The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Nigeria: Giant with a feet of clay

Curiouser yet, the president claimed in his Media Chat that his government was winning the terror war even on the heels of two devastating bomb attacks in the heart of the federal capital city, Abuja

Nigeria is a big for nothing country, no thanks to a totally depraved and clueless PDP- controlled federal administration that has for the past fifteen years held it under a stranglehold so debased everything has collapsed. Corruption has become systemic; indeed the country’s oxygen of life, insecurity prevails just as hunger roams the land with no less than two thirds of the population living on less than a dollar a day. I watched the Nigeria police announce a measly N50 million ransom for information on the abducted girls, a whole three weeks after they were stolen and my heart sank. I watched, in amazement, the president of Africa’s biggest economy – a joke with no jobs – wring his hands in utter helplessness, even as the girls’ parents claimed not to have seen a single Nigerian security man in the monstrous Sanbisa forest when they went on an agonising search of their children. And in what must pass as the most bizarre diversionary tactics, I watched, laughing, as the First Lady tried all she could to divert world attention from a do-nothing federal government after demonstrations erupted globally, insisting on the release of the girls. Curiouser yet, the president claimed in his Media Chat that his government was winning the terror war even on the heels of two devastating bomb attacks in the heart of the federal capital city, Abuja, on top of the unprecedented seizure of over 200 girls – exactly how to win a war indeed!

I stood awake most of the night of Wednesday, 7 May, 2014 listening to commentaries on the South-African national election and I could barely fight back tears for a Nigeria so blessed yet so rudderless. As I listened, waiting , in vain, to hear of ballot stuffing, ballot snatching, of police and soldiers standing by, complicit in rigging, my mind went to the shenanigans that pass muster as elections in Nigeria. I remembered the INEC wonder in Anambra just as I recalled Edo State governor, Adams Oshiomhole, bemoaning the involvement of the Nigeria police ‘in carrying electoral materials, arresting EDSIEC returning officers and coercing them into a police station which they converted to a collation centre, supervised by policemen imported from Abuja and Lagos in order to subvert the will of the people’. All that, because PDP’s celebrated ‘Mr FIX IT’ comes from the Local Government Area. This is a government and party which would not shy away from rigging a class captainship contest, in a primary school, were one of its chieftains’ children to be involved. PDP has so bastardised Nigeria that you will search in vain for any redeeming feature. When it is not massive oil subsidy scams, unremitted oil billions or unprecedented oil thefts, you would most probably be talking of a minister burning millions of dollars in unauthorised use of chartered planes. Where billions are not being creamed off pension funds, banishing millions to old age-terminal suffering, they would be scheming to rig the most rudimentary of elections, even where it is intra-party, as Nigerians recently saw in its governorship primary elections in Ekiti and Osun state. Even the arid Nigerian Prison Service has suddenly become one of the agencies millions could be creamed off.

The cumulative effect has been an unedifying corruption of the country’s electoral system such that the PDP, in the course of its stranglehold over Nigeria, has conducted elections which have been described as the worst anywhere on the face of the earth. Even the modest gains recorded in the 2011 general elections have since been rubbished as we saw in both Edo and Anambra states where INEC deliberately sexed up the electoral register.

Without a doubt, however, PDP’s rigging projections for the Ekiti and Osun 2014 governorship elections are bound to thump anything the world has ever seen in electoral manipulation anywhere. Completely browbeaten and blackmailed, no thanks to his 2015 ambitions, the president appears to have given the go ahead for the mother of all riggings in the coming elections, especially that of Ekiti which they claim will kick start their 2015 country capture. For this purpose, a group of renegades, past masters in rigging and sundry criminalities, whimsically, and, inappropriately called MAJEOBAJE – meaning, do not allow bad things happen even as they plan evil deeds – has been assembled and given orders to ensure that the wishes of the electorate count for nothing in the election, whichever way the Ekiti people voted as INEC is programmed to simply announce PDP the winner. We are well aware that they have, in this monstrous plot, the support of some so called Yoruba elders, even from outside the PDP, who have practically sold out to the devil itself simply because of their infernal hatred for a single individual. But they will fail. The immortal Awo had worse plots from amongst Yoruba elements then but they all failed. They have assured President Jonathan that nothing would happen whatever he chooses to do but they are all getting prepared to drink nothing but hemlock. I have, in many articles on this page, advised the president to dust up his history books on the consequences of rigged elections in Yoruba land and how we have proudly accounted for several Nigerian republics solely because some arrogant federal authorities, egged on by some reprobate Yoruba, believe that the Yoruba nation can be trampled politically for their financial gains. That will never happen as no foreign potentate, however seemingly powerful, would ever successfully inflict rulers on a people with a civilised culture and history dating back thousands of years as the Yoruba. Of course, nothing will happen if they allow a free and fair, one man, one vote affair, even if, in their collective wisdom, which God forbid, the Yoruba chose to give their candidate victory. What will never happen, as the case of the conscienceless woman of the Ekiti rerun election fame has shown, is for total strangers, however drunk on power, to inflict rulers on us. For these miserable and insufferable people, an election, properly so called, is not in calculation at all. That must be why the electoral businessman, Kashamu, must have insisted on recruiting ‘soldiers’, as candidates; individuals who so completely ill-represent Yoruba mores and culture, and shamefully and garrulously promising to invest billions like this were the stock exchange.

Having assured Jonathan that the heavens would not fall, whatever they do, they are currently pressurising one of their ghost candidates to step down hours to June 21 just as INEC is being ferociously worked upon to compromise. Electoral materials are programmed to be massively under supplied and very late too in APC strongholds – which actually means all over the state. They plan to orchestrate unprecedented violence with guns blazing, so that their fake security men, allegedly presently being trained at Badagry and Ojota, amongst other places, would effortlessly supervise ballot stuffing as well as protect ballot box snatchers. They have forgotten that we saw all these during the Obasanjo’s, deliberately inflicted emergency rule and have therefore more than learnt appropriate lessons. Where they cannot succeed, INEC is expected to declare elections inconclusive as it did in Ondo.

Omuo, Oye, Ikere and Afao are some of the towns earmarked as their redoubts where genuine and fake policemen would be so overwhelmingly deployed and their nefarious plans perfected. Of course, from their billions of free money from both Kashamu and the national treasury, they plan to bribe not only INEC but also security men and party agents.

