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Category: Sunday

Underground in my fatherland

On Thursday, 30th January, 1997, I received a plaintive letter from my sister that our mother was at the gate of final transition. For close to a decade, she had battled with various ailments, each leaving her increasingly frail and fragile-looking. But she was a tough cookie. She hung on like a proud boxer unwilling to kiss the canvas even after cruel punishment. Now judging by the tone of the letter, she was about to conclude her earthly labours.

It was a cold and blustery mid-winter morning in Birmingham. I had been told that after she was able to establish that I had gone into political exile with no hope of returning shortly, her health took a nosedive. She became inconsolable. She clung to life with the forlorn hope of being able to clasp her son to her withered bosom just one more time. But now, the biological clock was outpacing the clock of hope and other bodily organs. It was all a heroic gesture of maternal futility.

There was a special bond between this mother and her son, forged in adversity and the relentless civil war of polygamy and its associated malignancies. But looking back, this one was a polygamy so sophisticated and subtle even at that time that it must be considered to be at the cutting edge of the industry. At the crowning point of its domestic grandeur, it came with a cook who later rose to the upper echelons of the Nigerian Customs Service.

Mama had spent about two decades looking for a child. When all hopes appeared to have evaporated, the heavenly floodgate suddenly opened resulting in four births in a remarkable spate of five years. There was myself followed by a stillbirth which mama thought was the handiwork of Action Group devils, and a set of twins. One of the twins, a male child, died before he was two. One could still remember lying beside the stilled tiny corpse before they came to take the poor boy away forever. Benson was a beautiful boy.

I immediately began making preparations from exile to visit Nigeria. I was determined to give the old lady a farewell hug, and nothing was going to stop me. It was the high noon of tyranny. The reigning military tyrant appeared to have struck fear into the heart of everybody, and all appeared quiet on the home front. A sullen silence presaging a fierce thunderstorm had descended on the nation. Everybody one broached the idea of going to Nigeria to thought it was either mad or suicidal or both. I was advised to perish the thought. It was just too dangerous. But I wasn’t going to have any of that.

It was not mad; neither was it suicidal. It was based on some cold calculations. But in the post-colonial polity, there is always a ring of irrationality to the most rational-seeming decision. The past is not an infallible guide of the future. Based on my political hunch, I came to the conclusion that something would have to give by or before the 1st of October, 1998.

If I were to be captured or abducted by state agents, I would have to be released as part of a general amnesty for political hostages and detainees by that day when Nigeria must return to full blown civilian rule. If a more terrible fate were to befall one, one would only have predeceased his mother by a matter of weeks or days. Once I came to the conclusion that neither risk was too grave to take for mama, nothing was going to stop me from going to Nigeria.

I arrived in exile in November1995 in a rather recondite and roundabout manner. I did not choose exile. It was exile that chose me. I had left Nigeria for the US with some colleagues to participate in a USAID-sponsored International Exchange Program for Scholars. But shortly after departure, my premises were forcibly taken over by security people. It was the culmination of a tense battle of will and wits lasting almost two years. What I thought was going to be a two-week stay in America turned into 12 full years of peripatetic wandering as a migrant intellectual worker and traveling theorist in some of the metropolitan capitals of the world.

Of the tense battle of wits and will with a military despotism gone haywire, three incidents stood out. In the evening of Friday, August 26th 1994 while returning from a short trip abroad, I was waylaid by armed hoodlums on my way from the Murtala Mohammed International Airport. It was about seven p-m. As the vehicle conveying me was about to negotiate the Portland Cement exit unto Ikorodu Road, a nondescript car flew past us and immediately blocked the exit. Another blocked our retreat.

Just as we began wondering what was going on, three gun-toting thugs scrambled out and ordered us to lie flat on the main Ikorodu Road. My cousin ,who had come for me, and his son who was at the back of the car, jumped out and quickly obeyed. But I refused probably too disoriented by fatigue to fully comprehend what was going on and the dangers inherent in foolish heroism.

The lead hoodlum yelled at me and ordered me to remove my jacket. I quickly complied. It was as if he knew where my vital documents were, because he threw the jacket at the back of the car. By now, all the approaching vehicles were quickly turning back, creating total chaos on Ikorodu Road. Within seconds, the hoodlums drove the car into a back alley and disappeared forever. All my earthly possessions and the manuscript of a new work were gone.

That was the night General Sani Abacha finally bared his fangs. It was the beginning of a reign of terror that would last another four years. By some curious coincident, another set of state hoodlums invaded Gani Fawehinmi’s Chambers across the road and mercilessly hacked down his security guards. In Yaba, Commodore Dan Suleiman’s house was firebombed the same evening. The horror movie which was to culminate in General Abacha’s mysterious passage and Abiola’s equally mysterious death in detention had commenced in earnest.

For what seemed an eternity, I had stood on the Ikorodu Road, gazing at the sky and too stunned to make sense of what had just transpired. When I left London earlier that morning, it was a glorious late summer day. I had left the north London flat of a friend, Sola Fawehinmi, a.k.a Professor Jouls, full of spirit and optimism. A friend of ours, a zestful and humorous Ibo chap, had given me money and a beautiful bottle of perfume for his wife, a top immigration official. All that had disappeared together with my three suitcases in the night of tropical distemper.

By now, harsh reality shocked me out of the futile reverie. I quickly realised that my cousin who would shortly thereafter become a Professor of Psychology and his son were still lying on the road. I yelled at them to get up. We began trekking towards the Yaba Police Station like some vagabond wayfarers. It took us another hour or so to arrive at the Police Station, looking thoroughly disheveled and disoriented. Time had become completely irrelevant.

Every society gets its just deserts. It is the iron law of social retribution. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. The police are human too, and they did not come from Mars. In times of universal perversity, the police become universal perverts. The entire station reeked of the foul odour of cheap tobacco, illicit gin, stale fecals and fulsome fornication. Some of the policemen looked like hardened criminals and justly so. It was hard to tell who was who. These were hard men and women, cynical and gritty to boot.

In such fluid and flux circumstances where the lawful agents cannot be separated from the agents of unlawfulness, complainants suddenly become suspects and suspects suddenly become complainants. As they sized us up in a psychological battle of street stamina for which one had no energy or appetite, one was half hoping that one was not about to move from Gatwick to Golgotha in one single day. The cramped cage bristling with armour and ill humour was grimly symbolic of the nation itself.

Luckily this particular night, the police people appeared to be stalking some bigger games. After establishing our status and identity, an absent-minded officer in ragged slippers was asked to take our statement. He did this with a contemptuous frown which occasionally gave way to a senseless snigger. After this, an officer in mufti ordered us to be on our way with the stern warning to avoid Atan Cemetery if we still valued our life.

It was not yet the time of mobile phones. There begun another long and weary trudge to the University of Lagos. We had arrived well past midnight, looking like deserters from some Somali militia. Later in the afternoon, Segun Odegbami, the ace striker and former captain of the Green Eagles, drove one to his local tailor to have one kitted out. I was in the same dress for the next three days. The University of Lagos was also to become the abode of the fugitive and the internally displaced for the next two weeks.

It was around this time that I became closely acquainted with the late Peter Alexander Ashikiwe Adione-Egom, famously known as the Motor Park economist. The gifted and impossible Cambridge and Arhus-trained anthropologist and classical economist was also at this point in time slumming it out at the University of Lagos Guesthouse in a solitary bunker which looked like the bedroom of Kafka’s metamorphosis.

