The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • ASUU strike: Fed Govt, Wike lose their heads

    ASUU strike: Fed Govt, Wike lose their heads

    I shudder to think what intensity of anguish Nigeria’s eminent vice-chancellors endured as they reportedly sat glumly through last Friday’s meeting with the supervising minister of education, Nyesom Wike. Mr Wike, as everyone knows, is a man of many parts. Bold, dogged and energetic, the Ikwerre, Rivers State politician has made a huge impression on his followers, and, as it is obvious, is also now making a monstrously bigger impression on many Nigerians. The vice-chancellors who attended the meeting with him would doubtless have left his presence dumbfounded by the quirkiness of university education that produced such an impertinent man who many years ago defied the force and natural inclination of nature to leave a notable mark on his local government as an administrator and grassroots mobiliser.

    Not only was Mr Wike twice chairman of the now controversial Obio/Akpor local government, he performed with such distinction that he managed to win the confidence of Governor Rotimi Amaechi to become his Chief of Staff. Graduating with a law degree from the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Mr Wike also developed a well-honed style of politics that saw him become an implacable force in both local and national politics. He even evaded the censorious gaze of the avuncular Peter Odili, a former governor of the state, to win his support at the initial stage of his political career. And he also managed to fool the feisty and sometimes impatient Mr Amaechi to earn the juicy and powerful post of Chief of Staff and later director-general of the Amaechi re-election campaign. He has now seduced President Goodluck Jonathan, who more and more finds solace in the arms of fixers and enforcers serenading him with sweet talk and bombast.

    It is important to understand Mr Wike’s background in order to find explanation for his hardline stand in the five-month-old Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike. He has a law degree, is streetwise, aggressive and gregarious. But those who know him and have worked with him insist there is little in his character or education, not to talk of the logic and judgement that sets an educated man apart from an illiterate, to justify the degree he is brandishing. He is a practical politician who is effective and skilful in herding votes. But at bottom, he is a man who conceals his unimpressive intellectual endowment beneath a morass of public works projects. Such a man is more likely to resent his betters when they meet in forums that require logic, thoughtfulness, restraint and cultured language and diplomacy. Mr Wike precisely found himself at one such forum last Friday when he encountered his betters, vice chancellors and former university teachers whom he gloated over.

    To a deep and lettered man, such a meeting would lead him inexorably to the veneration and modesty that the knowledge imparted to him in his university days should naturally elicit. But to one plagued by doubts and inferiority complex, such a meeting could only trigger in all its fury the resentment his intellectual failings have dammed in his angry soul over the years. Like former President Olusegun Obasanjo who under Gen Murtala Mohammed took perverse delight in purging the universities and demystifying the super permanent secretaries who mocked his inadequacies, Mr Wike has issued orders to his former teachers which no reasonable man should ever give and which even under the military no one could hope to enforce. Sadly, the Jonathan government is populated by many such upstarts who read politics into every dispute.

    Acting on behalf of the Jonathan presidency, and after opening another war front in the president’s many battles, Mr Wike has ordered the deployment of policemen in universities to secure those who would heed the command to resume work. After all, of what use is power when it cannot be used? He has also ordered the vice-chancellors to reopen the universities, when in reality it was ASUU’s withdrawal of services, not the shutting of the campuses by school administrators, that paralysed the universities in the first instance. Those who fail to resume work, Mr Wike commanded the National Universities Commission (NUC), should be sacked, notwithstanding the fact that the universities have neither the resources nor even the available pool of qualified teachers to fill more than 40,000 vacancies already existing. In the opinion of Mr Wike, force should solve a problem that neither logic nor diplomacy could resolve in five months. As far as he understood, and based on the Kano meeting of the university teachers less than two weeks ago, at least 60 percent of them already indicated willingness to resume work. Of course Mr Wike’s foolish order and outburst are bound to unite the teachers once again, for they are nobody’s fools.

    It is a worrisome indication of the incompetence of President Jonathan’s men that a crisis nearing resolution could be allowed to fester once again, thereby snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The president has himself not demonstrated brilliant statecraft, nor shown any indication he has the steady hands to propel the country to greatness. But by surrounding himself with devious and vacuous advisers and aides, he is more likely to take more wrong-headed steps capable of dooming his presidency. The president sees foreign destabilising agents, when nothing of the sort exists. Those who trouble him and the country are his ministers and aides. They are the ones who instigate him into hardline position, who alarm him with imaginary enemies, and fill his mind with anachronistic ideas of the powers and perks of a president. Thus they tell us that Dr Jonathan is the first president to engage the ASUU in 13 hours discussion, as if it is a regrettable thing, or as if his job is limited to effusing power without a corresponding acknowledgement of the burdens and responsibilities of office.

    The few outstanding issues in the ASUU strike were the warehousing of the first tranche of promised financial interventions, making the agreement already reached ironclad, and paying salary arrears. I find it difficult to see how these should be a problem. Instead, Dr Jonathan, Mr Wike and other supposedly educated officials who snivel around the presidency think it is an affront to doubt the president. Were there not enough reasons to doubt the presidency before now? Had that office not been desecrated before, and is it not now being desecrated by the thuggish characters that deface its hallowed corridors? As an adviser, I would have asked the president to approach ASUU’s new doubts (not new conditions, by the way) with the kind of self-deprecating humour US President Barack Obama is famous for.

    Answering a question on ASUU strike during his last media chat in September, Dr Jonathan said that in the heady days of the Ghanaian ‘revolution’ President J.J. Rawlings closed down universities for a long time in order to reorganise the education system. Though he added he was not thinking in that direction, it was embarrassing and insulting that his mind even wandered in that direction. If he thought nothing of closing down public universities because many around him didn’t have their children attending them, would he also close down private universities if he had his way? By now it must be obvious to everyone that we are dealing with a fascist government, not an elected presidency. (See box). They have begun to see external saboteurs and internal collaborators. They are bypassing a somnolent National Assembly and simply directly deploying the increasingly fascist police force to undermine the constitution and take away people’s rights.