But again, we warn Abuja. Nigeria and specifically, the Jonathan government, has been in the eye of the storm globally these past many weeks. His government has been described as not only corrupt, but equally inept. All manner of words are currently being used to consign Nigeria to the very nadir of civilisation; a situation thousands of WEF meetings cannot assuage. It is therefore in their best interest not to unduly heat up the polity if it is not their intention to create a thousand Somalia rolled into one.

May 11, 2014
How close is Nigeria to federalism? (2)

Another naïve definition of federalism is the claim by the north that federalism is a system that ensures “being a brother’s keeper

Today’s piece is a continuation of the thesis that the ongoing conference in Abuja is likely to help Nigerians from all parts get to see the hidden fears of most of the nationalities or regions that constitute the republic, much more than it is likely to lead to re-inventing or re-launching Nigeria. We focused on the first regional position paper made available to the public, the document titled: “Northern Nigeria the Back Bone and Strength of Nigeria.” We concluded the first part on the note that the position paper prepared at the instance of northern governors and northern socio-political organisations chose to exaggerate the value of the North to the entire country or to the rest of the country.

Such hyperbolic self-presentation is not unexpected in a context which provides opportunities for many groups to defend and protect their interests, even when such interests are in opposition to each other. In a conference that is trying to review current ways of doing things with a hope to create new and better ways, it is normal for those who prefer the status quo to argue forcefully for such interest. It is also not unusual that each group in such context may choose to make what may amount to other interest groups as self-serving arguments. Such hyperbolic self-assessment is in harmony with the saying that war is a continuation of politics in another mode and that politics is also a continuation of war in another mode.

What is likely to make negotiations that are capable of changing the course of Nigeria’s history from the politics of self-enervation or self-paralysis difficult to accomplish are position papers that do not want to come to terms with the dynamic character of all social formations and human constructions. In addition, one thing that is likely to poison the water of amicable inter-regional or inter-nationality relations is presentation of position papers that “inferiorise” other regions or nationalities. Such positions are capable of revealing the fact that a journey that several regions believe is designed to lead to unity among various nationalities and cultures in Nigeria is a journey to make it easy for one region or nationality to dominate the other.

It is difficult for any political observer to miss the fact that the position of the north at the conference gives the impression that the region is not willing to accept any changes to the current political structure. In doing this, the region overtly scrambles the chronology of Nigeria’s political history. It states that the states derived from the regions that were amalgamated by Frederick Lugard in 1914 were not independent states but just administrative provinces. This attempt to begin the history of states in the country from 1966 smacks of gross distortion of history. History books are replete with the fact that there were several pre-colonial states before 1914. Benin Empire was one, Oyo Empire was another, Hausa- Fulani Empire was another, just as the Kanuri Empire was another, just to name a few of the pre-colonial states that British colonialists met on ground when they arrived in different parts of what later became Nigeria at their instance. ‘Provinces’ created from such independent pre-colonial states have not automatically lost their right to self-determination because of changes as parts of regions to states.

The north’s view that Nigeria’s federalism does not fit into the pattern of classical federalism as illustrated by the political experience of the United States does not negate the need for other polities to search for new forms of federalism. The American states that chose to go into a federation were not any more independent at the time they came together than the pre-colonial states in Nigeria were at the point of colonisation. States derived from such regions have not lost their independence to any other state within Nigeria since their creation.

Similarly, the view that the 36 Nigerian states are mere administrative provinces that cannot serve as federating units does not tell the whole truth. Nigeria at Independence was a country of three regions, none of which was dominated by the other until 1966. That the three regions were later transformed into 36 states is a product of decades of military dictatorships superintended by generals from northern Nigeria. It is now instructive through the north’s position paper that the 36 states must have been created by such military dictators as provinces to serve the interest of the north. What is not clear is whether the provinces were actually created for the north or for Nigeria. There is a strong need for more confessional statements from northern governors and other elite groups on the motive behind creation of states between 1966 and 1998.

However, delegates at the conference have the right to ask that the 36 ‘provinces’ or clusters of them be accepted as federating units in the same way that the original three regions served as federating units until the coming of military autocrats. The purpose of the conference is not just to make cases for sustaining sectional interests; it is principally to search for how to make Nigeria a functional federation that can add value to the parts as well as to the whole. What is implied in the position of the north is that it is the former Northern Region that owns Nigeria, not only because it can lay claim to 80% of the population or land mass, but also because it has succeeded over the years in owning most of the military heads of states that turned three regions into 36 states or provinces.

Another naïve definition of federalism is the claim by the north that federalism is a system that ensures “being a brother’s keeper.” There is nothing in the history of territorial federalism or ethnic federalism that suggests that the raison d’etre of creating federations is for constituent parts to serve as brother’s keepers. If anything, all examples of federalism—in North America, in South America, in Europe, in Asia, and even in some parts of Africa—indicate that federations are created so that constituent parts can be partners, who through the process of cooperation assist each other to achieve its goals of self-development and self-preservation through harnessing of energies of the partners.

The re-definition of federalism as an opportunity for brothers to make sacrifices for other brothers to thrive sounds profound, but it is not realistic. It is reminiscent of the philosophy of even development developed by military dictators during the decades in which they created multiplicities of states and in the process changed the percentage for derivation that was in force until the arrival of military dictators. If Nigerians wanted the country to be made into provinces to be ruled by a central government, there would have been no reason for the counter coup of July 1966. General Aguiyi-Ironsi’s efforts to create a full-fledged unitary governance of the country would have been enough for everybody including the soldiers from northern Nigeria that carried out the country’s second coup d’etat.

If truly the Northern Region paid to keep Nigeria together during the period of colonial rule, it must have done it for the colonialists rather than for the colonised. That the funds for keeping Nigeria together during the colonial period came largely from the north deconstructs the historical assessment of the motivation for amalgamation of the three regions in 1914, which characterised the south as the woman of means to partner with the northern prince. In addition, the north would have had no reason to ask in 1953 for a loose federation without any central legislative activities beyond Defence and Foreign Affairs. If President Jonathan’s opening speech at the conference promised anything, it is for the conference to come up with new ideas to make Nigerians from various nationalities love to belong to the same country and live together in peace and harmony. Position papers that present any section as the centre of Nigeria and others as its peripheries is not likely to lead to an environment of good inter-nationality relations after the conference, more so if decisions at the conference only succeed in reinforcing the status quo that the north appears to be obsessed with.

