Chthonian vigour becomes the fetish of the legal profession. Or whatever is left of it.
The logic and rigour of the Rule of Law incinerate in the searing crust of venal rites. No thanks to the corrupt lawyer and jurist.
The synthesis of their articulated and unarticulated sinful lusts is of enormous consequence. Justice now subsists as monetised and politicised privilege.
The gross and barbaric proliferates within the judiciary and the legal profession because men and women with the character of the dung-beetle and the carabid are deified as gems and cultural touchstones.
While the corruptible jurist presides as minister of judicial decay, the venal lawyer, flaunting the finesse of the carabid, splashes and wades in the judicial bath of dissolution.
Integrity is exorcised. Duplicity is internalised. The system dissembles because it has been compromised and bonded to a leash of cash, by unrepentant occults.
If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers in the first place, argues Edward Wood aka Lord Halifax.
And speaking to the nub of the legal profession’s deathly rally, French dramatist and writer, Jean Giraudoux, states, that, “There’s no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.”
The corrupt lawyer would misappropriate the first sentence of his paragraph and pay no heed to the second part. Perhaps because he is a creature of forgettable parts. Call it selective adoption or adaptation. I would call it the insolence of intelligence; the blooming of brawn and perverse intellect.
The malady persists where a supposedly brilliant, connected, legal luminary wields his passion and intellect, as the political goon or assassin would, a machete and gun, at a price.
Many a poor, ordinary client, who hires an ‘unconnected’ lawyer in pursuit of justice often suffers the treatment of the adulterous widow, who hires her lover cum husband’s murderer to protect her from the ire of vengeful in-laws.
This is perhaps an extreme take on the value of the lawyer to the justice system as there are a few good lawyers, who have committed their professional lives to equity and justice. These people are not the target of this article, but the maleficent band, masquerading as truth-seekers and legal activists.
Just recently, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) reportedly issued a query to Aliyu Umar (SAN), the prosecutor of the suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, in the ongoing trial of the latter, at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), for taking up the brief.
The NBA, in the February 12, 2019 query accuses Umar of professional misconduct for accepting the brief and the query has triggered discord along the north-south divide following an alleged secret move to de-robe and delist Umar as a lawyer because the NBA demanded a copy of his Call to Bar certificate.
Some lawyers are of the opinion that the NBA issued the query in response to a petition filed against Umar. How convenient? To the litany of arguments and counter-arguments trailing the NBA’s combative disposition to the Federal Government’s prosecution of the former CJN, I find a worthy retort in prominent lawyer and human rights activist, Femi Falana (SAN)’s take on the nation’s legal system.
In an interview with The Punch’s Gbenro Adeoye, published on October 22, 2016, Falana says: “For ideological reasons, I have always had enemies in the legal profession. I am not bothered because some of the NBA leaders are not defending judges but themselves. When I was working with the late Comrade Alao Aka-Bashorun, who is rated as the best NBA president so far, the NBA did not address press conferences to declare a state of emergency, whatever that means. If judges were harassed or lawyers were detained, the NBA leaders would meet the Attorney-General or President of a country to find out the basis of any arrest.
“Aka-Bashorun did that in Nigeria, Togo and Ghana. In 1987, Aka-Bashorun mobilised 270 lawyers to defend the late Gani Fawehinmi. He was fighting a very corrupt military junta. When the same military dictators later charged some of us with treasonable felony, the NBA also defended us.
“At that time, the NBA never mobilised 90 lawyers to defend any lawyer charged with corrupt practices…The human rights committees of the NBA were mobilised to challenge the violation of the human rights of the Nigerian people.
“I am only asking the NBA to return to the glorious era of defending popular causes. But I cannot be part of the NBA if it goes around assembling scores of lawyers to appear for other lawyers when they are charged with bribing judges. If you organise a press conference to issue threats over the arrest of judges accused of corruption, you simply parade the NBA as a pro-corruption society.”
Although Falana’s take on NBA’s complicity was issued in response to a separate incident, it no doubt suffices against the volley of expletives and righteous vituperation issued by the NBA and certain self-appointed judicial activists, in condemnation of Onnoghen’s trial.
For the records, Onnoghen was suspended by President Muhammadu Buhari for failing to declare his assets, estimated at $3 million in domiciliary accounts, in full, before assuming office as CJN. Buhari issued the penalty, guided by the order of the Code of Conduct Tribunal of January 23.
Responding to the charges, Onnoghen said he forgot to declare the assets, describing the non-declaration of his domiciliary accounts as a mistake. Uglier details unfurl in the wake of his prosecution.
Given the facts of the case, it is mind-boggling that so-called senior lawyers, mostly Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs), would feverishly defend Onnoghen. In tune with their character, they belted a ludicrous aria, projecting shrilly and disconcertingly, a vulgar melody, chock-full of hatred and ethnic bigotries. They spun tiresome yarns to dull the ugliness of Onnoghen’s misdemeanour.
In truth, their frantic struggle is to keep the skeletons in their closets safely tucked from the prying eyes of the government and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), especially lawyers who may be found complicit making unjustifiable deposits in the CJN’s problematic accounts.
At a round-table with the government, concerned lawyers made outrageous demands, including the reversal of Onnoghen’s suspension and letting him go scot-free with the money in his frozen bank accounts.
This is what happens when duty and ethics get drenched in the fount of errant lusts, and repute drowns in torrents of money that extinguishes brilliance like a muck-sodden ember.
By their concerted effort to scuttle Onnoghen’s prosecution to the curious query issued to Onnoghen’s prosecutor, Nigeria’s so-called legal giants commit to unprecedented ridicule.
They would never query a colleague for exploiting legal loopholes to free an established looter or mass murderer. They would rather wield their query, like a sword, on Onnoghen’s prosecutor.
Nigeria is in dire need of true ethical natives, heroes of the judiciary and legal profession, on whose watch, justice may experience a spirited rebirth.
At the moment, justice subsists as wild privilege; it suffers savage extraction from the womb without the possibility of rebirth. Think of it as a forgotten corpse in the judicial tomb.
Its varnished vault, like Paglia’s cave art, is a hymn to daemonic darkness.
Before Aso Rock turns jail-house to Muhammadu Buhari; before the presidential villa becomes tomb to his presidential copse, will he neuter the myth of his impending nemesis? Or will he nurture it? Will he deprive his ego the lyricism of the mystic cabal?
What cabal? The one crawling out of the woodwork, as you read. The one scurrying in ravenous packs, like spectres and gnomes of primeval murk, to parade as patriots. In a few months, Buhari will be seen as a national boon or disaster, depending on how he responds to their lure.
The quality of his response would determine if he would be hailed as a true change agent by 2023, or inexhaustibly maligned as the fig that let down the leaf, the affliction Nigeria ought to have expunged.
En route the polls, contemporary boondocks legend mooted parables of him as a warrior in wolf-skin vest, brandishing a shield of steeled morality and a stone-axe, forged to hack down monuments, that, the corrupt ruling class built to entrench corruption.
His second coming, like his first, was undoubtedly borne of reaction. But he never mulled how people see him: be it as the ‘cloned Jubril of Sudan,’ an ‘unrepentant nepotist,’ ‘religious fundamentalist’ or devoted ‘Change’ agent;’ Buhari adopts the eloquence of silence.
The new president-elect dissolved into multiple identities characterised by the political arena’s familiar bogeys. His transformation was akin to Daniel Orowole Fagunwa’s mythical forest ghommid’s.
Other beings passed through him as if he were a wraith. He mutated like Fagunwa’s ghommid, who transforms into a tree, an antelope, a raging inferno, a bird, water and a menacing snake. While Fagunwa’s mythical creature assumes more or less the characteristics typical of its new category of being, Buhari struggled to preserve his individuality, mostly the capacity to think and act humanely, against the assault and intimidation of Nigeria’s tyrant herd.
At his re-election, the New York Times, opined that it “was in many ways a referendum on honesty, as voters once again embraced a candidate who held up a broom at rallies, declaring to sweep away the graft that has given the nation a bad reputation worldwide.
“It was also a tribute to the power of incumbency. For all Mr. Buhari’s talk of fighting corruption, some prominent suspects – including a governor caught on camera handing out a bribe – have gone unprosecuted under his regime. Critics say he targeted political opponents in his anti-graft inquiries.”
The foreign newspaper, so doing, launched a subtle attack at Buhari. Was it right by its critique or not? Does it intone a honest appraisal of Buhari’s first term or does it follow coordinated attempts by so-called super powers and their agents to thwart Buhari’s re-election, citing his suspension of former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Walter Onnoghen, and his alleged attempt to muzzle the opposition en route the elections.
It was public knowledge, that, these self-acclaimed champions of the ‘First World,’ severely starved of slush money hitherto channelled into their economies via money laundering and other shady international transactions by corrupt public officers, made frantic efforts to influence the February 23 elections in favour of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s Atiku Abubakar.
