminished. And in the PDP, which his inexplicable and indescribable support for Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti makes him gravitate towards, his radical posture would both be repressed and absolutely misapplied. Dr Banire, on the other hand, is the perfect proponent of one eating his cake and having it. His intrepidity may not seem potent enough to lure him into defection, though I could be second-guessing him wrongly, and he seems precisely the sort of man to stay, fight and profit in his party, the APC. He even spent the better part of his stay in the party — a party he now casually lampoons — helped on every step of the way by mentors, some of them mentors of his own choosing. But now he is repudiating the methods by which he himself rose into prominence and by which he came to some comfort. His iconoclasm, sans his bad temper, obduracy and uncivil language, is not misplaced in a party desirous of sustaining its relevance and presenting itself as a change agent.

    However, just like Hon Bamidele proved by his consequential defection from the APC to LP, Dr Banire’s beloved party can ill afford the ossification many party apparatchiks seem to be comfortable with, but which he and his fellow iconoclast have challenged and denounced. They want imposition to end, though they seemed to have profited from variants of its application before now, and are quite unable to appreciate and interpret its complex and adaptable nature and multiple nuances. While their ambition to end imposition and other undemocratic practices within their party is not misplaced, assuming their diagnoses are right, their unpolished style of fighting good causes within their party leaves much to be desired. Dr Banire, from his recent lecture and interviews, is predicting doom for his party if it failed to conduct itself in a manner he believes is unimpeachable. He leaves no room for any error on his part. In fact, he has unguardedly threatened worse consequences for even his party leaders, sparing no one.

    There will be many more Young Turks like Hon Bamidele and Dr Banire, a few of them outrightly impertinent. The APC must learn how to deal with them and manage disaffection within the party. The party must also accept that its leaders are not infallible and can indeed be criticised or castigated by younger and radical elements in the party. But it is also imperative to understand that while they fought legitimately, Hon Bamidele and Dr Banire unfortunately fought blindly and unwisely.  The logic behind their grievances may be right, but the methods of their fight, not to talk of the intended and unintended consequences of their battles, expose them as short on character and lacking in conceptual depth of what their party represents and envisions.

    Judging from the actions and arguments of the two dissenters and perhaps other Young Turks within the party, I am afraid that even in the APC, whether among the leaders or followers, few really understand the visionary and aesthetic import of the party’s foundation and legacy. Many see the party as a vehicle for winning elections and self-promotion, which attributes easily become ends in themselves. But if my reading of the party is right, especially given its lofty promotion of Southwest integration when the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) held the reins, I think the party is an idea grander, loftier, and more sublime than its current methods, organisation and policies exhibit or match. Consumed by their sense of self-importance and distracted by their loathing for certain party practices that seemed targeted against their interests, neither Hon Bamidele nor Dr Banire apparently possesses the rich understanding of what the party is or stands for — an identity far greater and nobler than what is set down in the party’s constitution and manifesto. Had they understood this fact, both gentlemen would have fought differently, with reverence for the party’s grand ideas and great future, and with cultured civility towards party leaders who, though their methods may be shaky and even contradictory, best approximate the party’s spiritual essence.

    Many of the causes fought for by Hon Bamidele and Dr Banire are sensible. Their resolve and courage should be admired and channeled, for their party needs men like them to midwife a greater, bigger, stronger and more relevant political organisation. However,  their methods are unusually strident, and their manners suspiciously discordant, if not entirely objectionable. But party leaders, at least the few who can see beyond today and the chaotic manifestation of what the party represents, must find ways to reconcile the old and the new generation, and forge all of them into an exceeding strong army committed to truly transforming and renewing Nigeria. The party leaders’ vision must make them endure insults, be indifferent to mentee insolence, and enable them handle with perfect equanimity and fortitude the fractious tendency so common among the young and footloose radicals in the party, whether it be Hon Bamidele or Dr Banire, or any other Young Turk flushed with both the anger and unpredictable messianism that so often hobbles the young.