Category: Lawal Ogienagbon

IN the past few weeks, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has been embroiled in controversy over how to choose its candidates for next year’s elections. Should it be by direct or indirect primary? Both systems are allowed  for the picking of candidates. A party is free to choose which of the systems it prefers  with the consent of its members.

Where members disagree on which to adopt, there will be trouble as we have now in APC. For years, our politicians have been comfortable with the indirect system because, as some say, it creates an elbow room to manoeuvre. What they are saying in effect is that the system can be manipulated to favour certain candidates. According to its opponents,  its outcome does not always reflect the wishes of party members.

To them, the direct is it in order to ascertain the popularity of a candidate. The system, they say is open and cannot be manipulated. Everything, they argue, is done in the open; in full public glare, so to say, with all the aspirants and party members participating. As in politics, so in football, but to a limited extent. In the round leather game, a footballer always prays for a direct free-kick, a kick that he will take without any encumbrance. There will be no players forming a wall to prevent the ball from getting into the goal, if the keeper is not alert enough.

Every player prays for such an opportunity, where he will be left alone with the keeper. A penalty best typifies this kind of situation, but that is not to say, you cannot lose it, if it is not well taken. Whether or not a player will take his chance, he counts himself lucky when he gets a penalty. Though in football, a player prays for a penalty – a direct kick – which he can lose, in politics many aspirants are averse to such a direct system. They prefer the indirect system, where everything has been taken care of ahead of the exercise.

Again, while the footballer is not that disposed to an indirect kick because of the wall he has to beat in order to score,  to the aspirant, the indirect system is most favoured because all he needs do is to ensure that the wall, that is the delegates at the primary, are well taken care of before the d-day. The APC is in dilemma over this issue. Until now, the party had always used  indirect primary in picking its candidates before it changed course with the Osun State governorship shadow election on July 20.

Why then is there noise over the kind of primary to adopt for picking candidates for the 2019 elections? By now, it should be a settled matter since the party has adopted direct primary to pick its presidential candidate on September 20. But it is not, because some forces are bent on the old ways of doing things which always ended in chaos. The fight is now between the party’s governors and their lawmakers who do not see eye to eye. Where the governors and lawmakers are friends, everything is cosy. But where the governors and lawmakers are estranged, it is crisis galore.

The APC should be a party of example; a party that will lead the way for others to follow. The change it promised when it was elected in 2015 should be across board; it should not be limited to issues of governance alone. The way it intends to pick its standard bearers is generating heat because of its promise to do away with the old ways of doing things. Will it live up to its promise by giving us a clean, open and credible direct primaries at the state and national levels? There is nothing bad in either direct or indirect primary, but one is surely better than the other. And that is the direct primary, which its National Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, said the party has adopted.

The party, he said, decided to ‘’liberalise” its shadow election by making all registered members automatic delegates. Since the party is supreme, shouldn’t all members just fall in line and abide with that decision? Its all-powerful governors are not ready to toe the party line. Many of them are insisting on indirect primary where they can control delegates that will vote at the poll. A source quoted by this paper on Tuesday said it all.

According to the source, those opposed to direct primary are mainly governors who were the major beneficiaries of the delegates’ system, which they maximally exploited to personal advantage. But, senators, he added, are rooting for it. “Some senators are not in the good books of their governors. But, they can win at the direct primary if they are in the good books of their people in the party”, the source said.

The difference between the direct and indirect primary is just in the participants. In the direct system, every member of the party is  a delegate, but in the indirect, delegates are first elected at congresses before going for the shadow poll to pick candidates. Then, there are automatic delegates, who are all beholden to governors. With most of the delegates in the governors’ pockets, their excellencies’ candidates are bound to win.

With the problems wrought by the defections in APC, the party has to handle this issue with care in the interest of many of its federal lawmakers who did not join the defection bandwagon. Some of these lawmakers are not in the good books of their governors. In fact, they are at war. With the 2019 elections around the corner, the governors are waiting in the wings to exact their pound of flesh from the lawmakers to, as they say, teach them a lesson in the power game.