To be continued

May 11, 2014
The political wife as disaster

While campaigning for the office of President of the United States back in 1992, Bill Clinton regularly told voters that if they elected him Americans would ‘get two for the price of one’. He was referring to the widely acknowledged accomplishments of his wife, Hillary, who many felt was bright enough to be president someday.

Clinton’s remark underscores how a spouse can be an asset for a vote-chasing husband. Indeed, handlers of many a dour politician have perfected the art of getting their challenged candidate to bask in the reflected glow of the wife’s star shine.

As candidate of the US Democratic Party in the 2000 general elections, former Vice President Al Gore often came across as stiff as a corpse. All through the campaign season, his staff sought ways of humanising him using his then wife, Tipper. The climax of those efforts was an awkward smooch between the couple on the convention floor.

From former French President Nicholas Sarlozy and his celebrity wife, Carla Bruni, to the Ghanaian power couple, Jerry and Nana Rawlings, to the royal match-up of Britain’s Prince Charles and his late wife, Diana, a popular or accomplished spouse is often viewed as an asset.

But a political wife can be a two-edged sword. Her positives are a help to her husband, just as her negatives constitute a drag on his appeal.

In the early days of the Clinton presidency Americans were fascinated by the promise of the bright, young couple who had taken up residence in the White House. But the romance faded as an unelected Hillary started to intrude more and more into the process of governance.

The final straw came when her husband handed her the critical assignment of overseeing healthcare reform. The failure of the project had as much to do with the complexities of the US health system as they had to do with antipathy to the then American First Lady.

Things would go from bad to worse as Hillary became embroiled in the Whitewater scandal which originated from their home state of Arkansas. Many Republicans were keen to turn the controversial real estate deal into the Democrat’s version of Watergate. By then the First Lady whom Bill Clinton once advertised as an alternate president had become a liability who could not be fired.

Former US President Jimmy Carter respected his wife, Rosalynn’s, abilities so much he had her sit in on cabinet meetings. He also sent her out to different countries as an envoy. But by allowing their wives such freewheeling roles in their administrations, Carter and Clinton paid a price politically.

This brings us to the most overtly political wife in the history of Nigeria’s democracy – Patience Jonathan. Critics have long bemoaned her excesses, but the First Couple have largely ignored all criticisms of her presumptuous intrusions into governance.

This last week she overreached herself by intruding into the process of rescuing the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped from their hostel beds in Chibok, Borno State.

The meeting she summoned in Abuja to hold court before an assorted collection of women office holders and camp followers, has since become an internet sensation. Her dramatic tears, wild gesticulations, pidgin exclamations and all-round assault on the English language, have become the butt of a million jokes across the globe.

Today, those who printed “My Oga at the Top” T-shirts for sale have rolled out the “Na Only You Waka Come?” edition and are doing brisk business. What next? Ringtones?

In that one outing, Madame First Lady dealt her husband’s political goodwill a devastating blow with her comments and carrying-on. If she was trying to project empathy, she only succeeded in coming across as insincere and hectoring. Her tearful ‘breakdown’ would have shamed a fifth-rate actress in a badly-produced Nollywood home video.

Were Madame First Lady to be truly concerned, she would have headed for Chibok, Borno State where the grieving are located. She would have left Abuja unannounced, under a security blanket. In less than 30 minutes of an helicopter hop she would have been there to meet the sorrowing parents. Her photographs comforting the families would have been all over the newspapers and TV. Even if she didn’t utter a single word to the press it would have been a PR coup.

But what did she do? She sat in a cosy room in Abuja summoning the grieving to come to her. She railed at those who failed to turn up for not appearing before the one who had the power to help them locate their children. Such hubris!

To compound a calamitous outing, she then insinuated that the girls were not actually missing because of the discrepancies in the accounts of different stakeholders. In her paranoid world this was no mass abduction but the latest conspiracy against her husband’s rule by the usual suspects. She then gave them friendly advice: stop playing games and keep the demonstrations in Borno.

But while madam was busy playing circus mistress, the #BringBackOurGirls protests had swept the globe. Some of those driving it in distant parts of the world do not even know where Nigeria is; they were just moved by a powerful human story – the very sort that didn’t stir the Nigerian government until the world started crying out.

What Mrs. Jonathan forgets is that there’s a time for post mortems – and it is not now. A time is coming when the actions and inactions of the Borno State Government, West African Examination Council (WAEC), the military and others would be examined. At that time also what the President and his wife did and said would also be scrutinised. What the world expects now, however, is government action to rescue the girls. Anything that doesn’t help that cause is just self-serving drama.

As First lady, Patience Jonathan is one of the president’s informal personal advisers. He is free to use her counsel as he deems fit. But he should always remember that she wasn’t elected by us. Her office isn’t recognised by the constitution. He should know, if he’s not already aware, that at this point she has become one of his biggest liabilities.

Her meddling in Rivers State damaged the president’s relationship with Governor Rotimi Amaechi. Like an elephant in a shop full of china she’s at it again trying to install Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidates in several states – putting her at odds with incumbent governors who don’t appreciate her forwardness.

This is what it boils down to. Over the last six years we’ve seen the Jonathans under different situations. In the Chibok crisis we’re seeing a cold, calculating and unappealing side of the First Couple.

As we edge ever closer to the 2015 election year, many are beginning to address their minds to whether they want to go through another four years of Jonathan’s rule. But the president’s qualities would not be the only factor influencing voters.

After the First Lady’s display last week in Abuja, many will be asking themselves whether they can stomach another four years of Patience Jonathan’s histrionics.

May 11, 2014
Reinventing Journalism in Nigeria

In 1984, I was an intern in the defunct National Concord newspapers.

The three -months plus experience in many ways prepared me for what has turned out to be my long sojourn in journalism which from every indication will not end soon.

However, one aspect of my journalism career which I intend to give more attention is media career development.

Over the years, I have benefitted from one form of media career initiative or the other and I feel a compelling need to scale up my work in this area.

While many other professional groups are making conscious efforts to develop the capacity of their members with organised structures for continuos education on the job and career support, not enough is being done in the media.

Right from media training institutions for those who have the opportunity to attend one, to the various media houses there is a yearning gap for the implementation of well articulated media industry relevant training and career support for journalists.

