The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Ogun and 2015 polls: APC’s unending conundrum

    Ogun and 2015 polls: APC’s unending conundrum

    After hesitating for many months, the Olusegun Osoba camp in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ogun State has decided to defect to the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Though Chief Osoba himself has not made a formal announcement, the long-standing turmoil in Governor Ibikunle Amosun’s government all but made the defection virtually inevitable. Governor Amosun’s deputy, Segun Adesegun, who belongs to the Osoba camp, had a little over a week ago publicised his deep-seated grudges against the governor, much of it revolving around mistreatment, disrespect and inadequate funding. In the letter, the deputy governor sounded pessimistic the disagreements could be resolved. He may be right.

    The Osoba camp is believed to comprise some leading politicians in the state, including all the state’s three senators and six House of Representatives members. No matter what veneer of optimism the Amosun camp want to spread on the split, the Osoba camp is as formidable out of government as the Amosun camp remains formidable in government. If the two camps stay together, they will be even more formidable and stand a decent chance of defeating the resurgent and obviously well-financed opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state. As far as optimism goes in politics, both camps imagine they are so formidable separately that they can win the next governorship poll based on their individual merits, political integrity and grassroots mobilisation.

    Chief Osoba entertains the chimera that he has with him the state’s top national lawmakers and perhaps a plethora of other state and local government elected representatives. He probably thinks his camp is impregnable. But as some states have shown since 1999, it may take just one election for a grumpy and testy electorate to sweep a whole coterie of lawmakers away. Governor Amosun also imagines that his infrastructural renewal programme, the like of which has probably never been witnessed in the state before, may stand him in good stead with Ogun’s longsuffering voters. He will be misreading the times to think performance is a sufficient condition for re-election. In fact, in reality, apart from their befuddling incompetence in assessing candidates, Nigerian voters may have become unfathomably venal, irritable and impatient. They punish well-meaning candidates for little slights, and reward malevolent candidates for massive deceptions.

    The trouble in Ogun APC appears on the surface irreconcilable. But that is because APC leaders’ attention is riveted, perhaps inadvertently, on the wrong things. They seek ways of mollifying Chief Osoba, who seems in the opinion of many to be desirous of carving a liberal fiefdom for himself in a state where he can exert a powerful pull on the politics and bureaucracy of the state consistent with his national standing, age and political associations; and where he can erect a panoply of political and electoral frameworks to dispense equity and fairness according to his own peculiar understanding of justice and ideology. But it so happens that in the same Ogun State lives and governs someone like Mr Amosun, a man fiercely  independent and unwilling to subordinate himself to man or angel, or to Lagos or Ogun, but a man who was nonetheless probably the party’s best choice to win the governorship in 2011.

    The party’s pragmatic leaders, especially in Lagos, recognised this seemingly contradictory fact and prioritised their preferences. If their major desire was to win in 2011, they were willing to ignore Mr Amosun’s idiosyncratic irreverence. Chief Osoba, it seems, never quite reconciled himself to either Mr Amosun’s candidature or his independence for many reasons dating back to the 2003 governorship election. Every small disagreement has therefore loomed larger than necessary, and the governor’s sometimes complex realpolitik has seemed to the Osoba camp despicable and intolerable arrogance. Making a choice between who to support for a House of Representatives seat, such as the one the party had to make between Lekan Abiola (MKO”s son) and Olumide Osoba, became red rag to two raging bulls.

    Party leaders in and out of Ogun are miffed and bewildered by how quickly a small misunderstanding turns tectonic. They are expending energy to settle acrimonious party congresses, determine who should be supported for elective and appointive positions as well as party executive offices, pacify incensed party men elbowed out of the governor’s tight inner loop, and other long if not interminable list of grievances. I am not sure to what extent party leaders can procure peace by continuing to focus on the long list of grievances from both sides. With every resolution, a new grievance emerges. I even suspect that judging by the severity of the rupture between the Amosun and Osoba camps, party leaders may now focus on how to ensure a tentative peace so that the party can unite for the 2015 polls. If they succeed, it will be because Mr Amosun realizes the inadvisability of relying on his good works to give him electoral victory, and because Chief Osoba appreciates that even if Mr Amosun is vanquished, it would be pyrrhic victory so devastating to procure that even he would be unable to gain from it.

    Nevertheless, party leaders must wade into the fray not by looking at the long list of grievances or setting out broad principles for redress, but by examining holistically the bane of politics in the Southwest, and helping party leaders, both elected and appointed, to have a better and deeper understanding of the complicated nuances of contemporary political undercurrents. The region is gradually moving away from the patrician and paternalistic forms of politics and governance. Unknown to Chief Osoba, APC’s national leaders have had to quickly reconcile themselves to the fact that whether Ekiti under Kayode Fayemi, or Oyo under Abiola Ajimobi, or Lagos under Babatunde Fashola, the governors often and ineluctably resist any attempt by anyone to exercise control over them. Lagos and Osun, however, present an interesting study.

    While Mr Fashola chafes at any outside control, not being a politician dyed-in-the-wool however, he has been unable to summon the ingenuity to take over the state’s political structure. Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State, in spite of his well-known fondness for boisterous politicking, seems to be the most successful in the Southwest in balancing his independence with the need to accommodate his party’s national leaders. He has done it with effortless ease, due in large part to the easy-going nature of former Governor Bisi Akande and the ideological affinity he shares with former Lagos Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu. If restiveness in Ogun is to be pacified, party leaders in and out of the state will have to look closely at the Aregbesola formula, a formula I think, by the way, is more intuitively practical than rational or designed. It will be pointless blaming Chief Osoba or lambasting Mr Amosun. Blame game will only lead into a labyrinth.

    Mr Amosun has obviously not been wise enough in managing his relationship with Chief Osoba’s camp, considering how he has tried to win every battle, overt or covert. He wants to dominate the state and wholly determine its direction in accordance with the constitutional powers vested in him. If his party’s national leaders gave him breathing room, a number of reasons accounted for that pacifying change. But in his battles with Governor Amosun, Chief Osoba consistently makes reference to his age and association with the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo, at whose feet he said he learnt politics. Even then, Chief Osoba has not demonstrated the flexibility and restraint that come with the qualities he has ascribed to himself. Southwest history is replete with examples of party divisions preceding heavy electoral defeats. Why does Chief Osoba think Ogun can defy the odds in 2015?

    Chief Osoba may be a great politician and leader, but he is not ideological, notwithstanding the Southwest and APC’s progressive orientation. Indeed, most Nigerian politicians, the Southwest included, are not ideological. Mr Amosun is also ideologically blank, though his infrastructural renewal programme is exemplary. The common ideological causes and lofty visions for a great welfare society that should animate and bind the two political leaders together are thus inexistent. Until APC national leaders can help the two find a common cause, they will continue to undermine each other. Elsewhere, in Oyo, Mr Ajimobi is also not ideological, and he has found it difficult to conceptualise the inspiring common causes that have differentiated Lagos from other states, in spite of Mr Fashola’s lack of ideological affinity with Asiwaju Tinubu — the isolationist governor versus his expansionist and internationalist predecessor. If Mr Ajimobi had had a politician like Chief Osoba to discomfit him, say an aggressive Lam Adesina, Oyo would also obviously be in turmoil.

    The revolution begun in the Southwest some years back is stalling for much the same reasons the Ogun APC conflict is festering. It is uncertain how that conflict will be resolved, both in Ogun and the Southwest. Dr Fayemi has been dethroned, Mr Ajimobi is under enormous pressure and faces an uncertain electoral future, Ondo never really cottoned on to the revolution, Lagos quivers with uncertainty and is dithering, and Ogun now looks set to unravel spectacularly. A gargantuan conflict between idealism and populism is in fact underway in the region, between the so-called stomach infrastructure of grassroots governance and the futurism and inventiveness that epitomised the high points of the region’s development in the First Republic. Neither Chief Osoba nor Mr Amosun is persuaded by the transcendental quality of the causes they should be fighting for, causes that should concentrate their energies in the right direction and diminish the political self-aggrandizement that now propels their politics — a self-aggrandizement that irrationally drives politics in the Southwest and sets APC leaders against one another in Lagos, Oyo and Ekiti.

  • Christ School, Ado-Ekiti, 59-63 at 50

    Christ School, Ado-Ekiti, 59-63 at 50

    In tandem with the School’s new development plan, the set had, first of all, contacted the principal to identify its most urgent need which turned out to be a bore hole to serve the kitchen and the school clinic which do not have a running water of their own.

