The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Imelda Marcos at 85

Birthday highlights striking similarities between Nigeria and the Philippines; and marked in a peculiarly Nigerian manner

Old habits, they say, die hard. That is why Imelda Marcos still wants the best for their dead patriarch, former President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, even in death. Imelda, widow of the late discredited ruler who clocked 85 on July 2, visited the crypt of her husband in Ilocos Norte, in the northern part of the country, as part of her birthday programme. At the crypt, she remembered the good old days, with the flame of love still burning in her as ever. She kissed the glass coffin where her husband’s body is, in a white jacket, ceremonial sash and polished medals.

President Marcos was ousted from office in 1986; he died in 1989 but is yet to be buried, apparently because his widow’s wish is yet to materialise. He has been lying in a temperature-controlled mausoleum since 1993. Mrs Marcos’ wish is that her husband be given a hero’s burial, a wish the government finds absurd and has consequently turned down continually. No sane government would grant such prayer considering the harm done to the Philippines by Ferdinard Marcos who was removed during a sustained campaign of civil resistance against his regime’s violence and electoral fraud.

What this tells us is that the woman sees nothing unusual in the global perception of her husband as a chronic thief when he was president. It is none of her business that her husband was one of the world’s renowned rogues that ever lived. Of course, she too is not a saint. How can she? A woman without blemish could not have enjoyed the company of a celebrated thief like her husband. If it is true that ‘beside every successful man there is a woman’, then, Imelda must have been a bad influence on her husband. Her only luck is that in her country, as in Nigeria, many things, including the most unthinkable, are possible. That explains why Mrs Marcos could still be a Congress Representative in the same country that she and her husband plundered. That is why her son, Ferdinand Jr, could be a senator, and her daughter, a governor in that same country!

It is because in the Philippines, as in Nigeria, the ‘infrastructure of the pocket’ is vital that she handed cash gifts to people in her constituency, as part of her 85th birthday mementoes. And that was why the people would have collected the ill-gotten cash gifts happily, apparently with the kind of gratitude that words are not enough to express. Needless to say that a party was held in her honour in her family’s stronghold in the northern part of the country where she blew out a candle on a cake topped with a shoe decoration. It is not clear whether the cake designer did so out of mischief or due to request by Mrs Marcos. The import of my point here will be clearer when we realise that Imelda’s collection of shoes was one feature that differentiated her from her prodigal colleagues in her era as First Lady. She was reported to have had as many as 3,400 pairs of shoes after her husband was removed from power in 1986. This was enough to commend her for psychiatric test because something must be wrong somewhere for someone to desire such number of shoes. I guess this must earn her a place in The Guinness Book of Record because I am yet to see any other person with a heart for such primitive accumulation of shoes!

Then, Mrs Marcos realised that her birthday bash was incomplete without giving thanks to God for sparing her life to witness her 85th birthday. In church, she sang with a priest and was also presented with a crown made of flowers, a traditional birthday ritual in the country. What we were not told are the fat envelopes that the priests would have been given and the sweet and kind words they would have spoken of her and her husband, not forgetting to mention the privilege of having the former First Lady in their midst.

Yet, the likes of Mrs Marcos, in saner climes, would be a recluse that many people would want to avoid like the plague. This was a woman accused of stealing billions of public funds to sustain her ostentatious lifestyle during her husband’s 20 –year rule at a time when many Filipinos were wallowing in abject poverty. The only thing is that she was never convicted. That should also remind you of Nigeria. Many Marcoses are walking free on our streets who should be in jail in a situation where we are kind enough not to administer the capital punishment on them. And even though Mrs Marcos left the presidential palace many years ago, she does not think she has had her fair share of the place. She nurses a come-back there, this time not as First Lady but as First Mother. She is banking on her son succeeding the incumbent President Benigno Aquino whose tenure ends in May 2016. Perhaps the fact that her husband has not been buried 25 years after his death, such that she could still plant a loving kiss on his coffin makes her live in the illusion that death is like some deep slumber. Otherwise, an 85-year-old would by now be thinking of life hereafter instead of the mundane that she is still bogging herself down with. It remains to be seen though how far this ‘leap of faith’ would take her.

Obviously, she is overstretching her luck. But, as we await the result of her wish and desire in spite of the colossal damage her husband and herself did to their country reminded me of what Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State said on Monday at the inaugural lecture on democracy organised by Freedom House, which held at the MUSON Centre, Onikan, Lagos. Prof Larry Diamond, the Director of Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University, in the U.S. who was the guest speaker said virtually everything that ought to be said, from history to economy, political economy, politics, etc. about Nigeria. And it was not surprising that he did a good job because of his rich knowledge of the country. Apart from being a Fulbright scholar at Bayero University, Kano, he has written several books on democracy in Nigeria. These include ‘Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria’; ‘The Failure of the First Republic’ and ‘Nigeria in Search of Democracy’.

However, I was more fascinated by Amaechi’s submission (which drew the applause of the audience), that corruption persists in the country because Nigerians are not stoning corrupt leaders; this is what is directly relevant to what we are talking about today. Amaechi made copious references to the past saying that students in the country would have trooped to the streets with the humongous looting going on in the country. And he was correct. Hell was let loose in the Second Republic when we were told (rightly or wrongly) that some N2.8billion Nigeria’s money was missing. These days, we only made some side comments when told that about $20billion public money was missing. We forgot the matter only by being told that America would know if such money was truly missing!

I remember we were almost getting to the point of stoning those we saw as thieves in the Second Republic, particularly in Lagos. As a matter of fact, despite their security details, some of the public officials in the then ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) were stoned on the streets of Lagos and called thieves. Perhaps it was the military coup of 1983 that did not let that get to other parts of the country.

It is this same ‘I don’t care’ attitude to serious matters of public concern by the public that is giving Imelda Marcos the impression that her husband deserves a hero’s burial. It is the same mindset that is propelling her belief that the incumbent President Aquino, come 2016, could be succeeded by ‘Marcos the son’. If her wish comes to pass, then the Filipinos would be in for it, unless of course, Ferdinand Jr. is not a chip off the old block. But Amaechi’s point should be well taken because if the Marcoses had been stoned publicly, Imelda would not be running her mouth so insensitively as she is now doing.

July 6, 2014
Policy implementation gone haywire

Those who make policies and recommend implementation methods need to find out what the best practices are elsewhere

Like many other countries, Nigerian political leaders must have made many good policies. So must they have constructed bad policies in their efforts to govern the country effectively. Compared to many countries of its size in other continents (such as Indonesia and Brazil) and to smaller countries within its immediate region (such as Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire), the implementation of several of Nigeria’s policies leaves much to be desired.

On many fronts, policy implementation in the country is replete with confusion and practices capable of demeaning citizens. But there is no other sector where confusion reigns appears greater than in the transportation sector, particularly travelling out and into the country. Nigerians who happen to see the way immigration and customs services are delivered in other countries cannot but wonder if Nigeria has no respect for its own citizens.