    In the weeks ahead, and as the political noose tightens around his neck, a desperate Dr Jonathan will attempt extraordinary measures to keep himself in office. For all patriots, this is the time to abandon neutrality, a time to stand firm against fascism. The challenge before us then is how to guide this rampaging, paranoid bull through the country’s china shop lest we all come to grief. Indeed, the hysterical Mr Wike has managed to run the Jonathan government into a cul de sac. But if history is a guide, it is hard to see the government succeeding in its self-destructive course of action against ASUU. Not only are there no university teachers anywhere to recruit, Nigeria is hardly the right place for any competent teacher to come and offer his services, let alone for pittance and with no equipment to do the job. We are close to an election year; yet, Dr Jonathan is toying with the electorate and displaying unparalleled contempt for the youth. But perhaps we should wait to see what talisman he hopes to mesmerise us with in 2015.

  • Ongoing political realignment is last hope. No hyperbole

    After almost 15 years of unremitting political provocation, Nigerians are about to enjoy some relief from the tedium a succession of bad or incompetent leaders have subjected them to. Kawu Baraje, the chairman of the new Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP) that has just fused with the All Progressives Congress (APC), enthused last week that President Goodluck Jonathan should begin to prepare his handover notes. His effervescence is a reflection of the hopes elicited by the migration of five PDP governors into the APC, and the possible wholesale migration of the national legislators of the five states into the opposition party. If the migration is carried through in the National Assembly, it will mean an immediate and drastic alteration of legislative power. In addition, it will also mean in theory that the electoral vote-rich Southwest, Northwest and Northeast zones will go to the APC column. Political analysts recognise the impossibility of winning the presidency in Nigeria without two of these three blocs.

    It is hardly necessary to explain why the PDP could not keep the five governors, and why it may still lose a few more to the opposition. But it is important to state that the reason is not really the desire of the North to reclaim the presidency, after being shut out for a cumulative period of almost 13 years. The real reasons are the uncontrollable and spiteful internal dynamics of the PDP, and the almost absolute incompetence of the Jonathan government to engender progress and development and to facilitate peace. If Dr Jonathan had been a listening and charismatic president, the opposition against him would have been feeble. But now the opposition is potent and growing, and it is likely to succeed if it plays its cards well. More importantly, the country is an overripe pimple ready for a new party to take office, and new men, no matter their ideological disposition, to implement new political and developmental paradigms.

    But the expanded APC should not have illusions about its reach, power and readiness to take office. Its unity will remain testily brittle, and its ideological core will in the foreseeable future continue to be a kitchen midden of multifarious and sometimes conflicting worldviews. While the PDP has seemed to achieve some form of unity based solely on its long years in power, the APC will have to confect its own unity based on its members’ shared desperation to take power. Neither party’s unity will be contextually superior to the other, nor will one party’s style be less morally reprehensible than the other. The ageing PDP is a longstanding opportunist; the new APC is a latter-day opportunist. However, and more crucially, while the old opportunists have become inured to change and progress, and have even openly embraced fascism, the new opportunists, themselves idealists and theorists, appear genuinely interested in change, democracy, progress and stability. The choice facing the country is, therefore, clear and easy.

    Given the awful record of the PDP in government and the appalling characters that have seized governance and entrapped a willing Dr Jonathan, I have no hesitation in recommending change. Nor do I have hesitation in making the hyperbolic statement that four more years of Dr Jonathan would ruin the country. The signs are clear. But the APC must appreciate the kind of politics Nigerians play and why that sort of politics has held us in thraldom for so long. Dr Jonathan’s strength remains the fact that he is viewed in the Christian middle belt with a fondness and wistfulness that belie his unsuitability for the post he has held for nearly five years. In addition, many seem to find his consistent lack of composure and charisma, as well as his lack of profundity, both engaging and beguiling. (I have struggled to use inoffensive words for a man who merits the harshest adjectives for plunging the country into retrogression and chaos).

    In the South-South, neither his incompetence nor dullness matters to the single-minded voters of that zone. What matters are that he hails from their zone, and that the North, which they describe as parasitic, is once again annoyingly hankering after the plum post. I confess that such mechanical consideration of politics can be off-putting and is a dangerous path to follow for a country passing through trying times. If APC is to take the presidency, it will have to select its standard-bearers with considerable aplomb by avoiding sentiments and jaded calculations, take a little of the South-South and North Central as much as it can manage, and sweep the Southwest, Northeast and Northwest. The arithmetic of the next elections, not to say the dynamics of the National Assembly, favours the opposition party. If the opposition does not underestimate the fanatical ruthlessness of the Jonathan government, if it manages its own diversities well, checks its fissiparous tendency, and puts up a winnable ticket, Nigeria will be rid of the confusion and disaster that have bedevilled it for more than a decade.

  • And Festus fell…..

    And Festus fell…..

    They were from the same state: Edo. But one was from the periphery and outer margins of old empire while the other was from its very heart. They were born the same year, a few months shy of each other. One died at thirty nine, while the other died twenty seven years later at sixty six. They were both writers. But while one was a master craftsman of elegant prose, the other was a fiction writer of powerful imagination. They would have known of each other. But they were not friends. In all probability, they held each other in cordial contempt.

    The reason is simple. While one chose to work from the inside to expose the rotting innards of the Nigerian post-colonial state, the other waged a relentless intellectual and ideological warfare against it from the outside. No two individuals could have been more dissimilar in temperament, politics and ideological outlook. Yet in the end, they shared a similar fate. They were both victims of the state. One was spectacularly eliminated by a parcel bomb which bore all the hallmark of state execution. The other succumbed to a killer-convoy of the state

    There is no further point in comparing the late Dele Giwa and the recently departed Festus Iyayi, except to note that the unarmed prophet of any hue, if he is not deliberately courting martyrdom, must learn the nature and character of the post-colonial state we are dealing with. Yet it was impossible not to admire Iyayi’s consistency and adamantine integrity even while entertaining profound ideological and strategic disagreements with his vision and version of the post-colony. But he was not one of those contemptible charlatans that the late motor park economist famously dismissed as “ Nigeria’s akara and suya Marxists”.