    At a glorious 2014 Reunion& Home Coming event hosted by both the 59-63 / 70-74 sets from Friday, 23rd to Sunday, 25th October, 2014, my set (59-63) put together an absolutely unforgettable re-union that will long linger in our memories. It was, first and foremost, an opportunity for massive Thanksgiving to the good Lord who has kept us safe these many years; and having been weaned, from tender ages on Christ, there was no shortage of gratitude to God. And how exhilarating it was, jubilantly singing together again the school song: Christ is our corner stone (Songs of Praise 464) in those, once wondrously sonorous voices, now going croaky. The husky voices were, however, invigorated by those of the much younger 70-74 members and current students. Where I sat, directly in front of Oga Dele Falegan, (Oga being our patented way of addressing seniors no matter the age difference) former Director of Research, Central Bank of Nigeria, it was easy to affirm beautiful singing  as one of our major  attributes at The School from the beautiful way he sang. It was simply exhilarating and spiritually uplifting.

    Our own segment of  events  had kicked off the evening of Friday, 23 October at a sumptuous ASUN (roasted goat meat) night hosted by Dr Oye Adegbite,  FCA, and his dazzling wife, at their sprawling country home in the Government Reserved Area of the state capital. What a night of camaraderie and reminiscences! What a night to remember! We were particularly honoured by the presence of two great icons of The School.  First, Chief F. A.  Daramola, our highly revered teacher, and father of Hon Bimbo Daramola, who at 87 chooses to personally drive himself around.  Be not surprised, he is The School’s most venerated games master after the unmatchable Chief R. A Ogunlade of blessed memory. The other was Chief (Dr) JGO Adegbite, School goal keeper, senior prefect and, the first Registrar of the Ekiti State University who, coincidentally, is our host’s uterine brother.

    He was obviously the night’s hero as he regaled us with joke after joke. Wande Adebiyi, aka Flamengo, and incidentally another School goal keeper, was, however, not far behind. Yours truly relived the idiosyncrasies of one of our most loved teachers, the late Mr J O Iluku. And, of course, one of our own, the Venerable Jide Iyiola, said the prayers. In the meantime, Biodun Adu, Consultant Gynaecologist, far away from his London base, kept phoning in to share in the joy of the occasion. It was a night to remember.

    But looking back now, it is funny, if not surprising, that none of us that night remembered to recall that  song, weaved around a mythical Asian king, and  with which all students of our time, but  now unfortunately discontinued, were socially welcomed into the life-long family of CHRIST’S SCHOOL at  an archetypical BULLYING event.  Bullying  has been described as  the use of force, threat, or coercion,  to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively dominate others, and has occasioned suicides in places like the U.S, but not this thoroughly enjoyable one which  requires some elucidation especially for the sake of readers not already conversant with it.

    Midway into this  unforgettable night, at their very first attendance at  a socials event  in the school, new students are filed out on the expansive bowel  of the  QUADRANGLE, to be taught what is simply described as a song. The song, you are told, is about a king named O WATANA, OF SIAM, who is presented in much more mythical terms. You are soon engrossed in this fascinating new song which you soon start singing rather exuberantly, dancing in circles. That, however, is until you see your seniors, now a hilarious audience, singing back and pointing fingers at you.

    What they are singing now is what you get when you fully spelt out the king’s name which is O WHAT AN ASS I AM but which they now pluralise and turn to: O what asses you are, O what asses you are, O what an ass! Boy, you can only imagine the look on the new students’ faces but it is a night you will forever remember.

    The next day’s events took off a little behind schedule as a result of the state’s environmental exercise. So to the school’s Alumni Hall we headed an hour later at 11 am to kick start the 2014 REUNION & HOME COMING EVENT proper with a lecture on MY VISION OF CHRIST’S SCHOOL BY YEAR 2033, the Guest Lecturer being another iconic alumnus, Mr Kehinde Ojo, the immediate past Ekiti  State Commissioner of Education who is, unarguably, a man of many firsts.

    A member of the school football team, he was Senior Prefect and later, principal. A state merit award winner, he was one of the first set of school principals to be appointed Tutor-General by the Ekiti State government. He was therefore the ideal person to envision The School as it turns 100 in 2033. And didn’t he make a wonderful job of it! This, however, was after the Chairman of the event, our teacher and now Acting Vice Chancellor of the Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, Professor Femi Ajisafe, has called for the observation of a minute’s silence in memory of our dear classmates who have joined the Saints Triumphant. May the good Lord continue to rest them and uphold those they left behind. Amen.

    Chief Daramola, Professor Ajisafe and  Mr Ojo were later presented with plaques in appreciation of their support.

    This was followed by the inauguration of projects. In tandem with the School’s new development plan, the set had, first of all,  contacted the principal to identify its most urgent need which turned out to be a bore hole to serve the kitchen and the school clinic which do not have a running water of their own. This we agreed to do, thus solving a problem that has existed like forever and it was commissioned by Chief Daramola in the presence of the principal, his  immediate predecessor, and  a rapturous kitchen staff,  some students and members of staff. As it turned out, the bore hole will now also serve the school chapel. In addition, we donated 5000 customised exercise books to the students.

    The last event for the day was the dinner hosted by the 70/74 set to which our set had been graciously invited and what a night of good food, wine and camaraderie, at the Fountain Hotel, Ado-Ekiti.

    We all punctually assembled the following morning at the School Chapel for the Anniversary Service which, for us, was a debt repaid us by the school.

    How so?

    Way back in December ’63, believing that the set was too troublesome,  the  Principal, Canon L.D Mason, had promptly sent us home directly after our School Certificate exams without allowing us have the luxury of the usual send forth service to which  every set looked  forward to. This service, therefore, mentally took us back fifty one years; and how throatily we all sang trying to re enact those days of angelic voices. The sermon was taken by one of our most humane and revered teachers, and later university lecturer, The Very Revd John Olu Aina.

    As we look forward, trusting Christ, whose name we bear, to our 60th  anniversary, we all agree that this has turned out to be a wonderful occasion at which many of us were seeing again, for the very  first time, since that December day in ’63. We therefore thank God for His grace upon our lives as we say the School Prayer again:

    Grant O Lord

    That Christ’s School may be a Christian School

    Not in name only

    But, in deed, and in truth

    For the sake of Christ

    Whose name we bear

    This short recap will not be complete without expressing the set’s deep appreciation to both our Chairman, Adegboyega Adepitan, and our indefatigable Secretary, Oyeniyi Allen Alebiosu, both of who literally abandoned their personal chores to ensure we had a glorious outing. And our hearty appreciation goes to the elders and all who made it a worthwhile outing. Thank you all and God bless.

  • The Twenty Seventh October of Blaise Compaore

    The Twenty Seventh October of Blaise Compaore

    There is a cruel and neat symmetry to events unfolding Burkina Faso. It speaks to the paradoxes of people’s uprising in Africa and elsewhere else, and the virtual impossibility of having a popular revolution in the very society that appears to need it most. In all probability, the more harshly authoritarian a society is the less likely it is to have a revolution leading to immediate and automatic democratic emancipation of the people.

    In Burkina Faso, it all began in October and has ended in late October. If one were to put a sheen of revolutionary optimism on this, one can as well say that it all cruelly terminated in October 27 years ago but has resumed in another October 27 years after.

    It was on October 15, 27 years ago that Blaise Compaore cruelly terminated the quaint revolutionary experimentation of his bosom friend, Thomas Sankara, in a broad daylight putsch the like of which had never been seen in Africa. At the end of it all, the Ouagadougou Presidential Palace was a site of Homeric bloodletting. Several officers and many socialist cadres lay dead. Sankara himself, sensing the end, had brushed aside all efforts to shield him and the proud descendant of Mossi warriors had gone out to meet his assailants with service pistol blazing.

    It is the heroic people of Burkina Faso themselves who have found a name for their revolutionary uprising against a consummate tyrant. They have named their own version of the Arab Spring after a local bird. The Lwili  is the common name for bird in the Moore language that is most widely spoken in Burkina Faso. But in the past fortnight, the bird has been invested with the mythical aura of a voice that cannot be caged by a monstrous despot. Maya Angelou would be smiling. Twenty seven years after, the Burkinabes have found their voice again. It is the return of the repressed.

    But we must caution incurable revolutionary romantics against false hopes and futile optimism. The original Sankara revolution was not the product of a popular uprising. Sankara himself was hardly a natural democrat.  Belonging to the most elite and elitist of military formations, he merely enlisted the people in his revolutionary project. It was a drama of military giants; a bye product of an intense power struggle among the old Upper Volta military aristocracy. Once in power, Sankara knew where he wanted to take his people and nation, no matter the objective material and historical circumstances.