This is a delicate issue, which APC must  handle with utmost care to avoid disaster at the polls in 2019. An acrimonious primary will not be in APC’s interest because its fallout may affect the party’s chances in the forthcoming elections.

THE restructuring debate has not gone cold; it is still as hot as ever. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and one of his predecessors, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, are sparring over the vexed issue. Last week, Osinbajo said he was opposed to geographical restructuring, insisting that the problem with Nigeria is corruption. Once the malaise is treated, he argued, every other thing would fall in place.

Former Vice President Atiku, disagreed, arguing that the country must be geographically restructured to move forward. To Osinbajo, Atiku’s concept is “vague”. Atiku replies that Osinbajo should take a stand on the issue and stop ‘’this approbation and reprobation’’. Gbangaaun! Next round.

THE was not taken away alone. Leah Sharibu, 15, was abducted from her school with over 100 other girls. It all happened on February 19 at the Government Girls Secondary School, Dapchi, Yobe State. The girls were in their dormitories when their abductors struck. Boko Haram insurgents carted them away in trucks, driving throughout the night until they got to their destination.

Where they took the girls to remains unknown till today despite reports that the sect’s well known base, Sambisa Forest, has been reduced to Ground Zairo. If that fortress is no longer in the sect’s grip, where then could it have taken the 111 girls after their abduction? Do they have other places where they keep their victims? There is need to look beyond Sambisa in order to really render Boko Haram impotent.

The sect held on to the girls for over a month before releasing 105 of them. Five were said to have died. Leah was not released because she refused to renounce Christianity. She is the only non-Muslim among the girls. Since her mates were released on March 22, she has been the only one left in captivity. For a 15-year-old girl, this can be traumatic. No friends, no family or any other person that she can easily relate with.  Leah has no other person than God to keep her company.

After the others’ release, the government promised that she would not be abandoned in captivity; that it would do everything to bring her back. It has been six months since others returned home, yet nobody is sure of when Leah too would breathe the air of freedom. The Dapchi incident was not the first of its kind. It was predated by the kidnap of over 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State, on April 15, 2014. Till today, many of those girls are still in Boko Haram’s enclave, over four years after their abduction.

Where are they being held when Sambisa has been levelled? Have they been taking to another country? Is it possible that the sect has another base, where it holds victims, which the security agencies have not discovered?  We should be concerned about the whereabouts of these girls because as citizens of Nigeria the government owes it a duty to account for every one of us. It is consoling that the government has promised that it would not forget any of them in captivity.

But whatever needs to be done should be done with dispatch. These girls are some people’s children. Their parents can never be themselves until they are reunited with their kids. What is keeping these parents going today is the hope that they would one day see their girls again. Leah’s case is pathetic because of the circumstance of her own case. Out of 106 girls excluding the five who died, she was singled out to be held on to by the abductors.

What is her offence? Her refusal to embrace Islam! Can that really be the reason for still holding on to her or does Boko Haram have other reasons for its action which we are not privy to?  Boko Haram is not doing all it is doing because it loves Islam so much or because its members are the purest among Muslims. It is doing what it is doing because it pays it to engage in those bestial acts.

What has Islam got to do with abducting girls and forcing them to marry you or embrace your faith? What has Islam got to do with invading churches and mosques to kill people? What has Islam got to do with invading schools and carting away pupils? What has Islam got to do with storming people’s homes to snuff life out of them?

Islam, we are told, is a religion of peace. Since that is the case, why then should some people kill, maim, rape and loot in its name? Despite her fate, Leah Sharibu has really shown that she is made of sterner stuff. She has displayed a strong will, which is rare to come by these days. On Monday, we heard from the girl, who has shown uncommon courage in the face of adversity. Her abductors’ plan is to break her, but she remains unbowed.  Then as we know, there is a limit to human endurance. Her message to the outside world on Monday was a call to us all not to forget her.