Most Nigerians (outside members of the power enclave who have the privilege to bypass formalities at the airport) needing to use the airport to travel out are subjected to indignities at the hands of security personnel. For example, in front of every airline departure desk is a long desk on which travellers’ boxes are opened in front of other travellers. Women’s and men’s under wears are exposed to other travellers at the instance of anti-drug officers. Anti-drug men and customs officers run their hands through boxes of travellers, with the purpose of making sure travellers are not carrying drugs abroad. Bag owners whose underpants are turned into objects of spectacle for people unknown to them have learnt how to look on with embarrassment and with the hope that the officers would bring the invasion of their privacy to an end in good time.

Customs men and women are also at hand to ‘x-ray’ boxes to ensure that boxes do not contain food items that are needed by Nigerians here at home. Such officers are quick to tell travellers to go and obtain certificates to export such limited food items, ignoring traveller’s explanations that the food is for personal consumption by them and their family members waiting at the other end for them. Nigerians in the Diaspora are not believed by customs officers to have as much right as their homeland counterparts to eat Nigerian food. Little do Nigerian customs officers with enthusiasm to ensure that substandard food do not leave Nigerian shores know that such foreign countries have more sophisticated methods of filtering food items that enter their own space.

Travellers often wonder aloud why the country’s anti-drug police would not use sophisticated methods, like their counterparts in other parts of the world, to x-ray travellers’ boxes. Machines detect illegal drugs faster than police men can do by running their hands through women’s used underpants in boxes. Moreover, machines are not likely to mistake regular white powder for cocaine, as it happened not too long ago with respect to some Nigerian musician. Having a situation in which anti-drug enforcement officers run their hands through travellers’ boxes is also fraught with avoidable danger, especially the danger of agents working for politicians to drop illegal objects in the box of travellers belonging to opposition political parties. Drug detection is something that should be removed from human subjectivity. This must be why other countries invest in such machines and in training dogs to sniff illegal drugs.

The story is not different for Nigerians coming back into the country. The first point of embarrassment is that travellers see how connected Nigerians and even foreigners are aided by men and women in uniform to avoid getting on the lines for holders of Nigerian passports and of other passports. When confronted about this by bold travellers, immigration officers are quick to reply that such persons have been pre-cleared, whatever that means. I found myself playing such a role recently and got punished indirectly for such audacity. After giving my passport to two uniformed officers sitting feet apart from each other, I was still stopped by the man whose attention I had drawn to persons going past immigration desk without submitting their passports to immigration officers. On my way to the luggage claim section, the stern-looking immigration officer I had asked questions earlier stopped me. He asked for my passport and I told him I had gone through clearance. He retorted that it was his job to confirm that this had been done. He took the passport and looked through every page before handing it over to me.

Even after travellers collect their luggage and are apparently cleared by customs, they are still stopped on the way out by persons without any appearance to identify them as security personnel. The task in this case is usually to match the tag on the luggage with the copy given to the traveller at the point of departure. Shouldn’t this have been done before clearing customs, if it has to be done at all? A logical way to do this is to confirm that anyone claiming a piece of luggage is the authentic owner at the point that he or she removes the luggage from the luggage conveyor. Just a few days ago, a new mother coming from abroad was stopped after having been cleared by customs. The grand-mother pushing the new baby’s carrier was asked to present the claim tag for the carrier. She was told that there was no such tag, as the carrier was not checked in but carried into the plane with the baby in it. The ‘luggage officer’ (for want of better way to designate such workers) insisted that the carrier should have been tagged, but the grand-mother was not a push-over, she told the man to call in the airline’s representative.

There is nothing wrong with the government having policies that prevent persons entering the country illegally, taking illegal drugs out of the country, or exporting food in commercial quantity without obtaining export certification. But the ways such policies are implemented show lack of imagination and sensitivity to citizens who need travel-related services. For example, the practice of putting names of infants on passports of their mothers can no longer be used by new mothers who delivered their babies abroad. Nigerian embassies no longer provide such services, and most of the time, they do not regularly have passport booklets. Consequently, new mothers have to obtain the passport of the country of birth of their new children and then ask for Nigerian visa to bring their new infants home.

Those who make policies and recommend implementation methods need to find out what the best practices are elsewhere. Implementing a good policy in a bad way that dehumanises citizens makes nonsense of the good intentions of such policies.

July 6, 2014
A peep into the Republic of the Philippines as Nigeria atrophies

Aquino’s determination to lead the government and the nation towards the straight path has been the catalyst for unprecedented economic growth

In spite of the garbage being daily spewed on Nigerians by the so-called ‘protectors of Nigeria’s prosperity’, especially the over fed foreigner commentators among them who are so enamoured with an over achieving President Goodluck Jonathan it’s a surprise they hadn’t loaned him to oversee their respective country’s affairs, most Nigerians remain perturbed, agonising over what has befallen their country. It is the same reason this column will ‘afghanistIce’ today to let Nigerians see what governance is in other, even less endowed, countries of the world in contradistinction to the verbiage that passes muster here as governance. I must, however, thank a dedicated reader of this column for this paradigm shift, away from Ekiti affairs which had been the focus of the column for a straight ten Sundays, trying to ensure our people make the correct political choice until we got overwhelmed by PDP’s electoral abracadabra. Writing from Ibadan, the gentleman, who studied and married from that country, said, inter alia: ‘Good day to you. I have been reading your write ups for years now and I commend your efforts to straighten our society. Thank you so much. Please and please, go and read extensively on one country –The Philippines. There is a crusade going on in that country now by President Benigno Aquino Jr from which we can learn as a country. Let our people know about this. Many old and new senators are being whisked to prison without bail. They are sent there for corruption and ‘chopping’ of public money. I studied in that country and married from there and I live in Ibadan.’

That precisely was what gave me the urge to go read more about this island country in Southeast Asia situated in the western Pacific Ocean. It consists of 7,107 islands that are categorised broadly under geographical divisions with the capital at Manila though its most populous city is Quezon City. Its location on the Pacific Ring of Fire, and close to the equator, makes the Philippines prone to earthquakes and typhoons, but that very fact also endows it with abundant natural resources and some of the world’s greatest biodiversity. The 15th President of the Republic of the Philippines, Benigno Simeon Aquino III, has come to stand for Filipinos’ reinvigorated passion to build a nation of justice, peace, and inclusive progress. Aquino, the only son of democracy icons Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino and President Corazon Aquino, has in different junctures throughout his life responded to the challenge of acting with and serving the Filipino people. In 1983, after the assassination of his father, he returned from exile to the country to help show the way for the EDSA People Power Revolution -the nonviolent and prayerful revolution by ordinary people -that toppled a dictatorship and restored Philippines democracy. In 1998, Aquino entered public service to make sure that the democracy his parents fought for would bring changes in people’s lives. He served as Representative of the 2nd District of Tarlac from 1998 to 2007. In May 2007, he joined the Philippines Senate, wherein he worked to bring about legislative initiatives anchored on the protection of human rights and honest and responsible governance.