    It would seem in retrospect that Sankara deliberately courted revolutionary martyrdom. There was something about him which hinted at the holy martyr. For him, the life of the individual leader does not really matter as long as he could cultivate the cult of heroic example. His was a fundamental intellectual assault on the bastion of military reaction and authoritarian privileges; and on the cherished ideals of African post-colonial armies originating from colonial rapine and predation.

    They all noted.  Calm, cool, intensely cerebral and immensely self-possessed, Sankara was a master of the soaring revolutionary rhetoric which did not take hostages whether old imperialist or new internal colonialist. In a moment of exasperation and frustration, Francois Mitterand, the late French president, wryly described him as a cutting edge that cuts too sharply.

    Thomas Sankara was arguably the greatest son of Burkina Faso and one of the greatest sons of Africa ever. He gave his people a new name, a new identity and helped them to find their voice. It was too good to be true. The Burkinabe leader became a revolutionary poster boy for good governance and accountability all over the continent. Sharp, witty, quick on his feet and eternally swapped in paratroopers’ combat fatigues, Sankara was a walking reproach to the corrupt and dissolute post-colonial military oligarchy that held post-colonial Africa by the jugular.

    The good people of Africa noted. There was something mesmerising and electrifying about this new type of military rule. On a typical weekend, the Burkinabe leader could be seen in shirt and shorts personally coating the walls of the presidential villa. He had openly boasted that all his worldly possessions, including an old fridge, could be packed into the boot of his old Renault jalopy.

    Panache and self-assurance, intellectual rigour and revolutionary asceticism is not the kind of combination expected of an African leader, particularly in the nascent epoch of global capitalism. The noose began to tighten round Sankara internationally, continentally and nationally.  From Equatorial Guinea to Zaire, military despots dominant on the continent saw him as a dangerous advertisement for a more humane mode of governance and a source of inspiration to revolutionary wannabes in the post-colonial military.

    It is instructive to note that after Sankara was murdered by his friend, Nigeria openly threw protocol to the dustbin by immediately welcoming Compaore’s envoys, Captain Henri Zongo and Major Boukary Lingani. This was at the same time when the veteran African nationalist, Kenneth Kaunda, was firmly shutting the door of the Zambian nation against the miserable pair. Two years later in a classic instance of poetic justice, Compaore rounded up the two officers and had them summarily executed for plotting against him.

    With such friends and “revolutionary comrades” as the military bastion of the “revolution”, Sankara needed no enemy outside the national borders. Yet he had plenty of them. It is noteworthy that shortly after the ouster of his friend, “Beautiful Blaise” announced a sweeping programme of “rectification” which was nothing but a sly shorthand for rolling back the populist contents of the Sankara revolution. Yet for about a week after the “rectification” began, Compaore could not face the people he had “rectified” even on television, citing a historic bout of malaria. Some malaria indeed!

    For Sankara, the last straw was probably the seminal rift with Moamar Ghaddafi, the deposed Libyan despot. Despite his radical posturing, Ghaddafi was a pan-Arabic racist and equal opportunity anarchist who took a petulant childlike delight in destabilising Black African regimes irrespective of ideological colouration. Sankara stoutly refused to allow Charles Taylor, Ghadaffi’s protégé, an access through Burkina Faso to launch his war against his country. Two years after the overthrow of Sankara, Compaore granted Taylor free access through Burkina Faso. The rest is history.

    But the old native bird of Burkina Faso is not through with us yet. Twenty seven years after Sankara’s assassination and as Compaore fled the capital, the ghost of Sankara returned to the Burkina Faso capital for unfinished business. It was a much storied ghost. Irate protesters against Compaore were seen carrying huge banners bearing the portrait of the noble and iconic paratrooper. It was a historic trope for a return match. Nothing could have been more deeply symbolic of what is known as the cunning of history.

    It was also a defining moment in Burkina Faso history.  Twenty seven years ago and the very day after the murder of Thomas Sankara, Ouagadougou residents began arriving at the hurried makeshift grave that was fingered as Thomas Sankara’s last resting place, laying wreathes and tearing at their own body in a gesture of profound grief. It soon became a holy site. Soldiers forcibly dispersed them and then hurriedly uprooted Sankara’s remains for forcible relocation to an unknown and unmarked grave.

    Last week and twenty seven years after, the army in Burkina Faso was still struggling with the ghost of Sankara as they fired shots to prevent the people who have succeeded in banishing a murderous tyrant from entering the premises of the television station. With such a deeply entrenched counter-revolutionary army, a democratic revolution may well be impossible.

    Who needs a revolution, anyway? Given the recent experience of the so called Arab Spring where a popular revolt has led to the paradoxical consolidation of a counter-revolutionary military oligarchy and Libya’s precipitate lurch into radical anarchy, the civil leaders of Burkina Faso may have to lower their sight and cure themselves of romantic revolutionary delusions.

    The Burkinabe army is too deeply complicit in the Compaore era to play the role of a change-driven nationalist institution. It is its instincts as a veritable spoiler that will more likely gain ascendancy in the coming weeks and months. It is instructive that the first pretender to the throne that Compaore hurriedly vacated was his former ADC who had risen to become a general. The second was the second in command of his Praetorian guard.

    But even a badly wounded and badly compromised army knows when it is in need of a signal retreat. What the people of Burkina Faso have gained from their heroic struggle is the right to freely choose their own leaders. Not even the army can stop that. Many of the young people who rose in furious protest had not known any other leader apart from Blaise Compaore. But they know their history, and they know that there was another man called Thomas Sankara.

    Even more in death, Sankara has turned out to be the greatest nemesis of corrupt oligarchies. As the great man himself would say, not even the mightiest of armies can stop an idea whose time has come. It is that dictum that has just played out in the land of upright people. Thus as Shakespeare would say, the whirligig of time has brought its sweet revenge. On the twenty seventh October of Blaise Compaore, Thomas Sankara can  rest in peace. Burkina Faso must now move on.

  • APC and its presidential headache

    APC and its presidential headache

    The biggest challenge confronting the All Progressives Congress (APC) as it chooses it presidential flagbearer is not the number or quality of those who have put themselves forward.

    If anything, all with the exception of entrepreneur and newspaper publisher, Sam Nda-Iasiah, have some sort of experience at very high levels of government to brandish as qualification for seeking the top job.

    The real headache is that everyone of the aspirants has some form of baggage that the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) will gleefully exploit – diverting attention from Jonathan’s terrible record in office.

    Take former Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari. He is ordinarily an electoral powerhouse. In 2011, he did the near impossible by garnering 12 million votes on the platform of a political party that was just a few months old. What that proved is that the sheer force of his personality could deliver irrespective of the platform on which he runs.

    But I have argued in the past that this very strength – in particular his cult-like following in the north, eventually became his Achilles Heel – as his strategists were misled into thinking he didn’t need an electoral leg down south to help him to power. In the end, he swept the north but was undone in the South-West when Jonathan won the zone with the exception of Osun State taken by Nuhu Ribadu then flying the flag of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).

    Were he to emerge the candidate of APC, he would be running on a better structured platform with strength on both sides of the Niger. A strategy that targets that the votes haul from the North West, North East and South West – with small pickings elsewhere could put him within touching distance of a prize he has coveted all these years.

    The ruling PDP realise the potency of a Buhari candidacy and have begun undermining it even before it becomes reality – and there’s the rub for the APC. With the general on the ticket, the campaign will not be about Jonathan’s management of the economy or his failure to combat the raging insurgency in the North-East, it will be turned around to focus on the General’s record as a military head of state as well as his position on religious issues.

    We will be reminded that his regime authored the infamous Decree 4 which the military reined in Nigeria’s famously free-wheeling press. It wouldn’t matter that in 2015 voters are not being asked to elect a new military junta.

    The attempt to paint the khaki-clad Buhari of 1984 as the same as the agbada-wearing presidential aspirant of 2014 is one of the enduring lies of the emerging campaign. His opponents will not admit that as president he will not have the same powers he wielded 30 years ago. He cannot pass any budget or bill by fiat and would have to deal with a National Assembly whose complexity we cannot fathom now.

    As another ex-military ruler, General Olusegun Obasanjo, found out to his chagrin after his Third Term project bit the dust, there are times when this much-maligned body can prove to be an effective bulwark against would-be despots. There’s no reason to think that the constitution would be amended in 2015 to accommodate any autocratic streak in Buhari.

