The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Iwu’s troubled conscience

    Iwu’s troubled conscience

    There is no indication Maurice Iwu, former chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), will read this piece. He says that having learnt from former President Olusegun Obasanjo the resentful and vexatious habit of not reading Nigerian newspapers, he feels disinclined to read what people have said and still say about his management of the 2007 general elections. Given the way he vigorously put it, even if we could find someone to read this piece and freely redact its highlights for his spurned consideration, he would still be unresponsive to a habit that has stood many enlightened people well since newspapers became a staple of modern civilisation. “This is my first public function since I left office as INEC chairman,” he began with a disagreeable hint of self-importance. “I learned one thing from my former boss Olusegun Obasanjo never to read newspapers or watch news…That is the only way to focus on what I am supposed to do.”

    For a professor who is presumably an expert on something, and whose life and works are supposed to be devoted to blowing up the delusions of the ignorant majority, it is curious what lessons, and what examples, his bizarre tastes are inexorably drawn to. To him, newspapers represent a distraction rather than a resource tool. By his admission, since he needs to focus on his tasks, which he paints grandiosely in the nothingness of imprecision, it is strange that as a former public official he does not recognise that one of those tasks is to respond to public assessment of his stewardship. But if he says he loathes reading newspapers, we must allow him the liberty of stewing in the juice of his own ignorance. This, however, will not deter us from judging his time in office or commenting on his remarks whenever he indulges in sophism, as he did last week.

    Indeed, he made a few tendentious remarks last Tuesday in Abuja during the public presentation of Amanze Obi’s book, Delicate Distress. For a professor who wishes to be left alone to focus on his job, it is surprising that he was unable to interpret properly what his main task was in 2007 when he umpired the general elections of that year. Said he: “In 2007, Nigeria didn’t want elections. It wasn’t about giving Nigeria an election. It wasn’t about who won or how ballot boxes were snatched. The challenge I had was to ensure that Nigeria remained one indivisible country. We did that and many people thought it was easy.” I will return to his dubious conclusion that Nigerians didn’t want elections in 2007, a claim he offered absolutely no proof to substantiate. For now, let us instead consider his interpretation of his brief in 2007. There is nothing in the provisions of the electoral act relating to his office or his responsibilities that grants him the exalted task of safeguarding the unity of the country. Instead, he was simply expected to deliver a free and fair poll. It is apparent that that singular misinterpretation of his assignment was at the bottom of the multiple malfeasances associated with his regulation and moderation of the general elections of that year. The challenge of sustaining Nigerian unity, as he inelegantly and conceitedly put it, was one he assigned himself. No one, not the constitution, not his paymaster, nor yet the electoral act gave him the job he so gratuitously defined for himself.

    Professor Iwu specialises in pharmacognosy, a branch of science that has nothing to do with politics, except of course metaphorically. It is a rather direct science and a branch of pharmacology dealing with the study of natural drugs or active substances found in plants. If he needs to apply logic in his speciality, it is certainly not the kind of intricate logic familiar to social scientists who deal with subjective and often imprecise human behaviour. On the contrary, plants offer very precise and clearly distinguishable morphologies, irrespective of whether we are dealing with its anatomy or its external nature. It is, therefore, not surprising that Professor Iwu has had to rephrase his assignment in terms familiar to his expertise, and in ways that suited and excused his abject surrender to the whims of his employers.

    Dissatisfied with not letting bad enough alone – and he would have done well to emulate his other illustrious predecessor, Humphrey Nwosu, who waited for about 15 years to make peace with his equally troubled conscience – Professor Iwu wondered why instead of criticising his performance Nigerians did not celebrate his ‘achievement’ of keeping Nigeria one. How grossly mistaken can one be! Not only did his criminal miscarriage of the 2007 polls gravely threaten the unity and stability of the country, it set the country back by many decades and still continues to dog its march to democratic nirvana. If Nigeria remained one after the 2007 electoral debacle, it was not because Professor Iwu advanced the cause of unity, or even knew how to, but because Nigerians were themselves either determined to stay together notwithstanding the multiple provocations from the Iwus and Nwosus of this world, or had surrendered to the insuperable and paralysing resignation Britain’s manipulations had brought upon them since independence.

    It is truly numbing how Professor Iwu excused his failings. He said the 2007 polls were not about who won or lost, or about how ballot boxes were snatched. If he had not recast his assignment in terms of the unexampled arrogance he was accustomed to throughout his five-year tenure, all the while pretending there was a nexus between his office and Nigerian unity irrespective of his failings, he would have understood perfectly that his job was to ensure Nigeria held a free and fair election; and that unity, often a by-product of a fair election, was not his to procure or guarantee. In his Abuja remarks, Professor Iwu reminded his audience it was not easy transiting from one elected government to another. He should be reminded that that transition took place without the help of his puny talents, twisted logic, and the recklessly flawed election he superintended.

    The most shocking remark he made last Tuesday was that in 2007, Nigeria didn’t want an election. We may never know why the professor told this awkward lie to himself. Would Nigerians have furiously fought and defeated Chief Obasanjo’s third term agenda if they didn’t want an election? Would they have turned out in their millions if they hated the ballot box as the professor suggested? If they didn’t want an election that year, but wanted Chief Obasanjo out of office, what replacement did they have in mind given the constitutional provision of term limit? It took 15 years after the June 12, 1993 presidential election for Professor Nwosu to summon the courage to admit the truth of the election he supervised. Perhaps eight years is still too early for Professor Iwu to admit the truth of the election he bungled, and his conscience not seared enough to push him into reconciling with the oath he took and into making peace with the country he betrayed.

    It speaks volumes, however, that last Tuesday the professor spoke fondly of Chief Obasanjo as the mentor from whom he learnt the execrable habit of living in denial and deprecating media accounts of contemporary events. Indeed, we hope that sometime in our lifetime, Professor Iwu will be prodded into remorse by the shrill wailing of the agitated scruples left in him, as Professor Nwosu was unable to stay silent in the face of the loud protestations of his conscience.

  • Yar’adua Part 11

    Treader while responding to a news report in The Nation on the return of Taraba State Governor Dambaba Suntai and his intention to resume office made a rather poignant remark that captures the drama that has been playing out in the last one week in Jalingo.

    “Yar’ardua Part 11, we are enjoying it,” the anonymous reader wrote. He was obviously likening the controversy over the state of health of Suntai who returned from medical treatment abroad after ten months to that of former President Umaru Yar’adua who was finally declared dead after many attempts by his wife and aides deceive Nigerians.

    After undergoing medical treatment in Saudi Arabia during which he was reported to be brain dead, a claim that was denied by his aides, Yar’adua was flown back to the country and the impression was given that he was recovering.