Rather than do that, our politicians would rather conjure on poor Nigerians, the ‘earthquakes and typhoons’ which nature brings to the shores of Philippines with earthshaking consequences.

The most despondent days perhaps in Aquino’s life took place in 2009 when his mother died. Her demise prompted mourning from all over the country. But it awakened a remembrance of the values she stood for. It stirred up the people’s yearning for a leadership that is honest and compassionate, and a nation that trusts and works with its government. Immediately after her wake, people began to call on Aquino, urging him to run for presidency in the 2010 elections to continue his parents’ work. Signature drives and an outpouring of support through yellow ribbons and stickers went full blast, convincing him to run, not the multi-billion, foreign denominated advert campaigns we see around here. Moreover, candidates for president such as Senator Manuel “Mar” Roxas II, Pampanga Governor Eddie Panlilio, and Isabela Governor Grace Padaca all gave up their presidential aspirations to support Aquino. On September 9, 2009, the 40th day after his mother’s passing, he officially announced his candidacy. At his inauguration on June 30, 2010, he declared: “I want to make democracy work not just for the rich and well connected but for everybody,” emphasising that he was in office to ‘serve and not to lord over the people. The mandate given to me was one of change. I accept your marching orders to transform our government from one that is self-serving to one that works for the welfare of the nation.’

This, unfortunately, is what this unfortunate country has lacked, but now lacks more than at any point in our history. You will never, for instance, catch President Aquino protecting a minister under probe for the misuse of public funds, claiming that the agency of government constitutionally empowered to oversee the agency’s affairs had invited her a ‘million’ times for questioning. President Aquino, like his Ugandan counterpart, would rather hang himself than pardon the scion of a former president who is known to have fleeced the country to the tune of over N4 Billion dollars all because he must contest and win election. The Republic of Philippines, obviously a third world country like Nigeria, has shown by this, that you do not have to fight to the death to be president nor do you have to irredeemably mess up a country’s entire electoral system just so you would become an Emperor. In the case of President Aquino Jr, even candidates of the opposition parties withdrew for a man of honour, for a man they know will not be self-serving but will, in his own words, ‘transform government from one that is self-serving, to one that works for the welfare of the nation’.

Only this past week on CNN, Christiane Amanpour asked our dear Coordinating Minister of the Economy why a performing governor, one that is building infrastructure and catering to the welfare needs of the most at risk segment of society, could be whimsically thrown out of office. The minister could only resort to braggadocio, rationalising what she knows not, claiming that because an election was seemingly peaceful, it was transparent even as the larger world knows that there are enough rogue scientists, once the price is right, who would use science to screw up the most apparently transparent election. After all, science makes no noise as we saw when Syria sent to their early graves, hundreds of the opposition via the nerve gas.

The presidency of Benigno Aquino III has been marked by a hardy dedication to bringing about shared progress by doing things the right way. Aquino’s determination to lead the government and the nation towards the straight path has been the catalyst for unprecedented economic growth, which has trickled down to the margins of society through improved government services, reforms in the education system, and conditional cash transfers for the poor; an inspired campaign for good governance and justice as evidenced by the prosecution of corrupt government officials and the empowerment of the citizenry.

“My hope is that when I leave office, everyone can say that we have travelled far on the right path, and that we are able to bequeath a better future to the next generation.”

These are not the words Nigerians hear today as protagonists of 2015, without any consideration for our stolen girls or their parents, decided to mount the Jonathan re-election campaign preliminaries right on the same grounds as those poor women staying right there, rain or shine, to continue to draw world, and in particular, the Jonathan government’s attention, to the plight of the Chibok girls. Amazing, how unfeeling politics could turn!

As we march forward to an uncertain future in this country, everyone in public office, be they politicians or civil servants, even the many cheats that abound within the private sector, should know that if care is not taken, they could very well be victims of the same corrective measures President Benigno Simeon Aquino III is unerringly unfolding in the Philippines.

A stitch in time, they say, saves nine.

July 6, 2014
Amala, rice, corn politics

Following the surprise victory of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the Ekiti State governorship election, Ayodele Fayose, it is understandable why supporters and sympathisers of the All Progressive Congress (APC) are worried about the fate of the party in the forth coming Osun State gubernatorial election and future elections in the South West.

There are those who fear that the APC may lose its dominant status in the region if the party’s governors do not take necessary measures to prevent a repeat of the Ekiti experience. There have been claims that one of the major reasons Fayose won the election was because he was able to ‘connect’ with the majority of the citizens of the state by providing ‘stomach infrastructure’ instead of propounding some grandiose policies of what he hopes to accomplish if he is elected.

Abimbola Adelakun, a columnist in The Punch captured the joke which the Ekiti election has been reduced to with a facebook post in which she wrote: The lesson of Ekiti Election, serve your rice raw.

Consequently, APC governors and candidates of other parties have been bombarded with unsolicited advice about the need to adopt what they termed the Fayose’s populist political campaign style to ensure victory.

Apparently irked by this line of thought, which he said has even been suggested to him by some members of his cabinet, the Ogun State governor, Ibikunle Amosun, has said he will not reduce governance in his state to ‘Amala’ politics of sharing rice and money instead of neglecting infrastructural development.

I agree with Amosun that this advice, informed by those who want the governors to win at all cost is not only an insult on the intelligence of the people but a disservice to the electorate who elected them based on various electoral promises the governors made.

While there may be lessons for the governors to learn from the Ekiti about matching polices with politics, it will be unfortunate if genuine developmental policies will have to be sacrificed to satisfy momentary needs and selfish political interests.

Governors and other elected political office holders should strive to meet the expectations of those who elected them and improve on their standard of living, but this should not be done at the expense of the introduction of policies needed to raise the standard of productivity and service in the states.

If some teachers voted against Fayemi in protest against the introduction of competency test as alleged, Ekiti State is the ultimate loser as it will have to continue to have teachers who are not competent to raise the standard of education as required to meet new realities.

Edo State governor has reportedly backed down on the sack of teachers who failed the competency test for fear of the political backlash. I would rather have governors who would do what is right and in the best interest of the state now and in the future, instead of those who are so desperate to do anything to remain in office.

The picture of a governorship candidate of a party holding roasted corn he bought on the roadside has gone viral on facebook. Obviously, the picture is meant to be a publicity stunt to portray him as a ‘man of the people’ life Fayose, but the real implication is how cheap the basis for getting elected into political office has become.