    Even his much-vaunted desire to stop corruption in its tracks could get a reality check in that same National Assembly. People forget that one of the first bills Obasanjo sent to the legislature in 1999 was a stern anti-corruption bill fashioned after similar laws in Singapore. But by the time Abuja lawmakers finished with it what was sent back to the then president was a limp and near-useless legislation whose impotence is confirmed by the depth of sleaze in the country 15 years after.

    Other issues that will come to dog a Buhari campaign will include the retroactive execution of the convicted drug pushers, the controversial clearance for 53 suitcases to be allowed into the country at a time when the country’s borders were shut to allow for currency reforms.

    We will be told not to forget that the General once professed a love for Sharia – so much so that he would have loved for it to apply throughout the country.

    And let’s not forget the incendiary comments made by the ex-CPC presidential candidate after it became clear that his ambitions had bitten the dust four years ago. His embittered supporters took to the streets to vent their frustration with fatal consequences for many National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members who had serviced as electoral officers for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

    He may have distanced himself from the acts of violence, but his opponents would still seek to embarrass him and damage his candidacy on the altar of vicarious responsibility.

    This brings us to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar. Again, we are confronted with another political giant who through a series of wrong choices undercut his own relevance in national power calculations. We cannot forget in a hurry that at the end of Obasanjo’s first term Atiku controlled the PDP and the then president had to virtually go on bended knees to secure his backing and that of governors loyal to the then VP to clear the way for a second tenure.

    Frustrated out of the ruling party by Obasanjo, his ill-fated presidential run on the ACN ticket and his return to the party he had spurned and excoriated in the bitter days before the 2007 polls, and now his presence in APC, makes it all too easy for those who will paint a caricature of a desperate politician.

    Many acknowledge his virtues as a mobiliser who understands Nigerian politics. His deep pockets would make him an asset for a party like APC which could find itself challenged in the money stakes against the ruling party.

    Interestingly, in his campaigning so far, Atiku has tried to talk about issues and advance policy positions he would like to pursue as president. All that elevated politicking would disappear in a puff of smoke the moment he emerges APC candidate because the PDP, again constrained to shift attention away from Jonathan’s record, would dredge up the former Vice President’s many controversies.

    We would be reminded of the American Congressman William Jefferson’s saga as well as questions about Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) and sundry matters. From now till Election Day, Atiku would be defending and explaining himself against real and imagined charges in the court of public opinion.

    I will not dwell much on Kano State Governor, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso and Nda-Isaiah because whatever baggage they come with is linked to fact that their appeal is limited across the country. The PDP would be quite happy to dismiss them as provincial – never mind the fact that Jonathan and his erstwhile boss, the late Umaru Yar’Adua, could have been described in those terms at the point they assumed office in Aso Rock.

    Much of the handwringing within APC has focused on how much ammunition its aspirants have laid out for PDP attack dogs to play with.

    But this ignores the fact that Jonathan, the ruling party’s candidate, has baggage that would  finish off any candidate in different clime. Compared to his, United States President Barack Obama’s issues were child play, and yet American voters punished him and his party at last Tuesday’s congressional elections by handing power to the Republicans.

    If APC’s candidates have things they have to explain, then Jonathan finds himself in a similar quandary ten times over. On the economic front it is impossible to say that Nigerians are better off economically than they were in 2011. The recent collapse in power generation is an embarrassing enough statistic for a ruling party that has promised light since 1999, but only succeeded in delivering darkness.

    In the 70s the British Tory Party produced an electoral poster showing a serpentine queue of the unemployed waiting to be interviewed for a few job openings. The pay-off line was ‘Labour Isn’t Working.’ It was devastating. The inimitable Margaret Thatcher was swept into 10 Downing Street on the cusp of the landslide.

    Today, Jonathan’s stewardship in the area of unemployment can be captured just as succinctly with those photographs of an Abuja National Stadium packed to overflowing with desperate applicants seeking employment in the Nigerian Immigration Service.

    The exercise ultimately ended tragically with over 19 persons killed nationwide. Such is the contempt that the government has for public opinion that those like the Interior Minister, Abba Moro, who presided over that fiasco are sitting comfortably in their offices till date.

    To say that the administration has been scandal-scarred is to state the obvious. The nation still awaits the results of the forensic audit triggered by allegations made by the former Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, that the NNPC had failed to remit billions of naira to the Federation Account.

    Petroleum Minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke and erstwhile Aviation Minister, Stella Oduah, hugged the headlines for months over allegations of sleaze. While the former continues to fight to stop the House of Representatives from probing allegations that she spent a fortune hiring a private jet, the latter did the ‘needful’ by throwing in the towel when the heat became too much.

    But the government’s reputation totally went down the tubes with the botched attempt by its agents to smuggle $9.3 million into South Africa in a private jet in a bizarre arms shopping trip. While it was still trying to contain the first mess, it emerged that a second seizure had been made by the South Africans – bringing the total to $15 million.

    But perhaps the greatest failure of the Jonathan administration is its inability to end the insurgency in the North East. Today, the insurgents have carved out a caliphate the size of three states in that region. Those who predicted that country would break up in 2015 are inching closer to seeing that dire prophecy become reality.

    A break-up isn’t only when we are scattered in many pieces. Today’s reality is that unless the gains of the insurgents are quickly reversed the map of Nigeria handed to Jonathan in 2011 would be different from that he would hand to a successor next year.

    Today, Nigeria is more polarised along sectional and religious lines than at any time in its history. We are seeing a government and ruling party that has shown every readiness to use religion to divide the country in order to rule over it.

    Tragically, the diabolical efforts of the ruling party’s hacks have produced a situation where many voters have already made their decision on who they would vote for simply on account of his religious identification. That shows how much progress we are making.

    APC should stop searching for the perfect candidate. That creature doesn’t exist on the face of the earth. At any given time aspirants come with baggage. The answer is not to flee from a candidate because of baggage, but to see whether what he brings to the table is greater than his negatives.

    The party must decide whether a Buhari who’s a vote magnet up north should be dumped just because of his controversial past. Will it do better with a ‘safe’ candidate who doesn’t offend sensibilities but cannot galvanise the supporter base the way the General can? The same can be said about Atiku. Should he be passed over despite what he brings to the party just because opponents would call him names? It’s a no-brainer.

  • American mid term elections: Democrats eat dust

    American mid term elections: Democrats eat dust

    A lone slap from a friend stings more than a dozen from an enemy.

    he election is over and results are in. The Democrats suffered a tremendous thumping. To a large extent, the elections were a referendum on President Obama’s leadership. For him, it was a resounding setback on one hand. In a strange way, it may prove to be liberating. The Republican takeover of Congress frees him to pursue the conservative economic agenda that he shares with the Republicans because he will no longer have to worry about carrying along the Democrats in the Congress.

    The key change brought by the election was the Republican takeover of the Senate. The Republicans gained at least seven seats in the upper chamber, giving them a majority of 52. With three seats still in the air, the majority might increase by like number, giving the Republicans a solid 54-55 member majority against the 45-46 Democratic minority. In the lower House, Republicans gained approximately 20 seats to reach 243 of the 435 seat chamber. Many gubernatorial seats were up for bidding as well. Going into the election, Democrats predicted they would gain in this category. They were wrong. The Republican bonanza engulfed this group as well. Instead of gaining a handful of new governors, the Democrats lost them as well as a couple of incumbent seats.

    The dimensions of the Republican onslaught transcended the number of seats won. The margins of victory in many races were astonishingly wide. Republican victories generally approached landslide margins while several seats maintained by the Democrats were done so only by the thinnest margins.

    To a large extent, the lopsided outcome was more a product of who did not vote. The turnout of conservative voters was expected. Fueled to a large extent by an irrational hatred of President Obama and with that animus reinforced by Obama’s fumbling on health care, foreign policy and Ebola,  conservative Republicans trooped to the polls to register their disdain for the very idea of having to call Obama their president. The Democrats’ failure was not so much that the electorate jettisoned them. Only thirty percent of the registered electorate voted. The Democrats lost chiefly because much of their part of the electorate stayed home. For them, voting was not worth the effort.

    One poignant anecdote expresses the election in a nutshell.  Months before the election, a Democratic Party pollster wrote President Obama warning him that victory was fast retreating because enthusiasm among Blacks was dismally low. Without a high Black voter turnout, defeat was preordained. Democratic strategists also made the same point, albeit to a lesser extent, regarding the Latino vote.