    I remember reading some of the claims that he was already walking unaided in the Presidential Villa and playing lawn tennis when in fact the condition of the late President was getting worse.

    After all the lies peddled by the cabal led by the former first lady, Turai, who wanted to hold on to power at all cost, they had no choice than to announce his death when he finally gave up. Perhaps he would have gotten better if he had remained abroad undergoing treatment since the country does not have the medical facilities and personnel to attend to him.

    Like in the Yar’adua case, Suntai who obviously has not fully recovered and still needs the best of medical treatment was hurriedly flown back last Sunday and the cabal around him is desperately doing everything to fool Nigerians about the governor’s health status.

    Suntai arrived last Sunday and had to be aided to disembark from the aircraft in Abuja and Jalingo. He could not utter a word and barely managed to smile and wave to those who came to welcome him.

    Instead of allowing him to continue to get the much needed rest he needs and medical attention, he had reportedly written to the State Assembly to resume, sacked the state executive and appointed some new aides.

    Instead of the expected state broadcast, a recorded few minutes video has been shown on the state television with the governor purportedly swearing in the new Secretary to State Government and Chief of Staff and greeting the people of the state.

    After finally being allowed to see the governor, majority members of the state house of assembly have declared the governor unfit and asked him to return to US for treatment.

    Ordinarily, there should be no controversy over whether the governor is well or not. If indeed he is as his collaborators claim, he should come out and say so. He should perform some public functions and leave no one in doubt that he is physically fit to resume duties.

    He has stayed away for ten months and the state has been governed by his deputy so why the hurry to return.

    Those aiding the governor clinging to power are obviosly doing so for selfish purpose. They need to know that the governor’s life is more precious than whatever position they want him to hold on to.

    This kind of hide and seek game cannot continue for too long.

  • Sense and nonsense in Taraba

    Sense and nonsense in Taraba

    Governor Danbaba Suntai was obviously in pains as he disembarked from the aircraft that brought him back to Nigeria last Sunday. He is doubtless still recuperating, perhaps agonisingly slowly, from the injuries he sustained when the small plane he piloted crashed near Yola, Adamawa State last October. But whether that recuperation is fast or substantial enough to enable him resume his duties as governor is now mired in acrimonious debate. Neither at the airport nor anywhere in his state has Mr Suntai directly addressed the public. Instead, he has offered a few minutes of unconvincing taped video message to his state and the public.

    While Tarabans were still trying to make up their minds on how to view their governor’s return, and while the acting governor, Speaker of the State House of Assembly and a majority of the state’s lawmakers were steeling their nerves to resist the governor’s obsession with power, the controversy became even more intense and convoluted. Sixteen lawmakers, together with the Speaker and the acting governor, insisted there was no way the governor would be allowed to resume duty. He still needed medical attention, they said. He manifested clear symptoms of brain injury that would take a long time to heal, some medical specialists averred. Some Tarabans even concluded that the governor and his minders’ manoeuvres reminded them of the chicaneries of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua who was also too unwell in his last months in office to function as president, but was exploited by a cabal to wreak havoc on the country.

    If the Taraba drama were limited to the caricature it has become, we would safely enjoy it from the comfort of our homes. But with the determination of the anti-Suntai forces to unhorse the governor growing into a bitter struggle for power, and the pro-Suntai forces clinging desperately to power, the struggle could plunge the state into a violent and embarrassing confusion. On account of what he has manifested since his return, I really doubt whether Mr Suntai can still function as governor. He needs more care than he and his minders care to admit. However, the constitution contains provisions for resolving such difficult matters. I find it appalling that the House of Assembly, which obviously musters a majority to back the Speaker’s anti-Suntai point of view, evades due process and seems to embrace strong-arm tactics. Instead of tomfoolery, let the legislature constitute a medical panel to examine the governor’s ability to continue in office. I doubt whether in such an open case the empanelled doctors would betray their oaths by telling open lies. Nor do I think their conclusion would be any less self-evident than the clear incapacity of the hapless governor to perform the most gentle and menial of tasks.

  • 2004-2007 as PDP/Nigeria’s years of hope: fact or El-Rufai’s delusional fantasy?

    2004-2007 as PDP/Nigeria’s years of hope: fact or El-Rufai’s delusional fantasy?

    I must start this piece by stating that I have neither read nor am I about to read Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai’s new book, The Accidental Public Servant. At some point down the line, I will read it. Some of my professional friends and political comrades whose critical judgment I trust have read the book. While they are not exactly full of praise for the book, they all say that it is worth reading. But please don’t take this as either a recommendation for El-Rufai’s new book or worse still an endorsement for it. My friends’ and comrades’ opinion of the book is not the reason why I will read it. Rather, the sole reason why I will eventually read the book is because ever since he wrote a devastating critique of the late president Yar’ Adua and his administration from a centre-right perspective while Yar’ Adua was alive, I have followed his essays and blogs closely. I have read nearly all his essays since then and I periodically visit his personal website. The only thing I resolutely shun when I visit this website is the column that invites visitors to have a glimpse of El-Rufai’s latest personal activities. This indicates to me that the man has, or wishes to have, a fan club; I leave that to that to the young, the credulous and the fellow travelers of his ideological forays into the wilderness of contemporary Nigerian elite politics.

    In my opinion, El-Rufai is quite easily the brightest and most articulate spokesperson for the centre-right ideological and political position in Nigerian politics today. Later in this piece, I shall indicate what exactly this centre-right position implies, but for now let me add that for me, El-Rufai has the added interest of being the first politician and intellectual from the North to both articulate and embody this centre-right worldview with coherence, consistency and panache. In other words, while we have had brilliant radical leftist intellectuals and dedicated and unwavering politicians and spokespersons of the right aplenty from the North we have never, in my view, had a centre-right representative of the caliber of El-Rufai from the North. [Incidentally, we have not had one from the South either!]

    Needless to say and as I hope to demonstrate in this piece anyway, I am not using these ideological terms reductively. When I shall have finished what I have to say in this piece, I hope that it would have become clear that I do not think that his centre-right views exhaust all that could be said about El-Rufai. On the strength of the things that he says in his writings and the passion with which he says them, he is quite possibly a genuine patriot and a humanist. It just so happens that a man like the subject of this essay who is as open and even aggressive about his ideological beliefs ought to be taken up on those beliefs.

    On this last point, I now move directly to the substance of this piece, El-Rufai’s passionate espousal, in a recent article titled “Stunted Potentials Hobble Our Nation”, of the claim that the years 2004-2007 during Obasanjo’s second term in the presidency marked a period of great hope and promise not only for Nigeria but for Africa and the Black race. I think that this claim is both factually erroneous and morally bogus and indefensible, but before I state my reasons for this view, it is useful to state El-Rufai’s arguments in support of this claim on their own terms.