As it is now, all parents, who see themselves as true parents, are her father and mother. She is no longer only the child of Mr and Mrs Nathan Sharibu. This girl has gone through a lot, but her faith has kept her going. As we pray for her faith to see her through, the government too should step up action on how it can get Boko Haram to free her . Her message sears the heart and whenever I play it back in my head, my heart aches.

“I am Leah Sharibu, the girl that was abducted at GGSS, Dapchi. I am calling on the government and people of goodwill to intervene to get me out of my current situation. I also plead with members of the public to help my mother, my father, my younger brother and relatives. Kindly help me out of my predicament. I am begging you to treat me with compassion. I am calling on the government, particularly the President, to pity me and get me out of this serious situation. Thank you”.

Will we hearken to Leah’s cry for help or will we allow her abductors to break her will? May we not fail this girl as a nation at a time she needs us most.

AS a law enforcement agency, the Department of State Services (DSS), which is better known by its former name of State Security Service (SSS), is saddled with the enormous responsibility of gathering intelligence so as to nip in the bud any offensive act. To do this job well, its operatives are expected to work incognito.

These agents are to go about quietly without drawing attention to themselves in order to catch would-be criminals before they strike. You may be a friend to a secret agent without even knowing the job he does.

The DSS and its agents should operate with utmost secrecy and move only when they have concrete reasons to do so. In most instances, I am sorry to say, our secret agents work in breach of their modus operandi. They go about flaunting their identities and in the process they give themselves away.

Our secret agents are too open and too loud for the job they do. By virtue of their training, they are a special breed of people and they are expected to move about with stealth. But no, they prefer to announce themselves with fanfare, as if it is by so doing that they would make their mark. They cannot be blamed for this. It is more a leadership fault than that of these agents who are the foot soldiers. These agents are merely carrying out the orders of their superiors, many of who have not done away with the military mentality of running that complex organisation.

Under the military, the DSS was a tool for oppression and suppression. It worked closely with the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) gathering intelligence, which in many cases, turned out to be false. People were picked up at will and detained without any plausible reason. Newspaper houses and other businesses, which did not support the government of the day, were termed ‘’public enemies’’ and shut down.

It is the carryover of this mentality that is the bane of today’s DSS. Just imagine holding a journalist, Jones Abiri, for two years without charging him to court before commonsense prevailed under a new dispensation. This may be a sign of the much desired change at DSS under its acting Director-General Matthew Seiyefa.  It is high time the DSS charted a different path for itself in line with the practices of similar agencies around the world. What happened at the National Assembly on August 7 would not have happened at all, if the DSS had cultivated the right attitude of doing things following the return to democratic rule in 1999. It still believes in  jack boot mentality almost 20 years after the exit of the military junta.

As some have rightly said, the DSS’ blockade of the National Assembly was nothing short of a coup. It was not only a coup against the legislature, but also a coup against the country. The legislature is the live wire of democracy. If you remove the legislature from a democracy, you will cripple the government because there will be no organ to make laws for the smooth running of the country.

The DSS acted beyond its mandate by invading the National Assembly, citing a vague ‘’order from above’’, the same line it usually threw in the past at individuals and organisations whose premises were invaded at will under the military. Only God knows when it will come off this ‘’order from above’’ hangover. The DSS loves to assume the powers it does not have once it identifies an individual or institution as ‘enemy’ of the government. Once it tags you as such, you are in trouble. Without the government’s prompting, it will hunt and hound you, knowing full well that the government will look the other way.