    Prompted by these dire warnings, President Obama launched that special appeal to Black voters only he could do or so he thought. He made a series of appearances and radio announcements aimed specifically at Black voters. He also drafted the First Lady to the campaign hustings to deliver the same message. In his otherwise unremarkable radio announcements, the president chided his predominantly Black audience by telling them they have to convince “cousin Pookie” to vote.  “We all got a cousin Pookie who is a good person but sometimes is not quite as attentive to his civic responsibilities as he needs to be,” explained the chief executive. This statement drips with hypocrisy. For the entirety of his presidency, when asked why he has rebuffed Black American policy concerns, he has retorted that he was the president of the United States, not the president of Black America. However, when support was needed, he made a special appeal to Black people and did it in a way he dare not have ventured with any other constituency. It worked for him in the past.

    This time it did not work.  I am a Black American. And like most Black Americans, I don’t have a cousin Pookie as President Obama described.  Obama thought that he could flippantly say anything to Black people and they would jump through fire for him. In 2008, that was so. In 2012, it was still valid, but less so. Today, it is no longer the case. Enough Blacks have caught a true glimpse of the man. The frustration in a growing segment of the Black community is palpable. Before, Blacks would have gone to war for him. Now many will not venture to the neighborhood polling station. “He has refused to do anything for us so why should we exert ourselves for him” is the growing sentiment.

    The First Lady also tripped over her tongue. Responding to a question from a Black journalist, the health food advocate beamed,  “I give everyone full permission to eat some fried chicken  after they vote … I think that a good victory for Democrats on Tuesday, you know, should be rewarded with some fried chicken.”  Black Americans are fabled as being slave to the taste of fried chicken. Forget the substantive policy issues that face the Black community. Forget that the diminution of economics of the Black community is redolent of the Depression.  The First Lady’s implicit message was that you folks don’t understand the important things. Just trust us and allow Barack to handle these matters because he is smarter than the whole lot of you combined. All you need do is vote, eat a few pieces of fried chicken in reward for your obedience then go home and shut up until we need you for the next election. This time, Blacks were not buying the claptrap. They refused to go to the polls. Even among those who refused to vote, a number may have consumed some fried chicken on Election Day notwithstanding the First Lady’s conditional approval.

    The Obama strategy crashed against the wall of Black disenchantment. The abovementioned juvenile statements show the White House couple embraces the same bundle of prejudices and stereotypes toward the Black community that afflicts most White America and much of the Black elite. The Obamas and the Black political elite look with deep condescension at the very people who constitute their most loyal voting bloc. Shame on President Obama for treating Black people as if we are inherently off cue and lacking in some unidentified quality essential to responsible and productive citizenship. Instead of bringing greater understanding of minorities into mainstream politics, he picked the easier route.  He used Blacks to get him into office. Once there, he fed from the same bushel of racial stereotypes as most White politicians. As has been his wont, in the futile attempt to ingratiate himself to Whites, President Obama adheres to sad biases against Black people. As such, it is not cousin Pookie but President Obama and his ilk who are not “quite as attentive to their leadership responsibilities as they need to be.”

    Fortunately, more Blacks are beginning to pierce his insincerity, seeing him for the conservative elitist he has turned out to be. They now say to him and his party that they will no longer be satisfied with lofty words resulting in empty promises. If the Democrats want the Black voter to act, the Democrats better begin taking action beneficial to the Black voter. In the end, electoral politics is based on reciprocity not of unrequited affection.

    This small but growing number of Blacks returning to the reformist tradition of the community will not chain themselves to the Democratic Party. That Party has left its liberal habitation to drift further rightward as the Republican Party also does so. These people seek a progressive alternative. They now organize at the community and grassroots levels, reaching out to progressive elements in wider society. The challenge is steep but the effort is necessary because it represents a revival of the political agenda and mores that historically made the Black community the most political progressive and egalitarian element in national politics. If these progressive forces gain traction, Obama would have suffered a double defeat this election.  Not only would the White electorate have rejected him (almost two-thirds of White men voted Republican on Tuesday), Black progressives may have begun to thwart his post-election plans of being the unofficial leader of Black America once his White House tenancy expires.

    Even facing this prospect of dual defeat, President Obama will salvage something from this electoral debacle. In the privacy of his neoliberal conservative heart, he may welcome the Congressional change. While a liberal on social issues, the President is more Republican than Democratic on economic issues and foreign policy. Now that his party no longer controls any chamber in Congress, he can detach himself from the more liberal Democratic lawmakers.

    To maintain his liberal patina, he will battle the Republicans on social matters like immigration, gay marriage, and environmental protection. The Republicans will try to deracinate the eponymous health insurance regime, Obamacare.  He will fight to retain this part of his diminishing legacy. Without it, his legacy becomes too small for so vain a politician. To enhance that legacy, he will do as he has always done. He will contort himself until his spine snaps in order to show he is bipartisan and that he can accomplish something great despite the political forces stacked against him. To accomplish the great thing, he will not fight the strong Republican hand poised against him.  He will join to himself to it. He will work with the Republicans to achieve their great thing.

    Notwithstanding the dramatic noise circling the contentious social issues, the core objective of the Republicans is an economic one. They seek to disinter the remains of Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt so that they may bury his memory and the programs of his progressive New Deal even deeper. The Republicans want to privatize Social Security and rollback, if not eliminate, most economic welfare programs. They claim to do this to balance the budget. However, when it comes to increases in military expenditure or in suborning their pet industries, the imperative for budget balancing lapses.  They know there is no real need to balance the federal budget. The federal government cannot go bankrupt. However, they exploit this canard to destroy liberal and progressive programs they detest so that they can restructure the nation into the elitist pleasure garden of their dreams. They seek to drive the nation back to a time when income and wealth inequality were stark and the poor and working classes were supine and supplicant.

    In 2011, President Obama proposed a fiscal “Grand Bargain’ that gave the Republicans these things and more.  They did not join him. At that time, their objective was to thwart everything he proposed, even those things they would have done if they held the White House. If he offers a similar deal this time, they will join him as they have now electorally defeated him to the extent possible. With this, we face the prospect of President Obama being the architect of the diminution of the progressive economic justice and welfare structure that has been the central tenet of his own party and of Black support for that party for eighty years.

    Even with his attempt to appease the Republicans and act like he is of their camp, he is not out of the woods. He still does not fully understand the racial dynamics surrounding his presidency. Roughly 40 percent of White America detests the idea of a Black president even one as milquetoast as he. The majority of Republicans are of this persuasion.  No matter what he does, the Republican majority wants his hide. If he does one major thing they don’t like, particularly on immigration, they will initiate impeachment proceedings against him. They will do their best to make his legacy one of rebuke and failure. Ironically, as he cast stereotypes upon the Black masses, the White conservative elite casts the same stereotype on him and it has stuck. He is there cousin Pookie. Thus, while he should vote, there is no way he should be president.

    The more he estranges himself from Black people because of his elitism, the less support he will have when the time comes that he will need it.

    In the end, I seek not to reduce the setback the Democrats experienced solely to this one racial factor. The lack of funds, the quality of candidates and the lack of party organization all played roles. However, the critical path of this defeat runs through the White House and the disintegrating relationship between Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and Black America. Beside the Republican Party, the biggest winners in this are the Clintons. Bill Clinton shall keep his title as the official leader of the Democratic Party. The defeat will cause Democrats to play it safe for 2016. They will rally more quickly around Hillary Clinton than if they had won more seats in last Tuesday’s midterm.

    Neither party has much to offer the poor or working classes. Both parties have been bought and sold. The right side of Wall Street and the corporate war machine own the Republicans. The left side has purchased the Democrats. Those who seek to help the average person must migrate from the two major parties to form something different. Chances are poor for this happening. However, a few seeds of progressive awakening have been planted. While these efforts are far from what is needed, they may shake the Democratic Party and help it return to its liberal ethos. If so, this would be a good thing. But in the meanwhile, the economic agendas of the Democratic President and the Republican Congress dovetail.

    This spells pain for the majority of people. Despite nominal economic growth in America, 90 percent of the people are worse off now than at the end of the Great Recession of 2008-9. Blacks have suffered doubly worse; their pain is both economic and political. They suffer greater joblessness and loss of wealth. Meanwhile, the man in the White House treats them cavalierly after they placed blind faith in him. They have begun to perform a painful reality check. Many now believe they voted for an impostor. Because of Obama’s social aloofness  and economic conservatism that goes against the traditional progressive lean of the community, many have reached the stark conclusion that they have yet to witness the election of America’s first truly Black president.