    The bottom line in that article, “Stunted Potentials Hobble Our Nation” is the view that politics in any context is only as good as it is congruent with national aspirations. Between 2004 and 2007, states El-Rufai, there was a perfect congruence between politics and national aspirations in our country. On this claim, El-Rufai goes on to assert vigorously that those who “inherited” power after 2007 – Yar’ Adua and Jonathan – lacked such congruence on a monumental scale. “National aspirations” between 2004-2007 included such key elements like the shrinking of both the expenditure of governance and the participation of government in business; the creation of a modern national identity card system; a road map to a potential boom in the solid mineral sector to relieve the over-dependence on crude oil; strengthening of the banking system; a national mortgage system to drastically reduce a 17 million housing units deficit; and monetization of fringe benefits to reduce the lavish and wasteful lifestyles of public officeholders at the expense of the state.

    I admit it: reduced to this bare summary, there does not seem to be anything particularly extraordinary about this set of programs and ideas. But in the context of the discursive rhetoric of El-Rufai’s passionate arguments in the article, these ideas take on an urgent, visionary quality. Repeatedly, El-Rufai states again and again in the article that the vast majority of Nigerians are poor, subject to insecurity, prone to vastly inferior or inadequate hospitals, clinics and amenities while those in power wallow in obscene consumption and display of wealth. He pleads that time is not on our side, that our leaders must get their priorities right or we will sink further and further into devastation by insecurity, corruption, and poverty. One could not agree more with El-Rufai on these observations. And in a phrase that I particularly found resonant, El-Rufai in the article describes budgetary procedures in our country as a “fictographic art” full of much drama and noise but disconnected from the things that could cure governance in Nigeria of its endemic wastefulness, incompetence and paralysis.

    In contrast to all of this, El-Rufai argues in the article that between 2004 and 2007, Obasanjo’s administration charted a course that was bold, visionary and confident in its mission. Here is a sentence from the article that gives a flavor of the rhetorical flourish with which El-Rufai makes this claim: “The vision of that Obasanjo administration was to make this the last generation to merely speak of Nigeria’s potentials. We were determined to realise those potentials, confident that we had the talents to create wealth from the vast natural and human resource endowments of the country, leveraging the energies of its young people and latent assets in the Diaspora.”

    No great debating skills or prowess are needed to demolish this claim. 2004-2007 happens to coincide with Obasanjo’s second term in office. From his near impeachment close to the end of his first term (1999-2003), Obasanjo came into his second term a bitterly insecure ruler, a wounded lion who wanted to make everyone pay for his injured pride. He became paranoid toward all real and suspected enemies within and outside his party, the PDP; conversely, he demanded absolute loyalty from everybody, from members of his cabinet to the lowliest functionary of the presidential villa. He subjected the party to his absolute control. He ran government like a fiefdom, while paying lip service to respect for technocrats and a special responsiveness to foreign bilateral business and governmental powers. He ignored or even flouted decisions of the Supreme Court that went against him or his administration. He used government to enrich his cronies, sycophants and hangers-on. In some particularly notable instances, he placed mediocrities in high office, as in the case of the barely literate hair dresser that he made the Speaker of the House of Representatives. In some states of the federation, he installed stark illiterates like Andy Ubah and Lamidi Adedibu as political godfathers with more real power and authority than the executive governors of the states concerned. In the year 2006, he had a prolonged, bitter feud with his Vice President, Abubakar Atiku, in which both men voluntarily revealed how gross and unconscionable they were in looting the coffers of the nation to enrich themselves and their cronies. Perhaps the most important economic legacy of his rule was a massive transfer of wealth into a few hands at the expense of the vast majority of Nigerians. And his rule ended with the disgrace of his failed bid to have a third term in office, but not before he had taken the whole country through extremely bitter, cynical and divisive elite politics.

    Is it the case that, in making the claim that this period marked years of hope and promise for Nigeria, El-Rufai is ignorant of these universally known facts of Obasanjo’s performance in office between 2004 and 2007? No, absolutely not, for El-Rufai was in the thick of it all as one of two or three of the most trusted of Obasanjo’s loyalists during the period. As a matter of fact, El-Rufai presided over the privatisation of state and public enterprises through which a vast transfer of wealth to private hands was made in those years of Obasanjo’s second term. More specifically, El-Rufai was objectively an accomplice to the subordination of the party to Obasanjo’s personal megalomaniacal control; he provided both the practical muscle and the justificatory rhetoric for how a “strong leader” with a sense of mission and “national aspirations” could and should bypass ignorant and backward party bosses. Of course, it was not the case that the PDP was ever much of a disciplined, enlightened and patriotic party. But both Obasanjo and his loyal servitor, El-Rufai, belonged to the party and they putatively held their cabinet posts at the pleasure and in furtherance of the aims of the party.

    I understand that in his new book, El-Rufai is highly critical of Obasanjo, though reportedly in a careful, muted and nuanced manner. As I remarked earlier in this piece, I have not read the book so I don’t know the distance he has traveled between the book and this more recent article in which El-Rufai aggressively touts Obasanjo as a ruler who, between 2004 and 2007, seemed to be Nigeria’s, Africa’s and the Black race’ answer to all our problems. I would argue that this issue throws some light on what I said earlier in this piece about the centre-right worldview and praxis of El-Rufai. Stripped of all the rhetoric, the central ideas of El-Rufai in the article under review here are, one, that the market, not the government, should be the motive force of the economy and, two, once the state or the government has provided the basic infrastructures, it should sell off all state and public assets and enterprises to those who have the means to buy them. But since in ideology what is left unsaid or unspecified is as important as what is said and specified, we must note that it is out of a deliberate silence that El-Rufai completely leaves out the matter of how those to whom public wealth is transferred come by the means with which to buy and own public assets. In the Nigerian case, the answer to this all-important question is that it is the same state, the same government from whom they get the means to buy and buy cheaply from the state or government.

    On a closing note, let me remark that in the article I have been discussing in this piece, El-Rufai never once mentions the PDP by name. The only party that he mentions is the newly formed APC and this is strictly only to suggest that the “agenda” of Obasanjo in those years between 2004 and 2007 should be the only agenda of the APC. And even then, his faith is not really in that party; rather, it is in a strong leader with the vision and will to complete, in El-Rufai’s own words, what those who “inherited” power from Obasanjo could not accomplish – the “mission” spelt out in the “national aspirations” articulated by Obasanjo in those pregnant, promising years. This “leaderism” is the right-wing core of El-Rufai’s centrist faith in a market-driven economy under the expert management of efficiency-minded technocrats. I understand that after he decamped from the PDP, El-Rufai joined the CPC. That party has fused with others into the newly formed APC and as a consequence, El-Rufai is hedging his bets on the APC. In Nigerian elite politics, we know only too well of the phenomenon of AGIP – Any Government In Power. Thanks to El-Rufai, let us now also recognise APIP – Any Party In Power.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Re: Why do we need lawmakers when we do not even have law keepers?