July 6, 2014
That Fayose-Bamidele entente cordiale

One of the distinguishing features of the June 21 Ekiti governorship poll was the unprecedented collaboration between the supposedly progressive politician and House of Representatives member, Opeyemi Bamidele, and the Governor-elect, Ayodele Fayose, the conservative who passes himself off both as a progressive and pragmatist. Before the poll, the two entered into a gentleman’s agreement to join forces to help Mr Fayose sweep the poll. The agreement was disseminated in hushed tones, but reporters still got wind of it, and attributed the woeful showing of Mr Bamidele in the election to the fact that he had surrendered his goodwill to Mr Fayose’s cause.

If anyone doubted the existence of the entente cordiale or its potency, Mr Baimdele himself gloatingly told a newspaper last week that among the reasons Governor Kayode Fayemi lost the election was his unbridled pride. But if so-called progressives could smother one another in this fashion, like a husband who slept with a whore to punish his wife, then they are in more trouble than they imagine. And judging from Femi Fani-Kayode’s volte face – apostasy, some say – we must ask how on earth progressives recruit politicians into their leadership cadre?

In 2015, Mr Bamidele will likely have his path to the Senate paved by Mr Fayose, except he chooses something more exotic, something more mercantilist. By coming out openly to identify with Mr Fayose, he has indicated a permanent split with his erstwhile political family, a family that I have always argued is held together by the most tenuous of threads. More, the new conservative cum pragmatic alliance in Ekiti all but exemplifies the difficulty in assigning ideological colouration and conviction to Nigerian politicians. The leading political parties, especially the PDP and the APC, are still roughly cast in ideological colours, and mouth programmes along lines that show their leanings. Not so the politicians themselves. They migrate very liberally across the divides and flirt as expediently as their whims carry them, incommoded by our protestations and outrage.

The greater burden is on the APC, given its proselytising tendency, to firm up its ideological disposition and scrupulously vet those it admits into its leadership. The PDP basks in its expansive disposition to welcome everyone irrespective of his background and conviction. The APC cannot hope to match the PDP on that all-comers’ turf. It must rely on its distinguishing properties, its intuitive embrace of political morality, its instinctive and adaptable humanism. As its politics in Ekiti showed, the APC has not always got its priorities right, nor has it found ways to concretise its philosophy of governance, let alone stay faithful to the ideals of its founding. It must urgently address its mistakes if the Ekiti poll and all other prospective entente cordiales are not to turn its momentary defeat into a permanent rout.

July 6, 2014
Where the white man can’t win

A tour of africa’s “fever coast”

lbert J. Meyers of the staff of “U.S. News & World Report” has just toured the lands along the old “fever coast” of West Africa.

This dispatch takes you into jungle areas of tribal rites, superstitions and abject poverty—where the politics and culture of the white man are up against baffling odds.

Here on the Guinea coast of West Africa, you get a feeling that the white man will never really be able to understand this part of the world.

This impression grows as the traveler moves through Cameroon, Nigeria, Dahomey, Togo, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Guinea, and on up into Senegal on the African bulge.

All of these, now are free, independent, self-governing black countries, each with a vote in the United Nations. They are countries whose politicians fanning the winds of change that keep blowing up crisis after crisis in Africa. They seem as different from the white man’s world as night from day.

In the first place, West Africa is one of the most primitive areas in the world. There are no neat and gleaming cities here, such as Nairobi, in Kenya, Johannesburg and Cape town, in South Africa, or even Leopoldville, in the Congo. West African cities don’t gleam. They sprawl steamily amid a crowding, shoving mass of black community.

Linked to past. Sometimes, the stench in Africa is overpowering. Open drains crisscross the cities—uncovered to the flies and other insects. This is often called the “fever coast” or the “white man’s graveyard.” It isn’t difficult to understand why.

Many of the Africans here are descendants of those who were sold into slavery and taken to America—or of those who worked for the slave traders, rounding up captives from tribes other than their own.

The tribal system persists. Language barriers give an idea of its complexity. There probably are 400 different tribal languages or dialects. That is only one roadblock to unity. Tribal hostility is another. The tribes within one nation often are deadly enemies, yet owe common allegiance to a central government in Lagos, Accra, or Abidjan—whatever the capital of the country happens to be.

Everywhere, you sense the strange, secretive nature of the people. For instance, with these Africans, religion takes weird forms. Witchcraft and black magic are widespread. Ritual murders still are practiced. Humans are sacrificed to jungle gods. Children are kidnapped and sold to tribes that then slaughter them in sacrificial rites.

In West African cities, native families—husband, wife with the inevitable baby strapped on her back, other children and innumerable relatives—live in reeking, tin-roofed huts. In the bush, where most of tropical Africa’s people live, home is a mud hut with some kind of thatched roof.

The “mammy traders.” All over West Africa there are “mammy traders”—women sitting by the side of the road selling anything from tooth paste to juju charms. Jujus are supposed to do anything from improving fertility to making the wearer invisible.

An example of how Africans think jujus work: Recently, a Communist-indoctrinated terrorist in Cameroon killed a Frenchman out in the bush and was stripping the victim’s body when police arrived. The killer calmly went on with his work because he was wearing a “magic” juju ring sold to him by a witch doctor. He thought the ring made him invisible.

Slogans and lethargy. A “mammy economy” seems to prevail in much of West Africa. In Accra and other cities, for instance, the Africans travel by “mammy wagon.” These rickety buses are so designated because the businesses are run by women. The “mammy wagons,” always overflowing with passengers, carry slogans on their sides, such as “Jesus Is Mine,” “Nothing Bad,” “Slow but Sure.”

An American, talking to West Africans, discovers in them a sort of lethargic surliness. Perhaps that can be blamed on the climate. It is a climate in which disease—hookworm, tapeworm, malaria, yellow fever, leprosy—is likely to strike at any time.

The visitor learns this quickly. Near the dirt-strip airport at Yaoundé there is a beautiful lake. Its blue waters look cool and inviting. But swimming in the lake is forbidden, because any swimmer would be sure to get hookworm.

At the hotel here, the guest fights off centipedes, sleeps under mosquito netting, wakes up in the morning with mosquito bites anyway. He takes his malaria pills and hopes they’ll do the job.

English with static. A white man has language trouble almost everywhere. Even in Ghana, where English is the official language, communicating is hard. The average West African, if he speaks English at all, does it with an accent that makes it seem as though he had studied it by radio, taking all his lessons at a time when the static was very bad. To an American, listening to a Ghanaian speak English is rather like listening to a phonograph being played at three or four times its normal speed.

English, of course, is not the Ghanaian’s mother tongue. There are more than 50 tribal languages in Ghana, and the child naturally learns his tribal tongue first. Hence his tribal accent when he is compelled to speak English.

Most West Africans—whether in the cities or in jungle villages where bare breasted women and naked children stare impassively as a car goes by—know very little about the outside world. City swelling West Africans have formed their image of America largely from the movies they have seen. In Abidjan, Ivory Coast, a cab driver asked me to send him “a belt like the shooting cowboy wear.”

For whites, it’s “wa-wa.” The few whites who live and work in West Africa have a phrase that expresses their frustration. It is “wa-wa.” It means, roughly, “West Africa wins again—the white man just can’t win.”