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • The chicken of rentier states coming home to roost? 1

    The chicken of rentier states coming home to roost? 1

    It is salutary that after hedging for a few months, the minister of finance has finally come to terms with the new reality foisted on the country’s economy, especially its political economy by the laws of supply and demand in the international energy market.

    News about petroleum, Nigeria’s ‘king of crops’ is getting worse by the day. Reliable international sources of energy news are warning minute-by-minute that the price of petroleum has entered its downward journey south and may stay south for long. Even the federal government is taking note of the bad news. It just warned or urged states to look for other ways of raising revenue, rather than depending on the funds from fossil energy. What is required at this critical time is more than knee-jerk reaction from the federal or other levels of government.

    We have warned several times in this column in the last two years about the fast-approaching end to easy money from petroleum. Given the alarmist nature of Western media, in particular about matters that can readily unsettle African governments, it is possible for the forecast that the downward spiral in oil price will last long to be an exaggeration. What appears reliable for now is that Nigeria is losing a lot of revenue anticipated from sale of crude oil. Otherwise, there would have been no reason to tell the country’s 36 states to get creative about revenue mobilisation and less aggressive about revenue allocation.

    It is salutary that after hedging for a few months, the minister of finance has finally come to terms with the new reality foisted on the country’s economy, especially its political economy by the laws of supply and demand in the international energy market. It is right that the federal government has found the dwindling revenue from crude oil too serious a matter to justify denialist response on the part of its thinkers and handlers. Certainly, it is better to err on the side of pessimism than optimism in such matters.

    It is encouraging that the federal government has come to terms with the fact that its finance is under stress on account of the fall of oil price. If with over$70 per barrel, and about 80% of the budget coming from revenue from petroleum, the federal government appears to be having difficulty paying states their statutory allocations on time, then God save every level of government and even citizens when the basic law of economics catches up with all underdeveloped rentier states in 2015 and beyond.

    Some conservative economic pundits in the service of political partisanship have already started to argue that there is nothing to worry about, arguing that the prices of oil have been fluctuating for decades and that whatever goes up must come down and vice versa, as it has always done with the cost of energy. It is gratifying that the federal government is not depending on the perception of such intellectuals this time. The reality of the moment with respect to the future of fossil energy seems to be starkly different from what it was in 2009 when the price of oil dropped to about $40 per barrel.

    Too many new discoveries have been made since 2009. The United States had added Fracking to the lexicon of petroleum exploitation. It is the success of this venture, rather than any political change of heart on the part of that one-time regular buyer of Nigeria’s Brent crude that has stopped it from being one of our best customers. Fortunately, we still have the East to look up to for customers, especially India and China. The news coming from those countries also indicate that they are moving in the direction of borrowing or imitating the technology that brought shale gas into the energy vocabulary of the decade. Europe is certainly on the way to fracking and even Russia, a large supplier of oil and gas cannot be ruled out of the race for shale gas. The list of seekers of the technology of shale gas is getting longer. Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Estonia are already members of the Fracking Club.

    Moreover, more countries, hitherto without petroleum, are joining the club of oil exporting countries. Such countries include Nicaragua, and many of Nigeria’s neighbours on the continent: Ghana, Ehtiopia, Kenya, and Benin. Similarly, other technologies are emerging to increase production of renewable and clean energy. Even Shell, a long-time king of the energy market, is neck deep in renewable energy research and development. More than ever before, all brands of locomotive devices already have hybrid brands that combine a little of fossil oil with ethanol from sugar, cassava, or jatropha. Energy science news also indicates that some countries are already working on breeding bacteria that are capable of producing petroleum. It may be too soon to say that the era of glut on the petroleum market has arrived but it is also not unrealistic to say that sooner or later the world will supply more energy than buyers need. One consequence of this may be that prices of all forms of fossil energy will fall to the point of bringing embarrassment to states that have acted for so long to acquire the name of rentier states, i.e. states that depend not on revenue from the productive sector but largely rather from sale of natural resources without any significant value added.

    But, does or should the nose diving of the price of oil provide a sufficient condition for pessimism on the part of government leaders? It may in the case of a country that has taken the path of profligacy in its political policies over the years, especially one that has become a poster child for political and bureaucratic corruption to the point of having its enemies call it a global center for kleptocracy. However, where leaders are capable of listening to the wisdom of believers in humanism or the infinite capacity of human beings to alter or improve their conditions, there should be no cause for alarm, even if petroleum ceases to exist or advances in technology makes oil redundant.

    There have been leaders in the past who were indefatigable humanists. In the era of Awolowo, Azikiwe, and Sardauna, revenue from petroleum was so negligible that it was easy for the country’s constitution to reserve 50% of such proceeds to regions of derivation. Nigeria was competing neck-to-neck with Ghana then in export of cocoa for foreign exchange. Ivory Coast, today’s global leader in cocoa production was not any close to Nigeria in those years. The Northern region was also making huge revenues from growing cotton and groundnut while the Eastern region thrived on palm produce. It was not until the arrival of military dictators that easy money from petroleum became a source of radical policy changes that disabled the country’s three centers of production and balkanized the country into twelve, then 18, then 30, and 36 states, now slated to become 54, should President Jonathan have the means to implement recommendations of the recent national conference.

    It was well after the characterisation of Nigeria as a country that had problems of spending its petro dollars that military dictators also created a third tier of government and endowed local governments with direct allocation from the petroleum-based Federation account. As of the last count there are 774 of such local governments each with its own bureaucracy, and recently given additional encouragement by the national assembly that finally separated local governments from the 36 states that house them, in order for local government chairmen to have the freedom to use their allocations from the distributable pool. Consequently, for about forty years, Nigeria has not been baking the proverbial national cake; it has been sharing it almost without sense, all in the name of promoting national unity and even development. Once the goose that makes this possible loses its fertility, leaders would have to starting thinking hard like their counterparts in other parts of the world about how to stimulate development and thus make Nigeria attractive to all the nations within it to the extent that unity becomes a given.

    But calling for devaluation of the naira, as some have already started to do, may not remove most of the problems left by continued drop in the price of petroleum, the backbone of the country’s economy and the determiner of what its annual budget looks like. Correspondingly, asking states to look for other sources of revenue is not the way to go, given the size of many of the states and the disempowerment of such states by the federal government which itself receives the lion share of revenue from oil.

    To be continued

  • Caveat emptor……

    Even in deep autumn, the human mind is a deep spring of eternal hope and possibilities. Some of these hopes may turn out to be quite delusional. But that is neither here nor there. It is impossible to get through life without a few illusions. Life itself may yet turn out to be a grand illusion. But you must get on with it, whether you like it or not.

    It is good to be back to these labours. Like an ageing warrior, snooper often enjoys the din of contention; the agonistic rumble of the intellectual coliseum; the rude and irreverent jabs of mercenary commentators who have found ungainly employment on the internet. While there are blue and black collar jobs, the internet has now introduced the phenomenon of the yellow collar work force. Such are the contradictions of global capitalism.

    It is meet, then, to report once again that the reports about the death of the column are widely exaggerated. Despite a well-advertised and well-displayed announcement of a richly deserved rest, the rumour mill still went into overdrive gear. Both column and columnist were reported to have folded up, to employ K.O Mbadiwe’s famous fatwa against an offending newspaper and its editor. One report was said to have sighted Snooper in purgatory observing miserable penance.

    Among these unfounded rumours, Snooper’s favourite was the one which expansively noted that yours sincerely has sneaked out of both The Nation and the nation after a severe power struggle, with his tail between his legs and in fear of dear life. Oh dear!!! When Snooper complained to a friend, he shot back that given the engrossing turn of phrase, the fellow must be one of Snooper’s own boys. He was right.

    Snooper solemnly apologises for inflicting some of these chaps on the national psyche. You can never predict how some of these things will turn out. When you are training intellectual rottweilers, you never know when one of them will turn round to bite you in gratitude. Some of these boys, having returned from the phoney Jonathan Conference empty-handed but with their pockets fully loaded, have taken up calumny as intellectual sports.

    Meanwhile, Jonathan, a master of political ambush and crafty deception, has moved on to the real game in town, leaving them in the lurch. If they care to know, Snooper is acquainted with a veteran tailor in Agege who specialises in the radical restructuring of incontinent pockets. In local parlance, it is known as a double stitch up. Let’s meet at the engagingly named Pen Cinema around Orile.

    So many things happened while the column was away. As they say, a week is a long time in both local and global politics. This past week, the brave and heroic people of Burkina Faso finally saw off their veteran tyrant, the execrable Blaise Compaore,  a.k.a “ Beau Blaise”.