    I have just read your piece reflecting the subject above and could not agree more. I just have to react because it seems as though u and I were thinking alike from distance apart.

    Just yesterday in Owerri, I was standing by to pay for a roasted corn when an “Honorable” member of Imo State Legislative Assembly drove past me and many others waiting to grab their own corn. Once the idiot in a larger-than-life SUV with ISHA plate insignia saw that traffic was heavy on a Right turn (we were at a T-junction) he turned Left against the traffic and was trying with all impunity to wave other vehicles (with the right-of-way) off the road so he may cruise more freely away.

    Once I saw this, I lost my cool. I ran like I never did before, slapping my hands on the body of the car, shouting on top of my voice to attract attention: What manner of law do you guys make! Ehn! Tell me! What manner of law do you make for crying out loud! Do you realize what u are trying to do? ! Nigger you are breaking the law! The law you made!…and so many other invectives I was raining on the idiot as I could catch my breath. I was visibly mad, I tell you! By now people had gathered as he came to a stop as I was still shouting, banging on his Octopus of a truck, and acting, even telling him to take me to police or court for having “disrespected” an “Honorable Member”. Behold and Alas, he lost words, as more people had gathered; he rolled up his glass which was earlier rolled down to see the ant shouting and banging on his truck, and quietly turned back to join the legal direction of the traffic. So I agree with you that we don’t need laws when the law-makers are the law-breakers. As for their jumbo pays even as ASUU is asking for nothing other than Fed Govt honoring an agreement it already entered into in 2009, we cannot but appreciate the paradox Nigeria has come to represent. Where are we gonna run to? Shame on them for raping Nigeria in broad daylight. And for you: keep up the good work of informing and may you find peace and God’s blessings for “earning” your pay.

    H. I. E. Ph.D. (Atlanta).

    Just read ur piece on lawmakers. I worked with a senator from d biggest senatorial district in Nigeria. D constituency allowance which u d press constantly refer to as monthly salary is N106,000,000 every quarter for a Senator & N104,000,000 quarterly for a house of reps member barring the basic salary and other allowances.

    Do the math for Abike Dabiri Erewa who has been there for 14 years now! Senator Ganiyu Solomon has been there over 10yrs now. Their various constituency project should definitely be in excess of 3,400,000,000 (Naira) per constituency!!!

    We have 106 Senatorial Districs and 360 House of Reps Constituencies! But where are these projects? Where?

    O. O. 2348086511995

    … The politics in Nigeria is rob my back I rob yours. Not only the lawmakers are guilty, those fixing their wages are also laden with guilt. The executive (is) also rotten. Just recently a minister was accused of blowing N2 billion on chartered plane alone, no one has come up to deny that.

    M. 2348033691236

    Phew! I certainly appreciate the compliments, prayers and passion. I was ever so glad our communication was mediated by the networks or else I probably would have seen some eyes bulging out, neck sinews straining, spittle flailing in all directions and fingers tautly emphasising the words. However, two things struck me here.

    The first is that Nigerians are understandably angry at the macabre dance of deception that politicians are doing in the name of governance. Development responsibilities have been ostensibly shared between the federal, states, local governments and the national assemblies. But between the federal, states, local governments and national assemblies, as the tradition goes in story books, nothing resembling development has really touched the people’s lives. All over, the farmers still go to their farms with little hoes slung over their shoulders, feet shod in rubber flip-flops, skins stretched by the sun, eyes hopelessly vacant and stomachs still as flat as when Noah worked on his ark in the heat of the noon day sun. The women too are still hewing wood for supper, fetching water from long distances, cleaning children’s running noses (thick with the stuff) with their bare hands (and sometimes, yerk!, with their mouths!), walking bare feet transporting the farm’s produce on their heads. Worse, Nigerian roads are still some of the worst in the world, and my house still does not get electricity during the day. PHCN now waits for me to be fast asleep before grudgingly giving my house some slivers of the stuff. I ask you! I ask you!

    With the kind of money mentioned above, added to the development allocations from the federal, states and local governments, I honestly expect to have begun to see changes in the lives of the people. By now, I expect farmers to be wearing something closely resembling boots as they ride on their tractors across their endlessly stretching acres of farm. Naturally, tobacco-stained smiles will replace anxiety-induced frowns and I assure you skins will fill out through the power of the milk of kindness. By now, I expect the women to be using Kleenex for their children’s noses. I also expect clean water to be running through my Jacuzzi. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with dreaming about owning one. Someday.

    The second thing that struck me is that even though the real power belongs to the people, they are more cautious about exercising it than leaders are about brazening their own acts of perfidy. The leaders know this and take advantage of it. Only when pushed to the wall will the people act. Acts narrated above are not frequent, but they have begun; and this is why leaders should begin to beware. What started the Arab Spring was really no more than pent-up anger that was looking for where to happen. The recklessness of the state provided the playground.

    The recklessness of the Nigerian state seems to be rising daily. Murmurings about the emoluments and allowances of the assembly men and women had hardly dried up before we began to hear rumours about how the presidency and state executive members are giving gifts worth more than a billion Naira to the newly wed son and daughter of some government functionary in Abuja. Frankly speaking, I don’t know what they expect those children to do for a living. Work?! Yet, many Nigerians there are who technically ask their children to ‘focus’ on WAEC or GCE and leave JAMB for a while. Truth? They can afford only one or the other at a time. The wonderful thing is that the government pretends not to know these things.

    Now, you do the math. The people are angry, and the people own the power. The day is not long when anger and power will come together in one cataclysmic gale. I would prefer that happens in the ballot box rather than on the streets. In the ballot box, you can control your emotion. You can restrain yourself by only punching a hole in the offending party’s box rather than poking your fingers in the eyes of people who are doing little or nothing and being paid in billions. A word is enough…

  • David Mark’s theory on constitution without citizenry

    David Mark’s theory on constitution without citizenry

    What Nigeria’s lawmakers elected on the platform of the 1999 Constitution need to do is to listen to citizens whose votes brought them to the national assembly.