A Summit of Nigerian leaders and elders reportedly drawn from Afenifere, Northern Elders Forum, Ohaneze Ndigbo, Pan-Niger Delta Forum and Middle Belt Forum equally endorsed Atiku Abubakar, for the presidential poll.
All the retired generals, bank chiefs were solidly against Buhari’s re-election, since he caused them serious ‘bad business.’ His implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) policy, for instance, severely hampered their access to unearned benefits among other proceeds of their corrupt enrichment hitherto channelled into their banks’ coffers by dishonest public officers and government ministries in connivance with private collaborators.
One of the most curious kinks of the February 23 presidential elections, was the patronage of these predators by large segments of the voter divide, blinded by hatred of Buhari. As it was in 2015, this motley gang, comprising civil servants/treasury looters, pipeline vandals/oil magnates, thieving bank chiefs, chronic billionaire debtors, prophets of Mammon, ethnic/religious bigots, serving and retired military men, conspired to halt the Buhari shuttle.
They composed a soulful melody of hate, tainting Buhari as the most hideous villain bestriding the political space but thankfully, their melody fell flat on notes and lyricism as Nigeria refused to waltz to their spirited jazz of hatred and inordinate lusts.
Buhari’s re-election puts an end to the era, in which such desperate, lazy characters trooped to the presidential villa for hand-outs and unjustifiable favours.
Another beauty of his re-election is that none among them can misappropriate the glory of his electoral victory.
Buhari owes his second coming to the market woman of the sidewalk, the plumber, the bus conductor, the farmer, unemployed youth, student among others. He owes his re-election to everybody, including the career wailers and hailers and his most virulent critics.
Thus he must understand, that, he is not exclusively, the president of the north and parts of the south-west, south-east and south-south, where he won block votes. He is President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, warts, haters and all.
This time around, Buhari should feel free and very obliged to be decisive. He could start by scorning the renewal of licenses of shady individuals holding oil blocs in the country. How progressive it would be, if oil rich states rather than retired military generals, are exclusively allowed ownership and control of oil blocs.
Buhari should henceforth avoid a situation, wherever it exists, that the presidency is forced to pay the salaries of staff of private businesses of former heads of state; such malady is perpetrated by sneaking names of the latter’s staff into government payrolls as ghost workers.
Imagine a situation, whereby, a retired public officer, has about 400 of his staff on the payroll of the presidency or a federal ministry.
The multiple failures that beset the country, from the corrupt judiciary, executive and legislature, insecurity, substandard education, lack of quality healthcare, looting of public treasury, to the bloody insurgency in the northeast, are attributable to the dominance of a predatory ruling class.
At Buhari’s re-election, Nigerians expect that he would uncompromisingly lay to waste, the corrupt institutions built by his predecessors.
To achieve this objective, his mantra of chastity and change must neither be diametrically opposed to the realities of his ethics nor should it suffer the affliction of mutating expediences. The new president-elect must never dilute his moralist communion with toxic liquor. Lest he evolves as a revolutionary of the comedies.
He won’t eliminate besmirched society by redeeming morals with the amoral thus let him distance himself from toxic company.
Let him settle down to real work. In his recent address, he said there are tough times ahead. True. That warning is as much a jolt to him as it should be to its intended recipients.
The time for cuddling Buhari is now over. Let him truly aspire to fulfill his promises of ‘Change’ that every body can believe in and prosper by.
On this page, I campaigned for Muhammadu Buhari. On this page, I say, let him not conduct himself like the proverbial shepherd, who having lived among pigs, renovates his home after the sty with cinematic splendour.
IT would be astonishing if last week’s piece attracted no flak from certain quarters. Predictably, it did, thus affirming my claim that contemporary journalism suffers the affliction of too many con men mitered like the proverbial beautiful boy.
The latter’s claim to repute is a fanciful, militant disposition to the truth; craven masochism encroaches upon their puffed torso, leaving it a bloated sac of tissues and intumescent flesh.
Like tree bugs, they fed on and profited off Nigeria’s dysfunctional systems, under previous regimes. Post Goodluck Jonathan era, for instance, most of them played agent provocateur, specialists at ‘damage control’ for corrupt oil magnates, and looters in public and private offices, facing litigation or scandalous expose of their corrupt acts.
They waded and bathed in the splash of filthy lucre as their ‘clients’ let loose a dam of crud and corruptive tokens.
During the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)’s locust years, such characters ‘smartly’ established, media consultancies, online media, farms and poultries, boutiques, private schools, hotels as their Plan B, in the event that they lose their jobs in the fast-dissembling media industry.
Many, who couldn’t survive the rigours and ethical demands of mainstream journalism waited in the wings to play pall bearers of good, old journalism; like ghostly bats and owls, they are still keeping vigil, betting on traditional journalism’s death watch.
Left to them, Muhammadu Buhari is ‘bad market.’ If he weren’t, he would understand the expediences of government as a market place, and like his predecessors, enhance tyrant transactions that favour predator nations and conglomerates over home-grown, innovative, enterprising firms.
If he weren’t bad market, he would understand the expediency of ignoring the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and BVN policies, among others, that Nigeria’s filthy rich billionaire thieves, might continually plunder the public till in connivance with government officials, to enrich their offshore accounts.
Like their patrons, these shady characters, masquerading as ‘journalists/media consultants,’ make unrealistic demands of Buhari; they want him to make N1 equivalent to $1, and Nigeria, agriculturally self-sufficient, all within a period of four years. They want him to eradicate corruption, except in government circuits and resolve in four years, the devastation the PDP inflicted on Nigeria in 16 years. They also want the ‘money to flow.’
“Buhari is bad market. Who needs the TSA, of what benefit is it when boys are not smiling?” says a supposedly influential journalist/media consultant, in his acerbic outburst to last week’s piece.
His type is to journalism, what the so-called Dying Slave is, to the uncompleted tomb of Julius II. Their epic gaffes exemplify the soul’s struggle against the body; leg flexed, desire aflame, will-succumbed and currency-activated, they serve as the proverbial beautiful boy to a predatory ruling class.
The lyricism absent from political cult music attains musicality when fused with their greed. As the PDP era ended, so did the gaudy promiscuity of this supposedly chic set.
Today, while the crème of their breed comprising bank chiefs, corrupt civil servants, pipeline vandals, and oil thieves, recoil from public arena in fear of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the errand boys of the crew, that is, the rogue journalist/media consultants, have emerged from the woodwork, like patrician harlots loitering on dark streets, hawking their services to passers-by.
They have evolved from half-clad harlotry into complete nudity. These days, they wear their nakedness, like a fine garment, even as their fabricated repute engorges at full mast, like a eunuch’s limp member.
This minute, they manifest on Nigeria’s psyche, like disgruntled Sirens, with battered hindquarters and lips rimmed with the previous night’s fleshy spoils.
“Oh, those happy locust years,” they whine, reliving when oil thieves were feted as oil magnates; when hired assassins, political thugs and pimps were paid off with lucrative oil deals transacted in the tenor of rogue black ops.
They lust for the ‘good old days’ when the presidency’s concubines were compensated with oil blocs, that they might answer as one of Africa’s richest magnates. They cry for the luxurious epoch when the presidency bribed terrorists to strike and withhold attack, as expediences dictated.
Their disposition is quite wrong. But it is understandable. By their patronage of deep pockets, they are frozen in a moral void; they are mentally and emotionally stuck at age 13. But unlike medieval Greece’s beautiful boys, they aren’t society’s martyrs, nor are they victims of nature’s tyranny.
They are victims of extreme self-love, which is yet another facet of their moral turpitude and promiscuity. Promiscuity in the beautiful boy is an illness, a leakage of ethics that often aggravates his identity crisis.
By their lack of professional and personal ethics, they rupture the ritual integrity of press personae. Journalism, no matter how minimalist or innovative, is never simply news reporting. Like art, it is always a ritualistic reflection of reality and surgical reordering of society.
Every subject honoured by journalism should be deserving of nobility. Thus this minute, I ennoble Buhari and place him far above his rivals, not because he is a perfect human being. He isn’t.
He is inherently flawed and these past years, he has conducted himself in a manner deserving of reproach, on a few occasions. But his unsullied integrity, seeming incorruptibility and pedantry at sanitising public office, however, ‘far-fetched’ or ‘selective’ makes him worthy of praise and deserving of a second term.
Journalism’s beautiful boys would contest this. They would claim, for instance, that PDP’s Atiku Abubakar is Nigeria’s next best messiah and that projecting his candidacy, was their most heroic act to date. I would argue otherwise.
If journalism truly involves binding the humane to tyrant nature, to dull its tyranny, the journalist should conduct himself, like a clinical surgeon; cutting and grafting, lacerating and sewing, in moments of perceptual flurry and stillness, to rid society of its tumourous burdens.
Surgery is at the heart of journalism. Surgery as compulsion and surgery as stasis.
The contemporary journalist, who merely twaddles across a page, to fulfill errant lusts and shards of political correctness, is forever beholden to untameable aspects of his persona, and uncontrollable facets of reality.