A wasted genius who seemed to have turned his back on the Nigerian society, Ashikiwe, later known as Peter Egom, was better trained and better talented than most of Nigeria’s fabled official economists and could cut through their inanities with a single devastating sentence. A product of Kings College where he was classmate of the celebrated and much lamented Stanley Macebuh, Ashikiwe was also a superb athlete. He could walk the entire length of Lagos by sunrise before returning to hunt for breakfast.

I quickly recognised a kindred soul who had been done in by the evil system. At this point in time, his presence around University of Lagos was beginning to raise some dust of suspicion and unease. Many simply couldn’t understand what he was doing there and why he was living in a bunker with so many rich and influential friends. In a leap of imaginative malice, it was concluded that he was probably infiltrated into the university community by some security organisations bent on bringing the citadel of learning to heel.

But he was just among many gifted Nigerians who have volunteered for internal self-deportation. There are many of these Nigerian geniuses who have turned their back on the society in a gesture of self-immolation and social suicide. At that point in time, Ashikiwe, who loved to regale people about how he was chased out of a famously leftwing Department of Economics in East Africa for his militantly unorthodox economics, could not be bothered about social trappings. He believed only in the aristocracy of the intellect. As far as he was concerned, money was mere fiction.

The problem was that it was this “fiction” that must procure breakfast. You cannot walk into a restaurant proclaiming fiction as your currency. That would be what Samir Amin, the great Egyptian Marxist economist, called unequal exchange. In deference to this alimentary logic, the great hell-raiser would arrive at the Boys Quarters where one was holing up every morning, screaming the nonsensical appellation he had picked up from motor park conductors: “Baba Egunje, baba egunje!!” It was a signal to begin the daily forage.

The second encounter in the spiral of strange events that led to exile was even more devastating and potentially life-threatening. Sometimes in May 1995, Karl Maier, in the course of writing his celebrated book, This House Has Fallen, was brought to Ife by Seye Kehinde to have an intellectual interaction with me. We spent the whole afternoon in my house, discussing issues and lamenting the fate of the nation.

But all hell was let loose shortly after they left to return to Lagos. It was dusk. Suddenly fire and brimstone erupted. Some gunslingers who had taken up position unleashed a fierce fusillade . It was obvious that these were no ordinary gunmen. They were using tracer bullets which lit up the entire vicinity in a weird pyrotechnic of violence and mayhem. For about 15 minutes of continuous bombardment, one lay flat on the floor hoping that it was all a nasty dream.

Then there was a lull which seemed to have lasted an eternity. One could hear some people in low conversation arguing among themselves. They were not sure of their quarry. After this, the bombardment moved to two houses away. It was the premises of the urbane and cultured Professor Aduayi. At this point, one managed to crawl out of the house. After the smoke cleared, it was discovered that the professor’s wife had been wounded in the hand.

By this time, some concerned members of the university community who had been attracted by the crackling gunfire began converging on the scene. One or two of them carried weapons. Among the early callers was the then Vice Chancellor, Professor Wale Omole, and there was the inevitable activist and radical humanist Professor Toye Olorode who had dared a purported dismissal by his former teacher, Professor Aliyu Fafunwa, and had triumphed. There was also Professor Yomi Durotoye who was cradling a loaded assault rifle. But by then, the hoodlums had made good their escape.

Author’s note

The above are excerpts from the recently concluded, Underground in My Fatherland, a story of love, devotion and affection for one’s mother. These are very dark days indeed in Nigeria. The tragedy of state collapse mixes with the baleful comedy of failed and incompetent leaders dancing on the grave of Nigeria. We bring forward these excerpts in order to draw attention to all that is noble and ennobling about Nigeria, and to summon the spirit of heroic resistance with which Nigerians overcame collective tragedy in the past. It is a form of national therapy. If we were to concentrate on what is going on, it would be nothing but a grotesque statistics of death; “a catalogue of cadavers”— to quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Columbian master fabulist, who shed mortality for immortality last week. In a manner of speaking, the entire story is an ironic tribute and backhanded compliment to one of the greatest novelists of all time. In the nearest future, this column will pay the late master his proper dues. But for now, criticism, as Karl Marx would put it, is not just a passion of the mind but the mind of passion itself.

May 4, 2014
May Day: Then and now

Last Thursday was May Day, otherwise known as Workers Day. Years back, workers looked forward to May Day not only for its fanfare but also for the powerful words from Labour leaders to those in government; and oftentimes, from the head of state and governors. Even in the military era, the military rulers did not joke with Labour because they understood the use to which its enormous powers could be put.

But gone were those days. It seems the general fall in standards in the country has caught up with Labour too, with its leaders not knowing the value of what they carry. One expected the Labour leaders to be more vibrant and more articulate in a democratic setting. Unfortunately, it is not so; and unfortunately too, one does not know what could be responsible for this lethargy (some say it is docility) – whether it is the usual everybody has a price tag or it is just that the Labour leaders are overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the challenges confronting their members. Isn’t it baffling that there is nothing concrete from the unions over the missing Chibok secondary school girls? Nothing concrete from Labour over the spate of bombings? Nothing over the various scams that have almost emptied our treasury, etc? Of course I understand perfectly well that Labour leaders cannot be divorced from the society and that a society gets the kind of Labour leaders (just as it gets the kind of political leadership) that it deserves.

But President Goodluck Jonathan added salt to injury while addressing workers at the May Day rally held at the Eagle Square, Abuja. “The challenge of the country is not poverty, but redistribution of wealth, he said.” The president was reacting to a World Bank report which categorised Nigeria among the five poorest countries in the world. He said further: “Nigeria is not a poor country. Nigerians are the most travelled people. There is no country you go that you will not see Nigerians. The GDP of Nigeria is over half a trillion dollars and the economy is growing at close to seven percent.”

“Aliko Dangote was recently classified among the 25 richest people in the world . I visited Kenya recently on a state visit and there was a programme for Nigerians and Kenyan business men to interact and the number of private jets that landed in Nairobi that day was a subject of discussion in Kenyan media for over a week.

“If you talk about ownership of private jets, Nigeria will be among the first 10 countries, yet they are saying that Nigeria is among the five poorest countries”, the president said. So, ownership of private jets is the barometer for measuring poverty and affluence in a country? Some weird logic, you would say, but that is vintage President Jonathan who only yesterday traversed Bayelsa bare- footed, for you! Again, is a preponderance of private jets just a status symbol, or is it also a vote of no confidence in public air transportation in the country? My submission here is that President Jonathan should cast his mind back to those days he went without shoes; what would have been his reaction then if any leader had said poverty was not a Nigerian simply on account of the presence of many private jets in the country? Whatever that is is Nigerians’ feeling about his logic.

Indeed, but for the fact that the president was amply quoted verbatim, and also for the fact that such statements are becoming part his conspicuous mannerism, one would have said he was misquoted. Almost every aspect of his speech is an indictment of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which has been in power for about 15 consecutive years. What has the party done since the return to democratic rule in 1999 to redistribute the wealth? Perhaps, by way of suggestion, I can be of help here, if the Bretton Woods expert/s and other financial juggernauts in the government’s think-tank have not thought along that line. Such a simple oversight can be allowed, especially in an economy where wealth is so unevenly distributed and government officials and politicians are some of the highest remunerated in the world.

My prescription: let the government give to every Nigerian (including babies but excluding those with private jets and others who are stupendously rich) about N5million each. At least we can start the redistribution from here!