    David Mark’s recent pontification on the need to have a constitution that shuns people’s wishes is not new to politics in our country. The military ruled Nigeria for decades without a constitution. Even the 1999 Constitution that David Mark holds to heart as sacred enough not to need any referendum that involves those for whom the constitution is ostensibly written was crafted by former military colleagues of the Senate President. It is not Senator Mark’s militaristic notion of constitutions that should surprise citizens. It is his conviction as an elected senator by citizens that creating a constitutional process cannot be determined by citizens once there is a ‘constitution’ on ground, regardless of how citizens feel about the constitution.

    The fear of citizens inherent in Senator Mark’s effort to avoid citizens in efforts to create acceptable constitutions can be likened to what Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of the United Arab Emirates, one of the youngest federations in the world, said about his vision for Dubai’s development: The real crisis is rather one of leadership, management and perennial egotism. This is the kind of crisis that is bound to happen when lust for power prevails over granting people the love and care they deserve, and when the interests and destiny of one individual (or a small group of individuals as in the case of Nigeria’s National Assembly) become more important than those of a whole nation.

    Writing further about the transformation of Dubai within a federation, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum said: Our distinctive development experience in the UAE is a good example of what can be done when God blesses a country with an unselfish leadership that strives for the good of its people and not its own. Good leadership puts the interests of the community as a whole before those of any specific group….There is a world of difference between a leadership that is based on love and respect, and one that is based on fear.

    I am quoting Rashid Al Maktoum extensively to underscore that Senator Mark’s view that the process of making a constitution, captured in provisions of a constitution that citizens believe is an imposition on the country by military dictators, smacks not of respect for Nigerians but of fear of Nigerians by those that happen to occupy positions of legislative leadership. Insisting, as the Senate President has done, that the legalistic aspect of the 1999 Constitution is the matter at stake is to miss the point of the essence of constitutions. Constitutions become embodiment of laws that must be respected and obeyed only after they have been created by a process that has the blessing and consent of the people whose political behaviours constitutions are created to regulate.

    What Nigeria’s lawmakers elected on the platform of the 1999 Constitution need to do is to listen to citizens whose votes brought them to the national assembly. Millions of citizens are saying that the 1999 Constitution was not created with their consent and that the desire of citizens to participate in the 1999 election to move the country from military autocracy to electoral democracy does not and should not constitute a sufficient condition for the post-military political leadership to assume that citizens accept that the only thing to do with the 1999 Constitution is to ‘panel beat’ the document in whatever manner lawmakers believe in, without involving citizens in the process.

    What is implicit in Senator Mark’s theory about the current constitution not having a space for sovereign national conference is the conviction that Nigeria is about promoting statism, rather than creating a country or community of interests held by human beings. Statism refers to a notion that a country should be run as a bureaucracy, with emphasis on what those charged to run the bureaucracy prefer to do, rather than what citizens prefer to have. Our lawmakers need to realise that our country is in a process of democratisation and that real democracy is likely to be elusive until a people’s constitution is adopted to guide the country’s political culture. This should not be anything too difficult for our legislators to get in a country that went into election in 1999 without seeing a copy of the constitution that has now become untouchable to citizens.

    Holding briefs for authors of the 1999 Constitution and promoting the constitution as a sacred document that is available only to elected lawmakers to review without any substantial input from citizens is a dangerous thing to do. Our lawmakers who have chosen to amend a constitution that citizens prefer to be replaced need to know that for a constitution to be acceptable and respectable to people, citizens must believe in the transparency of the process that leads to the making of the constitution. Citizens had gone to court to challenge the claim in and by the 1999 Constitution that it was authored by the people of Nigeria. Late Biodun Oki spent the last years of his life to prove in court that the 1999 Constitution is not a constitution created with the consent of the people.

    Senator Mark’s worry: Where will the Sovereign National Conference be deriving its sovereigntyfrom, and under what framework? How will the conference be convoked and by whom and under what terms?” indicates the Senate President’s preference for statism as an approach to solving a fundamental political problem about the welfare and wellbeing of citizens of a country. These are questions that citizens should be given the opportunity to answer. Each constituency can prepare a handbook for its lawmaker to take to the national assembly on how to convoke a national conference. But this will be possible only in a context in which lawmakers see themselves as representatives of citizens, and not as their masters.

    Nigerians calling for a sovereign national conference are doing so for an obvious reason: demilitarising the Nigerian polity by replacing a constitution imposed on the country by a group of military dictators with a constitution negotiated freely by citizens. Callers for a people’s constitution believe that the military must have had a hidden agenda behind the 1999 Constitution, more so that the constitution did not see the light of day until after the election of 1999. Lawmakers who subscribe to the tenets of democracy need not act in a way to suggest that they also accept the hidden agenda behind a constitution imposed on Nigerians by departing military dictators. Senator Mark’s recent quibbling about sovereignty and sovereign national conference gives the impression that the national assembly is averse to referendum, because it is afraid of coming to terms with the real feelings of millions of Nigerians about the current constitution. If Nigeria is going to get its economics and development right, it is, asDaronAcemoglu and James A. Robinson, authors of WhyNations Fail have observed, necessary to get its politics right. Getting our country’s politics right requires a transparent process of creating a constitution that is acceptable to the generality of the people. And lawmakers should act on the side of citizens on how to bring about a constitution that is acceptable primarily to citizens, and not just to lawmakers.

  • Kidnappers and the demolition policy

    It is not clear what logic is behind the thinking that demolishing kidnappers’ properties would be an effective deterrent to kidnapping. But whether it is a deterrent or not, a few states have unthinkingly enacted laws empowering their governments to demolish or confiscate kidnappers’ properties. Interestingly, some of these states don’t even wait for the courts to prove the guilt of kidnappers before their properties are brought down. Timidity and perhaps also ignorance have not allowed the victims to test the validity of the laws in the courts, or if not the validity, then at least the processes. For even if the laws were valid, and I doubt if they are in light of the constitution, there is no kidnapper’s property that has so far been demolished in accordance with due process.

    One of the kidnappers involved in the abduction of Professor Kamene Okonjo, mother of the Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, was demolished shortly after he was arrested. The courts had not yet heard nor judged the case when the government hastily brought the property down. Chief Bonaventure Mokwe, the detained proprietor of the Upper Class Hotel in Onitsha is in court to prevent the Anambra State government from confiscating his property. It was brought down after some dry skulls were found in the hotel premises. He is yet to be found guilty of the crime, but the government has gone ahead anyway to demolish the hotel.

    In neighbouring Delta State, the Uncle P Guest House, estimated to be worth about N150 million, and owned by a retiree, Mr Pius Ogbeni, was also brought down, allegedly on the orders of the state government, for harbouring a kidnapper. The suspect had lodged in the hotel, like any other guest, for five days before checking out. His alleged victim was said to have been rescued in very controversial circumstances from the hotel. Today, no one is even sure where the victim was rescued from. But while the case was yet to be heard, let alone tried, the hotel was brought down.