    A quote often misattributed to Stalin has it that while one death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths are a mere statistic. Festus Iyayi’s death on the road adds to the lengthening statistics of state violence against Nigerian citizens. Other states kits and kilts their own, but the Nigerian state kills its best and brightest like a demented hen which must suck life out of its own eggs.

    Thirty nine years after Iyayi came to national political prominence in a memorable ASUU industrial dispute, he was still at it, this time as an aging generalissimo and grizzled veteran of ASUU protests. Nothing has changed. If anything, the conditions in the public universities have worsened. Nigerian universities have become a global laughing stock sustained by the unusual heroism and bravery of a few. Many illustrious men and women have perished trying to make sense of this epic failure of the Black person. The intellectual fortress has been stormed and decimated. Those who deliberately destroyed the university system and whose cultural conditioning could not equip them to appreciate the virtues and values of modernity and knowledge-based civilization have gone on to become statesmen.

    For a man who showed such a powerful imaginative understanding of violence in all its chilling economic, political, intellectual and psychological possibilities to die of its most crass and unimaginative variety is a truly benumbing irony. It is like a Panzer general being killed by an ox-driven cart. The killer state convoy is a unique Nigerian contribution to modern civilization. It will surely find a befitting place in a future museum of post-colonial atrocities. This must be in addition to low tech corruption and primitive state stealing. Future generations surveying the catacombs of our current catastrophe must wonder why such a gifted and creative people allowed themselves to be so misruled by their worst and most miserable human specimens.

    The fate of the author of Heroes reminds one of a Second World War Japanese soldier who also goes by the name Hiroo Onoda. Twenty nine years after the Japanese surrender, this incredibly brave and hardy soldier was still roaming wild on some forsaken Filipino island simply because he had not heard his commander’s order to surrender. A special ceremony had to be arranged with his old commander, now a bookseller, to allow the man who had become a semi-beast foraging on leaves, roots and pillaged rice for three decades to lay down his arms. Iyayi fought on in the most inhuman of circumstances until he fell. This is a parable for a paradigm shift for ASUU. A diseased society cannot produce a great university system.

    As a mark of respect to its fallen hero and all those who have been wasted by the Nigerian university system, ASUU must now commence an introspective soul-searching about how to redeem Nigeria along with its fallen university system. It is going to take a war of position, that is a costly inch by inch campaign rather than a war of manoeuvre which is a brisk lightning strike against a demobilised enemy. The Japanese knew that they had lost the military war, so they turned to another theatre of human engagement: economy. Once the nature of war changes, so must the mode of engagement. Luckily and as Shakespeare famously said, there is still some architecture in the ruins.

    All over Nigeria, our people are being wasted on a daily basis in needless and most absurd of circumstances. It will be foolish to imagine that this human culling on an industrial scale will not have its psychic toll on future generations. The well of communal wellbeing is already poisoned. As inhabitants of the land of living ghosts, we bring you this morning an early glimpse into the culture of human wastage in this unhappy land. It was written twenty six years ago on the first anniversary of Dele Giwa’s death. Welcome to the Inca Empire and its human abattoir as enacted in post-colonial Africa.

  • The new PDP – APC merger in perspective

    The new PDP – APC merger in perspective

    Nigerians have not seen the last of PDP’s troubles

    Not even the most audacious hater of the banal PDP could have , this time a year ago, conjectured that the political behemoth could  come crashing so ignominiously under the sheer weight of its sins against Nigeria and Nigerians. The sins of biblical Sodom from which only Lot’s family escaped eternal judgment, would pale into literal insignificance compared to PDP’s banality which, in  its  mere fourteen years stranglehold over Nigeria  reduced a resource –rich country, which should ordinarily have been the pride of black peoples all over the world, to an absolutely beggarly country wallowing in the lowest rungs of the world’s development index. In those fourteen years, the only time, as of recent, when a Nigerian can truly feel proud of this country is when our yet to be adulterated youth, win some sporting laurels far away  from our shores; more from their own individual efforts than any deliberate policy of the PDP-controlled federal government.

    Only recently, a Ghanaian minister lost her high office simply because she expressed a mere intent to have some huge amount of money at her disposal to politically control the people but  here in an amoral PDP- controlled Nigeria, a minister continues to sit pretty in President Jonathan’s cabinet despite copious evidence of  her moral, financial and constitutional  derelictions  and weeks after the president’s panel of inquiry set  up, more to obfuscate than to adjudicate, had submitted its report. In like manner, the government has washed its hands clean of any responsibility to ensure that those who creamed off billions of naira through the oil subsidy scandal are promptly brought to book, merely by handing them over to the courts which is equally under its baleful control, sure the accused ones will, at best, be given a slap on the wrist. After all, children of PDP Chairmen, past and serving, are among. But presidential spokespersons will waste no time in telling you how the president does not control the judiciary. Nigerians, however, know better than the courts which unashamedly declare that there is no split in the PDP, in your face as it is, straight from the party’s Abuja mini convention.

    Those who stole billions from the pension fund are not any different. Indeed, so horrible was the pension scam, and the government’s effort at cover up, that in spite of a court order to arrest him, the police claimed it could not locate an accused top gun in the pension’s department, who was, incidentally being guided round the clock by dozens from the same Nigeria Police until he was allegedly helped to escape from the country.

    Given the above scenario many Nigerians have refused to be excited at the historic merger of a huge chunk of that same political party with the All Progressives Congress, claiming, indeed, that Nigerian politicians are all the same: what with ownership mentality, imposition of candidates and the fact that corruption is basically party- blind, though much more at home in the PDP.

    My response to all these has been that although one individual Nigerian is hardly different from  the other, PDP  in its corporeal sense and dealings,  is completely irredeemable, no matter how good its individual members may be. It was for this reason that Moremi Funmi Olayinka, the late Ekiti State Deputy Governor, used to liken it to a virus. The reader is certain to know a decent PDP member who is, however, party to the large scale treasury looting and perverse election rigging over which the government has superintended these many years. They are getting worse by the day.