But that is just by the by. On a more serious note however, there are many ways wealth can be redistributed without giving handouts to people: By way of scholarships to students, by liberalising access to finance, by making power available, and what have you. Obviously, the president either deliberately did not tell the workers or he conveniently forgot to add that the chunk of the wealth in the hands of the few rich people in the country is ill-gotten. From pension fund scam to oil subsidy scam, to all manner of funds that are unaccounted for, especially in the oil industry; the whole place stinks.

Of course, we can say President Jonathan is only being a ‘chip off the old block’ because former President Olusegun Obasanjo, his (now estranged) political godfather expressed a similar sentiment when he said years back that we cannot say Nigerians are poor because many of them, including even teachers, can now afford ‘tokunbo’ vehicles! But if the president must be told, this country can never have wealth properly distributed in so far as we continue to have the kind of scandalous jamboree like his National Conference whose participants get stupendously paid in a country where government approved a meagre N18,000 as minimum wage.

I do not know how the workers reacted to the president’s speech and in fact would not be surprised if some of them, including their leaders, applauded it as an excellent one. But I know that in those days, such a speech would have attracted criticism from Labour leaders and the workers generally. How could the reward of what millions of hardworking Nigerian workers toiled for be in the pockets of a few?

President Jonathan has spent the better part of his life in the south south region, so he might not be conversant with the proverb that “a rich man in the midst of six poor men is their chairman”. It is just that the poor hardly meet; otherwise, that would have been clear to such a rich man because he would always remain the one to be called to chair the meeting. But the earlier the president understood this fact, the better for him and the country. Part of why Boko Haram seems to have an endless number of suicide bombers is that wealth has been over-concentrated in the hands of a few for far too long. So, the situation demands far-reaching measures to reverse the ominous trend and not endless promises as usual from the Jonathan government which is tall in making promises but shot in delivery.

Nothing in the president’s roadmap out of the wealth-lopsided logjam suggests he is on the right path. Indeed, he may be working assiduously in the wrong direction. His charted course is rather long and tortuous. It is like someone who wants to travel to Ibadan from Lagos and decides to go through the old road when all he could have done was hit the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and save himself a lot of time, energy and resources. It is time for the government to begin to work fast in the right direction to avoid a situation where Boko Haram would be a national feature. Contrary to what President Jonathan thinks, there is no politics in the World Bank rating. There is no cheating in photographs; it is the way you sit that the camera captures. So, the earlier he addressed the problem, the better for him, the government and the nation at large.

And, as for the Labour leaders, they need to go dust the books to see how their predecessors did it. Here, the works of Pa Michael Imoudu, Alhaji Hassan Sunmonu and Adams Oshiomhole, to mention only a few, would do. Not to talk of Frank Kokori, who was only secretary-general of the National Union of Petroleum Employees of Nigeria (NUPENG) but who many would think was NLC leader during the June 12 struggle. The times might have changed, the issues have not.

May 4, 2014
How close is Nigeria to federalism? (1)

From what has been happening at the conference since its inception, it is likely that those pessimistic about the national dialogue at the beginning may end up being vindicated

So far, discussions or deliberations at the ongoing national conference underscore the fact that those who expect that the Jonathan conference would lead to more federalism might need to start disabusing their minds. On the contrary, it is becoming increasingly clear from decisions reached at committees that the ongoing conference may very well lead to more centralism or unitarism, apart from cosmetic changes in areas not crucial to sustenance of the huge powers of the central government and the exclusive list of functions.

Recently, northern governors in collaboration with socio-political organisations in the region presented to the conference a document that seems to be strong enough to scatter the thoughts of southern delegates who had attended several South-south, Southeast, Southwest, ostensibly to mobilise the southern states in favour of the conference. In a cool, calm, and confident manner, reminiscent of Hausa-Fulani approach to national political matters before and since independence, the North brought to the conference a few days ago a paper that seems not to be devoid of suspicion and antagonism directed frontally against the South.

Despite the deflation of southern states’ contribution to Nigeria, it appears from reports of committees that the position of the North has been gaining more grounds and converts at most committees so far. It will not be surprising if many southern delegates with genuine commitment to federalism are already wondering if delegates from the south are awake at many of the committees. Some may even be cynical enough to say that most southern delegates, having enervated themselves with sectional conferences to ensure that they use the conference to further position President Jonathan for the 2015 presidential election, must have been left with no choice other than working towards ‘consensus,’ while their northern delegates continue to make unsupportable claim about being the backbone and pillar of Nigeria or the principal owners of Nigeria. More on the wild claims of the North later.

Of course, there are many Nigerians that did not invest any emotion in the conference from the start. Such people did not share the overflowing optimism that some of us uncompromising federalists shared about national dialogue, whenever or wherever it is convened. From what has been happening at the conference since its inception, it is likely that those pessimistic about the national dialogue at the beginning may end up being vindicated. That should not be totally unexpected in anything that has the character of a game of chance. The organisers of the conference chose to select delegates of their choice, rather than asking federating units to send their representatives. The organisers chose to legislate that decisions would be on consensus and that where this fails, conference decisions should be made or unmade by the wishes of 31% of delegates. This is a layman’s way of interpreting the rule that no decision can be taken at the conference except it is passed by at least 70% of votes.

Furthermore, the organisers of the conference tied the hands of delegates except the bold and no-nonsense ones from the North with the injunction not to say anything that problematises the territorial unity of the country at the conference and for delegates to note that the indivisibility and indissolubility of Nigeria is a given. Citizens had been told that this no-go area was a consensus from those that members of the presidential advisory committee consulted. President Jonathan on his part admonished conference members to be open to “table thoughts and positions on issues, and make recommendations that advance togetherness,” further enjoining delegates not to “approach these issues with suspicion and antagonism,” in order to ensure a stronger, more united, peaceful and politically stable Nigeria.”

If there had been firm ground rules (rather than presidential admonitions) about the language of position papers, the North would not have become victorious at many committees after insulting the rest of the country with the imperial language that subtends its position paper. Without doubt, a paper with the subtitle of “Northern Nigeria: the Backbone and Strength of Nigeria” smacks of gross insensitivity to the feelings of nationalities and states outside the orbit of the North. The people being referred to subtly as the Asiniwaye or Efulefu of Nigeria unfortunately include the Yoruba, age-old trading partners of the Hausa, Kanuri, and other nationalities in the North many centuries before the amalgamation of Nigeria by Frederick Lugard.

The North’s position presented a few days ago at the conference has achieved some significance, even if and when restoration of federalism fails. We observed in this column a few weeks ago that if the conference does not achieve anything, it would enable some nationalities to unearth their political or even cultural subconscious. Northern governors, Arewa Consultative Forum, and other organisations consulted before the crafting of the North’s position paper have clearly exteriorised the innards of the region’s political assessment of Nigerians who are not part of the communities indigenous to the North, thus elevating the threat of domination of one section by another.

Is anyone surprised that any of the fractions of the South has not taken the North up on its view that non-northerners in the country are backseat passengers on the journey to build a peaceful and politically stable Nigeria amalgamated to the North to support northerners as conductors of the train to Nigeria’s destiny? Those who have studied the sociology or anthropology of most of the nationalities in the South would have no problem coming to terms with the fact that there would have been so much fractiousness in the ranks of the South since the presentation of the North’s position.