This was the tactic it used in the past. It got away with it because the government needed an organisation to do its dirty jobs for it. The DSS suited that role perfectly and its head became the ‘beloved child’. That was then; now that things have changed, the DSS has refused to change. It wants to live in the past, when it did nothing but to frame up individuals and institutions, just to please the government. The DSS is not meant to be the lap dog of the president of a country. It is there to serve the country and its people. It should remember that presidents come and go. What happens to the president whose tune it dances to today when the former number one citizen becomes an ordinary citizen from who it can no longer take orders. Will the organisation invade his house because the tide has changed,  just as it did to some people while he was in office, claiming to be acting on ‘order from above’?

The August 7 fiasco showed the DSS under its sacked Director-General, Lawal Daura, in its true colour – an agency of anything goes once the boss gives the order.  The people should own their security agencies, such outfits should not be organisations to be used by those in power to torment the public. The Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris’ preliminary report on the invasion submitted to then Acting President Yemi Osinbajo, is an indictment of the DSS. According to the IGP, ‘’the invasion was a gross violation of the Constitution’’.

The IGP said Daura was working with some senators and politicians to destabilise the country. Daura was said to have claimed responsibility for the siege to the National Assembly. The action, he claimed, became imperative based on intelligence reports that some people were trying to smuggle arms and other dangerous weapons into the complex. If that is true, is that how to go about getting those people? From the IGP’s  report, Daura had no reason to have invaded the National Assembly that day. There is no reason whatsoever for that siege, which has again further lowered us in the eyes of the world.

It also showed that Daura does not have respect for constituted authority to have carried out such act without informing the then acting president. What was he trying to prove? That he was not answerable to Osinbajo, who was then holding fort for President Muhammadu Buhari? Our security chiefs should not by their actions divide the Presidency. The message Daura unwittingly sent across is that he was only loyal to the President and not the acting president, who stood in for the Commander-in-Chief, who was in London then. A top security chief like him should know better.

The DSS has all it takes to be a great security agency if its leadership does away with kowtowing to those in power. By now, those who think all power lies in the hands of the DSS boss sure know that there is a higher power that can demystify any self-styled mystical figure that sits atop the agency.

Baba Richie at 60

TODAY, Richard Akinnola, one of the best court reporters ever produced by the media, turns 60. Baba Richie, as some of us who grew under his tutelage call him is a highly-principled and a no-nonsense man. You always  know where you stand with him. If you are truthful and honest, then you can count him as your friend. But if you are not, forget it Richard won’t touch you even with a long pole. I came across Richie when I was covering the court. For those of us younger than him, he was always ready to come to our aid whenever we ran into problem with those legal jargons any rookie reporter will surely run into in the early stage of his career.

Richard was and is still an authority in court reporting. If you read his celebrated legal column those days in the Vanguard, you will see the rigour he put into his work. A man, who stands by those oppressed, he wrote a book on Justice Yaya Jinadu for standing up to the authorities who wanted him to bend the law to favour a permanent secretary in the 1990s. The book titled : Salute to courage is an ode to Justice Jinadu. As Richie joins the Senior Citizens Club today, I wish him all the best. May your tribe increase.

IT IS IN the character of our security agents to overreach themselves. By so doing, they think they are serving the interest of their master. To them, the best way to be seen doing their job is by preempting the master; some kind of mind-reading  to know what the master wants or does not want. You cannot blame them because their masters too appear to take delight in such boot-licking. Over time, our security agents have come to see this as the best way to discharge their duty.

When some one disagrees with the master, that person immediately becomestheir target. They will go after that person and do all within their powers to cut that person to size in order to win their master’s heart. Whenever they act over zealously, they quickly hide under what they call ‘’order from above’’. In most cases, they have no such orders to so act. But by dropping that line they know they will be covered.

Citing ‘’order from above’’ when there is no such order amounts to acting illegally to deprive a citizen of his right. Many citizens have been unjustifiably held by security men purportedly acting on the authority of the state when there is  no such mandate. It is quite unfortunate that our security men who should be the custodians of law and order are the very ones who flout the laws. Under the military junta, Nigerians saw hell in the hands of these security men who always acted with impunity because they knew that whatever they did they would be covered.