I acknowledge that there are indeed some efforts being made but what we need is a coordinated approach to ensuring that journalists are well trained in media training institutions. That some Mass Communication students graduate these days don’t have what it takes to work in a media house is a reflection of the quality of training they are getting and how obsolete the curriculum is.

There is need for a well defined working relationship between media training institutions and media organisations. If the graduates are being produced to work in media organisations, the training institutions should work with the employers to produce the right quality of graduates.

This will be possible if the lecturers regularly upgrade their knowledge and also observe part of their sabbatical in media houses. Journalism is a practical job and only those who have practiced the art can effectively teach and inspire young graduates to become outstanding journalists.

Media organisations and individuals should show more than passing interest in helping to train up-coming journalists. We should volunteer to teach some courses.

Won’t it be nice if during the Nigerian Union of Journalists, week observed annually members visit media training institutions and teach for some hours on various courses and give the students the benefit of their experience.

Nigeria media training instructions should also learn from the model in many developed countries where they have Media Career Services department manned by professionals who guide and mentor the students throughout their course and stay in touch with them after graduation.

Beyond the initial certification, the dynamic nature of media work requires that there should be regular on -the- job – training for journalists based on need assessment of the various category of staff.

I dare say that regular training is not a top agenda, if it is at all, of most media organisations in the country. We are so focused on the daily round of production that we think that regular training is a distraction. It is said that insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting a change. It is no surprise that in some instances we can’t claim to be making much progress beyond the technology.

I don’t know how many media houses budget or training of their staff. Some media houses have training managers, but in some instances such positions are ‘Siberia’ postings, if you know what I mean.

My experience is that we have largely abandoned training of journalists to Media Non Governmental Organisations, who understandably have their own agenda and focus. NGO trainings unfortunately do not cover many area of media coverage. Most times, they are in the areas of health, human rights and a few others.

Surprisingly, even when free trainings are organised for journalists, some managers are either not interested in allowing their staff to attend or the journalists themselves don’t take maximum advantage of the opportunities.

One possible excuse which is even not tenable is lack of funds since many media organisations are finding it difficult to pay salaries, but how do we explain that we employ young journalists and don’t give them basic orientation like it’s done in other sectors.

The defunct Daily Times had a training School for new and old staff. Radio Nigeria still has a training school in Lagos which I am not sure has the capacity to meet the demands of modern broadcasting. There is also the old TV College in Jos.

By now we should have had more training schools better equipped, better staff to cater for the boom in the media industry.

While media organisations have the obligations to train their staff, individual journalists as professionals should also invest in their own career. Our career is about our life and the progress we make should not be limited by only the support we get from our media houses.

Journalists should like other professionals take personal responsibility for to become better on their job. If artisans buy their tools, I don’t know why some journalists will refuse to buy simple gadgets to improve on their productivity and wait for their employers to buy for them.,

I am not aware that employers pay for most ICAN, NIPR,APCON courses that that staff are supposed to acquire, yet the concern staff dutifully enroll for the courses.

Using the popular definition of Public Relations, journalists should have a deliberate planned and sustained career plan. We should have a mission statement and goal.

A career is like a journey and unless it is planned it will be an aimless one than will amount to nothing no matter how long we are on the job. Like someone said, if you don’t know where you are going, everywhere you get to we look like your destination.

For too long many of us have carried on as if we are engaged in a lesser profession or even a trade which some claim journalism is. Journalism and other media work is too important for any professional to be a mediocre.

It is not difficult to have structured programmes for continuos education for as many journalists as possible. What the industry leaders need is the will and the commitment to provide an enabling environment to improve the cavity of journalists.

The task to reinvent journalism practice in Nigeria is a task that must be urgently done and we all have individual and collective roles to play.

Excepts from my 50th Birthday lecture on May 9, 2014

May 11, 2014
Ahmed Gulak’s Archipelago

Oh boy, oh boy! We know that this is a period of collective tragedy but one single political tragedy diminishes all of us. Has anything been heard about the black box of the flight Gulak 101? It reportedly took off from Abuja in heavy weather and made an emergency landing in Uyo as a result of political turbulence. The plane was said to have developed technical hitches. Thereafter, the lone occupant was also said to have developed itches and rashes as a result of political rashness. The plane was last seen limping and listless as it flew into the clouds. It was reported that all efforts to plead for a soft landing from the tower in Abuja fell on presidential deaf ears. This is not a case of a Bermuda Triangle. It is Ahmed Gulak who has fallen into his own archipelago.

May 11, 2014
The Dervish on the Savannah River

These are desperate times in Nigeria. The Boko Haram sect has abducted its way to international notoriety, focusing global klieg light on the nation and our national deficiencies. While the offer of international assistance in tracking the abducted girls must be applauded and appreciated, Nigerians must now appreciate that the initiative in confronting this local mutant of global terror has slipped from our hands. Before our eyes, Nigeria has become an international front in the latest confrontation between contending notions of human progress.

The implications for our military establishment and sacred national data are better imagined. But we need not worry or mourn. A feckless nation will always come to grievous harm. Two of the lessons we must learn as a building block for the future is the need for quality surveillance of our territorial space and the fact that intelligence gathering is a proactive business rather than a reactive affair. Given the repeated signals, Nigeria ought to have established a Federal Bureau of Counter-terrorist Intelligence a long time ago. It is this unit, rather than the police or the military, that should be the public face of the fight against terrorism.

Great nations thrive not just on the cutting edge sophistication of their technological eavesdropping but on the quality of their human intelligence. It was just a little over a decade ago that snooper met the Sultan of Savannah River in the house of a mutual friend in Savannah, Georgia. He was a former top official of the State Department, an Arabist to be specific.

But he seemed to have quarreled with his bosses and left in a huff. As a leisurely pastime which then became a full preoccupation, he had taken to sailing from New York in his specially kitted boat all the way down to Miami and then back to New York all year round. It was a weird form of self-exile and internal deportation.

It was on one of this to and fro, this nautical gallivanting, that our man chose to make a detour at the mouth of the Savannah River to visit an old friend , a fellow American and professorial colleague of yours sincerely. It was the same route that the youthful Brigadier James Oglethorpe had taken almost four hundred years earlier to found Savannah City and claim the whole of Georgia for King George and the Earl of Chatham.