When the journalist plays beautiful boy, he suffers a reduction of self; his elocution of feigned courage turns bestial acquiescence into an ecstasy of ethical bondage.
His predisposition to life in a moral void leads to perceptual dystopia, where decadent personae subsist, eyes open, mentally alert and compliant with the hyper-states produced by superimposition of material over mind, and elevation of filth as journalism’s altarpiece.
Where the journalist persists in this charred crimson territory, his descent is assured. Journalists adapting to ‘market need’ make heroism out of decadence too. Such characters live to glorify errant lusts above noble ideals and deeds. They talk a good game, thus they could be mistaken as heroes.
They would clothe Atiku Abubakar as a hero, and the PDP, as a party of saints, simply because Buhari is ‘bad market.’
This minute, journalism adorns political theatre’s oaken mask. To fulfill this function, the press dissembles into a masked party, teeming of woody characters; verminous, sharp-contoured, like malformed statuettes.
From the general elections to Walter Onnoghen-gate scandal, the corruptible journalist takes sides. But he is never on the citizenry’s side. Like the corrupt jurist, lawyer and law enforcer, he lends his services to the highest bidder.
He constantly engages at the feet and filth attic of his corrupt principal. Sophistry and malice leaps from his forked tongue as he attacks his puppeteer’s perceived detractors.
Masquerading as a moralist, he turns pliable and servile, a deformation of Castiglione’s courtier. He projects with slavish plasticity, his puppeteer’s whim and wile. His identity is self-evacuated as he persistently unfurls like a glove to the puppeteer’s palm.
Like Castiglione’s male harlots, his self abasement is unmanly and amoral. He elevates bum over forelock in a flagrant rite of political sodomy. This is no worthy portrait of the Nigerian journalist. Yet it is.
Even as we must ennoble the few, ethical natives without a dent or smudge to their repute.
Just recently, the Head of TVC News, Babajide Kolade-Otitoju, had to re-educate a print journalist and Editor of a national newspaper on the politics of the Onnoghen-gate scandal.
While the Editor spewed wildly and incoherently, accusing the Federal Government of bullying a supposedly virtuous judiciary, to the consternation of viewers in real time, Otitoju painstakingly schooled him, highlighting the shallowness of his thought-process.
Dumb-founded, the Editor, eventually agreed with Otitoju’s logic. Looking vapid, he stuttered a feeble plea, urging the press to counsel Buhari to let the embattled jurist go, scot free.
The dissembling of the Editor’s intellect was so painful to watch, particularly, as viewers mauled him via social media posts in real time. It was, however, entertaining, given his hitherto manic sentimentality.
The newspaper editor, no doubt, personifies reprobate segments of the press. The blame for the manifestation of his ilk is attributable to a dishonest society and the Nigerian press’ ideological crookedness.
Certain editors of powerful news platforms, reporters and online media have become prejudiced. Like Ogege, the spirit of embroidered woe, they have turned serpents, sleeping in Nigeria’s undergrowth, to merge with the hue of the prevailing wild. They forget that when Nigeria eventually submerges in the mire of bestial elements, even the press will be cannibalised.
The journalist, whatever, his designation, should flaunt no trait of the fawning page nor should he become the smooth flatterer and intellectual thug, twisting and turning with changing circumstance.
He shouldn’t be insanely reactive, nor should his words and deeds boom as a cloying mime of a corrupt politician, bank chief, jurist or some other puppeteer’s reprobate wile.
He should never be a spectacle of submission and ideological sodomy. He should be a heroic shiner of light and truth, a respectable, poster icon of quintessential journalism.
The corruptible journalist, however, becomes the fig that lets down the leaf; the memory of twigs where thickets maul seedlings into trunks of bitterness.
This imagery discounts the essence of the sacrifices made by foremost journalists among Nigeria’s pioneer statesmen and founding fathers.
Before they joined politics and attained the status of heroes, Anthony Enahoro was a journalist; Herbert Macaulay was an engineer, journalist and publisher; Obafemi Awolowo was a journalist, lawyer and astute entrepreneur, and Nnamdi Azikiwe was a journalist and teacher.
Despite their foibles, these men had in common, the fighter spirit of heroes and a prideful belief in the supremacy of the collective and a higher purpose. Thus at a crucial point, they deployed journalism to serve national interest.
Do contemporary journalists serve national interest? Today, do we have journalist-statesmen? Are Nigerian journalists worthy of the appellation, “Heroic shiners of light and truth?”
For instance, journalists and media houses know that the Muhammadu Buhari/Yemi Osinbajo team trumps rivals by integrity, political capital, resolve and ethical bent. But like most societal segments, they are too bitter over the incumbent government’s presumed pedantry and ‘stinginess.’
Spurred by greed, religious, ethnic bigotries, they choose to ignore the perils of re-electing the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), touting Buhari’s failure to resolve in four years, devastation inflicted on Nigeria, by the PDP during its 16-year leadership.
Many would accuse me of supporting Buhari/Osinbajo. Yeah. Your grief is welcome, and your vitriol, highly appreciated. We are at that juncture, where we have to choose the lesser of competing evils. Were Kingsley Moghalu of a more powerful platform, he would probably pose stronger opposition than a frantic and confused PDP.
The Nigerian press celebrates incarnations of humanity’s debris because doing otherwise could be suicidal. Politicians own the media. And tycoons determine the news. They place advertisements and pay the salaries of the men and women by whose professionalism or otherwise Nigeria accesses her news and information needs. Thus the quality of journalism you get.
It is foolhardy, for instance, to expect a journalist who hasn’t received salary in eight months, to be objective about a news story involving a commoner and a politician. The commoner will ignite his conscience with tears but the politician will silence it with hefty ‘brown envelopes.’
It is deceitful to anticipate fairness, honesty, integrity and accuracy from mainstream and online media, whose existence and continuity are determined by the whims of dishonest politicians and business moguls.
But the Nigerian society demands purity and impartiality from the press all the same.
In Nigeria, where voters are continually tamed and kept on a leash by a ruling class that capitalises on obvious handicaps: their impulsiveness, insensibility to reason and judgment, and overt sentimentality, it becomes increasingly difficult to nurture and enable a fair, vibrant press from among such human segment.
Despite its faults, society conveniently picks on a scapegoat, the press. The journalist is expected to serve as the conscience and moral compass of the society, challenging the government and checking the excesses of the ruling class, selflessly and uncompromisingly.
As utopian fantasies go, these are noble expectations of the journalist but the Nigerian society ignores its cultural shift from conventional morality to unbridled hedonism. It assumes, hypocritically, that the press will continually give it honest and developmental news even as every segment of the society strives to unmoor the journalist from his role as a crucial appendage of the nation’s critical mob.
The public, comprising big business, the government, and civil societies among other mob segments, vilify any journalist or news medium that seeks to truly educate and engage, rather than entertain and perpetuate their biased definitions of reality.
Society’s decadent patronage of the press seeks to stall journalism’s satiric commentary on its failings and predatory personae.
As bankruptcy looms, upholding integrity is akin to committing career suicide hence journalism’s submission to the leash of shady expediences, a profanation of ancestor cult.
To the disillusioned journalist, there is no dependable relief in ‘ethical practice’ with its priestly creed and hierarchies.
Rather they see prospects and decorum in the honouring of reprobate nature. The journalist thus turns defender of the corrupt. Like the Delphic oracle, he would not fade in ethical entrancement.
The modern voter is a moral catamite. Like Pope’s court-enamoured Sporus, he becomes his own nemesis, the mirror-evil, that he must be saved from.
He chooses neutering in the service of political parties and aspirants, to the detriment of society and country. His scorning of freewill for the leash of their token ejects him from the electorate’s altar-place of power.
He is self-eunuchised. But he understands, that to profit, he must integrate into a larger herd. Thus he becomes part of the docile crowd, mostly by will and often by default.
The herd is integral to the political party’s stature and perceived chances at the polls; the greater the crowd, the higher the contender and the party’s ratings in public and media circuits.
Parties live for those rare moments, in which their ratings plummet or pirouette skywards, hence in a frenzy to improve their ratings, they let loose, chieftains and agents inured to crowd sourcing and mobilisation for rallies.
As you read, a swarm of high and low agents of contending parties, descend on villages and towns, where they actualise a repertory of lies and abuse, and commit extortionate manipulations, to lure prospective voters to their rallies. As if massive turnouts translate to votes.
Their strategies resonate the mutation of integrity and ethics into grotesque forms, the tragedy of the electorate. Through the insolence of the crowd wars, contending camps highlight ‘massive turnouts’ at their presidential rallies as testament of strength and political capital.
The media have also learnt to amplify the debate by juxtaposing, for instance, Muhammadu Buhari’s Kano crowd with Abubakar Atiku’s Kano crowd. To what purpose does it serve to analyse aspirants’ strengths based on the size of the crowd that attend their rallies?
Shouldn’t contenders be assessed based on their performance and antecedents in public office?