Nobody was considered sacred that they could not touch under this omnibus ‘’order from above’’. Your home, your office, your business or anywhere for that matter can be overrun within a twinkling of an eye by these goons acting under, you guessed right, ‘’order from above’’. Many newspaper houses were shut under former heads of state Gen Ibrahim Babangida and the late Gen Sani Abacha under this whimsical order. As military head of state, Maj Gen Muhammadu Buhari, as he then was, also got two journalists jailed under the obnoxious Decree 4 for doing their job. Under this democracy, we have had a fair share of this impunity.

The police and the Department of State Service (DSS) are fond of singling out those with issues with the state for harassment. It is as if they are always waiting for friction between the government and an individual. Once they know of such problem, they tag the individual public enemy number one and go all out to get him. Since defection from one party to the other became a past time in the National Assembly, all eyes have been on our security agents to make a move for those seen to be giving the government tough time.

They find it easy to identify those people. Once you are no longer in the ruling government’s party or its good book, you become a target. We can see that from what has been happening to Senate President Bukola Saraki,  Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal, Kwara State Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed and others in their camp. Though President  Buhari has since said the defectors were free to go their own way, our security men do not seem to have heard him loud and clear. For all they care, the President could not have meant what he said. They simply did not believe that he was serious about his statement.

Since they have given the statement their own interpretation, it was just a matter of time before they moved against the government’s perceived enemies. They did that on Tuesday morning. Some armed DSS men, in hoods, stormed the National Assembly Complex and barred the lawmakers from gaining access to their offices. By their action, they also prevented the National Assembly leaders from holding a meeting to discuss crucial national issues. Interestingly, they claimed they were acting under ‘’order from above’’, implying that the government was aware of their action.

It turned out that they were lying. They had no such order to shut down the National Assembly. It was the sacked DSS Director-General Lawal Daura that was exercising powers that he did not have. It is high time the DSS, the police, and related security agencies weaned themselves of this military era mentality of storming public and private places to intimidate people for no just cause, citing a vague ‘’order from above’’. Our security men should not always be in a hurry to turn their guns on the very people who pay their salaries. No wonder our people do not see eye to eye with security men. The duty of our security men is to protect the nation and its citizens.

If the public hates the security agents with passion, they are the cause of it. There is no way any body can be friendly with the security agent who turns a gun on him. That is not possible. Daura and his men bit more than they can chew with Tuesday’s invasion of the National Assembly. They thought that it would be business as usual. But it turned out to be Daura’s last act and last lie in office. He lied to his men that he had an ‘’order from above’’ to shut down the National Assembly. The Presidency put a lie to his claim when it disowned him. He has since been sacked.

In a statement, the Presidency described the invasion as ‘’a gross violation of constitutional order, rule of law and all accepted notions of law and order’’, adding : ‘’all persons within the law enforcement apparatus who participated in this travesty will be identified and subjected to appropriate disciplinary action’’.

That is how it should be. Our security agents should not be allowed to trample upon the people and get away with it, all because they bear arms on behalf of the state. It is time they started to account for their action and inaction. This is how just and organised societies are built and Nigeria cannot be an exception.

THESE are interesting times. A time that you do not know what may happen in the next minute. A time that a politician elected on the platform of party A may defect to party B  without even his close friends and family members knowing his plan. Where a politician stands today is not necessarily where he will stand tomorrow and it is going to be like this until the elections are over in 2019.

It is in the nature of politicians to change camps as a chameleon changes its skin to match the colour of its environment. Politicians will always be politicians, those who know will say. By that, they are saying that many politicians have no scruples. They do not stand for something, rather they stand for everything.  A politician who does not stand for something, we are told, will stand for nothing.

I beg to disagree with the view that our politicians do not stand for something. They stand for something. If for nothing else, they stand for their own personal interest. They stand for something by reaping where they did not sow. They stand for something by appropriating money for their own comfort while the people they represent live in abject poverty. They stand for something by legislating laws to give themselves immunity from being prosecuted. If these are not issues a politician should stand for, I wonder what is worth standing for.

Politicians can be sly and deceptive. They say one thing and mean another. You can never understand their ways. This is why they say in politics, there are no permanent friends but permanent interests. The two leading parties in the country today following the 2015 elections are the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The APC is a coalition of parties comprising PDP, All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), and Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).

Those who joined APC from PDP did so from what they called the New PDP (nPDP). You would think that such people will never have anything to do with their former party again, going by what they said about it when they were leaving the fold four years ago. There was nothing they did not say about the party and its leadership then. Today, the same PDP has become a beautiful bride, or if you like the other woman, to them. For those who are fond of hitting the bottle the other woman analogy would not sound strange. It is a term used to describe those who take alcohol with reckless abandon. If a man can abandon his family for the bottle, something must definitely be wrong with him.

To the nPDP men of yesterday, the rejected PDP has today become the cornerstone of their refuge having become tired of their romance with APC. This estrangement is happening just as we approach another election year as it was the case when they were dumping PDP in 2014. Again, they jumped ship after moving out of APC to form what they called the Reformed APC (rAPC). In which vehicle will they drive out of PDP on the eve of the 2023 elections? Let me hazard a guess – the Energised PDP (ePDP)! You cannot put anything beyond our politicians. They are here today and there tomorrow.

They will always find reasons for their actions. When some members of the National Assembly comprising 13 senators and 37 House of Representatives members defected from the APC to PDP and the African Democratic Congress (ADC) last Tuesday, it was a sure sign that the crack in the ruling party was widening. Though the party leadership tried to stop the defections, its efforts were a little too late. Even President Muhammadu Buhari, who also intervened by inviting Senate President Bukola Saraki and others to the Villa, could not stem the defection tide.

More defections were expected to follow and they happened again on Tuesday when Saraki took leave of the PDP. ‘’For me, I leave all that behind me. Today, I start as I return to the party where I began my political journey, the PDP’’, he said in a statement on Tuesday. Saraki’s defection did not come as a surprise to political pundits. He was expected to make that move as most of his loyalists had already left APC for PDP. They even told him that well ‘’Oga we have left o. If you like remain there, you are on your own’’. Defection and cross carpeting on the floor of parliament are all part of the democratic process. It is just that our politicians use these as instruments to arm twist their party leaders for election tickets and other favours.

Often, it happens as an election year approaches, especially when it is time to pick candidates. So, defection has become an instrument of blackmail in the hands of unpopular politicians who feel that, that is the only way they can have their way and make it back to office. The APC defections are rather curious though. Why did its members become disenchanted with it so early in its life? The party is just four years old and has only spent three years in office. So, what went wrong? Is it that the party was just patched together for acquiring power without a meaningful plan for fostering internal democracy and governance.

No doubt a ruling party will always be under intense pressure, but that is when it is expected to show its character as a strong entity that can withstand any crisis. It is good that APC is facing this kind of crisis early in its life. It should be a learning curve for it. If it thought it was immune to the kind of crisis that swept PDP out of office in 2015, this has shown  that it assumed too much too early. The party needs to move fast to put its house in order for next year’s elections. Defections are not new; they will always occur in a democracy. So, losing your members to a rival party does not mean your end.

It should be a wake-up call for the party to address the genuine grievances raised by those departing to avert a recurrence in future. The problem is politicians can never be predicted nor trusted. They will always have one thing or the other against their party.  If that is not resolved in their favour, defection beckons. Will the defection of Saraki, Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed of his home Kwara State affect the party there during the 2019 elections? What are Saraki’s chances of retaining his seat as Senate president following his defection?

Will Saraki and his supporters be truly accommodated in PDP? Will the party throw its arms wide open to receive them or will it be shortlive romance just like that with APC? Will both parties respect the terms of their new found romance? Time will tell.