He was dressed in a snow white jalabiya. Dignified and good looking, the retired diplomat was an African American, but he could “pass”, to use an American lingo. There was something about him which reminded one of a ranking Brahmin of the Sudanese Arab master class. After decades of mixing it up with the Arabs, he had almost become one. One can imagine him taking an early morning stroll on the streets of Khartoum and Omdurman looking very much like an Arab nobleman. It was discovered that he spoke Arab, Bedouin and Wolof fluently. It was America at the summit of its power and glory.

The conversation ranged from the Mahdi uprising in Sudan, the repressed homosexuality of General Charles Gordon, a.k.a Chinese Gordon, and General Kitchener’s savage reprisal for the murder of the British general. At this point, yours sincerely longed for his great friend, Professor Hakeem Olumide Danmole, the notable Islamic scholar at the Lagos State University and one of the experts Nigeria sorely needs at this point. Quiet, well-born and well-bred, H.O.D will never thrust himself forward.

It was as if the fellow knew what one was thinking about. He committed a verbal indiscretion.

“I am surprised that you know so much about Sudan”, the retired diplomat noted with patrician bravura and a patronizing mien.

“To tell you the truth, I am also surprised that you know so much about Africa”, snooper shot back to his fiendishly gregarious laughter and good-natured bonhomie. Snooper decided to change the topic by asking him about the sad events of September 11th, 2001. It was still very fresh then.

“Don’t worry, America will find Osama even if it takes a decade. He will be located at least a thousand miles from his adoptive country and summarily dispatched”, he answered with a calm shrug.

It was when the conversation turned to Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab historian and philosopher, who anticipated Marx and Spengler in many respects, that the retired diplomat completely turned the table on yours sincerely. Everything snooper knew about the great historian had been self-taught. It shows the limits and limitations of what Karl Marx, in a famous polemic against Bakunin, called the “erudition of the self-taught”. Snooper had been pronouncing the name with a heavy “K” not knowing that the “K” was supposed to be silent.

“Oh you mean Ibn (K)Haldun”, the American corrected and then went on a long elaboration of the great man’s theory of Asabiya and the ascetic discipline and group cohesion that come naturally to people in climates of unremitting harshness like the desert. This Russian roulette has played out in the desert for centuries but the theory is generally applicable to human society as a whole. Then the old boy dropped his terminal bombshell.

“It is the spirit of Asabiya and its ascetic discipline which allowed the semi-nomad Uthman Dan Fodio and his group to overcome and overpower the corrupt and indolent Habe ruling dynasty. But it is the law of nature that when nomadic people settle in the city and begin to taste its forbidden fruits, they lose the plot completely. Dan Fodio himself hinted at this. Unless your country takes great modernizing strides in the nearest future another group from the fringes of the desert will try to take out the old caste. If you factor in other contradictions, particularly a restive South, Sudan will be a child’s play.”

Goodbye Savannah and welcome Sambisa Forest.

May 11, 2014
This theatrical mix of the absurd is sick making, what?

I think all this theatrical mix of absurdities will make this country’s past national elder statesmen turn in their graves

Honestly, dear reader, this last week has had my senses swinging wildly from left to right and back again. Events that I can hardly still believe have happened. All week, my emotions have swung from the serious pathos exerted by the sight and sound of mothers in agony over their missing daughters to the serious hilarity occasioned by the presidency over the same missing girls. I have tried but I honestly have found it difficult to get past the televised sniffles of the first lady.

Seriously, as I watched the now-gone-viral video of the encounter between the first lady and the government functionaries she invited to Abuja, I really did wonder and also made a few wishes, mostly wishes. First, I wondered why now after nearly three weeks. Then I wished that after the girls had been found, the first lady would do one more weeping: over Nigeria and what she has become. I wish she would weep for this giant of a country that had so much potential but which has now been brought to its knees by corruption and inept leadership. Then maybe the heavens would hear her sniffles once again and come to our aid, you know, like that book titled Cry the Beloved Country. We digress.

Today, I want to mention that absolutely nothing prepared me for our presidency’s retort to the western powers last week. It seemed to have just come out of the blues. It’s not every day you hear the president tell another president to ‘give me the equipment’ and I’ll take care of boko haram. This, as I read in a news report last week, was in answer to the demand of the presidents of the major world countries to Nigeria to free the Chibok girls reportedly captured by boko haram and end the entire occupation crisis.

Now, many facts immediately come to mind in that retort. It is well known that Nigeria earns millions of dollars a day from petroleum alone, only a part of which is used to execute the national budget. It is also well known that the largest chunk of that budget goes to defence, quite apart from the many other spendings approved for the same purpose. Yet, the soldiers facing the insurgents are forever complaining of being under-equipped and ill-motivated; and no one has explained to this country why this is so. Yet I believe that it is possible to dress and equip twice the size of the Nigerian army in the most modern form and the latest gadgets if the will can just be found somewhere beneath the rubbles of corruption and stashing aways. I guess that is the real problem – the corruption.

Then came the performance to oust all performances from the… err… first lady. With the press awash on the fact that the presidency had done nothing for over three weeks to help the abducted girls; that the presidency did not care because none of their own daughters were involved; I guess the president’s wife felt it was up to her to save the day. And save the day she tried to do. In a mixture of emotions ranging from incredulity that the principal of the Chibok girls’ school had come to a bidded meeting in Abuja without her retinue of workers (Na you alone waka come?); to a triumph nearly equal to the triumphal entry (She always achieves results when she is involved in a matter); to breaking down in tears (The lady wept!), the president’s wife showed her stuff. In her eagerness to salvage the situation, the first lady forgot a few things. The first lady forgot the little fact that she did not quite have the power to send for any governmental functionary because she is not their boss. She also forgot that she was not voted into power, only her husband was. Above all, she forgot that she is the woman and her husband is the man. A little mistake there, but then it can happen to anybody. In my house, I sometimes forget I am not the man of the house and do some table-lifting – big mistake.

Certainly, the presidency could have handled this abduction saga a little better. An earlier and more sensitive approach would have guaranteed greater results instead of this absurd theatrical mix long after the trail has gone cold and the criminals have forgotten their crime. By now, those girls may have been compromised. This is not good enough. It does not bespeak sufficient seriousness on the part of those in charge of the affairs of this country. This is why other governments more serious than us in this country now have the onerous duty of flying in to save us from ourselves.