The crowd at Nigeria’s political rallies are often the same. Large segments of the crowd that attend and chant party slogans at the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s political rallies also attend its major rival, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)’s rallies, usually at a price. The parties feed off the electorate’s ignorance and cattle mentality while the latter profit by a token, a glorified sentiment or ego.
The malady reinforces the electorate’s sheepish fascination with celebrity politics; large segments of the electorate are often captivated by contenders’ fame and fabricated repute thus they do not examine their antecedents or compare their verbal claims with verifiable facts.
The reality of their preferences is determined by bigotries, propaganda and the frequency and tenor of media reportage. Consequently, both the unlettered and supposedly lettered voter are severed from reality by prejudice and blind acquiescence to sophistry, base sentimentality and any lie that soothes and reinforces the biases of partisanship.
In pursuit of effete glories of the present, they choose to dwell in a fictive universe, where they are ensnared to fugitive perks and grandeur. Ultimately, their lives amplify an eonian lie, fabricated in the mills of duplicitous politics and aspirants.
In truth, they deserve pity; disabled by ignorance, the pathetic little fops are clueless of their handicap. Stripped of bluster, they cavort in the nude, wearing their witlessness like the proverbial new garments of the delusive emperor.
They do not understand, and are never willing to understand, how predatory leadership impoverishes and bankrupts them. They cannot decrypt policy failure and the con of micro-finance and commercial bank loans; they cannot decode the interests that plunge them into unmanageable debt.
Enthralled by garish tokenism and sound bites, they proclaim and chant illogical clichés and slogans. They are captive to the ditty and chorus of a political culture that markets predators as shepherds and maniacal looters as messiahs.
When push comes to shove and the folly of their actions bears down on them, they recoil from truth, seeking refuge in familiar plaints and vitriol. For the pitiful herd, life is a permanent state of ethical blackout, an inordinate quest for fleeting escapism and carnal gratification.
When conversation segues to the probe and prosecution of public officers for outrageous acts of embezzlement and corruption, they say: “Is he the only one? Is she the only looter?”
If the sitting president must probe and prosecute a public officer for treasury looting and corruption, they aver, that he must first, probe of every public officer that looted Nigeria since independence. It’s the only way, they would rest assured, that, the action was initiated without prejudice or malice.
Such arguments are bland and juvenile, yet they connote public commentary and discourse, thus reflecting citizenry amorality and desensitisation to corruption.
The loyalties and sympathies of the herd are reserved for the tyrants who treat them like dogs on a leash. Thus the Ekiti electorate’s denial of Kayode Fayemi at the expiration of his first term, and blind acceptance of their nemesis, Ayodele Fayose. Lest we forget Ogun electorate’s recent show of shame at the APC rally, where they pelted President Muhammadu Buhari, Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo and gubernatorial candidate, Dapo Abiodun, in furtherance of the host government’s juvenile plots.
The malady bespeaks Gustave Le Bon’s ‘Crowd’ philosophy, which contends that the type of “hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instils them with fear…Should the strength of authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.”
It is unsurprising then, that materially and intellectually impoverished folk would distrust democracy and its promise of collective good, to covet and pursue the vain and ephemeral perks of socio-political harlotry.
Harlotry subsists in the riotous mobs masquerading as concerned students, civil societies and ‘elders’ caught in the frenzy of reproach a la Onnoghen-gate. These groups of self-styled revolutionaries earnestly chanting anti-Buhari war and ouster songs, for instance, claim to be led by a noble, higher conviction in the interest of the state, but in truth, their indignation and partisanship is paid for.
Atiku currently presents as meal ticket to many who have failed to profit off a supposedly ‘stingy’ and ‘pedantic’ Buhari.
If by some radical twist of fate, Buhari/Osinbajo are voted out of office, Nigeria will regret her choices. Soon after the platitudes and chants have fallen silent, each voter would withdraw to lament individually, follies he committed in concert with a group of sentimental others.
Buhari is not perfect but his implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), anti-corruption campaign and decimation of Boko Haram inspires a pat on the back.
An act connects a person to person, or self to society. Action becomes illusion in an orbit where, as Heracleitus says in Pater’s epigraph, “all things flow.”
To expect progress by PDP’s Atiku/Obi, is to extend the gifts of alchemy to woodcutters, and expect them to turn pebbles to gold. Their gospel of ill bliss and a token will eventually lead each voter into a bower of bruises, much like a life sentence. A solitary confinement without parole.
If we fail to vote responsibly, Nigeria will subsist until 2023, like Rachilde’s necrophiliac aesthete, confined to a self-made tomb.
Patients share heartrending encounter with drug-resistant tuberculosis
The buzz about Bedaquiline
Tanimola begged her father to teach her to whistle. But much as he tried to teach her, she couldn’t. Her infant lips were too tender to hoot.
“She kept blowing air and bathing me with spittle,” said Folajimi David, her father.
Then, one Sunday evening, the five-year-old said, “Daddy, I can whistle with my chest.” To this, David responded with a smile, enthusing about how talented his little girl was.
He knew she couldn’t whistle with her chest. But “kids will always be kids,” thought the widower, craning his ear against her chest to hear it ‘whistle.’
All he could hear was the deep-seated wheezing that broke with her cough.
He blamed it on her inability to pass out the phlegm that was stuck in her chest. It’s one of the things she inherited from him, he thought; “I have never been able to cough out phlegm no matter how hard I tried,” he said.
Thinking she got that from him too, along with her looks, he gave her cough syrup, and then, a tincture of honey, bitter kola and mint.
But neither the cough syrup nor the potion provided relief to the five-year-old. She couldn’t sleep and she coughed through the night. By dawn, David noticed a spatter of blood on the bed sheet, at the spot she rested her head.
“Her symptoms got worse and she wheezed for breath like an asthmatic. But she had never been diagnosed of asthma. In the morning, she complained of fatigue, and collapsed on the way to the bathroom. That day, she didn’t go to school. I took her to a neighbourhood clinic from where she was referred to the Lagos teaching hospital,” he said.
Early diagnosis indicated that Tanimola had pneumonia and typhoid fever, for which she was treated. But her symptoms persisted.
“I became very scared when her teacher called, urging me to come for her; she said her cough had aggravated, and droplets of blood stained her teeth at every expiration,” said David.
Thus precisely eight days after she was treated at the teaching hospital, Tanimola was rushed to a private hospital, where lab tests and analysis revealed that she was infected by the Multi Drug Resistant strain of tuberculosis , widely known as MDR-TB.
David was diagnosed with the same disease, and father and daughter were advised to commence treatment at the state’s MDR-TB centre.
“We received the result late in the day, around 6.25 pm. There was no way we could report for treatment at that hour. I intended to take her to the clinic the following morning, which was a Tuesday,” said David.
But Tanimola would not make the trip with him. Seventeen minutes past midnight, she died in his arms.
David should have paid good mind to his daughter. Contrary to his belief, that, the five-year-old suffered a mild cough, she was in the advanced stages of MDR-TB. It wasn’t until she died, that, he understood the reason for her protracted cough and tiredness.
Today, David is “almost rid” of the disease. But he would never be rid of guilt.
The bereaved widower and his late daughter, however, represent a fraction of the country’s missing MDR-TB cases.
•An MDR-TB patient using his medication on the watch of a health officer at a DOT centre.
An awful way to die
Each year, nearly one and a half million people die from tuberculosis, that, for many years, has been treatable and curable. More than 30 million people have died since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared TB as a global emergency in 1993.
The devastation wreaked by the disease is best captured in the anonymous quote: “When TB wakes up and gets into the lungs, it eats them from the inside out, slowly diminishing their capacity, causing the chest to fill up with blood and the liquid remains of the lungs.
“A wet, hacking cough is evocative of TB. The lungs, now in liquid form, are sloshing around in the chest. Cough that up, even in microscopic, impossible-to-see droplets, near other people, and they have a very good chance of getting TB too.
“Eventually, liquid replaces the lungs; the suffering patients cannot get enough oxygen, and respiratory failure occurs. They can no longer breathe and they drown. It’s painful. It’s drawn out. It’s an awful way to die. But before any of this happens, the disease weakens you. It diminishes your capacity for work, and puts your family and friends, and anyone else you come into contact with at risk. Individual death is only part of the problem.”
The bereaved family often inherits death from the deceased too. Or vice versa. In the case of the Davids, for instance, the father infected his daughter with the disease “because her immune system was very low, compared to his own,” said one of the doctors that attended to the deceased.
The typical pathway of the infection according to health experts is as follows:
When somebody coughs, it spreads through the sputum and then a susceptible host inhales it. If the person’s immune system is intact, the TB stays dormant in the lungs, without causing any harm to the body. But if the body’s immune system is compromised, the bacteria mutates aggressively in the body, corrupting and totally overwhelming the host’s immune system as a full blown infection. From a single host, TB can spread to infect between 10 and 12 people.
The progression is worse where the hosts dwell in a slum. It spreads rapidly, and assumes the state of a pandemic.