Despite the assurance from President Jonathan that he did not convene the conference in order to gain any political mileage for his bid to run in 2015, the South would have been meeting in various caucuses on a paper that has made it clear to millions of children born in the South that they are second-class citizens in the country of their birth. Different quarters in Abuja would have been hosting meetings about not jeopardising the interest of the president by being too vocal and thus angering the North to boycott the country’s “mother of all conferences.” Certainly, given the ontological plurality of perspective among the Yoruba, that nationality would have been fragmented into groups of pro-Jonathan and anti-Jonathan for president in 2015 and of other groups of individuals who prefer to see themselves as apolitical professionals to the extent that there would be no serious group to counter bogus claims in the position paper of the North.

If southern delegates are too busy pursuing consensus to respond to claims by northern governors and socio-cultural organisations, their citizens outside the conference should come to their aid to ask northern governors some questions. Given the fact that most of the resourceful Mid-west region was also part of the theatre of war, like the part that later became the South-south, it is rational to ask of the presenters of the North’s position the following questions: 1) Where is the evidence to support that the North is the backbone and strength of Nigeria? 2) When the North was financing the civil war solely, what was the Western Region doing with its enormous resources from cocoa, palm kernel, and rubber? 3) Did Chief Awolowo, the finance minister during the civil war, tell the Yoruba region not to contribute funds to a war in which many of the commanding officers at the end of the war were Yoruba officers? 4) In 1960, it was common knowledge that the federal government of Nigeria owed the Western Region thousands of pounds in loan. What factors turned the fortunes of the North round so radically a few years later to the extent that it b ecame the only region to fund the civil war?

To be continued

May 4, 2014
John Kayode Fayemi: A deluge of endorsements

Ekiti should vote for a proven performer in all ramifications

As readers of this page must know by now, EKITIPANUPO WEB PORTAL is an indigenous Think-Tank and Intellectual Round-Table, advocating selfless governance of Ekiti people, by sincere Ekiti indigenes. Nothing, even of the minutest interest to Ekiti, is, therefore, allowed to pass, clinically un-interrogated, on the forum. So has it been with the governorship election scheduled for June 21, 2014. For instance, on Tuesday 29, April 2014, Bunmi Fatoye-Matory, a U.S-based, University of Ife and Harvard-trained, proud daughter of Igede-Ekiti, in endorsing Governor Kayode Fayemi, wrote as follows:

‘I, a daughter of Igede, a strong believer in ancestral ways and wisdom, a strong advocate of education, culture, integrity, good governance, an international traveller whose not-so-young-eyes have seen many examples of good, bad, wicked, and rejuvenating governance in my travels, heartily and warmly endorse the re-election of our Governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi. Eni to ba maa pegan Ajanaku la ni mo ri nkan firi (It’s the person who wants to slight the elephant that would pretend what just passed was something so small he missed it.)

‘JKF has turned our Ekiti into a place of pride and development. We have seen with our own eyes what this thoughtful and forward-thinking Ekiti son has done for our people and our land.

‘I am very, very proud of him. His agenda includes every segment of our population. He is not one of those politicians who want to turn our youth into thugs shouting “Baba o” and grovelling for the crumbs from the Oga’s table. He is not a Stomach Infrastructure politician like some of those clamouring to replace him now – selfish, backward, primitive and murderous people with questionable educational and cultural background, who will sell us and future generations down the river. For pursuing people-oriented policies in the tradition of our Sage and Orisa, Awolowo, for being courageous and steadfast in his promises to rejuvenate our Ekiti, for giving us a mirror with which we can look at ourselves and feel proud again, and to continue in this path of growth and development, I heartily endorse JKF for re-election.’

Earlier, on 19 April, Professor Ade Ojo (OON), Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, a proud Ifaki-Ekiti son and President of the Ifaki Progressive Union, in an absolutely seminal post that would have to be précis-ed, wrote as follows:

‘In the epic electoral battle to win the right to occupy Oke Bareke, the choice before the Ekiti electorate is to choose one of the three major contestants who are now busy selling their candidature to the electorate. Each has been exploring every available avenue: campaign grounds, billboards, the media etc to sell his candidature; the over-riding objective being to market his talents, experience, credibility, trustworthiness, potential and virtues as the best of them all and, therefore, the most capable to deliver the best dividends of democracy in the vital areas of health, security and education, infrastructural, economic and industrial development as well as in providing jobs for its teeming unemployed youths.

Each has leveraged on the inevitable horse-trading strategies as well as the political manoeuvring associated with political campaigns, especially in the third world. These include the ruthless exploitation of the material and financial advantages and other resources that could win over the undecided, the economically disadvantaged, as well as the gullible members of the electorate who can be bought over by the highest bidder. Parts of the tricks are eye-popping propaganda, some of which are nothing but outright lies. All these manoeuvres are keyed into the Machiavellian principle of the end justifying the means.

These manoeuvres are no doubt useful in attracting to the side of each gubernatorial candidate innumerable gullible and easily compromising members of the electorate in our peculiar socio-political situation in which the political manifesto of one party can be easily replaced with that of the other by merely changing the name of the original owner. Ours is also one in which politicians easily change parties with the receiving political party welcoming the decampee like the proverbial prodigal son. This is why, for example, the two main political parties in Nigeria have been defined as the same beer, bottled under different labels.

Given the above, I plead with my Ekiti compatriots to shine their eyes, watch their backs, look beyond the appearances and facades, be wary of the wiles and tricks of each gubernatorial candidate and be extremely careful not to mortgage their conscience or the future of the state, its development and the integrity of Ekiti people by falling victim to the greedy and mesmerising seduction of the pot of porridge through which, if care is not taken, birthrights can be traded away and the state bonded to a political monster who would saddle it with an embarrassing political leadership.

We must endeavour not to fall into the mistake of being seduced by the bait thrown to the electorate by these political parties led mostly by leaders with the common leadership deficits that plague African political leaders: godfatherism, greed, as well as the domineering and tyrannical monopoly of party machinery. In the context of the above scenario, therefore, the most viable option to ensure the future of Ekiti is to vote for a candidate who aggregates the best qualities that would not present our state as one that is bereft of values, honour and integrity. Necessity is therefore laid on every Ekiti to stake his/her vote on the candidate who is best endowed, most credible and more convincingly tested to position Ekiti beyond what and where it is presently: infrastructurally, developmentally and in terms of global best practices in good governance and the delivery of the dividends of democracy to its entire citizenry.

For the present and future generations of Ekiti, the choice before us is to opt for the candidate who is most adequate intellectually, in his utterances, and his ability and capability to present well articulated, knowledge-infused and implementable programmes especially in a knowledge-based economy, the architecture of which the state is already constructing. One of these candidates, obviously, positively towers above the other two on most of the issues and criteria examined above. Given that Ekiti should no more be thrown to the dogs or be returned to the locust years of moral attrition, nor administered by a governor whose record and credibility is suspect and with criminal accusations hanging on his neck.

Therefore, in summation, my candidate who I plead should be endorsed by all Ekiti, is he who, in public service has proved to be worthy, more convincingly and creditably tested, intellectually prepared, more versed and better exposed in best global practices in good governance, and, most importantly, more representative of the Ekiti virtues of honour, decency and unwavering respect for elders and the traditional order.

He is Dr John Kayode Fayemi, the incumbent governor of Ekiti State.

He is strongly recommended as better than any of the other two, and without a doubt, he is the candidate who can make Ekiti a better place for all and who will make Ekitis proud as their governor. He is not only better than the other two, on all fronts, he would, barring unforeseen eventualities, build on the achievements and records of his present tenure without the need to experiment with plans and programmes. He will improve on areas in which he may have under- achieved and will, without a doubt, invest more effort in making an Ekiti in which all shall have a sense of belonging.