A housewife sighs and says “wa-wa” when she has told her native cook again and again to wash the salad greens in a disinfectant solution and finds that he has done so—and then has washed them again at the water tap in the yard.

A businessman says “wa-wa” after he has waited an hour or more for a West African clerk to cash his check at a bank.

A traveler says “wa-wa” when he has been charged anywhere from 28 cents the first time to $2 the second for the same 10-minute taxi ride.

As an American looks at West Africa, he cannot fail to be impressed by its economic potential. There are rubber, gold and diamonds in Ghana, coffee and cocoa in the Ivory Coast, oil in Nigeria, plus mountains of iron ore.

A mass—in parts. Moving along the Guinea Coast—that great arc bordering on the Gulf of Guinea—a traveler sees West Africa as a mass of primitive people broken up arbitrarily into small countries, independent and in ferment.

This part of Africa was “Balkanized”—cut up into small territories by the British and French when they ruled the area. Now these territories are tiny countries, each with its own government, or about to get its own, each with its own brand of explosive politics.

A day’s drive from Lagos, Nigeria, to Accra, Ghana, takes a motorist through two other countries, Dahomey and Togo, on the way. Split up as West Africa is, it is hard to believe that it can ever amount to much politically.

Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah wants to unify under one flag the whole area—all of Africa, for that matter—with himself as boss. Others, like Felix Houphouet-Boigny, President of the Ivory Coast, and Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of Nigeria, want a loose federation with a customs union and a common market, if anything at all.

“No strings, please.” West Africa’s leaders have this in common: All want as much as they can get from both sides in the “cold war.” And they loudly proclaim that they want “no strings attached,” that they will be “neutral.”

This “neutrality” takes strange forms. In Ghana—where Russian technicians are suspect—it is a pro-Soviet sort of neutrality. But in Ivory Coast, President Houphouet-Boigny says this:

“If we Africans be naive enough to sever relations with the West, in the end we will be invaded by the Chinese, and the Russians will impose Communism on our Country.”

The overwhelming impression, after a tour of the new nations of West Africa, is that, if this area is ever to reach political and economic maturity, it is the white man’s skills that must do the job.

But then, this question arises: How can the white man ever understand or cope with this Africa of witchcraft and black magic, of tribal secrets and primitive customs, of mud huts and “wa-wa”?

Source: U.S. News & World Report (10 April 1961)

July 6, 2014
Is the confab really serious about recommending 18 more states for Nigeria?

Running a state is obviously a very costly business, and it does not include the expenses of caring for the people

Seriously? Honestly? When I read the report that the confab members planned to include the request that Nigeria create more states, I nearly flipped. I shook my head and immediately thought, surely, either that there are still people here who do not understand the problem, who do not get it, or I am living in Mars. Oh yes, there are people who normally do not get it and they are called, wait for it, the government. Today though, I prefer the other option: that I am living in Mars, because then, I can pretend others who do not get it do not exist. Let’s see now how best I can give the confab members my own opinion on the issue in a way that will not jolt them too much or give them the impression that I am not altogether with them or give them the impression I do not like them or the job they are doing. Now, how can I do that? NO, NO, NO; no more states. Haba!

Now, how can we explain this problem to them? Let us begin with the most basic implication of this calamitous and precipitous move. It will unbalance my psyche. I will not be able to wrap the fact around my tiny brain that there will now be, what, fifty-five states in Nigeria, what with Abuja being treated as a state with its own government. Listen, things are delicate enough around here as it is without anyone adding to the confusion. That’s it: more states = more confusion. You don’t know what I mean? Let’s see now.

To begin with, having more states means having more governors. Right now, in this present dispensation, Nigeria has had to cope with governors who went on sick leave lasting more than eight months at a stretch, some lasting for more than one year so far and still counting; governors buying and flying jets from public coffers; governors wrangling over who presides over the affairs of other governors while not having completed their original purposes as governors; governors in perpetual tussles with their godfathers; and governors generally doing all kinds of things but governing. Do we want more of that? Do we really? Wait now, there is more.

Having more states will definitely mean having more jets in the Nigerian airspace, and that will equally definitely make it more unsafe. Right now, there is an epidemic of the penchant for purchasing jets by public office holders. I tell you, it’s a biting bug, and it’s biting harder each day. So far, no one has told us that five out of six of the more than thirty-something jets currently in Nigeria were NOT purchased with public funds. No one. It is such a strange co-incidence that a goodly number of them belong to public office holders whose ‘people’ are still living in worse than abject poverty because funds meant for their relief are being spent purchasing … jets. Worse, the airspace in Nigeria cannot quite accommodate these excellencies who sometimes wonder why they should not fly their own jets, like cars, as proof that they really own them, like cars. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there is a governor who is still writhing because he wondered similarly and… Someday, I believe we will hear his story.

Anyway, we know that a governor must be accompanied by all the paraphernalia of office such as FLs, SAs, FSs, FDs, etc. Just hold on to your yams, all will be made clear. First of all, we do not want to be encumbered with more First Ladies whose credentials to the office do not go beyond the fact that they are consorts to the multiple mini emperors. Listen, many FLs are bad news. No, they have not done me any harm, but they have not done us any much good either. Have you noticed that each one sort of comes with a programme that consumes billions of state funds to execute and as soon as they and their principals are out of office, the programme sort of dies a natural death, along with our billions? I have noticed it and I tell you, it boggles the mind. There is something definitely fishy there that we must examine someday.

More, we most definitely do not want more Special Advisers to the Governors appointed to comfort the said governor, who is often caught in the throes of so much work he needs loads of them, SAs that is, not more work. We have written on this topic before, so we do not want to repeat ourselves here but we must say this. We hear there is a state that has more than a hundred Special Advisers to the Governor… The less said on the topic the better. Anyway, we all know that these are political jobbers who prefer not to exert themselves too much in the boxing arena called the workspace plying their God-given talents and gifts for their daily meals. No sir; they prefer to answer their benefactors’ summons.

Now, dear people, you most definitely do not want to add more to the number of first sons and first daughters we already have plaguing the country. Right now, we have chalked up such a huge number of them floating around everywhere in the world schooling, playing, laying and sniffing at the nation’s cost, it will make you wonder. You would not believe that those who are not abroad are here being contractors bidding for the same contracts issuing from daddy’s office as you and I. Guess who usually wins.

So now, people, there are three ways we can approach this thing. I think we should cancel the idea of having eighteen more states altogether. From what I have regaled you with above, you can see that running a state is obviously a very costly business, and it does not include the expenses of caring for the people. If we were to add that, heaven knows what a state’s bill would look like. Worse, very few of these states are actually generating enough to take care of the bills of the governor’s penchants, his family’s and his SAs. Seriously, nearly all of them have been going cap in hand to Abuja every month to have tea. Well, they have to take something while waiting to be received by the AG. Now, the boisterous atmosphere in the waiting room of that gentleman’s office is leading some of us to suspect they are having a tea party in there when they go, err, cap-in-hand. Let’s go on.