According to the 2017 Global TB Report, Nigeria is among the 14 high burden countries for TB, TB/HIV and MDR-TB. The country is also among the 10 countries that account for 64 percent of the global gap in TB case finding. India, Indonesia and Nigeria account for almost half of the total gap.
Nigeria is also ranked 7th among the 30 high drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) burden countries and second in Africa, with an estimated 4, 700 patients with multi drug-resistant-TB (MDR-TB) in 2015.
•A shanty kid picks her way through a river of filth in Makoko. The Lagos slum is widely known as a cesspit of diseases like tuberculosis.
Why TB persists…
Tuberculosis, widely adjudged to be a disease of the poor, is endemic in urban slums and communities, where the poverty level and population density is high.
“Most hospitals in the communities are, however, not equipped with TB care and that is where you have most of the cases. Also, most of the affected areas are hard to reach,” said Dr. Babawale Victor, a Senior Health Officer with the The National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Control Program (NTLCP), in a chat with The Nation.
Further findings revealed, that, while TB care services are supposed to be available at the Primary Health Centres (PHCs) across the country’s 774 local government areas (LGAs), they are absent in most of the target coverage areas.
Where PHCs are present, they are ill-equipped and understaffed to contain and treat TB patients, let alone MDR-TB sufferers.
Victor argued that prohibitive cost of treatment also delays and prevent individuals from initiating TB treatment after diagnosis. The dearth of paediatric TB specialists in areas most affected by the disease also poses an impediment to containment efforts, he said, stressing that, delay in reporting cases for treatment and lack of point-of-care laboratory capacity also hinder treatment and containment efforts, especially for multi drug-resistant TB.
A nurse at a Lagos based directly observed treatment (DOT) centre revealed, that, in order to encourage patients to complete the full course of treatment, they are provided some token for transport fare and meals. After the intensive phase, patients are allowed to return home for the continuation phase of treatment.
Why paediatric TB goes neglected
Until very recently childhood TB has not been a priority in public health and has remained essentially a hidden pandemic. All too often, paediatric TB goes undiagnosed in children.
While high-income countries now use sophisticated molecular tests to detect the disease, most developing countries, Nigerian inclusive, still use the method developed 130 years ago: the patient must cough up a sample of sputum, which is then checked under the microscope for the bacteria that causes TB.
Young children, generally, are unable to produce a sample. Even if a child with active TB succeeds in providing a sample, it often contains no detectable bacteria.
Compounding difficulties with diagnosis is the fact that children with TB have families that are poor, lack knowledge about the disease and live in communities with limited access to health care.
•TB bacteria inside the human body.
The burden of stigmatisation
Isa Mahmud, 35, was forbidden from using the same cutlery with his parents and siblings, soon after he was diagnosed with TB.
“Even after I started treatment, they kept their distance from me. My brothers stopped sleeping in the same room with me and my mother turned her face away from me whenever she had to talk to me, even after using a nose mask. I have been treated like a leper. They don’t even tell me sorry anymore, when I cough. Instead they frown and hiss. Sometimes, I feel like killing myself,” he said.
Experiences like Mahmud’s have often led to non-disclosure of illness by TB patients. Even while the chronic cough persists, some simply explain it away as “chest problem.”
Patients also dread being quarantined in the hospital, often likening it to a jail cell.
“They will make you feel like a condemned prisoner. The nurses are particularly careless in thought and speech. They shout at you and treat you like a hardened criminal. They make you feel like you are doomed for death,” said Gladys Onuh, who quit treatment at a Lagos Direct Observation Treatment (DOT) facility to patronise a herbal doctor.
The ugliness of hospital based care
A typical ward in Nigeria would contain 24 patients with MDR-TB, who should be cared for by 10 specially trained nurses running shifts, where they provide 100 per cent of their time for this service. Additionally, doctors attend to patients for about 15 minutes weekly. This depicts an ideal situation.
In reality, patients complain of stigmatisation by doctors, nurses and other health officers. Princewill Okeh, an outpatient in a treatment facility in the southern part of the country, complained that many TB sufferers are reluctant to come forward due to the hostility they might experience from public health officers.
“It’s one thing to be maltreated by your family but when government doctors and nurses also treat you badly, you lose hope in the system. This disease (MDR-TB) will make nurses and doctors avoid you. My girlfriend also has TB, but she would rather treat it from home. She has witnessed my experience with family and doctors and nurses. They all treat me like a demon. This is why she will never come to DOT for treatment. She is using home remedy and antibiotics,” he said.
Further findings revealed that some public health workers avoid the wards of MDR-TB patients thus leading to a fragmented bedside interaction and hindered service delivery.
In a recent Focused Group Discussion (FGD) conducted by health researchers, some participants recalled that healthcare providers in other facilities, which they visited for specialised services such as audiometry and chest X-ray avoided contact with MDR-TB patients and were more resentful than the healthcare providers at the
treatment centre.
They also stressed that it was disparaging and unfair for patients to use an inferior quality face mask while healthcare providers used a superior type.
“It is an inferior face mask. It is not a good type. It is the type they are selling in the market that they brought to us. They were using the better type. You see Nigerians! I argued with them seriously. They said, I argue too much because I am educated,” said a 54-year-old male patient.
The cost factor
Management of identified MDR-TB cases is based on a standardised WHO approved treatment regimen of 20 months, consisting of an eight-month intensive phase and a 12-month continuation phase.
Patients are placed on Pyrazinamide and four second-line anti-TB drugs namely Levofloxacin, Kanamycin (replaced by Capreomycin when indicated), Prothionamide
and Cycloserine. The five drugs are used for the eight-month intensive phase, at the end of which Kanamycin (or Capreomycin) is discontinued for the remaining 12-month continuation phase.
A recent study revealed that three models of MDR-TB care were utilised in Nigeria between June 2013 and December 2014, and differed only in their eight-month intensive phase.
Patients treated under Model A, were hospitalized for the complete duration of the intensive phase; patients in Model B were hospitalised for a duration of five months in the intensive phase while patients treated under Model C received the complete
intensive phase treatment as ambulatory care in the community.
The estimated total cost of providing diagnostic and treatment care as outlined in the Nigerian MDR-TB guidelines, was $18, 528 (N2,927,464) per patient for Model A, $15, 159 (N2,395,070) per patient for Model B and $9, 425 (N1,489,080) per patient for Model C – all 2014 figures.
Although financing for care and prevention has increased over the last decade, there remains a funding gap – $2.3bn (£1.74bn) in 2017. The biggest donor, the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria, allocates just 18 per cent of its resources to fight the disease.
Babawale Victor
Is Bedaquiline the next-best elixir?
There is no gainsaying the emergence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) has threatened the progress made in TB control globally; MDR-TB is the resistance to Rifampicin and Isoniazid, the most effective first line anti-TB drugs, by the disease.
Els Torreele, executive director of Médecins Sans Frontières’ access campaign, said there has been a dearth of research and development (R&D) over many years for adequate tools for diagnosis and treatment.
In the last few years, however, Bedaquiline (a bacterial drug belonging to a new class of antibiotics) has been released to treat patients with drug-resistant TB.
“Before Bedaquiline, the last drug we developed was before we put a man on the moon,” said Aaron Oxley, executive director of Results UK. “Unfortunately in TB – or fortunately now – things are about to get more expensive because we’re getting tools that actually work.”
Bedaquiline (BDQ) has a novel mechanism of action. It binds to mycobacterium tuberculosis ATP synthase, an enzyme that is essential for the generation of energy in the pathogen. Inhibiting ATP synthesis results in bactericidal activity. The atpE gene product (subunit c, a proton pump) is the target of Bedaquiline in mycobacteria.
The distinct target and mode of action of Bedaquiline minimises the potential for cross-resistance with existing anti-TB drugs thus the buzz about its efficacy and potency as an anti-MDR-TB nullifier.
Tackling the MDR-TB conundrum
A major issue with TB in Nigeria is the low TB case finding for both adults and children. In 2017 only 104, 904 TB cases were detected out of an estimated 407, 000 of all TB cases.
This indicates a treatment coverage of just 25.8 per cent thus leaving a gap of 302,096 cases, which were either undetected or detected but the cases were not notified especially in non DOT sites.
A total of just 1,783 MDR-TB cases were notified out of an estimated 5, 200, according to the health minister, Prof. Isaac Adewole.
Nigeria currently has 6,753 Direct Observation Treatment (DOT) centres compared to 3,931 in 2010. The total number of microscopy centres has risen from 1,148 in 2010 to 2,650 in 2017. GeneXpert machines installed in the country have increased from 32 in 2012 to 390 in 2017.
Treatment centres for patients with MDR-TB expanded from 10 in 2013, to 27 in 2017, while the number of TB reference laboratories also increased from nine in 2013 to 10 in 2018. Over 90 per cent of the TB patients notified in 2016 have documented HIV test results compared to 79 per cent in 2010, according to Adewole.