    Many have, therefore, wondered as to how these big guns ‘porting’ into the APC from PDP will not spoil the broth and my answer is  two-fold;  one,  that the milieu is by far different. Whereas all those murky practices are more the directive policies of the PDP, a party from which you could hardly identify a lone biblical Lot for redemption, you will find among the  APC leaders, individuals like its Chairman, Chief Bisi Akande,  General Buhari and many others,  who are, indeed, Nigerian poster boys of the incorruptible. These two leaders have held high public offices and have been adjudged completely above board, leaving office in flying colours and with serial testaments to their patriotism and honesty. It is equally true that while accusations of imposition and the lot could hold true in smaller, regional parties, it is totally unthinkable that individuals, qua individuals, could exercise the same level of influence in a much bigger, national party, like the APC.

    However,  much more important is the fact that APC’s hope of rescuing Nigeria from the evil stranglehold of the PDP, rests mostly on comprehensively galvanising the people to make it a mass movement  by aggressively pushing to the public space, PDP’s record of  unprecedented corruption and non-performance since 1999; one that has no single redeeming feature, not even the GSM phenomenon wrongly attributed to Obasanjo but  which  the thoroughly disreputable Abacha regime had, in fact, initiated.  APC should let the world know that PDP luxuriates in illegalities such as abrogating the electorate and robbing the treasury blind. These negativities should be comprehensively enumerated and their evil consequences brought home vividly to Nigerians. The APC must show, very clearly, how and why, these are the very reasons an otherwise blessed country like Nigeria is wallowing in the abyss of ignominy with the poverty level of its citizens in the high 70s.  The recent resignation of the chairman of SURE-P, though allegedly for health-related reasons, should best be seen in the fact that the programme was fast becoming a cesspool of patronage and corruption with which the decent man will never ever be connected. These inglorious facts about the PDP, therefore, impose a moral obligation of probity on all levels of the APC membership: leaders, officials and ordinary members alike, if it must lay claim to any higher moral ground which is a sine qua non for victory.

    Ever a master of self deceit and unprecedented rigging in whatever level of election, local, state or federal, the PDP had been loudest in  proclaiming on roof tops, how the exit of no less than five state governors and sundry legislators at all levels  would not affect  it. I imagine, therefore, that even if, as a result of its many problems, President Jonathan decides to dump the party today, some jokers like Gulak would claim that nothing has happened as long as Chairman Tukur remains his rambunctious and all-conquering self. It can only be a shame that President Jonathan could not see the disaster Chairman Tukur had become to the PDP.  A well-heeled and aristocratic former governor, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, unfortunately, sees the party only as an extension of his vast holdings where he is the undisputed authority. He could, therefore, not tolerate the elected party secretary, nor did it matter to him whether or not meetings of the national executive of the party, which he saw as no more than the nominal boards of his many companies, met as statutorily expected. Rather, it was game for him to summarily dissolve state executive committees which he replaced with some fringe, unpopular members as long as his word would be law. The result was that when concerned members, state governors inclusive, raised these troubling issues with the president who is the party leader, it mattered nothing. Indeed, to ensure he had his way, Alhaji Tukur went back many decades to drag the one and only Umaru Dikko, to head his self-appointed Disciplinary Committee; all these while the soporific PDP leadership slept. Today, they can only gnash their teeth as it matters nothing to them either if their party could no longer field a governorship candidate from within its own ranks but must go shopping for one in other political parties. Nigerians have certainly not seen the last of PDP’s troubles as the party’s winter is already here.

  • A diary of wastage

    He was the very symbol of wastage: frail limbs, premature grey hair and a sagging gait. I had put him down as another specimen from our museum of atrocity. He seemed to have understood. As he took his leave, the wasted young man asked me the million dollar question: “Why do we waste ourselves so much?” he cried.

    The metaphor itself, I’m told, originated during our darkest national moment: the civil war. But its sad antecedents, I’m sure, must be located in the bitter and self-destructive post-independence politics of our founding fathers. Like a malignant cancer, it has overtaken every facet of our national life. Wastage has become the dominant metaphor, the all-embracing formula for the tragedy of our collective existence.

    Wole Soyinka, ever the troubled prophet, first drew our attention to the creeping cancer in the mid-seventies. In a newspaper piece titled “Varieties of Wastage,” Soyinka assailed the invasion of our national life by the culture of wastage. We waste our best and brightest; our best and brightest politicians; our best and brightest soldiers; our best and brightest intellectuals; our best and brightest bankers; our best and brightest journalists etc. the road, taking its orders from the system, completes the carnage for us.

    One year this week, a novel and spectacular variety of wastage made its debut on the national scene. Dele Giwa, brilliant editor and one of the stars of Nigerian journalism, was bombed out of existence in his study. This writer is often amazed these days when people talk glibly about the Nigerian bomb without first conceding that the real “McKoy” made its sly and devastating entry several months ahead of the idle speculations. It is pertinent to add here that nobody can fool history and that if care is not taken, that horrifying spectacle of a gifted and virile young man with shattered limbs may itself become an alternative metaphor for our national condition.

    As the first anniversary of Giwa’s murder approached, I’ve been thrown into deep mourning and depression. Some days earlier, a good friend, Deji Adegorioye, who had gone to buy some drugs for his indisposed son had his life snuffed out by a bus belonging to the Celestial Church. Some weeks before this, another friend, Tunde Okeleye, a customs official, was battered to death by a danfo bus whose driver had perfected the murderous strategy of overtaking in the night with lights switched off. Death had barely closed in on him before some brave new Nigerians saw it fit to remove his money, his shoes, his wristwatch and the drinks he bought for his kids.

    As if all this was not enough burden on the soul, news came of the death by road accident of Professor Iluyomade, Oxford-trained law teacher and attorney-general of Ondo State. Something always conspires to deny us of even our brief sources of joy, I thought in deep gloom. I remembered how the Dele Giwa murder had put a damper on the Wole Soyinka Nobel celebration. And now the cultured and lively people of Ondo town will have to share the joy of their illustrious son winning the national merit award with the grief of burying another illustrious son.