    After his dismissal, the French-powered convoy was thought to be heading for the famous Po Garrison from whence in 1983 Compaore led his famous match on Ouagadougou  to liberate his bosom friend, Thomas Sankara,  from state detention. But the convoy made a detour and headed for Ivory Coast . A drawn , dazed and disoriented  Compaore was later seen arriving at a plush hotel in the Ivorian capital as the curtain drew on his inglorious epoch.

    In Nigeria, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, the gifted Civil War commander, passed on. Coming on the heels of his demise in saddening circumstances was the eightieth birthday celebration of his former Commander in Chief, General Yakubu Gowon. Gowon was the federal victor in the Nigerian civil war. But the clinking of champagne glasses had hardly subsided when the Boko Haram insurgents captured Mubi, the second city of Adamawa state and the economic nerve centre of the north east. Forty seven years after the commencement of the first civil war, a considerable swathe of the nation is now occupied by another rebel army.

    Each of these momentous occurrences merits a separate column, and they shall be so treated in the coming weeks. Each of the events may appear vastly dissimilar to each other, but they are all profoundly related in a dialectical manner of speaking. They speak to the paradoxes and trajectory of political tyranny in post-colonial Africa and to the final working out of the contradictions of military messianism on the continent. But it is the developments in Burkina Faso that merit primacy of attention for the light they beam on a momentous epoch of traumatic transition for the continent.

  • Religious politics, Southwest and general elections

    Religious politics, Southwest and general elections

    In the midst of a rising politicisation of religion under the Goodluck Jonathan government, analysts had speculated that the Yoruba of the Southwest would rebuff the schismatic campaign because of its potential to undermine their culture. The analysts thought that since some Southwest states in the Second Republic were ruled by either a Muslim-Muslim or a Christian-Christian ticket, the region had been inoculated against systematic and entrenched religious conflict. Until about a year or two ago, religion was obviously not a big issue in Southwest politics; now sadly it is inconceivable that any political party, no matter how popular or ideological, could ignore either its political potential or its debilitating effects.

    Under Dr Jonathan, the politicisation of religion is unlikely to abate, and his aides and campaign directors and sympathetic clerics will mine it copiously, as they are already doing with the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). It is not surprising that religious leaders like Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor have thrown in their lot with Dr Jonathan. To him and others like him, it is a natural and effortless process, a subliminally divine and even messianic struggle to win and hold down Aso Villa for God.

    But the surprise is that Southwest religious leaders have fully converted to the campaign and are helping Dr Jonathan market it. Whereas the South-South and Southeast can adapt to and project religious politics, seeing their regions are predominantly Christian, it may be counterproductive for their compatriots in the Southwest, who are almost split evenly between the two main religions, to flirt with religious politics. In the event of a religious conflict, the South-South and Southeast may escape unscathed. The Southwest would almost certainly be struggling to keep the peace and stanch the flow of blood.

    Historically, the Southwest had recognised this tangled skein of religious politics, thereby prompting cultural and political leaders to devise means of engendering religious harmony and reining in and even emasculating extremists. Sadly, the culture of tolerance and secularism is fading. Southwest clerics and politicians are carelessly forsaking the balancing mechanisms that have sustained their society for centuries. If they do not begin to take conscious steps to return to the wisdom of the past, but instead allow themselves to be unwisely and sheepishly sucked into the red vortex of Dr Jonathan’s religious politics, present and future generations will hold them responsible for the consequences.

  • Nigerian leaders: A commitment to sharing

    This democracy has been a godfather-based one because in most states, the godfathers have been having their says and their ways while the people have been watching history being assaulted

    Clearly, there are many students of the Nigerian democratic project who have come to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with this country’s democratic experiment that removing her leadership will not fix. This is really pitiful when you consider that those leaders are actually supposed to drive the democracy project. But, honestly, what can one make of the sudden pronouncement by the president of the Federal (and democratic) Republic of Nigeria that his party’s governors could all have a second term, gratis? Seriously? I call it the largesse of good luck. Actually, if the president had been anything like the Ekiti state governor, I would have said, ‘hmm, there goes the bar-room talk’.

    Instead, I just thought, has the president forgotten that this is a democracy and it is not for him to make such decisions by word of mouth? Rather, it should be the group of nitwit, half-wit, impoverished and neglected ‘we the people’ who get to decide who goes for a second term and who is bombed by word of the election box. Indeed, he himself may even be bombed in that box. Nitwits do have their day, I tell you.

    Perhaps, the president did not really forget; perhaps he was just acting in the spirit of things. In the spirit of things in Nigeria, it is possible for the president to anoint anyone for anything. Perhaps, he anointed his governors because he was well pleased with them; perhaps he needed something from them; perhaps he was hoping they would anoint him in return, who knows? It is obvious though that these clever, cunning and extremely intelligent Nigerians called politicians have taken the ancient, time-honoured and world-renowned democratic process and twisted it inside out, turned it upside down and wrung its very soul out to bring forth what is called home-grown democracy. I hate the sound of that; it is when we want to be dubious that we talk of home-grown anything. You and I know that what we have been witnessing since 1999 cannot by any stretch of my feeble imagination be called democracy. It looks more like something brewed in hell’s kitchen by Satan and implemented by his faithful ones.

    My question then is this: if we knew from the beginning that we were going to run a home-grown democracy, why did we bother to send our nation’s lawmen across the seas to the Americas to go and learn how they do it there soooooooo many times? This is something that every state and even the central government did. One poverty-ridden state somewhere in the north or centre of this country was said to have sent its lawmen on nothing less than 74 trips! Why did we waste such a colossal amount of money making monkeys of ourselves around the world, parading our behinds for the world to see, all the while thinking we were learning about the ways of men? Oh, what meritorious goons we have been!

    I think we all agree, people, there has been very little resembling people-based democracy in what we have been doing since this experiment began again. Take a look. Have we not been witnessing the law being transformed from the people’s last defence to the people’s nothing? Have we not seen this dispensation blatantly disobey orders issuing forth from our collective common sense in several matters? Well, have we not? Don’t let me name names.

    Problem is, those we have sent to the centre (of states, of the nation, of the universe) to speak for us are largely silent because they are speechless, wordless and voiceless. Reason is simple. We have been having houses of parliament filled with officers who (s)elected (i.e. rigged) themselves or were (s)elected by their godfathers. We have also been having state governors installed by their (you guessed it) godfathers who have hovered over them more closely than their guardian angels. This democracy has been a godfather-based one because in most states, the godfathers have been having their says and their ways while the people have been watching history being assaulted left, right and centre.

    This is why it is possible for the president of this country to forget the people’s will in the matter of who wins or does not win a governorship or senatorial seat election. I hear reps and senators from that party are also demanding that the largesse of automatic second term be extended to them. That means no election on earth, no people’s will on earth, can replace them. Hurray!  Frankly, I think we should by-pass these assemblymen and vote in the godfathers. They are more knowing. And while we are on the matter, I would like to also obtain the president’s permission to go for a second term as the chief controller of my dog. He is somewhat heady and I am not too popular with him right now mainly because I have not been too kind to him. If he were to choose his controller through an election …

    There are results from all these disharmonious and freakish assaults to history. First, there is a strong tendency for ‘We the people,’ the ordinary Nigerians, to come to truly believe that this is democracy. This is so far from democracy that I cannot begin to measure the distance. We do not know exactly what is prompting Nigerian democracy to go the awkward way it is going. Some have put it down to money. They say things like there is so much money in the country and no one is asking anyone to give account of anything. Maybe. Some have put it down to power. They say things like someone has to decide who is called to ‘come and eat’ out of that money. Maybe.  Some have even put it down to destiny. They say things like Nigeria is not meant to survive because it is actually no man’s land. Honestly, I don’t know.

    What I do know is that someone, somewhere, is misdirecting this democracy for reasons best known to him/her and the people are acquiescing. Too many people are too glad to be invited to come and eat. Heck, half of Nigeria is waiting to be invited. Just look at the list of presidential and governors’ aides – simply endless; all doing ridiculous things and all earning ridiculous pays! This is the reason many claim that democracy is working. Again, I don’t know.

    Truth is, since the dawn of the country, there has been no leadership group that has not approached, with great gusto, the bungling of things and the deliberate sliding down of the country towards destruction. Truly, it appears clear to me that if the nation’s succession of leaders had purposely set out to derail the country, they could not have done it differently.