The health minister disclosed, that, in addition to this, a shorter drug regimen for the treatment of MDR-TB was introduced in the country in 2017 to reduce the treatment duration for patients with MDR-TB and ensure better treatment outcomes.
•An x-ray of a lung damaged by TB
“To further strengthen TB notification in some challenged states, TB Surveillance officers have been recruited in 12 states (Rivers, Delta, Imo, Anambra, Lagos, Oyo, Benue, Niger, Kaduna, Kano, Bauchi and Taraba) to work with non-NTP facilities (private Health facilities, atent medicine vendors, community pharmacists), disease surveillance and notification officers, state epidemiologists and TB programme officers, to improve TB case notification, he explained.
In a bid to bolster Nigeria’s anti-TB campaign, the Federal Ministry of Health has also initiated an active case-finding campaign in key affected populations spanning people living with HIV, children, urban slum dwellers, prisoners, migrants, internally displaced people and facility based health care workers.
The result has been encouraging so far, with the detection of over 11,500 TB cases through active house to house case searching in 2017.
However, the number of TB cases detected represent a small fraction of the over 300,000 missing cases of TB in the country; that is, those that go undetected.
Recently, Nigeria signed a $71 million agreement to support efforts to control TB in the country over the next two years (2019-2020) thus signalling the government’s intention to prioritise TB efforts.
In the wake of the development, national TB program officials and health care practitioners converged in Lagos, as part of a training focused on building health systems’ capacity to tackle TB and multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) at the national and sub-national levels.
Prof. Isaac Adewole
These, among other efforts, are certainly meant for the long haul. On the short-run, the government and partnering agencies would do right to increase sensitisation efforts. It’s the only way prevent an experience like the Davids.
Sometimes, when he shut his eyes, David, 36, remembers his deceased daughter’s smile, and the pitter-patter of her feet.
In those moments, the world peels away and the bereaved father and TB patient, experiences fresh torment; heartbroken, he relives the screaming gleam in his daughter’s eyes just before the glimmer turned clay-like, the colour of burnt mud.
“I know she is in a better place. But I should have been more observant. My carelessness led to her death,” said David, in the tenor of a man for whom time and memory allows the gift of reflection. Until reality afflicts him with the plague of truth: Tanimola, his bubbly five-year-old daughter, lays dormant beneath cracked earth.
PHOTOS: William Daniels, Olatunji Ololade, Library
The current enthralment with the politically-correct aspirant will end in a splash of spittle and a curl of the tongue, inwards. No doubt. But this minute, vistas of the 2019 elections unfurl like a fragile fiction of ‘Change.’
Amid the racket, dreams of progress bloom like a fictional retreat. An elaborate simplicity. A Nabokovian invention of rarefied detail, as Gardner would say.
Incensed by the fiery mantras: “Change!” and “Change the Change!” citizens march to both real and taught indignation, unabashed arrogance, to stretch their necks for a leash of cash, bigotry and sound bites.
Soon afterwards, they will howl from dawn through dusk, threatening litters of tumult atop the soapbox, forgetting that the storms they incited would eventually consume them and weaker, wretched compatriots. But they will make good their threats anyway and increase the swell of trodden demise a la IPOB and Boko Haram.
The press would sensationalise the tragedies they incite via reportage that stretch beyond the photographs of civil deaths.
It’s all part of a recurrent script. Some would call it the Naija-theory of things. I would call it the therapy of the breadlines; the deputation of evil from one social class to the other.
The heathen dialectic of Nigerian politics depicts electorate mind and nature. Nigerians vote for tribe, money and random bigotries. Many vote to actualise established and latent hostilities thus the voter’s card becomes a weapon to torment a rival ethnic group and religious divide, seasonally.
The 2015 general elections, for instance, assumed a landmark in the country’s celebration of hate and bigotries. The electorate, severely divided, along religious and ethnic divides, voted for Muhammadu Buhari and Goodluck Jonathan in fulfilment of ugly stereotypes.
Few voters could convincingly articulate their reasons for choosing either Buhari or Jonathan. True, a depressed economy, sky-rocketing inflation and embarrassing corruption across tiers of government, substantiated the debate for and against either candidate.
For most voters, however, the decisive factor was the religious affiliation and ethnic root of the contestants. The malady subsists till date; as Nigeria prepares for the 2019 general elections, the electorate separates into two factions, spawned on ethnic and religious bigotries.
Even though Buhari and his supposedly strongest rival, Atiku Abubakar, both hail from the north and are both Muslim, large segments of the electorate do battle in the candidates’ names, guided by even more dangerous bigotry, intolerance for the anti-corruption fight.
Several folks are supporting Buhari and Atiku by default, having been led to support their running mates, Yemi Osinbajo and Peter Obi, whose religion and ethnicity they prefer.
Many would argue, that, Buhari and his team have made a mess of the much vaunted anti-corruption fight but the president’s apologists would argue otherwise; the latter would rather Nigeria re-elects Buhari, guided by his sparse victories or semblances of ‘Change’ instead of a baggage-infested Atiku.
The electorate, in turn, devotes too much attention to the presidential candidates. A crinkled fascination with presidential and to some extent, governorship aspirants, has often led to a situation, whereby, candidates vying for lesser offices enjoy a smooth ride to victory, not by merit, but by the strength and political capital of their parties’ presidential and governorship candidates. This also denies their offices crucial attention from the media, critics, and electorate.
Many would vote for Atiku and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP), in protest against Buhari’s refusal to ‘share the money,’ translatable as his refusal to run the government – like his predecessor – like a bazaar, where shady characters pocket unearned profits via treasury looting.
And while the social media pulsate with bickering for and against Buhari and Atiku, the traditional media pulses with the vitriol of certain prominent lawyers, journalists, and activists, who turned staunch critics and cynics of the Buhari administration, having failed to land plum positions as cabinet members and ‘contractors’ of the incumbent government. The latter has equally let loose, bands of apologists, to repel the propaganda and outright lies of pro-Atiku/PDP groups.
At the backdrop of these shameful realities, youthful segments of the electorate display political illiteracy that is embarrassingly far-flung and subsumed in sentimentality. In response, rival parties have learned to re-invent a political devil in the opposition, to exploit their ignorance and intolerance.
The youth rant across media that they have been excluded from power, at the state and federal levels yet they have populated Nigerian politics for 59 years as thugs, murderers, arsonists, vote buyers/sellers, and rhetoricians. They are deployed every political season by aspirants – who previously identified as youth five to seven decades ago – as unthinking muscles, emissaries of death and destruction.
Nigeria’s current dilemma is a consequence of bad choices and perversion of governance. There is urgent need for Nigeria’s enlightened youth to seek each other out in wisdom, and coalesce into more definitive roles.
Since elder politicians, whom Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, aptly described as the ‘Wasted Generation,’ have failed to grow up and make progressive choices for the nation, the onus rests on informed youth to answer as the adults the ruling class would never become.
The Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) assemblage is already a failed enterprise; driven by self-seeking egoists, the platform could not assume the prized role it set out to perform, thus leaving Nigeria with limited choices.
This calls for urgent, proactive steps by the youth. The first is to provide a foundation for the unity of ideas and cause, and to do it very quickly. The second is to evolve a social agenda that strengthens the ideals of a higher education, common progress and commonwealth. It is not too late to undo ruling class malfeasance but 2019 is gone. Hence strategic efforts should target the 2023 electoral season and beyond.
At the moment, familiar predators have regrouped into familiar camps. From the 2019 polls’ date, their political paradise will persist; governors will rule for two terms (eight years) and afterwards, compensate themselves with outrageous pensions and senate seats.
The malady subsists in real time. At the expiration of their eight-year tenure, for instance, certain outgoing governors, with unabashed arrogance, struggle to choose their successors, and other crucial public appointees. Some have waged war, to turn government into their family inheritance hence their frantic struggles to install their sons-in-law and siblings in government quarters.
Ultimately, they seek to impose stooges as successors. The latter are expected to cover up official fraud, embezzlement and other atrocities that they committed during their tenure.
This is the result of junk politics, where nothing changes, meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that institutionalise corruption and inefficiency in governance, according to Hedges.
Junk politics “redefines traditional values, tilting courage toward bluster, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of reason and intellect.”
At every turn, it seeks to obliterate voters’ consciousness of socio-economic and other differences in their midst, and it is the major indoctrination of Nigeria’s most prominent political parties.
Its about time the youth established a platform, unlike PACT, where more humane aspirants would foster politics as everything but a by-product of a diseased culture that seeks its purpose in characters, who are, as Boorstin writes, “receptacles into which we pour our purposelessness.”
The corrupt judge is a poseur. Like the venal politician, journalist, police officer and civil servant, with whom he shares kindred spirit, he flaunts a semblance of character but becomes visibly irritated and embarrassed, when reality punctures his contrived persona.
His dignity is better sculpted and more frantically articulated thus passing him off as some chthonian god, but like his corrupt peer across professional divides, he blooms like the proverbial damaged, beautiful boy, the object of dishonest citizenry’s unarticulated sinful lusts.