    These cruel tricks of fortune! Three weeks earlier, I was thinking of sending a telegram of congratulations to Chinua Achebe on his return to high form when I learnt of the death of Dambudzo Marechera, the gifted Zimbabwean writer. I had reckoned that Achebe who had survived a thousand literary cudgels after his immensely frank but immensely impolitic put-down of Obafemi Awolowo surely deserved some congratulations. But the death of Marechera, the supreme artist of hunger whose life must serve as a classic example of the dissolution of the flesh by spirit (whisky and co), halted me in my track.

    These deaths make my mind to focus on the damage the notorious Ife-Ibadan road might have done to the intellectual development of this country. One now remembers the Bamiduros, the Kola Adenijis, the Taiye Adebanjos, brilliant men who have gone through all the rituals of education only to have their lives tragically terminated on The Road. I remember now a tall, dashing young man who would have graduated with our class of ’75 at Ife. Onome Ibru would have been an invaluable asset not only to the formidable Ibru empire but to the entire country. His life was cruelly abridged on this monster of a road.

    Now consider this. If one were to resurrect all the people we have put through the ceaseless mill of our unedifying history, all the brilliant men and women that our monstrous system has hurried over to the great beyond! What an endless procession of shame and misery would it have been! What a staggering burden of collective guilt for the living!

    Let us end this sad piece with a disturbing but profoundly soothing anecdote. In the gloom and misery that enveloped the nation in the wake of Giwa’s murder. I had the honour of briefly participating in one of the planning sessions for his burial. In the atmosphere of consuming sadness, I had asked a journalist friend whether things would ever be the same again in the country. The man looked at me and said philosophically: “In forty years time, Dele Giwa will be remembered as a fearless journalist of the eighties.”

    Then he told me a story about his father. The old man, sensing that he had only a few more months to spare, decided to take his son down the memory lane on a tour of familiar spots on Lagos Island. As they crossed from one alley to another, the old man’s face would light with memory as they came upon some familiar land mark. “That is the house of so and so,” he would begin, “he was a socialite who died mysteriously in 1937.” At another spot the old man would look up and remark: “This is the house of J.K. he died in his prime in 1956.” And so on…

    His message was clear. Life will go on. Life must go on. The only honour we, the dazed survivors ,can do to the wasted is to resolve to change a system that is responsible for such colossal waste.

     

    •Culled from Newswatch, October, 1987.

  • Bring them in

    AIDS is just like any other disease which calls for a sense of realism, right information and a positive attitude

    Man, I heard someone say recently, is more often a victim of his circumstances than otherwise. Even when otherwise, such as when he becomes a victim of his choices, he is said to be a victim of the circumstances which led to the making of those bad choices. Frankly, I just love this theory. I had always thought that any day I chose to wolf down a large bowl of ice cream in a greedy disregard of my limits, I was merely displaying bad choice and bad taste. But now, that theory completely exonerates me, as when it happens now, I am only a victim of the creating circumstances that make me not to know my stomach’s limits. And the name of those circumstances is legion. First there is the hot, hot sun, then there is my hot, hot thirst, and finally there is my hot, hot greed. Good, I think that’s told them.

    While I agree with that tenet only for as long as it exonerates me from every responsibility from the consequences of some of life’s choices taken on my behalf, such as by my creator, I am sure you will agree, as I do, that it is difficult for anyone to want to completely distance himself from every responsibility for his bad choices. For instance, when I choose to taunt the dog and he to bite me, now please who is to blame: him that to bite the finger that feeds him or me who chooses to feed him that finger? Wherever the responsibility lies, there is no doubt about where the ensuing pain lies: in the body.

    The pain of AIDS, the dreaded disease caused by the virus called HIV, also lies in the body. The trouble about AIDS is that once it strikes, it does not ask questions. It also does not discriminate between the wise and the foolish, the young or the old, the ugly or beautiful. It just mostly strikes wherever it finds some careless choices going on.

    For instance, it can strike when it finds some carelessness in the exchange of blood through transfusion or drug needles. Luckily for us in this country, our hospitals have since begun to screen, test and frisk every blood they receive before giving it out. Good for us, I say, because that as good as eliminates the hospital as a source. Don’t you just shudder when you remember the story of Arthur Ashe, the famed American tennis pro who got AIDS from the hospital? I mean, here was the poor man running to the hospital for safety only to come out with something worse, death. Now please, snap your fingers over your head; that will not happen to you and I. I thank you, noble sir, for exercising your faith on my behalf.

    Funny thing though that many people, even after snapping their fingers over their heads still go out to court death. They insist on injecting their daily rations of ‘high’ directly into their arms with used syringes by themselves. I mean, it is one thing to want to take trips into some airy La-La land where the reality of a missing Pension Fund, SURE-P Fund or any fund with ‘P’ running into billions of Naira does not exist. Honestly, if there was a legal and safe way to get into that land, I would be the first to volunteer to go with you. I want to live in a land where Nigerian politicians or military do not exist too, just me and… and… Oh, never mind. It is quite another thing though to want to get there by injecting oneself with used syringes. I think just seeing the syringe is enough to kill me.

    AIDS can also strike the careless ‘un through exchange of bodily fluids, we’re told. I think this is the one that many of my countrymen and women have trouble swallowing. So, they prefer to have their physical relations on the straight, like, without fear. Goodness knows how many obscene text messages I have received since this column started. I hate to think that people fling themselves around the way they insist on flinging their declarations around. If so, then the 2014 theme “Getting to Zero in Africa” is endangered, like the continent itself. I think the operative word here, people, is fear. You know that famous quotation that’s been going around, ‘if you can still keep your head in this confusion, then it means you do not understand the situation’? By analogy, a Nigerian man or woman who blithely ignores the safety precautions our medico-administrators have been preaching quite clearly does not understand the situation. Sometimes, I think it is safer to fear a thing first even before understanding it. Then understanding will bring more fear. Quite the philosopher I am today, no?