Ekiti should vote for a proven performer in all ramifications

May 4, 2014
The real terror of Chibok

Today, world attention is riveted on Nigeria for all the wrong reasons. As you read this 276 girls snatched by Boko Haram insurgents from their dormitory beds in a government secondary school in Chibok, Borno State remain in captivity.

Their kidnapping has triggered a string of protests from women and civil society groups across the country. It has produced the usual promises of deliverance from President Goodluck Jonathan. The military high command have weighed in with assurances that they were doing everything to set the captives free.

But neither the demonstrators’ outrage nor the threadbare platitudes of government officials have brought the prospect of freedom any closer for the unfortunate girls.

Reports say three of the girls may have died, while some others are in very poor health. No one really knows what is happening to the rest. Once upon a time we would have been stunned by reports of 20 people killed in a single terror attack. These days not even the killing of hundreds causes us or our leaders to pause in shock.

That is why the Chibok kidnapping represents something of a watershed in Nigeria’s dark hour. It has galvanised the country in ways that huge body counts and gory pictures have failed to do. This is no longer about North or South, Muslim or Christian – it is about a shared humanity. Imagine if one of these hapless teenagers was your daughter?

Chibok is a sad chapter, but it is also a metaphor about present day Nigeria. For starters, it speaks about a country where confusion reigns. For close to two weeks we have been working with the assumption that 234 girls were missing. Now, Borno State Police Commissioner, Tanko Lawan, says well over 300 were actually spirited away on the night of April 14, 2014. Of that number 53 managed to escape – leaving as many as 276 in captivity.

In the early days after the abduction, the picture of confusion was best captured by the fiasco that saw the military claiming that the bulk of the girls had been rescued. They were forced to retract after the principal of the school attacked by the insurgents spoke up.

The ordeal of the Chibok girls underlines the embarrassing helplessness of a country the size of Nigeria. So far, everything that has been thrown at the insurgents militarily has only had limited effect. In the days and weeks after President Jonathan declared a state of emergency in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, a bombing campaign that targeted the militants’ camps in the Sambisa forest seemed to have broken their spine. Now we know better.

Even the prospect of a special operation to rescue the girls cannot proceed for fear that they have been converted into human shields by their captors in anticipation of an attempt to free them militarily.

As recent as two years ago administration officials were still arguing at the US State Department that Boko Haram was a Nigerian phenomenon that could be brought to heel using local solutions. Increasingly there is talk of getting foreign assistance to secure the release of the girls. This would suggest that the administration is finally admitting it lacks that capacity to prosecute this special fight.

We are coming to that realisation five years after it became evident that we had a serious problem on our hands. In that time we could have built our capacity to fight the terrorists more effectively. Rather than do that we were seduced by the delusion that we could sweet talk a maniacal band of killers who had made it clear over and again they had no interest in talking to a government they regarded as illegitimate.

Even if the limited Boko Haram of 2009 had not transformed into today’s full-blown insurgency, we had sufficient warnings that because of her endowments, her strategy place in Africa and the world, Nigeria would become a prime target for jihadi groups that were already active in the Maghreb.

That should have informed a change in our defence and security planning and expenditure. There is no evidence to show a shift from the conventional. At a time when terrorists are using cells of a few people to inflict massive damage on cities and communities, we are still stuck in the thinking that just driving tanks into the Sambisa will be enough to solve the problem.

For me the real worry is whether the nightmare will end in Chibok. Once terrorists conceive of some evil, they will seek ways to actualise it. They have shown that their preferred targets are vulnerable places like Chibok and Nyanya. Just thinking of other potential Chiboks is terrifying. What is our contingency plan?

The abduction drama should not stop us from thinking about preventing a repeat. The territory over which the terrorists operate is wide and hard to police. How do we guarantee that similarly vulnerable schools are not visited with such terror again?

Posting solitary military guards to watch over the institutions is a non-starter because they can be easily overwhelmed by the terrorists who operate in large numbers. We don’t have enough soldiers in the Nigerian Army to post platoons to protect every secondary school in the North East. In any event what sort of learning environment would that be with soldiers all around?

The key is to take out the terrorists before they can organise and launch their operations using better intelligence and technology. The repeat bombing of Nyanya, Abuja less than two weeks after an earlier attack that killed close to 100 people is confirmation that for as long as the perpetrators walk free these crimes will continue.

Nigeria needs help with intelligence and know-how. For all of the size of our conventional military we still don’t have the capacity and expertise to contain the terrorist campaign being waged by Boko Haram. We need help and must swallow our pride to get it.

It may even mean signing a pact with the United States to allow its drones to target these terrorists. The advanced intelligence assets that such an arrangement would provide will enable us strike hard at the killers where we can’t presently reach. Sure, the drone policy has its flaws and has taken out many innocents; still it has proven its potency from Yemen, to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Such drastic steps need to be taken on the military front while we are thrashing around for more permanent solutions. But let there be no doubt that the help we need now is from countries with proven experience and success in containing terrorists.

May 4, 2014
FIFA: Nigeria in the eye of the storm again

During his 90th birthday luncheon in March, the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, sarcastically described Nigeria’s corruption as a reference point which his countrymen should violently repudiate. Said he on that occasion: “Are we now like Nigeria where you have to reach into your pocket to get anything done? You see, we used to go to Nigeria and every time we went there, we had to carry extra cash in our pockets to corruptly pay for everything. You get in a plane in Nigeria and you sit there and the crew keeps dilly dallying without taking off as they wait for you to pay them to fly the plane.” Mr Mugabe was in an expansive mood, and his thoroughly entertained audience, reports suggested, roared with approving laughter. Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs ministry officials have protested that denigration, but nothing, absolutely nothing, will come out of the protest.

Barely a month later, another very damaging corruption allegation has been made by a convicted Singaporean match-fixer Wilson Raj Pemural who claimed in a new book that in exchange for gratification he helped Nigeria and Honduras qualify for the 2010 World Cup through match-fixing. FIFA has launched an investigation, including watching videos of the alleged matches, and it looks like one way or the other Nigeria’s goose will be cooked. Indirectly lending corroboration to Mr Pemural’s sordid allegation, one-time coach of England’s national team, Sven-Goran Eriksson, has also alleged, again in a new book, that Nigeria’s football administrators asked for half his salary in order to give him the job of coaching the Super Eagles for the same 2010 World Cup. He went on to describe our football administrators as ignorant and stupid.

Perhaps Nigeria will again protest this defamation. If they do, it will also amount to nothing. Nigerians remember the ignoble manner Amos Adamu was removed from the FIFA executive committee in 2010 and banned from sports administration for his involvement in bribery incidents connected with the hosting of the 2018 World Cup. He went to court and lost. Earlier, in 2008, the late President Umaru Yar’Adua had removed him from his position as Director-General of the National Sports Commission (NSC). The stories of Messrs Pemural and Eriksson, not to talk of the fall of Mr Adamu, indicate clearly the rot in Nigeria’s football administration. Worse, the stories, together with Mr Mugabe’s testimony, also show just how far gone Nigeria is.

But the biggest story of all is that to President Jonathan, Nigeria’s corruption story is one of perception, a chimera that has transfixed critics and the opposition. With such deliberately altered mindset, how can we ever fight the cankerworm?

May 4, 2014
Questions for President Jonathan

Despite the criticisms of the quarterly Presidential Media Chat with President Goodluck Jonathan by some media executives, I am one of those who think the interviewers usually try their best to cover the various critical issues in the country for the president to respond.

I watched the last one and was particularly impressed by the way the interviewers asked follow up questions to get the president to declare his stand on the 2015 presidential elections. Expectedly the president chose to answer the questions the way he deemed fit and still left the question of his presidential ambition still hanging.

I expect the question of President Jonathan’s ambition and many other urgent issues of national importance to come up tomorrow when the seventh edition of the chat holds. With the situation in the country, Nigerians are itching for answers to many questions bogging their minds.

Yesterday afternoon, I asked The Nation’s followers on Twitter and friends of facebook what they think should be the most important question President Jonathan should answer during the media chat.

I was not surprised by the numerous responses I got. Even though many were not enthusiastic about the outcome of the chat, indications are that Nigerians are particularly worried about the endless killings by the Boko Haram and other terrorist groups in the country.

More than ever before, Nigerians are worried about the future of the country and need a firm assurance from the president that he is still really in charge and not the terrorists who seem unstoppable for now.

If some Nigerians were to be on the panel of interviewers, here are some of the questions they would have wanted President Jonathan to provide exhaustive answers to:

Who should take responsibility for the continuous loss of lives and properties in the country?

What is your greatest fear for the country?

Where are our kidnapped school girls?

Why don’t you allow the North their independence, so they can rule themselves and stop blaming you?

What is preventing you from exposing Boko Haram sponsors?

Why has this administration paid deaf ears to the plight of over two million polytechnic students whose campuses have been shut for 10months following FG/ASUP face-off?

Where is the missing $20m which was not remitted to the federal account by NNPC?

Who ordered the withdrawal of army from the various check points before the attacks abduction of the girls in Chibok?

Mr President, tell me what will make me believe that you deserve my vote if you contest for 2015 election.

Sir, we would like you to tell us why you should continue to sit as the president even when almost everything is falling apart? We observed that heads of governments of other countries of the world do not wait to have one-tenth of the crises bedevilling us before throwing in the towel.

Why did you dance at a PDP rally barely 24 hours after the first Nyanya bombing?

Why are the youths not employed? How many times are we going to have fuel and cement scarcity?

With the issues on ground about the bombing and gunmen killing innocent Nigerians, what hope does the (let me use the word “ordinary” Nigerians) have in GEJ’s tenure as president for four to five years now?

Do you think you are trying your best in terms of security in the country?

Where are our kidnapped school girls?

Are the Nigerian Armed Forces not well-trained and paid to secure the nation?

If corruption and poverty are not our problems, then what is it?

May 4, 2014
Seshat revived: further thoughts on the state of reading and writing in our country

In the second segment of last week’s essay in this column, I joined my voice to the voices of thousands of those greatly excited by the declaration by UNESCO of Port Harcourt as the Book Week Capital for this year. In a move calculated to indicate how long and deep are the roots of writing on our continent, I pressed a drawing of Seshat, the Egyptian goddess of writing, knowledge and wisdom, into service as a photographic frame for my celebration of the achievement of the Rainbow Book Club and its efforts to revive reading and writing among schoolchildren and our youths. In order to reflect more deeply on the significance of that invocation of the Egyptian goddess of writing in last week’s essay, I wish this week to explore what it means in the contemporary period to go all the way back to ancient Egypt in order to give resonance to my encouragement of the yeoman efforts being made at the present time to revive reading and writing in our country.

I am sure that it could not have escaped many readers that it is because ancient Egyptian civilization was literate, indeed greatly treasured writing, that I invoked the goddess Seshat in last week’s essay. Shamanistic or miracle rainmakers are not found in desert communities and cultures; where rain hardly ever falls, a rainmaker will strive in vain and will starve. Although our continent invented some of the earliest writing systems and their enabling scripts, until the beginnings of the modern age, writing was not widely distributed in the vast majority of the societies and cultures of our continent. That is why gods and goddesses of writing do not exist in cultures in which writing does not exist. To give an apt and epigrammatic illustration of this observation, Orunmila of the Yoruba pantheon is the god of knowledge and wisdom; his divine patronage of culture and the arts does not include writing and writers.

Historically, Egyptian and Ethiopic writing systems were the main cultures of literacy and writing on our continent. Writing systems and scripts like Vai and Nsibidi in our own region of the continent did not develop into full scale and widely distributed regimes of writing and reading with consolidated extensions to processes and institutions for recording and preserving knowledge. In sum then, writing is both very ancient and very new in our continent, depending on which regions and cultures of Africa one is talking about. But this is not the main point that I wish to emphasize in this piece.

The main point that I wish to emphasize and develop into a full discussion in this essay is this: in the modern world, while it helps to have a long and ancient tradition of writing and literacy in one’s culture, it is not, and need not become a permanent cultural disability not to have had an ancient writing and literate tradition in one’s society. The deep historical truth is that once writing is introduced into any society, it becomes a considerably powerful means of recording and transmitting knowledge and experience across time and the generations; and it also becomes a powerful force for progress and the advancement of learning. But we must recognize that writing does not perpetuate itself, does not become a force for progress just by the force of its own intrinsic value. And writing systems change all the time; they are reinvented perpetually and in fact sometimes superseded by other writing systems and thereby go into oblivion. One graphic illustration of this historic reality is the fact that all the writing systems and scripts of ancient Africa have gone into oblivion and all the ideographic scripts like Vai and Nsibidi indigenous to West Africa before the introduction of the currently globally hegemonic Latin script have massively declined in the limited value and currency they once had. To put this observation across in concrete terms, other than cultural pride and the memorializing of past greatness, the Ethiopic scripts of Geez and Amharic confer no special advantages to modern Ethiopia and Eritrea over present-day Ghana and Nigeria. We must celebrate the achievements that produced the ancient writing scripts of Africa, even if they all now belong in the metaphoric museum of history, but what we make of writing and literacy in our age lies completely in our hands. This is why the title of this essay starts with the phrase, “Seshat revived”.

Let me give a concrete illustration of this phrase by alluding to my own experience and the experience of my generation with regard to reading and writing as inestimable vectors of pleasure, learning, enlightenment and progress, personal and collective. Today, the bookshops of the University of Ibadan and the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, look like ghostly hulks of what they once were when I was an undergraduate at the former and a teacher and researcher at the latter. It used to entail such cultural and emotional anguish for me to visit these bookshops that I have completely stopped entering them. Indeed, the anguish has become so deeply ingrained in relation to the U.I. bookshop that I often quickly walk past it when, over a weekend, I am staying with the Osofisans on the campus of the University.

On a larger scale, with the exception of perhaps only Lagos and Abuja, bookshops in all Nigerian cities are today like gutted, emptied versions of what they once were. When I was reading for my GCE “A” levels, there was no book on my required texts that I couldn’t get in several bookshops in Ibadan. This is apart from books that I regularly bought just for my reading pleasure – the bookshops were well stocked with them. And yet the Nigeria of today, the country of my late adult life is immensely wealthier than the Nigeria of my early life and young adulthood. Bookshops throughout the country should be bursting with a cornucopia of books on all subjects as bookshops tend to be in the nations of the world that truly value writing and reading. But for the herculean efforts of intrepid and dedicated dealers in the book trade like Booksellers of Ibadan and Glendora of Lagos (and others very thinly spread throughout Nigeria whose existence is unknown to me), we would still be going through the book drought that prevailed through much of the late 80s and early to mid-90s.

Let me come to the heart of what I am trying to put across in this essay. The great decline in reading among our children and youths and the equally catastrophic fall in standards of writing in books and newspapers in our country have many causes. But the chief cause is the fact that instead of giving a big boost to reading and writing, our oil wealth bonanza has done the exact opposite: it has fostered a pervasive philistine indifference to the great role that writing – and writing well – plays in all modern societies. In this respect, the very poor state of bookshops all over the country and the mediocre levels of writing that pervade much of what is published in virtually all our newspapers, are both symptoms and causes of the poverty that reigns supreme in our country today.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. It is not writing and reading as such that produced the grim statistic of 7 out of every 10 Nigerians living below the poverty line; it is gargantuan corruption, mismanagement and squandermania on a colossal scale that bear the responsibility for such an abysmal level of widespread poverty in the midst of vast oil wealth. But a decline in the quality of writing such as we are seeing now carries with it a disastrous fall in the quality of the intellectual life of the nation and is thus epiphenomenal to corruption and squandermania as the primary causes of poverty on such a large scale. Moreover, let us keep this in mind: for good or ill, we live now in the highly competitive world of a fully globalized capitalism in which intellectual capital and property occupy a pivotal place in the distribution of wealth and poverty between and within the nations of the planet. If by a revolutionary stroke of good fortune looting, waste and squandermania were to be terminated in our country next month, next year or the year after that, we would still have the task of a complete reform of our educational system, our reading habits and the quality of writing in our country to meet the challenges of 21st century global capitalism. Let me put this in the form of a pointed question: how can we ever become big players in the continental and global economies if our educational systems and the intellectual level indicated in the general quality of writing in our country remain so abysmally low?

I testify that at one time in the not-too distant past in this country reading and writing among the literati, as cultural habits and intellectual attainments, were of world class standard. I testify also that as that national literati expanded in number and demographics, highbrow, mid-brow and lowbrow levels in reading and writing emerged as they have done in nearly all modern societies; but mediocrity did not swamp and overwhelm writing and reading in the country. But now, except in a few locations or oases where reading and writing are still encouraged and nourished, “lowbrow” has completely eaten up both “mid-brow” and “highbrow”.

But all is not lost. Apart from the Rainbow Book Club whose activities I highlighted in last week’s column, I know of several other groups around the country where reading of novels and poetry and lively discussions on the state of writing and reading in the country are held regularly. I know of bookshops that are now relatively well-stocked and publishers that are once again giving superb, professionally competent editing to the books they are now publishing. But these are little streams, they are rivulets where we should have mighty seas of renewal – as we once did in this country. Seshat revived: writing has a long and hallowed history on our continent. But that history amounts to nothing if our present and our posterity are completely under the shadow of the prevailing and dominant philistinism in the intellectual and cultural affairs of Nigeria, the like and the scale of which was once foreign to this country.

Erratum:

In last week’s column, where I should have described the dictionary entry on the Latin phrase in extremis as the epigraph to the essay, I mistakenly called it the epilogue. The error is due to insufficient self-correction after the completion of the essay. This is a risk, a specter that all columnists face: sometimes, you miss obvious errors in your own essay that others would easily spot.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

April 27, 2014
The endgame of the Lugardian state

The funeral pyre has been aglow in Nigeria this past week. It portends the end of the Lugardian state as bequeathed by our colonial conquerors and as perfected by their neo-military inheritors and successors. Three incidents will suffice to illustrate this dire development for the Nigerian nation. Not surprisingly, they all have to do with the ongoing armed critique of the state and nation by the Boko Haram insurgency.

First was the abominable slaughter of scores of early morning commuters in broad daylight by the sect in Abuja, the capital city of the nation. This was followed by the wholesale abduction of hundreds of students from a secondary school in Yobe State after which they were herded into waiting buses for onward transportation to the dreaded Sambisa forest. Without mincing words, this is arguably the most alarming case of hostage taking in the history of contemporary warfare.

Last Wednesday, the super mullahs finally arrived at the supermarket, or almost. Lagos was gripped by fear and panic. There were unsubstantiated rumours that the dreaded nihilists were on their way to put the greatest conglomeration of Black people on earth to sword. This is as close to hell as it can get.

Earlier, and in order to ratchet up the psychological offensive, the insurgents had issued a statement that they were already in Abuja. After the apparently well-coordinated Nyanya bombing, no one could pooh-pooh the claim as fanciful boasting. The Nigerian post-colonial state is on its way to becoming a historic casualty.

A palpable fear enveloped everywhere. Maximum security was deployed. If the sect had Lagos within their rifle sight, then all is lost. Yours sincerely was caught up in the weird drama. Something will have to give eventually. Not even during the darkest moments of the civil war were state security forces subjected to this kind of nettling humiliation.

Force — raw, unadulterated violence— has been the organising principle and coordinating co-efficient of the stentorian state. It was not without some historic justification. The main rationale was that since human beings are no angels, it was the bounden duty of the state to rein in the wilder and more anarchic impulses of people in order for meaningful progress and development to take place.

This was the kind of menacing, authoritarian state bequeathed to an African continent already suffused with traditional tyranny. In the Congo, the state was known as Bula Matari, or the crusher of rocks. It crushed a lot of human rocks. From King Leopold who cut off their hand and limbs to Mobutu who smashed their brains and equally stole them blind, it was merely an exchange of monkeys for baboons. Ditto for all the colonial overseas possessions.

You cannot give what you don’t have. In Western Europe, the old stentorian state ruled the roost for a long time. For centuries, the English state brooked no opposition or dissent until they started lobbing off the head of their kings. In France, Louis famously proclaimed himself as the state until the people asserted their supreme sovereignty in an orgy of violence.

In Germany, the deposition of King Wihelm in 1914 marked the end of the old authoritarian state. For 40 years, General Frank Franco ruled Spain with an iron grip until biological coup d’etat intervened. So did Antonio Salazar in Portugal until the soldiers who bore brunt of the colonial wars in Africa began to abandon the shrine.

In Greece as late as the seventies, some deluded colonels seized power but were eventually overwhelmed and punished for their temerity. In Latin America, the same wave of popular uprisings ended authoritarian rule rooted in the Iberian model, most notably in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Chile.

Nothing lasts forever in human affairs. As societies progress, as new technologies develop, and as the clamour for more popular participation in governance increases, there usually comes a time when the aggregate of the means of violence and disruption available to certain non-state sectors equals or even surpasses the coordinates of violence and coercion available to the state.

Wise states, reading the handwriting on the wall, normally divest themselves of a substantial part of their capacity for the production of violence, opting for more refined forms of coercion and compliance. In such circumstances, certain societal institutions such as the school, the family, the media and even religion serve as ideological sectors of the state providing both blackmail and subtle intimidation at the intellectual, spiritual and psychological levels.

This is the norm in civilised societies. These social institutions constitute the first bulwark in the defence of the state against hostility and adversity. A lot depends on the intellectual cadres where and when it comes to humanising the state and making it amenable to the real needs of the people.

But when an ethically and politically bankrupt state decides to meet force with force and violence with violence, it may eventually be overwhelmed and subdued, giving rise to a radical reconstitution of the state or the nation or both simultaneously. If we were running a serious government with a homogeneous and organic vision of the country and its destiny, there ought not to have been a serious Boko Haram threat in the first instance.

But no country can escape the iron law of retribution. It is not by accident that the best run nations on the African continent such as Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Rwanda and now Cote D’Ivoire are nations where the state had once been subdued by hostile forces. Nigeria may yet undergo a revolution by default if the Boko Haram scourge leads to a significant deterioration of the security situation.

The problem with the Boko Haram insurgency is that it does not seek a radical and drastic reconstitution of the old Lugardian state but a radical Islamisation of the nation failing which a forcible partitioning will do. Except in a few aberrational enclaves, theocracy is incompatible with the paradigm or raison d’etre of the modern nation-state.

The Boko Haram insurgency may yet achieve its objective by default if its current siege on Nigeria leads to a fracturing of the military along religious, regional and ethnic lines, or if its campaign is brought home to the south of the nation. Even more so than in Western nations, the military remains the glue binding together the creaking joints of the old state in Nigeria. If it comes unstuck, Rwanda would be a child’s play.

On the other hand, if the sect were to hit a major objective in a densely populated megalopolis like Lagos, we might as well say goodbye to Nigeria as we know it. Our situation is far more precarious than we can imagine. Having proved themselves to be an extremely bloodthirsty and bloody minded group, we can as well conclude that if the Boko Haram group are not looking in this direction at the moment, it is not because of caution or restraint but because it has not put its logistics together.

This is why the events of last Wednesday even as they turned out to be a hoax should be an appropriate reminder of how little time we have left. The Nigerian political elite must put on their thinking cap. The nation is closer to the brink than we can ever imagine. This is not the time for inflammatory rhetoric, or for dangerous insinuations that polarise the nation further. Some endgame is here with us.

April 27, 2014
A tale of two empathisers

President Jonathan and Gov Shettima’s reactions to recent national tragedies as case study

President Goodluck Jonathan would appear to have left undone what he ought to have done, only to do what he ought not to have done immediately after the Nyanya bomb blasts of April 14 in which, officially, 75 people were reported killed (unofficial sources quoted over 200), and 170 injured, some critically; and the abduction of 234 students of Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, in the night of the same day. These were serious developments that should have put not just the government but the entire nation in a somber mood in societies where human lives are valued.

But not here. President Jonathan travelled to Kano the day after the bomb blasts, and a few hours after the abductions, to attend a political rally. Mr Labaran Maku, information minister, was to stoutly defend the president’s trip and also restate the usual government’s assurance (that assures no one). He said many things, including the usual belated closing of the door after the horse has bolted. “We will make it very difficult for people with bad intensions to penetrate our parks. Certainly, we are going to bring bomb detectors and we are going (emphasis mine) to work with our security to guide us on how to make our schools, parks, markets and other public places safe for our people,” he said. In our five years of fighting the insurgents, is it just occurring to the government that these public places must be protected?

Mr. Maku said the President has directed the FCT Minister to begin surveillance and provision of security around the Nigerian capital, Abuja. How come it is now that they are to begin these, in spite of the fact that Abuja had been attacked again and again by Boko Haram? What happened to the CCTVs in the city? Obviously Mr. Maku himself must have lost count of the number of times he had made similar statements and given similar assurances on behalf of the government since he became information minister.

Perhaps the worst of it all was his statement that President Jonathan made the Kano trip to drum it to the numbskulls that they (terrorists) cannot paralyse the government, whatever they do. Hear Maku: “I think going to Kano was a statement, a loud statement that terrorism will not stop the administration of this country”. Nothing could be more harebrained. It was the kind of defence that worsens matters when silence would have been golden.

Not only did President Jonathan go to Kano, he danced at the rally with many of his party’s supporters. Could they have been dancing on the graves of the Nyanya victims? Or could they have been thrilled that some 234 innocent girls had been abducted by Boko Haram members? What could have warranted such celebratory mood? Someone who “has suffered psychologically as a result of this criminality,” as Mr Maku wanted us to believe, could not have been in a dancing mood barely a few hours after these horrible incidents. Mr. Maku himself said journalists used some gory pictures of the bombing which I am sure the president saw. How come he still found the feet to dance after seeing such pictures, if indeed they were gory, and if indeed he was not insensitive?

Even the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Dr Andrew Pocock, donated blood for the Nyanya victims, a thing that the minister of state for health said was a major challenge. If the president was as touched by the incidents as Mr. Maku said, could he not have made blood donation or something relevant a major aspect of his Kano rally, instead of launching an attack on the state governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, over campaign funds that he accused the governor of misappropriating? If the rally was so sacrosanct that it could not be postponed so that Ibrahim Shekarau, a former governor of Kano State that the president went to receive into the ruling party would not change his mind, there were better ways of empathising with the relatives of the dead as well as the parents of the hapless girls.

Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima gave an example of this when he said: “I have seen very serious moments since I became governor of Borno State in 2011 at a period of insurgent crisis. I have seen many innocent lives lost for no reason and I mourn every life lost with empathy and high sense of responsibility. But the last one week has been my worst days as a governor and even the worst in my life. I am troubled as a father, as a leader and as a politician”.

Shettima is not done yet, “ First, as a father, any time my young daughter comes around me in the last one week at the Government House, my heart beats very fast, my heart becomes so heavy and I develop serious headache when I look into the eyes of my young daughter, I wonder how the parents of those students feel when faced with the harsh reality that their daughters are either in the hands of abductors in fear and desperation for freedom, or wandering somewhere looking for safety while parents do not know the status of their children”. This sums it up.

Someone who sees his daughter and remembers the reality that some other girls probably her age are out there in the hands of people that cannot be trusted can never find the time to dance so soon; it is just not possible. The talk about not grinding governance to a halt is rubbish. Is it by receiving a former governor into the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that you prove to insurgents that they cannot stop government business? Couldn’t Shekarau have been received by the party’s chairman? Why the president who was supposed to be the chief mourner then? Even Mr. Maku that was defending the indefensible could not have found that same excuse pleasant if his daughter was among those abducted. I do not need to ask him the question the typical Hausa man would ask on whether one has experienced something before if it is true that it is only someone who had experienced it that would know how it feels.

Governor Shetima said it all when he added that “I took a sympathetic note of one particular parent who reportedly said he preferred seeing his daughter’s body to the trauma of having her abducted”. Did this occur to Mr. Maku that it is the height of lack of faith in the system that would make a parent come to this sort of conclusion? It was for the same reason that the parents of the abducted girls had to go to the forest in search of their loved ones themselves. Dance will be a luxury that these parents cannot afford at this point in time; so, for the government to tell them that the president travelled for a political rally barely hours after their daughters were abducted to prove a point would only further alienate the parents from the government and reduce their faith in the country. “I pledge to Nigeria my country” is at this point so meaningless to them because it is not just a question of what they can do for Nigeria but also a question of what Nigeria can do for them. The same applies to the relatives of the victims of Nyanya blasts.

We seriously have to be wary of those advising the president; these goofs are just too many and too frequent. It is important to probe whether they are not the Boko Haram within that the president himself spoke of sometime ago because the quality of their advice is suspect. One is not suggesting that President Jonathan should engage the services of professional criers to weep over these sad developments before we will know that he is worried. But there are by far better ways to mourn the dead in the Nyanya bomb blasts in a way that it would not look like one is dancing on their graves. And, as for the abducted girls, I leave you with the words of Dr Nze Anizort:”Just imagining the horrors those children will be passing through is enough to send shivers down one’s spine. But all we can do is to imagine it; the girls will be living it.”

April 27, 2014