Gravitas, to him, is deceptively mustered. It is neither earned nor actualised. Thus soon after he is called to the bench, he scuds to the spotlight, like a pirate goon thundering ashore on a metallic scallop shell, the heraldic vessel of his unchaste personae.
Flaunting the pensive smile of Donatello’s dreamy David, he twirls in a gale of airs, that eventually precedes his fall, in the ruddy radiance of bleeding Goliath.
My heartfelt apology to the country’s paltry league of eminent jurists, who would rather die with their dignity intact, in pursuit of justice and the society’s greater good.
For a long while, the judiciary has thrived as a pagan altarpiece, where dishonest lawyers and judges, of presumed and often contrived calibre, have been known to pervert the course of justice, driven by an illusion of self-worth and a haughty belief that the law is an ass forever amenable to the whiplash of their wiles.
In their cultic epiphany, greed dominates the learned mind as it dominates its sight and picture planes thus their descent the ladder of judicial grace.
It should be clear to anyone now, that a corrupt legislature and executive aren’t Nigeria’s greatest problems, the judiciary emerges in real time, as the country’s greatest albatross to the rule of law and entrenchment of justice.
More worrisome is the unholy alliance between judges and shady politicians en route the country’s general elections. Apparently worried by the anomaly, then Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Walter Onnoghen, while declaring open the Annual Conference of Justices of the Court of Appeal in Abuja, in December 2017, warned judges against closeness with politicians ahead the 2019 general elections, arguing that they were capable of destroying the jurists’ reputation.
Six months later – in June 2018 to be precise – while swearing in 12 new Justices of the Court of Appeal in Abuja, Onnoghen subsequently charged judges in the country not to turn themselves into political tools in the hands of politicians, who may wish to use them in achieving their selfish ends.
“We have to be careful so as not to be used as instruments for personal and intra-party squabble…Look at the matter before you, look at the law and use the law to decide. It doesn’t matter who wins or losses, be careful. We should use the law to decide all political matters according to law because judiciary remains the hope of every man whether superman or ordinary man,” he said.
It is, however, ironic that despite his affected desire to preserve the integrity of the nation’s judiciary and rule of law, Onnoghen has become the subject of a riotous debate among a motley crowd of politicians, journalists and Twitter activists, over his perceived violation of the law.
Few days ago, the CJN was suspended by President Muhammadu Buhari for failing to declare his assets in full, before assuming office as CJN. Buhari issued the penalty, guided by the order of the Code of Conduct Tribunal of January 23rd. It will be recalled that the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) moved to arraign Onnoghen on a six-count charge of false asset declaration on Monday, January 14, seven days earlier.
Onnoghen allegedly failed to declare his assets estimated at $3 million in domiciliary accounts.
Responding to the charges, Onnoghen said he forgot to declare the assets, describing the non-declaration of his domiciliary accounts as a mistake.
Perhaps like Yeats’ “old, learned, respectable bald heads,” he was truly forgetful of his “sins.” Perhaps not. The jury, however, dissembles in turmoil over the legality or not of Onnoghen’s forgetfulness and his suspension.
Predictably, in the heat of the debate, parties routing for and against Onnoghen bandy diatribe, sculpted of spunk, relative truths, malice and outright lies. In the tumult of sophistry and righteous outrage, truth gets mortgaged and redefined along bigoted and sentimental paradigms.
While asserting his mission statement in 2018, Onnoghen said he was desirous of leaving behind “a judiciary that has been returned to its glory as a noble and enviable institution in every sense of the word.”
The possibility of achieving that dream morphs into a mirage, in the wake of his recent travails.
But this is hardly the first time Nigeria would be jolted by perceived illegalities of judicial officers.
Three years ago, the nation stirred to a rude nudge; following a seven-month sting operation, the Department of State Security (DSS) arrested seven judges across the three levels of the nation’s Federal High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, and recovered a huge cache of money in both local and foreign currencies in the arrested judges’ residences.
Surprisingly, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and a sundry crowd of activists screamed indignation, issuing hasty threats and condemnation of the judges’ arrest and called for their release. But gradually, the juvenile outrage morphed into increasing citizenry support amid higher awareness of the perversion of the justice system by corrupt elements.
The corruption of the judiciary, equally manifests in questionable judgements and judicial proceedings. It will be recalled that a magistrate court imposed a N2,000 fine on a former speaker of the House of representatives for forgery and perjury, while another magistrate court sentenced on a less connected citizen to 17 years imprisonment without an option of fine for the same class of offence.
Likewise, a Federal High Court handed a former director in the civil service, a two year jail term, with a N250, 000 fine option after the latter admitted to taking part in the stealing of N32.8billion Police Pension fund, while yet another court sentenced another citizen to 45-year-imprisonment for stealing a mobile phone belonging to a state governor.
In 1997, a study by the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (NIALS) revealed that corruption was cited by 30 percent of judges, 54 percent of litigants, and 50 percent of lawyers as a major problem in the administration of justice. Likewise, a report released by the International Commission of Jurists on Nigeria stated, that, “judicial corruption remains a major concern, and between 2002 and 2005, no fewer than six superior court Judges, including two Justices of the Court of Appeal, were removed from their positions on charges of corruption, while a number of other judges were under investigation.”
This certainly beggars the question: Who is a Nigerian jurist? Is he truly a brilliant and impartial social element, inured to the infinite perversions of justice personified by most lawyers, among other segments of the society?
Is he a predator, frantically seeking to prey on legal loopholes and hapless victims of judicial excesses?
Is he that remarkable cultural touchstone and custodian of morals? Or is he that unremarkable social element, whose existence is unmolested by the rumbling of a soul?
That Muhammadu Buhari and Yemi Osinbajo may emerge winners of the 2019 presidential elections is a given. Fans of the duo would applaud this. Their haters and cynics would find fault with the claim.
But reality bites in vicious mouthfuls. In time, some would learn to live with the truth. Many would, however, choose to cut their nose to spite their face, by rooting for Atiku Abubakar and company.
I would say, Atiku is mere sentiment, and most of the other candidates personify a dud joke, like minstrels of a political jest gone awry. Whatever the tenor of praise or vitriol aroused by my claims, it would be tawdry, to boot.
Now that I have incited your wrath, what colour is your indignation? Is it “onion brown, hell-red, or currency-green? Does it have a price tag? Certainly, it should. For you wouldn’t be fulfilling that sublime quality of Nigerianness, if your choler isn’t paid for.
My heartfelt apology to the ‘patriot,’ whose outrage is unsullied by money and random bigotries.
But we are at that point when new expediences and indignations are manufactured in our volatile mills. Last general elections, religion, hard currencies and tribalism were fed to our infernal factory thus turning many voters into insentient robots.
You see, indignation too could be paid for. It is often paid for. Hence at the forthcoming polls, many a vote cast shall amount to a reduction of self, by an electorate divided by baleful biases and socio-economic currencies.
As you read, critics, political thugs, and goons-for-hire are in bed with each other, in service of often shady aspirants, in a cycle, Arundhati Roy would call, a revolving bed in a cheap motel. Journalists, youth leaders, traditional rulers, women leaders, and civil societies are snuggled up under the sheets too.
It’s hard to keep track of the partners; they change so fast. Each new baby they make becomes the latest progeny of the means to subjugate and further impoverish the hapless electorate, in flagrant Roy-speak.
This brings us back to the Buhari/Osinbajo candidacy; some have argued, that, the moral bent of both men hasn’t enough juice, to fuel their re-election caravan, but whatever the slant of disillusionment affected by their critics, the fact subsists, that, the incumbent President and Vice President, with the support of a few like-minded patriots, have steered the Nigerian ship across stormy seas, on to a more pliant course.
Of course, their job isn’t half done. While glowing initiatives, like their implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), a tidier business clime and decimation of Boko Haram, represent progressive indices they could build upon, they do not totally absolve their leadership of inadequacies. But then, is there ever a perfect government?
Their next time out, Buhari and Osinbajo should commit at least, 30 percent, of Nigeria’s annual budget to the health and education sectors – split 15 percent per sector and thus sow the seeds for growth in the spirit of global development goals. They could also make history by facilitating a permanent surgical trimming of recurrent expenditure, and the decisive prosecution and sentencing of the corrupt.
These are some of my wishes for Nigeria, were they to be re-elected. I would say, Atiku and Peter Obi couldn’t muster the will to effect such progressive measures even if it were incised in their psyches and frantic manifesto. Atiku is hobbled by Atiku. And Obi is hobbled by Atiku. Certainly, the possibility of victory for the duo is a no-brainer, it would seem.
Yet Nigeria must savour the Atiku/Obi candidature, for presenting a semblance of challenge. Hardly any other candidate displays the ingenuity and promise, emblematic of dependable presidential candidates. So far, they have established their candidacy on a bedrock of sophistry, lip service, and blame-casting.
Indeed, the best role anyone could assume is that of a critic; the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT) fiasco, has revealed the moral, ideological inadequacies of Nigeria’s league of self-acclaimed messiahs.