That’s right; it gets me indeed that the American troop has had to come into this country to rescue Nigerian girls captured in Nigeria by Nigerians. You know why? It is because in every sphere of human existence in this country, I believe that Nigeria has some of the best trained officers in the world. Just think about the army, police, academia, anything, Nigeria has got it. What the people of this country need is the chance to prove themselves when the circumstances are equal, such as in a good system. American troops are able to fly into any rescue operation anywhere in the world because they are properly kitted out and the funds meant for them find their ways to them as at and when due.

But, imagine this. We are here unable to hold our country together in any way: no good transportation, inconstant power supply, sputtering water supply, very bad roads and no road networks, etc. Instead of working at these things, leaders are busy stashing things away. In the meantime, we have even gone and created a problem we cannot take care of by ourselves. I really do wonder for how long we are going to remain a baby that needs to be wiped and have her nappy changed by the bigger powers.

Let’s look at this American troop thing. Can you imagine what their presence here says about us to the rest of the known world? It says a great deal actually. First, it says loudly that we are incapable of any good thing. When it comes to corruption index, we are top of the cards. When it comes to human rights index, we are top of the table. When it comes to maternal mortality, we are top in the labour room. However, when it comes to good governance, the country disappears off the radar.

All of us are very interested in just getting the girls back, and may that be so. Any means will do, nationally or internationally contrived. The problem the country will grapple with afterwards, however, is that that rescue will constitute a compromise of the nation’s political power and will. The sanctity of the country’s sovereignty will now be compromised. There is an adage that says when one accepts a gift from someone else, the receiver becomes the slave of the giver. That is so true. Whence can this country hold its head high again if and when the foreign troop brings the girls home? How will I now be looking at you?

Lastly, I think all this theatrical mix of absurdities will make this country’s national elder statesmen turn in their graves. If they were to wake up today, they would look around them and at each other before voicing the only question running through their collective minds: ‘Is this the independence we fought for, or there is another to come?’ I can take only one lesson home from all this: there is indeed another independence to be fought for, and well may we win that.

May 11, 2014
Government’s whimsical approach to counterterrorism

Either because it lacked the imaginativeness to do what is right or because it believed no abductions took place on April 15, the Jonathan presidency did not wake up to the full import of the kidnap of more than 200 schoolgirls of the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State. For more than two weeks after the abductions, the federal government pretended the problem was not as serious as the rest of the world thought it to be. But after worldwide consternation over the abductions reverberated as far as Nigeria itself, the Jonathan presidency reluctantly roused itself from slumber. That rousing, however, did not include visiting Borno State or immediately putting into place effective strategies to solve the shocking crime.

Instead, the awakening led to a flurry of activities in the presidency. Dr Jonathan summoned everyone but the military commanders on the ground. Since he had apparently met with his top security chiefs, that step was more than enough. But what did he discuss with them, if after meeting them they still could not convince him the abductions took place? And rather than handle the Borno State officials that met with him between May 3 and May 4, like a statesman, especially because the entire security machinery rests on his own shoulders, the president and his police chiefs treated them harshly, almost as if they believed the Borno officials orchestrated the abductions.

A day after the unpleasant experience with the president and the police, the same Borno government officials were hauled before the first lady. The officials were subjected to worse indignities, with the first lady all but accusing them of trying to undermine her husband. Even in a military government, that kind of atrocious intervention was unlikely. The first lady thereafter summoned another expanded meeting to which she invited more state and federal officials. There she indulged in indescribable histrionics and concluded she didn’t think there was any abduction; or that if there was, the Borno State government, not her husband’s administration, had the responsibility of rescuing the schoolgirls. By May 8, however, Dr Jonathan had seemed convinced abductions that outraged the world indeed occurred, and had begun to declare with his customary optimism that given the involvement of the rest of the world, Boko Haram’s end was near.

It was an eventful week, the like of which Nigerians may never witness again, not in two lifetimes. In three or four frenetic days the president, his enthusiastic and boisterously proselytising wife and somnolent aides had run the whole gamut of emotions between disbelief, epiphany, and exultant embrace of new realities. It would be tragic indeed if this state of suspended animation were to continue after 2015 because some obtuse thinkers believe that the gentle Dr Jonathan is a victim of an indeterminate conspiracy by internal hegemonists.

May 11, 2014
Jonathan and 2015

Since former President Olusegun Obasanjo tamed the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during his eight turbulent years in power, the party had become unrecognisable both as a party, in its fundamental sense, and as a democratic institution, in its structural and operational sense. All it required for the party to retain and nurture its new identity and continue to decay magnificently was for Chief Obasanjo’s successors to be tarred with the same imperious and imposing brush. Luckily for the party, it had a succession of equally overbearing chairmen eager to lend their talents and services, not to say their lack of critical thinking, to the presidents that succeeded Chief Obasanjo. The party thus mastered the art of motion without debate, premise without conclusion, form without substance, and silence without reflection.

This, therefore, was the ecosystem that produced President Goodluck Jonathan. When he emerged as running mate to the late President Umaru Yar’Adua for the 2007 election, Chief Obasanjo had cleared the way and silenced the opposition within the party. And when it came to the turn of Dr Jonathan to take over from President Yar’Adua as acting president, and to contest in 2011 on his own merit, he was not unmindful of his party’s new political culture. Those within his party he could not browbeat, he bribed; and those he could not bribe, he dealt with brutally. If his opponents within the party thought he was easy meat, he gave them a lesson in life and politics they would never forget. Chief Obasanjo was not always successful in dealing with opponents outside his party, for they were recalcitrant and querulous. But Jonathan too has met more than his match in the opposition, for they have not lost any of their fire and truculence.

Yet, of all the sure things in Nigerian politics today, probably the most certain is that Dr Jonathan will contest the 2015 presidential election. And given the nature and character of the PDP, it is more than certain that if anyone will contest against him, it will be merely a formality to dignify the party, raise its esteem in the eyes of the people as a democratic institution, and give the false impression that neither the party nor Dr Jonathan engages in the tyranny that has become the PDP’s sinews. Already, party chieftains and rank and file have lined up ingloriously behind Dr Jonathan for the 2015 race. They all understand on which side their breads are buttered. They are not disconcerted by the sham enthusiasm and offensiveness with which they sell the president’s candidacy. They fiercely urge him on and impress it on him that their assurances are all he needs to win.