    Kidnapping is of course a very serious crime that should not be condoned. But so, too, are murder and armed robbery. If the last two do not cause an abridgment of due process, there is no reason not to subject kidnapping to the ambits of the law. Apart from the dubiousness of the kidnapping law itself, and the indefensible, if not immoral, haste with which the governments demolish properties, there is a clear lack of rigour in the anti-kidnapping law. Has the death penalty curbed or eradicated armed robbery?

    In light of the abduction of Mike Ozekhome, a prominent Nigerian lawyer, it will be hard to counsel restraint in tackling kidnapping. But counsel I must. Let the states, which have passed laws on kidnapping, take a second and more reasoned look at the laws. More importantly, let them follow due process and not jump ahead of the law in their populist desire to fight kidnapping. I suggest that victims of government’s arbitrary application of the law test the matter in court, and test it to its limits. I doubt they can lose if there are still enough judges who can call their souls their own, and who understand the deeper import of law and justice.

     

  • Nigeria’s unity: praying plus planning

    Nigeria’s unity: praying plus planning

    What is absent in General Gowon’s much needed homily is the need to plan, in addition to praying


    There is no doubt that America’s prediction that Nigeria is likely to get ruptured from inside by 2015 is already making Nigerian patriots tremble. From pronouncements in the print media in the last few weeks, it is clear that it is not only media pundits that are worried about the dwindling capacity of the country to survive all the problems militating against it by and beyond 2015. In particular, former military leaders who should know the importance of intelligence reports appear worried to the point that they have to assure ordinary Nigerians that they are not worried by America’s prediction that the country that they had lived to keep together in the last forty-seven years on their own terms may assume a character that is radically different from the unity-at-all-costs mentality and unity-is-the-only-issue mantra that Nigerians have been fed on since the Nigeria-Biafra War.

    General Obasanjo in his own case has affirmed that Nigeria is not going to break regardless of how American sign readers of other nations feel, adding that the threat to the country’s peace and progress has been occasioned by the lack of discipline of the political class that succeeded his own generation. One of Obasanjo’s military successors, General Ibrahim Babangida, has also assured Nigerians that there is nothing to worry about regarding any prediction from the planet about the fragility of Nigeria by or beyond 2015. Most recently, the country’s second military dictator, General Yakubu Gowon, added his voice to the rhetoric of or verbiage of peace in the face of threats to peace that have engulfed the country for a few years.

    If there is any military dictator whose voice is likely to be palatable to Nigerians, General Gowon must be one of such leaders. He was the military leader who supervised the war to keep Nigeria one between 1967 and 1970. He was a military leader who tried to restructure the country without puncturing or rupturing its cultural diversity. He created the foundation for the six geopolitical zones that many of the leaders who came after him have been afraid to accept as a possible model for managing the country’s diversity. Dividing Nigeria into twelve states in Gowon’s time brought about the seed of what Nigerians clamouring for true federalism today refer to as Southwest, Southsouth, Southeast, Northcentral, Northeast and Northwest regions or zones. Though he did not fire a shot himself, General Gowon spent his most productive years as a soldier dealing with threats to Nigeria’s territorial unity.

    Nobody should then be surprised that it is General Gowon’s assurance about the need for Nigeria to turn all negative predictions about its future as one united country into ashes that appears most passionate and religious about Nigeria’s unity in the face of threatening adversity: “Every Nigerian should stand against the claims. If every one of us believes that it will not happen, then it will not. I believe God will not allow such to happen. Nigeria Prays (Gowon’s NGO of intervention in the country’s problems for the past few years) is really praying against such; that’s the reason this group came into existence.” General Gowon added with conviction: “Nigerians at home and abroad are very concerned about the crisis that is rocking this nation. We believe that only prayers can solve it. If you love Nigeria the way I love Nigeria, and if I love Nigeria the way you do and we have faith, then we shall overcome.”

    What is absent in General Gowon’s much needed homily is the need to plan, in addition to praying. Praying is not as important as finding methods to make Nigeria achieve its goal of unity, peace, and progress. We need to revive some measure of humanism that was applied to the threat to Nigeria’s unity after he became the country’s military head of state. At that time, the country’s citizens were enjoined by his administration to pray to God to keep Nigeria one while those in the position of leadership under Gowon went on the drawing board to work out plans to make the job easier for God to do. We bought arms from other countries, sent emissaries to other countries to appeal to them to assist Nigeria, sent soldiers to fight in what was Biafra, and also created 12 states out of the four regions in existence at that time, to give a region to the Igbos while also giving a cultural space to the so-called minorities in the old Eastern Region, today’s South-south, the region or zone that produced the current president.

    To just ask Nigerians to leave everything in God’s hands in a country that is overtly divided by Boko Haram and zoning of the presidency to the North and the South-south is to move away from the injunction of giving unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. All the threats to the existence of Nigeria today are attributable to human action or choice of action or inaction, rather than to temptation by God. Militants in the Niger Delta asking for more money or inducing amnesty are not doing this on God’s account.

    Similarly, Boko Haram enthusiasts calling for Sharianisation of a multi-religious state-nation are not doing this on Allah’s behalf. Even those who say that the turn of minorities from the South-south to rule in 2015 or of the section which Prof. Ango Abdullahi called the country’s majority from the North must not be blocked are not acting because God wants anything of such. Even incurable federalists calling for regional autonomy or devolution of power to states or the regions are not necessarily working for God. All of these groupings are working for their own interests in a country with competing or conflicting interests. There is a sense in calling on God to touch the souls of each member of the various groups and equip each of them with the spirit of compromise, a pre-requisite for peace and development in a multinational society and a democratic polity.

    The challenge of the moment is for former military dictators, most of whom designed the Nigeria of our time, and the civilians that are jostling to rule or control the status-quo to also listen to citizens and hear them well on workable templates to peace and progress in a country blessed with diverse cultures and values. This is the time for Nigeria’s leaders-military and civilian– to recognise human capacity to affect the human condition without necessarily forsaking the importance of God’s ultimate power to bless the choice made by human beings. This is a good lesson of the enlightenment that must not be forgotten by any nation seeking peace and progress in the era of modernity.

  • March on washington: One foot still in the air

    March on washington: One foot still in the air

    August 28 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington where a 34 year old Black preacher stood before the Lincoln Memorial to deliver the most evocative address ever given in the capital of the world’s most powerful nation. On that day, Dr. Martin Luther King proclaimed his dream of a race-blind society. The excellent speech woke the conscience of those segments of the nation with consciences that could be awakened.