The only hope in sight is the Buhari/Osinbajo candidacy. Only the duo seems invested with the decisiveness and courage required to implement a radical, progressive overhaul of the country’s socio-politics.
But they can’t achieve this without a vibrant middle class. Could they initiate and sustain policies that would guarantee, the emergence and continuity of a spirited middle class?
Marx and Engels correctly assert, that, revolutions are unachievable by the poor because they provide the primary fodder for the goons, militias, and thugs employed by politicians to grab power at all costs.
The breadlines thereby constitute a dangerous divide, whom impoverishment has reduced “to bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.”
Thus the questions about the true nature of the Nigerian electorate: How politically literate are they? How amenable are voters to incitement, bribe, and wanton emotionality?
Poverty and illiteracy, no doubt, constitute social, psychological handicaps hobbling their capacity for informed choices at ballot time, hence the preponderance of voters susceptible to dark propaganda, ethnoreligious bigotries, and violence, all craftily marshalled to fulfill political aspirants’ inordinate ambitions.
The situation, I reiterate, requires urgent intervention, lest the prevalent sense of entrapment and despair, drives the impoverished to stage bloody revolts a la Boko Haram.
Common causal factors of insurgencies include widening income gaps, and a leadership insensate to rising socio-economic inequalities. Victims become generally tense and frustrated. Eventually, they become vulnerable to tensions created by their failure to gratify their economic needs, amid unstable social relationships.
Thus deprived citizenry are unlikely to achieve a successful rebellion or revolution, by themselves. It is rather a disenfranchised middle class and alienated members of the ruling class who orchestrate and lead such a revolt, argues James Davies.
The middle class and youths, who should personify the Nigerian spring are, however, bristling with uninspiring badges, notably political parties’ membership cards, guns, cudgels, bribes, and mindless bigotries, masterminded by parties and politicians.
They are like bond slaves turned weapons of mass destruction; thugs, propagandists, urchins et al. For the assassinations, misinformation, arson, mugging and other heinous tasks they perform, they aren’t interchangeable with the politicians’ wards; the latter are meant for nobler tasks and offices, like the governorship, senatorial, managerial, presidential seats.
Where children of the electorate serve as cannon fodder for political violence, the possibility of a peaceful revolt by balloting, is forever, muted. The citizenry is consequently eunuchised.
It is saddening to see Nigeria’s youth and prospective middle class misappropriate dissent; for instance, they are demanding to succeed the incumbent ruling class, hoping power would be “shared” or awarded to them, like benefits on a sweepstake.
Some, having realised their wrongness in approach, coalesced into movements, like the #NotTooYoungtoRunGroup (NTYTRG) and the Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT), to choose a younger, consensus candidate within their ranks, and counter the influence and spending power of the big parties and oligarchs.
But alas! Their passion for power translates to gibberish; since they could only muster sweetened banality against the opposition’s washed-out bromides, they dissemble under an interpretative cloud.
Loss is what you experience, after you trade the possibility of freedom, for sound bites and a token. The vote flowers trauma, where citizenry angst suffers the leash of a price tag.
Re-electing Buhari/Osinbajo could yet avail Nigeria her rite of riddance of unmeasured miseries.
This minute, Nigeria pulses to fluid femaleness. Next minute, fluidity may surge trapped, and femaleness, bland, as the sharp lance turns blunt in the hands of the worn knight.
Thus goes the rite of hierarchies by which a dominant male divide, harness female spunk to win elections.
How do politicians define a woman with a voter’s card? As manipulable muscle perhaps. In truth, she is a worker of marvels. She is a peasant farmer and market woman of the sidewalk. She is a maternal hero and guardian of fruits from errant male loins. She is the spangled artisan mining the dreams of those that would put her in fetters.
A shackled woman is a shackled nation; repressed womanhood often manifests dangerously; recent figures by the National Population Commission (NPC) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), estimate Nigeria at 193 million people with approximately 51 percent males and 49 percent females.
The figures hardly translate in favour of women in governance and elective positions.
For instance, women recorded low representation at the 2015 general elections, securing a paltry 6.2 percent (seven female senators) of seats in the Senate while men constituted 93.8 percent. Only six women emerged as deputy governors in the 36 states of the country and no woman was elected governor.
At the backdrop of this worrisome narrative, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, revealed that more men voted than women in 2015, thus bemoaning the marked decrease in the number of women who have won elective positions since 2007: 11 percent in 2007, seven percent in 2011 and 5.6 percent in 2015.
In 2015, only 44 percent of female voters were accredited to vote compared to 56 percent male voters, he said.
Thus Mufuliat Fijabi, founder of the Nigerian Women’s Trust Fund (NWTF), pleads for a level playing field with men, stressing, that women can excel and contribute immensely to the advancement of democratic governance in Nigeria.
Again, Nigeria pulses to this frantic fiction of change; as INEC, civil and women’s rights groups demand greater women participation in politics.
But getting more women involved in politics, portend no solution at a short stretch, rather greater attention should be paid to the quality of their political awareness.
Unlike her male counterpart, the female voter is modern politics’ most significant personae; a reckoning of phenomenal realities, she possesses immense power yet untapped.
Crucial questions should be asked: What is the pattern of votes cast by women? Who are their preferred candidates? What’s the quality of their electoral decision?
Are they rooting for” the candidate who always delivers?” What are the poetics of such delivery? Or are they clamouring to re-elect the candidate who bought them pepper grinders, ice coolers, ankara and bread loaves during the last general elections?
I remember an encounter with two female voters and neighbours, whose recent ‘upgrade’ to minor party chieftains at the grassroots excites them. Both are victims of “irresponsible baby daddies” and they are working for an aspirant, seeking to represent their constituency for the third time, at the federal legislative chambers.
At the latter’s first tenure, he promised them a borehole that never got built. At his second time out, however, he pleaded for forgiveness and bought pepper grinding machines, ice coolers and food warmers for women across the local districts of their constituency.
This time around, brandishing a hazy list of beneficiaries, he promises to give their children scholarships, valued at N20, 000 each. Of the figure, the recipient will pay a commission of N5, 000 to the woman leader, who facilitates the inclusion of her child’s name in the list of recipients. They have vowed to get him re-elected at all costs.
The duo is a fragment of a larger percentage of females, who like their male peers, are blinded by an insidious culture of tokenism, to gaping inadequacies of their preferred candidates and the consequences on the economic, social, and political structures that herald their lives.
They do not understand, that, these structures, which they have been tutored to serve, must be abolished to avoid disaster. The bane of such female voter divide is their handlers. Political parties activate their campaign teams with influential females answering to the title of ‘women leader.’
The latter flaunt the lustre of folk heroines and local champions, who develop multiple forms of sentiments in the female populace, exploiting emotionality for political benefits.
Some evolve into the political femme fatale, committing to their parties’ candidate irrespective of the latter’s true ethical bent. They play the devil’s advocate, showering plaudits and heroism on aspirants, whose lives are often examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed.
Local politics careens dangerously by the antics of such femme fatale, who survive by the mystique of an equation akin to politics of the herdsmen and the herd.
Women constitute a significant and very powerful section of the political divide no doubt. Societal problems, however, persist where they fail to wield their power and influence decisively in their interest and for the benefit of the country.
The social afflictions of inadequate primary healthcare centres, substandard education, gender violence, and economic insecurity persist, where women fail to participate in national, state and grassroots politics by their own terms
It is often argued that if more women get into politics, there would be less failure and tragedy in governance. This argument, however, falls flat on the face at the backdrop of revelations of monumental corruption perpetrated by female public officers at all levels of government.
Yet it may be argued that the culprits are victims of an interplay and intra-play of forces led by powerful male elements holding sway over public and private institutions.
Leadership failure is undoubtedly a male sport, invented by the politically dominant male to patent victory by the choices of a hapless electorate. In order to fulfill this dysfunction and make it amenable to modern precepts of political correctness, the Nigerian female is occasionally tossed political office, like a gift of bone to a starving dog.
Thus the emergence of often ceremonial female deputies and commissioners to male governors – even though their functions at times, conflict with the offices of their principals’ First Ladies. Such deputy governors, commissioners at the end, settle into roles and functions beneath their designations.
This is a manifestation of flawed choice, an ultimate human dilemma, precipitated by survival instinct, in a blemished system. The gravest challenge to our hopes and dreams as a nation, are the messy political transactions prevalent at the grassroots and party arena, every minute and hour of every day.
More women suffer the scourge of tarnished awareness in a political high drama that renders their conscience, a pitiful hostage of its flesh envelope; “whose surges and secret murmurings they cannot stay or speed,” says Paglia.
If the woman’s body is truly a labyrinth in which the man is lost, the Nigerian woman should loom formidably and intimidatingly over him as negotiations intensify on the country’s next social, political hierarchies. The conflict of economies and social ironies notwithstanding,
A new class of womanhood must emerge not as a corpse in future argument with itself, but as a heroic shiner of light and hope on Nigeria’s dark aspects.