The second thing we can do is to ask state agitators to prove that the proposed states can cater for themselves. This means that the entire areas must prove that they have enough resources to take care of the apparatuses of the governorship office as stated above and still have plenty left over to distribute to, err, the people, especially during elections.

The third option is to ask not for eighteen states but nineteen. That number will take care of all your own demands for new states, and also mine. Yes, my dear, I demand a state for myself. And why not? Frankly, if it is possible for me to live elsewhere in order to escape hearing about the grating, irrational deeds of mankind, white or black, I would gladly take the offer. Mars is a good option, but since there is no proof of life there yet, I am forced to settle for demanding a state of my own. Living on a state by myself, I will definitely be immune to demands from people that Nigeria be split into a hundred states. Surely, that time is coming too.

July 6, 2014
Ekiti unleashes strange metaphysics

Immediately the All Progressives Congress (APC) lost Ekiti State in the June 21 election in a fashion many have described as spectacular and unnerving, a strange spirit seems to have seized parts of the country, particularly the Southwest states. Now, everyone wants to copy Governor-elect Ayodele Fayose’s social mannerisms and re-enact his quaint political abracadabra. His victory is attributed to his distaste for intellectualism, his refusal to inflame and annoy the electorate with newfangled ideas about production and social relations, and his obvious fascination with what some analysts disdainfully call inferior taste.

Consequently, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the August Osun governorship poll, Iyiola Omisore, whose reputation is as tattered as Mr Fayose’s, has adopted the latter’s idiosyncrasies in order to appeal to the rabble and the booboisie. He eats by the roadside, hops on commercial motorcycles, shares rural jokes with farmers, and winks at the common idiocies of voters whose coarseness would ordinarily have received short shrift from him. You must expect that in the 2015 elections, many Fayose goblins will be let loose on the country, complete with the devil’s metaphysics to hoodwink and mystify the electorate.

Worse, the Southwest and nearby states are in frenzy to check the devil’s metaphysics from wafting into their states. Edo State is courting teachers, even romancing them, no matter their follies and foibles. Did they forge certificates and cut their official age, well, all is forgotten and forgiven. Should they even require the elixir of youth, the comrade governor would be glad to oblige them. What about quality of teachers and instruction? Why, in the face of vote herding, perish the heresy of quality control. Ekiti has taught a hard lesson on the vulgarisation of governance, and the lesson is well and truly learnt.

Ogun is also giddy with excitement to please teachers and civil servants. So, too, is Osun. The Southwest is truly animated, its governors eager to dole out, if need be, more than half of their states’ recurrent budget to obviate real or imagined discontent. Visionaries will be driven out of town, so also all ambitious social engineers and self-anointed political innovators. The future is now, and the new political and democratic orthodoxy is the need for politicians to connect with their bases. Let the future take care of itself, and let the devil take the hindmost. But it won’t be long before the Southwest is intoxicated, its maudlin soul sated and entangled in the labyrinth of grassroots politics, the kind best exemplified by Messrs Adedibu, Adelabu, Fayose and Omisore, all of them past and present champions and magicians of the devil’s metaphysics.

July 6, 2014
You, your green passport and the world

You were not nervous about your green Nigerian passport at the Toulouse airport as you prepared to leave for Berlin. You had your passport in your bag but you knew that you would not be asked to produce it either on the French or the German side of the border by immigration control officers. You knew because two days earlier as you traveled from Germany to France no one had asked you to produce your passport. In fact, you had your passport out in your hand as you approached the security check point but the officers waived it aside as something they didn’t need to see. And when you got to Toulouse and told your hosts about the experience, they laughed in a good-natured way at your ignorance of the fact that when you travel between European Union countries under the so-called Schengen Pact, you travel without your passport, as if it is a local journey. You smile in return as you remembered the fact that though you need no visa to travel between the ECOWAS countries, you still have to produce your passport and have it stamped when you travel from, say, Nigeria to Ghana or Sierra Leone to Senegal. But why are you writing about this experience, indeed this whole essay in the second person voice and not the first, as is customary with columnists and as you have done so far in this column?

You are writing in the second person voice because something totally unprecedented in your personal and professional career happened at Toulouse. You had gone to Toulouse to serve as an external examiner in the defense of a doctoral dissertation at the University of Toulouse. You, in conjunction with the other examiners, had found the dissertation brilliant. You had all praised the writer of the dissertation, recommending that he be awarded the doctorate with the highest distinctions. But then had come the shocker, to you anyway, because all the other examiners being part of the French system were completely unsurprised: the chairperson announced that in our reports, each of us had to write in the third person. Unbelieving, you had asked, “you mean I should write something of the order of Professor Biodun Jeyifo found the five chapters of the dissertation equally well conceptualised and written”? Yes, the Chairperson had replied, you must write your opinions and observations completely in the third person!

The look on your face must have eloquently expressed your disbelief, your amazement for all the other examiners chimed in by admitting that, yes, the practice seems utterly outlandish but that’s how they write their reports after a doctoral dissertation defense – third person voice all the way. You listened bemused and unconvinced as one of the examiners gave the lame explanation that the rationale behind the practice is to make for complete objectivity in the writing of the report since the third person voice is the voice of self-objectification par excellence: writing about yourself and your opinions in the third person, you are forced both to become self-aware and self-distancing. You could have replied that the first, second and third person voices are all devices, all artificial rhetorical techniques and none of them is inherently closer to the truth than the others. But you kept quiet: when in Rome, do as the Romans do…

That night, you wrote your report, all in the third person voice as requested. It was with great difficulty that you resisted the urge to be sarcastic, to stay within the third person rubric but break it up into contending parts as in “Professor Jeyifo thought that the methodology matched the subject matter of the dissertation, but then another part of Jeyifo thought that the candidate could have been a little more methodologically inventive while yet another part of Jeyifo thought that the whole point was irrelevant anyway”. But you resisted that urge. You resisted because as you wrote, you actually began to find the experience somewhat enthralling in that it began to feel like an other-body experience within your own body. In other words, it began to feel more than a mere change of rhetorical and stylistic register but something existential, embodied and therefore full of possibilities that the regular first person voice does not allow. And that was how that compulsory third person exercise in writing a self-objectified report led to this act of writing about the travails and misadventures of traveling in this world with the Nigerian green passport in the second person register. In plain language, it takes away the sting, the humiliations of the experience of traveling with a Nigerian passport when you write about it in the second and not first person voice.