    Those five decades ago, many people dared to believe the audacious dream might come true. The truth is that it still inhabits the land of dreams. Reality is a vigilant sentinel of its dominion. Rarely does it allow the delicate or kind to enter. If Dr. King were alive today, he would encounter both the benefit and pain of hindsight. The great man might lay himself down to sleep that he might dream a bit more or he might propose to knock Reality’s door with more vigour such that the hard door would open a bit more widely to the dream he gave us.

    While King touched those who believed in freedom and dignity for all, there were also segments of the population that profited from the old, unjust way. These people defined freedom as their right to place others underfoot. For them, his speech stirred nothing but dyspepsia and revulsion.

    Prejudice does not yield easily. It neither vanishes nor retires upon encountering its solution, as we would hope. It fights back, reasserting its claim on society with a vigour renewed by the challenge to its dominant position. To fight prejudice is to arouse it anew and cause it to adapt afresh.

    The unfolding march of events since that late August day 50 years ago prove that injustice and prejudice don’t disappear. Unless buried, they simply reinvent themselves. They never tire of plotting their own continuance. In some ways, America has advanced since that day. A Black man lives in the White House. Yet, for all this development symbolises, the progressive political and economic ideas that inform the Black American experience remain foreign to mainstream discourse. The Black man in the White House attained his position by convincing enough Whites that he would safeguard the vested interests that produce the systemic inequality suffered by poor Black, Brown and even White people.

    Today, income inequality climbs to its highest level in a century as do poverty levels. The comparison of the household wealth between Black and White Americans is less favorable now than decades ago. America has the biggest prison population in world history. Most inmates are Black and Latino men booked on minor, nonviolent drug offenses. While most inmates are Black, Whites perpetrate most crimes. There is but one answer to the riddle of this discrepancy between the rates of crimes committed and those of incarceration: Racism.

    Black men get incarcerated in droves, effectively becoming a vast army of the disenfranchised. Once enveloped by the prison system, these men and boys become ineligible for government programs in education and housing. Meaningful employment is denied them. Most states prohibit them from voting. While America has a Black man in the White House, a prime objective of the political economy is literally to funnel millions of other Black men into the big house known as the penitentiary. Taking a strategic view of things is to conclude that a Black man has been selected to preside over the gross incarceration of the highest number of Black men placed in physical servitude since the age of slavery.

    For those Blacks fortunate enough to evade the shadow of prison, life presents other challenges. Black unemployment doubles the rate of White America’s. Worse, those Blacks with jobs are herded into positions that pay far less and offer less employment security and benefits. Living in the Black community is costlier although the quality of what is purchased is inferior. Blacks pay more for basics such as food. Stores hike their prices knowing full well that the people in Black communities are poorer than the national average. Home mortgages, transportation costs and insurance policies are dearer to the resident of a traditionally Black community. In other words, the system is engineered to isolate then impoverished those who have become its victims. The little they have shall be taken from them.

    When the multitudes gather on Wednesday to commemorate the March on Washington, they should do so with the somber countenance of people who have too longed supped a bittersweet diet. Since the first March, the nation has changed much but the reality of its racial disparity has changed little. Racism has adapted to the new developments in the political economy and racism has adapted faster than the quest to end racism much as a bacillus mutates faster than the medicine used to kill it.

    At the most profound level, 50 years have vanished but not a day has passed. Every year of advance has been matched by one of regression. The dream of Dr. King has neither been fulfilled nor extinguished. It floats in abeyance. The 1963 event made history; but the dream itself remains both history in the making and in the unmaking.

    The March on Washington came for two purposes. The quest for Black American civil rights has been the reason the entire world came to see as the sole rationale for the gathering. However, there was another, perhaps more important impetus: the quest for economic justice. Too many people of all stripes and colors struggled in poverty in the land of plenty. Although America had achieved a globally unprecedented level of economic activity and material accumulation, many of her citizens languished in all-too-familiar squalor. Economic growth did not beget economic justice. Left to itself, economic growth promotes inequality and greater injustice.

    Dr. King was acutely aware of this principle of economic advantage compounding itself until mutating into an unfairness that stifles a nation by impairing the welfare of its most vulnerable. That is why he shifted focus to dedicate himself to the quest for economic justice once the desired civil rights legislation was had. He recognised civil rights for the poor were an empty gesture if joined by nothing more practical; it is a large plate bearing no food. To have the right to do something but always lack the means to accomplish is to be effectively deprived of said right. It is an insult cloaked in the garment of imaginary favor.

    Dr. King was dissatisfied with American political economic power as exercised at home and abroad. While he talked in the tone of reform, he was a revolutionary in pursuit of radical goals. He sought to restructure American foreign and domestic policy from its roots. This made him the most dangerous man in America. For his pursuit of economic justice, he was killed. While limiting himself to the confines of civil rights, he was safe although reviled by many. When he came to critique the entire structure of power and its disbursement was when he met the assassin’s bullet. He hoped to cleanse this great edifice of power by moral force. Those who held guard over the mean edifice met his moral force with a hot-fired piece of lead.

    Dr. King realised the peril he walked. Not only did he get threats on a quotidian basis, the death of another man he once met served as a warning. A few years before King’s death, Malcolm X had executed a decisive pivot. Having shorn himself of the idiosyncratic worldview of the Black Muslims (Nation of Islam), Malcolm transformed himself from conservative Black nationalist into progressive humanitarian. This turn quickly cost him his life because it also made him a dangerous man.

    As long as he beat the lone drum of racism, the system tolerated him, in fact, it found him entertaining. He was like a one-armed man trying to accomplish a task that could only be done with two. As soon as he started the simultaneous sounding of racial injustice/harmony and economic justice, the authorities found him less amusing. In what many suspect to have been a joint operation between a clandestine arm of the federal government and the Black Muslim leadership, Malcolm was executed in broad day.

    While Martin and Malcolm were executed for embracing an economic progressivism transcending racial politics, Black conservative firebrand Louis Farrakhan has been left to enjoy a prosperous, tidy life. Despite all of his histrionics, he is merely an entertaining beverage when taken in moderation. He is not a helpful tonic much less the cure of our woes. He preaches a brand of economic separatism that allows him to prosper on the backs of an ever impoverishing Black mass. As such, he is as much invested in the racist political economic structure as the Ku Klux Klan leader in South Carolina or the Wall Street banker who believes Black people are poor because they are naturally indolent. Farrakhan shouts at the racists but his shouts do not threaten them for they know he is one of them. He is but their exaggerated image in blackface. Sadly, he is not alone.