    Anyway, I’m sure you would have guessed that today is being marked specially as World’s AIDS Day. That’s just to draw attention to the scourge and its sufferers, to give them hope and encouragement and let them know that they are not alone. And also try and eradicate it altogether. Sadly, there are many silent sufferers agonising on their own for fear of what the society will do to them and only ‘come out’ when they are beyond help or reach. I know, I had a relative like that who never let out until it was too late, and even then never faced the reality till the end. I think AIDS is just like any other disease which calls for a three-pronged approach.

    First, hard as it may be, one should be realistic about one’s situation. Facing up to the reality of an illness is very difficult, I grant, but living in denial is a lot worse. As the people around me have always maintained, my knowledge of medicine is little, therefore dangerous. But, even they will grant that denial has never made a disease go into remission. While it is also true that there are all kinds of AIDS cure claims, there are no records that sufferers have found them. For this year’s theme to be realisable therefore, it is important to report early enough for the drugs that are available and which are heavily subsidised.

    The second thing is for one to obtain as much information as possible on one’s problem. Let’s face it; diseases deliver bad punches both foreseen and unforeseen. It is important to forearm oneself so as not to be knocked out. Luckily, we live in an information age with facts flying left, right and centre of one; so it is very easy to get informed on any topic under the sun from the internet to your neighbours. The other day, someone wanted to know how to cook rice on the internet and the silly thing answered. I ask you, what is this world coming to? Anyway, my point is to assure people that one needs not suffer alone anymore. The world is not called a global village for nothing: the reason is to let you know that if you crane your neck ever so slightly, an American hamburger will fall into your laps right there in your village. So will information.

    The third approach is to maintain a healthy attitude no matter what. This is difficult, particularly when the fellow is in pain. However, I am a firm believer in the notion that a positive attitude can not only make my pocket look like it’s filled with cash even when it’s empty but that it can give any group of bacteria a good run for its money. It’s just when those high heeled shoes keep pinching my little toes that my positive attitude fails me. Seriously though, World Aids Day is for us to remember that AIDS sufferers are people too. Bring them in.

  • Now, the turn of the compassionate undertaker

    It is a grim irony. Even those who bury the dead in the land are not exempt from dying in horrid and gory circumstances. The undertaker himself has been taken under. At this rate, the biblical injunction is set to come to pass: Let the dead bury the dead. Talking about needless and pointless deaths, this one could have been avoided. That plane ought not to have been cleared to fly.

    It is one of the evils of cannibal capitalism that it sets base profit above all other considerations. Nothing else matters. If the ageing pilot of the geriatric plane cares let him bring it down on a populous estate. It is the contract that matters, apologies, Festus Iyayi. They will cry for a few days and will get on with it until the next crash. And so a few seconds after being airborne, Tunji Okusanya, his son, his staff, the air crew and Deji Falae, beloved son of Olu Falae, the respected Afenifere chieftain and technocrat, were plucked back to earth in a chariot of fire.

    Last week, the whole of Lagos stood still as the great city bade farewell to the compassionate undertaker. Traffic was disrupted for several hours on the island. The outpouring of grief was unprecedented. It is a typical Nigerian paradox that a man who lived to prepare others for dignified death should now in death teach the living about the finer and nobler aspects of existence.

    Snooper never met this fine fellow. But from all accounts, he was a kind and compassionate man who touched many lives. He exuded human warmth and abundant generosity of spirit. He was a humble servant of death and a proud savant of life. Despite the bonhomie and the hail fellow well met airs, there was also something of the otherworldly mystic about him. He was a man who knew that death is the ultimate leveller. Goodbye Tunji Okusanya, the compassionate undertaker.

  • Dumping the Humpty Dumpty

    Dumping the Humpty Dumpty

    Five PDP governors’ defection to APC calls for celebration, but …

    At last, the expected implosion in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) began on November 26, when five of the party’s governors (G5) decamped to the All Progressives Congress (APC). The five governors: Rotimi Amaechi (Rivers), Musa Kwankwaso (Kano), Aliyu Wamakko (Sokoto), Abdulfatah Ahmed (Kwara) and Murtala Nyako (Adamawa), alongside members of the Abubakar Baraje faction of the PDP, defected to the APC on Tuesday. More are expected to follow suit. But it was an implosion foretold; the only surprise, if any, was that the party was able to hold itself together this far. For the better part of the PDP years, it had been a marriage of convenience or, at best, a coalition of strange bedfellows.

    Only a compound fool would not have seen what happened coming. It was obvious, as I noted a few months back, that reconciliation was almost impossible when a crisis has degenerated to the level the PDP crisis was, even then. There cannot be genuine reconciliation after the gladiators have thoroughly abused themselves in the media, or after washing some of their dirty linen in public.

    One of the things the implosion tells us is that the PDP is not a good manager. Its leaders have never demonstrated that they have the capacity to manage. And we should not be surprised because the party has not succeeded in managing success, legit or otherwise, that it has claimed at the polls over the years. If it had, Tuesday’s event would have been averted. Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, the party’s chairman, has remained what I called him in one of my write-ups a few months back: a ‘village headmaster’ who thinks his duty is to whip people, including governors, into line; to shape up or ship out.

    Without doubt the governors’ defection is good for democracy; it is good for Nigerians. There is no way any party can defeat the PDP as formerly constituted; not necessarily because it is a good political party or that it has done so much for Nigerians, but because it has a superb rigging machinery that it has been deploying in some states without serious challenge. That machinery must have been badly eroded now. Nigerians must therefore be ready to take the gauntlet, come 2015. I have said times without number that the 2015 elections would be a completely different ball game. That was long before the G5 left the party. I stand by that prediction. But where we as a people have to be vigilant is that by now, we should be able to predict the way the Jonathan presidency will react to the situation.