For the truth is that every time that an immigration official, having seen your green Nigerian passport and asks you to stand apart from all the other passengers with blue, black, burgundy, orange and other colors, you instinctively feel that the experience is not happening to you but to someone else. Perhaps the very worst of this kind of response that the green passport provoked when you presented the passport was in Istanbul, Turkey, 2010. You were not only stand apart, you were quickly surrounded by several immigration officials all armed and all unsmiling. You were then matched to an office far away from the queues of all the other passengers and made to sit in a waiting room for nearly an hour, no explanations given. At the end of that one hour, just as mysteriously, your passport was returned to you and you were asked to go. You tried to ask what had been the matter but one of the armed officials just barked at you, go! You went and as you joined your colleagues from other countries who had travelled with you for an international conference, everyone saw the look on your face and wisely knew not to ask you any questions for at least that moment, that day.

In your line of work, you travel a lot. Also, do admit it: from childhood, you’ve been bitten by the travel bug and you do have a love affair with travelling. Once in the early 1970s in Brooklyn, New York, when you were a graduate student at New York University, you’d seen a huge billboard with the legend, “See the World Before You Leave It!” and you had instantly adopted it as one of your few non-political mottoes. Philosophically, you believe that this earth, this planet is the only home we have as a species and you must see as much of it as you can. And you believe that if a part of us earthlings ever migrates to another planet to colonize and live on it that part of the species would be nothing like what we are now. But progressively worse and worse since that time in the early 70s, our green passport has become a liability with which to “see the world before you leave it”. Perhaps it is useful to make what you are asserting here plainer: it is far more vexatious and taxing to the spirit now to apply for visas and to present your green passport at the immigration control borders of many countries in the world than it used to be two to three decades ago.

You should also admit that it helps somewhat that you teach at a big-name institution but even that is often nullified by the negative talismanic power of the green passport. Recently – as recently as your application for a Schengen visa to Germany – you presented a letter from the Dean of your Faculty to you dated from late last year as proof that you are really an employee, a professor at the Institution in which you teach. Your letter was rejected and you were asked to produce a letter as recent as a week before your application. When you asked if you could have resigned in the middle of the same academic year, the stony response was – we just need a document with a more recent date, period! When you then went and asked the Chair of one of your two departments to write a letter of authentication for you, he said that no one, absolutely no one, had ever asked him for such a letter. He’d wanted to know why you were asked to produce such a letter of authentication, you’d said quietly to him, “you don’t what to know”. What you had in mind was of course you don’t want to know about the green passport and the headaches it generates when you want to and do travel.

Dublin, 17 May 2009. You have that date down in your expired passport as the date on which a big and bold inscription, “Visa Warning” was stamped on your passport. Until the expiration of that passport, everywhere you went in the world, you were asked what “visa violation” had you committed in Dublin, Ireland. Because of missed connections due to the airline’s own fault, you were put aboard a flight going to New York via Dublin instead of the original direct flight to New York. You disembarked with other passengers in Dublin for a stopover of about an hour. As soon as this immigration control officer saw your green passport, she asked you to stand aside and for the next forty-five minutes completely ignored you regardless of your protestations that your flight would soon be leaving. Well, you finally snapped and loudly demanded to see a superior officer because you were not a would-be economic refugee to Ireland, you were a passenger in transit whose plane would be leaving in a quarter of an hour. In response the officer looked at you as if you both belonged to two different species, took hold of your passport, stamped “visa violation” on a page in the passport and then let you go and board your plane for your flight.

You ask yourself: what are the headaches and inconveniences of traveling in the world with your green passport compared to the terrible hardships that most of our peoples face at home? Your response is clear and unambiguous: Nigerian fraudsters, scammers and con-artists have made nonsense of the value and worth of the green passport all over the world, just as looters, election riggers and state and non-state bandits have taken sovereign control over society, politics and economy at home. Whether you are at home or abroad, you carry Nigeria with you, their Nigeria, not the one we deserve and will achieve one day.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

July 6, 2014
APC’s Ekiti defeat

No one can sensibly challenge the right and freedom of Ekiti people to vote into office whomsoever they like. Two Saturdays ago, they exercised that right effectively, admirably and remorselessly to enthrone their 2006 reject, Ayodele Fayose. The balloting – not the processes – was done freely, and it largely reflected the will of the people. Many nations and peoples have similarly and lawfully exercised the same right. Germany voted in Hitler in 1933, France first denounced and later embraced De Gaulle; and even more appositely, in 1945, Britain rejected their heroic war leader, Winston Churchill, who had just led them to victory in World War II. Moreover, more than 2000 years ago, Jews also rejected Jesus Christ and preferred that their Roman overlords release the criminal, Barabbas.

In the June 21 poll, Ekiti took a good look at itself in the mirror and didn’t like what it saw. It saw in Kayode Fayemi, the incumbent governor, a reflection of themselves as aloof, inconsiderate, egotistical, elitist, cruel and sanctimonious. Promptly, Ekiti cut its nose to spite its face. I am persuaded they will rue the choice they have so cavalierly made, for they have shown neither the learning nor the strategic reasoning Ekiti needs to engage and project the finer values and virtues of the Southwest, values and virtues they were for a long time the palladium of. It turns out Ekiti is human after all.

After its candidate in the just concluded Ekiti governorship poll gracefully and heroically conceded defeat, and was praised for the unusual gesture, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has unexpectedly announced its readiness to challenge the constitutional breaches that attended the election process. The party identified at least seven of those breaches. Nothing will of course come out of the court case. The petition will neither affect the poll result itself nor make a dent on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) whose adrenaline in the Southwest is surging to a crescendo. Nor, it seems to me, can a court in the land be found to make any philosophical or nuanced constitutional pronouncements on the noticeable breaches. Rather than serve any useful purpose, therefore, the court case may prove futile, even dampen the value of the statesmanlike action of Governor Kayode Fayemi in conceding defeat, and distract from the more cogent discussions of Ekiti’s post-election future and the unsuitability of the PDP candidate in that election, Mr Fayose.

There have been many analyses of what went wrong for the APC in the poll, most of them, save one or two, put squarely at the doorstep of Dr Fayemi. He probably accepts blame with the same aplomb with which he concedes defeat. Idiosyncratically aloof, too cerebral, inflexible, and insufferably apolitical are among the many faults attributed to him. In consequence, his transformation agenda for civil servants, teachers, local governments, and educational sector were said to have cost him thousands of votes and the election. When he conceded defeat and read his statement on television, he appeared shaken, as anyone who has just lost an election would be. But whether he regrets his policies, most of which have borne and are still bearing fruits, is hard to say. We couldn’t tell from his television address or from his melancholic look. He however claimed credit for redefining governance and setting a solid foundation for the state. He hopes posterity will judge him fairly and probably well.

The APC will regard this defeat as a setback both for its political agenda in the Southwest and its national ambition to form the next government at the centre. Indeed, they may fear that the loss of Ekiti could trigger the loss of other APC states in the Southwest. Conversely, the PDP has begun to express the boundless enthusiasm that the winning of Ekiti may lead to the gaining of more states for the PDP in the region. They speak expressly of the vulnerability of Oyo, Osun, Ogun and even Lagos. Indeed, Information minister, Labaran Maku, PDP chieftain Buruji Kashamu, Governor-elect Mr Fayose, President Goodluck Jonathan himself, and other top PDP leaders indicated a few days after the election that the regaining of the Southwest was imminent. How they can hinge such gargantuan ambition on one election is difficult to tell, and especially without a concise programme, manifesto, ideology or even philosophical direction for the present and the future.