    A vast majority of the popular Black television preachers play the same role, in subtler cast. Only a weekly basis, they tell millions of poor Blacks that their economic prosperity is but a personal miracle away. They just have to wait for God to touch their shoulder. With this in mind and heart, there is no need to organise as a movement.

    The God they preach is a fraction of the God I know. God did not pluck the Hebrews out of captivity one by one. He freed them by the multitude. God speaks in terms of the individual but also of peoples and nations. Black America has been suppressed for a period rivaling the Hebrew captivity. Instead of the people coming together in greater unity and cohesion to raise their collective voice to God for collective deliverance, too many now merely ask Him to show them the exit of individual escape.

    When Wednesday comes, the keynote speaker at the commemorative event will be President Obama. This selection is inevitable as he is the first Black president. Superficially, his electoral ascendance symbolises fulfillment of King’s dream. Superficially! Yet, the reality of his climb is of more ambivalent consequence. The President will utter words that float on air. Yet, the bulk of his policies are leaden weights falling on the necks of already struggling Americans. Symbolically, he is the only reasonable choice to give the address. If we are to weigh the substance of his governance, he should not be invited to the event, let alone speak there. He should sit in the White House as did all those elitist presidents before him.

    The event is organised by the King Center, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), all venerable civil rights organizations. King was the president of the SCLC. That organization is as synonymous with him as is the King Center eponymous with him. The sad part of this is that time has passed by these organisations. Once at the forefront of history, these groups failed to evolve as Dr. King wanted. They now exist on the fumes of their pasts; this makes them barely relevant to the future. Once progressive, these groups are barely reformist and are mostly conservative. They see Wednesday’s gathering as a public invitation to an open-air museum. Because there is nothing radical or moving in these groups anymore, they do not see the event as a call to radical action or to resurrect a people’s movement in order to fulfill King’s dream.

    This is why they leap at identifying President Obama as the keynote speaker yet dare not also invite a speaker who will strongly critique government for the daily wrongs it heaps on the people.

    If King were alive, he would have asked the President Obama to participate. However, he also would be possessed of sufficient courage to tell the president that most of his policies bear a disturbing resemblance to those of his predecessor.

    A strident critic of the Vietnam War, King would oppose the killer drone campaign America has launched across the Middle East and parts of Africa. 9/11 would not have turned him into a reflexive warmonger. Himself a victim of government surveillance and dirty tricks, he would abhor the vast machinery government has erected to eavesdrop on all citizens, all the time. He would recognise it for what it is: not as an effective tool against terror but as a long, terrible step toward turning America into national security state where citizens become reticent to criticise their government out of fear of official backlash. Freedom and justice, not suppression, are the best weapons against terrorism.

    On the domestic front, he would abhor the massive bailout of Wall Street particularly as it was not matched with proportionate relief to the middle and working classes. He would campaign against presidential attempts to rupture the social safety net by clipping social security and other benefits.

    Here we come to decisive fork in the road. Black America was more united prior to the victory of the Civil Rights movement than before it. This is due to the class structure of Black America. The Black elite had basically imbibed the conservative economic ethos of the American political economy. This elite formed the leadership of the Civil Rights movement. Once civil rights were granted, their narrow personal interests were basically satisfied. They had the economic wherewithal to make use of the new rights. While still alive, Dr. King pushed them to be their better selves and seek the good of the entire community.

    As the years passed after his death, his voice faded from memory and this group fell back into their lesser selves. They left the rest of the Black community to its own impoverished devices. The elite only raise a hue and cry to stir the community when they fear overt racism might revive itself to the extent that their positions are threatened. However, they basically had stopped working to help the poor and downcast. They had become junior partners of the established order.

    I write this article not so much to inform readers about the intricacies of American racism but to expose you to the universality of racism’s reach. The very political and economic forces shaping American society and leading to Black America’s predicament are global in nature. What afflicts Black America also attacks Black Africa in similar fashion. Poverty, ignorance, unemployment abound. Disregard for the lives and quality of life of the Black African is as low as it is for the Black American. Too much of the African elite has made the same fateful, narrow-minded decision as their Black American counterparts. Instead of caring about the rest of the people, elites have jettisoned the masses. Being granted inferior status in the club of the global elite is sufficient for them. In exchange for this lesser membership in the elite, they have become the servitors of the conservative order. They seek not to change the order to benefit their people. They now seek to change their people to benefit the order.

    Dr. King wanted to see Black people in positions of leadership. He believed our unique experience with injustice could be used to make the world more just. He did not want to see Black leaders simply mimic the Whites who might have preceded them. Yet, this is what has happened. Sadly, the bulk of Black Americans and Black Africans have been left behind. Sadder still, each depressed community believes the negative myths the white world spreads about the other. You are related by blood and common experiences of repression. Yet you are ignorant of each other and estranged. You are alike yet are suspicious of each other. You despise the very person with whom you have mutual interests in helping each other.

    Until Black people begin to realise the immense depth, height and width of the barriers erected against them, we shall forever march in place. This is not Dr. King’s dream nor should it be our reality.

     

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  • We’ll miss Ngige/Soludo showdown

    In spite of the regrettable back and forth over the selection of the APC candidate for November’s Anambra governorship poll, I had hoped for the sake of Anambra State and the good of Nigerian politics that we would see a showdown between the cerebral Charles Soludo, former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, and the charismatic Chris Ngige, a senator and former governor of the state. From all indications, Dr Ngige, who seems increasingly built for the state house than for the senate, will still emerge as the APC candidate, notwithstanding the party’s indiscretion in announcing his candidacy without the conduct of primaries. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how Professor Soludo could emerge the candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). The party not only unnecessarily embarked on a barren screening exercise, it has left the sanctimonious Governor Peter Obi in a position where many are insinuating he is secretly directing choices from behind closed doors.

    My pain is that we would now not see a classical showdown between brains and charm, a sorry miss for Anambra, and a terrible distress for Nigeria. I do not, of course, imply that Dr Ngige has no brains. He certainly does. But Professor Soludo is not only an academician, he is fevered by his enthusiasm to conceive and enunciate policies, even as he seems to have excess of that endowment. Dr Ngige clearly outdoes most governors in Nigeria today in the charms department with his stately good looks, which for a short man is quite remarkable, with his suave performance on the soapbox, with his administrative acumen, with his intrepidity, and with his instinctive grasp of issues.

    The choice between Dr Ngige and Professor Soludo would have represented the age-old dilemma man faces in choosing his spouse: would he go for a brainy or beautiful lady? Sociologists would have been pleased to get an answer from the pace-setting Anambra electorate as an indication of how men think. After all, it is already settled that women do not set great store by how well a man looks, but by the content of his… Ah, why do I want to provoke a war?