    One consequence of this kind of anointing is that Nigeria’s leaders are not committed to leadership for the developmental progress of the country. Allegiance to The One who anoints is thus of far more importance than allegiance to the people’s progress. After all, the people’s progress cannot put food on the table, send one’s children overseas or install one’s wife/husband in a comfortable flat or house in London.

    People, this is not the way to give this democracy a chance. This is the way to kill it using all known methods such as violent stabbing, strangulation, murder and poisoning. Oh yes, we are already doing all four. As it is now, our leaders are more committed to sharing posts, money, spoils of office, bank accounts, girlfriends, boyfriends, each other, etc., than in moving this country forward. I think we need to go back to the dictionary.

  • At the National Education Summit (NES 2014): Is there a dividing line between the failing Nigerian state and its utterly failed educational system? [For Dipo Fasina, the Convener of NES 2014]

    At the National Education Summit (NES 2014): Is there a dividing line between the failing Nigerian state and its utterly failed educational system? [For Dipo Fasina, the Convener of NES 2014]

    The National Education Summit (NES) that took place in Abuja this week is unquestionably the most comprehensive and radical response that has ever been made to the colossal educational crisis in our country. Of course, since I was the Chairman at the Summit, it can be said, quite truthfully, that I make this observation not as a disinterested and neutral reporter who is looking back at an event at which he was not a participant, not an interested party. But as the reader will soon find out from my report and reflections in this piece, even persons and organizations opposed to both the organizers and objectives of the Summit will find it hard to fault my assertion at the very start of this piece that in NES 2014, we had something that is without precedent in the history of attempts to respond appropriately to the terribly dysfunctional state of education at all levels in our country at the present time. First, a word on the range and diversity of organizations and stakeholders that were both responsible for and present at the Summit.

    Officially, all the four Unions in our universities were listed as the organizers of the Summit. These are the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU); the National Association of Academic Technologists (NAAT); the Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU); and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU). But consider the fact that these four unions not only worked together to make NES 2014 happen, they also collaborated with the Federal Ministry of Education, the Ministries of Education of all the states of the federation and virtually all the major non-governmental and civil society organizations in the country that have anything to do with education at all levels in Nigeria.

    Indeed, in planning for and inviting participants to the Summit, all the governing councils of all universities in the country were contacted and invited, as were student bodies of all the universities in the land. Moreover, bodies such as the National Universities Commission (NUC), the Committee of Vice Chancellors, the Committee of Pro-Chancellors that usually regard themselves as serving interests and constituencies that own or regulate our educational institutions and those who work in them were consulted, invited and did actually send representatives to the Summit. Finally, associations of professionals like lawyers, doctors were also invited to the Summit and many of them sent representatives.

    I have meticulously gone over this comprehensive list of organizations and institutions consulted and invited to the Summit not merely in order to impress the reader with sheer numerical scale but, far more importantly to underscore the fact that at NES 2014 itself, not a single group, organization or person among this long list enjoyed any special privilege over others. The protocols of formal courtesy and deference did not last beyond the ceremonial opening session on Monday. Pro-Chancellors, Vice Chancellors and Deputy Vice Chancellors got no special treatment of any kind that distinguished them from students and non-academic staff present at the Summit. I personally keenly felt and secretly enjoyed this radical overthrow of Nigerians’ great love of deference to status, authority and privilege. As the Chairman of the Summit, the expression of formal or symbolic deference to me did not last beyond the first day of the Summit; from the second day to the fifth and final day, I was just another delegate and any courtesies or expressions of respect to me came from junior colleagues and was based solely on their sense of my professional work. Very distinguished professors and highly respected public figures mixed very freely with everyone else as if we were not in Nigeria but in another nation in a different region of the planet. I was particularly bemused to watch some Pro-Chancellors, VCs and DVCs being denied the countless acts and expressions of exaggerated obeisance to which they feel entitled and which they normally receive; they put on a brave face and acted like genuine, born-again democrats! [Normally, the only time this ever happens in our universities is when protesting students corner a VC, DVC or Chairman of Council in a rough patch of a campus that is in the grip of militant or violent turmoil]

    In case the point I am making through this profile of a radical practice of popular democracy at NES 2014 is not clear and unambiguous, permit me to make it explicit. In seeing some of the most highly placed officials of our tertiary institutions in free and open dialogue with senior professors, mid-career lecturers and the most humble members of our academic communities together with concerned citizens and organizations outside the educational sector, it felt as if we were in the only truly liberated space in Nigeria, a space in which what mattered, what motivated everyone present was not hierarchies of power, status or perquisites but the rescue, the liberation of our country’s educational system from its present near comatose state. Indeed, I solemnly testify here that in at least the last decade, I have not been anywhere of, or read or heard about any assemblage of people and organizations as in NES 2014 where Nigerians were gathered, not to give praise to God, not to jockey for money, position or power but simply and only to reflect on what needs to be done to liberate our country from its present dire and worsening conditions.

    This observation leads me directly to the two distinct but interlocking ideas that served as a sort of intellectual and ideological motive force for NES 2014, these being the liberation of Nigeria itself and a liberating education for all Nigerians, especially the pupils and students of our primary, secondary and tertiary institutions and the teachers who work in them. Please note that in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, I speak of the liberation of our country. This is significant, given the fact that the actual theme of the Summit was the liberation of the system of education in Nigeria at all levels from the forces that currently keep it backward, dysfunctional and crisis-ridden. The liberation of Nigeria; the liberation of education in Nigeria: these were the animating ideas of the Summit. Some of the most brilliant and penetrating presentations at the Summit astutely merged these two ideas.

    Without in the least intending any departure from the practice of radical popular democracy at the Summit, I mention here particular presentations and interventions from the floor in which these two ideas were brilliantly and compellingly fused and articulated and these were presentations or interventions by Emeritus Professors PAI Obanya and Otonti Nduka, Professors Toye Olorode, Asisi Asobie, Abdulai Sule-Kano, Demola Popoola and Comrade Biodun Aremu. In this context, I should mention here the many powerful presentations on gender within the framework of the linked projects of liberating Nigeria and a liberating education for Nigeria; regrettably, I must record the fact that quite a large number of male delegates to the Summit were openly derisory or even plainly hostile to this particular category of presentations. From this, one can conclude that Nigerian male academics are in dire need of liberation from a Neanderthal-like conservatism in matters of gender equality!

    There are formidable theoretical and ideological challenges to providing the link between, on the one hand, liberating Nigeria and, on the other hand, a liberating education for Nigeria and Nigerians, even though for most of those at the Summit who argued passionately for linking the two together, those links are pretty obvious. I happen to be on the side of those who took this position at the Summit; the point, though, is that I don’t think that we should complacently feel that since we feel that those links are pretty obvious, those who don’t think so are dumb or of necessity reactionary. Indeed, it is precisely because of this factor that the title of this essay has the phrase, “a failing Nigerian state and its utterly failed educational system”. For if you think, as most parents and employers of labour do, that the crisis of the massive production and reproduction of mediocrity and illiteracy in our schools and universities is one which can be simply corrected by holding the feet of federal and state governments and of teachers and lecturers to the fire of responsibility, accountability and patriotism, then you are not likely to think that you need to worry yourself about the liberation of Nigeria. For the great majority of those who take this position, great reform in policy, policy implementation and governance in our educational system is all you need; all talk of decolonizing the failing, neocolonial Nigerian state is ideological extremism as a means of hiding the collusion of teachers, professors and university administrators in the total debacle that has overtaken education in our country.

    But this view is a dangerous half-truth and the questions raised by and in the phrase “the failing Nigerian state and its utterly failed educational system” will not simply disappear. The line that separates one from the other is so thin that it barely exists. This is because it is the same alliance of interests and forces that are looting the Nigerian state dry and crippling it that are at the base of the corrupt, unethical and unprofessional processes that are ruining our educational institutions. If the Nigerian state is still failing and not yet completely failed as the educational system has, that is only because it is the senior partner, the hegemonic force in the relationship between the educational system and the federal and state governments. Without oil revenues and a largely volunteer army whose payroll is still assured for the foreseeable future, the Nigerian state would be as nearly fatally crippled as the Nigerian educational system. In their barracks, our soldiers live in conditions that are nearly as sub-human, insanitary and primitive as the conditions under which most of the students at our university campuses live and study, but at least the soldiers regularly and unfailingly get paid. Remove this dividing line and then the stark underlying reality would be revealed: the failing Nigerian state and the utterly failed Nigerian educational system are mirror images of one another. You cannot deal radically and effectively with one without dealing with the other. At any rate, at NES 2014, reform and revolution were not separated from one another; but neither was one confused with the other.

     

    – Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu