The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Okon dazzles them in Akure

    When beggars die, there are no comets seen, but the heavens themselves blaze forth at the death of princes” The immortal William Shakespeare could not have been more perceptive. It was a carnival-like exit on Friday in Akure as the entire state capital rose to bid goodbye to one of Akure’s most illustrious sons ever, Chief Adewunmi Adegbonmire, a.k.a Omo Ekun, the late Asiwaju of Akureland. Ancient and folklored political gladiators, the new kids on the political block and the cream of Nigeria’s progressive politicians came to wave a final goodbye to a true political generalissimo.

    Snooper was there, and so was the impossible and impertinent Okon who was fronting as Domestic and Political Secretary with concurrent accreditation to the Kitchen Cabinet.. It is quite a mouthful but then Okon himself is quite a handful. Strangely enough, the crazy boy seems to know the social and cultural topography of Akure and environ very well claiming to have served as an apprentice journeyman— whatever that means in the area.

    After an initial weather scare, the journey got on to a smooth cruise until Okon began his demented antics to snooper’s acute regret. All of a sudden, the mad boy jumped up as if stung by a scorpion.

    “Oga, tell dem plane driver to park, as I wan pee,” the crazy boy yelled at me.

    “Okon, don’t be stupid. This is not a kabukabu bus.” Snooper screamed at the fool.

    “Even dem kabukabu dey park for pipul make dem pee” Okon shouted at me. Before snooper could comprehend what was going on, Okon yanked an empty bottle from a revered politician and rapidly began filling the bottle to his bladder’s content with the velocity of a consummate rapist even as he was neighing like a wild horse. After this his face became frozen by a deranged grin. Snooper avoided him for the rest of the flight.

    But the firework started again as soon as we reached the church premises, teeming and milling with a mammoth crowd which was unprecedented in colour and diversity. From the distance, snooper began counting professors and eggheads from the old University of Ife who had come to bid goodbye to the illustrious warrior, but this seemed to have drawn Okon’s juvenile ire.

    “Kai, kai, dis yeye Yoruba people and dem feferity. If to say na better person kaput now dem no go comout. But na animal dem dey worship. See how dem they cry for dem tiger im pikin. If to say na tiger himself come kaput nko?” the mad boy snorted and snooper immediately whipped him into line with a look full of daggers.

    But the testy truce lasted up to the church doorstep. As soon as snooper hailed his old friend and school chum, Bola Akingbade, a.k.a Skiddy, the retired MTN mogul who was part of the choir, Okon exploded, “So na here dis one come dey hide after dem done daburu dem MTN? Dem phone don become kalokalo,” Okon sneered as snooper deliberately stepped on his toes to shut him up.

    Then as if contrite and penitent the mad boy sidled up. “Oga, ask him whether him get recharge card,” Okon crowed as snooper quickly doubled his pace only to run almost headlong into retired General Alani Akinrinade. “And where is Okon?” the great and greatly civil soldier whispered to snooper not realising that the scourge was right behind him.

    “Oga, no be dem sakadeli Brigadier be dat?” Okon sniggered.

    “Okon, just shut up,” snooper screamed.

    “So how come him no sabi Okon again? Abi no be me dey…?” before he could finish his idle drooling, snooper pushed him through the crowd and ordered him to seat down. This particular treaty lasted only a few minutes as Okon suddenly jumped up amidst the din of thanksgiving.

    “Oga I don look inside dem coffin, I no see tiger him pikin, na old man I see oo” the mad man boy shouted. Then as the ecumenical finally caught up with the secular, the officiating priest announced Kayode Fayemi as the governor of the Ekiti Diocese to prolong and protracted laughter.

    “You see now, when dem Yisa Jaguda come say Nigeria be country of 150 million naira na dem Yoruba people dey yab am.” The crazy boy hollered. Fearing for the worst, it was at this point that snooper initiated the process which put Oko in a semi-conscious haze until we got back to Lagos. It has been a glorious day for progressives in Akure.

  • On the road to cosmetic federalism again?

    On the road to cosmetic federalism again?

    If the preliminary result of National Assembly’s efforts to involve Nigerians in the amendment of the 1999 Constitution released exclusively by Leadership Sunday is accurate (and there is no reason to disbelieve the notes leaked to the newspaper by those in charge of the exercise), then Nigerians calling for re-federalisation of the country are about being urged to start the process of de-militarisation of the polity afresh.

    We said in this column a few weeks back that Nigerians might be buying a lemon at the end of the protracted effort by the national assembly to neutralise the call for sovereign national conference or constitutional conference. We raised issues with the process of selecting or inviting citizens to meet representatives of the national assembly in hotels in state capitals across the country; the amount of time made available for discussion; and why on earth anyone would prefer such informal consultation with citizens to a referendum.

    With the release of outcome of lawmakers/citizens’ interactions in November last year published by Leadership Sunday of January 27, Nigerians may at the end be blamed for an amended constitution that is more unitary than the one that federalists have found to be a source of inter-ethnic or inter-regional tension and of national under-development since the outing of the 1999 Constitution by General Abdulsalam Abubakar, after the presidential and legislative elections of 1999.

    In what Leadership Sunday called the highpoints of the House of Representatives’ People Public Sessions on the review of the 1999 Constitution conducted on November 10, 2012, ‘Nigerians have rejected’ the following: any mention of the country’s six geopolitical zones in the constitution as administrative or political units; abolition of State Independent Electoral Commission (SIEC) and transfer of its functions to INEC; call for a provision to allow Nigerians in diaspora to vote at national elections; establishment of state police; affirmative action for women in elective offices; transfer of any responsibility from the Exclusive Legislative List to the Concurrent List; etc.

    Is the report of Leadership Sunday only about what citizens have rejected? No. As the paper puts it: ‘As widely expected, voting patterns show Nigerians want state houses of assembly to be granted financial autonomy/independence as is the case with the National Assembly….The collated report disclosed that Nigerians backed amendments’ to abolish Joint State/Local Government Account; to create a role or place for traditional rulers at federal and state levels; to award indigeneship (rather than residency) to indigenes of other communities; etc. What is unmistakable about the preliminary result of collation of responses from citizens that travelled to speak with legislators in November is that majority of such citizens largely prefer the constitutional status quo that puts centralism over federalism.

    It is not clear what the announcement in Leadership Sunday: ‘voting patterns on all the issues itemised in the template for voting during the sessions in 318 federal constituencies of the original 360 constituencies have been collated and ready for official unveiling on January 31’ is designed to achieve. Is the unveiling of an informal voting by citizens that had no mandate from their constituencies being packaged as a true reflection of the thinking of constituents on the items presented in November to selected invitees by legislators? Is voting by an infinitesimal number of invitees to public hearings in hotel rooms being designed as a substitute for direct indication of citizens’ choice? Are Nigerians being prepared by the leaked collation of votes of a few Nigerians that had the privilege to travel to state capitals to meet with lawmakers for what the national assembly is likely to recommend as amendments? What does ‘as widely expected’ mean? Who widely expected what—the legislators or Leadership Sunday? It is uncharitable to think that the national assembly would intentionally parade the views of a few Nigerians at one-day public hearing as the voice of 160 million Nigerians.

    What is not uncharitable to do is to remind members of the national assembly that fears expressed before the decision of the national assembly to initiate amendment of the 1999 Constitution may be justified at the end of exercise. When citizens called for sovereign national conference or constitutional conference for the purpose of writing a people’s constitution that is mandated by citizens and assented to by citizens through a referendum, members of the legislative assembly said that all that was needed was ordinary amendment to the 1999 Constitution. Legislators refused to include involvement of citizens directly in the process by rejecting calls for a referendum. Now the same national assembly is claiming that majority of Nigerians have taken a position on items slated for amendment, when in fact only a handful of citizens attended the hearings organised for interaction between lawmakers and citizens.

    Many citizens at that time warned that legislators elected under the constitution in contention were not elected to write constitutions and that the matter of creating a people’s constitution should be given to another group set up principally for that task. Citizens were told by lawmakers and even the president that Nigeria should settle for amendment to a constitution that citizens never saw until after the inauguration of the first post-military government in 1999. While citizens called for constitutional transformation, their leaders, elected for purposes other than writing a constitution, preached and pushed for panel-beating of a constitution that citizens thought was a write-off.

    If the leaked report to Leadership Sunday is accurate, then federalists and constitutional purists who warned that amending a constitution that had no imprint of citizens ab initio would amount to a waste of time and emotion may be more prophetic than legislators who affirmed that re-federalisation of the country was attainable through amendments. Issues that citizens have been reported to reject indicate that the 1999 Constitution authored by the military on the eve of handing power to elected governments in 1999 only needs cosmetic touches designed to enhance the powers of the centre.

    A graphic example of further de-federalisation of the polity is the so-called approval by citizens that the exclusive legislative list should remain sacrosanct. Another example is purported approval by ‘citizens’ of the provision to divorce local governments from the states that constitute them. The Federal Republic of Nigeria will be the first such federation in the world, just as it will be the first federation that is incapable of tolerating state and local government police for purposes of enforcing laws and ordinances created by states and local governments.

    Without doubt, the report released to Leadership Sunday must signal the message of a luta continua to lovers of federalism and believers in federalism as the only way to ensure sustainable democracy and development in post-colonial Nigeria.

     

  • Hypocrisy of yesterday’s men

    Hypocrisy of yesterday’s men

    A loosely bound group of yesterday’s men and women seems to be on the offensive against the Jonathan administration. They pick issues with virtually every effort of the administration, pretending to do so in the public interest; positing that they alone, know it all. Arrogantly, they claim to be better and smarter than everyone else in the current government. They are ever so censorious, contrarian and supercilious. They have no original claim to their pretensions other than they were privileged to have been in the corridors of power once upon a time in their lives. They obviously got so engrossed with their own sense of importance they began to imagine themselves indispensable to Nigeria. It is dangerous to have such a navel-gazing, narcissistic group inflict themselves with so much ferocity on an otherwise impressionable public. We are in reality dealing with a bunch of hypocrites.

    With exceptions so few, they really don’t care about Nigeria as a sovereign but the political spoils that accrue from it. And so they will stop at nothing to discredit those they think are not as deserving as they imagine themselves to be. President Jonathan has unfairly become the target of their pitiable frustrations.

    Underneath their superfluous appearance, lies an unspoken class disdain directed at the person and office of a duly elected president of the country. It is a Nigerian problem, perhaps. In the same advanced societies which these same yesterday men and women often like to refer to, public service is seen and treated as a privilege. People are called upon to serve; they do so with humility and great commitment, and when it is all over, they move on to other things. The quantity surveyor returns to his or her quantity surveying or some other decent work; the lawyer to his or her wig and gown; the university teacher, to the classroom, glad to have been found worthy of national service. When and where necessary, as private citizens they are entitled to use the benefit of this experience to contribute to national development, they speak up on matters of public importance not as a full-time job as is the case in Nigeria currently.

    What then, is the problem with us? As part of our governance evolution, most people become public servants by accident, but they soon get so used to the glamour of office that they lose sight of their own ordinariness. They use the system to climb: to become media celebrities, to gain international attention and to morph into self-appointed guardians of the Nigerian estate. They mask self interest motives as public causes and manipulate the public’s desire for improvements in their daily struggles as opportunity for power grab.

    They are perpetually hanging around, lobbying and hustling for undeserved privileges. They exploit ethnic and religious connections where they can or join political parties and run for political office. They even write books (I, me and myself books, packaged as cerebral stuff); if that still doesn’t work, they lobby newspaper houses for columns to write and they become apostolic pundits pontificating on matters ranging from the nebulous to the non-descript. Power blinds them to the reality that we are all in this together and we have a unique opportunity to do well for the taxpayers and hardworking electorate that provide every public official the privilege to serve.

    Unsatisfied with the newspaper columns, they open social media accounts and pretend to be voices of wisdom seeking to cultivate an angry crowd which they feed continually with their own brand of negativity. They arrange to give lectures at high profile events where they abuse the government of the day in order to gain attention and steal a few minutes in the sun; hoping to force an audience that may ‘open doors’ for them, back into the corridors of power. These characters are in different sizes and shapes: small, big; Godfathers, agents, proxies. The tactics of the big figures on this rung of opportunism may be slightly different. They parade themselves as a Godfather or kingmaker or the better man who should have been king. They suffer of course, from messianic delusions. The fact that they boast of some followership and the media often treats them as icons, makes their nuisance factor worse. They and their protégés and proxies are united by one factor though: their hypocrisy.

    It is in the larger interest of our country that the point be made that the government of the day welcomes criticism and political activism. This is an aspect of our emergent democracy that expands on the growing freedom of expression, thought and association but there is need for caution and vigilance, lest we get taken hostage by the architects of odious disinformation. Nigerians must not allow any group of individuals to hold this country to ransom and no one alone should appropriate the right to determine what is best for Nigeria. The accidental public servants who have turned that privilege into a life-long obsession and profession must be told to go get a life and find meaningful work to do.

    Those who believe that no one else can run Nigeria without them must be told to stop hallucinating. The former Ministers, former Governors, former DGs, and all sorts who have been busy quoting mischievous figures, spreading cruel propaganda must be reminded that the Jonathan administration is in fact trying to clean up the mess that they created. They want to own the game when the ball is not in their possession. They want to be the referee when nobody has offered them a whistle. They seek to play God, forgetting that the case for God is not in the hands of man. One of the virtues of enlightenment is for persons to have a true perspective of their own location in the order of things. What they do not seem to realise or accept is that the political climate has changed.

    When one of them was in charge of this same estate called Nigeria, he shut down the Port Harcourt airport and other airports for close to two years under the guise of renovation. The Port Harcourt airport was abandoned for so long it was overgrown with weeds after serving for months as a practice ground for motoring schools. It was reopened without any improvement and with so much money down the drain, and the pervasive suspicion that the reason it was shut down in the first place was to create a market for a new airline that had been allowed the monopoly use of the other airport in the city. Under President Jonathan, airports across the country are being upgraded, rebuilt and modernized; in less than two years, the transformation is self-evident. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy from our see-no-good commentators comes from the one who superintended over the near-collapse of the aviation sector who is now audacious enough to claim to be a social critic.

    For the first time since 1999, the Nigerian Railway Corporation is up and running as a service organization. The rail lines have become functional from Lagos to Kano; Ewekoro to Minna, and very soon, from Port Harcourt to Maiduguri, Abuja to Kaduna and Lagos to Ibadan. They couldn’t do this in their time, now they are busy looking for money that is not missing with their teeth. When questions are asked, they claim they invented the ideas of due process and accountability. They once promised to solve the crisis of electricity supply in Nigeria. But what did they do? They managed to leave the country in darkness with less than 2,000 MW; abandoned independent power projects, mismanaged power stations, and uncompleted procurement processes. The mess was so bad their immediate successors had to declare an emergency in the power sector. It has taken President Jonathan to make the difference. Today, there is greater coherence in the management of the power sector with power supply in excess of 4, 200 MW; a better conceived power sector road map is running apace, and the administration is determined to make it better. They complain about the state of the roads. Most of the contracts were actually awarded under their watch to the tune of billions! They talk about corruption, yet many of them have thick case files with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the courts and the police on corruption-related charges. One of them was even accused of having awarded choice plots of government land to himself, his wives, his companies and other relations when he was in charge of such allocations! Really, have we forgotten so soon?

    These yesterday men and women certainly don’t seem to care very much about the Nigerian taxpayer who has had to bear the brunt of the many scandals this administration is exposing in its bid to clear out the Augean stable. They’d rather grandstand with the ex-General this, Chief that, Doctor this and ex-(dis)Honourable Minister who has no record of what he or she did with the funds the nation provided them to deliver results to protect our interest so that we don’t end up continuing to make the same wasteful mistakes.

    It is enough to make you shudder at the thought of any of them being part of government with access to the public purse; but then we’ve already seen what some of them are capable of doing when in control of public money, authority and influence; and to that the people have spoken in unison – they have had enough. Nigerians are wiser and are now familiar with the trickery from these persons whose claim to fame and fortune was on the back of their public service.

    Our point at the risk of overstating what is by now too obvious: We have too many yesterday men and women behaving too badly. We are dealing with a group of power-point technocrats who have mastered the rhetoric of public grandstanding: carefully crafted emotion-laden sound bites passed off as meaningful engagements. That is all there is to them, after many years of hanging around in relevant places and mingling in the right corridors, all made possible through the use/abuse of Nigeria. Our caveat to their audience is the same old line: let the buyer beware!

     

    Dr. Abati is Special Adviser (Media and Publicity) to President Goodluck Jonathan

     

  • Justice Talba and the pension thief

    Justice Talba and the pension thief

    If anyone had doubts that Nigeria was yet to start any serious anti-corruption war, the judgment handed down to a director of the Police Pension Office, Mr. John Yusuf, by Justice Abubakar Talba of the Federal Capital Territory High Court, Abuja, on January 28, was enough to erase that doubt. Yusuf’s case had been a celebrated one, given the magnitude of the amount allegedly stolen by the pension thieves in the Police Pension Office, and the fact that he was the first person to be tried for the police pension fraud. About N38.8billion was alleged to have been stolen. However, Yusuf and his ilk were said to have stolen N27.2billion of the amount. Indeed, Yusuf personally admitted to stealing N2billion. For this, the best Justice Talba could do was to ask the big thief to refund N325million, forfeit 32 houses and pay a fine of N750,000 or spend two years behind bars.

    It is unusual for people to engage in loud discussion in the courtroom, but in this case, people in the court, engaged in loud exchanges, loud enough for the court clerk to call everybody to order when Justice Talba pronounced his judgment. Obviously, Yusuf had stolen more than enough for the owner to notice; and Justice Talba too had shown a kind of uncommon compassion. Where did he expect the owners of the funds to get their money at retirement if this is the kind of kid gloves that judges in Nigeria would be treating people like Yusuf? Did it ever occur to Justice Talba that he too could be a victim of the Yusufs of this world upon his retirement?

    Quite annoyingly, the pension thief immediately paid the peanut of a fine, to the admiration and applause of his friends and family members, and headed for home. No shame; no remorse. I wonder what Yusuf would tell his children and grandchildren, if he is already a grandfather. Will he tell them that he just paid a fine instead of going to jail for stealing other people’s sweat? Do you know that in the kind of Nigeria where we now live, Yusuf would have organised an elaborate party to mark his victory over the country’s rotten system if the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had not rearrested him to face trial, this time, for allegedly not declaring some assets, among other allegations, including, again, theft? Some people might even take space in the media to felicitate with their own who was lucky to escape imprisonment for stealing. That is how sunk we are as a nation. This country is indeed in trouble if this is the way we want to fight corruption. I wonder how our leaders feel in the company of other countries’ leaders when matters like this crop up in the comity of nations.

    But I am happy that, for once, many Nigerians were enraged by the judgment. They must have been wondering why Justice Talba did not emulate Jesus Christ by simply telling the accused to ‘go but sin no more’. I am happy that, Nigerians protested the judgment; and particularly so that students and other youths were in the vanguard of the protest. It is rightly so because it is their parents’ future, and by extension their own future, that the Yusufs of this world are eating up today. With the kind of judgment handed down to Yusuf, we have every cause to be apprehensive of the pension savings. Rather than serve as deterrent, it will serve as stimulus for other pension and allied thieves. All they have to do is to steal big enough.

    That was why I laughed when last Monday, Justice Okon Abang ruled (in a matter between Capital Oil and Gas Ltd and its managing director, Mr. Ifeanyi Ubah, and Access Bank Plc and Coscharis Motors, over a N10billion loan the bank claimed to have given Capital Oil and Gas Ltd.), that Access Bank must withdraw its suit on the same matter in a London court. With rulings such as the one by Justice Talba, one does not need any expert advice that if one could afford it, he should not leave such matters in the hands of the unpredictable Nigerian judiciary. At any rate, I wonder why Justice Abang should be so concerned about whether someone has confidence in the Nigerian Judiciary or not; what, to me, should be his uppermost concern is that justice is done, no matter from where; whether home or from abroad. In any case, don’t Nigerian rich people leave our hospitals for hospitals abroad for the same reason that they do not have confidence in the country’s hospitals? Why couldn’t the minister of health or even the president protest this by decreeing a stop to it? The point that Justice Abang seems not to know is that confidence or trust are priced words that cannot be decreed or imposed; both are earned. It does not seem to me that anyone can force another person to have confidence in what he or she has a choice not to have confidence in. l leave the matter at that for now.

    But, meanwhile, to underscore how ridiculous the Yusuf sentence was, Justice Mashood Abass of the Oyo State High Court, Ibadan, just the day after Justice Talba’s judgment, sentenced the Provost of the Federal Cooperative College, Ibadan, Mrs Ruth Aweto, and the bursar, Mr Adekanye Komolafe, to four years imprisonment for deceiving the Federal Government by passing off 41 casual staff of the college as permanent staff, with annual emolument of about N7million, instead of N3.6million. They thereby made a dubious gain of N3.4million over one year. They had no option of fine. Their crime must have been that they are ‘petty thieves’.

    I do not know of a place where people set a date for revolution; it builds up over years only for the bubble to burst when the people run out of patience. The spontaneous reaction of Nigerians to the verdict tells me that there is still hope for this country. All we need is to sustain such protest whenever strange things like this happen.

    I know President Goodluck Jonathan has hardly seized any great moments. But he can take advantage of this because, to do otherwise would confirm the notion that the government itself is handicapped when it is anti-corruption because its hands too are not clean. The President may be saying this is the problem of the judiciary; but the buck stops at his desk. There is nothing that says he cannot initiate a genuine judicial reform that will take care of the inadequacies of our present laws which make it easy for big thieves to escape justice while poor ones get all the punishment. Anything can happen in a situation where people lose confidence in the judiciary, which is the last hope of the common man. All the arguments advanced by Yusuf’s counsel that made Justice Talba to have compassion (I hope it is compassion) on the accused pale into insignificance when juxtaposed with the sufferings that the owners of the pension being stolen and their dependants would face when the time to reap the fruits of their labour comes and there is no money forthcoming. Even Kootu Ashipa of old (Ashipa’s Court) would have done better, if only to prove to the world that the country’s anti-corruption war is not a huge racket or, sorry, a huge joke.

  • South African experience

    South African experience

    Professor Abiodun Salawu, a former colleague at The Punch newspaper, used to be a Mass Communication lecturer at The Polytechnic, Ibadan, University of Lagos and later Ajayi Crowther University.

    I was, however, surprised to hear that he relocated to South Africa some years ago considering that there are not enough mass communication scholars to teach in Mass Communication departments in the country’s public and private universities.

    Following his recent appointment to Mazisi Kunene Chair at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, I had an online interview with him during which he spoke on his experience living and teaching in South Africa.

    Why did you relocate to South Africa?

    I relocated to South Africa because of the better infrastructure in the country. Today, it has the best infrastructure on the continent; certain aspects of these, some people call world class. The research environment is also an attraction. There are motivations and facilities for research.

    What is the difference between being a lecturer in South Africa and Nigeria?

    This goes back to my last statement. The infrastructure and facilities are there to enable you do your work without much hassles. Colleagues in the sciences appreciate this better as they require certain equipment and facilities in their laboratories to do their work. For us in the humanities, we appreciate more the abundant online resources that we have to do our work. Provision of basic office facilities is also appreciated.

    What do you miss about Nigeria?

    I miss the culture of our people. I miss the culture of respect for elders, of appreciation of good deeds, of communalism and of industry. I miss listening to high standard Yoruba on certain radio/television programmes and movies. I also miss our foods – amala, ewedu, yam, fried plantain etc.

     How would you describe living in South Africa?

    It is a more organised living.

    What should Nigeria learn from South Africa?

    Nigeria can learn organisation of higher education from South Africa. Research is a priority in South Africa and there is huge provision of funds to facilitate, motivate and incentivise it. Many of our colleagues in Nigeria do not have (regular) opportunities to attend international conferences, but this is what an average lecturer in South Africa takes for granted.

    We can also do better with little or no disruption in our academic calendars as a result of staff strikes. Since I came here, I have not heard of staff (either academic or non-academic) going on strike. May be, we can just say such is rare here. Of course, there are grievances but they hardly result into industrial actions. I guess we need to find a way of managing conflict in our public institutions. This requires sincerity. The campuses in South Africa are much more peaceful than our own campuses. The fear of student cultism is remote. Even when students go on strike, it is not usually prolonged; and the grievances may be about lack of study loans. There was a time when students at University of Fort Hare demonstrated and one of the things they were demonstrating about was lack of internet in their residences.

     

    Full interview on : staging.thenationonlineng.net/category/online-special/

     

  • A judgment so bizarre, a Daniel could not have done it

    A judgment so bizarre, a Daniel could not have done it

    Some court adjudications, the last bastion of social hope for the average citizen, are so right on the mark that one can shriek with delight and exclaim like Shakespeare’s Shylock that indeed, a Daniel has come to judgment! On another hand, some are so incredible they can make one hiss and spit in disgust and exclaim that indeed, the law is such an ass! On a third hand, there are some judgements that are so bizarre they leave everyone’s mouth agape for the first five minutes. Then, the words start rolling out in gabbles as people go ‘gabble, gabble, judgement, gabble, bizarre gabble, gabble …’ The whole world, err, country is gabbling right now about the judgement of some seven hundred thousand Naira handed down against someone alleged to have pilfered over twenty billion Naira. It has me fair whistling now, and I tell you, I don’t whistle easily; I do it through the nose. That is also how I speak English.

    Now, if we remember anything about Shylock, it is the fact that the man was difficult to please. First, he drew a contract so tight that literally required that his debtor would not be able to wriggle out of it without shedding some of his precious blood. Next, he wound his daughter up in a domestic wreath so carefully woven with starvation that the poor girl could not legally get out of it without resorting to elopement. And that was what she did, with his lucre and diamonds. And that had him crying for his daughter and, yes, his lucre too. In the midst of his woes, he remembered a very comforting thought: the contract he had drawn up would at least give him the much needed respite of being able to obtain a pint of blood or two, just for the satisfaction of seeing someone shed some blood. The judge said yes, he was entitled, and so he enthused ‘… A Daniel come to judgement!’ Why am I giving you this long story in its entire height and breadth? I honestly don’t know except perhaps to give you the background of how Daniel, the biblical prophet, came to be associated with Judge Advocacy Duties (JAD).

    Good judgements are getting increasingly rare in Nigeria, perhaps because good judges are getting increasingly rare. Good judges are getting increasingly rare because, let’s face it, there aren’t many Daniels around anymore. (Don’t get me wrong; there are many people called Daniel but obviously, they are not necessarily judges.) So, good people are getting increasingly rare in Nigeria. Just to buttress that last point, I heard the other day that a couple in this country employed a supposed house girl; only to find the next day that their house had been swept clean of both goods and girl while they were at work. In English, this means that the girl disappeared with all their worldly goods before the good people came back from work the next day. What dangerous times we live in.

    And how’s this for a horror story? Someone recounted how the commercial vehicle he travelled in was waylaid on a Nigerian highway by the Nigerian highwaymen who demanded everything everyone had. After the robbers left, everyone was relieved to find that the only things they lost were material things, all that is, except one person who had cleverly quipped to the highway men that all fingers were not equal, that was why he could not give more than he did. They then made his fingers equal with their cutlass. I tell you, things are so bad in the country now you do not go around testing your wit against anybody’s anyhow. Now, where was I?

    Ok, like I said, everyone is gabbling about that judgement. People are wondering how on earth anyone can be said to embezzle something in the region of twenty billion Naira, and the court hands down a judgement that finds him guilty but awards only seven hundred and something thousand naira against him? That judgement stinks. It is laughable. It will encourage us all to steal and damn the consequences. That’s as good as throwing the judiciary into the dustbin of history like a discarded appendix.

    To start with, it has us all wondering what the role of the judiciary is in this world. I had always thought the judiciary was supposed to serve the purpose of arbitrating between two contending sides such as my dog and I. If I fulfil my contract of feeding, sheltering and clothing it (I brush his coat, don’t I?), then he should please bark to assure me he can guard the house. Now, when, rather than bark, he prefers to lick visitors’ feet, I have the right to call in the courts, don’t I?

    The judiciary should mediate between ‘We the People’ and anyone who decides he/she wants to go buy Italian villas adorned with swimming pools with the hard earned money of pensioners. We should expect the judiciary to hang such people for us by going after him/her, guns blazing and daggers drawn, on the side of The People against the corroding insect.

    But that’s just silly us talking. We must have thought we were in this normal country where everything runs as it should. Instead, we find ourselves in another country where the abnormal is not only common place but quite the norm because ‘friend, this is Nigeria’. Come, it is only in Nigeria that one can loot any number of billions and all you get is a tweak of your nose and a playful twist of your earlobe by the equally playful court. It is only in Nigeria that a major airport can be put in total darkness on the orders of a minion while his superiors are literally in the dark about it all. And all we do about these things is grumble silently.

    Really, I don’t begin to know the role of the judiciary any more, given their antecedents. Together with the police and the press, the judiciary is supposed to work for the progress and good of the society by punishing the bad and rewarding the good. Now, all that the judgement has done is show that the judiciary is crumbling. So, should these courts continue to adjudicate for us or should we look for another?

    Perhaps, we should look out for some wise men in our midst and set them up with all the paraphernalia of office without the wig, for I am beginning to suspect that wig. Just look at the colour. Ugh! That’s right, let us look for some hard-nosed, white-haired wise men who would come to judgements with only one thing on their mind: the good of the society. Forget your school-trained judges: they seem to be more preoccupied with wanting to be like the politicians – interested only in filling their offshore accounts that cannot be traced and which they will never spend. Believe me, I know; there are too many examples of Nigerians who did not spend theirs. Forget the law also: it is an ass anyway.

    Look, I believe that people are really not interested in the law being an ass any longer in Nigeria. The sanctity of the law is the progress and sanity of the society. I therefore recommend that the country should reject that judgement and ask that it be reviewed. It is too bizarre to believe. Indeed, one should not even let it stay in the records because someday, if the Martians succeed in colonising the earth and they come across that judgement, it will give a very bad image of the country and leave a sour taste in their mouths, if they have any.

  • Boko Haram’s controversial ceasefire/peace offer

    Both the federal government and Borno State have reacted with tentative unease to the offer by Boko Haram to declare unilateral ceasefire and engage in dialogue for lasting peace. On the part of Borno State, they are desperate to have any kind of deal as long as it would lead to cessation of hostility, but are not sure whether the sect’s proposal will fly, especially in view of the federal government’s newfound bellicosity. Abuja on the other hand is exasperated by the sect’s obduracy and refusal in the past months to enter into dialogue without preconditions. And in the face of the Mali campaign, which the government says may have disrupted Boko Haram’s command structure and safe haven, Abuja appears to think the sect is cornered and desperate. There is, therefore, brinkmanship on both sides.

    There has never been a consensus on dialogue with the Islamist sect. There will never be. But it is also understandable why Borno State, which has borne the brunt of the sect’s activities, is desperate to secure peace in order for economic and social activities to be restored. For both federal and state governments, the issue of setting a sound and principled precedent for leaders to follow in the face of anarchical groups levying war against the state is not urgent at all. This was why they pussyfooted for a long time over whether to dialogue with the sect or not. But just when the vacillating Jonathan government had made up its mind to fight until victory was achieved, the sect threw a hard bone into the mix, which Borno State seems resolved to chew with its milk teeth.

    In making up their minds on the sect’s proposal, especially the demand for N26bn compensation, it is important for both Borno and Abuja to know that the innocent dead, especially those whose lives were shattered for no reason other than either their religion or refusal to cooperate with the sect, cannot be part of that negotiation. The federal and state governments must also struggle with the deeply troubling irony of making a deal with the sect to reward its living and dead members for having levied war against the state and destroyed other people’s lives while purportedly fighting either social or economic injustice.

    Boko Haram militants, some state governments in the Northeast, and many of the sect’s sympathisers argue that since the federal government could spend hundreds of billions of naira to end Niger Delta militancy, it should be prepared to spend a decent fraction of that to end militancy in the North. Such arguments deliberately fail to take cognisance of the striking dissimilarities between the two types of militancy. While the Niger Delta campaigns were first and foremost directed at economic sabotage for years of indefensible neglect of the region, the Boko Haram campaigns were first and foremost an unconscionable human tragedy enacted wilfully by a misguided group that has now spawned more violently adventurous splinter groups. It is a disservice to intellectualism and to the country to excuse the destructions wreaked by the sect, or to monetise peace.

    Boko Haram sympathisers should be advised to limit their campaigns to pleading for amnesty for the sect’s foot soldiers. They should also limit themselves to suing the government for all the documented cases of extra-judicial killings carried out by security agents. Perhaps the courts may even compel the government to pay substantially more than the arbitrary N26bn the sect is asking for. But for the Republic to be saved and the law and constitution preserved, the sect’s leaders must be apprehended, tried and punished according to the laws of the land. In addition, security agents who engaged in extrajudicial killings should be brought to book, and the point made that Nigeria is not a lawless jungle filled with maniacal and uncontrollable killers in uniform. And then finally, the innocent dead and wounded must receive adequate compensation for peace to reign.

  • Maina, Elumelu, Lawan: The haunted hunters

    Maina, Elumelu, Lawan: The haunted hunters

    Panels in Nigeria do not just help the government to distract, entomb or procrastinate; they also consume virtually everyone who has had the misfortune of heading them. The examples of Abdulrasheed Maina (Presidential Task Team on Pension Reform (PTTPR), Ndudi Elumelu (House of Representatives Committee on Power Sector Reforms), and Farouk Lawan (House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on Monitoring of Fuel Subsidy Regime) are pointers to the contradictions that afflict the body politic. There are a few less significant cases, and many more near misses. The recent Mallam Nuhu Ribadu panel (Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force), a red herring, escaped the fate of the first three panels by the skin of its teeth and probably by the combustible nature of the panel chairman’s personality.

    After many months of controversial manoeuvrings, Maina was last week declared wanted by the police on the instigation of the Senate which had summoned him to shed light on missing pension funds totalling some N195bn. The Maina Presidential Task Team was constituted about two years ago to investigate pension funds mismanagement and to sanitise and modernise the procedure for pension administration in the military, police, Department of State Security (DSS), customs, immigration, prison and pension office (CIPPO) and the Head of Service Pension Offices. However, presenting the Senate’s case against Maina, Senator Kabiru Gaya said: “…N195 billion pension fund is unaccounted for. In the head of service alone, N139 billion was released but N100 billion was paid out to pensioners. In the police service, N131 billion was paid in five years but only N88 billion was paid out, N44 billion is yet to be accounted for. This money belongs to the masses and it is expected that it should be accounted for.”

    Why Maina avoided the summons has not been fully explained by any official in the Task Team. But he was quite enthusiastic in declaiming late last year that the team had discovered earth-shaking facts on pension maladministration. As he put it exuberantly and perhaps exaggeratedly: “I want to tell you that what we have uncovered will surprise Nigerians. We have found that pension fund up to N3.3 trillion was stolen by the cabal and we are going to recover all the money…we have recovered about N221 billion and deleted 71,135 ghost pensioners from the civil service list…In addition N74 billion of the N181 billion discovered has been mopped up for utilization in the 2012 budget…We have conducted biometrics for 170,000 pensioners, established e-pension management system, pioneered the payment of pensioners in the Diaspora and introduced smart cards to eliminate physical verification of pensioners.” By the time he began to lyricise his team’s achievements, he had become a hunted and haunted man.

    But a national reputation is not secured upon the basis of one aberration. While the Senate was engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Maina, with the latter still avoiding either arrest or imprisonment, Mr Ndudi Elumelu, a member of the House of Representatives, was left bewildered by how rapidly he transformed from hunter to hunted. It began with the late President Umaru Yar’Adua suggesting that his predecessor, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, had spent some $10bn dollars on power projects without result. Soon, the House of Representatives also declared alarmingly that the Obasanjo government actually spent $16bn on power projects with little to show for it. No one knew nor bothered to verify how the legislators did their calculations. But the sound of $16bn was enough to send the country, which was asphyxiating under a minuscule 3000MW generation of electricity, into a deafening uproar.

    In 2008, Elumelu was put at the head of the national consensus to get its pound of flesh from the enraged power sector (not fuel subsidy) cabal, not minding the collateral damage. But before the panel was through with its assignment, an assignment that saw it stepping on giant toes and engaging in acerbic exchange with Obasanjo, stories alleging bribery and corruption against the panel and its chairman became rife. Words of encouragement from governors and sympathisers were sadly insufficient to exculpate Elumelu. He was not even allowed to present his report, having barely managed to complete the assignment without being hounded into jail. He eventually went to jail for about a month, and was tried for allegedly misappropriating some N5.2bn Rural Electrification Agency (REA) contracts. It was only last year that he was discharged and acquitted. As for the panel’s recommendations, a total of some 88, most were thrown out, and the surviving few inoculated against causing damage to anyone’s reputation. The shell-shocked Elumelu is today quietly chewing the cud in the legislature.

    If Maina is scurrying animatedly from one rathole to another to evade what his pursuers call capture, and Elumelu has become almost phlegmatic, swearing never again to be lured into any national assignment where he would step on toes, Farouk Lawan, another House of Representatives member, is dismayed by how quickly he has fallen and how numbed he has become. If Maina is as clever as his words and visage indicate, he will humour the furious legislators probing the pension scam and get away with nothing but fierce censure. Elumelu has become a safe ruminant and legislative wonk. He was badly beaten and bruised, but he is still perching on what looks like the moral high ground. This is not the case with Lawan. The petit legislator has been beaten insensate by sickening, short-range blows from the executive branch and one of its men Friday, the illustrious and undiscriminating Mr Femi Otedola.

    Lawan’s story is probably the most dramatic and pathetic since Nigeria began its troubling experimentation with parliamentary practices. Member of the House of Representatives since 1999, his star rising with each passing year, and his elocution, like his rich voice, deliberate, endearing and near as oratorical as anyone who is not an orator can get, Lawan seemed made for parliamentary jousting and destined for parliamentary glory. Not only was he leader of the so-called Integrity Group in the Reps, a label he and others in his group acquired when they battled former Speaker Patricia Etteh over corruption allegations, he inspired confidence in many Nigerians about his bona fides, and evoked an unquenchable ability to strive for his country’s glory. In April 2012, according to the prosecutor, he solicited for a $3m bribe from businessman Femi Otedola, and only managed to collect $620,000 of the sum before his luck ran out. The state will try to make the accusation stick; but Lawan will try his best to wriggle out of the net. There is little hope, however, that he will succeed.

    But Lawan’s troubles began when he was named chairman of the panel on fuel subsidy payments. The panel did the job with such public daring and flourish that Nigerians were glued to what they dubbed the subsidy opera. In the din, Lawan’s mellifluous voice and characteristic surefootedness, both of which belied his size, could be heard and seen distinctly, soothing wounded hearts and lifting broken spirits. But with the Otedola accusation, the once confident Lawan voice has given way to a hoary, feeble baritone, slower than usual, and many of his statements contradictory and clearly illogical. A court has remanded him in prison until his bail application can be heard later this week. After stalling for many months Lawan now probably feels subdued, disconsolate and haunted, broken in spirit as he is in body, and perhaps with not the faintest idea of a way out.

    Of the three gentlemen, Lawan is probably the worst hit. While the courts will be procedurally restrained by legal exigencies to assume his guilt, the public is less troubled by any consideration of conscience. Once Otedola went public, they had concluded there was no conceivable way of escape for the petit PDP legislator from Kano. More, the public sighs in frustration at the paradoxical jinx afflicting panels in these parts, and the seeming impossibility of finding one good man in government by whom we could swear, or failing that, one good man anywhere to probe the failure of government.

  • The return of Mlungu

    The return of Mlungu

    (Towards the recolonisation of sub-Saharan Africa)

    As he lay mortally wounded in the open field, with vultures circling overhead and hyenas braying in the distance, Chaka made one final superhuman effort to raise himself from the valley of the dying. The great Zulu emperor was no stranger to near death experiences. He had survived horrific wounds before and outlived savage mutilations unleashed by enemy spears. But the gaping eyesores inflicted by his own envious siblings proved too close to call.

    His eyes glazed over with imminent death. But before he gave up the ghost, the great African warrior who was often referred to as a black Napoleon roused himself to give his historic verdict on those who had betrayed him. The great Zulu empire would not pass on to his resentful siblings. Mlungu is coming, Chaka noted as his great frame finally toppled over. Mlungu is the South African native epithet for a white person, particularly from overseas. As predicted, the empire promptly dissolved before the Boer invaders after some momentous bloodletting.

    As it is with everything African where legend is inseparable from reality and where fact meshes with fiction and fantasy, nobody is sure whether the prophecy is true, or whether Thomas Mofolo, Chaka’s fictional biographer, was indulging his splendid imagination. Some have even gone as far as accusing the great South African novelist of Sotho nationalism.

    It was alleged that a resentful Mofolo never forgave Chaka for smashing up his people’s pre-colonial fiefdom.. On the historic scale of a testament-like dismissal and denouncement of a whole race for perfidy, this one is at par with Alafin Aole’s celebrated denouncement of the Yoruba race. Ironically, they both happened around the same time. It was death and the king’s horsemen again as two different African communities in different parts of Africa experienced the same stress and strain brought about by historical pressures on old African feudal formations.

    Almost three centuries on, the successor nation-states to the old African empires are experiencing the stress and strains brought about by new historical realities. All over Africa, particularly in its sub-Saharan region, the nation-state paradigm is in dire straits. It appears as if the colonial falcon no longer hearkens to the post-colonial falconer. As anarchy is let loose in the region, the old imperialist cartography of the continent is under siege.

    If the pictures coming out of Mali this past fortnight are to be believed, Mlungu is clearly back in Africa, that is if he ever left. A recolonisation of failing and failed states in Africa is underway. If in the past, the recolonisation was often purely ideological or predatory, this time around it is for reasons of self-preservation. Let the African political dinosaurs who have failed their people and their nations continue to strut and preen about the imperial metropole without any sense of shame or sobriety. The judgement hour is at hand, and it is going to be a messy and savage denouement indeed.

    An engrossing historical paradox is unfolding before our very eyes. The crowds of native Malians lustily cheering and hailing French troops as they swept through the historic cities of Gao, Timbuktu and Kildai are welcoming their old colonial conquerors as new post-colonial liberators! It doesn’t get more paradoxical than that. This is not some desert mirage, or a sandstorm-induced optical illusion. It will be the same if the scene were to be repeated in many African countries.

    As we have noted repeatedly in this column, a dead man will have to be buried, if not because of his relations but because his corpse constitutes a health hazard to the rest of the community. As at this moment, many African countries, particularly in the sub-Saharan region, constitute a health hazard to the international community. As it has been brilliantly formulated, globalisation is both the universalisation of the particular and the particularisation of the universal. In other words, except where it meets successful local particulars, western modernity will try to extend its domain to every nook and corner of the world.

    With the globalisation of the social media network and the universalisation of satellite communication, the native Malians even in their desert encroaches know what good governance is all about. They reject the incompetent and bankrupt government in the South and the savage species of prehistoric Islamic fundamentalism that was foisted on them by the al-queda militants in the north.

    The Islamic fanatics did nothing to endear themselves to the local populace while they were in charge, and it was clear they had nothing to offer except the wild and merciless cruelty of their Stone Age inquisition. The testimony of the natives who had suffered under the harsh misrule of the frowning jihadists is apt and compelling. “Cest ne pas bon!,” they chorused in broken French with near universal revulsion.

    It was clear that to the average Malian there was nothing to choose between the buffoonish incompetence of the political elite left behind by colonisation and the Stone Age barbarity of the Islamic fundamentalists who are the sadistic relics of an older Islamic civilisation masquerading as a new variant of modernity. They chose their old colonial masters instead.

    In the continent of Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah, Herbert Macauley, Julius Nyerere, the former Benjamin Azikiwe and the former Jeremiah Awolowo and all the great titans of the decolonising project that seized the African imagination in the period leading to independence, this is like going back to one’s vomit. These great avatars of African consciousness must be turning in their grave at the plight of the continent.

    But let us be clear in our mind about one thing. The tragedy we are witnessing in Mali is not about a clash of two civilisations, that is western civilisation and its Islamic variant. Rather, it is the endgame of a dismal miscarriage of the two civilisations on the continent of Africa. This is about aborted western modernity and rationality as seen in the chaotic mess of sub-Saharan Africa and the debasement of the classical tenets of Islam as seen in the antics of the unenlightened jihadists that have seized the desert dunes of North Africa.

    With this in mind, the central question can now be posed and answered. Why is it that modern Mali, conceived as a true nation-state cannot solve the security challenges posed by corrupt and inefficient governance and the subsequent threat posed to its corporate existence by the Jihadists’ rebellion? And why is it that neighbouring countries in the West African community were so lax and laggard in coming to the aid of their sister-country until France seized the bull by the horns? The answer is that most of these colonial contraptions are not true nation-states in the classical sense of the paradigm. You cannot give what you don’t have..

    France is not in Mali on a naïve humanitarian mission. This is a security operation abroad for the purpose of maintaining internal security at home, such as happens with the periodic occupation of Haiti by the US in what is known as immigration control at source. With its large immigrant community of African extraction, a fundamentalist Islamic corridor straddling the desert fringes of northern Africa is a direct threat to metropolitan France.

    As the Islamic terrorists melt away into their desert redoubts wilting under the superior firepower of France, it is not yet Uhuru for Mali. They will be back as soon as French troops withdraw, to inflict momentous casualties on African peace keepers and the renegade Malian army. The jihadists already had a measure of Malian troops and they know they are not up to scratch. The Sahara Desert will be foaming with blood for a long time to come.

    After military expedition must come political expiation. It is not surprising that it is France that is showing utmost clarity in the confusion, calling on the Malian government to initiate negotiations with the more moderate elements in the north. This is the way forward not just for Mali but for other failed and failing states in sub-Saharan Africa. The political basis of these structural time-bombs will have to be re-negotiated clause by clause and phrase by phrase before their political elite bring the populace to further peril.

  • A grisly summons to enfield

    As snooper was landing in harsh and wintry London on Friday morning, we received a grisly summons to suburban Enfield to attend the funeral of Bimpe Ojerinola, nee Osibodu. A funereal gloom descended on yours sincerely which was compounded by the cold Arctic blast. Snooper had long been expecting a reunion with Bimpe, our late friend’s wife, but not a final farewell. Such is the ephemeral nature of life and the brutal contingency of human existence.

    Snooper was too overwhelmed and exhausted to make it to Enfield, but almost all the funeral eulogies painted a life of unblemished generosity and selfless love. Bimpe lived her life at the behest of others and was the nearest thing to a secular saint. A scion of the illustrious Osibodu family of Ilishan Remo, the departed was the wife of Segun Ojerinola, a Nigerian diplomat who fell in the course of duty to his fatherland in the Nigerian embassy at Belgrade in the late nineties where he was Head of Chancery.

    The ever swankily turned out and swaggering Segun Ojenrinola, a.k.a Jagger, was one of the rising stars of the Nigerian Diplomatic Corps until sudden death snatched him away in faraway Belgrade. Affable and clubbable to boot and full of witty pranks, Segun was a pure delight to be with. He was kind, courtly and courteously solicitous of the wellbeing of others. Now, he has been joined by his equally virtuous wife. May their worthy souls find eternal repose and may their orphaned children reap the fruits of the goodwill and kindness their parents have sown.