Mr Fayose himself, it will be recalled, won the Ekiti election without articulating any programme. He had enough time to do so. That he chose not to present a programme is perhaps a function of his general paralysis and disinterestedness in intellectual exercises, and the plain fact that he is an impulsive and spontaneous politician who lacks both the discipline and the sagacity to form and conform to a systematic body of thoughts. He ran on the basis of appealing to the emotions of frustrated voters, voters long overrated by analysts and politicians alike. He deftly exploited their anger against Dr Fayemi who was accused of a disconnect between himself and the Ekiti people. If Dr Fayemi was accused of hiking school fees, then Mr Fayose, in his sophomoric dualism, would promise to slash them. If Dr Fayemi was accused of eating, then Mr Fayose would starve. If Dr Fayemi acquired knowledge, then Mr Fayose would acquire ignorance, literally and metaphorically. Dr Fayemi’s policy of industrialisation, said Mr Fayose incredulously to cheering Ekiti electorate, was a trap and a fallacy.

Well, from October and for the next four years, Ekiti will be ruled by a man besotted to hunches, plebeian tastes and boyish and proletarian fantasies. After Mr Fayose was announced winner, there was some jubilation. But on the whole, Ekiti seemed transfixed and sobered by their fateful choice, for they know full well that having ordered the crucifixion of Dr Fayemi and asked for the release of Barabbas, the mortification that follows the betrayal of the irrefutable legacies of Ekiti’s proud and learned past is inevitable. The election of Mr Fayose twice in 11 years is already prompting hard discourses about the constituents of Ekiti persona and tradition. Even if they were angered and mystified by things too deep for them to comprehend, which things were enunciated by Dr Fayemi, was it a sufficient reason to embrace the proven tomfooleries of Mr Fayose? If, as Dr Jonathan said of the Ekiti, they had more professors per capita than any other state, could that professorial gravitas have failed to permeate the entire Ekiti society? These and other questions will be answered in the near future, for the state Mr Fayose so spectacularly misgoverned barely eight years ago has morphed so comprehensively under Dr Fayemi that the difference between the two gentlemen could become tragically stark.

Overall, however, the value of the Ekiti election will be felt more by the chastened and chafing APC than even the exultant PDP. The PDP of course hopes that Ekiti will open the door dynamically rather than ideologically to the Southwest. Iyiola Omisore is loosely perambulating in Osun, naturally without a concise programme or vision. And seeing how Mr Fayose returned to office, the PDP is priming Adebayo Alao-Akala for a return to Oyo. He will rely on federal might and the conspiratorial actions of the Minister of State for Defence, Musiliu Obanikoro, and the Minister of Police Affairs, Jelili Adesiyan. It is the future replay of this conspiracy that the APC hopes to prevent by challenging the Ekiti election processes in court. In their first coming, the PDP had no programme or vision for the Southwest. They hope to enact a second coming on the same aversion to programmes, ideas and vision.

The APC on the other hand needed the Ekiti defeat in order to prevent electoral disaster in 2015. Had they won, they would probably have smugly and blithely walked into a trap, if not total disaster, in 2015. Now, I think the party will be better able to gauge the quality and worth of the voters it hopes to convince to abandon their superstitions, prejudices, ignorance and sham reasoning. APC leaders must now look inwards to find the inner strength, resilience and intellectual subtlety needed to face what is certain to become a steamrolling, ungainly and coarse PDP. They must pay closer attention to how the states under their control are governed, find a balance between their vision and mission, and engineer a delicate equilibrium between leading and kowtowing to the electorate. Importantly too, they now more than ever need to reassess their programmes in order to convince themselves that the integrity of those programmes is worth defending, even at the risk of losing an election.

There are moments when I hope that what transpired in Ekiti is that Dr Fayemi knowingly and stoically stuck to the integrity of his programmes even when he knew the pitfalls. But at other times, I fear that he was in fact politically naïve, a feeling underscored by his reported desperation to woo the electorate in the closing weeks of the campaign, when the signal of defeat had broken through his characteristic imperturbability. If, however, he was appalled by the political behaviour of the Ekiti electorate; if he mocked and defied the offensive vacuity of his opponent; if he superiorly refused to engage in the demeaning ritual of seducing voters with the same kind of sorcery Fayose used, then he can in the truest Kiplingian sense say his costly defeat sneers at the cheap victory of his opponent, and that he had become a man in a sea of political and ideational dwarfs.

It is also argued that Dr Fayemi lost as a result of the obtruding politics of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. This position was advanced on television and in newspapers a few days after APC’s Ekiti debacle. But the fact is that Dr Fayemi, knowing the people he governed, and sensing negative campaigns in Ondo and elsewhere, actually distanced himself from Asiwaju Tinubu. But neither his efforts nor that of Bourdillon – mythically so-called – has mitigated the campaigns. The truth is that there is nothing anyone in APC can say, and there is nothing Bourdillon can do, to erase the impression that Asiwaju Tinubu meddles in Southwest states. On the contrary, what APC leaders need to do is fine-tune their programmes, push the Southwest legislative houses closer to civic culture where Houses of Assembly stand up to their governors and offer the checks and balances the region has been famous for even before the signing of the English Magna Carta, and courageously and with equanimous firmness enact such developmental feats that those who now call for paradigm shifts will know that paradigms indeed shifted many years back.

I have always indicated in this place my sympathies for the APC because I shudder to think what four more years of mediocrity and inaction by Dr Jonathan’s government could cause Nigeria. I would therefore advise APC leaders to approach the loss in Ekiti with the same fortitude great leaders faced setbacks. Let them convince themselves and their consciences that their programmes, their humanistic politics, and their vision for the country are impeccable. If they waver, their programmes could become diluted and diffused, and they would be unable to enjoy in the long run the approbation which only iconoclastic posterity can give.

Dr Fayemi himself, notwithstanding his “insufficient politics”, has a great political future ahead. Mr Fayose, who is already thundering boyish vituperations and inflating himself with the vaulting ambition to eradicate APC from the Southwest, can be trusted to make Ekiti sorry to let Dr Fayemi go. And if some opinion leaders in the Southwest, many of them Dr Jonathan’s lapdogs, still see the rapprochement between Southwest politicians and Northern politicians as an unsustainable and unsuitable alliance because of the prejudices and bigotries of the past few decades, then they deserve our pity. If the APC stays the course and holds firm; and if they produce the right candidates for the defining elections of 2015, then notwithstanding the Ekiti setback, a new Nigeria could still emerge, perhaps against the run of play.

June 29, 2014