But except Dr Jonathan is telling himself a lie and believing it, and the people around him are living in denial, they know the only chance they have of winning the 2015 race is for the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) to field an unelectable presidential ticket. A few months ago, before the insecurity problem magnified into an ogre, Dr Jonathan’s chances rested on the queer dynamics of the contest, especially the fact that he hails from a minority tribe and evokes hope in others like him tired of the tyranny of majority tribes that everyone, irrespective of state of origin, can successfully aspire to the presidency. There is also the unsettling use of religion as a tool of political mobilisation, which the president has raised into virtuoso art. Despite the dangers of elevating religion into the political arena in a country lacking in self-moderation in both politics and religion, Dr Jonathan has avidly plumbed that depth and made himself into some sort of quixotic religious champion.

From all indications, however, and in the face of the worst security challenges the country has ever had to contend with, neither religious affiliation nor area of origin will avail a politician much. The more Boko Haram terrorists inflict punishment on the country, whether in the Northeast or in the suburbs of Abuja, the more Dr Jonathan’s government demonstrate its impotence. Waves upon waves of attacks elicit from the presidency only messages of condolence and the summoning of security meetings. There are no new approaches, no inspiring and rousing talk of steely resolve in moments of national angst; and beyond cavalier wish of victory, there are no demonstrations of hope and confidence that the terror monster can indeed be defeated. As the Boko Haram attacks become more audacious and telling, so the Jonathan government has become more stupefied and feckless, sometimes even showing the violent sect sinister respect, and at other times pledging to it, out of desperation and fear, a most unnerving and counterproductive clemency.

It must be noted that Dr Jonathan seized upon the moronic tools of ethnicity and religion to anchor and give fillip to his flagging campaign because he despairs at ever finding concrete developmental achievements to parade. The economy has not yielded to his panaceas, nor has the society responded to his native charms. Even his talisman, which many tie teleologically to his name, has failed to reorder politics beyond his bucolic and innocent sermonizing. The consequence of these multiple failures is that, even without the aggravation Boko Haram’s terror was always capable of causing, the Jonathan government was doomed, to put it mildly. If these multiple failures irritate and vex the electorate, nothing rouses them into a greater rage than the poor judgement the president often exhibited whenever he confronted the mundane issues of the day.

The country has often been treated to his quaint and outrightly unsophisticated views on what should pass as the philosophical challenges of the day, and to his dour responses to the ordinary provocations of the people and especially the opposition. He dragged his feet on the Stella Oduah scandal and impatiently and infuriatingly dismissed our concerns because, as the Information minister Labaran Maku said, critics and the opposition politicised everything. Even when he sacked Ms Oduah, Dr Jonathan did it reluctantly, sullenly and bad-temperedly. The president has also ignored our irritations on the Diezani Alison-Madueke affair involving frivolously and expensively chartered jets and unremitted oil receipts, perhaps because we also ‘politicise’ the shocking disclosure of opaque public accounting and suspected sleaze in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. And he has done absolutely nothing about the Abba Moro Immigration Service recruitment scandal, perhaps, this time, because the Internal Affairs minister is backed by the president’s arch supporter, Senate President David Mark.

By trivialising public administration and policy so abysmally, Dr Jonathan illustrates and underscores his perfunctory and emotive approach to governance. This attitude hardly conduces to electoral triumphs as much as it provokes angry rejection. And by presiding over a government that tolerates ministers who sue the legislature to stall investigations, the rot in the system, not to say in the Jonathan presidency, can’t be more complete. So, Dr Jonathan can’t run on achievements, and he can’t run on sound judgement either, for after all, nothing exhibits poor judgement as his refusal to empathise with Borno families whose teenage daughters were abducted by Boko Haram militants, possibly for sex slavery.

Indeed, Dr Jonathan is cornered, just as his supporters are irrational to still embrace a president who can’t run on his records or on his ideas, or as it is becoming apparent, given his considerable staidness and lack of grit, on his personality. He will run only on if the opposition APC makes the wrong presidential ticket choice. The APC is still in a quandary over the 2015 ticket, perhaps still consulting. The party will require the highest gift of clairvoyance to do what is right, and to, as it were, read the mind of God. If it is any consolation to them, let them consult Churchill, Nixon, JFK and De Gaulle when those statesmen had to make life-changing and life-defining decisions without the faintest idea what powerful changes the outcomes would trigger. God help the APC.

In short, in a free and fair election, Dr Jonathan and the PDP can’t win the 2015 presidential election except the APC loses it. Given the president’s string of bad decisions, bad judgement and bad and ineffective policies, and notwithstanding his constant and exasperating resort to ethnic emotionalism and religious grandstanding, the initiative is no longer in his hands; it is in the hands of those he likes to romanticise as his enemies. Let these opposition enemies, therefore, be as ruthless as Chief Obasanjo was when that wily farmer and general corners his enemies, an idiosyncrasy that took the former president repeatedly but undeservedly to heights of glory and splendour in his many tumultuous decades on earth, starting from the time his friend Major Kaduna Nzeogwu planned a coup without telling him, and his former boss General Murtala Mohammed died alone on the streets of Lagos.

May 4, 2014
Boko Haram, sex slavery and mass rape: what can a predatory, dysfunctional and patriarchal state do about this particular atrocity?

As I write this column two days before it will appear in print and online, the whole world waits in desperate, anxious hope that the schoolgirls of Chibok, Borno State that were abducted by Boko Haram two weeks ago will ultimately, indeed sooner than later be released from captivity. But the sad fact is that Boko Haram is totally pitiless. Among the right-wing, jihadist terror groups of the contemporary world, Boko Haram has achieved a notoriety that is right there among the most heinous in calculated, maximum savagery. Take for example this fact: while the Taliban, one of the most cruel jihadist terror groups in the world, targets schoolgirls, it has never abducted them and then enslaved the abductees in so-called “marriages” as Boko Haram has reportedly done with some of the Chibok schoolgirls.