    Like a bad football player whose team is losing on the field, the ruling party has been abandoning the ball and going for the legs, instead, at the polls. It will do more of that now; it will soon start behaving like the wounded lion that it is. I said it just last week that the way this country is run, there cannot be any free and fair election, as long as the PDP is in power, irrespective of who heads the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). If the overall boss is incorruptible, desperate politicians, especially those with the backing of the ruling party will simply look for the incorrigible cheats in the commission to do their hatchet job. I guess that was what happened in the November 16 governorship election in Anambra State that made the commission declare the election inconclusive. We should expect more of such in the coming elections. The PDP will be more ruthless and more daring: People that were saints when they remained in the party will become sinners overnight for having the temerity to dump the Humpty Dumpty.

    Perhaps unknown to it, the PDP is full of itself, and that is why it continues to have the erroneous impression that no one can quit the party. In one breath, the party initially said it was not perturbed by the defection of the five governors. In another, its chairman, said to be on a visit to China, was blowing hot and cold simultaneously. First he was quoted as saying: “We cannot ask anyone not to leave the party if he so decided. After all, soldiers go, soldiers come. If anyone leaves the PDP, many more people will join. It happens every time”. In the same news report he said that “What we are saying is; let us come together as a party to promote the transformation agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan who we elected to lead us in Nigeria. Let us put behind us crises and bickering so that the President and leaders of the party could concentrate on governance and delivery of the dividends of democracy to all.” Pray, what dividends of democracy have Nigerians benefitted for the 14 years that the party has remained the ‘largest ruling party in Africa’?

    Tukur’s recurring mistake is that he keeps living in the past, or in self denial, or both; thinking that the PDP has such an alluring and irresistible appeal. Nigerians should pray he does not retrace his steps in this delusion of grandeur and that God should continue to harden his heart until he has performed the noble role of the ruling party’s undertaker.

    All over the democratic world, performance is a major determinant of whether a political party remains in power or is voted out. What has the PDP delivered in its over 14 years of ruling Nigeria? We are in deficit in virtually all sectors – education, health, economy, infrastructure development, transportation, etc. We cannot even sleep with our two eyes closed. To crown it all, we see and feel corruption around us daily, with the government forever helpless as if corruption is now the in-thing or is about going out of fashion. And nothing demonstrates this more vividly than the purchase of two-bullet-proof cars just to keep one minister safe.

    Meanwhile, there is no money to kit the security agencies to protect the rest of us. Isn’t it curious that the same President Jonathan that could not even wait for the file of the former President of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Justice Ayo Salami, to get to his desk before suspending him has not been able to act on the file of Ms Stella Oduah, the embattled minister of aviation, who is at the centre of the purchase of the controversial bullet-proof cars for a staggering N255million? The President admitted that the file on the recommendation of his committee on the scandal got to his desk more than a week ago. So, what is he waiting for?

    It is only people who want to continue to live in fool’s paradise that won’t see that the ruling party is adrift and lost, and is about sinking, not necessarily under the burden of its incompetence but under the yoke of corruption. It is therefore only proper that those with foresight, especially people that have not been feeling too comfortable with the way things are done in the party and the country at large will vote with their legs. That was simply what the five governors have done.

    This is however not to suggest that everyone in the PDP is bad or that everyone in the APC is good. Of course there are cases of some progressive elements who found themselves in the PDP not necessarily out of choice but due to irreconcilable differences over one issue or the other. The point must also be made that among every 12 disciples; there will always be a Judas. The APC should take cognisance of this. If the scales could fall from the eyes of the romantic lovers that once got wedded in the ruling PDP, there is nothing to suggest that the scales won’t fall from the eyes of those now joining the APC sooner or later. However, the important thing for now is that Papa has deceived pikin too long for pikin to notice.

    Above all, the APC must know that it is easier to marry than it is to stay married; the consummation of the historic defection of November 26 for the betterment of the country is what should be paramount, not defection for the sake of it. A word is enough for the wise.

  • ASUU strike: No, Wike! No!

    ASUU strike: No, Wike! No!

    I am at a loss why Supervising Education Minister Nyesom decided to issue the threat he did last Thursday to the striking members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

    Sounding like a military commandant, the minister ordered Vice Chancellors to reopen the campuses nationwide while lecturers are to resume duties by Monday or get sacked. Jobs of those who fail to return to work are to be advertised.

    I can understand the frustration of the Minister and the federal government over the refusal of the union to call off its over four months strike after the agreement reached at the meeting with the President.

    It is indeed embarrassing that the strike had been allowed to last this long and the government is justifiably desperate to end it having according to the minister met all its commitments and obligations with respect to the 2009 agreement.

    Notwithstanding that most Nigerians agree that ASUU has a good cause and should get the government to provide adequate resources for funding university education in the country, the feeling in most circles is that the strike is lasting longer than necessary.

    Having got the President to personally intervene in the matter and his promise this time around to meet the government’s obligations, many expect that the strike should be called off while the details of the agreement is being fine-tuned.

    However threatening the lecturers the way the Minister did last Thursday is definitely uncalled for. He was unnecessarily combative and may have complicated the crisis instead of maintaining his cool in the face of whatever frustration he may be feeling.

    To be fair to the lecturers, I remember the same Minister saying after the Aso Rock meeting that the union leader have reached an agreement with the President which they have to communicate to their members for ratification.

    If the union leaders for any reason are yet to agree with their members on the terms of calling off the strike and are asking to get the agreement signed and clear some grey areas, the government should not resort to any military tactic which is bound to back fire.

    Many of the campuses were not really shut since the strike commenced so there is no need for the minister to give the impression that all that is required to end the strike is to order reopening of the campuses. Vice Chancellors can go ahead and re-open the campuses that are closed but what will it matter if lecturers refuse to lecture as they have dared the minister.

    Not even under military regimes did the government succeed in ordering lecturers back to classes in situation like this. Wike should have known as a lawyer that there is no need in giving an unenforceable order. Like a reader who responded to one of my earlier write-ups on this strike noted, Wike should know that the country has witnessed an ASUU strike longer that the present one and the lecturers can decide to stay off the classroom for as long as they remain united on this cause.

    Having been magnanimous enough to intervene in this crisis before now, the President should not allow Wike to mess up the situation through what the ASUU leaders have aptly described as “empty threat”.

    The situation should not be reduced to one of his political battles considering that this is a national matter that requires some wisdom to resolve.

    ASUU’s demand may not be totally acceptable to the government but the disagreement cannot be definitely resolved by sack threat and deployment of policemen to campuses.

  • APC enlargement: rise of citizenship over subjecthood?

    APC enlargement: rise of citizenship over subjecthood?

    Whether before or after elections, citizens have been relegated in the last fourteen years to the realm of subjects

    Dominocracy is where rulers are too powerful; where there are inadequate means of challenge, scrutiny and accountability; and political life itself, as well as the quality of citizenship, is eroded and devalued.
    The absence of secure forms of sub-central government, the lack of independent institutions that are more than the creatures of the government of the day, the failure to develop the apparatus of social and economic participation; all this, and more, properly reflects a politics of subjecthood rather than of citizenship. – Tony Wright, British MP

    The much-vaunted electoral democracy in Nigeria in the last fourteen years has not resulted in the birth of a democratic culture that enhances the participation of citizens in their governance. With one political party in power for so long, democratic choice for citizens has been restricted to disagreement within the ruling party that has come to perceive itself as invincible and irreplaceable. PDP has over internalised and exaggerated its superiority over other political parties so manifestly that some of its leaders often refer to the party as the largest political party in Africa and as a party ordained to rule for the next sixty years. The effect of what appears as the end of the politics of choice to voters has been frustration for citizens who have generally felt more like subjects than citizens. But this past week appears or promises to have brought the politics of choice back to the country’s political landscape, and hopefully with it, a good measure of optimism that change to democracy from what Tony Wright has, in another context, called dominocracy may very well be on the way to Nigeria.

    The new kid on the political block is the enlarged APC. The PDP is not new to Nigerians in many respects. It is a party that has ruled the country rather than governed it for the past fourteen years, without being able to change for the better most of the dismal statistics in terms of human development index that the first PDP government inherited in 1999. Over 65% of Nigerians still live in destitution after fourteen years of governments supposedly chosen by citizens and are thus subjected to citizens’ scrutiny and approval, as distinct from decades of military autocracy that owed the citizens no explanation for whatever it did or failed to do. Nigeria is lagging behind many African countries with respect to improving the situation of maternal and child mortality, percentage of citizens with access to safe potable water and proper sanitation; access to electricity for industrial and residential use, access to good roads, functional education, etc. In other words, it is only the PDP that needs to be on the defensive politically.

    APC has not been in control of the central government and thus should have no reason to invest its utmost energy on optics and rhetoric. Citizens are expecting to hear messages of motivation and not of manipulation from the new political party that has brought a party of equal weight to stand up to the ruling party. Many APC states have good records to show about doing so much with so little for their citizens. Many APC states have a political pedigree that is generally referred to in popular parlance as progressive tradition of politics in the country. It is also significant that there are many states that are willing to be infected by the virus of progressive politics, thus making it possible for the recent enlargement of APC. The enlargement must be made to translate into empowerment of the party. The principle of ‘no founder, no joiner’ provides a level playing field for all party gurus. But the initial philosophy that brought APC into existence must not be lost in the process of preparing a level-playing field. The main challenge about bringing change to the country may now rest on the new party for the obvious reason that it is APC that has set a new goal for itself and citizens with like minds: saving democracy.

    To save democracy, the party is in a good position to use its national spread and the experience of its new members, as well as the recent experience of the party in Anambra. One thing that militates against democracy in the country is the absence of independent institutions. Such absence has since 1999 encouraged the personalisation of politics and privatisation of power, with the result of a culture of impunity across the land. Independent institutions that require struggling for before 2015 elections include getting a new Independent Electoral Commission that can perform the function of an impartial umpire. Election is too crucial for the survival of representative democracy to be left in the hands of persons that are constrained in any way. Unlike the judiciary, INEC officials do not have the security of tenure of judges and thus need every protection they can get to do their job without any trace of partiality. This has not happened since 1999 and it has to happen if democracy is to be saved.

    More eyes are thus going to be on APC to re-define democratic politics and put the polity back on course. APC is expected to provide leadership in terms of the politics of ideas, particularly popularisation of a vision that sees Nigeria beyond just a site of enormous power for those who are ready to play the game. Citizens are already too hungry for a party that has a vision that is rooted in an ideology that accepts that the role of government is the improvement of the life chances of citizens in all spheres. Whether before or after elections, citizens have been relegated in the last fourteen years to the realm of subjects. Their desires have thus not been able to enjoy noticeable space in the planning of a centralised state drowning under the weight of a burden it prefers to have but not to carry in an efficient and democratic manner. APC cannot afford not to persuade citizens about finding another way to govern this country well. More questions are certainly going to be thrown by citizens at the APC because more answers are expected from it than from the party that has been in power for the past fourteen years and that appears to have exhausted and enervated itself in the process.

    While elections are important in a democracy as the only means of peaceful change, democratic politics is much more than electoral democracy. Citizens want to be included in the way they are governed. They want to have a say not only at elections but at all times about the performance of their government. Democracy is not just for the sake of executive and legislative leaders; it is mainly for the sake of citizens. Any political party with the confidence of citizens has little to fear before, during, and after elections. APC should not allow the success of the last few days to diminish the attention it gives to mobilisation of average citizens. It needs to shift the focus of its membership drive to average citizens now yearning to become co-owners of a party that has announced plans to enter into a ‘monitorable’ social contract with citizens. Doing this can enrich democratic politics in the country, as it is capable of allowing other parties to upgrade themselves ideologically and culturally.

    People across Nigeria have a vision of the Nigeria they want to live in and leave behind for their children. They have ideas about what they believe the government can and should do to make their citizenship of the country fruitful and fulfilling for them. Citizens across the country are not in the dark with respect to the need to ‘re-constitutionalise’ the governance of the country. APC as the alternative party must be ready to deal with hard questions from citizens and to assuage their fears about a country that has for long appeared to be ‘irreformable’ at the hands of military dictators and post-military rulers alike.