The so-called “marriages” are nothing but acts of mass rape since a “marriage” entitles the man to conjugal rights to the “bride”. In the extremity of this atrocious act, Boko Haram has now lost any visionary claims it ever had to a utopian Islamic state to replace the present decadent and dysfunctional Nigerian state, especially in the North. Indeed, with this act of sex slavery and mass rape, Boko Haram is now less like the Taliban and more like John Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of Uganda. One of the regular terrorist acts of the LRA in the high tide of its insurrectionary operations in the forests of northern Uganda is mass abduction of schoolgirls to serve the all-male members of LRA as sex slaves and servants. The LRA is a violent fundamentalist Christian sect while Boko Haram is a fundamentalist jihadist Moslem group: in the perverse moral universe of 21st century terrorist movements around the world, religion is a mere excuse for self-serving, reactionary insurgencies in which faith is transmogrified into an opportunistic heresy to induce droves of disaffected male youths into their ranks.

As we pray and hope that the abducted schoolgirls may regain their freedom soon, I suggest that the atrocity provides us with a unique opportunity to begin to focus on the startling resemblances and links between the essential and pathological maleness of the Boko Haram insurgents on the one hand, and on the other hand, the backward patriarchal tendencies produced by the policies and acts of the dysfunctional and predatory Nigerian state that the group seeks to overthrow. At the heart of this uncanny link between the patriarchy of the Boko Haram insurgents and that of the patriarchy of the hegemons of the Nigerian predatory state is the fact that male youths have become the most restless and volatile social group in our country while, to the contrary, female youths have become either sidelined in the scheme of things or have become occasional victims of male violence through acts of rape, physical abuse, intimidation and disrespect. Moreover, in the general and widespread of reign of poverty in the land among teeming millions of a dispossessed populace, women bear the brunt of poverty far more than men. This is because as in all the developing societies of the world in which there are no social safety nets for poverty and its ravages, in our country women as mothers and caregivers have become the social safety nets for children and the sick.

In development sociology, this phenomenon is in fact known as the feminization of poverty. Sadly, tragically, there are few places in the developing world more stricken by this phenomenon than Nigeria, a land awash with oil wealth. I suggest that one reason for this is the fact that an opposing trend to the feminization of poverty is at work in our country, a trend that for want of a better term I call the masculinization of violence, by the Nigerian state, and outside the state in the scores of militias and marauding gangs spread across all the regions of the country. What are the symptoms and expressions of this phenomenon that reveal startling resemblances between Boko Haram and the dysfunctional and predatory Nigerian state?

Before I go into an exploration of the more complex and subtle manifestations of this masculinization of violence that links Boko Haram to the Nigerian predatory state, it is necessary to emphasize that for most people either in support of or indifferent to women’s rights, the key challenge that women face in our society is their marginalization at the manifold sites of political, economic and social power in our country: too few in government, parliament, industry, and middle class professions with the exception perhaps of lawyers; and too few as leaders and opinion molders in both parastatals and voluntary organizations with perhaps the exception of women’s own organizations. Women constitute at least half of the population; some statistics actually put them at slightly more than men. But in nearly all the sites and locations of political power and economic muscle in our country, men call the shots. There are of course many outstanding women who shine and hold their own in all fields of endeavor in our country. But they are the exceptions and for the most part they operate in a world dominated by men. Indeed, this particular group of women are sometimes perceived as “honorary men” that are clearly distinguishable from all other women, the vast majority of whom are excluded or marginalized from the levers of governance and the corridors of power.

The world of men: a world dominated by men, excluding and marginalizing most women and consigning them to poverty, disenfranchisement and almost lifelong hardship, this in a land flowing with oil wealth. A world whose overwhelming male dominance is obscured by our fixation on real and manufactured differences based on religion, ethnicity and regionalism. But this world of men also excludes and marginalizes other men in their tens of millions. To this, add the fact that the median age for Nigeria is 19 and you get the startling fact that the great majority of the men excluded from “the world of men” of wealth, power and substance are young men in their teens and early adulthood.

In all human societies of the past and the present, the exclusion of large segments of the population from power and wealth has always been a recipe for instability and social unrest. When this is compounded by the fact that the vast, teeming masses of those so excluded and marginalized are male youths that constitute the human and demographic majority of the society, social unrest gives way to worse forms of crises beyond mere instability. These brutal and bizarre forms of social unrest are perpetrated mostly by and through marginalized young males: cruel and barbaric forms of extortionate gangs that kidnap people for huge ransoms and often slay those kidnapped any way after the ransom is collected; private militias that use ethnicity to pursue their own self-serving agendas; high incidence of insubordination and anarchic rebelliousness of youths toward all forms and levels of authority.

Psychobiologists would look for an explanation of this development in our society in the combination of typically high levels of the male hormone, testosterone, in young males with joblessness, lack of sustaining positive hopes for the future and plain restlessness that comes from having nothing of value and worth to occupy one’s time and energies. But this, I suggest, is only one part of the story. Beyond psychobiology, there is the grim, sobering fact that violence is the tool by which the “world of men” of the corrupt and dysfunctional Nigerian state keeps so many in our society deprived, frustrated and powerless; consequently, violence is the response of that other “world of the men” of our millions of disaffected male youths who, in one way or another, are refusing their exclusion and marginalization.

In bringing this piece to its conclusion, let me reiterate that at the present moment as I am writing this piece, the most important thing is my solidarity and the solidarity of women and men of goodwill and conscience in our country and in the world at large with the young abducted schoolgirls of Chibok and their families. We are at a new crossroads in the engagement with this savage and barbaric insurgency that is Boko Haram. The captivity of the girls is our shame and a mirror of our collective helplessness in being ourselves captives of the Nigerian predatory republic.

But this helplessness pertains to the Nigerian dysfunctional and predatory state itself. For the truth is that the nearly all-male operatives of the Nigerian security forces combating the all-male Boko Haram insurgents are ill equipped and poorly paid; and for the most part, they are as demoralized as the rest of the Nigerian peoples in their ten of millions. Against the stark reality of the manifest helplessness and ineptitude of the Nigerian state in securing the freedom of the abducted girls, the masses of women and men seeking their freedom are beginning to organize and to look to their own communal resources to meet the terror of Boko Haram – without letting the Nigerian state off the hook. The portents are clear: Boko Haram will be defeated if and only if the Nigerian inept and corrupt Nigerian state is itself defeated by the will of the Nigerian peoples. What needs to be done is to convert the surfeit of male-dominant violence that is fuelling both the Boko Haram insurgency and the Nigerian state to patriotic, democratic ends. These tens of millions of young males that are jobless, restless and volatile, what else can or must we do about or with them?

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

May 4, 2014